“What’s the café he stopped in?” I asked, pulling my laptop over towards myself.
“The Coffee House,” Mills said. I looked it up, finding a small, family-owned place that he would have driven past on his way to his sister’s.
“Think it’s worth popping in and seeing if they remember him?” Mills asked.
“Not sure,” I replied, looking at the place on the map, drumming my fingers. “Odds are he really did just pop in, eat breakfast, and carry on to his sister’s. Even if someone else was there, someone that he knew, what are the odds that the people working there took any notice of it?”
“Slim,” Mills sighed. “but at least we know he wasn’t in the inn yesterday morning like Daisy said.”
“It’s the evening we want to know more about anyway,” I replied, closing down the page and shutting my laptop. “He went out. He must have done. How did nobody at all see him?”
Mills shrugged. “I suppose in inns, people coming in and out all the time is a given, anyway.”
“But they can’t have had many guests there, surely?” I pointed out. “But if nobody was at the desk, then it would have been fairly easy for him to go out unnoticed.”
“He didn’t take his car, though,” Mills added. “Maybe someone picked him up?”
I lifted my head, eyes wide.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I murmured. “That would explain how he ended up so far down the river if someone drove him there.”
“Somebody who came to see him,” Mills went on, pacing around the floor. “But not somebody that he felt the need to, or wanted to, tell his sister about.”
“Easy enough for a car to have pulled up outside, he jumped in, and none of the staff was any the wiser. His car was still there, and nobody saw him leave.”
“And no transport down by the river itself because whoever had driven would have just driven off again.”
I nodded, standing up enthusiastically. “Someone he knew then. I doubt he’d have gone on a midnight joy ride with a stranger in his dressing-gown.”
“He hurried, though,” Mills added. “He didn’t bother to stop and change, but he knew they were there. So, he could have written the code, hidden it just in case.”
“That would mean there was a chance he knew he wouldn’t come back,” I pointed out.
“He definitely knew them then. Well enough to go out, well enough not to bother changing. But he did take his phone.”
“And his wallet,” I added. “Well, we might be understanding how he went about his evening, but we’re still none the wiser as to who the hell killed the poor bugger.”
Mills grunted, deflating a little. “So, what now?”
“Now,” I checked my watch. “Now we get Sharp to get in touch with her code excerpt and hope that we can find something tangible from that, and tomorrow we get back on it, maybe go and pester Crowe for some information.”
“She won’t thank us for that.”
“Normally, I’d not risk pissing her off, but we’re stuck in the mud here, Mills and I need something real to start looking into before I lose my mind.”
“God help us if that ever happens,” Mills commented. “There is, of course,” he added grimly, “the chance that Crowe will turn around and tell us it was an accident.”
“There is,” I admitted, fatigued by the very thought. “but until she does, I think we’ll go along as planned. For today, I think we need to call it. We’ll not solve any problems pacing around this room and coming up with theories. Take the code to Sharp’s office,” I told him, handing it over. “Then I’ll buy us a pint before we call it a day.”
“Sounds good to me, sir,” Mills said with a sigh, taking the code and leaving. I looked back at the board once more. That piece of paper better have something useful on it, I thought to myself, else I really didn’t know what we would do.
Nine
Thatcher
I kept my word to Mills, and after we left the station with Sharp’s blessing, I took us down to the pub for a quick pint before crawling home, not that I needed much persuasion to myself, to be honest. It had been a much longer day than I had realised, considering the ungodly hour we were woken up this morning.
Normally we’d sit and talk a little about the case or catch up on anything else, but we both sat there rather sullenly, nursing our pints slowly until the exhaustion got too much, and we both slinked homes. We’d found a place that wasn’t far from either of our houses, and it was only a short walk through the cold winter evening until I was home, showered, eating and then falling in bed beside a sympathetic Liene who’d kindly taken over the cooking and dishes for the night.
The early night did me a world of good, and I woke up the next morning to my alarm feeling in far better shape than I had yesterday. I found a renewed interest in the case, which despite being a blinding nightmare of baseless theories and confusion, was, I had to admit, one of the most interesting cases I’d been given for a while.
I thought about it as I showered and dressed and ate breakfast. A soldier visiting from somewhere else in the country just for the weekend ended up dead in a river with a coded note under his bed. If indeed, it was his. Part of me had to wonder if it had been left there by another guest and had been overlooked when cleaning. I doubted it, though. The inn had been spotless; even the skirting boards were clean, so I couldn’t imagine they’d let something sit under a bed for so long without it being seen.
Liene and I left the house together, the slow Monday morning bustle surrounding us as people skirted off to work and parents herded their reluctant children to school. We walked into the city, parting ways with a quick kiss as she headed down towards the museum, and I carried on to the station, wrapping my coat tightly around me. This cold was messing around, and everyone else out on the street hurried along wrapped in hats and scarfs, clutching cups of hot drinks, their breath the steam fogging around their heads.
