The Coffin Trail

Chapter Sixteen

‘So you’ve nothing further to add?’ Nick Lowther asked.

Tom Allardyce’s expression remained impassive. Except, Hannah thought, for a hint of scorn in the way the corners of his lips turned down. Grudgingly, he’d led them into the kitchen, a large well-proportioned room commanding a view of Underfell and the coffin trail that wound down from the slope beyond. At least he was house-trained to the extent of leaving his boots in the back porch before venturing on to the well-scrubbed green linoleum tiles. Half a dozen towels were hanging over a huge old-fashioned wooden clothes horse to dry and the rich smell of baked bread lingered in the air. Before taking a seat at the table occupying the centre of the room, Hannah had run her fingertips along the rims of half a dozen Port Meirion plates displayed on a tall pine dresser. Not a speck of grime. Whatever Jean Allardyce had done with herself, she hadn’t forgotten the dusting before her departure.

‘Don’t reckon I have.’

‘And you can’t tell us when we may be able to speak to your wife?’

‘No.’

Hannah stood up. ‘In that case, Mr Allardyce, we won’t be troubling you any further.’

‘Thank Christ for that. I can get back to my work.’

‘For the moment, I should say.’ Hannah forced a sweet smile, hoping to provoke him. ‘For the time being, you’re quite free to carry on cleaning your car.’

‘It’s a job to be done,’ he said, as if stung. She exulted inwardly at having dented his calm. So that was his weakness. He didn’t like it to be suggested that he shirked his duties. ‘One of the many. I was up in the fields before six this morning. And you ask me where Jean is! I haven’t got the bloody time to be looking after her as well as everything else.’

‘When your wife gets back,’ Nick said, ‘can you ask her to give us a ring?’

‘Assuming she does get back,’ Hannah added.

Allardyce glowered. ‘And exactly what d’you mean by that?’

Hannah didn’t reply, just allowed her gaze to settle on the farmer, letting him exercise his imagination.

‘What do you reckon?’ Nick watched as the collie raced after the departing Mondeo, barking furiously.

‘I’d say the dog’s marginally preferable to his owner. At least with our four-legged friends, what you see is what you get. Allardyce gives nothing away.’

‘He stuck to his story about the night Gabrielle was killed. Hear no evil, see no evil. Backed up with a convenient alibi from his good lady.’

‘Not quite so convenient for him if she’s vanished.’

‘What do you make of that? Something or nothing?’

‘I wish we had tapes of those calls. Perhaps we should have set the hotline up differently. Run it into the main switchboard so that we could have automatic recording. Then we’d know if Jean Allardyce was the woman who phoned us.’

‘Wisdom of hindsight,’ Nick said. ‘Don’t reproach yourself. It’s an utter waste of energy.’

‘All right, if she is our caller, then why would she go missing? That’s what bugs me.’

‘Early days yet. According to Allardyce, it’s only a few hours since he last saw her. Barely long enough for a serious shopping trip, never mind anything more life-changing. Maybe she’s playing hookey for once in her life. For all we know, she has a secret lover lurking in Staveley or Troutbeck or somewhere.’

‘She’s not the type.’

‘Is there a type?’

Hannah gave him a sharp glance, but he was concentrating on the road ahead. ‘Anything’s possible. As I remember, she wasn’t bad looking, in a bloodless sort of way. Good complexion, I rather think she had an enviable pair of boobs, but her cardigans were so shapeless, it was hard to tell. If you ask me, the mere thought of an assignation with a lover would have scared the living daylights out of her. Quite apart from fear of what hubby would do if he found out. Did you see that dog-eared Mills and Boon next to the coffee machine? My guess is that she got her fix of romance strictly secondhand.’

‘What would have prompted her to ring the hotline, if she’d kept quiet about something important the first time around?’

‘Allardyce gave us one interesting titbit. She served Daniel Kind and his partner when they came to dine with the Dumelows. Could be Daniel said something that pricked her conscience. Especially given that she didn’t share her husband’s hostility to Barrie Gilpin.’

‘So that’s why you asked him about Ben Kind’s son?’

