Salt Lane Page 11

  ‘It’s a case. A dead woman who this woman was impersonating. I think it’s going to be mothballed unless I can find something good.’

  ‘Oh. One of those.’

  ‘What do you mean.’

  ‘I know you. The way you become sometimes. It’s one of your babies. The ones you don’t want to let go.’

  ‘You make it sound like something irrational, David. It’s not at all. The woman was murdered. We may have found her killer, but…’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But… just but. It doesn’t quite make sense to me. I need to know why she died.’

  ‘I like it when you’re passionate.’

  She laughed.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. I promise.’

  ‘OK.’

  They faltered.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Got to go.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said, put down the phone and stood. The office around her was still empty; it felt suddenly very provincial here, and far away from the fast-paced, busy offices she had worked in in London.

  Fifteen minutes later, at 8.30 in the morning, she stood on a sodden carpet dressed in her protective suit, addressing officers.

  ‘First, anything that explains who Hilary Keen was and what she was doing living in Eason’s backyard.’ They were gathered downstairs in Stanley Eason’s front room, armchairs piled to one side, damp wallpaper peeling off the walls. ‘Any property that might have belonged to her. Any mentions of her name or who she was. Bank statements, a rent book, anything. It’s possible that Eason took her mobile phone. Look for cash. It’s also possible that he stole money from the victim at some point.’

  She had been in enough of them to know the stink of burnt houses, of charred wood and every pungent chemical stench set loose by flame. The windows had been opened, but it made little difference. It clung.

  The house was surrounded by tape; its entire ground floor was still wet from the water the firemen had poured onto the house. They had pulled a tarp over the wrecked roof to protect it from the elements.

  Two constables stood waiting for her to tell them what to do. A bigger team would have helped.

  ‘Secondly, anything that might relate to or explain her murder. That is going to be harder. We are still not sure how she died. The current theory from the pathologists is some kind of asphyxiation. Any material that hints of a sexual motive for the killing. Hilary Keen was not sexually attacked, but rule nothing out.’

  ‘Jesus. Is that a rat?’ One of the policemen pointed at a sodden dark shape in the corner of the room. Evidently Eason wasn’t the only victim of the fire.

  ‘Fortunate we’re all wearing protective clothing, isn’t it?’ said Cupidi.

  ‘This paper suit ain’t protecting me from nothing.’

  ‘I hate rats.’

  ‘Boys.’ She clapped her hands. ‘Come on. Pay attention. Finally, use your instincts. This whole case is a weird one. We don’t know how she was killed or why. We’re looking for anything that might give us an insight into this man and his relationship with the murdered woman.’

  ‘Instincts?’ said the older of the constables.

  ‘He didn’t have a computer, but is there a diary? Letters, photographs, mementoes. Right?’

  ‘So. Pretty much anything,’ said the man.

  ‘I suppose that’s a reasonable way of putting it,’ said Cupidi. ‘Pretty much anything.’

  ‘So we don’t know what we’re looking for at all?’

  ‘Socrates would say that is an advantage,’ said Cupidi.

  ‘Who’s that when he’s at home?’ asked the younger copper.

  ‘He’s that new Crime Commissioner,’ said the older one. Cupidi wasn’t entirely sure he was joking.

  As they started their work on the ground floor, she went upstairs to the bedroom where Eason had set fire to himself.

  The sunlight filtering through the tarp bathed the place in blue light. Up here the reek of smoke penetrated everything. Everything – sheets, carpets, clothes, furniture – was covered in a black oily film. It was a double bed, spread with a pile of blankets.

  On the bedside table, next to a radio, was a photograph, entirely obscured by the blackness. She picked it up and wiped the glass with her blue plastic glove.

  A black-and-white picture emerged of a man and a woman at a wedding. In it, a young Stanley Eason stood stiff-backed, unsmiling but proud, next to a black-haired woman, shorter than him, with a plain face, who squinted into the camera. It must have been taken outside one of the local Marsh churches. Keeps himself to himself since his wife died, Cupidi remembered the man in the garden centre saying.

