He examined it. A small, circular piece of card, a bespoke item printed for a pub Ben guessed Duggan had visited during his stay in the UK. The mat smelled faintly of stale beer. On the front was the name of the pub, the Man O’War, with a picture of an old sailing ship. On the back, Ben read, ‘The Man O’War has been the local public house in Hunstanton since the late 18th century, and was originally built from the timbers of a warship wrecked against the nearby cliffs in 1776. Many changes have been made over the years but we continue to honour our traditional role at the heart of the community! Jack and Sally welcome you aboard.’
Which was all good promotional material for the Man O’War, but what was it doing in Duggan’s pocket? Ben didn’t know Hunstanton, though it was a safe bet that it was a long way from landlocked Oxfordshire. A quick check on his phone revealed that Hunstanton was a seaside town in Norfolk, about 135 miles and a three-hour drive away.
That set him thinking. Emily Bowman had told him that Duggan’s work for her involved travelling about the country. She’d also said her family had relocated from London to the north of England at some point. Norfolk, stuck out on the easternmost bulge of England’s coastline, was only on about the same midland latitude as Birmingham, not particularly far north at all. What family leads could Duggan have been following up there?
For a discouraging moment Ben was thinking that this was all going nowhere, and that he was just chasing shadows. But then he noticed the faint handwriting that had been messily scribbled by someone, presumably Duggan, in biro along the top edge of the mat.
ACHILLES-14 / Galliard
Ben had no idea what it could mean, but instinct told him to hang onto the mat, in case it was important somehow. He slipped it into his own pocket and went on searching through the rest of Duggan’s things until he was certain he’d find nothing more, and left the bedroom.
The other two bedrooms were empty and hadn’t been used in a while, beds made up tight and undisturbed dust on the surfaces. Still wondering where the killer could have got in, Ben went into the bathroom near the backstair – and that was where he found what the police had missed. The upstairs bathroom belonged to the older part of the vicarage, and still had the original windows and fittings. The windows were set low, just above floor level with a broad wooden sill. The catches were of the old-fashioned zero-security variety, just a couple of curly cast-iron handles with a thin locking tab that wouldn’t require much pressure from outside to pop open. Replacing them with something more modern had been one of those jobs that Ben had urged Jude to take care of when he’d inherited the place, but Jude wasn’t any more of a DIY handyman than Simeon had been.
Sure enough, one window was open a narrow crack, with just a few flakes of paint and a couple of small splinters on the sill to show that it had been recently pried open. Maybe if McAllister’s nemesis Forbsie hadn’t shut down the investigation in the belief that they’d solved the case, the cops would have found the forced window. Ben knelt by it and looked out. There was a mature sycamore tree growing too close to the house, which had spread out considerably since the last time Ben had been here. Even in Simeon and Michaela’s day they’d fretted about falling branches damaging the roof. Like with the windows, Ben’s advice to Jude had been to lop the damn thing, but Jude had refused on sentimental grounds.
Ben considered the distance from the nearest branches to the window. One particular limb looked thick enough to support the weight of a man, and the gap wasn’t far. A nimble climber, not too heavy, could easily have leaned across to the outside ledge while prying open the window. Not easy, but it could be done. On their way out, the intruder would just pull the window shut behind them before escaping back down the tree.
Ben thought about the lack of any bloodstains on the bathroom floor, or the passage and the backstair. As he’d pointed out to McAllister, the killer was likely to have been covered with it. But a clever operator – a pro – could have worn disposable overalls and overshoes that they quickly stripped off after the deed was done, and stuffed in a bag. That way they’d leave little or nothing of a trail to follow.
Ben returned down the backstair, headed outside into the garden and went over to examine the tree. It didn’t take him long to find the fresh scrape on the bark about six feet off the ground, and the recently snapped limb a few feet higher up.
Ben thought, No signs of forced entry, my arse.
He’d learned something, but he still had too little to go on. Tonight, he would learn more.
