by J. R. Ellis
The man continued. ‘He could be haughty and anyone who had any money dealings with him said he was mean, and I’ve heard he didn’t pay his bills on time. I had no problems with him or his wife, but then they only came in here to buy things like milk and newspapers. I don’t think it helped that he was a posh “comer-in”. The previous owner of the manor house and the grouse moor was a local man. I’m a comer-in myself, but I’m a bit more ordinary.’
‘So, tell us what happened at the end of that evening.’
‘The bar slowly emptied. Ian and Wilf went home, leaving Alan and myself. We were finishing our last pints. Then Alan said goodnight and left.’
‘Did he seem different or odd in any way?’
‘No, just his usual jolly self. I was the last person in the bar. I remember the inn was quiet. Then I left, walked over here and went to bed. It would have been about ten past eleven.’
‘Did you see or hear anything unusual?’
‘No.’
‘How long have you lived in the village?’ asked Steph.
‘Nearly four years. You soon get to know everybody when you’re doing this job. And all the gossip. But I’m sorry, I haven’t heard anything that would be useful to your investigation.’
‘A pity,’ replied Oldroyd. ‘Did you know anyone who might have had a motive for wishing to harm Mr Fraser?’
Gorton shook his head. ‘No. Ian Davis didn’t like working for him. Alan Green did some jobs for him and said he was a mean sod, but I couldn’t imagine either of them killing Fraser, despite what Kirsty says. We’ve all heard about her seeing Alan Green with the gun. Could she have made a mistake?’
‘Possibly,’ said Oldroyd.
‘There were also those animal-rights and green campaigners: Tony Dexter and Liz Smith. Fraser got on their nerves too, but again I can’t see them committing murder.’
‘No,’ said Oldroyd wearily. Gorton was only repeating what everyone else had said. There was no new information. He decided to wind up the interview.
‘I’ll let you know if I hear anything over the counter,’ said Gorton as they left.
‘Thanks,’ said Oldroyd. He was too tired and frustrated with the lack of progress to warm to Gorton’s little attempt at humour. ‘Well, it’s been another day in which we’ve pretty much drawn a blank, apart from a few unconvincing leads,’ he remarked with a sigh, as he and Steph walked back to the inn. He was looking down at the ground and slouching along.
Steph had known Oldroyd a long time, and knew that he was susceptible to dark moods on occasion. ‘Cheer up, sir. We’ll get there in the end. We always do, don’t we?’
Oldroyd smiled. ‘I suppose so, but there’s always a first time. Anyway, let’s call it a day and hope for some inspiration tomorrow.’
‘You usually regard a difficult case as a challenge, sir. What’s wrong this time?’
‘Yes I do, I do. I don’t know. I can’t seem to get my head round this one. I think I’m missing something.’
‘You’ll crack it, sir.’
Oldroyd laughed. ‘Well, it’s good to know that my team have such faith in me. Yes, you’re right. I have to practise what I preach and be patient. Let’s get back to Harrogate. I’m going to have a relaxing evening watching a film with Deborah.’
‘Sounds good, sir.’ Steph smiled to herself. It seemed she’d said the right things and succeeded in boosting her boss’s mood.
Rob and Sheila Owen were making up after their row. Sheila sat on the sofa, still looking jittery but not drinking alcohol any more. She’d stayed in the flat all day but had now calmed down. Rob was sitting next to her and stroking her hair.
‘I’m sorry I said that about you planning Fraser’s murder,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I was stressed out with what’s happened and the police coming back. I didn’t know what to think. The whole thing was just overwhelming. When you said all that about Fraser not paying his bills, I thought for a terrible moment they suspected you, and then I wondered about it myself.’ She shook her head to dispel the memories.
‘Don’t worry – it did look suspicious and I should have told you. You had a right to know. I was treating you like a child. The thing is, you’re the most important person in this place.’
‘Rob! That’s not true, it’s a team effort.’
‘Yes, but you’re the key person. If it wasn’t for the reputation we’ve got due to your food, we’d be nowhere. I was trying to shield you from any financial worries so you could concentrate on what you do best.’
