Tainted Ground (19 page)

‘It looks all right,' Mrs Horsley said, giving it back. ‘You'd better come in.'

The door of the tiny semidetached bungalow opened straight into the living room. It was all immaculately clean and tidy and we sat in armchairs that had hand-embroidered covers on the cushions. Fresh flowers were in a vase on a coffee table and there were others on the window ledge.

‘We're very sorry about Peter,' I said. This was not a lie, everyone is sorry when a mother loses her son, whatever he had been in life.

‘I failed him, really,' said Mrs Horsley sadly, seating herself. ‘But it was always going to be difficult. Perhaps I'd better explain – I didn't say anything about it to the police who've been already. My husband and I fostered Peter. He was one of those abandoned babies – found in a bag in a shop doorway. We couldn't have children of our own so over the years we fostered quite a few. It seems terrible to say so but was something my Tom said from the beginning. Peter was a bad one. He had all the chances the others had but was bad right from the start. Heaven knows who his mother was, probably some poor ignorant little girl who'd had him literally thrust upon her by a nasty piece of work. I believe that, you know, horrible people often have horrible children. And now he's gone, the world got rid of him like trash as though the world knew what he was.' She wiped a stray tear away with the corner of her apron, realized she was still wearing one and, almost angrily, took it off and threw it aside.

‘He'd got in with the wrong people,' Patrick said. ‘Have you any idea who they were?'

‘Not an inkling,' declared the lady. ‘He kept everything under wraps, even with me. The only time I ever saw him in recent years was when he was broke and had nowhere to stay.'

‘Did he ever mention a man called Keith Davies? Or Christopher Manley?'

Mrs Horsley's lips pursed. She was in her seventies, I thought, and although she walked with a bad limp could not be described as failing, bright darting brown eyes denoting a keen intelligence. She said, ‘He once threatened me with someone he called Keith.'

‘Threatened you!'

‘Yes, it was when I told him I couldn't afford to keep giving him money. I knew he was spending it mostly on drink, he was staggering drunk when he came round that particular evening. He said he knew someone who'd make me change my mind; this Keith. Keith had been sent to prison for grievous bodily harm. I showed him the door and got all the locks changed the next morning so he couldn't get in – I'd always given a key to him until that day.'

‘No surname was mentioned?'

‘No.'

‘Do you know if that was before or after he gave up his job at the undertakers'?'

‘Oh, before. It was a while ago now and I only heard about the job thing from someone else. I wasn't even at home when that happened. A friend and I went to Torquay for a little bridge-playing holiday.'

‘For a week?'

‘Chance would be a fine thing. No, just for a long weekend. My neighbour went as well.' She smiled a little grimly in recollection. ‘I think Peter must have tried to make it up to me because when I came back he'd worked on the garden. I'd been on to him for ages about the unevenness of the paving slabs, how dangerous they were, but he never did anything about it. Not until that weekend before he lost his job, or gave it up, you say. But he made a terrible mess of it and I ended up having to pay a man to put it all to rights.'

We asked if we could view the garden and duly gazed through the kitchen window over a neat rectangle of lawn, a tiny patio, a couple of shrubs and not much else. We went out there. Trees in larger and more mature gardens on the farthest boundary made the whole area very private, and high fences separated Mrs Horsley's home from those on either side. Anyone digging a makeshift grave would have gone unnoticed.

T
he body was found a matter of only six inches below the patio paving slabs and, as James Carrick observed, it could so easily have been discovered by the gardening contractor Mrs Horsley had hired to make good the botched job her son had done. Arrangements were made for her to be taken to a friend's house to stay overnight and for most of the next day, while the search and subsequent exhumation was carried out.

Although decomposed it was possible to see how the old farmer's body had been stamped on and battered, presumably with a spade, to make it fit into the shallow hole that had been dug. When I learned this I felt sick and was all for tossing the remains of the perpetrator down the nearest mine shaft, followed by several tons of cement.

