The Edge

by Clare Curzon

  ‘There, then,’ said Connie. ‘I knew she’d be a breeder. Still, that’s not what these gen’elmen came to hear about. We have to tell them what we know about the folks up at the house.’

  Beaumont produced a pocket tape-recorder and found a place for it next to the scones. ‘We’d like to use this, if that’s acceptable,’ Yeadings said, seeing the man’s suspicious glance at it. ‘It saves my sergeant having to take notes.’

  Connie smiled confidently, hefting the heavy teapot. ‘We’re used enough to them things. Send messages that way to our grandchildren in New Zealand. Their Mum died last winter of leukaemia, so we make sure to keep in touch regular.’

  It was clear to Yeadings that, shocking as news of the murder had been, this couple were accustomed to take life and death as a part of the expected. And as they explained how things were – they the real husbandmen while the owners regarded the herd as an investment or tax-deductible statistic – it appeared that beyond a normal countryman’s deference for the ‘gaffer’, Ned Barton held no great opinion of the adult Hoads personally. Indeed, he and Connie seemed to have had more contact with the younger members of the family.

  ‘Would you happen to know if young Angela had a special friend at school?’ Beaumont probed cautiously.

  ‘Not one special one,’ Connie doubted. ‘She’d invite a whole crowd over at once. They were great people for parties, the Hoads. A real worry it was to Ned when the kiddies all came flocking down and wanting to pet the animals. Most of them were townies, wouldn’t know a bull snaffle from a sprig o’ cow parsley. We were always scared they’d get up to mischief and hurt theirselves.’

  ‘Angela had a friend staying overnight,’ Yeadings told them. ‘Rather plump, with thick blonde plaits. Her school clothes had name-tapes sewn in: Monica and the initial J. Would you happen to know her surname?’

  ‘Oh, that little girl. Yes, that’s just what her name was. Jay, see. Like that screechy bird. Her dad’s a lawyer up in London,’ Ned helped out. ‘They got a big place over at Ashridge. Her mother plays at farming, like the Hoads; only her herd’s not a patch on ours. Mostly Friesians, see. Bulk producers, not quality like English Shorthorns and Channel Islands.’

  Beaumont shot to his feet and left the room, reaching for his mobile phone. Slower to grasp the import of what Yeadings had said, Connie could barely wait for her husband to finish his derogatory comments. ‘D’you mean there was this other little girl up there last night?’ she asked, aghast. ‘You said earlier on that there were just four killed.’

  Yeadings nodded. ‘So there were. At first we took Monica Jay for one of the family. It made four because the son was absent. Would you have any idea where Daniel might be?’

  There was an instant of horrified silence. ‘Oh, Lor’!’ Connie cried in anguish. ‘What a terrible thing for him to do!’

  So she’d jumped to the same snap assumption as Beaumont. It was odds on that the press would do the same. Under tomorrow’s screaming headlines they could twist it deviously into libel-limit suggestion.

  ‘He never done it,’ Ned declared scornfully. ‘Too much of a milksop.’

  ‘We’ve certainly found nothing yet to make us think he did,’ Yeadings warned, looking up as Beaumont returned. He passed to him the further information about the Jays, but his sergeant nodded as if he already knew.

  ‘Did you ever meet Monica’s parents?’ Yeadings asked Ned.

  ‘Took them around with a lotta visitors the first time. There was a party up at Hoads’ and they came down, wanted to see the milking parlour. After that, Mr Jay always made a point of talking output to me.’ Now Ned was certainly curling his lip.

  ‘Bit of a bluffer?’ Beaumont suggested.

  ‘Not real country folk. Incomers, see?’

  Both detectives saw. They’d met his kind: part of the Home Counties influx of businessmen playing at being squire: property developers, bankers, politicians.

  Ned reached out a horny claw for a second scone. ‘These are all right, Mother.’

  Already, Yeadings thought, they were beginning to assimilate what had happened, seeing it as an event, however horrific, in a series dogging their efforts to get by. He guessed life hadn’t been easy for them, and he appreciated that the Hoads – at least the adults of the family – might not have been their favourite people.

