The Coffin Trail

Chapter Four

‘To Tarn Cottage,’ Miranda said, raising her glass.

‘To Tarn Cottage — and us.’

Daniel took a sip of Bollinger and leaned back gingerly in his chair. His back was creaking like the cellar door after a long afternoon spent laying carpets in the hall and living room while the plumber fitted a wash basin and the builders put finishing touches to the new airing cupboard. No matter how many times it was vacuumed, the cottage never seemed free of dust, and he and Miranda were always glad of a chance to get some fresh air into their lungs. They escaped to the paved area outside the living room as soon as the last of the workmen left. The York stone flags were uneven and some were half-hidden by creeping dandelions, but until the sun sank out of sight they could escape the wood shavings and the smell of new carpets and look out at the tarn. In the chill evening air, he felt another twinge: an unexpected sense of loss. One day, would he regret abandoning the career he’d striven for, simply to fulfil a fantasy of a new life with a woman he still hardly knew?

The moment she stretched her arms and yawned elaborately, allowing him to admire the way she filled the navy blue overall, he knew the answer. How could he ever tire of Miranda?

‘Oh, I do love sloshing paint on walls.’ Her overall was covered with splashes. ‘Wonderful therapy.’

‘I never suspected you of this insatiable appetite for do-it-yourself.’

‘It’s not my only insatiable appetite,’ she said, sneaking a hand inside his shirt. ‘At least there are one or two things you’re still good for. But I’m not having you use your lack of expertise with drill and chisel as an excuse for fiddling with a new book just yet.’

‘Spoilsport.’

‘Did you hear the forecast for tomorrow? It isn’t bad. Why don’t you get out from under my feet and leave me to be lusted after by that nice young builder with the unicorn tattoo? You can go into the village and run a couple of errands. Afterwards, you could make a start on clearing the grounds.’

‘Aren’t you supposed to wait a year in a new house before making any drastic changes to a garden? So you can work out exactly what is growing, and where.’

She removed her hand and waved at the thick undergrowth spreading out from the patio all the way down to the pool. ‘Does it take an Einstein? The brambles have to go. Same with the ground elder. Weeding isn’t enough. It needs digging out, so not a trace of it is left. Otherwise we’ll never be rid of it.’

He savoured the flinty taste of the champagne. It crossed his mind that she wanted rid of more than the ground elder. She was determined to transform the cottage in a matter of weeks, to make it unrecognisable as the house that a supposed murderer and his mother had shared. A sort of exorcism. But Mrs Gilpin had left no trace of her personality here, nothing to show that she had ever existed. It was as if she had withdrawn from the world after the death and disgrace of her son, determined to wipe away all evidence of his life or hers, even in her own home.

‘You’re a ruthless woman.’

‘I know what I want.’

‘Me too,’ he said, reaching towards her.

She shivered. ‘It’s freezing. I think I’ll take my drink inside.’

He put his arm around her. ‘Good idea. I’ll help you to warm you up.’

‘Twenty minutes ago you were dog-tired and your back was killing you.’

‘A chance for you can try out that massage technique you wrote about last month.’

‘But the bedroom stinks of paint, even with the windows open.’

‘There was another reason I bought that sheepskin rug for the living room. Come on, let’s test it for comfort.’

‘Daniel?’

‘Mmmmm?’

‘You were talking in your sleep.’

His head was hurting after too much Bollinger and his back still ached. Miranda always made love with an intensity that he’d never before experienced, not even with Aimee. Exhilarating, but she’d left him drained. He forced his eyes open. The living room was in darkness.

‘What time is it?’

‘Half past four.’

‘Too early.’

‘No, Daniel, don’t drop off again. This is important.’

They were curled up together under a duvet on the massive new rug. He felt a spasm of pain in his vertebrae as he propped himself up on his elbows and looked into her anxious face.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I woke up ages ago and couldn’t get back to sleep again. Then I heard you muttering to yourself.’

‘What was I saying?’

‘Aimee. You kept repeating her name, over and over again.’

Guilt knifed him. ‘Oh Christ, Miranda, I’m so sorry.’

‘You were dreaming of her.’

‘No, no. It’s just that…’

But he was lying and they both knew it. He’d had the same dream many times before, although this was the first time he’d woken her with it. Each time he was running through the streets of Oxford, pounding the pavements, heart thumping, desperate to find Aimee before it was too late. Always the same panic, the same sick feeling in his stomach. No matter how many times he had that dream, it always ended in precisely the same way. He failed to save her, he was always too late.

Miranda dozed off, but sleep continued to elude him. In the recesses of his brain, a scratchy voice echoed. It belonged to the woman who had lived here for so long.

‘Barrie! Barrie! Now look what you’ve done!’

