Siren Song

by Jo A. Hiestand

  “Was she in her car, either when her body was found or when she was shot?”

  “The police didn’t think so. They found her car at her house, in Chesterfield, and—”

  “At her house! How’d it get there if her body was discovered outside Elton?”

  “No one really knows, but the police surmise that either she drove home and met someone, got in that person’s car where she was killed…” She paused, again reliving the testimony of the inquest, recalling the stuffy oak-paneled room, the warmth of too many people, the rumors and speculation and whispered fanciful accusations, the tiresome drone of legal and medical jargon. Linnet swallowed, then added, “Or they drove to Elton, to the place where her body was found, and they got out and she was killed there.”

  “What’s the significance of Elton?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Did Marta have a friend there? A family member? There’s some reason why she went or was taken to Elton.”

  Linnet shrugged, her eyes downcast. “I’m sorry. I don’t know of anyone.”

  “So she ends up in Elton and her car is at her home in Chesterfield. Her car was examined thoroughly, I assume. What was the result?”

  “There was no blood in the car, nor any hair or fingerprints that weren’t hers, her husband’s or her son’s.”

  “Which eliminates her being shot in her car, then. Evidently her casino money wasn’t in the car, either.” He sighed as Linnet shook her head. “In her purse—was that with her body?”

  “Yes. It held the usual things: latch key, car key, wallet, lipstick—”

  “But not the two hundred and fifty-three thousand five hundred pounds.”

  “Nor did the police find it near her body. It disappeared.”

  McLaren refrained from saying ‘How surprising,’ and asked, “So what about Marta’s body? Any defense wounds? Bruising on her hands or forearms, skin under her fingernails…” Probably not, he mutely answered himself. Shot in the back of the head signified she never saw it coming, never had a chance to fight for her life.

  “No.”

  “And she was found…”

  “Ten days later. Twenty-first of June. Near Elton, as I said. She had been dumped along the B5057. Just off the road, actually, which was why no one found her body immediately.”

  “It’s a rather uninhabited place.”

  “A lot of ramblers like the spot,” she said, her voice tightening.

  “I just meant it’d take a while to find her, or anyone, in that area. A lot of moorland to contend with.”

  “Yes.”

  “So the police had no idea where to search originally for her the night of your big adventure, I assume. Elton’s a bit of a distance from the casino in Nottingham.” In Derbyshire, he would have added if the region’s geography weren’t so obvious. Nottingham was in Nottinghamshire, the county east of Derbyshire. Another police force, another mode of life.

  As though privy to McLaren’s thoughts, Linnet said, “I know it’s odd, being so far from where we were that night. Even from our homes.”

  “And yours is…where?”

  “We both live in Chesterfield.”

  McLaren did a quick mental calculation. Nottingham was perhaps twenty or thirty miles from Chesterfield, nearly on the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border. And about the same distance from Elton, which put the village on the western side of this triangle. “Why go to Elton to dispose of a body?”

  “I don’t know,” Linnet said. “No one does. The police didn’t catch the killer.”

  “Or they’re not closing in fast enough, at any rate,” McLaren clarified. “Who found her?”

  “Some rambler. I can’t recall his name.”

  “Someone above suspicion, evidently.”

  Linnet reddened but ignored the remark otherwise. “Neither Marta nor I know anyone who lives in Elton. She has a brother-in-law who lives in Matlock, but no one in that part of Derbyshire. I can’t understand it.”

  “When did you two separate? You didn’t drive down to Nottingham together?”

  “I know it sounds odd, Mr. McLaren, but we were coming from different directions that evening. It was a Friday, which is Marta’s half-day at the shelter. She gets off at noon. And since it was her half-day, she drove to Matlock to visit with her brother-in-law there and have lunch. We had arranged to meet at the casino at six o’clock, at the blackjack tables. I get off work at five every day, so I easily got there on time. Marta was a few minutes late. We played a few hands, as I said, then had dinner and decided to try the slot machines and the roulette table.”

