Authors: Martin Edwards
‘Three hundred yards at most. You can’t see Fell View from there, because the lane bends. The Corner is overlooked by one house, but it’s empty at present.’
‘How many houses are there in Ravenbank?’
‘Six in total, but two haven’t been occupied for some time. Stefan says he showed up in good time, half an hour early, but there was no sign of Terri.’
‘I can’t believe he expects us to fall for this crap.’
‘According to him,’ Fern said, eyes fixed on a patch of damp on the wall, ‘he became restless, and decided to wander up the lane, to see if he could spot her. He’d never been to Ravenbank in his life, and he thought he might have misunderstood what she’d said about where to meet.’
‘And then he conveniently stumbles on her dead body?’
‘Pretty much. He followed the course of the beck, and a few minutes later he found her. She was lying in a dip in the ground, with a blanket over her face. He says he recognised her shoes, but he lifted the blanket to make sure. And saw that someone had bashed her face in.’
‘What about the murder weapon?’
‘Says he didn’t see anything that might have inflicted the damage. He dropped the blanket back on her face – and legged it. Close to where his car was parked, he threw up.’
‘We’re looking to find where the blanket came from?’
‘Sure – if we can link it to him, he’s toast. His story is, he didn’t know if the killer was still lurking at the scene. He says he was in a state of shock. Petrified, and overwhelmed by shock and grief. So he jumped into the Fiesta and drove like the clappers, desperate to get away from Ravenbank.’
‘He admits clipping the Mercedes?’
‘Oh yes, and doing a runner from his bedsit in Glenridding. He admits he wasn’t thinking straight, but he says he thought he’d been set up. Someone had lured him to Ravenbank so that he’d be blamed for the crime. He had to get away. Halfway to Euston, it dawned on him that he’d made matters much worse for himself by running away. He claims it came as a relief when he was picked up yesterday evening. By then, he was trying to get up the nerve to hand himself in.’ Fern paused. ‘And set about clearing his name.’
Hannah ground her teeth. The farrago this man had conjured up to try to save his miserable skin made her tremble with anger. Stefan must have realised he couldn’t escape justice for long. So he’d spent the time he’d bought in cooking up a tale designed to explain away any forensic
evidence linking him with the crime scene. If only they could find the missing weapon.
‘You can’t seriously believe he has any chance of that?’
‘One thing you need to know.’ Fern fiddled with her collar. Why was she so uncomfortable? ‘Deyna says Terri sent the text from her mobile. Yet Robin Park says that Terri mislaid her phone yesterday, so at the moment we have no way of disproving Stefan’s explanation.’
‘Does Park know where the phone is?’
‘Uh-uh. He assures us he’s turned their cottage upside down, but no luck.’
Hannah scowled. ‘You’re worrying me, Fern. Last night you seemed so confident. Of course it’s a long haul to assemble the evidence, but …’
Fern digested the last of the Mars bar. ‘You’re not going to like this.’
Leaning back in her chair, Hannah said, ‘I’m waiting.’
‘It seems insane, but … I’m starting to wonder if he really is our man, after all.’
‘You were a bit rough with her,’ Louise said. They were standing in Tarn Fold, watching Hannah’s car disappear from view. The sun had vanished, and Daniel felt the first drops of rain on his cheeks. ‘Don’t forget, she’s the professional detective. Not you.’
‘All right, I got carried away. But the easy answer …’
‘Is sometimes the right answer,’ she interrupted. ‘That’s what you don’t get, Daniel. This isn’t an intellectual chess game. Talk to any practising criminal lawyer, and off the record they’ll admit ninety-nine per cent of their clients are guilty. The same will be true of Stefan.’
He put his hands up in mock-surrender. ‘You win. Let’s go back inside. If we stay out any longer, we’ll get drenched.’
He turned back towards the cottage, but she caught him up with a few brisk strides. ‘You don’t fool me. When you give up so easily, and change the subject, I can tell you’re not really listening.’
‘I was listening, just not agreeing. The mere fact something happens nearly all the time doesn’t mean it happens always.’
‘What makes you doubt Stefan’s guilt?’
He waited to reply until he’d closed the front door behind them, shutting out the incipient downpour. ‘Does lightning strike three times in the same place? I don’t think so.’
