DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crime Thrillers: Books 1-3

by Oliver Davies

  “Maud,” I interrupted her, leaning closer to her, “did Selene pass away before or after Richard Sandow was married?”

  “Before,” she told me, “I was there to tell her he was engaged. Marriage happened a few months after she died.”

  I could feel Mills looking at me. So perhaps Mr Sandow had held off the wedding until she was gone, and any chance of her returning was gone too.

  “What about Sebastian?” he asked Maud as I thought. “Do you keep in touch with him?”

  She looked away, studying the other people in the café. “From time to time. I wish I could have done more,” she said softly, her face drawn with sadness.

  I nodded and waited a moment. “He doesn’t know who his father is,” I stated.

  “No,” she agreed with the shake of her head, “nothing to do with him.”

  “What about you?” I asked her. “Do you suspect who it is?”

  She hesitated, thinking for a moment, but chose to shake her head again and fold her hands in her lap.

  “Thank you, Maud,” I said, “you’ve been very helpful.”

  She nodded and smiled at us both, standing up and shuffling away, back into the busy streets outside. Mills and I leant back in our respective chairs.

  “So, Richard Sandow,” he mulled aloud, “was engaged, but didn’t marry until after he learnt that Selene was dead?”

  “Makes sense. Holding out hope, but once she knew he was engaged, that would be what Sebastian recalls,” I added.

  “They were discreet,” he pointed out, “discreet enough that Maud didn’t know. And nobody else interfered at the house, did they?”

  “She might not have known but others may have,” I said.

  “The butler?” Mills twisted in his seat. “Sir, he’s been nothing but helpful.”

  “I know.”

  “But you still suspect him?”

  “Until we have a clearer lead, Mills, I’ll suspect everyone. I’ll suspect Lord Hocking himself, if I bloody well choose to.”

  He smiled at that and then turned away, looking thoughtful. “What about the children?”

  “Henry’s children? They’re infants, Mills.”

  “No,” Mills shook his head, “Henry himself. Rupert and Rose. Maybe they learnt about it, maybe they dug into why they never knew Uncle Richard, started poking around and learnt about their father’s past. Learned about Selene.”

  “It’s not uncommon for parents to have past loves, Mills.”

  “But what if they learnt about what happened to her, how she was treated? Maybe they learnt about Sebastian. About the half-brother they might have, or the cousin they might have and how he’s been treated!”

  “So, they steal the painting they know their father loves,” I hopped onboard his train of thought, “knowing full well nobody in that house would stop and question them.”

  “The annual party,” Mills added, “the perfect cover for them to do it. Maybe they had help from someone like Dennis or Maud.”

  “So, what to do with the painting? Why take it if not to sell it?”

  “Just because?”

  “People very rarely do things just because, Mills. They want this to stew. They want him to think about Selene and Sebastian, think about what he did, relive it, even. Him and Richard both.”

  “And the threatening note?”

  “They knew the angle of the camera,” I pointed out, “knew that the family would all be inside, knew that we would be there and see them, knew that a car would be arriving to pick up some forgotten things.”

  “By the staff who were top of their suspect list.”

  “They knew how their mother would react to all this,” I added.

  “We never did see Henry. He was out for the day but maybe that’s just what he told them.”

  “And Rose,” I added, “we didn’t see her until she joined her father and myself in the garden. She’d been outside for a while, and she knows those grounds well, you said as much yourself. It could have been either one of them.”

  “And having it discovered whilst we were there,” Mills held up a hand, “keeps them in the clear.”

  “Someone would have told them,” I countered, my voice slowing. “They would have had to learn about Selene and Sebastian and the painting. From someone. I doubt it was Maud.” I gestured to the doors that the brightly coloured maid had just slipped through.

  “Dennis?”

  “Possibly. Working together, they get to punish Lord Hocking, guarantee his daughter takes over when he retires.”

