The Company She Kept (15 page)

‘What's up? You're looking chuffed,' Kite remarked to Abigail as she came to perch on the edge of his desk, watching him pecking away with two fingers at the typewriter.

She was feeling cheerful, if the truth be told. She'd been hoping fiercely to be allowed to remain as Mayo's dedicated sergeant but had realistically accepted that he wasn't going to make do with second best any longer than he had to. He and Martin Kite were a good team, who complemented each other and were used to working together. As soon as he could, he'd have Kite working with him again. It wasn't a personal matter, it was common sense.

But Kite was stuck with the child pornography case; nobody was willing to risk screwing up an inquiry that had taken three months to bring to fruition by not getting it right in the last stages. This was the boring part, difficult for anybody but especially for one of Kite's gung-ho temperament. He was still up to his ears in interviewing witnesses, his natural inclinations being to pull out all the stops and go for the bastards, but following instructions to handle it with kid gloves since two of the men were local big wheels and however it was dealt with, it was going to cause a stink.

‘It's beginning to look as though we have a suspect, Martin.'

‘This Darbell, is it?' He sat back and reached for yet another mug of coffee, making a face when he found it empty.

‘He was in all the right places, including the night of that first putative murder in 1979, at Flowerdew. Apparently there was only one man present that night, so in that case Darbell must be the “he” who failed to keep his temper – which figures. He seems to have had a fairly low flashpoint.'

Suddenly, she gave a toss to her thick plait, threw a radiant smile at Kite and said, ‘Chuck that report over, Martin, and I'll type it for you if you'll go down and fetch me some coffee. I can't bear to see anyone making such a ham-fisted job. I've got half an hour before the gaffer wants me.'

She'd told herself she'd had her moment in the sun and it was now back to her cake and milk. But now – glory! A few minutes ago, Mayo had told her he wanted her to remain on the case and added, ‘High time we went to have a look at this place, Flowerdew. I don't suppose there's much to be gained from an empty house but it's beginning to intrigue me the way it keeps cropping up. Time for us to take a shufty at it.'

It was hard to imagine the scene as he'd last seen it: the rain lashing down on to the dark moorland, the pathetic body of Angie Robinson lying beneath the plastic shelter. The truck-driver McKinley's alibi had been confirmed: at nine o'clock, two hours' journey away, he had apparently been eating egg and chips in a motorway cafe in company with several other drivers who were prepared to confirm this. He would no doubt be relieved to know that Mayo had mentally crossed him off his list of suspects and was looking nearer home.

Hartopp Moor took on a totally different aspect in the daylight. Bare and windswept today, it had its own peculiar beauty, a wild emptiness, with the odd clump of yellow furze and the young heather, not yet in bloom, bending to a scouring wind. A bright sun reflected the occasional black, oily gleam beneath the sedge, indicating peat beneath. Mayo, who had been born within a few miles of the Bronte Parsonage and missed its bracing ambience, wound down his window to let the clean, cold air rush in, while Abigail did her best not to flinch. The cry of a curlew was the only sound. There was an empty, unimpeded view for miles.

‘Next left, I think, Abigail.'

Almost at once the turning materialized, a narrow road
which
dropped into what might have been a different world, so different was it from the moor they'd been crossing.

The Morwen valley was pretty, soft and fertile even at this season when the trees and hedgerows were bare, but with the occasional field of winter wheat already showing pale spears, the quickthorn greening over and wild cherry showing pale stars of blossom. Now and again, signs of habitation appeared: a farm or two, a grey church and a cluster of cottages.

The road meandered unhurriedly through the valley until eventually, three or four miles past the church and the last of the cottages, they came to the place they were looking for. It was situated in a hollow, a decaying tree-girt house built of rosy Elizabethan brick, gabled and timbered, with a sagging roof and tall, twisted chimneys. Smaller than Mayo had expected, though small in this sense was relative: compared with your average three- or four-bedroomed semi it was pretty big, though not by any means a mansion. Surrounded by a high brick wall, only the roofs and upper storeys were clearly visible from the road.

