An Unfinished Murder Read online

  An Unfinished Murder

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  PART TWO

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  About the Author

  Copyright

  An Unfinished Murder

  Ann Granger

  A few years ago I wrote a series of fifteen crime novels featuring Alan Markby and Meredith Mitchell. I have since been asked many times for a ‘new’ Mitchell and Markby. But it is not so easy to pick up characters after a lapse of years. Are they still the same age? Or do they now qualify for a bus pass apiece? How has the world around them changed?

  Well, yes, they have aged and Alan Markby is retired. But when an old case is unexpectedly reopened, he finds himself called upon by Superintendent Ian Carter and Inspector Jess Campbell to lend a hand.

  So, this book is not only for friends of Campbell and Carter but also for all those fans of Mitchell and Markby. They’re back!

  Prologue

  The bend in the lane was looming and Josh was getting ready. He knew that once they turned it, and were out of sight of the house, Dilys would hit him. She was a year younger than he was, only eight, and smaller, though chunkily built. But she moved like lightning. So, although Josh knew it was coming and was ready to dodge, he also knew that she’d still catch him a few painful kicks and punches before he got out of the way. He wasn’t allowed to hit her back, because Auntie Nina said boys shouldn’t hit girls. Well, perhaps so, but Josh knew they did, because the various boyfriends who passed through his mother’s life frequently blacked his mother’s eye, or worse.

  While they’d lived with their mother (Josh still thought of it as ‘when they lived at home’), the cops had been at the door every other day or night, or so it seemed. If it wasn’t the fights that brought the uniforms, then it was tearing the place apart looking for drugs. Once, they burst in looking for a shotgun belonging to the current boyfriend. It was discovered under Dilys’s bed and their mother had gone crazy when she realised that was where the boyfriend has stashed it. It took three of the uniforms to hold her back when she rushed at him, brandishing a pair of scissors. After this episode, the Social interfered and they’d ended up living with Auntie Nina.

  Josh wasn’t Dilys’s only target. She had attacked other children in the new school they attended. This caused a lot of trouble. Dilys now knew she mustn’t do that, but she still had the anger in her, so she took it out on Josh. The child psychiatrist Dilys had been sent to see explained it as Dilys and Josh having grown up in a violent home. It was a form of self-defence, the doctor said. She, Dilys, was making it clear to anyone who might be inclined to hit her that it wouldn’t pay. She’d hit back. So, she hit out first.

  Again, Josh reasoned, that might be so. But it didn’t explain why he was included every time they got the lecture about not attacking other kids, because he hadn’t done anything. That was the bitter injustice of it all. Josh didn’t want to hit anyone. He hated the violence. He loved his sister. He’d loved his mother – still loved her, wherever she was – and not being able to protect her in the past had filled him with guilt.

  Living with Auntie Nina was all right, if you accepted Auntie Nina’s rules, which were many. At least, no one had fights or got drunk and vomited all over the place, and the police didn’t come. That, said Auntie Nina, meant he and Dilys were Very Fortunate. They had the chance of a Normal Life. He could have argued about that, too, because he knew, from the parents who turned up at the school gates, that in a normal life children lived with their mothers, and not with the Auntie Ninas of this world. Most of the other children also had fathers. Josh didn’t know who his father was; he had never asked, because he dreaded being told it was one of the tattooed boyfriends. Also, he suspected perhaps his mother didn’t know. But he kept this and other opinions to himself, because if he’d learned anything, it was to keep quiet.

  But he did speak now. ‘Listen, Dilys! Don’t start punching me, right?’

  ‘I want to,’ said Dilys simply.

  ‘But I don’t want you to!’

  ‘It makes me feel better,’ returned Dilys, after a moment’s consideration of his argument.

  ‘It doesn’t make me feel better. I’ve got a big bruise on my arm from where you clouted me yesterday. Don’t you like me?’

