A Killing Karma

DCI Will Casey is asked by his parents to
investigate a double murder at the Fenland commune where they live
strictly unofficially. As if thats not enough, Casey also has to solve a
very unpleasant murder on his own patch: a John Doe found dead in a
dark alley. With the help of his knowing sergeant, Thomas Catt, Casey
must try to get to the bottom of both official and unofficial cases . . .

A KILLING
KARMA

Copyright 2007
Geraldine Evans

Publisher’s
Note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

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Reserved.

'What did you
say?’ Unable to take in what he was hearing, Detective Chief Inspector ‘Will’
Casey asked for it to be repeated, unsure that he'd believe his ears even then.

‘
Two
suspicious deaths?’ he queried. Two! They certainly didn't do things by halves.
But then he knew that already. Such a proclivity had been the bane of his life
for years.

He bit off a
curse and said, ‘And you say you haven't notified the local police?’ He paused,
hoping to gather both wits and patience, while he listened to the garbled explanation.
But unusually for him, he succeeded in gathering neither, as his next words
proved. ‘Are you both stupid, Moon, or just criminally irresponsible?’

Pointless,
really, asking such questions, Casey told himself with a grimace that he tried
and failed to turn into an ironic smile. When were they ever anything else?

Illogically,
he thought, This can't be happening to me. Only he knew it was. He really must
have been very wicked in a previous life to bring such bad karma with him to
this one.

He stared
unseeingly at his living room. Gradually, his eyes came back into focus. It was
as if his mind needed to ground him, to calm him. Without will or conscious
effort, his gaze travelled round his living room till it rested on the wall to
the left of the chimney breast and the place where his favourite piece of
scripophily had once rested. The rare and — to Casey — precious, old share certificate
of the Stockton and Darlington railway had been sacrificed to pay his parents'
debts. The certificate Rachel had bought him in its place was interesting in
its way, but it would never replace the original which had had a special place
in his heart. His gaze moved around as he listened to further garbled
explanations from Moon. This time it rested on the carved Hindu elephant-headed
god,
Ganesh
. His mother had pressed this on him just before she and his
father returned home the last time they were here. For good luck, she had said.
He had tried to return it to her, thinking she and his father had more need of
the god's protection. Even though she had laughed aside his offer and pointed
to a similar, much smaller carving at her throat, he wished now he had insisted
she keep the larger carving of
Ganesh
. Being so much bigger, it must
surely provide greater protection in keeping with its size.

Too late, he
breathed on a sigh as he told Moon he would get there as quickly as possible
and put the phone down.

This time his
parents had — by a country mile — managed to surpass any of their previous
lunatic stunts. And, for the life of him, he didn't see how he could begin to
save them from the consequences of their actions.

But, he told
himself as he jerked his unwilling body into movement, grabbed his coat and car
keys and headed out into the unseasonably chilly July night, there's no one
else to do it, so you'd better get up to the Fens and see if you can rescue
something from the mire.

The word
mire
caused him to pause in the doorway of his neat semi-detached as he wondered
whether he should change out of his new suit. But then, as he remembered his
parents' two muck-attracting and neglected mongrels had both died within a
month of one another earlier in the year, he decided such a precaution wasn't
necessary.

As he climbed
into the car, started it up and made for the Fens, he told himself it was
fortunate he was on a week's leave. At least it gave him the time and freedom
to try to sort the mess out.

God knew what
he'd say to Rachel. He'd have to tell her, of course, he accepted that.
Deception was no basis for a committed relationship and he and Rachel had been
together now for some months. She spent much of the time at Casey's home, but
kept her own flat on in the town. He was just grateful he didn't have to
explain the situation to her while his mind was in turmoil and he was still
trying to get his head around the grim events he had just been told about.

But as luck
would have it, Rachel was out this evening. She had driven to Norwich with a
woman friend to see a play that had been highly recommended. Casey hadn't
wanted to go but had encouraged Rachel to do so, seeing as she was so keen. As
a musician, between practising, performing and touring, she didn't get much
opportunity to be on the receiving end of entertainment, and although he
regretted the loss of her company, he didn't begrudge her the evening apart.

It wasn't that
Rachel wouldn't sympathize if he told her what had happened — she had met his
parents and would understand how they could have got into their current
predicament almost as well as he did — it was just that he'd prefer to keep
this business to himself until he'd extracted the full story. So he was
relieved not to have been forced by her presence tonight to explain what the
phone call was about.

Will Casey had
always found the flatland Fens and their equally flat and empty approaches
desolate, even during daylight hours. How had the Elizabethan writer Michael
Drayton described them? Something about 'a land of foul,
woosy
marsh. With
a vast
queachy
soil and hosts of wallowing waves'. Of course, much of
the waterlogged land had been reclaimed since Drayton's day. But with the wide
and moonless night sky louring darkly down at him through the mist that every
so often lifted to reveal the flatlands stretching to the horizon on either
side of the road as he drove with no light but cats eyes in sight, he couldn't
help but share something of Drayton's feelings about the place. He reflected
that on such a night as this the legendary Black Shuck might roam the Fens. A
giant black hound, to see Black Shuck was once believed to bring death within a
week. With a shiver not solely attributable to the legendary hound, Casey
wondered what scenes were waiting for him at his parents' home; a commune of
so-called happy hippies enjoying their own version of Utopia.

