An Unfinished Murder Read online

  Carter sat listening to this exchange without comment. His face still wore that bland expression, but Markby suspected he was highly amused.

  * * *

  ‘Nice place you’ve got here, Alan,’ said Carter later, surveying the late Victorian frontage of the one-time vicarage.

  ‘Well, we were lucky,’ returned Markby modestly. ‘The Church was selling it off and we wanted – well, I wanted – a decent-sized garden. We’re still trying to get it straight, of course, and we’re beginning to feel we never will. It was very dilapidated when we bought it and needed everything from rewiring to a new kitchen, new bathroom, new pretty well everything; and no one had taken a paintbrush to it since who knows when. But we’ve grown very attached to it,’ he added hastily. ‘Have you managed to find the right home for yourself in Gloucestershire?’

  ‘No,’ said Carter frankly. ‘I was living in a cramped flat with odds and ends of furniture left over from my divorce settlement. I’ve moved into a slighter larger place, but I haven’t bought any more goods and chattels. Oh, I bought a single bed for my daughter when she comes to stay.’

  ‘Sorry,’ apologised Markby. ‘I’ve been down that road myself. I was lucky. Meredith rescued me.’

  ‘No need to apologise. If I haven’t moved myself into a better place, and fixed it up properly, it’s no one’s fault but my own.’

  They found Meredith sitting with Josh in the kitchen, where they had obviously been drinking tea and eating chocolate biscuits from a tin with a picture of Victorian children playing in the snow on the lid. Markby thought he remembered the tin from Christmas, when Meredith had won it in a raffle. It had sat in the cupboard ever since, waiting for its moment.

  ‘We can all go into the sitting room now,’ suggested Meredith. ‘It’s a little cramped for more than two people out here.’

  Josh had risen to his feet on their arrival, and Markby thought with regret that, faced with a stranger, a police officer and the prospect of questioning, Josh had assumed his most vacant expression. If he carried on looking like that, Carter would dismiss anything Josh said.

  At the suggestion they leave the kitchen for a more formal setting, however, Josh’s blank expression turned to one of alarm. ‘I like it here,’ he muttered.

  ‘Fair enough!’ said Meredith briskly. ‘I’ll make you all a fresh pot of tea and leave you to it. Josh and I haven’t quite eaten all the biscuits.’

  Josh’s expression now became guilty, as if he were to be charged with polishing off the contents of the tin.

  ‘It’s all right, Josh,’ said Markby gently. ‘Sit down, for goodness’ sake. It’s only a chat. Mr Carter is interested to hear about how you and Dilys found the girl in the spinney.’

  Josh sat reluctantly and placed his forearms on the table with his hands clasped. It somehow gave the impression he was in handcuffs. He had garden soil under his fingernails and he wore a stretched and baggy hand-knitted sweater, probably the work of Auntie Nina. Without warning, he broke into speech, all the words he hadn’t spoken before now pouring out of him in an unstoppable stream.

  ‘I never spoke before, because when I went back to the spinney, she’d gone, that girl had gone. So we thought it best to keep quiet. No one would have believed us, anyway. I told Dilys not to say anything. It’s not her fault. I didn’t know about the bracelet, that she still had it . . .’ Josh paused. ‘I knew she had it in her hand on the way home, on the day we found the body, and I made her throw it away. I didn’t know she’d gone back and found it again. I only knew that when she gave me the box, a few weeks back, to keep while she’s inside.’ Josh looked up and, showing animation for the first time, fixed his gaze on Carter. ‘She’s not a thief, Dilys! She’s never been that. But it was pretty, see, and she fancied it.’

  ‘We understand that,’ said Carter calmly. ‘What I’d like to know, Josh, is how soon you went back to the spinney again, after the two of you had stumbled on the body.’

  ‘It rained for two whole days, so I didn’t go back until the second day,’ said Josh firmly. ‘And then I went on my own. I wouldn’t let Dilys come with me; because if the girl had been lying there since then, the rats might have got to her, and I didn’t want Dilys to see that. I’d been waiting for someone else to find her. But after two days, and no one saying anything, I decided to go back and check it out. The rain had stopped. I slipped out of the house while Auntie Nina and Dilys were watching the telly after tea, and I went down there, to the spinney, and she’d gone, the body, I mean.’

