A call came in before he could make up his mind what to do next.
‘Gavin? Have you got some news?’
‘Yes. I was feeling particularly spiteful today, so I decided to check on Mr Edson’s alibi for Tuesday night.’
‘He was out for dinner,’ said Cooper.
‘Yes.’
‘You checked up with the restaurant? What made you do that?’
‘I don’t like him. Is that a good enough reason?’
‘It’ll do for me, Gavin.’
‘When we visited him, I remember him being very specific about what he and his mother ordered. Migratory ducks and all that.’
‘Yes, he was.’
‘To me that suggested a very good memory. Or more likely that he’d made a note of it, so that he could sound totally convincing if he was asked about it later.’
‘Gavin, sometimes I love your appalling cynicism.’
‘It gets results,’ said Murfin modestly. ‘See, by doing that, he wasn’t actually telling us a lie. Only by omission, anyway.’
‘Go on, then. What was it he omitted to mention?’
‘That it wasn’t just him and his mother who were supposed to be eating at Bauers that night. They had a table booked for three.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘They know Edson well there.
He dines with us often
, they said. So I asked who else was in the party. The head waiter sounds the sort of bloke who clocks everything.’ Murfin laughed. ‘A bit like an upmarket Barry Gamble, I suppose.’
‘Yes, Gavin.’
‘Anyway, there was no third person. A table was set for three, but it seems the third person never arrived.’
At Riddings Lodge, Cooper found only Glenys Edson at home. In the room packed with antiques, he saw that the glass table was damaged. A jagged crack ran right across it from one edge, shattering the perfect reflection.
‘An accident,’ said Glenys Edson, before he had even asked.
‘What a shame.’
‘These things happen.’
Cooper glanced at the tapestry, remembering his conversation with Gavin Murfin.
You can’t just sit and do nothing for hour after hour, day after day. You’d go mad. You’d start tearing up the furniture
.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know when Russell will be back,’ she said. ‘He’s taken the car for a spin.’
‘The Jaguar? No, of course not. The MG convertible.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Do you know where’s he gone?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Mrs Edson, I need you to talk to me about your son. And about Tuesday night.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m not telling you anything. Not without Russell here. You’ll have to speak to him.’
‘On Tuesday night, you visited Bauers at Warren Hall. You were dining in the restaurant there. Who else was supposed to be with you?’
Mrs Edson drew herself up as stiffly as she could. ‘I’m afraid that I’m not going to be answering your questions.’
‘You know this is a murder inquiry?’
But he could see that meant nothing to her.
‘You’ll have to arrest me then,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, Detective Sergeant, I’ll ask you to leave.’
Frustrated, Cooper peered through the gates of Riddings Lodge as he used his phone to call the office. He got through to Gavin Murfin.
‘How are they getting on with the slurry pits, do you know?’
‘They’ve got two pumps set up to remove the liquid, but there are several inches of thick mud at the bottom, which is slowing the job down. I’m told the smell is appalling.’
‘Oh, I can imagine.’
‘In fact, we’re starting to get complaints from the residents in Riddings,’ said Murfin. ‘I guess the wind must be blowing in the wrong direction.’
‘I hope to God they find something,’ said Cooper. ‘Otherwise they’re going to throw me into one of those slurry pits.’
‘We’ve found the van, though.’
‘The gardener’s van? AJS Gardening Services?’
‘That’s the one. Dumped in a lane behind Riddings. No sign of the owner, Mr Summers. Luke Irvine is there.’
Cooper was at the location within a couple of minutes. The doors of the van had already been opened. In the back, among the gardening tools, he found a small pile of stainless-steel posts, each measuring over three feet long. They were the kind of thing used for preventing parking on grass verges. Very popular in Riddings.
He picked one up and slapped it against his palm.
‘These must weigh about eight pounds each.’
‘Good enough for the job,’ said Irvine.
‘A bit unwieldy, I would have thought. But if that was what came to hand … a thing this size would certainly strike fear into your victim.’
‘What are they exactly?’
‘These are the posts they embed in the ground to stop people parking on the grass,’ said Cooper.
‘So they are. I tripped over one the other day.’
‘And I parked up against one. I don’t know if these are the exact posts used in the attack on the Barrons. But somewhere in Riddings, there’ll be at least one with traces of Zoe Barron’s blood on it.’
Since Edson had left the Jaguar behind at Riddings Lodge, Cooper called in and asked for the search to be extended to the car. He remembered the thorough cleaning it had received earlier in the week, a handyman in waterproof trousers working away on the bodywork under Edson’s eagle eye. If any evidence was available to be found, the interior was likely to provide more traces.
