‘Bloody hell!’ Michael said softly.
He took the dead boy’s wrist, forcing himself to touch the clammy skin. He could lift it, but there was definite resistance. He released it, then stood up and gazed around him. How the devil had the poor little tyke got here? There was no reason why Darren Stebbings should be walking across country. But there was a track over there, skirting the edge of the pasture. It ran across the landscape and joined the other track which ran down the edge of the woods. Darren might or might not have come that way. More to the point, someone else probably had. Michael had a spontaneous, father’s, thought. Thank God Bridget wasn’t staying at home this Easter. They’d been right to send her to Wales. Bridget could have been wandering about out here … This could have been his daughter.
Once that thought had left his mind, another entered it. Michael hesitated. This would put the finishing touch to it. A second death meant that the Jenners would almost certainly leave. For a mad moment, Michael toyed with the idea of moving the body, hiding it somewhere. A stupid idea, he told himself. It would turn up. Besides, this was pure selfishness. This was more important than the farm’s troubles.
He dug his mobile phone from the pocket of his quilted body-warmer and called the police. Then he rang Caroline and told her what had happened. She didn’t say much, only that he should watch out. The killer was long gone, he assured her. The boy was stone cold and stiffening. ‘You keep that door locked!’ he ordered.
‘It’s locked,’ came her quiet voice, its calm ruffled by worry and growing shock.
The news came as a sombre and unwelcome development to Markby and to Jess Campbell. Inevitably, the first thought of both of them was that they should have treated Darren’s disappearance with more urgency. It had rung alarm bells and they had tried to find him.
‘But not tried hard enough!’ said Markby grimly.
Now Jess was being driven to the scene by Steve Prescott. They drove in silence, Jess thinking furiously what this new death might mean.
Prescott spoke once to say, ‘If he died out here in the middle of nowhere, it’s no wonder we didn’t find the poor little bugger.’
Jess supposed that was Prescott’s attempt at consolation. He knew what she must be thinking. In a sense, he was right. To search miles of open land was a marathon task. In the case of any missing person, one began first with tracing his regular contacts and places he visited. No one had suggested that Darren, despite or perhaps because he lived in the country, spent his free time hiking up hill and down dale. At every opportunity he headed for Bamford and that was where they’d looked first.
They passed by the Stebbings’ cottage. As they reached the gates to Overvale House, a few metres further on, a figure lurched from behind the gate post and brought them to a halt by the simple process of standing in the middle of the drive in front of them. It was Stebbings himself, wild and hirsute as ever, waving his long arms up and down as usual, giving the impression that the arms were operated not by him, but by some unseen puppeteer.
‘Damn!’ said Jess.
They hadn’t contacted Stebbings yet. Their intention was to remove the body, once it had been photographed and the pathologist had seen it, and request Stebbings to come and make formal identification at the morgue. But that wasn’t to be so, it seemed.
Stebbings stumbled to the car and crouched by Jess’s window. She let it down.
‘What’s going on?’ he demanded hoarsely.‘I saw the police cars going up there.’ He pointed in the general direction of Overvale House. ‘Has it got anything to do with my boy? Have you found him?’
Jess took a difficult decision. ‘We’ve had a report of a body, Mr Stebbings. We don’t know for sure whose it might be.’ The identification by the farmer, Fossett, was probably right but they would still need that of a family member to be quite sure. ‘Why don’t you go home,’ Jess went on, ‘while we investigate it? I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I’ve anything to tell you. This might not be anything to do with Darren.’
She felt the foolishness of saying this, even as she spoke.
Stebbings, rightly, had no truck with it. ‘My boy’s missing. Now you’ve found a body. Who the hell should it be? I’m coming with you.’
He grasped the handle of the rear door. Prescott was out of the car in an instant and on his way to intercept him. Jess called out to stop him. Stebbings would certainly resist and there would be a regrettable scene. Things were already regrettable enough.
‘All right, Mr Stebbings, you can come with us. But please, do as we tell you. We’ll look at the body first and if we think it’s necessary—’
‘I’m coming with you!’ said Stebbings obstinately.
