An Unfinished Murder

by An Unfinished Murder (retail) (epub)

  Just for an instant the image of Jess Campbell entered his mind, but he thrust it away. No chance.

  All the same, Carter went back to the living room and picked up the phone.

  ‘I wondered if you were back,’ said Jess’s voice in his ear. ‘I was going to give you a call soon and ask how you got on.’

  ‘If you’re not settled in for the evening, you could come over here and I’ll tell you all about it.’ Carter glanced around the room. It looked depressing, and it was cold. ‘I should warn you, it’s chilly here.’

  ‘Then why don’t you come over here? Have you eaten?’

  ‘Lasagne at lunchtime. How about you?’

  ‘I’ve had a pizza. I can make you a sandwich, if you want one. Only it would have to be either cheese or tuna, because that’s what I’ve got in.’

  ‘I don’t need feeding, but I would really appreciate a listener.’ Dear Lord, I sound pathetic! he thought.

  ‘Fair enough,’ she told him.

  Carter found a bottle of wine in the cupboard, retrieved his coat and car keys and set out again.

  * * *

  Jess’s small flat was blessedly warm and, unlike his, managed to be a home and not just a place to sleep and keep belongings. His feelings of guilt redoubled, Carter sank back into a comfortable chair. ‘You really don’t mind my turning up like this and ruining your evening with work?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Jess grinned. ‘You don’t have to go on a guilt trip.’

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘Just tell me what happened. Actually, I really want to know. Did you see Alan Markby?’

  ‘I saw him, and he took me out to the spot where the remains were found. It was pretty desolate. You know what it’s like when an area has been searched.’

  Jess nodded. ‘Is it a remote area?’

  ‘Not really. There are houses nearby. They’re old enough to have been there when Rebecca Hellington was buried. But nothing immediately next to the small wooded area where she was found…’ He paused. ‘It’s not the first time I’ve found myself at a scene like that, and I ought to be used to it by now. But it’s always depressing.’

  She listened in silence while he recounted the highs and lows of his day. More lows than highs, to be honest. She sat on a sofa with her legs tucked under her, her glass of wine in her hand, and her intelligent face – elfin, with its pointed chin and wide-spaced grey eyes – fixed on his. Her red hair reminded him of Josh, although the gardener’s was carroty, while Jess’s was darker. Auburn, they called that, Carter thought. She wore it cut short. At work she was a human dynamo. Now she looked relaxed, the day’s problems set aside. He envied her ability to put the working day behind her and have a private life. But did she? She used to go around with Palmer, the pathologist, although she’d always insisted it was purely friendship. But he’d heard that Palmer had someone else now, a regular girlfriend. Palmer must be out of his skull. As casually as he could, he asked, ‘Speaking of wooded areas, is Tom Palmer still seeing that girl who paints trees?’

  ‘Yes, they’re planning to move in together. They’re house-hunting.’

  ‘What happened to the other one he hung around with for a while – the one who spent her time with Petri dishes and bugs? She went to Australia, but I heard she was coming back here. Did I hear wrong?’

  ‘No, you heard right.’ Jess sounded as if she didn’t care one way or the other. But it could be a front.

  ‘So, he’s definitely not getting back together with her, then?’

  ‘No, he was very upset when she accepted a year’s research grant and buzzed off without a backward glance.’

  ‘It is upsetting,’ said Ian grimly, recalling the departure from the family home of his ex-wife. Jess hadn’t said anything. Never mind Tom Palmer not thinking straight, Ian thought angrily, I’m the one who can’t summon up the courage to move my relationship with Jess on from where we are now. But would she want that? Would it be a good thing, after all? There were plenty of couples who managed to juggle personal partnerships with professional ones… and an awful lot who didn’t. Workplace romances were notoriously dodgy. He and Jess formed a good partnership professionally, and they were friends, or he wouldn’t be sitting here. But he’d be a fool, he told himself, to try and bring romance into it.

