Cause of Death (9 page)

‘It fits with what we know,' he said. ‘You remember that kerfuffle off the Welsh coast a couple of months back?'

Mac nodded. Friends and ex-colleagues of his had been involved in what turned out to be a complex investigation into arms deals. There'd been very little proper reporting regarding what had actually gone on and even official channels had been cagey, but so far as Mac had understood it, some government-backed agency had been mixed up in illegal dealing. ‘Power vacuum?' he asked

Kendall nodded. ‘From what we can gather a couple of key players were removed from operations. One we know is dead, the other we're not so sure about but he's off the radar anyway. There have been rumours about another big player moving in to fill the void and of a possible turf war. Nothing concrete, you understand. But it's possible Haines and our old friend Vashinsky – remember him? – are planning on pooling their resources.' He frowned.

Mac asked, ‘Problems?'

‘Problems in that we can't get access to the information we need. A lot of it's in a file labelled National Security and we humble policeman can't be trusted with the likes of that. As a result we're working blind. We know something big went on. We can guess that big business – of the so-called legitimate kind – and government agencies – likewise – got themselves entangled with the out and out illegal, and that whatever happened has led to a major reshuffle of the key players. We are aware of at least two organizations manoeuvring for position and our intel on the financial side is that very large sums of money are being moved around. We can only track them so far; the individual amounts are small and legal, but the number of transactions is through the roof. We didn't know about Haines being involved, not for certain, though his name came up in a report about a month ago.'

‘In connection with?'

‘An immigration issue. Not him, but one of his known employees. Two days later said employee turns up dead in a Birmingham canal.'

Mac frowned. ‘You think Haines was responsible?'

Kendall shrugged. ‘Our Mr Haines has always run legitimate businesses alongside his nefarious ones. We know he launders money through the legit side, but we've not been able to get enough evidence of how. Haines is a tax exile, lives abroad for nine months of the year and uses that boat of his like a floating home the rest of the time. His official address is a town house in Lichtenstein from which he controls his legitimate business interests, one of which is a diamond importer based in Birmingham and which this dead man, Joseph Meinen, worked for.'

‘You said an immigration issue?'

‘Not with Meinen. He's an EU national, living and working here quite legitimately. He'd applied to bring in a woman he claimed to be his Filipino wife. On the face of it everything seemed straightforward, but immigration did some digging and discovered this was the third potential Mrs Meinen and he'd not bothered to divorce either of the first two. They dug deeper still and twelve arrests were made. Meinen was already dead by the time they knocked on his door.'

‘Haines found out?'

‘Looks that way, and we both know he's not a man who likes the idea of being cut out of the profits or, for that matter, anyone that might draw unwanted attention.'

‘I'd have thought a body in the canal would do that anyway.'

‘Well, you would, except that it's down as a tragic accident. Meinen had been drinking heavily in one of the canalside clubs. He left, walked along the towpath, slipped and fell and hit his head. Drowned because he'd either been knocked unconscious or was too drunk to pull himself out. The inquest approved a narrative verdict. No case to answer.'

Mac absorbed this. ‘The one thing that puzzles me,' he said, ‘is why should Haines turn up here now? What requires his personal attention?'

‘Now that,' Kendall said, ‘is the question.'

They tossed ideas back and forth for a few minutes more and then Kendall took his leave with the promise to keep Mac informed; Mac, in return, promised to keep an eye on Stan Holden. As he drove away he could not help but ask himself why he had refrained from mentioning Karen's return.

Andy returned to the dig site that afternoon, his head full of missing persons' reports and control keys used to manipulate the databases. He was glad to get back out into the fresh air.

More bones had been found, Elodie told him. She thought they might have been metacarpals and they had duly been dispatched to the lab. So that, Andy thought, meant they had a sum total of a tibia, a fragment of rib, most of one hand – the right – and a collection of random vertebrae, which begged the question of where the rest of the skeleton was hidden.

