Chapter Six

The three detectives met up late that evening at Vera’s house. It was just across the hill from Gilswick, closer than the police station in Kimmerston, and Joe was summoned to bring pizza and beer on his way home. He caught the takeaway-pizza place just before it was closing and had to pay over the odds for beer in a small convenience store. He was surprised to see that Holly was there, sitting in the chair that he thought of as his own. He couldn’t remember her ever being invited to Vera’s house before and she seemed uncomfortable, a bit nervous. There was a wood fire in the grate, but the logs must have been damp because it soon fizzled into nothing and Vera made no move to revive it.

Holly sat in her coat and nibbled at a slice of pizza. She’d refused the beer and now held a mug of instant coffee. He couldn’t see her drink from it; perhaps the mug hadn’t reached her standards of hygiene. He hadn’t really wanted alcohol, either, though he took a bottle to keep Vera company. To prove his allegiance? He still felt weird, disengaged. Two murders in a valley where nothing happened, where smart people lived. He couldn’t take it in.

Vera was talking. She seemed to have a personality transplant when they were in the middle of an investigation. To become younger and more energetic. She stopped grizzling about her health, her itchy skin and the aches in her legs. Joe thought that Billy Cartwright knew her too well: there was something ghoulish about her passion for her work; for suspicious death and other people’s tragedies.

‘We have ID on the boy in the ditch. Patrick Randle. Joe, what do we know about him?’

‘He only registered with the house-sitting agency six months ago. He looked after a place in Devon for a month and then a flat in Hampstead.’

Holly looked up. ‘That’s in London.’

‘Yes, Holly, we do know that.’ Vera was at her most imperious. A pause. ‘Do we know if Randle was offered the Carswell job just by chance? Or did he ask to come to Northumberland?’

Joe thought Vera had a knack for making them all defensive. ‘Oh, I’m not sure. The woman I spoke to didn’t seem to know the details. The agency owners were out for the evening.’ He realized that he sounded like a schoolboy making excuses because he hadn’t done his homework. ‘But I did find out a bit more about Randle and the agency.’

‘Go on.’

‘The owners of the agency are a couple called Cunningham and the company’s based in Surrey. As I said, Randle had only been on their books for six months. Because the house-sitters are put into a position of trust, they’re all vetted pretty carefully. They need a CRB check, at least two references and an interview. Randle had no criminal record and he provided two good referees. One was the supervisor of his PhD and the other was the priest in the village where he’d grown up.’

‘Which was?’

Joe checked his notes. ‘A place called Wychbold in Herefordshire.’

‘Is he still a student then?’ Vera finished the beer in her bottle and set it on the floor beside her chair.

‘No, he recently completed his doctorate and was taking some time out, before heading straight back to academia for postdoctoral research. A bright lad apparently.’

‘What subject?’ This was Holly, who seemed to be feeling left out.

‘Ecology.’

‘Family?’ Vera asked.

‘Mother, still living in Herefordshire. The locals have informed her of her son’s death. Randle was an only child, and his father died when he was a teenager.’

Vera smiled at him, the closest she’d get to telling him he’d done a good job. Then she lay back in her chair and raised her eyes to the ceiling, which was nicotine-brown and hadn’t been decorated since her father, Hector, had died. Smoking was one of the few vices in which she didn’t indulge. ‘Of course it’s important that we find out if Randle asked to come to Northumberland. We need to find out if he had a specific reason for being in Gilswick, or if this was random.’

There was a moment of silence.

‘Could it have been a burglary gone wrong?’ It had crossed Joe’s mind that some of those paintings downstairs in the big house might be valuable, and there could have been bits of jewellery in the master bedroom. His Sal made him watch Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday night and he was always astounded at the value put on stuff he wouldn’t give house-room to.

‘Well, that might work, if Randle’s was the body in the house and we didn’t have a second corpse.’ This time Vera made him feel like the stupid kid at the back of the class. ‘Besides, I didn’t get the feel that anything had been taken, and there was no sign of a break-in.’

