The Killing Season (18 page)

‘I much prefer The Murderers,’ she said and I wondered at her smile until I walked in the door. It was an old pub that had been built around 1530, was still family-owned and was full of different spaces – or nooks and crannies as they liked to call them. I could also see that this and The Gardener’s Arms was in fact all one building, with two separate entrance doors and signs. Hence Laura’s smile. Her little joke.

Sitting at the bar I sipped on a half-pint of the ale named after the pub, whilst Laura enjoyed a Bloody Mary with the somewhat vampiric delight I had predicted a few days before.

‘So are we on the case, boss?’ she asked.

‘Will you stop calling me that!’

‘Would you prefer “Gramps”?’

‘No, I would not. Might I remind you that I am going back to the police force in a matter of months.’

‘I very much doubt that.’

‘Mystic Meg, are you?’

‘Kate doesn’t want to go back to London.’

‘Yes, I do know that, thank you, Sherlock.’

‘And there are three women in your house, Jack. You’re outvoted.’

I was beginning to feel that there were more than three women in my prospective marriage, too.

‘So back to the case,’ Laura continued, as if the matter had been settled. ‘You have a murder that took place a number of years ago. You don’t know how long. Nigel Holdsworth was murdered sometime in the night or early morning after the stag party. The same murder weapon has possibly been used. Somebody has defaced the gravestone of Nigel Holdsworth’s grandfather, and Len Wright, the original suspect in his murder because the reverend was diddling his fiancée, has an alibi as he was busy beating up said fiancée at the time and then spending the night with a whore in our fair cathedral city.’

‘So far so good.’

‘So far so bad, I would have said. However, someone, maybe the murderer, has been defacing gravestones, first of a relative of Nigel Holdsworth and now of a relative of his buddy Len Wright who has since disappeared.’

‘True.’

‘So are the names on the gravestones being defaced as a way of ticking off the victims? Like a trophy?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Well, one thing’s for sure, at least.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You’re not a local. You can’t go on the Shannock killer’s list. As you don’t have any relatives in the cemetery.’

‘What the bloody hell is a Shannock?’

‘Sheringham born and bred. Third generation, technically.’

‘Anyway,’ I said, finishing my drink and smiling patronisingly at her. ‘Len Wright is on the run from the long arm of the law, not from any Shannock killer, as you call it. He’ll turn up somewhere sooner or later.’

THE FOLLOWING MORNING
and another early one at that.

I was with Sergeant Harry Coker down on the beach again. Superintendent Dean was thankfully nowhere in sight and was giving me a bit of a wide berth, apparently. She had phoned my old boss Diane Campbell but had not got quite the response she had wanted, according to the scuttlebutt that Harry had cheerfully passed on.

The council people who had been clearing the site had made a small entrance into the cave. There were barricades all around it and safety notices. The architectural engineer had stated that there was a very low probability of further collapse. It had been a confluence of extreme conditions that had caused the initial slide. Lightning striking the chalk blocks that had sealed up the entrance and been weathered and covered over time. Again, they were unable as yet to tell us how long. The cave, apparently, had been tunnelled into the cliff hundreds of years ago. One of a few tunnels, possibly, that had been dug back in the days when smuggling was a common occurrence on this part of the coast. Holland and continental Europe were relatively close across the North Sea, hence the history of raiding and invasion and smuggling going back more than a thousand years.

The sergeant had a torch in his hand and was showing me around the interior of the cave. It ran about fifty yards before it hit a solid wall of more chalk.

‘This has been artificially built, too,’ he said, playing his torch beam over the surface of the wall.

I nodded. There were cracks and lines showing where the non-uniform blocks had been assembled.

‘Was it built before or after the dead man was walled up in here, though?’ I asked.

‘No way of knowing until we can cut through this wall.’

‘Is that going to happen?’

‘Not anytime soon and not until after a lot of red tape has been peeled away, that’s for sure.’

‘Health and Safety?’

‘The modern mantra.’

