A Market for Murder

by Rebecca Tope

  Den knew, if he thought about it, that he was likely to be a lot more objective than either Drew or Maggs, because of their deep emotional involvement in what had happened. They had scarcely even started to wonder about the reasons for Karen’s shooting, while he felt he was moving steadily towards an answer to that question. He felt himself uniquely placed to produce an explanation, with his personal knowledge and professional expertise. He allowed himself some moments of complacency as a result.

  He spent an hour on Saturday morning filling in several pages of a new reporter’s notebook with everything he could think of to do with the two murderous attacks. There was a separate page headed ‘Theories’ where he noted anything for which there was no actual evidence, but which might fit the known facts. This was the page Maggs found most interesting, and to which she had mainly contributed.

  Grafton killed because of selling out to supermarket

  Karen saw the killer without realising it

  Karen also saw supermarket bomber

  Connection with Mary Thomas/twin/police arresting her while Karen present

  Karen has information that would lead to the killer

  Grafton and Karen both present threats to the 3 witches’ plans

  Killer concealed gun in garment, bag, box while doing the shooting. Is this possible?

  Mary Thomas has no twin. It’s her all the time.

  Maggs sucked the end of her pen as she scanned the page again. ‘This is all obvious stuff,’ she complained. ‘We haven’t really thought laterally, have we?’

  ‘Except for the twin, which I still think you’ve got wrong,’ he agreed.

  ‘So let’s see.’ She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, as if awaiting divine inspiration. ‘I know: what if Grafton was shot by mistake for Karen? So it was just another attempt at her on Thursday?’

  Den winced. ‘Surely not?’ he spluttered.

  ‘Or even worse, but still not impossible – what if Stephanie saw something at the supermarket? And she was the intended victim on Thursday.’

  ‘Maggs, you worry me,’ Den said. ‘What a terrible idea. And daft, because Stephanie wasn’t at the farmers’ market, was she?’

  ‘True. But I could be right about Karen. Now, the gun. Where could it have been hidden? Where’s the last place anyone would look?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Hey! Maybe they hid it in Grafton’s coffin! Nobody looked there.’

  ‘I know I’ve said this before, but you really do watch too many second rate movies, you know.’

  ‘No, but listen. It could be right. They haven’t found it, have they? And it would be a huge risk for somebody to carry it away with them. The police did search people once they’d got the idea of what was going on. They could have stuffed it in if they’d lifted one corner of the lid.’

  ‘Are you sure? Don’t you seal them down?’

  ‘Well, we do, yes, but not as securely when it’s cardboard. We actually run parcel tape around it. The colourless stuff. It doesn’t show too badly. And it’s better than the lid accidentally coming off. So if someone had a sharp knife, they could easily cut a section.’

  ‘They would have been seen, Maggs,’ he objected. ‘Surely there was never a moment when the coffin was unattended.’

  ‘Well, no, there wasn’t,’ she admitted. ‘But everyone was looking the other way, in the first few minutes. It’s like conjurors – they distract attention from what they’re doing. If it was all part of a plan, it would be possible. I’m sure it would.’

  ‘A gun’s quite a big thing,’ he said. ‘I think it would be much too risky. What a giveaway if they were caught.’

  ‘Hmm. So where else? The other place they use in movies is a pram. There weren’t any prams, so that can’t be right.’

  ‘Thank heaven for that,’ Den said fervently.

  ‘Now who do we have on the suspect list, again? It’s quite a number, because everyone was at both places. Nobody has an alibi.’

  ‘Except Sally Dabb’s husband,’ Den reminded her. ‘He was at work both times.’

  ‘Pity. He’s quite a likely suspect otherwise.’

  ‘Why would he shoot Karen?’

  ‘Um … well, maybe he thought she’d been encouraging Grafton and Sally’s affair. Actually, he isn’t so likely, now I come to think about it.’

