A Market for Murder (13 page)

‘Because she was at both scenes. Or was said to be. She denies being at the supermarket when it was bombed. She wouldn’t tell us a bloody thing, to be honest. Clammed up like a professional. I felt very much like slapping her.’

‘She was at the supermarket. Karen Slocombe
says so. That should be good enough for anyone.’

‘Go and ask her about it then,’ Hemsley invited. ‘If you can find her.’

Den found her without difficulty in the cherry orchard. The fruit was forming in clusters on the boughs, and Den realised he’d never seen a serious crop of cherries before.

‘Unusual,’ he said, coming up to her quietly. ‘What will you do with them?’

To her credit, she didn’t jump, at least not visibly. She turned smoothly, every muscle under firm control.

‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘Or is it afternoon?’

‘I’m sorry to intrude like this,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’m a friend of Karen Slocombe’s.’

If he’d expected that to elicit a notable response, he was disappointed.

‘Indeed?’ was all she said. Then she remained standing under the tree, simply waiting for what might come next. He observed her minutely. Medium height, slim, wearing the sort of clothes you’d expect on an older woman. A skirt that looked too thick for the warm season, and a tweedy sort of jerkin over a check shirt. She looked like someone off to the point-to-point, except that her feet were bare.

He hadn’t noticed at first, in the long grass of the orchard. But now he could glimpse toes and
ankles beneath the calf-length skirt and his entire impression changed. Here was a woman capable of anything. A woman without any respect for conventions, dangerous and unpredictable.

‘You lied to the police,’ he said calmly. ‘Karen heard you.’

‘Karen has it all wrong.’

‘She thinks you’re involved in some sort of secret activity, to do with food politics. GM crops, probably. You’re thought to be part of the group that trashed the maize crop last month …’

‘An eco-terrorist?’ Her eyes twinkled at him. ‘Isn’t that what such people are called?’

‘You tell me.’

‘You haven’t told me your name,’ she accused him. ‘That’s not very polite, is it?’

‘Oh, sorry. Den Cooper.’ He still had to remember not to prefix his name with
Detective Sergeant
, and reach for his ID card.

‘Well, Den Cooper, I really don’t understand why you’re here. You seem to want me to admit something, to make a confession to you. Can that be right?’

‘It’s right in a way. I’m not a messenger for Karen – she doesn’t even know I’m here. But I want you to understand she’s on the same side as you. She doesn’t see why you and she seem to be opposed in some way. I think she’s quite upset about it.’

‘Ah! You’re her protector. Sir Galahad. But hasn’t she got a perfectly good husband for that sort of thing?’

‘I’m not her protector. I want to know what’s going on, for my own satisfaction.’

‘And you think I’ll tell you, just like that? I don’t
know
you. You could be working for SuperFare itself, for all I know.’

‘Well, I’m not. I’m just taking an interest, and trying to get to the bottom of what’s been going on. I’d appreciate you telling me some of the background. What
is
food politics, anyway? It sounds daft, when you think about it. And I’m not working for SuperFare. I’m hardly working for anyone just now.’

She stared up at his face, as if trying to decide something. ‘Are you by any chance trying to offer me your services?’ she asked. ‘Because that might be a different matter, if you are.’

‘Why? Do you need somebody?’

‘I do, as it happens. Come on in and have some soup while I tell you about it.’

Den realised afterwards that he ought to have known what was coming, at least in outline. A woman living alone, nudging sixty, with all her faculties, was inevitably going to have an eventful past. And that eventful past was very likely to impinge on the present and cause a variety of ripples. It was Den’s experience that the
explanation for most present crises lay in things that had happened decades earlier. He was aware that time scarcely mattered at all when it came to the passions that people generated between themselves. Emotional wounds never really healed, and if they were not aired and admitted, they slowly festered until something eventually had to give.

Mary Thomas told him a story that roughly fitted this view of things.

‘I’ve lived in this area all my life,’ she began, settling herself comfortably in the big wooden kitchen chair. They both had bowls of thick vegetable soup in front of them, and chunks of home-baked granary bread. ‘It’s funny how embarrassing it can be to admit that, sometimes. As if there’s more virtue in moving around and living in a lot of different places. Makes a person sound dull, I suppose.’

