A Killing Karma (4 page)

Star butted
in. 'Hey man,’ he said, ‘that doesn't vibe with my memory.’

With a degree
of contempt evident in his voice, Dylan Harper said, ‘No. But then you rarely
ever recall anything as it really was, do you?’ He sighed, and ignoring Star,
he stared down at the crushed cannabis plants and added, ‘The rest you know,’
before he turned away.

This situation
just got better and better, Casey thought as, from Kris's place of death, they
made for the outhouse where DaisyMay's body currently lay. Casey made them all
remain outside. Although if the worst happened and Casey's relationship to Moon
and Star was discovered by the local police and thence conveyed to his own
force, any stray DNA that he left in the house could be explained by his visits
over the years, any found in the shed could not be so easily explained away, so
he insisted, in spite of the ‘Hey, man’ protests, on donning a set of the
protective gear that he had brought from the car before he entered the shed. As
he said to himself, any reasonably competent SIO from the local force would be
likely to wonder at finding traces of another, unknown set of DNA in one of the
commune's outhouses. They would then spread their net wide, which would
certainly include
him
once they found out the connection, even if it was
simply for elimination purposes.

He was risking
his career enough just by being here. But trying to help his parents and the
others was an entirely different matter. There was no point in needlessly increasing
the dangers to himself by being as careless as the rest.

But as Foxy
Redfern had pointed out, they were as yet uncertain if the dead man had even
been murdered. He might well have just died from natural causes or an overdose
of the unnatural substances with which he had regularly abused his body.

Foxy Redfern
had been right when he had said that DaisyMay Smith had been viciously beaten,
as Casey saw when he lifted the sheet that covered her body and shone his torch
at her.

She lay on a
board propped on a couple of trestles in one of the sheds that had been turned
into a makeshift morgue. Someone had surrounded her body with candles. Worn
down to half-used stubs by now, their yellow flames gave the dead woman's face
a healthy glow that was unnatural and so eerie, Casey felt the hairs on the
back of his neck stand up.

And as he
played the torch over her and stared down at her poor, marked face that, for
all the lifelike colour the candles gave it, was clearly no longer of this
world, Casey saw that one of the bones in her right arm looked misshapen.
Presumably, it had been broken during the frenzied assault while DaisyMay had
tried to defend herself.

His
examination of the body by the torch and candlelight revealed it had been moved
after death; the dark post-mortem hypostasis made that self-evident, without
the need for further corroboration, but Casey decided this was a case that
needed all the corroboration it could get, given its location and his
involvement.

‘So, where did
you find DaisyMay's body? And when was she last seen?’

‘She was last
seen by Madonna in the kitchen around ten-ish this morning,’ Moon replied. ‘No
one else remembers seeing her after that.’

Casey wasn't
surprised at this. Which of them, apart from the young and naive Madonna, would
be foolish enough to admit to being the last to see DaisyMay alive?

‘She was found
in the apple orchard,’ his mother, Moon, explained. ‘
Lord Krishna
knows
what she was doing there as the apples aren't yet ready for harvesting. It's a
good distance from the house and as there are several more outhouses between
the orchard and the house the noise of any cries would have been muffled.’

Casey nodded.
After he let the sheet fall back over DaisyMay's poor battered face he shone
his torch on his watch. It was late. Rachel would certainly have returned home
from her theatre trip by now. In his haste, he had forgotten to leave a note to
explain his absence. Not wishing to be disturbed while he questioned his
parents and the rest, he had switched his mobile off. But now, as he ushered
them all ahead of him as he left the shed and followed behind them, leaving
DaisyMay Smith and her encircling candle stubs alone again, he switched it on
and gave Rachel a quick, reassuring call.

‘Hi,
sweetheart,’ he said quietly for Rachel's ear alone. ‘Sorry I didn't leave you
a note. I got an urgent call-out.’ More loudly, for the benefit of his fellow
conspirators as well as Rachel, he added the rider, ‘I'll tell you all about it
when I get home.’

As he returned
the mobile to his pocket, Casey faced the commune members and said, ‘As you'll
tell the local police all about it tonight as soon as I've gone.’

They seemed to
be surprised by this instruction and a noisy hubbub of protests broke out.

What had they
expected? Casey wondered grimly. That he'd be as keen as most of them had been
to sweep two deaths under some convenient soil carpet, solve the murders
himself in the space of an hour or so and leave them to go about their business
as if the deaths had never happened? But while he marvelled at such an
expectation, he thought it probable that was just what they had expected. It
would be in keeping with their general
laissez faire
attitude.

Determinedly,
Casey set about destroying any such lingering hopes. It took about ten minutes
before their drug-and death-dazed brains managed to take in that he meant what
he said. But at least by the time he was finished, he concluded from their
silence that they had conceded they had no choice but to contact the police and
formally report the two deaths.

Casey decided
to leave it up to them to figure out what answer they came up with to explain
the fact that Kris ‘
Krishna’
Callender had been in his grave for two
months or more without benefit of either death certificate or coroner's
inquest. He didn't envy them the task.

Before he
drove off, Casey raked his lights over the front of the farmhouse, first full
beam, then dipped, then full beam again, as a reminder to them that, although
he might be going away, their problems certainly wouldn't. He had told them it
would look better if they did as he had forcefully suggested and report the two
deaths themselves, rather than leaving him to make good their failure to do so,
which was something he had promised them he would do if he had to. From their
sullen expressions as he had climbed in the car, Casey knew they believed him.

