Scaring Crows

by Priscilla Masters

  Barra was incredulous. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Well I suppose the old dear from the cottage would know if anyone did.’

  Joanna glanced at her watch. ‘I’m picking her up in a little over half an hour. I’ll ask her then.’

  A second thought flitted unpleasantly through her mind. If they had hoarded cash Ruthie would have known. They had found none. So if there had been money stashed away someone must have taken it. Who better than the missing daughter? Her arguments seesawed from guilt to innocence, from victim to killer.

  And despite her instincts Ruthie Summers remained her chief suspect but the only sign she gave to Barra of her turmoil was to mutter, ‘If the aunt says they did keep quantities of cash around the place we’d better find it.’

  Barra gave a loud snort and echoed her doubts. ‘If the innocent-looking wench hasn’t helped herself.’

  ‘Don’t prejudge,’ she said. ‘She may have an explanation.’

  ‘Well it had better be very convincing. Unless ...’

  His grey eyes were sharply thoughtful. ‘I wonder if she saw what happened and fled.’

  ‘Where?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘I might buy that one,’ she said wearily, ‘if her aunt hadn’t impressed on me what an isolated life she led. But everyone agrees that apart from her father and her brother and the chap from the Milk Marque board there was nobody in their lives. At least nobody who saw them regularly. It was always just the three of them.’

  But even as she said it she knew this was not strictly true. There were other people. There was the strange man now living at the Owl Hole. And there were more. There was the aunt. There was the tanker driver. There was Pinkers. There must have been other, neighbouring farmers. And who else? Was there yet another person?

  Barra was saying nothing but he watched her carefully and followed her back into the blazing porch, already baking in the morning sun and still full of annoying, buzzing flies.

  She swatted one on her arm. ‘Where do they all come from?’

  He laughed. ‘There’s always plenty of flies around a farm. I grew up next door to one, in a little cottage on Grindon moor. They don’t bother me. You get used to them. I suppose they have plenty of stuff to breed in. Silage, manure, plenty of muck and warmth.’

  ‘Thank you for the graphic comment,’ she said drily. ‘Especially when I’m just psyching myself up to attend the post mortem.’

  They were on time to pick Hannah Lockley up from her cottage. And she was waiting for them at the front door, a small, square figure, looking peculiarly old-fashioned in a battered black straw hat and a dark, shapeless dress. She seemed somehow shrunken from yesterday, older and frailer.

  ‘I’ve had a terrible night,’ she said. ‘I’ve hardly slept at all. I can’t stop going over and over in my mind what must have happened to Aaron and Jack. How it happened.’ She gave them a fierce look. ‘Awful. Absolutely awful.’

  They watched her lock the door with a huge, old key and tuck it under the coconut mat. Mike opened his mouth to speak but Joanna shook her head. Now was not the time for a lecture on Crime Prevention.

  Miss Lockley followed them down the path and into the car before addressing Joanna. ‘Who do you think it was, Inspector?’

  ‘It’s early days yet.’ It was a weak, unhelpful reply.

  The old lady’s face crumpled as they drove past Hardacre. ‘Why do you think they were...?’ She swallowed.

  It was an ideal opportunity. Joanna turned to face her. ‘Did they keep cash in the house?’

  Hannah gave a deep sigh. ‘I can see the way you’re thinking, Inspector,’ she said wearily, ‘but they weren’t like that. For all their old-fashioned ways they put their money in the bank. There wouldn’t have been more than a few pounds in the house. Nothing worth stealing and definitely not worth killing them for.’

  It was a blind alley so Joanna tried another one. ‘Have you thought of anywhere your niece could be?’

  ‘No.’ The old lady looked thoughtful. ‘I’ve wondered about that all night and I can’t think of anything. But I heard it all on the radio. She must have heard it too. She’ll turn up.’ She spoke with hearty confidence.

