The Hanging Wood

by Martin Edwards

  Begin at the beginning. The first person to see was the father of Callum Hinds. Tactful handling was vital any time, but all the more so given his latest bereavement. She rang Lane End Farm to arrange an appointment; to progress the review in line with the ACC’s timescale, she couldn’t leave the grunt work to admin staff. Hinds’ wife Deirdre listened in silence as Hannah explained she was looking into Callum Hinds’ disappearance, not his sister’s death.

  ‘Routine, I suppose?’ she said at last. ‘That’s what the police always say on telly, isn’t it?’

  She sounded numb. Shock, more than grief, Hannah supposed. Orla was not her own flesh and blood, but the discovery of her stepdaughter’s corpse buried in grain was enough to stun the sturdiest soul. When Hannah asked for a word with Mike Hinds, his wife said he was out in the fields, too far away to be summoned to the phone.

  When Hannah expressed surprise, Deirdre Hinds’ patience frayed.

  ‘This is a working farm, Detective Chief Inspector. Life goes on, there is no choice. We have livestock to look after. This sunshine is too precious for Mike to waste after the rotten spring we had. Anyroad, he’s not the type of man to sit inside and feel sorry for himself.’

  But she agreed that her husband would make himself available at the back end of the afternoon – ‘Might as well get it over with’ – and Hannah rang off before she had time for second thoughts.

  Hannah was determined to lead the key interviews herself. One compensation of being shunted into cold case work – Lauren had sidelined her after a major prosecution turned sour – was the chance to work as a proper detective again, rather than sinking forever into the quicksand of management. Whenever the chance to escape bureaucracy and desk work came her way, she grabbed it. She was so much keener on meeting witnesses than targets.

  Better not take Maggie, lest old antagonisms between Hinds and Mr Eyre complicated the discussion. She’d bring Greg Wharf along. Mike Hinds might be one of those old-fashioned blokes who didn’t take women police officers seriously. Pick one maverick to deal with another.

  Her next call was to Kit Payne. She made it as far as his PA, who insisted he was in conference, and couldn’t be disturbed, but booked her in for the following day – ‘Only an hour, mind. He has an important meeting with a delegation from the Bulgarian Holiday Home Association.’

  In between lunch and an interview for the force blog about the previous evening’s award ceremony, she tried ringing Daniel, but his phone was on voicemail. Oh well. At least she had a date with Mario Pinardi.

  ‘How could you do that to your own brother?’

  Orla’s voice jangled in Aslan’s brain. He’d roamed the country lanes hour after hour, losing track of time. His shoes were pinching his toes. Tomorrow, he’d have blisters, but so what? Anything to put off the moment when he came face-to-face with Michael Hinds.

  Of course, he should have been kinder to Orla, but now it was too late. He’d never done regrets, and now wasn’t a good time to start. Once she’d come back to his squalid bedsit, and he’d shocked her by offering to share a joint the moment they stepped through the door. She made it clear she wanted to talk, to reminisce about her childhood with Callum, and the days leading up to his disappearance. He was sure she’d dreamt that he was Callum, come back to find her – it was her very own fairy tale. She’d detected a resemblance, something in the shape of his head, and the way he walked, not to mention the almond colour of his eyes. The line between fantasy and reality was hard to draw.

  It didn’t help that she was pissed. When she took off her headscarf, he saw her bald head for the first time. Her features were pretty, but the smooth scalp turned him off. He gave her a can of beer, while he had a smoke. When he dropped a few hints about his past, she didn’t seem to take it in. He’d assumed she would be happy, but instead she was bemused. They talked for a while, but when she sat herself down on the side of his bed and asked for a cuddle – for comfort, she said, that was all – he drew away. She must have seen the distaste in his eyes, for a tear trickled down her cheek. This infuriated him, and when he’d said something cruel, her face twisted in pain. She jumped up and ran off down the stairs. Of course, he didn’t follow.

  What was it about women? The easier he found it to attract them, the sooner he wanted them out of his sight. His mother had doted on him, had given everything she could and asked him for nothing in return, but a heart attack had taken her away from him at a stupidly young age, while he was on board a ship in the Adriatic. At her funeral he’d wept, but no woman since had stirred his emotions.

