by L. J. Hutton
But what bothered Bill even more was the presence not half a mile away of a big country house hotel. Damn it, the place even had its own static caravan site for those who couldn’t afford the price of the hotel itself, and that meant that it was a far busier site than either of the others.
“How the hell did someone kill you and never get seen?” he wondered aloud. “I know it was late March, but even so, by that time the hotel would have been starting to pick up with folks having short breaks. Easter wasn’t until into mid April this year, so a lot of places wouldn’t have been open for visitors yet, but even so...” Then he thought to look at a lunar calendar. “Oh you have got to be joking!”
There it was, the thirtieth, which was when Damien had died, was another new moon. Justin had died on the twenty-sixth of July, and Sanay on the twenty-fifth of August. Glancing up to check whether anyone else was about to walk in on him, Bill then made a note of the other new moons of the year. If this really was a pattern, then he needed to check those dates, but equally, he wanted to do it without somebody looking over his shoulder who would ask why on earth those dates were significant. Mercifully, when he came to feed the dates into the system, June, May and April were devoid of incidents, which was faintly reassuring.
And so he was almost hoping that this moon thing was just a really weird coincidence by the time he’d realised that there had been no new moon in February, because it had come at the end of January and on the first of March, and therefore nothing besides Damien had come up for both new moons in March. But that technically made the date of Damien’s death the new moon equivalent of the full moon’s blue moon – in other words a rare second event within one calendar month. So was that significant? Was that why his death had been more violent?
Groaning at the very thought of that, Bill moved on, determined to keep his feet as firmly on the ground as possible. But when he put in the thirtieth of January, what should pop up but the old farmer who had died in his orchard. Muttering dark oaths under his breath, Bill now knew that he must add the farmer’s case to his own list, even if he might never be able to convince anyone else of the pattern without a lot more information. It was worrying enough to make him retrieve the dates of last year’s new moons and go through all of them, and it was with surprisingly intense relief that he found no other cases. Okay, then. So whoever was doing this had only started this year. Why?
He had to break off at that point to deal with more immediate issues, but at the end of the day, large mug of tea in hand, he managed to settle down to review Damien Farrah’s case notes. And the first thing that really leapt out at him was that this was no casual choice of location. Damien and his family regularly took short breaks at the hotel, and if they hadn’t been the most popular of guests, Bill certainly got confirmation of what Carol had told him of Mr Farrah senior buying his family’s way out of trouble time and again. An exasperated restaurant manager told of losing waitresses over and over because of the unwanted attentions of Damien and the middle brother, both in terms of some very inappropriate comments when you bore in mind that many of the waitresses were school girls working in the evenings and at weekends, but also the occasional groping.
“Oh you really are a bunch of charmers,” Bill muttered as he read on. “You rely on intimidating these girls into not complaining in case it goes on their employment record.”
But then he sat up and really took notice as he came to the witness statements which said that Damien had come to the hotel several times on his own, always with a different woman. ‘The last woman I saw seemed really upset at breakfast,’ a waitress had said, ‘and she seemed to be rubbing her arms a lot – like she’d been hurt.’ Another described seeing the woman – who had been the last but one before Damien’s death, if you assumed there had been a woman that time too – wearing sunglasses down to breakfast, and then begging the staff to get her a taxi to the station at Knighton, but to not tell Damien Farrah that they were doing it. He’d been very angry about that, shouting and swearing at the receptionist until the under manager had had to step in. Yet when Lucinda and her team had spoken to the housekeeping staff, all had said that they had seen no signs of violence in the rooms at any time. Nobody could recall ever seeing any blood, or the place looking badly disturbed – not even as though someone had tried to put it right afterwards.
“So where did you take them?” Bill murmured as he read on. “Was it out into the grounds of the hotel? Was that how you got spotted?”
The more he looked at the map, the more he could see the network of paths around the hotel, both through the woods and out across the open land.
“Did you con them into thinking that they were going for a romantic walk under the stars, only to find that you tried to rape them?” he wondered when he cross-checked, and found that none of the Farrah family had recognised any of the young women’s names once they’d been retrieved from the hotel’s register.
But then the confirmation Bill had hoped for turned up.
‘He had a new woman,’ Mr Farrah senior had told Lucinda, virtually scoffing at the suggestion that his son might have been having trouble finding women who wanted to spend time with him. ‘Absolutely besotted with her, he was. Classy bit of skirt, too, by the sound of her. Tall and slim and with natural golden blonde hair. He said she was his ray of sunshine, his summer sun. Told me, ‘you won’t be wanting for grandsons once I get ploughing her field, Dad,’ and you could see he couldn’t wait to get at her. But something about her made him realise he had to be a gentleman about it. No rushed fumblings with this one.’
However, nobody at the hotel knew anything about this mystery woman. Whoever she was, she hadn’t checked in with him on his last visit like the others had. And she hadn’t dined with him that night either. What the staff had noticed was that he was very agitated, but in an excited kind of way, as though he was going to get something he’d been waiting for. Even odder, the farmer who owned the field where Damien had been found, had spoken with real anger of previously having to warn Damien off from trespassing on his land, having found some of his precious saplings broken and ripped up after Damien had been seen walking through with various women. Yet on the night of the murder, he’d seen nothing of Damien, much less the woman. And there was one vital thing missing from everyone’s accounts – not one person knew her name!
