The Dead of Winter

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘Maybe we’re reading too much into this,’ Rina said at last. ‘Tim, I’m sure I saw a list of shareholders somewhere?’

  ‘Yes, it’s . . . Ah, here it is.’ He skimmed down the list of names. ‘Well, what do you know?’

  ‘Anyone familiar?’

  ‘Yes, actually. Three names. The mysterious Professor Meehan – or at least I assume Mr S. Meehan is him. Then our friends David Franklin and Edwin Holmes. Edwin was part owner of this place.’

  Rina took the list from him and looked thoughtfully at it. Shareholders were listed: four of them, plus a company called Reality Enterprises for which they had no separate listing. She was willing to bet that many of the names would be on both lists.

  She frowned. ‘Look at the other name,’ she said. ‘Do you recognize it?’

  ‘Oh, my God.’ Joy’s eyes were wide. ‘Miss G. Wright. Could that be Grace Wright? But that’s—’

  ‘Impossible, or someone else with the same name,’ Rina said. ‘What on earth is going on?’

  NINETEEN

  Gail and David had dozed in front of the fire in the big room, Miriam not being happy about leaving them unobserved until she was sure they had fully recovered. By the time Rina and the others went back down, Gail had woken again and was looking better. It was clear, though, that she was worried about something and that David Franklin was not sympathetic.

  ‘I felt Simeon’s presence,’ she asserted. ‘I told everyone during the seance that I felt someone else, and I felt him again just before the car crashed. I’m sure of it. I think Simeon’s dead.’

  She was clearly agitated, and David Franklin was not helping by being so dismissive.

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone actually checked that he’d made it home?’ Viv asked. ‘He might have had an accident or something. I mean, with the weather being so bad.’

  ‘The weather was fine when he left,’ Robin pointed out.

  ‘You don’t actually believe her?’ David Franklin was annoyed now.

  ‘I’m keeping an open mind, just like you told us to,’ Viv retorted.

  ‘Has anyone heard from him?’ Rina asked.

  It seemed no one had.

  ‘We didn’t exactly part on the best of terms,’ Rav confessed. ‘He didn’t like the idea of Edwin’s ghost. He thought the project was doomed to failure.’

  ‘Why was that?’ Joy wanted to know.

  ‘Oh, as Rina pointed out, it was nigh on impossible to reconstruct what happened in 1872. Edwin was adamant he wanted to continue, and Simeon equally adamant it was a bad idea.’

  ‘Look –’ Mac sounded tired and irritated – ‘what’s the harm in calling his home and making sure he’s all right? I’d like to ask him a few questions, anyway.’

  ‘What about?’ Robin asked.

  ‘I’d like to know why Edwin was so adamant about continuing with this experiment and Professor Meehan so much against it.’

  ‘You think this experiment had something to do with Edwin’s death?’ David Franklin scoffed. ‘Get real, Inspector, or whatever you are; it was a thief, an opportunist. It was—’

  ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere,’ Robin said thoughtfully. ‘You’d have to be an odd kind of opportunist thief to trek across the fields in the snow, just on the off-chance, and then not steal anything.’

  He had a point, Rina thought, mentally kicking herself for not trying to discover sooner where the strange man she had seen had come from.

  ‘If the thief had arrived by car, wouldn’t we have heard it or seen tyre tracks or something? And it’s not exactly a quick getaway, is it? Not down a gated road,’ Rina said.

  Rina’s gaze met Mac’s, and she could see that he, too, was processing this train of thought through and reaching the same conclusion.

  ‘What other houses are near here?’ Mac asked.

  ‘Only the farm,’ Melissa said. ‘But the farmhouse is a good two or three miles away. Most of the land round here belongs to the estate. There’s just, like, a narrow spit of farmland running along that back boundary. He uses it for grazing; I think there’s some kind of covenant on the use of the land. There’s a lot of that kind of thing round here.’

  ‘Other buildings? Barns or anything?’

  She shrugged. ‘Estate cottages that used to be let to the estate workers. They are going to be renovated eventually.’