  A muck spreader thundered down the narrow lane towards him and he pressed against a hedge to allow it to pass. For a nanosecond, he understood the strange impulse that had caused Orla to take her own life. How easy to leap under the heavy wheels at the last moment, and put an end to everything. A cop-out, yes, but at least he’d be rid of his baggage for good. No more complications, no more crushed expectations.

  How long had he dreamt of making his way back to Lane End Farm? Across three continents, and for as long as he could remember, yet now he saw the fields in the distance, he felt a chill that the sun’s warm rays could not dispel.

  His nerve ends jangled, pins and needles pricked his fingertips. He patted the butterfly knife in his pocket, but for once it didn’t give him the warmth of reassurance. He wasn’t spoiling for a fight. But he was afraid.

  DS Mario Pinardi was tall, dark and handsome. Unfortunately, as far as his female admirers in Cumbria Constabulary were concerned, he was also married, to a stunningly lovely lady, a fellow Scot of Italian descent. Hannah’s best friend, Terri, had met Mario at a Cumbria Constabulary charity dance years ago, and still asked after him, but she was wasting her time. Photographs of Alessandra Pinardi, along with young Roberto, Davide and Claudio, festooned the walls of Mario’s cubbyhole in the police station in Keswick. His family-man image might have been tedious if he were not such good company. Hannah liked him enough to push to one side the sneaking suspicion that he was in the same mould as Will Durston. Insufficiently driven to make a first-rate detective. She was prejudiced by her apprenticeship with Ben Kind. The job came before your private life, was Ben’s creed. Mind you, Ben had messed up his own private life, and hers was going down the pan as well. Mario was wiser than both of them.

  ‘Horrible way to go, drowning in grain,’ he said. ‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

  Hannah and Greg shook their heads, and he grinned. ‘Good decision, it’s out of a machine and tastes like weasel pee.’

  ‘Any words of wisdom from the pathologist?’

  ‘Orla cracked her head on the side of the tower on her way down. Nasty gash, the blow probably knocked her unconscious. Otherwise, she might have been able to climb back up.’

  ‘If she wanted to,’ Greg said.

  ‘True, but the deputy coroner is a softie. If she can find a way of turning this into an accident, rather than suicide, she will. Easier for the family to bear, especially the father. Bad enough to find your one remaining child lying dead in a heap of grain. Worse if you torment yourself over whether you could have done anything to persuade her not to jump.’

  ‘You’re sure she did jump?’

  ‘If anyone wanted to do away with her on a farm, there are plenty of easier murder methods. You couldn’t drag an unwilling victim all the way up to the top of a grain silo.’

  ‘Might someone have talked her into making the climb?’ Greg asked.

  ‘To take a look at the interesting grain? I don’t think so. She’d been boozing, there were empty cans on the passenger seat of her car. God knows what was in her mind, but she wanted to climb that tower. The only reasonable assumption is, she intended to jump.’

  ‘She grew up on the farm,’ Hannah said. ‘If she had suicidal thoughts, she’d know there was no guarantee that she’d die. The cavalry might have ridden to the rescue. In the shape of her father, or his labourers.’

  ‘If they saw her go up there, or heard her yelling for some
one to drag her out. If not …’ Mario made a throat-slitting gesture.

  ‘Might have been a cry for help,’ Hannah said. ‘People weren’t taking her seriously. She wanted Callum’s case reopened, nobody was listening …’

  Mario winced. ‘Do you really want to go there, Hannah? I heard about those calls she put in to you and your team. Let’s not encourage the IPCC to get excited, eh? When those guys go off on a wild goose chase, you never know how long it will last, or where it will lead. Keep it simple, that’s my recommendation.’

  He meant to be supportive, but her stomach wrenched with frustration. If she’d wanted an easy life, she wouldn’t have joined the police in the first place.

  ‘Orla didn’t give us enough to enable us to take any action. She was unhappy, and she’d had too much to drink …’

  Greg said, ‘You don’t haul yourself up a grain tower just to enjoy the view from the top.’

