Tainted Ground

by Margaret Duffy

  We asked if we could view the garden and duly gazed through the kitchen window over a neat rectangle of lawn, a tiny patio, a couple of shrubs and not much else. We went out there. Trees in larger and more mature gardens on the farthest boundary made the whole area very private, and high fences separated Mrs Horsley’s home from those on either side. Anyone digging a makeshift grave would have gone unnoticed.

  Ten

  The body was found a matter of only six inches below the patio paving slabs and, as James Carrick observed, it could so easily have been discovered by the gardening contractor Mrs Horsley had hired to make good the botched job her son had done. Arrangements were made for her to be taken to a friend’s house to stay overnight and for most of the next day, while the search and subsequent exhumation was carried out.

  Although decomposed it was possible to see how the old farmer’s body had been stamped on and battered, presumably with a spade, to make it fit into the shallow hole that had been dug. When I learned this I felt sick and was all for tossing the remains of the perpetrator down the nearest mine shaft, followed by several tons of cement.

  Who was behind it all? Had the attack on Patrick in Bristol been connected with the case? If so, someone had seen us in the pub and acted on impulse, as surely no one had followed us there, something about which we are both very vigilant and careful. Was there any point now in going to London?

  Before any decision could be made about this we received the report from Kew. It arrived by way of a phone call to Carrick, shortly to be followed by an email. The Professor of Botany admitted to becoming hugely enamoured of the task and had enlisted the help of colleagues involved in every pertinent branch of science, one of whom had access to an electron microscope. In short, and leaving aside all scientific language and Latin names, the samples of tea, one from the coffin, the other from the box at the Manleys’ flat, were identical and were a very early variety not now commercially grown – we could see drawings of the plant in the Lindley Library if we so chose – which had originated in China. The sample had partially rotted before it had dried out and as microscopic salt crystals were present the conclusion had been drawn that the tea had been immersed in salt water, in an estuary or the open sea. Minute fragments of feldspar and grains of sand were also present, the former being one of the ingredients of Chinese porcelain, the other being kaolin, or china clay. None of the evidence confirmed that the sample had come from a shipwreck but that was the cautious conclusion of those involved in the investigation, as porcelain exported to Europe in the eighteenth century had been packed in tea, in itself worth a small fortune at the time, for the voyage.

  I almost missed the postscript, a short paragraph to the effect that the writer apologized for getting even more carried away by the romance surrounding the find, but were the Avon and Somerset force aware that gold ingots were often loaded aboard such vessels as well? Further research would no doubt yield more information but the writer himself, very regretfully, could not spare any more time.

  Elspeth had been right.

  ‘It’s coming together,’ Carrick said, rubbing his hands, not in glee but because we had just come from the burial site and the weather had become bitterly cold. Blowing on his fingers, he went in the direction of the canteen, with us in tow, where we warmed ourselves on thin, salty soup of indeterminate ingredients and bread rolls that could, and probably had been, used as cannonballs. They had run out of butter.

  The body had already been removed by the time Patrick and I had returned to Mrs Horsley’s home but Carrick had been present since the find had been made, hence his chilled state. This apart, I thought he looked haggard, ill.

  ‘Gold ingots,’ he said thoughtfully, stirring his coffee. ‘Where are they, if that is indeed what they are? Probably abroad by now.’

  ‘That kind of thing must have a very limited market,’ I said. ‘I realize that they’re likely to be melted down but historical ones might be worth even more left as they are because of their provenance. If whoever has them is keeping them hidden until he can find the right buyer …’

  ‘That development, having found the right buyer, might have prompted those involved to unearth them now,’ Carrick said. ‘Ingrid, would you go to the library this afternoon and see if you can find more info?’

  It would be nice and warm in there and was only a short walk away.

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ Patrick said with an ‘I’ll come with you’ look on his face.

