Vera waited in the big house for Paul Keating. She’d given her orders, rattling them off to Joe Ashworth until she’d confused him and had to start again more slowly. Then she’d spoken on the phone to Holly.
‘Where are you, Hol?’
‘On my way, Ma’am.’ The voice sounded as if she was speaking through a piece of hosepipe. She must be using the hands-free set in her car. But, even so, Vera felt a stab of anger. Why did that Ma’am always sound as if her DC was taking the piss? Cocky and resentful at the same time.
‘Well, don’t stop at the cordon in the lane. I’ll leave instructions for them to let you past. Come to the big house further up the valley. The drive is the first on the left after you pass the crime scene. I’ll be waiting for you.’
‘You don’t want me to help out at the scene?’ She sounded offended. It took very little to offend Holly.
‘Not at the scene in the ditch. There’s been another murder, and I need someone fresh here. We don’t want any further contamination.’ That shut Holly up.
Vera waited outside the house, sitting on the white bench where the photograph of the owners had been taken. It was cooler now, with the sun only just over the horizon, but there was the smell of cut grass that always made her think of summer. She loved this time of year. She’d sent Joe back to the station to start making calls and pulling together information. And to organize all the extra personnel they’d need for the following day. She’d already talked to Billy Cartwright on the phone. They’d need a different team at each locus, and she wanted him to supervise both, so he’d need to bring in another manager for the lane as well as for the house. Paul Keating was the only Kimmerston pathologist on call. He’d said he’d try to pull in a colleague to help with the post-mortems, but he wanted to look at both scenes himself. ‘Don’t worry, Inspector. I’ll change before I head up to you. We’re aware of the dangers of cross-contamination.’ She’d known him for decades, but he’d never used her first name.
There was the sound of a car on the drive. Holly’s Nissan. Very new and very sensible. No fun. The young woman got out, slender legs first.
Am I just jealous? Because she’s young and bonny and organized? Am I being unfair?
‘You said there was a second murder.’ Holly was already struggling into the paper suit, pulling bootees over her shoes and tucking her hair into the hood.
‘A middle-aged man in the flat where the house-sitter was staying. It looks as if he’s been stabbed, though there was no sign of a knife on my first quick search. No sign of a break-in, either, so it’s possible that he was known to our first victim.’ Vera thought that an intruder would be unlikely to wander into the flat in the attic without prior knowledge of the building’s layout. Any valuables would be in the main part of the house, and it had taken her and Joe a while to find the entrance to the staircase in the kitchen. But those speculations could wait.
‘ID?’
‘Nothing yet. I’ve sent Joe back with a photograph to circulate. Our victim looks the sort who’d be reported missing, though. Respectable. You know.’
Holly gave a brief nod.
‘The first victim is Patrick Randle. Aged twenty-five. He was employed by an agency to stay in the house while the owners were away. I’m presuming they wanted someone to walk the dogs and cut the grass, and they could afford to pay an outsider to do it, but we’ll need to check the details. Joe will phone them from the station.’
Holly nodded again.
‘Shall we go up then?’ Without waiting for an answer Vera went inside the house. She locked the kitchen door behind them, then opened the painted door by the side of the Aga. ‘You go up first.’ She didn’t want Holly following her up the stairs, muttering when the progress was slow. ‘There’s a small passageway at the top. Wait for me there.’
Randle’s flat was in shadow now. Vera flicked a switch and spotlights fixed to the beams in the sloping ceiling lit the rooms. For a moment she wondered if she’d imagined it all. She’d look into the bedroom and there’d be no body on the floor. The stripped pine boards would be clean. But the middle-aged man was still there, caught in the pool of artificial light.
Vera stopped at the doorway and moved aside so that Holly could see into the bedroom. ‘I don’t want to go in there. I saw the body from here and haven’t been over the threshold. This is a fresh scene suit, but I was out near the ditch to look at Randle. We don’t want a defence lawyer screaming further down the line that we didn’t keep everything separate.’
‘You want me to go in?’
Well, I didn’t bring you out here for your scintillating company. Vera took a breath, told herself again that she was probably just jealous. No other reason why this woman should get under her skin. ‘Yes please, Hol. It’ll take Billy a while to get a separate team of CSIs here and I’d like to see if there’s any ID on the body. And while you’re in there, have a look for the weapon. I’d say we’re looking for a very sharp knife and it might have been thrown under the bed or a chair.’
Holly walked into the room. She made her way to the far side of the body so that Vera would have a good view of what she was doing.
She’s bright, Vera thought, considers everything.
The younger woman squatted by the side of the body, taking care not to move it or touch the skin, and reached into the pockets on the suit jacket. First the outside pockets, and then she lifted the cloth so she could get into those on the inside. She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’
‘Try the trousers.’
‘I can only get to the front pockets without moving him.’
‘That’ll do.’ Vera thought that only younger men carried important things in their back pockets anyway. Or middle-aged men in jeans. This man would have his wallet inside his jacket. A wallet and his keys. And that led her to wonder how the victim had got here and, if Patrick Randle had owned a car, where it might be kept. There had been no vehicles parked on the gravel outside the house. She was still thinking about that when Holly stood up.
