Tiger Blood (DS Webber Mystery Book 2)

by Penny Grubb

  ‘Suzie’s right,’ Webber said. ‘You need to get that note.’ Webber’s words ignored what he’d said but the tone and slight inclination of his head told Ahmed he’d accepted the point. ‘We need to dig into the money side,’ he said, ‘now we know how much the Morgans had.’

  Pamela Morgan … all that business with the other old school friend, Kowalski, telling Farrar’s dad that it wasn’t a suicide at all. Of course she was wrong. He’d seen the coroner’s report and the coroner had seen the note. It was just another frayed edge because the case was so old.

  ‘Will Jones, the animal rights man,’ Webber said. ‘He was Edith Stevenson’s boyfriend in school. I’ve just had that from Jack Meyer. He has photos should we need them. Jones wasn’t at the same school, in fact he’d left before sixth form. The others in the group didn’t approve.’

  Edith Stevenson. Ahmed felt the prickle of anticipation over his skin. She was the one who’d walked the same way as Tom’s mystery man. Tom must have known who he was dealing with. It was Tom all over to pretend a woman was a man, to hold his secrets close until he decided what to disclose. And it was Edith Stevenson who’d refused to talk to him, then hidden from Suzie. A link with Will Jones connected her to the events surrounding Robert Morgan’s death rather than Tom’s, but she was the key to something, somehow.

  Suzie pushed herself to her feet and reached for a marker pen to add the link. ‘Could Will Jones and Edith Stevenson have worked together? Why would she have wanted Robert Morgan out of the way?’

  ‘Why would any of them?’ Ahmed said. ‘We haven’t had a sniff of a good motive. If it’s not a psychopath it’s more like a fight gone wrong or that someone targeted the wrong man.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate petty jealousies,’ Webber said. ‘Meyer talked about tensions in the group, and that would be about the time that Stevenson became involved with Jones. Maybe we need him in again, get a bit more about the whole dynamic.’

  Ahmed cast his mind back to his own schooldays, the jostling for position within his peer group. The staff were on the outside. ‘He was their teacher,’ he said. ‘I think we need to hear it from their classmates if we want the real story.’

  Suzie gave him a quizzical look but was prevented from replying by an insistent beep. She glanced at the computer screen. ‘The lab,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it.’ She moved to sit the other side of the desk. They heard the video call open.

  ‘Go on,’ Webber said to Ahmed.

  ‘Michael Drake,’ Ahmed said. ‘The only way we’re going to get a real picture of Robert Morgan is through his wife’s friends. And it’s the old school network that keeps cropping up. Edith Stevenson won’t talk to us. China Kowalski’s out of reach. God knows where Tilly Brown is. Pamela Morgan and Gary Yeatman are dead. I want to call round on Michael Drake again. He was one of the inner circle and he was happy to talk.’

  ‘OK.’ Webber glanced at Davis as he nodded. ‘Then Meyer again if need be. He’ll come in like a shot if you ask him.’

  ‘Well …’ Ahmed hesitated. He didn’t think Webber and Davis had got the point. ‘I was thinking Brad Tippet ought to be the next port of call. He was sort of one of them. He was a pupil I mean, not a teacher. He’d know the dynamics.’

  ‘Yes, but we haven’t entirely unravelled the business with his car,’ Davis pointed out, ‘and I’m not sure we’ll get him in again voluntarily.’

  ‘He’s a real outsider for the murder,’ Ahmed said.

  Webber looked at their list of suspects. He didn’t like the way it resonated with Melinda’s lists scrawled on boards stacked behind the TV at home. Ahmed was right; Tippet was pretty much in the clear for the Dorset murder, but Davis had a point too. Tippet wouldn’t be falling over himself to cooperate.

  A voice said his name. He looked up to see Suzie swing the computer screen around to face them as she said, ‘Yes, it is. He’s here with DI Davis.’

  Webber saw a familiar overalled figure framed on the screen; the woman from the lab, fully kitted out, the tools of her trade around her. He took in the hint of a self-satisfied smile playing at the edge of her mouth. The last time she’d looked at him like that had been to tell him she’d confirmed the presence of Robert Morgan’s DNA in that plastic sheeting. He pulled in a sigh and braced himself for whatever grenade she was about to toss out to them.