  She pulled open the bedside drawer; it contained a Bible, a blister pack of indigestion pills and a box of buttons. She left them; one of the constables would later come and record this room methodically.

  Underneath the layer of soot, the place looked neglected. There were piles of newspapers and farming magazines lined up along the wall and a collection of old wellington boots in another corner. She wandered to the bathroom and opened the smoke-blackened window, leaning out.

  The caravan where Hilary Keen had lived would have been parked beneath it.

  One of the coppers emerged from the back door with an armful of coats and dropped them down onto the ground. He then picked one up and started going through the pockets.

  ‘Anything?’ she called down.

  ‘Pile of his bank statements, that’s all so far. I’ve bagged them. Reckon we’ll find anything?’

  ‘We won’t know until we do,’ she said, though she wasn’t any more certain than he was that there was anything here to find.

  Outside, she was grateful for clean air. She lifted up the tape and was walking under it as a car pulled up. ‘Is he going to be OK?’ the driver called from his window.

  Cupidi recognised him as the cashier from the garden centre whom she had spoken to the day before. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘They’re saying he killed someone, is that right?’

  ‘We were trying to speak to him in relation to a possible murder. That’s all we’re able to say at present, sir.’

  ‘Same thing, though, isn’t it?’ The man didn’t drive off; just sat there with the engine running as if waiting for something. ‘Terrible, isn’t it? I mean, you’d never have guessed. Always seemed such a quiet chap. Still waters. There was always something odd about him.’

  Only yesterday, according to this man, Eason had been a victim of police harassment.

  She paused, wondering if there was something else he wanted to say. You had to be open. People volunteered their part of the story in many ways.

  But he just sat there staring at her, and she stood by the car, until it became embarrassing. He was just another rubberneck.

  ‘Oi, Sarge! Something you should see.’

  She turned and went back into the house. ‘Here, in the kitchen.’

  She followed the voice. It was dark in there. Someone had secured the window she’d smashed by screwing a large sheet of chipboard over the frame. Her feet crunched on broken glass.

  The man was holding the door to Eason’s old freezer. Thick pink blood was oozing out, down the pale door and onto the floor.

  ‘This lot’s going to start stinking,’ he said.

  ‘Meat?’

  ‘Yeah. But it’s not that.’ He shone a torch into the compartment. Next to the packets of defrosting meat was a blue plastic bag full of rolled banknotes. There had to be several hundred pounds there. ‘Bingo,’ he said, grinning.

  FIFTEEN

  When she arrived back at the incident room, she saw that McAdam had added a photo to the whiteboard. The face of the dead man from the slurry pit, skin washed clean, eyes half closed. The chairs around the table were only half full. It was high summer. With the holiday season they were low on numbers.

  Cupidi was digging in her bag, struggling to find a pen that must have fallen to the bottom, pulling out lipstick and mascara, when the constable next to her stood a
nd started clapping. Others joined in. Cupidi looked around, and there at the door was Constable Ferriter, pink T-shirt and skirt, smiling back at them.

  Cupidi stood, too, and joined in the applause, and now the whole room was clapping a young copper. ‘Proud of you, Constable,’ said McAdam, smiling.

  ‘God. Don’t. I’m embarrassed,’ said Ferriter, though she didn’t appear to be. She made her way to the empty seat next to Cupidi.

  ‘Though make sure you don’t do anything that reckless again. We’re short enough on staff anyway,’ said McAdam.

  Clapping changed briefly to laughter.

  ‘So. First things first. Anything from Eason’s house?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Cupidi. ‘We’ve found a roll of notes. It doesn’t prove anything, of course, but it may have been money that Stanley Eason stole from Hilary Keen’s caravan. We’re sending it to forensics to see if we can trace Hilary Keen’s prints on it. It’s not exactly a smoking gun because we know she paid him rent, so even if she’s all over the notes, it’s possible he came by the money through legal means.’

  ‘Good. Good. Any news on how Eason’s doing?’

  ‘Not great. He regained consciousness last night for a couple of hours but was incoherent, and this morning he’s back in the coma. He appears to have multiple organ failure, including a heart problem of some sort.’