  It struck him that she was looking thoughtful, as she had been during their meal at the Wayfarer’s Return. Was she thinking the same thing as he was? Or was she thinking about something – or even someone – else altogether?

  Just when the silence between them was threatening to become awkward and he was wondering if he ought not to have come here, she spoke.

  ‘So, we’re reopening the investigation at this end,’ she said.

  That’s that, then, thought Ian. I’m indulging in pipe dreams and she’s thinking about work! Thank goodness he hadn’t made a fool of himself.

  ‘We are indeed,’ he replied briskly. ‘Although it does now look as though the girl carried out her intention to go to Bamford for her father’s birthday. Your old chum Markby has done all right,’ he added. ‘He and his wife are living in a big old rambling place, a former vicarage. She’s writing detective stories, all about a piano tuner.’

  ‘Under what name?’ asked Jess, ever practical.

  ‘I think her own maiden name, Mitchell.’

  ‘I’ll seek some of them out. At least she can consult him for details of police procedure.’

  ‘She could, but he says she doesn’t. She makes it up. They’re all set in the nineteen-twenties, anyway.’

  ‘I see. What about the witness, the gardener?’

  ‘Big, strong, silent type. Takes off his boots and leaves them outside the kitchen door, but slapdash when it comes to washing his hands.’ Carter grinned briefly. ‘Imagine the woodcutter in Little Red Riding Hood. But we did get him talking.’

  ‘Good witness?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Ian, tilting his wine glass and watching the red liquid swirl round inside it, ‘a surprisingly good witness, considering he was recalling events that took place when he was nine years old.’

  ‘And the sister is doing time for a violent assault? Wonder what sort of witness she’ll be.’

  ‘Markby will find out. He’s going to see her. This is to be a joint operation, as I was explaining, although technically it’s Inspector Barker’s case. He’s in charge at Bamford now. He is not a happy man.’

  ‘Don’t suppose he is. What should we do?’

  Carter appreciated the ‘we’. ‘I’m going to track down, if I can, Peter Malone. In theory, there ought not to be any difficulty in finding him. I saw him the other evening, so we know he’s living somewhere locally. Unless, of course, he drove miles to the Wayfarer’s Return for that meal out. I think it more likely he’s not far away. I hope so, anyway.’

  ‘He may be in the phone book, although he could be ex-directory. Dave Nugent will track him down on the computer. If Malone is any kind of professional, he’ll have a web page of some sort.’ Nugent was their technical wizard. ‘He’ll be surprised to see you – Malone, I mean.’ Jess frowned. ‘Unless he did see you in the pub, the other night. He didn’t give any sign of it.’

  ‘I saw him and I kept my head down,’ Carter pointed out. ‘He may have done the same.’ He refilled his glass and Jess’s. ‘There is one piece of the jigsaw that doesn’t belong. I don’t mean it doesn’t quite fit. It seems to be out of another jigsaw altogether.’

  She raised her glass in a mock salute and grinned. ‘Only one?’

  ‘OK, none of it fits together yet – and it won’t, until we get going on this new enquiry. How do you remember Markby? As thorough?’

  ‘Extremely thorough. Definitely not one to leave stones unturned.’

  ‘Of course, when you knew him he had made superintendent, and when I knew him he was an inspector. But thoroughness isn’t something you learn and then forget. Nor is it something that comes with age and rank. You’re thorough, or you’re not…’


  He paused and Jess asked, ‘Where is this going?’

  ‘He couldn’t find any trace of Rebecca,’ Carter said. ‘Back in the day, when we were all scouring the country for her, especially between here and her hometown. Neither our investigation nor his turned up a train or bus ticket purchase, or a fellow passenger who’d noticed her. Her family was well known in her hometown, ran a local business. She went to school locally. Not a soul came forward to say they’d seen her, even across the street, exchanged a wave, that sort of thing. She disappeared from here and her bones have turned up there – and in between, there is a blank.’

