by Faith Martin
MURDER
NOW AND THEN
A gripping crime mystery full of twists
FAITH MARTIN
DI Hillary Greene Book 19
Joffe Books, London
www.joffebooks.com
First published in Great Britain in 2021
© Faith Martin 2021
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Faith Martin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-1-78931-875-3
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
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CHAPTER ONE
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Former DI Hillary Greene jumped off the prow of the Mollern, her narrowboat home of more years than she cared to remember, and onto the towpath of the Oxford canal. She stood for a moment, breathing in deeply of the slightly damp but warm early spring air, and cast an assessing eye on the sky.
From the branches of an about-to-bloom pussy willow nearby, a hedge sparrow sang with his usual gusto, and was answered by a rival male from the farmer’s field beyond. Deciding that it probably wasn’t going to rain within the next ten minutes or so, she set off briskly on the short distance up the towpath towards the village of Thrupp and the car park of the Boat pub, where she regularly parked her car.
Thankfully, her ancient Volkswagen Golf, Puff the Tragic Wagon, was feeling in a benevolent mood that morning, and despite the moist air started on the first turn of the key.
Her commute to the Thames Valley Police HQ in Kidlington was less than five minutes (maybe ten if she got caught in the rush hour) as Thrupp was on the outskirts of the large village — or was it the town? — of Kidlington. Hillary knew that the locals had long been unable to agree on the status of Kidlington, and she was far too wily to pick a side. Stick your head above the parapet on that one, and you were likely to get it knocked off.
She left Puff in her favourite spot in the HQ car park, more or less underneath the spreading branches of a horse-chestnut tree, her bag slung over one shoulder.
Once inside the lobby, she traded the usual and mandatory friendly insults with the desk sergeant and headed downstairs into the bowels of the building.
The CRT (Crime Review Team), where she worked as a civilian consultant solving cold cases, wasn’t a high priority with the top brass, hence the less-than-glamorous digs. However, since retiring as a DI, she’d become almost used to being treated like a mole, and rarely noticed the lack of natural daylight any more.
She passed the large computer-packed office (where the majority of the CRT officers hung out, using computer databases and the newest technological breakthroughs to constantly check old cases for modern-day matches) to the much smaller communal one where she and her tiny investigative team were based.
The powers-that-be had recognized that some cases needed the old-fashioned touch of an experienced detective, and thus had recruited Hillary to lead a small team dedicated to working unsolved murder cases or other serious crimes. Alas, cutbacks had dwindled her team to just herself and two others: a former police sergeant, Claire Woolley, who’d worked for years in a rape and domestic violent unit, and a civilian ex-soldier, Gareth Proctor, who’d recently been invalided out of the army.
She saw that neither one had come in yet — but that wasn’t surprising. She was nearly always early. Unlike her days as a DI, she and her team were supposed to stick strictly to a nine-to-five regime, as overtime was utterly unheard of.
She carried on to her own office, which had — literally — once been a stationery cupboard. She had room to open the door, squeeze past the small desk, pull out a single chair which hit the back wall almost instantly, giving her just enough room to slither between it and the desk. If she was ever to put on weight, she’d probably have to be reassigned another room. A former toilet stall maybe?
She logged on to her computer, checked her emails, and then impatiently bided her time until Superintendent Roland ‘Rollo’ Sale, head of the CRT, called her in to his office. She’d filed her report on the case they’d successfully been working on and had closed only yesterday, and now she was looking forward to seeing what they’d be working on next.
She had to exercise patience (not her strongest point) for another half an hour or so before finally getting the phone call. Once it came she walked quickly to his lair — one of the few with a window near the ceiling that allowed you a nice view of people’s feet as they walked past on the pavement above.
She was, as usual, wearing one of her civilian ‘uniforms’, which today consisted of a skirt and jacket in dark green, with a plain cream-coloured blouse. Now in her mid-fifties, her bell-shaped cut of dark brown hair with chestnut highlights owed a little more to hair dye than Mother Nature, but it wasn’t something that particularly worried her.
When she tapped on the door and walked in, her eyes went instantly to the large folder on the desk in front of her boss, unaware that her sherry-coloured eyes were gleaming.
Rollo Sale, though, smiled happily as his best detective fastened her eyes avariciously on the file and once the pleasantries were over, wasted no time in filling her in on the case he’d selected. She listened, as usual, without saying much, but making copious notes.
The superintendent was glad to see her back on top form again. The last year and a half had been extremely rocky for her, following the death of her partner, the former head of CRT, Steven Crayle. She had lost weight and still looked rather thin, but he was relieved to see that her old stamina had returned, and that she’d regained her dry sense of humour.
