A KILLING KARMA
A Casey & Catt Procedural
Geraldine Evans
A KILLING KARMA
Copyright 2007 Geraldine Evans
Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Chapter One
'What did you say?’ Unable to take in what he was hearing, Detective Chief Inspector ‘Will’ Casey asked for it to be repeated, unsure that he'd believe his ears even then.
‘Two suspicious deaths?’ he queried. Two! They certainly didn't do things by halves. But then he knew that already. Such a proclivity had been the bane of his life for years.
He bit off a curse and said, ‘And you say you haven't notified the local police?’ He paused, hoping to gather both wits and patience, while he listened to the garbled explanation. But unusually for him, he succeeded in gathering neither, as his next words proved. ‘Are you both stupid, Moon, or just criminally irresponsible?’
Pointless, really, asking such questions, Casey told himself with a grimace that he tried and failed to turn into an ironic smile. When were they ever anything else?
Illogically, he thought, This can't be happening to me. Only he knew it was. He really must have been very wicked in a previous life to bring such bad karma with him to this one.
He stared unseeingly at his living room. Gradually, his eyes came back into focus. It was as if his mind needed to ground him, to calm him. Without will or conscious effort, his gaze travelled round his living room till it rested on the wall to the left of the chimney breast and the place where his favourite piece of scripophily had once rested. The rare and — to Casey — precious, old share certificate of the Stockton and Darlington railway had been sacrificed to pay his parents' debts. The certificate Rachel had bought him in its place was interesting in its way, but it would never replace the original which had had a special place in his heart. His gaze moved around as he listened to further garbled explanations from Moon. This time it rested on the carved Hindu elephant-headed god, Ganesh. His mother had pressed this on him just before she and his father returned home the last time they were here. For good luck, she had said. He had tried to return it to her, thinking she and his father had more need of the god's protection. Even though she had laughed aside his offer and pointed to a similar, much smaller carving at her throat, he wished now he had insisted she keep the larger carving of Ganesh. Being so much bigger, it must surely provide greater protection in keeping with its size.
Too late, he breathed on a sigh as he told Moon he would get there as quickly as possible and put the phone down.
This time his parents had — by a country mile — managed to surpass any of their previous lunatic stunts. And, for the life of him, he didn't see how he could begin to save them from the consequences of their actions.
But, he told himself as he jerked his unwilling body into movement, grabbed his coat and car keys and headed out into the unseasonably chilly July night, there's no one else to do it, so you'd better get up to the Fens and see if you can rescue something from the mire.
The word mire caused him to pause in the doorway of his neat semi-detached as he wondered whether he should change out of his new suit. But then, as he remembered his parents' two muck-attracting and neglected mongrels had both died within a month of one another earlier in the year, he decided such a precaution wasn't necessary.
As he climbed into the car, started it up and made for the Fens, he told himself it was fortunate he was on a week's leave. At least it gave him the time and freedom to try to sort the mess out.
God knew what he'd say to Rachel. He'd have to tell her, of course, he accepted that. Deception was no basis for a committed relationship and he and Rachel had been together now for some months. She spent much of the time at Casey's home, but kept her own flat on in the town. He was just grateful he didn't have to explain the situation to her while his mind was in turmoil and he was still trying to get his head around the grim events he had just been told about.
But as luck would have it, Rachel was out this evening. She had driven to Norwich with a woman friend to see a play that had been highly recommended. Casey hadn't wanted to go but had encouraged Rachel to do so, seeing as she was so keen. As a musician, between practising, performing and touring, she didn't get much opportunity to be on the receiving end of entertainment, and although he regretted the loss of her company, he didn't begrudge her the evening apart.
It wasn't that Rachel wouldn't sympathize if he told her what had happened — she had met his parents and would understand how they could have got into their current predicament almost as well as he did — it was just that he'd prefer to keep this business to himself until he'd extracted the full story. So he was relieved not to have been forced by her presence tonight to explain what the phone call was about.
Will Casey had always found the flatland Fens and their equally flat and empty approaches desolate, even during daylight hours. How had the Elizabethan writer Michael Drayton described them? Something about 'a land of foul, woosy marsh. With a vast queachy soil and hosts of wallowing waves'. Of course, much of the waterlogged land had been reclaimed since Drayton's day. But with the wide and moonless night sky louring darkly down at him through the mist that every so often lifted to reveal the flatlands stretching to the horizon on either side of the road as he drove with no light but cats eyes in sight, he couldn't help but share something of Drayton's feelings about the place. He reflected that on such a night as this the legendary Black Shuck might roam the Fens. A giant black hound, to see Black Shuck was once believed to bring death within a week. With a shiver not solely attributable to the legendary hound, Casey wondered what scenes were waiting for him at his parents' home; a commune of so-called happy hippies enjoying their own version of Utopia.
