Authors: Elena Forbes
‘Already thought of that. There’s a private access road that goes right through the woods to the lake. I’ve had it sealed it off, for our use alone.’
‘Which way are the stables?’
‘Back the way we came, but it’s a spa now. They turned the old stable yard into an indoor pool. They haven’t done a bad job, I have to say.’
‘You know this place quite well,’ Tartaglia said, thinking that it was much bigger than he had imagined. To make any sense of what Wade and Fleming had said, he would have to try and familiarise himself with it, piece things together the way they had been eighteen years before.
Roberts nodded. ‘I’ve lived here a long time.’
‘But you don’t sound as though you come from around here?’
‘I’m originally from the Elephant and Castle. But we moved down here when I was fourteen, when my dad died and my mum remarried. By then, the damage was done.’
‘I imagine this place has changed a lot in the last twenty years.’
‘It certainly has. I know it like the back of my hand. My mum still lives in one of the nearby villages. I’m ashamed to say I used to come here with my stepdad to pot the odd rabbit or pheasant. That was before it was all redeveloped, of course. The Colonel had died and his wife was living here on her own by then. She must have been in her eighties, blind as a bat and rattling around in the house like a dried pea in a tin can. When she died, the family sold it fast as they could.’
‘When was this?’
‘Must have been the mid-Eighties. It was a right wreck by then and they hadn’t the cash to keep it going, let alone do all the necessary repairs. It changed hands several times after that.’
‘Do you remember it in the early Nineties?’
Roberts shook his head. ‘Sorry. I was working in Bristol by then, with a young family to keep me busy. All I know is Avondale Properties bought it about ten years ago and they’ve sunk an absolute fortune into it. I’ve played golf here a few times with friends and it’s a good course, although personally I couldn’t stretch to the membership. But the wife and I come here sometimes for a meal on special occasions. We were here for her fiftieth only last month. I also bought her a day at the spa as a special treat.’
‘How far is it from the spa to the lake, or to the main house? I just want to get my bearings.’
‘About a mile each way, I’d say, maybe a little more. It’s a triangle.’
‘Is there a map anywhere?’
‘I’m sure we can pick one up at reception, if you want.’
‘That would be useful.’
Roberts stuffed his hands in his pockets, looking thoughtful. ‘Perhaps you can enlighten me. All I know is that there’s a body in the lake and it’s a young girl.’
Tartaglia nodded. He’d been wondering when Roberts would ask. ‘We think she died during a party in the summer of 1991.
There were some students living here at the time.’
‘What happened?’
‘We’re not sure exactly, but one of them found her, then he and his friends decided to cover it up so as not to get into trouble. It’s only come to light now.’
Roberts glanced over at him. ‘Sounds fishy to me. You think the girl was murdered?’
‘It’s not clear. It may have been an accident. That’s why we need to get her out of there if we can.’
‘If it’s just an accident, why are you here? I mean, you work for an MIT, right?’
Tartaglia nodded, picking up the suspicious, resentful edge in his voice. He had come across the attitude before. The Met was the only police force in the country to operate dedicated murder investigation teams. Outside the capital, the volume of murders was much lower and there was no need for specialisation. Roberts worked in CID where he handled a whole range of serious crimes. He was a bigger fish in a much smaller pond, but somehow that wasn’t enough. His expression said it all: ‘Here’s this flash, know-it-all Met Murder Squad DI, with his sharp suit and fancy foreign name, coming down from the smoke, muscling in on my turf.’ Tartaglia had heard it before. It didn’t help that he was a good fifteen years younger than Roberts. But life was tough and Roberts would have to learn to live with it.
‘We’ve been told to pull out all the stops,’ Roberts said, clearly not satisfied. ‘I can’t tell you the job I had getting the search team organised last night. Why the urgency, if she’s been down there that long and you’re not even sure if she was topped?’ He looked at Tartaglia questioningly. He must resent being called out on a Sunday, particularly when he knew he was being given only part of the story, but it wasn’t Tartaglia’s job to enlighten him. Roberts would have read about the Logan and Khan murders in the papers but the cases were still not officially linked. Also, they were leaking badly enough as it was and there was no reason for Roberts to know more than the bare bones.
‘What happened here might possibly be linked to an ongoing murder investigation,’ Tartaglia said. ‘I’m afraid I can’t say any more at the moment.’
