An Unfinished Murder

by An Unfinished Murder (retail) (epub)

But it was a failure, and somewhere along the line Carter began to feel he, personally, had screwed up. The disappearance of any young girl with her future ahead of her must be a tragedy. It was agreed, unofficially, that the missing girl was most likely dead; the body had been disposed of either out in the countryside or in the river. There were possibilities enough, and the budget couldn’t be stretched out endlessly. The active search ground to a halt. Other matters, obvious crimes, took precedence: a murder, a bank robbery, a hideous case of child cruelty. In all of these instances there was physical evidence. But Rebecca had vanished as if in a puff of smoke – or like a genie in a fairy tale, dematerialising back into the lamp.

  Eventually, the decision had been taken to put her disappearance on the back burner, in the absence of any new evidence – such as a sighting of her alive, or the discovery of remains – and she became a ‘cold case’. But he, Carter, had never forgotten this failure in his early career as a detective.

  This morning, to his astonishment, he had received a phone call and discovered that Alan Markby hadn’t forgotten it, either.

  Footsteps sounded now in the corridor outside his office. Through the small window in the door he saw the head of Sergeant Morton passing by. He got up and hurried to the door, pulling it open just as Morton was about to disappear round a corner in the corridor.

  ‘Phil?’

  Morton backtracked and asked, looking wary, ‘Sir?’

  ‘You don’t happen to know where Inspector Campbell is just at this moment, do you?’

  ‘I believe she’s gone down to lunch, in the canteen,’ Morton told him. ‘Should I fetch her up here?’

  ‘Oh, no, no,’ Carter said hurriedly. ‘Don’t disturb her. I’ll see her later.’

  Morton continued on his way, looking relieved that he hadn’t been given any kind of new job.

  A glance at his wristwatch confirmed that it was just after midday and, after a moment’s deliberation, Carter decided to head down to the canteen and see if Jess was indeed there. An informal approach, that was the thing, he told himself. You couldn’t get much more informal than the canteen.

  * * *

  He found Jess starting on an early lunch of macaroni cheese. She was staring down at it with a slight frown. Carter, rather self-consciously, had acquired a cup of coffee at the counter, together with a baked potato filled with not very much tuna and a lot of sweetcorn. The canteen assistant had served him with a puzzled look. He didn’t know if that was because of his unexpected appearance in her workplace or because she knew something about the baked potato that he didn’t. He wished now he’d gone for the macaroni. The large room echoed with the clatter of cutlery and subdued chatter; the air was damp and warm, and smelled of baked beans.

  ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course not!’ Jess replied, looking up and appearing startled, as he approached at her table. Then, and only then, he realised that she hadn’t been staring down at the food but at what looked like a letter, rather a scrappy, scrawled one, lying on the plate beside the macaroni.

  ‘Sorry, I’m disturbing you!’ he exclaimed, embarrassed.

  ‘No, not at all. It’s just that we don’t often see you in here.’ As she spoke, she crumpled the letter up and pushed it into her pocket.

  ‘Well, I thought I ought to show willing occasionally.’ Ian ruefully indicated his baked potato.

  She laughed. ‘Why did you pick that, if you don’t like the look of it?’

  ‘Panic,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like the look of any of it. Although, that cheesy thing looks nice.’ He picked up a fork and prodded the potato. ‘It’s an excuse, I’ll come clean. I wanted to have a word about a phone call I’ve just had. Oh, nothing to do with a current investigation!’ he added hurriedly. ‘It was more in the nature of a private call, although it relates to an old case. You, ah, remember Alan Markby?’

  Surprised, Jess abandoned the macaroni cheese and stared at him. ‘Of course! He was the superintendent directing a murder investigation I was attached to at Bamford, before I came here.’

  ‘Mm, my acquaintance with him was well before that – and mostly conducted over the telephone. I did meet him a couple of times; he was a tall, thin, fair-haired chap. He was pleasant, cordial even, but he wasn’t any help.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘I was with the CID here and had just made sergeant. Markby was older than me. He was an inspector then. He’d reached superintendent by the time you knew him, you say?’ Carter took a mouthful of the potato and filling, and it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. A bit dry, however.

  ‘Yes, he had. This case you worked with him on, it was a murder case?’

