The Coffin Trail

by Martin Edwards

  ‘The Promised Land,’ Bryant said in his broadest West Riding accent.

  ‘If you say so. She modelled a bit, tried a little acting. She’d ditched the boyfriend early on and he went back to London. We checked and he died of a drugs overdose a year before Gabrielle was killed. She mixed in bad company. The old story, plenty of men were keen to take a pretty girl to bed in exchange for a slap-up dinner and a few quid to help with the rent.’

  Les Bryant plucked at a hair growing from his nostril. ‘My daughter wanted to be an actress. Christ, the day she signed up with an agency, I hit the roof, but would she listen? They ripped her off something rotten. At least she finished up with an Oscar.’

  ‘Really?’ Hannah was startled.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, deadpan, ‘while she was resting, she took a job as a dental hygienist in Batley. Finished up marrying the dentist. Oscar Padgett.’

  She laughed. ‘There are worse fates.’

  ‘Obviously you’ve never been to Batley.’ He saw her glance at the post-mortem photographs. ‘Matter of fact, I spoke to Jenny on the phone only last night, but you know something? It’s six months since I last saw her face to face. Kids, bloody hell. You have any?’

  His conversational swerves kept catching her on the back foot. She was starting to like the crusty old bugger, but she’d hate to be interrogated by him.

  ‘Never got round to it.’

  He puffed out his cheeks. ‘Not bothered about the ticking clock?’

  She shrugged and said, ‘Neither of us is exactly desperate to start a family.’

  Bryant said, ‘Take it from me, there are more important things than the job.’

  ‘Actually, I worked that out a while back.’

  ‘Well, then.’ His dour features were expressionless. Challenging her to get uptight, but she wouldn’t be provoked.

  ‘We were talking about Gabrielle.’ She cleared her throat. ‘While she was in Leeds, she met up with Natasha Litvinov. Tash Litvinov, as she was known. They had plenty in common, both struggling for a break.’

  ‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’ Bryant grunted. ‘I told my Jenny, but would she listen?’

  ‘Both of them became disillusioned, they decided to start again. Tash came up to this neck of the woods, met a rich man and settled down. Gabrielle wanted to get right away. She fancied trying her luck in the States.’

  ‘Hollywood?’

  ‘She never seems to have made it beyond Las Vegas. For a couple of years she lived with a croupier from one of the casinos. Most of the time she spent as a waitress, serving free booze to gamblers to keep them at the tables or the slot machines. The pay was nothing special, but a pretty girl can make a good living out of tips from the punters.’

  ‘Why come back to England?’

  ‘According to Tash, her relationship had broken up and she was getting homesick. She’d earned a few quid and had this idea of travelling around Europe. Britain was her first stop.’

  ‘And her last.’

  ‘Uh-huh. She’d only been back a week when she turned up on her old mate’s doorstep. Tash had done well for herself, she’d married a property developer called Dumelow. He bought a mansion in Brackdale and played the local squire. After all those auditions, she finally landed the part of lady of the manor.’

  ‘How thrilled was Tash to see a face from the past? A reminder of the dark days, before she met her sugar daddy?’

  ‘She told us she was thrilled to have someone around she could gossip to about the past. She does her best, but the truth is, she doesn’t exactly have a lot in common with the good folk of Brackdale. Though she did introduce her friend to an odd-job man who worked on the estate.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. Barrie Gilpin.’

  ‘Got it in one. Barrie took a shine to Gabrielle from the moment he set eyes on her. He kept turning up at the pub in the village where she’d taken a room. According to the landlord, he was a bit of a nuisance. Constantly offering to buy her a drink, not taking no for an answer.’

  ‘Did she show him up in public? Take the piss?’

  ‘As far as we could establish, she humoured him, let him buy her the occasional orange juice.’

  Bryant groaned. ‘You can’t help wondering if it would have been safer to be rude. He might have felt encouraged. Stalkers are like that. They take the slightest pleasantry as a sign of lust.’

