Death of a Raven (10 page)

“OK,” he had drawled. “Thanks.”

I had penned a few lines concerning Specific Gravity and then addressed him again. “You’ll have to open it.” The Hock was to have accompanied the Sunday dinner and I had been involved in some frantic mental arithmetic as to the state of my Post Office savings account with which I would have to replace it.

“Perhaps we’d better have coffee,” Patrick had decided and himself put the kettle on. I had stood around feeling useless while he had asked my parents, watching television in the living room, whether they would like some and had then returned to make it, beans, grinder and all — we never drank instant — unerringly putting his hands on china, spoons and all the ingredients. It was not until several weeks later that he had confessed to being given coffee by my mother every week when he delivered her butcher’s order, and had watched her make it.

We had tried to score points off one another for the rest of the evening but then it had become unnecessary for what we had become involved with was not physics but chemistry.

We rode our bikes, took the dogs for walks and went for long rambles over Dartmoor. I discovered that his main attraction, other than looks, was his ability to make me laugh. He was then, as now, a superb mimic. One day we both laughed until we cried, hugging each other under a hot summer sky.

We were both quite innocent until that moment when I felt the warm skin of his back through his shirt and the way the sinews of his body flowed beneath my fingers. I had drawn back, shocked speechless by the delicious pang that had shafted through me.

Both innocents, we had not so much as kissed before. One moment we had never touched one another and the next were as close as it is possible for two human beings to become. It seemed a logical conclusion for suddenly he was my man and I his woman. There was nothing planned or furtive, it was the only way we could express this discovery of possession.

I can remember nothing of removing clothes, no awkwardness, fumbling or embarrassment. Gazing up at the sky I had fleetingly wondered what it would be like and then he had touched me and I had known. A little later, gentle but strong, he had entered me and there had been bright, blazing pain. He had paused, kissing away the few tears, but then I had urged him on. Subsequent pleasure had taken us both by surprise and we had lain paired for a long time, greedily drinking the last few drops of nectar.

For a week it had been our drug. In scorchingly hot summer weather we escaped whenever we could to the empty open moor and extracted every possible moment of pleasure from our young bodies. By this time of course we knew that we were doing wrong, our upbringing had seen to that.

Patrick had then suffered a severe bout of conscience and offered to marry me. My reply that I was under age had caused him to attain a shade of paleness that I had not believed humanly possible. Then he had repeated the proposal, come hell, high water, horsewhips and jail. I had accepted.

After this there had been an unspoken understanding that we would behave ourselves and wait. Then, when his three “A” levels and considerable ingenuity had made him acceptable material for the police, I did not see him so often. After a few months he left to join the army and I hardly saw him at all for two years.

We married when I was twenty-one. By that time the Gillards had moved to Hinton Littlemoor in Somerset and the ceremony was performed there by the Bishop of Bath and Wells. It was a wedding that the village has talked about ever since; military uniforms, a horse drawn carriage, the ancient church aglow with flowers. If only my father had lived to give me away then my day would have been really perfect. He had died shortly before of a crippling disease that had turned him into an old man in his forties.

Perhaps we had never stopped to think before we were married. Patrick simply wasn’t the marrying sort by then; too many places to visit, too much to do, a real professional soldier. We began to have rows — about his long absences from home, his holier than thou attitude when he
was
around — all culminating in total war when he discovered I had been taking the pill without telling him. Then we had split up.

Now we were together again, had come full circle, and things still weren’t right.

I glanced at my watch and saw that six minutes had gone by. Queen was taking me too close for comfort to some overhanging branches as she grazed so I picked up the reins, nudged her with my heels and turned her away from them. She made for a lush patch of grass and tugged at it greedily.

I had forgotten that animals have their own early warning systems. All at once her head shot up and her ears pricked forward. She stopped chewing to listen, long strands of grass hanging from her mouth. Just as I was about to dig her with my heels again she recommenced grazing but warily, looking into the trees. I grabbed some of her mane, preparing for flight but just then she sighed noisily and a small brown porcupine trundled out of the undergrowth and went across the track like a clockwork toy.

