“The woman? Irene Adler?” Pru’s flush revealed her immediate regret about making the quip, but Robin’s thoughts had gone down the same lines. God forbid there was some sort of Sherlock Holmes element to muddy the waters. The works of Arthur Conan Doyle produced their fair share of nutty enthusiasts.
“That’s not funny, Sergeant.” Tuckton drew himself up to his full five foot five, which was still three inches shorter than Pru and lost some of its effect as they were seated. “We were infiltrated, and I don’t use that word lightly, by an imposter. A female, and please note that I don’t say ‘lady’, member of the Cads and Scoundrels.”
“Cads and Scoundrels?”
“CAS. Culdover Archaeological Society.” Tuckton smirked at what he clearly thought was a brilliant play on words. Robin could think of stronger nouns for both C and S, but either the Culdover Detectorists thought they were being daring enough or Tuckton was bowdlerising the expression for Pru’s benefit. The quickly hidden grin on his sergeant’s face suggested she was having similar thoughts.
“You’d better tell us all about this incident.” Pru’s manner was at its most pacifying. “It could be important.”
Tuckton fluffed up like a gamecock at her interest. “We used to work closely together, CD and CAS, if you’re happy for me to use the acronyms.”
Robin nodded. Better them than the excruciating nicknames.
“There are many local sites still to be explored properly,” Tuckton continued, “with modern techniques, not just the villa itself. If only we didn’t have distractions—distractions like Lydia Oliver.”
“We’re listening.” Robin nodded; he’d been half expecting Tuckton to say The Woman was named Becky Bairstow, so he was now rapidly re-evaluating where the interview was going. There was clearly a flood of information Tuckton felt the need to discharge, so better to simply let that happen.
“She joined us last summer, just after we started having extra get-togethers away from the CAS. We had business we wanted to discuss that there never seemed to be the opportunity for at our joint meetings. Too many people wanted to squeeze the metal-detection side of things out. Said it wasn’t proper archaeology.” Tuckton shook his head. “Lydia was rather a breath of fresh air at first. Very up to date. Had some modern tweeter account called Trowelgirl or something.”
Robin noted the possible Twitter handle and smiled encouragingly.
“She wasn’t the world’s greatest detectorist, but I suppose I have to say she was a productive member of the society. Up to a point. I mean, she helped us get to grips with social media, but it was at a heavy price.”
Robin took a punt, based on a note in the witness’s voice and the look in his eye. “Was she pretty?”
“One might say so. In a rather flashy way.” The admission seemed to cost Tuckton a lot in terms of pride. The man was either making no effort to hide his feelings or was incapable of it; as a drama queen, he could have taught even Anderson a trick or two.
“You mentioned her productivity. Was it also in opening doors?” The comments Anderson had found—and the possible contents of some of the deleted ones—were making sense.
“It pains me to say so, but yes. She had contacts, or said she had contacts, at all sorts of places, like the university. We were hoping she’d use those connections to create some opportunities for us. She could charm”—Tuckton winced at the words—“the birds out of the trees. She certainly charmed us.”
“So what soured things?” Robin spoke sympathetically, appealing to the “us males against the monstrous regiment of women” side that evidently lay in Tuckton’s nature.
“Not only did none of these ‘mythical’ opportunities come to anything, it turned out she was a mole. For the Cads and Scoundrels. Sent to infiltrate our ranks and report back.”
“Report back on what?”
Tuckton drew himself up again, gaining a whole quarter of an inch in height. “Have I not conveyed to you the tensions there are between the two societies?”
“I’m beginning to get a good idea of that.” Tensions enough to commit murder, though? And could it be that Lydia Oliver, rather than Becky Bairstow, was the victim? “I’d be grateful if you could give us all the information you have on Lydia Oliver. We need to talk to her.”
“I’ll do my best. I have her application form at home—perhaps I could send you a copy?”
“If you could scan it and send us it by email, that would save time.” Robin noted, with pleasure, Tuckton’s fleeting look of horror at the notion of scanning a document.
“Application form for what, by the way?” Pru asked.
