Mud, Muck and Dead Things Read online

  ‘But?’ she asked. ‘There has to be something else. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Dead sure of it,’ said Morton, oblivious of the unfortunate turn of phrase. ‘But he won’t say. He’s the sort of old chap who keeps what he considers his business to himself. He’s told us what we need to know, in his opinion, and that’s that.’

  ‘Look him up on the computer,’ said Jess. ‘And while you’re about it, enter the name of this place, Cricket Farm, as well, and see if police records throw anything at us.’

  Phil raised his eyebrows and looked round the yard. ‘Receiving stolen goods?’ he hazarded.

  ‘Not necessarily. More likely driving without a current tax disc or any insurance. I’m not suggesting he’s public enemy number one. But he and the police have crossed paths before, I’m sure of that. We make him very jumpy.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ said Phil, who, all in all, was not having a good day, ‘he isn’t going to be much use to us. They’re very close in the country. Don’t like you to know their business. Do you reckon he’s on the level about not being able to write his name?’

  Jess said patiently, ‘There may be any number of reasons why he can’t write. He must be going on sixty or more. In his day, dyslexia was seldom diagnosed. That could be one reason. Or he may have missed a lot of schooling for some cause or other. Needed here to work on the farm? We don’t know. He’s illiterate, but that certainly doesn’t mean stupid. Eccentric maybe and, I agree, not talkative about his business. Once he’s accepted we don’t care where he gets his old cookers and washers from, he might be more chatty.’

  ‘Hey!’ exclaimed Morton. ‘If he can’t write, he probably can’t read. How is he going to read his statement before he makes his mark?’

  ‘You should know the drill, Phil. You read it through aloud to him and put a declaration at the bottom that you’ve done so – and also that you were the person who took the statement. You add a note that he’s illiterate and then you sign it, with date and place.’

  ‘He wants to know if he can go. I got his home address off him. He lives in that direction.’ Morton pointed away up the hill. ‘It’s just before the crossroads, he says, off down a dirt track on the right, a cottage on its own.’

  ‘I want a word with him first,’ Jess said.

  Eli watched her approach, an expression of deep mistrust on his face.

  ‘Mr Smith,’ she said firmly, anticipating some opposition, ‘We’ll need to go into the farmhouse.’

  ‘Whaffor?’ demanded Eli, thrusting out his jaw and blinking rapidly. ‘The girl isn’t in there. She’s in my cowshed. What’s the house got to do with anything?’

  ‘We have to search all areas of a crime scene.’

  These words had an unexpected effect on Smith. Beneath the weather-beaten tan of his skin, she was sure he blanched. He looked panic-stricken.

  ‘You seen it,’ he croaked. ‘You seen all you need to see. You seen my yard and my cowshed and you can see all you need of the house from here.’

  ‘We haven’t seen inside it. We have to do that, Mr Smith. We’ll be very careful. We won’t damage anything.’

  ‘No, no,’ Eli burst out, waving his arms wildly. ‘It’s boarded up. No one’s been in there since – no one’s been in there for nigh on thirty years.’

  ‘It certainly appears to be boarded up,’ Jess agreed patiently. ‘But perhaps someone has found a way in and managed to conceal it.’ Eli looked terrified. ‘So I hope you understand we have to enter.’

  ‘Locked,’ said Eli unhappily. ‘Even if you lever the boards off, you can’t get in. No one could. If they did, I’d see it. No one has. It’s locked, it’s all locked.’

  ‘Have you the keys?’

  ‘I got ‘em,’ Eli admitted sullenly after a pause during which he chewed at his lower lip and studied Jess. He was probably wondering if a denial would thwart the police. He’d decided rightly it wouldn’t. They’d break down the door. ‘They’re back at my place.’

  ‘Then Sergeant Morton will go with you now and collect them.’

  Eli didn’t move.

  ‘All right, Mr Smith?’ Jess frowned. The old fellow was looking more than worried. He looked ill. Pearls of sweat had gathered on his forehead. She wasn’t sure if he feared what they might find in the house or if some other reason inspired his distress. She hoped he wasn’t working up to a heart attack. Gently she asked, ‘What’s the trouble, Mr Smith?’

