Death on the River: A gripping and unputdownable English murder mystery (A Tara Thorpe Mystery Book 2)

by Clare Chase

  Blake met them in the driveway. ‘Tara, would you talk to the forensics guys? The store’s round the back. Find out as much as you can.’ His gaze moved to Wilkins. ‘I want us to interview mother and daughter separately.’

  Wilkins nodded, and the pair of them walked towards the front door.

  Tara watched as an unfamiliar person let her boss and Blake in – a medic maybe – and then she walked around the outside of the building. She would be interested to talk to the forensics team, but she wished she could be in on the interviews too. Of course, it was Blake’s territory now this extra event had moved the case up the scale.

  She was looking forward to the day when she could go for promotion and take on more responsibility.

  Just you wait, Wilkins. It seemed he’d let his career stagnate. Or maybe no one would let him take the next step.

  She went to introduce herself and found she was talking to Tony Griggs: the same guy who’d been present when Ralph Cairncross’s body had been pulled from the Forty Foot Drain. He gave her the standard protective gear and she dragged it on before ducking under their tape.

  ‘Don’t come too close,’ Tony said. ‘We’re still photographing the footprints.’

  She nodded, looking at the tracks in the snow. One lot came from smallish shoes and went straight from the back door to the store, and then back again. A second lot came at the store from round the side of the house, from a gap in the hedge. Presumably they belonged to the person who’d locked Sadie Cairncross in. Another set – which matched those – went from the store to the house and then back to the same point in the hedge. And a third came from the house to the store and back again.

  The store itself was a windowless, insulated shed-like structure tacked onto the side of the house.

  ‘All sealed up to protect what’s inside,’ another of the forensic team said, ‘but there’s an air con system.’ He pointed to the footprints. ‘Looks like our perpetrator went indoors to switch it off before they left. We’re looking at the footprints inside and checking for fingerprints.’

  Tara nodded. ‘Would switching the air con off have been enough to put Mrs Cairncross at risk of suffocation?’

  Tony frowned. ‘Eventually, maybe – but I’d guess it would have taken a while. We’ll be doing tests to check.’

  It sounded as though someone had wanted to mimic the death in Ralph Cairncross’s book, but they’d gone about it in an inept way. Yet there’d been nothing inept about the way their perpetrator had handled the previous deaths…

  ‘Whether there was a threat of suffocation or not, it must have given her a hell of shock,’ Tony said. ‘Especially if she’s even remotely claustrophobic.’

  There was no denying that.

  Thirty-Seven

  ‘We’d like to speak to you separately,’ Blake said. He was standing in the sitting room.

  The woman who’d been introduced to him as Philippa Cairncross looked mutinous. He wasn’t entirely surprised. Her mother had still been hyperventilating when they’d turned up.

  ‘She’s none the worse, overall,’ a doctor was saying. ‘It’s been a shock, of course, but she’ll be fine.’

  ‘How can she be fine when someone tried to kill her?’ Philippa said.

  The doctor looked her straight in the eye. ‘You’ll be in shock too.’

  Tim, the constable who’d been first on the scene, was still present. ‘Why don’t I make you and your mum another cup of tea, whilst she talks to my colleagues?’ he said. ‘You show me where everything is.’

  Philippa pulled a sour face, but at last she let the officer lead her from the room. The doctor followed them out too. ‘I can come again if you need me,’ she said, glancing at Sadie over her shoulder. Mrs Cairncross nodded absently.

  Blake sat down opposite her, and Patrick took an adjacent chair.

  ‘Tell us exactly what happened,’ Blake said.

  Mrs Cairncross stared into space. ‘I had a phone call from Dr Richardson this morning,’ she said. ‘He’s an academic expert on Ralph’s work. He said he’d been told my husband had a manuscript by a writer I’d never heard of, filed away in the archive store. He’d agreed to write a scholarly paper about this person and asked if I would mind him borrowing the manuscript if I could find it.’