  “Then you both drove home in your cars. Did you follow her?”

  “What…like making certain she wasn’t followed?”

  “Not necessarily, though that would have been a laudable precaution. I just want to know if you drove home together, or when you separated. Helps me make sense of when her car appeared at her house.”

  “She had to have driven home. Otherwise the police—”

  “Would’ve found a third party’s DNA in the car.”

  Linnet bit the end of her fingernail, trying to recall the night. The sound of sheep bleating carried downwind, reminding McLaren of the unfinished stonewall that stretched over the hill. But he made no move to resume his work. Several minutes later, she said slowly, “I think we split up on the other side of Ripley.”

  “Ripley!” Clearly, McLaren hadn’t expected the parting to be so near to Nottingham. Ripley lay approximately equidistance between the casino and Matlock, farther northwest.

  “I believe so. We’d driven up the A610 and then I turned north onto the A38, heading for home. I’ve tried to recall exactly when we split up. The trouble is, one set of headlights in a rear view mirror looks remarkably like another.”

  “You weren’t following her, then.”

  “No. I had started out that way, riding shotgun, as you said.” She allowed herself a slight smile, as though envisioning an old American western film, then said, “But we’d changed places quite soon after leaving Nottingham. A lorry was ahead of us and we both passed. Marta pulled back in line, behind a second lorry and probably assumed I would, too. I couldn’t see the sense of that, so I passed the second one, thinking she’d follow me and get ahead of me again. The road was quite busy—well, being late Friday night, it would be. I waited for some time, oh, probably several minutes, before I saw a car pass the lorry and fall in behind me. I assumed it was Marta since the car stuck quite close behind me.”

  “You don’t know for certain if it was she or not.”

  “No. But the car stayed with me all the way to Ripley, as I said. Right on my tail.”

  “And outside Ripley you turned right onto the A38, heading for Chesterfield.”

  “Yes. I don’t know when I realized that the car following me hadn’t turned.”

  “You didn’t turn into a lay-by and ring her up on her mobile? Weren’t you concerned with her driving home alone with that amount of money?”

  “She’d told me before we left the casino that she was thinking about going back to her brother-in-law’s. So when the car behind me disappeared, I figured she decided to do that and had continued on toward Matlock. I really didn’t think much about it until much later that night when her husband rang me up to say Marta wasn’t home and she wasn’t at her brother-in-law’s.”

  A lamb called to its mother somewhere higher up the hill before McLaren said, “Matlock isn’t really that far from Elton, where her body was discovered. Certainly, it’s not next door and there are closer places, but it’s not ridiculously far away like Manchester, for instance.”

  “No, I suppose not.” The words came slowly as Linnet pictured the distance between the two places.

  “But Elton could be significant.”

  “Because it’s out of the way, you mean?”

  “That may be part of the reason it was chosen, yes.”

  “But not the main reason.” She studied his face, trying to understand what he was r
easoning. “Why? What do you think?”

  “Elton is close to Matlock.”

  “You can’t think her brother-in-law—”

  “I don’t think anything one way or the other right now, Miss Isherwood. Except that this friendly coworker of Marta’s, this Verity Dwyer, lives in Youlgreave. And Youlgreave is about three miles from Elton. As I said, suggest anything to you?”

  THREE

  They ended the talk unsatisfactorily—Linnet walking back down the hill, disappointed and angry, and McLaren having heard enough to convince him the woman was on a fool’s errand. If the Derbyshire Constabulary had not been able to find a murderer by now, who was he to open up a can of worms one year later with his amateurish effort?

  But the case nagged him, whispered to him the rest of the afternoon as he worked on another section of the wall, murmured questions as he sat at his kitchen table over tea, rumbled over the dialogue of the television program he was trying to watch. Finally giving it up, he switched off the telly, grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, and sat at the dining room table, a map of Derbyshire, a pen and a sheet of paper in front of him.

