by LJ Ross
“Aye, she’s got her feet under the table, all right,” Phillips chuckled. “Has us both wrapped around her little finger, that’s the truth of it.”
Ryan flashed his sergeant a smile.
“You and me both,” he said, and heaved a theatrical sigh. “I don’t know how we manage to get ourselves into these scrapes, Frank. We could have been living it up, out on the tiles every night…a pair of good-lookin’ stallions like us would have cleaned up at the Bigg Market on a Friday night.”
Phillips laughed, knowing fine well that Ryan had never been to the clubs in Newcastle’s legendary Bigg Market on a Friday night, or any other night.
He’d never lived…
“Aye, all very well for you, maybe. You’ve got half the women in CID still carrying a torch, not to mention Samantha, who’s still got that crush—”
Ryan was a bit embarrassed. “On me? I’m old enough to be her father.”
“Yeah, but you look like a bleedin’ superhero and she’s been watching all those Marvel films, hasn’t she? Every time your name comes up, it’s all, ‘Ryan’s so handsome’ and ‘Ryan’s so kind’…it’s enough to put me off my quinoa. Mind you, with the way you’re going, you’ll be looking more like Superman’s older, knackered brother, soon enough.”
“Flatterer,” Ryan said, deadpan.
Phillips laughed.
“Seriously, though, I can’t help noticing you’ve been burning the candle at both ends, lately, son. I know you’ve got Emma but—”
“It isn’t that,” Ryan interrupted him. “She’s five months old now and sleeps really well, except when she’s teething. Besides, we’ve had plenty of help from my parents.”
“What is it, then?” Phillips asked. “Operation Bertie?”
Ryan gave a brief nod.
“I know it’s been months now, but I feel it, here,” he said, rapping a knuckle against his chest. “This isn’t over yet and, until it is, I won’t rest.”
His words hung on the air as the landscape changed, and the car began to wind its way through the rolling countryside of the Howardian Hills, which undulated on either side of the road and were flanked by rich woodland, all tinged with a sprinkling of winter frost.
It might have been something from a postcard.
“Whoever killed this monk had an eye for window dressing,” Phillips murmured. “What was the name of the place, again?”
“Crayke College,” Ryan said. “Next turning on the left.”
Phillips spotted a collection of ancient stone buildings peeping through the trees and prepared to revert to ‘work mode’.
Before then, he had one final thing to say.
“You’re not imagining it,” Phillips said quietly. “I know, in our game, we’ve usually got things wrapped up quickly, then we’re on to the next adventure. This is harder, because we still don’t know who we’re dealing with, we only know they’re out there.”
“Morrison thinks I’m overreacting,” Ryan said. “She thinks I’m in the throes of sleep deprivation, and that new fatherhood has addled my brain.”
“Whereas, we both know, you’ve never been quite reet in the heed, as my old Da’ would say.”
Ryan laughed. “Probably true,” he admitted, feeling a little better than before.
Phillips looked out across the misty, snow-flecked meadows and then back at his friend.
“Anyway, all I want to tell you is that you’ll never be alone, lad. You’ve got all of us here, ready and willing to help.”
“Thanks, Frank. I might hold you to that.”
CHAPTER 10
It was a little after one-thirty when Ryan and Phillips drove through a set of impressive pillared stone gates, where they were met by a police constable from the North Yorkshire constabulary bearing a clipboard and the eager, stony-faced look of one who’d recently left the training academy.
“Sorry, there’s no entry to the College, today, unless you’re a parent—”
Ryan held out his warrant card for inspection. “DCI Ryan and DS Phillips, from Northumbria CID. Your SIO is expecting us.”
He wasn’t sure whether to feel gratified or concerned when the young man’s eyebrows shot into his gelled hairline.
“Right—sorry, chief inspector, I didn’t recognise you. Carry straight on, and I’ll radio DCI Patel to let her know you’re on your way.”