‘Elementary, my dear Lowther. Even though Allardyce says he’s sure that Barrie killed Gabrielle, she may have suspected there was more to the murder than met the eye. Don’t forget, if she has been keeping back important information about the case, it may have nothing to do with her husband.’

‘Her cousin Joe Dowling, then?’

‘Or Simon Dumelow.’ As their car rounded a bend, Hannah caught a fleeting glimpse of the Sacrifice Stone outlined against the sky. ‘Consider this. If she caused strife for her employer, it wouldn’t only be her job on the line. Her husband would finish up right behind her in the dole queue. That’s the sort of prospect that may have been weighing on her mind. It could explain why she told Linz that we should forget about her earlier call.’

‘Isn’t Dumelow supposed to be in a business meeting today?’

‘With his accountant in Manchester, or so he told his wife. If Jean Allardyce hasn’t turned up by tomorrow morning, I’ll ask Maggie to check him out. Has he really been closeted in some high-powered boardroom wheeler-dealing? He wouldn’t be the first man to lie to his wife about his whereabouts.’

‘You don’t think he and Jean Allardyce…?’

‘It seems unlikely he’d leave his gorgeous wife for her. But who knows?’

‘Maybe she’s just so sick of Allardyce that she’s decided to jack the marriage in.’

‘With no clue or warning? She hasn’t left any note or word of explanation. Unless he’s found one and is keeping mum.’

‘Which isn’t impossible. Anyway, in her shoes, would you want to provoke a man like Allardyce any further if you were running out on him?’

‘It might be the best chance I’d ever had. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold and all that. On the other hand, I don’t think I’d hang around to wash his towels and the kitchen floor, let alone start baking bread before I packed my bags and left.’

The minute she walked through the door of their cottage, even before she set eyes on him, she knew that Marc was in a temper. No Poirot-like powers were required to reach this conclusion; it was enough to hear her partner stomping around on the creaky upstairs floorboards. The slamming-shut of the bathroom door merely confirmed her deduction.

In the early months of their relationship, when she’d first encountered his propensity for acting like a spoiled teenager each time something didn’t go his way, she’d allowed his moods to rattle her. Eventually she’d realised this was the reaction he sought, whether or not consciously. Her most effective retaliation was to feign indifference. These days, pretence wasn’t often required; ignoring him and getting on with what she wanted to do was becoming easier all the time. As she made herself a toasted cheese sandwich, she wondered if this pattern was common to all couples. Perhaps it was a sign of maturity, that one could still love a man whilst finding his habits and behaviour a source of recurrent irritation.

She couldn’t be sure, though; this was by far the longest and most intense relationship of her adult life and she didn’t have much first-hand experience to measure it by. Her father had succumbed to prostate cancer when she was eleven and although her hazy memories suggested that her childhood belief that her parents were devoted to each other was not far off the mark, her mother had re-married within twelve months. The step-father had proved to be an alcoholic and Hannah and her elder sister hadn’t shed many tears when his liver had packed up permanently. While she’d been at university, her mother had died of pneumonia and her sister had emigrated after meeting an Italian on holiday. Isobel had divorced Silvio after a couple of years but had stayed on in Rome, teaching English as a foreign language, leaving Hannah to make her way in the police force. Apart from a couple of fellow students and (a big, big mistake that made her go cold simply to recall the gleeful gossip that her surrender provoked) a handsome but boastful fellow police cadet, she’d slept with no one but Marc. Listening to fellow women officers, she’d sometimes wondered if she was missing out. Too late to worry now. She was doomed to respectability. She was a Detective Chief Inspector.

Upstairs, the shower was roaring. Presumably Marc was trying to sluice away the troubles of the day. He’d already tried one solution; a bottle of Glenfiddich stood on the breakfast bar alongside an empty glass. While munching the toastie, she channel-hopped with the TV remote. True to form, when she fancied half an hour’s escape, the screen was filled with soap opera actors shouting at each other, demanding “Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?” The alternatives included a documentary about AIDS in Africa and a close-up of a bowel operation in a hospital drama renowned for its gritty realism. She’d moved into the kitchen to wait for the espresso machine to finish gurgling, when she heard heavy footsteps bumping down the stairs.