Daniel remembered Mrs Gilpin shouting out to her son, scolding him for coming into the cottage without bothering to wipe his muddy feet. It was the wettest morning of the holiday and the two of them had been right here in the front room, playing with a Monopoly set that Daniel had brought. Barrie was unfamiliar with the rules but found the names of the London roads and stations fascinating. Soon he could recite them by heart, even though his strategy in zooming around the board was closer to anarchy than capitalism. It was great fun and their hoots of glee attracted the attention of his mum who had been out in the barn, chopping firewood. She always needed to be occupied. He never actually heard her say that the devil finds work for idle hands, but he was sure she believed it.

‘It was my fault, Mrs Gilpin, not Barrie’s,’ he said, as she appeared in the doorway, red-faced and scowling. ‘I got caught in the cloudburst and dashed in the moment Barrie opened the door. Sorry, I forgot…’

‘You mustn’t cover up for him,’ she said, her cheeks dark with temper. ‘He has to take responsibility for his own actions. He’s not a little child any more.’

Daniel opened his mouth to protest but a glance at Barrie kept him quiet. His friend was shaking his head, as if to say It’s not worth it, she won’t listen to you. Everything’s always my fault.

In the end he gave up the struggle for sleep and padded into the front room. It was a mess, with hundreds of his files crammed into cardboard storage boxes piled into dangerously leaning towers. He tiptoed around them, searching out the sheaf of press cuttings he’d collected about Barrie Gilpin’s crime, before retreating into the soon-to-be-tiled kitchen to study them by the warmth of the stove.

The murdered woman was called Gabrielle Anders and she’d been in her twenties. Not much seemed to be known about her. She came from London, not Cumbria, but she’d lived in the States for years. She had been staying in Brackdale for a few days while she toured around and visited friends. One night someone had slashed her throat so viciously as almost to sever her head. After stripping off her clothes, the killer laid her ruined body on the Sacrifice Stone.

A young woman found dead on an ancient boulder mentioned in legends about pagan rituals. Journalists loved it and treated their readers to lurid descriptions of human sacrifice through the ages. A popular historian from Bristol University contributed an excitable feature claiming that the instinct to shed the blood of innocents as a means of self-preservation remains just below the surface of every supposedly civilised society. Early reports added that a local man was missing from home. The police gave his name as Barrie Gilpin and revealed that he was known to the victim. With a red pen, Daniel had highlighted the quote from Detective Chief Inspector Ben Kind of Cumbria Constabulary that had first caught his eye. His father said that the missing man might be able to help with their inquiries. A smudged photograph of Barrie scowling at the camera illustrated more vividly than any words that he was the sort who preyed on pretty and defenceless young women. Even the laziest reader would deduce his guilt. The hunt did not last long. Forty-eight hours after the killing, a walker peered into a narrow ravine and caught sight of a crumpled body at the bottom of the cleft. Barrie had not travelled far.

Suicide or accident? A quick death or a lingering end in a rocky tomb? Who cared? The reports implied a poetic justice about his death. The final cutting carried another comment from Ben Kind. It said little, but was pregnant with implications. He announced that the police investigation into the murder of Gabrielle Anders was being scaled down.

Same old story, Daniel thought, as he slipped the scraps of paper back into the buff folder. Everything was always Barrie’s fault.

After daybreak, he went out for a walk. Dew glistened on the grass and gusts of wind whipped his hair. After circling the tarn, he followed the track that meandered up the side of the fell to a small cairn that marked the halfway point. Above the tree-line, the terrain was patched with heather and scrub. In the sun, he had to screw up his eyes as he took in the view. The serenity of the valley was a perfect cure for a troubled night. The village slept, but he could hear plaintive cries from sheep in the fields surrounding Brack Hall.

I mustn’t let the murder take me over.

Rather than continue on the steep path to the Sacrifice Stone, he turned back. When he reached the cottage and looked in the living room, he saw Miranda’s shape under the duvet.

A tousled head appeared. ‘Where did you get to?’

‘Just getting some fresh air.’

He bent over and began to kiss her. She squealed, protesting that his cheeks were cold, and he said that she would have to warm him up. Hungrily, he undressed again and wrapped himself around her.

An hour and a half later, after breakfasting on scrambled eggs and scalding coffee, he jumped in his car and drove along the tree-fringed lanes towards the village. When he switched on the radio, Isaac Hayes was crooning “Walk On By”, followed by Sandie Shaw with “There’s Always Something There to Remind Me”. He couldn’t help laughing at himself. There was no escape.

What exactly had happened to Gabrielle Anders up on the heights? Unable to resist temptation any longer, he glanced over his shoulder. High on the hillside stood the Sacrifice Stone. Melancholy even on a spring day, it preserved its mysteries in sombre silence.

