by Rebecca Tope
‘It’s all about angles again, isn’t it,’ Den said. ‘Have we got a report on that? The point of entry, I mean?’
Hemsley overlooked the we, but Den had heard it as soon as it left his mouth.
‘It wasn’t fully head on, as far as they can tell. But of course she could have turned her head to look down the road, and been hit in the middle of her forehead by someone standing at ninety degrees to her. Do you follow?’
‘Perfectly. I don’t suppose anybody was watching her when it happened?’
‘Not with any degree of attention. Nobody’s come up with anything so far, anyway. They’re all too gobsmacked at how it could have happened.’
‘If the gunman fired from the hip, or even chest, the angle would be upwards,’ Den realised. ‘Wouldn’t it?’
‘Yeah. But she was standing at the top of a few steps, already above the road. So we have to factor that in. It’s all horribly imprecise.’
‘Poor Drew,’ Den sighed. ‘He must be going through hell.’
Maggs would never have believed the strength of her feelings for Drew, until forced to face them. His grief and fear were ravaging her, making words like sympathy and concern laughably inadequate. And although she worked heroically to save him from having to think about the job or the house or the children, nothing could protect him from the terror he felt at the prospect of losing his wife.
Den in his turn was also afraid. Not for Drew, or even Maggs, but for himself. He knew himself to be lacking in some way, to be falling short of expectations. If he can’t make Karen better, he could almost hear Maggs thinking, then he should at least be able to locate her attacker. There should be something useful he can do.
And so he understood where his main role lay. He had to continue to conduct his own investigation, either together with the police or independently, and never rest until the job was done.
Den knew a little about motives for murder, from repeated experience, and top of his list came ‘Jealousy’. People could be jealous of a number of things: a preferred sibling, a good name, money, health – and it often made them mad enough to kill. It could spark a sudden rage, or creep up on you in a long slow burn. It could be mixed with pride or hatred or greed. It could disguise itself as something else. It could arouse a desire for revenge. Whatever form it might take, Den had learnt that it was an excellent place to begin when searching for a motivation in a killing.
Logically, it seemed right to begin with the death of Peter Grafton. He and Maggs had agreed that Karen had most likely been shot because she had discovered the identity of Grafton’s killer, whether wittingly or not. And he also agreed with Maggs that they’d both been dilatory in consulting Karen about the whole business. They’d given it less attention than they ought to have done, leaving her to carry the burden of witnessing the man’s death as well as some aggravation afterwards from people like Mary Thomas. Along with all the other feelings, there was a simmering guilt on both their parts.
‘She wanted to talk about it,’ Maggs had said sadly. ‘She knew the people involved. She wanted us to help her work out what was going on.’
‘I went to see Mary Thomas,’ he defended himself half-heartedly. ‘But I let her sidetrack me into a lot of stuff about her sons. I don’t think she was taking me very seriously.’
‘So what now?’ Maggs had wondered.
‘We find the killer,’ Den had said emphatically. ‘Before anybody else has to go through what Drew’s going through.’ The depth of Maggs’s gratitude was painful when he said that.
They’d drawn up a list of potential suspects. Everyone at the farmers’ market, for a start. Maggie Withington, Joe Richards and Oswald Kelly were no more than names, gleaned only after Den had dropped into the Incident Room and cribbed from the notes on one of the whiteboards. ‘Maggie sells bread, and Kelly sells ostrich meat,’ he told Maggs. ‘And Richards must be the man I bought our chops from. Very organic and very expensive.’ Sally Dabb was in a category on her own. She had been too close to Grafton to be on a list of suspects for that killing, but she had as much opportunity as anybody else, when it came to the attack on Karen.
The list of those in the frame for killing Grafton had seven names on it: Geraldine Beech, Hilary Henderson, Mary Thomas, Sally Dabb’s husband, Julie Grafton, Humphrey Thomas (son of Mary) and – because Den knew the police could not entirely rule this out – Karen Slocombe. Plus, of course, an unspecified number of people, who might have had unfathomed reasons to want Peter Grafton dead, and who could have lurked in the public lavatories with a crossbow.
