The Hanging Wood (12 page)

‘When we talked yesterday, I didn’t mean to put her down, please believe me.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Was Aslan feeling guilty, or just trying to redeem himself in Daniel’s eyes?

‘She was just … hard work. I had no idea she was desperate enough to do something so terrible. If she’d given me a clue of what was going through her head, it might have been—’

‘Might-have-beens are a waste of time,’ Daniel said. ‘You said it yourself, you were just colleagues who went out together a few times.’ Aslan chewed his lower lip. ‘You’re right. I mean, we absolutely never slept together or anything.’

Too much information. Daniel flicked his key fob to unlock the door of his car.

‘I haven’t been able to concentrate.’ Aslan moved closer, reluctant to let him go. ‘I went for a long walk, trying to get my head straight. I finished up at the farm. From the lane, I saw the silo where she died. Imagine, Daniel, deprived of your breath by the sheer weight of the grain.’

‘Better not to dwell on it, it won’t help.’

‘But how can I get her out of my mind?’ Aslan exhaled. ‘I can’t stop thinking of Orla. She was fascinated by … by siblings.’

‘Hansel and Gretel, you mean?’

‘Hansel and Gretel.’ A faraway look came into his eyes, reminding Daniel of a gambler contemplating a last throw of the dice. ‘And Castor and Pollux.’

‘Castor and Pollux?’ Daniel frowned in puzzlement. ‘That’s not a fairy tale, though, is it?’

‘You’re right.’ Aslan closed his eyes, and Daniel sensed he was playing a game, but didn’t intend to explain the rules. ‘Sorry, my head is spinning. There’s too much to take in, it’s not easy to make sense of things.’

Footsteps came clip-clopping over the gravel, and Aslan
spun round. Sham Madsen aimed an infrared key at the door of her sports car. It bore this year’s registration plate. A present from Daddy, no doubt.

‘Too nice to work overtime!’ she called, gesturing to the cloudless sky. ‘Fancy going into Keswick for a drink, Aslan?’

‘I’m not—’

‘Oh, come on. It’ll do us both good. We deserve a
pick-me-
up after what’s happened.’

Daniel watched the pair climb into the natty yellow car. Sham gave him a cheerful wave as she revved the engine, shattering the quiet of St Herbert’s. Not everyone was in deep mourning for Orla Payne.

‘The folk singer reminded me of Marc,’ Terri said, as she returned from the bar to rejoin Hannah at their table under the spreading branches of a willow tree. ‘Are you going to ask him to do a request after the interval?’

They’d come to listen to a folk singer perform in the beer garden of a pub-cum-hotel in Windermere. He wasn’t exactly Paul Simon, and not simply because he was
fair-haired
and flat-voiced, but while the sun shone and the wine flowed, who cared?

‘Marc’s taller, and he doesn’t have a cleft chin.’ The wine was dry and strong. Already her head was starting to swim. ‘And this guy is way less gorgeous.’

Terri squealed so loudly with merriment that a couple of heads turned. She never had many inhibitions at the best of times, and she’d got stuck in to the pina colada while waiting for Hannah to arrive. Just as well they’d booked cabs home.

‘Tell you what, if you really are serious about giving up on dear old Marc, would you mind if I gave him a call?’

‘Are you kidding?’ Hannah almost choked on her drink. ‘I thought he wasn’t your type.’

Terri smirked. Three marriages and countless other relationships had ended in tears, yet her faith remained unshaken that Mr Right was waiting for her out there. Preferably on the deck of his own private yacht or beside the drawbridge of a baronial castle, but she wasn’t that fussy, over and above her golden rule of getting rid of all her underwear every time a relationship broke down:
new man, new pants
. Hannah loved her relentless optimism, even though there were moments when she could understand why she drove so many people to distraction.

‘Hey, I couldn’t misbehave with a bloke who lived with my best friend, could I, now? So I covered up. But if you’re moving on …’

‘Jesus, I don’t believe this.’

