The Corpse Bridge (25 page)

‘We all thought it was a good thing for her to have so many interests,' she said. ‘Especially when she was on her own. It stops you brooding, doesn't it? Sandra was into handicrafts and nature. She took a lot of walks. And, well … there were more esoteric things that personally I didn't understand. She was a very spiritual girl.'

According to her sister, Sandra had occasionally complained of pains, but was under the impression she suffered from heartburn. She sometimes mentioned sweating excessively and feeling dizzy. But Sandra simply treated herself with a variety of herbal remedies. She never worried that they might be signs of heart problems, said Maureen. And then, a little guiltily, she remembered that their grandfather had died of a heart attack, and perhaps a cousin too. So there was a family history, after all.

When pressed, Mrs Mackinnon admitted that her sister might have used cannabis occasionally. So she knew about that. But she had no idea of the existence of a boyfriend, if there was one. And sisters normally told each other these things, didn't they?

D
iane Fry walked into the CID room. She seemed to have appropriated a spare desk as her own for a while. But it hardly mattered. There were always spare desks in every department at West Street these days. Cooper wondered where she'd been since they left the mortuary together.

‘So what about our second victim, Mr Redfearn?' said Fry, when she'd brought herself up to date with the latest developments. ‘Mrs van Doon says we won't have her post-mortem report until tomorrow. But there must be something to go on. Time of death, for a start.'

She looked expectantly around the room.

‘The FME says three days,' said Becky Hurst at last.

‘What? Since he died?'

‘Yes.'

‘That makes it Thursday night,' said Cooper. ‘It's only an estimate, of course…'

‘I know.'

‘There hasn't been a missing person report,' added Irvine. ‘We've contacted Mr Redfearn's company here in Edendale and they say they weren't expecting him in the office today, so they weren't concerned about his absence.'

‘What about his family?'

‘He has a wife, Molly, but she's been away on a shopping trip with some friends in Paris. According to Mr Redfearn's secretary, it was a regular pre-Christmas trip that Mrs Redfearn took every year. It seems the husband regarded it as a bit of a break for himself too.'

‘How long has she been away?' asked Fry.

‘Since last Thursday. She's due back in the country tomorrow.'

‘She must have tried to call him during that time, surely?'

‘Well…'

Fry stared at Irvine. ‘Don't you think so, Luke?'

Irvine glanced at Cooper. ‘Well, perhaps not. It depends what sort of marriage they had, doesn't it? If they've been together for a long time, I mean…'

‘What are you saying, Luke?' put in Hurst in a challenging tone.

Immediately, Irvine became defensive. ‘You know – absence not only makes the heart grow fonder, it can be essential to keep a relationship going.'

‘So they were happier when they were apart?'

‘I'm just suggesting that some people are. A break from each other for a few days. She goes shopping with the girlfriends. He can go off and play golf, or whatever. It suits both parties. You must have heard about that sort of arrangement.'

Hurst frowned. ‘Well, I suppose so.'

Cooper didn't want to believe it either, but he knew it was true. No one really understood what went on in other people's relationships.

‘Besides, everyone knows the spouse is top of the suspect list in a murder inquiry,' said Irvine, as if playing a trump card.

‘Not in this case – you've just told us she wasn't even in the country at the time.'

‘Never heard of a contract killing? The Redfearns are well-off. She could afford someone good, instead of just some low-life off the street.'

Cooper nodded. It was a possibility they would have to cover, even if it seemed unlikely at this stage.

‘We'll need to get Mrs Redfearn in as soon as she arrives,' he said.

‘To confirm ID on the body?' said Hurst. ‘It won't be very pleasant for her. Couldn't we do it from photographs?'

‘That might be better,' agreed Cooper.

So the body of George Redfearn had lain at Pilsbury Castle for three days. Even in the best of circumstances a human body rapidly became difficult to identify. There was little point in expecting family members to make a visual identification of their loved one's remains after they'd been lying out in the open for an extended period of time. Fire, explosion or long-term immersion in water worked even more quickly to destroy any recognisable features. Identification then came down to more scientific measures – DNA comparisons or forensic odontology to confirm identity from the teeth.