‘I know it’s crazy,’ Den agreed, when Maggs gave a shout of protest at the inclusion of Karen on the list. ‘But they don’t know her like we do. They only have her word for it that she was where she said, and saw the bolt strike. They’re sure to think it at least possible that she invented it all as a cover for herself.’
‘But we know she didn’t,’ Maggs insisted. ‘Why is she on our list?’
‘Just in the interests of completeness,’ he assured her. ‘And because she was at the supermarket when that bomb went off.’
He should not have added this last remark. He knew he’d blundered as soon as the words were out. Maggs stared at him through narrowed eyes.
‘You think there’s a chance she shot Grafton!’ she accused. ‘Don’t you?’
Den shook his head. ‘No, really I don’t. But there is a logical possibility. I was trained never to make assumptions, always keep an open mind. That’s all I’m doing here.’
‘But hardly any of these people could have popped into the loos and out again without someone noticing,’ Maggs objected, realising as she said it that it was feeble. People were coming and going all the time, inevitably, and it would be hard to pin down witnesses who would swear to precisely who was where at the exact moment the bolt struck home.
A second perusal of the list confirmed that everybody on it, except for Sally’s husband, Archie Dabb, had been at the funeral. ‘And he might have been hiding behind the hedge,’ Maggs pointed out. ‘If we’re aiming for a process of elimination, there’s an awfully long way to go.’
Den had retained enough of his police training to know that close attention to the murder weapon would repay the time and trouble spent. He recalled Hemsley’s cautious remarks about a ‘Brocock conversion’. This was a new one on Den, and he was conscious of the deficiency in his understanding. As far as he could remember, a Brocock was a relatively harmless airgun, beloved by hobby shooters. He was very hazy about what a ‘conversion’ might entail.
‘Look it up on the Internet,’ Maggs suggested.
‘They’re not going to describe the whole process, in detail, are they?’ he scoffed.
‘You might be surprised.’
But when he’d logged on and done a search of the Web, he’d found nothing more than some plaintive statistics from a shooting webpage, claiming that Brococks were seldom converted, rarely implicated in criminal activity and undeserving of their bad reputation with the police.
‘They would say that,’ he muttered to himself, but he did wonder just how sure forensics could be that this was what they were dealing with. The bullet in Karen’s brain was a .22, as Danny had already revealed. It would normally have been fired from a rifle, rather than an airgun. The conversion, he suspected, was not as simple as Hemsley had implied. If his assumptions were correct, it would need someone with a metal lathe to make and then insert some sort of sleeve, which could deal with the explosive ‘rimfire’ method of expulsion used for a .22 bullet, rather that the airgun which employed a gas. One practical consequence of this conversion was that firing the thing would produce a far louder noise than it would have done as an airgun.
But Den knew from experience that the entire community was full of people with very handy practical skills. They probably did have metal lathes, some of them, tucked away in their workshops or garages. They recycled as much as they could, turning unwanted objects into something useful. Karen took her lawnmowe
r just down the road somewhere to be overhauled; Drew knew a chap who could provide metal nameplates occasionally for the coffins if the family demanded it. And wasn’t Sally Dabb’s husband some sort of mechanic? Den jotted a brief note beside the man’s entry on his lists.
Den had phoned the Social Services office and told them he wouldn’t be back until Monday at the earliest. They hadn’t seemed concerned. That gave him three days to pursue his enquiries. Or two and a half now: already it was the middle of Friday and all he’d done so far was talk to Maggs and sit over his notepad, deep in thought.
Unfortunately, concentrated thought proved elusive. Images kept intruding of Karen undergoing brain surgery to remove a bullet, combined with Drew’s ravaged expression and Stephanie’s desolate wails. It was a calamity almost too huge to grasp. Like a boxer’s punchbag, it kept swinging back and bashing him in the head. How was it possible? How could their own Karen have fallen victim in that way? What – what – what – had she seen or heard that made the killer strike her down so ruthlessly?