  He leaned forward as one about to impart a confidence.

  ‘What are they going to say about it all?’ he asked in a hoarse whisper. ‘They won’t like it.’

  ‘Who are they?’ Jess asked.

  Eli blinked and rallied. He adopted something of his former determined stance. ‘The neighbours,’ he said. ‘Terrible ones for gossip, the neighbours.’

  With that he turned, stomped off to his lorry and climbed into the cab.

  ‘Follow him down to his cottage and get the keys, Phil,’ Jess said. ‘Don’t ask him any more questions just now. He’s in a bit of a state and he’s elderly. But don’t let him pretend he can’t find those keys or anything like that. He does seem worried about his neighbours.’

  ‘Neighbours?’ Morton stared at her incredulously and indicated the dripping trees and empty fields around them. ‘What’s the silly old fool on about? He hasn’t got any ruddy neighbours.’

  Chapter 4

  Lucas was at home. Normally, walking into the gracious late-Georgian terraced house he owned in Cheltenham filled him with the pride inspired by a trophy possession. It stood in a terrace of white or pastel-washed others. Its tall sash windows that had once gazed out on carriages, when Cheltenham had been a fashionable spa town, now rattled to the passing motor traffic. But it kept its air of superiority, of quality.

  Lucas appreciated that. He’d started from nothing, with no advantages, and worked his way up, as he liked to tell new acquaintances. Everything he had, he’d got for himself. Besides this house, he also owned a small flat in London’s Docklands. But he only used that as a pied-à-terre, somewhere to base his activities when business called him to the capital. The flat was ‘new money’ and that, for all its glitter and power, couldn’t shake off the whispered reproach of being ‘flash’.

  Not so this house. True, it had been a little run-down when he’d bought it, five years earlier, but it had still kept an aura of being a dowager ‘in reduced circumstances’. Because of its shabby state and antiquated fittings he’d acquired it at a very reasonable price. Since then he’d spent a small fortune renovating it and furnishing it. The cost had included the services of a very expensive interior designer. At first, Lucas hadn’t been happy with the designer’s choice of pale blues and yellows as a décor. It had seemed a bit too feminine. But now he saw that the designer had been right. The colour scheme set off the lofty ceilings, the sculpted cornices and ceiling roses and Lucas’s own collection of period furniture.

  Not that too many people saw the interior of Lucas’s house. He lived here alone. He’d been married once, early on, as a very young man. It hadn’t lasted long and he’d made up his mind that marriage wasn’t for him. Apart from anything else, any divorce now would cost him millions.

  Of course there were women in his life. He kept a legendary ‘little black book’ in which he recorded the telephone numbers of several available lovelies whom he could squire around London, as necessary. All of them knew they were just a number in his book, but when Lucas took them out, he spent money freely and if they were ‘very good girls’, they generally got an expensive present as well. It was a business arrangement, like any other in Lucas’s life. The girls were happy enough. When one of them dropped out, he replaced her number with another. High-class tarts really, but exclusive enough to escape the derogatory description. They were all ‘models’ or ‘actresses’. It was to his credit that he maintained a genuine sort of friendship with the girls. All of them thought him ‘a great guy’. He actually liked them. He just wasn’t going to enter
into any permanent relationship with any of them.

  There were also, now and again, affairs with married women, bored rich women with time on their hands, who liked a bit of an adventure. They knew Lucas wouldn’t be indiscreet or boast. He knew they were just having fun. He – and they – liked the challenge, the frisson of risk. He had always trusted them not to be foolish and until now that trust had been repaid. But there was always a first time…

  As for men, most thought Lucas ‘a good chap’. Except for those who had crossed him and they growled about ‘that sod Lucas Burton’. Lucas didn’t take kindly to being crossed and usually got his own back. Otherwise, he was a man of his word, kept his wits about him and didn’t give others the chance to put one over on him. Thus he had a trick of staying on civil terms even with those he’d outmanoeuvred in deals, so there weren’t too many malcontents. Lucas, they all agreed, could turn on the charm ‘in bucketfuls’. Even the few who cursed his name conceded that, though they said it sourly.

