‘Maybe they hadn’t. This could all be in McGinley’s head.’
‘But even if it is, why the hell would McGinley agree to do it for someone he barely knows?’
‘I found out some other stuff about him,’ Millie said. ‘McGinley’s father died after a scuffle years ago at a football match. The other people involved were police officers. McGinley has a pathological hatred of the police.’ She paused. ‘Oh, and he’s dying from liver cancer,’ she added. ‘He’s got nothing to lose.’
Everything went quiet as those facts were digested.
‘It certainly explains a few things,’ said Griffith eventually, blowing out air. ‘If McGinley’s doing this as a favour, it means he doesn’t know you and is working on a description, or at best some kind of photograph. It would explain why we might have some cases of mistaken identity.’
‘That’s entirely possible,’ Mariner agreed. ‘If McGinley was looking for a man walking, say, in Plackett’s Wood, he could feasibly have mistaken Theo Ashton for me, especially from the back. There’s a big age difference, I know, but we’re of a similar height, same sort of hair colour.’
‘Could that investigator — what was his name, Hennessey? — have been working for McGinley?’ asked Sharp. ‘How long had he been in Caranwy?’
‘He was already established by the time I got here.’
‘He’d been here since the Saturday,’ said Griffith. ‘And then a day after you arrived, Theo Ashton was killed, right in the area where you were walking.’
‘When I came across him, Hennessey looked pretty shocked. I assumed it was because of the discovery of the body, but maybe it was seeing me alive and well.’
‘He would have found out that afternoon that you were staying at the hostel—’
‘—and a couple of days later Bryce is murdered there.’
‘We found a shortwave radio at the byre,’ said Griffith. ‘If it belonged to McGinley he’ll have realized pretty quickly that he’d fucked up.’
‘Or Hennessey communicated that to him,’ said Sharp.
‘So then he will have found out where I’m staying and tried to do the job properly.’
‘How does this fit with the SUV though?’ Griffith queried.
‘Crosby’s contacts are many and varied,’ said Mariner. ‘It would be like him to not just rely on one person.’
‘There’s a big difference in the MOs of all these attacks,’ Griffith pointed out.
‘They’re all knife attacks though,’ Mariner countered. ‘McGinley’s first victims, the ones personal to him, were shot, which would indicate he’s more comfortable with firearms. Maybe when he killed Theo Ashton it was the first time he’d used a knife. The attack smacks of desperation because he was unsure of his weapon and working out in the open, so needed to get it done quickly and thoroughly. He does it over and over to make sure of it. With Bryce he thinks he’s alone in the hostel and has got all night to allow Bryce to slowly bleed to death.’
‘It’s more of an assassination,’ Griffith seemed to agree, although the frown on his face seemed to belie his words.
Even though he barely knew the man, the expression was a familiar one to Mariner. Something wasn’t adding up. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘It’s just that, from what little is known about McGinley, it all sounds too organized, too resourceful. McGinley is small time; an inadequate petty criminal. Would he go to these lengths simply to earn the respect of someone like Frank Crosby?’
‘Going out in a blaze of glory?’ suggested Sharp. ‘If he wanted the notoriety, he’s certainly achieved that, if only in the short term.’
The discussion had come to its natural conclusion and DCI Sharp ended the conference call, on the undertaking from those in each locality that information would continue to be shared at intervals, or whenever fresh intelligence came to light.
In Wales, Mariner was considering spending some time exploring Llanerch, prior to returning to Caranwy, when Griffith unexpectedly said: ‘We’re just about to interview Willow about his organic produce business. Since you’re here, you might want to stop by the observation room?’ Mariner didn’t need to be asked twice.
In the interview suite, Nigel Weller was looking decidedly uncomfortable. Griffith didn’t pull any punches. He disclosed what had been learned through the soil analysis, keeping Mariner’s role out of it, then he asked a simple question: ‘If you are a vegetable grower, why do you import in bulk from the continent?’