“Joining the detectorists’ society. We can’t let anyone just stroll in. Mind you,” he added conspiratorially, with an arch glance over his shoulder, “we’ve tightened up security no end since Mata Hari conned us.”
Robin, mind boggling at whether a prospective detectorist would now need to provide three character references before being allowed to join this merry band, simply nodded. He waited as Pru gave a contact email for Tuckton to use, and let her beat him to the sting-in-the-tail questions.
“Have the detectorists been involved at all up at Culford over the past year?”
“No. Much as we could add a lot to the process, we’ve been banned.”
“Not even unofficially?” Pru smiled winningly. “I mean, somebody must see the value of your input.”
Tuckton snorted. “Charlie Howarth from the council doesn’t. I wrote to him offering our help, but he dismissed us out of hand. At least he also turned down the CAS.”
“So you have no idea of who the woman in the grave is? Or how she got there?”
“No. If I did have an idea, I’d say. It’s not every day that a young woman goes missing, is it? I—” The colour drained from Tuckton’s face. “Lydia went off somewhere. Is there a chance the dead woman is her?”
“We don’t know who she is. That’s why we have to follow up every lead.”
“Good God.” If Tuckton wasn’t genuinely surprised, he was a consummate actor. “It never occurred to me. We thought she’d just . . .”
“Just what?”
Tuckton squirmed in his seat, clearly weighing up the relative merits of the truth and a lie. From the pained expression he wore, he appeared to have opted for the truth. “Just run off with one of the club members.” If he’d been a dyed-in-the-wool racist describing how his daughter had eloped with a member of the West Indies cricket team, he couldn’t have appeared more disgusted. “He’d been in charge of organising the Christmas dinner, so we had to cancel it.”
That cancellation appeared to be the biggest problem of all. Although the possible coincidence of dates between Lydia “running off” and the burial of their dead woman meant this had to be taken seriously.
“Was the bloke she ran off with married?”
“No, but he was going out with someone else. Sian. Nice girl. She used to be quite keen on archaeology, but after Lydia went off with her man, Jerry, she quit. She took up line dancing or samba or something,” he ended lamely.
Robin wondered whether he’d meant zumba rather than samba. He also wondered whether Sian’s new hobbies had included finishing off love rivals.
“Was Sian part of the group?” Pru asked.
“Not officially. She came along with Jerry a couple of times, but she didn’t say a lot. Quiet, unassuming type. As I said, a nice girl.” “Nice” seemed to be the pinnacle of praise so far as Tuckton was concerned.
“We’d better have a word with her. Can you get us her contact details? In fact,” Robin added, “can you give us the contacts for all your members? I assume you won’t be able to do the same for the CAS?”
“You assume correctly.” The impact of such curt words was lost; Tuckton’s voice no longer contained the edge of bluster. Whatever he’d said about The Woman, he was clearly concerned about her well-being. “Will you let me know? If it is her in the grave.”
Robin thought about answering with a terse, You�
�ll know soon enough, as it will be all over the news, but the detectorist’s reaction had touched him. He’d developed a bit of a nose for a villain—that facility had played a part in their last case when there’d turned out to be something rotten in the state of Abbotston—but nothing about Tuckton made him smell a rat. “We’ll be in contact, I promise. And I take it that you’ll make sure to let us know if there’s anything else you can think of that might link to this case, even if it’s the most bizarre rumour of goings-on up at the villa.”
“I will. I wish there were more I could tell you, perhaps to the discredit of the CAS, but there isn’t.”
And if Tuckton couldn’t find even that tiny bit of dirt to hurl, there was no point in continuing the interview.
Back at the station, Robin got his team to work on this new line of investigation—those of his officers who weren’t out trying to finish the last of the door-to-door enquiries, all of which had been drawing a blank. Now they had coincidence of gender and timing with the victim and a possible motive in the rivalry between the groups. But the faint streak of optimism about Lydia Oliver being the dead woman kept being dampened by the lack of a missing-persons report in that name, assuming the Abbotston team hadn’t been so negligent as to miss the obvious. Meanwhile Pru, who’d acquired a contact number for the student who’d done the dissertation and had the subsequent fallout with Howarth, got on the blower to her while Robin chased up the forensic team.
