Pollard looked up from checking the date in his diary’s calendar for 1975.
‘According to that sales manager bloke you talked to, Grant bought his BMW on 2 April at the drop of a hat, after havering about getting a new car for some time. For some reason he suddenly made up his mind, and cleaned up his Morris Marina ready to trade in on the night of 1 April. Of course, this mayn’t mean a thing as far as we’re concerned. After all, you’ve got to make up your mind sometime about changing your car. But this letter coming on top of that phone call shows that somebody’s interested in Grant’s doings, and has been for the last fifteen months anyway.’
Toye asked if you could see into the garage from the road.
‘Yes, you can. If you stand at the gates it’s down a short length of drive and straight in front of you. But the house isn’t on a road that leads anywhere, except up on to Cattesmoor. There aren’t likely to have been casual passers-by, I mean. Possibly moor walkers, I suppose, but hardly after dark in early April.’
‘What did the household consist of in April ’75?’
‘That’s something we’ll have to look into when we’re through with this well job... Got anything up, Strickland?’
‘Smudged glove prints on the letter and the envelope, sir, and what look like men’s prints from handling the envelope.’
‘Well, we’ll leave it pro tern and push off.’
The two police cars set out in convoy, Pollard and Toye leading in the Rover. After several weeks of unbroken sunshine the sky was heavily overcast, and there was a hint of thunder in the still air. When they came out on to Cattesmoor from the land leading up from Churstow, they entered a vast, empty and vaguely sinister world.
‘It’s enough to give you the willies up here this morning,’ Toye remarked unexpectedly as he drove with extreme care over the rough surface.
‘Hankering after the bright lights?’ Pollard asked with a grin. ‘It’s not the moor that’s giving me the willies,’ he went on, ‘it’s the case. As I’ve said before, I’ve got a nasty feeling that we’re still only scratching about on the surface. Even if we find unshakeable evidence that the hippy from the lookout turned into the skeleton in the kistvaen during a sojourn in the well we’re going to investigate, are we any further on? How did the hippy die, and who concealed his body? Here, let’s have the binoculars. The farm’s just coming in sight.’
A couple of minutes later he reported that nobody seemed to be around but windows were open, so that at least the family had not gone off on another cruise. Fifty yards short of the farm he told Toye to stop, and Boyce and Strickland drew up behind them.
‘We don’t want to look like an assault group,’ he said. ‘I’ll go ahead with the warrant. Come on when I sign to you.’
There was still no sign of life as he reached the garden gate, but the click of the latch started up a torrent of hysterical barking inside the house. The door opened, the black and white spaniel shot out and slobbered wildly over his shoes, and he was confronted by Mrs Ling in a serviceable nylon overall. She looked at him with a kind of grave detachment, and he knew at once that she realised what he had come for... I bet it isn’t the first time her crackpot husband has landed himself in one hell of a mess, he thought. She’s hardened to it...
‘Good morning, Mrs Ling,’ he said. ‘May I have a word with your husband, please?’
Before she could answer Geoffrey Ling appeared at a bedroom window. Resting his arms on the sill he surveyed Pollard with an air of reckless amusement.
‘What can I do for you, Superintendent?’ he enquired with mock politeness.
‘Nothing, Mr Ling, at the moment,’ Pollard replied. ‘I have called to tell you that, acting on information received, we are going to open up the unused well in your newtake.’
There was a short pause. Pollard realised that Mrs Ling was signing herself off by shutting the front door.
‘Well, who’s stopping you?’ Geoffrey Ling demanded.
‘As the representative of the law I’m unstoppable, Mr Ling. Do you wish to see the search warrant I have with me?’
‘No.’ As he uttered the monosyllable Geoffrey Ling vanished from sight with the abruptness of a pantomime clown disappearing down a trap door. Pollard turned and walked towards the gate.
‘What on earth goes on?’
He glanced round to see an extremely pretty girl at another first-floor window. She had apparently just got out of bed, and on seeing him grabbed ineffectively at the shoulder straps of her nightdress. He hurried out of the garden without engaging in conversation, and returned to his support, to find Boyce and Strickland lamenting the fact that they had no binoculars with them.
