by Rebecca Tope
Ridiculously, Drew found himself unable to move. He couldn’t just let go of the coffin. He couldn’t put it down without the cooperation of the other three. He couldn’t go to his wife, and yet it was the most absolutely necessary thing he had ever had to do.
Maggs took over. She twisted round to address the two men at the rear corners. ‘Put it down!’ she ordered. ‘Now.’
Somehow they did it without turning the whole thing upside down. All around was a babble of confusion, but the only sound that Drew could hear was his daughter, wailing over and over, ‘Mummy!’
Karen could hear her child’s screams, as if from a very long way off. She seemed to have somehow condensed into one small point of awareness, in which the image of one person’s eyes was still before her, as well as Stephanie’s frantic voice. The person who had shot her had first made eye contact with her, cool and unemotional and utterly treacherous.
There was no pain, no light or dark, no fear. She couldn’t think or feel. She didn’t say to herself, I must be dead, or even, I must go to Stephanie. It was a place beyond reach, beyond all control, that she had retreated to. But she could still see those eyes and hear the screams.
Drew was almost as detached, in his own way. He folded Stephanie tightly into his arms, letting her cling to him, but wanting terribly to be with Karen. He still had no clear idea what had happened. All around people swirled and chattered, calling out and asking questions. He looked briefly for Timmy but soon gave up when the child was not immediately visible. The sky seemed to have gone dark, and he was cold. He hugged his little girl for warmth, and tried to force his mind to function.
Someone had shot Karen, but where was that person? Where was the gun? How could they not be standing there, unmistakable, in a cloud of black smoke, evil grin on their face? And yet nobody stood out. They just milled and pushed. Somebody took a flash photograph, which Drew felt as a searing blow both physically and emotionally.
Maggs seemed to be everywhere. She shouted at the photographer, who lowered his camera but didn’t move away. Then she was kneeling beside Karen, and speaking loudly to someone. She pushed a woman away, and reached a hand to a different person.
‘It’s a head wound,’ he heard her say. ‘She’s been shot in the head.’
And then, very strangely, there was a loud noise in the sky, and a sudden wind. Stephanie stiffened in his arms, turning her head this way and that. ‘Helicopter!’ she whispered.
Drew looked, then. ‘Yes, helicopter,’ he confirmed automatically. He still didn’t know quite why, or how, but he felt something click into place inside him. He knew he wasn’t to be allowed the luxury of paralysis. He was needed too urgently for that. He stood up with Stephanie still in his arms.
‘Is she alive?’ he asked Maggs.
‘Oh yes,’ came the sturdy reply. ‘Breathing quite normally, and pulse not too bad.’
‘But she’s unconscious.’
‘Yes.’
The crowd straggling along the lane and circling the abandoned coffin came to his notice. ‘Oh, God – the funeral!’ said Drew. Stephanie wrapped her arms around his head in consolation.
‘That can wait,’ Maggs asserted. ‘They have to get Karen to hospital first. Lucky there was a helicopter on standby. Lucky we had somewhere for them to land.’ She flashed him a reassuring smile and showed him her mobile phone, tucked into the waistband of her smart black trousers. Even in the midst of catastrophe, Drew knew she’d scored a point.
‘What happened, Maggs?’ He had moved to stand beside Karen, but couldn’t touch her because of his daughter. ‘Wasn’t there a shot?’
Maggs nodded again and swept the onlookers with a single gaze. ‘One of them must have done it,’ she said unemotionally.
‘But they’d have to have had a gun on them. They’d be easy to spot.’ It sounded completely foolish in his own ears.
‘So you’d think,’ she nodded. ‘But it probably isn’t as simple as that.’
Some of the crowd were in easy earshot. Julie Grafton was squatting beside her husband’s coffin, one hand resting on it protectively. Della and her Bill had retrieved their children already. Drew thought he remembered seeing them both running from his back garden where Karen must have sent them to play. Almost absently, he saw that his own Timmy was holding Della’s hand, as if content to let her be his mother in Karen’s absence. Geraldine Beech was alongside Julie, as was the brother-in-law and the neighbour. Hilary Henderson and Mary Thomas were both in the same general area. The volunteer bearers seemed to think their role had been transposed into guardians of the coffin. Another twelve or fifteen people had retreated slightly, as if to differentiate themselves from the main players. Staring at them all, Drew focused again on Mary Thomas, with her long skirt. Something clicked inside him.
