Grave Stones (5 page)

Charlotte Frankwell opened the door to number 3 and gave the policeman one of her winning smiles.

He brandished his ID card in front of her nose and she invited him in. She sat opposite him at the kitchen table, leaning forward to display an impressive and possibly fake cleavage. What Charlotte didn’t know was that in spite of his appearance she was wasting her time. Hesketh-Brown had one man and two women in his life: one an intelligent and attractive wife, Betsy, who was a teacher in Tunstall, in the Potteries; the second, his daughter Tanya, who was six months old; and the little man, Tom, a sturdy six-year-old who already had a plastic policeman’s helmet that he practically went to bed in. And the tiny baby and his wife were the only women likely to be in his life for the foreseeable future.

However, for all his morals, Danny Hesketh-Brown was a man and he hadn’t missed out on the skinny jeans and white see-through shirt. And Charlotte Frankwell wasn’t wearing a bra to restrain those bouncing breasts. Had he been available she would have been a very tempting proposition. Heske-Brown sighed. Time was… Then he remembered the kisses that had sent him off to work that morning and felt ashamed.

‘There’s been an accident at the farm,’ he began awkwardly.

‘What sort of accident?’

‘The farmer, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh.’ She seemed unconcerned. ‘Coffee?’

‘No thanks.’

She seemed not to have heard him decline the offer, clip-clopping into the kitchen on pink stiletto mules and absent-mindedly filling the kettle. She turned around then to face him in an almost choreographed move and he wondered why such an attractive woman who didn’t look over thirty felt she had to be so obvious – wearing blatantly seductive clothes and an awful lot of
make-up
. She concentrated on spooning deliciously scented ground coffee into a cafetière and filled it with boiling water. ‘Well, the farmer’s old,’ she said. ‘I guess it was bound to happen sometime.’

Hesketh-Brown hesitated. Grimshaw must have seemed ancient to her but all the same this was a callous response. Even if an expression of sympathy was sometimes a formality, he would still have expected it. He had to remind himself that Charlotte Frankwell wasn’t aware of the circumstances of Grimshaw’s death. He let her carry on believing that poor old Grimshaw had met with an accident. Too early to start promoting the official line, anyway. Until the post-mortem was completed,
nothing
was certain.

Charlotte poured the coffee and they sat around the kitchen table, Hesketh-Brown’s mind busily memorising details. Charlotte Frankwell wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. There was a brand new Merc C 350 parked in the drive, which the last time he had run a fantasy price check had been retailing at £32K. And she had a child. A daughter. He’d seen a pair of small, pink shoes in
the laundry beyond the kitchen, which fairly obviously didn’t belong to Ms Frankwell. How the hell could she afford to live in a place like this? Rich parents? He narrowed his eyes. He didn’t think so. She didn’t have the polish of boarding or finishing school.

He sat back in his chair. Must be divorce, then, Danny, my boy, he thought, and felt pleased with himself for sorting out an answer.

‘When did you last see the farmer, Mrs Frankwell?’

Apart from raising her eyebrows at the ‘Mrs’, Charlotte simply looked bored. She carefully studied an intricately painted fingernail. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said impatiently.

‘Well, your land backs on to his.’

She shot him a look of scorn. ‘Unfortunately,’ she said. ‘Fairly typically of my ex-husband – almost my entire view of the dilapidated farm is taken up with a barn that’s falling down and a cowshed that isn’t much better.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘Perhaps Gabriel hoped I’d be out in the garden one day and the bloody things really would collapse on me.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The entire place,’ she said, ‘stinks like a sewer. I wouldn’t have come here if I’d known. And I’ll be selling up very soon. Moving to Spain the second I’ve sold. Put my darling daughter in boarding school. Preferably one with very long terms and short holidays.’

All of a sudden Hesketh-Brown didn’t find Ms Frankwell at all attractive. In fact she looked downright ugly. He looked around him. ‘But it’s a nice place,’ he
said. ‘You’re lucky to be able to afford it.’
At your age.

Her eyes narrowed. She knew exactly what he was thinking.

How?

And she deliberately didn’t tell him.

‘Yes,’ she said coolly. ‘It is nice, isn’t it?’

Danny was getting fed up with this game. ‘So you don’t know when you last saw Mr Grimshaw.’

She looked up then and he caught a gaze of her amazing blue eyes heavily fringed with what he suspected were false eyelashes. ‘No.’

He stood up then, leaving the barely touched coffee on the table. ‘And you haven’t noticed anything suspicious around the farm?’

‘Like what?’ She pursed her lips.

This woman, he thought, is dangerous.

He had the feeling he was playing a game involuntarily. But far from seducing him, this woman was annoying him. ‘Well then, if you can’t help…?’ He left the phrase open, the ball firmly and squarely in her court.