“You’re infamous,” Phillips whispered, from the corner of his mouth. “Maybe he’ll ask for your autograph.”
“Shut your pie ho—damn it, I can’t even insult you in the same way, since you’re not eating pies anymore,” Ryan grumbled.
“Salad hole doesn’t have the same ring to it,” Phillips agreed, smugly.
They followed a winding driveway towards the main entrance of Crayke College, which formed part of a much larger estate belonging to the adjoining monastery that extended to farms, orchards, playing fields and equestrian facilities, in addition to the main school buildings and boarding houses, which were large enough to resemble a small village. The school catered to children from the age of seven and, having attended a similar establishment from around that age, Ryan was struck forcibly by the strength of his own animosity—towards establishments of that kind, and, sadly, towards his own parents for having left him there.
“Bringing back a few memories?” Phillips asked, with his usual insight.
Ryan nodded, but said nothing more as they crawled along the driveway, his eyes scanning either side to gauge the terrain.
“Must be hundreds of acres, here,” he said eventually. “Plenty of ways for somebody to gain access without anybody noticing.”
Phillips made a rumbling sound of agreement.
“There’s a security lodge, back there, but there’s miles of perimeter wall with a place like this,” he said. “Easy enough to hop over it, if you know how to avoid the cameras.”
“Exactly. Not counting the river and any other gated entry points.”
They rounded a bend in the driveway and had their first glimpse of Crayke College. It was a majestic sight, by any standards: the gilded edges of its clocktower shimmered in the early afternoon sunlight, while its patrician architecture sprawled in symmetrical columns made of warm, finely-honed sandstone.
“What a dump!” Phillips joked. “Wonder what the upkeep is, on a place like this.”
Ryan was lost for words. As it happened, he had a very good idea of what the running costs were for a stately home the size of Crayke College. Whilst he’d never made any secret of his upbringing, which had been very privileged, neither was he in the habit of broadcasting it. He’d always preferred to be judged on his own merits as a person rather than on the trappings of his family’s wealth, but he was no hypocrite. Thanks to an accident of birth, he’d enjoyed advantages other children hadn’t. Others might have mentioned that personal qualities of integrity and dedication might also have played their part, but Ryan knew there had been inequality of opportunity, even if he hadn’t asked for it.
His decision to lead a different kind of life than the one his father had mapped out for him was one of many contentious issues that divided the two men, and it was only in recent times that they had begun to rebuild their fractured relationship. Charles Ryan could not understand why his son would wish to reject his birthright, while Ryan could not begin to imagine a life spent within the echoing walls of his childhood home, playing Lord of the Manor whilst others survived on the bare minimum. He’d used a generous inheritance from his grandmother to fund several charitable ventures, which were managed by others to redistribute money he plainly didn’t need. Aside from Anna, Phillips was one of only a handful of people who’d ever visited Ryan’s family home in Devon—even then, only to attend his sister’s funeral at the chapel on the Finley-Ryan estate. However, Phillips knew nothing about Ryan’s other philanthropic ventures, and he would have been embarrassed to speak of it.
“It takes hundreds of thousands a year,” Ryan said simply, and left it at that.
&nb
sp; Phillips gave a long whistle.
“Think I’ll stick to my campervan,” he said. “Low overheads, for one thing, and you can go wherever the wind takes you.”
There was a second’s pause, then Ryan began to laugh—not at Phillips, but at himself. There were all kinds of riches, he thought, but some things were priceless.
“Did I miss something?”
“You haven’t missed a thing, Frank,” he said, warmly. “Not a damn thing.”
* * *
When they approached the front entrance, which consisted of a large, circular gravel driveway in front of a pillared portico, they spotted several police vehicles parked off to one side. Assuming correctly that the local police were keeping the gravelled area clear for forensic analysis, Ryan followed their example and pulled up alongside the others.
Spotting their arrival, a woman in a plain black trouser suit peeled away from a group of police and forensics staff and crunched across the gravel to meet them.