Prescott opened the rear door to allow Stebbings to get in. Unfortunately, while they had been concentrating on the man, they had failed to see his wife. She must have seen them drive past the cottage and had run out and followed, catching up with them at the gates. She presented an incongruous figure in her apron, her lank greying hair fixed in a row of pin curls across her brow. She said nothing, simply opened the other rear door and got in beside her husband.
‘No, Mrs Stebbings, I’m sorry,’ Jess exclaimed. ‘Your husband will come with us and he’ll—’
‘I’ll not be getting out,’ she said in a sullen, obstinate voice. ‘You’ll not get me out.’
Prescott, who had known it take three strapping constables to get one drunken female teenager into a police car, murmured, ‘It won’t be easy, ma’am, not unless her husband …’
‘Do you go on back home, Dorcas,’ ordered Stebbings.
‘No, Harry,’ she replied in the same obstinate tone.
Stebbings apparently recognized it. ‘She won’t go,’ he said flatly.
Jess heaved a sigh. ‘All right, Mrs Stebbings, but when we get there I must insist you remain in the car, is that understood?’
Michael Fossett had waited by the body, sitting on the ground with his arms resting on his bent knees. The dog lay on her stomach beside him. Watching the dead, thought Michael. It was an ancient custom, he’d heard, that the dead were not to be left alone. Overhead birds wheeled in the sky. Crows. They knew there was carrion below. It was as well he and Marge were here and had discovered the body so early in the day. Otherwise the crows would have found it first and he’d seen what crows could do to the carcass of a dead sheep. It was a wonder foxes hadn’t scented the body during the night. A fox has sharp teeth and isn’t fussy what he eats.
The first police officers to arrive came by way of the track which ran by the woods. They parked their car at the edge of the field and walked over it towards the waiting Michael, who rose to his feet. Madge stood up too.
‘His name is Darren Stebbings,’ Michael said by way of greeting as they reached him. Both of them were very young. They probably weren’t that much older than the dead youth. One of them looked queasy. ‘He’s stiffening up,’ Michael added. ‘He must have been lying there all night.’
The constables consulted together and he heard the words ‘missing person’. They phoned for back-up and soon all manner of people began to arrive. One of the constables took Michael aside and started to take a statement from him. He asked if he could leave but was asked to just stay a few minutes, because the inspector would be there shortly and might want to speak to him.
About ten minutes after that the inspector arrived and turned out to be a young woman with short red hair. She wasn’t alone. She had a burly sergeant with her and, worse, she had Harry Stebbings lurching along beside her. Both she and the sergeant looked put out and Michael guessed there had been some argument with Stebbings about this. Stebbings had won.
Michael felt a strange mixture of emotions, pity certainly, but also deep embarrassment and shame. Death ought to be a private matter. Here they all were standing around gawping at Stebbings’ boy as he lay there, looking young, vulnerable, unattractive and lifeless. Now they were staring at a father as the man first set sight on the body of his son. All
this ought to be done behind closed doors, decorously, the body neatly laid out, flowers and candles nearby. But that was sentimentality and this was raw life.
Stebbings stared down at his son in silence for a long moment then muttered, ‘Yes,’ and turned aside.
That was when the door of one of the police vehicles parked over by the woods opened and a woman got out. She began to run towards them, stumbling over the rough ground and uttering weird cries like seagulls make as they wheel in the air. To his horror, Michael recognized Dorcas Stebbings. Who on earth had brought her here? But probably, he realized, she had refused to be left behind.
She was near enough now to be seen clearly. She still wore her old-fashioned pinafore. Her hands, which she waved in the air, were oddly whitened and Michael guessed that this was caused by flour. She’d been baking when the news had come.