  ‘What did you think might have happened to her? To the body?’ Carter asked him. ‘Do you remember?’

  ‘Of course I remember!’ said Josh, sounding cross. It was the first time Markby could ever remember him sounding anything other than phlegmatic or, occasionally, cheerful. ‘I’m not daft, you know. I wasn’t then and I’m not now!’

  They calmed him down with more tea and chocolate biscuits, and he resumed his tale.

  ‘I thought, when I saw she’d gone, that I’d been wrong and she hadn’t been dead, after all. That when Dilys and I saw her, she’d been asleep. Probably drunk, like Dilys said, first of all. It was Dilys who later said, on the way home, that the girl was dead. But she said it because she’d taken the bracelet and I’d found out. She might have been making an excuse. So, I thought perhaps the girl had woken up and gone off home.’

  ‘But,’ Carter suggested quietly, ‘you waited for someone else to find her, so you must have thought she wouldn’t have moved.’

  Josh gestured with one massive begrimed paw. ‘I had to check it out, didn’t I? I had to go back and see if she was still there. I didn’t want her to be lying there. I didn’t want to think she was dead—’

  He stopped and stared down at the tabletop and the biscuit crumbs on his plate. ‘To tell you the truth, it made me afraid our mum could be dead, too.’ His voice had sunk to a whisper. ‘We hadn’t seen our mum in a long time, but no one had told us whether she was dead or not. I thought she might be, because she hadn’t tried to see us. But I didn’t want to think it. That girl – I thought perhaps our mum was like that, lying dead somewhere. She had long hair, like our mum.’

  There were a few minutes of silence after that, because neither of the other two men knew how to break it.

  It was Josh who took up the tale again. ‘But when no one else found her, and I couldn’t see her when I went back to the spinney, I began to think that, really, she couldn’t have been dead. She’d woken up and left. But that meant Dilys had taken the bracelet off a live person, and was a thief, and I wasn’t going to tell anyone that. On the other hand, it had poured for most of those two days, so perhaps no one else had gone to the spinney and that was why no one had seen her. I didn’t know! You’re asking me to remember now all the things I was thinking back then, when I was nine! It was all a muddle in my mind then and still is. All I know is, I went back, two days later when the rain had stopped, and she wasn’t there.’

  Josh thumped his hand on the tabletop. His face had grown alarmingly red, his scarlet cheeks clashing with his hair, and for a moment Markby feared he might break down and, like a child, burst into tears.

  ‘It’s OK, Josh, take it easy, we understand,’ he said. ‘We know you must have been in shock, back then. Of course, you didn’t know what to think. It was brave of you to go back on your own and check.’

  Josh heaved a sigh and relaxed his shoulders. ‘Well, then, a bit after that, I saw the girl’s photo in the local paper. Auntie Nina always read the local paper, and she still does. I was sure it was her photo, the girl we found, because I’d seen her really close up, in the spinney. The story in the paper said that this girl came from Bamford and she’d left to be a student somewhere. She had been supposed to come home and see her mum and dad; but she’d never turned up. Everyone was looking for her, because no one knew where she was. I knew, because Dilys and I had seen her in the spinney. That’s to say, I knew where she’d been on that day, when we found her. But I didn’t k
now what had happened to her after that, so I told Dilys we must say nothing, because we’d be in trouble for not telling anyone at the time. Do you understand?’

  Josh raised worried eyes, looking first at Carter, for understanding, and then at Markby, for support.

  Together they assured him they understood.

  ‘I puzzled over it, all those years,’ said Josh now. ‘If she was dead, how could she move? Not unless someone else moved her – and who would do that? So, why didn’t someone else find her, like Dilys and I did? Or, if she’d been asleep and got up and walked off somewhere, where had she gone? No one ever did find her. I decided it wouldn’t help if I did speak out, because wherever she was, she wasn’t in the spinney.’

