The Price of Butcher's Meat

3

Hat Bowler greeted him with a smile too bright to be genuine.

Wield said, “Right, Hat. What’s so important?”

“Nothing important, really, Sarge,” said Bowler. “It’s that Miss Brereton. She’s at the Hall. Says she wants to collect some of her clothes and other personal belongings.”

Wield, in both his personal and his professional life, had developed a sensitive ear for an evasion. He said, “You mean Miss Brereton’s being detained outside the Hall by PC Scroggs who is under strict instructions to admit no one without contacting me?”

“Not exactly,” said Bowler.

“Then let’s start again, this time exactly,” said Wield.

It turned out that Bowler had glimpsed a figure passing behind an upstairs window and when he asked Mick Scroggs who he’d let in, he received the answer, “No bugger.” Investigation revealed Clara Brereton. She said she’d entered by a rear door to which she had a key. In Bowler’s eyes this cleared Scroggs of any blame, but the fearful constable, in unsolicited testimony to Wield’s reputation as Pascoe’s enforcer, had said, “Doesn’t matter, yon ugly bastard will kill me!”

Bowler had a kind heart and Scroggs was a likable youngster and the DC might have been tempted simply to approve the young woman’s request to pick up her clothes, then escort her off the premises, but for one thing.

“Thing is, Sarge, it wasn’t her room she was in, it was Lady Denham’s.”

“How do you know?” asked Wield.

“Didn’t look like the kind of room I’d have expected someone like Miss Brereton to have,” said Bowler. “Too fussy. And the wrong stuff lying around.”

“Mebbe she’s an old-fashioned girl.”

“No. I got Scroggsy to take her downstairs and I had a poke around. It was definitely the old lass’s.”

“You ask Brereton what she was doing there?”

“No. Thought if she was looking for something, it was best not to alert her we knew, not without talking to you first.”

“The room’s been searched, you know that? DCI was very particular about that. Nothing found that seemed relevant, so what could Brereton have been after?”

“Maybe these,” said Bowler.

He produced a manila A5 envelope from which he spilled four photographs onto a table. The color wasn’t great and they’d been printed on ordinary cartridge paper, but the images were clear enough. Taken from above they showed a middle-aged man lying on top of a young woman. They were both naked. The shadows suggested the sun was high in the sky. The ground beneath them looked sandy, possibly a beach.

Wield examined them. Bowler’s awkwardness was explained now. He’d done well to unearth these, but claiming the credit meant dropping Scroggs in it.

“It’s not Brereton,” said the sergeant.

“No. She looks Asian to me. You know the man, Sarge?”

“No. Where were these?”

“In this antique writing desk.”

“So why weren’t they found during the search?” asked Wield in some irritation. “Some bugger’s been careless.”

“Don’t think so, Sarge,” said Bowler. “There’s a drawer hidden beneath a drawer. My granddad was a cabinetmaker and I used to enjoy helping him when I was a kid and he taught me all about this kind of secret drawer. Everyone thought I’d probably go into the business, but it wasn’t the woodwork that fascinated me, it was the business of hiding things and finding them out. Sorry…”

He tailed off, thinking this was more than the sergeant probably wanted to hear, but Wield nodded as if he understood, and said, “Good work. So what would Lady Denham be doing with mucky pictures?”

“And why would Miss Brereton want them?” said Bowler.

“If that’s what she were after,” said Wield. “Did she have a bag?”

“No.”

“What’s she wearing?”

“Sun top, loose cotton jacket, lightweight fatigues, the kind with the big pockets down the front.”

“You had a good look at her then?”

Hat flushed, then grinned.

“Close observation, that’s what you taught us, Sarge.”

“That’s right. So you go back and closely observe Miss Brereton till I finish up here. I shouldn’t be long.”

He went back into the interview room. On the table were spread the contents of Sandy Griffiths’s case, clothes, toiletries, a notebook, a couple of paperbacks, and a laptop that was switched on.

He looked questioningly at the woman, who said, “I told Mr. Seymour it was all right to look.”

She kept a tidy machine. Her address book was minimal, the recycle bin was empty, and her documents contained only a single folder entitled Hollis.

He opened it. There were photographs of pigs, close crowded in metal pens. His mind registered distaste though his face showed nothing. He didn’t know if any welfare regulations were being broken here, but this was not a sight anyone who enjoyed a pork chop wanted to see. Some of the pictures showed dead piglets, lying in filth.

“Did you take these?”

She shrugged.

“Is this why you came to Sandytown, so you could do a raid on the pig farm?”

“Has there been a raid?”

“Someone defaced the sign at the main gate, I understand. The night of your arrival, I think it was.”

“There you go. We’re not alone,” she said, smiling.

“So you’re denying it was you and your nieces.”

“Of course. We want to use the law against these people. Why should we alienate it by committing criminal damage?”

He said, “Mebbe because the law is slow and messy and you get your kicks out of direct action.”

“Is that how you feel about your job, Sergeant?”

“No,” said Wield. “I like slow and messy. Dennis? Anything you want to ask Mrs. Griffiths?”

Seymour, knowing the tape was off and the interview had not been formally resumed, took this as an invitation to sign off. He closed the notebook he’d been studying and set it on the table.

“No, Sarge,” he said.

“Good. Thank you for being so helpful, Mrs. Griffiths.”

“I’m free to go?”

“Of course. Like a hand repacking your case?”

“No. Men can manage unpacking all right, but putting stuff together again is best left to a woman.”

“I think you’re right. Each to his own, eh?”