  ‘So what will happen to the farm now?’ Yeadings asked.

  ‘We’re still here, so it goes on working, and them going won’t make no difference. Another lot’ll come along to buy. Might even get somebody knows a bit about cattle for a change.’

  He sniffed, ignoring Connie’s murmured warning about respect for the dead. A practical man, he clearly hadn’t had a lot of it for Frederick Hoad alive.

  DI Salmon had materialised, suitably chuffed at his temporary promotion. At 2.30 p.m. the nuclear team re-assembled in Yeadings’ office, less Z, sent to obtain a photograph of the Hoads’ missing son. When they were seated the Boss surveyed them grimly.

  ‘Except for Acting-DCI Salmon, you’ve all been through the farmhouse, so you know the layout. I want you to see it happen. How was it? How many involved? – a single frenzied attacker assaulting the parents, killing the father, then the children before they could wake? Or more than one killer, fanning out to work room to room? And the woman escaping, running barefoot through the yard. Who pursued her, stabbed and mutilated her body? Possibly raped her, then left her displayed like a sacrificial victim on an altar? What kind of mentality was that?’

  Salmon wasn’t sure the superintendent was dealing with this in the best way. OK, so it was a massacre and the woman’s death was overkill. It had knocked them all of a heap, but visualising the crime could clutter you up with a lot of wrong impressions. It was bald facts that counted, material evidence that would bring the villains finally to book. He harrumphed deep in his throat and the Boss’s eyes swivelled on to him.

  ‘If he did rape her …’ Salmon began.

  ‘We’ll hope for DNA. There’s one thing not to be known outside this office: even if he didn’t penetrate the body himself, it appears he used a broom handle.’ Yeadings was being atypically crude. ‘Then surely he’d have masturbated. Traces on his hands. He’d have touched other surfaces. But we can leave that to SOCO.’

  His face was grey, locked into grim lines. ‘I don’t need to say that catching this monster must be given greatest priority. A family at home, wiped out, overnight, in a matter of minutes.’

  ‘And a little girl visiting,’ DC Silver added in a low voice. ‘Where does she fit in? Did the killer or killers know she didn’t belong? Did they even look to see who it was?’

  ‘That’s important,’ Beaumont put in. ‘How intimately was the Hoad family known beforehand? Was it planned, or a random break-in? Would the killer know by now that one of the family had escaped? Sir, what are we doing about the missing son?’

  ‘Enquiries are being made with neighbours and through his school,’ Yeadings said tightly. ‘Something should soon be coming in on that.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Time we met up with the extended team,’ he warned.

  They made their way down to the Incident Room. It was already crowded, with uniform and plain-clothes officers seated at tables and on windowsills. Latecomers had filed in to stand propped against the walls or sit cross-legged on the ground. When the conversational buzz ceased, Yeadings resumed, his voice depersonalised.

  ‘Exit Wounds: a firearms subject you should be familiar with. On entering a human body, the bullet creates a neat round hole, like a mouth’s small O of surprise. Once inside, the ravages begin, splintering bone, ripping cartilage, pulverising soft tissue. When it emerges from the body’s denser pressure there’s an explosion into open air, so the surrounding damage is extensive. Exit wounds look mightily more severe than what happened at the start.’

  Yeadings paused, looking round. None of that was news to the extended team. But he’d a specific point to make about this massacre of apparent innocents.

&nb
sp; ‘What we found at Fordham Manor Farm,’ he went on, ‘horrific as it is, should be seen as a single, extensive exit wound. Faced with that, we must work back to the point of entry, which eventually may prove far less momentous by contrast. And finally our objective must be to discover the first cause and the motive. Bear in mind that in any fatality the killer is the person, not the weapon.’

  He was aware of a slight, restless movement in mid-room; the tensing of shoulders in barely smothered protest that he was making a lecture of it.

  ‘I know that this is only partially a firearms case. The principal weapon was a knife, possibly knives. But the image remains true. Overall, we work backwards from exit wound to entry, all the way from massacre to intent.