She’d spoken to Geraldine Beech and Hilary Henderson, according to Maggs. And had tried to visit Mary Thomas, to argue the point about the woman’s presence at the supermarket. Den recalled his own session with the last-named, and came to a decision: he was going back to Cherry Blossoms in Ferngate, to speak to Mary Thomas again.
It was as if she’d been expecting him. Before he could reach the front door, she had thrown it open and was standing waiting for him, unsmiling and pale. Her small eyes had shrunk even further into her head, and her hair was wild. Her clothes looked strange, too. In place of the long skirt there were tight jeans, which he could see were not properly fastened at the waistband. A wedge of flabby beige flesh protruded, clearly visible beneath the incompletely buttoned shirt she wore over the jeans. She seemed entirely unaware of the figure she presented.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Come in, will you?’
He ducked through the doorway and followed her down the spacious hall. They went into a large square room, with a high ceiling and polished antique furniture. Who, he wondered, did the polishing? It didn’t strike him as something Mary Thomas would do herself.
She made him sit down in a leather armchair, and then perched tensely on the edge of a sofa opposite.
‘How’s Karen?’ she asked. ‘That poor girl! Her poor husband!’
Den shook his head. ‘I haven’t heard anything since early this morning. She was still unconscious then.’
‘Have they caught anybody?’
This, he felt, did not do her justice. It was obviously a silly question, for several reasons.
‘I doubt it,’ he said with a brief lift of one eyebrow.
‘You’re not working with the police, are you?’
Another daft remark. What was the matter with the woman? ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course I’m not.’
‘So what are you doing?’
‘Trying to help my friends. Drew Slocombe is my girlfriend’s business partner. It’s almost like family. I need to know why Karen was singled out, why it happened.’ He stopped himself, hearing the edge of violence in his own voice. He discovered that his fists were tightly clenched, and forced them to loosen.
‘We all need to know that,’ said Mary Thomas quietly.
‘Have the police interviewed you?’
‘Again, you mean? Oh yes. But they didn’t take me in for questioning this time. They searched me for a gun in the road yesterday, and asked me exactly where I was standing, where I thought the shot came from, whether I knew who might wish to harm Karen, how this might connect to the killing of Peter Grafton. They asked everybody the same things. I thought you were there? They presumably asked you, as well?’
He frowned at her. ‘Not really. I didn’t arrive until it was all over.’
‘Didn’t you? Well, well. It just shows how unobservant I am, doesn’t it.’
‘Drew’s a very good bloke,’ Den said softly. ‘He didn’t deserve this.’
‘You think I’d argue with that?’ She leant towards him. ‘You think I don’t admire him, wish him well, regard him as one of the best people I know? I promise you, that’s how I feel towards the Slocombes.’ She heaved a deep sigh, and he thought her close to tears. ‘Drew Slocombe sets the sort of example we’ve been dreaming of for years. Most of what’s good about this community is exemplified in what he’s doing. We rejoice in him.’
‘We?’ Den asked, feeling rather overwhelmed.
‘Geraldine and Hilary and me, and the others. We’ve been trying to show people how to live for years now, struggling the whole time against the tide of commercialism and greed and sheer stupidity. We were gaining ground, in spite of everything. Trying to keep the wretched farmers afloat, through the horrors of foot and mouth, and government apathy and consumer blindness. Trying to get people to stop wasting so much, and to understand what it means to live more simply. We were getting there. The tide was beginning to turn. And then …’
Yes? Then what?’ he prompted her.
‘Then it all started to go wrong.’ She looked away, rubbing one ear. ‘Starting with Peter Grafton.’
Den knew better than to hope she was about to tell him chapter and verse of who and why and how, but he couldn’t avoid a sudden lift in his expectations.
