A Cotswolds Murder

by Roy Lewis

  ‘Any sign, Bert?’

  Bert peered through the dusty windscreen.

  ‘There’s one light down there,’ he said. ‘That van over by the trees.’

  Even as he spoke a broader shaft of light gleamed against the trees, a van door opening at the sound of the ambulance. A dark figure emerged, a tall young man, running, waving.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Bert. ‘Okay, we’ll waste no time. I’ll go in, help the lass out. You can get the van turned.’

  ‘Bit tight, just ’ere,’ the driver said. ‘Swing round up above, that’s the way.’

  Bert got out and was hurried towards the van. The driver backed, swung the ambulance around in a long, easy curve. You could never tell on camp sites like these. Once you hit the grass you could easily get bogged down — a bit of rain was all you needed and on a slope like this your wheels could burn a scar on the grass, settle in soft earth and you could be stuck until they brought a tractor to drag you out. Ambulance drivers had to be careful.

  He left the engine running and got out. Bert was just coming out of the caravan with the woman. She could walk, but she was obviously in trouble. Her husband was just behind her, carrying a case, looking a bit sheepish. They often did, as though now it was happening they felt they shouldn’t ought to have done it in the first place. Bit late now, the driver thought stoically, with memories of his own six ventures in this direction.

  He helped Bert assist the woman into the ambulance. The young man got in with her. The pert little bit with the tousled hair and the come-hither figure asked if she ought to go along too. ‘Up to you, love,’ Bert said, and she looked around the site hesitantly, and decided to stay where she was.

  I’d stay, keep you company, love, the ambulance driver thought, if I wasn’t busy. He pressed the throttle and the engine roared. Bert rapped on the window to signify everything was okay and the driver swung the ambulance around, heading for the gate.

  The pregnant woman — Mrs Keene — she looked close, and taking it rough, first time, he guessed. So he’d take it easy. Hurry, but smooth. Another little pride. First thing, get off this bloody gravel track, great lumps of stone, send the ambulance lurching all over the place. But careful of the slopes, don’t get stuck, for God’s sake.

  Swing left, head slightly for that end caravan, then pull back on to the track to drive out of the gateway. Funny there were no lights up above — asking for trouble, that, with all the gippoes about. Stowford Fair or not, he wouldn’t—’

  The thought, the complaint vanished from his mind. He slowed the ambulance, stopped. He looked back briefly to see the dark shape of Bert’s head, looking forward at him. He put the gears into neutral and sat for a moment staring at the bundle lying just to the left of his headlights. If he had stayed on the gravel track he probably wouldn’t have noticed it.

  He got out slowly, but his heart was thumping against his ribs. It was one thing to he calm when you handled the sick and the dying on stretchers into the ambulance. It was easy enough to fight the sickness when you’d seen more than a few traffic accident cases being shelled up for the mortuary.

  But this was different. He wasn’t calm, and his stomach was churning.

  ‘What’s up?’ Bert called as he got back into the driver’s seat. He could trust himself to only a couple of words.

  ‘Police job,’ he said, and set out hell for leather for Stowford.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector John Crow.’

  ‘Detective-Inspector George Stafford.’ The two men shook hands solemnly, then Stafford gestured towards the car that waited in the station yard, and led the way. ‘Good journey?’

  ‘Train was on time, anyway.’

  ‘Down from Edinburgh, hey?’

  ‘Not business. Short holiday, really.’ Stafford slid into the back seat as the driver took Crow’s luggage and stowed it in the car boot. ‘Didn’t think you Murder Squad characters ever managed holidays. Sir,’ he added, as a quick afterthought, then caught the gleam in Crow’s eyes and grinned. ‘Sorry, sir, we’re only recently expanded as a force and one gets into the habit of—’

  ‘Don’t apologize,’ John Crow said. ‘I’ve no objection — we’ve got to work together so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be at ease.’ He looked sideways at George Stafford nevertheless. Big, brash, confident, easy in his manners. He’d be a popular man on the force, and one accustomed to getting results. An extrovert who, from his size, would probably have been a striker in the county soccer team or a front row forward in the local rugby club. Young, bright, pushing, perhaps a little impatient. And, probably, right now a little surprised. He’d be thinking that John Crow didn’t look like everyone’s idea of an efficient Murder Squad man. It was to his credit that he hadn’t let the surprise appear in his eyes.

