An Unfinished Murder Read online

  ‘The bracelet,’ said Carter. He sounded weary.

  ‘Yes, the little girl, we’re told, took it off a body. I would have been too scared when I was eight to do anything like that. Perhaps she found it somewhere else.’ Jess leaned in, willing him to listen and knowing his mind was elsewhere, back in time, fixating on the memory of frustration and failure. ‘Ian, you’re talking about two children who, apparently, were used to the police coming to the door and asking questions – even having the police burst in to search their home.’

  ‘That was when they lived with their mother,’ Carter reminded her. ‘They were in foster care when they found the body, or so Markby’s gardener says.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the gardener, Josh, the little girl’s brother. He was still a child who’d been trained from babyhood never to tell the authorities anything – even, if he had to say something, to lie. Now, twenty years later, while his co-conspirator, Dilys, is in prison, he suddenly speaks to Alan Markby. Whatever prompted that, it’s still not rock-solid evidence that Rebecca is buried in those woods. We don’t know he’s telling the truth. The local force will go through the motions and put the file away again.’ She glanced briefly across the room. ‘So, Malone is dining here tonight with his wife. This place is gaining a good reputation, so why is that strange? There is absolutely nothing to worry about.’

  * * *

  ‘The Rennies are in the bathroom cabinet,’ said Caroline Malone. She was sitting before the dressing-table mirror and applying moisturising lotion to her face. She was a tall, slender woman of the type the Pre-Raphaelite painters had liked. She had a long straight nose, clearly defined lips and a firm jaw. Her blonde hair was usually worn coiled into a knot at the nape of her neck. Before going to bed, she braided it into a single long plait.

  Without turning, she could see her husband in the edge of the mirror. He was in pyjamas and dressing gown, and he was scowling as he sifted through the small stack of paperbacks on his bedside cabinet. But it wasn’t the reading material on offer that had put him out of sorts, she was sure of that. He’d been like it during the entire drive home.

  ‘You’ve got indigestion?’ he asked, glancing towards her.

  ‘No, I’m fine, but you’re not. I’m assuming you ate something that disagreed with you tonight. I thought the food was OK, but I was careful what I ordered. You know that if you eat too much fried stuff, you get a bad stomach.’

  Her husband tossed the paperbacks aside. ‘I didn’t eat too much fried food. I’ve not got a bad stomach, and I’m not out of sorts.’

  ‘Like hell you’re not!’ she said crisply. ‘You turned all introverted and gloomy halfway through the meal, and you’re still brooding. If it’s not the food – what, then?’ She swivelled on the stool to face him squarely in the mirror.

  He hesitated and then sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘OK, if you must know, I had a bit of a shock at the pub. I saw someone there I met years ago.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go over and speak to him? Or was it a her? Did you have a falling out, whenever it was – years ago?’

  He was silent for a moment, then asked, ‘Do you remember Rebecca Hellington?’

  Whatever she’d expected him to say, she hadn’t expected that. Malone felt a spark of unworthy pleasure at seeing her face fall. She even frowned, before she remembered that it would cause lines on her forehead and consciously smoothed her brow. But Caroline was never at a loss for long. She quickly regained her composure.

  ‘Wasn’t she that girl who made a fuss at Nick’s party and went all weepy? I had to take her over to my parents’ place, and hide her in my bedroom. She became a sort of girlfriend of yours later, didn’t she? Then she went missing or something. I’m not surprised. I thought her seriously flaky.’

  ‘Yes, she went missing – and they never did find her.’ Defensively, he added, ‘She was only a sort of girlfriend, nothing serious, and not for very long. But when she disappeared, the police got excited about it. A Sergeant Carter interviewed me several times.’

  ‘I should think he spoke to loads of other people, not just to you!’ said Caro carelessly, stretching out her chin and studying her reflection critically for early signs of wrinkles.