Ben slipped back out of the property the way he’d come in. He was walking through the patch of woodland in the direction of his car when his phone went.
To his surprise, the call was from Emily Bowman. She sounded upset and worried, and suddenly wanting to talk to him after all.
‘Mr Hope?’
‘I didn’t expect to hear back from you.’
Her next words stole the breath from his mouth and halted him in mid-stride.
‘I know your son is innocent.’
Chapter 15
‘Are you hearing me?’ Emily Bowman said. ‘Your son didn’t kill Carter Duggan. There’s no way he could possibly have been involved.’
Ben was almost too stunned to reply. He leaned against a tree and clasped the phone tight against his ear. ‘How do you know this?’
‘Please. I need to talk to you. Can we meet again?’
Ben didn’t want to wait that long. ‘We can, but I need you to tell me now. What do you know? And why the change of heart?’
She replied, ‘What you said to me before, about destroying the life of an innocent young man … it really stayed with me. I can’t live with that thought. I’m not a selfish person. I’m a person who’s afraid. Terribly afraid. And I’m someone who needs your help, Mr Hope. After you left, I looked you up by the web address on your card, and I saw what you do.’
Ben was confused. ‘I don’t understand. Why does it matter who I am, and what I do?’
‘Because you protect people,’ she replied. ‘That’s what I need.’
‘You’re asking me to protect you?’
‘Or else I thought perhaps you could recommend someone in that line of work. I have to have the best, and I need them to start immediately. I don’t care how much I have to pay. I have to get away from here as quickly as I can, and I have a place to hide, but I don’t want to be alone. What if those people find me?’ Her voice sounded hollow with fear and she was talking so fast she was tripping over her words.
‘Slow down. Explain why you need protection. Who’s going to find you? What does this have to do with Duggan, and Jude?’
‘I … I’m in terrible trouble. I should never have involved Mr Duggan in this. It’s all my fault.’
‘This is about your family history?’
She gulped a deep breath and tried to speak. ‘Our family has a secret, Mr Hope. A horrible secret that people have died for, and I’m terrified that more people will die because of it. My mother, Glencora Bowman, knew it. It was only after she passed away, when I was going through her things, that I came across Violet’s journal. Well, it was really more like a memoir. You might say a confession, even.’
‘Violet?’
‘My grandmother. Years after the event, she wrote it all down in a book. It wasn’t meant to be read by anyone else but her. When she died, my mother read it and then kept it hidden away.’
Ben asked, ‘Years after what event?’
‘It’s too long a story to go into now. I promise I’ll tell you everything when you get here.’
Ben had to bite back his frustration. ‘And this secret book is the reason you hired Carter Duggan?’
‘Yes. The things my grandmother wrote … I was so disturbed by them that I had to find out more. I didn’t know where to start. I needed help, if I was ever going to get to the truth.’
‘And did he?’
‘Yes, and I believe that what he discovered cost him his life and now I’m so afraid the same is going to happen to me.�
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Now Ben understood more clearly why she’d seemed in such a hurry to get away from home earlier. There seemed little point in asking her what Duggan had discovered. Instead he asked, ‘Are you still at the house?’
‘Yes, but I’m frightened to stay much longer in case they return.’
‘Who, the people in the black Mercedes?’
Emily Bowman was too panic-stricken to be taken aback that he knew about that. ‘There isn’t time to talk about this by phone. How fast can you get over here? I can explain everything to you when you arrive. Then you’ll see why it’s just not possible that your son killed Mr Duggan. Please, Mr Hope. Will you help me?’
‘I’ll help you,’ he agreed. ‘But on one condition. That whatever information you’ve got to tell me that gets Jude off the hook, you’ll repeat in a formal police statement to Detective Inspector Tom McAllister.’
‘Anything,’ she said desperately. ‘Just hurry. Please!’
‘I’m on my way,’ he said, and ended the call.