  The squad car accelerated out of the station car park and Crow settled back in his seat. ‘We’ve not far to go,’ Stafford said, then hesitated. ‘You . . . er . . . you familiar with the area?’

  ‘Familiar enough,’ John Crow said. But more than familiar, really. Headquarters were established at Stowford, and that was a village he knew little enough about, but most of the area was reasonably well known to him. In recent years his visits to the Cotswolds had been fleeting, often just a car drive through on the way to another case, but it remained a favourite place for him and Martha, as it had been a magical place for him as a child. It was odd how childhood memories always produced pictures of golden days, but the days he recalled in the Cotswolds certainly were golden. The villages of grey and straw-yellow stone were as mellow as the Cotswold fields of stubble after the harvest, and he could remember sitting with his uncle on a hilltop, being shown the sweeping panorama of a countryside that, perched on the edge of the teeming southeast with its seventeen million inhabitants, was yet medieval in its character. A librarian and local historian, his uncle had tramped John Crow across the awesome vertical western edge of the ancient seabed that had reared up millions of years ago to form the great escarpment. He had shown him twelfth-century grey-walled villages and they had spent long afternoons on the long, open, flat-topped north wolds where the sheep grazed placidly on the high land.

  Now, Crow glanced at George Stafford, a local man, and wondered if he had ever seen the countryside as John Crow had. He doubted it. Local people grew up in an area and never saw it — unless there was someone like an uncle of John Crow’s to show them. The rounded, heavily wooded hills were just hills; the steeply folded-in coombes just valleys; and the timeless rusticity of the old woollen towns just a stubborn resistance to modern progress, unless you were shown, told, forced to look and see. John Crow had gained much from his uncle, but not only in terms of the Cotswolds. Rather, he had gained an attitude — it made him look at things and people in a way a man in a hurry could not. For the land and people were alike in that one respect — they only gave you their secrets if you respected them, listened to them, looked at them. Gave them time. George Stafford would be a man who was short of time. He would say he needed more than the life allotted him, to do all he wanted to do. It was an old argument and one John Crow had turned aside from many years ago. Perhaps one day George Stafford would do the same.

  ‘Eggstone,’ Stafford said suddenly.

  ‘Sorry?’ Crow said, coming out of his reverie.

  ‘Eggstone,’ Stafford said, pointing to the distant limestone ridge. ‘It’s oolite, but around here they call it eggstone because it looks like roe — you know, it’s made up of small round granules. I always think that there’s no greater stone — you see its sort of honey colour in these buildings?’ He leaned forward, peering out at the buildings they passed at the top of the bank. ‘Where else in England will you find that kind of stone, hey?’

  ‘Where else?’ Crow said, smiling. And where else will you find such a pompous, arrogant, egocentric, supercilious fool as John Crow? ‘You must tell me all about it,’ he said, still smiling. ‘And then we can talk about this man Lindop.’
>
  * * *

  During the next half-hour John Crow learned a little more about the Cotswolds, and a great deal more about George Stafford. He had been brought up among the tall old stone cloth mills of the Stroud valleys but his father had been a farmer originally and George Stafford looked forward to a similar occupation — on a small scale — when he retired. He was just twenty-six now, satisfied with life, urgent, but not hasty. And he had already done a considerable amount of work on the Lindop murder.

  ‘I’ve got the files ready for you at the King’s Head in Stowford. We thought you’d probably want to work centrally from Cirencester, but an ops room at Stowford is necessary, we reckoned, because of its proximity to the caravan park.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘The ops room is set up in Stowford station, and I booked you a room at the King’s Head. You can get a good pint there.’

  ‘That helps.’