  He hesitated before adding, ‘I’m beginning to work on a theory – and it is only that, as yet. What if she didn’t travel to Bamford; or didn’t travel when she was alive? She may have had the intention of going home, but she stayed here and she died here. Don’t ask me how her body got to Brocket’s Spinney – that’s the name of the patch of woodland. Desolate spot it must be, too, even when you’re not floundering around by torchlight, looking for a grave. Yet someone chose to bury her there.’

  Jess raised an objection. ‘If someone here killed her, how would he know about the spinney at Bamford, and that it’d make a good place to bury the corpse? And it would have taken time to transport her body there. Or did someone at Bamford travel all the way down here to kill her and then ferry her body all the way back again? That hardly makes sense. It would be a pointer to the murderer’s identity.’

  ‘It’s like I said,’ Carter replied. ‘We’re missing a bit of the puzzle, and I can’t even imagine what it looks like.’

  Chapter 9

  The following day, Markby set about planning his visit to Dilys, researching the task ahead as an actor might prepare for a role. It’s difficult for a man of certain years to stand in the shoes of an eight-year-old disturbed little girl. No less difficult to understand the workings of the mind of a twenty-eight-year-old with a history of violence and failed bouts of therapy. But he had to make an attempt to get into Dilys’s memory. Josh had repeated his version of finding the body several times now, but Markby was particularly keen to hear Dilys’s account. After they had stumbled on the grisly sight, Josh had left the scene almost at once. Dilys had lingered to take the bracelet. That had taken some nerve, thought Markby. Dilys had to crouch down right by the corpse, looking into Rebecca’s face, wary lest, after all, the eyes might open and the ‘dead’ woman sit up and demand to know what Dilys was doing. Dilys might well have seen something, some small detail, which her brother had not.

  But the trip in semi-darkness to the spinney with Carter the evening before had been both unsettling and unsatisfactory. Had Markby been able to overhear Carter’s conversation with Jess Campbell, he’d have agreed a hundred per cent with Carter. As an experienced police officer (even retired), he ought to have got used to such scenes. But he never had, when he’d been a serving officer, and it was no better now. Unpleasant though it was, Markby knew he needed to go back there again for a third time. More and more, his instinct told him the answers were there – or should be there.

  The day was dull and a fresh wind had picked up. He pulled on an aged quilted body-warmer over his sweater and set off. It meant driving along a B road lined with stone walls. Last night, coming here with Carter, he’d driven right to the spinney. Today he was going to walk part of the way.

  Walk the scene. That’s what he’d learned to do, all those years ago, as a young constable. An elderly sergeant had taught him that. ‘Surprising what you spot when you’re on your own two feet, lad,’ he’d said. ‘Little things you drive right by in a car. Get out and walk.’

  He had to keep a sharp eye out for a spot to pull off the road. Luckily, just before he reached the spinney, he came upon a passing point and a gritted area big enough to let him pull in, park up and set out on foot.

  It was a short walk and, in other circumstances, would have been enjoyable, with the fresh breeze in his face. But he didn’t find any significant clues. If there ever had been, he was too late. Possibly Barker’s search team had been along here already. But if they had – and if they’d found anything – Barker hadn’t let him know.

  Now he had reached the spinney itself. On his very first visit here, before going to Barker with Josh’s story, he’d found the place in the lamentable state later seen by Meredith. Later, he’d been here to gaze upon the bones of Rebecca Hellington amid the havoc caused by the search. The whole area had been churned over and swarmed with the searchers. Last night’s brief foray into the undergrowth by torch, with Carter stumbling alongside him, it had been eerily quiet and deserted.

  Seeing the place again in daylight, he was put in mind of a huge carcass that had been stripped. The activity, the noise of the search, those had gone, and most of the original rubbish had been removed: the rusting cooker and decomposing material in bin bags, and the concrete rubble. Nina Pengelly would be pleased about that. But there was fresh debris in the plastic blue-and-white police tape that had flapped and danced in the breeze the evening before. It could now be seen to have wound itself, like a tangle of unravelled knitting, around the bushes and trees. It was as though some huge demented spider had been at work. The excavations were everywhere as trenches and holes, making negotiating a path hazardous. He wondered how he and Carter had managed to navigate a way to the grave last night by torchlight without either of them breaking an ankle. Vegetation had been uprooted and tree branches snapped. In addition, following the departure of the police searchers, the sightseers had moved in. The earth was trampled into a sea of mud and scored by tyre tracks. It had rained overnight and the ruts and holes were part filled with water. Takeaway food cartons and soft drink cans littered the area. It was impossible to imagine it had ever been a place where children had played.