Holly shot Joe one of her superior looks.

There was a moment’s pause.

‘Do we know anything about the older man?’ Vera asked at last. ‘The man in the flat. Anything from the second CSI team, Joe? Holly didn’t find anything in the pockets that she could get to easily.’

‘Still no ID,’ Joe said. ‘They’ve taken fingerprints, but there’s no match yet. And when I left the station there’d been no missing-person report that could have been him.’ He was starting to think of the older victim as the ‘grey man’ now too. Grey and almost invisible.

‘And no information on how he actually got to the house?’ Absent-mindedly Vera reached out for another beer.

‘No, but we haven’t canvassed the neighbours yet.’ By the time they’d got a team together, most of the villagers would be in bed.

‘That’s a priority for the morning then. Let’s talk to Percy Douglas and his daughter again. Then apparently there are some fancy barn conversions at the end of the lane. The victim wouldn’t have passed them to get to the big house, but the residents might have been out and about this afternoon.’

‘It couldn’t have been a murder followed by suicide?’ Holly was tentative, worried about being shouted down.

‘You mean Randle killed the older man, then himself?’ Vera didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand, but she sounded sceptical. ‘Have we got a cause of death for Randle yet, Joe? Dr Keating was at that locus first.’

‘He says they’ll do both autopsies first thing tomorrow; after working two scenes he needs a break and doesn’t want to start tonight. He’ll bring in a colleague to help, but he’ll supervise both. He’ll move on to the grey man once they’ve completed the forensic capture on Randle.’ Joe paused for a moment. ‘He said he’d go for a seven o’clock start. He hasn’t got much on just now, so the place will be quiet.’

‘Did he tell you how Randle died?’ Vera sounded impatient. Joe thought that, unlike the pathologist, she wouldn’t need a break. If she had her way, they’d be in the mortuary now, working through the night. ‘Keating must have some idea! Was he stabbed, like the older man? I couldn’t tell from the top of the bank. If he was stabbed, it must have been in the back, because there was no disturbance to the front of the clothes. And it looked to me as if he was placed under the cow parsley. I can’t see how he could have done that himself.’

‘A double-killing then?’ Joe stretched. He supposed this would mean big-style overtime. Sal liked the extra money, but not the fact that he wouldn’t see the bairns awake until all this was over.

‘Though Hol found a knife in the pond at the big house.’ Vera ignored him and continued her train of thought. She was like a tank when she got going. Relentless. Nothing would stop her. ‘If we assume that it was the murder weapon and that Randle was stabbed too, it makes sense that the young man was killed somewhere near the house. Otherwise the killer would have had to go back to the house to chuck the knife in the pool. Joe, will you organize a proper search of the garden tomorrow. The big cheeses won’t make a fuss about resources, not with two deaths and the press going ape.’

Joe could tell her mind was sparking and fizzing and she was still considering the possibilities. He thought she would probably be up all night, working through multiple scenarios. He hoped Keating had switched off his phone; otherwise he’d get no rest, either. She’d pick at every thread until one led to real information.

‘But the only blood in the flat or the rest of the house was under the older man, so we definitely need the search team in for the garden. I can’t see that Randle was killed in the flat.’ Vera looked up at him. ‘Did you get through to the Carswells, the home owners?’

‘Yes, I spoke to Mrs Carswell, just before I left the station.’

‘On the landline number I gave you? Not a mobile?’

He smiled, understanding the way her mind was working. ‘They’re definitely in Australia. There’s no way they could be our murderers.’

‘And? Had they met Randle?’

‘No, but they had chatted to him on the phone.’ Joe looked at his notes again. ‘Mrs Carswell said he was well spoken and very pleasant. They were reassured that he’d be perfect for what they needed.’

‘How did she take the news that we found a body in her attic?’ Vera still had the energy of a hyperactive three-year-old.