‘Sorry, Ma’am. Nothing. That’s unusual, isn’t it?’
‘His pockets have been emptied,’ Vera said. ‘To delay identification, or for some other reason.’
Holly kneeled again to look under the bed. ‘No sign of a knife.’
Downstairs in the big kitchen Vera was on the phone to Joe. ‘Can you get me the registration details of Randle’s vehicle? We found a driver’s licence on him. There was nothing on the grey man’s body, so an ID for him would be brilliant.’
‘The grey man?’
‘The man in the flat.’ That was how she was thinking of him. As a grey man. Anonymous. She waited on the line while Joe dug out the details of Randle’s car. A small VW, only a year old. Would a young man be able to afford a car like that? Unless he had wealthy parents? She wasn’t sure. The young had always been a mystery to her, even when she’d been one of their ranks. She’d understand the grey man better and felt more sympathy for him, without knowing anything at all about him.
They went outside. ‘There are some buildings at the back.’ Vera’s feet crunched on the gravel, slightly muffled by the paper overshoes. ‘I’m assuming one of those has been used as a garage.’ The light had thickened into dusk. A bat skimmed over their heads. Vera waited for Holly to scream, but she gave no reaction.
There were two garages. One was a small open-fronted barn, rickety and in need of repair. Against one wall stood a neat stack of logs, depleted after the winter. That was where they found Randle’s car. ‘We won’t be able to get into the vehicle,’ Vera said. ‘There was a bunch of keys on Randle’s body, and Billy has those.’ Holly put on new gloves and tried the handle. The car was unlocked. Was that carelessness or a sense that crime would be unusual out here in the valley? Again Vera thought that the boy must have money, if he cared so little about security. They looked through the windows, but didn’t get into the vehicle. There were two empty Coke cans on the passenger seat. In the back a brown Manila file was stuck in the side pocket.
‘I want to see that,’ Vera said, ‘as soon as the CSIs have finished with it.’ She paused. This was where the gravel ended and the vegetable garden began. There was no sign of another vehicle and the second garage was locked. So how had the older man arrived at the house? The nearest public transport would be the bus to Gilswick, and she guessed they’d be as common as hens’ teeth. Then there’d be the walk down the lane. A good two miles, possibly more. In his grey suit and his city shoes. Someone would surely have seen him if he’d made the journey during daylight. Otherwise he must have got a lift. That would have been organized in advance. The grey man wouldn’t be the kind to hitch-hike. Or a taxi. Or – and as Vera considered the possibilities, this seemed most likely – Randle had brought him here. And that meant there must be some connection between the two men. They’d arranged to meet.
The second garage was more solid, stone-built to go with the house, but put up more recently. A padlock held the two doors together. Vera tried the smallest key on the bunch given to her by Susan and it opened as smoothly as if it had just been oiled. Inside there were two cars: a new Range Rover and an elderly Morris Minor estate, obviously much loved. The women stood at the door and looked in.
‘The family that lived here had money,’ Holly said.
Vera nodded. Money, but class. Nothing too showy here. Nothing ostentatious. Then she remembered that nobody had spoken to the Carswells yet. She needed to know that they really were in Australia, and they might have more information about Randle. She’d had the impression they’d already left when the house-sitter arrived and that Susan had managed the handover, but one of them had probably talked to Randle on the phone. She called Joe again and left him more instructions. ‘See if any of the local taxi firms brought our second victim to the big house. Have you talked to the Carswells in Adelaide yet?’
‘I’ve tried, but there was no response. It was still early morning there then and they might have been asleep. I was going to give it another hour.’
‘I’d like to know what contact they had with their house-sitter. Did they meet him before he started work? The cleaner settled him, so the Carswells weren’t here when he arrived.’
Suddenly the garden was flooded with light. Two lamps on black iron stands set along the drive and one fixed outside the main front door had switched on. Presumably they were on a timer or had a light sensor. Was that a security measure or just about convenience? Holly was walking away from the garage and back towards the house. A tawny owl started calling from the trees behind them. It seemed to have become night very quickly.
‘Ma’am.’
That word again. Vera remembered a line from one of the cop shows that she pretended never to watch on the telly. Don’t call me that! I’m not the bloody queen. She took a breath. ‘Got something, Hol?’
Vera walked over to her colleague. Holly looked as insubstantial as a ghost, but Vera’s shadow was very sharp in the white light. Sharp and even bigger than usual, because she was still wearing the scene suit. Holly was looking into a small pond. It was surrounded by flagstones, slippery with lichen. The water looked black and oily. Everything monochrome. Now there was a half-moon and that was white too.
In the mud at the side of the pond, only visible because one of the lamp stands stood right beside it, was a knife. Thin-bladed, with a black handle. Vera thought it was similar to the ones she’d seen in the kitchen of the flat, slotted into a wooden block.
‘What do you think?’ Holly sounded very pleased with herself. ‘Could this be our murder weapon?’
Before Vera could answer, before she could shower Holly with the praise the DC obviously felt was her due, headlights swept across the black grass. This would be Paul Keating and the new team of CSIs. Again, the cavalry arriving just in time.