Ben ran for the car. The Alpina’s twin-turbo engine fired up with a roar and the fat tyres spun hard into the dirt. As he surged away towards Boars Hill the excitement was running hot through his veins that he’d found a witness who could exonerate Jude. Things were moving quickly now. He thought about calling McAllister to fill him in on this unexpected development – but then decided to leave it until after he’d spoken with her.
If Ben had acted on that initial impulse to tell the cop where he was going, he’d soon have come to regret it.
It was only a twenty-minute drive from Little Denton to Boars Hill, even without shredding every speed limit in sight as Ben often tended to do when he was in a hurry. But a few miles out from the village, he cursed as he saw the tail of slow-moving traffic ahead. A queue of a dozen or more cars was stuck behind a lumbering farm machine, with unbroken streams of cars zipping the other way at seventy. Overtaking would have been suicidal.
Ben joined the line and for the next several minutes impatiently settled down to a thirty-mile-an-hour pace, lighting up a Gauloise to soften his frustration. Peering past the line of traffic he could see a layby coming up on the left, but the farm machine made no attempt to pull in to let people pass.
The people you meet when you don’t have a gun. Ben swore a little more loudly and drummed his fingers on the wheel. ‘Come on. Come on.’
Finally spotting a break in the oncoming traffic he saw his chance and stamped his foot to the floor. The eight-speed auto transmission kicked down a few gears and the revs soared to a fruity howl as he swerved out into the right-hand lane to overtake the dawdling queue as though it was standing still. It wasn’t often on Oxfordshire’s overcrowded main roads that he got the chance to demonstrate the fact that the Alpina D3 bi-turbo was the world’s fastest production diesel car, with a skilled and fearless driver at the wheel.
But for all that, by the time Ben reached his destination a few minutes later, it was already too late.
He knew from the moment he raced into the courtyard of the big house that something was wrong. The old guy with the shotgun was still pretty much in the same spot that Ben had seen him last. But he’d been on his feet before, and now he was lying sprawled out and immobile on the gravel, flat on his back with his arms and legs outspread. He didn’t look as if he’d died of a heart attack.
Ben skidded the Alpina to a halt on the loose gravel and burst out of his driver’s door, keeping low as he ran over to the body on the ground. The old guy’s eyes stared emptily up at him. The chequered shirt he was wearing under his Barbour jacket was soaked almost black with blood, all down the front. Ben tore the shirt open from the neck and saw the two large-calibre bullet holes that had punched his chest three inches apart. Heart shot and lung shot. There was little point in feeling for a pulse. But the dead man’s skin was still warm to the touch.
Which meant he’d been alive until very recently.
Which meant that whatever was happening inside the house was just minutes old, or still ongoing.
Ben didn’t have time to think about it. He simply had to act.
The man’s shotgun was still clenched in one lifeless hand. Ben peeled away the fingers and wrenched it free. Twin hammers, twin triggers; it was a seriously old-fashioned tool probably dating back to the time of the last King Edward. One barrel of the gun had been fired, and not long ago judging by the sweetish tang of freshly burnt powder Ben could smell as he cracked open the action and ejected the spent case. The second barrel was still loaded, its hammer cocked. The old guy had managed to get off just a single shot before the opposing gunfire had cut him down.
Ben knelt over the corpse and quickly searched through the pockets of the Barbour jacket, found a handful of loose cartridges and grabbed them. He swung away from the body and ran back to the car, crouching for cover behind its front wing as he reloaded the spent shell. He looked over at the house, listened hard; could see nothing, could hear nothing. No sounds of violent disturbance from within. No gunfire came from the windows. The place seemed empty, but he sensed it wasn’t.
He cocked the second hammer, thought fuck it, surged to his feet and sprinted towards the house. The front door was lying ajar. To go crashing through like a stormtrooper was a sure way of getting yourself shot by anyone who might be lurking in the hallway. He eased the door silently open the rest of the way and peered inside.