‘Fancy a drink?’ she called. Perhaps his mood had nearly run its course. If not, she could always retreat into the bathroom herself and relax with a long soak in the tub while the aromatherapy candles gave the steamy atmosphere a tang of rosemary and juniper.

‘I’ll have a whisky. Neat.’

He was framed in the doorway and as she turned to face him, it struck her yet again what an attractive man she shared her life with. At least she hadn’t become indifferent to him, at least he still had the ability to turn her on. His features were smooth and regular, his gaze clear and penetrating, and she knew that if he touched her in a certain way, she would melt: not a matter of choice, not a decision to be made, he could still do it for her.

She gave him a conciliatory grin. ‘Bad as that, huh?’

He replied with a grunt and wandered off to the living room. When she followed with a well-filled tumbler and the bottle of Glenfiddich, he was watching the TV without the sound. The documentary had finished and been replaced by a football match. Two European teams she’d never heard of. She switched off the set and put on the CD player. Erik Satie; not her sort of music, too ethereal, but Marc was a fan. He gulped the whisky down without uttering a word. The coffee was still too hot, so she went to sit cross-legged on the rug, right at his feet. She caught the whiff of alcohol on his breath as he poured himself another generous measure.

She pushed the glass to one side with a firm shake of the head. ‘If you drink much more of that tonight, you’ll be no good to me later on.’

He still didn’t say anything as she eased off his socks and began to stroke his soles. Foot massage was something he liked, something that often formed a prelude to making up after an argument or a period when they’d been too busy to spare enough time for each other. Suddenly she realised how much she wanted this to end in their making love, to magic away the troubles of the world.

‘Want to tell me all about it?’ There was no hard skin anywhere on his feet, no callouses, no corns; he just didn’t have physical blemishes, this man. Already she was getting into a rhythm, moving her hands up and down, up and down.

‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ he said hoarsely.

She could feel the tension in his body. He hadn’t closed his eyes yet in surrender to her caress, let alone made a move to unfasten her blouse or jeans.

‘Come on, talk to me,’ she whispered.

‘It won’t help.’

‘Hey, relax.’ She ran her nails lightly over the surface of his feet ‘You’re not the only one who’s had a difficult day.’

It was true enough. They were no nearer to finding their anonymous caller. Bob Swindell had reported that Dale Moffat in particular had been hostile and unco-operative when questioned, but Linz didn’t recognise the voice of either of the sisters. The likeliest candidate remained Jean Allardyce and she’d gone AWOL. Tomorrow they’d have to try again. How much did Marc care about that, or about anything other than his own preoccupations? Increasingly of late, a sceptical voice kept quizzing her: just how tough can it be, running a bookshop, for God’s sake? Opening and shutting pretty much as you please, answerable to no one but yourself?

‘Is that so?’ He lifted his legs, pulling out of her grasp. ‘Sorry, it keeps slipping my mind how much more arduous your job is than mine.’

‘I never said that.’

‘You were thinking it, though.’ With a defiant glare, he picked up the tumbler and took a mouthful of whisky. ‘Don’t deny it, Hannah. I know you too well.’

Her cheeks started burning and that made her angry, with herself and with him. She hauled herself up and said, ‘For God’s sake, what’s got into you tonight?’

His eyes were glistening. For a few seconds she was afraid she’d gone too far and that he would dissolve into tears. ‘All right. If you really want to know, it’s to do with this inquiry your people are running. Leigh called me earlier. She and Dale have each been given the third degree by a pair of your DCs.’

She was baffled. ‘Is that all?’

‘It’s enough.’

‘Leigh’s getting it out of proportion. The team was only conducting routine follow-up interviews.’

He tossed back the remainder of the whisky. ‘Is this simply because Daniel Kind has turned up on the scene? Because his father never accepted Barrie’s guilt, you want to keep the son happy by going through the motions, is that it?’

‘This has nothing to do with Daniel Kind.’

‘You’ve not spoken to him?’

When she hesitated before replying, she saw a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes. ‘He and I have talked, yes. What about it?’

‘There’s no need for your sidekicks to go around upsetting people all these years later.’

He poured himself another finger of Glenfiddich. In some bizarre way, he seemed to regard himself as having scrambled on to the moral high ground. With no bloody justification at all. The sheer unfairness of it made her skin prickle.