“You have got to be kidding me!” Bill breathed. “Okay, this goes beyond coincidence now. Two women with no name, and a third with something that’s probably a nickname? That can’t be a coincidence.”
It was enough to have him thinking that tomorrow night he must read through the farmer’s files, but just as he was getting his jacket and car keys, Ray came dashing in.
“You are not going to believe this, gov’!”
“Oh God, not another body?”
“Not exactly.”
Bill frowned. “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’? Please don’t tell me it’s in bits.”
However Ray shook his head. “No, it’s odder than that.”
With a sigh, Bill draped the jacket around the back of his chair and sat down again, gesturing Ray to take the seat on the other side of the desk. “Go on then, hit me with it. What’s happened?”
“Vijay Bose’s gone missing!”
“What? Now? After his cousin’s vanished?”
“No, gov’, that’s the really weird bit. You see, as far as the family were aware, Vijay and his mate Tufty had gone over to Italy. Remember me telling you about how we’ve always been suspicious about Mr Costa – Marissa’s husband – supposedly going home? Well the gang have used the story of them going to ‘visit’ him as a reason for them to leave the country whenever things have got a bit hot for them at home. So nobody questioned them when first of all Tufty disappeared, and then Vijay started making veiled comments about setting up a new base of operations. They all just thought he was being coy about needing to take a month or two away – and there were reasons why that fitted which I’ll come to in a bit.
“But the thing is, Vijay had promised to be back for his kid sister’s eighteenth birthday party. And so when it got to a day or so before it was due and still no sign of Vijay, his mum got onto Marissa Costa, and together they started making phone calls. Well God knows who they were calling. All my mates in Walsall have been able to establish is that it was to mobile phones somewhere in Italy – probably burner phones that got ditched after one use. But my mate Likesh just rang me from the station to warn me that both women are screaming the place down now, because they think that whoever did for Sanay has done for Vijay.”
Chapter 9
BILL FELT ANOTHER OF the telling shivers run down his spine. “So do we have any idea at all of the last time either of these charmers was seen alive?”
Ray winced. “We’re running into the same brick wall of the Costas’ caginess over what they’ve been doing – or rather my mate Likesh and his team have – but as best they can tell, Tufty has been missing since May, and Vijay since June. That’s the last time people in the area can recall seeing them, anyway.”
And there it was. The accounting for the hole in the dates between Damien and Justin. But would Bill ever be able to prove it?
“Has there been any kind of confirmation that either man went abroad?” he asked Ray, silently praying that they would have at least crossed the Channel.
Unfortunately Ray was shaking his head before Bill had even finished speaking. “No, not this time. And these two rogues had come up on the Border Force’s radar because we’d asked about them so often, so they’ve been on a watch list. Granted, it was more about whether they were bringing people into the country, but previously their passports have been checked over and over, and they don’t seem to have ventured out of the EU. So no strange trips to former Eastern Bloc countries for instance, nor even as far afield as somewhere like Turkey. All of which means that our oppo’s are thinking that there may well be some family link to Italy, even if it’s not the missing Mr Costa nor our missing men.”
Bill leaned back in his chair and stared unfocused at the ceiling as he thought aloud. “Not a hint of them going abroad, then. So if they have vanished, the chances are that it’s somewhere here in the UK. But where could that be? We’ve found not so much as a whisper of Sanay and his tribe going regularly to the area where he was dumped. Which means I can’t see any reason to start combing the hills around there for bodies – or at least not without a lot more hints in that direction.”
He sat back up straight. “What do we know about this Tufty character?”
“Aagh,” Ray groaned. “Another charmer. Did a stint in the Territorial Army and tried for the SAS.”
“What? That doesn’t sound right.”
“I said ‘tried’, gov’. He didn’t get past the first day of selection – for the Territorial side, as well, not the regulars. Oh he was above average in terms of fitness, but his kind of fit came from pumping iron in a gym, not the sort those guys need. Nonetheless, he used to sit in the local pubs telling anyone who’d listen that he’d been in the SAS. The old boys who’d been in the army knew it was all hot air and dismissed him as a braggart, but there are always the gullible ones – the ones who live in cloud-cuckoo-land themselves – who got sucked in by his stories. What Likesh’s team got out of them was that this guy used to go off rough camping on his own at times, and of course that doesn’t make it any easier to work out where he might be – could be the Outer Hebrides for all they know.”
“And do we have a proper name for Tufty? Please don’t tell me that his parents actually called him that.”
Ray laughed. “No, I’ve no idea where that name came from.”
“Really?” Then Bill realised how young Ray was. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Years ago there was a squirrel character who was used to promote road safety to school kids. He was called Tufty, and kids could join the Tufty Club. He was on TV a lot, but I’ve just realised that I knew about Tufty because of my older brothers. He wasn’t really around much even when I was a kid, but he’s kind of passed into urban legend.”