Abigail cut the engine and went to try the pair of high, rusty, wrought-iron gates which proved, not unexpectedly, to be locked. She looked round and saw that on the other side of the road a grassy knoll rose directly opposite the house. Scaling it nimbly, she made room for Mayo to scramble up beside her. From their new vantage-point they were able to see right over the wall and observe the tranquil scene spread out before them.

The deserted house looked peaceful and undisturbed, as though it felt it had existed long enough and was now, without regret, slowly crumbling into the earth. Reflected in the still waters of the lake which stretched in front of it, it had stood like this for centuries, a jewel of a house, true to the original conception of its builder. Until some twentieth-century vandal had added the absurd, minaret-like structure which was tacked on to one end – stuccoed, domed and once painted blue and white. This was no doubt Kitty Wilbraham's doing, the study she had added on to house the gruesome mementoes of her working life. ‘How's that for an improvement on the scenery?' Abigail asked, making a face.

Mayo grunted. He thought it the sort of outrage local planning authorities ought not to allow people to get away with, though more than likely permission hadn't even been asked, with the relative isolation of the house giving Kitty Wilbraham cause to feel she could cock a snook at authority, that what she did with her own property was nobody else's business.

‘Might be an idea to take a gander round the back,' he said, curious to know more of this house where Kitty Wilbraham had lived.

Behind the house rose an extensive belt of woodland, stretching out to the left, while most of the foreground was taken up by the tadpole-shaped lake which appeared to run out at its narrow end towards a boathouse in the distance and thence to join the river, a glimpse of which could just be seen beyond the trees. A wall surrounded the property and like the house it was crumbling and decaying, overgrown with ivy and toadflax and following the road at least as far as the next bend. A speculative look appeared in Mayo's eye and Abigail had a nasty premonition she was going to be instructed to scale the damn thing.

‘Looks as if it's held up only by hope and the grace of God,' she offered hopefully.

Mayo, however, was slithering down the bank and taking his boots from the back of the car. ‘We'll follow it round. There'll be some way in at the back or I'm a Chinaman.'

He set off at a fast pace and now knowing by repute the alacrity with which the gaffer welcomed the chance of a walk, preferably on the rougher mountains of Wales, or the remoter Scottish moors, and the longer the better, plus her own antipathy to walking anywhere but on the paved streets of a town or city, Abigail groaned, tucked her trousers into her boots, then set off at a canter to catch up with Mayo's long strides.

About a hundred yards further along, just after the sharp bend in the road, the wall turned at right angles to the hedgerow, continuing upwards along the edge of a ploughed field. They first had to push through the scrubby hedge of hawthorn, beech and field maple, then walk along the margin of the field whose deeply ridged furrows followed the line of the wall, here in a considerably worse state of repair than along the front, with gaps in it like a boxer's front teeth. Another fifty yards and the wall petered out altogether and the woodland began, a mixed plantation of coniferous and deciduous trees.

Leading between the trees was a path running parallel with the house, thick with the mast of beech and oak, springy with pine needles that deadened their footsteps. It was dark beneath the canopy but lit here and there by the brassy, hopeful gleam of aconites alongside the bramble-snagged and obviously little-used path. It wasn't until the house eventually came into sight, slightly below where they stood, that they paused to take stock. The silence was total, apart from the croo-croo of the wood pigeons and the stirring of the small wind in the bare branches above.

Then, ripping the silence apart, came the slam of a shotgun. Pellets sang past their ears and bit into the trunk of a spruce, chips of soft bark flew as the sound ricocheted through the clearing. The two detectives covered a lot of space in a very short time and froze, flattening themselves behind tree-trunks. Outraged pigeons clattered up into the trees before the woods settled again into silence.

‘What are you doing here? Don't you know this is private property?'

A cautious look showed a man standing watching them with a gun to his shoulder, a dark-browed individual with a closed expression and a black labrador at his heels.

‘We're police officers and what the hell d'you think you're doing with that gun?' Mayo demanded, emerging from the shelter of his tree.

