Skeleton Plot

by J M Gregson

  ‘And when was that, Mr Simmons?’

  He grinned at them. ‘Nice try, Chief Superintendent. I could have incriminated myself there, couldn’t I? But only if I’d known the answer, of course. As it is, my reply is that I’ve no idea. I was going to ask you when and how that gruesome thing got there.’

  ‘“When” is about twenty years ago. “How” is what we’re trying to find out now.’

  ‘And I can’t help you with either. This shouldn’t take long.’ He gave them a smile which had little mirth and much challenge.

  ‘You were one of the men on the spot at the time. We haven’t so far discovered many of them.’

  Before Simmons could react, the door of the room opened and an attractive woman, probably in her mid-thirties, Hook thought, brought in a serving wagon which contained a large pot of tea and home-made scones, butter and jam. ‘You shouldn’t have bothered,’ said Lambert immediately, embarrassed not just by the fact that he had not been asked whether he required refreshment but by the extravagance of what was offered.

  ‘Sunday afternoon,’ said the woman with the wagon. ‘You’re working outside your working week and my husband is being quizzed outside his normal working hours. You both surely deserve a little pampering. I’m Lisa Simmons, by the way, Jim’s wife.’ A boy of around eight and a girl a couple of years younger tumbled into the room behind her in raucous pursuit, anxious to see who it was who was visiting at this hour of family relaxation. ‘And these two are Jamie and Ellie, anxious to view the famous detective and no doubt to impede his progress. Out, please, kids, and take your noise and your toys with you.’ The children obeyed, though not before the boy had shaken hands solemnly with John Lambert and the girl had introduced the toy dog she carried to Bert Hook.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said Jim Simmons, looking affectionately at the door his wife had closed securely to prevent further interruption. ‘Do help yourself to scones and jam.’ He poured milk and tea carefully into the cups his wife had laid out and handed them a little clumsily to his guests. His movements said that he was a man too active to be accustomed to tea and scones in the afternoon.

  Hook was much easier than Lambert in this situation. He bit into his scone appreciatively and said, ‘How long have you been married, Mr Simmons?’

  ‘Eleven years, now. I can’t believe how fast kids grow.’ With that entirely conventional sentiment, Simmons too bit into his scone, viewing it and its coating of home-made jam with approval.

  This was altogether too cosy for John Lambert, who had not come here to witness pleasant domesticity, but to pursue a serious criminal inquiry. He said tersely, ‘Were you in a serious relationship at the time when the corpse of the young woman was buried on your land?’

  ‘It was not my land twenty years ago. I believe that you have already spoken to Daniel Burrell, the man who owned the land and farmed here at that time. I’m sure he was able to tell you more than I shall be able to do.’

  So Burrell had rung him. Warned him, in fact. Why had he thought it necessary to do that? As if he read these thoughts, Simmons said, ‘He still takes an interest in me, old Daniel. Thinks I need looking after, I expect. Thinks I’m still eighteen, as I was when I first came to work for him twenty-five years ago. I appreciate his concern, even though I learned to look after myself a long time ago. But he was always good to me, was Dan. He had a son of his own, who wasn’t interested in farming and took a different course in life. I sometimes felt that I was like another, adopted son, because I took on the role on the farm which he had hoped his son would fulfil.’

  ‘And how did that manifest itself? I suspect that you already know that we visited Mr Burrell in the care home this morning. He told us virtually nothing about you and the way the two of you felt about each other.’

  ‘Did he? Well, that’s Dan, I suppose – it doesn’t surprise me. He’d let you form your own impressions, let me make my own way with you.’ He smiled affectionately. ‘I visit him regularly, you know. He still wants to know what goes on here, what changes I am making and whether I think they are successful.’

  ‘Do you own this farm now?’

