Hung Out to Die

by Anthony Litton

  Chapter 14

  Calderwood was right in the short-term, and some of their extra workload was re-allocated back to others, and they, again, had more time to continue with the Riminton investigation. Despite their newly renewed resources and optimism, however, their progress was slow, and, several weeks later, when they had, somewhat reluctantly, released the body for burial, they were no nearer finding out who’d attacked Debra Addison and why.

  Surprisingly, her will stated she wished to be buried in Beldon Magna’s small Norman churchyard on the edge of the village green. This was much to the annoyance of the main beneficiary, who found it was going to cost considerably more than a less scenic urban interment would have done.

  Thus, it was on a warm, sunny afternoon in early Spring, with the air alive with birdsong and vibrant with the scent and colour of the flowers blooming on the grass verges, that Debra Addison, latterly known as Della Riminton, was laid finally to rest. Though whether ‘rest’ anywhere, under any circumstances, was possible for that highly talented, but troubled, vitriolic and rather cruel lady, was something that Desmond doubted, as he stood dry-eyed and totally unmoved in the ancient graveyard, watching her coffin as it was lowered into the clinging, muddy earth of her grave.

  As he looked around at the other mourners, he wondered again why she’d chosen to be buried in Beldon Magna. Certainly she’d made no strong links locally. Though a large number of locals had indeed turned out, he suspected that those who’d come out of curiosity somewhat outnumbered those who’d come out of respect. Certainly the sharply dressed Metropolitan contingent, of which there were a surprising number, many of them familiar faces from television, were much more her type. Indeed, watching them, he could see at least another dozen Debras of both sexes. He realised suddenly what a huge wrench it must have been for her to leave what was so obviously her milieu, and gave him some idea of the fear that had driven her into deciding to do it.

  The vicar eventually droned to an end: as boring on duty as he was socially, Desmond noted wryly. The congregation – or audience, as he waspishly thought of it – turned thankfully, and headed to the refreshments laid on at The Rose and Sceptre, or, as some locals still stubbornly referred to it, The Dog and Witch, for reasons hidden deep in the Middle Ages.

  *

  “Oops! Someone will hear us!” Annette Challis giggled late that evening, as she again tripped over the cobbles in her heels and fell down.

  “It’s those bloody shoes! Told you not to wear ‘em. Silly cow!” responded Jim White, her less than sympathetic escort, as he looked anxiously about.

  “That’s no way to speak to a lady!” Annette responded, slightly annoyed. Despite what everyone thought of her, she knew she was no common slag. She had her standards, and demanded those she was going to sleep with treated her with respect. After all, hadn’t she always made a point of at least knowing their names?

  If you were a lady, love, we wouldn’t be here, her beau for the night thought but, wisely, left unsaid. “You sure Billy’s away until tomorrow?” he asked out loud, suddenly feeling his erection losing most of its upward trajectory at the thought of Annette’s rather large, and very tough, husband returning home early.

  “Course I am! If you’d turned that bloody torch of yours on, I’d not have tripped. Give it here!” she demanded, grabbing it from his hand.

  “Careful with the light!” he yelped as the pair made their unsteady progress down the narrow lane. “Someone will see us.”

  High heels and an equally high level of alcoholic intake do not make for any degree of steadiness when walking on cobbles. When the cobbles in question are also slippery from the evening rain, disaster is almost inevitable. Thus, she had not gone many more paces down the ill-lit thoroughfare before she tripped again.

  Sighing in exasperation Jim, started to lean down to help her up, but he didn’t get very far.

