Dead Weight (Three Oaks Book 11)

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘If you have been tampering with evidence,’ Blosson said in a shaking voice, ‘or influencing witnesses, I’m going to have you, my lad.’

  That did it. ‘I also learned,’ I said, ‘that there had been trouble between this person, your Detective Inspector, and Mr Branch in the past. I believe this arrest to have been motivated by spite following on from some past grievance.’

  There was a moment of horrified silence. I saw Bruce flinch and I hoped to God that Mrs Branch had not been wool-gathering. I had put my head on the block and Alistair’s beside it.

  Blosson’s face had gone from white to scarlet and back to white again. He hesitated over the choice between a dozen explosive replies and as a result for a moment he merely gibbered. Fraser looked at him thoughtfully and got in first. ‘Is this true?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly not,’ Blosson snapped. ‘I resent this accusation and, if you’ll leave it to me, sir, I will take appropriate action.’

  ‘I’m sure that you would. Have you ever encountered Mr Branch in the past?’

  ‘I have no recollection of doing so. None at all.’

  Fraser studied him for several seconds and then turned his attention to me. ‘I hope that you’re wrong,’ he said, ‘but for your sake I have to hope that you have some reason, good or not, for what you’ve said.’

  ‘I understand that it happened while Mr Blosson was still in uniform and that it may have had to do with a traffic incident,’ I said. My mouth had gone dry.

  ‘Then it should still be on record,’ Fraser said. ‘Sergeant, get on to Records and see if they can trace any such event.’

  ‘The phone’s in the hall,’ Bruce said. It was the first time that he had opened his mouth since passing the buck to me (whatever, I thought in a moment of escapist frivolity, a buck might be in the context.)

  The Sergeant was a tall man who had to be near the age for retirement. His face was totally impassive. He got up without a word and left the room.

  Blosson began to speak but Fraser held up a hand. ‘We’ll wait,’ he said. I had always known him for a fair man. He was not going to come down on either side until the facts were in the open. Blosson subsided but he was a burning fuse.

  In the silence that followed, I could hear the Sergeant’s voice in the hall. But I had to get my knowledge into the open quickly, while I still had their ear and a degree of trust from Fraser. ‘While we’re waiting,’ I said, ‘do you have a photograph of the evidential dog faeces available?’

  Fraser looked at Blosson again. The Detective Inspector hesitated and then, with a show of reluctance, lifted a briefcase from beside his chair. After a brief hunt he produced a larger print of the photograph I had already seen, handing it to the Detective Superintendent. ‘It’s nothing more or less than a piece of shit,’ he said to me, ‘the same as you’re talking.’

  ‘That,’ said Fraser, ‘is more than enough of that.’

  Sergeant Parkes returned almost immediately. ‘They’ll call us back,’ he said.

  ‘In the meantime,’ Fraser said, ‘we may as well hear what Mr Cunningham has to say about the evidence.’

  He handed me the photograph. In this enlargement the turd was now several times life-size and the image was still razor-sharp. I made a pretence of studying it, for Sergeant Morrison’s sake. ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ I said. ‘If this had been deposited in the gateway of this house, one might expect, perhaps, to see the surface dusted with road grit and possibly sand left over from last winter’s snow clearance. Instead, if you look closely, you can see what look like grass seeds embedded in it and several small grass stems. There’s even a portion of grass blade. And I think that you’ll find that the black specks are rape seed. When your forensic scientists examine it, they’ll have to agree that this was transferred from the lane behind the houses, which is where Mr Branch said all along that he walked.’

  ‘Let me see that.’ Blosson got up and snatched the photograph out of my hand. He carried it to the window and studied it for a full minute before coming back to stand over me. He glared at me, but I had the impression that he was looking between my eyes rather than into them. ‘You interfered with this specimen before we uplifted it,’ he said at last.

  I leaned back to escape the smell of his sweat. ‘You can see for yourselves,’ I said, ‘that that suggestion is ridiculous. If I had known of its existence, which I did not, and had I wished to tamper with it, which I wouldn’t, I would only have had to take a stick and flick the evidence across the road and into the rough ground beyond, where it would have been lost for ever or have become meaningless. Can you really picture me sprinkling it with grass seed, just to invalidate it as evidence?’