‘It must have been disarticulated a long time ago,' Elodie mused as they sat on the edge of the trench.

‘Why?'

‘Well, Joe and I have been talking about it and the jumble of bones is really strange. I mean, think about it. If you bury a body and the soft tissue rots away and then the skeleton disarticulates where you left it, the bones would all be laid out in some kind of order. If you had to move the bones, then you'd most likely just pick up, say, the legs all in one go, then, I don't know, maybe the skull and arms together or something. We've got bits and pieces from all over the skeleton. It's just a bit strange. I mean, most people are kind of squeamish. I don't think they'd stop and sort out a confusion of bones, do you?'

A confusion of bones. Andy liked that, but he was inclined to agree. ‘So,' he said, happy to continue the speculation for a while, ‘what would create this confusion?'

Elodie laughed and Andy thought that if she hadn't been so obviously involved with Joe the digger driver, he'd have been summoning the nerve to ask her out himself.

‘It reminds me of when the bones are dug up after burial and stored somewhere else, usually in a special box. Like a reliquary or an ossuary or something.'

‘So,' Andy said slowly, ‘what if the body was buried then someone had to move it later and they put all the bones into a box? Then for some reason they've got to move them again now, so they literally just pick out what comes to hand.'

‘Sounds gruesome, doesn't it?'

‘I've seen worse,' Andy said, then realized how that might sound. ‘I mean, this isn't so bad, in the sense that it's just bones. It's not like seeing a dead person when they've just been killed. It's like . . . I don't know, easier in one way.'

‘Have you seen many dead people?'

‘I . . . Yes, three so far,' Andy admitted. An old lady, a teenage boy and a woman who'd committed suicide. At the time he felt he had coped well, focused on the job and on trying to impress his new boss, but he knew he was still processing the experiences.

‘I must have seen dozens,' Elodie said. ‘But that's kind of different, isn't it? And they've all been bones except one.'

‘Except one?'

‘My grandad when he died. Gran had an open coffin. Apparently it was traditional in the family or something. The strange thing was he didn't look like Grandad. He looked like someone's idea of what Grandad should have looked like.'

‘Oh, if we're counting that sort of body then I suppose I've seen two more,' Andy said. ‘I saw my grandad too, just after he died. I was glad I had, it was like, I don't know, confirmation. He'd been in hospital and then a hospice and we went in to see him just after he'd passed on. You know, that was the first time I understood why people say passed on, because that was exactly what it felt like. Like he'd moved. His body was there but he'd kind of left the building, you know?'

Elodie laughed. ‘Yeah, I know.' She got to her feet and brushed the mud from her clothes. ‘I've got to get on,' she said. ‘I've got work to do.'

‘So do I.' Andy scrambled upright, cursing his luck that he should meet someone so gorgeous and friendly and so easy to talk to, only to find someone else had got there first.

T
ed Eebry called round to Peverill Lodge to see what Rina thought about the boxes he'd dropped off. He stayed for tea and cake, and Stan, never one to refuse either, sat with Rina and Ted and the Peters sisters as they gossiped in the kitchen.

Rina, it seemed, had decided to buy the two boxes from him. They were duly brought through from the dining room and set down on the kitchen table while Rina and Ted decided on a price. Curious, Stan picked up a bundle of papers from the closest one and flicked through while listening in to the conversation. The treasure being discussed seemed to be a mix of old playbills and programmes, a few magazines scrawled with autographs from people Stan had never heard of and a stack of photographs. There also seemed to be the odd personal letter and Stan glanced briefly at one of these. It was from a woman called Ada Barker to her sister, telling her about a booking for the summer season on Clacton pier. It was dated for March of 1953 and Stan could not help but wonder why on earth this letter could be so important that it had been kept since then.

Glancing at Rina and seeing the obvious excitement with which she and the Peters sisters viewed these innocuous contents, Stan decided he must be missing something. Always a man who travelled light, his entire possessions now resided in the little room upstairs at Peverill Lodge and amounted to the contents of one small shopping bag.