  She, too, sounded bone weary, Rina thought.

  Mac nodded. ‘Could someone give me Simeon’s number then?’ he said.

  Rav produced his mobile phone and began to scan through the entries.

  Rina drew back one of the heavy curtains and gazed out on to the white landscape. The sky should have been night black by now, but instead was a deep, heavy grey, bellied with snow clouds and oppressively low. Light flakes had begun to fall again, and something told her it would not be long before they grew much, much heavier and more numerous. Tomorrow the police would arrive, she told herself, if they could get through. Either way, they would have to venture out when it was light, see if they could find the barn or half renovated cottage where the man might have holed up.

  Had this stranger killed Edwin? That didn’t work, somehow, though Rina was not sure she could explain why.

  Mac returned looking oddly put out. ‘Simeon didn’t make it back home,’ he said. ‘I spoke to his son. None of them have seen or heard from him in over a month, long before he came here. In fact, they didn’t even know he was here. They reported him missing more than three weeks ago.’

  Silence as everyone absorbed this.

  ‘I know he was getting divorced,’ Rav said slowly. ‘We didn’t talk about it, but he mentioned that his marriage had broken down.’

  ‘I knew it.’ Gail seemed caught between horror and triumph.

  ‘You knew nothing,’ David Franklin said. ‘A vague feeling is not knowing.’

  It looked as though their dispute was going to flare again, and Rina, for one, didn’t think she could be bothered with it. ‘I understand that you and Simeon are both shareholders in this place,’ she said. ‘Edwin too. What will happen to his shares if he really is dead?’

  She saw Mac frowning at her, wondering what she had dug up that he hadn’t.

  A beat of silence, and then David Franklin shrugged. ‘What of it?’

  ‘You never told me that,’ Gail said.

  ‘I didn’t know either.’ This from Melissa.

  Interesting, Rina thought, that both women felt they should have been informed. ‘Apparently, there was one other individual shareholder,’ she added, ‘and a parent company of some kind? Reality Enterprises?’

  ‘Who is the other shareholder?’ Mac asked her.

  ‘Well, that’s the interesting thing. Miss G. Wright. Grace, perhaps?’

  ‘What?’ Gail looked from Rina to David. ‘I don’t understand. Edwin created Grace, he—’

  ‘Oh, he just borrowed the name,’ David Franklin said. ‘He said there’d be a better connection if the name sounded real, or something, I don’t know. Anyway, your point is?’

  Rina shrugged. ‘I just found it interesting, that’s all.’

  ‘I think we all do,’ Melissa said.

  ‘I told Edwin I thought Simeon was dead. What if—’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Gail. We all heard you tell him.’

  ‘Actually, some of us had gone up to bed before that.’ Until now, Jay had remained silent; merely observing.

  ‘Yes, well. It has no bearing, anyway,’ David said irritably.

  ‘Look, it’s late, I suggest we all get some food inside us,’ Melissa interrupted. She looked, Rina thought, particularly upset by this latest revelation, and Rina wondered why.

  ‘Do you need a hand?’

  ‘Thank you, no. I’m fine. Someone had best give Toby a call. Food will be just a few minutes.’

  Toby. Rina glanced round the room, wondering why she hadn’t noticed his absence earlier.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Tim said.

  Mac followed him, that unspoken
anxiety now permeating the room. They returned a few minutes later with odd news. ‘Toby’s gone,’ Mac said.

  TWENTY

  They had searched the house and then gone out with torches to look for Toby, investigated the outbuildings and looking for footprints in the snow, but there was no sign of him. His clothes were still in the room, but not his coat or gloves, and Viv noted that one of the small video cameras seemed to be missing.

  ‘What would he go out for?’ Viv stamped cold feet on the floor of the boot room. ‘It’s bloody freezing. Toby hates the snow.’

  ‘And what would he want to film?’ Robin was clearly really puzzled.

  ‘Whatever it was will have to wait until morning,’ Terry said practically. ‘We can’t see to search any further out, and it’s starting to snow really heavily again.’