Now, reality had entered their ramshackle paradise and it had suffered a mortal blow. Two mortal blows, in fact. And he was expected to sort it out and make it all better.
In the next rising of the murk, Casey glanced briefly towards the huge, star-studded Fenland sky and wondered whether he should pray to the Almighty or the Hindu god of hopeless causes ...
Chapter Two
As Casey slowed his car for the approach to the commune's smallholding, he was surprised to see that the gate was shut. Not only shut, but locked with a large padlock and chain, as he discovered when he got out of the car. Casey presumed that with one body lying in a shallow grave in the smallholding's grounds and another presumably laid out in one of the outhouses, they had decided to exercise a rare prudence. Shame it was a little late, he thought.
Amongst the usual collection of rusting old wrecks littering the yard, two of them still balanced on bricks as they had been on his last visit, Casey was astonished to see a brand new 4x4 that gleamed in the sudden light as the front door opened. Where had they got the money for that? he wondered. Unless they had a visitor. That must be it, he concluded as Mo
on crossed the yard to unlock the gate. Some wealthy patron who thought their lifestyle romantic. Deluded fool, he thought. But it was going to be awkward. Would he have to wait for hours for their visitor to leave before he could talk to them about the two deaths?
However, when, after his mother had enthusiastically embraced him and — a rarity from either parent — thanked him for coming to their aid, he asked Moon who amongst their assorted on-benefits acquaintances could afford such a car, she just mumbled something he couldn't hear and Casey didn't pursue it. He came to another conclusion: that their visitor was someone they would rather he knew as little about as possible.
Almost immediately, Casey heard dogs barking. Worried for a moment that the commune members had obtained more mangy, mud-attracting mutts, he quickly dismissed the thought; acquiring more dogs would require an energy and purposefulness singularly lacking in the commune members given that they rarely found energy for anything other than smoking dope and making babies. On the still air of this flat and otherwise silent countryside, he knew sound could travel some distance and concluded that the dogs must belong to one of the commune's neighbours.
Just as he had satisfied himself that he was safe from the attentions of uncared for dogs, two hairy and muck-coated specimens came racing around the side of the house yapping frenziedly. To no avail, Casey tried to shush them, only too conscious of the unorthodox reason for his visit, he could do without the dogs drawing attention to his arrival. With his attempts at quietening the animals clearly doomed to failure, he hurried after Moon, squelching through the mud, hoping that his disappearance through the front door would shut the dogs up.
As he trudged back with her, fending off the curious dogs and their sniffing noses, Casey took a look round the smallholding. And although the darkness was kind to it, the commune's property still looked as uncared for as the dogs. Daylight would doubtless have revealed the level of ramshackle squalor that Casey recalled from his previous visits: rusted corrugated roofs on all the outbuildings; the broken windows in most of them which had never been replaced; weeds which sprouted with vigorous, unchecked growth all over the yard and the land that had been left uncultivated as well as amongst most of the cultivated area also, which received only a sporadic and half-hearted weeding. Several doors still hung off the hinges they had hung from on his last visit. They swung and banged in the suddenly stiffening breeze with an irritating relentlessness that would drive most normal people mad. He could only suppose the drug use endemic among the community transformed the banging into the tinkle of heavenly bells. Or something.
The house was no better, he saw as, by the light of candles that flickered in the sudden draught, he and Moon entered the large living room and he pulled the door to behind them. Candles provided the room's only illumination and, but for the hall light that had gleamed out into the yard, Casey would have assumed that the electricity had been cut off again. Through the candlelit gloom, he saw two new settees and a huge plasma television which took pride of place in the corner. Even the carpet was new, he noticed, and replaced the one with the multiplicity of burn holes. They really were looking remarkably affluent for people with no visible means of support and Casey's gaze narrowed suspiciously as he realized that not only was there no rich visitor immediately apparent, but that his normally impecunious parents hadn't tapped him for a loan for some weeks. It wasn't like them. So what had changed?
Moon must have noticed his astonishment, because she told him, ‘We came up on the lottery.’
‘How much?’ Casey asked before politeness stopped him.
‘Enough,’ Glen 'Foxy' Redfern replied for Moon from where he lounged full length on one of the new settees. His reply was abrupt and told Casey, clear as clear, that their lottery win was none of his business. But then he had always been a belligerent personality. Must go with his wild bush of red hair.
Their lottery win must have been more than enough, thought Casey, to judge from all the money they'd spent. And as there was no visitor in evidence, he surmised that the 4x4 in the yard was a new purchase of theirs as well. So why hadn't Moon and Star repaid him some of the money he'd lent them over the years? Disgruntled at this thought, Casey crossed the room, stepping over the bodies lounging on the large, grubby cushions that littered the new carpet.
One thing hadn't changed: like the outbuildings and grounds, everything was covered in a layer of dust, the original furniture a mismatched mix of colours and styles that no amount of brightly-coloured Indian throws could bring together.
