Making A Killing (The Romney and Marsh Files Book 2)

by Oliver Tidy

  ‘How could you see them?’

  ‘We couldn’t, they was carrying a torch. They waited there for a bit and then we could see someone else coming, they had a torch too. I was crapping it then. I thought we’d been had in a pincer movement, you know? We soon realised they wasn’t interested in us and if you can afford a car and petrol you don’t have to go looking in ponds for your golf balls. There’s nothing else out here. I thought they might be out here dogging or something.’ Romney was glad that the youth couldn’t see his appalled expression that he should be so familiar and blasé with the concept. ‘So we crept up a bit closer. It was exciting really. I could hear it was a man and a woman, but I wasn’t close enough to understand what they was saying. They was soon arguing though. The bloke was shouting at her and she was shouting back at him. Then they started fighting.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘No. It was dark so I couldn’t really see them. But I know what noises people make when they’re fighting each other. We get enough of that at school. One of them dropped their torch. Then it all went quiet. I’ve seen her. I know she’s dead.’

  ‘Did you see where the man went? Did he arrive by car?’

  ‘No, he didn’t have a car. He only waited for a bit. I suppose he was looking at what he’d done. Then he just walked off back over the course.’

  Romney almost crossed his fingers. ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘No, like I’ve said it was too dark.’

  ‘OK. You’ve done well to remember that much. We’ll get you looked after and taken home. You’ll have to attend the station with a parent and give us formal statements tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know who he was?’ said fatty.

  ‘You said it was too dark.’

  ‘To see him, yeah, but I know his voice. He’s caught us out here before. He’s sneaky like that. He walks around the course at night trying to catch us. It was the old git: the head green-keeper who lives in the cottages over there.’ The boy pointed in the general direction of Bill Thatcher’s home.

  Romney and Marsh took two uniformed officers with them. Although the DI couldn’t imagine that Bill Thatcher, or his wife, would give them much trouble, it was better to be safe than sorry and in Romney’s wide experience the sight of overwhelming numbers often did much to dampen the most ferocious of criminals, a category which the head green-keeper did not fall into in Romney’s opinion.

  They walked across the golf course towards the dark patch of buildings. A light was on in an upstairs room guiding them on. Away from the bustle of the crime scene the darkness quickly swallowed them up and, despite the torches, navigation of the natural and man-made obstacles became awkward and hampered their progress. Romney collided with a gorse bush and swore as he heard the fabric of his trousers tear when he pulled himself free of its barbs.

  Their progress became slower as they were forced to pick their way through the flora. They were not even halfway before Romney was chiding himself for not taking a car and going by the road. Still, there was nothing to be done about it now except put on a brave face and plough on. To turn around and walk back would have made them a laughing stock.

  Then the first fat drops of water began their sporadic pattering of the countryside. Within a minute it had increased to steady rain. In light summer clothing all four officers were soon soaked to the skin.

  By the time they arrived in front of the cottages the rain had turned to a deluge. It cascaded down from the heavens, like broken guttering. There had been no hurry for the final five minutes of their journey; none of them could have got any wetter.

  Romney looked behind them towards the oasis of light they had left, but in the downpour he could barely make out anything. He also reflected that their cumbersome progress towards Thatcher’s front door must have been well advertised by their own approaching torch beams to anyone who had cared to be looking. And if Romney were in the property having fled a dead body, he would have been looking. He told one of the constables to radio back for a car and then sent them both around to the back of the property as a precaution. But Thatcher didn’t strike Romney as the sort who would run and where would he go?

  Romney tapped lightly on the wood of the front door. It was opened promptly by a small, round old woman. She stared up at him with a tight mouth.

  ‘Mrs Thatcher?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is your husband in?’

  She took a moment considering what they would do to her floors and then said, ‘Come through. Took your time I noticed.’

  ‘It’s dark,’ said Romney, ‘and we don’t know the golf course like your husband does.’