Cooper thought about the handyman. He had been checked out, like everyone else. But every job here was contracted out. Someone came in to do the cleaning, the gardening, to wash the car. There was a man to fill the swimming pool, and another man to rake the gravel. And teams of small, soot-blackened children to sweep the chimneys, too.
Well, maybe not the last one. But it was a close-run thing.
Gavin Murfin turned up among a team of officers who were arriving to begin a search of the grounds. This could be a long job, unless they had a stroke of luck.
‘It’s amazing,’ said Murfin. ‘I suppose Mr Edson didn’t think we would check his alibi. He just couldn’t imagine us going to Warren Hall and asking about his dining arrangements. It took them completely by surprise when I phoned.’
‘I don’t think he’s been living in the real world,’ said Cooper. ‘Some of these people in Riddings have probably been used to it all their lives. Being comfortably off, I mean. But something happens to people when they suddenly have unimaginable amounts of money. It seems to be too much for the mind to take.’
‘You know what? I think I might lose touch with reality too, if I woke up one morning and discovered I’d won millions of pounds.’
‘I agree,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ve often thought winning the lottery was the worst thing that could happen to anybody. Buying a ticket every week is like playing Russian roulette.’
‘Well, it didn’t do Mr Edson much good, in the end.’
Cooper looked back towards Riddings Lodge. He could only see the roof from here, the late-afternoon sun reflecting from the dormer windows. He was reminded of that glimpse of Chatsworth House a few days ago. Some properties looked magical from a distance. But not so good close up.
‘Actually, it’s an older story than that,’ he said.
Murfin took no notice of the comment, as he often did. If it was too difficult to think about, he didn’t bother. It was a sensible attitude, one that had probably helped him get through life so far without going mad.
‘This Russell Edson,’ said Murfin. ‘I was always a bit troubled about him, like. He gives off the airs and graces, but everyone knows his situation. All fur coat and no knickers, my old mother would have said.’
‘What?’
‘It means all show. Outward appearance, with no substance underneath. Someone who pretends to be wealthy or important, when actually all they’ve done is learned how to present themselves. What you find underneath doesn’t match what you see on the surface.’
‘All outward appearance. You think so?’
Murfin was warming to his subject now. For once, he wasn’t eating, or even chewing. Cooper realised that he was serious, might even be excited about the job now that things seemed to be going their way.
‘Listen,’ said Murfin. ‘My dad worked for a company once where they were up against a serious business rival. One day, the rivals put personalised number plates on all their vans. I thought that was pretty impressive myself. But Dad told me that when you saw someone put personalised plates on, you knew they were in trouble. In business, you have to pretend you’re doing well. You’ve got to find some way of putting out a message, like. And he was right, too. The rival firm went bust a few months later.’
Cooper turned at a sudden flurry of excitement in the grounds of the lodge. One of the officers in the search team had raised a hand, and had become instantly the centre of attention. He was standing near the long rhododendron hedge that marked the boundary of the property.
‘Sergeant Cooper!’ the officer called urgently. ‘Over here.’
‘What is it?’
‘There’s a body.’
It lay half on the lawn and half under the rhododendron bushes. Legs in brown corduroy trousers, torso in an old brown anorak. Cooper knew who it was before he had seen the face. Barry Gamble. Lacerations on his face, thorns embedded in his flesh, the hair on the back of his head matted with blood.
Cooper and Murfin stood watching as the scene was taped off.
‘He was attacked from behind,’ said Cooper. ‘From the way he fell, it looks as though he was running, and pitched forward on his face when he was struck.’
‘So he was running away from someone.’
‘Seems like it. Someone a bit quicker on his feet than he was, too.’
‘Do you think someone caught him snooping again, and overreacted?’ asked Murfin.
Cooper nodded. Gamble had seen something, without doubt. What it was, he hadn’t been telling. At least, he hadn’t told the right people. Talking to the wrong person might have been what got him killed.
‘You know what?’ said Murfin. ‘Some people would give anything for their last testament not to be “found wearing a brown anorak and brown trousers”.’
Cooper remembered that Gamble was a keen amateur photographer, and that Riddings was his chief subject. Somewhere there ought to be photographs. Lots of photographs.
At Chapel Close, Monica Gamble had already been informed of the death of her husband, and a female officer was sitting with her. Monica didn’t look quite as shocked as many people would in these circumstances. Perhaps living with Barry for all those years had led her to expect an outcome like this.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Gamble,’ said Cooper, ‘but we have to take a look in your husband’s shed again.’
