Two Feet Under (Lindenshaw Mysteries Book 3)

by Charlie Cochrane

Robin nodded. “Right, well, you need to check whether she and Becky Bairstow have any connection.”

  “Already made a note to, sir.” Ben pointed—superfluously—at his pad.

  “Good.” Having given his constables a bollocking, Robin was pleased he hadn’t scared them all stiff in the process. “What more do we know?”

  “Not much,” Sarah responded. “It only came up because the officer who sent us Becky Bairstow’s dental records mentioned it. They’d considered Philippa Palmer as identification for their dead girl. The fact she had a degree in archaeology made them mention it to us.”

  “There are hundreds of women with degrees in archaeology. We’re back in the realm of coincidence.” Pru stared at the incident board. “And if she isn’t dead, she can’t have been buried at Culford.”

  Robin’s mobile phone began to ring, signalling a halt to proceedings. As soon as he saw who was calling, he mouthed, “The boss,” and went into his office, then shut the door behind him.

  “Chief Inspector Bright.” He tried to convey a tone both professional and friendly. “How are things, sir?”

  “Better for me than you, I guess.” Cowdrey’s usually asthmatic tones sounded clearer and healthier for his break. “No murderers on the loose here. Or if there are, I don’t have any responsibility for catching them.”

  “It must be heaven.” Once they’d dispensed with a few further pleasantries about his boss’s holiday, Robin could give the man an update on the case so far.

  “Sounds like you have it all under control. And you’ve had plenty of practice by now. Two years ago I might have felt the need to dash back, but I’m confident it’ll all be going well without me.”

  “Thanks, sir. Much appreciated.” Robin wished he could feel so positive.

  “I’ll be back home the day after tomorrow, unless you feel you need me before then.”

  “Your Fiona will kill me if I drag you back early.” One domestic drama with a colleague was enough to deal with. “If there’s a problem, I’ll let you know.”

  “Good. Anything else I should know about, or will it all keep?”

  Robin tossed a mental coin. Heads he’d leave reporting back about the less-than-brilliant Abbotston team until the boss was in the office once more, given that their underperformance was hardly a matter of urgency. Tails he’d give the boss a bit of a heads-up right now because he wanted the bloke to know what he’d be returning to. Tails won; if things blew up, then Cowdrey would have wanted to know as soon as the fuse might have been lit, even if it were only smouldering.

  “Just something bubbling with the team. Young Ben’s turning out to be a real star, and Sarah’s got potential to be one too, but the other two needed a rocket and I’ve been delivering it. You’d have thought they’d see this case as a chance to make their names, especially given the cloud this nick’s been under.”

  “Still resenting us? They’ll never forgive the Stanebridge yokels for solving their last murder case for them.”

  “They’ll bloody well have to learn how to.” Robin snorted. “And it’s not only that. I suspect somebody—may not have been one of my team directly—has been leaking to the media. I’ve spoken to them about it, and if I get wind of who’s involved, they’ll be speeding along the disciplinary route before their feet touch the ground.” Robin glanced out of his office window, but everybody appeared to be hard at work.

  “I’ve got your back on that if it’s needed. Maybe we haven’t chucked out all the bad apples.”

  “You could be right.”

  The call ended with a bit more chit-chat about Cowdrey’s holiday, after which Robin gave himself a few minutes of thinking time before opening the office door once more. Thirty seconds later, Pru appeared—a pair of very welcome coffees and some biscuits in hand—and no sooner had she got herself settled than Ben stuck his head through the door, with Sarah in tow.

  “Got a minute, sir?”

  “Yep. Take a pew if you can find one.”

  Ben looked uneasily over his shoulder, at his other colleagues, then lowered his voice. “They’ll probably think we’re trying to be teacher’s pets.”

  “Sod them if they do,” Sarah countered before making a point of shutting the door and addressing Robin and Pru. “We think some of the team took their feet off the gas. You know, when we believed the dead woman was Becky Bairstow.”

