Souvenirs of Murder

A HANGING MATTER

DEAD TROUBLE

SO HORRIBLE A PLACE

TAINTED GROUND
^*

COBWEB
^*

BLOOD SUBSTITUTE
^*

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  

First world edition published 2009

in Great Britain and in the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

Copyright © 2009 by Margaret Duffy.

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Duffy, Margaret.

Souvenirs of Murder – (A Patrick Gillard and Ingrid

Langley mystery)

1. Gillard, Patrick (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

2. Langley, Ingrid (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

3. Great Britain. Serious Organised Crime Agency–Fiction.

4. Murder–Investigation–Fiction. 5. Detective and mystery

stories.

I. Title II. Series

823.9'14-dc22

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-090-6   (ePub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6810-7   (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-174-4   (trade paper)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

CONTENTS

ONE

In hindsight, it is difficult to decide which of the two was the most momentous; The Case of the Man who Tried to Take Over a Village and Ended up Dead or the fact that my husband, Patrick, had been given the job of catching a woman regarded as one of the world's most dangerous criminals and was accused of her murder. At the time, of course, the latter was the priority, the former not affecting me so personally, although it did others to whom I am close, very much so. My first, and at the time I hoped my only, contribution was that of finding the corpse.

Patrick had been an ‘adviser' for SOCA, the Serious Organized Crime Agency – the inverted commas necessary as this particular operative goes to work armed to the teeth – for several months when he was given the assignment. It was felt by those in charge, namely Richard Daws, his one-time boss in MI5 who never seemed to be allowed to retire, and Commander Michael Greenway, a lesser mortal to whom Patrick now answers, that he was exactly the right man for the job. My unease started at this point. I knew full well – the novelist wife is on the payroll as ‘consultant' to the ‘adviser' – that he did not exactly have bucketfuls of experience in dealing with glamorous females who regularly execute those members of their establishment who fall short of expectations by personally garrotting them with a length of fine wire. I had pointed this out to Commander Greenway, adding that the harpy no doubt kept it neatly rolled up in her knickers' drawer and wouldn't an equally off-the-wall member of staff of SOCA, if there was such a person, be more suitable for the job?

Greenway had given me a wary smile. I know he values my contributions but has also learned that this female novelist comes at the price of asking the questions that Patrick, for several reasons, does not. His wariness was also due, I felt, to the fact that I was hugely eight and three-quarter months pregnant at the time and he thought of me along the lines of an unexploded bomb. I had every sympathy for him as, although a married man with a family, he did not want to have to play midwife on his office carpet.

‘Patrick
can
do off-the-wall though, can't he?' he had remarked gently, the man in question a little late for the meeting, stuck in a traffic jam.

‘Yes, he can, but with the kind of skill that impresses men,' I had replied. ‘As you know, he's an ex-undercover soldier, used to dealing with terrorists and the like. He's only ever really operated in a man's world.'

And can reduce strong men to tears with his voice alone and at Christmas often cracks walnuts just with his fingers.

‘With the help of criminal profilers we're going to turn him into the kind of person to impress this woman,' Greenway had said after a thoughtful pause. ‘And look, although the assignment's not going to be achieved in five minutes the groundwork is being done by others – he's not going in alone.'

So I had had to resign myself to the inevitable.

This conversation was nothing to do with the fact that Mark was born the following day, at around four in the afternoon, not that I was actually bothered by what hour it was at the time. He was in as much of a hurry as Justin, our first, who had arrived in the ambulance, and Patrick made it to the delivery room with five minutes to spare. I was glad about this, he is not the kind of man to have the emotional stamina to be able to bear his partner yelling her head off in the throes of childbirth for any length of time.

We were living in a rented furnished house, having sold our home in Devon, while extensions were added to the old rectory at Hinton Littlemoor in Somerset that we had bought from the diocese. Patrick's parents – his father is still rector there – had been due to be rehoused in a gerbil hutch of a new bungalow, one of several being built on land that is, since the railway closed and all the culverts became blocked up, in effect, the village's flood plain, and the rectory put on the market. The prospect of this was simply too awful for words and Patrick's anger had honed his haggling skills to drive down the price: it was no secret that the building needed a new roof.

‘No more babies,' Patrick had muttered just after the birth, rescuing his wrung hands that I had been holding so that he could mop my hot brow.