  It was at that moment that any chances of their not being seen or heard were shot to hell. Annette screamed and screamed again. In fact, she didn’t stop screaming for several hours, even after they’d pried her loose from the blood congealing on her hands, in her hair and – most disgusting of all – in her mouth; even after the police arrived and dealt with the now totally hysterical woman; even after she’d been taken to hospital and cleaned up. In fact, for the rest of her life, some small part of her mind never did stop screaming, and she could never, ever again go out when it was dark. But then, those who knew the circumstances usually forgave her. After all, it wasn’t every day that someone tripped up and fell onto a heavily bleeding body; it wasn’t everybody, who, disorientated and, in the dim lighting, seeing a hand, reached for it, thinking it was Jim’s, only to find that it wasn’t. That was bad enough, but to find that the hand she was now gripping was actually no longer attached to anything at all, well, that really, really, did beat everything.

  Chapter 15

  “Gwil? Where are you?” called Desmond urgently, as he looked round the empty bar of the Rose and Sceptre, its original oak panelling staring back as impassively as it had done for almost four hundred years.

  He jumped as a voice, seemingly from the building itself, answered. “I’m down here!” followed shortly by Gwilym’s head as he emerged from the trapdoor of the cellar set in the floor near the bar. “What’s the matter? What’s happened?” he asked, his voice and gaze sharpening as he saw how pale the other man was.

  “There’s...been another one...another murder,” Desmond almost whispered.

  “Dear God!” Gwilym muttered in shock. “Who? Where? When?” rapidly followed as he quickly got his wits together and his analytical brain started to function again. “I thought I’d not seen the police here first thing. They’re usually here pretty sharp in the morning,” he muttered.

  “It’s no one local: not from the village. It’s one of the people who came up for the funeral from London. A man called Peter Wentworth.”

  “But he’s staying here! In fact, I thought he was still in his room,” Gwilym replied, stunned. “Where was he found? Not here, obviously,” he added, feeling some guilty relief.

  Desmond shook his head. “No. It was in Bellan’s Lane,” he replied. “That very dark stretch near the cottages.”

  “Jesus! Well, at least it might make the council do something about the ruddy lighting!” swore Gwilym, and Desmond nodded. Like all the local residents, they both agreed that the small and very dark lane, leading off the village High Street and passing two rows of Tudor cottages, was dangerous. Its dark shadows and uneven cobbled walkway made it hazardous even before it meandered aimlessly to an end, its rough, uneven surface merging with the grass and soil of the open common.

  “What the hell took him up there on a night like last night? It was pissing down most of the evening. A bloody odd night to be out sight-seeing. He didn’t strike me as the type anyway,” he added. “How did he die? I assume the police are sure it’s murder?”

  “Oh yes, two severed hands make suicide extremely unlikely,” responded Desmond flatly. “It’s got to be connected to Addison’s death,” he added.

  “Jesus! Poor bastard!” muttered Gwilym. “Yes, it must be. Two deaths, and in such bizarre ways,”“ he added. “What makes it absolutely certain, I would think, is that they worked together in London. More than that – he was her boss at The Sunday Voice for several years, right up to when she left so suddenly.”

  “How’d you find that out?” Desmond asked in surprise.

  “I was talking to him in the bar last night after you left. Had a very interesting chat, we did. I didn’t take to the man, too hard-eyed, with that silky, unhealthy friendliness you get from some people. He was very forthcoming about Ms. Addison, though. So much so, that we’d arranged to have another chat later on after breakfast.”

  “Jesus! You realise that makes you one of the last people to see him alive!”

  “Oh yes, I realise that! And that will make me a prime suspect in his death.”

  “You? Why you?” a
sked Desmond in surprise.

  “Because everyone knows that you and I are very closely connected, to put it at its mildest, and you were the first to find Debra Addison. I’d not blame the police if they put us both right to the top of their list of suspects, even arrest us!” he added theatrically.

  “I doubt we’ll go that far, immediately anyway, Mr. Owen,” Calderwood interjected quietly, having entered the bar unnoticed from the incident room. “But we do need to talk to you with some urgency. Now, if that’s not too inconvenient?”

  Gwilym nodded and followed him through. Surprising what a few flip-charts and tables can do to change a room, he thought, as he looked around and saw the comfortable, Jacobean-style lounge completely transformed into a utilitarian, efficient and very organised workspace.