  ‘Men are like that, never mind stalkers.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t think he was stalking Gabrielle,’ she said. ‘He was just lonely and out of his depth. This glamorous woman with a Nevada tan had turned up out of nowhere and she didn’t make him feel small when he tried to make friends. Of course he was excited. That doesn’t make him a murderer.’

  ‘Easy for him to have become carried away. If he tried it on and she lost patience with him, who’s to say that he wouldn’t have snapped? He had access to the axe that killed her.’

  ‘There’s more. All the evidence pointed to the body having been moved. The Dumelows had a four-wheel drive that was stolen the day before Gabrielle’s murder. We found it burned out in a remote wooded area. Barrie could have killed her and then used the vehicle to transport her up the coffin trail, within spitting distance of the Sacrifice Stone. Headlights in the dark can be seen for miles in a valley like Brackdale, but we couldn’t find any witnesses. No big surprise, at that time of night, probably nobody was looking. Afterwards, so the official theory went, he hid the axe, dumped the four-by-four, and set off across the fell-side. In the dark, he slipped into the ravine. He broke his legs in the fall and in any event the sides were too steep for anyone to climb out if they weren’t kitted out with the proper gear. Death by exposure, everything neatly tied up.’

  ‘Why go back up the fell? Why not go home and tuck himself up like a good mummy’s boy? If Ma Gilpin was besotted by her only child, she might even have come up with an alibi.’

  ‘Not her. She was so honest it hurt to take her statement. Trust me, I interviewed her. From the word go, she admitted that he’d been out most of the evening.’

  ‘Do you think she was afraid he’d killed Gabrielle?’

  ‘No way. She was convinced of his innocence, she never wavered for an instant. He wasn’t capable of hurting anyone, she was adamant about that.’

  ‘Not exactly evidence to stake your reputation on,’ Bryant said with a weary sigh. ‘I can see why pinning the crime on Gilpin was the only game in town.’

  ‘But it wasn’t,’ Hannah said. ‘Ben Kind was no fool. He’d have faced up to reality if nobody else was in the frame, but there were other candidates for the murder of Gabrielle, men with access to the four-by-four and the axe…’

  ‘Tash Dumelow’s husband, for one?’

  ‘Simon Dumelow’s made a lot of money in a rough business and when he was twenty, he picked up a conviction for actual bodily harm. But he’s much older and apparently more civilised now. For a long time he’s been paying other people to do his dirty work for him. We wondered if he’d made a pass at his wife’s mate and reacted badly to rejection. But by all accounts he’s always been genuinely crazy about Natasha and even though she was laid up with flu at the time, she swore he never left the house that night. Then again – what if she was lying to protect him?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Tom Allardyce, the tenant of Brack Hall Farm, Ben’s suspect of choice. Tash had introduced him to Gabrielle Anders, just as she had Barrie. Eight years before Gabrielle was killed, he was charged with raping a girl he’d met in a nightclub in Carlisle. But the prosecution fell apart.’

  ‘The way prosecutions do,’ Bryant said grimly.

  ‘Yeah, tell me about it.’

  ‘Did he have an alibi for Gabrielle’s murder?’

  ‘You bet, again conveniently provided by a mate of his, the local publican. Man called Dowling. The investigating officers couldn’t shake him and the CPS advised that if the case went ahead, Allardyce would walk out of court without
a stain on his character.’ A tinge of bitterness entered her voice. She couldn’t help it; she was thinking not so much of Allardyce as of Sandeep Patel. ‘Actually, those were the very words the lawyer used. I looked up the file.’

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Miranda’s cheeks were crimson, her eyes packed with tears. ‘What do you want to speak to her for?’

  He placed the receiver back in its cradle and turned to face her. Sun was streaming into the kitchen through the narrow blinds, making him blink in the glare. The most beautiful morning since they’d moved in – and all of a sudden she’d lost it, absolutely lost it. He wanted to say what’s the problem? but his mouth had dried. This was a landmark, as striking in its way as the Sacrifice Stone: their very first row. It had flared without warning, an explosion from an unsuspected spark. She’d walked in to the kitchen as he was dialling and when she asked, he said he was calling Hannah Scarlett. Thinking nothing of it, so that he was rocked on his heels when she cried out as though he’d smacked her. A mug of coffee slipped from her hand and crashed to the floor, splintering in jagged fragments, brown liquid eddying across the new diamond-shaped tiles.