Half an hour later, Hillary went to brief her team on their latest assignment, feeling pleased with the case Rollo Sale had selected.
Claire Woolley was a hefty woman in her early fifties, with short black hair and brown eyes, and stood five feet ten inches in her stockinged feet. She was a warm, motherly sort of woman by nature, but after years of seeing the worst of humanity, she had a backbone of steel.
Although Rollo Sale was technically in charge, he let Hillary do things her way and just get on with it, which was how everyone liked it. This
was not surprising, since her solve rate as a full-time DI had been second to none, and that had continued with her move to cold cases.
‘New case, guv?’ Claire asked hopefully.
‘Yes, murder this time,’ Hillary confirmed. Their last case looked set to put away a serial rapist for the rest of his life.
Hillary noticed Gareth Proctor sit up a little straighter at the word ‘murder’. He was the latest recruit to her team, but she thought, overall, that he was settling in well. Never having trained as a police officer, he’d come through a steep learning curve with flying colours so far. Although his tendency to bark respectful answers at her — as if she were a colonel in the army — could wear thin occasionally, she had no issues with either his work ethic or his discipline.
He was, as ever, dressed as neatly and immaculately as you’d expect from a former soldier in a dark blue suit with what she supposed was a regimental tie, and his blond hair had been recently trimmed to its usual very short length. His only concession to sartorial diligence was his habit of taking off his jacket and hanging it on the back of his chair, which wasn’t surprising. The heating down in the basement levels tended to be fierce, the ancient radiators seeming only to function on two levels — blast furnace in the winter and, thankfully, stone cold in the summer.
Intelligent blue eyes watched her thoughtfully. As was his habit, he sat with his left hand in his lap, hiding from view the scars that ran from his hand up the entire length of that limb. When he walked, he used a stick to help support his left leg, which was withered and weakened, a legacy of being too near a bomb when it exploded.
At thirty-six, he’d been divorced for a few years now, his marriage being unable to withstand the pressures put on it by his near year-long hospital stay and his loss of job, friends and former life.
Hillary’s team had never been funded as well as anyone would like, and she’d had to work with a variety of people over the years, most of whom came and went quite quickly. Chief among these were students who thought they might like to make the police their career (and then quickly decided that they didn’t!). But there were also people like Claire, who’d retired from the job, and then found time hanging heavy on their hands and decided to return, albeit in a less stressful role.
Hillary was used to training the uninitiated and working with whatever skill sets they brought, while trying to bear in mind that she was lucky to have ‘staff’ at all. Naturally, some worked out better than others, but so far, the former soldier looked as if he was going to be a good fit and, with luck, might stick around for some time to come.
She understood his reasoning for taking this particular job only too well, for while they might not be the army, he appreciated the chain-of-command mentality of police work, and understood and approved of the gravity of what they did.
Nodding at both of them, she walked to the white board, now wiped clean of the specifics of their previous case, and began to fill them in on their latest assignment.
‘All right. This is Michael Beck.’ She put up a not particularly good photograph of a young man with nondescript brown hair and eyes. Neither good-looking nor ugly, he peered impassively back at them from a photograph that had probably originally been given to them by his family. ‘He was twenty-two years old when he went out on his bicycle one morning and never returned. His body was discovered that evening in the water meadow not far from where he lived in the village of Woodeaton.’
She named a village that was on the outskirts of Oxford, and was unfortunately used as a rat-run by commuters who worked in the hospitals that proliferated in the nearby suburb of Headington. ‘This was in early September 2011. He’d not long finished doing a BA in Ancient History at Bristol and had had to move back into the parental home while trying to find a job and a place to live.’
Claire, mother of three grown kids, grunted. Oxford was notoriously difficult when it came to finding affordable housing. Her eldest was still living in rented accommodation that she wouldn’t have thought big enough to house a kennel.
Hillary’s lips twitched at this wry comment. ‘Quite. A local dog walker found him in the late afternoon near Islip, which is more or less the next village down from Woodeaton — a distance of maybe two and a half to three miles or so. According to the files, there’s a weir in the river nearby where the Ray flows into the Cherwell. The water meadows there are a popular spot with villagers in the summertime.’
‘Do courting couples still like to roll in the hay these days?’ Claire mused.