‘Sorry,’ she said – without regret.

He gave up and left without saying anything more.

They were up in the clouds. Joanna was still sneaking a few pages of her book while Matthew, without enthusiasm, was struggling with the sudoku. ‘One of the difficult ones,’ he muttered.

She took no notice. Charlie Fox was facing her antagonist.

The airhostess came round with the drinks and Matthew eyed the small bottles of champagne. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Why ever not?’ He bought two and then confided in the woman in the seat next to him. ‘We’ve just got engaged.’

The woman, plump in a cream T-shirt encrusted with sparkly stones, was fulsome and generous in her congratulations. Joanna stared out of the window at clouds that looked like soft sand, as though you could run through them, sinking only ever so slightly. Matthew flipped the cork out of the champagne, poured her one and handed it to her. ‘To us,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ echoed the woman in the cream T-shirt.

Joanna took a long sip and acknowledged that she wasn’t looking forward to flashing her black pearl at Korpanski. She almost dreaded his response.

Korpanski, meanwhile, down on the ground, was enjoying directing the investigations and already anticipating bringing Joanna up to date. ‘Have we got the next of kin yet?’

‘We’ve just located her. She’s on her way from the Potteries.’

‘Sir,’ PC Timmis had got as far as the barns and was swinging the great door open.

Dreading what he would see Korpanski gave in, stomped towards the barn himself and peered inside.

They drank their champagne, yawned through the usual announcements about turbulence and duty free, then it was, ‘Return your seat to the upright position.’ Joanna peered out of the window. Manchester looked its usual grey, half smothered in a damp, chilly looking fog, the airport impersonal. They stood up and reached for their hand luggage in the overhead rack, and it suddenly hit her how different things were from their outward journey. She might simply have slipped the ring on her finger but the reality was that it meant so much more than that. She knew that tacitly she had agreed to a wedding; and that was the first of the list of problems.

Joanna Piercy had always been unlike other little girls. Encouraged by her father, she had been a tomboy, the son he had not had, disappointed with two daughters. She simply hadn’t ever had the dream of being princess for a day in a cloud of white chiffon,
to the sound of church bells and bridesmaids in pink. But her mother and her sister would want exactly this. They would try to persuade her towards the traditional. Not a beach wedding barefoot in Bali or a simple civil ceremony in a hotel or registry office. That would be battle number one.

Next she would be, in title at least, stepmother to Eloise. She drew in a deep, sighing breath. Eloise, sharply intelligent, openly hostile. Theirs had been an uneasy relationship from the first. Matthew’s daughter blamed Joanna for the break-up of her parents’ marriage, and though Matthew had sworn the relationship had been damaged before they had ever met, Joanna had certainly been at the very least the catalyst for the split. Problem number two.

Thirdly, Matthew had never made any secret that he wanted another child. When she had had a miscarriage the year before he had grieved – more than she had, which in turn made her feel guilty and wrong-footed. It wasn’t only that Matthew wanted a child. His desire was more specific than that. Like her own father, he wanted a son. The trouble with that particular wish was that it was something not even the most devoted wife in the entire world could possibly guarantee.

She filed behind him along the aircraft aisle and felt a moment of sheer panic. She actually moved forward to touch his arm and tell him that it was all too much. She could not go through with it. She bumped into his rucksack and took a step back before lecturing herself. This was silly. ‘Get a grip, Piercy,’ she whispered,
knowing that she could not imagine a life without Matthew Levin at her side.

So…

She did touch him then, reaching forward so he turned his head and brushed her lips with his own.

Sealed with a kiss.

Roderick Beeston was the vet the police invariably used in cases where animals were involved. Familiar with both large and small animals, he had looked at dog bites, neglected animals, poisoned dogs, victims of road accidents, deflected a man-eating Alsatian and so on. His talents were useful to say the least.

At three in the afternoon he turned up in a battered Land Rover, looking every inch the country vet. Green wellies, a Barbour oilskin, corduroy trousers. Ignoring the rain that tumbled incessantly from the sky, he strode towards Korpanski, his hand already held out. He gave Korpanski’s outstretched hand a vigorous shake. ‘Hello, Mike,’ he said. ‘What have we got here?’

‘Not sure, really. The farmer’s been bashed over the head and there are some dead animals around. A dog…’ They both turned as Korpanski indicated the stiff body of Ratchet. ‘And there’s more,’ he said. ‘In the barn. A couple of cows, some pigs.’

Roderick Beeston looked serious. ‘And Grimshaw’s dead, you say?’

Korpanski picked up on the note of enquiry in the vet’s tone. ‘You knew him?’