Cooper recalled that Mr Redfearn's body had already started to look badly bloated when it was found. Even after twenty-four hours, when the remains had cooled to the temperature of the environment, the skin of the head and neck turned greenish-red and discolouration began to spread across the rest of the torso. The facial features could become quite unrecognisable.

Fortunately, the weather had been cold and this body was exposed to the air. But once bacteria started to dissolve the tissues, gases formed blisters on the skin, and the body swelled grossly and began to leak. In another day or two it would no longer have looked human.

Fry turned towards Cooper. ‘So what connection are we making between these individuals, if there is one?' she said.

‘I don't know, Diane. We haven't found one yet.'

‘I presume you're looking?'

‘Of course we're looking. What do you think we're doing – sitting around on our backsides with our thumbs in our mouths waiting for someone to come all the way from Nottingham and tell us how to do our jobs?'

She raised an eyebrow and Cooper's anger subsided.

‘But you haven't found anything,' said Fry calmly.

He sighed deeply. ‘Not yet, no. It's difficult to point to any significant similarities. Whether deliberately or accidentally, both victims seem to have fallen far enough for the impact to be fatal.'

‘It hardly constitutes a pattern.'

‘Not on its own, no,' agreed Cooper. ‘Apart from that … well, the victims aren't even the same age or gender. True, they're both white and ethnically British, but—'

‘But the ethnic minority population in this area is – what? Two per cent?' said Fry.

‘About that.'

‘It's hardly a multicultural melting pot, is it? So your killer would have to try really, really hard if he wanted to find a black or Asian victim. As far as the evidence goes, these individuals could just have been chosen at random.'

‘Random,' said Cooper. ‘I hate random.'

‘I know. Me too.'

Those were always the burning questions. Not how the murderer committed the crime, but what motivated him or her to take those specific, drastic measures.

‘But you still think the two incidents are linked?' said Fry.

‘Yes, I do.'

When Cooper told her the story of the Bowden burial ground, Fry couldn't help herself. Her reaction was accompanied by a cynical laugh.

‘Your friend Meredith Burns didn't mention the graveyard, did she?
Just general envy
, she said.'

‘That was wrong of her,' agreed Cooper.

‘Trying to avoid bad publicity for the earl, I imagine.'

‘But they reported the incidents – including the graffiti. They must have known questions would be asked.'

‘Wait a minute, though. Burns said the graffiti was discovered by one of the staff before the first visitors arrived on Friday.'

‘Yes, she did.'

‘Well, what if that wasn't the case? What if members of the public saw that graffiti before it was covered up? It would be too late to keep it quiet then. They would have been talking about it all over the area by the end of the day. Some of the visitors would have been taking photographs of it on their phones.'

Cooper nodded. Fry was probably right. He could hear the discussion that might have gone on in the estate office.

‘So they decided to make a pre-emptive call,' he said. ‘Damage limitation.'

‘And I bet they thought it had worked. A visit from the Neighbourhood Policing Team, probably a PCSO making a few notes for her report and tutting sympathetically. Burns said they didn't expect anything to come of the visit. She meant they were
hoping
nothing would come of it. She really didn't want to see us turning up at the abbey. Though she put a good show on, I'll give her credit for that. Ms Burns had you more interested in looking at the nursery than enquiring into any reason for the incidents.'

‘That's not true,' protested Cooper, aware that he was starting to flush, feeling the familiar discomfort that Diane Fry was so easily able to provoke in him.

‘And now the murder of Mr Redfearn,' she said. ‘If there's no evident connection between the two individuals, why do you insist on believing these two incidents are linked?'

‘Oh, that's easy,' said Cooper. ‘Because of the Corpse Bridge.'