  Carrick had other plans for him. ‘I’d like you to accompany me to talk to Brian Stonelake again. I feel I ought to be the one to tell him we’ve found his father’s body. And who knows, he might have remembered a bit more about his own criminal activities.’

  I needed to pause for a short while in order to mull over the various aspects of the case before I sought out even more information. Pared right down to basics the situation so far was thus: three people, who knew one another, had been brutally and horribly murdered. Whichever way you looked at that crime alone, the method of removing them from the land of the living was lurid, unnecessarily blood-boltered and right over the top, the only ‘excuse’ possible being that knives are silent whereas firearms are not. But a silenced handgun would not have been heard beyond the walls of the barn. In my view whoever had done it had an obsession with knives, not to mention a thoroughly nasty turn of mind.

  The victims’ cars had then been discovered, burnt out, in a quarry. Subsequently, a coffin had been stolen, the body, that of the father of the man on whose farm the bodies had been found, having been substituted for something unknown but obviously valuable. Then another man, Horsley, had been found murdered in similar fashion.

  ‘Who probably assisted at the first killings, and before that helped someone else, possibly the bossman, raid the undertakers’, and could have been the van driver who met the Tanner brothers,’ I said to thin air, having borrowed Carrick’s office to do my thinking. ‘He was then superfluous, someone who might prove awkward and had to be eliminated. He might also have demanded a share of the loot.’

  If one was going to work along the lines of Brian Stonelake having been set up – it was wobbly to assume that the selection of his father’s coffin as a hiding place was a coincidence but I was sticking with that for a moment – then only someone comparatively local could be responsible. As had been suggested before, whoever it was would know the lie of the land and the identity of neighbourhood villains.

  I had thought it odd right from the start that the Manleys and Keith Davies had bought adjacent flats at the mill and that Davies was employed by the other two, for it was not as though the Manleys were elderly and unable to look after themselves. One got the impression that Davies had been their minder. To protect them from whom? The bossman? Others in a gang with which they had been involved? Whatever the truth, someone had caught up with them.

  Known facts contradicted certain aspects of this for it appeared they had left home on that particular night of their own free will, got into their cars, and driven, independently, to the deserted barn in order to meet someone. They had then been overpowered and killed. Perhaps they had been promised a payoff or a share in criminal proceeds as a lure to get them there. That said, the coffin had not then been recovered so it was likely that none of the three knew exactly where whatever it was had been concealed.

  And, the thought shot into my mind, had anyone yet shown the Tanner brothers a photograph of Peter Horsley?

  I gazed around. Where was the file? I had a quick look and it was not with several others in a wire tray on Carrick’s exceedingly tidy desk, so I went to see if I could find Lynn Outhwaite.

  ‘The DCI might have it in his document case,’ she told me when I found her.

  ‘Where are the Tanners now?’ I asked her.

  ‘They’ve been released on police bail.’

  ‘Has anyone shown a photo of Horsley to them to see if they recognize him as the man driving the van?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think s
o. Why don’t you ask Carrick?’

  ‘Any chance of a copy of the photo in case no one has?’

  ‘Look, you mustn’t go tangling with that pair.’

  ‘Sergeant Outhwaite, I’ve tangled, as you call it, with far worse people than that pair of beer-bellied boneheads. Do I get a photo or not?’

  She found one for me.

  Obeying orders to the letter I went to the public library first and spent about an hour and a half researching shipwrecks in the South China Sea area, as I already knew that was where most of the wrecks had been found, making notes. I was torn as to whether I should contact Carrick with regard to the photo as failing to do so might result in a wasted trip. But better that than be forbidden to go in search of the bovine duo.

  I reckoned that the Tanners would have gone straight back to work, for beer money if nothing else, so I walked back to the nick to get the car and set off for the quarry. It looked as if it might snow, the sky a leaden grey, the wind a bitter north-easter.