Who was behind it all? Had the attack on Patrick in Bristol been connected with the case? If so, someone had seen us in the pub and acted on impulse, as surely no one had followed us there, something about which we are both very vigilant and careful. Was there any point now in going to London?

Before any decision could be made about this we received the report from Kew. It arrived by way of a phone call to Carrick, shortly to be followed by an email. The Professor of Botany admitted to becoming hugely enamoured of the task and had enlisted the help of colleagues involved in every pertinent branch of science, one of whom had access to an electron microscope. In short, and leaving aside all scientific language and Latin names, the samples of tea, one from the coffin, the other from the box at the Manleys' flat, were identical and were a very early variety not now commercially grown – we could see drawings of the plant in the Lindley Library if we so chose – which had originated in China. The sample had partially rotted before it had dried out and as microscopic salt crystals were present the conclusion had been drawn that the tea had been immersed in salt water, in an estuary or the open sea. Minute fragments of feldspar and grains of sand were also present, the former being one of the ingredients of Chinese porcelain, the other being kaolin, or china clay. None of the evidence confirmed that the sample had come from a shipwreck but that was the cautious conclusion of those involved in the investigation, as porcelain exported to Europe in the eighteenth century had been packed in tea, in itself worth a small fortune at the time, for the voyage.

I almost missed the postscript, a short paragraph to the effect that the writer apologized for getting even more carried away by the romance surrounding the find, but were the Avon and Somerset force aware that gold ingots were often loaded aboard such vessels as well? Further research would no doubt yield more information but the writer himself, very regretfully, could not spare any more time.

Elspeth had been right.

‘It's coming together,' Carrick said, rubbing his hands, not in glee but because we had just come from the burial site and the weather had become bitterly cold. Blowing on his fingers, he went in the direction of the canteen, with us in tow, where we warmed ourselves on thin, salty soup of indeterminate ingredients and bread rolls that could, and probably had been, used as cannonballs. They had run out of butter.

The body had already been removed by the time Patrick and I had returned to Mrs Horsley's home but Carrick had been present since the find had been made, hence his chilled state. This apart, I thought he looked haggard, ill.

‘Gold ingots,' he said thoughtfully, stirring his coffee. ‘Where are they, if that is indeed what they are? Probably abroad by now.'

‘That kind of thing must have a very limited market,' I said. ‘I realize that they're likely to be melted down but historical ones might be worth even more left as they are because of their provenance. If whoever has them is keeping them hidden until he can find the right buyer …'

‘That development, having found the right buyer, might have prompted those involved to unearth them now,' Carrick said. ‘Ingrid, would you go to the library this afternoon and see if you can find more info?'

It would be nice and warm in there and was only a short walk away.

‘That's a good idea,' Patrick said with an ‘I'll come with you' look on his face.

Carrick had other plans for him. ‘I'd like you to accompany me to talk to Brian Stonelake again. I feel I ought to be the one to tell him we've found his father's body. And who knows, he might have remembered a bit more about his own criminal activities.'

I needed to pause for a short while in order to mull over the various aspects of the case before I sought out even more information. Pared right down to basics the situation so far was thus: three people, who knew one another, had been brutally and horribly murdered. Whichever way you looked at that crime alone, the method of removing them from the land of the living was lurid, unnecessarily blood-boltered and right over the top, the only ‘excuse' possible being that knives are silent whereas firearms are not. But a silenced handgun would not have been heard beyond the walls of the barn. In my view whoever had done it had an obsession with knives, not to mention a thoroughly nasty turn of mind.

The victims' cars had then been discovered, burnt out, in a quarry. Subsequently, a coffin had been stolen, the body, that of the father of the man on whose farm the bodies had been found, having been substituted for something unknown but obviously valuable. Then another man, Horsley, had been found murdered in similar fashion.