  ‘Yes. I completed the payments five years ago. Not long before his wife died. Emily was very good to me too. I think she loved me.’ He made that daring claim without hesitation, without the embarrassment a sturdy English yeoman should show in declaring such things. He was plainly proud of being close to the Burrells, of being trusted and liked by them. Bert Hook thought he could understand that; having seen and liked the former proprietor of Lower Valley Farm that morning, he could only think that a man who had acquired his trust and friendship must be a man of some quality.

  Lambert apparently had no such thoughts. He said bluntly, ‘This place must have cost you a lot of money.’

  Hook thought Simmons might show the usual British outrage at being questioned about money matters – in his experience, many people were prepared to be surprisingly frank about sex, but regarded finance as sacred and intensely private. But this man spoke almost as though he had been prepared for the question. ‘Not as much as you’d think. The farmhouse is tied to the land. It is covenanted as an agricultural residence, so it can’t be sold as a private house. And small farms are cheap, because most people think they are on the way out. Salisbury Plain is full of huge factory farms. Herefordshire has a few idiots like me who think that we can still make a living from smaller units.’

  Lambert nodded, studying his man closely, looking at him directly and unblinkingly, in that way which often unnerved people who were used to conventional social interchange rather than police interrogation. He had a feeling that Simmons was happy to speak of anything which would divert him from the period when the corpse had been hastily interred on the land which he had been working at the time. He said brusquely, ‘Tell us about this place twenty years ago. Tell us about what you were doing then and who else was around these buildings then.’

  ‘The type of farming was not radically different from what I am doing today. The great changes in British agriculture had come about well before then.’

  ‘I don’t want a lecture on farming history or modern methods. What I need is the clearest picture you can give me of what was happening in this particular place at that particular time.’

  Jim Simmons looked at him steadily, measuring his opponent as clinically as he would have assessed the potential of an acre of land. ‘Dan Burrell was emphatically still in charge. You did things his way or you didn’t stay around for very long.’

  ‘You must have found that irksome.’

  ‘Not at all. I may have given you the impression that he was a reactionary. If so, I have done him an injustice. Daniel was very aware of tradition and he regarded himself as being in temporary charge of land which had fed people and provided employment for centuries. But he was open to new ideas. He knew that you couldn’t hold back progress, even if you found it uncomfortable. He believed that you learned to farm by being in daily touch with the land, but he also sent me off to agricultural college to learn about the wider world and the ideas which were going to shape farming in the next generation.’

  ‘You’re saying that he was open to argument?’

  Simmons smiled. ‘We had a few of those, in our time. You had to choose your moments, with Dan. But if you did and you spoke sense, he would listen.’

  Bert Hook said softly, ‘And from what you said earlier, Jim, you had Mrs Burrell on your side.’

  The farmer glanced sharply at him with this first use of his forename, but raised no objection to it. ‘Emily was always good to me. She always wanted me to have the farm, once she realized that her own boy wasn’t interested in it.’

  Hook nodded. ‘Even when you didn’t seem the most likely candidate to take over.’

  It was an intuitive stroke, the kind of thing he sometimes threw in unexpectedly; it stemmed more from his assessment of the individual in front of him than from any knowledge of the facts of the matter. And it worked on this occasion. S
immons apparently accepted that he had done some previous research, that he knew more than he actually did about the situation in this place twenty years or so ago. ‘You’re right there. It was Emily who made me feel that I could take this place on, who made me feel that I could organize myself and organize the finance and the labour I needed to take over this place from Daniel and make it a going concern. It took her at least ten years to do that.’

  ‘Because no one would have thought that you had that in you when you first came here, would they, Jim?’

  ‘No, they wouldn’t, and least of all me.’

  ‘So tell us about those early years, Jim.’

  Simmons looked at the two CID faces opposite him, the senior one grave and suspicious, the other expectant and encouraging. He wondered quite how he had got here, how he seemed now almost to be volunteering this account of himself as a young man which he would have preferred to keep hidden. ‘I was a bit wild, in those years. I was surprised Dan kept me on, at times.’

  ‘But you had Emily on your side. I suppose she spoke up for you, at critical moments.’