‘Honest, kid, if you let him go, there will be plenty queuing up to take him off your hands. I’m asking for a head start, that’s all.’

‘Do me a favour.’

‘Hannah, you don’t realise. Good-looking bloke like that? Intelligent, with oodles of charm. Did I mention he reminds me ever so slightly of Hugh Grant? I might as well stake a claim.’

Flowering jasmine spread over a small pergola close to their table. Hannah breathed in the perfume before fumbling for her dark glasses. Not so much to keep out the sun as to disguise any trace of mistiness in her eyes.

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Seriously?’

‘It’s more than six months now. No sign of these frantic women battering down the doors of his bookshop to get their hands inside his dust jacket.’

‘He’s fobbing them off, I bet. Waiting for you to give him the chance to make amends.’

‘It will take more than making amends.’ Hannah swallowed a mouthful of wine. ‘We’ve been through this before.’

‘All right, then, where are you up to with Daniel Kind?’

‘Not seen him for ages. We bumped into each other at a lecture about criminal narratives, and that’s about it.’

‘But?’ Terri would have made a good prosecuting counsel. She could spot the slightest gap in a witness’s testimony. ‘Anything planned?’

Hannah groaned. As if her own labyrinthine romantic entanglements were not enough, Terri was addicted to matchmaking. ‘Well, he referred a cold case to me.’

‘He’s definitely interested.’ Terri pronounced her verdict with the supreme assurance of an agony aunt. ‘Just cautious, if you ask me. I’d say he’s been hurt in the past, and doesn’t want to make himself too vulnerable.’

‘Maybe. By the way, you didn’t tell me about your blind date with that bloke from the driving school?’

Terri’s face was a picture. ‘When I first saw his stomach, I thought he was eight months pregnant – enough said. And don’t think you can get away with changing the subject, Hannah Scarlett. I know what you’re like. So when are you seeing Daniel again?’

‘Listen, he’s a friend, no more than that. Right now,
friendship is all I want from any man, believe me.’

Terri became solemn. ‘This isn’t just about Marc straying off the straight and narrow, is it? The miscarriage knocked you back more than you realise, Hannah. It takes a long time, believe me, I know. But—’

‘The miscarriage is nothing to do with it.’

Apart from Marc and Terri, nobody else knew about her miscarriage. Oh, and Daniel, she’d mentioned it to him in a moment of weakness. But she hadn’t made a big deal of it, and he’d probably forgotten. Might Terri be right? From day one, she’d tried not to dwell on her loss, but once or twice it had featured in bad dreams. Invariably she awoke in a cold sweat of fear and self-loathing, for the inadequacy of her mourning for the child that never was. Would she ever have a baby of her own? Time kept moving, the odds against lengthened with every year that slipped by.

‘OK, OK, keep your hair on.’ Terri adopted a confidential tone. ‘Anyway, Marc isn’t the only show in town. Stefan, that hunky Polish bloke behind the bar, was telling me about Krakow, where he comes from. Sounds fabulous. Maybe he’s hoping to whisk me off for a mini-break.’

Hannah let her friend’s chatter slosh over her as the folk singers made their way back through the crowd. Was she being too harsh on Marc? They’d been together a long time, it might be a mistake to throw away all those shared memories. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Stefan the Pole emerge from inside, carrying a tray of drinks to a table of his fellow countrymen. He cast Terri’s bare legs a very frank glance, and Terri treated him to a coquettish smile without pausing for breath in the midst of an account
of the latest idiocy of the girl she’d just hired at her
makeup
studio.

Chances were, Terri might find a reason to cancel her taxi home tonight. Oh well, good luck to her.

The singer who looked a little like Marc cleared his throat and tapped the microphone.

‘And now we’d like to do one of our favourite songs from the Fifties, “Bye, Bye Love”. Maybe it’s one of your favourites too.’

Yeah, Hannah thought, you’re singing my song. And I didn’t even need to put in a request.