‘Past the farmhouse and then bear right to the newtake,’ he told Toye.
They skirted the farm buildings, parked the two cars among the trees of the windbreak, and entered the newtake at the western end of the right of way. Access had been provided by the simple expedient of knocking down a small section of the encircling drystone wall. Similar rough and ready methods of clearing the track had been used. Gorse and bramble bushes, bracken, and the occasional dwarf rowan tree had been savagely lopped, and the debris flung on either side and left to wither.
‘The well’s on the house side, not far from where you come out again on to the public path,’ Pollard said, striding ahead. ‘There it is, behind this thicket.’
They squeezed through the two strands of wire forming part of Geoffrey Ling’s very amateur attempt at fencing, and stood looking down at a piece of heavy sheet iron under a pile of stones. Jackets were peeled off in an eloquent silence.
‘Hold on,’ Pollard said, pausing when half out of his. ‘We’ll have a photograph, Boyce, before we shift this little lot.’
In due course the stones, some of them sizeable, were removed and stacked, and the unwieldy sheet iron heaved up and dragged to one side. Immediately a revolting smell rose from the well shaft, which Danby Blake had apparently used as a rubbish dump after abandoning the idea of extending it down to the permanent water table.
‘Phew!’ Boyce commented, holding his nose before embarking on further photography.
The other three watched him, perspiring in the sultry heat and hitting out at the swarm of flies attracted by the stench.
‘For God’s sake smoke, Strickland,’ Pollard said. ‘I wish I hadn’t given it up. Now then, Toye, let’s have a look.’
The bricks lining the shaft were streaked with green slime where surface moisture had seeped in and trickled down, and some of them had fallen inwards where the mortar had crumbled away. A jumble of rusty tins, ends of rope and discarded household effects reached to within a few feet of the top, and a zinc tub, tilted to one side, was partly full of nauseous looking dark liquid.
‘Maggots!’ Toye exclaimed triumphantly.
‘We’ve got to get that tub thing out without spilling the muck inside it,’ Pollard said with sudden decision. ‘I wonder if all this junk goes down to the bottom and it’s safe to step on it?’
With an improvised rope round him as a precautionary measure, Toye, the smallest and lightest of the team, lowered himself into the shaft and succeeded in getting the tub level. He attached ropes to the handles, and steadied it as Boyce and Strickland hoisted it up. Pollard took a sample of the liquid in a sterilised bottle, and the rest was slowly and carefully poured off. In the residual mud were three small bones.
‘Metacarpals, or metatarsals,’ he said with a grin. ‘Don’t ask me which.’
In a jubilant atmosphere Toye suggested going down again for another look round.
‘Cuh!’ Boyce broke in. ‘Here’s that girl!’
Pollard looked up and saw a slim figure in blue jeans advancing from the direction of the house. As he went forward to meet her, the girl stopped.
‘Can I talk to whoever’s in charge, please?’ she called to him.
‘Good morning,’ he said, coming up to her. ‘I’m Detective-Superintendent Pollard. You’re Miss Ling, aren’t you?’
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‘Yes, I’m Kate Ling,’ she replied. ‘I want to talk to you. Let’s go into the barn. It’s cooler in there.’
They walked in silence towards a stone building with an Early English arch over the doorway.
‘Is this part of the pilgrims’ chapel?’ he asked.
‘Quite right,’ she said. ‘There are a couple of filled-in windows of the same period on the other side. I’d like to restore it now that the Possel Way’s been opened up, but it wouldn’t be the slightest use suggesting it to Father, of course... Do you mind sitting on these tea chests?’
They sat down facing each other. At close range Kate Ling was even better to look at, Pollard thought, wondering how Geoffrey Ling could have fathered anything so attractive. In essentials her face was her mother’s with the same good brow and regular features, though without the heaviness of the older woman. Instead it was vitalised by her father’s vivid blue eyes and a strong hint of his intelligence and dynamic quality. She suddenly broke the silence.
