The Corfe Castle Murders (Dorset Crime Book 1)

by Rachel McLean

“Tina’s a good girl. I hope she gets the recognition she deserves.” Gail eyed Lesley. “I bet she was the only one who listened to you earlier. Did as you said.”

  “You could say that.”

  “See? Blokes, the lot of them. You’ll be the most senior woman your department has had since... well, since forever.”

  Lesley was used to working with men and women. She didn’t like to dwell on it too much.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she said. It was almost dark now; she could barely make out the route back to her car. “We’re not going to get much more done here tonight. Where’s your car?”

  Gail pointed. “Back there, in a field. Why don’t we go for a drink? I can fill you in on what to expect of Dorset Police.”

  Lesley smiled. “That’s kind of you. But I’d rather keep an open mind. And I need to get an early night.”

  Gail gave a mock salute. “No problem, Lesley. It was nice meeting you. I’m sure our paths will cross again very soon.”

  “I’m sure they will.” Lesley looked towards the village. There was no way she was finding her way back to the car. “I will ask you a favour though.”

  “Name it.”

  “A lift to my car? I’m on West Street car park.”

  Gail laughed. “No problem. Come with me.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Morning.” Lesley walked into the MCIT office and placed her bag on an empty desk. DS Frampton, sitting at the next desk along, looked up and half-rose from his chair.

  “Ma’am. Good to see you again.” He tugged at his tie. It was the same colour as the tweed jacket he’d been wearing yesterday, but today it was teamed with a dark blue suit that even Lesley could tell clashed with it. “I was expecting to meet you in the reception area.”

  Lesley smiled. “Thought I’d save you a job.” She held up the lanyard she’d brought with her, along with the ID attached to it. A Dorset Police badge would follow. “I’m official now. No one can accuse me of intruding on a crime scene.”

  She surveyed the group of desks. They were to one side of an open plan office, large windows behind them overlooking the patch of grass in front of the modern police building and the road beyond. Two other men sat at two of the group of four desks. One was in his mid-thirties, with scruffy blonde hair and a too-tight suit. The other was ten years younger, with light brown skin and closely cropped hair. His suit looked cheap but at least it fitted him.

  “So?” she said. “You going to introduce me?”

  The two younger men stood up, each looking awkwardly at the sergeant. Frampton ran the flat of his hand across his hair, which had been smoothed down with far too much of some kind of cream.

  Frampton gestured towards the man in the tight suit. “This is DC Johnny Chiles, Ma’am. Been on the team for eight years.”

  DC Chiles leaned towards Lesley and extended his hand. He smelled of cheap aftershave. Lesley shook his hand.

  “DCI Clarke, but you already know that. Eight years on Major Crimes, and still a DC?”

  His face tightened. He looked sidelong at Frampton, who ignored him. So there was tension there.

  Lesley turned to the remaining man. “And you are?”

  “DC Michael Legg, Ma’am.” He had a Dorset accent, stronger than Frampton’s or Gail’s. He didn’t put his hand out, and neither did Lesley.

  “So this is the team,” she said. She nodded at the empty desk. “I’m assuming that’s not mine?”

  “Vacancy, Ma’am,” said Frampton. “DC Graves retired.”

  “Good for him. We’ll need to find someone new then, won’t we?” Lesley looked around the office. Another group of four desks was further along by the same set of windows, occupied by four uniformed officers.

  “Our neighbours?” she asked.

  “Temporary,” said DC Chiles. He sucked his teeth. “We were hoping that now we had a new DCI, the team might grow.”

  “And what’s wrong with that lot?” Lesley surveyed the four uniformed officers. She recognised one of them: PC Abbott from the crime scene.

  “They’re Uniform, Ma’am,” Chiles said. “Support officers. We need detectives.”

  “Uniformed officers can be an invaluable resource as part of a major crimes team,” she said. “Don’t underestimate them.”

  Frampton and Chiles shared a look. DC Legg watched, saying nothing.

  “So where am I?” Lesley asked. “Over there?” she pointed towards an empty office.