  At this question Dilys began to cry quietly, tears rolling down her face. So, he put his arm around her consolingly, because he understood. It had always been too much for Dilys and she couldn’t cope. She hadn’t coped with the shouting of the terrifying men and the blood running down their mother’s face. She hadn’t coped with their mother slumped on the sofa in a drugged stupor, unable to respond to anything they said. She couldn’t cope now with Auntie Nina’s rules or the home-cooked meals Auntie Nina said were good for them. They had to eat everything, even though they’d never seen a Brussels sprout or a parsnip before. They had managed all their short lives, until they came here, on takeaways and microwaved pizza.

  Dilys snuffled into his T-shirt for a moment or two until the tears stopped. Then she kicked his shin.

  ‘Walk over there!’ ordered Josh, as he hobbled a few feet away to one side.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Dilys quite calmly.

  It was like that. The anger had been released from where it had been bottled up inside her, and now she was fine… until the next time.

  ‘Auntie Nina says we have to go for a walk,’ said Josh. ‘But it’s already nearly five o’clock and we have to be back by six, so we can’t go far. Where would you like to go?’

  ‘To the spinney,’ said Dilys.

  The spinney was a patch of woodland behind the row of council houses. Auntie Nina lived in the first house. But, although she could see the spinney from her kitchen window, she couldn’t see into it, because it lay at the bottom of a downward slope. Thus, if they went there, they’d be out of range of her interference.

  ‘All right,’ Josh agreed.

  Dilys smiled and began to sing a carol, ‘Good King Wenceslas’, which they’d learned at school months before, at Christmas. She liked the story it told and didn’t worry that it wasn’t the right time of year for it.

  All the local children went to the spinney, not just Josh and Dilys. The kids clambered up into the low branches or made camps in the bushes and picked blackberries when they were in season. They seldom let Josh or Dilys into their camps, so Josh and his sister made their own camps in a different spot. But Josh was a first-rate climber, so if someone’s hat was thrown up into the branches, or a ball, and lodged there, Josh would be called in to shin up and retrieve it. That would mean a temporary truce during which they were let into the other camps. The moment was fragile and soon broken because, inevitably, Dilys flew into one of her rages.

  Josh and Dilys clambered over the stone wall around a field, walked across it to the far side, then scrambled down into a ditch where Dilys got stung by nettles, resulting in a rash of white spots that burned like anything. That meant ten minutes hunting for dock leaves to rub on the reddened flesh to soothe it. It put Dilys ba
ck into a bad temper. When they finally made it into the spinney, it was deserted. Josh was pleased they had it to themselves and didn’t need to negotiate a play area with other kids. Dilys found a fallen branch and began to thrash the bushes with it and strike it against the trees. It was only a matter of time before she swung it at him, Josh reckoned. So, he walked ahead of her and turned off the path into the tangle of undergrowth, because it would take all Dilys’s attention to negotiate a route – and that would absorb her energies, with any luck. He could hear her behind him, slashing wildly with the branch to clear her way.

  He had been wrong in thinking they were alone in the spinney, because they weren’t. Ahead of him, through the vegetation, he could see a patch of white and another of blue. He guessed someone had thrown rubbish away there. But when he got a little nearer, he could see there was someone lying on the ground, apparently sleeping. The person was half smothered with leaves and twigs, in some places more thickly than in others. It was as if someone had tried to cover up the sleeper but hadn’t finished the job. The lower part of a leg in blue jeans and a foot in a white trainer hadn’t been covered at all. Josh hesitated and then moved nearer. At the opposite end to the white trainer, a pale face peered through the leaves, tilted up as if to see who approached. The face belonged to a woman. Josh thought her quite a young woman – perhaps because she had long fair hair, like his mother’s. Her head was turned to one side and he could see her forehead, nose and one eye. A hand poking up through the mulch pointed its pink-painted fingernails at him.

  ‘Is she drunk?’ asked Dilys, who had arrived alongside him, and was staring down at the woman critically. ‘Perhaps she fell over last night on her way home from the pub.’

  ‘No,’ said Josh.