From the conversation, he gathered that this Ted Eebry was a trader in antiques and oddities. Having nothing better to do and not feeling comfortable joining in, Stan studied this stranger at the table and wondered what it was that felt wrong about him. Stan was used to reading people and situations; many times in his life his very survival had depended upon it and he'd never quite lost the habit. One thing he liked about the people at Peverill Lodge was their utter transparency. Yes, Rina was capable of guile and craftiness, but she was far too honest a soul to deceive if she didn't think it utterly necessary. And while Tim was a master of deception in his professional life, he was too utterly spaniel-like to make a success of his occasional and inconsistent attempts at generating the persona of ‘man of mystery'.

Stan liked dogs. You knew where you were with them ninety per cent of the time, and Tim was just like a giant puppy, all long limbs and enthusiasm.

Rina was telling Ted about a friend of hers. Stan glanced at the leaflet she was holding which featured the photograph of a very pretty young woman in a very skimpy costume. Apparently her name was Madge Pershore and she had gone missing and everyone thought she'd been snatched and murdered. It turned out she'd just run off with a juggler from a rival act.

Everyone laughed at the story, except Stan, who realized belatedly that he should, and Ted, who chuckled in a forced and awkward kind of way as though Rina's story had touched a nerve and he was trying to hide the fact.

Stan found himself studying the man carefully, noting the strain in his eyes and the pallor of his skin, which somehow still showed beneath the redness typical of an Englishman who still did not use sun cream.

Ted Eebry, Stan thought, was a man with a secret, and it wasn't one that made him happy.

F
riday evening rolled around and, after a surprisingly hot day, brought storms. Rina watched the lightning out of her bedroom window and thought about Madge Pershore and her juggler. It was so long since she'd thought about her friend, and telling Ted about her the day before had been an odd experience. From being a stranger to Rina's thoughts, Madge had become a constant companion through the day as she had recalled the things her friend had said and the fun they'd had together in those long lost days.

‘I never thought you'd settle down with anyone,' Rina said as a new flash of lightning lit the rain-dark sky. ‘And you had the most amazing legs.' She laughed, thinking that her own pins hadn't been so bad back then.

Ted Eebry sat in his kitchen and listened to the rain lashing the window. On the table in front of him his laptop sat open and the remaining surface had been spread with copies of the local newspaper and a couple of the national dailies. He had been tempted to buy others but knew that, creature of habit that he was, it would practically have been headline material in its own right if he had deviated further. Ted was terribly conscious of doing anything that might draw unwanted attention.

He had scoured the print pages and pored over the news sites on the Internet, but was no wiser or more informed than he'd been a couple of hours before. No more information about the bones found at the dig site was forthcoming. Not sound information anyway, just the usual round of speculation and tentative links to young women who had disappeared from the local area and turned up murdered.

‘Local,' Ted scoffed. ‘Since when is Liskeard local? It's two flipping counties away.' But then the report had been written by some London-based journalist, Ted thought. Like as not he saw everything west of the M25 as local to Dorset.

The local papers themselves were no more helpful. The addition of a statement from the site foreman explaining that work on unaffected parts of the site would continue as normal and that everyone was anticipating an excellent turnout on the open day was the only new element.

‘I bet they are,' Ted said bitterly. Already at fever pitch, curiosity about the refurbished airfield and excitement about the fair, the music and the vintage vehicles scheduled for inclusion in the event could only be heightened by the proximity of a murder scene – which, despite all official proclamations to the contrary, was what local gossip was stating as cold hard fact. Ted snorted his disgust at such ignorant informants.

Rain lashed harder against the window and something crashed down in the garden, startling Ted from his reverie. Getting to his feet he crossed to the window and peered out through the curtain of weather at the long garden beyond. He swore softly as he realized the crash must have been the stack of plant pots he'd left beside the compost bin, brought down by the strengthening winds. One more thing to clear up in the morning.