Den smiled and waited.

‘I married when I was thirty. He was a widower, quite a lot older than me, with three grown up children. We had twin boys.’

Den found himself looking round for signs of twin boys, despite knowing they must be adults by this time. The idea of twin boys appealed to him much more than he would have anticipated. ‘Nice,’ he said.

‘Busy,’ she corrected him. ‘But they were bright
and funny and handsome. Not identical at all, by the way. But their father died when they were ten, which was not nice at all. He was fifty-five, which was far too young to die. He’d neglected to change the will he made when we were first married, which still left everything to his older children, and although I contested it, and did get this house, it was a meagre living for a while. I can see what you’re thinking.’ She aimed an accusing look at him. ‘Why couldn’t I go out and get myself a job?’

Den spread his hands in outraged innocence.

‘Never mind. I did, as it happens, but my earnings were nothing to boast about. Anyway, I became expert at working the system, accepting whatever handouts various organisations might have available. And that included places at Christ’s Hospital for the boys.’

‘Christ’s Hospital?’

‘It’s a boarding school in Sussex. They take boys – and girls now, I believe – with brains but not much money. They wear strange
old-fashioned
clothes, but it’s an excellent place on the whole. It would all have been fine, except that I lost my sons in the process. They never really felt like mine after that. I went through a period of absolute rage against Michael for leaving his will the way it had been before the twins were born. I was sorry for myself and my boys, and I hated Georgina, Fergus and Ninian
– my stepchildren. Even though they were as pleasant as possible throughout, they clearly believed themselves entitled to the money, and never gave me anything beyond what they were forced to.’ Den shook his head sympathetically.

‘Anyway, they all dispersed, and I haven’t spoken to any of them for ages now. They’re not relevant. It’s my own boys, Joshua and Humphrey, who concern me.’

Den began to wonder where all this was leading. Although she was speaking fast and the soup was still hot, he felt a flicker of impatience.

‘Well, to cut to the main point, they, my sons, became very political in their senior school years. They both went to the LSE and took part in political rallies and campaigns and I don’t know what.’

Ah!
thought Den.

‘Joshua gradually lost interest, after he graduated, but Humphrey has been getting more and more into it. He’s been on all the big protests – and a lot of smaller ones. He’s taught himself a mass of environmental science, been to America to see what’s going on there, and is enormously committed. And he’s taken me along with him, you might say.’ She gave a rueful grin. ‘It feels as if I’ve now got at least one of my sons back.’

‘Joshua and Humphrey,’ Den repeated, almost
reaching for a non-existent notebook to write down the names in.

‘That’s right. They’re twenty-seven now, which is very hard to believe. Joshua lives in Leeds with a girlfriend. He’s working in some little college that calls itself a University.’ Her dismissiveness was awesome.

‘And Humphrey?’

‘He’s based in London, but he travels all over. You never know where he might show up next. I’ve got very good at spotting him on the news. I knitted his balaclava, so I can always recognise him.’

If you can, so can the police
, Den thought. ‘So he’s an eco-warrior, is he?’

‘That’s right.’ Excitement glittered in her eyes. ‘And he needs all the help he can get.’

Den remembered that she’d said she wanted his assistance. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Not me. You’re not asking me to go and pull out genetically modified sweetcorn, are you?’

She laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ she assured him. ‘Nothing like that. Though you ought not to condemn them for it until you understand the facts.’

‘I do understand the facts,’ he said crossly.

‘Good. No, what we want from you, Den Cooper, friend of the estimable Slocombes, is
intelligence
. In both senses of the word. Ferret out
the undercurrents for us: whether they’re onto us; where they’ll strike next – that sort of thing. But above all, I want you to persuade Karen to change her story about the supermarket. Tell her it’s absolutely vital that she should stop saying I was there. Because I wasn’t. That was not me. Karen was mistaken.’ She slapped the table hard with each short sentence. So hard that Den very nearly believed her. 

‘You want me to
persuade
her?’ he echoed. ‘How am I meant to do that?’

‘She’s your friend, isn’t she? Do it in whatever way you like.’

‘We’re not actually that close,’ he began. ‘I don’t think.’

‘Oh, well,’ she shrugged. ‘Don’t get in a state about it.’

