Cold Relations (Honey Laird Book 1)

by Gerald Hammond

  No mention had been made of Pippa, but she knew that the Labrador would be welcome. Pippa had already been walked. Honey kept a bag packed ready for emergency departures and Pippa had a permanent bed in the tail of the Range Rover, so her call at home took only a few minutes. As she drove, her spirits rose. Dead bodies were never pleasant company and those that had been under water for any length of time were among the worst, but at least, if this should be the missing Mr Colebrook, the case would open up.

  Wind and rain made driving conditions even worse and there were holdups caused by two accidents, but she pulled up outside Ian’s modest house in Newton Lauder in two hours. Ian Fellowes hurried out, struggling with a golf umbrella, to help her in with her dog and small luggage to where Deborah was waiting with an enormous hug. The two women had become firm friends during Honey’s first stay in the town, and the bond had been renewed during several subsequent visits.

  Deborah could be very discreet, but when a case was local she preferred not to hear the details until it was over. During the meal they exchanged news and talked generalities. The Fellowes’s young son had already been fed and when the meal was over Deborah took him off to his bed while Ian and Honey settled in the sitting room. The boy had been named Ronald and was known as Ronnie, after a disreputable great-uncle that Deborah had nevertheless dearly loved.

  ‘One of Colebrook’s sons,’ Ian said, ‘the eldest one —’

  ‘Vernon,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. He was quite prepared to make the identification. But it’s about three weeks since his father did his vanishing act and, to be brutally frank, the body seems to have been in the water for most if not all of that time.’ He looked at her as though wondering how delicate were her susceptibilities although he knew that she was no stranger to dead bodies. ‘So I would not trust an identification made on facial appearance only. We’re fetching his dentist up to the mortuary, here in Newton Lauder, first thing, before the post-mortem begins.’

  ‘No help from the fingerprints?’ she asked. ‘Of course, I know what long immersion does to skin —’

  ‘That isn’t the problem. There are at least partial fingerprints left on the hands. Your Sergeant Bryant was helpful but he said that he couldn’t furnish an authenticated set of Mr Colebrook’s prints.’

  ‘I’m afraid that he was right, for once,’ Honey said. ‘The trouble is that on the Friday, the day before the shoot, they had a carpet cleaning firm in. Next day, the housekeeper and her husband spent the day on a massive springclean, finishing with a polish and a wipe over all the surfaces. Even his keyboard and his brushes had been wiped. There are a few fingerprints in the house still, but prior to the big cleanup the sons and their families and God knows who else had been in and out of the house. We simply don’t know which if any of the remaining prints pertain to Mr Colebrook.’

  ‘That gives us an explanation without being a scrap of help,’ Ian said gloomily. ‘For the moment, then, we can only say that it seems highly probable that it’s his corpse and wait for dental evidence.’

  ‘I accept that,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘The dentist should be able to settle the question. But it leaves us with a problem. I, along with several other people, saw Mr Colebrook leave Tinnisbeck Castle, intending to head north towards his home near Edinburgh. There’s no sign that he ever reached his home. His car turned up well on the way home. The car may have been wiped over, but I saw him myself putting on gloves before he drove off. If that was his habit, the few prints that were found in it are as likely to be those of a mechanic or his housekeeper’s husband. His brace of pheasants was still on the floor behind the front seats. His gun and a cartridge bag were securely locked in the boot. The point I’m working round towards is that either he got into the water that evening and somebody else drove his car to the Bellbridge Hotel or he drove it to the hotel and somebody else brought him about halfway back towards where he started —’ Ian began to speak but she held up her hand. ‘Let me finish. He or the car may have done all sorts of journeyings in between, but the principle holds. What were you going to say?’

  ‘You’ve just said it for me.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. How was the body found?’

