A Killing Karma (3 page)

‘Kris
“Krishna” Callender was a total tosser. Misnamed too; although he might have
followed the womanizing aspect of
Krishna's
character, he sure as hell
wasn't put on this earth to fight for good and combat evil like
Lord Krishna
.
The man was evil.’

The youth
directed a look of defiance at Casey, a defiance he proceeded to share around
the room full of adults who tried to shush him.

But the youth
wasn't to be silenced. 'I don't see why all of you seem so determined to
pretend Kris was a great bloke and destined for sainthood. Because he was
neither — ask my sister if you don't believe me,’ he told Casey as he nodded to
a very pregnant girl huddled in the far corner, who might, just — have scraped
over the legal age of consent when she had conceived what, to judge from the
youth's words, had to be the not-so-saintly Callender's baby.

‘What's your
name?’ he asked the boy, having forgotten it.

‘I'm Jethro
Redfern and my sister's called Madonna.’

Casey nodded.
Apt, he thought. For hadn't the original Madonna been impregnated by someone
other than her husband? It was ironic that a group of people who chose to
follow the Sixties’ ethos of rebellion against the conventions of the previous
austere decade and who had enthusiastically embraced such concepts as free love
and taking drug-fuelled trips, should, in turn, themselves suffer from
rebellious youth. But, as Casey noted from the set faces of the adults, the
irony seemed to have escaped most of them.

Casey turned
back to his mother. ‘Is this true? Was Kris Callender such an unpleasant man?’

She didn't
answer. Neither did anyone else.

Casey looked
pointedly at Moon. 'Mum,' he said, ‘you were the one who called me in. You were
the one who asked me to pick up this poisoned chalice in order to help you all.
How do you think I can do that if you won't tell me the truth?’

Casey's
reasonable question brought only more silence. ‘Fine,’ he said as he stood up.
‘Have it your own way. I'm out of here.’ He turned towards the door, hoping to
convince them that he was about to leave them to sort out their own mess. He
hoped the shock of the two deaths and their current predicament had made his
mother, at least, temporarily forget what a dutiful, responsible, totally
unsuitable
son he had turned into. But, in his heart, Casey knew he couldn't abandon them
and as his mother let him know that she would cooperate he gave a brief sigh as
he waved goodbye to that tiny window of opportunity when he might just have
made his escape ...

Instead, he sat
down again to become yet another part of this guilty conspiracy of concealment.

'Jethro's
right,’ Moon now admitted. ‘Kris wasn't a nice man. He was trouble almost from
the day he arrived.’

‘So why didn't
you just kick him out?’

This
reasonable question brought just a shrug of Moon's shoulders.

His father put
in his second contribution of the evening. ‘Kris had bad karma, man.’

After that, it
didn't take Casey long to add to what he had already learned about Callender
from young Jethro. Kris's ‘bad karma' had basically consisted of most of the
human vices of thieving, bullying, cheating and womanizing.

Jethro's
sister wasn't the only young girl he had impregnated, Casey now discovered.
Several girls in the neighbouring villages had also fallen victim to Callender's
suspect charm; no wonder the commune members didn't get on with the locals.
‘Free love’, they called it. Yet, from where Casey was seated, the desolate
look in young Madonna's eyes said that, for her at least, the 'love' she had
shared with Callender had been far from cost free.

Now that he
had forced them to tell him the truth about the first victim, he asked them
about the second. ‘This DaisyMay Smith — was she also disliked?’

‘No, of course
she wasn't,’ Dylan Harper, her newly-bereaved partner, said sharply from the
corner of his settee.

Dylan was a
slim-hipped, gypsyish-looking man with springy dark curls and an array of
golden earrings. At the moment, he looked as tautly-sprung as his tight black
curls. ‘My Daisy was the most generous of women. She was also carrying our
first child.’ His voice broke on a sob as he added, ‘And now I've lost her and
the baby.’

‘I'm sorry for
your loss,’ Casey told him gently.

Dylan Harper's
emotional outburst contrasted strongly with the behaviour of Kris Callender's
widow. Kali Callender's face looked the opposite of tear-stained even though
her husband was dead and already in his makeshift grave. Though given what the
others had to say about him, Mrs Callender's calm acceptance of her husband's
death wasn't altogether surprising. Still, it was strange that she seemed to
accept the very pregnant presence of her dead husband's much younger paramour.
Most women would surely have found Madonna's continued presence intolerable.

Casey asked
her, ‘Did you know about your husband's secret burial? Did you agree to it?’

Kali Callender
raised her chin a notch. Her gaze met his fearlessly — shamelessly, even.

'Yes,' she
said. ‘Of course I knew about it. I agreed to it. Kris was the worthless shit
the others told you he was. The only honest day's work he's ever done was on
our stall at the local market, and since we discovered that even that work
wasn't honest at all, but just a means to cheat us all, I had no illusions
about my husband.’ She broke off, and in an echo of Jethro's youthful defiance,
added, ‘Hey, pig man, I was glad someone had killed him. I just wish whoever
did it had done so sooner and saved me grief.’

Casey let her
words die away before he again stood up. An uneasy communal sigh passed around
the room. He assumed they feared that after Kali's insulting 'pig' reference,
he was about to threaten to abandon them for a second time. Reluctantly, only
too aware of how deep in the mire he was already, he put them out of their
misery. ‘I'd like to see where you found Kris's body and where you buried him,’
he told them. 'I also want to see the body of Ms Smith.’

The group all
stood up, their expressions a mixture of relief, resignation and unease that
even the cannabis-induced calm couldn't entirely eradicate. Led by Moon and Casey,
they all trooped outside and made for Kris Callender's lonely grave. Casey was
glad to get out into the fresh air, because the farmhouse smelled of a combination
of unwashed dog, candle grease and the sweet, sickly odour of the cannabis that
permeated the place. Partway there, and after tripping over he knew not what in
the dark, Casey stopped them and suggested they would need a torch.

