Murder In Midwinter

by Fleur Hitchcock

  The trailer lurches as we set off down the track but steadies quickly. I close my eyes and try to imagine it rolling neatly behind the bulldozer, instead of careering madly down the hill and tipping me and thirty sheep into a snowy ditch.

  Crump.

  I open my eyes. The bulldozer is still in front and we are still behind. A dented field entrance is also behind, but Ollie is driving really slowly, really carefully and it’s looking great. We drop down past the highest fields. Ollie slows and I scramble down from the trailer to open the gate. He so nearly makes it through without damage, just twanging the metal of the gate and leaving it slightly bowed.

  It almost shuts and I pull myself up again nestling among the sheep.

  “Brilliant, sheep,” I say. “We made it, we made it back down to the farm.”

  “Yee-hah!” shouts Ollie, which is when the trailer goes into an invisible pothole and tips me and most of the sheep out into the snow.

  Chapter 19

  “What do you think you were doing?” asks Auntie V, sticking antiseptic cream on to the ice-cut on my nose.

  “Rescuing the sheep,” says Ollie.

  “But with a bulldozer?” says Auntie V. “That’s…”

  “Brilliant,” says Gethin, pouring hot milk into mugs of cocoa. “Brilliant.”

  “Inspired,” says Ollie. “Absolutely inspired. You’ve no idea, Mum, just how bad the weather is up there at the top of the hill. We’d have lost the sheep.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “Ow! I didn’t think how much damage the bulldozer would do to the gate.”

  Auntie V swings my chin up so that she can see right into my eyes. “It’s not the gateposts I was worried about. The main thing is you’re all back safe and sound. The sheep are safely tucked up in the hay barn, the ponies are safe, and we’ve now got our very own snowplough!”

  * * *

  Gethin’s dad arrives in a tractor to take him home.

  “There’s still no policeman,” I say. “I thought he’d be here by now.”

  “I passed some police just now, so they’ll be with you in a minute, love,” he says.

  Ollie disappears up to his room. “Gonna change my trousers.”

  Auntie V goes out to the hay barn where the sheep are milling about. Alone downstairs, I ping open my phone and reread Zahra’s messages.

  She hasn’t sent any more.

  I grab my tablet and type Llandovery into the search engine, but the Wi-Fi’s too weak and it soon reverts to the dinosaur. Ollie’s right, it does seem to be supplied by Feeble dot com.

  The early afternoon light slants through the kitchen window and I stand in the warmth holding my tablet, loading and reloading. On guard. Megan stands next to me, alert. We’re both listening.

  It would be really brilliant to see either Auntie V, or the police, or both, but the track stays empty. Behind me, the clock is maddening. The silence between ticks is vast.

  A sound makes me looks up. A police four-by-four stops outside the gate. Two of the dogs race towards the door, Megan lowers herself to her haunches and growls.

  “Hey, dogs,” I say, “the cavalry’s arrived.”

  * * *

  From the kitchen window I can see the back of the car. I’m expecting it to be Sergeant Lewis from yesterday, but it isn’t – this man’s bigger and he’s wearing a beanie hat with “POLICE” embroidered across the front.

  He skids out of the door of the car and leans back in to pick something up. As he does so, a single ginger curl springs from the side of his hat and catches in the watery sunlight.

  Oh!

  Oh, no!

  “Ollie!” I yell.

  “OLLIE!”

  But Ollie doesn’t come.

  I’m frozen. I stand staring through the window, watching the man straighten up. He pushes the curl back under his hat and checks his face in the wing mirror.

  It’s him.

  The clock on the wall ticks.

  I hear the gate swing open, creaking.

  Retreating from the window, I duck down and feel my heart beat in my eardrums.

  I creep around to the front door. There’s no key in the huge lock, but the bottom of the door has an ancient rusty bolt going straight down into the flagstone floor. With both hands I try to silently push it down, but I can’t move it. It’s solid. It obviously hasn’t been used for years.