  Markby picked his way through the debris back to the spot where the bones had been unearthed. He was looking down into the empty grave when his ear caught the crack of a twig and a rustle of leaves. At the same time, he experienced that familiar and unpleasant prickle running up his spine, and knew he was being watched. He looked up and saw, staring at him intently from a short distance away, a young woman.

  When recounting this to Meredith later, he admitted to having received quite a shock. Not only because she’d been able to get so close to him unobserved, indicating he wasn’t as alert as he might once have been, but because when she saw he’d spotted her, a look of undisguised delight crossed her face. That was more alarming than seeing her there, and she had a further unpleasant surprise for him.

  ‘It’s Superintendent Markby!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘No, it’s not, it’s plain Mr Markby!’ he retorted at once. ‘I’m retired.’ (Was he doomed to repeat the last words ad infinitum?) He hadn’t a clue who she was; being addressed by name completed the discomfiture he already felt.

  ‘But you were the investigating officer here at the time Rebecca went missing?’ she persisted. ‘I’ve checked the old newspaper reports. Your photo is in them. Have you come out of retirement to assist in the present enquiry?’

  Markby was beginning to be seriously alarmed. ‘Look,’ he said brusquely, ‘you clearly know who I am, and you’ve been doing a lot of homework. Perhaps you’d tell me who you are and what you’re doing here!’

  ‘Sure!’ she said brightly and walked towards him, holding out a small card.

  ‘Damn,’ said Markby gloomily, taking the card and reading it. ‘Press.’

  ‘My name is Tania Morris. I’m a stringer for three national dailies.’

  He took another look at her. She was in her mid-twenties, sturdily built, her fair hair trimmed into a bob that made her look somewhat old-fashioned. A bit, he thought, like an illustration in one of those adventure books for schoolgirls that had belonged to his mother. They’d still had their place in a bookcase on the landing in the family home during his boyhood. His mother had been sentimental about keepsakes. Alan and Laura, his sister, had read the yarns with howls of laughter.
Sensibly, this up-to-date example had tucked her jeans into wellington boots. They were fancy ones, green and patterned with daisies, the sort of thing garden centres sold. Meredith owned a pair, not patterned with daisies but with autumn leaves.

  ‘Where are you based?’ he asked truculently. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘I drove here from Stratford on Avon. But I’m by way of a Bamford local, too, in a sense. My family lived here for a couple of years when I was young. One year, they booked a family holiday from Hellington’s Travel, when I was seven. We all went to the Algarve. It was the year before Rebecca went missing. I don’t think they kept the travel company going for much longer after that. I’m not sure. We – my parents and I – we moved on. But, you see, I feel I have a link.’ She tilted her head to one side, studying him. ‘I’d really appreciate an interview. You remember Rebecca’s disappearance. You must have been in charge of the search for her.’

  ‘She didn’t disappear from Bamford,’ Markby heard himself say, mulishly. ‘She disappeared from where she was a student at a teacher training college, over an hour’s drive away. I wasn’t in charge of the hunt for her. Gloucestershire police force was.’

  ‘But you looked for her here.’

  ‘Yes, because it was thought she might have come home to visit her family. But we found no trace of her here. No one saw her. That was the extent of my involvement, so there is nothing further I can tell you.’

  Ms Morris had her inquisitor’s stare fixed firmly on him. ‘But she was here, wasn’t she?’ She pointed at the excavated grave.

  Markby was suddenly very angry.

  ‘She was buried here. That’s all we know! And we didn’t know it then!’