I made it to work without getting frostbite, pushing myself into the warm building and took the stairs two at a time to get upstairs and into our office, where I leant against the radiator. There were some unread files on my desk that I hadn’t looked over before leaving yesterday. One was from Fry, with the witness’s statement, and the other was from O’Flynn, with whatever information she had managed to get from Sybil and Ernest after we left them yesterday. They needed looking over, but I needed a drink, so I pushed myself off the radiator and wandered into the kitchen, still in my coat and flicked the kettle on, pulling two mugs from the cupboards and scooping coffee into each one. Mills came in as I waited for the water to boil, giving me a nod from the hallway, and he lugged his things down and dumped them on his desk. I carried the coffees in, sliding one to him as he took his coat off and rubbed his hands together.
“It’s going to be a right foul one this year, isn’t it?” He muttered, gratefully taking the hot mug.
“Sadly, I think you’re right.” I replied, shrugging my coat off and sitting down, pulling the files over and flipping the first on open.
“From O’Flynn?” Mills asked.
I nodded, “And Fry. Witness statement.” I held it up, and he reached over to grab it, collapsing in his chair and glanced it over.
“Nothing that we didn’t already know,” he muttered. “Did Fry study English or something? My reports are never this well written.”
I chuckled and glanced over O’Flynn’s notes. “Nothing here sticks out,” I told him. “Nothing that makes me want to head over there and talk to them again, anyway.”
Mills hummed, looking a little disappointed in that verdict. “Where does that leave us then?” He asked.
I grinned and pulled my bottom desk drawer open, fishing out a Toblerone that had been in there for a while.
“Now,” I said, kicking the door shut and brandishing the chocolate. “We go and see dear Lena.”
With a smirk on his face, Mills rose from his chair, grabbing his coffee and following me downstairs.
I knocke
d on the door with the Toblerone, clutching my mug safely in the other hand.
Lena cracked the door open, sticking her head out, glaring at the smile I sent her way.
“Good morning,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow. “What is it, Max?”
I held up the chocolate, and she laughed, snatching it from my hand and walked back into the lab, holding the door open for us.
“Come on then,” she said from inside. Mills and I shared a triumphant grin and wandered in, heading to the back table to stay out of her way as she bustled around.
“You couldn’t have let me get settled at least?” She muttered under her breath, still in the process of turning everything on. The body wasn’t even in the room yet, so we sat silently as she got to work, pulling her coat on and slipping from the room, propping the door open. She returned a moment later, pulling a stretcher alongside her, the body covered with a large sheet.
“You’re in luck,” she told us. “Chocolate or not, I’d have been getting back to you on this one.”
“You’re a star, Lena,” I replied.
“I’m aware,” she said simply, manoeuvring the body onto the table and looking up at us. “Come on then, leave the mugs.”
We placed them on the table we had taken a perch on and walked over to join her. She pulled the sheet back down the body, letting us take the first proper good look at Major Alexander Riggs we’d had. He looked his age, early thirties, with short black curls. There were a fair number of scratches and bruises on his body, some of them bigger and uglier than others.
“So,” Crowe clapped her hands together. “First and foremost,” she waved us around to stand on her side of the table, and she carefully angled Riggs’s head to the side where a large gash had been stitched together. “This was under a lot of mud, dried blood and general river gunk, but there it is. Blow to the back of the head,” she said, letting his head gently back down. “Something flat, a bit sharp. Like a spade or something.”
“Homicide then.”
“Oh, he was murdered,” she nodded solemnly. “And the blow would have killed him. There are some scratches on his wrists and on his ankles as well,” she indicated them. “Nail marks. Someone dragged him or tried to, anyway. Marks on his back indicate the same thing.”
“What about all these other scratches and bruises?” Mills asked.
“General battering from the river, I’d say.”
“Just from being pushed in?” I asked.
“Unless the current carried him a bit,” Crowe answered. “I checked his stomach contents and blood, no sign of any alcohol in his system, no drugs, he’s clean. Or he was,” she added softly, pulling the sheet back into place and pulling her gloves off with a snap.
“Why don’t we head back to their river?” Mills asked. “Take a look around a bit further upstream to where he was found. SOCO didn’t clear much area out there.”
I nodded, “worth a shot. We might find something useful out there.”
“Take a hat, for God’s sake,” Crowe warned us. “Cold as anything out there.”
“Thank you, mum,” I retorted, grabbing my mug from the table. Crowe pointed at me; her eyes narrowed in warning.
“After all, I’ve done for you?”
I grinned, walking over to her and giving her a kiss on the top of her head. “We’d be lost without Lena.”
She hummed, waving me off and gave Mills a wink. “I’ll have the report sorted later. Don’t let him fall in the river this time,” she added, getting a laugh from Mills.
“That happened once!” I defended myself as I made for the door. “And it was not my fault.”
“I’ll bring him straight to you, Lena,” Mills said with a smug smile, trailing after me. I shook my head at the pair of them, Lena’s laugh following us from the lab.
Mills and I headed upstairs, leaving our mugs in the kitchen, grabbing some warmer clothes, some waterproof coats and wellies before jumping into a car and heading out.