Nigel Weller was a sensible man and knew when he had been rumbled. He sighed heavily. ‘I didn’t set out to con anyone,’ he said. ‘When I first moved out to Caranwy it was with every intention of growing and selling organically produced vegetables. On paper the fertilizer looked promising, but it just didn’t work. Oh, it altered the soil temperature a little but not enough, so then I invested in the poly tunnels, and finally the turbines to try heating them, but it was impossible to ensure that they were adequately insulated. And the plants needed warmth but they also needed more hours of sunlight than they were ever going to get realistically out here. I thought infra-red lamps might do the trick but they didn’t. After a couple of years it started to become clear that I was never going to be able to create the right conditions, least of all naturally. There had been some commercial interest in the product and I’d even attracted a couple of sponsors, but they started to become impatient, and what savings I had were dwindling. But somehow I couldn’t quite let go. I still had some ideas about the fertilizer, so I just needed to make some money to be able to continue the development a little longer. And by this time I’d become used to the life out here. It suited me and I didn’t want to lose it and that was quite apart from all the investment I’d made in the farm.
‘Then one day, by chance, I got chatting to a guy running a successful stall at one of the markets and he let me into a secret — that he supplemented his organic produce with non-organic. He said that if you were careful about how you did it, nobody could tell the difference. I hadn’t ever intended it to be long term; it was just to generate some extra income to keep us going until the fertilizer was perfected. He gave me his contact in Holland, and that was when I set up the scam.’
‘And was Theo Ashton planning to shop you?’
‘Theo?’ Weller seemed genuinely taken aback by the suggestion. ‘Of course not. He was like a son to me. He and Amber have been happy at the farm. Why would he have wanted to destroy what we’ve got?’
‘Perhaps he’d been offered something more enticing by Joe Hennessey,’ Griffith suggested.
‘The wildlife photographer? What’s he got to do with anything?’
‘Hennessey was a jack of all trades; part-photographer, but he was also a private investigator and a journalist,’ said Griffith. ‘Maybe this was a story he was going to sell to the papers.’
Weller leaned back in his chair. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Theo would not have sold us out under any circumstances. He and Amber have — had — too much to lose. I hold my hands up to deception, but if you think I had anything to do with the death of Theo Ashton, you are insane.’
Afterwards Griffith joined Mariner in the observation room. ‘So what now?’ asked Mariner.
‘We’ll turn him over to Trading Standards. It’s all we’ve got.’
‘And Theo Ashton?’
Griffith looked through the glass at Weller. ‘I don’t think he would have killed the lad. And the bottom line is that we have no evidence for it anyway.’
For Mariner the whole afternoon’s experience had been very like being back at work, so it felt strange when a squad car deposited him at the White Hart, returning him to the middle of his so-called holiday. He felt drained by the experience, but tomorrow he had the walk with Suzy to look forward to. He went to bed and slept soundly.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Day Eleven
On Friday morning Mariner got his stuff together and walked up to Gwennol at the appointed time. It was bitterly cold again, with
squalls of rain blowing in from angry clouds. The door to the MIU was open but there was much less activity going on up here now. It was always the same when the heat began to go out of an investigation, and Mariner didn’t envy Griffith the task that lay ahead. They’d gone from having no suspects to several, but none of them was straightforward and they all lacked any sound evidence. Climbing the wooden steps to Suzy’s flat he found the door open and her waiting for him, all ready in boots and walking gear.
They set off this time across the Gwennol estate, round the back of the Hall and away from the village, crossing a stone bridge on the far side of the valley that took them up on to the hillside, branching off along a narrow track that began to climb steeply. They kept up a steady pace and soon, aside from the wind rustling the trees, the only sound was that of their own breathing and the occasional rook cawing overhead. After walking for more than an hour, they crested the rocky outcrop of the hill and stopped to catch their breath for a moment.
‘Did your “some other time” girl like walking?’ Suzy asked suddenly.
