The Coffin Trail

Chapter Eleven

Driving home through a spring storm, Hannah wondered about coincidences. First, Ben Kind’s son had moved into Barrie Gilpin’s old cottage; then a nameless woman had suggested that Barrie was innocent of murdering Gabrielle Anders. Hannah could not imagine what might connect the two events, could not conceive what had brought Daniel Kind to the Lake District now that his father was dead.

Rain pounded her windscreen. She swore and screwed up her eyes as the lights from an oncoming heavy goods vehicle dazzled her. As the lorry lumbered away into the distance, she pictured Daniel in her mind. Although she rarely watched television, she’d caught a couple of his programmes. She’d been curious about the boy she’d heard Ben speak of. The physical similarities between father and son were subtle, the resemblance more apparent in their quick, urgent movements than in physical build or shape of jaw. They shared a sharp sense of humour and she guessed that they would laugh at the same jokes. Daniel’s thesis that a historian was a sort of detective intrigued her. He must care as passionately about uncovering secrets of the past as Ben had about solving crimes.

Passion. Yes, that was the word that came to mind when she thought of Ben. He was a tough, demanding boss but fiercely loyal to his team. Hannah had been devoted to him. The drift of thought made her shiver, even though the inside of the car was warm. She and Ben had never had an affair. There had been times when she’d speculated about what it might be like, moments when he’d given the impression that he thought of her as a woman, rather than just as a loyal and industrious subordinate. Once or twice he’d touched her on the arm or back. Maybe it was accidental, but she’d found the frisson scary as well as exciting. He’d never gone further and she’d never given him any encouragement; Marc’s jealousy of the time she spent with Ben weighed her down enough without an additional burden of guilt to bear. Besides, Ben already had one broken marriage behind him, and Cheryl back at home. She had Marc. Why spoil everything for the sake of a quick fling?

Sometimes she wondered whether the careful way in which they avoided flirting with each other was in itself a sign that their relationship might easily trespass beyond the professional boundaries. But nothing ever happened; after he retired she kept in touch, but didn’t often find the time to see him. When she’d heard of Ben’s death, she’d sat cross-legged on the staircase at home and surrendered herself to a good old-fashioned cry. Thank God Marc had been out that day. He’d have been sure that he’d had good cause to suspect her of infidelity. Even now, in lonely moments she interrogated herself, wanting to know if it really would have hurt anyone, if she had just slept with Ben once or twice. She still wasn’t sure of the right answer.

She slowed to a crawl as the lane bent first one way and then another. In this downpour it would be so easy to skid and go through a hedge or smash into a stone wall. At last she could see lights in front of her and she knew that she was almost home. Marc would be absorbed in his catalogue; it was her turn to cook their meal. Not so many years ago, she’d ached to see him even after the shortest separation and to this day she loved to stroke his fine hair, to run her fingers along the smooth contours of his naked back. This evening, he was more likely to fall asleep in front of the television than to start kissing her all over as a prelude to making love. The trouble was that life kept getting in the way. Her job, his job, pointless arguments about who had more time to deal with a flooded washing machine or a blocked drain. Maybe every couple went through these phases, but it reminded her of being stuck in a traffic jam. No sign of movement on the road ahead.

* * *

Over coffee, she decided to tell Marc about the anonymous call. In their early years together, whenever she talked about her latest case, he’d been as rapt as if she’d been describing the discovery of a fabulously rare first edition. Sometimes she worried that she said too much to him, but a couple shouldn’t have taboos, and she had to trust the man she loved.

‘Attention seeker,’ Marc diagnosed after she recounted the conversation between Maggie and the woman. ‘Craving the lime-light but too frightened of being found out as a liar to go through with it.’

Even if he were right, Hannah was sorry that he wasn’t intrigued. The Gabrielle Anders killing had been the first murder case she’d been involved with after meeting Marc. They had only been sleeping together for a few weeks and she hadn’t yet moved in here, the house that he’d been born in and inherited after his parents’ death. She’d confessed to him — and to no one else, certainly not Ben Kind — that blended with her horror at the brutality of Gabrielle’s killing was not only a grim resolve to see justice done but also a shivery excitement from being at the heart of the investigation.

Taking advantage of his knowledge of the area, she’d speculated aloud about the significance of the draping of the body over the Sacrifice Stone the night after its discovery. They’d stayed up most of the night while he recounted all he knew of the history of the ancient landmark and the obscure legends about virgins slain each year in return for a guarantee from the old gods that the valley would remain fertile forever. Life coming out of a death, he’d told her, is the most potent myth of all.

‘Maggie’s not soft,’ she said stubbornly. ‘When I quizzed her, she was convinced the woman was genuinely wanting to help, and genuinely afraid.’

‘What would she be afraid of after so long?’