  ‘A hospital porter on late duty. He usually gives his dog a walk before he goes to work. He phoned us and then went off to work like a good member of hospital staff but a thoroughly bad witness. I don’t think he has much to tell us so I haven’t had him fetched away from work. The finder is usually suspect, but in this instance he seems to have no connection whatever with the Colebrooks. We had a quick look around before the light went, but there are no obvious signs of violence. Probably Mr Colebrook was brought there to be disposed of. Unless, of course, he jumped in of his own accord or met with an accident, but the absence of his car makes either unlikely. I suggest that one of us might see him tomorrow while the other attends the post-mortem. And we’ll have to have a better search of the banks of the loch. Not, I think, a full-scale fingertip search of the whole area unless something turns up to suggest that more than the simple dunking of an already dead body took place there.’

  She nodded sadly. ‘For all the good it’ll do us after more than a fortnight of wintry weather. But I suppose somebody may have dropped a monogrammed handkerchief or a bloodstained dagger.’ Privately, she wondered whether she would prefer to lead the search in the wind and rain or to attend the postmortem in a nice and dry but chilly mortuary.

  The decision was made for her. ‘I’d better attend the PM,’ Ian said. ‘You catch the porter before he leaves for work and then go round the perimeter with my two beauties.’

  ‘How was the body dressed?’ she asked.

  ‘Tweed jacket and breeks, cotton and nylon shirt, Saltire Society tie, woollen sweater, braces, green kilt stockings and garters, brogues, cotton vest and pants. And a cartridge belt. We took that off rather than have live ammunition so easily available.’

  ‘That sounds pretty much how I last saw him, except that I wouldn’t know about his underwear. And it agrees with how his housekeeper says he left home. I’d like to see the clothes. Could I get a look at him before they undress him?’

  Ian looked at her doubtfully. ‘You won’t like it,’ he said, ‘but I suppose that could be arranged.’

  She was tired and the idea of facing the night again was unattractive, but she could imagine some eager beaver or an attendant arriving for work at some godless hour and making an immediate start. ‘Could we go now?’ she asked.

  He looked at her in surprise. Then he nodded. ‘I’ll phone and make sure that there’s somebody there to let us in.’

  *

  Ian’s car was already locked away. They left Pippa in the house and took the Range Rover up to the hospital. A mortuary attendant produced the body, rather with the air of a conjurer showing that the lady was not in fact sawn in half. A body that has spent several weeks in water is not a pretty sight but Honey had become at least partly inured to unpleasant sights and was able to control her nausea. She studied it with care. ‘It certainly looks very like him,’ she said. ‘The clothes look very similar, all but one thing. A pair of green Wellingtons was found in his car.’

  ‘Is that the one thing?’

  ‘No. The one thing is that he was wearing a cartridge belt. The loops were full? I thought so.’ She probed cautiously at the corpse’s waist. ‘And his right-hand jacket pocket is full of cartridges too. You missed those.’

  ‘He’d been shooting. You knew that. We’ll empty his pockets in the morning.’

  ‘He had shot quite a lot. So why was the belt full? And I’m sure that he never put cartridges in his pocket, he loaded from his cartridge belt. I’m positive that I remember seeing him take his cartridge belt off.’

  ‘A belt of twelve-bore shotgun cartridges is heavy,’ Ian said. ‘So he was meant to sink?’

  ‘Until natural processes brought him up again. He may have been meant to stay down.’

  ‘Yes. Which confirms that he was put there as a
method of disposal. I noticed one other thing. I can’t believe that it’s of any significance. His shirt was tucked into his underpants.’

  She hid her amusement and then sobered as she saw the implications. ‘That doesn’t mean that somebody else dressed him. And it doesn’t mean that they didn’t, provided only that the somebody knew his personal habits. I don’t think we need consider the possibility that he was killed at home and brought away again. Let’s get back to the car.’ When they were settled in the Range Rover again and rolling down the hill she said, ‘I had to attend the autopsy when an MP committed suicide while I was in the Met. Between that and shopping for my father, I know a little about men’s clothes as purchased and worn by old-fashioned gentlemen of English upbringing. The upper crust male, once he’s past a certain age, dislikes anything that grips him around the waist. Belts, elasticised waistbands and self-supporting trousers become anathema. He likes everything to hang comfortably and, more important, reliably from the shoulders. So he wears braces, and his underpants have loops through which go the legs of his braces. I’ve even got Sandy sold on the style of dress for winter. Now think about it. With that arrangement, his shirt has to be tucked into his underpants.’