The early hours, and Aslan staggered off the pavement and on to the road that led to his bedsit. At last, he’d shaken off Sham; he wasn’t in the mood to take her back, and they’d both had so much to drink that they’d probably have fallen fast asleep the moment they climbed into bed.

A car hooted from behind and he ducked out of the way. Once again, he thought how easy it would be to stumble into the path of a passing vehicle. But suppose you didn’t die? Some people were maimed for life, and he didn’t fancy that. Sham had talked endlessly about her family; she wanted him to be impressed that on one side she was descended from the landed gentry, on the other from successful business executives. Money turned her on; she said her father always said that money was power. But famously, it didn’t bring happiness, and it gave Aslan a rush of pleasure – much more than when she let her legs brush against his while they were drinking – to hear that even the Madsens were not as content as they seemed. He’d never figured out what he really wanted from life –
apart from loads of money and no-strings sex, obviously – and it made him feel better that other people hit the same snag. He’d hate to think of himself as some kind of sad loser.

According to his daughter, Gareth Madsen felt twinges of envy, because his brother had control of the family company. Bryan resented the fact that he’d never made a mark in national politics, while Fleur was, in her niece’s eyes, an older woman who flirted shamelessly with younger men, but never got up the nerve to do anything about it. Sham was right there; during his fleeting encounters with the chair of St Herbert’s, he’d felt conscious of her appraising stare, and when they talked, she never allowed him enough personal space. But she gave the impression she was just amusing herself. Perhaps she guessed that he didn’t fancy shagging someone old enough to be his mother.

Weird though it was, Purdey appealed to him more than the other Madsens, something he’d had the tact to conceal when Sham persisted in running her sister down. Maybe it was just Purdey’s ruthless determination to succeed that he envied; she must have inherited it from their dad, as their mother, an ex-model, was apparently no Einstein. Sham was better-looking, but she was jealous of Purdey. Not a bit like Orla, who idolised Callum, even though he’d treated her with disdain.

Aslan found himself on the doorstep of the whitewashed cottage converted into bedsits and fumbled with his key in the lock. He meant to get up early tomorrow when his head had cleared, and follow through on what he’d gleaned from Sham. In the end, it had been just as well
he’d agreed to go out with her. Orla had made no sense with her drunken hints about Castor and Pollux, but tonight Sham had unwittingly given him a glimpse of the truth. He’d have kissed her, but she’d only have got the wrong idea.

Ugliness was in the eye of the beholder, but Hannah had to admit that Mike Hinds had not been too unfair to the man who had taken away his first wife. Kit Payne’s face and body seemed lopsided, as if the result of inexpert do-it-yourself. Tall, with an egg-shaped head and hunched shoulders, he had a large nose, a receding chin, and teeth as crooked as Chesterfield’s church spire. There was a mournful light in his grey eyes, and the corners of his mouth drooped, as if apologising for his lack of photogenic appeal. Whatever Niamh Hinds once saw in him, it wasn’t good looks.

His office, on the first floor of Madsen High Command, was airy and spacious, reminiscent of an upmarket hotel room, with a leather sofa, plush chairs, and a balcony overlooking the park’s lovingly tended gardens. A shelf next to his desk was crammed with awards and certificates bestowed upon the park by tourism and environmental bodies. Half a dozen photographs showed a woman with dyed red hair, a toothy smile and lots of bronzed flesh. In
one picture, she’d posed on the deck of a yacht in a tiny pink bikini. Niamh’s successor, no doubt, someone else able to see past Kit’s lugubrious appearance to the man beyond. Or at least as far as his bank balance.

Once his secretary had supplied bottles of water, he led Hannah and Greg on to the balcony and waved them into wooden chairs. When Hannah expressed her condolences, the egg-head bowed.

‘Poor Orla.’ Kit chewed at a fingernail. ‘I’m not sure she was ever truly happy.’

‘You’ve known her all her life?’