‘Mary Thomas!’ he gasped. ‘It’s her! It must be.’ He looked at Maggs, eager to have her understand, but she’d gone.
Two men in odd uniforms were kneeling beside Karen, and Maggs had withdrawn to give them space. ‘Husband?’ one asked.
‘That’s me,’ Drew supplied.
‘What happened?’
‘Someone shot her. Maggs said it was in the head.’
‘Mummy,’ Stephanie whimpered, heartbroken. Drew thought he’d preferred her screams.
‘Mummy’s going to be all right,’ he assured her. ‘They’ll take her to hospital in the helicopter and make her better.’ He almost believed it himself as he said it.
Deftly the paramedics produced a stretcher and lifted Karen onto it. Then they trotted briskly back to their air ambulance. Drew stared after them. ‘Where will they take her?’ he asked nobody in particular.
‘I’ll ask,’ said Maggs, setting off in pursuit. The helicopter’s engine was still idling, the rotor blades now motionless, but Maggs bent over, just the same. People always bent over when they were near a helicopter, thought Drew inconsequentially.
‘What about the funeral?’ came Julie Grafton’s voice, the words bursting out as if no longer content to wait.
Drew turned to her. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Can we do it ourselves?’ asked the brotherin-law. ‘I mean – you’re not going to be in any state, are you.’
‘Where are the police?’ Drew demanded, then. ‘There’s just been an attempted murder. We ought not to touch anything. Everybody should stay where they are.’ A sudden surge of rage swept through him. He wanted the person who’d done this to be caught and tortured and reviled and then executed very painfully. ‘Who was it?’ he shouted. ‘Who did this to my wife?’
The sound of a car door slamming was followed quickly by two more. As if conjured by his words, uniformed police officers materialised from along the lane. And then another car engine became audible: one that Drew thought he recognised. Two minutes later, the tall figure of Den Cooper came into view.
‘Den!’ called Drew, thankfully. ‘Oh, Den, it’s good to see you.’
Maggs came stumbling back over the field and garden from the helicopter, evidently feeling exactly the same. Neither she nor Drew paid any attention to the policemen trying to make sense of the scene before them.
Den eyed the air ambulance, as it noisily lifted into the air, and then the coffin on the ground at his feet.
‘Somebody shot Karen,’ said Maggs. ‘Somebody here. One of these people did it.’
‘Hey! Steady on,’ said Peter Grafton’s brother. ‘You don’t know that. It could have been someone hiding behind the hedge, or one of the cars. With this crowd, you can’t possibly know exactly what happened.’
‘And where’s the gun?’ said the neighbour. ‘There hasn’t been time for anyone to dispose of a gun. We’d have seen them if they’d thrown it over a hedge. How could anybody do that without being seen?’
‘Well, somebody did,’ said Maggs flatly. ‘Because Karen’s got a bullet hole in her head. Unless you think it somehow fell out of an aeroplane up in the sky, or came from a gun with a
range of half a mile.’
‘Everybody’s still here, I assume,’ said Den. The two police officers were moving deftly from person to person, taking down names and addresses and brief statements. ‘You’d have seen if anybody drove away.’
‘Yes, I suppose they are,’ Maggs agreed. ‘Except they could easily have walked away, back towards the church, then across fields, to a waiting car.’
‘Do you know exactly who came to the funeral? Did you make a list?’
She shook her head. ‘We hardly ever do that. I would think Julie knows who they all are. She was early, and watched everybody arrive. I counted thirty-eight, not including small children.’
Den’s attention was mainly on the policemen. Another two cars arrived, parking ostentatiously in the middle of the road. The men who got out quickly began to run tape across the thoroughfare, preventing any through traffic. ‘Good God, they can’t do that!’ said Maggs. ‘Nobody’s going to want to go the long way round, in and out of the village.’