  ‘I do not need to remind you that in so complex an investigation no clue, no physical trace, no word of mouth, no implication is too minor to be disregarded. Search, expecting to find. Then consider whatever is found, however insignificant at first sight. Each of you has an individual angle on it; the next man a different one, so share your knowledge. Pass it on, include it in your report. All investigation is a mosaic.

  ‘You are all, or at some time were, family men. This is a family destroyed. We cannot leave it – un …’ For a split second his voice faltered.

  Unavenged? Beaumont asked himself.

  But after his burst of metaphor the Boss saw fit to rein in emotion at the last. ‘Unsettled,’ he said firmly.

  Beaumont grunted aloud. So that’s what they were to do – simply settle the matter.

  Put it right? Could anyone?

  Chapter Three

  DS Rosemary Zyczynski parked her blue Ford Escort sufficiently far from the house to allow her time to study it while she approached the front door on foot.

  Amsterdam without a canal, she thought, confronted by the flat façade with its three gables, the central one fiddle-shaped and the outer two stepped. Maybe back in the seventeenth century someone had brought an architect over from the Netherlands.

  At a later date an extension had been added to each end, and their horizontal rooflines balustraded.

  She saw now that the Bartons’ cottage, built of dark red brick and flint, typical of Buckinghamshire, had been the original farmhouse from the late sixteenth century. At some later point prosperity had struck, prompting the landowner to aspire to building a more impressive residence. Which this certainly was, deservedly a small manor house, the lordship to which its sometime owner had bought to match it, but ridiculously carried it away to a town house in Maidenhead. Since the incomer Hoad hadn’t acquired those manorial rights, he’d been accepted locally as a gentleman farmer.

  According to more of what Beaumont had picked up, he was actually a townie with an inherited fortune from manufacturing, and modest pretensions to joining county society. But now, whatever dubious glory the move had brought him was over. As the familiar words had it, he’d brought nothing into the world and taken nothing out. But there could have been a more merciful way of going.

  She halted on the threshold, acknowledging the nod of the constable on duty, and rebuked herself for the disdainful attitude. She was herself a townie gone countrified from choice, and no matter what the dead man had been like, she knew her uncustomary bile was to cover up revulsion at the crime.

  No bodies remained in the building, but chalk marks on the floor downstairs and the children’s bloodied beds would be reminder enough of the Incident Room’s first sickening photographs of slaughter. What she must investigate now was something too pitiable to be easily endured.

  She stepped inside, zipped herself into sterile white overalls, pulled on plastic overshoes and latex gloves. Someone looked out from the door of an inside room and she recognised Ken Bates, a civilian photographer from Scenes of Crime. ‘Still here then,’ she remarked.

  ‘If ever we get one right it has to be this one,’ he said grimly. ‘We’re going for every minute detail. Sam’s still upstairs bagging. Sing out before you go up and he’ll tell you where you can tread.’

  Rightly he’d assumed that her main interest was the children’s rooms. Which didn’t mean she’d spare herself the immediate death scene he was presently occupied with. She followed him back into the dining room, hands clasped behind to prevent touching any surface.

  There it was total disarray with an overturned chair and the table crammed into a corner against a china cabinet with shattered glass doors. Behind them the once-elegant dinner and tea services were decimated and the rear wall spattered with shot.

  Beyond a tall window was a second cupboard of the same style, or at least superficially so. It appeared to have been used for glassware displayed on shallow shelves backed by a mirror. But that entire portion had been swung out to show a steel cabinet behind. This in turn gaped to reveal a range of shotguns and rifles. Two sets of grips were empty.

  One of the missing firearms, a double-barrelled, side-by-side twelve-bore, lay a few paces ahead of her, beside the outline of a body drawn in chalk on the polished floorboards. There was the distinct bloody tread of a shoe’s toecap alongside. But no great quantity of blood, considering the number of wounds.

  Z stood a moment taking it in. There was a storyline here but she needed to work out the sequence. Ken Bates resumed his work, focusing on the rubbed marks of wear on the cabinet wall behind where the guns were missing.