  I try again, succeeding only in skinning my knuckles.

  Crunch, crunch.

  The man’s footsteps pad on the ice crust in the yard, getting closer.

  I could run upstairs or I could try to hold the door shut.

  I grab the only weapon I can see. An old metal flat iron, and wedge the top of a chair under the door handle, balancing the iron above the door. Racing upstairs to Ollie’s room, I hammer on the door.

  “He’s here – we need to hide.”

  “What are you on about?” He’s sitting on his bed in a T-shirt and underpants.

  “The murderer, Peter Romero, he’s here. We have to hide,” I gabble. “There must be somewhere. Show me.”

  Dazed, he stands and looks around. “There should be a torch here, there’s a priest’s hole under the stairs.” On top of a pile of What Car? magazines I spot a head-torch, grab it and race towards the top of the stairs.

  “Where?” I say.

  Downstairs, the dogs are going bonkers, and I can hear heavy knocking on the door. There’s a crashing sound.

  “Here,” says Ollie, pushing an embroidered hanging to one side and opening a tiny doorway. “Quick. You first.”

  I throw myself into the tiny space expecting a floor and find it a couple of metres lower than I thought. Cobwebs brush my face and the square of light above me disappears as Ollie crams into the space alongside.

  “Will the hanging cover the door again?” I whisper.

  “Hope so,” he mutters.

  Clunk. That’ll be the iron falling from the front door.

  Heavy feet sound on the flagstones.

  Ollie and I go completely still.

  The feet clump on the stairs.

  We sit in a tiny pool of torchlight, listening.

  The cold bleeds into my legs. Colder than I’ve ever been.

  In here, the thumps are muffled. I realise we must be within the walls of the downstairs of the house and although we probably can’t be heard we both stay silent.

  I play the torch around the walls. They’re made of huge damp blocks of rock, coloured with strange yellow lichens. It’s a dungeon.

  A prison.

  If someone shoots us down here, no one will ever know.

  Boards thump and the dogs bark. Then there are more heavy footsteps on the stairs and the floorboards over our head creak.

  The creaking stops.

  Starts again.

  “He’s in your bedroom,” whispers Ollie.

  My heart beats so loudly I have to cover my ears to hear the silence.

  He’s in there for ages, and then the feet sound again.

  Something heavy slides across the floor.

  I turn off the torch and we sit in the dark, listening.

  There’s a really long silence in which I wonder if he can see the door. I imagine him pulling back the hanging and seeing it.

  I hold my breath, just like I do when I’m playing hide-and-seek with the twins and Zahra.

  Ollie holds his.

  Feet sound on the boards again, disappearing a little before reappearing on the stairs behind us.

  I feel Ollie tense up beside me and I reach my hand over to his. “Wait,” I whisper.

  The dogs bark in the house. I can’t work out if he’s gone or is still there, hoping we’ll come out.

  We wait.

  Chapter 20

  “I’m so sorry,” says Sergeant Lewis. “I should have been here, but I had to pick up a prescription for Mrs Preston. It only took a minute but…”

  Auntie V gives him a worried look. “Just as well you got back when you did,” she says.

&n
bsp; “I know, the moment I saw that car outside the yard I knew there was something wrong.” He pours himself another cup of tea. “But I’d no idea … he’s a big man, isn’t he? Knocked me right over on the way out.”

  He goes to stand outside the front door and I wonder just how much use he is.

  Ollie sits next to me on the sofa.

  “That was terrifying,” he says.

  “Yes,” I say, resisting the desire to say: now you know what I feel.

  Ollie stares into the fire and then jumps to his feet. “Stay there,” he says and rushes out into the yard.

  The flames leap and fall as Ollie crashes back in through the front door and a small wet thing lands in my lap.

  Rabbit.

  “Oh!”

  “I saw it, yesterday, in the snow. It’s yours, isn’t it?”

  I nod, biting back a tiny sentimental tear. “Thanks, thank you.”