  He drew a deep breath. ‘But I should have said something, I know that now. Because now I know she was still in the spinney; only someone had buried her in the two days before I went back there…’ Josh paused and added, with a kind of regretful recognition of a task well done, ‘They made a decent job of it, burying her. I give ’em that, because I didn’t spot any disturbed earth, back then. But it had been raining, like I said, and that would flatten out any sign of digging. They must have covered her grave over pretty good, with leaves and that.’

  He raised his eyes to look at them defiantly. ‘I didn’t speak out all those years, because I didn’t think it would do any good,’ he said. ‘But then I didn’t know Dilys still had the bracelet. When I found it in that box she gave me to keep for her, I knew I’d been wrong and I should have spoken up.’ He turned his eyes towards Carter, and there was despair in them. ‘We messed up your search for her, didn’t we?’ he said. ‘Because the bracelet spelled out her name. I could have told someone that, and they would have known who it was we saw, even if her body had gone.’

  Carter leaned forward and said, encouragingly, ‘Yes, that’s true, but you must have been a very scared little boy. We understand that. If it helps, look at it this way. Because Dilys kept the bracelet, we have that evidence now.’

  Markby knew he would be forever in Carter’s debt for those words, because a cloud seemed to pass from Josh’s countenance. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s right, isn’t it? It was evidence, and Dilys kept it safe.’

  Alan met Carter’s gaze and he knew that Carter was thinking, as he himself had thought during the conference meeting, that the bracelet had survived safely but, in forensic terms, it was now useless.

  When Josh had left them, Meredith came back and suggested Carter stay for dinner.

  Ian thanked her; however, he ought to start the drive back home. ‘But there is one thing I think might be helpful.’

  They both looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘I’d like to see the place where the remains were found, if you can spare the time to take me there, Alan.’

  ‘We’d better go now, then,’ Markby said. ‘Before it gets too dark.’

  * * *

  The spinney didn’t look any better in the twilight. There was a chill breeze playing around their heads. It rustled the foliage on the remaining trees and made the strands of police tape, some of which had broken loose, flutter like ribbons in a rhythmic gymnastics display. There were rustlings in the undergrowth, and an unseen bird flew through the branches overhead with a rattling sound.

  ‘Pigeon probably,’ observed Markby. ‘Clumsy blighters.’

  Carter said, ‘My daughter would call this spooky.’

  Markby grinned briefly. ‘It is spooky. I understand that it was a pretty spot, twenty years ago.’

  ‘Hard to imagine it.’ Carter pointed away to the right. ‘Where is the grave?’

  ‘Over here. I’ve got a torch. Mind how you go.’

  They trod a wary route through the undergrowth, stumbling and both nearly losing their footing on more than one occasion.

  ‘Here we are,’ Markby said, and he shone the torch beam down into the excavated mud. ‘You can’t see much now. But this is where she was.’

  ‘And where did the children originally find her?’

  ‘You’d need Josh here to tell you that. It wasn’t exactly this spot. But it wasn’t that far away from where we’re standing now.’

  Carter grunted and said, ‘Thanks for showing me.’

  They picked a cautious path back to the road. Carter paused there and said, ‘I can hear traffic. Quite a way off. Over there.’ He pointed in the direction of the muffled hum.

  ‘That’s the motorway. But it hadn’t been built twenty years ago, when Josh and Dilys found the body.’

  They moved away from the spot and Carter stopped again, this time to point uphill, across a patch of open land. ‘What are those houses, up there, right on top of the rise?’

  ‘Brocket’s Row. There are only eight of them, four sets of semis.’

  ‘There are still some people living up there now who were residents twenty years ago, as I understood you to say. Who are they, exactly?’ Ian sounded thoughtful.

  ‘Josh’s foster mother, Nina Pengelly, the elderly woman Meredith went to see the other day. Trevor Barker says he will be talking to her. As you know, I told Barker there is another old-time resident – an elderly man, now in a wheelchair.’ Markby added quietly, ‘I think I know what’s in your mind.’

  Carter looked towards him but the light was so poor now, all he could see of the other man’s face was a pale glimmer, an almost featureless oval.

  ‘Local knowledge,’ said Alan Markby’s voice.