  McAdam seemed to shrink a little. If Eason died, it would be difficult for him.

  ‘And the caravan you spoke about? Did you find that?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Sort of?’ McAdam frowned.

  Cupidi explained what she’d found at the breaker’s yard. ‘I had it impounded but to be honest, there wasn’t much there.’

  ‘Right,’ said McAdam resignedly. ‘All we have so far that suggests guilt is the money and Eason’s behaviour, then?’

  Cupidi frowned and was about to answer, but McAdam continued. ‘We’re now concentrating our resources on the body at Horse Bones Farm. This is what we know. Victim is aged at around thirty. Probably North African origin. So, Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan, Egyptian, Libyan. Possibly Syrian even. No name. No identifying details. He was in good health when he died.’

  The photo in the centre of the board was of the man’s head and bare shoulders. His eyes were half open and the skin had sunk down towards his skull; the relaxed muscles of the un-mistakably dead. ‘So who was he?’

  ‘The gentleman had no papers on him. No ID of any kind was found,’ said Ferriter. ‘The coastguards have been warning about the uptick of boats arriving on the coast. I’d guess he was one of them.’

  Cupidi paused from rummaging in her bag.

  ‘An uptick,’ repeated Ferriter. ‘A rise. Like on a graph.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ Cupidi protested, and went back to delving.

  ‘So what was he doing on the farm?’ asked McAdam.

  ‘The barn was pretty isolated. He was hiding, I presume,’ said Ferriter. ‘Finding a place where he could conceal himself from the authorities. Sufficiently far from the house to avoid notice from anyone living there.’

  ‘Maybe it was the farmer found him,’ suggested a constable. ‘Didn’t like the idea of someone trespassing. You know what they’re like.’

  ‘It was the farmer reported him dead,’ said Ferriter. ‘And the farmer who showed us where he’d been sleeping.’

  ‘All the same, it’s possible,’ said McAdam.

  ‘It didn’t look to me like he’d slept there for more than one night,’ added Cupidi, pulling a packet of Anadin Extra out of the bag and adding it to the pile on the table in front of her. ‘If someone homeless has been in a place for a while there would be signs he’d eaten there. The place would have looked more used. I think he was there one night, two at the very most. He was on the move.’

  McAdam nodded. ‘Good.’

  Cupidi continued. ‘But he had made a serious attempt to hide himself. He’d built himself a kind of bunker in the hay. So the question is, who was he hiding from? The farmer? Goes without saying. But maybe other people as well. If he was killed, maybe he was running from whoever killed him. What about the signs he had been assaulted?’

  ‘Which brings us to these,’ McAdam said, turning his laptop round so the rest of them could see the screen. ‘What do you see?’

  Cupidi finally found a biro and looked up. He was scrolling slowly through a slideshow of photographs, each showing a different part of the murder victim’s torso and limbs. Each showed at least one dark semi-circular mark; some several, clustered together. Some had laid a white ruler on the dead skin.

  ‘They’re like… moon shapes,’ said Ferriter, peering at a photo of the man’s thigh on which the maroon C-shape was clearly visible.

  ‘Is that religious? Like a crescent?’ somebody chipped in. ‘That’s a Muslim thing, isn’t it? And the dead guy, he’s a Muslim isn’t he? Some kind of ritual killing?’

  They moved on to the next picture. ‘It’s not a crescent. Some of them are round.’

  McAdam read aloud from a printed report: ‘The ecchymoses are all the same size, of a diameter of around five centimetres, and would suggest repeated blows with a single weapon. We haven’t got any more yet.’

  ‘Ecchymoses?’

  ‘Doctor-speak for bruises,’ said Cupidi.

  ‘So he was… tortured?’

  Those who had laptops with them tapped keys, searching for the folder containing the pictures on their own devices. Others stood and crowded McAdam’s end of the table so they could get a closer look. Cupidi leaned in. It was more than just bruising. The force of the assault meant that the victim’s skin had been ruptured in a couple of places.

  ‘Is it a weapon of some sort?’