But as it
seemed to be the general consensus that the commune didn't actually possess
such a useful tool, they waited, huddled together against the chill night air
while Casey walked back to his car, stepping carefully so as to avoid whatever
other ready-to-trip-the-unwary rubbish the gloom might conceal, to retrieve his
own torch from the boot.

The brief interruption
in the grim night walk and the first solitary moments he'd had since his
arrival gave Casey time to think. But as he considered the current situation
and his part in it, he rather wished he hadn't. Because time to think tended
only to increase his mental anguish, caused, not least, because if he hadn't
suspected before he knew now that he wouldn't be able to trust even his parents
to tell him the entire truth. Hadn't they already tried to mislead him about
Callender's character?

Given this
conclusion, for a few brief seconds, Casey was again tempted to abandon them
and leave them to their fate. But just by making this one visit he had allowed
himself to become too compromised to walk away. And although he liked to think
that his parents wouldn't betray him unless it was when they were in a
drugged-up, love-their-fellow-man, stupor, he had no illusions at all about the
other members of the commune.

If one of them
had murdered Kris Callender and DaisyMay Smith, which, given the presence of
the barking dogs, seemed likely, and they thought he was getting close to the
truth, they would surely shop him without question or hesitation in order to
spread the burden of guilt.

Not for the
first time, as he walked reluctantly back to the waiting group, Willow Tree
Casey found himself envying the orphaned state of his DS, Thomas Catt.

As they stood
around the tumbled earth of the inexpertly dug grave, Casey questioned them all
further and learned that — apart from his other assorted vices — Kris Callender
had been a crack cocaine addict who had been found to be regularly exchanging a
proportion of the commune's produce that he was supposed to sell at the local
market to help support the community, for supplies of the drug to feed what had
become an increasingly voracious habit.

It explained
why Callender had been such a keen and dedicated stallholder, a realisation which
only amplified the indignation of the others.

But while Callender's
addiction added one more complication, to the commune members it meant only one
thing — a let-off for them, for reasons they weren't slow to point out to
Casey.

‘We all
thought it probable that Kris got on the wrong side of his dealer and was
killed for his pains.’ Foxy Redfern's enthusiasm for this explanation was such
that he repeated it twice and then a third time with the slightest of
alterations. ‘If Kris was murdered, which none of us know for sure — for all we
know he could have died from an overdose — he must have been killed by an
outsider rather than by a member of the commune.’

As they'd
already been over this ground, Casey made no comment. In the gloom beyond the
range of the torch, he could see little more than the circle of white faces
bobbing up and down as they again showed a ready willingness to support Foxy's
theory. They seemed to have forgotten the ‘barking dogs in the night time’ at
his own arrival. Surely even their minimally-retentive memories wouldn't allow
them to have it both ways and forget the dogs' barking at strangers?

As they set
off again, away from Kris Callender's hastily-dug grave, they walked towards an
array of outbuildings at the back of the house. Seeking enlightenment, Casey
asked, ‘So why was it you decided to bury him rather than report his death? You
still haven't told me.’

This time he
got the answer that was, he judged, a deal closer to the truth than their
earlier responses had been.

‘We found his
body in one of the greenhouses amongst our cannabis plants,’ Foxy Redfern told
him, stopping so abruptly that Star cannoned into him.

It confirmed
what Casey had suspected.

Foxy pointed
through the open greenhouse door.

Casey, in the
limited light provided by the torch, hadn't recognized the plants.

‘No way we
wanted the cops here, poking their noses into our business. They'd have done us
for sure. They're just looking for an opportunity. That crop brings us in
bread, man. We didn't see why that shit, Kris, should bring us more grief when
he was dead. He brought enough when he was alive.’

Some of the
cannabis plants lay flattened on the soil, presumably where Callender's body
had crushed them. Even these cash crops were surrounded by weeds, though here
at least some attempt had been made to keep them in check.

‘When did you
find his body?’ Casey asked, expecting the answer to be sometime in the last
few days. DaisyMay Smith, the second victim, had been found only this morning
and had still been warm to the touch, as his mother had told him on the phone.
DaisyMay had clearly been but freshly killed. Casey thought it probable the two
deaths were connected, so he was stunned at Foxy's reluctant admission.

‘We found
Kris's body two months ago.’ He paused and frowned as he searched his
drug-damaged memory. Then he conceded, ‘Well, maybe it was a bit more than two
months. I can't exactly recall.’

Clearly Foxy,
helped by the light from the torch that Casey still held, had noted the look of
shocked dismay on Casey's face, for he added laconically, ‘He'd have stayed in
the ground, too, with no need to drag you into it, if it hadn't been for DaisyMay's
death. You see that has definitely got to be murder. For, though in Kris's case
the cause of his death was unclear, Daisy had obviously been beaten. Viciously
beaten. It made us uneasy, man. Made us question who could have killed her. The
thought that it might have been one of us unnerved the women. They persuaded
Moon to phone you.’

‘It wasn't
just the women,’ Dylan Harper insisted as his flashing gypsy dark eyes met
Casey's. ‘The “dead woman” as you keep calling her, was my wife — or at least the
next best thing to it — we'd talked about getting married once the baby was
born.’

Better late
than never, was Casey's silent response to this.

‘And even
though she'll still end up in a hole in the ground, I wanted my wife to be
properly buried, to have an official hole in the ground instead of a hole in
the corner such as we dug for Callender. My Daisy's entitled to a proper burial
and I insisted she got one. That's the main reason Moon rang you. Even though
the women were spooked, they'd have been persuaded to get over it but for my
insistence.’