‘Yeah. Not well.’ Beeston gave an open, friendly
grin, brushed some of the curly black hair out of his eyes. ‘These moorland farmers don’t like paying my bills but I’ve been here a few times. He had a problem with some sheep a couple of years ago. Nasty case of Footrot. We had the devil’s own job getting rid of it. Just when we thought we’d won, another damn ewe would start limping. Poor old Grimshaw. He was one of those people who seem to have no luck. And now this. Well…’

He returned to the Land Rover, slipped on a pair of latex gloves, removed a large black bag from the back and approached the body of the dog, unmistakably long dead.

‘Dear, dear.’ Roderick Beeston sniffed at the dish. ‘Looks like poison,’ he said, fingering a sliver of foam around the dog’s mouth. ‘Probably barbiturates. He would have just gone to sleep. Dogs are easily disposed of with a dose that would simply ensure a human a good night’s sleep. Poor old thing. Not the nicest of hounds. These old farmers’ dogs know their place and guard their area with what could be called aggressive vigilance. Had my trouser leg in his teeth a couple of times.’ He patted the head of the dog. ‘Not any more though, eh, Ratchet? I’ll take him with me, Mike, do a post-mortem and let you know.’ Together, he and Mike loaded the body bag into the car. Ratchet had not been a large dog but he was surprisingly heavy. ‘I can do an analysis on this stuff but at a guess it is simply barbiturates.’

‘We’ll want to run our own fingerprint check on
the dish first,’ Korpanski warned. ‘It just might give us the break we need. Who knows?’ He slid the dog dish and contents into a plastic sleeve and sealed it before spooning some of the dog’s vomit into a second bag and sealing that too.

‘OK, but I’d like to do an analysis on the stomach contents,’ Beeston said, ‘if it’s all right with you. And I can titrate the doses of whatever was in Ratchet’s dish, if you get your guys to pass it on to me when they’ve finished with it.’

Korpanski nodded and the vet straightened. ‘So what else?’

‘In the barn.’ Together they rounded the farmhouse and opened the barn doors wide to peer inside. It was like a scene from a Doré engraving of Hell. Animals’ skinny bodies were strewn around the barn. All dead. There was a stink of death around the entire place, heightened by the gloomy interior. Beeston bent down to study a black and white cow, lying near a calf. The cow’s brown eyes were sunken, wide-open, appealing for something. ‘My initial guess is dehydration,’ he said.

Appealing for water, then.

They walked to the back of the barn where two pigs lay. Beeston bent over one, touched its flanks. ‘Still alive,’ he said, crossing to a large bucket of water and carrying it back, sloshing over the barn floor, to splash on the animal’s head. The piggy eyes flickered; its tongue lolled out. The vet continued trickling water into its mouth. ‘It might just make it,’ he said, ‘but the
other one,’ he glanced briefly across, ‘she’s obviously had it.’ He sighed. ‘Lovely pair of Tamworths, they were. Grimshaw had them for years. Had one of his few pieces of luck last year with a really big healthy litter from this pair. I gave him the name,’ he added cheerily, ‘years ago, when Grimshaw bought him because of the red colour. This is the boar. Old Spice. Judy named the sow. Posh.’ He turned around, full of merriment and mischief. ‘Get it? Posh Spice? One of the few amusements his daughter contributed to the farm.’

Korpanski smothered his grin.

‘You see, if the animals were shut in here,’ Beeston continued, ‘even though the weather was cool, they would have needed to drink. Lots.’ He scratched behind the pig’s ear then stood up. ‘This is a bad business, Mike,’ he said grimly. ‘I don’t know how much you can tell me about what’s happened to Grimshaw…’ He accompanied the probe with a frank, enquiring grin. ‘Bashed on the head, you say?’ He waited for the detective’s explanation.

‘It looks like murder,’ Korpanski said awkwardly. He hated breaking protocol and was uncomfortably aware that whatever it
looked
like they didn’t
know
– not for sure. ‘We haven’t done the post-mortem yet. It’s later on this afternoon. But it has to be homicide.’

‘Poor man,’ Beeston said, then, looking around him, ‘I wonder why on earth anyone would want to kill Grimshaw.’ Then, ‘No Inspector Piercy?’

‘She’s on holiday till tomorrow.’

‘This’ll bring her right back down to earth with a bump.’

‘Sure will,’ Korpanski agreed.

‘I’d better go up the field and just make sure the sheep are OK,’ Beeston said, ‘then I’ll come back and look after Old Spice.’ Korpanski watched him open the five-barred gate and stride up the field, the vet’s purposeful step underlining his feelings.