  Fraser looked at the Detective Inspector with raised eyebrows.

  ‘I did not move it, I swear to God,’ Blosson said in a shaking voice.

  ‘I never thought that you did,’ Fraser said, but I could see that Blosson’s outburst had put the thought into his mind. He held out his hand for the photograph.

  Blosson, returning to his chair, paused to put it into his hand.

  ‘And I never suggested it,’ I said, ‘although I’m amazed that a DNA test was obtained without the lab being asked for any more detailed comment.’ I was tempted to suggest that mention might have been made of the grass and seeds and might have been suppressed, but I was afraid of alienating Fraser as well as Blosson. Fraser was capable of seeing the point for himself. ‘I’m only suggesting that without the evidence of the dog-turd and the cigar butt, both of which could have been transferred from the back lane, you have only a weak motive to offer against Mr Branch and there were several others with more pressing ones.’

  ‘In fact,’ said Bruce, ‘I suggest that you have no justification for holding my client any longer and that you may as well release him immediately on police bail while awaiting the result of a more thorough investigation.’

  ‘A more competent investigation,’ I said.

  Blosson leaned forward, prepared to erupt but Fraser frowned him into stillness and silence. Fraser, I decided, had learned the habit of command since we had last met. ‘A little while longer won’t do Mr Branch any great harm,’ he said. ‘We’ll see how quickly the lab can report on those seeds and what they say about them. And, of course, what else Mr Cunningham has to tell us.’

  I took a few seconds to arrange my thoughts in tidy sequence. Blosson’s malevolent glare distracted me. I looked up at the ceiling. ‘The physical evidence,’ I said, ‘has to be seen along with the testimony of Mrs Guidman, who was at her kitchen window all morning and looking across the corner of the field towards the back lane. She was keeping an eye on the movement of pigeon over the rape field on her husband’s behalf. She’s pretty certain that she saw Mr Branch go home by that way and her description of the person’s clothing and of his dog both tally. Very shortly afterwards, she saw a different figure emerge from the back gate of this house, do something surreptitious which involved some stooping and go back in through the gate.’

  ‘I tried to interview her,’ Blosson said. His posture had begun to alter subtly. As the flaws in his investigation emerged, he seemed less like a tiger narrowly restrained from attacking its prey and more like the prey, defiant but running out of time. He ran a finger round his collar. I could see sweat on his upper lip. ‘There was never anybody at home when I called.’

  In for a penny, in for a pound . . . ‘Or else your reputation had gone before you and she was afraid to answer the door,’ I said.

  Blosson was roused from defensiveness to renewed indignation. ‘Are you calling me a bully?’

  ‘You have that reputation. If the cap fits . . . I suggest that the person Mrs Guidman saw was collecting this excrement and a discarded cigar butt.’

  ‘I suggest that that’s no more than a wild guess,’ Blosson said furiously.

  ‘And I suggest,’ Bruce said, ‘that on the present evidence you clearly cannot justify holding my client any longer. That is all that we’re here for
.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ Blosson said. ‘There’s more evidence. You don’t know the result of the post mortem yet.’ He looked enquiringly at his superior.

  ‘Go on,’ Fraser said. He was concentrating intently but giving no sign of which way his thoughts were going.

  Blosson groped in his briefcase again and came out with a typed and stapled document. He leafed through it and licked his dry lips. ‘There had been no time for bruises to develop but the pathologist found marks on either side of the deceased’s hips, consistent with a pair of hands taking a grip. He also found a small bloodstain, Group O – which is Mr Branch’s group – on her skirt in a position corresponding to the fingers of the right hand of her assailant. Mr Branch had a recent small cut on his third finger.’

  ‘At any given moment,’ I said, ‘about one man in three has a recent scar on a hand.’ I held up my right hand. A barbed-wire scratch was still livid on my palm. ‘Especially those of us who live in the country and do our own gardening. Tell me, were there any other marks on the body?’

  Blosson was on the point of inviting me to go to hell but Fraser spoke first. ‘Tell us,’ he said.

