Mud, Muck and Dead Things Read online

  So when he did turn round and said, ‘Good morning,’ politely enough, she returned his greeting fairly stiffly.

  She thought he looked puzzled, just very briefly, and realised that she was glaring at him. She managed to assume a neutral expression.

  ‘Superintendent Carter? I – we’re very pleased to see you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘and you’re Inspector Jessica Campbell. It’s nice to meet you.’

  He held out his hand and Jess shook it. He knew how to shake hands with women, she noted. He neither mangled your fingers in a manly grip nor balanced your hand in his palm as if it were a Fabergé egg.

  Pleasantries satisfactorily over, then. But he looked younger, when you saw his face, than the grey hair suggested, probably only in his mid-forties. Some people went grey early. Jess held up the folder in her hand. ‘Sergeant Morton has just given me this. You’ll have been told we have a new murder case?’

  ‘Yes, and that’s relevant, I take it?’ He nodded at the folder. He was still speaking calmly enough but there was a definite awkwardness in the air. They were like strangers at some particularly chilly drinks party, standing around trying to find something to say.

  Briefly Jess’s mind went to Alan Markby, who’d been her senior officer in her previous job. She’d thought Markby an imposing figure when they’d met but he’d gone out of his way to put her at her ease. This man, she decided quickly, didn’t have Markby’s skills with people. The nicely judged handshake had been misleading. But then, it was Carter’s first day. It wasn’t a question, as it had been when Markby met her, of the senior man interviewing a new member of his team. Now the senior man was new and, in a curious reversal of roles, almost being interviewed, certainly judged, by those already here.

  She pulled herself together and replied briskly. ‘Yessir. The body is that of an unidentified young woman. It was found by a man named Eli Smith who owns Cricket Farm, where the deceased was discovered in a disused cowshed.’

  ‘Disused?’ He twitched an eyebrow.

  ‘Smith doesn’t farm there any more. He still owns the land and uses the yard for a scrap-dealing business. He’s a sort of scavenger. When we got out there on Friday his lorry was laden up with all kinds of metal junk, old cookers and so on. He lives nearby but not at the farm. The old house there is boarded up.’ She held up the folder. ‘This is why. He used to live and farm there with his parents and brother. Then, twenty-seven years ago, the brother took a shotgun and shot dead both parents. Eli wasn’t there at the time. He was attending a cattle market. Plenty of witnesses saw him there. Perhaps he was lucky or the brother, Nathan, might have shot him too.’

  ‘So, murder has struck three times at the farm? A rather grisly coincidence. What sort of person is Smith?’

  ‘He’s a funny old chap,’ Jess told him. ‘He must be in his mid to late sixties. He told us that he went to the farm to drop off his load of scrap, so his discovery of the body was purely chance. But I spoke to a woman called Penny Gower on Saturday morning. She runs a livery stables and riding school further down the hill from the farm. She saw a strange Mercedes car parked between the farm and her stables, pulled off the road, on Friday afternoon. The driver was crouched down inside it as she drove past, as if he didn’t want to be seen. She mentioned this to a friend, a man called Andrew Ferris, who was at the stables. He decided to call up Eli on his mobile because he thought it might just be dodgy. That’s what took Smith out there, about an hour later, to check over his premises. He did have a load of scrap too, so he was killing two birds with one stone. But he didn’t mention a phone call from Ferris when we interviewed him. I put this to Gower and Ferris. They both said that would be “Eli’s way” and seemed to find it amusing.’

  She tapped the folder. ‘This does go a long way to explaining that and some of the things Smith did say. The place holds a terrible memory. He was very upset about the body being on his property, and even more distressed that we’d be unbarring the abandoned house and going inside. But then, with a history of murder there, he’d know people might think yet another body an odd coincidence. He expressed worry about what the neighbours would say. Although, as Phil Morton pointed out, he doesn’t have any neighbours. He lives about three quarters of a mile away in an isolated cottage. Oh, and he’s illiterate.’

  ‘A likely suspect?’ Carter asked in that same calm way.