‘I'll make an appointment for you at the vet's as soon as I get home,' I had promised, looking down into the little red crumpled face and praying that this one wouldn't be as stroppy as his brother.

That we have two children already – Victoria was the second – is something of a miracle, Patrick having been seriously injured in his Special Forces days before he joined MI5. Then Patrick's brother, Larry, was killed and we adopted his two, Matthew and Katie, and suddenly the Dartmoor cottage seemed rather small. I was desperately hoping that our nannie, Carrie, would be able to carry on. She had moved with us to Somerset but her overriding concern was her mother, who lived in Plymouth and did not enjoy the best of health. The matter was soon, and amazingly, solved to everyone's satisfaction when a recently widowed friend whom she had known at school – both ladies are natives of Bath – asked her if she would like to go and live with her on the outskirts of the city.

Just over a month later, my domestic arrangements more or less intact, I found myself, in a dismal February in the rented house, a barn conversion a mile from Hinton Littlemoor, with a new baby, a figure more redolent of a champion Jersey than that of any kind of consultant to a crime-fighting agency and a bad case of post-natal blues. At least, that was what other people who happened to be around when I suddenly burst into tears were calling it. I thought it had far more to do with the fact that I was not only site managing the building work on the rectory and had been right from the beginning, but now was lugging Mark around, by this time a healthy nine pounds in weight, for what seemed like hourly breastfeeds, never mind the aftermath. Patrick's parents were having an extended holiday while the worst of the mess at the rectory was going on – for a few weeks the house was uninhabitable – their son heaven only knew where undergoing ‘training'. In view of the proposed assignment I was agog to know what this entailed.

And, of course, the business of writing books had gone right out of the window.

The builders, who were working to a very tight schedule, had at first tended to dismiss the pregnant and then somewhat dour nursing mother who turned up every day – I did not take the baby into the house while work was going on – as a dimbo to be smiled upon and ignored. After a few skirmishes along the lines of their being content to use the wrong roofing slates, not the ones we had ordered, they were now brewing me tea while bringing me up to date, exactly, with the work in progress and would I like to inspect what had been done since my previous visit?

Church services were being taken by a retired bishop, a lay reader and any other clergy who were deemed to be free. While John had been in need of a complete break from what is, in effect, a seven day a week job Elspeth had been particularly reluctant to go away with a new grandchild on the scene and while I might need help.

Late in the morning of the day when they were due back, a Saturday, I was on a mission to harry the decorators who were putting the finishing touches to John and Elspeth's new two-bedroomed annex. All on the level, it had been created from the old garage and stable with a new floor above that gave the house another two bedrooms, one with an en suite bathroom that would be for Patrick and me, the other for any visitors. A boxroom with a big cupboard was now the nursery with a connecting door to our room – Carrie's was just across the landing. My priority on this particular morning was to get John and Elspeth's new home fit to live in but if furniture could not be brought in or curtains fitted today because paint was not dry then it was not a disaster if they had to stay in bed and breakfast accommodation in the village for one night. This eventuality had been pencilled in at Rose Cottage, a short distance away just off the high street.

The main part of the rectory was still full of the racket of sawing, nail guns and drills but at least the doors of the rooms that were not being touched, most of those downstairs, had been sealed with special tape to prevent the entry of dust. This had meant that the furniture in them could remain in situ. Another single-storey extension was being built on to the kitchen to make it bigger, swallowing up an old integral coal store and outside toilet, plus providing a small room where the children could have their computer and do homework. Later, a large conservatory would be built over the courtyard outside with a door into it from the kitchen, another from the living room and yet another that was the entry to Elspeth and John's quarters so they would not have to go out into the open in order to join us. On the opposite side double doors would lead on to the garden. John would still have his book-lined study in the main house: that was sacrosanct.

My mind full of colour schemes – it had been difficult to organize these over the phone and in the end Elspeth had said it was safer to leave it all up to me – I first went round to where the painters were emulsioning the walls of the annex pale cream, the plaster too new to cover with wallpaper. I was told that they hoped to put the final coat of gloss on the woodwork in the afternoon and it was obvious it would not be dry in time for the rector and his wife to move in that day, the smell of paint notwithstanding. Therefore I would have to put off the curtain people and the carpet fitters.