‘What’s your theory – that Gertrude Smith’s faceless ghost walks on Hallowe’en, and every once in a while she inflicts on some poor woman the same fate she suffered herself?’
‘If so, she certainly kept out of the way when we went searching for her. No, there’s a simpler explanation.’
‘Which is?’
He leant against the kitchen door, and looked her in the eye. ‘That five years ago, someone took Gertrude’s case as a template for a brand new murder. And the night before last, that same someone killed Terri.’
‘But why?’
‘As you say, I’m not a professional detective. I hardly knew Terri, and I’ve no idea why anyone would want to murder her. She struck me as a life-enhancing person.’
‘Hannah cared a lot for her. She’s obviously shattered by what’s happened.’
‘If Terri upset someone, she wouldn’t do it deliberately. So why react so violently?’
Louise folded her arms. ‘Are you planning to do anything about it, or just sit back and await developments?’
‘Like you said, I’m a historian, not a cop. Better leave it to the police to worry about Shenagh Moss.’
‘Meaning that you still want to research what happened to Gertrude Smith? But how? Miriam Park was no help.’
‘The only way to understand what happened to Gertrude is to understand the people she was close to. Roland Jones, and the Hodgkinsons. Any history student knows, it’s a mistake to rely too much on word of mouth recollection, especially when nobody’s left alive who remembers the people concerned. So – time to scout for documents.’
Fern stomped off to resume command of the investigation while Hannah grabbed another coffee, and asked herself how anyone other than Stefan could have hated Terri enough to kill her. Surely she hadn’t just been in the wrong place at the wrong time? Not in the small hours in Ravenbank, it was inconceivable. She must have been targeted.
Hannah was shivering, and she couldn’t blame Cumbria Constabulary for skimping on the cost of heating. The cubbyhole was stuffy and claustrophobic. Time for a breath of fresh air as she marshalled her thoughts. Five minutes later, with gusts of wind blasting rain into her face and making a complete mess of her hair, she’d begun to doubt the wisdom of braving the elements, but she turned up her coat collar and walked on until she reached the castle.
A coach was disgorging a party of children. Hannah
heard an enthusiastic teacher announcing that this vast medieval stone fortress had once imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots. But what kids who came here really loved was the story of the Licking Stones. After Bonnie Prince Charlie captured Carlisle Castle, the English inflicted brutal reprisals. Thirsty Jacobite prisoners had to resort to licking the stone walls of their dungeons to get enough moisture to stay alive. The survivors’ reward was to be taken to Gallows Hill, and executed. To this day, you could still see the marks where the tongues of the doomed prisoners had worn away the stone.
No Police and Criminal Evidence Act in those days, no civil liberties, no worries about whether the forensics would survive scrutiny in court. Hannah spun on her heel, leaving the school party to their tour. Despite the weather, the walk had cleared her head. It was dangerous to acquire a taste for revenge. Fern was right. However much she hated Stefan for his cruelty to Terri, the evidence against him needed to stack up.
Back at the station, she sought out DC Josh Higginbottom, and asked him to join her for a bite of lunch in the canteen. Josh had been an up-and-coming colleague of Fern’s, until the day he’d tried to break up a fight between two teenage thugs in a car park a stone’s throw from the station. One of the kids, a broken beer glass in his hand, slashed Josh several times across the face and throat. He’d lost one eye and only an emergency operation saved some of the sight in the other. Even then, it took eighteen months for him to admit defeat in his efforts to resume operational work and accept a job in Communications.
‘You can get used to anything in time,’ he said, when
she asked how he was doing. ‘I won’t deny that I still have black dog days. When the lad who glassed me was let out of prison, the urge to track him down and give him a taste of his own medicine was almost impossible to fight. But I got pissed and got over it.’
Hannah smiled. ‘Not exactly what the doctor ordered, but if it works …’
‘Yeah.’ He rubbed the livid scar on his neck. ‘Sorry to hear about your mate.’
As usual when she was with Josh, she felt ashamed of being unnerved by his gaze. One glass eye, one that didn’t seem focused, peering out from damaged flesh. He could be moody, Josh, he was well known for it, but nobody had more right. He was a man she admired, and whose company she enjoyed, yet whom she always found strangely intimidating.