  Upstairs, Wayne had stopped hammering. He must have overheard. Daniel could picture the young builder’s coarse features wrinkling with prurient amusement. He swore to himself. His shoulder muscles tightened with tension; he’d never seen her like this before. How to calm her down? He might have been a junior doctor, asked to diagnose from symptoms he’d never encountered in his career.

  ‘You can’t keep on with it,’ she said, ‘this constant…reaching back in time.’

  But I told you, it’s what I do, he almost said. I’m a history man. He ground his teeth, forcing himself not to throw more coal on the flames.

  ‘We were supposed to be starting all over again,’ she said. ‘Clean sheets for both of us.’

  ‘That’s right. Of course. I never meant…’

  ‘Then why hark after what’s gone?’

  ‘This isn’t about Aimee. You’re right, we agreed we had to get over everything that had gone wrong. Aimee, Richard. And it’s working, we’re doing fine. Talking to Hannah Scarlett is different, it’s about…’

  ‘It’s about Barrie Gilpin! Your precious Barrie, the suspected murderer! You know something? It’s finally dawning on me. You’d never have wanted to live here if it wasn’t for Barrie.’

  She was leaning towards him, pointing her finger. During the small hours, he’d been dimly aware of her restlessness. The smell of paint lingered in the bedroom and neither of them were sleeping well. In the early hours, she’d climbed from under the duvet and disappeared downstairs to make herself a drink.

  She’s overwrought, he said to himself. All this work on the house, living 24/7 in a building site, it’s enough to exhaust anyone. The noise, the dirt, the dust, they’d test the goodwill of a Mother Teresa clone. This isn’t about me, or Barrie, or Hannah Scarlett. I just need to give her space.

  ‘Sorry, I know I’ve harped on about the Gilpins. This is our place now, not theirs. I never meant to hurt you.’

  He reached out for her, but she stepped backwards, evading his grasp. Her foot slid in the pool of coffee and she gave a little yelp as she clutched at the table to keep her balance.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked. Not a clever question, but the best he could manage.

  ‘No, I’m not okay.’ As her head shook, her hair flapped in front of her face so that he couldn’t make out her expression. ‘I just feel I can’t shake it off, this thought that a murderer lived here, in my house. I thought if we cleaned and painted and everything, the place would become ours. But Barrie Gilpin’s clinging on like – like some sort of incubus.’

  ‘Miranda…’

  ‘There’s no escaping him. Not when we go out to The Moon under Water. Not when we’re invited to dinner by the Dumelows. We had the chance to make new friends and then you started asking about Barrie Gilpin and the evening was spoiled.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

  ‘This isn’t healthy, Daniel. You need to let go.’

  ‘I don’t care so much if Barrie was a murderer.’ He surprised himself by saying this, but as soon as the words left him, he knew it was the truth. ‘I liked him, but you’re right, it was a long time ago. If he killed the girl, he deserved his fate, as everyone says. But I need to speak to Hannah Scarlett.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Dad and Cheryl were drifting apart, and his work meant everything to him. Maybe he confided in Hannah Scarlett. She can tell me about him.’

  ‘But what do you want to know?’

  ‘What he was like.’

  Arms folded, she said, ‘He’s dead, Daniel. I hate to say it, but you need to move on. Start writing again, we can’t live on fresh air.’

  He swallowed hard. ‘You’re right. But first I want to talk to someone who knew him well. All I want to do is to fill in a few of the blanks…’

  ‘Don’t even try,’ she said. ‘Some mysteries aren’t meant to be neatly solved, some questions don’t have any answers. Leave them be.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  She snorted with exasperation. ‘I give up. There’s no reasoning with you. All right, but don’t blame me if you end up hurt. He did walk out on you, remember.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘A man who’s capable of that is capable of anything.’