Much like the inhabitants, he thought, as he looked around the circle of expectant, sheepish, drugged and out of it faces in their habitual well-holed jeans and shabby kaftans. He took the chair with the fewest stains and burn holes — the new settees having been appropriated by Star and Foxy Redfern, both sprawled out in such determined ownership that one would think they had never believed that property was theft.
While he gathered his thoughts, he examined the faces again; there were his mother and father, of course, Moon and Star Casey respectively, names which they had adopted long ago in their first hippie flush. They were by far the oldest of the commune members. Both were now pensioners, though one wouldn't have thought so from their irresponsible and ‘opt out’ lifestyle.
Sitting upright and tight-faced on one of the older settees was Dylan Harper, the bereaved thirty-something partner of the second victim, DaisyMay Smith; and across from him was Scott ‘Mackenzie’ Johnson, another, older, thirty-something; and beside him, sitting close, was his nineteen-year-old gay lover, Randy Matthews. Then there was Kali Callender, in her early forties, the widow of Kris ‘Krishna’ Callender, the first supposed victim; and Glen 'Foxy' Redfern, next oldest to Moon and Star, with the wild frizz of bright red hair that had earned him his nickname; and Lilith whom he called his wife, though as they had been married in a beachside ceremony of much spiritual significance, but probably spurious legality, Casey doubted their marital status. There were also still up, although the hour was late, several teenage children of the commune, whose names Casey had forgotten.
The missing faces — apart from the younger children who, amazingly, had tonight clearly been sent to bed at a reasonable hour — were those of the dead pair: Kris ‘Krishna’ Callender, Kali's husband, and DaisyMay Smith, Dylan Harper's girlfriend.
Casey cleared his throat and looked directly at Moon, his mother. ‘You were somewhat incoherent on the phone, Mum, so let me, first of all, make sure I've got this clear. You say one of you found Kris dead in one of the greenhouses and have yet to report his death?’
Moon nodded. Unsurprisingly, her normal, calm aura wasn't much in evidence this evening. Even under the flickering candlelight that lit the room but dimly, he could see her fingers moving restlessly at her throat as she fiddled with the little charm of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant-headed god of good fortune. This time, his failure to work his claimed magic had taken on epic proportions.
Moon's eyes, too, seemed restless; the gaze from the still vivid green eyes that were so like his own, kept sliding away from Casey's. He prayed this reluctance to hold his gaze wasn't an indication that Moon was guilty of rather more than just the concealment of two sudden deaths.
Casey continued. ‘And then, as if that wasn't enough to be going on with, for reasons that escape me, having failed to call for the police or an ambulance, you decided to move Callender's body to an outhouse before burying him in the garden. Have I got it right so far?’
His mother gave another reluctant nod.
But although Casey had claimed that the reasons for their actions had escaped him, he suspected that he understood the reasons only too well.
‘Were there any marks of violence on Kris Callender's body?’
‘None that I noticed, though I didn't look that closely,’ Moon admitted. ‘Besides, it was getting dark when I found his body.’
Casey felt a shiver of dread crawl down his spine. For that was the first time his mother had admitted that she had been
the one to find Callender's corpse. Uneasily, he wondered what other unwelcome admissions would follow.
He already suspected that Kris's body had been found lying amongst the cannabis crop which he knew they grew behind the house, concealed by a hedge, in one of the larger greenhouses, which location, for Casey, went some way to explaining their bizarre decision to bury him quietly without notifying anyone in authority of his death.
‘Tell me,’ he went on, although he doubted they would tell him the truth, ‘how did you all get on with the dead man? Was he well liked?’
A jangle of voices broke out at this point, all seeking to reassure him that Kris ‘Krishna’ Callender had been variously 'a great guy’, 'a hard worker, who always insisted on manning the market stall where we sell our produce, rather than following the rota as we used to’, 'a gentle, benevolent, deeply spiritual man’ and one who was ‘in touch with the earth’.
Whatever else he might have been, Kris Callender was certainly the latter now, Casey thought. But, having met Callender a number of times whilst visiting the smallholding, he suspected the man's right to join the queue for sainthood.
‘If he was murdered, it must have been an outsider that did it,’ Foxy Redfern insisted.
'I don't think, at this stage, that we can rely on that theory,’ Casey warned. ‘Though I agree that someone could have come in from outside.’ Their previously lax security made that a distinct possibility. It was the only aspect of this worrying situation that gave him hope. But even as he voiced the words he recalled the barking dogs: how likely was it that someone could approach the smallholding without the animals making a similar racket to the one that had heralded his arrival? Unless the mongrels had arrived after Callender's death. They were certainly new additions. He questioned them on this point; reluctantly, they admitted the dogs had arrived before Callender's death.
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