The hallway was empty. That was, apart from the corpse of Margo, Emily Bowman’s housekeeper. She was sitting slumped in a chair with her head lolling against her left shoulder and her tongue hanging out. Her face was laced with blood from a large bullet hole in the dead centre of her forehead. Another – the killer’s first shot, Ben guessed – had drilled her through the chest. A pool of red at her feet reflected the light from the open doorway.
Something shiny and golden twinkled from the edge of the blood pool. Ben didn’t need to pick it up to know what it was: a spent cartridge case from a .45 automatic. One shooter could have entered the house, or a two-man team. Both armed with high-capacity pistols. Ben was undergunned, but even an antiquated twelve-gauge was a supremely deadly weapon, in the right hands.
The packed boxes and bags were still in the same place. It looked as though Emily Bowman had delayed her escape just a little too long. But where was she?
Ben hunted quickly through the downstairs rooms. The house seemed even bigger than it looked from outside, and it took him a whole two minutes to clear the ground floor. There was no sign of her. Racing back past Margo’s sitting body he headed up the stairs.
And that was where he found Emily Bowman.
Chapter 16
At the top of the stairs, an elegant U-shaped galleried mezzanine landing with an ornate white wood balustrade partly overlooked the ground floor to Ben’s right. To his left ran a series of closed white wood doors, separated by gilt-framed paintings and ornamental statuettes. Diaphanous light filtered down from a stained-glass dome set into the ceiling far above. A wrought-iron spiral staircase at the far end of the landing led up to the second floor.
Ben stalked cautiously along the landing, slow but urgent, clutching the shotgun and ready to react at the tiniest noise or movement. The carpeting was thick and silent underfoot. He checked the first door to his left and found an airy, graceful bathroom with a Victorian tub and satin drapes veiling a tall window. The second and third doors were both empty bedrooms. He quietly closed each door and moved on.
Halfway along the landing something on the richly-carpeted floor caught his eye. It was a bright, fresh spatter of blood that hadn’t yet soaked into the fibres. It was followed by a trail of spots. There was a red smear on the handrail of the balustrade.
Ben stopped breathing. A couple of steps ahead of him was the fourth door. The first three had been closed but this one was open a few inches. There was another blood spatter across the middle of the door at chest height, garish and livid against the glossy white paintwork. Ben nudged the door the rest of the way open
with his toe. He already had a bad feeling what he was going to see inside.
Emily Bowman was lying face-down half across the bed with one leg hanging off the edge. The tweedy kilt skirt was riding up to her waist. Part of her right shoulder had been blown away, the buttercup-yellow silk blouse stained crimson. There were two more bullet holes in her, one in her back and one at the base of her skull.
Ben stepped into the bedroom and stood over her. He could easily piece together the evidence to picture the whole scene: Emily Bowman had been upstairs when she’d heard the first exchange of gunfire coming from outside, followed quickly afterwards by the shots in the hallway below. Gripped by panic, she’d started running for the stairs when she must have been confronted by the killer or killers coming up from the ground floor. Turning back in horror to run the other way; then the shot blasting out; the bullet slamming into her right shoulder, the blood spraying. Emily had wobbled but she hadn’t fallen. Using the handrail to steady herself she’d managed to get as far as the fourth door and burst through it at the same moment that the second bullet caught her in the back. The white flash. Already dying on her feet as she staggered into the bedroom and then collapsed facedown onto the bed.
Then the killer, or killers, had calmly walked into the bedroom after her, and executed her with a last cold-blooded shot to the back of the head.
Ben gently rolled her over. The brutal damage to her face was what he would have expected from a large-calibre point-blank gunshot exit wound. He’d seen worse, but right now he couldn’t remember when.
He was sickened, angered and saddened at the sight of her lying there. If he had got here a few minutes sooner, she might still have been alive. And whatever secret she’d been about to reveal to him might still have been Jude’s best chance of exoneration. Now that, too had been snuffed out with a bullet to the head.
The Pandemic Plot Page 10