He turned his head back just in time to see an oncoming tractor. Putting his foot on the brakes and squeezing against the hawthorn hedge, he reminded himself that even in this pretty lane, unexpected dangers could lurk around the corner. Taking more care, he arrived at the first row of cottages that marked the entrance to Brack. The village was full of nooks and crannies. Over the centuries it had grown in higgledy-piggledy fashion, artless and appealing. The main street curved over the stream before running past the church. It divided around a small square boasting a general store and The Moon under Water before narrowing as it left the settlement and heading for the world beyond the valley. Behind the square wound a maze of paths and lanes, the homes of a couple of hundred people and a handful of barns, small businesses, and workshops.

Daniel was still accustoming himself to the transition from the busy malls of Oxford to this quiet backwater. In Brackdale, people relished the chance to linger over gossip. Everyone knew everyone else and no transaction was ever hurried; he was having to learn to relax and stop rushing at everything. And he was loving it.

Brack’s principal store was called Tasker’s; it doubled as a postoffice and he had a parcel of books to send back to the London Library. The local newspaper regularly chronicled the continuing struggle between the Royal Mail, wishing to increase efficiency and cut overheads through centralisation, and local people who campaigned against plans to compel them to travel miles to collect their pensions and BBC licences. In the end, economic realities would prevail and the community would lose its battle, but Daniel was sure it was worth going down fighting.

A sporty yellow Alfa 156 was parked opposite the entrance to the shop, a garish contrast to the rusting Fiestas and mud-splashed 4x4s on either side, and as unlikely a sight in a Cumbrian hamlet as a lumbering Hackney cab. Tasker’s was a double-fronted Aladdin’s cave, with narrow aisles leading between overflowing shelves that reached up to the ceiling. If you couldn’t find it in Tasker’s, the odds were you wouldn’t find it anywhere north of Manchester and south of Carlisle. Behind the main shop counter were rows of chunky toffee jars, the kind that Daniel had seldom seen since childhood. A girl was serving a small boy with liquorice and blackcurrant chews and it took an effort of will for Daniel to tear himself away from the sweet aroma and join the queue stretching back from the post office grill.

Half a dozen people were ahead of him. At the front, a shrivelled pensioner in a vast brown overcoat smelling of mothballs was arguing with a baffled teenage assistant. Daniel took his place behind a tall woman with blonde hair falling on to the shoulders of her wax cotton Barbour. After window-shopping at a pricy country-wear shop in Kendal the other day, he recognised her walking boots as top-of-range Le Chameau. She was clutching a packet of headache tablets. Turning, she smiled at him and towards the cantankerous old man.

‘I hope you’re not in a hurry to send that parcel. If you are, please do go before me. I’m not rushing off anywhere.’

She wasn’t wearing make-up and didn’t need to. Her lightly tanned skin was close to flawless, her cheekbones high, almost Slavic. Although he didn’t recognise her subtle fragrance, he had no doubt that it was expensive. No prizes for guessing that she owned the sporty Alfa outside.

‘Thanks, but I’ve all the time in the world.’

‘You may need it,’ she said. ‘Once Derek gets a bee in his bonnet…’

The old man raised his voice, blaming the assistant’s youth for her incompetence. Tiring of the wait, a couple of women in the post office queue drifted away to pick up milk and provisions. A burly man in shirtsleeves, presumably Mr Tasker, appeared behind the counter and joined in the debate with his dissatisfied customer.

Daniel grinned. ‘Regular occurrence, is it?’

‘It’s uncanny,’ she said. ‘Whatever time I call in, he always seems to be in front of me, making some sort of complaint.’

‘You live locally?’

‘Not far away. You?’

‘We’ve just moved here.’

‘I thought we hadn’t met. Do you live in Brack?’

‘Further down the valley. A little place called Tarn Cottage.’

Her eyebrows lifted. Whenever the cottage was mentioned, people seemed to take a step back. Everyone in the valley associated it with the Gilpins, which was natural enough after so many years, but they regarded it as inextricably linked to the murder of Gabrielle Anders.

‘How lovely. So we’re more or less neighbours. My husband and I live on the way out to your new home.’

‘Brack Hall?’

She laughed. ‘How did you guess? On second thoughts, don’t answer that. Maybe it’s better if I don’t know. Anyway, my name’s Tash Dumelow. Tash as in short for Natasha. Pleased to meet you…’

‘Daniel Kind,’ he said as they shook.

‘Kind?’ She frowned. ‘The name rings a bell.’

This kept happening, thanks to the television series. He’d never quite realised until the first programme was broadcast how many people spent their time with eyes glued to the screen. His ratings had scarcely rivalled the soaps, but people kept recognising his face or name. He decided not to enlighten her and instead said something anodyne about the pleasures of country living. She gave a vigorous nod of agreement.

‘You’re absolutely right. I was a city girl, but now I’d never want to live anywhere else. As Wordsworth nearly said, this is the loveliest spot that woman hath ever found.’