‘Pretty much. I started work here before she was born, although I began in the offices, assisting the operations director. When he retired, I was promoted, and I became friendly with Bryan and Gareth. In those days, the old man was still in charge – Joseph Madsen, I mean. Gareth and I are much the same age, and he’s always been good to me. He was friendly with Mike Hinds, and through him I met Niamh. That was when Orla was a baby.’

‘So, before you began your relationship with her?’

‘Of course.’ Kit’s sallow cheeks suffused with colour. ‘At that time, we were acquaintances, nothing more.’

‘How come Gareth and Mike Hinds were chums?’ Greg asked. ‘They don’t have much in common, do they?’

Kit raised his eyebrows. ‘You’ve met Mike, then?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘Hard work, isn’t he? But Gareth is brilliant with people. Like Mike and Niamh, he and Sally both had young children, it was a bond. Besides, Gareth always believed it is vital to have good relations with the local community. It’s the secret of our success.’

And Bryan Madsen married the lady who inherited the stately home next door, Hannah thought. No wonder the brothers were rich; even their social life was a masterclass in strategic planning.

‘When did you become involved with Niamh Hinds?’

‘Gareth told me their marriage was on the rocks. It saddened him. He liked Niamh, as well as Mike, but it was a match made in Hell. Mike was a womaniser, who had a string of affairs with local girls he picked up in the bars of Keswick, while everyone saw that Niamh wasn’t cut out to be a farmer’s wife. She was lovely and vivacious, but making sure the cows were milked was never a priority for her. I understand why Mike found her frustrating. She was never the easiest woman.’

‘But the two of you …?’

Kit coughed. ‘She and Mike had a blazing row one night. He’d been messing about with some girl in Keswick, not for the first time, and she consoled herself with a
retail-therapy
binge at the expense of their joint account. He’s never been the sort to seek forgiveness for his sins. Instead, he threw her out of the house, when she was only wearing a nightdress. I used to go for a walk around the park every night, checking that everything was as it should be. I still do, even though we now have state-of-the-art CCTV. I was on my way home when I saw Niamh. Running from Lane End towards Gareth’s house – though I knew he was away at a conference.’

‘Did she ever have a fling with Gareth?’ Greg asked.

‘Certainly not!’ Kit’s voice rose, and a couple walking along the path below glanced up in surprise. If his outrage was faked, Hannah thought, he was in the Charles Laughton
class as an actor. ‘Gareth’s a handsome chap, and he’s never been short of female admirers, but he’s not like Mike.’

‘Meaning?’

‘In his younger days, Mike Hinds was pathologically unable to keep it in his trousers. I’m not saying Gareth behaved himself before he met Sally, either, but Mike was reckless. He has a self-destructive streak, if you ask me. Poor Niamh was faithful to him despite the provocations and the mistreatment. At least, until …’

‘Go on,’ Hannah said.

‘That night, we talked. She’d drunk a couple of bottles of Rioja, but I persuaded her to return to the farmhouse and make her peace with Mike. Not a sensible plan, but I didn’t have much experience of marital discord. To be honest, I didn’t have much experience of women, full stop.’ He hesitated, but Hannah’s sympathetic expression encouraged him to continue. ‘I’d only had one significant relationship, and that ended when my girlfriend decided to become a nun. Niamh went home, but she and Mike started arguing again. In the end, she hit him, and blacked his eye.’

Hannah noticed Greg fighting a losing battle to keep a straight face. He loved that line about the girlfriend who fled to a nunnery, rather than get involved with such an ugly bugger.

‘Did her husband retaliate?’

‘Yes, it’s in his nature. An eye for an eye, that’s his philosophy, that’s why I’ve never had a civil word from him, even though Niamh is long-since cold in her grave. He grabbed hold of her arms, and finished up breaking one of them and having to drive her to A and E.’

Kit paused to let his words sink in, but Hannah motioned for him to continue.

‘The next day, I phoned to see how she was, and she told me what he’d done. I was horrified. She needed a shoulder to cry on, and I offered mine. One thing led to another, and within a week she’d walked out on Hinds and moved in with me.’