When his call ended—to little avail—Pru knocked on his door, then came in to plonk herself on the chair on the other side of Robin’s desk. “I’ve spoken to Ros Butler, the girl who did the dissertation on maximising the use of the Culford site.”
“I know who she is.” Robin was in no mood for pussyfooting about. “And?”
“And not a lot. She couldn’t shed any light on the dead woman and hadn’t noticed anything suspicious at the site. Apart from Charlie Howarth, of course.”
“She thinks he’s suspicious?” Robin liked the sound of that, especially if it was based on fact rather than instinct.
“She thinks he’s a smarmy, slimy git. Her words, not mine.” Pru grinned. “Sexist to boot. He wasn’t interested in any of her ideas about increasing profitability of the site, or similar sites, and part of that seemed to be because she was ‘just’ a girl.”
“We knew that already.”
“What we didn’t know was that she came up with a scheme for selling reproduction antiquities. You know, coins and jewellery and things. She’d done a fully costed commercial plan and reckoned that as a small business, it would create a regular income so long as the scheme was rolled out at shops over all the local sites, as well as on eBay and the like.”
Robin nodded appreciatively. “Seems eminently sensible. What was his problem with it?”
“He had a list of them, although Ros said they all were surmountable and it seemed like he was clutching at straws.” Pru consulted her notes. “Taking up staff time, the need for upfront investment in technology and training, blah blah. Ros reckoned that the admin staff on-site had plenty of time to spare and that investment needed would be minimal. Her take on it was that he didn’t like it because it wasn’t his idea and he couldn’t wangle a way to get the credit. Sounds like him,” she added with a snort.
It sounded odd, but was that simply because Howarth was a dinosaur? There was nothing to connect him yet to the dead woman—whether she was Becky or Lydia or whoever—and they couldn’t go down the route of investigating the bloke just because he had the sort of face you’d like to punch, although that late-evening visit to the villa needed explanation. Especially if Pryce had got back to them to say that Howarth’s car had been spotted on-site sometime during the previous summer, so within the broadest window for the body’s interment.
“Ros also reckons that Howarth tried to stop this dig happening. Said there were more important sites, ones that hadn’t been investigated at all, and if the university had the resources, they should throw them at those.”
That was interesting. “When was this?”
“I’m not sure. I asked her, but she didn’t know. It was a rumour going round the department. The people there aren’t keen on Howarth, either. Think he’s a jobsworth.”
“He may well be. I wonder if he wrote those letters to the paper?”
“Doubt it. Anonymous isn’t his style. Anyway, he’s up to something, even if I don’t know what,” Pru said with finality. “Blimey, when I think of all the times me and my pals were taken in by his crap.”
“Well, maybe—” Robin was interrupted by Ben knocking at the office door. “Yes?”
“Would you like the good news or the mixed news, sir?”
“I’d like people to stop arsing about. Sorry.” Robin held up his hand. “No call for that. Take a pew and tell me what you’ve got.”
Ben sat a touch gingerly, avoiding Robin’s gaze. “We’ve got the dental records for Becky Bairstow, so I sent them over to Grace.”
“That is good news.” Robin was pleased to see Ben look up and give him a cautious smile. “What’s the other bit?”
“I can’t find anything about this Lydia Oliver woman. Not yet. If you ask me—” Ben stopped, clearly worried that he was at risk of another tongue-lashing.
“I do ask you,” Robin encouraged him. “I always want to hear my team’s ideas.”
“So long as they’re not daft!” Pru chipped in over Ben’s shoulder.
“You can’t always tell if they’re daft, though, can you? Not at the time.” Robin didn’t want Ben or any of the other constables sitting on something that turned out to be vital, just because they were scared that their idea was too off beam. “Anyway, you should have heard Pru when she was first in the job. Gold medal in daftness.”
“I thought that was Anderson, sir.” Pru’s eyebrows shot up. “You can’t be as inventive as him, Ben.” She’d obviously taken the young constable under her wing, no doubt recognising in him the same qualities she possessed.