Of course, it
was a threat that he was loath to carry out. He hadn't spent years making sure
that the reality of his parental inheritance didn't damage his career to step
voluntarily into the limelight of a murder investigation now and announce to
the world that the commune had called him in because he was the policeman son
of two of the drug-taking hippie suspects.

Fortunately,
he believed they were all even more dazed by the day's events than they usually
were by drugs, and therefore incapable of the coherent thought necessary for
such a conclusion.

But even if
the various commune members failed to grasp this fact, Casey was aware that it
was only by staying in the background and organizing an unofficial, behind the
scenes, investigation away from the commune that he would both keep his career
free from contamination and be able to try to find the killer, thereby helping
his parents and the rest out of their predicament. Casey reflected on the
damage that would be done to his career should it come out that the commune had
called him in the belief that he would help them conceal the deaths. As it was,
he had been persuaded not to reveal his relationship to Moon and Star to the
police. He hadn't taken much persuading. Besides, as Moon had pointed out when
she said, ‘Willow Tree, hon, the only way we'll get a fair hearing is if you
look into the deaths. I realize you can't do it officially, but at least when
the official pigs turn up and arrest us all you'll be able to find the evidence
that we didn't kill our friends.’

As he drove
back to King's Langley and its comparative sanity, Casey wished he could be
sure on that point. Bemused, he stared through the still lingering mist on the
road as he pondered how his mother expected him to come up with the goods,
given that what the commune members had so far told him had been little enough
and that a mixture of truth and lies, the little made less owing to the hazy
memories of the long-term drug user.

He only hoped,
with the smallholding about to be overrun by the forces of Lincolnshire's
finest, that no member of the commune either deliberately betrayed him for
newspaper money or accidentally let slip his identity or his unofficial,
unreported actions of the last few hours.

It was after
he arrived home but before he had a chance to make his own shamefaced
confession about his recent activities that Rachel exclaimed at the state of
his new suit.

At her look of
horror, Casey looked down and saw she had reason for her exclamation. His new
suit was ruined. Between getting caught on rusty wire that had ripped it in
several places, coming into contact with deep, noxious puddles in the yard and
suffering Craggie's mud-covered and drooling embrace, the suit was surely
beyond salvage. Besides, Casey didn't think he would ever want to wear it again
as it would never feel clean and  uncontaminated.

It was £500
down the drain, because he thought it unlikely he would be up to brazening out
the insurance claim form and its inquisitorial demands as to how, where and
when the suit had sustained such damage.

As expected,
after he had told Rachel about his nocturnal activities, she told him what he
already knew — that it hadn't been only his parents and the rest who had
behaved foolishly. By taking their problems on to his own shoulders, he had shown
himself to be the biggest fool of all. Worse, he knew she was right.

‘You realize
you could lose your career over this if it comes out?’ she asked.

Casey nodded
miserably, a misery only exacerbated as she added a rider.

‘Or worse.’

Because he
knew she was right about that as well. Only, somehow, he'd not been able to
leave his parents, Moon and Star, to deal with their own failure of morality
and responsibility. He never had been able to. But maybe, if by some miracle he
came through this current problem without a stain on his character or career,
he might start to think differently in future.

As Rachel said
before she stumped off to bed, maybe it was time he did.

As expected,
by the next morning, the story of the two smallholding deaths had surfaced.
Casey had gone out early to learn the worst and as he scanned the shelves of
the nearest newsagent, he saw that they featured as front page news in all the
local newspapers as well as several of the nationals. He bought a selection and
carried them home to read them more thoroughly and see if his name had escaped
into the public domain.

As he sipped
his breakfast coffee and quickly searched the lines of newsprint opposite a
silently reproachful Rachel, he just hoped no one who knew both him and his
parents decided to inform the papers of their relationship. At least, so far,
his secret was holding up.

He had, of
course, taken considerable trouble throughout his police career to keep an
identity distance from his parents, aware that if the connection came out it
would do his career no good at all. So far — apart from in one instance — it
had worked well. But that one instance had involved his sergeant, so Casey
wasn't altogether surprised when DS Thomas Catt rang his mobile shortly after.

‘Hey, Willow
Tree,’ ThomCatt greeted him, chafing him by using Casey's given name instead of
the ‘Will’ which he had taken care was the name by which he was commonly known.

It told Casey
that Catt, too, had read the morning's papers.

‘Please don't
tell me you're the same Casey whose parents are front page news this morning.’

'I wish I
didn't have to, ThomCatt,’ Casey admitted. ‘Unfortunately, I am that very same
Casey.’

Tom's piercing
whistle caused Casey to grimace with pain and hold his mobile away from his ear.
When he returned the phone to his ear, it was to hear Tom say, 'I presume you
know all about it?’

After Rachel's
reaction, Casey was unwilling to make a second admission about his nocturnal
activities , unwilling, at first, even to confirm Tom's guess.

But ThomCatt,
whose nickname had in part been bestowed because he shared the feline's cussed
single-minded curiosity, wasn't to be put off.

‘Come off it,
Will. We both know you're the patsy your parents turn to at the first whiff of
trouble. It's inconceivable to me that they wouldn't have called you in to sort
out this latest bit of bother, especially with you being on holiday and with
time on your hands.’

Last night had
proved that it had been inconceivable to his parents as well, reflected a more
than rueful Casey. Reluctantly, as he accepted that Tom's logical assessment
was unassailable, he admitted, ‘OK. Yes, they did call me in. But keep it under
your hat.’