‘Together with Orla and Callum?’

‘Yes; my life changed overnight. She swept me off my feet, there’s no other way of describing it. Niamh was a challenge, but I was ecstatic. I did everything I could to make her happy to the very end.’ He swallowed, as if embarrassed. ‘As for the children, their rightful place was with their mother, and staying at Lane End Farm wasn’t an option. I was glad to take in the kids, but it was tough on them. Especially on Callum, who resented me for muscling in on their lives. You have to remember, the boy was young.’

‘The two of you had a difficult relationship?’

‘I can’t pretend otherwise, no sense in rewriting history. I was an ignoramus when it came to children. I don’t mind admitting, I made mistakes.’

‘What sort of mistakes?’ Greg had conquered his laughing fit.

‘Oh, I was naive enough to expect them to be polite and well behaved. Orla was no trouble, but Callum made a nuisance of himself at every opportunity. Unfortunately, Niamh refused to let me discipline him.’

Greg exchanged a glance with Hannah. ‘Discipline him how?’

‘Mike Hinds thrashed Callum whenever he stepped
out of line, but the one and only time I tapped him on the backside, he ran off to complain to his father, and Mike made a huge fuss. Talk about double standards.’

‘What had Callum done?’

‘He found some beer – I suspected Mike gave it to him, but he refused to admit it. After knocking back the booze, he went out and broke several caravan windows. A stupid act of vandalism. Not hugely important in the scheme of things, perhaps, but embarrassing for me.’

‘When was this?’

‘The week before he disappeared.’

‘Do you think the incident played any part in his disappearance?’

‘Certainly not. The very idea is ridiculous!’

Hannah and Greg kept their mouths shut. Kit’s lower lip was quivering. Perhaps he feared that he’d protested too much.

‘Listen, Chief Inspector, Callum took it in his stride, I can assure you. Mike beat him countless times. I only gave him a single slap.’

‘I see.’ Greg made it sound as though Kit had coughed to grievous bodily harm. ‘So were you really surprised when Callum went missing?’

As Kit opened his mouth, they heard the door open, and a woman’s voice called out.

‘Seen that husband of mine, sweetie?’

Sally Madsen swept on to the balcony. She reeked of perfume, and her white top and shorts displayed acres of orange flesh; she must spend half her life on a sunbed. ‘Sorry, Chief Inspector, didn’t realise Kit was busy.’

‘If Gareth isn’t in his office, he can’t be far away,’ Kit
Payne said. ‘We are getting together with Bryan for a sandwich lunch to review the month’s sales figures.’

‘Thanks, sweetie. I only wanted to see if he needed the Merc this afternoon. My little runabout is in for repair.’ Sally Madsen gave a smile so brilliant that Hannah became convinced she’d invested in cosmetic dentistry. ‘Sorry to interrupt. Have fun!’

She left as quickly as she had arrived, but the dynamics of the interview had been wrecked. Sod’s law. Kit had been rocking on his heels, and Sally Madsen’s fortuitous arrival had given him time to regroup.

‘In your first statement to the police,’ Greg said, ‘you admitted you’d had a disagreement with the boy, but you downplayed it. You certainly didn’t mention that you had hit him.’

‘It was a tap, not a beating.’

On the path below the balcony, two couples and their fresh-faced children in tennis kit were knocking a ball back and forth between them. Happy families, but who knew what tensions festered beneath the smiles and chatter?

‘What made you decide Callum’s uncle killed him?’

‘Philip was the last person to see the boy alive, and he committed suicide after a police interrogation. What else could anyone think?’

Convenient, Hannah thought. If Philip hadn’t been tried and found guilty in the court of public opinion, more questions would have been asked about Callum’s relationship with his stepfather.

‘Mr Hinds told us that, when they were small, Orla and Callum loved playing together in the grain. So they were close?’