How do you think she took it? A complete stranger was stabbed in her home. Joe kept his voice even. No point winding her up even more. ‘I described the dead man, but she said it didn’t sound like any of her acquaintances. She would ask her husband and get back to me if they had any thoughts.’

‘Are they planning to come home immediately? That’d make life complicated. It’s useful to have the big house empty.’

‘Nah. Their son’s girlfriend’s expecting a baby. The first grandchild. They’ll stay on until after the birth.’

Vera nodded.

Joe shut his notebook and then remembered something else. ‘She said not to ask Susan to look after the dogs. Apparently the woman hates them, but she’s the best cleaner they’ve ever had and they don’t want to lose her. Mrs Carswell said that there’s a family in one of the barn conversions – Professor and Mrs O’Kane – who’d take the dogs in. I’ve spoken to the team on the ground and asked them to sort it out.’

Joe stood up and made it clear he was planning to leave. His toddler was going through a nocturnal phase and, though she didn’t work outside the home, Sal made it quite clear that he should take his turn. He was shattered already.

Vera finished her beer and set her glass on the table in front of her. ‘So we have three priorities for tomorrow.’ She held up a fat thumb and two fingers of her right hand in order, as if she was counting. ‘We need to find out where Randle was killed, and at least get a name for the older man. And talk to the neighbours in the valley.’

Holly seemed relieved that Joe was making a move and started packing her iPad into her bag. He knew she thought this sort of discussion was a waste of time and preferred structured briefings in the police station. He sometimes wondered why she wanted to rush home. As far as he knew, there was nobody waiting for her. He’d never been invited into her flat in Gosforth, but she hadn’t mentioned a partner. Her sexuality was the subject of curiosity at the station, but maybe that was only because she’d made it clear that she didn’t welcome advances from male colleagues.

Vera got to her feet to see them out. The empty pizza boxes were on the floor and she picked up a scrap of crust from one of them and stuck it in her mouth. ‘Are you okay to do the post-mortems with me, Hol?’

‘Yes, sure.’

Joe was glad not to have the early start, but felt abandoned. Vera usually liked him with her in the mortuary. She’d once said that Holly was like a puppy needing a run. ‘All that energy. I find it distracting. And it doesn’t feel respectful in the presence of a corpse.’

They stood for a moment with the door open. Below them a string of lights marked the village that represented Vera’s nearest civilization. They’d nearly reached the cars when Vera shouted after them, ‘And for Christ’s sake, Joe, get a decent night’s sleep. You’re no good to me looking like a washed-out dishcloth.’

He didn’t like to say that it would be his turn with his youngest child, if she decided to wake in the night. Vera might be all for gender equality at work, but she thought Sal’s sole purpose in life was to prepare him for work with her.


In the end the toddler slept well until nearly six. Then Joe made coffee and switched on the television. He’d wake Sal at seven and still get to the police station before Vera and Holly returned from the post-mortem. He took his coffee into the lounge. The bairn was on the carpet playing with a stack of blocks. Happy as Larry, so Joe switched from CBeebies to the breakfast news to see if there was anything on the Gilswick double-murder. Nothing on the national news, and only a brief piece on the local. It would have been too late the night before for the press office to get out a media release. He carried on watching anyway. There was a feature about immigration, a reporter in the street asking passers-by what they thought about border controls. Usually the journalist got the answers he was hoping for: bluster and bigotry. As Joe looked, the reporter approached a man walking down the pavement towards him. The man just shook his head and hurried on, ignoring the fact that the reporter was calling after him, ‘Surely you must have an opinion, sir.’

Joe grabbed the remote, pressed a button to pause the piece and then played it again. No doubt; the bloke who’d refused to answer the journalist’s question was their second victim, the middle-aged man in the grey suit. He thought Holly would be a Radio 4 person. She might not even own a television, and anyway she’d be in the hospital, helping Paul Keating with the forensic capture of Patrick Randle’s body. Holly wouldn’t be the person to deliver news to the boss that might lead them to their older victim’s identity. The thought cheered him up and carried him through the changing of a stinking nappy.

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