  “Should have picked it up before,” he mumbles, leaning forward to toast his hands at the front of the wood burner. I think that’s a kind of apology.

  “He was in the house, Mum, that man was in our house.”

  Auntie V shivers. “I know. And they haven’t caught him.”

  * * *

  Snow falls ever harder, and Inspector Khan rings from London.

  “You’re to stay in,” he says. “We’ve got people on all entry and exit roads, and the house is under surveillance from up the mountain.”

  “I can’t go out at all?”

  “No. Not even into the yard. You must stay in the house. But now that he definitely knows you’re there, I think you can ring your family. Maybe give it a couple of hours. Anyway, we’ve removed the phone taps.”

  “So the phone was tapped?”

  There’s a silence. “Um – yes,” he says. “We think he’s been listening in, trying to find out any plans.”

  “Is that how he found me? Through the phone?”

  He pauses. “We don’t think so, no. Could he have followed you on to that bus? Is that possible?”

  I remember the bus. Stopping and starting all the way down the road. It was packed.

  “He might have done,” I say. “And what about the hit-and-run in Llandovery?”

  “You know about that?”

  I stay silent.

  “We’re assuming it was Peter Romero because it was his brother’s car.”

  “But why is he after me? I still don’t understand.”

  “He must think you saw more than you did. That’s why it would be really helpful to know what you saw, even if you don’t think it’s significant. You understand?”

  I nod at the phone. I understand.

  * * *

  Keeping away from the windows, I crawl across the floor and sit in a dark patch by the wood burner where I reckon no bullet could ever reach. I can’t prove what I saw, but perhaps I can work out what I might be searching my memory for.

  I google Romero.

  The loading circle turns and turns and nothing happens.

  I look across at Ollie, staring at his laptop. I know that he’s also watching a loading circle, waiting for contact with the outside world.

  He glances up at me. He doesn’t smile, but he doesn’t frown. Perhaps hiding from a murderer under the stairs has changed his view. That and my bulldozer cure. And he did give me the rabbit.

  Perhaps, if I ask nicely, he’ll give up his little scrap of Wi-Fi so that I can actually look up something important, because if I’m going to be imprisoned like this then I need to know more about the Romeros.

  It’s worth trying.

  “Ollie,” I say. “Could we look up some stuff on your laptop?” And although it feels really hard to ask, I say, “Would you help me with this?”

  Dropping a cushion to the floor next to me, he sits with his laptop on his knees.

  “Go on then,” he says. “Shoot.”

  I look at him.

  “OK – bad choice of words. Tell me what you know.”

  I gaze at him to check that he’s one hundred per cent serious about this, and decide that he is. The stupid competitive Ollie seems to have been replaced by something almost human.

  “I don’t know much, but can we look up Peter Romero.”

  Ollie types it in and we both gaze at the screen. I’m thinking about us hiding in the priest’s hole. I’m thinking of Romero holding a gun inches away from me on the other side of the front door. I’m thinking that something doesn’t quite make sense.

  Peter Romero loads. There are six hits.

  Eventually, there are some smiling pictures of random Americans. One beaming at the camera in golf gear, another aged five in a pair of swimming trunks and two Spanish-looking men with a canoe.

  “There,” I say, pointing at the bottom of the screen. Three pictures. Two are blurry portraits. We look up the sites they’re on and they link to the newspaper articles. They seem to come from a CCTV camera.

  “Keep trying,” I say and Ollie clicks down the entries.

  “Bingo,” he says.

  It’s a wedding. A bride and groom who I don’t recognise and then my man standing behind them, smiling. Looking good in a suit.

  Ollie clicks on the picture. It leads to a wedding photographer’s site in London. It has the picture, and the names of the people in the photo underneath.

  “Tracey Torofdar and Sam Pridham,” reads Ollie.

  “Look them up,” I say.

  There’s a Tracey Torofdar who works for a mobile-phone company.

  And a Sam Pridham who works for a London art auctioneer, in theft recovery.

  I stare at the wall.