‘Orla told me about the grain – it stuck in her memory, poor girl. She looked up to Callum, but most of the time he regarded her as a nuisance. I hate to say it, but he was patronising and sarcastic by nature. As well as rather sly.’

Apart from that, a lovely lad, Hannah reflected. ‘How did Orla react when her brother vanished?’

‘She was a dreamer.’ Kit drained his glass of water in a single gulp. His mouth must have been very dry. ‘A fantasist. She seemed to see it all as something out of a storybook.’

‘She was in denial?’

‘In a matter of days she lost her brother and uncle. She found it hard to take in.’

‘When did she give up on the idea that Callum might still be alive?’

‘With hindsight, I’m not sure she ever did. After a year or two, she stopped talking about him. But recently, I discovered she still clung to the belief that he might turn up, safe and sound.’

The sun was grilling Hannah’s forehead. She blinked in the glare, wishing she’d had the foresight to bring a hat. Greg was sprawled out in his chair, soaking up the heat like a holidaymaker. Kit had pushed his own chair back into the shade.

‘How recently?’

‘Oh, since she came back to Keswick. She phoned me one night, when she’d had a skinful. It was like rewinding the years, and trying to make sense of Niamh in her cups. After a few drinks, it was impossible to reason with either of them.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She insisted Callum wasn’t dead, said she’d never
accepted that Philip was capable of harming a hair on his head.’

‘Did she explain herself?’

‘Not at all. She seemed to be on a high, and kept repeating,
But he’s alive, you don’t understand, he’s alive
. She was right, I didn’t understand. In the end, she rang off in disgust because I was being obtuse. Yet the next time we spoke, which was the last time I saw her, she’d changed her tune.’

‘In what way?’

‘She still maintained Philip was a scapegoat, but when I pressed her on why she’d said Callum was alive, she refused to give a straight answer. It was as if she’d suffered a massive disappointment. She seemed desperate to talk about something else, anything else.’

‘When was this?’

Kit Payne’s pale tongue passed over his lips. ‘Last Friday.’

Well, well. ‘As recently as that?’

‘Yes, she called at my house after finishing at St Herbert’s. Glenys had popped out for her weekly get-together with three old school friends; Orla preferred it when she wasn’t around. That pair never found much to talk about together. I made her a pot of tea, but she didn’t stop long. Twenty minutes, maximum.’

‘How did she seem?’

Kit Payne contemplated his bitten nails. What caused his habit, Hannah wondered, stress or bad temper?

‘Absurd as it seems, I think she had finally accepted that Callum was dead, though she still clung to her fantasy that Philip hadn’t killed him.’

‘Daniel! Just the man!’

A greeting that, in Daniel’s experience, never spelt good news. He turned at the door to the Old Library, and saw Professor Micah Bridge walking towards him. There was an ominous quality in the principal’s delight at catching his attention.

‘I hate to disrupt work on your magnum opus, but I wonder if you would be kind enough to spare me a couple of minutes?’

Plainly he meant ten minutes minimum, but Daniel believed in showing good grace when surrendering to the inevitable.

‘Glad to.’

‘Splendid, splendid.’

The principal accompanied him down the corridor to his suite of rooms in the wing at the far end. The charity’s published accounts showed that the salary of the man in charge was pitifully low. But his accommodation was luxurious if old-fashioned, and Daniel suspected Micah Bridge was so unworldly that he might have paid for the privilege of working here.

The bookshelves in the sitting room held the principal’s personal collection of first editions; oil paintings of his predecessors hung on the walls. No television, no sound system, this might have been the home of a
nineteenth-century
man of letters. Daniel submitted to the leathery embrace of a voluptuous old armchair while the principal rang a bell to summon Jonquil, a student who worked in the restaurant, and ordered Turkish coffee for two before making small talk about the challenges of preserving the De Quincey manuscripts in the Old Library. He was building
up to something. Perhaps he’d got wind that Fleur had invited Daniel to become a trustee, and wanted to recruit an ally against the balance sheet barbarians knocking at the gates of Rome.