‘If I could tell her there’s a really good reason for changing her story, that might be different.’ He tailed off again, as he realised this wasn’t the case at all. ‘No, it wouldn’t,’ he corrected himself. ‘She’s too honest for that.’

‘All
right
,’ she snapped. ‘I get the message. Though I think you might be overestimating her
a trifle. Nobody’s above telling a few lies – even to the police.’

‘True,’ he smiled, hoping to appease her, before wondering just where that left him.

The soup finished, she produced two pots of homemade yoghurt, flavoured with something she said were her own cherries, frozen from last year. Den would never have guessed, but then he didn’t think he’d tried frozen cherries before.

‘Well, one final thing, and then I must let you get on,’ she said. ‘It’s to do with my husband.’

Who was dead, Den recalled. He gave her a politely expectant expression.

‘When he was married to his first wife, he worked at Porton Down. You know, where they do secret government scientific experiments. I always thought, actually, that he was somehow contaminated by some ghastly virus, which is why he died so young. But that’s beside the point. He had a colleague there who became his best friend, and kept in touch right up to when Michael died. He still keeps in touch with me. He works in genetics now. Plant genetics.’ She paused meaningfully. Den pushed out his lips to show he grasped the point. ‘He has some very ambivalent feelings about the whole business,’ she went on carefully.

‘You mean he’s a mole? A spy?’

‘Something like that. He’s very worried that
he’ll be implicated in any direct action, if his association with me is ever traced. So we never do meet directly. We don’t even email each other. We use go-betweens, you see.’

‘Is this another job for me?’

‘Clever boy!’ She clapped her hands satirically.

‘Let me think about it first,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I like what I’d be getting into here. And it doesn’t feel as if it’s getting anybody any closer to sorting out who killed Peter Grafton.’

‘Of course it is, you idiot,’ she scoffed. ‘Of course it bloody is.’

Maggs’s mobile phone sang its little song at her, to indicate she had a text message. Drew widened his eyes in warning when he heard it. ‘I thought you kept that thing switched off when you were at work,’ he said.

‘I do. It’s only a text message.’

‘But it played a tune. I
hate
them doing that. It’s crass.’

‘Drew, you are the most old-fashioned
thirty-five-year-old
in the world. What’s the matter with you?’

‘So you think it’d be OK if it did that in the middle of a funeral, do you? At the graveside, when we were having a minute’s silent reflection?’

She sighed. ‘No, of course not. I don’t even take it out there with me. And I didn’t mean to leave the sound on. It doesn’t usually do that.’ She peered at the tiny screen. ‘It’s Den. He’s been to see Mary Thomas, and she has work for him.’

‘What? Who?’ Drew shook his head crossly. ‘How can he say all that in thirty characters or whatever it is?’

‘Ah! You’re interested really, aren’t you? You’d love to get into texting – go on, admit it.’

‘Absolutely not. It’s horrible. All those stupid abbreviations.’

‘Well, don’t get worked up about it. I’m switching it off, look. Satisfied?’ She made a show of silencing the phone and putting it on a shelf. ‘Just don’t let me go home without it.’

‘What is Den doing, exactly?’ Drew went on to ask, risking Maggs’s flicker of triumph at having his interest.

‘I don’t know. Last I heard, he was going to try and see his friend Danny again. I’ve no idea what’s been going on since, except he’s been talking to the Thomas woman.’

‘Do you get the feeling we’re not keeping up too well on this one?’ he suggested.

‘Hmm. I know what you mean. But we
are
keeping up, really,’ she decided. ‘We’ve got the victim’s funeral, for heaven’s sake. We’ve talked
to his wife and his girlfriend. We’re just following a different path …’

‘Speaking of paths,’ Drew interrupted, ‘don’t you think …’

‘Drew Slocombe, if you say another word about those damned paths, I’ll … I’ll …’

‘All right.’ He put his hands up in surrender. ‘But if anyone slips, or starts walking on somebody’s grave, you’ll be responsible.’

The paths in the burial ground were a constant worry to Drew. They were little more than mown strips between the complicated grid of burial plots, which were under Maggs’s charge. They’d discussed laying decking or gravel or wood chippings, but always concluded that plain grass was best. After a busy spell, with several visitors, and a few burials, most of the paths were sufficiently well trodden to remain clearly visible, but with the lush spring grass and a few weeks of relative inactivity, Drew worried.

