Untimely Graves

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘I’d better come straight down, then, I’m only at Kelsey Road,’ Cleo told her, before she’d considered her obligations, though she needn’t have worried about that. Sue had already made a start with the vacuum cleaner, and Sam having explained the situation to her, insisted that she could cope with what needed to be done on her own.

  ‘Of course you can,’ Dorrie clucked. ‘Just leave what you can’t manage, my dear, a bit of dust never hurt anyone. You go to your mother, Cleo, and tell her how sorry I am, especially for her, for he was a horrid man, as well I know.’ She paused. ‘I’ve met your mother, you know. I slipped in the snow last winter, going down the hill, sat right down on my coccyx and simply couldn’t get up. Not a soul came to help me up, except your mother. So kind! I’d thrown a snowball right across the street at one man and shouted yoo-hoo for help, but he took no notice. Your mother brought me home in her car and made me a cup of tea and a hot bottle, rang for the doctor and waited while he got here. No permanent damage done, thank goodness.’

  Highly diverted, despite her indignation at Dorrie’s plight, by a picture of her sitting in the snow throwing snowballs until rescued by Daphne, Cleo almost smiled. But yes, that did sound very like her mother.

  12

  Earlier the same morning, the men and women delegated to the enquiry were variously dispersed about the dedicated incident room at Milford Road Divisional Headquarters, waiting for Mayo. Waiting for Godot, it was beginning to seem like. He was late, which was unusual. Hating to be kept waiting himself, it was one of his virtues not to keep others waiting. People had found seats or perched on desks, windowsills, leaned against the walls. The air was thick with chat, banter and cigarette smoke, this last a permanent gripe for the non-smokers, who considered it an infringement of their rights which forced them into passive smoking. Abigail threw open a window before Mayo came in, hoping to forestall any abrasive comments from him. Looked at her watch, again.

  ‘Finish that Caramello, Scotty give us all a chance to hear what the super has to say when he gets here,’ ordered Kite irritably. He wished Mayo would get a move on. He was torn between the desire not to miss out on anything connected with these two major enquiries, and his appearance as an official witness for the prosecution in the case against Lord Spenderhill at Birmingham Crown Court, where he was due to start giving evidence in an hour or two. The hearing was expected to last some time, so the investigation here might even be over before he’d had a chance to get stuck into it. Story of his life.

  Unperturbed by the reprimand, DC Barry Scott, the station slob, amiably screwed the Caramello wrapper and threw it more or less at a waste bin, missing, while noisily sucking the last of the toffee from his teeth and washing it down with a loud slurp of coffee. Kite gave him a look, though chocolate bars were less offensive than some of the more pungent snacks he consumed, and much less so than his personal problem. Despite the look, the belch which followed was barely suppressed. Jenny Platt pointedly picked up the wrapper between finger and thumb and binned it.

  ‘You can be disgusting,’ she told him.

  ‘You should see me when I really try.’

  ‘Try? That’ll be the day!’

  ‘Watch it, Scotty!’ Farrar warned, meaning watch it in more ways than one. There was no room for passengers on Mayo’s team and Scotty had been pushing it for some time. Grown idle as well as incompetent, he was already a marked man. Few would be sorry to see him go.

  Farrar’s intervention gained him Kite’s approval. He hadn’t been among the advocates for Farrar being made up to acting sergeant, but since Carmody, the big Scouse sergeant, had landed himself for a long spell in hospital by being pushed spectacularly down three storeys of a fire escape, thereby leaving a desperate gap on the team, Farrar’s long sought-after promotion had been inevitable. And as his senior officer, Kite felt bound to support him, in public at any rate. Occasionally, he sensed that the lad was at least trying. And Kite had a lot of time for anyone who tried.

  Where the hell was Mayo?

  A look passed between Kite and Abigail; she nodded and decided to start without him. Immediately she began, the room became quiet, and she had the attention of everyone there. She had just outlined the case, then turned to the board behind her, where the usual montage of facts, names, dates, times, crimescene photographs was assembled, when Mayo came in, unsmiling and apologising for keeping everyone waiting. He waved a hand for Abigail to continue, took a seat to one side and sat listening, one hand cupping his elbow, the other covering his mouth.