  Joanna eyed the old lady curiously. For all the grief she was expressing there was a certain complacency in her manner. Had she worked nothing out? Where could the girl have gone? More than that how? The Landrover was parked outside. They must be four miles from the nearest bus stop. No taxi had reported picking a girl up from anywhere near here. A plea for her to return home had gone out on last night’s radio, a hotline set up. No one had rung to say they had seen her and she had not been in contact.

  And yet through all this, Hannah Lockley was sure Ruthie would return. Not only that, but she was convinced of the girl’s innocence. Joanna wished she could share that same conviction.

  She watched Hannah give a self-conscious tug to her hat and listened as she returned to more mundane matters. ‘And then when I got up this morning I just didn’t know what to wear. I mean – it isn’t a funeral, is it? But I felt for their sake I should dress properly. Oh dear,’ she said in a sudden flood of emotion. ‘This is a dreadful business, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes it is.’ Mike spoke woodenly from the driver’s seat. ‘But all we want to do is our job. We want to get this bloke and shove him behind bars.’ He pulled up outside the mortuary before turning around. ‘You’ll be all right, will you, Miss Lockley?’

  Only then did Hannah Lockley’s iron self-control break. ‘Let’s just get on with it,’ she snapped.

  Through the open door Joanna could see the mortuary attendants had laid the bodies out side by side, their forms covered with a green cloth. There was a vase of Arum lilies on a small table. They were good at these soft touches conveying their sympathy.

  She touched Miss Lockley’s arm. ‘You needn’t actually go into the room if you don’t want to. You can look through the window.’

  There was something Victorian about the old lady as she drew herself up with dignity. ‘I’ll do the job properly, thank you very much, Inspector.’

  A moment later it was all over, nothing different except Hannah’s face was chalk-white.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said over and over again as they sat her down and offered her a cup of tea. ‘I hadn’t thought I would be like this.’

  ‘People don’t know how they will react,’ Joanna said softly. ‘But it’s always bound to be a painful experience.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought they would look so neat,’ Hannah said faintly. ‘All night I’ve been lying awake picturing them with holes and blood and something horrible in their faces.’ She fished a man’s handkerchief out of her pocket. ‘But I didn’t think they would look so peaceful.’ Then her iron resolve broke and she pressed the handkerchief to her face. ‘Whatever Paulette would have said I don’t know. My poor family. We are cursed. Oh,’ she moaned, rocking slightly in her chair, ‘if only Ruthie would come home.’

  ‘Perhaps ...’ Joanna said cautiously and could not continue.

  It had still not occurred to this elderly aunt that if her niece did turn up alive and well suspicion would have to focus on her. But it was not up to Joanna to plant that particular seed in her brain. She took a harder look at the pale eyes and the boney hands and realized. Neither had it occurred to the ageing spinster that her niece might not turn up at all.

  Mike took the distressed old lady back to her cottage while Joanna met the two SOCOs at the door and together they waited for Matthew to arrive. The mortician made them a coffee which they drank apprehensively. Traditionally the police hated PM work and the three of them were no exception. The last thing any of them wanted was to throw the coffee up all over the floor. It was with some relief that at twenty past nine they heard Matthew’s tuneless whistle as he turned his key in the door. He entered the room looking happy, well rested and animated. He was never more relaxed than when he was about to reveal the se
crets of a corpse. Or two. A double treat.

  He gave Joanna a warm grin. ‘Hi.’ And ignoring the others present gave her a hard, happy kiss on the cheek. She met his eyes, recognized the gleam behind them. She never loved him more than when he was in this mood, ready to absorb himself in his work. He ran his fingers through his honey blond hair, always cut a touch too long for real tidiness.

  ‘We’d better get stuck in. No point in hanging around. No time to waste.’ He rubbed his hands together and addressed the mortician. ‘Wheel them in while I get changed.’

  He emerged a moment later in a green cotton gown covered by a huge, blue plastic apron. ‘I wonder what little secrets are about to be spilt on to the mortuary floor.’ Then he held his hands up. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  He tied her into a cotton attendant’s gown and eyed the SOCOs. ‘Ready?’

  They nodded, pale faced.

  An hour later he’d finished and they were sitting together in his office.