  ‘So we’ve got the three witches, Mary, Geraldine and Hilary; Julie Grafton; the other stallholders – Joe Richards, Maggie Withington and the ostrich man. Some villagers, maybe, though I can’t imagine why. They were at the funeral and could have been at the farmers’ market. People like Della and the Westlake woman.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Della. The one who looks after Drew’s kids.’

  ‘Yes, I know her. Who’s the Westlake woman?’

  ‘Oh, she lives at the farm down the lane from Drew and Karen. Towards the village – that nice big farmyard.’

  ‘How do you know her?’

  He smiled patiently. ‘Sometimes, if I get to you early, I leave the car and go for a little walk. She’s often in the yard, and we have a little chat.’

  ‘Shit! You’ve got another woman. How old is she?’

  ‘Sixty-ish. Maybe a bit less. Nice brown eyes.’

  ‘Was she at the funeral?’

  ‘Oh yes. Hanging back, on the fringes, but there. She gave me a friendly nod when I arrived.’

  ‘Well, add her to the list then. She might have designs on Drew’s field. Or want to put them out of business for some reason.’

  He puffed out his cheeks in admiration of her inventiveness.

  ‘Or,’ she added, ‘if she’s sixty, that puts her in the same age group as the witches. Yet another one from that little gang. What a time it must have been when that lot were at school together. I wonder what made it so special.’

  ‘Hilary said it was 1960, the year they left. I suppose that must have been some sort of turning point. Wasn’t that when Kennedy got to be president? And youth culture was born. And according to Hilary, the first signs of the rot setting in.’

  Maggs was thoughtful. ‘All a bit vague,’ she judged. ‘I wonder if something a bit more definite happened – a bit closer to home. Don’t they say that most motives for murder go back well into the past?’

  ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘We could have a look at the newspaper archives. See if there was some big local crisis.’

  ‘That’s an Internet job,’ she decided. ‘Whose computer can we use?’

  ‘Danny’s. Though he might have already thought of it. He usually gets one of the DCs onto that job, in the first day or two.’

  ‘How do they know what to look for?’

  ‘They don’t. They just trawl through local papers for background. They learn to spot familiar names cropping up over the years. Plus big local events like protests against new developments. The sort of things that make people hate each other.’

  ‘I’m impressed.’

  ‘You didn’t think the police were that clever?’

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘So it would really be quicker to check with Danny first.’ A renewed eagerness caught his attention.

  ‘You haven’t met him, have you?’ Den realised. ‘You want to see what he’s like.’

  ‘I did see him, I think. When we first met. But I don’t remember much about him.’

  ‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘He’ll probably be there today, after what happened to Karen. The whole thing’s going to be ratcheted up quite a bit now. No rest for the SIO.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Senior Investigating Officer. Keep up, woman.’

  Karen knew she was awake. She could hear and think, and feel something cool and smooth under her hands. But she couldn’t open her eyes, and certainly couldn’t speak. It alternated between being worse than the worst imaginable nightmare and being oddly restful. The complete removal of control should have been terrifying – and was at intervals – but it was also very liberating. Then as time went on, and her thought processes seem
ed to clear a little, stark terror began to filter in. What if she was going to be like this forever?

  She found she could only think in short childlike phrases. Little ribbons of unjoined-up musings flickered through her mind. ‘Drew-and-the-children’ was a recurring one, because she could hear their voices close by. ‘I-can’t-move’ and ‘My-head-hurts’ came up quite often, too. Everything quite unemotional, except for the fear that lurked on the sidelines. The fear she knew would pounce as soon as she managed to understand what was going on. So she stopped trying to make sense of it. It could do no good, and only increased the pain behind her eyes.

  Something was touching her hand, pressing warmly against her skin. It felt good, a contact that went much deeper than words. But it was frightening, too. An insistence went with it, a demand that she make some kind of effort. And making an effort was so terribly risky. Something inside her gave up and she sank into a comforting greyness which was quite a lot like sleep.