‘What’s the problem?’ Her voice was rising; she couldn’t help herself. ‘I don’t get it. For God’s sake, Dale and Leigh aren’t kids who need to be seen in the presence of an appropriate adult. They’re mature women, they can cope with a few questions.’

‘Leigh told me they pretty much reduced Dale to tears. Don’t they realise she’s a lone parent? That she’s…vulnerable?’

‘Vulnerable? Don’t make me laugh, she’s about as vulnerable as Cruella de Ville.’ Hannah softened her tone as she added, ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten that you and she used to see each other. Fair enough if you still want to look out for her. But there’s nothing to fret over. Bob and Linz were only doing their job. No one’s accusing her of murdering Gabrielle Anders.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ he snapped. ‘Routine investigations are all in a day’s work for you, but the sisters aren’t used to being interrogated. Made to feel as though they are being secretive, holding stuff back, obstructing the police in the course of their inquiries.’

‘Dale and Leigh were both working at The Moon under Water at the time. It was possible that either of them might have been our anonymous caller.’

‘Ludicrous.’

‘Or they may have seen something, without even realising its significance. We have to cover all the bases.’

He took another drink of whisky. ‘This is so typical. You people do anything you want.’

‘You people?’ She reached out and seized his wrist. ‘Hey, this is me. Your partner, remember? I’m not you people.’

He drained his glass and poured again. ‘It’s true, though, isn’t it? Police work is all about trampling over lives, regardless of the consequences.’

Without a word, she took the tumbler out of his hand and put it down on the rug. ‘Marc, I can’t believe you’re saying this. It’s so over the top. Look, we’re both tired, you’ve obviously had plenty to drink already. It’s not even dark yet, but never mind. Why don’t we have an early night for once?’

‘You always have to have the last word, don’t you?’ he said bitterly. ‘I will go up, but maybe I’ll spend the night in the spare room. You can get on with your work as late as you like without any disturbance.’

His words were like needles entering her flesh. ‘Why are you doing this?’

He gave a curt nod in the direction of her briefcase and laptop. ‘You’ll have brought work home, presumably? As always. You’re forever saying you need to catch up with the paperwork. Well, here’s your chance.’

‘I don’t need to…’

He sprang to his feet, although the decisive effect was compromised by a slight stumble which caused him to knock over the glass of whisky. As Hannah let her voice trail away, she watched an amber stain spreading out over the rug. Reaching out for the music system remote, she brought an abrupt end to Trois Gymnopedies.

He stopped at the door, seemed to waver for a moment. ‘Goodnight, then.’

She didn’t answer. Tonight there wasn’t anything more for them to say to each other.

She’d never asked Marc directly about his love life in the years before they got together. It wasn’t that she was incurious; far from it. But there were some questions — a lot of questions, actually — that it was better not to ask. You never knew how easy it would be to live with the answers.

Unlike her previous boyfriends, he seldom talked about himself. Except at their most intimate moments, when he gave himself to her without reservation, there remained something unknowable about him, something other-worldly and remote. In those heart-stopping weeks after she’d first slept with him, she’d vowed that she would suppress her natural inquisitiveness and concentrate on the here and now. All that mattered was that she never lost him.

Of course, she couldn’t resist playing the detective game. As time passed, she became assiduous in picking up crumbs that he dropped. Marc was no monk in his earlier days, that was for sure. He’d lost his virginity to an older woman whom he’d met while working in a hotel during his gap year. Maybe from her he’d learned the patience and technique that made him as different from her previous lovers as Mozart from Meatloaf. He’d taken lovers at university, but out of term time he kept going back to a Brackdale girl he’d first courted as a diffident, acned schoolboy. Dale Moffat.

Hannah sat in the living room, rifling her memory for the bits and pieces of information he’d let slip about Dale. After consigning the Erik Satie CD to the bottom of a box of their least-played music, she’d put on Diana Krall and gone in search of comfort food. In a corner of a kitchen cupboard she’d discovered a forgotten box of Belgian chocolates. The legend boasted that the contents represented an exquisite combination of refined taste and time-honoured tradition: how could she resist? She’d worry about her weight in the morning. In the absence of sex, chocolate wasn’t such a bad substitute.