I looked up at the roof of the cave, wondering how many thousand tonnes of rock and assorted glacial-deposit matter lay above us, and thought that the health-and-safety brigade might have it right for once.

We walked back through the cave towards the entrance. I was kicking the loose rocks aside when something caught my eye.

‘This site been fingertip searched?’ I asked.

‘Not yet. Our resources are a bit stretched at the minute, as you know, Jack. We have a recent murder and a missing man to deal with as well.’

‘Do you want to bag that, then?’ I said, pointing to a fragment of card that had come loose from the rock. There was water around it. Presumably the rest of it had been washed away now that the wall had been breached and the spring tides had come crashing up to the cliff face.

Sergeant Coker crouched down, removed a small ziplock plastic bag from his pocket and teased the fragment into it. It was beige, about two inches wide on the straight and downward angles. The inner edge where it had been torn was crooked. Part of a red circle with the letters IAL remaining in a faded red on top of a blob and part of a solid hemisphere of something or other in the same shade.

‘What do you reckon it is?’

I looked at the piece of card in the see-through bag and shrugged. ‘It might be a clue. Might just be a piece of litter washed in on the tide.’

‘If it’s a clue I am buggered if I know what it means.’

I nodded. But something familiar about it tugged at the back of my mind.

We walked back out through the wall of chalk blocks that the deceased man had been buried in and back onto the beach. The tide was far out now. And another spring tide wasn’t due until the full moon so the cave and whatever else was in it should be safe from the waters of the North Sea at least until then.

As we walked back up towards the West Promenade my phone made contact with the Vodafone signal once more and beeped in my pocket. I took it out and found that I had missed a call. I vaguely recognised the number but couldn’t place it. I pushed the green telephone signal and listened to the dial tone.

When the woman at the other end answered, she could barely speak through her tears.

‘Inspector Delaney, I need to see you.’

She broke down in tears again and her words were unintelligible. ‘It’s OK, Helen,’ I said. ‘I’m coming straight there.’ I clicked off the phone and looked at the sergeant, deliberating for a moment.

‘Fancy a trip out to Salthouse?’ I asked him finally.

HELEN MIDDLETON HAD
recovered some of her composure by the time we arrived at her place.

She was in her newly finished kitchen and handed us both a cup of tea and led us back into her living room. I had introduced the sergeant and she was pleased that I had brought him along.

We sat down in the chairs that she indicated. Then, as she sat down herself and placed her teacup carefully on a coaster, her puppy jumped straight into her lap.

It was a relief to see him. I had been worried about the dog.

Bruno could obviously tell that his mistress was upset and seemed anxious to offer what comfort he could.

‘What’s happened, Helen?’ I asked.

‘Your friend came round to finish off my kitchen.’

‘Yes.’

‘Completing the woodwork on the windows, glazing them and so on, whilst colleagues of his . . . I believe the expression is
made good
?’

‘It is.’

‘And a very good job he made of it, too.’

‘Yes.’ I wasn’t quite sure where she was heading with this but she seemed, as before, reluctant to broach whatever it was that was worrying her.

‘Have Bill Collier or his workmates been back, Mrs Middleton?’ asked Sergeant Coker. I had filled him in on some of the background. Not all of it, of course.

‘No, he hasn’t. Inspector Delaney assured me that he wouldn’t be and he has been as good as his word. They haven’t bothered me at all. Of course, I have been away for a while, staying at a friend’s cottage, while the work here was completed.’

‘That’s good.’

‘So what’s happened?’ I asked.

Helen’s eyes welled with tears again and it took her a moment or so before she was able to speak.

‘The man they found blocked up in the wall of the cave – I know who he is.’

The young girl sat huddled on the cold bench in the underground room that the men had come and built in their back garden. She hugged her rag doll Jemima to herself – its eyes were almost as big as her own.

The man sat next to her and patted her on her knee.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ he said but she didn’t reply. She was shutting out the sounds of the screaming noises that still haunted her. It was a warm afternoon but she was shivering. A small lamp threw out some amber light into the darkness.