  Lucas wasn’t feeling very charming at the moment and walking into the house had failed to lift his spirits as it usually did. He felt bloody awful. He’d washed the mud off the Mercedes in the lock-up garage he rented. (The drawback of these period properties was that they had no garages of their own.) He’d also cleaned his shoes in the garage and would get rid of them as soon as possible. He pulled them off now and glowered at them; no longer expensive acquisitions but potential stool pigeons. That sort of farm dirt was traceable and the minutest speck would tell the police, if they ever got to him, that the car had been at Cricket Farm. He couldn’t dispose of the Merc so easily, nor risk taking it, in its spattered state, to the car wash where it would attract notice and comment. So he’d done the most thorough job he could but knew forensic examination could still find something.

  On his way home, he’d disposed of the muddy rags and his soiled handkerchief in a convenient skip. But he had a third problem. To his dismay, when cleaning up the car, he’d found a scratch on the left wing mirror. It wasn’t a big scratch but it was in a highly visible spot. He wasn’t altogether sure where he’d done the damage. It might have been in that damn farmyard or it might have been just after he’d driven off in a panic and pulled into the entry to that field to make his phone call. He hoped he’d scraped the wing mirror there on the crumbling drystone wall. He’d been in such a state he hadn’t noticed. If he’d scraped against something at the farmyard, that would be a much more serious matter. It was a trace left at the scene of the crime.

  ‘Scene of the crime!’ muttered Lucas aloud, as he splashed whisky into a tumbler. Well, that’s what the plods would call it when they got around to finding it. Sooner or later they would do that. The later, the better. But it was too much to hope the body would never be discovered. For a few mad minutes, when parked by that field, he’d allowed himself to be optimistic. But he was a realist. Sooner or later someone would go to the farm.

  He’d have to deal with the scratch himself. He couldn’t take the car into the usual place for maintenance. They knew him and would remember. Nor could he phone one of those fellows who came to your house and fixed up minor scratches. He’d have to do it himself. But heck, as a teenager he’d patched up a succession of old bangers. He’d do it first thing tomorrow. They wouldn’t get to him, not if he did a proper job on cleaning and repair. Why the hell should they? Only if the other talked … that was another thing he had to see to tonight. Unlike the scratch, Lucas couldn’t leave that job until the morning.

  He drifted out into the kitchen, glass in hand. Lucas didn’t cook, apart from making toast in the morning. He either phoned out for a home-delivery takeaway service to bring him something or he went out to eat. He didn’t want to make any human contact tonight because he was agitated and someone might spot it. Nor did he feel hungry but he did feel sick. He should eat something.

  He looked fruitlessly in the as-good-as-empty cupboards, containing only the scant necessities for his breakfast: the marmalade, coffee and tea, an ancient opened packet of sugar that had already lasted six months, a half-eaten packet of cornflakes and, for some reason, a tin of sardines. He couldn’t remember buying the sardines. His fridge was equally devoid of anything except butter and milk, and half a dozen cans of lager. Why the hell wasn’t there any cheese? Everyone else had cheese in their fridges.

  For the first time, and with a real shock, it struck him how pitiful these oddments of grocery must look. He had always thought of himself as a man who didn’t bother with domesticity. Now he had a sudden unwelcome vision of himself as an ageing singleton, no family, no wife or partner, no one who gave a damn, really. Not even the complaisant girlfriends. They didn’t care. Once that absence of commitments had appeared freedom. Now it made him look – could it be – like a loser? He pushed the thought away. He wasn’t himself. Who the hell would be after stumbling over a corpse?

  Eventually he ran to earth a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits his cleaner must have put there to have with her endless cups of tea. She came three times a week and hardly had anything to do. Fortunately she wasn’t due to come again until Monday. Perhaps it was she who’d bought the sardines. If so, he couldn’t imagine why.

  Lucas knocked back the whisky, made a large pot of coffee and retired with it and the chocolate digestives to his study, to plan what he should do. He needed a clear head in order to think.