  ‘Her father says she and her brother used to love playing in the grain,’ Mario said. ‘Once the silo was built, he put it out of bounds. Maybe she was reliving childhood memories. The mind can play strange games.’

  He said it as though he’d read the phrase in a book. Hard to imagine sensible, uxorious Mario allowing his own mind to play games. Yet his theory was persuasive, if obsessing over Callum meant Orla wanted to relive their shared past. ‘How is the father? You’d think he’d be prostrate, but when I rang the farm, he was out working as usual.’

  ‘That’s farmers for you,’ Mario said. ‘On duty twenty-four/seven; it’s not so much a job as a way of life. Doesn’t mean Hinds isn’t gutted. But he’d never show weakness. Strong man, very proud. We offered him a leaflet about bereavement counselling, and he ripped it up without a word.’

  ‘Didn’t he realise Orla had come to the farm?’

  ‘He says not, it came as a total surprise. And nobody seems to have seen her climb into the silo.’

  ‘Do we believe that?’

  ‘Lane End isn’t swarming with workers, like most dairy farms these days. Hinds has cut back on headcount to keep turning a profit. His labourers are Polish, and they were scattered far and wide over two hundred acres. Given the path she took from the rear of the farm to the silo, it might have been more surprising if somebody had spotted her.’

  ‘Unless they were looking out for her?’ Greg suggested.

  ‘Nobody seems to have had the faintest idea she meant to come to the farm. The pathologist thinks the time of death was not long after she dived into the grain. We’ll know more once the PM is completed.’

  ‘The gash on the head,’ Greg said. ‘Any chance it might have been inflicted by someone else?’

  ‘There are blood traces on the inside of the tower, where we believe she banged her head,’ Mario said. ‘Indications are that the impact was severe enough to knock her out, and when she came round, she was up to her waist in grain and unable to free herself. It would have been dark inside, and the noise would have prevented her from attracting attention. The next load probably buried her. The one after that would have been fatal.’

  ‘Open-and-shut case?’ Greg asked.

  ‘Trust me, she killed herself. That’s the reality of what happened; whether she changed her mind when she recovered consciousness is academic. We don’t need to overelaborate, it’s simple. Same as your cold case, I guess.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Hannah said. ‘I want to ask Michael Hinds if he still thinks his brother killed his son.’

  ‘Better wear your body armour, then.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I’m sure so. Orla tried to persuade him that Philip didn’t murder the boy, and their conversation turned into a furious row.’ He lowered his eyes, as if struggling to comprehend why some families could never be happy. ‘Pity – that was the last time she and her father ever spoke to each other.’

  Until now, Aslan had always found it easy to take decisions. Go there, say this, pretend to do that. Perhaps the secret was that none of it seemed to matter. Once he’d arrived at the Lakes, decisions became harder to take. In the past he’d scoffed at ditherers, people who were afraid to act. But did they hesitate simply because they cared too much?

  Outside Lane End Farm, he’d encountered a couple of labourers who had sneaked out for a crafty smoke. The men exchanged a few words in a foreign language, and wandered back into the farmyard. Maybe they thought he was an undercover snooper from the Border Agency, checking up on migrant workers. If only they knew his own visa was phoney, bearing a made-up name, and that his knees were knocking with apprehension.

  So far he hadn’t caught sight of Mike Hinds. He knew what the man looked like, he’d memorised his appearance thanks to Orla. A sentimentalist, she’d kept dog-eared photographs of her parents as well as Callum, and she’d shown them to Aslan over a drink in a bar. For once, he hadn’t needed to fake interest.

  No matter how many times he rehearsed what he might say when they came face-to-face, it never sounded right.

  You don’t know me, but …

  I know this will come as a shock …

  Sorry to disturb you, but we need to talk …

  Please don’t slam the door in my face, please …

  Shit, he was no good at this. He hated his own weakness. People who knew him would never believe it; everyone thought he was brash, so why had confidence deserted him, when he needed it most?

  He heard a car with a quiet engine, coming down the lane. Even before he set eyes on it, instinct told him the police were coming. Surely they could not be on to him?

  His stomach felt queasy. This was all too difficult. He wanted to run away and hide.