Den just shrugged. ‘They’re going to have to,’ he said.
Maggs was jigging on the spot, worrying about Karen, terrified for Drew and the children, angry at what had happened and embarrassed at the sudden abandonment of the funeral. It felt as if she ought to be in six places at once. Drew, she supposed, must be in an even worse state of indecision.
‘I have to follow them to the hospital,’ he was saying loudly to Della. ‘Can you look after the kids for me? I ought to have gone with her in the helicopter.’ He was holding himself tight, hands on elbows, shoulders hunched, as if trying to cope with a sharp abdominal pain. He’d somehow managed to remove the clinging Stephanie and pass her to Della. He looked round. ‘Maggs!’ he called, as if she was much further away, ‘Can you deal with things here?’
‘Course I can,’ she assured him.
‘Just a moment, sir,’ one of the policemen intercepted his jerky progress towards Karen’s car. ‘I need to speak to you for a few minutes first.’
‘But …’ Drew’s eyes grew wilder. ‘What if she dies? What if she dies when I’m not there?’
‘Just two or three minutes, sir, and then we’ll provide a vehicle for you. You might not be too safe to drive just now.’
‘But then I wouldn’t be able to get back. And the children will need me. And the funeral … oh God, the funeral.’ He let go of his elbows and clutched both sides of his head instead. ‘I keep forgetting the funeral.’
‘That can wait, sir,’ the policeman said calmly. ‘It’s unfortunate, but true, all the same. The lady …’ he nodded towards Julie Grafton. ‘She’s being very understanding. Don’t worry about that.’
‘They’ll do it themselves, Drew,’ Maggs said. ‘We’ve already got it sorted. They don’t need us, really.’
Another wail from Stephanie distracted Drew yet again. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said curtly to the policeman, and went to his daughter, where she was standing next to Della, the woman’s arm around her shoulders, with the three little boys all clustered silently beside her. She looked like a symbolic statue of Motherhood. Her husband Bill was also part of the tableau, holding the hand of his son Finian. All the faces were white and expressionless. Except for Stephanie’s which was red and enraged.
‘Where’s Mummy gone?’ she demanded of Drew. ‘What did they do to her?’
It occurred to Drew and Maggs simultaneously that the little girl might have actually seen who shot Karen. She had been level with Karen when it happened, facing the same way. If the person had been visible at all, then surely Stephanie must have witnessed the shooting. But if she had, wouldn’t she have said? Wouldn’t she have at least pointed to the individual in accusation?
Maggs acted first. She knelt down beside the child, and pulled her gently towards her. ‘Steph, we’ll have to let Daddy go and talk to these policemen, then they’ll take him to be with your mummy. You and Timmy can stay here with Den. He’ll play with you until Daddy gets back.’ She glanced over her shoulder at her startled boyfriend. ‘Isn’t that right, Den?’
‘Well …’ he began, with a frustrated glance at the scene in the lane. ‘I thought Della …’
‘It’s probably best if they stay at home,’ Maggs said firmly. ‘Della’s going to have her hands full with her own boys. They look fairly shell-shocked to me.’
‘Oh, well.’ Den knew when he was beaten. ‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Sir,’ interrupted Drew’s would-be interviewer. ‘I really think we need to have a talk.’
But there was no real urgency in his tone. All the impatience was on Drew’s side. So long as nobody left the vicinity, the questions and examinations could go on all day and all night, for all the police officers cared. They were, in any case, awaiting the arrival of a more senior officer, to make decisions and give instructions. Plus a photographer, although nobody believed there would be anything useful to record now. They had already exchanged muttered remarks, to the effect that they had to find the gun, prevent people disappearing and try to dispose of the obtrusive cardboard coffin – preferably in that order.
Maggs heaved a long steadying breath. The first shock was abating now. Things were beginning to settle down. She gave the crowd a hard look, examining the people one by one.