  ‘Do you want the bad news or the bad news?’ she said.

  His gaze met Suzie’s in a glance of complete understanding. ‘Just get on with it,’ Suzie snapped.

  The woman’s eyebrows rose briefly as though surprised at the bad temper aimed her way. These lab types saw some nasty stuff, Webber knew. When feeling charitable he excused their inappropriate levity on those grounds. Just now though he didn’t feel charitable.

  ‘The remains are not Tilly Brown …’ she began.

  ‘That’s good news,’ Suzie growled at her, ‘and we already know that. It’s a man.’

  ‘One of them’s a man,’ the woman continued smoothly. ‘And I can give you a name.’

  ‘One of them?’ from Ahmed.

  ‘Who is it?’ Webber could see Suzie’s hand resting on the desk next to the screen. He saw her index and middle fingers slide to cross each other and became aware his own fingers were making a similar move. His silent wish was for this to be someone clearly tied into the illegal disposal of animal carcasses, a tight-knit closed loop, no complications.

  The woman’s mouth curved again to that hint of a smile. ‘It’s a Mr William Jones.’

  Webber watched Suzie’s hand ball into a fist as Ahmed smothered an expletive. He clutched for the straw. ‘Is this the same William Jones who was gaoled in 1986 after the release of tigers in Dorset?’

  ‘It was ’87 before he was gaoled.’ She looked pleased to have caught him out. ‘But yes, that’s the one.’

  Webber’s mind grappled with the fragments trying to sort fact from speculation. The information about Jones going to see Gary Yeatman had come from Joyce Yeatman via Melinda. It seemed partly corroborated by the landlady who had suffered Jones’s presence in her house for a few weeks around the same time. He wondered what would come back to bite them out of all this. Ahmed would be interviewing Joyce Yeatman in a couple of hours. If she talked about Melinda there was nothing he could do about it. Mel hadn’t done anything wrong, not really.

  Davis spoke into the pause. ‘What did you mean, one of them?’

  ‘There’s a second body underneath Jones.’

  ‘What the … hell’s been going on up there?’ Webber had to hold back an urge to kick something.

  ‘It’s not Tilly Brown, is it?’ Ahmed’s tone held a plea.

  ‘It’s looking like this one’s a man too. I’ll have more in a while. They’re both badly decomposed.’ She looked slightly disappointed to have given Ahmed the negative he’d wanted.

  When Suzie ended the call, Webber pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘The summer of 1996,’ he said. ’10 years after the tiger thing, Jones supposedly turned up at the Yeatmans’ house looking for Gary. Joyce passed on the message. Gary went out to see him and later he told his wife that Jones wouldn’t be back.’

  Suzie’s stare remained on the now blank screen as she said, ‘So did he take him up behind the gravel pits, knock him on the head and bury him?’

  ‘That would take some doing on his own,’ Ahmed said, scribbling a note. ‘I’ll quiz her on timings. See if she can remember how long he was gone.’

  ‘Maybe she was in on it.’ Davis voiced the thought that Webber was trying to suppress. Melinda was too close to this woman.

  ‘Do we have a date for Jones calling on Yeatman?’ asked Ahmed, reaching for the file. ‘His landlady reported him when he did a moonlight. I looked it up. It was 1996. July … no, was it August …? It must have been about the same time.’

  Suzie pulled a face. ‘After all this time if she’s innocent she won’t remember, and if she was in on it, she’ll say she’s forgotten.’

  ‘Give it a try,�
� said Webber. ‘Get Joyce Yeatman to pin it to something we can date. Is she into sports? Was she watching TV when Jones called round? The Olympics were held in Atlanta that July. Charles and Diana got divorced in the August. And–’ Ahmed’s surprised stare pulled him up. He cut short the litany. He’d looked it up with Melinda when he was coaching her to quiz Joyce on exactly this. Thankfully, she’d held back. He changed tack. ‘It’s going to be interesting if that was the last time anyone ever saw Jones.’

  ‘But if he was an item with Edith Stevenson maybe he went to her,’ Suzie said.

  ‘Maybe, but that was when they were eighteen. This is 22 years later.’

  ‘Gary Yeatman died a few months later. It’s down as a suicide.’

  ‘Crashed his car, didn’t he?’