  They followed her up a narrow passage towards the kitchen at the rear of the house. Bill Thatcher was slumped in an armchair. He wore a shirt that was stained with blood. There was blood on his face and it continued to seep from beneath a tea-towel he held to a wound on his forehead. His colour was bad and his eyes had a distant unseeing quality.

  Romney and Marsh stood dripping water on to the lino. Romney said, ‘Radio for an ambulance, Sergeant Marsh. And tell those two they can make their way back. We won’t be needing them.’

  Bill Thatcher spoke thickly as he struggled to sit more upright. Romney noticed the sweat that stood out on his forehead. ‘I did it. I bashed Emerson’s head in. He was already dead, but I did it.’ He managed to glare at Romney. ‘Are you going to write this down?’ Thatcher’s breath was laboured and Romney’s concern deepened for the old man’s wellbeing.

  ‘It wouldn’t make any difference, Mr Thatcher. It’s not admissible. Just take it easy until the ambulance gets here. There’s plenty of time to sort this out.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said the old man. ‘Just listen to me. I hacked Emerson to pieces. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, it’s clear,’ said Romney, hoping that now, with his confession off his chest, Thatcher would leave it.

  ‘That bitch tonight, she tried to kill me. She did this to me.’ He touched his head. Romney found himself wanting, needing, to hear it. And he listened quietly. ‘I pushed her off. She fell in the bunker. It was an accident.’ Thatcher raised his voice, ‘I’m always telling them. I’m always telling them: leave rake forks down. No one in my day would leave a rake like that. I couldn’t do nothing for her. I don’t want to die with people thinking I killed a woman.’ Thatcher was becoming increasingly agitated and Romney was becoming seriously concerned for him.

  Mrs Thatcher put a hand on his arm. ‘Sssh, now Bill. That’s enough.’ He submitted meekly to her will.

  A sudden thumping noise upstairs had both Romney and Marsh, who was back in the kitchen, staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘Who is up there, Mrs Thatcher?’ said Romney.

  ‘No one. Must just be the window banging. I’ll go and close it.’ She stood to leave and it came again: three regularly spaced bangs, louder than the previous ones. Romney opened his mouth to speak, but the words were choked off in his throat as a noise that started as a low muffled moan, filtered down through the timber and plasterwork, gaining in register and volume to become a terrifying shriek of anguish and frustration. It was something barely human. Under the layer of water that covered Romney’s bare arms the hairs began to rise. He exchanged a wide-eyed look with Marsh and then turned his gaze on Mrs Thatcher.

  ‘Don’t go up there,’ she said.

  Romney could feel his blood pumping in his ears. ‘Who is it, Mrs Thatcher?’

  ‘None of your business,’ said the old woman, with something of her husband’s defiance. Romney was in the kitchen doorway before the woman could find her voice again. ‘Leave her,’ she shouted. ‘She’s angry, that’s all.’

  Romney was trying to make sense of these words as he took the stairs two at a time. On the small landing he was faced with three doors. One had a simple but solid hasp and staple arrangement on the outside frame. As Romney stared at it wondering what the hell was going on something slammed into the door on the other side straining ag
ainst the crudely installed catch. The low moan returned and again it rose in pitch and crescendo to a blood-chilling climax.

  ‘Stand back,’ called Romney, finding some immediate comfort in the sound of his own voice. ‘I’m a police officer. I’m going to release the catch.’ Only a disquieting silence answered him.

  Mrs Thatcher got to the foot of the stairs. ‘Don’t open that. Listen to me,’ she shouted up.

  ‘Sir,’ called Marsh.

  But Romney already had his thumb under the hook. He put his weight against the wood and popped it up. Opening the door he was greeted with only darkness and the drumming of the rain on the roof. It was like staring into a cave. And then from out of the pitch, screaming like a banshee fleeing the mouth of hell, something short and stocky ran at him. In the instant before it hit him, butting him with its head Romney got the impression of shoulder length brown hair, dull eyes and slow, plain features.