  *

  “It was pretty much what you’d expect, I suppose,” he told Desmond late that night over their usual end of the day drink. “They were being pretty cagey, obviously, but I gather that the time of death was when very few would have an alibi; around midnight to one o’clock, I reckon, though they wouldn’t say. They were particularly interested about the conversation Wentworth and I had had.”

  “So am I, so I wish you’d get on with it!” smiled Desmond, well aware of how the Welshman could, when he felt inclined, spin any tale of five minutes into a full scale production lasting a great deal longer.

  “Sorry, I’ve been asked not to talk to anyone about it, particularly any of the major suspects,” responded Gwilym, making it one-all by his reckoning.

  Desmond smiled again, acknowledging the gentle hit, but knew Gwilym too well not to know that his partner would be itching to tell him, which he shortly did.

  “Wentworth was pretty talkative by the time I spoke to him. It was late, and he was the last one in the bar, so I grabbed the chance to have a natter.” He took a slug of his drink and went on. “Her death had shaken him up a bit, I think, and he wanted someone to talk to about it, and about her and the time they worked together.”

  “Had there been something going on between them?”

  “No. Not when she left, anyway, from what he said. From what he half-said, I think there’d been something much earlier, but, the way he spoke, it was just two people wanting a shag,” he said; succinct, if nothing else, thought Desmond, with amusement.

  “Did he say why she left? Had anything spooked her, or was it just she felt the heat of having trodden on Rizzio’s toes?”

  “He didn’t know. He just knew that one day she walked into the office, handed in her notice, cleared her desk, and left immediately once they’d agreed to waive her notice period.”

  “Curious!”

  “Yes, and he said something even curiouser – that when he asked her how she’d manage without her salary, perks and so on, she merely laughed, said that was the least of her worries, turned and left. That was the last he ever saw her, or heard anything about her, until the papers got hold of her death and found out who she was.”

  “Hmm, a useful chat. I assume the police had interviewed him and others who’d worked with her?”

  “Oh yes, very soon after you found her, apparently. He said they’d done a thorough job on anyone who she’d worked with over the previous five years, current and previous employees too, I gather. Some have been interviewed again fairly recently.”

  “They are being thorough,” murmured Desmond, impressed.

  “Or desperate. Rumour tells me that the Rizzio lead is getting them nowhere, so they have to do something, widen the field, so to speak.”

  “A good night’s work Mr. Publican!” said Desmond jocularly as he rose and made them both another drink.

  “Yes, I think so,” mused Gwilym. “Funny thing was, it might have been even more useful, but I got the oddest feeling that he was waiting for something, or someone. I caught him glancing at his watch a couple of times. And then he closed off the conversation pretty quickly before he went off up to bed.”

  “You think he was going to meet someone?”

  “I do, and I am fairly certain that that’s why he ended up in Bellan’s Lane.”

  “And dead,” said Desmond, sadly.

  Chapter 16

  “Bloody hell, I’m bored. How the hell do you stand these things, Jemma!”

  “Desmond! You’ve been here less than five minutes!

  “More than enough to remind me why it’s been so long since I came to the last one!” he rejoined, tartly. “But I felt I had to come along to support one of my closest friends in her fund-raising efforts,” he added mischievously.

  “Bollocks! You’ve come to do some sleuthing!”

  “That too,” admitted Desmond. “I’d heard the last couple on our original London list would be here, so it seemed a good opportunity to meet them ‘accidentally’ as it were.”

  “Be careful, Desmond,” Jemma responded, suddenly becoming very serious. “I know you’re able to recall all sorts of things, but this isn’t some parlour game. Whoever did this is deadly serious, and will turn on you should you become a threat. The second murder last week showed that, if nothing else.”

  Chill fingers suddenly curled round Desmond’s neck, but he gave no sign of his own growing unease as he looked down on her serious face, touched at her genuine concern.