  ‘Missing person. Although, when we couldn’t find any trace of her, we began to suspect we were looking for a body.’ Quickly, Carter sketched in the background to Rebecca’s disappearance. ‘We found no trace at this end and Markby found none at the Bamford end. It’s been an unsolved mystery ever since.’ Hurriedly he added, ‘I don’t mean Markby didn’t try and trace her. I’m sure he did all he could.’

  Jess was frowning. ‘He must be retired by now, Alan Markby.’

  ‘He is retired. But he’s been on the phone to me this morning.’

  ‘The body’s turned up!’ Jess exclaimed. In her surprise she’d spoken more loudly than she’d intended, and heads turned. More quietly, she hissed, ‘Something important must have happened. Is it a body?’

  ‘Not a physical body. But evidence of a body, possibly. It’s a bit more complicated than that. You know, I would have thought Markby would have forgotten all about it by now.’ Carter abandoned the potato. ‘Look, if you’re free this evening, come and have a pub meal with me somewhere? Then I can tell you all about it. At the moment, it’s not official business, nothing to do with us. But I have a sneaking feeling Markby is on the trail and, sooner or later, I’m going to be involved in some way. Hardly anyone else still professionally active now will remember the case. But I do!’

  ‘Alan Markby was a keen gardener!’ Jess remembered suddenly. ‘He had a girlfriend in the Diplomatic Service.’

  ‘Well, since the time you knew him, he’s married the girlfriend, she’s taken to writing detective stories, and he’s acquired a gardener to help him with his hobby. That’s what’s led to the phone call.’ Carter abandoned his lunch and stood up. ‘Think of a pub you’d like to eat at tonight.’

  Jess, left to contemplate the mangled shell of the potato on Carter’s plate, thought resentfully, So, what’s it got to do with me! Unless Ian just wanted to pick through her memories of Markby, ahead of any fresh involvement with him. ‘Yes!’ she muttered. ‘That’s it! Still, it will be nice to have a decent pub meal tonight, instead of something microwaved at home!’

  The macaroni cheese, during her talk with Ian, had gone cold and rubbery. She pushed it away to join his abandoned potato, and hunted in her pocket for the now very creased sheet of paper.

  Her twin brother, Simon, was a doctor working with a medical charity active in areas of conflict, resulting in camps of desperate refugees, ravaged by hunger and disease. Communications from him were sporadic, since he was usually out of the range of any mobile phone signal. Emails tended to arrive at odd intervals, and to consist of a couple lines saying he was OK and hoping she was, too. Letters were almost completely unknown, because postal services were early casualties of general mayhem. Besides, who had time nowadays to write letters? Simon certainly didn’t. To receive one was nothing short of amazing. The letter read:

  Sorry that this is such a scrawl. I have just heard that a courier is flying out and we’ve been told if we have letters we should hand them to him pronto, so I only have a few minutes. I am OK. Hope you are. I’ve scribbled a few lines to Mum under separate cover. Do you remember Mike Foley? He trained with me in London and he’s been out here working with us. He’s been sick and is being sent back home to recover. He’ll be staying with an old uncle in Bath, the only family he has left. Understand the old fellow is difficult, deaf and
set in his ways. So I hope you won’t mind, but I’ve given Mike your address and suggested he get in touch with you when he gets to Bath. You will not be that far away. Thought you might like a personal update of what I’m doing. If you think it’s all right, you could take him to see Mum and he could chat to her, too. Only, don’t take him if you think it would upset her.

  Take care,

  Love,

  Simon

  What did he mean, ‘don’t take him if you think it would upset her’? Jess tapped the crumpled sheet thoughtfully. Their mother would be delighted to have first-hand news of Simon. Her brother knew that. So, the warning referred to something else.

  Jess searched her memory for Mike Foley, and it supplied a misty image of a tall, thin, muscular young man in running shorts and vest. Track athlete, a middle-distance runner, as far as Jess could recall. ‘He’s been sick and is being sent back home to recover.’ Recover from what?

  No point in worrying about that now. When, and if, Foley showed up, there would be time to sort that one out.