  ‘But what if he’s hurt or . . .’

  They looked at one another, completing the sentence but not wanting to say anything aloud.

  ‘Would he have had his mobile?’ Terry asked.

  ‘In his pocket, probably, but you know what the signal’s like round here.’ Viv gnawed at her lip. ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Tell the local police and look again in the morning. Nothing else we can do,’ Terry said.

  Rina agreed, but a feeling of deep dread and even deeper sorrow had taken a hold of her. This would not turn out well, not for anyone.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Morning brought clearer weather, and the heavy machinery arrived, following in the tracks of the snow plough. Slowly, the rocks and mud were cleared.

  ‘How long now?’ Inspector Chandler shouted up to the digger driver.

  ‘About an hour, if we don’t hit any snags. I can see that car, by the way. On its side, it is. They were lucky.’

  Chandler nodded and went back to flapping his arms and stamping his feet. It was fiendishly cold, the temperature actually falling now the sky had cleared. Just what they needed, he thought: ice atop snow where the roads had not yet been cleared, and where it had, on top of the compacted skim of snow left behind on the tarmac. He had no illusions about the gritting lorries getting up this way; their energies would be focused on the main routes and town centres, and the rural areas would get what, if anything, was left.

  At least the two in the car had got themselves out; there had been three weather related deaths so far, and he had no doubt there would be more.

  He got on the phone and tried to call Aikensthorpe to let them know help was finally on the way. ‘No frigging signal.’

  The police constable with him, a local boy, just grinned. ‘You could try climbing a tree, sir.’

  ‘I’ve got a better idea, Constable. I could send you up the tree.’

  ‘My mum wouldn’t like that, sir, and you know what my mum is like when she doesn’t like something.’

  Chandler laughed. ‘Oh, I’d be the last person to upset Mrs Brown,’ he said. He’d known the lad – not that he was a lad now, he reminded himself – and his mum for more years than he cared to think about. ‘You been up there since the new lot took over?’

  ‘What, up to Aikensthorpe? No. Me sister applied for a job. They advertised for casual staff to help out with events, and she did an interview and they said they’d let her know when something come up, but—’ He shook his head. ‘She did a wedding, I think, just serving food, like. They had a massive marquee on the lawn, but she’s not been asked back. She don’t know anyone what has. And they were slow paying.’

  Chandler nodded. That chimed with what he’d heard. He tried the phone again, just in case, but the road had been cut between a sheer rock face on one side and a bank rising behind the hedge on the other, and every time he dialled the signal dropped from only just there to not at all.

  ‘Once we get past the bend the phones’ll work,’ the constable predicted.

  Chandler sighed and went to see how the digger was doing.

  The driver had been about right; it was just under the hour by the time he broke through the last section of mud, tipping the final load of clay and rock on to the verge. Here the rock face dropped down almost to road level and slowly gave way to scrubby woodland and deep gullies where the run-off from the winter rain was channelled off the road. Chandler followed the digger through the gap and went to check on the car before the digger driver prepared to nudge it over on to the verge, where it would lie until the recovery lorry could be brought up.

  Definitely no one inside. He glanced into the rear of the hatchback, making certain that no one had been thrown out of the passenger compartment and into the rear. He’d known it happen when a vehicle rolled.

  Satisfied that it was empty, he pulled open the driver’s door with some difficulty, checking for personal belongings that might need urgent retrieval and, more to the point, might actually be in reach. A mobile phone had got itself wedged beneath the passenger seat and, reaching in, Chandler managed to grab it. Out of habit, he slid it into an evidence bag before putting it into his pocket.

  Seeing nothing more of interest, he gave the signal for the digger to shove it over to the side of the road. The driver beckoned to him and then called to him to climb up into the cab.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘Take a gander down there. Looks like someone else crashed out on the bend.’

  Chandler looked. They would never have spotted it from the road, he realized. It needed the height of the cab for anyone to see into the narrow fissure that dropped down from the road.