‘Suppose she’d seen a husband or a lover behaving in a way that made her suspicious. Or a former husband or lover, someone who’s fallen out of favour in the meantime. How about a work colleague or neighbour? That’s the upside of cold case investigations. Witnesses may be tempted to come out of the woodwork when they wouldn’t have contemplated talking to us at the time of the original investigation. I’ll never forget the sight of poor Gabrielle Anders and comparing the photographs of her when she was alive. She’d been so pretty once. Not too difficult to understand why our caller might be frightened, is it?’

‘Where do you go from here?’

‘To the old files, and the original exhibits. I’ll crawl over the statements while Nick sees if any of the evidence can be improved forensically with the new techniques.’

‘I thought you never had much luck with forensic stuff linking Gilpin to the crime?’

‘Clothing fibres were found at the scene. A few hairs. He’d been up by the Sacrifice Stone on the night of the murder, we were confident we could prove that. The fact he’d gone missing and his body turned up nearby seemed like a bit of a giveaway.’

‘To say nothing of the murder weapon.’

‘The most damning evidence we had. If you remember, the pathologist reckoned that Gabrielle was killed by a blow to the head and then post-mortem her face was struck and her neck cut by the axe we found.’

Marc nibbled at a hangnail. ‘He’d hidden it near a cairn on the fell-side, hadn’t he?’

‘Someone had hidden it. Even Mrs Gilpin couldn’t deny that it was Barrie’s axe. The only question was whether it had been stolen to commit the crime. Not impossible.’

‘But unlikely.’

‘Stranger things have happened. Ben kept pointing out that if you wanted to frame someone for a murder, Barrie was an ideal candidate.’

‘He didn’t like to be proved wrong.’

‘Nothing was proved either way,’ she snapped. At once she wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Why must she always rise to the bait whenever he had a dig at Ben? In a calmer tone she added, ‘He wanted everyone to keep an open mind, that’s all. Which is precisely what we ought to do now.’

He yawned and stretched out a hand for the TV remote control. ‘Best of luck.’

‘You might like to rack your own brains.’

‘What do you mean?’ he murmured.

‘Well, you were walking in Brackdale yourself that day, remember? Gabrielle was staying at The Moon under Water. Was there anything you noticed, anyone you saw, that was a little out of the ordinary? You might not have paid attention at the time, but with hindsight…’

The theme tune of his favourite quiz show was playing on the television. ‘I’m sure I’d have mentioned it,’ he said absently, his eyes shifting to the screen. ‘It was just a normal afternoon as far as I was concerned. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.’

What if she’d been my sister?

Half a dozen file photographs of Gabrielle Anders were fanned out on her desk, but instead of inspecting them, Hannah was staring through the rain-streaked window. In her head she could see her father’s pale face as he bent to whisper bad news in her ear. On the morning of her fourth birthday, her mother had miscarried. Years later, Mrs Scarlett told her that the baby had been a girl. Hannah had longed for a younger sister, not least as an ally in the daily skirmishes with her insufferably superior elder sister, but Mum had never been able to carry a third child to term. Had the lost child lived, she would have been the same age as the dead woman.

That thought had sneaked into Hannah’s mind during the dreadful afternoon up at the Sacrifice Stone. Gazing at Gabrielle’s ruined face, she’d dug her nails into her palms, fighting to suppress her anger at such cruelty. A detective needed to remain detached. Soon she would have to attend the post-mortem, when the cold flesh would be cut to the bone, when organs and tissues would be explored with relentless attention to forensic detail. But Hannah could not bring herself to think of Gabrielle Anders as an exhibit and a source of clues. A few hours before, Gabrielle had lived and breathed.

She might have been my sister.

Who was she trying to kid? Turning back to the photographs, Hannah was forced to admit that she and Gabrielle were scarcely lookalikes. No point in bitching that it was wonderful what you could do with make-up, subtle lighting, and cosmetic dentistry. There was a gulf between them in attitude. You could see it in Gabrielle’s almond eyes and in her high cheekbones, you could see it in the way she held her head. She was a predator. In one of the studio photographs, taken when she’d been an aspiring model, she gazed straight into the lens while her tongue peeped out and touched her upper lip. This was a woman savouring power, the power to stop a man in his tracks and make him do her bidding.

Hannah had always lacked that confidence. She could never tease men into watching her every move and the thought of screwing her way to the top made her gorge rise. Anything that she achieved in her career would be thanks to her own efforts. The wild life hadn’t been kind to Gabrielle in the long run. Easy to imagine that she had acquired the dangerous habit of thinking herself irresistible and that in the end it had cost her life. If the two of them had ever met, they’d have had nothing in common. Probably loathed each other on sight. They weren’t sisters at all — yet Hannah could never quite rid her mind of the notion that fate had forged a bond between them. Victim and detective, thrown together by sudden death.