  Robin, who’d just about calmed down again about the media, felt his hackles rising once more. “Am I dreaming that I asked Alison to carry on the search?”

  “You’re not dreaming.” Ben, squirming, appeared torn between covering his colleague’s back and loyalty to the new regime.

  “Ben tried to nudge her about it. Yesterday,” Sarah confided.

  Pru sighed. Robin knew from experience that she’d not have let that sort of task slip if she’d been in the same position as Alison. “You had a hunch she’d not come up with the goods?”

  Ben shifted uneasily. “Maybe. I mean, there are a lot of missing-persons reports to get through.”

  “You’re too nice for your own good.” Robin shook his head. He’d let Cowdrey deal with Alison when he got back from his holiday; it was the kind of task the boss enjoyed.

  “He needs to be hard as nails, like you.” Pru grinned.

  “Right. Before this becomes a Robin Bright character-assassination session, I want to bat a few ideas back and forwards. Get some momentum again.” This was where Robin missed Anderson. He’d been great for brainstorming, even if some of his suggestions had been way off beam. Out of their interaction new ideas had tended to spring. Pru hadn’t yet demonstrated quite the same facility, although that might be due to the relative newness of their working relationship. “Back to the basics of the case. Why do you strip all the ID off a body?”

  “Because you want to delay identification so you can get as far away as possible before somebody twigs who it is.” Trust Pru to state one of the most obvious—but nonetheless valid—explanations. “Maybe only a day or two’s delay while the police put out a picture or a photofit might be crucial.”

  Sarah nodded. “And if you’re fairly confident the corpse won’t be found before nature does her bit in making a photo impossible and a photofit less accurate, that gives you further breathing space.”

  Robin, still haunted by the notion that something had likely been feeding on the newly dead girl’s face, pressed on. “If that’s the case here, the strategy’s probably worked. What else?”

  “Spite?” Ben suggested. “You know, murder not being enough. Maybe wanting to wipe away any trace of the person. Like you somehow claim their identity by stripping it from them.”

  “Then why not go the whole hog and take off the hands so you take the fingerprints away too?” Sarah asked.

  “Because you can’t actually eliminate someone’s identity entirely that way. Not in the age of DNA sequencing.” Ben shrugged. “And anyway, maybe the killer wasn’t that sadistic.”

  “Shame our dead woman hadn’t got a twin sister who was on the national database,” Pru said. “Then we’d have got somewhere.”

  “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Oh, what is it this time?” Irritated by the interruption, Robin grabbed the phone on his desk. “Hello? Ah, my favourite CSI.”

  Ben eased out of his chair. “Want us to go, sir?”

  “Hold on, Grace.” Robin put his hand over the mouthpiece. “No, you can all be in on this.” If it put the rest of the team’s noses even further out of joint, so be it. They needed to see how effort was rewarded, and they’d get updated in due course. “Sorry about that. Just making sure the children keep quiet while you’re talking.”

  “Give Pru my love.” Grace chuckled. “Okay. They’re working on a reconstruction of our lass’s face, but you won’t have it for a while. The doctor was right about postmortem changes. Some creature either dug into the grave and had a gnaw, or did so before she was reinterred. They seemed to have liked the nose.”

  “Steady on! You�
�ll be putting me off my snack.” Robin ruefully eyed his uneaten biscuits.

  Grace snorted. “Such a wimp. Anyway, all the evidence points to her having been stored in a garage, wrapped up in a carpet. Curious mixture of fibres, oil, and other chemicals on the clothes. Maybe one of our furry friends got in and had a nibble during that period. Cat or a rat or—”

  “I get the picture.” Robin shuddered. “Was she killed there?”

  “I can’t say. She was in the garage for only a short time—a few days maybe—before she was moved. Want all the technical bits about how I reached that conclusion?”

  “Might as well have all the works. I don’t think I can face a custard cream anytime soon. No chance she was wrapped in a rare type of carpet that only three people in England have bought?”

  “Not quite. It’s upper end of the range, though. Chinese wool. Not the sort of thing most of us would have offcuts of lurking in the garage to soak up a leak from the sump.”