‘Rabbiting. Think yourselves lucky you didn't get hurt. I didn't see you there.'

This was a patent lie. They had been standing in plain view in the middle of the clearing and the gun had without doubt been aimed deliberately. Aimed to miss, maybe, to put the fear of God into them, but aimed, all the same.

‘You own this property?'

‘I keep an eye on the house here, look after the grounds. I've a smallholding over there.' The man jerked his head backwards.

‘In that case you can give us a few minutes of your time.'

He debated this. Then he gave a brusque nod and said grudgingly that they'd better come over to his cottage, whistled for the dog and began to walk away, leaving them to follow him across the top edge of the ploughed field and into a small cleanly-swept farmyard surrounding a tiny, brick-built cottage with a slate roof. The yard had a tidy air of self-sufficiency, despite a clapped-out old motorbike standing in one corner and a pigsty in the other. As they walked towards the cottage a big shire horse gave a loud whinny and thrust a gentle, inquiring head over the door of a stable nearly the size of the cottage itself.

‘No need for that,' Abigail was told as she tried to knock off the earth clinging to her boots at the doorstep, ‘I'm not houseproud.' She took them off, all the same, leaving them by the door before following him into a living-room warm from an open fire in the range and redolent with the savoury aroma of a slow-cooking stew in the fireside oven.

Plainly whitewashed, as neat and clean as the deck of a ship, the interior gave the lie to his remark. It spoke of an owner with few material needs, living alone and content to do so. A sink under the window, a scrubbed pine table in the centre, on it an old portable typewriter, a pile of paper and a ledger or two. Open plank shelves filled to capacity with books, both paperback and hardcover, ran across one wall.

‘All right. Maybe you'll tell me what this is all about? Sit down.' Apart from a sagging easy chair in front of the range, there were no seats other than two wooden stools which he pulled out from under the table. Visitors were patently not encouraged. He himself ignored the easy chair. With a curt ‘Basket, Nell,' to the dog, he stood with his back to the fire, facing the room. ‘Well?'

Abigail availed herself of one of the two stools, but Mayo, not intending to leave the dominant position to the man he was about to question, leaned back against the sink and folded his arms. ‘I'm Detective Chief Inspector Mayo and this is Sergeant Moon. And your name?'

‘You can call me Tommo, everyone does.'

‘Your proper name, please.'

‘Maryan Thomas, spelt with a “y”. You can see why I prefer Tommo.'

Mayo frowned. He had come across the name, as a man's name, before, though he couldn't immediately remember where. ‘How long have you lived here, Mr Thomas?' He was damned if he was going to use the nickname, which he found ridiculous, besides being unwilling to introduce any sort of familiarity into the interview.

‘Seventeen years.'

‘And before that?'

The stillness before he answered was scarcely the space between one tick of the clock and the next, but this was clearly a question that wasn't welcome. At last he replied that he'd been teaching at an agricultural college in the north of England but had given it up in order to farm.

‘Do you own this place?'

‘I do now. It was a hovel and I lived in it rent-free when I first came here, in return for the work I put in on the house and garden.' An obvious pride lifted the heaviness of his features, and made him more loquacious. ‘They call it organic farming now but for me I'd no choice if I wanted to survive. I couldn't afford fancy gadgets and expensive chemicals. I built up my smallholding, bit by bit, and in the end I was able to buy it from Kitty – from Mrs Wilbraham, the owner. She wasn't demanding in what she asked, it didn't break me,' he added ironically.

He was a taut, compactly-built individual, sturdy but with no spare fat, nothing at all extraneous about him, in fact. His answers were punctuated by considered silences. He was the sort who'd keep secrets just for the hell of it – and would be a reluctant, even downright hostile, witness. There could be violence just beneath the surface.

‘Do you know a woman called Angie Robinson?'

He thought, and said eventually, ‘I
did
.'

‘What do you mean, did?' Mayo asked. ‘How d'you know she was dead?'

That called for another pause. ‘I didn't, and I hardly knew her, but I'm sorry to hear it.'