‘I don’t know what you expect to find in there. It’s just rubbish.’
‘Not to your husband, perhaps. I think Mr Gamble knew a lot of things he wasn’t telling.’
‘Of course Barry knew things. He knew things about everybody. It was his interest. All right, his obsession. But he never meant any harm. Never.’
‘Why didn’t he just come to us with his information?’ asked Cooper. ‘It would have been so much simpler.’
‘After the way he’d been treated?’ said Mrs Gamble. ‘He knew he was under suspicion from the start. It was obvious none of you believed what he was saying.’
‘Well, that was because he was lying,’ said Cooper. ‘Mrs Gamble?’
She nodded slowly. ‘What is it you want particularly?’
‘Your husband’s camera. And any CDs, memory sticks or storage devices he might have kept his pictures on.’
‘Will it help?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ said Cooper.
There were so many uses for a laptop these days that Cooper carried one in his car. He opened it up and loaded the memory card from Barry Gamble’s camera.
The card held about two hundred pictures. The first were shots of the derelict farm building and the two abandoned slurry pits, no longer simply suggestive of picturesque decay, but carrying a greater significance.
And there, of course, was the guide stoop. It had been photographed from all angles, with each of its faces depicted and the inscriptions clearly legible.
Sheffeild Rode, Hathersich Rode
. One of the pictures showed the stone in the foreground, with the slurry pits behind it. It was as though the stoop was pointing towards the exact location where Zoe Barron’s phone and wallet would be found.
Sheffeild Rode.
Cooper wondered if the next step in Gamble’s campaign of anonymous communication would have been to send a copy of this photograph. The last stage, just to make the point clear for those who were too dim to put two and two together.
He didn’t intend to go through all two hundred images on the memory card. He sorted the files into date order and looked for shots that had been taken on Tuesday.
From that night, he had expected pictures of the Barrons. But the shots he found weren’t of Valley View, or its grounds. They had been taken nearby, yes. But the house they showed was Riddings Lodge.
Cooper scrabbled around until he found a copy of the Riddings map. It seemed that the only spot where Gamble could have got some of these views of Riddings Lodge was right on the boundary between Edson’s property and the Barrons’. There was only a narrow strip at that point where the two properties bordered each other. To the west was the Hollands’ garden at Fourways. Eastwards, there was only the rough sloping ground at the base of the edge. The rock-strewn heath cut a slice between the manicured lawns and almost looked as though it ought to continue along the boundary line as far as Croft Lane.
Eagerly Cooper swung round to his screen and called up the aerial view. When he zoomed in, it became obvious. There was more than just a boundary line between Riddings Lodge on one side, and Valley View and Fourways on the other. The satellite image had captured a wider, darker area that connected the base of Riddings Edge with Croft Lane. A sunken lane, surely? But why hadn’t it been visible on the ground?
Then he remembered the dense rhododendron hedge, yards and yards of it along the bottom of Edson’s garden. He’d stood and admired it from Edson’s lounge. He recalled thinking that many keen gardeners would have tried to get rid of the shrub. Rhododendrons sucked minerals out of the soil and prevented anything else from flourishing near them. But Edson hadn’t cared about that. He had no interest in gardening. He probably never went near the hedge – not near enough, anyway, to see that it hid the remains of a sunken lane under its dense foliage.
But Barry Gamble had known about it. Gamble had sneaked into the old lane to take photographs of Riddings Lodge. He still had rhododendron twigs sticking to his fleece days later. But why did he want to photograph the house so secretly?
Cooper turned back to the photographs and scrolled through them. Figures started to appear now. Glenys Edson taking a stroll in the garden. The housekeeper, Mrs Davies, walking round the house. Mrs Davies pictured talking to the odd-job man, whose name Cooper had forgotten. There was Russell Edson himself, standing in the conservatory, apparently doing nothing. Waiting, perhaps.
And who was that? A younger man, talking to Edson. Now there were several shots, taken by Gamble in quick succession. The two men seemed to be arguing, judging by their arm gestures. Finally there were two frames capturing Edson and the other man coming outside, stepping out of the conservatory and turning towards the garage on the other side of the drive. A moment later and Gamble would have lost them from sight. But those last two frames were good ones. Edson was clearly recognisable in both, his hair swept back, his expression upset or angry – Cooper couldn’t be sure.
And the other, younger man? With a jolt, Cooper realised now that he’d seen him before. Edson hadn’t been joking when he’d said he’d got a man in. This man might have been called in to do the gardening. But he’d come even further into Edson’s life, judging by the close, affectionate embrace that Barry Gamble had captured in the very last frame.