  At last, something tangible. “True.”

  “Yeah. Not even in posh places like Lindenshaw. I’ll email everything over to you. Then you can go through the details when you’re not feeling so squeamish.”

  “Oh, haha. Thank you, Grace. Over and out.” Robin put down the phone, then gave his eagerly waiting listeners the low-down.

  “That carpet could be useful. Chase the money.” Pru tapped her notepad. “Not that we’ve come across anybody unusually well off yet, apart from my mate with his Mercedes.”

  “You don’t have to have won the lottery to buy a decent Chinese rug. And that doesn’t imply I’m making a connection to Becky Bairstow.” Robin rubbed his hands together. “While we’re in a brainstorming mood, want to look at why somebody moves a body? Apart from the fact it soon stinks to high heaven?”

  “I think you just answered your own question, sir.” Sarah stifled a snigger. “And you’d be constrained by rigor mortis, wouldn’t you? Easier to manoeuvre the body if you wait until it’s floppy. I wouldn’t want it hanging around my garage for too long.”

  Robin noted from the corner of his eye, and not without satisfaction, that Ben appeared a touch green round the gills, although the young constable still managed to contribute his thoughts. “He—or she—the murderer, I mean, doesn’t seem to have been that organised. Assuming it was premeditated. Wouldn’t they have planned a better way of getting rid of the body? Short and long term?”

  “You’d have thought so.” Robin nodded. “Perhaps it was simply an accident or self-defence and the culprit panicked. Hid the body in the nearest convenient place until they could work out what to do. It happens.” How many crimes hadn’t come to light because the culprit had executed some simple plan for disposing of the body? There were plenty of nice deep holes left in the countryside to stick a body down if you could transport it there, so why choose Culford?

  “If it was self-defence, why not report it straight away?” Pru’s question roused him from his thoughts.

  “Because people are stupid and illogical and prone to panic.” Robin picked up the custard cream and absent-mindedly nibbled a corner. Biscuits always made things better. “And once you’d made a decision not to report it immediately, the worse it would look if you didn’t report it until later. To the point you’d maybe not be able to report it at all.”

  “Is that what you think happened here, sir?” Sarah chipped in.

  Robin wagged a finger of the hand which wasn’t occupied with his biscuit. “Don’t go jumping to conclusions.”

  “I wonder if the murderer is kicking themselves,” Pru mused. “They might have assumed the body could have lain undetected at Culford for years, not knowing about the risk that the students would relocate their dig.”

  “Unless they wanted the body found there,” Ben pointed out, to snorts of disbelief from Pru and Sarah.

  “He’s got a valid point.” Robin flicked a biscuit crumb off his cuff. “Shallow grave, for a start, and the mosaic placed as though it was meant to signify something. Any news on that, by the way?”

  Sarah, glancing through the window, muttered, “Don’t hold your breath. Alison was supposed to follow that up too.”

  “You take that task over, then. It’ll be right up your street after you’ve gone with Pru to the archaeological society meeting tonight.” Robin clocked the delighted twinkle in Sarah’s eye at being given the new responsibilities. “Okay, how did they move the body from garage to site? Car? Van? Somebody must have spotted a ruddy great truck if it went down there.”

  Culford was down a road designed to take one car in each direction—and barely that—so anything much larger than a minibus would have attracted attention, surely. A coach might escape notice given the prevalence of school trips, but a large vehicle moving around at night? The police would have expected that to be reported, and they’d seen nothing of the sort in the statements.

  “What if the vehicle was driven up to the site during the day, when comings and goings are just routine? And then the body disposed of later that night?” Ben suggested. “And before anybody says one of the on-site staff would have noticed a vehicle left there overnight, it could have been done one of the days when the villa was shut.”

  Pru looked up from her notes. “Shut? I thought it was open every day bar Christmas and New Year?”

  “Normally, yes.” Ben opened a file and produced a piece of paper which he laid on the desk. “Do you remember the storms we had last July? They had to shut the villa for three days because they couldn’t guarantee safe access to visitors.”