I felt weak, sweat trickling down my back.

“Please don’t let it be much longer,” I whispered. Every day, every moment, it seemed that a mirror was being held up before me, forcing me to view my own inadequacies. What on earth had a colonel in MI5 seen in me to convince him of my usefulness?

Queen threw up her head and to my horror let out a ringing, brassy neigh. Then I saw that she had seen Patrick and it only needed me to pick up the reins again for her to set off at a jaunty walk in his direction.

“He’s dead,” Patrick said. “Someone cut his throat.”

Chapter 11

I stared at him stupidly.

“Looks as though he drank himself into a stupor and was then murdered. There’s no sign of a struggle.”

The greens of the trees pressed into my eyes, the buzz of insects grew louder.

“It happened a couple of days ago I should think … there are plenty of flies.”

It became imperative that I dismount but when I had done so there was no strength in my legs. I suppose Patrick caught me for the next thing I was aware of was him mopping my face with his handkerchief soaked in water from a ditch.

“I’m not at all the fainting sort,” I mumbled and then pure shame made me cry. Survival training in the Cairngorms had come to this.

Patrick was concerned but also impatient to report to Le Blek. He scrubbed at my face with the moistened handkerchief, tilted up my chin and kissed me. “Don’t fret. I know you’re not. Is it that time of the month?”

How could I sit there blethering that I was no bloody good at my job when a man was lying dead with his throat cut not a hundred yards away? I got to my feet, regretted it, took several deep breaths and went over to Queen who frisked me busily for sugar.

“You ride her.” 

“No, your leg’ll chafe raw in this heat.” Even after all this time there was not the courage to talk of stumps.

Every step of the way back I wished I had taken up his offer. “You’re too old,” whispered an inner taunting voice, “stick to writing.” When we reached the pick-up it was like an oven after standing in the sun. Was I going to faint again, be sick or die? I didn’t particularly care.

We stopped at a store we had passed on the way out and Patrick phoned Le Blek. I knew that the instructions how to find Lanny’s remains would be precise to an obsessive degree; the exact number of telegraph poles from a certain landmark to where the narrow track joined the highway, a compass bearing, perhaps a report on the condition of the track as to its suitability for police vehicles, any information that could be of the slightest use.

I sat in the truck, resting my head on the side of the cab. Mark was not over-communicative either, fiddling with the radio, trying to find some music. This proved to be saturation bombing heavy rock and after I had given him a long suffering look he switched it off.

“Never seen a dead body before?” I enquired.

He rubbed his palms across his face wearily. “Only a guy that got knocked down by a car in Port Charles and I didn’t get that close. When I saw Lanny I thought at first that he was smiling, then I realised that the smile was across his neck. He was all sort of stiff and bloated and there were flies coming out of his mouth.”

“Nasty,” I agreed, failing to convince myself that I was not after all going to be sick or faint.

Mark said, “When I phoned Le Blek back another bloke answered, one of his men. He said his boss had been called out to a robbery. That’s probably why we haven’t seen him.”

“Mmm.”

It was strange how I could converse like this and at the same time be engaged in hectic calculations.

*

One might be forgiven for picturing a man called Le Blek as short, dapper and prone to making expressive Gallic gestures whilst speaking. Nothing could be further from reality. The RCMP man, for this was what he was, not from the local police, was nearly as tall as Leander Hurley, wore his clothes like a scarecrow in a gale and when sitting, like now, his hands rested in his lap. But the fingers clasped and unclasped as though they might be more usefully employed holding a gun or twisting a suspect’s arms up his back. In the jargon of the Wild West, he looked mean.

“You’re sure you touched nothing?” he said to Patrick.

We were in the dining room at Ravenscliff; Le Blek, Patrick and myself sitting around the table, Hartland leaning on the wall by the door as if to prevent anyone escaping and Mark standing just to one side of and behind Patrick’s chair. I found it interesting choreography.