‘Thanks. I’m still in denial, to be honest. But like you say, getting your head round bad stuff takes time. The unfairness of it all, the sheer … finality. I’ve often wondered how you’ve coped.’
‘Me too. You can’t simply rely on the passage of time. You need to force yourself to carry on. However reluctant you are. If that seems tough, trust me, it’s better than the alternative.’ He studied his fingernails. Badly bitten, she noticed. ‘As you can probably guess, I did think long and hard about the alternative, but life’s short enough as it is.’
‘You were on the team with Fern five years ago when another woman was murdered at Ravenbank. Shenagh Moss, an Australian.’
‘You know something? The last major case I worked on before …’ He gestured at his face. ‘I’ll never forget it.
When I heard someone else had been killed in Ravenbank, I couldn’t believe my ears. It’s so tiny, you wouldn’t expect two bike thefts, let alone two murders.’
‘Last time, the assumption was that Shenagh was killed by her ex, but Fern wasn’t convinced.’
‘Me neither. But Fern didn’t agree with my theory.’
Hannah felt her heart pounding. ‘Who did you think killed Shenagh?’
‘The bloke who kept pestering her. Not Meek, the neighbour.’
‘Which neighbour?’
‘The smarmy bloke she’d dumped for old whatsisname who lived in the big house. Knight, he was called. Oz Knight.’
The Armitt Museum and Library stood just beyond Ambleside’s constantly photographed Bridge House, on the route to Rydal Water and Grasmere. Set back from the road, it was a modern stone building, designed to house an eclectic assortment of books, manuscripts, paintings, geological specimens, and miscellaneous unclassifiable bits and pieces. There were even second-hand books for sale.
A young Dutch volunteer called Trijntje was on duty. She recognised Daniel from his television series, which had been screened across Europe, and five minutes spent chatting about historians as detectives was the perfect prelude to the questions he wanted to ask.
‘This man you’re interested in, Roland Jones, what would you like to know?’
Good question, not easy to answer. ‘I want to know more about him. What sort of man he was.’
‘He was an educator, yes?’
He nodded. ‘It’s a long shot, but I wondered if he features in the papers you keep in the archives?’
Charlotte Mason was already well known in the world of education when she moved to Ambleside in the late nineteenth century. Here she’d established the House of Education, dedicated to training governesses and others who taught the young; to this day, homeschoolers follow the methods she advocated, seeking to educate the whole child, not just the mind. Mason lived to a ripe old age, dying five years after the end of the First World War. Roland Jones had become prominent in liberal education, and Daniel wondered if the tutor had studied Charlotte Mason’s pioneering methods. Might he even have had a personal connection with her, and the training institution she’d founded, which once occupied premises next door to the Armitt? But this was tougher than looking for a needle in a haystack; Daniel wasn’t sure what to do with the needle, even if by a stroke of luck he found it.
‘We have so much material upstairs,’ Trjnitje warned him. ‘Even to skim through will take many hours.’
‘I’ve got all day. If I don’t find what I’m after, I’ll come back tomorrow.’
She treated him to a brilliant smile. ‘So Roland Jones is a famous man in the history of Cumbria, yes?’
‘Not famous, no, but finding out about him might just help me to rewrite a page of that history.’
‘Amazing!’ She was thrilled. ‘Then we must give you all the help we can!’
The PACE detention clock kept ticking. Fern could obtain an extension of the basic twenty-four hours for which Stefan could be held without charge, but ninety-six hours was the absolute maximum, and she’d want to make a decision long before then. Over a coffee, she reported to Hannah that she was losing hope of making the case against him stick.
‘Looks like we’re back to square one. This time yesterday, I’d never have believed it. When he claimed Terri texted him, asking for a meeting, I thought he’d overreached himself. Then what happens? His story checks out.’
In his haste to catch the train down south, Stefan hadn’t noticed that his mobile had slipped out of his pocket. An honest passer-by had found it lying in the road in Oxenholme, near to where he’d parked his car, and handed it in at a nearby shop. A lucky break – but for Stefan, not the detectives aiming to prove his guilt. He’d deleted the text message, but the techies had retrieved it easily enough.
‘It might all be some elaborate stunt to throw us off the track.’
Fern made a face. ‘No point in wishful thinking.’