Roberts pursed his lips. ‘I see. Can you tell me this much; if the girl was murdered, do you have a suspect?’
Tartaglia hesitated. He felt like telling Roberts to mind his own business. His head felt thick and he didn’t like being cross-examined, but there was little to be gained from antagonising him. If the girl had been murdered, Fleming was the most likely candidate, but short of a confession there was no real evidence to nail him with. Nor, for the moment, was it clear who would handle the investigation. His only interest in the girl was in relation to the Logan and Khan cases and it would be logical for the inquiry to be handled locally. But it wasn’t his call and there was no point stirring things up with Roberts until they knew exactly what had happened. He chose his words carefully.
‘We have a statement from the man who originally found her in the lake, which is corroborated by others who were here at the time. There’s no point in making assumptions or thinking about likely suspects until we have more information. As I said before, the first step is to get her out of the lake.’ He hoped he had been emphatic enough and that Roberts would leave it there.
‘I see,’ Roberts said again.
They walked in silence for a few minutes, accompanied only by the rhythmic beat of their strides on the gravel. Eventually, the drive opened up into a wide turning circle in front of the main house. Although the honeyed colour of the stone was different, it reminded him of Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott’s house in the Borders, all pepper-pot towers, pointed gables and gothic windows. If it had once been run-down, it didn’t show. Everything was pristine and in good order, paint new, windows sparkling, lawns and flowerbeds as tidy as a municipal garden.
‘Do you want to take a look around the house?’ Roberts asked.
‘Maybe later. All I need for now is the map, then let’s go to the lake and see how they’re getting on.’
The reception desk was in a small vestibule, just inside the front door. Tartaglia picked up a map and a glossy leaflet about the hotel and followed Roberts into an enormous, vaulted baronial-style banqueting hall. It was lit by two tall stained glass windows, which cast a rainbow of colours onto the stone floor. He could smell fresh coffee and bacon. The buzz of voices and clink of china and cutlery were coming from a room off the hall, where breakfast was still in progress. It was only nine-thirty, but he realised how hungry he was. He had picked up a couple of croissants and a Red Bull at a service station on the M4 but they had barely touched the sides and he had passed on the coffee from the vending machine, which looked undrinkable.
‘Just need the gents,’ Roberts said. ‘Won’t be a sec.’
As he disappeared back in the direction of reception, Tartaglia sat down in a comfortable armchair by the vast stone hearth. He still felt groggy and his head was beginning to ache with renewed vigour. He would give anything for a decent coffee but he didn’t want to delay getting down to the lake. Shielding his eyes from the sun, which was streaming in through the windows, he took out the hotel leaflet from his pocket and started to read, hoping that he might learn something interesting about the place and that it might keep him awake. It gave a potted history of the house, which dated from the early 1800s. The land had originally been bought and eventually developed by Jeremiah Wilson, the son of a wealthy merchant from Bristol who had made a fortune importing tobacco and sugar in the late eighteenth century. Bristol had been a thriving port at the time and he wondered if slave trade money had been involved too, although there was no mention of it. As Roberts had said, the Wilson family had continued to live in the house until the late 1980s. It had been turned into a hotel ten years later, well after Fleming and his friends had left. There was no mention of what had happened to it in the intervening period.
Roberts reappeared moments later and led the way out through a small door to one side of the huge, carved wood staircase. They walked down through a series of lawns and terraced gardens and came to a high yew hedge with a gate in the middle, which was manned by a uniformed officer. Beyond was an area of open parkland and woods. Roberts took a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his brow. ‘The lake’s just through the trees.’
They showed their IDs and once they had been signed in, they followed a path that had been recently cut through the long grass of the meadow. They had just entered the cool shade of the wood when Roberts’s phone started to ring. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said, stopping to answer it. ‘I’ll catch you up. Just follow the path.’
The sky overhead was bright blue, and the air was filled with the buzzing of insects and birds, calling high up in the trees. A pair of young male pheasants were rooting among the dead leaves below, paying Tartaglia no notice. The path wound downhill through a dense mixture of deciduous trees and tall rhododendron. Within a minute he saw the lake in front of him. He stopped in the shade of a large beech tree and gazed down at the water. It stretched out smooth and dark, like a huge teardrop. He heard the muted sound of running water somewhere beneath him where, he assumed, the lake was fed by an underground stream. The leaflet had said it was man-made, excavated at the time the house was built, although it looked completely natural in its setting, as though it had been there for a thousand years. The trees came right down the slope almost to the water’s edge, some reaching far over, their branches scraping the surface.