‘Rob, that’s a lovely thing to say, but keeping things from people like that isn’t good, is it? Because when they find out, they feel deceived and angry.’
‘I know, and I’m sorry, too.’
‘Come here.’ Sheila pulled him to her and they kissed. ‘I don’t think you’re a murderer.’
They sat together for a while, feeling more relaxed than at any time since the murder. Eventually, Sheila looked at her watch. ‘Now look at the time. I’d better get down to the kitchen.’ She got up, her mood seemingly more positive. She had thrown off her recent lethargy.
Rob was pleased that she seemed to have regained her enthusiasm, and followed her back into the inn where he was due for a stint on reception.
That evening, Oldroyd and Deborah were sitting on the sofa in Oldroyd’s apartment watching a film.
‘Well, I enjoyed that,’ announced Deborah as the drama finished and she took a sip from her glass of wine. ‘I’m glad they got back together in the end. I’m a sucker for a romantic ending. How about you? Jim? Oh, here we go again. Jim! Wake up!’
Oldroyd snorted, started and sat up. ‘What? Oh dear!’
‘I asked you if you liked the ending.’
He ruffled his hair and yawned. ‘I have to confess I didn’t see it.’
‘What was the last thing you saw?’
‘When there was that fight in the hotel and the police were called.’
‘That was ages ago! You must have been asleep for nearly an hour! Great company you are. I thought you were quiet because you were absorbed in the action.’
‘Sorry,’ said Oldroyd, looking sheepish. ‘It’s been a tiring day.’
‘Maybe,’ said Deborah thoughtfully, ‘but that’s not the only problem. You’ve got nothing but work to occupy your mind, so when you’re not there your brain packs in. You’re getting stultified. You need something creative to balance all this struggling with puzzles – something where you can relax, go at your own pace.’
‘I like my music.’
‘Yes, but that’s passive. You need something where you can engage your mind in a different way and produce something.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, you’re a literary type, aren’t you? But you’ve never told me about any writing you’ve done yourself.’
Oldroyd looked up, interested. ‘No, that’s true. I was thinking yesterday when I went to see that artist bloke in the village that it would be nice to portray the dales landscape. I can’t paint, but I could do it in words. Actually, I used to write a lot of poetry when I was a teenager; mostly dire stuff about the meaning of life or soppy romantic sonnets about some girl I was in love with.’
‘I’ll bet they liked it.’
‘Maybe. I wrote some poetry at university too, but it’s so long ago that I’d almost forgotten about it. It’s the same old story: once work took over it was fascinating but time-consuming and it pushed everything else out.’
‘Well, it sounds to me like it’s time you took it up again. I think it’ll be very good for you. You told me what your sister said about retirement and she’s right. If you don’t develop interests in the next few years, you’ll leave the job with a vacuum inside you. Work will have taken everything.’
Oldroyd nodded. He felt a sense of discovery. ‘You know, I think you’re right, about both things. I do need something outside work, and why not return to writing poetry?’
‘As long as you don’t write a soppy sonne
t about me.’
‘Oh no, you’d be worth an epic of enormous length.’
‘Get away with you!’ she laughed, and Oldroyd went into deep thought.
‘You know, I think I’m going to write some good old-fashioned descriptive poems. I love Edward Thomas and Hardy, but there’s not as much poetry about the northern landscape. One of the suspects we interviewed, a bloke called Dexter – a sort of eco-campaigner and writer – he said he wrote landscape poems and I felt a little pang of envy. I didn’t give it much thought at the time but now you’ve brought it up it sounds exciting.’ He felt himself becoming more animated. This felt like the perfect hobby, marrying his need for stimulation and his love of the landscape. ‘And I’d want to incorporate some dialect words. We were investigating a case a while back – a body turned up in a pothole, and I found an old book with some nineteenth-century dialect verse about caving in the dales. They were very evocative, those poems.’
Deborah smiled. It seemed she had achieved her purpose.