  ‘He’s a long way down though,’ the digger driver said.

  Chandler agreed. Getting down from the cab, he called the constable and together they stomped through the thick snow to where the car now lay half buried. Chandler brushed snow from the windows and peered in. No one inside, that was a blessing, though there was a suitcase on the back seat.

  ‘Someone was planning on going somewhere,’ the constable commented. ‘Though you’d think they’d have put it in the boot.’

  Chandler nodded. ‘Doors are unlocked,’ he said. ‘It looks like someone parked up here and decided to walk. Maybe they thought about taking the case and then changed their minds. I’ll have a quick look for some ID; you uncover the number plate and we’ll call it in.’

  Chandler tugged at the driver’s door while Constable Brown went round to the rear of the car and began to excavate the number plate. The doors were frozen closed, and it took several minutes of persuasion to get them open. Chandler stuck his head inside and began to root in the glove compartment. Then he stopped. Something wasn’t right. He knew that smell. Faint though it was, he knew that smell.

  Withdrawing his head, he came round to the back of the vehicle and tried the boot. Again, the lock was frozen shut.

  ‘You got a lighter?’ he asked his constable.

  ‘Um, no. I don’t smoke.’

  ‘You do smoke. I’ve seen you sneak the odd one. Don’t worry, I won’t tell your mum.’

  Constable Brown produced the lighter, and they heated the lock. Cautiously, Chandler pressed the button and propped it open.

  ‘Christ!’ Brown jumped back.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Chandler said softly. The cold had dramatically slowed the rate of decomposition, but it couldn’t completely obliterate that faint whiff of death Chandler had detected. Once sniffed never forgotten, he thought grimly, looking at the dead man’s face and the massive gash between his eyes that had obliterated most of what had been his nose. One blow, so far as Chandler could tell. Hard and heavy and without hesitation, if he was any judge. One blow to kill the man. Whoever delivered it had either been dead lucky or had known exactly what he was doing. Beside the body was a towel and a plastic bag, and from the amount of blood on it, Chandler assumed it had, at some time, been wrapped around the head. Why bother taking it off again?

  Unless someone had wanted to check the man really was dead.

  Gently, Chandler lowered the lid of the boot and led Brown back up the slope. He hopped back up on to the cab. ‘Reckon I ca
n get a signal from up here?’

  ‘Try it. Find anything?’ asked the digger driver.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  ‘Damn. Reckon they hit the rocks?’

  ‘No,’ Chandler told him. ‘I don’t think he hit anything. In fact, I reckon you’d be more accurate if you said that something hit him.’

  It didn’t take long to identify the body; Professor Simeon Meehan still had his wallet and driving licence in his pockets, and the police computer soon turned up the information that he had been reported missing.

  But it also didn’t take long before Chandler knew the confusing fact that Professor Meehan had actually been at Aikensthorpe for much of that time.

  ‘We’ve got ourselves a real can of worms,’ Chandler muttered as he got off the phone to Mac. ‘Looks as though our roving inspector might actually be on to something.’ Truthfully, he hadn’t fully believed that the death reported at Aikensthorpe could be other than natural. In Chandler’s experience, the deaths of old men in their beds tended to have very normal explanations.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Mac was thoughtful as he returned to where everyone had gathered in the main hall. Today, any sense of camaraderie seemed to have vanished and the group had become factional. Not hostile to one another, just oddly tribal and protective of themselves. Rina and Joy sat with Tim on one side of the fireplace. Terry and Jay close by, but not quite belonging. Rav seemed to have joined forces with Robin and Viv and presently they were playing cards with Miriam, an activity Mac knew she didn’t really enjoy.

  Gail and Professor Franklin maintained an uneasy silence over by the window, near to one of the solid old cast-iron radiators. They could have moved to the fire, he thought, but since Rina’s challenge the day before, Franklin seemed to be avoiding her. His relationship with Gail puzzled Mac, though, like Rina, he guessed they must be having some kind of an affair. He still couldn’t figure out what might have drawn them together; they really didn’t seem to like one another.