He followed the path down to the water’s edge to get a better view. Wondering how much longer Roberts would be, he lit a cigarette, enjoying the stillness. There was barely a ripple on the surface of the water, which shimmered in the morning sunshine. A small island lay just offshore, close to where he was standing. It was connected to the mainland by a narrow footbridge. A church stood in the middle, encircled by tombstones. On the far side of the lake, an impressive-looking building with pillars and gates opening onto the water nestled amongst the trees. He assumed it must be the boathouse. Several cars and a pickup truck and trailer were parked in a clearing nearby and a man in green tracksuit bottoms was leaning on the bonnet of one of the cars, with what looked like a mobile phone clamped to his ear. Next to him were two uniformed police. The search team’s RIB was moored beside what looked like a diving platform in the middle of the lake. One of the team sat in the boat keeping watch, in contact with the divers via a headset. They would be working in pairs, deep in the muddy water, the orange surface marker buoys the only indication of where they were.
The house was further away from the lake than he had imagined from Fleming’s description and it must have been quite a hike at night, even under the light of a full moon. He tried to picture it all – Fleming kneeling down in the water under the trees, finding the girl’s body. He wished now that he had asked Fleming to draw him a map to show exactly where he had been. But standing there, looking at the scene, Fleming’s story sounded a little more plausible than it had done in the interview room, although he was still sure something important was missing from it.
He heard the cracking of branches in the undergrowth behind him and turned to see Roberts emerge at the top of the bank.
‘Not much going on,’ he said, as Roberts slid down and joined him.
‘It’s a bit like watching paint dry. That was my sergeant on the phone. You can just see him over there on the far bank. He’s the one in the green tracksuit. He thought I was still in the car park waiting for you and he was just ringing to say there was no news.’
‘Shall we go over there?’
‘Not much point at the moment, unless you just want to stand around staring at the water. I don’t know how they’ll find anything in there. It’s as thick as soup. You’re sure she’s somewhere in the middle?’
‘That’s what we were told.’
Roberts shrugged. ‘Well, they started right over there by that pontoon, or whatever it is. Apparently, they’ve been working their way outwards in some sort of formation, but I’m not holding my breath. At this rate, we’ll be here all day. Do you want to go and grab a coffee and a snack back at the hotel? Maybe you can tell me a bit more about the case you’re working on. They’ll call me as soon as they find anything.’
He had no intention of giving Roberts anything further on the case, but the suggestion of coffee and a snack was something he couldn’t turn down. ‘Sounds a good idea. But before we head back, I’d like to take a look at that little church over there, and maybe also the boathouse.’
Roberts looked at him as though he were mad. ‘Suit yourself. I’ll just go around and have a word with the lads and tell them what we’re doing. Let me know when you’re ready.’
They parted company and Tartaglia started to walk towards the church. Sunlight shone through the trees onto the goldencoloured walls. Panes of glass were missing from some of the mullioned windows and a couple of sparrows flew out as he crossed the little bridge that linked the shore to the island. Surprisingly, the church door wasn’t locked and he pushed it open. Light flooded in through the windows onto a bare interior that had been stripped of any furnishings. The stone floor was covered in a thick layer of dust, but he could still see where the handful of pews had once stood. A few memorial plaques were dotted around the walls, dedicated to members of the Wilson family, and a large, reclining statue of a young man in uniform lay on a plinth to one side of the altar. Briefly reading the inscription, it sounded as though he had been the only son, killed in battle during the First World War. Behind it, he found a low wooden door, which he assumed led down to the crypt. It, too, wasn’t locked, and he carefully picked his way down the narrow stairs, using the little Maglite on his key ring to shed some light. The whole place reeked of damp. When he reached the bottom, which was flooded with an inch or so of murky water, he decided he had seen enough. The heavy metal gates in front of him, with their coat of arms, the decaying coffins on their shelves beyond; it all matched almost exactly the description in the email sent to Joe Logan. Whoever had written it, had to have stood there at some point. Was it one of the five, or someone else who had visited Ashleigh Grange?