For as bitter as the cold was, I had to admit that as we made our way into the countryside, it was rather beautiful. The fields were coated in frost, the sky pale.
“Think it’ll snow?” Mills asked.
“Out here, most likely. You a fan of snow?”
“I was when I was a child,” he answered. “But now it just means defrosting the car every morning and making sure I put grit on the driveway.”
I chuckled under my breath. “The fun of adulthood, eh?”
Mills nodded grimly and seemed to be happier that I was the one driving today, the country lanes bad enough for him without the threat of ice on the roads.
We made it to the riverside where Riggs had been found, and we climbed out, layering ourselves in clothes, zipping the bright coats over the top before stuffing our feet into the boots and heading down towards the bank. The cold at least meant the earth was fairly solid under our feet, so there was little risk of us sliding down some mud.
“Crowe said he was dragged,” Mills said, shuffling on his feet to stay warm, breath coming out in a fog.
“Dragged from where?” I wondered, turning back to look at the road. “If they were in a car, then from the road most likely,” I added. The ground between where I’d parked the car and where we stood looked fairly untouched, and besides, our being out yesterday might have ruined any evidence that he’d been yanked over. I liked to think that someone would have noticed some drag marks or blood, so I decided to head a little further upstream, where the grasses and weeds grew thicker.
The current looked faster today, the wind pushing it along, and I looked back down to where Mills stood. I could just about see him, but I could easily see where the banks stretched out, forming a little bump where Riggs must have ended up. If he’d come down from here, it would have stopped him from going further down the river.
I gave Mills a wave, and he jogged over to join me. I pointed out the natural curve that I had seen, and we started scoping around the area where we stood, looking for any sign or trace that might have gone unnoticed in the bustle yesterday. I crouched down among the long grass, feeling slightly ridiculous as I groped around in my gloves.
“Sir?” Mills called. He was standing behind me, looking down to the river.
“Did you find something?” I asked, craning my head back to look at him. He shook his head, a strange expression on his face, and nodded to the river. I looked up, then shot to my feet as a narrowboat churned along, a salty faced man looking at us with a peculiar expression. He took in our coats and slowed his boat to a stop.
“Morning,” he called.
“Morning,” I replied.
“This about that chap they found?” He asked in a thick local accent.
“You know about it?” Mills asked.
“Heard of it down at the pub,” he told us. “Not summat that happens often, is it?”
“Do you this river well?” I asked. The man cheered up, patting his boat.
“We’ve been on her going on twenty years now.”
“A long time,” Mills observed.
“Ah, you can’t learn the ways of a river without being on em that long,” he said meaningfully. “You “ave to learn the currents.”
“The current strong here?” I asked.
“Not so much down here,” he answered, looking at the wide, flowing river. “Further up though, faster. Pushed him down here, didn’t it?”
“Did it?”
“Didn’t it?”
We stared at each other in a weird standoff moment, then the man grinned and patted his boat again.
“Up there,” he pointed up towards the church spire in the distance. “Speeds up coming out of the village then slows down coming round that bend in the hill.” He wore a pair of fingerless gloves, his aged hands mapping out the river with a familiarity that I envied. “Where was he found?”
I debated mentally for a moment, Mills staying quiet and letting me gauge this situation.
“Just down there,” I pointed to
the open bank, where it curved in.
The boatman nodded, looking up the river, then down again. “Won’t be carried far from ‘ere.” He told us.
I nodded slowly, thinking about the state of Riggs’s body, all the bumps and bruises and scratches. He’d been covered in mud and river sediment when we got to him, so he’d been in the water for a while. Or, as our boatman suggested, he’d travelled a long way down it.
“Were you out here yesterday?” Mills asked.
The man shook his head. “Not on Sundays. I visit my daughter on Sundays.”
“Up in the village?”
“Next one along,” he said. “Left last night.”
I nodded. “Thank you, sir.”
He lifted his flat cap in a funny salute, then returned to his boat, chuffing back along the river. We watched as he trundled along, vanishing around the bend, and Mills let out a sound that might have been a laugh, but it was hard to tell.
“That was weird,” he commented after we stood in silence for a while.
“It was. We should have thought about it sooner, though,” I remarked, looking back up towards the church spire in the distance.
“Thought of what, sir?”
“Asking the locals. Think of the state of his body. The river wasn’t kind to him, and down here,” I waved an arm towards the river, “it’s not that fast. If he got carried down from further up, from towards the village, then he wouldn’t have needed a car, would he?”
Mills nodded, understanding dawning quickly on his face.
“You want to check out the village, ask around the locals?”
“Worth a shot,” I muttered. “Let’s walk up, though, follow the river just in case there’s something worth seeing.”
Mills grumbled but plodded after me. “I think it goes through private land at some point,” he remarked. “Through a farm or something.”
“Then we’ll follow it for as long as we can,” I answered, looking over at his unimpressed face. “Cheer up, Mills. I’ll buy you a hot chocolate when we’re done.”
Buried With Honours: A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crime Thriller Page 8