  ‘Doubt it,’ said Jess firmly, dismissing her own recent conjectures. ‘He’d put her somewhere else, wouldn’t he? Not so near his own property, especially not in his cowshed. There’s plenty of land. He could have dumped her body anywhere. He could have buried her in one of the fields. No one would have known.’

  ‘So could anyone else,’ Carter said.

  She realised he was watching her closely as she spoke. His eyes, she thought, were hazel and the look in them cool. It spooked her almost as much as the first sight of him standing by the window had done.

  ‘Yes, it’s strange that the murderer should dump the victim in the cowshed,’ she agreed. ‘Unless, of course, he killed her there and just abandoned her body.’

  ‘It would still have been more sensible to move her. If the yard is used for any kind of business, the likelihood of someone stopping by would mean an increased chance of discovery.’

  There was a silence. ‘You’re saying,’ Jess said slowly, ‘that the body was left there to be found?’ She frowned. ‘Funny, Eli Smith said that it had been left “on purpose”. But he meant, I thought, on purpose to get at him. Someone who knew about the earlier murders, and holds some grudge against Smith.’

  ‘And have you checked that? Someone with a grudge against Smith?’

  There was something unsettling about the level expression and the unwavering calm tone.

  ‘We’ll talk to him again. But no, as yet we haven’t. I have spoken to a local woman, Selina Foscott, who was a child at the time of the farm murders and remembers the Smith family as loners. Isn’t it unlikely someone would go to the length of killing a young woman just to embarrass Smith? Besides,’ Jess went on, ignoring a faint twitch of the other’s eyebrows, ‘there is another possible suspect.’

  ‘The driver of the parked Mercedes?’

  ‘Yes, he was spotted again very shortly after the first sighting. That is to say, Selina Foscott was driving out of the stables on to the road when a silver-grey Mercedes shot across her bows. She just avoided a collision.’

  ‘What are we doing about finding this Mercedes driver who was so shy?’

  ‘We’ not ‘you’. Jess appreciated that.

  ‘Phil Morton’s got on to traffic division, sir, in case a speed camera picked him up – and we do have a scraping of metallic silver-grey paint from the gatepost at the farm, so it looks as though our man was there that afternoon. Forensics will confirm if the paint comes from a Mercedes. He’s a definite suspect.’

  ‘When’s the pathologist doing the post-mortem?’ Carter asked suddenly.

  Blast! She’d forgotten. Jess felt herself flush. ‘At half-past nine this morning, sir, so…’ She consulted her wristwatch. ‘He’s starting about now. Sergeant Morton has gone down there to attend. I know you wanted to see everyone at ten, but now Morton’s out and we have two on leave and one sick—’

  ‘Oh, scrap the ten o’clock briefing,’ Carter interrupted. ‘I’ll see everyone who is here when Morton gets back. I’m interested to see Cricket Farm and where the body was found. Could you drive me out there, do you think?’

  ‘What, now?’ Jess asked.

  ‘Yes, now,’ he said. ‘Unless you have something more urgent to do?’

  ‘Um, no,’ said Jess, stuffing the report on the Smith killings into the mini rucksack she carried everywhere in lieu of a shoulderbag. ‘That is, I’ll be happy to show you the scene of the crime, sir. I’ll see if I can find the keys to the house. Phil Morton had them. They might be in his desk.’

  ‘Good, and on the way out there, you can tell me anything else I should know.’

/>   Whatever that meant.

  * * *

  Cricket Farm appeared abandoned but plenty of signs of the activity that had taken place there over the weekend remained. Blue and white tape still fluttered across the entrance. There was no man on duty guarding the spot so presumably the technical boys had finished. Sightseers might come later, drawn to the scene by gruesome curiosity, but as yet they hadn’t found their way to this fairly remote place.

  Jess and Carter ducked under the tape and she showed him the cowshed where the body had been found. A roughly chalked outline on the dirty floor could still be made out, but it was already partly obliterated. No more rain had fallen but the next time it did, it would blow in here and the chalk markings, the last sign of the dead girl’s presence here, would disappear for good.

  ‘No idea who she is, then?’ Carter asked, staring down at the spot.