O
n his desk Cooper found the leaflets that Meredith Burns had given him on Saturday. He put aside the one advertising the Halloween Night and opened the leaflet about the attractions of Knowle Abbey.

For a few minutes he read about its claim to historic associations and the generations of Manbys who'd lived there. He skipped through the stuff about antique furniture and fascinating collections of curiosities, turned the page on details of the restaurant and the craft centre, and the walled nursery. Then he reached a few paragraphs about the extensive parkland on the Knowle estate.

Finally, he dropped the leaflet back on his desk with an exasperated groan.

‘How could I have been so stupid?' he said.

‘What is it, Ben?' asked Irvine in surprise.

‘Grandfather,' said Cooper.

‘What?'

‘
Meet Grandfather, 1am.
It's not a person. It's a place.'

‘T
he family tend to refer to him as the Old Man of Knowle,' said Meredith Burns as she led the way from the estate office at the abbey. ‘It's a traditional Manby joke, I think. A reference to the previous earl. The “old man”, you know?'

Cooper nodded. ‘Yes, I see,' he said.

As he and Diane Fry followed Burns along the signposted trail into the parkland, Cooper reflected that the old Derbyshire lead miners had often talked about ‘t'owd man' too. But they'd meant something quite different. They'd usually been referring to the Devil.

But who knew what went on in a family like the Manbys? In any family, in fact. Perhaps there was more than a coincidence in the similarity between the miners' superstition and the way the Manbys referred to the old earl. That portrait of the seventh Lord Manby in the Great Hall made him look a real tyrant. And when had Knowle Abbey begun to deteriorate so much? Had a previous owner neglected its maintenance, while spending his fortune on something else entirely? That would be enough to cause some degree of resentment among his descendants when they inherited a crumbling estate up to its chimneys in debt.

They'd entered the edge of the trees, and as the trail took a sharp bend they lost sight of the buildings they'd just come from.

‘I don't like forests,' said Fry. ‘You ought to know that by now.'

‘This is hardly a forest,' said Cooper. ‘It's landscaped parkland. Some previous earl obviously planted a few trees to create a view from the east wing.'

‘But you said there are wild animals.'

‘Roe deer. They're far more frightened of you than you are of them, Diane.'

Fry didn't look convinced. But he knew no animals would come near her, if they could help it. She was hardly Snow White, attracting wild creatures to feed trustingly from her hand. She was more the kind of person who would introduce a badger cull, then willingly extend it to include anything that moved in the dark.

‘One of the great things about these big trees is that they make such wonderful landmarks,' Burns was saying. ‘You might not be able to find your way through a wood where all the trees are the same age and look identical. But anyone can find this grand old chap.'

‘And lots of people do, I suppose?' said Cooper.

‘Oh, he's a tourist attraction in his own right. We have signs on all the trails to point the way to him. Visitors love to come and stand underneath his branches and have their photos taken, or see how many of them it takes to reach all the way round his trunk. British people have a very affectionate relationship with this particular species.'

‘Do they?' said Fry.

Cooper laughed. Her horrified expression suggested she was imagining a much more intimate relationship than anything Burns had meant.

‘There he is,' said Burns. ‘The Grandfather Oak.'

The Old Man of Knowle, or the Grandfather Oak, was a thousand-year-old oak tree. Its status as a unique tourist attraction was the reason it was mentioned in the leaflets about Knowle Abbey.

Cooper paced round the tree. He didn't really know what he was looking for, but he could find none of the things that he might have expected from examining the scene at the Corpse Bridge. No effigy, no noose, no witch ball filled with curses. Not even any graffiti or obscene messages carved into the ancient bark. There were no signs that anyone had been here with malicious intent. And it would be useless to do a forensic search of the woods. Far too many people came through here, leaving signs of their presence.

He looked up into the branches. It would make a great vantage point, he supposed. But these branches were old and brittle. A couple of the larger boughs were propped up by lengths of timber to prevent them from snapping under their own weight. He wouldn't want to try climbing this tree without proper safety equipment.