  ‘Now, as far as the homicide is concerned, we’ve made a start by taking statements from all the people immediately concerned, including the people who were actually on the caravan site that night, the ones who were in Stowford, the chap called Hartley who owns the bungalow near the site, and the ambulance men, of course. There’s been no time to start sifting the statements, but now that you’ve arrived to take charge the Chief Constable says he’ll let us have as many men as we need to get the donkey work done.’

  ‘It looks as though he’s having his work cut out in other directions,’

  Crow murmured as he leaned forward to peer over the driver’s head.

  George Stafford laughed. ‘Everything happens at once.’

  They were just entering Stowford. From the top of the hill Crow could see almost the whole of the town. It was typical of many Cotswold villages. It was off the beaten tourist track so had not suffered the birdlands, model railways, and aquariums that had been foisted on to places like Bourton-on-the-Water to attract the coaches with their bands of day trippers. It boasted one main street that was broad enough to be called Broadway and held memories of old mail-coaches. Between footpath and road was a wide green strip of turf that was unmarked by parking meters. The houses were honey-coloured, the window frames white-painted, there were hints of Georgian and dashes of mock Tudor, erect, discreet iron street lights, green hanging baskets in front of a scattering of unpretentious guest houses, a tiny humpbacked bridge that was enough to bar motor-coaches, a stream too small to encourage fishermen, a battlemented church that would be no older than fourteenth century and the whole enclosed in a ring of thickly wooded hills that made a newcomer imagine there would be one way into Stowford and no way out.

  But right now it was packed.

  Parked along the sward right through the centre of Stowford was a long colourful line of caravans. They varied in style from ancient, gaily-painted dilapidation, to heartless cream and chrome. A prominent sign at the first junction denied entry to all cars except on business and in the Broadway itself there were strolling groups of people, sightseers, visitors, locals, mingling with dark-skinned Romanies, swarthy youths showing off ponies, fortune-tellers bangled and complacent about their futures, young girls giggling and hopeful about theirs. In the afternoon sunshine the street gleamed with colour against the bright backdrop of the wooded hills; there was an air of excitement about the place that the local murder would have seemed to do nothing to dispel, and somewhere around a corner pop records blared out a cacophonous chorus that sent ponies dancing in alarm and teenagers jigging in delight.

  ‘Stowford Fair,’ George Stafford announced. ‘Three hundred years old, they claim, but I’ve seen records going back only to 1837. But who am I to argue?’

  * * *

  From the window of his room in the King’s Head John Crow looked down upon the throng in the Broadway. He grunted. ‘I suppose they’ll be kicking up a noise until the early hours.’

  ‘It’ll last only another forty-eight hours,’ Stafford said. ‘Then they’ll be packing up. By Sunday the street will be swept clean again. You’ll have no trouble sleeping then.’

  ‘Causes problems, though,’ Crow said.

  ‘The Lindop murder? Yes. Too many strangers about the place. The local press no doubt will hint that the coup de grace could have been delivered by a Romany hand.’

  ‘Could it?’

  Stafford shrugged, and joined Crow at the window. ‘It’s possible. I mean, we know most of the trouble-makers in this lot. They’ve been coming for years for the fair. As usual, most of them were in the pubs when Lindop was killed. The problem would be to show some link between a gipsy among this lot and Lindop out at Lovesome Hill. We’ve certainly heard no whispers so far.’

  ‘Mmm . . . Well, thanks anyway. I’ll get myself a cup of tea and a sandwich, and have a chat with the landlord now, and then I’ll come across to the station when I’ve had a wash.’

  ‘We’re just over there,’ Stafford said, pointing. ‘Almost opposite the King’s Head and poised between Madame Defarge and the Count of Monte Cristo.’

  When Stafford had gone, John Crow rang downstairs and arranged for some tea and sandwiches — he had had no lunch on the train — and then washed away the lethargy that travelling always brought upon him. The late afternoon sun slanted in upon him as he sat down for half an hour and skipped through some of the files that Stafford had left with him. After a little while he rose and went downstairs to his sandwiches and tea, introduced himself to the licensee and his wife, and indulged in a few pleasantries. They were somewhat taken aback by his tall gaunt appearance and their young daughter could not drag her glance away from his bald domed head, but they were soon at ease and amiable, once they had got over the fact of his appearance and the reality of his occupation. Policemen were different, detectives more different, odd-looking detectives most different of all. It was a hurdle John Crow had had to cross all his professional life.