  ‘Not yet. No one of that description has been reported missing. I would have thought she was a local girl, out here. It’s a bit far from town. On the other hand she was quite smartly dressed in a casual way. A woman’s pink jacket, presumably hers, was thrown over the body and it looks new. I got the impression from the way she was dressed that she’d gone out planning to meet someone.’

  ‘A man?’ Carter turned his head and surveyed her. She realised with shock that his eyes, which she’d thought hazel in the artificial glare of her office, were actually green in this light.

  ‘A man, possibly. Or she might have planned to go out with a girlfriend on a shopping spree or to take in a film.’

  They moved out into the yard. Carter nodded towards the house. ‘What about in there?’

  ‘I don’t know that they found anything, sir. Sergeant Morton didn’t mention it but I only spoke to him briefly this morning before he dashed off to the morgue.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Carter. ‘Well, we’ll have a conference later. Now we’re here, we might as well take a look.’ He set off towards the sombre bulk of the building and after a moment’s hesitation Jess followed him.

  The house seemed to loom even more unwelcomingly as they neared it. The front door, with its coat of faded peeling brown paint, had been unboarded as had two of the downstairs windows. Splintered holes in the frames showed where the boards had been wrenched off. Upstairs the boards remained in place but didn’t cover the windows completely.

  Jess took out the bunch of keys she’d found in Morton’s desk, helpfully tagged with a small label in Phil’s hand reading ‘Cricket Farm’. A second attempt found the right key and the door creaked open. They went in.

  The first thing to strike Jess was the overpowering odour of damp, dust and decay. It swept over her in what the Victorians would have called a miasma, filling her nostrils, clinging to her skin and infesting her hair and clothing. She would smell of this house for the rest of the morning, if not for the rest of the day. When she got out of here the first thing she’d want to do would be shower and change. But she’d have to wait until this evening for that.

  Carter made no comment but he coughed and put his hand over his mouth and nose.

  Only the light from the open front door illuminated the place and the gloom wasn’t helped by the hallway’s ancient wallpaper patterned with brown roses. Even new it wouldn’t have been very attractive. Now great strips of it had peeled off in the damp atmosphere and hung in unsightly strands like skin after a bad attack of sunburn. On the plaster behind, black mould had formed. They looked into the two small rooms to either side of the hallway, those with the unboarded windows looking out on to the yard. One appeared to have been the family sitting room and contained a rotting three-piece suite and a faded carpet, freshly marked with mud from the recent intrusion. There was a hole in the seat of one of the armchairs. It looked as if something had gnawed its way into the horsehair stuffing, which had been pulled out and lay scattered around like tangled twine, black and shiny.

  A rodent’s nest, thought Jess with a shudder. Let’s hope it’s abandoned.

  Above the fireplace hung a discoloured mirror. Two china vases, probably of Edwardian date, stood on the mantelshelf, veiled in cobwebs. Between them a silent clock waited in vain for a hand to rewind it. It had stopped, she noticed, at ten minutes past four; in a creepy coincidence about the time Selina had had her near-miss with the silver Mercedes.

  The other room had been a dining room with a square oak table, a thick layer of ancient dust forming a dull grey tablecloth, and four high-backed chairs. Two more matching chairs stood against the wall so it must be possible to extend the table. Again all appeared to date from the period just before the First World War. There were two lithographs on the wall, faded and yellowed. The nearer one showed two female figures in vaguely antique draperies, one veiled. They were standing by a fork in the road. The veiled one was gesturing to the right-hand track. The other, apparently younger one, pressed one hand to her breast and with the other was pointing down the same right-hand path. Jess peered at the wording underneath.

  ‘“Ruth and Naomi”,’ she read out. ‘“Whither thou goest I too will go.”’

  She glanced across at the companion picture on the other side of the room. It appeared to have a similar Biblical subject.

  ‘They never bought anything new,’ said Carter unexpectedly. ‘The grandparents must have farmed here. Perhaps the great-grandparents did, and last of all the parents. Eli, is he called, the present owner? Eli and his brother would have farmed here after them, had everything gone according to plan.’