“The door of the bus was open,” Patrick told him. “I went in, saw what had happened and came out again. Mark took a peep and decided to give it a miss. Then I went in again and looked around for a little longer. Neither of us laid hands on anything.” He took his time before he continued but Le Blek, surprisingly, did not interrupt or try to hurry him. “I can understand your irritation with us. I’m not trying to do your job for you.”

Le Blek looked at Mark for a moment, who squirmed, and then said, “Well at least you had the decency to give me a bell and tell me what you found. Can’t say that I understand your methods though, taking a woman along. Does the British Army have female scouts these days?”

“Only on night sorties,” said Patrick.

Le Blek did not smile. “You guys on some kind of assignment over here?”

Patrick said, “I believe I mentioned that my brief is to —”

“I know all that,” the other interrupted. “You’ve just told me about it and I reckon I’ve got it off by heart. Give.”

“OK,” Patrick said after a pause. “I exceeded my brief.” 

“Is that all you have to say?”

“Yup.”

Le Blek leaned forward. “Mister, I could have you run in as a suspect, and young damp-round-the-ears hiding behind you.”

Mark’s hands gripped the back of Patrick’s chair but his face remained expressionless.

“Why did you tell Mark that Lanny’s prints were on the cans we found near Andy’s accident?” Patrick asked.

“Ill-judged,” Le Blek agreed.

At this moment Emma came in to tell Hartland that London wanted him on the phone.

Le Blek said, “I made Gaspereau’s record known to him for the same reason — to frighten him off any detective work.”

To Mark, Patrick said, “Please take a short walk in the garden for five minutes.”

When he had gone out Le Blek said, “Mister, if I want to interview that —”

“It’s Major, or didn’t you learn that bit off by heart?” Patrick cut in. “You’re wasting my time as well as your own. I’m answering none of your questions in front of Hartland and members of his family. In a nutshell this is the state of the game: the marine consultancy earning its living helping to haul your navy out of the birchbark canoe era is heavily involved at home with work on the Trident programme. So when the managing director is threatened, MI5 become very interested. Furthermore, when one of the company’s top engineers is killed on a road here in a manner I have proved fairly conclusively not to be an accident, everyone at home gets slightly jittery.

“Then,” he went on, “the real whizz kid with the brains is poisoned. This
might
be accidental, but you said yourself that even if it is shellfish poisoning you want to know where he ate the clams. Right?”

“Agreed,” said Le Blek stolidly.

“Going back to the Gaspereau brothers …”

“They’re real filth,” Le Blek interposed and Patrick paused, frowning. “Been terrorising the whole neighbourhood since they were knee-high. Any amount of folk would queue up to cut their throats.”

Patrick nodded. “Can I rely on your discretion?”

“In what connection?”

“In connection with the fact that David Hartland is involved with the British security services.”

“I already knew that.”

“How?” Patrick rapped out.

“I got it from Hurley — he should know.”

Then, I was convinced, Le Blek could have bitten off his tongue. He had never before come across the Gillard method of retreat, charm and pounce. Patrick glanced at me and his eyes were smiling. But he gave Le Blek his reward.

“Bryce Gaspereau has been to this house before.”

Le Blek swallowed his pride. “When, and who saw him?”

“The old gardener, though he was a bit vague about it. There were other men as well.”

“Hurley did mention …”

“I’m sure he did,” Patrick said dryly. “Women like that tend to stick in the memory.”

“You think something’s going on here?”

“Quade was on his way to meet Emma the night he was killed.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Definitely. She booked the motel room in her own name. I’m convinced that Mark didn’t set those thugs on me either.”

“It’s not what you’ve said,” said Le Blek slowly after a short silence, “but what you’ve left out.” He brooded. “I appreciate that people in your line of business don’t have to get a bloke drunk before you rub them out but —”

“Yes, I noticed that in the bus too,” Patrick interrupted. “One pile of empty cans neatly stacked in one corner with the pull-rings dropped inside, the others — those near Lanny — just dropped on the floor.” 