  ‘Like they used to say laughingly about John Major?’

  ‘Yes. Thereby revealing themselves to have no aspirations above Marks and Spencer.’

  *

  Deborah met them at the door, along with an anxious Pippa. They each sniffed. ‘You smell of the morgue, both of you,’ Deborah said.

  ‘You let your imagination run away with you,’ Ian told her.

  ‘Well, humour my imagination, both of you. Go and change. Get ready for bed and come down in dressing gowns for a nightcap.’

  ‘If we’re having a pyjama party,’ Honey said, ‘you must join in and not just serve the drinks, looking superior. Go and put on your frilliest nightie.’

  Deborah laughed. ‘No, thank you very much. The minister would certainly arrive at the door. And I’d hate to give him an excuse for his infuriating air of superiority. He puts it on so much more convincingly than I do.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Ian had to leave the house early. Business in a mortuary begins promptly, despite any lassitude on the part of the occupants in transit. Honey had a slightly more leisurely breakfast with Deborah and Ronnie, fetched Pippa from the back porch which she had shared with the Fellowes’s Labrador, and set off to keep an arranged appointment with the finder of the body. The rain had gone and the wind had blown itself out, leaving a cool but pleasant day.

  A B-road passed near the small loch where the unfortunate gentleman, whoever he might turn out to be, had been found. A rough track connected the two. Honey was first at the rendezvous but she had overtaken a motorcycle with a large dog seated, very upright and dignified, in a sidecar. This turned out, as she supposed, to be conveying the hospital porter. The unmarked Ford bringing PCs Bright and McFadden followed on.

  The dead man might have walked to the waterside but more probably had been carried, alive or dead, by vehicle. Since then the porter, who introduced himself as Sam Wylie, had circled the loch a dozen times on his morning walks and, following his grim discovery, the scene would have been traversed by the ambulance, several cars and many more sets of feet. Nevertheless, she saw no need to risk disturbing any fragments of evidence that might conceivably have survived. They walked from the road. The track showed all the signs of traffic, vehicular, pedestrian or animal, but if any of it was of significance Honey could not perceive it.

  Mr Wylie was insistent that she call him Sam although he was meticulous in addressing her as Inspector. A snap of his fingers brought his dog out of the sidecar. This was an absolute canine cocktail with no particular breed dominating. He was hairy, long-eared, short-nosed and bowlegged but nevertheless very appealing and biddable. Pippa, when brought out of the Range Rover, took one look, gave one sniff and accepted the other as harmless and well-intentioned. With a flicker of the telepathy that can develop between dog and owner, Honey thought that Pippa, as a pure-bred Labrador, was enjoying quiet amusement at the other’s mixed parentage. The other dog, however, was quite unabashed and retained a manner both friendly and exuberant. Mr Wylie, though just as friendly, was round-faced and balding.

  It was Honey’s experience that quite different details may be noticed while travelling in one direction as against the other, so after a very short briefing she sent the two PCs to circumambulate the loch clockwise while she and Sam Wylie went round it widdershins. They were, she told them, to look for signs of activity and, though it was to be supposed that the dead man had arrived at the water by way of the track and entered the water thereabouts, they were to look particularly for any signs of traffic arriving at any other point.

  The day had brightened and even the sun was making an occasional appearance. A mild breeze left over from the previous day’s wind stirred the upper branches of the pines. The loch extended to no more than perhaps four or five hectares. It was a pretty spot. Trees had been kept back from the immediate waterside, presumably to aid the casting of an angler who cared to try for the one or two brown trout who snatched at the belated hatch of midges that still danced over the water.