  Near the top of the board was written the name of the victim, Charles Howard Wetherby, aged forty-four, and pinned underneath was a large photograph of him taken at some school function, very much alive, plus several less attractive ones taken after he was dead. Stills of the room where he was killed, diagrams plotting the position the killer must have taken, the distance he stood from the body, the pattern of blood splashes, a diagram of the estimated trajectory of the bullet, plus a computer-generated map on the wall showing the layout of the school and tracing all the possible means of entry into it, and entry into the Bursar’s office … all this surrounding the bland face of the man who was now dead.

  ‘I trust you’ve now all read your information sheets,’ Abigail went on, ‘so you don’t need to be told that Doc Ison estimates the time of death as not more than ten minutes or so before he was called, which was at one thirty.’

  At 12.08 precisely Trish, one of the two girls in the outer office, had set the recorded message giving the times the office would next be open, and departed with the other girl, Beverley; they’d been clock-watching because they’d wanted to catch the stall on the open market where they could buy reject designer knitwear, before everything was sold out. A minute later, Mrs Atkins had popped her head round the door and told Wetherby she was going to lunch. She’d then driven home for a quick snack and to prepare vegetables for the evening meal, and returned at half-past one. She had taken some papers into his office and found Wetherby dead.

  ‘Other people we need to speak to are these.’ Abigail indicated on the board the names of Wetherby’s colleagues on the administration and teaching staffs, with special attention to the name of John Riach, and additionally, Sam Leadbetter. After a moment’s thought, she picked up the marker and added Dorrie Lockett’s name to the board. ‘Most of you are familiar with this lady. She’s on the list because she went to the Bursar’s office around noon, too, seemingly to give him a piece of her mind.’ This generated some amusement among the troops, and she warned, ‘But before you get any ideas, he was seen alive after she left.’

  ‘All the same,’ Kite intervened thoughtfully, ‘until she got too old to cope with that sort of hassle, she used to work at Villiers House.’ He was referring to one of the women’s refuges in the town. ‘And I once saw her go for a drunken Irishman twice her size who was looking for his wife there. He didn’t know what had hit him.’

  ‘That’s a thought to bear in mind, unlikely suspect though she might seem,’ Abigail said. ‘Dorrie saw her home under threat – or at least herself as being persecuted. She knows enough about abused women to hate their abusers – plus, she’s a law unto herself.’ Privately, she thought Dorrie Lockett actually shooting Wetherby seemed, even so, an unlikely scenario.

  ‘So, there are the basic facts we have to work with,’ she concluded. ‘What we now need to find out is what his relations were like with his family, his colleagues, if he had any other known associates. Especially if any of them owns a gun or knows how to use one. As you know, a cartridge case was found at the scene. Ballistics say the weapon was a 9mm automatic, something like a Beretta, or a Walther PKK. Plus anything else you can pick up. You know the drill. Sergeant Farrar will issue the allocations. Mr Mayo?’

  He seemed worried, she thought, as he stood up to speak. Not outwardly apparent to anyone who knew him less well than she did, perhaps, but this murder, coming almost on top of the other, was putting a strain on everyone, and Mayo most of
all. Extra resources had been forthcoming, but not nearly enough. There would necessarily have to be some doubling up and this would put additional demands on men and women already disappointed by the lack of any success in getting anywhere at all with the previous murder. Nor were they likely to get any further, until they found out who the dead woman had been, yet no one had so far come forward to claim her as a missing relative, friend or partner. The inevitable conclusion was that she had been a stranger to the area, brought here from elsewhere – which made the question of the place where she’d been found an even more puzzling one.

  Mayo said, ‘All I want to say is that we need a result on this case, and I’m sure you’re all aware of why. But not at all costs. We need a safe conviction, but let me emphasise that I want it handled properly. None of us want this investigation to drag on – but don’t sacrifice thoroughness for speed.’

  Having exhorted everyone to get cracking and waste no more time, thanking them in advance for what he knew would be their best efforts, Mayo closed the meeting. ‘Give it your best, lads.’ Before leaving for his own office, he then spoke to his two inspectors, explaining why he’d been delayed.