  ‘Cause of death,’ he said, ‘fairly obvious really. Gunshot wounds to the chest. Range of somewhere about four feet for Jack. Much nearer for the old man. Very little scattering of the shot, some scorching and I’ve fished out quite a lot of wadding from the wound. Interestingly Aaron Summers wasn’t going to last much longer anyway. I thought he was emaciated when I first saw him. I’ll send a section off to the path lab for confirmation but I’d lay a hefty bet that that ugly lump I pulled out of his stomach was a malignancy. Poor blighter.’

  She watched him in surprise. This was a side to Matthew she rarely saw. She had not heard him express pity for a victim before. A pathologist merely reported facts, without emotion. His patients were all dead – beyond suffering – anatomical exercises, textbook stuff. But of course Matthew was a doctor too. And what more natural than that he would react to this pathology as would a doctor who would know the suffering and eventual, inevitable outcome of this ‘ugly lump’ which had eroded Aaron Summers from the inside out.

  ‘How long would he have lived?’

  Matthew peeled off his latex gloves. ‘We’re talking about weeks,’ he said. ‘The thing was far gone. I’ll ring his GP and find out some more.’

  But the real question was, did this discovery have any bearing on Aaron’s murder? Surely not. How could it? So she moved to the second figure. ‘And Jack?’

  ‘Uum, Jack was in pretty good shape.’ He paused. ‘Apart from quite a bad old head injury. There was still some depression of the skull and extensive tissue necrosis underneath. It might have been done when he was a child, possibly even when he was a baby. And I think it would almost certainly have resulted in some brain damage.’

  She followed him to the sink and watched him sluicing his hands.

  He laughed. ‘That’s the weird thing about this job,’ he said. ‘Every now and again you get a real surprise. I mean the gunshot wounds were obvious. The rest, well ...’ And at last he was answering Joanna’s question. ‘But I can’t see how either finding affects your case, Jo.’

  ‘Neither can I.’

  She watched him filling in the forms in his careful but scrawly writing, something nagging hard at the back of her mind. Something he had said. ‘Matthew,’ she began slowly. ‘What’s likely to have caused Jack’s skull fracture?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe he was dropped as a baby, fell downstairs. It could have been anything.’ He stopped. ‘Has anyone said Jack was retarded?’

  ‘No ... Yes.’

  Hannah Lockley’s words when she had learnt about the murders. ‘So the idiot son went berserk in the end.’ Joanna had heard the words but not followed them up at the time. Only now did they make sense. She nodded and Matthew continued. ‘Well, I’d lay a bet he was, at the very least, slow. Now.’ He crossed the room towards a blackboard on which was sketched a plan of the murder scene, the sitting room, positions of the bodies, doors and windows. ‘As for the major wounds. The shot Jack received was just a little off centre and angled while Aaron’s was full blast central chest.’ With his finger he traced a line from the front door to the spot which marked the point where Jack’s body had been found. He spoke to one of the SOCOs. ‘Can you remember the exact measurement?’

  ‘Just under four feet.’

  Matthew nodded. ‘The assailant took one or two steps inside the room. Jo, he was no nearer. The shot in the bodies isn’t very scattered and even on Aaron there’s practically no scorching. Besides, shotgun wounds much over four feet are rarely fatal and that couldn’t have suited our killer. I suppose ...’ He paused for a moment. ‘I suppose that you’ve already worked it out that Aaron might have been the designated victim while Jack’s happening on the scene was a bit of bad luck.’

  ‘I had considered that possibility,’ she said cautiously.

  ‘And Aaron has to have been shot first otherwise he would have been near enough to have grabbed the gun from the killer. Understand what I’m saying, Jo. There was blood on the floor. The killer took two steps forward, stepped in it.’

  But Joanna shook her head. ‘We’ve found no bloody footprints, Matthew.’

  ‘Not enough for prints but particles, invisible to the naked eye. Put it like this,’ he said. ‘I’d like to see some shoes.’

  ‘Or wellies?’

