An Unfinished Murder Read online

  ‘Funny how things happen…’ said Markby into his coffee mug. It was a shot in the dark and mentally he had his fingers crossed.

  Josh brightened. ‘That’s it!’ he agreed. ‘You never know how they’ll turn out.’

  ‘So, how have they turned out?’ Markby ventured to ask.

  Josh drew up his legs so that his boots were planted firmly on the floor and twisted in his chair to look directly at Markby. ‘I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about our Dilys,’ he said.

  Dilys? Hang on; wasn’t that Josh’s mysterious sister?

  ‘In what way?’ asked Markby, adding, ‘I’ve never met your sister, if that’s Dilys.’

  ‘Well, you won’t now, or not for a while,’ said Josh. ‘She’s in prison.’

  ‘What did she do?’ asked Markby. He couldn’t remember the name of Dilys Browning in the local paper.

  ‘She always did hit people,’ said Josh earnestly. ‘She didn’t mean anything by it. She used to hit me. She hit kids in the playground at the school they sent us to, when we came to live here.’

  ‘To live with Mrs Pengelly, your Auntie Nina?’ Markby prompted.

  Josh nodded, clearly encouraged. ‘She does it because she’s unhappy, see? When we were kids they sent her to see some fancy doctor – psychiatrist – but it didn’t help. In the end, Dilys hit the doctor. She got passed around doctors a lot after that but it didn’t do any good.’

  ‘And does she still hit people? Is that why she’s in prison now?’

  ‘That’s it!’ Josh smiled unexpectedly. It was a smile of pure relief. ‘I knew you’d understand. But that’s all she’s ever done, hit people. She’s not a thief!’

  ‘Has someone accused her of being a thief?’

  ‘No!’ said Josh indignantly. ‘I haven’t got to that bit yet.’

  ‘Oh? Sorry! Go on.’

  ‘They’ve banned her from a lot of clubs and pubs and places like that,’ said Josh sadly. ‘She’s been up before the magistrates lots of times, up there in London, where she’s been living. But this last time it was really bad. She glassed a guy in a pub and nearly cut his throat. There was blood everywhere, all over Dilys, too. They had to take him to hospital and get the gash sewn up. It was an accident; she didn’t want to hurt him. She doesn’t realise she hurts other people because of the hurt inside herself. It’s all she’s thinking, that she’s hurting!’ Josh gazed at him, willing him to understand. ‘I can’t explain. Only, she didn’t mean it. She just struck out but she had a glass in her hand …’

  Markby sighed at this only too familiar explanation. I happened to be holding a bottle… I happened to be holding a breadknife…

  ‘And?’

  ‘And they told her she’d be sure to get a custodial sentence this time, so she came to see me. She brought a cardboard box with her personal stuff in it, for me to keep it safe for her while she was in prison. She couldn’t leave it where she’d been living. It’d have been pinched.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Markby, nodding.

  ‘Well, after she’d left, Auntie Nina looked into the box and saw it was mostly clothes and a couple of DVDs, nothing much. But Auntie Nina said she didn’t want an old box lying around and, anyway, the clothes would probably go mouldy if they were left like that. She told me to take everything out. She’d wash the clothes and put them away tidy – and any other bits and pieces I should put somewhere in my room, in a drawer. So that’s when I found it, at the bottom of the box.’

  ‘Found?’ Markby prompted. It was like drawing teeth. But they were getting to the important bit, he knew that. It was vital not to hurry Josh now.

  ‘The bracelet. We found it – well, Dilys found it, sort of found it, when we were kids. She was only eight. Robbing dead bodies, that’s a crime, isn’t it?’

  Josh stared at him, waiting for an answer. But the disconcerting leap from finding a bracelet to dead bodies had momentarily floored Markby.

  ‘Dead bodies…’ he managed to croak. What on earth was coming next? Who had robbed a dead body? ‘It might depend on the circumstances,’ he said carefully. ‘Archaeologists find items in burials that end up in a museum.’

