Grave Stones

by Priscilla Masters

  Korpanski frowned at her. ‘Remembered what?’

  ‘Why Kathleen Weston looked familiar.’

  Korpanski waited.

  ‘I was driving down St Edward’s Street last summer some time. It was a boiling hot day and the traffic had stopped. It was piling up a bit. I wondered what was going on so I pulled over. And it was her. Mrs Weston. Standing in the middle of the road. She’d stopped her car, put her hazards on. A cat had been run over – a ginger thing – and she was retrieving the body.’ She recalled the woman cradling the dead cat, lying it gently on the back seat of her car while around her the motorists watched, confused and uncharacteristically obedient at the strange tableau being played out in front of their eyes. ‘Blow me, Mike,’ she said, ‘if I didn’t see flowers at the site a day or two later. Can you believe it? I actually read the message on the cellophane. “You poor thing,” it said.

  ‘And it was her?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m sure. The name on the flowers was Kathleen.’

  She turned back to the assembled officers, who were well used to asides between the inspector and her sergeant.

  ‘Mrs Weston is a fanatical animal lover who objected to the state Jakob Grimshaw kept his animals in. So…’ she wanted them to realise this, ‘the inhabitants of the estate begin to look a little more involved in the farm and the farmer. Charlotte Frankwell, divorced wife of our property developer…’ She paused for a minute. ‘I can’t see why she would want the farmer dead unless it was, perhaps, hoping for an increase in the value of her property. Peter Mostyn, who bought the field beyond the farm without planning permission for a knockdown price, and is in financial trouble since his divorce. Mr Gabriel Frankwell, who stood to gain a huge amount of money if he could disrupt the farm and buy the land. He was probably pretty furious with Grimshaw for sneakily selling off a field to one of his neighbours and is anxious – no desperate,’ she corrected, ‘to leave the country.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘And he doesn’t have much time to be messed around, which might have made him flip.’ She stopped for a moment, pondering. She could well imagine Gabriel Frankwell to be a man with a temper who would not appreciate being thwarted. She could picture him being a killer. Cold-hearted and pitiless. So how could she reconcile that image with a man who wanted to be present at his child’s birth? All killers have their Achilles’ heels, their soft spots, their little tendernesses.

  She resumed her talk. ‘We have Hilary Barnes, who apparently heard some suspicious noises that might have been the sound of the crime being committed, but she took a few days to come forward. Why? Why the delay? Teresa Parnell, who is trying to convince us through her supernatural powers that she knows exactly when the crime was committed and it does appear to tally with what Hilary Barnes said.’ She eyed the rim of sceptical faces. ‘So if you believe in the supernatural or collusion or they both really did hear something – which is quite feasible given the sustained attack on Mr Grimshaw – we have the time and date of the murder. Just bear in mind,’ she warned, ‘that if we go down this path anyone who has an alibi for mid-morning on Tuesday the 11th of September is innocent.’ She let the words sink in before adding unnecessarily, ‘It’s a big assumption to take and takes out our chief suspect, the woman with a dual motive – revenge and inheritance.’ She eyed the officers. ‘Let’s look at the rest of the inhabitants of the estate. In number 8 we have the Watkins family: Mum, Dad, three children. Dawn?’ She looked across at Dawn Critchlow.

  ‘Nothing there, Joanna,’ she responded. ‘Very much an average family.’

  ‘OK, so we’ll discount them for the time being. And in number 6 we have the Chappells, whom I understand are on an extended cruise of the Mediterranean and have been away since the beginning of September. So we can discount them too. What about number 2?’

  DS Hannah Beardmore spoke up. ‘I interviewed Mrs Probert,’ she said. ‘Faria. She’s a belly dancer.’ A couple of the junior officers sniggered and Joanna caught the comment, Wish I’d interviewed her and so on. She let it pass. Police work needed a touch of humour.