‘It’s the men in my life, as the women’s magazines would say,’ she told him. ‘They’re simply driving me up the wall. Take Father, to start with. You see, he’s always been like this. Doing quite crazy things to annoy people who’ve annoyed him, I mean. He can’t adjust to a situation. Mother can, of course, or she’d never have survived — oh dear, I’m not doing this a bit well! I know the police don’t answer questions, so we’d better take a hypothetical case... Suppose a man found a human skeleton in his garden, and put it into a public place for a joke. If it’s proved that he did, or if he — well, saw the writing on the wall and owned up, what would happen to him?’
‘He might face a charge of failing to report a discovery of human remains to the police,’ Pollard replied noncommittally. ‘If he had tried to mislead the police in any way it could be a serious matter.’
‘Would he be sent to prison?’
‘That would depend on circumstances.’
There was a pause during which he waited for Kate Ling to voice a further anxiety.
‘Of course nobody who’d — who’d killed someone would throw out the skeleton ages afterwards, almost on their own doorstep,’ she said, a shade defiantly. ‘Not unless they were certifiable, anyway.’
‘It would hardly be the sort of thing anyone compos mentis would do,’ he agreed, and sensed her relief.
‘Well then, there’s Peter Grant, my fiancé,’ she went on. ‘It’s about him that I’m so frightfully worried. You may have found out already that he came out here while we were away on a cruise at Easter last year. Mother and I didn’t tell Father, but we both thought it was a good idea for somebody to keep an eye on the place, and I did want the roses watered if there wasn’t much rain. It’s been a job getting a garden going...’
‘Miss Ling, just exactly why is this bothering you so much?’ Pollard pressed.
‘You must know perfectly well,’ she said impatiently. ‘It’s clear as daylight from the papers that the hippy, this skeleton in the kistvaen, according to the police, vanished into thin air just about then. And Peter’s getting beastly anonymous letters. He told me about the first one last night, and now he’s rung to say there’s been another. Perhaps the police are getting them too, from someone who’s trying to make out he’s a murderer. People seem to be laying off Father now, and concentrating on Peter. I suppose it’s sunk in that Father wasn’t here.’
‘What are these anonymous letters about?’ Pollard asked.
‘About coming out here, and changing his old car for the BMW just then. As if — well, you can see the idea.’
‘That he might have brought a corpse out here and hidden it, and thought there could be traces in the old car?’
Kate nodded without speaking.
‘You know, much the best thing for Mr Grant would be to bring those letters along to us,’ Pollard told her.
‘I know,’ she said, beating with her fists on her knees. ‘I keep telling him so! He’s hopeless. He’s got a thing about dragging us into it. He’ll be furious, but I’m going to tell him that I’ve talked to you about it all, and he can damn well hit the roof. He’s taking me to a dance tonight, and I’ll make him listen.’
Pollard wrote down the telephone number of the police station at Stoneham and gave it to her.
‘Either of you can ask to be put through to me at any time,’ he said, ‘or just leave a number for me to ring if I’m out. And going back to the first of your worries, anyone who had carried out the sort of practical joke we were talking about would be wiser to let the police know about it, as things have turned out.
‘Men,’ she said, with a wealth of expression, getting to her feet. ‘Not you: you’ve been great. Thanks a lot.’
She touched him lightly on the shoulder and was gone.
Pollard sat on for a couple of minutes deep in thought. Finally he emerged from the agreeable coolness of the old barn to find the rest of his team reclining under the trees, and heard that Strickland had clinched matters by finding a long bleached hair, dark near the roots and caught on a bit of wood.
By teatime the various finds from the well-shaft had been handed over to the pathologist who had examined the skeleton, and Boyce and Strickland had departed for London. Over cups of tea Pollard gave Toye details of his conversation with Kate Ling.
‘As far as Geoffrey Ling and Peter Grant go,’ he said, ‘we’ll let things simmer for the next twenty-four hours. I’ve got a hunch that there’ll be developments, anyway where Ling’s concerned. In the meantime there are a couple of leads worth following up. One’s finding out who was living in Upway Manor at the beginning of April last year. On the face of it the most likely person to have spotted Grant cleaning his car that night would be someone in the house. His sister, for instance, although it’s difficult to imagine what motive she could have for getting him convicted for murder or manslaughter. Not money: Hemsworthy said they each got about £40,000 and a half-share in the house from the aunt last year. Young Grant’s taking Kate Ling to a dance tonight; and incidentally, if he’s expecting a pleasant evening, he’s got another think coming. She may be besotted about him, but she’s a forceful and forthright young woman. I’ll go along to Upway Manor and register surprise that he isn’t at home. With any luck it’ll lead to a cosy chat with Davina Grant to renew old acquaintance: I think it’s better for me to go alone. Less official, and easier to pump her. You take a break and go to the flicks if there’s anything on you can sit through.’