  ‘I found – and Dilys came along just a few minutes later – a dead woman in the spinney, down the hill from the house. She had leaves and bits of branches over her but she wasn’t covered over completely.’

  ‘When was this?’ yelped Markby, automatically reaching for his mobile phone and then dropping his hand, because he didn’t want to interrupt Josh.

  ‘Years ago, when we were kids. Dilys and me, well, other families didn’t like us, because we’d come from a bad home; and Dilys kept hitting their kids, and we weren’t local. We got the blame for all sorts of things, mostly things we hadn’t done. So, I reckoned we’d get the blame for this, somehow. Not that we’d killed her, but that we shouldn’t have gone poking about in the woods. I don’t know…’ Josh paused and shook his mop of red curls. ‘They’d have found something to blame us for. So, I told Dilys she wasn’t to speak of it ever. I’m only telling you now, because of the charm bracelet.’

  Don’t say anything! Markby warned himself silently. Just wait. He’s getting to it.

  ‘We left the body where it was and started off home. We were nearly there when I saw Dilys had something shiny hidden in her fist. It was a charm bracelet – a sort of charm bracelet, only it didn’t have charms on it, just letters of the alphabet. She’d managed to slip it off the dead woman’s wrist without me seeing. Dilys has always been very quick. I was really angry, I can tell you! Dilys wanted to keep it and said it wasn’t stealing because the woman was dead. But I made her throw it away. She did. I watched her. She chucked it into some flowers growing on a bank. But I didn’t know she’d snuck back later and found it and kept it hidden away all these years.’

  Josh sighed. ‘It’s my fault. I should have realised she’d go back for it. I should have gone back before she could, and thrown it somewhere else where she couldn’t find it. So there it is – was – at the bottom of the box she’d given me to keep safe. The thing is, I’ve kept thinking about that dead woman all these years. I thought perhaps she had family and they were looking for her. Perhaps she had kids, like us – like we were, then…’

  Josh had slumped dejectedly. ‘So, when Auntie Nina said you’d been an important copper once, I thought, well, you’d be the person to tell.’ Josh looked up. ‘It’s time now to tell someone, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Markby gently. ‘You’ve done the right thing, Josh. Have you still got it, the bracelet?’

  In response, Josh pushed his hand into his jeans pocket and drew out a silvery piece of jewellery. He held it up, stretched out, so that Markby could read the letters: R-E-B-E-C-C-A.

  ‘How old were you, Josh, when you found this? Dilys was eight, you say?’ Markby knew his voice was shaking.

  Josh nodded. ‘I was nine, just coming up to ten.’

  Markby made a quick mental calculation. ‘Oh, my dear God…’ he whispered. ‘Rebecca Hellington! You and Dilys found Rebecca Hellington. Josh,’ he said carefully, ‘leave this with me and I’ll see if I can sort it out. Someone may ask you to tell the story again, so they can write it down or record it on tape. It will be nothing to worry about, because that’s normal procedure. Just tell it as you told me. And don’t worry that you or Dilys will be charged with any crime. You were both under ten at the time, the age of criminal responsibility. It would have been better to have reported what you found – just telling your Auntie Nina would have done it. Then she could have contacted the police. But you can’t be charged under the law with anything.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right, then,’ said Josh, relief sounding in his voice.

  ‘You didn’t tell Auntie—tell Mrs Pengelly, did you?’

  Josh looked at him, his blue eyes wide with shock. ‘We’d never have heard the last of it! Of course we never said…’ He paused. ‘Anyway’, he added, ‘the next time I went to the spinney, the body had gone.’r />
  ‘When was that? When did you go back?’

  Josh frowned. ‘Not the next day, because it rained really hard. It would have been the day after that. And she wasn’t there any more, like I said.’

  ‘All right.’ Markby stood and gathered up the empty coffee mugs. ‘I’ll take these back to the house.’