Despite a sudden stitch of pain, the mere thought made Mariner smile. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said. ‘She could never get her head round the attraction of it. Her idea of a walk involved her credit cards — or, even better, my credit cards — and armfuls of designer shopping bags. I took her up Clent once, one of the little hills just outside Birmingham, on a beautiful, warm, sunny day, and she asked me what was the point, if all we were going to do was climb down again.’
‘So the two of you didn’t do any of this — walking holidays?’
‘No. We were only together a couple of years and holidays were one of the few things we ever argued about. To be honest it would probably always have been like that. Anna was always wanting to go somewhere and do things, which as far as I’m concerned, means visiting places that other people consider worth going to — by definition, those are the places I’d do anything to avoid.’ They’d done it once, he remembered; a long weekend in Florence in July, when among other things, Mariner was subjected to the torture of queuing for four hours in the baking sun, along with hundreds of other tourists, for the privilege of shuffling past Michelangelo’s David. When they finally got there, the statue didn’t look any more impressive to him in the flesh than the photographs he’d already seen in books. He made the mistake of saying so. It hadn’t been the most successful of weekends — apart from the sex, he thought ruefully.
Setting off again they began a descent into the valley running in parallel to the Vale of Caranwy, joining the course of a stream that cut a groove through the hillside. As the path flattened out, the sound of trickling water increased and they came into a hollow, alongside a twenty-foot limestone cliff, with a deep tarn at its base. ‘What do you think? Perfect, isn’t it?’ Suzy cried, scrambling over to the water’s edge.
‘Perfect for what?’ Mariner asked naively, noticing that she had already dumped her rucksack on the rocks and was fiddling with her watch.
‘A swim.’
‘What?’ Mariner thought he must have misheard her, even though as he watched, she was starting to remove her outer clothes.
‘A swim,’ she repeated. ‘Haven’t you ever done wild swimming?’
‘Not in bloody April,’ said Mariner. Walking over to the water’s edge, he squatted down and dipped his fingers into the green water. ‘It’s arctic.’ His voice came out as a squeak.
She sat down on a rock to take off her boots and gazed up at him, rolling her eyes. ‘Don’t be so pathetic. It’ll just be a quick dip. I thought you liked the outdoors.’
‘I do,’ said Mariner defensively. ‘But I also have an aversion to bronchial pneumonia. I haven’t brought a towel or anything.’
This time she openly laughed. ‘My God, you’re a wuss after all. Who’d have thought?’
Ordinarily Mariner never felt a need to prove himself to anyone, but for some reason that remark stung, so he put down his pack and started removing his clothes with the same enthusiasm he’d have had for a particularly invasive medical exam. ‘This is complete madness,’ he muttered, half to himself. ‘We’ll die of exposure.’
‘Rubbish,’ she shot back, stepping out of her very skimpy underwear. ‘It’s great for your circulation and your heart. The Scandinavians do it all the time.’
‘But they have the sense to follow it up with a hot tub,’ he grumbled. Her olive skin contrasted ridiculously with his own pasty white flesh; not that she’d have noticed. She was already wading into the icy water, shrieking with the cold, and as Mariner dropped his boxer shorts on to the pile he’d created, he saw her plunge into the water and swim strongly across the pond. Stepping gingerly into the water, his feet sliding on the slimy rocks, Mariner suppressed an anguished cry and the desperate urge to run back out again. No chance of that. She was paddling about underneath the cliff, where the rock shelved away. ‘Look, there’s a cave under here!’ she called, and disappeared momentarily.
Mariner watched, his limbs starting to throb with the cold, but she didn’t reappear. ‘Suzy?’ he called uncertainly. ‘Suzy!’ He started to thrash out across the pond, then suddenly she was there again, grinning broadly. ‘It’s a tunnel,’ she said. ‘It goes right into the mountain.’
‘There’s a whole network of them underneath these hills,’ Mariner said, his teeth chattering. ‘Can we get out now?’
They were in the water for no more than five minutes, which was about four minutes fifty-nine seconds more than was comfortable for Mariner, and as soon as he could, he was out again and pulling on his clothes.