  Drew tried to convince himself that Karen had responded to his touch. A tiny frown, a flicker under the eyelids. A nurse had been watching from the other side of the bed, and had silently nodded at him, sharing his hopes. But there’d been nothing further, and Timmy began to wriggle and complain, so they left the room.

  A young doctor had been watching out for them. He ushered Drew and the children into a small room, and began to talk about different levels of unconsciousness and the difficulty of making meaningful predictions.

  ‘What usually happens?’ Drew asked clumsily.

  ‘There isn’t really a usually,’ the man explained. ‘Each case is different. There are too many variables, you see. The extent of the damage, the age and health of the patient – and something that looks like the desire to get better. It sounds a bit new agey, I suppose, but patients do differ in the amount of effort they’ll put in. It can be so tantalising, watching them. Some just give up without much of a struggle at all. I’d give anything to know what goes on inside.’

  Drew chafed at this, especially as Stephanie was paying close attention to the doctor’s words.

  ‘Well, she’ll be a fighter,’ he said robustly. ‘No doubt about that.’

  ‘I’m sure she will. And, as I say, she’s not as deeply unconscious as she might look. All the scans show a lot of brain activity. She could wake up at any time. Believe me, I’m not just saying that.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Drew assured him, with a smile at Stephanie. ‘We believe him, don’t we?’ he said to her.

  The child frowned. ‘When will she wake up, then?’ she asked. ‘Why is she so tired?’

  ‘She’s not tired, Steph. She’s hurt. She’s poorly, and people always sleep a lot when they’re poorly. It’s nature’s way of making us better. If we lie still, all the poorly parts can mend more quickly.’

  ‘Mmm,’ came the dubious reply.

  Timmy was clearly puzzled by events, and clung round Drew’s neck like a magnet.

  ‘We’d better go,’ Drew decided. ‘We can come again tomorrow.’

  It felt almost violent to be leaving Karen there alone with whatever strange dreams she might be having. His place was by her side, day and night, talking to her, urging her to emerge from the darkness back to her rightful life. But he had to consider the children, and instinct told him that they needed him more than Karen did.

  The drive home seemed to shake him out of his dazed misery. Either the visit from Julie Grafton, or the sight of his injured wife, or simply a spontaneous recovery – whatever the explanation, by the time he pulled up outside the house, he was anxious to speak to people about the shooting. Maggs, Geraldine, the police, even Mrs Westlake from the nearby farm – they would all have vital information for him, or ideas and suggestions. He couldn’t drift uselessly any longer.

  But first there was the matter of survival. The freezer was well stocked with fruit and vegetables from their own garden, and meat and bread from other Food Chain people. Karen sometimes bartered her produce for that of other people, which always gave her and Drew a buzz. ‘Wait till we do a funeral in return for a year’s supply of clothes for us all,’ Drew had joked. ‘Handmade, of course.’

  Karen hadn’t been very amused. ‘We’ve already got the kids’ clothes exchange,’ she reminded him. ‘And I never need anything, now I’m not working.’

  ‘Well, something else, then,’ he insisted. ‘Surely you approve of money-free transactions?’

  ‘I do, of course,’ she nodded. ‘But it’s not as simple as you might think. When we explored the feasibility of a LETS scheme, we decided it wouldn’t work.’

  ‘LETS? Remind me.’

  ‘Local Exchange Trading Scheme. It just means bartering, really, but with an organised structure.’

  ‘Ah, yes. One of those things where you say the last word twice,’ he’d teased, determined to avoid getting too serious about the whole issue. ‘You said LETS scheme. The S stands for—’

  ‘Yes, Drew, I know. For heaven’s sake.’ He hadn’t really understood why she’d been so tetchy about it. Surely it was possible to live simply, and still be able to find some humour in it?

  Now he winced as he remembered this and other occasions when he’d been irritating and deliberately derisive about Karen’s new-found philosophy. It wasn’t at all that he’d disagreed with her; he just wished she wouldn’t be so solemn about it. And for the first time, it dawned on him that because he’d been glib and seemingly unimpressed, she might well have been thinking and doing things that he hadn’t known about.