  ‘Jammed cruise control.’ Ahmed said the words with studied casualness, his gaze fixed on the paperwork in front of him.

  Webber narrowed his eyes. Ahmed was snatching at anything to veer towards more recent happenings. But of course he was right; it had been a jammed cruise control, but the two incidents were decades apart. Coincidence, he told himself, recognising a tinge of desperation in the thought.

  ‘It doesn’t look good for Gary Yeatman,’ he said. ‘And it’s not looking great for Edith Stevenson either, but we’ve nowhere near enough to drag her in.’ He thought back to Meyer’s comment about Pamela and Michael being the peacemakers. ‘Ayaan, when you talk to Michael Drake, find out if he kept in touch with Edith Stevenson. He might be our way in there.’

  Chapter 35

  Ahmed closed his eyes for a moment in silent exasperation. The lights had finally shown green just in time for everything to come to a standstill to wait for an ambulance to pick its way through the traffic, taking long enough that the signal was back at red before he could make any headway. It was always like this when time was tight.

  He’d scrabbled about for ages looking for Michael Drake’s mobile number, having had no luck on his landline. Drake had answered from the chaos of a pre-Christmas supermarket queue and done his best to put Ahmed off until the following day, but Ahmed hadn’t allowed him to end the call. Drake was a compliant sort. Ahmed imagined he’d been doing other people’s bidding his whole life; not the type to say no to a police officer. It hadn’t been too difficult to hustle him into agreeing to hurry home where Ahmed promised to meet him.

  ‘You can be a real bully,’ Suzie had said as he’d ended the call. ‘The poor guy didn’t deserve that. Where was he off to?’

  ‘He’d been shopping. He was calling in on a friend on his way back. Said his wife wanted a couple of hours peace and quiet to have a lie down.’

  ‘She’s not well, is she?’

  He’d sniffed. ‘That’s what they told me, but my impression was that he’s the sick one. She’s only 30, half his age.’

  Suzie had given him a look. ‘So how come she didn’t answer the phone when you rang the house?’

  ‘Good question. Maybe she had other plans for her couple of hours peace. Maybe she’s gone out somewhere she doesn’t want him to know about.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s not your job to incite marital disharmony.’

  Ahmed had turned away, his eyes narrowing at the hypocrisy of her rebuke.

  At last the signal showed green again and he set off following the route of the ambulance that had impeded him, its flashing blue disappearing into the distance. He needed to get across to the Drakes, talk to Michael and then get back in time for Joyce Yeatman. She’d agreed to come in, but instinct told him he wouldn’t find her as accommodating as Michael Drake. It wouldn’t enhance the interview if she arrived on time and found she had to wait for him. He’d tried to push Suzie into fielding her if he was late back, but had had only a vehement, ‘No way. I have a hospital appointment, and anyway I told you I’m not going anywhere near that woman.’

  Drake had been one of the inner circle. He was key to finding Robert Morgan’s secrets. Did he know Gary Yeatman’s wife? Had the rest of the quintets known her? Drake would be able to tell him and he wanted this stuff in his head when he talked to Joyce Yeatman. If she was a liar hanging on to her own secrets she’d had decades to hone her stories.

  He wished he’d asked the questions the first time he’d met the Drakes. Voicing the thought to Suzie, he’d added, ‘But we didn’t know the half of it then.’

  She’d looked up and said, ‘I doubt we know the half of it now.’

  Unspoken between them was the phrase; and we never will. Webber had talked to him about cold cases, told him to manage his expectations; witnesses die, evidence degrades, people forget. Webber had gone as far as to say this one had yielded more hard forensics than they could reasonably have expected given it had never had the trappings of a murder enquiry attached to it until recently. And now their best prospect, the animal rights protester Will Jones, had been found buried by the gravel pits, and left them with the question of whether or not he and Gary Yeatman had worked together, and the further question of whether Edith Stevenson or Joyce Yeatman had been in the know.

  Nearly at the Drakes now. The flashing blue of the ambulance was still visible as a pale reflection that bounced around the rainwashed vista ahead. It must be wading through Christmas traffic not to have broken free of the city’s grip.

  The Drakes’ road was just ahead. Michael would be back by now and it occurred to Ahmed that if he had returned to find his wife missing, he would be in no mood for a chat about his old school friends. Well, as Suzie said, he could be a bully when he wanted. He didn’t intend leaving empty handed.