  It slammed into his midriff smashing the wind out of him and sending him backwards down the staircase. Instinctively, he reached out as he fell. He grabbed his assailant as the momentum of the charge brought it within arm’s length. They fell, locked together, rolling over each other to the bottom step. Dazed and winded and with an excruciating pain in his side Romney was barely able to raise his arms to fend off the blows that rained down on him from the small pudgy fists.

  ‘Hurt my daddy,’ it shouted. ‘Hurt my daddy. Hurt my daddy. Hurt my daddy.’ Its energy seemed boundless. It re-broke Romney’s nose. The DI was dimly aware of it being pulled off him, a nearby scuffle and then silence. At least the beating had stopped. He tried to sit up but the pain in his side was unbearable. Blood from his nose ran into his eye sockets. He gave up and flopped back on to the cold floor.

  With his vision obscured he had to suffer the disturbing commentary of the next few moments blind. He understood Mrs Thatcher shouting something to someone called Melanie. He heard Marsh take up the call. Both drifted away through the open front door. Marsh came back momentarily and asked him if he was all right. He would have liked to tell her what a stupid bloody question that was. How could he be all right? But he just raised a thumb. He heard Marsh jabbering into her radio. He caught the words ambulance, emergency, young-girl, escaped and back-up. Behind it all was the lashing of six weeks of rain on the garden. And then even that faded into silent blackness.

  ***

  19

  Even though he couldn’t see much through the swelling around his eyes, Romney understood he was awake. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know how he got there. He had no idea of how long he had been asleep. But he felt comfortable, and dry, and there was no pain anymore. For the moment that would do him.

  A few minutes of that and he began to crave more. There was a white ceiling above him. It had a fluorescent light on it. He tried to raise himself up, but the stabbing pain returned to scotch the idea. He turned his head as far as he could to either side. He was fairly sure that he was in a hospital bed then. He moved his fingers and discovered a plastic gadget in his grip. He pressed it. A nurse came in shortly afterwards.

  Perhaps two hours, or maybe four, or maybe six, after that, Romney really had no idea, someone entered the room and identified herself as DS Marsh. It certainly sounded like her.

  ‘I would ask you how you feel, sir,’ she said, settling herself into a chair, ‘but apparently you’re so full of pain killers you probably don’t feel anything.’

  ‘Whoever told you that is a bloody liar. My side is agony.’

  ‘Have you tried squeezing this?’ Marsh prodded the contraption the nurse had shoved into his grip.

  Romney gave it several taps and gradually the pain began to recede. ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me about that? I’ve been lying here suffering for hours. Why are you here, anyway?’

  ‘You’re my DI, sir,’ she said, with a simple matter-of-factness that conveyed an idea of loyalty far more forcefully than had she been trying to. Romney found himself deeply and strangely touched by the easy comment. ‘Besides, I thought you would probably want to hear what happened last night as soon as possible.’

  Romney had been lying there wondering about little else. ‘Is it good or bad?’

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘How bad?

  ‘Very bad.’

  ‘Bloody hell, don’t try to soften it for me, will you? I’ll remind you that I’m in hospital.’

  ‘You asked, sir.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  Marsh noticed that he squeezed himself another couple of shots of detachment. ‘Where do you want me to start?’

  ‘How about with me. What’s happened to me? People don’t want to tell me anything. I feel like I’ve done something wrong.’

  ‘Your nose was broken again. You’ve got three fractured ribs, you’re suffering from concussion and you’ve broken your wrist.’

  ‘That explains why I can’t lift my right hand, at least.’

  ‘Actually, it’s your left one that’s broken, sir. I don’t know what’s wrong with your right arm. Maybe you snapped some tendons when you fell down the stairs.’

  Romney closed the narrow slits that were passing for his eye lids and breathed deeply in and out a couple of times. ‘What happened last night? What was that thing that attacked me?’

  ‘The Thatchers had a daughter late in life, very late for Mrs Thatcher. She was born with Down’s Syndrome. She was in her late twenties. Apparently, she had quite a temper on her and the only way they could deal with her when she was having one of her tantrums was to lock her in her bedroom and leave her to tire herself out. That’s what they’d done last night. Her name was Melanie. When she saw what had happened to her father when he staggered in the front door she became very agitated and Mrs Thatcher got her up to her room and locked her in.’