  Chapter 4

  Josh had not turned up at the Old Vicarage to work in the garden the following day. He’d phoned early to say he’d gone to deal with a blocked drain. Meredith took the call and thought Josh cut the link quickly once he’d delivered his message. He probably wasn’t giving her a chance to ask him questions about the bracelet. But he didn’t ask what Alan had done about it, either. That did surprise her.

  Alan, when she reported this, gave as his opinion that Josh’s memory of the body in the woods had been a burden for twenty years. Now he’d been able to put it down, he’d done just that. He’d handed it over to a suitable person and had walked away.

  ‘I hope,’ said Alan worriedly, ‘that he’ll come back to the garden again and not abandon us completely now.’

  ‘If he’s clearing out someone’s drain,’ said Meredith, ‘it’s a good moment for me to go and visit Mrs Pengelly. How old do you think she is?’

  Alan considered. ‘Possibly not extremely old. She was young enough, twenty years ago, to act as foster parent to a couple of disturbed kids. Perhaps more or less my age? And I don’t consider myself to be old!’

  Before tackling Trevor Barker the previous day, Alan had taken a few minutes to check out the spinney where Josh and Dilys had stumbled on the body. So, Meredith decided to do the same before tackling Mrs Pengelly.

  Brocket’s Row, she discovered, sat atop a steep rise in the ground. Behind it, sloping downhill, was an area of rough pasture, plentifully dotted with clumps of weeds and bushes, and surrounded by the crumbling remains of a stone wall. The spinney lay beyond and below it, right at the bottom of the hill, and beyond that, she could see the roofs of warehouses, Dudley Newman’s would-be business park. She drove on the short distance downhill until she reached it, then climbed out of the car and stood looking back and upwards towards the houses. The spinney, as a block of trees, would be visible from up there, but it would be too far away for anyone to see what went on in its shady interior. Alan had warned her that, lately, someone had been using the spinney to dump rubbish, but from the road this eyesore couldn’t be seen. That was probably why the Council had not been here to put up notices warning against fly-tipping. No one had reported it.

  Once she stepped between the trees, Meredith immediately saw what the problem was. Any and every kind of debris was here. Someone had tipped out irregular lumps of concrete. It must have been quite some time ago, because already blackberry bushes had colonised the heap. There was an ancient gas cooker nearby, leaning drunkenly to one side with stinging nettles clustered around its feet. There were several black plastic bin liners. One had split and an unpleasant, rotten smell oozed from it, together with a dark tarry liquid. Meredith skirted these horrors and came upon a worse one, the body of a dead fox with sunken flanks and its jaw open in death as if it was snarling at her. She wondered if it had foraged amongst the plastic bags and eaten something poisonous. Through the trees, to the rear of the patch of woodland, it was just possible to make out the dark shapes of the warehouses that were all that remained of Dudley Newman’s ambitious project. In every sense, literal and metaphorical, the place stank of decay.

  She had no wish to linger. It was impossible to tell how the spinney had once looked when local children had played here, and certainly not possible to guess just where Josh and Dilys had found the dead girl. Would Josh be able to pick out the spot after so many years and major changes in the surrounding vegetation? Meredith retreated from the spinney and its horrors, got back into her car, then turned round and drove back up to the top of the hill.

  There were eight houses – four sets of semis, standing in a row – cresting the rise and looking out over the town like a raiding party, assessing the target below. Probably there had once been a plan to build a bigger estate of social housing, but that hadn’t happened, for whatever reason, and only these eight houses remained. It seemed nothing planned for this outlying area of Bamford prospered – neither Newman’s doomed project nor this even earlier one, decided on by some post-war planning committee in a rush of socialist fervour. The houses were a good size but looked their age, and not only in style. The exterior walls had been rendered with pebbledash long ago, a fashion Meredith had never liked. Now some rendering was flaking, and what remained was a dirty khaki in colour – all except one house, the first one, belonging to Mrs Pengelly. The exterior of that house was in good order and painted white. It made Meredith think of one shining clean tooth in a mouth of bad ones. The front garden was tidy, too, with a lawn and a rose bed. But Mrs Pengelly had Josh to keep all that as it should be. The occupants of the other houses seemed to have lost heart and interest. Renovation of these homes, and installation of modern facilities, would be costly. The best thing would be to knock them down and start again. A modern-day Dudley Newman could do that. But probably, like the spinney, Brocket’s Row had been forgotten and left to its fate.

