The Funeral Boat (2 page)

‘Nothing else?’

‘Not really. Do you think it’s the same lot, sir?’ He looked at Heffernan anxiously.

Heffernan turned to his sergeant. ‘Well, Wes. What do you think?’

‘Same modus operandi,’ said Wesley thoughtfully. ‘But it’s the first time they’ve actually fired at someone. Perhaps they panicked.’

‘It’s possible. Let’s just hope they’re caught before their aim improves,’ Heffeman said with sincerity.

A small groan from the bed made the three policemen look round. Daniel Wexer’s eyes had opened and he was attempting to

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sit up. Wesley, the son of two doctors, rushed to the patient’s aid. ‘Take it easy now. Take your time,’ he said gently.

‘I’m okay,’ Wexer gasped. ‘I’ll be all right.’ With Wesley’s help he managed to sit, propped up by a trio of plump hospital pillows. PC Wallace handed him a glass of water and drew the curtains around the bed.

‘Is Jen okay?’

‘Your wife’s fine,’ Wallace assured him confidently. Wesley and Heffeman exchanged looks. This young lad would go far.

‘I want to make a statement,’ said Wexer, his voice gaining in strength. ‘I don’t want to see the bastards get away with it.’

Gerry Heffeman and Wesley Peterson listened carefully as the farmer made his statement while Wallace dutifully wrote it down. It was a familiar story. Isolated farmhouses in the area were being systematically raided for valuables and vehicles … and the robbers were armed and unpredictable. With the summer tourist season and its associated problems rapidly gaining momentum, this was the local force’s worst nightmare.

Exhausted by his efforts, Wexer lay back and closed his eyes. He had thinning hair and the rugged complexion of one who had spent much of his life out of doors. Wesley found it hard to guess at his age, which could have been anything betweenˇ forty and sixty.

Gerry Heffeman nudged his sergeant. It was time to go. They mumbled a few words of encouragement to PC Wallace and were about to leave when the curtain drawn round the bed parted.

A girl, dark-haired, skeletal and aged about sixteen, rushed to the man in the bed. His eyes followed her with loving anxiety. ‘Dad ’” are you all right?’ she asked before looking up at Heffeman. ‘Are you the police? Do you know who did this? Have you got them?’

‘We’ll do our best to find ‘em, love,’ Heffeman assured her. ‘Did you see anything last night?’

The girl shook her head. ‘I wasn’t there. I live in Neston with my mum.’

Heffeman nodded. There was nothing more to be learned from the newcomer.

‘We’ll be off now, love, and leave you to talk to your dad.’

The girl sat on the bed, peering anxiously into her father’s face. ‘Mum sends her … well, she asked how you were.

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Before the farmer could reply the curtain parted again, this time to admit a fair-haired woman. She was in her late twenties, tall with a turneQ-up nose and freckles. There were dark shadows beneath her green eyes. She looked as though she hadn’t slept.

‘This is Mrs Wexer, sir,’ said Wallace helpfully.

Wexer’s daughter’s facial expression changed dramatically. Concern for her injured father was replaced by a glowering of deep hatred directed at the newcomer. ‘I’ll be off,’ she announced curtly, standing up. She pushed past Jen Wexer and left, her fathers eyes watching her helplessly, pleading with her to stay.

‘What was all that about?’ asked Gerry Heffernan bluntly. Wesley looked at the inspector, uncomfortable: sometimes tact wasn’t his boss’s greatest asset.

Jen Wexer sighed. ‘We, er … don’t get on. My husband split up with her mother, his first wife, and Penny and her brother seem to blame me.’

‘Oh, Jen, come on, it was hardly your fault. The kids’ll come round,’ said the optimist in the bed weakly.

‘Let’s not talk about it, Dan. How are you feeling? How’s the leg?’

Wesley and Heffernan looked at each other. It was time to leave. They had done their bit.

‘Not much love lost there,’ Heffernan commented as they left the hospital.

‘You can say that again. It can’t be easy for these kids when their parents…’

The electronic buzzing of the mobile phone in Wesley’ s pocket announced that he was needed. When he had finished his brief conversation, he turned to the inspector, not quite knowing how to break the news.

He decided on the direct approach. ‘A body’s been found at a smallholding just outside Stoke Beeching, place called Longhouse Cottage. Call came in from a lad who turned up a skeleton while he was digging a drain. I said we’d be straight over.’