It seemed an age before their luggage came through on the carousel, Matthew’s battered green rucksack and her huge black suitcase. Next came the trip back to their car in a van laid on by the parking arrangement. And then there was the matter of locating Matthew’s BMW. They heaved their luggage into the boot, started up and joined the traffic out of Manchester.

The post-mortem was arranged for four o’clock. It was a grim afternoon, chilly enough to warn of the approaching winter.

Korpanski and PC Timmis parked in the lot outside the anonymous brick building, the scene of so many dramas played out under the white arc lights angled over a mortuary slab.

Doctor Jordan Cray was already in his scrubs, gloved-up and waiting.

There followed the usual procedure, the cutting off and bagging up of the clothes to be examined by the forensics team, the weighing and measuring of the body before the initial examination and taking and labelling
of samples – blood, hair – giving them to the scenes of crime officer. The entire body was x-rayed and the pictures displayed on a computer screen.

Next came measurement of the injuries, the external damage done to the head and the rest of the body, photographing the injuries with a rule next to them. It would all be needed as evidence, finally to come before the courts and the coroner.

Then it was time to begin, starting with the head. The mortuary attendant used the Stryker saw to remove the skull cap while Cray made comments as he worked.

‘Fragments of bone embedded in the brain,’ he muttered. ‘Fractures of C1 and C2.’ He looked across at Korpanski. ‘He had more than one potentially fatal injury. The high spinal fractures would have rendered him quadriplegic, unable to either move or breathe. And the extent of the skull fractures – they’re embedded deep in the brain. Death would have been quick and, looking at the copestone, I’d say that is your murder weapon.’

Korpanski nodded.

It was an hour later that Jordan Cray was documenting his findings.

Cause of death: respiratory failure due to extensive skull fractures particularly in the occipital area, together with cervical spinal fractures which caused fatal and irreparable damage to the Circle of Willis.

Then he described the sequence of events, as he saw them, to the detective. ‘What happened was this,’ Jordan Cray said slowly. ‘There was a fight during which Mr
Grimshaw tried to protect himself.’ He indicated the injuries on the under side of the victim’s forearms, then held up his own to illustrate his opinion. ‘I think the weapon then was something like a baseball bat, judging both by the marks and the fact that there’s no debris in the wounds. One of these blows was forceful enough to break his left ulna. This is typical of a defensive injury.’ He crossed to the x-ray screen and traced the bones with his forefinger. It didn’t take five years in medical school to see the displacement of the smaller of the two forearm bones.

Cray moved back to the body and continued. ‘Our victim fell backwards, indicated by bruising and lacerations on the sacrum and lumbar region of the back. I think he probably fell against the wall. This happened shortly before death. You saw the green stains on the clothing? I think if you consulted a botanist he would confirm that the moss was the same. And then when our victim is hurt and helpless on the floor, our killer sees his or her chance and topples the copestone right on our victim’s head, fracturing two cervical vertebrae.’

Korpanski felt queasy. ‘Oh,’ he said, seeming to taste the formalin on his tongue even though the air exchange was turned full on.

‘I’d say that did it.’ Cray finished with a flourish of satisfaction. ‘And incidentally, Sergeant Korpanski, I removed a rose thorn from Grimshaw’s right palm. That should give you some clue to the location of the initial assault.’

All this time, back at the farm there was activity. The copestone had been removed to the laboratory for DNA analysis. The entire wall and murder scene had been photographed from all angles, an arc light illuminating the darker areas. The fingertip search of the scene was ongoing, as were the disposal of the animals’ carcases and the search of the farmhouse.

Roderick Beeston had taken Old Spice to his surgery and was drip-feeding the animal.

Hesketh-Brown had moved to the other side of the road and was interviewing more inhabitants of the Prospect Farm Estate.

Amongst them was Hilary Barnes.

He’d found her in the garden, secateurs in her hand and a weed bucket at her feet. He flashed his card and asked her whether she’d noticed anything out of the ordinary.

She looked him up and down before replying as though her answer somehow depended on what type of person this detective was.

‘I was dead-heading my roses when I noticed some flies,’ she said. ‘Nasty big bluebottles. There have been more of them recently, as well as a particularly offensive smell.’ She looked severely at Hesketh-Brown as though it was all his fault.

‘Have you noticed anything else?’

The woman looked at him now with wise eyes and a touch of humour.

‘Apart from the police cars screaming round the
place, do you mean? Or the house-to-house interviews going on across the road all afternoon? What specifically, Constable?’ Her mouth actually twitched.

So she’d actually read the ID card.

‘There’s been an incident,’ he said carefully.

‘So I gathered.’

‘At the farm. I’m afraid the farmer’s had an accident.’

‘An accident, Constable? Do you mean he’s fallen off the haystack or turned his tractor over?’

Hesketh-Brown felt hot. There was no fooling this woman, was there?