  Blosson pursed his lips but began to leaf through the report. ‘You’ll not be wanting her state of health and old appendix scars,’ he said. ‘There’s only . . . Here it is. “A puncture wound about four days old on the left thigh, made with a blunt but pointed instrument such as a belt buckle.” Look for yourself if you like.’ He held out the document.

  ‘I’m satisfied,’ I told him.

  ‘What was Mrs Horner’s blood group?’ Bruce asked.

  Blosson hesitated. ‘Also Group O,’ Fraser said. Blosson’s mouth snapped shut. I heard his teeth click.

  ‘I understand,’ said Bruce, ‘that the deceased’s left earring had been torn from her ear. If her attacker pulled it loose, he might easily have got blood on his fingers. He may then be assumed to have dropped the earring, apparently by accident, into the butt and when Mrs Horner looked or reached down into the water he lifted her by the hips and pushed her in, transferring her own blood to her skirt in the process. Or if the earring was pulled off accidentally by a twig, he might have got blood on his fingers from the earring in picking it up and, again apparently by accident, dropping it into the water butt.’

  Blosson started to protest but again Fraser signalled for him to wait. ‘Mr Hastie is correct,’ he said. ‘I have to decide first whether we have enough of a case to justify holding a respectable man in custody – always a serious matter for him and one not to be treated lightly. I think that we should meet this Mrs Guidman straight away. Sergeant, would you telephone and ask her if we can pay her a visit or, if she prefers, she would come to us here?’

  ‘I don’t think that she trusts telephones,’ I said. ‘She equates them with computers and smart bombs.’

  ‘In that case, Sergeant, go and convey the invitation.’

  The Sergeant got up again. ‘Very good, sir. Where do I go?’

  ‘If you go out of the back gate,’ I said, ‘and look to your right, you’ll see that the lane goes through to the village street between the corner house – Mr Bovis’s – and the smaller house to the left as you look at them, which is where the Guidmans live.’

  The Sergeant gave me a nod of thanks and left the room. We heard his footsteps crunch over the gravel.

  Fraser looked from me to Blosson. His glance was speculative, as if at specimens in a bottle. He was weighing us up and when he had made up his mind he would come down hard on one of us, but I took comfort from the fact that, whatever the outcome for Alistair, already the evidence of a sloppy investigation was piling up. ‘I think,’ he said to me, ‘that we can manage without the chiel amang us takin’ notes while you give me an outline of just what other evidence you have uncovered.’

  ‘Are you aware that she was a vicious and spiteful woman who made a hobby out of courting unpopularity?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ Fraser said, frowning, ‘I wasn’t told that.’

  ‘A gross exaggeration,’ Blosson said. ‘Gross.’

  ‘A word with any of the locals would confirm what I have just said,’ I retorted. ‘Even her close friend Mrs Bullerton said much the same only today. I’ve met the type before, in the army. It usually stems from one or the other of two attitudes – high or low self-esteem. The swollen-headed may think, “They’re all stupid, how dare they judge me?” And somebody else with a profound inferiority complex may recover some confidence from being a focus of attention, a thorn in the public flesh, and getting away with it.’

  ‘To which group would you suggest Mrs Horner belonged?’ Fraser asked curiously.

  I remembered a corporal who had plagued a year of my army service and an unsatisfactory kennel-maid whom we had got rid of as fast as the legislation would allow. ‘There’s a middle group,’ I said. ‘Non-achievers who think that the world owes them a better deal. They can have both attitudes at the same time.

  ‘As one example of her malevolence, you’ve had a report on the find we made in the garden?’

  ‘I glanced at Sergeant Morrison’s report,’ said Fraser. ‘I had difficulty seeing it in any sensible context.’

  ‘No wonder,’ Blosson said. ‘It’s a load of rubbish!’

  ‘Have you had a lab report on the rabbit skin?’ I asked.

  ‘I ran the evidence over to the lab straight away,’ Blosson said, ‘just to see what sort of stunt you were trying to get away with. But it’s rabbit skin all right.’ He took a few stapled pages out of his case and almost threw them at Bruce, who passed them more gently to me. I scanned quickly through the scientific officialese.