‘Longhouse Cottage?’ Gerry Heffernan pursed his lips and let out a long low whistle. ‘It’s my bet the chickens have come home to roost.’

‘Chickens? Well, it is a smallholding,’ said Wesley with a

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smile. It wasn’t often that Heffernan’s pronouncements were so cryptic.

‘If a body’s been found there, I reckon I know who it belongs to.’

‘Really?’

Heffernan took a deep breath before embarking on his story. ‘Jock Palister was a farm labourer who came into money about twenty years ago and bought Waters House, a big place on the hill above Longhouse Cottage … origin of windfall unknown. I was a young constable at the time and I remember there was talk … and a couple of bank robberies in Plymouth that went unsolved,’ he added meaningfully.

‘So?’

‘Jock led what seemed like a blameless life for a good few years - in other words he didn’t get caught - then he disappeared suddenly leaving his loving wife, Maggie, and sixteen-year-old son, Carl, in the lurch with a load of debts. They had to sell Waters House and most of their land and move into an old farm worker’s cottage down the hill … tatty old place called Longhouse Cottage. Now they just about scrape a living from three or four acres with some hens and a few scraggy sheep … if you can call it a living.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I think old Jock’s turned up again.’

‘Buried on his own land?’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me. His disappearance was always a bit of a mystery.’ He sighed. ‘Why did old Jock have to choose now to pop back up, eh?’ He rolled his eyes to heaven in an uncharacteristically theatrical manner. ‘Oh, Wesley. What have we been doing to deserve all this?’

As Wesley drove out of Tradmouth past the low glass and concrete comprehensive school and the architecturally unin-spiring swimming baths, he tried to organise his thoughts.

Just under a year ago, Wesley and his wife Pam had needed little persuasion to leave the cosmopolitan bustle of London and settle in the ancient Devon port of Tradmouth with its quaint quaysides and steep, narrow streets tumbling down to the river. But Wesley had been kept busy since his arrival and something told him that things were going to get worse. Criminals, unlike the invading army of tourists, did not come to Devon to take a holiday.

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It was a glorious day: the temperature was in the seventies and the sky was a spectacular shade of unbroken sapphire blue. To Wesley’s right the ground rose to hilly, hedged fields. To his left the pasture sloped down to meet the sparkling sea. This was hardly the landscape he’d known in London. And it wasn’t the sort of day to contemplate violence and murder … but he feared that was what waited for them at Longhouse Cottage.

Gerry Heffernan slumped back in the passenger seat with his eyes closed, seemingly asleep, while Wesley slowed the car down, peering out of the window, searching for the gateway to the smallholding. He noticed two driveways a few yards apart; the first bearing a rustic wooden plaque with the name ‘Waters House’ in bold letters, the second a home-made sign with the barely legible words ‘Longhouse Cottage’. A pair of gateposts, covered in flaking blue paint, loomed up on his right. He flicked the indicator and executed a right turn onto a track that would make any self-respecting car owner fear for his suspension.

He wasn’t sure whether the low stone building he eventually reached was Longhouse Cottage or some sort of outbuilding, such was its dilapidated state. There was an ancient and disreputable-looking Land Rover parked in the stony rectangle that passed for a yard. An array of half-dismantled vehicles at the side of the house, perched on bricks, made the pair of gleaming police cars parked beside them look positively Space Age in comparison.

Wesley studied the building with its protruding central porch. Longhouse Cottage - the name should have told him. He judged that it had enjoyed a few additions in its long lifetime, but the central section had remained relatively untouched. A fine example of a classic Devon medievallonghouse - with accommodation for the farmer at one end of the building and the animals at the other - dating back to … he hardly liked to hazard a guess. It had probably been abandoned at some stage in its history by the farmer of the land, who had built himself something more fashionable and allowed his workers to live in the old building. It wouldn’t have survived in this form otherwise - unmodernised and apparently unloved. He looked up to the top of the gently rolling hill where a large white house stood, half hidden by trees. presumably this was Waters House; home to Jock Palister and his family in wealthier days.

Heffernan had woken up with a jolt when the engine stopped

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and now both men climbed out of the car, amazed to see Detective Inspector Stan Jenkins walking slowly towards them, a look of relief on his face.