  ‘And I let her out,’ said Romney.

  ‘Yes. She probably heard the raised voices downstairs and thought you’d done that to her father and so she attacked you. Maybe she just didn’t think at all.’

  ‘How is she? She must have hurt herself going down the stairs.’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  Romney thought he’d misheard her. ‘What?’

  ‘She’s dead, sir.’

  ‘How? She attacked me. After the fall. I remember. She was punching me in the face.’

  ‘I dragged her off you and she bolted out the front door just as a police car was pulling up. It must have spooked her. She ran off into the night across the golf course. She was found this morning in a water hazard. She’d drowned. Apparently, she was familiar with the golf course, but in the rain and the dark she couldn’t have seen where she was going.’ Romney lay stunned and dumb with the news. ‘Mr Thatcher is in Intensive Care. He’s stable. Lillian West fractured his skull with her torch. I don’t know how he made it home to be honest.’

  ‘How’s the mother taken her daughter’s death?’

  ‘You were right about her: she’s a tough old bird. She hasn’t shed a tear for her. I can see she’s hurting, but she won’t cry. Life couldn’t have been easy for them. I’ve had a good chat with her. She doesn’t blame you for her daughter’s death. She wanted me to tell you that. She also told me that her husband didn’t mutilate Phillip Emerson. Do you want to hear about it now?’ Romney nodded. ‘It wasn’t a secret that the Thatchers had a daughter with Down’s Syndrome. When the golf course was shut the old man would take her for walks over it. He doted on her, apparently. They were very close. It was one of the reasons that having the club on their doorstep was so important to them.’

  Romney thought back to his goading of Bill Thatcher at the police station and was embarrassed and ashamed.

  ‘When Emerson and Masters had become involved with their property development scheme Emerson went to the Thatchers’ cottage and upset the old man with his proposals. The daughter had seen and heard it all. She must have remembered him. On the night that West and Emerson met on the thirteenth green Melanie was out on the course with her father. He
was checking rabbit traps and she was out of his sight. He found her next to Phillip Emerson’s bashed in corpse with a golf club in her hand. They believed she’d stumbled across him, remembered him and his threats and the way he had upset her parents and lost her temper. We’ll never know whether that’s the truth as the parents understand it, or whether it’s just a fabrication that no one can now challenge, or be held responsible for. Last night might just be a series of unfortunate events that have become a convenience for a great untruth.’

  ‘Was he already dead before she did it to him?’

  ‘They didn’t know, or at least that’s what Mrs Thatcher is saying. She said they couldn’t get it out of her and then they stopped talking about it. Naturally, they wanted to protect her, so Thatcher took the clubs, cleaned them off and hid them. When Elliot Masters committed suicide, he had an opportunity to get rid of them. The bag of clubs could have gone back to his widow who probably wouldn’t have been any the wiser about which were her husband’s. In the Thatchers’ limited reasoning, if the clubs were found in his bag suspicion would fall on him for the murder of Emerson, especially as they were business partners. It was too good an opportunity to miss and with Masters dead he wouldn’t be able to refute any allegations made post mortem. If the clubs were never found then that would work just as well for them. It was perfect. She told me they considered planting the clubs a victimless crime. Maybe she was right. They did it for the best motives anyway if you believe everything else she is saying.’

  ‘But we can’t.’

  ‘We can’t disprove anything either. I don’t disagree that she’s got plenty to lie about.’

  ‘So why was Thatcher on the course with Lillian West in the middle of the night?’

  ‘The Thatchers realised that, even with Emerson and Masters dead, sooner or later the club might still sell the property and they would be facing the same bleak future – nowhere to live with a grown up Down’s Syndrome daughter, them not getting any younger and no pension, other than the old age state one. As you pointed out to Thatcher, that couldn’t have got them much.’