  Josh unfolded himself from the canvas chair in which he’d been wedged and stood up, too. He had to bend his head, because the roof was too low to accommodate him. Markby himself was still a tall man. He hadn’t lost much to age. But Josh must be about six foot three, he thought.

  ‘I’ll finish digging over that patch,’ said Josh and set off towards the vegetable garden.

  Markby walked thoughtfully back to his house and into the kitchen. It was empty. He put the mugs on the table and went in search of Meredith.

  Chapter 2

  Markby found his wife in the study, staring intently at her computer. Her tawny hair, still thick, with only a sprinkling of grey strands, fell forward around her face. Her fingers rested on the keyboard in a position that suggested she’d stopped typing suddenly, mid-sentence.

  ‘Not going well?’ he asked mildly.

  ‘Going OK, but something isn’t right…’ She leaned back, stretched her arms above her head and turned to smile at him. ‘So, what’s new?’ she asked.

  Since retiring from her job with the Diplomatic Service, Meredith had taken to writing books – more specifically, detective stories. When she started on the first of them, he had protested, ‘I’m all for you writing, but well, crime fiction… people will think they’re real-life crimes I’ve told you about.’

  ‘No, they won’t,’ she had returned, ‘because I’m setting all my stories in the nineteen-twenties. Anyway, when people read them, they won’t know I’m married to an ex-copper.’

  ‘They’ll soon find out,’ he’d replied gloomily.

  ‘So what? Anyway, the detective in my book is a piano tuner by trade.’

  ‘You’re serious about this? Why?’ he’d asked incredulously.

  ‘I’ve thought it through, you know!’ She’d sounded nettled. ‘In the nineteen-twenties having a piano was the fashionable thing. Like having a telly now. Pianos need tuning regularly. So, my piano tuner visits all kinds of homes to fix the piano. It’s a time-consuming job, so he’s there for an hour or so, just sitting quietly in the parlour and pinging the piano strings, while the household carries on around him and probably forgets he’s there. He can overhear things, notice things, be there when odd things happen.’

  ‘Right…’ Markby had conceded the argument.

  So, now he didn’t know whether the question she posed was rhetorical – meaning that she’d hit a snag in a plotline – or she’d read his face, as she did all too well. That puzzle was quickly resolved.

  She asked quietly, ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing… that is to say, I’ve learned about something that happened a long time ago. It’s an old unsolved mystery and has to do with an investigation I carried out locally on behalf of the Gloucestershire force, years back. With conspicuous lack of success, I may add.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you and Josh have dug up a vital clue in the potato patch!’

  Markby shook a warning finger at her. ‘No joking! You’re a lot nearer the mark than you imagine. The thing is, I’ve just had a curious conversation with Josh.’

  Meredith raised her eyebrows. ‘Having anything like a conversation with Josh is curious in itself, isn’t it? I only manage to get single sentences out of him. It’s generally a question about whatever work he’s doing around the place and, once I’ve answered, he usually just nods and takes himself off again.’

  ‘Well, this time we were having our coffee break in the shed, when he suddenly asked me if it was right I’d been a senior police officer, before I retired. He said his Auntie Nina – Mrs Pengelly – had told him I was.’

  ‘She’s his foster mother, or she was,’ Meredith said, ‘not a proper aunt. What made her suddenly tell him that you’d been with the police? I’m surprised he didn’t already know.’

  ‘I don’t know why she told him; that’s something I’ll have to look into. I’m not really surprised he didn’t already know, because he doesn’t talk to people, does he? Look, let me tell you what he told me.’

  She listened quietly while he repeated Josh’s tale. ‘Wow!’ she said softly, when he stopped speaking. ‘Who was Rebecca Hellington?’

  ‘She’s been a missing person these past twenty years. There’s never – till now – been any evidence that she’s dead. Her family – her father, at least – believed she must be, because she didn’t get in touch with them. She normally phoned home at least once a week. She was a student at a West Country teacher training college, but her family lived in Bamford. They ran a travel agency in the town. Being reported missing doesn’t necessarily mean the person is dead. People vanish from their usual haunts deliberately and don’t contact anyone. They have all sorts of reasons. Her mother insisted for a long time there was some explanation and Rebecca would turn up. But I have to confess that the police were inclined to agree with her father at the time. The thing was, we had no evidence either way, whether she was dead or alive.’ He fell silent.