‘Hello, Stan. Wasn’t expecting to see you around this morning,’ said Gerry Heffernan. ‘I thought you had a hospital appointment.’

‘Yes, I did, Gerry. I went first thing and I was in and out in half an hour. Saw the consultant private,’ he added in a whisper.

‘Everything okay?’

Stan looked down and shuffled his feet. ‘Well as can be expected, Gerry.’

‘What’s wrong exactly?’ Gerry Heffernan always believed that beating around the bush had never advanced the sum of human knowledge.

Stan’s face reddened. ‘Oh, er … the old trouble,’ he muttered mysteriously. ‘I’m due to go in on Friday so I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you to deal with this one. Don’t want to start a case then have to drop it after a couple of days, and with my sergeant away … ‘ He shrugged his shoulders apologetically. ‘Did you see that farmer who was shot last night?’

‘Yeah. He didn’t tell us much we didn’t know already. Looks like the same lot, all right. His leg’s in a bit of a mess … but so would yours be if it was blasted with a sawn-off shotgun.’

Stan Jenkins shook his head in disbelief. ‘Terrible,’ he mumbled. Stan always seemed amazed at the extent of human wickedness … an odd reaction, Wesley always thought, for a policeman of so many years’ experience.

‘So what have we got here, then?’ Heffernan asked bluntly. ‘This body, is it Jock Palister’s?’

Stan pushed back his thinning grey hair, a worried expression on his face. Wesley had heard rumours of Stan’s imminent retirement ever since he had arrived in Tradmouth - and there were those who said it was long overdue. But something - perhaps the fear of long days spent in the company of Mrs Jenkins, if station gossip was anything to go by - kept Stan at his post. ‘I really don’t know, Gerry. It was Carl Palister who called us: that’s him over there in the field with his mum. He was digging a drain near the edge of the field when he turned up a human skeleton. I reckon Carl and his mum look worried about something … especially her,’ he said significantly. ‘But if they’d known the bones were there, surely they wouldn’t have called us out.’

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‘Yeah, Stan. You could be right.’

‘And Jock only disappeared three years ago,’ continued Stan. ‘This body looks as if it’s been in the ground a lot longer than that. ‘

‘Has Dr Bowman been called?’ asked Wesley.

‘He’s on his way … should be here any time.’ Stan turned to Heffernan, a look of relief on his face. ‘Well, Gerry, I suppose this one’s yours. I’ll leave you to it. Good luck.’

‘Thanks, Stan.’ Heffernan tried to sound as if this fresh addition to his considerable workload didn’t bother him in the least.

‘The body’s over in the field,’ said Stan, climbing wearily into one of the police cars. ‘Go and have a look for yourselves.’

Gerry Heffernan led the way. Wesley, following behind, hoped he wasn’t about to witness anything too gruesome. He came from a medical family - his parents had both come to England from Trinidad to train as doctors and his sister had read medicine at Oxford - but his stomach for such things was weak.

They made their way across the field, carefully avoiding the molehills and sheep droppings that littered the uneven ground. A gang of dirty-looking sheep watched them, chewing grass insolently. They reminded Wesley of the bored adolescents who hung around outside the amusement arcades of Morbay.

A pair of uniformed constables. stood in the far corner of the field, peering down into a hole in the ground. A well-muscled young man, with dark curly hair and minus his shirt, stood nervously to one side, talking to a middle-aged woman who wore a shabby, flowered frock. She watched Wesley intently as he approached and whispered something in the young man’s ear.

Heffernan nodded to the woman. ‘Morning, Maggie. Still keeping us in work, then?’ The woman said nothing but glowered at the inspector.

The two constables stood aside and watched as Wesley reached the hole, a gash in the earth; ten foot long and five foot deep.

The young man spoke, glancing nervously at Gerry Heffernan. ‘There were a load of stones down there … put there deliberate, I reckon.’ He regarded Wesley with anxious eyes, as though desperate to prove that this gruesome find had nothing to do with him.

‘Carl,’ said Heffernim, in a friendly tone. ‘How are you keeping?’

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‘Okay, thanks, Mr Heffernan,’ Carl replied with a tentative smile. He leaned on his spade, the sweat glistening on his muscular torso. There were many who forked out good money in Tradmouth’s flashy new gym to achieve a body like Carl’s. But the demands of the smallholding saw to it that his fitness regime came free of charge.