  Blake remembered Tara telling him about Dr Richardson, and relaying his detailed knowledge of Cairncross’s books and contacts.

  ‘And you went to look for the manuscript straight away?’ he said. ‘That was why you were in the store when the intruder turned up?’

  The woman nodded. ‘Dr Richardson said it was urgent. Someone else had dropped out of a conference that was happening in two days’ time. He said he was sorry to trouble me, but if I was able to find it, could he possibly come and pick it up later this morning? So I went straight off to search.’ Her breathing was still shallow.

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘I fetched the key to the archive – it’s kept hanging up in the kitchen – and then went and unlocked it. I left the door ajar, even though it’s so cold. It’s always struck me as airless in there when the door’s closed. The storage is all on the wall that adjoins the house, opposite the entrance to the store, so my back was to the door as I began to search. It was then that I heard it slam behind me. And I found I couldn’t get out. I’d left the key in the lock on the outside, and someone must have turned it.’

  ‘That must have been terrifying.’ Blake ignored Patrick’s look. He thought the circumstances were odd too, but he wanted Mrs Cairncross’s full cooperation. ‘Were you able to call for help? Did you have your mobile on you?’

  She shook her head. ‘I keep it in my handbag. Most of my skirts don’t have pockets.’ Her eyes were far away for a moment. ‘Ralph always said they ruined the line, and he was right, of course. But it’s still stupidly impractical.’

  But she might easily have had it with her. And any intruder would have been aware of that…

  ‘What about your daughter?’ said Patrick.

  ‘She was out,’ Sadie said. ‘She’d gone into town.’

  ‘Didn’t she do that yesterday?’ Wilkins snapped, hostility clear in his tone.

  But it didn’t seem so very odd. It wasn’t far, and Blake imagined Philippa would feel cooped-up in this cavernous, shadowy house, day after day. He’d want to get out if it were him.

  ‘She still had more Christmas shopping to do,’ Sadie said. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I wasn’t sure when she’d be back.’ She looked at Blake. ‘She’d told me she might stay out for lunch. It was probably panic, but I felt breathless almost immediately. I didn’t know how long I could last in there before I passed out. I thumped on the door, and shouted, but our gardens are so big, I didn’t think the neighbours would hear me. I hoped Dr Richardson would come round the back when he got no reply at the door. But at the same time, I was scared he’d just think I’d forgotten and leave again.’

  Blake and Patrick exchanged a glance and Sadie Cairncross picked up on it. ‘It’s true that I only went in there because of his call, but I don’t see how he could have been the one to lock me in. And why would he, anyway?’

  Indeed, and if he hadn’t… ‘Do you know him well, Mrs Cairncross?’ Blake said.

  ‘No, not really. We’ve spoken a couple of times maybe, at the odd book launch.’

  ‘So, tell us,’ Patrick said, ‘what made your daughter come home early after all?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It isn’t even one o’clock yet. If she was going in to finish her Christmas shopping I’d have thought she’d have needed longer.’

  ‘She called me.’ Sadie took her phone from her bag and showed it to them. ‘She’d seen a pair of boots she thought I might like as a present, so she sent me a photo of them. When I didn’t text back she called. And when I didn’t answer – either my mobile or the house phone – she got worried. She came back straight away and found me.’

  ‘Was the key still in the door of the store?’ Blake said.

  S
adie shook her head. ‘Philippa said not. There’s a spare and she used that.’

  Philippa’s story tied in exactly with her mother’s. She said she’d been to the shoe shop where the boots were sold and ‘a few other places’. She’d wandered in and out. When they’d asked her for specifics she’d said she couldn’t remember.

  Back at the station, Tara, Patrick, Max and Megan were caught up in a flurry of fact checking.

  A couple of hours later, Blake called everyone together.

  ‘What’s the situation now? Patrick, do you want to start?’

  ‘As you know, sir, mother and daughter’s stories match – very precisely. So much so that they come across as rehearsed.’