  “Really?” Why had nobody mentioned that? Although given the problems in the area at the time—including a partially collapsed bridge on a trunk road and a landslip on the railway line which had caused transport chaos—minor problems at minor archaeological sites had probably escaped most people’s notice. Robin scanned the article, which had been screen-captured from the local newspaper website. “The dates could work out, just about. Somebody could have had that site to themselves for several hours.”

  Pru voiced what they all might have been thinking. “Especially if they looked like they had legitimate reason to be there.”

  “Yep.” Robin ran his finger around the picture on the page—a fuzzy image of Charlie Howarth that appeared to be linked to a video. “Let’s see what your smarmy mate has got to say about it.”

  Ben proved to be a better driver than Anderson, Robin not feeling the need to keep one hand clamped onto his seat as they negotiated the lane up to Culford villa. Howarth had suggested they meet at the council offices, but the police had insisted they wanted to be on-site.

  If Howarth’s expression of disappointment—hidden quickly, but not quickly enough—indicated he was upset at not seeing Pru, his cheery greeting was clearly an effort to show nothing was wrong.

  “Inspector! I see that your missing woman wasn’t who you thought she was.”

  Robin forced a smile. “We were pleased to find her alive and well and were able to eliminate her from our enquiries.”

  “Um, yes, indeed. How can I help you?” The offer, superficially cooperative, was made with such a smarmy smile that it stung worse than an insult.

  Robin introduced Ben, made a few pleasantries about how they’d hopefully soon be letting him have his site back, then opened the gate—the constable on duty having been stood down—and manoeuvred them towards the taped-off area where the body had been found. If it made Howarth uncomfortable, all the better.

  Robin got out his notepad, more for show than use. “Can you tell us why you didn’t mention that the villa was forced to shut at around the crucial time?”

  “Shut? Oh, yes. The storm. I thought you’d be aware of that. It was a big deal, having to disappoint so many people.”

  “A big deal for you, perhaps, but the police had plenty of other important matters to deal with then.” Ben evidently was as little satisfied with the response as Robin. “Didn’t you realise the date was significant?”

  “I’m afraid I never
connected the two, but—”

  Robin cut in. “Did you visit the site during that time?”

  “No. Well, yes, but only when we were about to reopen. I was on holiday with my family when everything happened.” Howarth smoothed his tie. “You can check.”

  “We will.” Although chances were the alibi would check out. Though it only counted as an alibi if they were sure that was the crucial period. “Becky Bairstow. Turns out she’s a friend of yours?”

  A wary tone replaced the cheery one. “Yes. Why?”

  “I was going to ask you that. Why the hell didn’t you tell us that you knew her when we linked her to the dead woman?”

  Howarth cast a glance over his shoulder, although there was nobody else on-site to overhear. Guilty reaction? “Can I speak confidentially?”

  Robin nodded.

  “I asked Becky to do me a favour, one that I didn’t want word getting around about.”

  “Infiltrating the local archaeology group?” Ben asked, earning himself a dirty look from Robin. Why lead the witness down that line? And was Robin imagining the fleeting expression of relief on Howarth’s smarmy face?

  “Yes. I didn’t think it was relevant to the case, seeing as none of the people involved have gone missing, have they?”

  “How can you know what is and isn’t relevant? Especially when the chaos she caused amongst that group happened around the same time our dead woman was killed?” Robin, losing patience, moved closer, forcing Howarth towards the crime scene.

  “I didn’t realise that when you interviewed me. I was in shock about what had happened here.”

  Valid point, but not one that reduced Robin’s desire to punch him. What was it about the bloke that made him so angry? A sudden recollection of one of the teachers at school, Mr. Brideman, who’d not quite connived at the bullying Robin suffered but who’d turned a blind eye to it, flashed through Robin’s mind. Howarth could have been his twin. Maybe Robin should hold back and let Ben lead on this interview, although would the constable be confident and experienced enough to ask the right questions at the right points?