Two officers had moved to intercept her but she swept them aside. Both Harry and the woman inspector tried to catch at her but she eluded them, too. Her wild progress was inexorable, beyond any human interference. She had seen the body now and her voice rose even higher in a kind of squeal such as pigs make when being loaded up for the slaughterhouse. She flung herself at the body and they all rushed forwards to drag her away, but she had wrapped her arms round the stiff corpse and was trying to hold her child to her bosom as she must have done so many times when he was a toddler and had fallen and cried for comfort. But the body was cold and rigid in her arms.
‘Leave it be, Dorcas!’ Harry shouted at her and took her arm to drag her away.
‘Please, Mrs Stebbings,’ the woman inspector was pleading. ‘Please, you mustn’t touch …’
‘Not touch!’ Dorcas shrieked at her.‘Not touch my own child!’
They pulled her away and, as they did, she caught sight of Michael.
‘They’ve taken our children!’ she screeched at him. ‘They’ve taken Mr Jenner’s girl and they’ve taken my boy! Where’s your girl?’
‘She’s staying with her grandparents,’ Michael heard himself say.
She uttered a long moan. ‘You’ve still got your child. But they’ve taken mine! I’ve got nothing now!’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Michael muttered to the woman inspector. ‘Can’t I go now? I’ve made a statement. My wife’s alone at the house. I must get back. You know where to find me.’
The inspector said he could go. He set off as quickly as he could, turning his back to the grisly scene, Marge scurrying at his heels. But he was still able to hear those crazy cries from the distraught mother. He wanted to put his hands over his ears, blot them out, but it would be in vain.
Her mind has gone, he thought in frozen horror.
By the body, one of the constables who had first arrived on the scene approached Jess Campbell.
‘Wallace, ma’am, from Bamford station,’ he introduced himself. ‘We had a call out to a break-in this morning and while we were there, his – ’ Wallace indicated Darren – ‘his girlfriend turned up. She wanted to tell me something.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jess said later. ‘It should not have happened that way and I didn’t mean it to.’
She had been describing the scene by Darren’s dead body to Markby. He had listened quietly and without interrupting, but she could see the reproach in his face.
‘I know the body should have been removed to the morgue and then the father called there to make a positive ID. But they’d both seen the police car pass by their cottage earlier. They knew something was up. Stebbings was waiting by the gates to Overvale House and jumped out in front of my car. I had to admit there was a possibility we’d found his son and then he insisted on coming along. He seemed calm enough. I agreed. I hadn’t counted on the woman. She must have seen my car and come running out of her cottage. She came up while I was talking to her husband. She still had her apron on and her hands covered in flour. She just got in the car. I couldn’t order Prescott to drag her out.’ Jess’s voice was miserable.
‘No, it shouldn’t have happened that way,’ Markby agreed. ‘But sometimes events take over. Has a doctor seen Mrs Stebbings?’
‘Yes. He’s given her something. She – she just lost it completely. I suppose I should too, in her situation. To see her cradling that body, it was awful.’
‘Come on!’ Markby said briskly. ‘We see awful sights all the time in our job. I feel badly, too, because I’ve got the poor little blighter’s camera and he was so upset when I took it off him.’
‘What do you think he was planning?’ Jess asked. ‘We’ve spoken to Cherry Basset again. She insists that she only knows he was sure he knew a way of getting some money.’
‘Which we can bet was blackmail. I’d taken his camera and he wanted to buy a new one. He’d taken a photograph he knew was worth money. He went to someone and told whoever it was about it. That someone was the killer. The boy wasn’t the brightest. He wouldn’t think about that, only about the money.’
Jess had handled the discovery of Darren’s body badly. Dorcas Stebbings shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the grim scene. But would Darren have been lying dead there if Markby hadn’t taken his camera? It was something Markby would have to live with.
Aloud, he said, ‘Let’s concentrate on this computer of the boy’s.’
Darren’s computer and other photographic paraphernalia had been brought from his attic workroom to HQ to be looked at by an expert. The expert in question, a young Asian man, looked up as Markby and Jess came into the room.
‘Pretty straightforward,’ he said. ‘He stored several of the photographs he took with the digital camera on the computer’s hard drive and the rest on disk.’