  ‘Fair comment.’ Blake said. ‘But it might be as well to leave the theories until we’ve been through the facts.’ He didn’t want his DS colouring everyone else’s judgement.

  Wilkins frowned. ‘Meanwhile, Dr Richardson denies making the call, claims not to know anything about the manuscript Sadie Cairncross was searching for, and insists he hasn’t been invited to attend any last-minute conference.’

  ‘Sadie Cairncross said herself that she doesn’t know Dr Richardson well,’ Blake added, ‘so if someone rang pretending to be him, it’s unlikely that she’d have noticed the voice wasn’t right. What about the number of the caller?’

  ‘It was a mobile,’ Max said. ‘We’re trying to track down the retailer who sold the sim card and the phone. We should have that information before the day’s out, but it could well be a prepaid one that’s untraceable.’

  ‘Nothing’s come back yet from the team interviewing people on Madingley Road,’ Patrick said. ‘We’re after anyone who might have witnessed a person entering the Cairncross property through the hedge. There’s a footpath on the other side. It’s used by dog walkers, so the snow’s been trodden down there. It’s hard to make out any footprints outside the garden to help us judge where the intruder came from or went to.’ He looked round at them. ‘If there was an intruder. The staff at the shoe shop Philippa claims to have visited don’t remember seeing her.’

  ‘Though they said the shop was very busy,’ Tara put in, ‘didn’t they? And there was the photo she messaged to her mother, of the boots she wanted her to look at.’

  Blake saw the look Patrick gave her. How could the team work with the two of them like this?

  ‘Yes,’ his DS said at last. ‘But she could have taken that the day before. We should apply for a warrant and get the techs to look at her mobile. And on top of the shop staff not remembering her, she had no receipts for any purchases today. Only those from yesterday. I’ll be interested to see the shop’s CCTV footage.’

  ‘You’re thinking this is all staged?’ Blake said. ‘Because one or other of them – most likely Philippa – is guilty of being involved in the other deaths, and they want to make themselves look like victims?’

  ‘Easy enough to buy a disposable mobile, make the fake call, and stomp around the garden in boots that aren’t yours. If there was a genuine would-be murderer at work today they were pretty useless. Mrs Cairncross might easily have taken her mobile with her into the archive store, enabling her to call for help and be out of there again in five minutes.’

  Blake hated it when Wilkins had thoughts that independently echoed his own. It worried him.

  ‘But those mistakes are almost too much, wouldn’t you say?’ asked Tara. ‘Surely Philippa would have noticed the same holes you’re picking up on, and have made the arrangements more believable? She’s no fool.’ She paused, and Blake watched a frown trace itself across her brow. ‘It’s certainly true, though, that this plan seemed far more likely to fail than the others our perpetrator has tried. It’s like a crude copy, still with a reference to one of Ralph Cairncross’s books. There was no attempt to hide the involvement of a third party. But maybe that’s deliberate.’ They all looked at her, but she seemed unfazed. ‘So far, Philippa Cairncross has looked guilty, and this latest development accentuates that impression. We’re all sitting here wondering if today’s drama was a set-up. But maybe that was the real killer’s intention all along. Perhaps we’re drawing just the conclusions they want us to, and this latest development wasn’t so clumsily engineered after all.’

  ‘Nice try,’ Patrick said. ‘But if so, how could the killer be sure Philippa would come home in time to save her mother? Without that intervention Sadie Cairncross might really have died.’

  Tara’s pause was longer this time, but eventually her expression cleared. ‘We’ve always said the person’s a gambler. Maybe for them it was a win-win situation after all. Either Sadie Cairncross lives, and it looks like a put-up job between her and her daughter, or she dies, and another person they have cause to resent – for whatever reason – is wiped out.’

  That was all possible too, but Blake knew how much Tara wanted Patrick to be wrong. Did she really think her version of events was the most likely one, or was her animosity influencing her judgement?