  “Yes, Ma’am.” Frampton shuffled towards it and opened the door. She picked up her bag and followed. He stood at the door as she entered and smoothed her hand across the desk.

  The office was bigger than the one she’d had in Birmingham, with tall windows at the front of the building. In her last office, she’d had a high window that opened onto a light well in the middle of the building. She’d never turned the lights off.

  Here, the light, even today’s thin sunshine, was blinding.

  She crossed to the window. “I’ll need blinds.”

  “Ma’am?” said Frampton.

  She balled a fist and pushed it against the wall. “Bloody main road’s right out there. Can’t have any Tom, Dick or Harry looking in at what we’re doing.”

  “Err…” said Frampton.

  “What?” She placed her bag on the desk. It wouldn’t take long to settle in.

  Frampton gestured to Chiles, who was in the doorway. Legg was still at his desk, typing into his computer. Either he was the industrious, antisocial type, or this team didn’t get along.

  Chiles returned with a glass jar. A pile of pound coins and fifty pence pieces sat in the bottom.

  “Your charity drive isn’t going very well.” Lesley reached inside her bag for her purse. “What you fundraising for?”

  “It isn’t a charity drive,” said Frampton. “It’s a swear jar.”

  Lesley stared at the jar. She stared at Frampton, blinking back at her. She stared at Chiles, holding the jar out, his lips pursed. She put her purse back in her bag.

  “I’ve never heard anything so damn ridiculous,” she laughed. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  Frampton shook his head. “50p for a...” He cleaned his throat. “For a ‘damn’. A pound for your previous infraction.”

  “Infraction? You mean me saying bloody main road?” She leaned against the desk. “I’ve never heard such crap in my life, Sergeant. Get that thing out of my face and don’t try to tell me how I should talk. I’m a copper, not a fucking nun.”

  A muscle below Frampton’s left eye twitched. He muttered under his breath. Was he counting? Tallying up her infractions?

  She’d show him bloody infractions.

  DS Frampton nodded at his colleague who left the office, taking the offending jar with him. He placed it in a filing cabinet. DC Legg watched, still saying nothing.

  A man’s face appeared around the door: mid-fifties, skinny, wearing uniform and a Chief Superintendent’s badge.

  “DCI Clarke, I assume?” He strode in and grabbed her hand, pumping it ferociously.

  “You must be Detective Superintendent Carpenter, Sir,” she replied.

  He winked. “I don’t normally dress like this, on my way to some godawful thing with the Chief Constable. We’ll talk properly later.” He finally let go of her hand. “You been getting into trouble with the language police?”

  Lesley eyed DS Frampton. He’d been rude to her at the crime scene and he’d pissed her off by telling her how to talk. But he was a member of her team.

  “Just getting to know my new team, Sir. I expect we’ll be hitting the ground running.”

  “The Corfe Castle incident, yes. They’ve already brought you up to speed?”

  “I’ve been to the crime scene, Sir. I was in the village when the body was discovered.”

  “Lucky you.” Carpenter’s face brightened.

  “I wouldn’t put it like that, Sir.”

  He waved a hand. “You know what I mean. Tragic event, life cut brutally short
and all that. But bloody fortunate that our new DCI is on the scene when it happened.”

  “Not when it happened, exactly. Now that would have been lucky.” She smiled. “I could have prevented it.”

  “Ha! Of course you could.” He patted her shoulder. “Anyway, must be off. You’re SIO, of course. I’ll expect a briefing, my office, 6pm. One of your lads will tell you where to go.”

  “Of course, Sir.”

  He left her office and waved at the officers sitting outside as if he was minor royalty. They straightened at their desks. Lesley rolled her eyes.

  She clicked her fingers to pull her team members’ attention away from the senior officer.

  “Right, folks,” she said. “In my office. Let’s work out our plan of attack.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Right,” said Lesley as the three detectives gathered in front of her. “Drag a couple more chairs in, will you?”

  DS Frampton nodded to DC Chiles, who left the room and came back dragging a chair. DC Legg followed and did the same. The three men stood awkwardly for a moment, then shuffled onto the chairs.