  She’d not seen any signs of age yet. But if ever she did, her husband thought resentfully, she’d be off to see about getting a chin tuck or face lift, or whatever it was, immediately. He’d often wondered if the underlying reason why she’d never tolerated the possibility of them having children, was the fear of losing her figure. ‘We don’t need kids,’ she’d declared in the early years of their marriage. Later, the objection had been, ‘My cousin Nick has enough to go round. I don’t want to live in a cross between a playschool and a madhouse, even if you do!’ So, that had been that. Caroline always got what she wanted. Or, to turn the expression around, she didn’t bother with what she didn’t want. No more talk of children of their own. There was something about her vanity and self-absorption that was like a suit of mail. Sometimes, he envied it. Right now, it was really irritating.

  ‘That’s who was there tonight, Carter!’ he announced, almost in triumph, hurling a metaphorical javelin. He was pleased to see it found a chink in his wife’s armour.

  ‘Sure?’ she asked sharply, whirling round on the stool to face him directly.

  ‘Absolutely, not likely to forget him.’

  ‘I suppose it was to be expected, that they’d have interviewed you, when it all happened,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Could you tell them anything?’

  ‘Of course I couldn’t! Rebecca told me she was going home for the weekend, to a place called Bamford, in the Cotswolds somewhere. I thought that was where she’d gone. I told Carter that, more than once. He was an obtuse sort of guy, couldn’t seem to get it into his head. In the end, he accepted I wasn’t a suspect. Or I think he did, at least. It was hard to tell what he thought.’

  Caroline was watching him carefully with that slow, unsettling appraisal she adopted when deciding on whether or not to buy something: a dress, a shade of lipstick, an explanation. She was an interior designer by profession and if something didn’t match up, out it went. She was like that with people, too, as he’d discovered over the years. Perhaps she’d picked him because he suited some design she’d hatched for her life. Perhaps, he thought, one day he’d be discarded together with some old curtains and a carpet that was showing signs of wear.

  He was being unfair, he decided. He didn’t doubt she loved him; and he loved her. He found her exciting, truth to tell. She was watching his face, probably reading his mind.

  ‘So?’ she said at last.

  ‘So, tonight, at the pub, he was there. I’ve just told you! He was having dinner with a woman, a red-haired female.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ she persisted. ‘We’ve all of us changed over the years. You haven’t seen him since that time, have you? Perhaps the man in the pub just looked a bit like him.’

  ‘I told you. It was Carter!’ The anger crackled in his voice.

  It convinced her at last.

  ‘Did he see you?’ She was always practical.

  ‘Not sure, don’t think so.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, then, does it?’ Caroline decided.

  ‘Just gave me a shock, that’s all. Have you ever been interviewed by the police?’ Now he sounded sullen.

  ‘Of course I haven’t!’ She bridled, then added reluctantly, ‘Only by the traffic cops, that time I drove off the road coming home from the races.’ She rapped the glass surface of the dressing table irritably. ‘They put points on my licence, when it wasn’t anything serious. It didn’t involve any other car. No one was hurt.’

  Malone would have liked to retort that, although no one was hurt, Caroline shouldn’t have been behind the wheel. But he didn’t say it, because the reason she had been driving was that he had been drinking merrily in the hospitality tent, and so he wasn’t fit to drive. Unfortunately, in his own impaired state, he hadn’t realised at the time how much over the limit Car
oline had also been.

  So, he replied now, ‘Well, then, try to imagine being grilled by the police because they’re convinced you’re withholding vital information regarding a possible major crime. They have a way of looking at you as if they suspect you’re Jack the Ripper.’

  ‘Don’t brood on it!’ she advised him, and turned back to the mirror.

  It was no use her saying that. He’d think of nothing else for days. Even seeing Carter ‘off duty’ and dining with a lady friend failed to erase the youthful images of the policeman, etched into his memory. Malone could see him now as clearly as if the fellow sat in this bedroom, in that chair over there, an educated thug, a sort of inquisitorial machine with cold green eyes. He’d been undeniably frightening, and had shown an implacable determination to solve the case. Peter had spent twenty years resolutely forgetting the guy. But you don’t forget unpleasantness. You only bury it. Then, when you least expect it, it climbs up out of the grave, and back into your life. He shivered. Was Rebecca going to do that? Climb out of some unmarked grave, if she was dead? They didn’t know, did they? Nobody knew.