‘Visitor!’ Maggs announced. Her hearing seemed uncannily acute to Drew, who hadn’t noticed a thing. When he looked out of the window he saw a red Citroën parked by the road gate, and a woman coming towards the office.

‘It’s Sally Dabb again,’ he observed.

‘So it is,’ Maggs agreed.

‘Must have come to view Grafton.’

‘Very likely. And I thought we decided nobody
could see him until tomorrow. I haven’t got him presentable yet.’

‘I’ll put her off if I can.’

‘You won’t be able to,’ she said glumly.

Maggs was right about Sally’s reason for turning up. She was calmer than on her first visit, but no easier to deal with.

‘I’ve got to see him,’ she urged. ‘And I have something I want to put in with him. Just a letter – nothing you could object to. Is he in his coffin yet?’

‘Well,’ Drew said. ‘The thing is …’

‘He is
here
, isn’t he?’ she demanded.

‘Oh, yes, he’s here. But you have to understand … I mean, we’re not like other undertakers. We haven’t got the same facilities. And there are two other funerals this week, which is unusually busy for us.’

‘So?’

‘Well, it’s a bit difficult to let you see him this afternoon.’

‘Why?’

Drew clenched his jaw, badly tempted to give it to her straight, all about the post-mortem and the smell and the crowded cool room, and the unfinished, almost disrespectful, way Peter Grafton’s body was simply plonked into the cardboard coffin. Worst of all, the fact that there was an uncoffined body
currently lying on the floor, because the trolleys were both already occupied.

‘Because it’ll upset you,’ he said.

‘Upset
me? Do you think I’m not already as upset as anybody can be?’ She stared wildly at him, her eyes swimming. ‘I was
there
when he died. I got his blood on me. I saw that bolt in his neck, heard the way he gurgled and gasped for air. I can’t sleep, because every time I shut my eyes, I see it all over again.’

‘OK,’ Drew decided. ‘Come on through.’ She was right, of course. Nothing she saw now would be as bad as the experience she’d already had.

‘But he’s on the
floor
!’ she shrieked. Maggs was in the room, trying her best to give Drew unobtrusively vicious glances.

‘No, no, that isn’t him,’ said Maggs, washing her hands with strong green soap. ‘But I know it looks bad. Can’t be helped, I’m afraid. And it truly doesn’t imply any lack of respect.’

Sally subsided, literally as well as emotionally. She drooped over the plain lidless coffin, and reached into it. ‘Hi, Pete,’ she whispered. ‘What have they done to you, eh?’

She stroked his hair, which looked perfectly normal, but which Drew and Maggs knew hid a lot of crude stitching just below the surface. They both clenched their jaws with apprehension, watching her.

Sally looked up at them, her face completely serene. ‘It’s so strange, isn’t it,’ she murmured. ‘It’s him, and yet it absolutely isn’t. He can’t hear me or feel me. He doesn’t care about anything at all. He’s like a block of wood.’ She lightly fingered the skin of the dead man’s cheeks. ‘Hard and cold. I loved him, you know, even though we never did anything to feel guilty about. He was a very loveable man.’

Drew realised he hadn’t given much thought until then as to what Grafton had been like as a person. The various facts he’d gleaned from Karen and Julie, and now Sally hadn’t added up to a complete personality. And nobody to date had described him as
loveable.

‘We were getting into a mess, weren’t we Pete?’ the woman went on, unselfconsciously. ‘Are you glad to be out of it? Saved us a lot of damaged feelings later on, you could say. Fancy getting yourself
murdered
, though! We’d never expected that, had we?’

She leant over, one arm completely inside the coffin. It was a moving tableau, to Drew’s eyes, but he could feel Maggs impatient and disapproving beside him. Aware of being surplus to requirements, he removed himself from the room, leaving his colleague to deal with the visitor as best she could.

‘You’ll get cold in here,’ Maggs burst out, after a few minutes.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘And – well – I need to get on, I’m afraid. Sorry.’