  Now he felt more normal, he could contact the person he’d arranged to meet – and had so urgently had to put off. That relationship was now definitely over. The other person might not be agreeable at first but would see sense; Lucas would make sure of it. Besides, the more he thought about it, the more he disliked the apparent ‘coincidence’. Of all the places for there to be a dead body (a dead body, a human one, just lying there…) it had been waiting for him where they’d agreed to meet.

  No, no, coincidences happened in films and in books. They happened in real life too, but he had to make certain. Could it be that he was the victim of some malicious practical joke? Had one of the people he’d outmanoeuvred in a business deal failed to be won over by his proverbial charm? Was this someone’s idea of revenge?

  Well, if he had been set up, he wanted to know who’d done it. And that person would find he was dealing with ‘the other Lucas’, the one who lacked all charm, the street-fighter he’d once been.

  He didn’t believe the person he’d been going to meet had done the dirty on him, because there’d be no reason for it. But someone else, who’d known of the proposed meeting; that was the most likely. Damn it, he’d sworn the other to secrecy and had thought they were of a mind on it. It was in both their interests. Surely no third party…

  He took out his mobile phone, scrolled down the list of names in the address book, and pressed a number.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said briskly when the call was answered. ‘Are you alone? Then listen. Our association is over. Yes, over! There was a dead body at that farm. No, I’m not bloody drunk! Why the hell did you pick that place? I walked into some sort of a barn and there was a stiff. Yes, I’m sure! How should I know who it was? Sooner or later it will be found and the cops will be all over the place. I never went there, all right? You and I never agreed to meet there. That’s the story and the way it stays. We’re merely acquaintances with no personal history. Yes, that’s what I said, just acquaintances; and we’re going to stay that way…’

  The person at the other end of the call broke in with vigorous protest.

  ‘Shut up!’ snapped Lucas. ‘Now then, I wouldn’t like to think I’d been set up…’

  More vigorous protest.

  Lucas overrode it. ‘All right, I’m not accusing you! But if not you then who was it? Have you blabbed? Well, have you said anything? Let slip some hint, left some piece of paper lying around with my name or phone number on it, or the name of that blasted farm? Has anyone had a chance to overhear when we’ve been talking on the phone?’

  A pithy response to this.

  ‘Well,’
said Lucas. ‘I don’t like coincidences and I don’t like being dropped in it. I do think I was set up – perhaps we both were – and I want to know why and by whom! You can take it from me, I’ll find out.’

  * * *

  When Jess got home late on Friday evening, a crumpled envelope with an unfamiliar stamp greeted her on the mat just inside her door. She stooped to pick it up with surprise and pleasure. Simon had found time to write. Letters from her twin were few and far between. He was a doctor working for a medical charity in various world hotspots. The areas he found himself in were remote and dangerous, communications uncertain and vulnerable. He had no free time. So this letter, scribbled at night probably by the light of an oil lamp, was a rarity.

  She tucked it in her pocket to be read at leisure and savoured later, and back-heeled the door closed behind her.

  Her flat was small but it suited her because, for one thing, it was low maintenance. Something she didn’t have time (or the inclination) for was vacuum cleaning and dusting. On the other hand, she was by nature tidy and disliked living in a tip. So the flat was carefully furnished with essential pieces only and no ornaments except a framed family photo taken when she and Simon had been about twelve, in the garden of a rented holiday cottage in Cornwall.

  The pair of them, their red hair glinting in the sunshine, grinned at the camera. Jess had both arms wrapped round the neck of the family Labrador. They had always taken him with then because no one could accept putting him into kennels. Not until he had gone to dog heaven, accompanied by a funeral elegy over his grave in their back garden, spoken by their father, had the family ventured abroad on holiday. It didn’t mean they were untravelled. Her father had been in the Army and when she was a small child they’d all lived for a time on a NATO base in Germany. It was another reason, she supposed, that her parents had felt no need to brave the airports or ferries at holiday time. Perhaps it was also the reason both she and Simon had chosen unsettled adult lives. Simon did more travelling than she did but a CID officer hardly worked nine to five. Like today, the unexpected was always ready to pounce.