  He nodded. ‘And I’m sure some would have splashed on the top too.’

  This was what had always impressed her about Matthew. Not just the work he did on the slab but the piecing together of the facts.

  She watched the mortician wheel the two bodies out of the room before turning her attention back to him. ‘How long would Jack have taken to die?’

  ‘A minute or two. No longer. And by the way, in case you want to know, neither had fired a gun in the last couple of days. And now it’s time I wrote my reports.’ He gave a last glance at the two officers, busy bagging up the samples for the forensic lab. ‘Have you got all you want?’

  ‘Yes, thanks, Doctor.’

  ‘Including their fingerprints?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll ring the coroner and we’ll pop them back in the fridge to await further instruction but you can tell the relatives we should be happy to release the bodies for burial quite soon. It’s a straightforward case and I don’t think there’s anything more to find. Not from these two anyway.’ He grinned at her. ‘Time for a coffee?’

  They were settled in his small office before he broached the subject of Ruthie. ‘Found the missing girl yet?’

  ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘No sign.’ She reached across the desk to touch his hand. ‘How you do love your work, Matthew.’

  His green eyes gleamed. ‘And how you love yours.’

  For a long moment they held each other’s gaze and Joanna was conscious that their early moments had been just like this – light-hearted bantering that had suddenly got out of hand.

  And then she had found out that Matthew was married. She closed her eyes to blot out the memory.

  ‘Of course,’ she smiled, ‘stating the obvious. If we had found Ruthie Summers dead what we would now be investigating would be a very ugly triple murder. It’s even possible that it was done on the spur of the moment as the gun was habitually kept in the front porch. It might even have been loaded. Damn.’ She clenched her fist. ‘If we’d known how casual they were about their firearms we’d never have stamped his gun licence.’ She returned to her original train of thought. ‘But if we had found Ruthie’s body I suppose it would have made things easier because we could be certain that this was the work of an outsider. As it is ...’ Even now she hated to say it. ‘She’s the chief suspect.’

  Matthew was silent for a moment. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that you have considered the possibility that she might have wanted to spare her father the agony of dying and shot him to prevent further suffering.’

  ‘A euthanasiac killing? And Jack?’

  ‘Maybe he got upset and she ...’ Even Matthew found it difficult to say.

  But the memory of the he
art-shaped face, the pensive dark eyes and the slightly nervous twist to the girl’s face made her shake her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Whatever the explanation I don’t believe that’s it.’

  ‘So what is?’

  Joanna shook her head. ‘I simply don’t know.’

  ‘So where do you start?’

  ‘With her photographs, then to the bank. No one can live on nothing. If she withdrew money that’ll give us a sign of premeditation. Plus an indication of guilt. And, I suppose, if there has been no withdrawal it sort of tips the scales in her favour.’

  ‘And towards her death,’ Matthew observed.

  ‘One step at a time, Mat,’ she said. ‘At the moment when I say it tips the scales in her favour I simply mean being innocent of the crime. I don’t like jumping to conclusions. We’ll put some pictures of her on the national TV and keep our fingers crossed she turns up. I really do hope we’ll find her.’

  Matthew grinned at her. ‘Proper little terrier, aren’t you?’

  ‘Woof, woof.’ She stood up then. ‘I’d better get back to the Incident Room,’ she said. ‘Mike will be wondering what’s happened to me. Time’s leaping forward. We should start interviewing potential witnesses.’

  ‘Anyone special?’

  ‘A particularly unsavoury specimen called Pinkers,’ she said. ‘He runs a neighbouring farm and he’s milking poor old Aaron Summers’ cows at the moment.’ She gave Matthew a mischievous smile. ‘Much as I’d love to burst in Rambo style with the heavies, I think in reality Mike and I will go prodding round his cowsheds and see what we can come up with.’

  ‘Well don’t forget your wellies.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘No other suspects in your sights?’

  She gave a deep sigh. ‘It’s usual form to interview the person who found the body at some length. Statistically speaking the last person to have seen the victim alive is also the first person to find them dead – if you see what I mean.’