  “Seems a little convoluted,” Mills admitted. “Why not just confront their father about it?”

  “Why indeed?”

  “And why hold on to the painting? Why not destroy it, let him see it with an actual knife through it, not just a photograph?”

  “There’s something about the painting itself. A message could have been left in the study, a knife, like you said. And if there was something in the painting itself that they wanted to see, a photograph. But they took it. From a crowded house, they lifted it from the wall and took the whole thing with them.”

  “But not to sell.”

  “But not to sell,” I confirmed.

  “Maybe once they find what they need from the painting, they’ll do something else. Maybe,” Mills suggested, “the threat on the doorstep was just to make sure everyone stayed scared. After the burglary, they were all on edge, leaving the bloody picture keeps them that way.”

  I got the feeling he was right. “But what exactly are they hoping to get from that painting?”

  Seventeen

  Thatcher

  I went home that night via Mills’s home, to arm myself with a small library of art history books he had bookmarked and made notes of. I was surprised by his house. It was nice, small, but clean and ordered, personal. When I was his age, my house was a litter bed of empty wrappers and half assembled furniture. I wondered if the infamous mother of his had something to do with the neat house. I looked around as he fetched the books, glancing at a picture of him with two small boys.

  “Your nephews?” I asked.

  “Charlie and Sam,” he replied, “they’re good boys. Slightly wild. I take them about once a month for a day, give my brother and his wife some time to themselves.”

  “That’s good of you.”

  “It’s the stuff we do for family,” he replied simply, handing me a great stack of books. I glanced down at them, the muscles in my arms protesting at the sudden weight.

  “It might take me awhile to get through these,” I remarked.

  “That’s alright. Take all the time you want. She won’t mind.”

  “She won’t?” I double checked.

  “So long nothing gets spilled on them, and they don’t get ripped or dented or anything,” he shrugged. “It’ll be fine.”

  “Won’t happen in my home,” I assured him. “Books are very well looked after there.”

  He looked dubious. “I’ve seen your filing system, sir. And I know you dog ear pages.”

  “There is nothing,” I defended myself, awkwardly balancing the books, “nothing wrong with dog earing a page in my own book. A library book, no. But mine? Who cares? It’s not like I lend them out.”

  “Not to anyone?” he asked, amused.

  “Well, two or three folks, I suppose.”

  Exactly three, in fact. The first being Sally who was worse with her books than me. And Jeannie, who I didn’t so much as lend them to as much as she just sort of left with them. They made their way eventually. And the only other person who borrowed a book was my friend Mike, who honestly couldn't care less. I was silently striking Mills off my list of potential borrowers, if I’d have to go through this discussion every time.

  “Two or three?” he repeated. “That’s all of your friends, sir. I’m impressed.”

  I tried to point a finger at him. “Don’t push your luck, Mills. I hear they need a sergeant in Grimsby.”

  He rolled his eyes and started for
the front door. “You wouldn’t. Sharp would have your head. She’d send you to a new station or give you a promotion,” he added menacingly.

  I grimaced at the very thought.

  Mills opened the door for me and helped me to the car where I carefully set the books down in the boot alongside some equipment from the coaching house, an itchy blanket and a fishing rod. I needed to sort that lot out. A job for the weekend, so long as nothing else got stolen or nobody got stabbed.

  He gave me a quick wave from the door as I drove away from his house, making my way through the slowly darkening city to home. Streetlights flickered on, the spring evenings still too dark and groups of people still roamed the streets. Men in suits heading home from work, night shift people only just emerging from their homes. Young girls and boys, moving in packs to the nearest pubs, tugging off ties and letting their hair down. There was a time I’d be there myself, down the Bell, chatting to Paul. But there always seemed to be more important things going on now.

  I got home and jumped out the car as the neighbouring door swung open and my landlady trotted out, helping me carry the books upstairs and into the house. She followed me in, fussing over the mess, picking things up and folding them as I set the books down on the coffee table. I turned to finding her holding a blanket, staring at me.