  ‘I’m sure she did. Neither she nor Dan acknowledged it, but I’m sure that it was Emily who kept me here, on one or two occasions. I’m not sure I’d keep a youngster on now, if he did some of the things I did then.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Yes. I was never in any danger of becoming an addict – I hadn’t the money, apart from anything else. But I dabbled and experimented, in the way stupid young men did and still do. One or two mornings I didn’t turn up on time for work. One or two others I wasn’t fit for work when I got there. You can’t have that kind of thing on a farm.’

  ‘Or anywhere else, Jim. People don’t keep their jobs for long, if they’re doing drugs.’

  He nodded. ‘I can see that. I only know farming.’

  ‘No doubt you got into fights as well.’

  Simmons smiled grimly. ‘One or two. A few bloodied noses and hurt pride. Nothing that got me into trouble with you lot.’

  Bert returned his smile. ‘No. We check criminal records before we speak to people, whenever we can. I expect there were girls as well.’ He didn’t mention boys or men. You had to ask about those as well in most situations nowadays. For the moment, he’d ignore that, in view of the reason why they were here and the evidence of a happy marriage which they’d glimpsed earlier.

  Simmons gave a brief nervous smile and snatched a glance at the door his wife had shut so firmly behind her. ‘There were, yes. I’d been in a care home from twelve to sixteen. I was still finding my way with girls when I came here.’

  Bert Hook was around the same age as the man he was questioning. But he felt almost avuncular as he said, ‘I was a Barnardo’s boy myself, Jim. I worked it out through sport rather than drugs. But I wasn’t much good with girls, for a long time.’

  Confession often prompted confession, in the right circumstances. It did that here. Simmons said, ‘I did all right with the girls. It didn’t do me much good. I got myself into a few scrapes with women. I tended to pick the easy ones rather than the ones who were best for me, when I was a young man. I was lucky to end up with Lisa.’

  Hook nodded. ‘And I was lucky to end up with my Eleanor. There’s an awful lot of luck in these things.’ He glanced at Lambert, but found that his chief was content to let him play his patient game. ‘We think this mystery girl who was killed and buried here at that time was a drug user, Jim.’

  ‘I knew nothing about her.’ His features were suddenly set in stone.

  ‘With respect, you don’t know that, Jim. You don’t know who she was, any more than we do at the moment. And you’ve just indicated that you associated with a variety of girls at that time in your life.’

  He smiled bitterly. ‘I like that term. “Associated with”. I took them to bed, whenever I could. No, that’s not correct. Most of them didn’t make it to bed. Most of them were up against a wall, or in the woods, in the summer.’

  ‘All this sounds pretty turbulent. You must have had arguments with some of them. Must have fallen out quite seriously, at times, I should think.’

  ‘I had a few rows, yes. Girls don’t take kindly to being ditched, do they? And I didn’t even know how to be tactful, in those days. I was a bastard at times. I’m sure I deserved the names they called me and the slaps across the face I got from time to time.’

  ‘And no doubt you retaliated also, from time to time. No doubt you hit back, as an impulsive young man.’

  ‘No! I never laid hands on a woman. I got out as fast as I could when they turned nasty, but I never hit back. Not with girls.’

  ‘Not even with a girl who was hooked on drugs? They can be very irrational, girls like that. Quite unreasonable.’

  ‘Look, I know what you’re about here because you’ve virtually told me. I didn’t kill a druggie or any other girl. And if I had, I wouldn’t have buried her here. Don’t shit on your own doorstep. That’s the expression, isn’t it?’

  Lambert came in now as he heard the man’s voice rising. He said calmly, ‘You might have had no alternative, if you wished to dispose of a body quickly. If you hadn’t meant to kill her but had hit her a little too hard with a blunt instrument, for example. In those circumstances, you’d have had to conceal the remains as swiftly as possible, which would probably have meant locally. The furthest point of the farmland might have seemed to you an excellent place to dispose of a corpse. After all, it’s taken around twenty years to expose the skeleton, and it might well have taken much longer.’