  ‘I’ve just spent the last half-hour with the ACC, drawing up a statement for the press. There’ll be a conference tomorrow morning,’ he told them abruptly. ‘He’s not too happy, as you might imagine, with this latest shooting.’ Which must be the understatement of all time, Abigail thought, looking at him with sympathy. Sheering, the ACC, was not a patient man, perhaps understandably, being ultimately accountable for what had now become three outstanding, unsolved murders on his patch.

  An hour later, every man and woman having been made aware of their particular area of responsibility, the incident room had emptied. Kite brought two cups of coffee for himself and Abigail and perched companionably on her desk. The scratchiness between them after his return to plain clothes on his promotion to inspector had reached a fairly amiable truce. Kite wasn’t the introspective type and he didn’t care to probe too deeply on the reasons. It might have had something to do with the fact that Abigail’s departure was a more or less foregone conclusion.

  They’d barely drunk their coffee before Mayo buzzed. ‘My office, both you and Martin, pronto,’ he barked when Abigail answered.

  It wasn’t like Mayo to be so peremptory, not without apparent reason. ‘Jump to it, Martin. His Nibs is suddenly either in a mood or a big hurry.’

  Mayo motioned them to two chairs in front of his desk when they entered, and without saying anything further, slid across the surface what Abigail saw immediately was the pathologist’s report, which must have just come in. It ended up midway between the two of them. ‘You first,’ Kite said generously.

  Abigail read it, guessing now at the source of Mayo’s abruptness. Tension could take you like that, when you hardly dared to believe in something that indicated a break might suddenly be possible.

  The report was straightforward. A general description of the body. Results of the internal examination, with details of the condition and weights of the various organs, showing that he had been a man in previous good health. And most importantly followed the results of the external examination, giving a detailed description of the cerebral wound caused by the entry of the bullet, fired at close range from a small-calibre handgun. In-driven fragments of bone had resulted in irreversible damage to the brain, causing immediate death.

  But the rider accompanying the report was why Mayo had sent for them: the bullet which had been extracted from Wetherby’s brain had been identified as of the same make, model and calibre as the bullet which had killed the woman found in the River Kyne.

  Timpson-Ludgate had made no further comment, except to say that it had already been sent to the ballistics people for further examination and comparison with the first one. Every bullet retained the markings of the barrel it was fired from, every barrel had singular irregularities peculiar to itself and none other, therefore if it could be shown that the striations on the bullets were identical, it could safely be assumed they were fired from the same gun …

  ‘And I don’t need any funny remarks about first finding your gun,’ Mayo said, forestalling Kite before he’d time to open his mouth. He lapsed into a thoughtful silence, from which he eventually roused himself, reaching for the telephone and requesting Delia to put him through to someone called Geoff Blake in Forensic Ballistics.

  The resulting conversation, after an interchange of greetings, made as little sense as one-sided conversations usually did, except that it was very apparent a favour was being called in, and that Mayo would appreciate the results of the tests and comparisons of the two bullets extracted from the two victims being on his desk as soon as possible. It didn’t actually sound like a request for a favour: from here, it sounded half-way towards an order, but presumably Geoff Blake didn’t see it like that. He said something which evidently restored Mayo’s equilibrium and made him laugh as he put the phone down.

  He pushed himself away from the desk and paced about a bit with his hands in his pockets. ‘The press are going to have a bloody field day with this – three unexplained shootings in as many months!’

  ‘You don’t believe —’ Abigail began.

  ‘No, I don’t believe the Fermanagh business had anything to do with these last – but no way are these two cases going to follow that into the same limbo – not if I’ve anything to do with it. Forget Fermanagh, concentrate on this.’ He slapped a hand down on the path report. ‘We might start by having a look at something that cropped up yesterday.’ He told them about his conversation with George Atkins.

  ‘If George thinks there’s something fishy the chances are he’s right,’ Kite said when he’d finished, and Mayo nodded. Like himself, George believed in what he called his copper’s nose. Neither acknowledged hunches or intuition – except the sort gained through a lifetime’s experience. They weighed a notion, balanced what they knew of the facts against the possibilities, and came up with ideas.