  “What is it?”

  “Working again?” she asked, her lips pursed, soft green eyes filled with sternness. She’d been watching from the window again, I realised. Sometimes I wondered if she and Elsie had a conspiracy going.

  “Not necessarily,” I countered, taking the blanket from her, “maybe I have a new hobby.”

  She laughed in my face. “When you take a new hobby that has nothing to do with your work I shall run down the street in my great-nieces fairy costume, singing God Save the Queen and playing the bagpipes.”

  “That’s quite the image,” I told her, looking over her white curls and wrinkled skin. “You might have to start practising now you know. Bagpipes are a tricky instrument to master.”

  “I can already play the bagpipes,” she told me proudly. “My husband taught me. Played for a living, he did. He was Scottish.”

  “Really, Mrs McIntosh, was he?”

  “Save your sarcasm, boy. What’s all this for?” She indicated the books, plonking herself down on a chair. I didn’t argue, Mrs McIntosh was a good woman and whenever she got lonely she popped over for tea or to give me a life lesson. I didn’t have it in my heart to send her away.

  “A missing painting,” I told her, “I’m wondering why someone would steal one, but not sell it.”

  “Everything has its own value, Max,” she told me sagely.

  “I know. I’m hoping to find something that can find me a thief.”

  “From a painting?” She sounded dubious.

  “Yes, from a painting.”

  She shook her head. “The way your mind works, Max Thatcher, I’ll never understand. And this lot is meant to help you do that?”

  “That’s the hope. Maybe they’ll know something that I don’t, something useful.”

  “Well, then. I’ll not keep you,” she said, rising from the chair.

  “You can stay,” I assured her quickly, “if you want to. You’re always welcome, Mrs McIntosh.”

  She smiled at me and pinched my cheek. “Some other time, lad. Some other time.” She shuffled outside, going down the front steps and up the ones directly next door. I could hear her through the walls sometimes, she liked to play Queen on Sunday mornings, loudly, singing along.

  After fetching myself some dinner, eating it at the kitchen table to avoid getting anything on the books, I had a shower and changed, collapsing onto the sofa with a drink in hand and pulled the first book towards me.

  I opened it onto Mills’s notes; pieces of paper jammed in between the pages, post-it notes pointing to specific paragraphs of words. I started with Brynmor Ragsdale, finding nothing more interesting about him that Mills had not already told me. A short, somewhat sad life that ended as most lives ended back then, struck short by war, unfairly and suddenly.

  I skimmed through pages about oil paintings and old masters, Pre Raphaelites and royal portrait artists and ended up looking at a skull, painted onto a portrait that, apparently, symbolised death. A common occurrence it seemed, and I remember Mills saying as such. Artists left things in their work, an allusion to something, an image of themselves, letters or numbers of words that held some hidden meaning. And then I remembered Da Vinci. Not the mad himself, naturally, but the book and the film, Tom Hanks. Hidden meanings, hidden clues. All painted into the backgrounds and reflections, smuggled amongst crowds, in shapes. I flicked through to find Michelangelo, the shape of the human brain on the Sistine Chapel.

  Without Ragsdale’s painting, it was impossible for me to know if he had hidden something in the background. Perhaps some figure or cryptic meaning painted onto the house or the lake. But why take it? I wondered. Why bother with all of it and how on earth did it have anything to do with Selene Whitlock and the brothers?

  They took the whole thing, frame and all.

  The frame.

  I stood up, almost knocking over the table with my knee in the process and strode over to my mantlepiece. I’d put out the photographs, after all this time, but I couldn’t remember where. I scanned the dressers and the walls, looking for it, delved into some older boxes and sat back on my haunches, annoyed.

