by Jane Adams
Chapter Twenty-Three
Wednesday 2 p.m.
There was more heat in the day than Mike had expected. The rain had come and gone while they had been at Netisbrough and by the time the two of them reached Otley the sun had burned the rest of the cloud away, leaving only blue heat and the damp rich smell of wet greenness flooding into the car through the open windows.
The farm had taken time to find, set back off a side road and surrounded by well-grown trees and unpruned hedges.
Mike pulled the car to a stop in what had once been the back yard of the house. The warm damp hit him as he got out of the car. The air was very still. The scent of earth, rotting wood, and the last of the flowers left in the overgrown beds rose up around them.
‘Shame to see places like this when there are folks needing homes,’ Price said unexpectedly. ‘I mean to say, guv, the house looks sound enough, seems stupid not to sell it or at least rent it out.’
Mike nodded thoughtfully. He crossed the yard and pushed his way through the dense undergrowth, making for the line of broken-down fencing just visible behind the mass of nettles and rambling roses.
He swore softly as the thorns bit through his shirt sleeves, and brushed irritably at the cuckoo spit and spilt pollen that clung to his clothes.
Beyond the fence were flat fields. Broad swathes of land, densely planted. The same on the other side — they’d seen that driving up — and probably out at the back, too. Featureless flat lands, made for the use of combines and mass market needs, and here, this little house and its garden, a lost island in the middle of it all. Neglected and left to rot.
Mike glanced around him at the ragged undergrowth. He could make out the lines of borders and narrow pathways, just wide enough to give access to the beds.
If there was a well here, where would it be? Close to the house?
He went back to where Price was pacing about the yard, poking at things with a long garden cane he’d found and glancing about him with an air of dissatisfied curiosity.
‘A well,’ Mike asked him. ‘Where would they dig a well in a place like this?’
‘You’re asking me? Christ, guv, where I come from we’ve got hot and cold running and full gas central heating.’
Mike laughed. ‘So, take a guess.’
‘Be close to the house,’ Price said, looking around. ‘You’d not want to be carrying water far.’
‘But there’s nothing in the yard . . . What’s that?’ He pointed to the small outbuilding at the side of the house.
‘Outside loo, one of the old kind with a hole in the bench and a bucket underneath.’ He grinned at Mike’s look of distaste. ‘It took a while to get indoor plumbing round here. I had an aunt out this way, they only got theirs in the mid-seventies. Till then it was the loo seat, the bucket and the dilly cart.’
‘The what?’
Price grinned again. ‘Dilly cart, we used to call it. Came round to collect the . . . er . . . waste once a week or so. I remember when I was a kid and used to stay with her. It stank to high heaven when the dilly cart came.’ He laughed, shaking his head and clearly remembering with the perverse pleasure that comes with knowing something is long gone. ‘It’s not likely the well would be close to the outhouse, is it?’
He had a point.
Mike glanced around once more but was reluctant to investigate further. Already, in his mind, this was scenes of crime territory. He wasn’t happy about poking around like some half-trained flatfoot.
‘Well, sir?’ Price asked him, clearly bored now and ready to eat.
‘Lunch,’ Mike said, to Price’s evident relief. ‘That place you were telling me about. Then we’ll get back to base, talk to Jaques and see if we can get some men out here.’
Price nodded, then grinned wryly. ‘Nice, that,’ he said. ‘Spot of gardening on a hot summer afternoon.’
‘I’ll make sure they bring the deck chairs,’ Mike said, mirthlessly.
* * *
Wednesday 10 p.m.
Tynan shrugged, Mike could hear it over the phone. ‘I don’t know, Mike, he didn’t seem to want to go in for specifics, just told you to watch your back. And he doesn’t like Superintendent Jaques too much either. Seems he was a friend of Fletcher’s.’
‘Fletcher had a lot of friends, John. Bad judgement doesn’t make them all guilty.’ He paused, taking this new information on board.
‘Well, I’ll see you Friday, then,’ Tynan said. ‘Give my love to my favourite lady, will you, Mike?’