  ‘And Reuben Bysouth’s reputation doesn’t exactly smell of violets,’ Kite added. ‘I remember him from when I first joined the force. If this old woman is as friendly with him as she seems to be, I suggest she’d bear watching, too.’

  ‘Right, but they’re not necessarily friends,’ Abigail pointed out. ‘Though you might need to call your neighbours that if they’re the only ones for miles. If she needed help when she was being flooded out, who else would she turn to?’

  ‘Fair enough. And George says Jared’s straight enough, at any rate … all the same, we’d better have a word with this Mrs Osborne, but check beforehand to see if she’s licensed to own a gun,’ Mayo advised, annoyingly stating the obvious.

  ‘If it was a gun Cleo Atkins saw,’ Kite said.

  ‘Oh, George thinks it was. He says Cleo wouldn’t make a mistake about a thing like that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she?’ Kite looked doubtful. ‘OK, but a gun wouldn’t be all that surprising. The old girl used to be a farmer’s wife and she’ll be used to having them around the place. Living out there at the back of beyond, maybe she thinks it a good idea to keep one handy.’

  ‘In a drawer?’ Abigail asked, frowning.

  ‘The ground floor had just been flooded, furniture and other stuff carted upstairs, I don’t suppose anybody bothered too much about what was put where, that’s why she’d got excited about it. Maybe it’s a relic of her husband’s – which she knows she isn’t entitled to keep, without a shotgun licence. Especially since it wasn’t locked up, as it should have been.’

  ‘We’re not talking shotguns, though. It’s a pistol we’re looking for – and if it was in the drawer, we’re not going to find it, now, are we, not after somebody’s seen it?’

  ‘Check, all the same,’ Mayo said tersely, bringing the discussion back to the point. ‘If only to eliminate … especially with this latest development. We’re looking for a gun that maybe killed both victims – which means whoever used it knew, or was targeting, them both.
So it’s important – and so is any possible connection Wetherby may have had with Kyneford. It wasn’t chance the woman was found where she was. Given the choice, there must be hundreds of better places to dump a body than where it was left. And don’t forget to check on the Bysouths at the pig farm. Grand job for one of you – a ride out, lovely breezy day like this, what more can you ask?’

  Kite, looking unusually spruce in his best dark suit, donned especially to impress the jury later that afternoon, looked pointedly at his watch and grinned beatifically.

  Abigail groaned. ‘Why do I always draw the short straw? Reuben Bysouth sounds a real sweetheart, another who’s been belting his wife around. I can’t wait. Never mind. I’ll take Jenny with me, but later this morning. I’d like to have a word with Cleo Atkins before I give myself the pleasure, and I have people to see at the school first, as well.’

  ‘Leave the Assistant Bursar to me,’ Mayo said. ‘Riach, isn’t it, John Riach?’

  He could never properly focus his mind on a case until he’d seen all the important witnesses at least once. Riach no doubt fell into this category, since he had worked alongside Wetherby for many years, and could almost certainly tell him as much about the Bursar as anyone. The more you knew about the victim, the closer you got to the killer was a basic rule to work by, but as yet no one had been able, or willing, to tell him just what sort of man Wetherby had been. While he didn’t seem to have been actively disliked – his wife and Sam Leadbetter apart, perhaps – nobody seemed to have cared for him overmuch. Certainly no one seemed particularly distressed at his demise. He’d led an apparently ordinary and uneventful life, no different in substance from many another man who kept the real state of his marriage and his domestic affairs to himself. So why had he been shot through the head? Murder didn’t normally happen without cause.

  Cleo had decided, after all, that there wasn’t much point in rushing down to see her father, now that she knew why he’d wanted to speak to her. It would only upset Val’s arrangements for MO and interrupt the unexpected run of work at her father’s office: if Daphne had gone in to work, it was unlikely that the discovery of her boss’s body had upset her too much. She rang George instead at ten, when Muriel had said he would be in, and he told her with a resigned sigh that going in to work was probably the best thing for Daphne … she’d no doubt taken charge and was organising everybody there, it would be good therapy as far as she was concerned.