‘Can we see them?’ Markby asked.
‘Sure, no problem.’
The images appeared one by one on the screen. Fiona Jenner in her bikini lounging by the pool. Fiona Jenner walking with her hands in her pockets and her long hair flying in the wind. Fiona riding one of the horses.
‘His father didn’t understand that the images could be stored like this,’ Jess mused. ‘Or he’d have ordered Darren to destroy them. He was keen on Fiona, wasn’t he?’
‘She was the nearest he could get to a celebrity,’ Markby said sadly.
The images flicked on. But now they were different. These hadn’t been taken at Overvale. They’d been taken, it seemed, in a pub car park. The pub itself could be seen in the background and was familiar.
‘That’s the Feathers!’ Markby said, excitement touching his voice. ‘Fiona went there at least once, we know that.’
There were several people in the frame. Most were young men and wore identical white T-shirts with some slogan on the breast.
‘A team,’ Markby said. ‘The darts team, arriving for the match. There was a darts match the evening Fiona was seen at the Feathers.’
Here was another frame showing the darts players but, this time, the home team with the pub’s name on their shirts. With them were a few women.
‘There’s Fiona!’ Jess said. She pointed at the screen. ‘Look, her body’s obscured by that other woman, but her face is clear. It’s Fiona Jenner! She must have gone there with someone on the home darts team.’
‘And that,’ said Markby, pointing at another figure, ‘is Ted Pritchard, from Rusticity. It could be coincidence. He drinks at the Feathers. It makes sense he belongs to their darts team. Or, he could have met Fiona at Overvale House,’ he added, ‘when he was delivering the garden furniture there.’
‘Got chatting to her and asked her out for a drink,’ Jess said. ‘Suggested she come along for the darts match?’
‘But why would she agree?’ Markby said thoughtfully. ‘Not for his company, we can be sure of that. Fiona wasn’t interested in male company other than Toby’s and he was a relative. I don’t suppose she was a darts fan, either. But there might have been something else linking them …’
As he spoke another picture appeared on the monitor screen. Markby recognized it as the track beside the woodland where he’d sp
oken to Harry Stebbings. A white van was parked on it and standing by the van, deep in conversation, were Ted Pritchard and Fiona Jenner.
‘That’s it!’ Markby snapped. ‘We need to talk to Ted Pritchard at once! Come on, we’ll drive down to Rusticity now!’
It was lunchtime and Markby called by the Feathers first. It was situated on the way from Regional HQ to the Watersmeet trading estate and they knew Ted sometimes drank there at lunchtime. But he wasn’t there today and Dolores Forbes hadn’t seen him. Her whole person quivering with curiosity she offered them a drink, on the house. They declined it. She looked half disappointed and half relieved. She wanted to know why they sought Ted Pritchard, but she didn’t believe in handing out free drinks as a matter of principle.
They drove on to the trading estate. At Rusticity they found Ted’s business partner, Steve Poole.
‘Ted’s lunch hour,’ said Steve, his pale gaze inquisitive. ‘What do you want him for?’
‘Just to check something,’ Markby said vaguely. ‘Where might he be?’
‘You could try the Feathers. He goes over there for a pint and a sandwich some days.’
‘We’ve already called in. He’s not there.’
Steve scratched his thinning hair. ‘Then he’s probably out on his bike.’
‘His bike?’
‘Oh, keen cyclist, is Ted.’ Steve nodded wisely. ‘Keeps himself fit that way. He’ll have gone home to collect his bike and cycle miles before he comes back here to work.’ Steve pointed down the road towards the open countryside beyond the trading estate. ‘He’ll be out there somewhere.’
Chapter Thirteen
Meredith and Toby had made better time on the return journey from Cornwall, leaving very early in the morning and arriving on the outskirts of Bamford at lunchtime. They were now heading for Overvale House so that Meredith could drop Toby there. As they travelled they had spent the time in urgent discussion as to what Jeremy Jenner was to be told.
Ann Granger Page 24