‘Will do, John. See you soon.’
He put down the telephone and crossed to where Maria sat on the small sofa. ‘John sends his love,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘He tell you what Andrews said to him?’
Mike raised an eyebrow. ‘Way ahead of me again, are you?’
She laughed. ‘He called earlier, wanted to know if he’d catch you here tonight’.
He nodded, settled back, contented and very tired. The wall clock with its slow-ticking pendulum told him it was a little after ten, but it felt much later. Not that it had been a hard day; it just felt as though it had been a long one. His prolonged interview with Jaques, late this afternoon, reporting on what Fletcher had and had not told him, had just added to his sense of frustration.
‘So, Jaques wouldn’t play?’ Maria asked him, seeming to read his thoughts as she so often did. Mike shook his head. ‘He’s got a point, of course,’ he said, trying to be generous. ‘It’s such a long shot, would require officers we really can’t spare.’ He shrugged wearily. ‘And Fletcher’s track record really doesn’t encourage anyone to take him seriously. It could just as easily be another of his games. We didn’t even see a bloody well.’
‘But you don’t think he’s lying?’
‘No, not this time. It was strange, but he behaved as though it was almost dragged from him. No, I’m not sure what I mean either.’ He frowned, trying to get a handle on things. ‘He spent the entire time we were there not telling us anything, waited until we’d practically made it out of the door before he told us about the house.’
It had been odd, that, the way Fletcher had spoken so hurriedly, so urgently, as though afraid that someone else should hear. Then clammed up again, simply demanded to be taken back to his cell.
‘Yes,’ Mike said again, ‘I believe there’s something in what Fletcher said, and I think we should at least look for that bloody well. Got to admit, though, it would make a damned good place to hide a body.’
Maria laughed. ‘So, now what? You work on Jaques?’
‘I work on Jaques.’
The telephone rang again, its sound shrill and insistent, cutting through the peace of the room. Mike knew, even before Maria answered it, that it was work.
‘Jaques,’ she mouthed at him, handing him the receiver.
Mike took the phone and listened in silence. He replaced it on its rest with the exaggerated care typical when something troubled him. When he turned back to Maria, his face was strained.
‘You’ve got to go?’ she asked him.
He nodded. ‘Out to Netisbrough,’ he said. ‘It’s Fletcher. They found him hanging in his cell about an hour ago. The governor wants to know what I said to him this morning that made him want to kill himself.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Wednesday midnight
The coast road out to Netisbrough was unlit and almost deserted this late at night. It was close to midnight by the time Mike reached the high cliff overlooking the prison compound now laid out below him, its outline drawn in lights like some elaborate funfair ride.
Fifteen minutes later he was standing beside Jaques and his superior, Chief Superintendent Charles, in what had been Fletcher’s cell.
There was little in the tiny room to give any sense of what had gone on there. Neatly made top bunk, bottom one unoccupied, shaving gear, soap and other toilet articles on the top one of two shelves, books and a pad of writing paper, a couple of pens on the lower one. Nothing pinned to the walls, nothing
visible that wasn’t, clearly, in its designated place. An environment already made impersonal by its very nature, made all the more so by the lack of input from its inhabitant. By the apparent lack of desire to make any kind of mark.
It reminded Mike of the Pearsons’ living room. That same sense of impermanence, of someone just passing through. That might have been accountable in the Pearsons’ case, moving on so many times in a few short years. But Fletcher was likely to have been here for a long time. Tied into a system that did little to accommodate personal difference. In such circumstances, most people would do anything just to delineate their territory, state their sense of self.
Here, there was nothing.
He walked over to the far wall, turned, looked at the top bunk. A strip of cloth still hung from the end of the bed, cut ragged by the penknife that had been used to free Fletcher’s body. He moved over to the bed, comparing its height with his own. Fletcher had been almost as tall, an inch shorter than Mike maybe.
‘He did it from here?’
The puzzlement must have shown in his voice. Jaques said, ‘Seems he was determined. Must have leaned into the noose till it pulled tight, then, as he lost consciousness, his weight would have done the rest.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘Anything’s possible, Mike,’ Jaques snorted irritably. ‘If you’re desperate enough.’