  ‘Another interesting theory.’ Patrick’s tone was mocking. ‘Personally, I still doubt that anyone else was involved in the other deaths. But I think we’ve got Sadie and Philippa Cairncross convinced that someone was. And that’s been enough. They’re frightened that we think they’re responsible, so they’ve cooked up this plan to make themselves look innocent.’

  ‘Not Sadie, surely?’ Tara said. ‘Her shock looked genuine to me.’

  ‘We should talk to her doctor again,’ Blake said. ‘Do that, would you, Max? See if she thinks Sadie Cairncross could have faked her reaction.’

  ‘If they didn’t cook up the incident together, then I’m betting Philippa acted alone,’ Wilkins said. ‘She’s very hard-nosed.’

  ‘Though she’d have known she was frightening her mother half to death,’ Tara said. ‘Would she have done that willingly? She seems to mind about her.’

  ‘Philippa might have felt that was better than the alternative,’ Wilkins said. ‘If she ends up in jail she’ll leave her mother shamed and alone.’

  Blake held up a hand. ‘But with reference to your idea of the other deaths being innocent and coincidental, Patrick, I have an update too. Forensics have come back on the crate Tara and I found behind the house on the Forty Foot Bank. It gives us proof that someone kept a grass snake in there, and there are traces of what they gave it to eat, too: crickets, apparently. So they clearly kept it for a little while. There’s a plot all right. How far it goes is still up for debate.’ He looked at his DS. ‘The Cairncross mother and daughter might yet have staged this morning’s attack. I could believe that. But the story on Not Now’s website – with its allusions to fairy tales – was way off the mark. And pretty soon, everyone’s going to know that.’

  He glanced at Tara, knowing it would be the first time she’d heard the news too. He watched the relief flood over her face; he was right with her. Fleming had looked pretty chirpy about it as well. He was guessing they’d all be having a celebratory drink tonight.

  Except Patrick…

  Thirty-Eight

  Like everyone else, Tara was chasing facts. Had Philippa been seen in town? Who had sold the phone used to contact Sadie Cairncross, when, and to whom? Had it been used to call any other numbers? What had the neighbours on Madingley Road seen? The more holes they could pick in Sadie and Philippa Cairncross’s story, the better the case became against Philippa.

  But Tara still wasn’t convinced. When the coast was clear she slipped outside to call Dr Richardson. She was after insight and opinion rather than hard facts – but she reckoned it would be time well spent.

  Of course, she knew he could have been lying when he’d denied ringing Sadie Cairncross that morning. He could have used a new phone, made the call from just outside the house on Madingley Road, crouched behind the garden’s perimeter hedge and watched as Sadie had entered the store. He might have been the one to cross the garden, leaving those footprints in the snow, and lock her in. Someone had, whether they’d been for real or staging the w
hole incident. But Tara couldn’t think why he would. Yes, he’d mocked Ralph Cairncross’s ideas – hadn’t liked him much perhaps – but there’d been no animosity in his voice when Tara had interviewed him. He seemed to view Cairncross and his Acolytes as a collective curiosity, nothing more. And he was far less likely to be responsible for the series of deaths. He wouldn’t have influence over Lucas Everett and Christian Beatty, or have had an obvious opportunity to put the snake in Ralph’s car.

  So, satisfied that he wasn’t involved, she called him, and knew she’d give weight to what he said. She stood outside, looking over Parker’s Piece, crowded with young children and dogs playing in the snow. Her breath clouded the air and her hands felt numb as she dialled Richardson’s number.

  ‘Good to speak to you again,’ he said, when she got through. ‘This is a bit of a business, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it. I just wanted to get your take on our mystery caller. I realise it’ll be speculation, but is there anything that struck you about what Sadie Cairncross claims she was asked to find from the store? Sadie never got as far as actually searching for the manuscript, for obvious reasons. Do you know if it’s something that really exists?’

  ‘My mind’s been running along similar lines,’ Dr Richardson said. ‘And I’ve been trying to check. It’s not something I’ve heard of, and I can’t find any record of it existing in the standard databases and academic reviews, so it’s possible your caller made it up.’