In Nidderdale it was another fine night. There was a full moon which kept disappearing behind clouds as they moved steadily across the sky. How Stean Gorge was quiet except for a breeze rustling the trees, the occasional night calls of birds, and the sound of the stream at the bottom of the ravine. It was deserted except for three shapes crouching around the entrance to Tom Taylor’s Cave halfway down the gorge. Water dripping from the cave roof could be heard falling into pools and echoing in the darkness.
DC Potts and two of his colleagues had been given the job of keeping watch on the cave. They were dressed in black as a camouflage in the darkness. It was tedious work and the September night was getting rather chilly. It was after midnight.
‘Bloody hell,’ whispered one, blowing on his hands. ‘I wish old Gibbs would come and do a stint himself, then he’d know how bloody boring this is.’
‘What then?’ replied Potts. ‘If he found out how bad it was, he wouldn’t want to do it again, and we’d get it just the same. Anyway, I expect he did plenty of this when he was a junior officer, and he’s now enjoying giving it to his minions to do.’
‘Too right,’ said the third man. ‘I can’t wait till I move up the ranks and I can make some other poor sods do the donkey work.’
‘Well, you won’t, unless you do a good job now.’
‘Is this bloke likely to be armed?’
‘I doubt it,’ replied Potts. ‘That would draw attention and it would also be very difficult to manoeuvre in the cave, as we assume there’s some kind of narrow, well-concealed entrance to his hiding place. He also wants to come and go as carefully and quietly as possible. We have the element of surprise: we’ll overpower him easily, assuming he’s by himself – and I think that’s highly likely.’
They fell silent for a while. A sheep bleated in the distance and a dipper sped upstream, its white breast the only visible part of its body. The rocky sides of the gorge were black and menacing. They seemed to imprison the officers waiting below.
‘How long do you think we should stay if there’s nothing happening?’ said one, shifting his position to avoid stiffness.
‘A while yet,’ said Potts. ‘No one’s going to come unless they’re pretty sure that there’s no one around, and that means the dead of night.’
At that moment, the black fluttering shape of a bat passed at speed just over their heads and disappeared into the cave.
‘Bloody hell, that was another! Spooky little things, aren’t they? I wouldn’t—’
‘Quiet!’ whispered Potts urgently. ‘I can see something. Everybody to the hiding places.’
One man moved swiftly into the mouth of the cave and crouched behind a rock, and another stepped off the path and hid at the back of a bush. Potts went behind a tree, from where he could peep out and see what was happening. A figure was walking slowly and quietly up the path by the stream towards them. Potts saw the glow of a small torch. As the person got nearer, Potts saw that they were wearing a balaclava. It was clearly the figure that had been identified by the witness. When they reached the mouth of the cave, Potts shouted, ‘Go!’
It was over in seconds. As the three detectives pounced from different directions, there was no escape for the newcomer. Potts produced a torch of his own, ripped off the balaclava and shone the light on their face.
‘Shit!’ he exclaimed, and threw the balaclava on to the ground. ‘Ryan Gomersall. I might have bloody known.’
‘I haven’t done nowt.’
‘Oh really? Well you must have done something, then.’
‘Eh?’
Potts was frustrated and disappointed. ‘OK. You’d better show us where you’re hiding the stuff, because if we have to find it ourselves, you’re in big trouble. We might even arrange for you to have a little accident. Poor man, he fell into the stream in the dark and knocked himself out. It was his own fault for coming here in the middle of the night. It’s a dangerous place, How Stean Gorge, isn’t it?’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘Don’t push us.’ He came close to Ryan’s face. ‘Now, where is it?’
At the moment of Ryan Gomersall’s apprehension, Kirsty Hemingway was standing at the same window as she had on the night of Sandy Fraser’s murder. She had recovered sufficiently from that trauma to be sharing her bed with Harry again, but the shock had disturbed her sleep patterns. She felt some weird compulsion to look through that window and down to the scene of the crime.
All the hotel lights were off and it was much darker than on that fateful night. Was it only four days ago? It felt like four months.