“You said you didn’t touch anything.”

“I carry a small flash lamp,” he was told. “All the best burglars do.”

“Any idea why he wasn’t killed with a bullet?”

“You know why — bullets can be traced to weapons.”

“D’you carry a small knife too?”

“Ask a sensible question … like why worry about bullets being identified when only an hour’s drive away is the border with a country where it’s every citizen’s right to carry arms?”

The corners of Le Blek’s mouth turned down but nevertheless conveyed the impression of a smile. “Let’s stick to what we know. Lanny Gaspereau is dead. Some time before that happened he might have stood by the side of the road to Quispamsis, smoked a few cigarettes and drunk three cans of La-batts. There is a possibility that he was waiting for someone and that he took a shot at that person and the guy was killed. Are you saying that the Hartland woman fixed it all up?”

“It was no secret where Quade was going.”

“That’s an evasive answer. Did she then arrange to have Lanny killed to prevent him talking?”

“Whoever did would be aware of his drinking habits and that he might shoot his mouth off if he had a skinful.”

Le Blek gave an impatient shrug, as if he was trying to shake off the entire line of reasoning. “This doesn’t feel right to me. It just doesn’t tie in with a guy in Britain getting a threatening letter.”

“It was probably made to look like that.”

But Le Blek was off on another tack. “What you said just now … about identifying bullets. What did you mean?”

“The KGB prefer to use the home made product.”

“Here? Don’t make me laugh. I think I might learn a lot more by asking the Hartland boy about the Gaspereau brothers’ friends and acquaintances.”

Patrick stood up just as Hartland re-entered the room. “He’s clean. I’ve talked to him. They only took him fishing.”

Le Blek also rose and for a moment there was a bizarre vision in my mind of two characters in a Wild West film reaching for their guns. In reality neither of them moved a muscle for several seconds. Then Mark came in.

“Sonny,” said Le Blek to him. “You nearly got yourself into a load of trouble. Next time, ignore what some foreigner tells you and leave police work to those whose job it is.”

“My son is a British subject,” Hartland said. “Have you finished with your enquiries?”

“For the moment,” Le Blek said and left.

Hartland rounded on Mark. “I hope you realise what he meant. His notion of trouble is to take you to a quiet place and paste hell out of you.”

I bit back the retort that sprang to my lips, that over Patrick’s dead body would Mark have been removed from the house for more questioning.

“Well?” rapped out Hartland. “Will he be back?”

“He might,” Patrick said. “When he discovers, or someone tells him, that Lanny’s hunting rifle wasn’t in the bus.”

“Did you take it?”

“Of course I didn’t bloody take it! You seem to forget that I’m trying to solve this business.”

“I do sometimes wonder, Major.”

But at least we had discovered that Leander Hurley was with the Canadian Security Service.

*

Chris Fraser’s presence could not fail to be supportive. Although several inches below six feet in height he was a big man, barrel chested and with a small pot belly. His appearance was deceptive however for he moved like a cat and had graceful precise hands. Fascinated, I sat in Emma’s favourite chair in the living room and watched him light his pipe, the actions slow and methodical, his gaze straying now and again to admire the view through the window. He had grey eyes, greying fair wavy hair and a slow charming smile as he turned to speak to me. 

“I read
One
for
Sorrow
,” he said. His voice, like the tobacco in his pipe, was a rich and deep nut brown.

I said, “I hope you took no notice if anyone told you that I’m reputed to be read mainly by women.”

He chuckled. “I read pretty well anything about Devon, including fiction. My sister is a great fan of yours — she gave it to me to read. I hope you’re working on
Two
for
Joy
.”

This was not telepathy on his part of course. The titles come from an old country saying concerning the sighting of certain numbers of magpies;

One
for
sorrow
,