  ‘I know what that is. Scaffolding,’ said Cupidi.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The end of a scaffolding pole.’

  For a second, nobody spoke.

  ‘Two, maybe three people, holding scaffolding poles,’ she continued. She mimed hefting a long heavy pole and jabbing it towards Ferriter, who was standing next to her. ‘That would make that mark. They drove him into the pit. Like an animal.’

  ‘No need to look so enthusiastic,’ complained Ferriter.

  ‘Just demonstrating.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said a constable, looking at his phone. ‘You’re right. Diameter of a scaffolding pole, 48.3 millimetres, says Google.’

  ‘So they? Two people? More?’

  ‘There’s no mention of ligature marks on the body?’ asked Cupidi.

  ‘No,’ said a copper who had the report open in front of him.

  ‘So if he wasn’t tied up, we can assume it wasn’t one person, going for it.’

  Cupidi turned again towards the photographs. ‘The bruises are all around his body. The victim was a fit young man. Plus, those poles are heavy. They’re, what, two metres long, even the short ones? You couldn’t swing them easily and if it was just one person, it would be easy to get away. He was trying to get away from a bunch of them, ask me. You’d need at least three people, or a man like him could just dodge them. I’d guess it was a few of them – four, maybe five.’

  ‘A gang.’

  ‘Know what? I think I remember there were scaffolding poles in the hay barn,’ said one of the officers. ‘A pile just inside the door.’

  ‘Did you log them, Peter?’ McAdam looked at Moon. ‘Are there photos on the shared drive?’

  It would have been Moon’s job. He had been in charge of the scene that day.

  ‘That was where the victim had sheltered, I understand,’ said McAdam.

  Moon hesitated. He hadn’t gone into the barn. ‘Yeah… but—’

  Ferriter butted in. ‘My fault, sir. Sergeant Moon tasked me with recording the barn. I didn’t notice them, sir. Sorry.’

  After yesterday, Ferriter was the golden girl. Nobody minded her not noticing.

  McAdam turned to Moon and said, ‘That was your responsibility, Moon. Get down there right away after this meet
ing and collect them. Hopefully they haven’t been contaminated further.’ Then he turned to the rest of the team. ‘So these injuries may suggest that he was hiding from more than just the farmer.’

  ‘Yeah. Well. If they’re the sort of people who do something like that –’ Cupidi pointed at the screen – ‘you’d hide from them, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘What’s this about, then? Drugs? People-smuggling?’

  Nobody answered.

  ‘Two deaths,’ said Cupidi at last. ‘Both bodies disposed on farmland, about five miles apart.’

  There was a moment of silence.

  ‘Are you suggesting there’s a connection between the two?’ asked McAdam.

  ‘Doubt it,’ volunteered one copper. ‘The dead man at Horse Bones Farm was young and fit. I can’t see him being killed by a man Eason’s age. Just don’t see it. Different offenders.’

  ‘That’s assuming Eason killed Hilary Keen,’ said Ferriter. ‘Everything we have on Eason so far is circumstantial.’

  Cupidi looked at her curiously. It was a point. What if Keen’s killer wasn’t Eason at all?

  McAdam pressed his fingers together. ‘Like the constable says, I believe we should assume this is a separate case,’ he said. ‘Different methodology.’

  ‘Listen, though,’ interrupted Ferriter loudly. ‘Up to now, we don’t have anything that strong on Eason. Nothing that would stand up.’

  As she spoke, Cupidi watched the frown form on McAdam’s face. If the killer was Eason, then he could brush off criticism of how he’d handled the siege at the house. But if it wasn’t, then he might find himself in trouble.

  Ferriter ploughed on. ‘If we can’t just take it for granted he killed her, we can’t assume they’re different cases.’

  Suddenly everyone was talking. ‘So why did he try to top himself when you turned up at his door?’

  ‘I have that effect on people,’ said Cupidi, before anyone else could. There was murmuring in the room.

  ‘Well,’ said McAdam. ‘Obviously it’s important to consider that point, Jill. Thank you. Well done.’

  Not understanding the implications for their boss, Ferriter looked around the room, pleased with herself.