As the moon came out from behind the clouds, she could just make out the place where the confrontation between Fraser and his killer had taken place. She shuddered and turned away. A cool breeze came through the window and ruffled her thin nightshirt. She didn’t believe she would ever forget the sound of that shot and the sight of the blood splattering on to the ground. Even worse was the image of Alan Green’s face: not angry or threatening, but smiling at her – yes, smiling.
She glanced over to the spot again, half expecting to see that eerie face. The smiling face of a murderer. It was the stuff of nightmares and ghost stories. Suddenly she shut the window and rushed to join Harry in bed, cuddling up to him for warmth and reassurance.
Harry woke up. ‘What’s wrong?’ he mumbled.
‘Nothing, go back to sleep.’ Harry looked at her, then closed his eyes and almost immediately began snoring. The long hours in the kitchen were exhausting.
Kirsty lay there for a while listening to the wind in the trees and imagining that all sorts of horrible things were out there. There was no news from the police investigation, and they had not caught Alan Green. She had the feeling that further unpleasant things could happen in the village, and the idea kept her awake for some while longer.
Four
Bracken Pot Wood
Outgang Hill
Darnbrook Cowside
Greenhaw Hill
Oldroyd did not sleep well that night, despite his relaxing evening. He found himself turning over the details of the case in his mind and, when he did drop off, he woke up again very early in the morning. He decided to get up and go into Harrogate HQ early.
His appearance caused some raised eyebrows, as he was not known to be an early riser. Unfortunately, his efforts went unrewarded as Gibbs rang with the bad news that the mystery figure at How Stean Gorge was not the person they were looking for.
‘Turns out it was just a drug dealer, well known to us, with plenty of form. He was using the cave to hide his stash. He’s a young local chap and knows the area. He’d managed to find a small opening in a dark corner high up in the cave, which led to a small chamber ideal for hiding illegal drugs wrapped tightly in plastic bags against the damp. Those caves never cease to amaze me – there’s always something new to discover, isn’t there?’
‘Yes, I know all about that,’ replied Oldroyd, remembering yet again the dramatic case he and his team had investiga
ted in the potholes of the limestone area of the western dales.
He was disappointed with this news, but not particularly surprised. He’d not been convinced that Green would hide in a cave. Green had gone – disappeared, almost as if . . . as if what? An idea was forming in his mind, but as yet he couldn’t define it.
‘Right. You may as well continue a low-level search for Green, but I think you’re right: he’s fled the area. I assume you’ve put out information to other forces with the description such as we have?’
‘I have, sir.’
‘Good. Well, why don’t you follow up on firearms licences? Did Green have a licence for the shotgun he used to kill Fraser? If it was him. Has anyone reported any guns missing or stolen? It might tell us something.’
‘Yes, sir. That was next on my list.’
Oldroyd rang off and then sighed. Gibbs was a stalwart and dogged officer, and Oldroyd knew he’d given him an almost pointless task. The truth was that they were struggling. He comforted himself by remembering that it was still early days, but nevertheless this case had a strange feel and it had so far completely defeated them.
Henry Saunders was relieved to be back in London and at the desk in his plush office. He sighed as he looked out of the window at the towering office blocks of the City. The grouse moors of Nidderdale and the shocking events of Friday evening already seemed very remote. He felt a sense of relief. The truth was he had made a rather fortunate escape and nobody had suspected anything.
Saunders had a senior position in a venerable old firm of merchant bankers, which paid him handsomely. His wealth had been well known to everyone including Sandy Fraser. Saunders frowned at the memory. Sandy: his old friend from school. They’d always got on very well, as he’d told the police.
But what he didn’t tell them was that Sandy had changed in recent years; he’d become much more money-conscious. Saunders shook his head. He knew what the problem was – it wasn’t difficult to work out. Sandy had overstretched himself buying that big estate: land like that didn’t come cheap. Of course, Sandy would never talk about it, that was bad form. He always conducted himself in a gentlemanly way, even when he’d started to blackmail Saunders.