  Ten days Marta’s body laid in the heather and grass alongside the road. Ten days for the insects and animals to work on her. He’d seen enough corpses to know what time, exposure and carrion produced. Sometimes you ended up with a body barely recognizable. Sometimes it was recognizable enough to be unbearably heartbreaking. In the warm summer months, when a body goes off much more quickly, that ignoble end comes faster. He shook his head at the shameful end of life, wondered briefly how her husband and son had handled it, then forced himself to think as a detective once more.

  How long he had worked, he didn’t know. Time ceased to flow as he jotted down questions and bits of information from the case. He stared at the map, trying to make sense of the site where Marta Hughes’ body had been found. Other than Elton being a fairly isolated village, did it offer another significant reason?

  Linnet had said that the casino money had not been found on Marta’s person, giving weight to the police theory of a robbery gone wrong. If no one from the casino had trailed her, how did Verity Dwyer know about the casino win? Was that mentioned at the inquest? Had Marta rung up Verity on her way home to tell her the good news? Was their friendship that close that Marta would do that?

  Without mobile phone records, McLaren had no answer to his first question. And without knowing Marta or Verity, he couldn’t answer the second. Her car had been parked at her house, locked, her car key in her bag. The car sustained no damage, so Marta had not been forced off the road. It appeared like she’d merely left it in the driveway, about to walk into her house at any minute. No one heard her scream or fight off an abductor; nothing like broken twigs on bushes or shoe scuffs on pavement marked a kidnapping. Didn’t this point to an arranged meeting and continuance of the evening’s fun? Without someone other than Linnet…if Linnet told him the truth about that.

  The more he thought of the case as Linnet recounted it to him, the more he knew he had no resources to help with the investigation. Assuming he would even dream of taking it on. And he was no longer a cop. Wasn’t even a private detective. He was a laborer, now. A builder and repairer of dry stonewalls. Even if he wanted to help, he was hesitant to do so. Even if his professional police life had been in Staffordshire and the Marta Hughes case was here in Derbyshire, news traveled. Traveled about cases and coppers who had been disciplined or who had mucked up. Traveled with the excited whispers of back-stairs gossip. Especially in police departments. Was there a cop in England who hadn’t heard of him, hadn’t heard what had happened to force him from the constabulary? He took a long drink of beer, trying to push the horror from his mind, trying to ignore the words that still echoed in his head. But the map danced before his eyes, the face—imagined though it was—shimmered beneath his handwriting on the page. If Verity Dwyer hadn’t killed Marta but she was wrongly suspected of it, lost her job and friends due to it, and living with that residue, as Linnet had said…

  The glass slammed down onto the beer mat as the familiar feeling of rage washed over him. Injustice. As Linnet pointed out in the first minute of their meeting. She had known how it would affect him. She had learned, somehow, of his past. The word rattled in his brain, taunted him, dared him to uphold his values.

  He got up, shoved his chair into the table, and got out his guitar. A large, Martin Dreadnought model that laid a rich, full foundation for his voice and the voices of the members of his folk singing group. He launched into ‘Travel the Country Round,’ not bothering to tune the instrument, not thinking of the song’s lyrics. The third verse and chorus slid by before the significance hit him. He’d sung about squandering money. Was his subconscious whispering to him about Verity Dwyer? Cursing his song choice, he began the introduction to “Cold Haily Rainy Night,” a favorite of his and one of his group’s most requested songs. But the words died on his lips before he had finished the second verse. Music could not penetrate his black mood, as it usually did, lifting his spirits. Perhaps Marta and Verity preyed too heavily on his mind. And heart.

  He put the guitar back in its case and got another beer from the fridge. There was more than one way to quell the maddening rush of words that persisted in his mind even through his singing. He wandered into the back room, plopped down onto the sofa, propped his feet on the coffee table, and downed half of the bottle before he saw the framed citation on the wall. He stared at it, not reading the words he had memorized years ago, yet knowing what it said.