  ‘They’ve gone and good riddance,’ said the man on the gate, a different one, giving me the impression he would have spat in the road by way of a further comment had I been a bloke. ‘Been given the boot.’ He gave me a sideways look. ‘You don’t look like the sort of person normally to be asking after them.’

  ‘I’m not quite the police,’ I told him, not being yet qualified to carry a warrant card, if indeed, I decided to go that far, ‘but nevertheless I’m checking up on them and the trouble they’ve got themselves into.’

  ‘Try their home. Don’t ask me where that is, though.’

  ‘It’s all right. I know where they live.’

  Colliers Row, Hinton Littlemoor, someone had said.

  On impulse, I showed him the photograph. ‘Have you ever seen this man hanging around here, perhaps waiting for the Tanners?’

  He had not and I thanked him and drove away.

  Colliers Row had probably been built during the Victorian heyday of the mining industry in the Somerset coalfields and was a terrace of limestone cottages with steeply sloping rear gardens set high above Hinton Littlemoor. One could reflect on the attitudes of those times: workers’ homes were sited at this spot, open to the elements, because no one higher up the social scale would want to live here. Even today and with pine and fir trees planted on the stony ground behind them it was a bleak place.

  There was one cottage out of the eight that appeared not to have been modernized, still with what could be an outside lavatory and the garden a sea of weeds and rubbish. This, surely, was where the Tanners lived. It was strange that two grown-up brothers continued to live together in what must have been their childhood home.

  The road climbed from where I had paused and then curved sharply round before dividing at a little green in front of the houses, the right-hand fork providing access to them and then rejoining the road at the far end of the terrace. I parked by the unkempt cottage. The rotting gate moved only reluctantly on its rusting hinges but I shoved it open and banged on the front door: the bell did not seem to work. Almost immediately a woman put her head out of an upstairs window of the house next door.

  ‘There’s no one there, luv. The poor old dear’s in a home now and it’s going to be sold.’

  ‘I’m looking for the Tanner brothers,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, they’re right down at the end. Isn’t this place a disgrace? My husband’s trying to get something done about it. The council got rid of the squatters weeks ago but no one’s come to clean up the mess the filthy little beasts made.’

  I mentally apologized to the Tanners – whose names were Jethro and Vince, I had learned from the file – thanked her and walked down to the far end of the row.

  This house too gave every appearance of being deserted, all the curtains drawn, and again I rang the bell to no avail. Banging on the door drew no response either. A sixth sense telling me that someone was at home, I went down a side way towards the rear of the house. The path was host to quite a few motorbikes, some seemingly intact, others in pieces, a lot of oily patches on the ground, tools everywhere.

  The back door, within a small ramshackle porch, was ajar but virtually barricaded off by a strange collection of items; an ancient wooden clothes horse, sundry garden tools and what Patrick would call a ‘handrolic’ mower. It occurred to me as I was forced to stop that they were arranged in such a fashion that the merest touch would send the whole lot crashing down. Was this, in effect, a makeshift burglar alarm?

  I leaned carefully over and rapped on one of the glass panes of the door. Then, when nothing happened, took a hoe that was not part of the fortifications and pushed the door open wider with it, quite difficult as it was oddly heavy.

  An enormous bundle of old iron weights, tied by their handles, crashed down from somewhere above it.

  I stared at the hole in the kitchen floor in a kind of frozen horror for what seemed ages but it could have only been a couple of seconds for I had all guns blazing when two huge outlines materialized in the gloomy interior.

  ‘Are you bloody well trying to kill someone?’ I bellowed at them.

  The brothers sidled like nervous horses.

  ‘You got the other blokes with you?’ asked one in what, for him, was probably a whisper but came out as a hoarse bark.

  I tossed a mental coin. ‘No,’ I replied, adding tersely and sarcastically, ‘You’re quite safe.’

  ‘What d’you want?’

  I gestured towards the splintered boards and the ironmongery – of the kind once used in greengrocers’ to sell stones, if not half-hundredweights, of potatoes – which were slowly subsiding into the cavity beneath the floor. ‘What’s all this about, then?’