“DCI Ryan? I’m DCI Dina Patel,” she said, after he’d unfolded himself from the car. “Glad you could make it down.”
Patel couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, and Ryan found himself stooping slightly so as not to loom over her diminutive height. She wore a thick winter coat over her suit and, as the air began to penetrate, he decided she definitely had the right idea.
“Thanks for reaching out to us,” he replied, shaking her hand. “This is Detective Sergeant Frank Phillips.”
Patel shook his hand, too, and then gestured to the building at her back.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” she remarked.
“Not bad,” Ryan agreed, opening the boot of the car to retrieve his ski jacket. “I hear they’ve had some trouble, here, lately.”
“Bad business,” she muttered, and looked out across the lawns to clear her head of the images she’d seen that day and would likely take home with her, later that night. “As I said on the phone, we got a call from the headmaster around nine o’clock this morning to report a murder. Control dispatched a couple of first responders to the scene, who were here by twenty-past, at the latest. They took one look at the scene and called in the cavalry.”
Her throat worked, as if she was still fighting nausea.
“Gets to you sometimes, doesn’t it?” Phillips sympathised. “Thirty years in the business and it still turns my stomach.”
She gave a brief nod, then seemed to pull herself together.
“Worse I’ve seen in a long while, and I’ve got fifteen years under my belt,” she told them. “The man was tortured, possibly for hours, and aside from the Faber case you had a few months ago, it’s the only one of its kind we’ve seen in these parts for a good, long while. That’s what prompted me to call you—I thought there might be a link.”
“It’s appreciated,” Ryan said, and meant it. Not all Major Crimes Units were as cooperative, nor were Senior Investigating Officers always as communicative as Patel appeared to be.
She nodded, rubbing her hands together for warmth.
“It benefits both of us to know if there’s any connection,” she said. “It makes sense to share what information we have, and perhaps you can tell me if there are any facets of the killing that strike a chord with what you’ve seen before.”
“We’ll help however we can,” Ryan said, carefully.
“All right, then. Let’s walk and talk.”
Patel led them towards a narrow pathway running behind the sports hall, which bore a pretty, hand-painted sign marked ‘ORCHARD & CIDER MILL’.
“Vic’s name was Jacob Jamieson—or Father Jacob, as he was known around these parts,” she said. “Born in 1968, he’d been a monk for the past twenty years. Prior to that, he worked as a history teacher.”
Patel raised a hand to one of her team, who passed them on the way.
“From what we can gather, Father Jacob was well respected in the community here, and well-liked by the staff and pupils. He was housemaster of one of the larger boarding houses, named after St. Cuthbert,” she said, pausing to point towards a two-storey, stone-built edifice on the far side of the sports hall. “It’s that one over there.”
“St. Cuthbert?” Ryan asked.
“Yes, funny for that name to crop up, after what happened in Durham,” she remarked. “Actually, before he became a monk, I’m told Father Jacob was an authority on the life and works of St. Cuthbert, and it seems that he was able to maintain his interest as part of his monastic occupation.”
Ryan and Phillips exchanged a meaningful glance.
“Really? I suppose it’s not uncommon in Benedictine circles,” Ryan said. “Cuthbert is a major saint, particularly in this part of the world.”
“I wouldn’t know much about it—wrong religion,” she said, with a smile. “But we’ll do a full dive into his background when the preliminaries are underway.”
Ryan nodded. “What are the circumstances?” he asked, bringing their discussion back around to brass tacks. “You didn’t go into too much detail, over the phone.”
Patel gave him a watery smile. “It was still pretty fresh, when I rang you,” she explained. “As far as we can gather, Father Jacob went missing from St. Cuthbert’s boarding house while the boys were enjoying their weekly Sunday Movie Night over in the main school hall.”
“So, he was left alone in the boarding house?”