  ‘She’s what you’d expect,’ Hannah continued in her soft voice, her hair shining around her face almost like a halo. ‘Flirty, a bit of a sexpot, I suppose, with a very quiet husband who barely said a word all the time I was there. He seemed to agree with everything she said.’ She wrinkled her brow as though trying to find the right words. ‘I think Faria is a bit of a firecracker. No more Turkish,’ she continued, ‘than I am. I caught a distinctly Brummie accent when she was off her guard. She could cause trouble in a marriage, I would think, leading someone on.’ Her pause and flush were barely perceptible, the stillness in the room even less so. Hannah’s husband, Roger, had had an ill advised affair with a woman at his work. Hannah had become unhappy, quiet and pale. But recently they had had a holiday together and she was almost back to her old self. Almost. The scars were obviously still there.

  Hannah resumed her briefing. ‘But Grimshaw was surely beyond that sort of temptation? So I can’t see the fact that Faria was a flirt would have any bearing on our investigation.’ She screwed up her face. ‘I mean, this isn’t a sex crime, is it?’

  Most heads shook a negative.

  ‘She looked completely disinterested when I asked her about the farmer. I got the impression that she hardly knew him. And the same goes for her husband.’

  ‘Right.’ Joanna flashed her a smile. ‘Thanks. This helps to clarify things. Narrow the field. So far,’ she continued, ‘we have little to go on. We don’t even know the day let alone the time of Jakob’s death.’ She frowned. ‘Not for certain. As it was obviously days if not a week before the body was found and Jakob basically led a quiet, isolated life, neither pathological evidence nor neighbour sightings have been very helpful. I’m going to make the usual plea to you – that we keep our investigations going in every corner…’ She stared at the upturned faces, Timmis and McBrine, Hesketh-Brown, Bridget Anderton, Dawn Critchlow, Hannah Beardmore and the rest, and resumed her lecture. ‘…Every stone lifted up and peered beneath. We intend inviting Judy Wilkinson to come down to be fingerprinted.’ She gave one of her bland smiles, ‘to exclude her dabs. We found no fingerprints at all on the box, which is strange. Mrs Grimshaw’s should have been there, Jakob’s and possibly his daughter’s, so a couple of years ago it was wiped clean and placed in the attic.’

  To accumulate dust.

  ‘What about Farrell’s Animal Feeds?’ She addressed Bridget Anderton.

  PC Bridget Anderton took her time before replying. ‘The boss, Robert Flaxon, seemed annoyed by my presence. He was quite angry.’

  ‘And the driver?’

  ‘Tim Bradeley,’ Bridget said, thoughtfully. ‘He appeared above board.’ She recalled Bradeley’s blunt features and steady grey eyes. ‘I didn’t get the feeling there was anything there. He knew the money was there, though whether he realised how much I couldn’t say. But…’

  Joanna waited but PC Anderton would not be hurried.

  ‘I found out,’ she said, ‘that the feeds are imported from Eastern Europe, sourced from India. Sorry,’ she said apologetically. ‘It’s probably got nothing to do with anything.’

  Joanna was inclined to agree with her.

  ‘I was just surprised, that’s all,’ Anderton mused to herself. Having to import animal food seemed strange to her.

  And now it was time for action. Joanna charged the officers with specific duties, and as they filed out, she turned to face Korpanski.

  He was leaning forwards, staring into space and running his hands through his hair, a well-known precursor to bad news.

  ‘If she did find the box,’ he said gloomily, ‘why leave it there, in the farmhouse? Even Judy would have known it would lead us straight back to her.’

  So this was what he had been brooding about. She shrugged. ‘No idea.’ She sensed what was wrong. ‘Look, Mike.’ She was finding this awkward. ‘If you don’t want to be there when your old school friend is questioned, it’s OK.’<
br />
  His face was tough and a blank. ‘I’ve got no objections.’

  ‘She wasn’t a sort of…?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘nothing.’ His dark eyes held a plea. ‘I just find it difficult,’ he burst out. ‘She was simply a hanger-on. But I feel…’

  ‘Spit it out, Mike.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘sort of responsible.’

  ‘Oh.’ She decided then that he would be no use at her side. ‘I’ll interview her with one of the others.’

  But Judy Wilkinson was playing hard to get.

  Joanna tried her mobile number and got an answering service.

  She realised she felt an antipathy towards this woman, recognised that it was irrational and certainly not professional, and did her best to leave a neutral message.