‘You looking for something else, Croft?’
Mike glanced over at the speaker. It was the first time Chief Superintendent Charles had spoken to him since he had entered the cell.
‘I don’t know, sir. It just doesn’t look right. I would have said that Fletcher was worried about something when we spoke to him, but not suicidal. No, definitely not that.’
Charles shook his head. ‘That’s what the governor keeps saying,’ he commented. ‘Certainly he wasn’t considered high risk. He wasn’t on the potential list.’
He paused, thoughtfully, then went on. ‘You’re right, though, something’s not kosher.’ He glanced around the room, taking in its furnishings and its few personal oddments as Mike had done earlier. ‘The way he was found, Mike, it puts a little doubt on the suicide angle.’
‘Oh?’
‘Hmm. Could have been an accident. Could be something else.’
‘An accident?’ Mike asked.
Jaques laughed but there was no humour in it. Charles was already out of the door. Jaques followed him. It was left to Price, standing on the landing, leaning idly against the safety rail, to explain. He grinned at Mike and told him in an undertone, ‘Seems they found him with his pants round his ankles and his dick hanging out, guv.’
Mike gave him a sharp look.
Price continued, relishing the details. ‘I’ve heard tell, that it, er, increases the sensations, guv. Gives you a real high. Adrenaline rush or something, being that close to copping it. Kind of—’
Mike silenced him with a gesture. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I get the picture.’
‘They figure maybe he got a bit too excited, got himself so wound up he didn’t realize how far gone he was.’ Price was unwilling to be put off.
Mike nodded again. ‘I got your drift the first time.’
They were following the senior officers down the stairs now, their feet ringing on the metal steps. It appeared that an interview with the prison governor was next on the list. Mike was not relishing the prospect. Price’s thoughts were clearly running the same track.
‘Bit of a naff deal, though, isn’t it, guv? Not a peep out of him in all this time. Model prisoner, they said he was. Then the day we come to see him, this happens.’
He sounded so affronted that Mike had to smile. He nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’d rather he’d waited a few days, would you, Sergeant? Just to keep the records straight?’
Price frowned and looked across at Mike, his lips parted ready for protest, then he saw Mike’s wry smile and grinned in return.
‘Got to admit, sir,’ he said, ‘it is bloody lousy timing.’
* * *
‘And this farmhouse. You say the two of you went out there today?’ Charles asked.
Mike nodded. ‘I reported back to Superintendent Jaques. Asked about the possibility of ordering a full search.’
‘We don’t have the manpower,’ Jaques put in quickly. ‘To get something like that done, on the vague say-so of someone we know to be a pathological liar. Well, sir, it seemed not to be worth the effort at the time.’
Mike frowned. ‘I wouldn’t have called Fletcher a liar, sir,’ he said. ‘It was more that he wouldn’t back his statements up than that we found them to be falsehoods. And surely, sir, the finding of Ryan Sanderson’s body puts something of a different complexion on things.’
Charles nodded slowly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this afternoon I would probably have agreed with you, Jaques. We’re under-resourced and heading over budget as it is. But in the light of what’s happened, both with the Sanderson boy and now with Fletcher ..’
‘If we could find the well, sir,’ Price put in, ‘we’d have some idea of whether or not there’s truth in it. No well, no go, and it’s likely to be close to the house. Probably wouldn’t take that much finding. And it might make the difference, sir, between Ryan Sanderson being one random killing and something one hell of a lot more serious.’
Charles nodded thoughtfully. ‘I agree,’ he said. Then, ‘Jaques, I want a preliminary search made of the house and the immediate surroundings. If the well is there, then I want that searched, see what we turn up. Then we’ll review the situation.’
Jaques nodded. ‘Yes, sir,’ but he was clearly unhappy. Having cast the prospect off as a wild goose chase, he was reluctant, now, to take it on board again.
‘And do I put it out as suicide or accident? Either way, it reflects badly on everyone.’