  Hannah smelt the farm before she set eyes on it. She had the sunroof open, making the most of the weather. Sitting behind her, Greg had spread notes about the Callum Hinds case over the back seat and was studying them in uncharacteristic silence. The lane traipsed around a forbidding hawthorn hedge, and petered out in a tight turning space. North of the lane, woodland stretched towards the slopes of the fells. The caravan park was masked by trees. Lane End might have been in the middle of nowhere, rather than five minutes’ drive from the centre of Keswick.

  Crumbling stone pillars guarded a dirt track leading to the stone farmhouse. Ugly single-storey extensions had been added on either side of the building, as if to remind visitors that this was a workplace, not the setting for some rural idyll. No front garden, just an open space where a mud-spattered estate car and a couple of farm vehicles were parked.

  As Hannah reversed in the turning space, she caught sight of someone in her rear-view mirror. A tall man with a thick mass of hair and a beard, standing next to one of the stone pillars. He wore a T-shirt and shorts, and she’d have assumed he was one of the myriad walkers who swarmed over the Lake District, if he’d had a rucksack on his back. But there was no rucksack. As the car swung round, the man stared at them, before turning on his heel. Within moments, he rounded the hawthorn hedge and vanished from sight.

  ‘What do you suppose he was up to?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘I’ve heard of trainspotters.’ Greg shrugged. ‘But farmyard spotters?’

  The only greenery this side of the fields was the thick ivy curtain around the entrance porch. A cobbled yard separated the house from a slurry tank, a straggle of steel-framed sheds and a two-storey L-shaped brick outbuilding. Two swarthy labourers watched from behind a tractor as the two detectives got out of the car. They muttered to each other in a language that Hannah recognised as Polish. You heard it spoken a lot in the Lake District nowadays; the place was a magnet for people who wanted work and didn’t expect to be paid the earth. She caught the word policja, and for a moment she thought they were about to come up and buttonhole her. But one of the men put a restraining hand on his companion’s wrist, as if he’d had second thoughts. Before Hannah could approach them, they hurried off towards the sheds.

  ‘Ever get the feeling that people are avoiding you?’ Hannah said as she locked the car.

  ‘A
ll the time,’ Greg murmured. ‘Cold Comfort Farm, eh? They’re not exactly rolling out the red carpet.’

  ‘Maggie has a favourite phrase,’ Hannah said. ‘Every farm is unique. Each has its own design, but more than that. Each has a distinct personality.’

  ‘Yeah, well, what does that make Lane End?’ he asked. ‘A surly recluse?’

  A muck spreader roared in the distance as they rang the doorbell. Deirdre Hinds kept them waiting a whole minute before she opened up. In her early forties, she was short and squat and carrying too much weight. Her cheeks were pasty, and her eyes red-rimmed. Distress due to her stepdaughter’s death? Her hands were covered in flour, and she didn’t offer to shake.

  ‘Inspector Scarlett, is it? He’ll be somewhere around the yard. You’ll have to excuse me, I’m busy baking.’

  The door banged shut in their faces before they could utter a word.

  ‘Charming,’ Greg said. ‘And there was I, hoping she’d offer us a traditional farmhouse tea.’

  ‘Wonder what she made of Orla?’ Hannah said as they headed for the yard.

  ‘She doesn’t look like a wicked stepmother to me. Downtrodden, yes. I bet her old man wasn’t happy that she arranged this meeting.’

  Hannah pointed to the top of the silver tower, visible in the distance above the roof of the barn. ‘That must be the silo where Orla died.’

  Greg made a face. ‘I can think of better places to finish up.’

  ‘What would be your choice, then?’

  ‘Easy.’ He smirked. ‘A nightclub, surrounded by lap dancers. Expiring happily at the age of ninety-seven.’

  ‘In your dreams.’

  ‘You did ask, ma’am.’

  Insidious, how working alongside someone changed your attitude towards them, for better or worse. She’d heard a good deal about Greg before he joined her team, most of it bad. Lauren Self loathed him, which explained his banishment to Cold Cases. Yet although he had an ego the size of Blackpool Tower, she’d begun to warm to him. In her head, Ben Kind growled, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t get soft in your old age.’ Good advice. Given an inch, Greg would take a mile.