  ‘Mrs Wilkinson, it’s Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy here. We need to talk to you…’ She paused, ‘again, as new evidence has turned up.’ She left her direct number plus her mobile number and rang off. At the moment there was no evidence to charge her on. They could keep it informal for now. Stick to fingerprinting her ‘for purposes of exclusion’. If Judy Wilkinson was innocent, she had just lost her father. If the police were too heavy-handed, the Press would be down on them like the proverbial ton of bricks, quoting police harassment. No she had to play this one right by the book.

  Korpanski wafted the piece of paper containing Hilary Barnes’s message in front of her.

  ‘OK,’ she said wearily. ‘I’d better go round.’

  Hilary Barnes proved to be an energetic-looking woman in her fifties with a business-like air. She led them into a palely carpeted living room and motioned for them to sit down on a brown leather sofa before sitting down herself, her eyes round with nosiness.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she apologised. ‘When I heard the noises I didn’t realise what it was. I thought it was just the farmer and the animals shuffling around.’

  ‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ Joanna suggested. ‘What date are we talking about?’

  ‘Tuesday,’ Hilary Barnes said. ‘It was Tuesday the 11th. I know because my husband went away on the 9th for a few days – he works for Wedgwood – so I was alone in the house. I normally put the radio on but that morning I was going to visit my daughter in Leigh-on-Sea for a couple of days and wanted to concentrate on what clothes I was taking, so the house was quiet. I was in the bedroom, packing.’

  ‘And?’ prompted Joanna.

  ‘At around eleven I fancied a cup of coffee so was boiling up the kettle in the kitchen when I heard a shout from the farmyard.’

  Behind the glasses there was apology mixed with guilt. ‘It wasn’t unusual,’ she protested, ‘to hear noises. The farmer, Jakob, he was always shouting at the cattle. And they’d moo away back.’ Her lips twitched. ‘Or baa or whatever. The farm made a lot of noise, always a dog barking and things.’ She gave a vague smile.

  ‘I did look out of the window but I saw nothing.’

  ‘Do you mind?’ Joanna stood up.

  Hilary Barnes led her into the kitchen, which was at the back of the house. It was incredibly neat. Cream units, glazed cabinets, terracotta floor. Bang up to the minute. Joanna crossed to the large window that overlooked an equally tidy garden; patio furniture, decking, an immaculate lawn bordered by a row of apple trees almost bent double under the fruit – the wet summer had resulted in a bumper harvest – and beyond that stood the dry stone wall, the epicentre of the murder investigation. Through the leaves of the trees she could just make out the corner of the cow shed and the muddied concrete path at its side. To the left, the sheep were grazing in the field, unconscious survivors of the tragedy. But Hilary Barnes’s house was at the top of the estate. The farmhouse was invisible from here, as was the actual spot where Grimshaw’s body had been found. Unless she had looked out of her kitchen window at the precise moment Grimshaw had come round the corner of the cowshed, she couldn’t have seen him. Joanna felt a sharp stab of disappointment. Hilary Barnes struck her as a reliable witness. She trusted her much more than Mrs Parnell. And it would have been good to learn the time and date of the murder. It would narrow the field and move their investigations forward like nothing else.

  Hilary moved to her side, agitated. ‘I was standing right here,’ she said, ‘when I heard the cry.’ Her face was stricken. She believed she had heard her neighbour’s cry for help and done nothing.

  Joanna was piecing together Matthew’s version of the forensic sequence, trying to picture the skinny shape of the man, old and bowed well before his time, pursued by…?

  That cry would surely have been the result of the initial blow, the one that broke one bone and displaced another. The blow that winded him.

  ‘Then what?’

  Hilary Barnes was frowning, struggling to recall everything. ‘Nothing for a while,’ she said, ‘just some banging and clattering. I thought I heard the barn doors open. Honestly,’ she was appealing to Joanna not to blame her for failing to interpret the significance of what she had heard, ‘there was nothing out of the ordinary apart from the shout.’ She moved away from the window, looking shaken.

  ‘I boiled the kettle,’ she said, ‘and went back upstairs to my bedroom.’

  ‘Would you mind?’ Joanna asked politely.

  ‘No, no, not at all. Follow me.’

  Mrs Barnes led her into a large master bedroom with an en suite bathroom beyond. Joanna realised at once that the room was at the front of the house; the window overlooked the road. Not over the farmyard.