  There was a knock and Wayne put his face around the kitchen door. As usual, he made it obvious that he was drinking in the sight of Miranda. In her clinging Levis, she always looked good, for all the blotchiness of her complexion and the rings around her eyes. Trying not to smirk – but not trying too hard – Wayne couldn’t keep the schadenfreude out of his voice.

  ‘All right, folks? Any chance of a cuppa, if you’re not too busy?’

  ‘Hannah Scarlett.’

  Her voice was low and cautious, as though he was calling to sell uPVC windows or a time share in Spain. As he’d waited to be put through, he’d wondered if she would instruct a minion to fob him off. He watched the sun play on the surface of the tarn as he pressed the mobile to his ear. Miranda had retreated to the bedroom with a headache but that hadn’t stopped Wayne humming “Yellow Submarine”. Daniel didn’t have a game plan, other than to hope that curiosity would get the better of her when she was given his name. So far, so good.

  ‘We’ve never met, but you worked with my father, Ben Kind.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I moved to the Lake District recently and…’

  ‘Yes, I heard.’

  ‘I met Marc when I visited his shop.’

  ‘He mentioned it.’

  The conversation was becoming a ritual dance, the participants invisible to each other and unwilling to risk a false move. What might she look like, he wondered irrelevantly: another peaches-and-cream blonde, a younger Cheryl – or more like his mother, angular and dark?

  ‘I suppose you’re puzzled about why I should call you.’

  ‘The thought’s crossed my mind,’ she said calmly, ‘but I’m sure you’re intending to explain.’

  ‘You’ll be aware that we’ve bought Tarn Cottage.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Too late, he realised that he should have planned what he was going to say. He’d never give a lecture without adequate preparation and rehearsal, so why had he blundered into this without proper thought?

  ‘It’s just that…I’d love to talk to someone who knew my old man.’

  ‘You could try his wife.’

  ‘Been there, done that, come away with a flea in my ear. She’s moved on.’

  ‘I bet she has,’ Hannah Scarlett said drily.

  ‘She doesn’t want to be reminded of the past. Or that I was part of his life before she took over.’

  After a pause she said, ‘He talked about you.’

  His skin prickled with embarrassment. ‘Not tediously, I hope.’

  ‘Ben was never tedious,’ sh
e said. ‘He was proud of you and of what you’d achieved. You should be proud of him.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said, ‘which is precisely why I’d love to talk to you about him. Not over the phone, but face to face. Sorry, I know it’s an imposition – but would you mind?’

  Another pause. He guessed she was weighing up pros and cons. When she spoke again, her voice seemed to shrug.

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  He almost stammered out his thanks but something stopped him, an intuition that if he became effusive this woman would draw back into herself. Ben Kind had prized loyalty; that was why his desertion of his family had come as such a shock. Cheryl had been – well, an aberration. If Hannah Scarlett had earned his father’s trust, she must be dependable and discreet. She’d keep her emotions on a tight leash and have little time for people who lacked the same control.

  ‘When would suit you? Of course, I’ll fit in with your diary. My time’s my own and you must be rushed off your feet. Leigh Moffat told me that you’ve taken on a new project.’

  ‘Oh, she did, did she?’

  He discerned a touch of scepticism. Maybe she and Leigh didn’t hit it off? None of his business, anyway. He said, ‘You’re in charge of a cold case team. It occurred to me that you might want to take a second look at the murder of Gabrielle Anders.’

  ‘Now why would you think that?’

  No surprise at his suggestion, he noticed, just a dead-eat response, a professional refusal to give anything away. Interesting.

  ‘No reason, really. The party line was that Gilpin was the killer, but nothing was ever proved. So – when can I see you?’

  He hated sounding like a bashful suitor, trying to fix up a date, but her reply was measured. No hint of playing hard-to-get.

  ‘Today I’m busy, but I have a space in my diary tomorrow. Mid-morning in Kendal?’