  At five-thirty he left the King’s Head and threaded his way through the crowded street, passing between the fat woman Stafford had designated as Madame Defarge and the gorgeous middle-aged Romany with the brocaded suit he had called Monte Cristo. The police station beyond was a solid, dark building. Three stone steps, an uninviting façade, an Enquiries window that did its best to resist enquiries, and a large room beyond, where George Stafford stood talking to a generously built sergeant and a fresh-faced surly young man in a denim jacket, jeans and high-heeled boots. As Crow entered George Stafford was jerking his thumb in a peremptory gesture and the young man turned disconsolately on his high heels, stared rudely at John Crow almost till he reached the door, and then disappeared into the street.

  ‘Trouble?’ Crow asked.

  ‘Not really. Storm in a teacup if you ask me. We’ve been having the Post Office engineers on our backs for some time — there’s been a ham working a local radio around here playing pop music and interfering with the local station that’s just been set up. They’ve not been pleased. Nothing we could do about it because the ham played it very carefully — every time a Post Office van hove into sight he shut down. Until the other night. A fracas developed in the Broadway – a couple of gipsies started waving bottles at each other, the fight spread into Chester Street, and there you are — who should be reporting the battle, hot eye-witness account, but our ham.’

  ‘That was him?’ Crow asked, nodding towards the door.

  ‘The very chap.’ Stafford’s broad face split into a happy grin. ‘Course, he was asking for it. I mean, if he wants to become a fight broadcaster he ought to choose a better spot. He’d pinpointed himself for the Post Office people. They were down on him within seconds of his starting the following evening — Chester Street gave up her radio ham meek as modern ale. He’s been in this afternoon, arguing. Said when he put out his broadcast at ten-twenty-eight on the dot he was doing a public service, warning the local constabulary of nefarious goings on in Chester Street, preventing a riot and all that.’

  Crow smiled. ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘I told hi
m to push off. Argue it out with the Post Office, not me.’ Stafford shook his head. ‘It was quite a night, though, believe me. A near fatal affray in Chester Street between three drunken gipsies, a tip-off that Northleach Hall had been cased for a likely job, and to cap it all Mr Lindop getting the back of his head bashed in at Lovesome Hill Caravan Park.’

  ‘There are some places with worse records for a night.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stafford said, grinning widely, ‘but this is Stowford!’

  They went through to George Stafford’s office which was to serve as the operations room in Stowford, and Stafford sat down behind his desk and lit a pipe while Crow began to read through the reports and statements again. Stafford was on his second pipeful when Crow looked up.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Now tell me how you see this thing.’

  Stafford pulled a face. ‘This is the first time I’ve been pulled in on a murder case. I thought I’d be dogs-bodying around rather than putting up theories.’

  ‘You’re local. You could see things I wouldn’t. Maybe you’ve already seen something. So tell me.’

  Stafford laid down his pipe and frowned. ‘The act itself was pretty straightforward. Lindop was struck down from behind by a heavy blunt instrument. We picked up a crowbar in the grass; it looks as though it was the murder weapon — there were traces of blood and hair on it — but there’s no way in which we’re going to lift any prints off it. Anyway, he was struck from behind and it looks as though his skull was somewhat less than normally thick. A muscular feller but with no skull to match. A heavy blow to the back of the head, a good looping swing, and he was a goner.’

  ‘So much for the act. Any confirmations from forensic?’

  ‘Not yet. The reports should be through by tomorrow; all I’ve been given so far is some preliminary stuff such as I’ve just given you. Now then, motive . . . The going gets tough. No apparent motive. No robbery. Signs of violence inside the van, grass a bit trampled outside, but I’m afraid we’ve got some clodhopping coppers and things got a bit churned up out there, so again things don’t look too clear. But this Lindop wasn’t marked — apart from the hole in his skull, I mean. If there was a bit of a roughhouse inside the van he came off better than the other chap.’