  ‘Did you hear anything more?’

  ‘Just grunts and scrabbling.’

  ‘Barking? Did you hear the dog, Ratchet, barking?’

  For the first time Hilary Barnes looked confused, as though she didn’t know the answer. ‘I can’t remember,’ she said slowly. ‘It would have been natural to have heard him. He was a very noisy dog,’ she said.

  ‘So when did he stop being noisy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ms Barnes was frowning. She didn’t have an answer to this one. ‘It’s easier to remember a noise than the lack of it.’

  It was true. Korpanski was looking even gloomier.

  Joanna resumed the questioning. ‘Did you look across to the farm later?’

  Mrs Barnes shook her head. ‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘Now I wish I had. I might have saved the poor man’s life.’

  ‘Who knows,’ Joanna said. ‘You might have put yourself in danger.’

  Hilary Barnes looked appalled. ‘You don’t think the killer will come back?’

  Joanna shook her head. ‘No. No, I don’t think he will. Anyway, there is a police guard on the farm so,’ she smiled, ‘for the moment you’re safer than ever.’

  Hilary Barnes looked mollified.

  ‘Did you go out into the garden later on that day?’

  Hilary Barnes shook her head. ‘No. I set off for my daughter’s early afternoon.’

  ‘Did you see or hear anything else?’

  Again Mrs Barnes shook her head regretfully.

  ‘Did you notice a car or hear one at any time that morning?’

  Again Mrs Barnes shook her head. ‘No. Not particularly.’

  ‘Do you know Mrs Parnell?’ Joanna asked abruptly.

  Unexpectedly, Hilary Barnes looked embarrassed. ‘You mean from number 4?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not well.’ She spoke stiffly.

  Behind Joanna, Korpanski cleared his throat and shifted his feet. She got the message. They were both thinking the same thing. ‘Interested in the occult, Mrs Barnes?’

  ‘A little.’

  So was this a clumsy plot the two women had hatched to divert attention away from the real time of the murder?

  Could be. Why? As they’d obviously been there at the time. Had Mrs Barnes confided in Mrs Parnell and the medium used the information?

  ‘Did you mention hearing this disturbance to Mrs Parnell?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

  Joanna decided to k
eep this rogue card up her sleeve. ‘It doesn’t matter. Thank you for getting in touch.’

  ‘Do you think I did hear the murder?’

  Joanna met the pale eyes. ‘It’s possible,’ she said. ‘Quite possible. You may have given us the breakthrough we needed.’

  Outside, she addressed Korpanski. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she warned. ‘If eleven o’clock on Tuesday the 11th of September was the time of the assault, our chief suspect has an alibi.’

  ‘Unbreakable. Judy Wilkinson works at a doctor’s surgery. She was seeing patients all that morning. I’ve seen the patient printout. She had half an hour for lunch from twelve thirty to one. There wouldn’t have been time for her to drive out here, take fifteen minutes to murder her dad and then get back for her afternoon’s work. It simply isn’t possible. If our two witnesses are correct and that’s the time of the murder, Judy Wilkinson’s in the clear.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Joanna said.

  She finally got hold of a snappy-sounding Judy Wilkinson at precisely ten thirty.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘I’m in the middle of my morning surgery.’

  ‘We need to interview you again,’ Joanna responded calmly, ‘and fingerprint you to exclude your prints from the crime scene.’

  No need to mention the box – not at this point, anyway. ‘When is it convenient for you to call in here?’

  ‘I finish at five. I can be with you for five thirty, if that’s all right, Detective Inspector Piercy.’

  Joanna felt her face and voicebox tighten. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘See you then,’ and put the phone down with a crash.

  Most people believe that police work is impersonal. Little do they realise it can get very personal indeed.

  With a sigh she picked up the next message on her desk. Colclough.

  Chief Superintendent Arthur Colclough. He of the bulldog jowls, all-seeing eyes, scary intuition and ultimately benevolent, paternalistic character. He was like a terrifying but fair headmaster and whenever Joanna was summoned to see him she felt like a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl caught smoking behind the bike sheds. Teetering on the very edge of retirement and bliss in the sun, Colclough had a holiday home in Cyprus, at which he entertained all the family including his adored granddaughter, Catherine, for increasing periods of time.