A Killing Karma (5 page)

Tom whistled
again.

‘Will you stop
doing that?’ Casey asked irritably. Understandably, his normally calm demeanour
had deserted him.

‘Sorry. But I
want to help. So what's on the agenda?’

‘For you,
work. You've got a job to do, remember? As you pointed out, I'm currently on
holiday. Besides, I don't see what you can do all the way down here, especially
when you're doing the usual full shift.’

Both men were
based in King's Langley, a small market town of medieval origins in Norfolk
that was situated midway between Peterborough and Norwich — a good distance from
Casey's parents' Fenland smallholding.

'I don't see
what
you
can do, either — officially,’ Tom retorted with his usual
respect-for-authority failure, ‘seeing as you can hardly poke your nose into
the Lincolnshire investigation. I suppose you've already questioned your
parents and the other commune members?’

‘Last night.’

‘And?’

Casey
explained what he had learned the previous night. In anticipation of another
piercing whistle at the revelation of the months’-old burial of Kris Callender,
he began to remove the phone from his ear again. But Tom must have thought
better of it.

‘You're going
to need help, Will,’ his DS insisted. ‘Checking everyone's motives and
opportunities, not to mention finding out the identity of the dead man's
supplier while keeping out of the way of the official investigation, is not
going to be easy. Certainly, it's not a one-man job. I’ve got one or two
contacts up that way, but as I'd guess you keep a low profile when visiting
your parents, I very much doubt that you have. Am I right?’

Casey made
another reluctant admission. Catt was right, of course, Understandably, he'd
always done his best to keep the low profile ThomCatt had referred to on his
infrequent visits to his parents. He had also kept these visits as short as
duty permitted, without trips to the pub with the casual and nosy acquaintances
such trips tended to strike up.

'So-do you
want me to call these contacts and see if they can suss out the ID of
Callender's drug supplier?’

Thomas Catt
invariably had ‘contacts' all over the place. Many of them were retained from
the youth spent in assorted children's homes when he had made some unlikely
friend-ships — not all of them either unsavoury or without contacts of their
own.

Grateful that
ThomCatt had so willingly offered his services, Casey felt unable to do anything
but agree, only too aware that he wasn't in a position to refuse such generously
offered assistance.

‘But keep as
low a profile as if you were me visiting Moon and Star at the commune, Tom,’ he
warned. ‘They're my parents, so it's only right that my career should be put in
jeopardy for their sakes. There's no reason why the same need apply to yours.’

‘Keep cool,
Big Willy,’ Catt advised cockily. ‘And don't worry. Aint I a big boy now?’
Casey imagined him patting the beginnings of a paunch as Catt added, ‘And
getting bigger all the time. Besides, I've always preferred my life to be
enlivened with a little spice. I can take some of the load and keep a low
profile at the same time. Smart as paint, me,’ he boasted with the confidence
of a cheeky Cockney sparrow that Casey could, at the moment, only envy.

Casey hoped for
Tom's sake, that his boast and his confidence didn't prove misplaced.

From what the
newspapers said, it hadn't taken the Lincolnshire police long to charge all the
adults at the commune with the less serious crimes of failing to report Kris's
death, of burying his body without official sanction and growing cannabis with
intent to supply. Further, greater charges were likely to follow unless Casey,
with Catt's help, could come up trumps.

Because as the
papers Casey had so feverishly scanned earlier had speculated with their usual
careful libel-avoidance while still making their comments perfectly comprehensible,
after the commune's unorthodox behaviour, they might well soon face further
charges of a much more serious nature.

Aware, after
his telephone conversation with Moon the previous night, that it would be
impossible in the near future to again visit the commune, he had made his
surreptitious trip to the Fens via a late night store and bought a new
pay-as-you-go mobile. He had handed it to his mother with the instruction
‘Please don't lose this one.’

Anticipating
the arrests and the listing of their possessions by the custody sergeant, Casey
had also instructed her to conceal the mobile somewhere as secure as she could
find on the smallholding in anticipation of their release on police bail. He
had also instructed her to make sure the cannabis growing in one of the commune
greenhouses was dug up and destroyed. The newspaper reports made clear the
latter instruction had been ignored and he had little confidence his
instructions about the mobile would have been noted and acted upon either. But
he could only do so much. If Moon, Star and the rest chose not to cooperate
there was little or nothing he could do about it.

He made
another coffee and sipped it slowly. He just had to hope she had obeyed his
first injunction, for he would need to be able to contact her regularly. He had
told her that, once they were released on bail, he would ring her every evening
around seven o'clock.

Meanwhile, he
had instructed, she was to search her unfortunately drug-raddled memory for any
clues as to who might have been responsible for the murder of DaisyMay Smith
and the probable murder of Kris Callender. He wanted means, motives and
opportunities, he had told her, ‘And you're the only one I can rely on to get
them for me.’ And he wasn't too sure about
her
. He had good reason to
doubt after such an interval that she would remember much more about
Callender's death than she had already told him. Casey had discounted any
chance of getting useful help from his father. Sloth-like, Star ambled his way
through life, noticing little or nothing. Besides which, his memory was
notoriously poor and he had difficulty stringing half a dozen words together
before his brain faltered to a standstill. He would have enough trouble coming
up with an alibi for himself even for DaisyMay Smith's very recent murder, or
of providing clues as to which of his fellow commune members might be guilty of
such violence, never mind demanding answers of his memory about Kris
Callender's death which had occurred two months or more ago.

As for the
drug supplier they had mentioned, he would have to leave identifying him to ThomCatt
because, although he had questioned each member of the commune about the
supplier's identity, they had all denied knowing anything about him. A denial
that Casey didn't for a moment believe.

