A Very Private Murder (22 page)

Psychiatrists say that the risk of being caught adds a certain something to illicit sex. They also say that psychopaths build castles in the air, schizophrenics live in them and psychiatrists collect the rent. Dave knocked and came back in, mumbling an apology.

Walking back to the car he told me about the phone call. ‘Three messages for you,’ he said. ‘A Miss Toby Curzon wants to speak to you. Said nobody else would do. Then Special Branch returned your call. Have you been chasing them?’

‘Yep. And the third …?’

‘Ah! This is the one you’ll love. Superintendent Krypton Knickers herself would like an audience, if it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Karen Kent? Jeez! What does she want?’

‘Well, she
is
the boss. What shall I tell control?’

‘Huh! Tell them we’re in East Yorkshire, doing follow-ups. It’s about time you were familiarised with the locality.’ We’d reached the car. I zapped the door locks and we climbed in.

Dave is the nearest I have to family. We go back a long way, have shared a few scrapes, covered each other’s back on more than one occasion. We even played in the same football team for a while. I’m his daughter’s godfather. As we pulled onto the motorway I said: ‘So Sophie didn’t make it to Dan’s birthday?’

‘No, she sent him a card with a cheque in it.’ He made it sound as if they’d laced the money with the anthrax virus.

‘I suppose they have their own lives to live,’ I said.

Sophie went to Cambridge University and was Dave’s golden girl. Mine too. She got pregnant and married during her second year, and now Dave and Shirley never see her or the baby.

‘They manage to see
his
parents often enough,’ Dave told me. ‘Young Courtney’s growing up and Shirl’s missing his best years. She’s pretty upset about it. We didn’t even see him for his first birthday. They sent us a photograph and that was that.’

A sixteen-wheeler came steaming by and I pulled out into his wake. It’s not often we get the chance to gossip on a personal level. In the car, with the radio turned off, is the best we can do. The overtaking lane was clear so I moved over and put my foot down. We talked about holidays and young Dan’s job prospects. He’d walk a decent university, but his sole ambition is to play for Manchester United.

‘I’m a bit concerned about Karen Kent taking over the enquiry,’ I admitted.

‘Whatever for?’ Dave asked. ‘You could eat her for breakfast.’

‘Hmm. On the whole, I think I’d rather have a full English. It’s just that, you know, you can always find something that you should have done, or could have done better. She’s never led a murder enquiry, but it would look good on her CV, so she’ll be anxious to put her stamp on the job. Hindsight, and all that.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, for a start, if it was young Oscar helping Mrs Threadneedle with her groceries in the supermarket car park …’

‘Which it almost certainly was,’ Dave asserted.

‘… which it probably was,’ I concurred, ‘his prints would have been all over the bags. But we didn’t check for them.’

‘There was no reason to,’ he said. ‘She’d been to the supermarket and done some shopping. Big deal. You can’t dust everywhere for prints.’

‘Will you explain that to KK or shall I?’

‘OK, so the bags will probably have gone to the dump but all the stuff she bought will be in her fridge and larder. He’ll have left his mark on something that will prove he was there.’

‘Too late,’ I said. ‘While you were answering the phone outside her office Carol McDoodle told me that Janet Threadneedle was giving young Oscar piano lessons. His prints could be anywhere in the house.’

‘Oh, right. Back to the drawing board.’ He sat silently for a while, then turned to face me. ‘Would that be piano lessons or “
piano lessons
”?’ he asked, making that quotation marks gesture with his fingers.

‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘She’s old enough to be his mum.’

‘Charlie, where have you been for the last hundred years?’

I was doing ninety-five in the fast lane and a BMW was tailgating me. I pulled to the left and he accelerated away.

‘What did you want Special Branch for?’ Dave asked. Special Branch are not some super-special,
hi-tech
cloak-and-dagger outfit, dedicated to protecting citizens of our fair country at considerable danger to themselves. For a start, they rarely make arrests. Every force has its own Special Branch, whose members spend most of their working day loafing around airport arrival lounges, looking at faces, checking passenger lists. They gather intelligence. Once, they were concerned with normal, routine, cross-border crime; then drug smuggling became flavour of the month; now it’s international terrorism that keeps them awake at night. The jobs they used to be involved with, like organised crime and VIP protection, have been offloaded onto specially trained firearms officers, under the watchful eye of CID, which means me.