  ‘You looked for her here?’ Meredith prompted when the silence lasted.

  Markby started. ‘Yes, in cooperation with the Gloucestershire force, as I told you. They were investigating her disappearance at their end. They liaised with us, because she had told two people at her hall of residence, plus her boyfriend, that she was thinking of going home for the weekend. If that was the case, she never turned up. The parents were in a terrible state.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Meredith said quietly, ‘particularly if they were expecting her. So, she had definitely informed her parents, and not just a couple of college friends, that she was coming for the weekend?’

  ‘She’d mentioned it as a possibility but hadn’t confirmed it. They’d been waiting to hear from her, to let them know what time her bus would arrive here. She was in the habit of travelling by National Express coaches, because it was so much cheaper than using the train.’

  ‘Even cheaper, if riskier, would be to hitch-hike?’ suggested Meredith.

  ‘Her father assured me she wouldn’t have done that. I remember he said she was too sensible. Also, he’d told her that if she was really broke and couldn’t afford the bus ticket, he’d send her the money or a ticket. He’d made her promise she’d do that, because they didn’t want her to hitch.’ Markby’s normally calm features formed a ferocious scowl. ‘I don’t even know if the spinney is still there! I should have asked Josh. I can remember when it was mostly open country behind those old council houses. I’m astonished those homes are still there – that Mrs Pengelly is still living in one of them. The land was developed over the years. Come to think of it, it was one of Dudley Newman’s projects, could have been his last. You remember Newman? His vision of the future was to cover the surrounding countryside with bricks.’

  ‘The builder? I remember him, though I never had much to do with him. But a body was found on one of the sites he was building houses on, I certainly remember that! It turned out to be quite a hairy episode for me! Don’t tell me it’s happened again. I might begin to worry about Newman!’

  ‘Yes, I remember that one, too, but the later development behind Brocket’s Row didn’t involve houses. Newman got delusions of grandeur and put a sort of business park there. As far as I recall, nothing suspicious was found during the work on it – or it was never reported, if it was! The business park didn’t do well and now, I believe, it’s mostly storage units.’

  ‘So, the spinney may have been concreted over to fulfil Newman’s aim in life?’

  ‘It may have been. I’ll have to check that out before I go to Trevor Barker with my story.’

  ‘You’re reporting this to the police here at Bamford, then?’

  ‘I have to report it as my citizen’s du
ty. And I’m reporting it to Inspector Barker, because he’d be upset if I went over his head.’ Markby sighed. ‘My hope is, that particular patch of the spinney escaped Dudley Newman’s attentions. Then there is a chance we can still find Rebecca. However, it seems likely her killer returned soon after the children found her, and moved her elsewhere. He’d heard the kids earlier, perhaps, and any intruders temporarily frightened him off. Or it might have made him decide the spinney was too popular a spot, so he moved the body somewhere else. All we know is that, after Josh and Dilys found her, no one else did. It would have been reported to us at the time. Josh did return to the spot two days later, but the body had disappeared.’

  Meredith was ready with an objection. ‘If she hadn’t been buried, just covered with leaves and twigs, surely someone else must have stumbled over her, as the children did.’

  ‘Which suggests the body wasn’t lying on the ground like that for long. As I said, either the killer went back and made a better job of burying her in the spinney later that same day, soon after the children saw her. Or he moved the body altogether and buried it somewhere else – and we have no clue where.’ He transferred his gaze to the window and the view of the church beyond. ‘So, Rebecca, where are you now?’

  ‘This is going to make trouble for Josh,’ Meredith said soberly. ‘Will he cope? He likes to be left in peace to get on with a specific job. He won’t like a lot of strangers arriving on the doorstep wanting him to talk.’