‘Would you like some toffee?’ asked the man.

The young girl shook her head.

‘You’re a big girl now. You’re seven, so you don’t have to be afraid any more.’

But the roundness of the girl’s eyes testified to the contrary.

‘Can you keep a secret?’

The girl nodded.

‘It will be our special secret. I am going to show you something but you are not to tell anyone else. Not mummy or daddy or anybody.’

The girl nodded again.

The man pulled back his wrist and showed her the watch strap he was wearing. It was a watch she had seen him wear before, but now in the centre of the strap there had been inset a shiny new plate. The girl looked at it but could not read what was written on there.

‘What does it mean?’

‘It’s Latin. Amor Vincit Omnia. It means Love Conquers All.’

THE NIGHT SKY
was coal black as I drew the heavy drape curtains over the bedroom windows.

They were old, period windows, as they were throughout the cottage: very nice to look at, pretty rubbish at keeping out draughts. After I had gone back to the police station and left Harry Coker to brief Superintendent Dean and the posse from Norwich, I had picked Siobhan up from school and cooked dinner. When Kate came back with baby Jade, she asked me about my day and I promised I’d fill her in when the kids were asleep.

I climbed into bed and took a sip of a brandy and soda I had prepared earlier. It was a small shot of brandy, a large shot of soda. As the curly-haired Jewish man once remarked, the times were getting different.

Kate came in, bereft of make-up, her own long curly hair tied back. She was wearing a warm-looking but far from sexy pair of pyjamas. She still looked heart-meltingly gorgeous.

‘Get in here, sex kitten,’ I said, pulling back the duvet on her side of the bed.

‘Sure, and where else would I be going?’ she replied, giving a laughable impersonation of the brogue that I sometimes adopted for dramatic effect.

‘Nowhere, I hope.’

‘Well, you can count on that,’ she said as she slid under the duvet. Something in the way she said it implied she meant more than she was articulating and I had a damn good idea what she was referencing. But I let it slide for the moment and kissed her instead.

‘That’s for you,’ I said.

‘So now, tell me what she said.’

‘It’s 1941, and Helen Middleton is seven years old. The war is in full swing. England is getting hammered. This part of the country particularly so.’

‘I know that. I grew up playing amongst the pillboxes along the clifftops here, remember.’

‘So, young Helen is lying awake at night listening to the screaming bombs being dropped from thundering bombers. The explosions tearing up the towns and countryside. Being dragged out of bed down to the air-raid shelter in the garden. Her father is away, her mother is an emotionally closed woman. The only reassurance in her life comes from her older brother.’

‘And he was fighting overseas?’

‘No, he was a chronic asthmatic, excused service. Twenty-nine years old, so quite a bit older than her. She was unplanned. He was a music teacher and like a surrogate father-figure to her in those desperate times.’

‘I’m not sure that I like where this is heading.’

I took a sip of my brandy and soda and shook my head. ‘No, it’s nothing like that.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘One day she was hiding out in the shelter and still hearing the screaming bombs, but they were only in her mind now, in her memory. Her brother came to fetch her out, but she was terrified, traumatised. So he told her a secret.’

‘Which was?’

‘That he had fallen in love. He had met a young woman and they had fallen in love with each other. She had given him her dead father’s watch, not expensive but of great sentimental value to her. He showed her the inscription on the band that he had had engraved and fitted on a strap for the watch. “Amor Vincit Omnia.”’

‘Love Conquers All.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Our man in the cave.’

‘It certainly looks like it.’

‘So why was it a secret?’

‘She doesn’t know. She doesn’t even know the name of the woman that her brother met.’

‘What was his name?’

‘David Webb. He taught music at the local school, like I said. But he was also a member of the Home Guard and a volunteer on the Sheringham lifeboat crew.’

‘So what happened? He just vanished? Something to do with this woman? A jealous husband, a protective father?’

‘Helen doesn’t know. Nobody knows.’