  “Someone shut the door?” Lesley suggested. Chiles did the honours.

  Lesley placed her elbows on the desk, her fingers entwined. “OK, we’ve got a murder inquiry to get cracking with but first, let’s set some ground rules.”

  Frampton tugged at his collar. Legg brought out a pad.

  Lesley smiled at her team. “We didn’t get off to the best start. You pissed me off at the crime scene, Sergeant, and then there was all this crap with the swear jar.”

  The DS opened his mouth to speak. Lesley raised a hand to stop him.

  “But,” she said, her gaze flicking towards the door and the half-glazed partition wall it sat in. “And this is an important ‘but’. We’re a team. I’ve got your back, so long as you do your jobs. I run a tight ship, no cutting corners, no excuses for lack of attention to detail, no running around after wild hunches.”

  Lesley thought of DI Zoe Finch, her favourite team member back in West Midlands Police. Zoe had done her share of running around after hunches. But her instincts had been good, and she’d spent years proving that to Lesley. And when Lesley had needed to rein her in, to remind her of procedure, she’d listened. Mostly.

  “When we’re facing the public, or for that matter, senior management, we present a united front. No going behind your colleagues’ backs. No contradicting other members of the team, except when you’re in this room. That make sense?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” said DS Frampton. He glanced at the other two in turn, Chiles first. Always Chiles first, Lesley noted. The DCs murmured agreement.

  “And while we’re on that,” Lesley said. “You don’t need to ma’am me all the time. We’ll be spending a lot of time together. It makes me feel like the bloody Queen. Call me boss, or guv.”

  “No problem, boss,” said Frampton.

  “Good.” Lesley smiled at him. “And I don’t want to keep using your titles. Remind me of your full names.”

  Frampton cleared his throat. He gave Chiles a look.

  “Johnny Chiles, Ma’am. I mean boss,” said the constable.

  “Johnny. That what you prefer to be called?”

  He nodded.

  “You sure?”

  Another nod.

  “Fair enough. Johnny it is. I’ll try not to laugh.” She turned her gaze on the other constable.

  “Michael Legg. Mike. Boss.” He scratched behind his ear.

  “Mike. That’s more like it. What do you two tend to call DS Frampton here?”

  “Sarge,” said Johnny.

  “Even though the two of you have clearly been friends for yonks?”

  The constable frowned at her.

  “That means for a very long time,” she told him. “I’m going to have to learn to speak Dorset.”

  “DC Chiles and I have worked together, on and off, for twelve years,” said the sergeant.

  Again Lesley thought of Zoe. Her relationship with DS Mo Uddin, who she’d met in training back in 2001.

  “So I bet when you’re in the pub you call him by his first name. Which is?”

  “Er, Dennis,” said Johnny.

  “Don’t worry, son. You can carry on calling him Sarge when you’re in the office. I’ll stick with Dennis.”

  All these blokes’ names, she thought. Maybe Gail had a point.

  “OK, so that’s the introductions out of the way,” Lesley said. “I’ve told you how I work, I’ll come to learn how you work. How about we get on with finding Archie Weatherton’s killer, yes?”

  The tension in the room fell. Lesley looked through the glass partition to see PC Abbott watching them. She gave the younger woman a nod and Abbott looked away. Lesley wondered how soundproof these walls were.

  “Someone fetch a bloody board, will you?’’ she said to her team. “We’ve got evidence to collate.”

  Chapter Ten

  Gail was pouring resin into a faint footprint she’d found at the back of the tent. It probably belonged to the paramedic or the heavy-hoofed PC Mullins, but she could always hope. She was disturbed by Gav’s voice outside the tent.

  “Hey! This is a crime scene. You can’t just walk in.”

  Gail opened the tent flaps. Gavin Larcomb was a bear of a man, six-foot-five and built like a brick shithouse. He’d had to get forensic suits specially made to avoid wandering round crime scenes looking like a kid in last year’s school uniform.