“Inventive but effective. He should go far. You all should,” Robin added. “You don’t want to find yourselves being career constables.”
“Like Lew—” Ben, flushing, clammed up.
“Like who? Come on.” Pru tapped her fingers together.
“Sorry, sir. I just don’t want to end up like Sergeant Lewington, on the front desk. I mean, he’s good at his job, but he could have done a lot better. I—”
Robin forestalled him with a wave of his hand. “I suggest if you want to make progress, first thing to learn is not to comment on your fellow officers. Unless you’re whistle-blowing.”
Ben, red to the ears, nodded. “Noted, sir. Sorry.”
“Apology accepted.” Robin sighed. Another example of shoddy Abbotston practice? No wonder the place was so low on morale. “I know you won’t do it again.”
“I won’t.” Ben swallowed hard, then brandished some paper. “Lydia Oliver. I think she might be a sock puppet, sir. Somebody creating an online identity that hides her own. It’s easy enough done if you’ve got several email addresses and a bit of nous.”
“Why would she do that, though?” Pru asked. “Was she trolling people?”
“Not that I can see. It’s just that she appears from nowhere.”
“And disappears equally rapidly? Sometime last summer or autumn?”
“About that.” Ben nodded.
“If she was a spy”—Robin rolled his eyes at the notion, but they had to consider it—“for the other side, then she might have wanted to hide her name. Makes you think about what sort of shenanigans we’ve stumbled on.”
“I might be able to help with that.” Ben, evidently growing in confidence again, waved a slip of paper. “I’ve been poking about online, and you know what it’s like. You click a link and then another . . .”
“You need to take care.” Pru wagged a finger. “You’ll see things you’ll never unsee. Or end up with a Russian bride. You didn’t in this case, I hope?”
B
en flapped his hand. “Leave off, will you? Russian girls aren’t my scene, anyway. I—”
“Sian!” Robin clicked his fingers, then jabbed them at his notes. “Sorry. You said Russian, Pru, which reminded me of the woman Lydia Oliver cuckolded.”
“Cuckolded?” Ben glanced at Pru, What the hell does that mean? writ large on his face.
“Had it away with her boyfriend,” Pru explained.
“You should have made him look it up for himself. Anyway,” Robin continued, “isn’t there a Sian who volunteers on the site? Do you think it’s the same one?”
“It’s a common enough name, but it could be,” Ben agreed.
“Tuckton said she’d gone off archaeology, though,” Pru pointed out.
“She may have done, and then gone back on it. Tuckton’s persona non grata up at Culford, so he probably wouldn’t know.” Robin turned to Ben. “Can you add that to your growing list of jobs? Or get someone else onto it.”
“Will do.” Ben made a note. “Now, what I found online . . .”
“I’m all ears.”
Ben took a deep breath. “Okay. Some bloke was blogging about the rivalries in archaeology and how daft they were when there were more important things to consider. He mentioned Culdover in passing, along with some other places, and though he didn’t point the finger at anybody in particular, he riled people. They thought he was taking the piss. You should have seen a few of the comments.”
“Any from Lydia Oliver?”
“Not that I could see. Tuckton had given his two penn’orth, though. Anyway, this guy with the blog is called Richard Agnew, and he’s quite an authority on Roman sites. He did a bit of work at Culford ages ago.”
“You think we should see him?”
Ben’s brows creased in thought. “Yeah, although it’s nothing other than a hunch based on one of Agnew’s replies to a comment. About everything not being rosy in the archaeological garden and the lure of filthy lucre. He does tend to what you’d call purple prose.”
Robin nodded, appreciating the constable’s erudition as well as his nous. It wouldn’t hurt to talk to Agnew if nothing else turned up, not least because it might help to scratch the itch he’d developed; there were dodgy goings-on at Culford, irrespective of the murder. “Okay. That’s good. Carry on with the digging around, and let me know if you turn up anything else even vaguely suspicious.”
Two Feet Under (Lindenshaw Mysteries Book 3) Page 7