  From the appearance of the corpse, there could be little doubt that it had been in water for most of the interim since the day of the shoot. During that period there had been rain and a few hours of light frost, so she was not optimistic about finding a clear record. Sam Wylie pointed across the water to where gaudy tapes marked the spot where the body had drifted to the bank. Honey studied the tracks made by Mr Wylie’s trainers, which he claimed to have worn every day for his walk so that he could change into clean shoes for work. The path around the loch was muddy in places. Mr Wylie’s footprints were well represented, as were those of sheep, rabbits, dogs and, she was fairly sure, a fox but no tyre tracks or other human prints were discernible, so it seemed that any movements by officers or stretcher-bearers had been kept away from the path and on the short heather.

  They moved slowly. Sam Wylie had made it clear that he had time to spare before his work. Honey was carrying her camera and was prepared to collect and record the location of every scrap of toffee paper or other rubbish but there was nothing to be seen. Even traces of animal origin were few and clearly non-human. There were even one or two hoof-prints of a horse, but the idea of Mr Colebrook being transported across a saddle, as if by some Valkyrie, was too much to swallow. The trampled area where the body had been lifted from the water was taped off, though she was at a loss to think what good that would do except to preserve a record of the churning of the mud by constabulary feet. The place, after all, had been randomly chosen at the whim of the wind and current and there was no reason to suppose that the dead man or any ill-wisher had ever set foot there. Sam Wylie was positive that he had never met another human on his daily walks there, except for one or two anglers in season. The season was now well past.

  A few yards further on they met the two DCs. Bright and McFadden had nothing to show except for a carrier bag that they had retrieved from the water and which could have blown there from miles away.

  They walked on.

  ‘Anglers,’ she said. ‘Could you describe them?’

  ‘Gosh, no. If a man’s facing the water and I walk past behind him, I maybe say “Good morning” and he maybe answers but he doesn’t usually look round – too busy watching his fly. And I maybe say “Any luck?” and all the reply I get is “Bugger all” if you’ll pardon my French, Inspector. And it’s a couple of months since the fishing stopped.’

  ‘Have you ever seen two men at a time?’

  ‘Once or twice.’

  So the possibility of guests was there to confuse the issue. All the same, the point remained. ‘Somebody had to know that this loch was here,’ she said, ‘but you can’t see it from the road and it isn’t marked on the ordinary scale road maps. If I send somebody with some photographs, could you pick out anybody that you’ve seen before
?’

  Mr Wylie scratched his bald spot. ‘I could try. I’m not promising anything, mind.’

  ‘If you promised anything, I’d know that I couldn’t rely on you. Too many witnesses tell the police what they think we want to hear. What we do want is the truth.’

  ‘There was one man who’d caught a whopper. Must’ve gone three and a half pounds easy. He showed it to me, more than once. I might remember him.’

  ‘Was he red-haired and rather tall?’

  ‘Short, fat and balder even than I am.’

  They completed the circuit and met the two detective constables again. An area of churned-up earth had been taped off near the mouth of the track but there was nothing to be learned from it. The forensic team had already been over it and, in making casts of whatever they hoped against hope might prove significant, had left nothing of interest behind. They began the walk back to the cars. Sam Wylie, who was becoming pressed for time, hurried ahead.

  ‘Well,’ DC Bright said, ‘that was a perishing waste of time.’

  ‘You think so?’ Honey said.

  Her tone warned him. ‘All right, Inspector,’ he said. ‘So I’m an idiot. What did I miss?’ They had worked together in the past and he knew just how far he could go.

  ‘You saw the loch. Did you know that it was there?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘You saw the fish?’

  ‘A few brown trout. Nothing over about half a pound. Just tiddlers. What about them?’

  ‘Big fish probably feed deep at this time of year. I have a little job for you,’ she told him. ‘Find out who owns the fishing here – if it’s not free-for-all. I suspect that it’s stocked. So is it a club? Or does somebody sell tickets? Is the local authority the landowner? Find out. I want a list of ticket-holders and I want photographs of them. And make it quick. Inspector Fellowes wants a briefing meeting at four, to follow the post-mortem as far as it’s gone.’