  It was here, I knew it was. I had taken it from the coaching house with everything else, wrapped it up in an old newspaper. Standing up, I went into my bedroom and opened the wardrobe, pulling out an ancient leather bag that had belonged to my grandfather during the war and heaved it out onto the bed. Inside were mostly his belongings. His medals that I really ought to frame, his and grandmothers’ weddings rings that had been left to me and might bury with me, silver spoon from his Christening and one from mine. An early photograph of the coaching house when he first bought it, still youthful, his hair still dark, stood beneath the oak tree with grandmother. Their faces were blurry now, the photograph itself tinged brown with age. I placed delicately aside and reached my hand into the bag again, feeling for the wrapped rectangle, and found it.

  I pulled it from the bag and took off the string, carefully unfolding the newspaper wrapping. It was one photograph that I had not looked at for years. Not since she died. I sat on the bed, holding it in my hands. It was worse than one on my desk in the station, worse than ones I had put up all around the house.

  It was of the two of us, when I must have been around twelve. We were sitting outside Elsie’s house in the garden, it had snowed, and we’d built her a snowman using her husbands’ old hat and pipe. The photo itself was lovely, we were both staring at the camera with huge grins, bundled in scarves and mittens. That was not why I kept it away. I kept it because it was her favourite picture, the one she’d used.

  I flipped the photograph over, carefully pulling away the backing of the frame. On the other side of the photograph, she’d left a note. In her curling, sprawling handwriting, slightly shaky and smudged she’d written in, on her last day.

  This is how I remember us. This is how you will too.

  That was why I kept it wrapped up, kept it in grandad’s old bag in the top of my wardrobe. Those few words that I hadn’t deserved to be given, but she had given me, anyway.

  I wiped at my damp eyes with my sleeve and sniffed loudly, replacing the frame and took the picture downstairs, propping it on the coffee table. I hadn’t gone in search of it for the memories, not really. But for what she’d done. A picture she knew I loved, a picture we both loved. And she’d hidden something inside it, a note for me to find, a message for later on. Tucked away behind the frame.

  I reached for the phone, calling Mills and cleared my throat a few times before he answered.

  “Sir,” his voice came through, slightly muffled and I glanced at the clock.

  “Too late to be calling, Mills?”

  “No, sir,” I
heard him rustling about, “what is it?”

  “I think I know why our thief took the whole painting. What if there was something hidden behind it, not in the painting itself, but in the frame?”

  “Like a letter?” he asked, his voice getting stronger and clearer.

  “Like a letter.”

  “From Selene,” he was thinking aloud again, his mouth trying to keep up with his brain, “maybe a letter for Lord Hocking, a letter about Sebastian.”

  “Maybe she wanted to tell him who the father was, tell him about Sebastian.”

  “But someone didn’t want him to find the letter?” Mills questioned.

  “What are the odds he’d ever find it?” I asked. “More likely is, they wanted to find it. Wanted the contents of it to use for themselves.”

  “Against the Lord?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Would explain a lot,” he muttered. I could picture him up and about, staring out of a window or something, one hand curled around the back of his neck. “Why they took that one, why it hasn’t been sold.”

  “Why nothing’s happened yet. Remember what Harrer said?” I asked. “Those older paintings need a professional hand. You can’t just pop the frame on and off.”

  “Explains why nothing much has happened at all. Save the threatening note on the doorstep.”

  “I think you were right about that one,” I told him. “It was placed there to keep them on their toes.”

  “Vindicta,” he recited. “They want revenge, and they want to use Selene to do it.”

  My mind whirled back to Sebastian. When I met him, I couldn’t imagine him being the one behind this, but maybe that initial hunch was right. Maybe Richard still wanted revenge and wanted that last letter from Selene to achieve it. Or indeed, the butler, who would have known Selene, who might have even known that she left something behind in the painting.

  “Would anyone know if she left something there?” Mills asked.

  “Dennis, perhaps,” I said, “maybe Maud.”

  “She didn’t say as much.”

  “No. But I don’t think there’s anything vindictive about that.”