  ‘Funny phone calls.’

  ‘Don’t tell ’er!’ bawled his brother.

  ‘Which one of you is Vince?’ I asked.

  ‘Me,’ said the one who had answered my first question.

  ‘Vince,’ I said gently. ‘You could have been on a murder charge right now. What funny phone calls?’

  ‘Thought they might be from that bloke you were with who chucked the drill bit at us.’

  ‘That’s Patrick. He’s my husband – and a copper. We were with DCI Carrick.’

  He registered surprised. ‘He looks like a hired killer.’

  ‘Only when he worked for MI5 – or if you harm one hair of my head.’ Nothing was actually lost by bunging that one in, I decided.

  Jethro burst out with, ‘Course he’s a copper, stupid, he grilled me afterwards.’

  Vince shrugged. ‘I got Carrick. How was I to know?’

  ‘Tell me about the phone calls,’ I requested.

  Silence.

  ‘I only came out here to show you a photograph,’ I wheedled. ‘Please tell me about the phone calls. They’re obviously threatening. You might need police protection.’

  ‘Some geezer said not to talk to the cops – or else.’

  ‘You don’t have a lot of choice as you’re already in trouble for digging up the coffin,’ I told him impatiently, getting a bit fed up with talking to them across a palisade. These were, after all, the people who had desecrated the churchyard and so thoroughly upset my in-laws. ‘We’ve found what should have been the rightful occupant, by the way.’

  The pair moved a little closer to the door.

  ‘You have?’ said the other man, Jethro. ‘Where?’

  I produced the photograph and held it out. ‘Buried in this man’s mother’s garden. Know him?’

  It was snatched.

  ‘No,’ said Vince.

  ‘The man who met you with the van,’ I prompted.

  ‘No, that wasn’t him,’ Vince said again. ‘Not that we really saw his face. It was dark, like.’

  ‘Tell me the truth,’ I pleaded.

  Pointing to the photo, Jethro said in strangled tones, ‘That’s the bloke who was fished out of the effin’ river, innit? I wondered where I’d seen that ’orrible face before.’ He drew himself up. ‘Lady, I don’t care if your man is
handy with all kinds of hardware, we ain’t saying no more.’ He thrust the photo at me. ‘We don’t know nothing else. We didn’t see who the bloke with the van was.’

  ‘But it wasn’t him,’ Vince added.

  ‘But if you didn’t see his face how do you know that?’ I bawled at him.

  ‘He was older. He spoke, like.’

  ‘Is it the same voice as whoever’s making the threatening phone calls?’

  But the pair had gone back into the gloomy interior, Jethro manhandling his brother out of the room to prevent him from saying more.

  ‘Look, we can put a tap on the line and trace the calls,’ I shouted after them, not about to follow. You do not corner grizzly bears unless well armed.

  There seemed nothing for it but to go and fetch a big gun and I was not in the least squeamish about unleashing him on them. Then I remembered that Patrick was no longer permitted to take people apart, not even a brace younger than him and almost twice his size.

  ‘Sod it,’ I muttered and hurled aside the barricade.

  The fanfare of collapsing impedimenta petered out as I went inside, and I found myself in a small kitchen. A short hallway led into a living room, probably at one time two but now knocked into one. That was where I found them.

  A very, very old lady sat in an armchair on one side of the fireplace and on the other a young woman held a baby, her feet up on a battered sofa, sharing it with another woman who was probably about ten years older than me. Jethro and Vince stood nearby, propping up the walls. In the dim light, the curtains closed, the group looked like a peasant family in a Dutch painting.

  ‘I’ll arrange police protection,’ I promised.

  ‘Oh, the lads’ll go for sure,’ cackled the old woman in a flat loud voice that suggested she was profoundly deaf. ‘They’ll do a runner and leave us women to fend for ourselves.’