‘Barry Sidebottom,’ I said. ‘The aggrieved husband. He’s supposed to be in Portugal but I’d like to know his recent whereabouts. It’ll be interesting to learn if SB have anything on him.’

* * *

We’d had a cold, cloudless night, courtesy of high pressure off North Utsire, wherever that is, and now the fields were steaming as the sun burnt off the early-morning dew. But the rivers – the Wharfe and the Ouse – clung to their smoking blankets and at Stamford Bridge we plunged into gloom as we crossed the narrow humpback over the Derwent, where, nearly a thousand years earlier, history had reached a tipping point. Here, one September morning in 1066, the final page in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
was begun. The Vikings were routed but the Normans were mustering in the South, and nothing would ever be the same again.

There’s a steep hill leaving the town, which has been the scourge of generations of caravan-pullers, but the engine revved like a turbine, taking us charging up out of the valley and in seconds we were bursting out into the sunshine again. The birds were singing, the sky was straight out of a holiday brochure and we were doing what we do best.

‘Look!’ I said, thumping a dozing Sparky on the arm.

‘W-What?’

‘Buzzard.’ It had showed itself briefly above the trees, soaring on the updraught, and been lost behind us.

‘Oh, right.’

I said: ‘Do you think the Curzons came over with Bill the Conqueror?’

‘Probably.’

‘I bet they did. I bet they were given a few thousand acres for services to William.’

‘So they were the enemy, back then.’

‘Most likely.’

‘Are we nearly there yet?’

I drove to Dunkley first, pointing out the Alice Hawthorne, which had that desolate look reserved for pubs that are closed, and the little housing project where old Motty Dermott lived. I parked outside his house and rang the bell, just once, but he didn’t appear. A neighbour came out and told me it was Springfield House day. I chatted to her for a while and learnt that the old-timers went there twice a week for a hot meal and game of bingo. Otherwise, she didn’t want to talk. This was a small village, and I looked like a policeman, and curtains were already twitching.

At Curzon House I stopped in my usual spot, bang in the middle of the park. About ten visitors’ cars were parked sensibly near the entrance, and a minibus with
Barbara Castle Comprehensive
emblazoned along its length was in the shadows at the end of the house. As I stretched myself upright I heard the chatter of children coming from that direction. The tennis court was down there, so they were probably having a tennis lesson.

‘Where’s the old deserted village?’ Dave asked.

I pointed. ‘That way. About quarter of a mile, that’s all. It’s called Low Ogglethorp, without an ‘e’ on the end. High Ogglethorpe has acquired the ‘e’. It’s probably a Victorian affectation.’

‘And you’re hot on Victorian affectations.’

‘They’re my speciality subject. What’s the interest?’

‘Sophie did her thesis on lost villages. There are hundreds of them, all over the place. I took her round a few. Not this one, though. Became a bit of an expert, though I say it myself.’

Sophie read history at Cambridge. First one in the family, and all that. Dave plays the disappointed father but underneath he’s as proud as Punch of her, and quite rightly. Me? I’m merely a neutral observer. It must be something in her perfume that makes my hormone levels go haywire every time I see her. I pulled myself together and said: ‘Let’s go look at it, then.’

‘It’ll do later,’ he said. ‘We’re supposed to be on an investigation.’

‘We are,’ I replied. ‘You do your measurements, or whatever, and I’ll sit on a stone and cogitate. It’s that way.’

We strode off along the lane I’d followed Toby down, nine nights earlier. The freshness of the morning was turning into a warm day, and the burbling of a distant lawnmower explained the smell of cut grass that followed us.

‘It was the Enclosures Act did it,’ Dave informed me.

‘Did what?’

‘Got rid of the people. Back in the sixteenth century all the peasants had their own little allotments and got on as merry as pigs in muck, give or take the odd plague or Black Death. They grew wheat and had home-made bread every day. Delicious.’

‘For every meal,’ I suggested.

‘Well, yes, but they got by. Then Mr Brutal Landowner worked out that he’d make a lot more money out of keeping sheep, without all the unpleasantness of collecting taxes from the common people. So he drove them off the land and bulldozed their cottages.’

‘They had bulldozers, back then?’

‘Very primitive ones.’