  “I know, my love. Gwilym said much the same thing, and I am being careful. I’d be foolish not to be. But if I can do anything to bring this sadist to justice, I will. I scarcely knew Debra Addison and didn’t at all like what I did see. I hadn’t even met Wentworth, but all the terror and horror both must have undergone, is something no one should have to endure,” he said quietly.

  It was Jemma’s turn to shiver as his words hit home. “Someone must have hated them beyond anything sane to have done what they did. It was gross, all that slashing and stabbing, the dis-disfigurement, the amputations,” she murmured quietly.

  “You don’t know the half of it, Jemma,” he replied. Or do you? he wondered idly for a moment, as he looked at her curiously. The police had deliberately not released all the appalling details on either case, but she obviously had access to sources with more information than had been released officially.

  He watched her as she turned away to greet more arrivals. As always, he was impressed with the way she handled herself on these occasions. Not naturally outgoing and sociable, she had, he knew, relentlessly schooled herself in the social arts of the politician. Now, she was faultless, and, whatever the event she was attending, she made sure she knew a little about as many of the people she was likely to meet as was possible. Like now. He knew she’d never yet met the young husband and wife standing in front of her, but she was happily talking to them about their latest arrival.

  The same with the elderly, shy-looking, couple who approached her next. They were new to the village, and had come along to the fund-raiser more to meet people than to show support for her. She was aware of this, but still greeted them warmly, and knew enough about them to move them smoothly from doubters to firm future supporters.

  “It was really kind of Eleanor to let us use the Dower House again,” she said as, duty for the moment done, she turned back to him. “It really makes a difference to hold something here,” she added, standing on the terrace of the beautiful Regency house and looking down across the large garden, its herbaceous borders vibrant with colour, and the air full of the scent of lilac and early honeysuckle.

  He shrugged her thanks away. “You know she’ll always be happy to, as long as you’re our MP anyway,” he added, smiling.

  “To be honest, I wasn’t sure she’d be up for it after her remarks about the Prime Minister.”

  “Yes, referring to our head of government as a duplicitous little twerp was going some, even for her! Mind you, to be fair, what she’d said about the last one wasn’t much better,” he added and the two old friends burst into delighted laughter.

  “You two are having far too much fun! We must be at the wrong party!” a tall graceful looking woman said, smi
ling as she kissed them both, her height making necessary a considerable stoop to reach Jemma’s cheek.

  “Carolyn! Lovely to see you,” said Jemma, looking up into the thin, clever face of her friend.

  “Like you, my dear, just doing my duty,” the older woman replied, which was no more than the truth. As chairwoman of the local constituency party, her presence at such an important fund-raiser was only slightly less necessary than that of the MP herself. Her blue eyes suddenly became alight with mischief as she lowered her voice.

  “And I’ve brought Miles!” she beamed with slightly malicious pleasure.

  “So I see,” replied Jemma, looking across to where a tall, distinguished looking man was chatting to two of the younger, and more attractive, females. “How on earth did you manage it?” Sir Miles Daventry’s usual aversion to any sort of public gathering was well known in the constituency.

  “He’s doing penance at the moment,” his wife replied crisply. “And still has some way to go,” she added. “So he’s offered, entirely spontaneously, I may add, to equal whatever we raise tonight by a personal cheque!” she ended triumphantly.

  “Bloody hell, Carolyn! You lot usually raise upwards of three thousand quid on this do!” ejaculated Desmond.

  “I know, darling; generous of the sweet man, isn’t it!” She laughed as she went off to mingle with the other guests, her summery print dress swirling round her elegant legs.

  “How that pair stay together, I really don’t know,” murmured Desmond once she was safely out of earshot.

  “I don’t think anyone does – except those two themselves. The only time I’ve seen either of them seriously unhappy was a few years ago and they’d split up, seriously split up, and divorce seemed unavoidable.” She shook her head at the memory. “I bumped into them separately and they both looked positively haggard.”