“As far as we know—yes. My sergeant’s trying to get his hands on any available CCTV footage, so we can check that against the statements we’ve had from the other staff at the school, as well as the monks who reside in the abbey. The problem is, the list of potentials isn’t limited to people on school grounds,” she said. “They publish the school timetable online, including when there’s a movie night, so anybody could feasibly have planned the right time to pay a visit.”
“What about the kids?” Phillips asked.
Much as Patel hated to think any child could have perpetrated so heinous a crime, she had to consider the possibility.
“Them too,” she said, bleakly. “We’re coming to this with an open mind.”
They reached the edge of the treeline, where a natural opening led through to a meadow, inside which an enormous apple orchard had been planted.
“This way,” she said, taking care to use the plastic walkway that had been laid out by forensic staff, rather than stomping over the soft turf as they meandered through the bare trees. “The abbey owns the orchard, and the monks have a cottage industry making their own cider from the apples. In the season, it’s full of people, including external visitors who can tour the orchards. At this time of year, it’s deserted. Father Jacob was found in the cider mill at around half past eight this morning.”
“He didn’t die at the boarding house?” Ryan queried.
“Highly unlikely,” she said. “You’ll see what I mean, soon enough. How he came to be in the mill is anybody’s business, but we’ve found tracks leading from the back of St. Cuthbert’s House to the sports hall that suggest he might have been running towards the main building. We found drag marks and some evidence of minor blood loss, where the pathway forks.”
“Where the perp caught him, before he could call out for help?” Ryan wondered.
“It would fit,” she agreed. “The forensics team have a job on their hands to cover this kind of area—they’ll be here for days. Then, there’s the problem of the dog prints.”
Both men frowned in confusion.
“There’s a dog?”
“There’s a pack of them,” she said. “The college keeps its own hounds—for farming and grousing purposes, naturally.”
Another bone of contention with his father, Ryan thought sadly. He, who had grown up on the land and was a qualified firearms specialist, didn’t like to kill another living thing—whereas his father had been raised to manage the land and, having served in the military, took a different view of the matter.
They tended to avoid any discussion of politics, as a general rule.
&nb
sp; “When they couldn’t find Father Jacob, they brought in the Captain of Beagling and his best sniffer dog,” Patel was saying.
Ryan frowned.
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me that, when they thought Father Jacob was missing, rather than calling in the police they brought in one of their pack dogs?”
Patel wasn’t overjoyed about it herself.
“Destroying trace evidence, in the process. The dog scrambled all over the route Father Jacob took last night, not to mention the footprints of everyone who trampled after him. If they’d told us sooner, we could have used our own trained dogs, if need be.”
“It’s a self-contained community here,” Phillips pointed out. “Places like this tend to close ranks, and they like to run things their own way, without outside interference.”
“You mean, the kind of people who believe they’re answerable to a higher power, rather than to man-made justice?” Ryan wondered aloud.
“Maybe,” Phillips nodded, thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s exactly the kind of place this is.”
CHAPTER 11
There should be a word for it, Ryan thought.
A word was needed to describe the unique emotion a murder detective experienced when they looked upon the decaying carcass of what had once been a living, breathing person. It was another kind of privilege, he thought, because only a handful of people would see the remains of Father Jacob Jamieson in such a compromised, vulnerable state; only they would know how to treat those remains with respect and care—which mattered, whether or not the person who’d once inhabited that body turned out to have been good or bad.
Sadness, disgust, nausea, impotence…
Ryan felt them all, yet none of those words was adequate to describe the whole, raw experience. He, and every other murder detective, forensics officer, mortician and pathologist were the ferrymen, who carried the dead to their place of final rest.
At times, the burden weighed heavily.
Ryan stood alongside Phillips and Patel inside the doorway of the cider mill, which was protected from the elements by a large forensics tent that billowed in the breeze. As the air whipped through the cracks in its material, they were afforded an occasional reprieve from the ripening aroma of decomposing flesh and dried blood, which mingled with the lingering scent of rotting apples that clung to the walls of the mill and inside their noses.