  ‘Spell it out for me,’ Fraser said.

  I took him through the tale of the luckless Horace from the first inkling picked up by an anonymous source, through the hunt by Jason in Mrs Horner’s garden to the excavation of the remains. It was clear that neither of them had taken in the full implications of Sergeant Morrison’s report. If Blosson looked surprised, Fraser seemed to be hiding genuine disgust. I had thought that a senior policeman would have seen it all before, but apparently a neighbour who would kill and eat a little girl’s pet rabbit was more abhorrent to him than the average criminal. ‘If that was typical of her behaviour,’ he said, ‘we need have no shortage of suspects. Are you suggesting Mr or Mrs Pelmann for the role?’

  Bruce was nodding but I shook my head. ‘That’s for you to weigh up,’ I said. ‘But probably not. For one thing, neither of them bears any resemblance to Mrs Guidman’s description of the figure that came out of the gate. For another, somebody told the Pelmanns that the information had reached the police from me and Mr Hastie here. Pelmann came to see us. He was indignant and his manner was threatening, but it didn’t suggest guilt to me.’

  Detective Superintendent Fraser glanced again at the Detective Inspector. ‘I let it slip,’ Blosson said. ‘Accidentally.’

  ‘We’ll discuss it later,’ Fraser said. ‘Who else?’

  ‘It would be quicker to list the people who didn’t owe her a grudge,’ I said. ‘How about Mr and Mrs Dalton from further along the road? When they were innocent newcomers, they left their key with Mrs Horner while they went abroad. She gave her few friends a conducted tour and the Daltons’ most intimate secrets were causing hilarity all over the neighbourhood in no time flat. Ten days ago, I’m told, Mrs Horner went further and made, in company, a totally unforgivable suggestion arising from the same invasion of the Daltons’ privacy.’

  ‘What intimate secrets?’ Fraser asked.

  ‘I don’t think that it’s for me to tell you. But,’ I said grimly, ‘if anybody, male or female, ever treated me that way, there would certainly be violence done and to hell with the consequences.’ Truth to tell, I was still a little sensitive about my brick-dropping. Perhaps the Daltons would take their revenge by spreading the tale of my clumsiness around. ‘A few tactful questions would be all that was needed. But take note of this. A lorry came by from the direction of th
e sand-pit at almost exactly the moment that the Pelmanns heard Mrs Horner cry out. If you accept that that was when she went into the water butt, Mr Guidman, who was on the Moss, saw Mr Dalton walking towards this house and the village very shortly afterwards. I’m told that Mrs Dalton joined her husband for lunch at the hotel. That doesn’t prove anything. I suppose that Mrs Dalton could have done the deed and hurried on to join him. But she looks quite unlike the figure that Mrs Guidman describes.’

  ‘There are more?’ Fraser asked.

  ‘Certainly there are more,’ I said. It seemed a good moment to throw names at him. ‘Who would you like next? Mrs Bullerton herself admits that she visited here that morning but the lorry driver saw her walking away from the village towards her home.’

  ‘Well, then—’ Fraser began.

  ‘But,’ I said – Fraser groaned – ‘her daughter is married to Mr Bovis next door to here. She has left him for her husband’s partner, who is Mrs Horner’s nephew. Bovis is the type of charming rogue that many women dote on. A very suitable person to be out and about buying antiques at the door, although I suppose that a wife could soon tire of being married to a charming rogue. Mrs Horner seems to have favoured Bovis against her nephew during an earlier row about the value of a pair of silver candlesticks; and then she was furious with her nephew for leading Mrs Bovis, as she would regard it, astray.

  ‘This is where you may feel that it gets interesting. Mrs Horner therefore intended to cut the nephew out of her will. Mr Hastie found notes to that effect and Mrs Bullerton states that Mrs Horner told her of that intention.’

  ‘Another motive,’ Fraser said.

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘Ian Shute, Mrs Horner’s nephew and beneficiary, is a partner in the antique shop. The shop shows all the signs of a serious cash flow problem. The assistant tells me that they suffered a serious loss by buying a major item which turned out to have been stolen. I can’t think of any profession more dependent on the availability of capital than the world of antiques.’