  Solve the case. Malone grimaced. That was whodunnit fiction-speak for you. Bring on literature’s finest sleuths. Bring on their hard-drinking, dishevelled television equivalents. Bring on Sherlock Holmes – or Tintin and Snowy, come to that – or any inspiration thrown up by the talents of the pen. They were all pallid, unimpressive wraiths compared with that guy, Carter, and the horrible reality. But Carter, for all he’d scared Peter witless at the time, hadn’t solved the mystery.

  Malone was sure Carter hadn’t forgotten it, either. But I’m not a scared student now, he told himself. I’m a successful, no, dammit, I’m a very successful man. I have nothing to worry about, just like Caroline says.

  His wife had finished at her vanity mirror and stood up, slipping off her wrap. Malone decided she looked thoughtful. She was probably wondering whether the old story would find its way back into the local news, and whether he – and, by association, his wife – might be mentioned. She had spent considerable care and many years building up a professional reputation. Hey! So had he! Neither of them wanted their names to appear in the popular press, even if only a passing mention.

  He stretched out a hand for the paperback he’d started reading the previous night. It was a whodunnit. On the cover, an artist had depicted a dark shadow looming over a sunlit landscape. Somehow, he didn’t fancy it now. He threw it back on the pile and switched out the bedside light.

  Chapter 6

  Jess was to be proved wrong. A decision was taken to make an exploratory dig in the spinney. The owner of the land, including the area of rough pasture alongside the wooded area, had turned out to be a Canadian descendant of the Brocket family, aged eighty-four, who’d never set eyes on the spot and had no desire to. He lived in Toronto and had to be reminded that he’d inherited this remnant of the family estate. Used to wide expanses of prairie, mountain and forest, he was especially disgusted when told the land in question amounted to no more than a few trees and a scrap of coarse grass and weeds. ‘No use to anyone!’ he opined. ‘If you want to dig it up, go ahead.’

  Josh went along with the police team on the first day to point out the spot where he and Dilys had stumbled on the body, as exactly as he could, given the length of time and the changes in the spinney. But Josh, though city born, had become a countryman and he knew about the lie of the land. On the second day one group of searchers gave a shout. Others hastened to the spot and gazed down at the disturbed earth and the long slender leg bones and partially uncovered ribcage, startling white against the black soil and leaf mould. Someone stooped and brushed away more earth where the head ought to be, and the empty eye sockets and open jaw stared back at them.

  Trevor Barker, called by the officer in charge of the diggers, in turn called upon Markby. The two men stood, side by side, and stared down at the now fully exposed skeleton. The body was laid out completely straight, as if by professional morticians, except that the head was slightly turned to one side and no one had closed the mouth at the time of death, so that the jaw hung open. A few clumps of what now looked like cotton threads clung to the skull: long, fair hair.

  This, then, thought Markby, was what he had been looking for twenty years earlier, without knowing it. He’d been seeking a missing girl. The likelihood that the hunt would end in the discovery of a body had always been at the back of his mind. That was all too often how it did end.

  Markby imagined that the dropped jaw was calling up a grotesque greeting to him. ‘Hello, where have you been? What took you so long?’

  Mentally, he replied, ‘I’m sorry. I would have liked to find you before this. I will now do all in my power to help those who must track down the person who put you there.’

  Barker expressed himself aloud quite mildly. ‘Well, I’ll be damned. It’s here!’

  He was, he explained to his wife later, flabbergasted.

  * * *

  Markby went home, told Meredith about finding the body, and they discussed it briefly. Then he went to bed, as anyone in any other line of work might do. But, of course, he wasn’t a police officer any longer, and he’d lost the knack of putting aside the day’s discoveries. Sleep was slow to come.