The door swung open, rocking on its hinges as Les Bryant strode in. As usual, he dropped into a chair without being asked. The little discourtesies were a habit, gestures to make the point that she might be in charge, but he had no intention of tugging his forelock to her. Fair enough, as long as he stayed on-side.

‘Nice bit of stuff,’ he muttered with a nod at the photographs.

‘Not when I saw her,’ Hannah said, sliding out of a plastic wallet a set of photographs taken at the post-mortem and shuffling them on to the desk. The corpse’s face was scarcely recognisable, the lovely hair matted with blood.

He winced at the wounds on the swollen face. ‘Vicious bastard. If Gilpin did kill her, what happened to him was poetic justice.’

‘And if he didn’t, then he’s another victim.’

‘You’re not suggesting he was thrown into the ravine?’

‘We never found a scrap of evidence that suggested his death was anything other than an accident. Suicide was an outside bet, so was murder. But the verdict at the inquest was accidental death and Ben Kind didn’t disagree. He wondered if Barrie might have had a close encounter with whoever had killed Gabrielle. There were traces of her blood on his hand and sleeve…maybe he’d come across the body during a nocturnal ramble and fallen to his death while he was running away in panic.’

‘Speculation,’ Bryant said.

‘Yeah, Ben had to admit he was pissing in the wind. Apart from any other consideration, Barrie was a strong, fit young man. Even if he’d stumbled across someone armed with an axe, he’d have had a good chance of showing him a clean pair of heels. But if Barrie was set up, we never came close to showing who did it, or how. We couldn’t argue against the decision to run down the inquiry.’

‘So what’s changed? Yesterday’s phone call doesn’t take us too far.’

Us. At least he was thinking as a team member, not a devil’s advocate whose first priority was to scoff at any fresh initiative. ‘All I’m doing is taking a second glance. Nothing more. I can’t justify devoting too much resource to something as nebulous as the message that Maggie took.’

Les Bryant leaned back in his chair. ‘Time to look at the case from a different angle, then?’

‘I think so.’ Hannah pointed to the photographs. ‘Starting with the victim.’

‘How much do you know about her?’

‘Not a lot.’ Hannah sighed. ‘Born and raised in the East End. Home a tower block, mother an occasional prostitute. She was one of four kids with three different dads. Before her tenth birthday, she was bunking off school. At fifteen she moved out and no one kept in touch. She seems to have followed a boyfriend up to Yorkshire.’

‘The Promised Land,’ Bryant said in his broadest West Riding accent.

‘If you say so. She modelled a bit, tried a little acting. She’d ditched the boyfriend early on and he went back to London. We checked and he died of a drugs overdose a year before Gabrielle was killed. She mixed in bad company. The old story, plenty of men were keen to take a pretty girl to bed in exchange for a slap-up dinner and a few quid to help with the rent.’

Les Bryant plucked at a hair growing from his nostril. ‘My daughter wanted to be an actress. Christ, the day she signed up with an agency, I hit the roof, but would she listen? They ripped her off something rotten. At least she finished up with an Oscar.’

‘Really?’ Hannah was startled.

‘Yeah,’ he said, deadpan, ‘while she was resting, she took a job as a dental hygienist in Batley. Finished up marrying the dentist. Oscar Padgett.’

She laughed. ‘There are worse fates.’

‘Obviously you’ve never been to Batley.’ He saw her glance at the post-mortem photographs. ‘Matter of fact, I spoke to Jenny on the phone only last night, but you know something? It’s six months since I last saw her face to face. Kids, bloody hell. You have any?’

His conversational swerves kept catching her on the back foot. She was starting to like the crusty old bugger, but she’d hate to be interrogated by him.

‘Never got round to it.’

He puffed out his cheeks. ‘Not bothered about the ticking clock?’

She shrugged and said, ‘Neither of us is exactly desperate to start a family.’

Bryant said, ‘Take it from me, there are more important things than the job.’

‘Actually, I worked that out a while back.’

‘Well, then.’ His dour features were expressionless. Challenging her to get uptight, but she wouldn’t be provoked.

‘We were talking about Gabrielle.’ She cleared her throat. ‘While she was in Leeds, she met up with Natasha Litvinov. Tash Litvinov, as she was known. They had plenty in common, both struggling for a break.’

‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’ Bryant grunted. ‘I told my Jenny, but would she listen?’

‘Both of them became disillusioned, they decided to start again. Tash came up to this neck of the woods, met a rich man and settled down. Gabrielle wanted to get right away. She fancied trying her luck in the States.’

‘Hollywood?’

‘She never seems to have made it beyond Las Vegas. For a couple of years she lived with a croupier from one of the casinos. Most of the time she spent as a waitress, serving free booze to gamblers to keep them at the tables or the slot machines. The pay was nothing special, but a pretty girl can make a good living out of tips from the punters.’

‘Why come back to England?’