‘The dog walker was a man in his seventies,’ Hillary said with a grin. ‘And, according to the original report, had only his mutt for company. He saw the body and gave the alarm. According to the pathology reports, Michael had been hit over the head with something oddly shaped, vaguely rounded, and was probably made of some kind of metal rather than wood. Unfortunately, the pathologist wasn’t able to match it to any of the usual suspects.’ She meant things like a cricket or baseball bat, poker, sandbag or some other hand-made kind of bludgeon like a rock in a sock, but she didn’t think this needed spelling out to her team. ‘It was a single blow only, but it cracked his skull sufficiently to kill him, with death resulting probably within a few minutes. He certainly didn’t drown, as the medical reports later made clear.’
‘He was probably dropped in the river sometime later?’ It was Gareth who asked the question and sounded slightly tentative. He was very much aware that he was still green when it came to police work, but he’d gained enough trust and confidence in both women to feel comfortable asking questions.
‘I think so,’ Hillary said cautiously. ‘If he’d been standing by the river and fell in immediately after the blow, he’d probably have some water in his lungs as his death wasn’t instant. When you’ve copied the files, you can go over the medical report for yourself and take in the details. You’ll see that the doctor thinks the angle of the blow indicates that the victim was hit almost on top of his crown — which means with a distinctly downward stroke.’
‘Meaning, unless the killer was a giant, Beck was either sitting or kneeling,’ Claire said. ‘Did he get hit from the front or the back?’
‘Back, they think,’ Hillary said.
‘Well at least the poor sod didn’t see it coming,’ Claire muttered.
‘The original senior investigating officer, DI Weston, has now retired and is living in Spain,’ Hillary carried on, ‘which is nice for some! But it means he’s not readily available for us to pick his brains. From what Superintendent Sale told me, he’s confident the original team did a good job, but they simply couldn’t bring it home to anybody. They did, however, identify two strong suspects.’
She paused to place two more photographs on the board.
‘This,’ she tapped the photograph of a middle-aged man with reddish-brown hair, which had clearly been taken at an outdoor event of some kind, ‘is Dr Timothy Durning.’ A lean and tall man, with thin but good-looking features, he looked like the academic she already knew him to be. He was wearing a neat bow tie and old-fashioned waistcoat: a look that suited him, but one that not everyone could bring off. ‘One of the victim’s tutors at uni, Michael laid a charge of sexual harassment against him, that wasn’t upheld, but which nevertheless resulted in Dr Durning leaving the university under the proverbial cloud. DI Weston’s notes say that although the university’s inquiries couldn’t prove Michael’s claim — there being no independent witnesses — they were uneasy enough about what they discovered to suggest that the good doctor resign. Which he eventually did, but not without some rancour on his part.’
Claire heaved a heavy sigh. ‘Don’t tell me — he’s now probably working in some posh public school earning a mint without a stain on his character.’
‘Well, we’ll soon have to find out,’ Hillary said and added, with a wicked little grin, ‘and since you seem to have taken such a shine to him, perhaps you’ll have the task of tracking him down, Claire.’
Claire groaned good-naturedly.
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‘Gareth, you can find out all you can about this woman, with her current whereabouts a top priority.’ Hillary tapped the second photograph. ‘Dr Mia de Salle. She and our murder victim had been “going steady” for over a year before splitting up. According to Michael’s family and friends, it was not an amicable break-up. Michael ended it, and Dr de Salle did not take it well. There were vague mutterings about her becoming a bit of a stalker.’
Gareth nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said smartly.
The woman in the photograph looked distinctive rather than beautiful, with long black hair and wide hazel eyes. She had the kind of thin, aesthetic face you sometimes saw in old master paintings.
‘Mia de Salle was twenty-five years old at the time of the murder,’ Hillary swept on. ‘They met at Bristol, where she was doing a PhD in . . . something or other.’ She knew she’d need to take at least the rest of the day in order to fully absorb the data, but it annoyed her not to have the details already at her fingertips.
‘According to the original reports, Dr de Salle had no alibi, but there was no forensic evidence linking her to the crime and no witnesses placing her in the vicinity either. And although DI Weston thought she was “squirrelly” — and that’s a direct quote from his notes — she denied any and all knowledge of Michael’s recent whereabouts and activities.’
‘Well she would, wouldn’t she?’ Claire said dryly, paraphrasing the famous courtroom quote from the Profumo scandal. Hillary’s lips twitched again, but she doubted Gareth understood the reference. He was way too young.
‘All right,’ Hillary said briskly, ‘you know the routine. Claire, you need to get any paper files from records, and make copies for everyone. Gareth, help out with that — it’ll be a mammoth task and will probably take a few days. Do it in batches and then go on to something else, or you’ll set fire to the old photocopier!’