  The eye was open and filmy. It stared at them without registering anything. This woman couldn’t see them. She wouldn’t see anyone, now or ever again, because Josh knew she was dead. He felt sick, but it was the sickness of despair not of revulsion.

  Perhaps their mother was dead by now, like this, and no one had told him or Dilys. It was something that worried him constantly but he was afraid to ask Auntie Nina, because she might have replied that, yes, his mother was dead. For as long as he stayed in ignorance, there was a chance she might still be alive and he’d see her again. But looking down at this woman, he began to dread that this was how it had all ended for his mother.

  ‘What, then, just asleep?’ asked Dilys.

  ‘Yes!’ lied Josh. ‘Come on, she might wake up and be cross.’

  Dilys still had her branch and she waved it above her head. ‘I could hit her with this. That would wake her up.’

  ‘No!’ Josh grabbed her arm and pulled her back. ‘Listen, we’ve got to go back now, understand? You mustn’t say anything about this girl being asleep here. It will make trouble. We’ll be blamed for something. We always are.’

  ‘I won’t tell,’ said Dilys sturdily.

  Josh knew she wouldn’t. Dilys didn’t use words much. She preferred action. Besides, she also knew the value of keeping quiet.

  ‘Come on, then.’ Josh released her arm and set off back the way they’d come.

  After a moment or two, he realised he couldn’t hear Dilys. So, he stopped and looked back. His sister was still standing by the body. Seeing he was looking at her, she gave him a defiant stare.

  ‘Come on!’ urged Josh. ‘Before she wakes up.’

  Dilys set off towards him, and they made it back to the main path. The rest of the way home passed in silence until they’d climbed back over the stone wall into the lane. It was then, as Dilys scrambled down, that he saw she had something gripped in her grimy fist. It glittered.

  ‘What’s that?’ he demanded and tried to grab her hand.

  But Dilys was too quick, as usual. He just grabbed air.

  ‘What is it?’ he snapped at her and, for once, he must have sounded really angry, because Dilys reluctantly opened her fist and he saw it was a chain with little silvery objects attached to it. It was a charm bracelet. Their mother had owned one, until one of the boyfriends had stolen it and sold it to buy a fix.

  ‘You took that off the girl in the spinney!’ he gasped, appalled.

  Dilys looked mutinous and obstinate, as only she could. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s not stealing, because she wasn’t asleep. I think she’d died. She was cold and felt funny, like a dead fish.’

  ‘You touched her?’

  Josh’s voice came out as a squawk.

  ‘Only to take off the bracelet. It’s nice.’ Dilys held it up and stretched the chain out in a line from which the tiny objects dangled.

  Josh could see now that the silvery objects weren’t charms; they were letters of the alphabet. In a line now, as Dilys held the chain taut, he saw they spelled out the name R-E-B-E-C-C-A.

  ‘Throw it away, now, at once!’ he ordered.

  ‘No!’ said Dilys belligerently.

  ‘Auntie Nina will see it.’

  ‘No, she won’t. I’ll hide it. I’m good at hiding things from her. She’s stupid. She’s never found anything I’ve hidden.’

  Josh had a nightmare vision of a stash of small stolen articles hoarded by his sister somewhere. ‘If it’s found we will get into a lot of trouble!’ he said and then, inspired, added, ‘And they’ll tell that kids’ head doctor they send you to!’

  This made an impression on Dilys, who muttered and fidgeted but eventually threw the bracelet into a nearby clump of tall, pink wild flowers; ‘ragged robin’ Aunt Nina called those plants.

  ‘Remember,’ he warned his sister, when they reached the house. ‘You don’t say anything to anyone about this!’

  Dilys nodded and gave his arm a punch by way of having the last word.

  * * *

  As agreed, they didn’t speak of it. Not until many, many years later.

  For the next twenty years, Josh had nightmares about that pale glazed eye staring up through the leaves; but he couldn’t and wouldn’t talk about it. Then, one day, he broke his silence.

  He spoke to Mr Markby, and that was only because he had learned that Mr Markby had once been a policeman – a detective, and a top-ranking one.