“Indeed. Which is why it strikes me as odd-during our little chat, you didn’t once refer directly to the fact that Lady Denham was murdered yesterday.”

For the first time a flicker of what his close friends and associates might recognize as a smile ran over Wield’s face.

“No,” he said. “What’s really odd is neither did you. Let DC Seymour know when you’ve finished repacking and he’ll drive you back to Seaview Terrace.”

With the door closed behind them he said to Seymour, “So what do you think, Dennis?”

The DC’s answer was typically prompt and direct.

“Almost certainly responsible for the spray job on the pig farm notice. She probably drove the car, let the youngsters do the climbing. And I’m pretty sure she wrote the letters Lady Denham got. Noticed you didn’t mention them, Sarge.”

“No, I didn’t. She was ready for everything I was likely to ask, so she’d have been ready for that too. Best thing with her was to frustrate expectation. Anything more than gut feeling she wrote the letters?”

“That funny spelling. That notebook I was looking at, nothing significant, just jottings, reminders, that sort of stuff, but I did notice she spelt diet and receipt both with an ei.”

“That is how you spell receipt, Dennis,” said Wield gently.

“Is that right?” said Seymour, unfazed. “I’ll try and remember that, Sarge. But diet’s d-i-e-t. Isn’t it? Not d-e-i-t.”

“Right. So she wrote the threatening letters and we’ve got her at the scene. Why don’t you see her in the frame for the hog roast murder?”

“Don’t reckon her as a killer, that’s all,” said Seymour.

He was, judged Wield, the only one of the DCs who would have ventured such an unsupported judgment. Sometimes, by contrast with Novello and Bowler, he might come across as a bit naive, but what you got from him was always simple reaction without hidden agenda.

“There’s been a lot of cases across the world where animal rights extremists haven’t fought shy of killing and maiming,” said Wield. “And I got the feeling she wasn’t as laid back about losing her eye as she let on.”

“Okay, she might have lobbed a rock down at the old lady. Might even have broken the cliff fence to give her a fright. But strangling her…not a woman’s MO, is it?”

Wield tried to work out if this was sexist or not. Either way, he tended to agree. Could even be that the fence and the falling rock were pure accident. Interfering with the car brakes would have been a serious attempt at causing harm, but the local garage had poured scorn on the notion that anything other than her ladyship’s reluctance to pay for maintenance was needed to make them fail.

“Right, Dennis. Once you’ve got Lady Nelson back to the Terrace, start getting this lot down on paper for the DCI to look at. I’ll be over at the hall talking to the poor relation.”

But when he got across to the hall, there was no sign of Clara Brereton.

“Gone for a swim,” said Bowler, trying for bright and breezy but not getting close.

“She’s what!”

“I told her she had to wait for you and she sat around for a bit, then a couple of minutes ago she suddenly got up, said she was getting hot and would it be okay if she popped down to the beach for a swim and waited for you there? I said I didn’t think that was a good idea, but she was already moving off. I didn’t see how I could stop her without arresting her.”

“So why didn’t you go with her?”

“Thought I’d better let you know what was happening.”

“You’ve got a phone.”

“Yeah, I know. Thing was, Sarge, she’s not got anything with her, so unless she’s wearing a cozzie under her clothes, I thought maybe she wanted to skinny-dip…”

Jesus, thought Wield. What was it with these sensitive young straights? Tongues hanging out at the sight of a scantily clad lass, but overcome with embarrassment at the prospect of seeing one naked!

“That’s her problem,” said Wield. “Come on.”

With a promissory glance at Scroggs, who was discreetly keeping his distance, he set off toward the cliff path.

As they walked, Bowler continued his defense.

“Anyway, I couldn’t see it made much difference, Sarge. I mean, we’ve got the photos-”

“How do you know it was the photos she was after?” interrupted Wield. “She might have left them because they weren’t what she wanted.”

They reached the top of the path and paused. Before them lay the sea, gleaming silky blue under the noon-high sun, stretching away to a heat-smudged horizon. For a moment they were lifted far above the sordid concerns that had brought them here.

Mebbe, thought Wield, letting the peace and beauty of the scene wash over him as he drew in a deep breath of the famous sea air that Tom Parker claimed cured everything, mebbe what we’re meant to do is go down this path and if we find yon lass skinny-dipping, we should strip our clothes off too and join her!

He shook the daft fancy out of his head and started the descent.

Gradual at first, it soon began to steepen, not enough to be a problem unless you had vertigo, for time had worn good footholds in the rock. Nevertheless a wise man concentrated on his footing and forgot the view. Bowler was ahead, moving with the easy confidence of youth, but suddenly he stopped and called, “Sarge!”

Below them the cliff was now steepening to a degree sufficient to cause concern even to the young and active. There was a ledge beyond which it seemed to fall away sheer and here the path turned sharply right to follow the ledge and then descend the cliff face by zigs and zags. Along the ledge and all the way down the remainder of the path, a wooden fence had been built to give protection from the drop.

This was the fence that Lady Denham suspected had been sabotaged. No doubt now, though sabotage was perhaps too subtle a word. The top bar of the fence had been shattered and hung drunkenly from its stanchions.

Bowler leapt down the last few feet, steadied himself against one of the uprights, peered over, and said, “Oh shit!” Then he was off along the oblique path at a breakneck speed.

Wield reached the broken fence and looked down and saw what had provoked the young DC’s reaction.

Below him, sprawled facedown across a huge sea-smoothed boulder, was the body of Clara Brereton.