Sally Dabb did not take the hint. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘I’m happy for you to carry on. It’s rather nice in here, isn’t it. You’ve got a lovely view of the field.’ The cool room, comprising the end section of the single building that was the Slocombes’ home and Drew’s office, had a
good-sized
window overlooking the burial ground. Built of breeze blocks and painted a stark white, it contained aluminium trolleys, and a wall of deep shelves for the paraphernalia required for the disposal of bodies. Despite their simple alternative style of doing things, there was still a need for wrappings, and paddings and name labels and washing materials. Flat-packed cardboard coffins were bought in tens, and stacked on the bottom shelf. Even flat, they took up a lot of space. Maggs felt there was never enough room, and with three bodies and a visitor in there, it was difficult to move around. She sighed, and went back to brushing Mr Lancaster’s hair.

‘Has Julie been in to see him?’ Sally suddenly asked. Maggs felt a further stab of disapproval. The question seemed to be lacking in taste.

‘Well,’ she began, the undertaker’s natural reticence overtaking her. ‘I think she said tomorrow.’

‘It doesn’t matter, you know,’ Sally said, with a sad smile. ‘Julie knew all about me and Peter. I mean, she knew we were great friends, and that we had something special. She didn’t mind.’ She looked at Maggs, recognising the frosty manner. ‘We
weren’t
lovers, as I keep telling you. It might have come to that, eventually – though I doubt it. We were just really good friends. You do believe me, don’t you? You were so nice about it when I came here last week.’

‘I believe you,’ Maggs admitted. ‘But it still sounds as if it was a bit of a mess.’

‘It was getting complicated,’ Sally admitted. ‘In a whole lot of different ways.’

‘That’s obvious,’ said Maggs.

‘Why? What do you mean?’

‘He got himself murdered, didn’t he? And nobody seems to have any idea why. You can’t really get more complicated than that, as far as I can see.’

Sally’s wide lips curved in an involuntary smile. ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I suppose you can’t.’

Both women acknowledged the moment of warmth; the intimacy that arises in the presence of a dead body. Maggs had felt it a hundred times before. The mere fact of being alive when the person lying there so cold between you was not, made for extraordinary alliances. A shared
mystery, a shared relief; whatever it was, it had a persistent power.

Sally turned back to her
drooping-over-the-coffin
posture. ‘It’s tragic that he’s dead, so young. He would have done all kinds of things.’

‘It’s a waste,’ Maggs agreed with all sincerity.

‘Will they catch who did it, do you think?’

‘Bound to.’ Maggs gave Sally a robust look. ‘They won’t rest until they do.’

‘No,’ said Sally vaguely.

Drew described the visit to Karen that evening, remembering how little consideration he’d given to the character of the deceased. ‘What was he actually like?’ he asked her. ‘Maggs seems to think we’ve missed something.’

‘Very good looking – you’ll have worked that out for yourself. One of those really beautiful men, I suppose. Nice skin, thick hair, and a lovely voice. It had a kind of richness to it, that made you want to listen hard to anything he said. And he always met your eye when he was talking to you. And he smiled a lot.’

‘This is all very superficial,’ Drew objected. ‘What about his
character?’

Karen nibbled her lower lip thoughtfully. ‘Pleasant. Sociable. Charming, even.’ She heard her own words. ‘I’m just saying the same things again, aren’t I? The fact is, all I knew of him
was that superficial charm. I’ve no idea where his real passions lay, or what he was thinking.’

Drew smiled. ‘All the women seem to have adored him. Reminds me of Jim Lapsford.’ Lapsford had been Drew’s baptism of fire into the murky world of suspicious deaths and hastily prepared cremation papers. He and Karen had investigated the truth of Lapsford’s death together.

‘Oh, no,’ she said emphatically. ‘Not the least bit like Jim Lapsford.’

‘But you were convinced he was having an affair with Sally Dabb. So he must have been rather more than pleasant towards her?’

She chewed the lip more frenziedly. ‘No, not really. They laughed a lot together, and
touched
each other. Hands on shoulders, that sort of thing. Peter didn’t do that with everybody. It was obvious how much she liked him. She gave him moony looks, all big eyes and girly smiles. And he liked that.’

‘She told me and Maggs there was no sex going on between them, remember.’

‘So you say. She wants you to be her PR people, and squash all the rumours about them.’