  “Chief Constable’s Commendation. Detective Sergeant Michael Ross McLaren. You are commended for the professionalism, commitment and determination you showed whilst carrying out your role of Family Liaison Officer during the investigation into the death of Hadley Davis. The sympathy and consideration you showed to the family undoubtedly helped them cope with not only the death of Hadley, but also with the distresses of the police investigations. Your effort helped to secure the successful conviction of Larry Tomkins at Nottingham Crown Court on 3 December 2004.”

  Here he was, a year after Marta Hughes died, refusing sympathy and consideration to another murder victim’s friend. Was the chief constable’s commendation merely words? Had his role then been a sham? Was it a sham now? Had he abandoned every principle he had ever believed in merely because he had suffered an injustice?

  He woke the next morning, questions still echoing in his head. The night on the sofa had been comfortable enough, he supposed, for he didn’t remember falling asleep. Frowning, he turned off the table lamp and glanced at the far wall. The commendation still glared at him from behind its glass cover; the photos of familiar faces smiled at him from their wooden frames. One in particular seemed to silently chide him. Dena Ellison, his former fiancée. She constantly commended him for his sense of right and integrity. Had he changed so much in the year since he had left her?

  Wanting to block the memories, his eyes shifted to a photo of himself and another cop, his mate through police training. They’d had the good fortune to be appointed by the same Constabulary after leaving university, and worked together for ten years. He’d lost track of the man when they eventually drifted to different departments. Now McLaren started at his one-time friend before looking at his younger self. They were incredibly happy back then, ignorant of what could happen to a career, unaware of backstabbing and lies. McLaren’s hazel eyes seemed alive with hope for the future, his smile bright and unforced. Sun lit his blond hair, giving him a healthy glow that hinted at a long, robust life. He snorted, averting his eyes from the photo. What the hell was he doing—playing at fortunetelling?

  He grabbed the bottle sitting on the coffee table and downed the remaining beer in one long gulp. It was flat and tasteless. Seeing Dena’s photo smiling at him from over the top of the bottle, he put the bottle back on the table. Nothing marred its smooth surface but the brown glass bottle and the television remote. In fact, nothing much occupied the room—or his house. Like the kitch
en, the rooms were sparse in furniture and personal items. He had disposed of a quantity of things when his life turned upside down last June, ridding himself of painful memories by boxing up or throwing out his epaulette number pins, tie tacks and other uniform items. Shoved numerous boxes of framed commendations and photos into the attic, not wanting to see his nemesis’ grinning face, consigned police manuals and notebooks and police themed knick-knacks to the dust of garage shelving. But it hadn’t cleansed him as much as he thought it would; he still carried their memories and that June day in his mind and soul. So why were these few photos and this particular commendation still on the wall to taunt him? Sure, he had seen them during his year of emotional exile. He couldn’t have boxed them up and relegated them to a dusty corner if he had wanted to do. Something had stopped him.

  Dena’s mocking gaze pulled his eyes back to her but he quickly glanced at the adjoining wall, feeling strangely uncomfortable. Several nails protruded from the apple-green painted surface, mute reminders of the sequestered photos and certificates that had decorated the space. Why haven’t I removed those nails? Because I’m lazy? Because I never saw them? Because I haven’t had a chance to hang the new family photos? He shook his head, opening up to the truth that he had barricaded from his mind and heart. The admission hit him as hard as a stone. Because deep down in my soul I still love the job; I want to be part of it. The reason, once acknowledged, left him shaky yet feeling empty, as though his heart or brain was missing. He leaned forward but stopped as he reached for the bottle. What would his life be like now if it hadn’t been shot to hell last June? What would this room be like now—full of Dena’s laughter and scent and the myriad things that made a house feminine, lived in and loved?