‘Tell me about it,’ he invited.
She told him quite a lot over the next half hour, concerning the establishment of the farmers’ markets, the ideological enthusiasm of the participants, the sense of being involved in something important and promising. And then the slow onset of disappointment and disillusion. One by one the stallholders came to accept that they were playing at the very fringes of real food provision. Nobody, absolutely nobody relied on their wares for their staple shopping.
But the individuals concerned were not the type to give up. They were determined to change the way people thought about food. In various ways they diversified, and promoted their point of view.
‘We go into schools, you know, and get ourselves into the media. We criticise the intensive farms, battery hen units, use of pesticides. We never rest.’
Den nodded ruefully. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Drew and Maggs talk about it all the time, too.’
‘And still it never feels as if we’re getting anywhere. So, a few months ago, things began to crack. Compromises, fighting talk, just a general impatience to win through. The language changed. I remember Hilary saying “It’s war” and thinking she was right. It was time we stopped trying to be sweet and cuddly and kind, because that wasn’t working.’
‘So you put a bomb in SuperFare?’ Den asked, unable to believe it possible.
‘No, no,’ she waved a dismissive hand.
But Den noticed she didn’t meet his eye as she made her denial. ‘So who did?’
‘I really don’t know. Someone from outside. It couldn’t have been one of our Food Chain group.’
‘And you still say you weren’t there when it happened?’
‘I was not there.’ She shook her head regretfully. ‘That was such a disaster, Karen practically bumping into … my sister.’
Den guffawed rudely. ‘Don’t tell me; your twin sister?’
Mary Thomas widened her eyes offendedly. ‘Yes, as it happens. She’s called Simone Baxter, and lives in Bristol. Twins run in the family.’
‘Does anybody around here know about her?’ He was still deeply suspicious.
‘Hardly anybody. It’s a long and rather sad story, as they usually are, I suppose. My mother had three children already, when she was expecting us. There wasn’t much money, my father was in poor health, my older brother was getting into trouble for lack of attention. She never dreamt she was having twins, and the shock was terrible. As it happened, she had a friend who knew a couple who were desperate for a child. These things happened fairly commonly in those days. A private adoption was arranged, and Simone was taken to live in Vancouver. She had a happy childhood, on the whole, despite a constant sense of something missing. I had
that same feeling.’ She gazed at the floor for a long moment.
‘Then Simone found us again. When she was about thirty-five, shortly before Mother died. It was all quite awkward, and we never could make up for all the lost time, but gradually she and I became good friends. She moved to Bristol three years ago, and – in the way these things often happen – she became very involved and active in food politics. We discovered we shared an outlook on life, moving along much the same tracks. She’s extremely good at organisation and motivating people.’
‘And your friends – Geraldine and Hilary – have they met her?’
Mary smiled. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘They’ve met her all right. It’s funny – people never really believed me at school, when I said I’d had a twin. It was no secret in the family, you see. But neither did my parents broadcast it. So when she reappeared I wasted no time in introducing her to them.’
Den had nothing to say to that. The sudden introduction of a twin sister felt like playing dirty. It was cheating, and he found himself chafing at it. Besides, he suddenly realised, a woman raised in Vancouver was unlikely to be mistaken for Mary Thomas, the moment she opened her mouth.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Maggs was learning more than she could ever have guessed about living through a crisis. Drew’s anguish was like a heavy chainmail garment weighing down on her shoulders, making everything she did ten times slower and more complicated. She wanted to assure him that everything would be all right – but didn’t dare in case it wasn’t. It occurred to her that it would have been easier if Karen had been killed outright, and then upbraded herself for the terrible thought. People telephoned, to the house and the office, asking for news, offering condolences, wanting to help. Drew spoke to a few of them, but in a daze. Maggs took most of the calls, when she wasn’t trying to produce food for the children or keep them amused. The business was put on hold, though fortunately no new funerals presented themselves.