As for sex, every community had at least one Dale. Pretty, vivacious, narcissistic; smart enough not to cheapen herself by spreading her favours too thickly but not quite smart enough to do a Tash Dumelow and hit the jackpot. When Marc was sixteen, she’d dumped him for the star centre forward of the school football team. By the time he came back as a student on his first vacation, the acne was long gone and the soccer player wasn’t scoring any more. Hannah gathered that Marc and Dale liked each other’s company and liked going to bed together even more, but it was never a grand passion. Long before Marc took his degree, Dale caught the eye of a married man and, in time-honoured tradition, finished up pregnant. She’d kept the baby but not the boyfriend.

When the child was a little older, she and Marc had resumed their affair on a sporadic basis. As far as Hannah could figure out, it was a fallback position in more senses than one. If Marc was ever without a girlfriend for the night and Dale wasn’t otherwise engaged, they usually finished up in bed together. In the unlikely event that matrimony had ever been on the cards, Hannah had no doubt that the presence of Dale’s boy Oliver was enough to deter Marc. For a lifelong commitment-phobe, taking on a stepson in addition to a wife was too much to ask. Perhaps that was why he insisted on surrounding himself with books. The dusty tomes never threw up or got toothache, they never made demands.

‘She does know about you and Dale?’ she’d asked when Marc said that he’d invited Leigh Moffat to run the cafe at Amos Books.

‘Of course, those two don’t have secrets.’ The question seemed to amaze him. ‘But it’s not an issue.’

She’d thought about joking that it would be different if the boot was on the other foot, and she was proposing to set up with the brother of an ex, but she let it go. It would never occur to him that she might suffer a pang of jealousy. In a way, she felt flattered that he regarded himself as incapable of betraying her. Only in the darkest moments of self-doubt did she wonder if she was fooling herself. Or if he was fooling himself.

Leigh was less blatantly alluring than her sister, but to Hannah’s mind more attractive. Like Dale, she’d never married; Hannah didn’t have a clue why not. There had been relationships with men, Hannah gathered, but nothing that lasted, and she seemed content to spend a lot of time with Dale and Oliver, upon whom she doted. Apparently she’d been on her own for years, making a modest career in catering while Dale drifted from job to job. Both were intelligent women, but neither seemed to possess any burning ambition. Hannah couldn’t relate to such a lack of drive. To her, it was an article of faith: any woman with talent owes it to herself, and to her gender, to make the most of her potential. From childhood, she’d been determined to make her own way and never to be beholden to a man.

Leigh wasn’t the type to worry without good cause. Whenever Hannah met her, she radiated a calm assurance that verged on the intimidating. Impossible to imagine that in her entire life, she’d ever allowed a souffle to sink or stepped outside her front door without the benefit of a discreet touch of blusher and eye-shadow. If neither she nor Dale was the anonymous caller, why so much angst over what they remembered of the day when Gabrielle Anders had been murdered?

Unless, Hannah supposed, they remembered something about Marc that they didn’t want anyone to know.

The choice was simple. She could imitate Marc and take refuge in booze to stop worrying herself sick. Or she could do something. No contest. She found herself reaching into her case for the personal organiser, and then for the phone.

She was halfway through dialling Daniel Kind’s mobile number when she asked herself what she was doing. Already it was mid-evening; soon it would be dark. He would be busy with his work or doing whatever he did in the company of his partner, the journalist. They weren’t even friends. It was — well, Lauren Self’s phrase would be quite inappropriate. What would he think if she called him out of the blue, without an excuse?

As his phone rang, she cut off the call. Perhaps he was out. Besides, she wasn’t sure what to say if he answered. The impulse to dial his number was inexplicable: why not Nick, or even Les Bryant? It wasn’t as if she fancied him. That morning, she’d taken care not to look straight into his dark eyes, so reminiscent of his father’s. The trouble was, all he had to do was to check who had called in order to discover that she’d called for a couple of seconds, only to think better of it. Embarrassing.

Given the option, it’s always better to do something than nothing.

How many times had she heard Ben Kind say that? As a piece of philosophy, even he’d admitted its limitations, but right now it was apposite. What did she have to lose?

She dialled the mobile number again.