  In front of him stood a skinny woman with dark spiky hair. She had her hand on the cordon tape and had placed one foot inside.

  “This is our place of work, pal,” she said in an accent Gail recognised as Glasgow. “You can’t keep us out.”

  “It’s a crime scene.” Gav grabbed the tape. He clearly itched to grab the woman too, but they all knew how it would look if the biggest bloke on the team was photographed with his hands on this scrawny sparrow of a woman.

  “Can I help?” Gail stepped out of the tent, peeling off her gloves.

  “Who are you?” The woman slapped a hand to her forehead. “Jeez, there are delicate 12th century artefacts in there. You’ll....” She stared at Gail, her chest rising and falling. She looked like she might cry.

  “There’s also evidence relating to a suspected murder,” Gail told her. “And if you’re who I think you are, it’s the murder of one of your own.”

  “Archie.” The woman’s expression slackened. “Poor bastard.”

  Gail was in front of the woman now. She’d dropped the tape, thank God.

  “Look,” she said. “I don’t know if you’re aware of forensic methodology, but we’re being incredibly careful in there. We have plates on the ground to protect it from our boots and we’re cataloguing everything as we go.”

  “You have no idea how precious that stuff is,” the woman said, her voice hoarse. “Coins, bones, jewellery.”

  “We’re not interested in any of that. All I want to know us what was left behind when your colleague was attacked.”

  “What’s your name, love?” Gav asked.

  The woman gave him a look of disdain. “Don’t love me, you Neanderthal.”

  Gail suppressed a laugh. The insult was appropriate, she supposed, for an archaeologist.

  Gail looked at the woman. “What’s your name?”

  “Crystal Spiers. I’m in charge of this dig.”

  “Has anyone been to see you? I imagine CID will want to talk to all Mr Weatherton’s associates.”

  “Associates? You are full of it, you lot, aren’t you? No, no plod have come knocking on our door just yet. We still have that pleasure to come.”

  Gail nodded. Gav had left them and gone to join Brett, cataloguing evidence bags and placing them in containers ready to go in the back of her car. They’d taken mud samples and some seeds and pollen from nearby plants. Anything they could use to place a suspect at the scene. Unfortunately there was still no sign of a weapon.

  “We’ll be done in a few h
ours,” Gail told the woman. “And then you can have your site back.”

  “Have you found anything?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t—”

  “Come on. It’s my bloody tent you’re using. Archie was a colleague, a pal. If someone did away with him, I want to know who.”

  “We haven’t got as far as identifying a suspect yet. But you’ll need to take this up with the Major Crime Investigations Team.”

  “Hmm.”

  The woman lowered herself to the ground. The grass was still damp with the morning’s dew, her sturdy brown trousers would get wet. “I’m not going anywhere till you do,” she said. “And I’m watching everything that comes out of that tent. You find anything of archaeological significance, you damn well tell me, yes?”

  “We’ll do our best,” Gail replied. Truth was, she had no idea what archaeological significance would look like if it hit her in the face with an early medieval brickbat.

  “Good.” The woman shuffled on the grass, her lip twitching. She was cold and uncomfortable by the looks of it, but she wasn’t about to admit it.

  Gail sighed and turned back to the tent. Gav was back. “You want me to keep an eye on her?”

  She nodded. This was going to be a long morning.

  Chapter Eleven

  Mike Legg had wheeled in a movable whiteboard which Lesley had placed against one of the windows.

  “It’s difficult to see it with the sun in our eyes, boss,” said Dennis.

  “I don’t want people wandering up to our windows being able to see what we’re up to.”

  “Can’t we move it just for now,” suggested Mike, “and then put it back after?”

  Lesley waved her pen at him. “Fair enough.” She moved the board against a wall.

  “I’ll want photos printed off, helps get the cogs whirring,” she said. “But for now, you’ll have to put up with my scrawl.”

  She smiled at her team. The two constables smiled back nervously and Dennis rearranged his tie.

  She wrote Archie Weatherton’s name on the board, followed by Laila Ford’s. She drew an arrow from Archie to Laila and wrote girlfriend.