  So, Josh hoped, perhaps he wouldn’t be shocked.

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  ‘I’m retired,’ said Alan Markby.

  He said it casually, although he was curious as to what might have prompted the question.

  ‘But you were a proper detective? Auntie Nina said you were.’

  Josh Browning was a grown man but he still lived with the elderly lady who had once been foster parent to him and to his sister when they were children. Mrs Pengelly her name was, by rights, although Josh always referred to her as Auntie Nina. The sister had left the area, but Mrs Pengelly and Josh shared a home in the slowly crumbling row of social housing that had been erected in prefabricated sections in the second third of the previous century. It was named after a farmer from whom the land had been purchased to build them. At the time they were constructed the houses had been intended to be temporary. Elsewhere in the country such ‘estates’ had long since been demolished and replaced by more modern homes. Goodness only knew why no one had demolished Brocket’s Row. But it had become the sort of project put at the back of every queue and eventually forgotten.

  The houses had originally backed on to open country and woods. That had mostly disappeared under a trading estate and warehousing, originally described optimistically as a ‘business park’. But Brocket’s Row still stood. As far as Markby knew, Josh had no other family, except for the sister he’d once mentioned in passing. Only the one time and then clammed up.

  Josh didn’t make conversation. He seldom spoke at all unless it was absolutely necessary. This led some people to think he was mentally backward but Markby knew this wasn’t so. Josh was sharp enough and observant. He remembered what he saw, even the tiniest detail. Sometimes, shyly, he would remind Markby of some detail about the garden. There had bee
n a rat hole under the fence a year ago but he, Josh, had filled it in. The rat hadn’t come back, because Josh had poured strong disinfectant around the area and no animal liked that. This year, a jackdaw had taken to hanging around the garden waiting for scraps. It was always the same one, slightly lame, and Josh had not seen its mate. There were others in the church tower, next door, but the one that visited the garden roosted there. It was a loner, ‘like me’, Josh had added with a rare smile.

  He was an odd-job man by occupation and could turn his hand to most things. Alan Markby and his wife, Meredith, lived in a Victorian building, a former vicarage, and things always needed doing around the place. So, over the years, Josh had become a familiar visitor, painting, hammering, climbing up on the roof to replace dislodged slates after winter storms and, increasingly, doing the hard work around the large garden. That was where he was working alongside Markby today, digging over the vegetable plot and getting it ready for courgettes. Those were Meredith’s idea.

  But Markby had no idea what had led Josh suddenly to ask, ‘You were a copper once, is that right?’

  They were sitting in the shed, drinking coffee in a mid-morning break. Josh was tall and strongly built, and took up a lot of space. He had a mop of red hair and features that looked as if they’d been chiselled by a sculptor who was still learning the craft. He had stretched out his legs and was contemplating, apparently, the soil-caked boots he wore. His question had come out of nowhere, just spoken without any preamble.

  ‘Why?’ asked Markby, because there had to be a reason. Josh didn’t do purposeless chat.

  ‘You were an important copper here in Bamford, Auntie Nina reckons.’

  ‘I was a superintendent, and it was quite a while ago now. Does it matter?’

  Markby kept his voice casual but he was watching Josh’s averted face closely. Markby knew about witnesses. Long years of investigating serious crimes had taught him that they came in all sorts of guises. There were the liars and the fantasists, the inaccurate, the embroiderers, and occasionally the observant. There were always the ones who knew something but didn’t want to trouble the police with it, because it mightn’t be important, or it was something embarrassing to speak of. You couldn’t make them talk but, when they were ready, they’d talk of their own accord, although it might take a long time for them to get round to it. Sometimes their information wasn’t important and sometimes, annoyingly, it was. He wouldn’t know which classification Josh’s information fell into but he was absolutely certain Josh knew something – a secret – and he was trying to share that knowledge. The trouble was, Josh didn’t know how to go about it and, having started the conversation, he now seemed to have exhausted his ideas and had plunged back into his normal silence.