He assumed
they were scared that if this dealer thought they had reported him to the
police he might well decide to do to them what, in their insistence on their
own innocence, they were determined to believe he had already done to Kris
Callender and DaisyMay Smith. Though if this unknown outsider had killed Callender,
it didn't explain why DaisyMay was the only one of the two who had been
brutally murdered. She rarely left the confines of the commune these days, Moon
had told him, and unless this dealer was the more obliging sort who went in for
home deliveries, it was unlikely she had had anything to do with him or any
other dealers. Besides, since her pregnancy, which was apparently a troublesome
one which left her rarely feeling well, DaisyMay had given up drug-taking so
was unlikely to require the services of a dealer.

Fortunately,
Casey had been able to obtain, for his parents at least if not the rest, the
services of an excellent solicitor and they had both been released on bail this
morning pending further inquiries.

Casey was more
wary than ever with the police probably still on site, and even though he had
put her new mobile on a non-ringing setting, he was reluctant to call his
mother at their appointed time that evening. Instead, he texted her and told
her to ring him back but to find somewhere well out of police earshot before
she did so.

Rather to
Casey's surprise, she obeyed the instruction and rang five minutes later,
clearly rattled by the invading presence of so many ‘pigs' on the commune's
smallholding.

‘You've got to
help us, Willow Tree,’ she told him with a trace of what sounded like hysteria
evident in her normally laidback voice. ‘You know how little brotherly love the
local pigs have for us.’

Casey
suspected his mother was right about that. The commune's presence on the edge
of the village was not liked by the neighbours, who, not unreasonably, thought
that, with their irresponsible, druggy lifestyles, they attracted other
undesirables. The local police had a down on them for a similar reason.

Casey thought
it unlikely the local Lincolnshire constabulary would be able to pass up the
temptation to get the whole lot of them out of their hair completely and
permanently, by charging them with murder. And given the commune members'
behaviour up to press, it wasn't unreasonable that DCI Boxham, the man in
charge of the Fenland investigation, should feel confident of success. After
all, they had buried Kris Callender — an indicator of guilt if ever there was
one. And if the post-mortem on his remains proved conclusively that he had been
murdered, their defence, already questionable and faintly surreal, would
quickly become farcical. Not to mention unsustainable.

God knew that
Moon, Star and the rest of their raggle-taggle band of brothers, sisters and
kids of as many colours as Joseph's Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, wouldn't
have endeared themselves to the investigating officers by firstly burying Kris
without making any attempt to report his death and then by leaving it till
hours after they had found Daisy May's body to actually contact the police. The
fact that she appeared to have been brutally beaten to death would, for Boxham
and his team, make this delay even more reprehensible.

Casey,
listening intently as Moon poured out the details of what the local force had
so far said and done, recognized that he'd been backed into a corner from which
the only escape would be to find a solution to the deaths that would prove his
parents' innocence. He suspected it would be a far from easy, maybe an
impossible, task.

‘So, what did
you find out, Thomas?’ Casey asked the following morning, with an unconscious
formality as he opened the front door of his home and ushered Catt inside.

‘
Thomas
?
Oh, dear. Have I been a naughty boy, then, to get my full moniker?’

‘What?’ For a
moment, Casey had no idea what his DS was talking about. Then he realized and
apologized for his distant manner. Casey supposed that it was only by adopting
a formal air — even unconsciously — that he felt he had any control left at
all.

‘That's all
right. Stress takes us all in different ways. Rachel in?’ Catt cautiously
enquired before he ventured any deeper into the house.

Casey shook
his head. ‘She's gone shopping with a girl-friend to take her mind off my
predicament,’ he told Catt. He wished the retail therapy of replacing his
ruined suit could take his mind from his current seemingly insurmountable problems.
But as there was no hope of that, he made coffee and they retreated to the
living room to work on their unofficial murder inquiry.

Once settled
in the living room — a large, tidy room with many books and neat piles of
musical scores, which, unlike his parents' home, boasted no clutter — Casey
began to question him again.

‘One of my
contacts has been in touch,’ Catt told him. ‘He's talked to various people,
some druggy and keen to remain friends with their supplier and some non-druggy
and with no need to keep on the guy's right side. By the way, Callender's crack
dealer is a bloke called Tony Magann. The usual nasty piece of work, so my
sources tell me.’

Catt paused,
took a sip of vodka-laced coffee. ‘There's no way of knowing exactly when that
guy, Kris Callender, died, you said?’

‘No. All the
commune could tell me was that it was around two months ago.’ Casey didn't add
that nothing the commune members had told him could be taken as gospel.
Besides, Catt was smart as a whip apart from being as familiar with the effects
of long-term drug use as he was himself, so would be able to come to the
inevitable conclusion.

'Okay,' he
said, 'I get the drift.’ Proving to Casey that his own conclusion about Catt’s
understanding had been tellingly accurate. ‘For the dead bloke, two months is
the — very rough — timescale. Understood. But for the girl, we've got a
reasonably accurate time of death, you said?’

Casey
confirmed it. ‘The timescale's about three to four hours. DaisyMay Smith was
last seen around ten a.m. in the kitchen of the smallholding. Apparently, she
and Madonna Redfern were comparing notes on their pregnancies and arguing as to
who was having the worst time. She was found dead in the apple orchard behind
the farmhouse around two o'clock that same afternoon.’

‘Then this
drug dealer bloke Magann can't have killed her,’ Catt told him. ‘He was,
according to all sources I spoke to, including the hospital, visiting his sick
mother from ten in the morning till after four that day.’