‘There, wasn’t that exhilarating?’ Suzy said, her head popping through her thick sweater.
Now that it was over, Mariner had to admit that it had been. ‘Probably caught my death though,’ he complained.
‘Come here then, I’ll warm you up.’ Stepping over to him, she put her arms around him, rubbing them up and down his body. Mariner couldn’t resist. He leaned forward and kissed her, briefly on the lips, or at least that’s what he’d intended, but it was so good that he carried on, and then his arm was around her, drawing her in to him.
‘Well,’ Suzy said, when he finally broke the kiss. ‘That was unexpected.’ She looked at him. ‘How far is it back to Gwennol?’
‘Not far, if we take the shortest route,’ said Mariner.
‘All right then.’
Scrambling back down the path, they were making their way across to the estate, when they came across a small stone cottage set back behind a neat garden. ‘It must be the Reverend Aubrey’s,’ Mariner said, lowering his voice. ‘He used to be the local pastor but left the ministry in disgrace some years ago.’
‘What kind of disgrace?’
‘The kind of disgrace the clergy is renowned for lately.’
‘Looks like he’s still unpopular,’ Suzy observed. ‘Someone’s chucked wood stain all over his windows.’
She was right; although Elena had given Mariner the impression that things had died down, there was a transparent brown liquid splattered over the window panes, standing out against what were rather grimy net curtains. ‘Could have been there years,’ said Mariner. ‘An old guy living on his own, maybe he doesn’t clean his windows very often.’ He didn’t want to pry, but he walked the few feet into the garden and ran a finger down the glass to try and ascertain what the substance was. And that was when he realized it wasn’t on the outer window but on the inside, and that it was the staining of the curtains themselves that made it that odd translucent brown colour. ‘Wait here,’ he told Suzy firmly. Walking round to the back of the cottage he found the back door of the property an inch or so ajar. He pushed it gently and called out a cautious, ‘Hello?’ But as the door swung open, wafting out a cloying, metallic smell, Mariner knew that there would be no response.
‘What is it?’ Suzy had followed him around the side of the cottage.
‘It’s ugly,’ said Mariner. ‘Have you got your phone with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Carry on down to the estate and keep going until you can get a signal or to a landline, and call the police,’ he said. ‘Ask for Ryan Griffith if possible. That unfortunate habit of mine? It hasn’t gone away.’
Mariner didn’t enter the cottage but sat and waited on the grassy bank to one side. It was a long, cold wait and he was relieved to finally see a mud-spattered Land Rover bumping along the grassy track towards him. He let Griffith and Blaine put on their forensic suits and go into the cottage.
Griffith emerged a few minutes later and immediately lit up a cigarette, before coming came over to join Mariner. ‘It is the Reverend Aubrey,’ he said. ‘He’s been shot multiple times, including in the head. What you can see all over the windows, well, you can guess. Either he was sitting in his armchair when the killer got in, or he was made to sit there.’
‘How long ago?’ asked Mariner.
‘Hard to say exactly, of course, but a matter of days I’d say. It’s pretty gruesome. Scenes of crime are on their way.’
The two men sat in silence while Griffith smoked his cigarette. ‘We’ve had news about Joe Hennessey too,’ he said, at last. ‘The post-mortem has given us a ToD somewhere on Monday afternoon.’
‘Monday? So that’s before Bryce was killed,’ Mariner remarked.
‘May or may not be significant,’ said Griffith. ‘But it does start to undermine our idea about Hennessy being killed for incompetence. The other result we’ve had is from the waterproofs found at the byre. The blood all over them is definitely Theo Ashton’s, so it’s likely they were worn by his killer, but we’re pretty certain it wasn’t Glenn McGinley who’s been sleeping rough there.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ asked Mariner.
Griffith raised his cigarette. ‘McGinley’s a chain smoker, and there were no dog ends. I’m not sure that he’d have bothered to go round clearing up after himself.’
‘Probably not,’ conceded Mariner. ‘But someone has been hiding out there?’
Buried Lies (Reissue) Page 26