Toye was doubtful, but said he would shop around. He asked Pollard what other lead he had in mind.
‘We’ve got to put in some more work on picking up our bloke’s trail after the Hawkinses lost sight of him on the cliffs. We can take it as read now that he left Starbarrow Farm as a skeleton sometime during last weekend. What we’ve got to find out is when and how he got there, either alive and kicking, or as a corpse. You remember this George Akerman who goes around vetting the antiquities on Cattesmoor? Well, there’s just the chance that he may have spotted a hippy type sleeping rough during the week after Easter. Worth asking him, anyway. But we’ll leave him till tomorrow. I want to concentrate on Davina Grant tonight.’
After they had written up their notes Toye went off to investigate the programmes of Stoneham’s cinemas. Pollard sat on for a time meditating, occasionally referring to the file. In spite of the progress made during the day he still had the frustrating feeling of merely skating about on the surface of his case. What, he asked himself, was behind the anonymous attempts to cast suspicion on Peter Grant? Were they being made by the killer of the hippy, who must in that case also have it in for Grant? Or was Grant the killer himself, and the author of the phonecall and the letters in an attempt to confuse the trail? Pollard found himself wanting to reject this possibility for Kate Ling’s sake, but of course it called for the fullest investigation. He would leave a note at Upway Manor that evening, requesting in official language Grant’s presence at the police station on the following morning. Having deci
ded on this move and written the note, he debated the line he should take with Davina Grant in his attempt to get information on the members of the household in April 1975. In the end he decided to play it by ear, and left the police station for his hotel and a call to Jane.
It seemed probable that Peter Grant would be taking Kate Ling out to a meal before the dance, but Pollard dallied over his steak and chips to avoid all risk of finding him at Upway Manor. It was eight o’clock when he set out on foot. The clouds had dispersed, and it was a sunny warm evening.
Pilgrim Lane was almost deserted at this hour, and Pollard concluded that most of its residents must be having a Saturday evening out. A small group of youths in crash helmets and leather jackets stood round a Honda parked at the kerbside in earnest confabulation. An old man in shirtsleeves with a scraggy neck looked down at him from an upper window, contentedly smoking a pipe, a budgerigar’s cage hung out to catch the last of the evening sun. A grubby small child looked up at him from a doorstep as he passed, but otherwise he met no one. The street seemed shorter than he remembered it, and he was soon beyond the builder’s yard and the modern bungalows, and at the point where Upway Manor was just visible in the trees, halfway up the hill ahead. It was just about here, Pollard thought, that the BMW had passed him, coming back into Stoneham. A short distance farther on he came to the first Possel Way signpost, and the road began to rise steeply. He came to a halt on the Stoneham side of the Manor gates, and stood listening intently. A few steps further enabled him to look down the straight drive into the garage. Its doors were open, and as before there was only one car, an Austin Cambridge as far as he could see. He bore left and prospected, and was relieved to see that the BMW was not drawn up at the front door. There was a light in one of the ground-floor rooms, but no one was visible through its open windows.
Acting on a sudden impulse Pollard approached the house noiselessly, walking on the edge of the lawn. He noted that the slightly neglected appearance of the garden which had struck him on his first visit was now more marked. As he drew nearer to the windows he heard a curious sound coming from the room. After a second or two he identified it as something like tough paper being cut vigorously with a large pair of scissors. It stopped suddenly, and a shadow fell on one of the windows. He instantly stepped off the grass and crossed the gravel sweep in front of the house with deliberately firm tread. As he rang the front door bell deep barking and growling came from inside the hall. The next moment Davina Grant’s head appeared through the nearer window.
Suddenly While Gardening Page 8