  ‘You want to see me?’

  Meredith jumped. So absorbed had she been in studying the front of the house, she hadn’t heard the approach of the speaker. She turned now and saw a small, wiry woman wearing jogging pants, a purple fleece jacket zipped up to the chin, and a crocheted beanie hat that could have passed for a tea cosy.

  ‘Mrs Pengelly?’ she asked. ‘Yes, I was just wondering if you were at home. I’m Meredith Mitchell.’

  ‘Oh, I know who you are!’ was the prompt reply. ‘You write them books, detective stories. I’ve read a couple. They’re about that man who mends pianos and solves mysteries. I’d have thought he had enough to do with just the pianos.’ She pushed open a wooden gate. ‘Come on in, then.’

  Indoors, the house was far more welcoming than the location. It was warm, and spotlessly clean and tidy. The furniture was old, but looked comfortable. A blue budgerigar in a cage hopped up and down on its perch as they entered, uttering whistles of excitement.

  ‘That,’ said Mrs Pengelly, ‘is Bobby. I let him out to fly around the room, but not when I’ve got a visitor. He sometimes perches on your head and if you’re not used to it, it feels funny. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  Meredith felt that, before she settled in too well, she ought to explain her presence. ‘I’m here because of something Josh told my husband. Josh helps us in the garden.’

  ‘I know why you’re here,’ said her hostess, who seemed pretty well informed about everything. ‘Josh told me all about it and I’ve been expecting one of you to turn up.’ She eyed Meredith in an assessing sort of way. ‘I thought it might have been your husband. He used to head up the police here, years ago.’

  ‘He thought you might rather talk to me, and I wanted to come and see you. All this must have come as a shock. I thought you might be upset about it all. Also, if they haven’t been already, a serving police officer or two might call by.’

  Mrs Pengelly nodded and walked out of the room without comment. Meredith could hear the sound of a kettle coming to the boil and a clink of china. Mrs
Pengelly returned bearing a tin tray with two mugs on it, a jug and a bowl of sugar.

  ‘I don’t take sugar, thanks,’ said Meredith, accepting her mug. It had wild flowers painted on it.

  ‘Not many people do, nowadays,’ said Mrs Pengelly. ‘All kinds of ideas people have now about stuff not being good for you. Burnt toast it is now. Who eats burnt toast, anyway? Besides, you shouldn’t go letting it burn in the first place. Do you mind if I switch on the logs?’

  While Meredith disentangled this speech in her mind, Mrs P stooped and switched on a fake log fire in the hearth.

  ‘Cheers the place up!’ she said. ‘Even if you don’t have the heat on with it.’ She sat down and fixed her visitor with a sharp gaze. ‘Mostly people call me Auntie Nina.’

  ‘Please call me Meredith. I realise Josh has told you about the body he and his sister found in the spinney years ago. May I ask, when did he tell you?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me twenty years ago, when they found the poor girl,’ said Auntie Nina fiercely. ‘I’d have reported it.’

  Meredith realised that it was best to think of Mrs Pengelly as ‘Auntie Nina’. She wondered briefly what had happened to Mr Pengelly. The other woman had divested herself of the purple fleece and was revealed to be wearing a green-and-white striped rugby shirt. It must be in a boy’s size. Meredith suddenly realised that her hostess probably shopped for clothes at jumble sales or in charity shops.

  ‘You’ve got the garden all nicely laid out now, I hear,’ Auntie Nina went on. ‘It was in a terrible mess before you took on the vicarage. Father Holland, who used to live there, never got round to any gardening. Courgettes, is it, you want to plant next? So Josh says. I never grow anything exotic. Never cooked anything like that, either. Anyhow, one thing led on to another, as it does, and I found myself telling Josh I remembered when your husband was in the police. I was just making a bit of conversation,’ observed Auntie Nina, stirring two spoons of sugar into her tea. ‘But Josh got really interested. Anyway, later on the next day, when he came home from your place, he said he’d had a word with Mr Markby and told him about something that had happened years back, when he and his little sister were here together. That’s Dilys,’ she added, in case Meredith wasn’t sure.