‘According to Tash, her relationship had broken up and she was getting homesick. She’d earned a few quid and had this idea of travelling around Europe. Britain was her first stop.’

‘And her last.’

‘Uh-huh. She’d only been back a week when she turned up on her old mate’s doorstep. Tash had done well for herself, she’d married a property developer called Dumelow. He bought a mansion in Brackdale and played the local squire. After all those auditions, she finally landed the part of lady of the manor.’

‘How thrilled was Tash to see a face from the past? A reminder of the dark days, before she met her sugar daddy?’

‘She told us she was thrilled to have someone around she could gossip to about the past. She does her best, but the truth is, she doesn’t exactly have a lot in common with the good folk of Brackdale. Though she did introduce her friend to an odd-job man who worked on the estate.’

‘Don’t tell me. Barrie Gilpin.’

‘Got it in one. Barrie took a shine to Gabrielle from the moment he set eyes on her. He kept turning up at the pub in the village where she’d taken a room. According to the landlord, he was a bit of a nuisance. Constantly offering to buy her a drink, not taking no for an answer.’

‘Did she show him up in public? Take the piss?’

‘As far as we could establish, she humoured him, let him buy her the occasional orange juice.’

Bryant groaned. ‘You can’t help wondering if it would have been safer to be rude. He might have felt encouraged. Stalkers are like that. They take the slightest pleasantry as a sign of lust.’

‘Men are like that, never mind stalkers.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t think he was stalking Gabrielle,’ she said. ‘He was just lonely and out of his depth. This glamorous woman with a Nevada tan had turned up out of nowhere and she didn’t make him feel small when he tried to make friends. Of course he was excited. That doesn’t make him a murderer.’

‘Easy for him to have become carried away. If he tried it on and she lost patience with him, who’s to say that he wouldn’t have snapped? He had access to the axe that killed her.’

‘There’s more. All the evidence pointed to the body having been moved. The Dumelows had a four-wheel drive that was stolen the day before Gabrielle’s murder. We found it burned out in a remote wooded area. Barrie could have killed her and then used the vehicle to transport her up the coffin trail, within spitting distance of the Sacrifice Stone. Headlights in the dark can be seen for miles in a valley like Brackdale, but we couldn’t find any witnesses. No big surprise, at that time of night, probably nobody was looking. Afterwards, so the official theory went, he hid the axe, dumped the four-by-four, and set off across the fell-side. In the dark, he slipped into the ravine. He broke his legs in the fall and in any event the sides were too steep for anyone to climb out if they weren’t kitted out with the proper gear. Death by exposure, everything neatly tied up.’

‘Why go back up the fell? Why not go home and tuck himself up like a good mummy’s boy? If Ma Gilpin was besotted by her only child, she might even have come up with an alibi.’

‘Not her. She was so honest it hurt to take her statement. Trust me, I interviewed her. From the word go, she admitted that he’d been out most of the evening.’

‘Do you think she was afraid he’d killed Gabrielle?’

‘No way. She was convinced of his innocence, she never wavered for an instant. He wasn’t capable of hurting anyone, she was adamant about that.’

‘Not exactly evidence to stake your reputation on,’ Bryant said with a weary sigh. ‘I can see why pinning the crime on Gilpin was the only game in town.’

‘But it wasn’t,’ Hannah said. ‘Ben Kind was no fool. He’d have faced up to reality if nobody else was in the frame, but there were other candidates for the murder of Gabrielle, men with access to the four-by-four and the axe…’

‘Tash Dumelow’s husband, for one?’

‘Simon Dumelow’s made a lot of money in a rough business and when he was twenty, he picked up a conviction for actual bodily harm. But he’s much older and apparently more civilised now. For a long time he’s been paying other people to do his dirty work for him. We wondered if he’d made a pass at his wife’s mate and reacted badly to rejection. But by all accounts he’s always been genuinely crazy about Natasha and even though she was laid up with flu at the time, she swore he never left the house that night. Then again — what if she was lying to protect him?’

‘Who else?’

‘Tom Allardyce, the tenant of Brack Hall Farm, Ben’s suspect of choice. Tash had introduced him to Gabrielle Anders, just as she had Barrie. Eight years before Gabrielle was killed, he was charged with raping a girl he’d met in a nightclub in Carlisle. But the prosecution fell apart.’

‘The way prosecutions do,’ Bryant said grimly.

‘Yeah, tell me about it.’

‘Did he have an alibi for Gabrielle’s murder?’

‘You bet, again conveniently provided by a mate of his, the local publican. Man called Dowling. The investigating officers couldn’t shake him and the CPS advised that if the case went ahead, Allardyce would walk out of court without a stain on his character.’ A tinge of bitterness entered her voice. She couldn’t help it; she was thinking not so much of Allardyce as of Sandeep Patel. ‘Actually, those were the very words the lawyer used. I looked up the file.’