  ‘Has to be,’ agreed Carter. ‘Someone had to know this spinney was here, and they decided to bury the girl in it.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Markby. ‘And then they sat back and watched while the police floundered about looking for her. Even laughed, maybe.’

  Carter didn’t miss the bitterness in his voice. ‘You and me both,’ he said. ‘They were laughing at us all.’

  Chapter 8

  Carter made the long drive home without incident or delay, but darkness had fully overtaken him before he reached Cheltenham and the block of flats where he lived. When he’d first taken up his present post, he’d rented a flat in Gloucester, but had soon decided he preferred to look for a home in Cheltenham. It would be a much nicer place for his daughter to come to on her visits. He’d had vague ideas of evening strolls along the streets of fine Georgian and early Victorian architecture, pointing out the details to Millie, and of visits to the theatre there, also with Millie. So far, he hadn’t had the chance to take evening strolls – and he hadn’t got to the theatre, either. Millie had dragged him to the cinema to see a long, animated film featuring a lot of prehistoric animals speaking modern colloquial English and forming unlikely alliances. To his shame, he’d fallen asleep in the middle of it. Millie had found it hilarious. She’d talked about it all the way home and for the next two days.

  The architect of this block of flats had paid the past a token tribute with a mock-Regency facade. The planning committee that had passed the plans would have liked that. Carter wasn’t sure he did. He liked things to be honest, what they were, and not pretend to be something they weren’t. Perhaps that had been his objection to the prehistoric heroes of the film. Perhaps he had a policeman’s literal mind and his imagination had atrophied. Perhaps he needed to spend more time with his child. If only.

  The street lighting cast an inadequate orange glow on pavements, and curtains were drawn at all the windows, except for two on the first floor that were dark: his flat. The veiled light behind some of the other curtains shimmered and occasionally grew brighter and then duller. The residents of those flats were watching television. As he climbed the stairs, he heard the muted tones of voices and bursts of music. Once, he heard the sound of gunfire and shouts. Action movies, he thought. He imagined the viewers as couch potatoes, sitting in front of scenes of frenetic adventure. Perhaps they’d all had busy days and were entitled to lounge about.

  He opened his door and walked in, experiencing the usual lack of enthusiasm. ‘Going home’ at the end of the working day was generally a positiv
e thing. ‘I’m off home!’ he’d hear other officers say, pulling on their coats, hunting for their car keys, their worried or bored faces brightening at the thought of warm rooms with televisions flickering, children running around and – for the lucky ones – dinner appearing on the table. But Millie was back at boarding school; during the upcoming half-term break she would be flying out to France to spend the time with her mother and step-father, not to mention her new baby brother.

  The temperature in his flat was lower than outside in the street. During the winter, he’d kept the central heating going, but as soon as March came around he switched it off, because it seemed a needless expense when he was away all day. A weekly cleaner came and dusted and vacuumed, so the flat wasn’t dirty. It was just depressing. He wondered now why he’d bothered to make the move from Gloucester. It made no difference where he chose to sleep. Wherever it was, he’d be there alone.

  He threw down his coat and briefcase and paused to pick up his post and riffle through it. Nothing of much interest. He tossed it aside and picked up a framed photo of his daughter instead. She was perched on a stile, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the image of a cat printed on it. She was grinning at the camera and waving. There was open countryside behind her. He remembered that day out as a family, before his wife had left and taken Millie with her.

  He went into the kitchen, and it was more discouraging than the living room. Worse, now he couldn’t help comparing it with Markby’s Victorian kitchen. His mind’s eye threw up the memory of the period iron range kept as a ‘feature’, and the modern cooker. There had been a Welsh dresser with cups and antique plates on it. He was sensitive to odours and he recalled the lingering background aroma of bacon, coffee, fresh flowers. His kitchen here smelled of bleach, because the cleaner was a believer in pouring it down the sink. The units were flat pack. It wasn’t that he couldn’t have found the money to improve the look of the place a bit. But there seemed no point in it. It was unlikely he’d ever be the owner of a comfortable ‘period residence’, as estate agents liked to call old houses. Well, not unless someone came along wanting to share it with him. That did not seem likely to happen soon.