  In the early hours of the morning, he slipped out of bed and made a cautious descent of the staircase, because it was inclined to creak. He poured himself a modest whisky and took it into the kitchen, as that was the warmest room. In the cooling night air, the fabric of the house and the wood of the furniture around him settled, as if their joints were stiff, uttering a groan from time to time. There were other odd sounds: a slight rustling, a single sudden crack. Sometimes, it did seem as if voices whispered to him. What caused this illusion he had no idea – other than the fact that he sat at the scrubbed pine table in a house that was over a hundred and fifty years old, and it talked to him. In the company of those long gone, he thought about murder.

  When he’d been a younger man, setting out on his career, he had always known that dealing with unnatural deaths would be part and parcel of his work. Each and every death had come as a shock and had been distressing. He had learned to cope with that, as police officers do, but he had never allowed himself to become hardened to the many grisly and pitiful sights, because once that happened, you lost an essential part of your own humanity. You had always to feel pity. You had always to feel anger. What you did not allow yourself was to be swayed in your judgement by these emotions. So, he had never indulged in the ‘black humour’ that helped some officers deal with horror. Nor had he allowed any officer on his team to indulge in it within his hearing. If you can do nothing else for the dead, you can at least respect them.

  And hadn’t he met Meredith because of a murder? That young man, the one who kept the Siamese cats. He recalled other cases, too, after he’d met Meredith. The old family grave, opened to receive a new occupant in the very churchyard next door to this house – then still a vicarage – only to reveal a burial far too fresh. A body sprawled in a wine cellar. And the murders that appeared above all to be so ‘wrong’: the murders of the young.

  He drank the last of his whisky, rinsed the glass and set it, upside down, on the draining board. Then he quitted the kitchen and its ghostly company. At least, he hoped it was only that – and not mice.

  He managed to avoid the creaking stair tread, but when he slipped into bed, Meredith stirred alongside him and her voice asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. I couldn’t sleep.’

  There was an upheaval in the duvet as she turned towards him and he felt her hand on his shoulder. ‘Is it finding the bones of that girl?’

  ‘I suppose so. I’m out of the habit of dealing with murder cases.’ He put his hand over hers. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to become obsessed about it. I wish… I wish I could have found her twenty years ago.’

  ‘Twenty years ago, you didn’t know she was dead, not for sure. It wasn’t your case. It was Ian Carter’s.
He hadn’t asked you to look for a body, only to check if anyone had seen her in Bamford recently. No one had.’

  ‘Oh, someone had seen her, more than one person. Josh and young Dilys saw her – and whoever buried her.’

  After a moment she said, ‘You didn’t fail. Carter and – what was his boss’s name?

  ‘Parry, elderly fellow. He was grey-haired, getting near retirement, nice enough old boy. He died several years ago.’

  ‘It was Carter’s failure, then, and Parry’s.’ Then she added, ‘And her killer’s, it was his failure, too.’

  Surprised, he asked, ‘Oh? Why?’

  ‘Didn’t mean her to be found, did he?’

  * * *

  The post-mortem examination quickly established the body to be female and that of a woman of about twenty. Subsequent DNA tests confirmed it as that of Rebecca Hellington.

  But Markby had known, from the first sight of the remains, that they would be Rebecca’s. They all knew it.

  Unfortunately, the examination of the bones would not make it immediately possible to pinpoint the cause of death.

  Chapter 7

  ‘It’s very good of you to agree to join us, Alan,’ the Assistant Chief Constable said. ‘And to come early. I’d like a quick private chat before the others get here.’ This speech was accompanied by a hearty shake of the hand.

  ‘I’m listening,’ Markby said courteously, disengaging his mangled fingers.

  The ACC drummed his fingers on his desk. He was a pink-faced, plump man with small eyes and a snub nose. He was usually smiling, so that he often resembled a kindly pig. He wasn’t smiling now.

  ‘You and Superintendent Carter are old acquaintances, aren’t you? I am assuming you met him at the time, when you were handling the case at this end of things, and he was hunting around the girl’s college, interviewing her friends, her boyfriend, trying to learn anything that might explain where she’d got to. Twenty years ago, of course, now.’ He sighed. ‘This is going to be a tricky one, Alan. But you don’t need me to tell you that.’