  And then back at the picture.

  “Why would he shoot his brother?” I say. “I can’t imagine it. It’s so alien. He must be a monster. But he doesn’t look like a monster. He doesn’t look like a killer.”

  “What does a killer look like?” asks Ollie.

  “I don’t know, I suppose I’ve never seen one,” I say. “Except for him.”

  Outside the wind batters the house and new snow taps on the windows. I wonder how close Peter Romero is. He could be just outside the farm, hiding in the snow. He could be watching the gate from somewhere up on the mountain.

  Headlights shine in the yard and I tense up, before realising it’s just the police patrol checking on Sergeant Lewis.

  He sticks his head around the door. “Both of us now you’ll be glad to hear. Me and WPC Catherine Jones.”

  “Good,” says Auntie V. “Coffee?”

  “That’d be lovely,” says the sergeant, disappearing out into the hall.

  “What exactly does Peter Romero do?” I ask, as Ollie types the name in again and flicks through masses of entries. “I mean – most people are on some sort of register for work.”

  “He doesn’t appear to do anything,” says Ollie.

  He clicks on a link that looks promising before it vanishes. Just vanishes.

  “What?” he says. “Where’s it gone?”

  He clicks back and forth and then it just says, unauthorised.

  We stare at the screen.

  “That’s odd,” he says. “It’s like he doesn’t exist.”

  “There’s a lot about this that doesn’t make sense. Can you look for the newspaper article about Georgio?”

  Ollie works back through the tabs until he finds it.

  While we wait for the article to load, Megan comes over and lays her head on my knee. It’s heavy, but curiously comforting.

  Some years ago he was associated with the theft of a very small Vermeer painting from a private collection, but charges were dismissed.

  Ollie types in: Art theft + Romero.

  Some old articles come up, one connecting Georgio with a missing Matisse, stolen from a private collection in Denmark, and another one mentioning his part in the return of a painting stolen from a museum in Italy.

  He is also thought to be connected to a Vermeer stolen in 2001 by a European gang from an exhibition in the Netherlands.
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  There’s a picture of it. It’s two girls standing in a kitchen. Girls in Kitchen, it says.

  “Gah!” says Ollie sitting back. “We’re going round in circles. And anyway, that inspector from London must know twice what we know.”

  I hate to admit it, but he’s right.

  Handing me the laptop, he clambers back up off the floor and stretches out on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling.

  The fire spits and crackles. The wind lifts the heavy curtain hanging over the hall door and I shiver. I know that the snow must be falling and falling. I wonder if they’ll ever get Peter Romero? He’s got the whole of Wales to hide in.

  Auntie V switches on the telly.

  Antiques Roadshow. They’re talking about a painting of a cow. “Twenty thousand pounds at auction, possibly…” says the expert.

  The woman who owns the painting pretends to be surprised and the camera moves on to a hideous dog-shaped jug, that’s worth a fiver.

  I close my eyes and try really hard to remember what it was I saw in Regent Street. People on the pavement, rushing. The lights, the coats and shopping bags and faces, lots of faces. Millions of faces, and then the man at the back, the break in the crowd, him shouting at the woman, him holding the gun with one hand – and his other hand doing what?

  Idly, I use Ollie’s laptop to look up that Vermeer that was stolen in 2001. The private collection is unnamed, but in a small Telegraph article it suggests that it might belong to the Queen.

  It was, is, very small. 21 × 24 centimetres. Smaller than a sheet of A4 paper. Painted possibly in 1664. Estimated value: two hundred million dollars.

  What?

  Is that two hundred million?

  Auntie V gets a jar from a cupboard and pops the lid open. “Olives anyone?” she asks.

  “Yes please,” says Ollie.

  “Good, good,” she says, and then, glancing out of the window she says. “That snow’s getting worse.”

  “Hmm,” I agree.

  Two hundred million.

  “Really?” I say out loud.

  “What?” says Ollie, hanging his head down from the side of the sofa so that he’s upside down.