  His thoughts flew back to the bomb at the supermarket, and how surprised he’d been that she’d been there at the time. Karen did not go to supermarkets. So why had she suddenly deviated from her own rock-solid stand? And how come she’d been there at the very moment that a bomb exploded?

  It wasn’t a clear thought, but a mere nudge at his awareness. As soon as he felt it, he wrapped it in a thick blanket and packed it away out of sight. But the nudge had been enough: what if Karen had known about the bomb? And if she had, then perhaps that would go some way towards explaining why she’d been shot.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Stephanie and Timmy ate their lunch with no ructions, and Drew put his mind to how he should spend the remainder of the day. He couldn’t go anywhere unless he took the children with him, but he could phone people. He could alternatively try to find someone to babysit. Della was the obvious first port of call, especially as he didn’t know for sure that she’d gone with her family on the usual Saturday outing. The events of Thursday afternoon must have shaken her up, just as they had everyone else, and perhaps she and Bill wouldn’t feel like going anywhere.

  But, as with Julie Grafton, Drew felt an odd reluctance to leave his children with Della. Who, he asked himself, could he trust? Well, Maggs, of course, but she wouldn’t want to be summoned back to North Staverton on a Saturday unless it was on a funeral call. Apart from her, he really couldn’t think of anybody. All the obvious candidates had been there when Karen was shot, and any one of them could theoretically have done it. And that meant the same person might take it into their head to murder Stephanie and Timmy as well, unspeakable as the thought might be.

  So he started telephoning, first having set the children up with a chaotic assortment of toys on the kitchen table. He supposed it was the strangeness of the situation that ensured that they played quietly, and with no visible enthusiasm.

  ‘Maggs? Is Den there? Has he seen his Inspector friend today? Does he have any idea what’s going on?’

  ‘We’re just back from seeing him, actually,’ she said.

  ‘We?’

  ‘Yes, I went as well. I’m not going to be left out of this. You know how good I am at coming up with theories about what must have happened.’ Then she seemed to remember something. ‘Oh, Drew, listen to me. Are you all right? Have you seen Karen?’

  ‘I’m much better than I was. And yes, we paid a quick visit this morning. No change, really. They think she’ll be OK, though.’


  ‘Really? Is that what they said?’

  ‘They say she could wake up at any moment.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that.’

  ‘And I want to know who shot her,’ he said emphatically. He told her about Julie Grafton’s visit and her offer to look after the children.

  ‘And you wouldn’t let her?’

  ‘No. I can’t trust any of them. How can I? Any one of them could have shot Karen.’

  ‘Not Julie, surely?’

  ‘Yes, of course Julie. She was walking alone behind the coffin. Everybody had their heads bent …’

  ‘How do you know? You couldn’t see them.’

  ‘Well, they probably did. Anyway, she could have hidden the gun in her jacket, whisked it out and back again before anybody noticed.’

  ‘I can’t really see it,’ she said. ‘I like Julie Grafton.’

  ‘She’s OK. But it was funny, her showing up like that. What did she want?’

  Maggs snorted. ‘Well, I know it won’t have occurred to you, but I think she might possibly have her eye on you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well she’s on her own now, isn’t she? Some women can’t cope with that, even for five minutes. They’re out trying to find a replacement before the first husband’s body’s cold.’

  ‘But surely not me. I’m not available.’

  Maggs’s silence was eloquent. Drew’s could feel trickles of ice right through his system. ‘That’s horrible,’ he said faintly.

  ‘I expect I’m wrong,’ she said, sounding apologetic. ‘Forget I said it. She’s much too nice for that.’

  He inhaled deeply, and tried to get back to the central issue.

  ‘She talked about the shooting,’ he said. ‘Her suggestion was that it must have been someone at the very back of the crowd. Maybe they lagged behind on purpose, knowing nobody was going to turn round and look behind them.’

  ‘They would when they heard the shot, though. How could anybody fire and then hide the gun in that tiny second before everyone turned to look?’