Now, reality
had entered their ramshackle paradise and it had suffered a mortal blow. Two
mortal blows, in fact. And he was expected to sort it out and make it all
better.

In the next
rising of the murk, Casey glanced briefly towards the huge, star-studded
Fenland sky and wondered whether he should pray to the Almighty or the Hindu
god of hopeless causes ...

As Casey
slowed his car for the approach to the commune's smallholding, he was surprised
to see that the gate was shut. Not only shut, but locked with a large padlock
and chain, as he discovered when he got out of the car. Casey presumed that
with one body lying in a shallow grave in the smallholding's grounds and
another presumably laid out in one of the outhouses, they had decided to
exercise a rare prudence. Shame it was a little late, he thought.

Amongst the
usual collection of rusting old wrecks littering the yard, two of them still
balanced on bricks as they had been on his last visit, Casey was astonished to
see a brand new 4x4 that gleamed in the sudden light as the front door opened.
Where had they got the money for that? he wondered. Unless they had a visitor.
That must be it, he concluded as Moon crossed the yard to unlock the gate. Some
wealthy patron who thought their lifestyle romantic. Deluded fool, he thought.
But it was going to be awkward. Would he have to wait for hours for their
visitor to leave before he could talk to them about the two deaths?

However, when,
after his mother had enthusiastically embraced him and — a rarity from either
parent — thanked him for coming to their aid, he asked Moon who amongst their
assorted on-benefits acquaintances could afford such a car, she just mumbled
something he couldn't hear and Casey didn't pursue it. He came to another
conclusion: that their visitor was someone they would rather he knew as little
about as possible.

Almost
immediately, Casey heard dogs barking. Worried for a moment that the commune
members had obtained more mangy, mud-attracting mutts, he quickly dismissed the
thought; acquiring more dogs would require an energy and purposefulness
singularly lacking in the commune members given that they rarely found energy
for anything other than smoking dope and making babies. On the still air of
this flat and otherwise silent countryside, he knew sound could travel some
distance and concluded that the dogs must belong to one of the commune's
neighbours.

Just as he had
satisfied himself that he was safe from the attentions of uncared for dogs, two
hairy and muck-coated specimens came racing around the side of the house
yapping frenziedly. To no avail, Casey tried to shush them, only too conscious
of the unorthodox reason for his visit, he could do without the dogs drawing
attention to his arrival. With his attempts at quietening the animals clearly
doomed to failure, he hurried after Moon, squelching through the mud, hoping
that his disappearance through the front door would shut the dogs up.

As he trudged
back with her, fending off the curious dogs and their sniffing noses, Casey
took a look round the smallholding. And although the darkness was kind to it,
the commune's property still looked as uncared for as the dogs. Daylight would
doubtless have revealed the level of ramshackle squalor that Casey recalled
from his previous visits: rusted corrugated roofs on all the outbuildings; the
broken windows in most of them which had never been replaced; weeds which
sprouted with vigorous, unchecked growth all over the yard and the land that
had been left uncultivated as well as amongst most of the cultivated area also,
which received only a sporadic and half-hearted weeding. Several doors still
hung off the hinges they had hung from on his last visit. They swung and banged
in the suddenly stiffening breeze with an irritating relentlessness that would
drive most normal people mad. He could only suppose the drug use endemic among
the community transformed the banging into the tinkle of heavenly bells. Or
something.

The house was
no better, he saw as, by the light of candles that flickered in the sudden
draught, he and Moon entered the large living room and he pulled the door to
behind them. Candles provided the room's only illumination and, but for the
hall light that had gleamed out into the yard, Casey would have assumed that
the electricity had been cut off again. Through the candlelit gloom, he saw two
new settees and a huge plasma television which took pride of place in the corner.
Even the carpet was new, he noticed, and replaced the one with the multiplicity
of burn holes. They really were looking remarkably affluent for people with no
visible means of support and Casey's gaze narrowed suspiciously as he realized
that not only was there no rich visitor immediately apparent, but that his
normally impecunious parents hadn't tapped him for a loan for some weeks. It
wasn't like them. So what had changed?

Moon must have
noticed his astonishment, because she told him, ‘We came up on the lottery.’

‘How much?’
Casey asked before politeness stopped him.

‘Enough,’ Glen
'Foxy' Redfern replied for Moon from where he lounged full length on one of the
new settees. His reply was abrupt and told Casey, clear as clear, that their
lottery win was none of his business. But then he had always been a belligerent
personality. Must go with his wild bush of red hair.

Their lottery
win must have been more than enough, thought Casey, to judge from all the money
they'd spent. And as there was no visitor in evidence, he surmised that the 4x4
in the yard was a new purchase of theirs as well. So why hadn't Moon and Star
repaid him some of the money he'd lent them over the years? Disgruntled at this
thought, Casey crossed the room, stepping over the bodies lounging on the
large, grubby cushions that littered the new carpet.

One thing
hadn't changed: like the outbuildings and grounds, everything was covered in a
layer of dust, the original furniture a mismatched mix of colours and styles
that no amount of brightly-coloured Indian throws could bring together.