Ray’s eyes went wide. “Oh that makes sense now! Likesh said that he was in every damned club or team you could think of when he was around. Darts, pool, football, you name it, he’d play it. I guess someone older must have given him the nickname and it stuck. But in answer to your question, his real name is Gaylord Harbottle.”
“Christ almighty!” Bill guffawed. “What were his parents thinking? No wonder he went by Tufty! Can you imagine being called Gaylord in some scruffy inner city comprehensive? Poor sod must have had the living daylights persecuted out of him for that. No surprise he turned into a right tough nut. He must have had to fight his corner through every class he went into at school.”
Ray chuckled. “I know. Some parents are bloody cruel to their kids when it comes to names.” Then added more sombrely, “But that doesn’t help with finding him either, because the Costas at least admitted that if he had to book into anywhere, Tufty often used his maternal grandfather’s name, which was Harry Smith, or his half-uncle’s name, which is Josh Lee.”
“Travellers by any chance?” Bill guessed.
“Settled these days, but yes. And again, when Tufty was a kid in the early nineties, his family used to go all over Herefordshire and Worcestershire doing fruit and hop picking in season, even though they had a house in Walsall. So that means that Tufty probably has a good knowledge of some of the quieter parts of the counties, particularly if he’s gone back and camped in those places.”
“And of course that’s assuming he went of his own accord back to somewhere familiar to him,” Bill mused. “If he did and he really wanted to go underground, he could well have travelled up to somewhere like the Appleby horse fair with traveller families. The ones who’ve been up to Cumbria may well be heading back by now, but that doesn’t mean he’s automatically returning with them.”
He knew he had to make such observations in fairness to Ray, but in his heart of hearts, Bill knew that Tufty was dead somewhere in this area.
“What’s the Appleby horse fair?” Ray asked, proving that Bill needed to expand his knowledge.
“It’s probably the biggest gathering of gypsies in England,” Bill explained, “and especially the real Roma, not just the social dropouts. It usually takes place in June, and then the travelling families gradually work their way back to where they over-winter during August and September. It’s quite a sight, because they do still trade horses up there, so be glad we don’t have to police it! But if this Tufty character hasn’t been seen since May, then that makes the horse fair a genuine possibility, as some of the old sweats in your mate’s team ought to be telling him. Doesn’t make it any kind of certainty, but it would be worth checking up on.”
“I’ll pass that on,” Ray said gratefully. “I’ve been trying to find any reference to farmers complaining of someone rough camping on their land over the summer, just in case he came our way, but I’ve come up empty so far.”
“And what of Vijay Bose? Any thoughts from your pal as to where he’s gone?”
Ray shook his head. “He’s even more of a puzzle than Tufty Harbottle. I mean Tufty you can imagine clearing off on his own, but Bose always liked to have his gang around him, liked to be the big fish in his own small pond. And he was a city boy though and through. Everything we ever heard about him said that he liked his comforts. I can’t imagine where he’s got to if he didn’t go to whatever family he’s connected to in Italy. I mean, Italy I can understand. He’s the kind who’d love posing in a kerbside café by some tourist spot, because he was good looking in a rough kind of way, and he always wore designer clothes – or rather, good and expensive knock-offs of them, if still far from the genuine price.”
“Hmm. Very much the urban cowboy, then.”
“Definitely. He kept Tufty around as his hired muscle, and Tufty liked the prestige of being the right-hand man of someone like Bose. I suspect for Bose it was like knowing he had the biggest and nastie
st Rottweiler in the neighbourhood – Tufty had his uses when it came to intimidation, because Bose never liked to get his hands dirty in that way.”
“But you say both mothers are now screaming the place down?”
Ray winced. “If anything Juliette Bose has an even bigger mouth than Marissa Costa, and that’s saying something. Poor Likesh had those two and one of the other sisters, Marigold Jankowski, all creating a scene together at one point.”
“Jankowski? Holy hell, the family’s like the bloody United Nations!” Bill snorted.
“Oh you wouldn’t believe!” Ray said with a wry grimace. “After what’s-his-name Jankowski cleared off back to Poland, Marigold – who seems to take her name literally and has the brightest orange hair I’ve ever seen – has since been shacked up for years with an Estonian by the name of Indrek Pahapill, who we think is connected to a people smuggling gang.”
“Good lord, you’re hardly short of possibilities for who Bose might have crossed and come to grief by, are you?” Bill sighed. “Given that you told me back when I first arrived that you thought Bose was involved with people trafficking, and now it turns out that both Vijay and Sanay’s aunt is knocking off someone else in that evil trade, you can’t help but think that there’s a connection there somewhere.”
“That’s what Likesh has been thinking,” Ray confirmed. “He rang me really to just double check that we’d not had any kind of connection to Sanay’s death out here. They think that maybe Vijay Bose got too big for his boots with these tougher guys, and that he’s been taught a lesson by them.”
“That sounds only too plausible,” Bill agreed. However, when Ray had left him, and he’d made his way to the privacy of his car, Bill couldn’t help but think that the bodies of Tufty Harbottle and Vijay Bose were out somewhere this way – they just hadn’t been found.