  Z tried to get the picture. Hoad had run to defend his family with the gun and, being tackled to the ground, had somehow discharged its shot into the wall and china cabinet. The man confronted by the shotgun had then stabbed him several times, using a knife as on his upstairs victims, but at some point he too could have removed the second firearm missing from the cabinet. There was an immediate need to identify the gun taken away.

  ‘What actually killed Hoad?’ she demanded.

  ‘Didn’t you get the pics I took?’

  ‘There was too much blood to distinguish every wound. And the Boss won’t pre-guess the Prof’s official findings.’

  ‘Whatever else, there are plenty of stab wounds. He was lying face-up. Could have been blown backwards by a single shot, and then stabbed to finish him off. There was what could be a small entry wound in the chest. I never touched the body, and couldn’t say for sure. If a bullet’s left inside him you’ll discover later at the post-mortem. Anyway nothing passed through; no bullet was found in the floorboards or walls.’

  So, accepting Ken Bates’s guesswork, the killer used a different firearm from the dead man’s shotgun, because a spread of lead shot would surely have shown over chest or face.

  If so, how did Hoad’s killer get hold of the gun? Bring it with him or locate and unlock the steel cabinet before Hoad reached him? Unlikely. So perhaps he’d brought only the knife, hid away, then snatched a gun after Hoad had opened the steel cabinet. But one ready loaded? The ammo should have been securely kept elsewhere. Yet, if he’d been the first to fire, that would account for Hoad’s shot going wide.

  Later, had he chased the fleeing woman across to the barn with the same gun, but feared a shot in the open could rouse neighbours in the cottage? Or had he pursued and knifed her before remembering the unlocked armoury and coming back for the second, missing weapon? Doubly armed, he would be doubly dangerous.

  As yet it wasn’t clear at what point Hoad had been alerted and come downstairs. Before or after the others had been stabbed to death?

  ‘Has any knife turned up?’ she asked.

  ‘Not to my knowledge. Best ask Sam.’

  She gave the murder room another sweeping scan, then went to the foot of the stairs. ‘Sam!’ she called.

  Bernard Weller, known generally as Sam, appeared almost instantly on the gallery above the hall. He too was now a civvy SOCO, an ex-sergeant from the force. ‘Z, hi. Come on up,’ he invited. ‘Use the left side of the stairs where it’s taped.’

  She followed him down a short corridor to the large front bedroom where the duvet was flung back from the four-poster. One casement window was latched
open and a rain-drenched curtain dragged aside. The central heating was full on. An open door revealed the en suite bathroom. The only lighting, apart from the SOCO’s powerful torch came from one twin bedside reading lamp, the other of which was overturned. Weller saw her eyes swing to that, but he shook his head. ‘The killer never did that. The woman must have knocked it over as she rushed out.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s clean. There are blood smears from gloved hands along the gallery rail outside and lint from the woman’s bathrobe caught on a picture frame where she pressed against it. She must have run out, got caught, broke free, perhaps kneed the killer, and was lucky to gain a few minutes and make for the stairs. Too bad that her luck ran out in the end.’

  So probably she’d not been the first one attacked. But why run to the stables? Z wondered. To draw danger away from the children? Why not make straight for the farm cottage and protection from the Bartons?

  ‘The girls’ bedroom?’ she demanded.

  He nodded back towards the passage. ‘Next one. You passed it. We’ve finished in there. You’re free to look around. The brother’s room is off the opposite wing, far door on the right.’

  She went there next, putting off the worse option. She found everything normal, as untidy as any teenage boy would leave a room: magazines spilling from a chair, an old pullover slung over its back, and used underwear on the floor beside the bed. The door gaped open on his own bathroom where two dark green towels were abandoned on the tiles. Both had dried out and the smaller one showed smears of blood. Nothing excessive. A big lad of nearly sixteen, he could have nicked himself shaving.

  Nobody had been in to tidy up after he’d left. And no clue to when that might have been.

  Without touching them she read the titles on two of the magazines. One dealt with Information Technology. The other, more fingered, was a catalogue for camping equipment.

  If he’d spent the previous night under canvas as intended he’d have had little sleep because of the storm. Maybe he was catching up with it now and would eventually return in a bedraggled state.