The first thing she noticed was the group of three women, all oddly alike, standing together a little way removed from the rest. She knew their names: Geraldine Beech, Mary Thomas and Hilary Henderson. They were of a similar age, and there was an odd air of intimacy encircling the little tableau they made. Den followed her gaze.
‘The three witches,’ he murmured. ‘Now I can see why they call them that.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The police did not find the gun that had been used to shoot Karen. The bullet was removed from her head in an operation that lasted three hours, and which left the surgeons trembling and sweating. They had expected her to die under their probing forceps at any moment.
It was a .22 bullet, and although cautious about making premature assumptions, it was suggested that it came from a converted Brocock airgun. This is what Detective Superintendent Hemsley told Den Cooper on Thursday evening. ‘There are quite a few of them around these days,’ Danny said. ‘It’s not terribly difficult to convert, if you’ve got access to the machinery. It makes a legal airgun into a powerful weapon. And it makes life very hard for us: they’re almost impossible to trace.’
‘Well, I can’t say I know anyone with a Brocock, converted or otherwise,’ admitted Den. ‘Not being very helpful, am I?’
‘You were pretty prompt getting to the scene this afternoon,’ Danny said.
‘I was on my way anyhow. I dithered about whether to go to Grafton’s funeral. You could say I was disgracefully late, in actual fact. I thought I’d hang back until it was mostly over, and then have a word with Maggs and Drew.’
‘I dare say they were pleased to see you.’
Den heaved a sigh. ‘I don’t think they’d have been pleased about anything,’ he said.
Investigations at the scene made little progress. It was always difficult when the victim hadn’t died immediately, and therefore had to be whisked away to hospital. Not only was there no certain evidence as to how the body had fallen, where the direction of fire had come from, who had been in what position – there was also massive disturbance of potential forensic evidence. In this case, as with the murder of Peter Grafton, there had been milling people, jostling and shuffling, coming and going, leaving almost nothing to reveal precisely what had happened.
But this time, the mystery was even deeper. How could a person surrounded by others have drawn a weapon from a bag or pocket or waistband and directed it at Karen, fired it and subsequently hidden it, without being observed?
‘Must have been more than one person involved,’ was Detective Inspector Danny Hemsley’s conclusion. ‘Someone shielded the killer, and then took the gun and disposed of it in the confusion.’
‘It wasn’t in the ditch or the hedge,’ came the def
inite report. Both had been exhaustively searched. So had the mourners, and their cars, before they’d finally been allowed to go home. But all the police officers knew that there had been many minutes before they’d arrived, in which the weapon could have been concealed. Anyone who wanted to could have walked away, come to that. If the shooting had been planned, then the opportunities for concealment and escape were plentiful. And if the killer had been someone uninvolved in the funeral, hiding in a field opposite the Slocombes’ premises, he could have run off long before anybody could notice or apprehend him.
‘Except it must have made quite a noise,’ Hemsley remarked. ‘Wouldn’t you expect everyone to turn to the source of the sound? Wouldn’t you think they’d know more or less where it came from? Why are they all so vague about that?’
One of his officers had relocated from Birmingham, where shootings were more frequent. ‘It echoes around, sir,’ he said helpfully. ‘And seems to come from all sides at once. Different people will tell you it came from entirely different directions, depending on where they were standing in relation to the shooter.’
‘Like when you hear a car backfire,’ added another. ‘You can never be sure which vehicle it is, even if you’re looking right at it. Funny, that.’
‘Bloody frustrating,’ grumbled Danny, thinking of the whole confused case.
But Den Cooper wasn’t feeling frustrated. It was a collection of far hotter emotions. Rage, passionate anxiety for Karen, and an inescapable excitement at this startling new turn of events. Being with Danny gave a further twist – the warm sense of being part of a team, the throb of a headache from all the hard thinking, the fear of failure: it all came flooding back.
‘Two different people to look for?’ he suggested. ‘Two different weapons used for the attacks, after all.’
Hemsley nodded, but he wore a dubious frown. ‘Not so different,’ he judged. ‘But I still don’t get how a person could fire a gun in a crowd without being seen. They certainly couldn’t have sighted it properly. Not unless they were behind the hedge.’