Charles turned his attention back to the governor, who had put the question. He sat behind his desk looking weary and disconsolate.
‘We wait for the path reports to come in,’ he said. ‘No point in jumping the gun.’
‘What have you told the next of kin?’ Mike asked quietly, his sympathy going out to whoever had ended up with that job.
‘There’s no one close,’ Charles said. ‘His wife left him five years ago and he’s estranged from his brother. The parents are dead. The brother’s been told it looks like suicide.’ He shrugged. ‘Under the circumstances, it seemed kinder.’
Mike nodded.
‘There’s a daughter,’ Charles went on. ‘We’re trying to get an address.’
Charles turned his attention back to the governor and returned to discussing the best way to present Fletcher’s death to the media. Mike stared down at his feet, slumping back in his chair and gazing thoughtfully at the scuffed toes of his old brown shoes.
He shifted uncomfortably. The chair in which he sat was not made for slouching. Wood, with low curving arms. It looked like a refugee from a dining set, this one the carver, wheel backed and with a hard seat. He sat up straighter and gazed, instead, at the well-worn, dark-grey carpet.
What had been going through Fletcher’s mind that morning?
Mike didn’t believe for one instant that Fletcher had lied about the farm, about the bodies he swore were concealed there. Mike wished he could believe that Fletcher was, as Jaques had accused him, a pathological liar, but it didn’t fit.
And if he wasn’t lying — if there was some measure of truth in his hastily uttered, swiftly regretted words that day — then what else could be truth? How many more deaths had there been?
Mike sighed heavily and glanced about him.
Jaques, Charles and the governor were still discussing the politics of events. Drafting a statement. Price sat listening, clearly bored, his fingers steepled together in front of his face as though framing a shot.
The room was painted a depressing pale green. Heavy curtains of a darker shade hid the windows. Filing cabinet, desk, small side table decked out with coffee mugs, milk and sugar on a brushed aluminium tray.
Bookshelves, a couple of certificates in a dark corner and three cricketing prints on the wall opposite the door.
The usual jumble of paper and pens, in-trays and envelopes arranged across the desk and a letter opener, made of bone, which the governor played with absent-mindedly as he talked.
Mike finished his inventory and went back to staring at his feet, legs stretched out in front of him.
In his mind he went once more through the items in the cell: bunk to the left of the door, chair just beside it; small table across in the far corner; two shelves above it; shaving gear, toilet things, books, writing pad, pens.
What books? There were two that Mike had taken note of, spines facing towards the room, lying on their sides. A Western novel and a D.H Lawrence, The White Peacock.
And the writing things.
‘Did he send many letters?’ Mike asked suddenly.
The others turned back to him.
‘I can find out,’ the governor told him. ‘Important, is it?’
Mike shrugged, noncommittal. He could feel Jaques’ eyes on him, narrowed with suspicion, trying to discern the direction of Mike’s thinking.
‘And there was no note,’ he said, thinking aloud.
‘No, I’ve already told you that.’
‘The notepad, on the shelf,’ Mike asked. ‘Was that checked?’
‘ ’Course it bloody was,’ Jaques said irritably. ‘Nothing on it.’ Then he frowned. ‘What are you getting at, Mike?’
Mike shook his head. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Well,’ Charles said, ‘it wouldn’t hurt to have the notepad sent down to forensics, run it through an electrostatic test.’
Mike nodded.
‘You think there was a note?’
‘I’m not convinced it was suicide, sir.’
‘Then, what? Accident?’
Mike hesitated, unsure that he wanted to commit himself. Then, ‘No. I’m not convinced of that either.’
Charles gave him a hard look. ‘It’s a possibility we have to consider,’ he said slowly. ‘But if you think someone helped Fletcher on his way, why look for a suicide note?’
‘I’m not, sir. Not exactly.’ He paused, feeling his way forward. ‘It crossed my mind,’ he said, ‘that Fletcher might have had second thoughts about what he told us. Or that he might use having told us something to put pressure on one of his so-called friends on the outside.’