‘Who probably assisted at the first killings, and before that helped someone else, possibly the bossman, raid the undertakers', and could have been the van driver who met the Tanner brothers,' I said to thin air, having borrowed Carrick's office to do my thinking. ‘He was then superfluous, someone who might prove awkward and had to be eliminated. He might also have demanded a share of the loot.'

If one was going to work along the lines of Brian Stonelake having been set up – it was wobbly to assume that the selection of his father's coffin as a hiding place was a coincidence but I was sticking with that for a moment – then only someone comparatively local could be responsible. As had been suggested before, whoever it was would know the lie of the land and the identity of neighbourhood villains.

I had thought it odd right from the start that the Manleys and Keith Davies had bought adjacent flats at the mill and that Davies was employed by the other two, for it was not as though the Manleys were elderly and unable to look after themselves. One got the impression that Davies had been their minder. To protect them from whom? The bossman? Others in a gang with which they had been involved? Whatever the truth, someone had caught up with them.

Known facts contradicted certain aspects of this for it appeared they had left home on that particular night of their own free will, got into their cars, and driven, independently, to the deserted barn in order to meet someone. They had then been overpowered and killed. Perhaps they had been promised a payoff or a share in criminal proceeds as a lure to get them there. That said, the coffin had not then been recovered so it was likely that none of the three knew exactly where whatever it was had been concealed.

And, the thought shot into my mind,
had
anyone yet shown the Tanner brothers a photograph of Peter Horsley?

I gazed around. Where was the file? I had a quick look and it was not with several others in a wire tray on Carrick's exceedingly tidy desk, so I went to see if I could find Lynn Outhwaite.

‘The DCI might have it in his document case,' she told me when I found her.

‘Where are the Tanners now?' I asked her.

‘They've been released on police bail.'

‘Has anyone shown a photo of Horsley to them to see if they recognize him as the man driving the van?'

‘I'm not sure. I don't think so. Why don't you ask Carrick?'

‘Any chance of a copy of the photo in case no one has?'

‘Look, you mustn't go tangling with that pair.'

‘Sergeant Outhwaite, I've tangled, as you call it, with far worse people than that pair of beer-bellied boneheads. Do I get a photo or not?'

She found one for me.

Obeying orders to the letter I went to the public library first and spent about an hour and a half researching shipwrecks in the South China Sea area, as I already knew that was where most of the wrecks had been found, making notes. I was torn as to whether I should contact Carrick with regard to the photo as failing to do so might result in a wasted trip. But better that than be forbidden to go in search of the bovine duo.

I reckoned that the Tanners would have gone straight back to work, for beer money if nothing else, so I walked back to the nick to get the car and set off for the quarry. It looked as if it might snow, the sky a leaden grey, the wind a bitter north-easter.

‘They've gone and good riddance,' said the man on the gate, a different one, giving me the impression he would have spat in the road by way of a further comment had I been a bloke. ‘Been given the boot.' He gave me a sideways look. ‘You don't look like the sort of person normally to be asking after them.'

‘I'm not
quite
the police,' I told him, not being yet qualified to carry a warrant card, if indeed, I decided to go that far, ‘but nevertheless I'm checking up on them and the trouble they've got themselves into.'

‘Try their home. Don't ask me where that is, though.'

‘It's all right. I know where they live.'

Colliers Row, Hinton Littlemoor, someone had said.

On impulse, I showed him the photograph. ‘Have you ever seen this man hanging around here, perhaps waiting for the Tanners?'

He had not and I thanked him and drove away.

Colliers Row had probably been built during the Victorian heyday of the mining industry in the Somerset coalfields and was a terrace of limestone cottages with steeply sloping rear gardens set high above Hinton Littlemoor. One could reflect on the attitudes of those times: workers' homes were sited at this spot, open to the elements, because no one higher up the social scale would want to live here. Even today and with pine and fir trees planted on the stony ground behind them it was a bleak place.