  He swung the car round the turn and let out a huff of frustration. There was the explanation for the continued presence of the pulsing blue light. The ambulance sat foursquare in the middle of the road, parked cars solid either side. He was near enough to get out and walk but he couldn’t just abandon the car …

  His line of thought crashed to a halt as he took in the scene; the open front door, the bustle of reflective jackets. The chaos of an emergency in full swing was all focused on Michael Drake’s house.

  Ahmed slammed the car into reverse, slapping on his own set of blue lights as he did so. He slewed the vehicle across the end of the street blocking it to traffic, keeping the ambulance’s escape route clear. He leapt out and sprinted back towards the action, pausing only to be sure he heard the clunk of the lock as he clicked the keys behind him.

  Michael Drake stood just outside the open front door, a man in green coveralls at his side grasping his arm. A woman by the ambulance called across. Ahmed heard an exchange of medical terminology between the two of them. As he came closer he took in Drake’s ashen face, the beads of sweat at odds with the hard cold of the December air. The paramedic’s voice was robust and reassuring. ‘She’s in good hands, Michael,’ he said. ‘Now come back inside. We need to keep you safe as well.’

  Briefly Michael’s stare moved from the ambulance in the middle of the road to the face of the man holding his arm, then to Ahmed rushing up beside them. Ahmed forestalled objections by flashing his warrant card. ‘Come on, Michael.’ He took Drake’s other arm to help ease him into the house. Michael’s stare had returned to the ambulance, held as though by a magnetic force that wasn’t broken until the two men at his side had eased his body far enough round that his head had to follow.

  ‘I need him lying down,’ said the paramedic. ‘He’s going into shock.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ The words strangled themselves as they emerged. Drake suddenly locked on to Ahmed as though seeing him for the first time. ‘Thank God, thank God, thank God,’ he babbled, trying to raise his arm to grasp Ahmed’s. ‘If you hadn’t called me … oh my God!’

  The shivering beneath Ahmed’s hand intensified, Drake’s voice lost coherence in the chattering of his teeth.

  Between them, they lowered Drake to the floor lying him on the rug by the fire. The paramedic barked orders, ‘Cushion … blanket … pull that coffee table closer … get his legs up…’ which Ahmed leapt to obey. />
  Calm began to settle. Ahmed stood looking down at the back of the paramedic’s head as he bent over Michael Drake whose shaking had subsided into ragged breathing that threatened to become sobs.

  The paramedic twisted his neck to look up at Ahmed, tipping his head to summon him closer. ‘Check if the responder car’s still out there, will you?’ He kept his voice low. ‘I’ll stabilise him and get him in that. I don’t want him in the ambulance with his wife.’

  ‘It will be,’ said Ahmed. ‘The road’s blocked. No way out.’ He paused, then mouthed, ‘What happened?’

  The man rolled his eyes towards the fireplace, mouthing back, ‘Mantelpiece.’

  Making sure to keep out of Michael Drake’s line of sight, Ahmed stepped towards the fireplace. The hand-written note was prominent, propped against a clock whose second hand ticked past the hour as Ahmed looked at it.

  To Michael, he read.

  He reached in his pocket pulling on a pair of latex gloves before lifting the page and opening it out. The writing was even and neat.

  Make no mistake, if you’d come right back after the supermarket you’d have found me in time, but you won’t, you’ll do like you always do. What’s the betting it’s 2 hours on the dot. Are you reading this and panicking or have you already found me. I’m upstairs by the way.

  Footsteps. More people came in. He kept his back to the room to hide that he was reading the note but was aware of the paramedics talking to each other arranging to get the Drakes to hospital. A woman’s voice said, ‘She did what? Selfish little bitch.’ He felt sympathy with the sentiment but was shocked she’d spoken the words aloud and within earshot of Michael Drake who was now being eased on to a stretcher.

  ‘DC Ahmed.’

  He turned. Michael was staring at him, pale, shaky, struggling to get out the words. ‘Thank you … so much … If you hadn’t…’ His voice cracked.

  ‘Just you try to relax, Michael,’ the paramedic said, his tone both reassuring and authoritative. ‘You’re in safe hands now, both of you.’