  And if Nathan Smith hadn’t put an end to it all with a double blast of a shotgun.

  By common consent they moved out of the room and proceeded to a long wide kitchen that ran across the back of the house. Off it a small stone washhouse contained a mangle, to operate which you’d have needed the strength of a navvy, and a large grey-enamelled cylinder perched on claw feet.

  ‘A copper,’ said Carter, taking off the lid and peering inside. ‘I don’t mean one of us! I mean, for boiling the white linen. This must be sixty years old at least. They never got round to buying a washing machine.’

  They moved back into the kitchen. Plates on a wall rack were covered in dust. Saucepans hung, similarly begrimed, from hooks. A yellowed calendar pinned to the wall was twenty-seven years out of date. Thick cobwebs hung across the window like net curtains but the spiders had long departed. In the corner stood two pairs of gumboots caked in long-dried mud and a tatty old mackintosh hung behind the door.

  ‘Eli just locked the place up, after the original investigations had finished, and left,’ said Jess wonderingly. ‘He simply walked out leaving it all exactly as it was. It’s like Miss Havisham’s house in Great Expectations.’

  Carter looked at her curiously. ‘Have you read the book? Or just seen the film?’

  ‘Both,’ said Jess, nettled. ‘I’ve got an English degree.’

  ‘I’ve only ever seen the film,’ said Carter, unperturbed. ‘But I was a botantist.’

  A botanist! For a moment Jess almost fell into the trap of asking what on earth had drawn a man with an interest in field studies into police work. But, as she knew herself, men and women joined the police force for all kinds of reasons. She’d had hers. Carter had had his. What would have been the alternative for him? Schoolmastering? Still, she wondered that he hadn’t gone into forensics.

  Carter was searching about on the floor and peering at the surface of the pine table. ‘Is this where it happened? Here? Did one of the brothers blast his parents into oblivion in this room?’

  ‘Nathan was sitting in the kitchen,’ Jess told him, ‘when Eli came back from the market. The shotgun was on the table here. The parents were dead but I’m not sure if he shot them in here. Perhaps it was out in the yard. Let me take a look at the report Phil Morton printed out for me.’ She pulled it out of the bag and took it to the cobwebby window for the little light admitted to fall on the printed page. ‘Mr Smith senior was killed in the – oh, in here!’ She looked up and met Carter’s eyes. Then she looked
down at the pine table he’d been studying.

  Beneath the dust, were those spots of dried blood?

  Jess took a deep breath. ‘The mother was killed through there in the washhouse. The bodies hadn’t been moved, just lay where they fell.’

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Carter asked unexpectedly and accompanied his question with a slight smile, as if to indicate he wasn’t serious.

  But if Superintendent Carter asked you a question, Jess had already decided, it was because he wanted to know your thoughts.

  ‘If I were to start believing,’ she replied, ‘it might be in this kitchen. It’s not hard to imagine Nathan sitting here.’ She tapped the back of a chair. ‘And Eli over there by the door. Only Eli’s not dead, of course.’

  But he is, she thought suddenly. In his own way Eli died the day he came home and found Nathan sitting here covered in their parents’ blood. This empty house was Eli’s tomb. Oh, his physical body walked around out there. His spirit had been left here, trapped, mummified with all the other mouldering dusty remains.

  Carter smiled again but only nodded.

  They climbed the creaking staircase to the first floor. Up here there was only the light seeping through the gaps between the boards across the windows; and an occasional brighter patch where a board had loosened and dropped off altogether. An unpleasant acrid odour pervaded the air. Carter took a small torch from his pocket and the beam danced around them. It illuminated a double bed decked with mouldering sheets and rotting satin eiderdown; a dressing table thick with dust but still bearing a glass tray and matching cut-glass pots; a dressing gown hanging on the back of a door, its tasselled belt trailing on the floor. Nearby lay a long-dead and desiccated mouse.

  Jess uttered a small exclamation and pointed at the wall. Carter swung the beam of the torch back to the spot and it showed up the paler oblong on the darkened wallpaper.