When Daniel explained that he’d moved up from Oxford and Miranda from London, Tash said, ‘So you don’t know people in this part of the world?’

‘Not unless you count the fact that in the last few weeks we’ve had half the tradesmen in Cumbria helping us renovate the cottage.’

She smiled. ‘Will you let me give you a tip, as one off-comer to another?’

‘Please.’

She lowered her voice, one conspirator briefing another. ‘If you ever hope of being accepted by the locals, you’ll need to get the details right. People like the Taskers don’t talk about Cumbria. That’s an administrative creation. Dating back to the Seventies, admittedly, but in a place like this, that’s only yesterday. The powers-that-be patched together Cumberland, Westmoreland, and a bit of Lancashire. If you’re a native, you talk about the Lakes. Or the Lake District.’

He grinned. ‘Thanks, I’ll try to remember.’

She patted him on the back. Her hand felt warm. ‘Now, you must come for dinner. My husband will be delighted to meet you both. We’ll be four off-comers together. Simon is a property developer from Skipton and I was born in Moscow, would you believe?’

‘I’d never have guessed.’

‘Oh, I moved to England in my teens and I like to pretend I’m a native. Anyway, we’ve lived at the Hall for ten years and people are only now starting to believe that — oh, I don’t know, that Simon really isn’t about to concrete over Kentmere or build a shopping arcade or multi-storey car park in Longsleddale. That’s one thing you’ll soon discover, Daniel. They are a suspicious lot round here.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ he promised. ‘And thanks for the invitation. We’d love to come sometime.’

‘Let’s make a date now,’ she said. ‘Would Saturday evening be too soon?’

By the evening, as he lazed outside with Miranda and a glass of Sancerre, listening to the soft sounds in the trees and watching the fading amber of the sun colour the fell-side, he’d started having second thoughts about dining out at Brack Hall.

‘We could make an excuse. Remember, we did come up here to get away from it all.’

‘We ought to get to know our neighbours,’ she said, waving a cloud of midges from her face. ‘This is our home now. Besides, I’m intrigued. Last time I was in the shop, I overheard Mrs Tasker chatting about the Dumelows.’

‘Don’t tell me. She’s a trophy wife. He’s a rich businessman who’s away a lot.’

Miranda chortled. ‘Mrs Tasker, a trophy wife? She must be size eighteen at the very least.’

He feigned to cuff her ear. ‘I suppose she’s torn between a Brackdale native’s instinctive loathing of excessively rich off-comers and fervent gratitude for their continuing custom. It’ll take a long time for us to gain acceptance in a place like this.’

‘You’re telling me. I asked at the shop if there was a gym in the valley and Mrs Tasker looked at me as though I wanted to celebrate a black Mass. In the end, she admitted there were a few places. Apparently Tash works out at a fitness centre in Kendal.’

‘I suppose she’s bored out of her skull, that’s why she was so quick to invite us around.’

‘She paints watercolours, she gives time and money to good causes. Does her best to fit into the community. But her husband’s away a lot — a tenant farmer looks after the estate.’

‘So let’s hear the gossip. Tales of wild debauchery up at the Hall?’

‘No mention of orgies, sorry. You’ll have to make do with me. The Dumelows seem popular enough. Mrs Tasker said they’d agreed to sponsor an arts festival in the village hall and to throw their grounds open for charity in the summer. But she and her friend were badmouthing the farmer. He’s not popular, even though his family have lived in Brackdale for generations. Apparently, he has a vile temper, and last week he blacked his wife’s eye after a row. They were both wondering why she puts up with it.’

‘Probably the same reason women have put up with bullying for centuries. Lack of options.’

‘At least we don’t have to schmooze with him when we visit the Dumelows. Maybe I’ll wear my little black dress. Just as well I didn’t throw it out to make more room for Aran sweaters and dungarees. Mind you, I get the feeling that whatever I wear, I won’t be able to compete with the lady of the manor.’

He reached out for her. ‘You don’t need to compete with Tash Dumelow.’

As she leaned towards him, a loud shot cracked the silence, transfixing them both for a second until they realised that no one was shooting at them. The noise had come from the other side of the woodland.

‘Jesus,’ Miranda’s face was white. ‘Was that a rifle? Who would be shooting around here?’

‘A farmer,’ Daniel said. ‘Presumably the tenant of Brack Hall Farm. Hope he wasn’t aiming at his wife.’

‘You don’t think…?’

‘No, no.’ It hadn’t been a good joke; her hands were shaking. ‘Happens all the time in places like this. Farmers shooting vermin.’

She frowned. ‘You mean — foxes?’

A current of air stirred the trees, otherwise everything was quiet again. But the mood was shattered and Miranda picked up her glass and trudged back to the cottage. Daniel stayed outside, wondering about the fox. Dead, presumably. The farmer must be a skilled marksman. He’d only required a single shot.