‘Of course. Left behind by the Romans, perhaps.’

‘Could be. So now only a couple of families were kept on, to work as shepherds, with no land of their own, and the landowner was freed of all the hassle he’d had before. And nobody was snaffling his deer and pheasants every night.’

‘They had pheasants?’

‘Hmm, possibly not. Rabbits, though.’

‘They definitely had rabbits. If we meet Mr Curzon you’ll try not to bring up the depopulation of the countryside, won’t you, please? It could be a touchy subject.’

‘I’ll try not to.’

‘Good. Turn left, through that gate.’ It looked benign in the sunshine; had lost the air of spookiness that enveloped it on my last visit. ‘This is it,’ I said.

Dave was impressed. Most of the ones he’d seen were simply grid references on a map, with little to show that a community had once lived, played, argued and dreamt there. They’d been moved on and then the very stones they’d owned were taken away to build a bigger house for the master, and stables for his horses and cattle. When he’d cast his expert eye over the place I said: ‘The rabbits are through there. It’s called Coneywarren Field.’

‘This way?’ He pointed to a narrow path that cut through the overgrown strip of wood that separated the two fields.

‘Yep.’ I stepped after him, dragging through the brambles that covered the track, dodging the odd branch that he let fly back. Suddenly he stopped and raised an arm. ‘What?’ I asked.

‘I can hear voices.’

I could hear them too. Or perhaps one voice, muttering something unintelligible, over and over again. I gestured for him to move on, and in a few seconds we were on the edge of the clearing known as Coneywarren Field.

Toby was wearing cut-off dungarees and a T-shirt that made her look like a hillbilly. Her back was towards us and she was attacking the ground with a garden rake. After a while she dropped the rake and gathered up a bundle of rubbish that she’d produced, and all the time she was muttering to herself: ‘Bastards, bastards’ – word I didn’t catch – ‘bastards.’ She shoved the rubbish into a bin liner and picked up the rake again.

‘Toby,’ I said, but she didn’t hear me. ‘Toby!’ Louder this time, and she spun round, her empty expression turning to shock as she recognised me. I walked over to her, Dave following, and put my hands on her sparrow-boned shoulders. Her face was distorted with hatred and betrayal, her bottom lip trembling, and she’d aged thirty years in the few days since I’d last seen her.

‘What is it, Toby?’ I asked. ‘What’s upsetting you?’

‘Look,’ she replied. ‘They’ve trashed it. Look at all the rubbish. And they’ve pulled Mummy’s tree over. What will I tell Daddy? He mustn’t see it like this. He mustn’t.’ She started to cough, and we both gave her tissues, but there was little else I could do for her except watch, helplessly, willing her to pull through it, paralysed by my inadequacies.

Dave did better. He enveloped her in his arms and told her she’d be all right. ‘Take it easy,’ he whispered. ‘You’ll be OK. Everything is fine. Breathe through your mouth. That’s the way. Big breaths … in … and out … in … and out.’ After a few minutes the convulsions subsided and Toby looked more like her old self. Dave relaxed his grip on her.

I cast a glance over the place and saw what she meant. Someone had held a party, complete with bonfire, takeaway pizzas, and copious quantities of Foster’s and alcopop. The evidence was spread about for all to see. Not content with having a good time, they’d pulled over the substantial silver birch tree that had been growing in the middle of the clearing. As I looked I realised we were standing in the middle of a stone circle, a miniature version of Avebury. The tree, I remembered, was planted over Toby’s mother’s final resting place. No wonder she had murder in her heart; I was feeling the same.

‘Let’s sit down,’ I said, and led her over to the same log we leant against before. ‘Don’t worry about your daddy,’ I told her. ‘He’ll be more upset to see you like this. He’ll be OK, I promise you. Don’t worry about him.’ 

Dave had followed us. ‘This is Mr Sparkington,’ I said. ‘He’s a detective, too.’

Toby held out a solemn hand and big Dave shook it. ‘Are you Charlie’s boss?’ she asked.

‘Only on a Thursday,’ he told her.

‘That’s today.’

‘I know. That’s why he’s so grumpy.’

‘Ah! You’re having me on.’ There was just a flash of the old Toby as she jousted with him. ‘Have you ever done a hundred and twenty-five in a cop Volvo?’