  Jim Simmons nodded slowly, accepting the logic of this. Then his face brightened. ‘But if I’d buried a body there, I wouldn’t have sold the land on, would I?’

  ‘Probably not. But our information is that you’d sold two other plots for handsome sums before you sold the neighbouring plot to the Jacksons, who were the last people to move in at the end of the building development. It would have been difficult to refuse what Joe Jackson was offering you for a fifth of an acre of pasture land, wouldn’t it? Everyone knew the sum was far more than the land was worth to you. And you’d already sold two similar plots for less than what Joe was offering. You couldn’t have refused his offer without exciting suspicion, which was the last thing you would have wished to do. And had those bones been lying just a fraction deeper, they would never have been disturbed. It was only because a young man was doing very enthusiastic double digging that he turned up the skull. You could say that you were very unlucky.’

  ‘No! You could say that the person who put that body there was very unlucky. I had nothing to do with that death and nothing to do with that burial.’

  Lambert stared at him for five long seconds, assessing the man as much as his statement. Then he said tersely, ‘Very well. You will understand that we cannot simply accept what you say at face value, in these circumstances. We need to establish the innocence of everyone who was around here at that time. We shall know many more details of the death in the next few days, and we may then need to question you again, Mr Simmons. In the meantime, we need the names from you of other people who were regularly around this farm twenty years or so ago. Particularly young men or women who might have associated with a girl who was around your age at that time.’

  ‘There aren’t any. Not that I can pinpoint for you. I’m no longer in touch with anyone who was around here at that time. My life has changed and so has theirs. They’re not around here any more.’

  ‘Nevertheless, we need to contact them and eliminate them from this inquiry. Give some thought to the matter, please. You will see that it is very much in your own interest to give us the names of people who may have been around then and who left the area shortly afterwards. They may have had good reason to leave quickly. Just as you have good reason to recall them and everything you can remember about them and deliver it to us. Here is my card. Ring this number at any time and someone will take the details of whatever you are able to tell us. Good day to you, Mr Simmons.’

  It was Hook
who drove the police Focus carefully down the track to the farm entrance and the lane beyond it. He had a sense that Lambert was planning to say something, but he had too much experience of the man to hurry him. The Chief Superintendent was too old now to change his ways, too respected by his team to be hurried.

  Eventually John Lambert said unexpectedly, ‘What did you think of the tea and the scones?’

  ‘I thought they were excellent. And more welcome for being unexpected.’

  ‘And carefully arranged. The man was showing us what a paragon of family life he is, with his pretty wife and his attractive children. It didn’t take you long to burrow into his wilder past, Bert – congratulations on your technique. It makes me wonder exactly what it is that Jim Simmons is trying to hide from us.’

  SIX

  ‘I’m sixty-eight now.’

  Very few women announced that information. Occasionally people who considered themselves very old boasted about their age and the miracle of their survival; otherwise, women in particular preferred to conceal their years.

  CID officers are normally expert in assessing ages. It is something which becomes second nature to them as they gather experience. Lambert would have put the age of this woman as a good ten years older than sixty-eight. If her statement was correct, she’d probably lived a difficult life.

  It was Detective Sergeant Ruth David who had brought her into Lambert’s office, and she wouldn’t have done that without good reason. Ruth David said, ‘It’s in connection with the Brenton Park case, sir. Mrs Grimshaw thinks she may be able to help us towards an identification of the human remains discovered there.’

  Lambert glanced from one to the other of the two very different female faces in front of him, which were united by their earnest appreciation of something of huge import. He said, ‘I’d like you to stay for this, DS David.’ Ruth’s dark hair was cut short and was glossy black, in contrast with the unkempt wisps of grey-white hair which peeped out from beneath the hat of the woman who now sat down opposite Lambert. DS David’s smooth oval face was very different from the lined and troubled one beside her.