Almost Love (3 page)

Chapter Three

Despite the fact that it was an unspoiled morning and he was driving along some of his favourite country lanes in brilliant winter sunshine, Inspector Tim Yates was not happy. He thought that he had probably been sent on a fool’s errand, for one thing; to a place near Helpston, as well, which was not, strictly speaking, in his territory. For another, he had had one of his rare disagreements with Katrin – OK, he conceded, as he rewound the events of the previous evening in his mind, it was a row . Katrin had been behaving strangely of late – she was not her usual sunny, rational, forgiving self. There had been a heated exchange, during which she had said that it was he who had been behaving thoughtlessly. She would say that, of course. Nevertheless, her comments had prompted him to embark on some unaccustomed moments of introspection. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps they both needed a holiday. Perhaps he would be in a better mood if Superintendent Thornton hadn’t landed him with this bloody ‘incident’, or rather, non-incident. It would turn out to be a wild goose chase, he would put money on it. In the meantime, Detective Constables Juliet Armstrong and Andy Carstairs were investigating what appeared to be a contract killing that had taken place in Spalding the night before – a man had been found dead in Ayscoughfee Gardens, the cause of death apparently a single bullet through the forehead. Drugs, thought Tim. Drugs would be at the bottom of it; though it was odd that the man seemed to be a vagrant. He had been trying to persuade his superiors for months that there was evidence of an organised drugs gang at work in South Lincolnshire. Perhaps now they would believe him. Discovering the identity of the victim in the park could lead to the uncovering of a drugs network. If so, it would probably be the most important case that South Lincolnshire police had worked on for many years. And here he was, traipsing around the countryside looking for a vain old woman who had contrived to go missing.

His assessment of Claudia McRae’s character was not entirely based on prejudice. As a history undergraduate, he had developed a passing interest in archaeology and, of course, he had heard of her. Dame Claudia McRae, as she was now. Most people had heard of her, even if they barely knew what archaeology was about. Her fame had been attributed to her having pushed back the boundaries of what the women of her generation were allowed to achieve; she had succeeded in gaining eminence in a science (art?) that had previously been a fiercely-guarded male preserve. Tim had read one of her books, however, and he suspected that vanity and a decided talent for self-promotion had also been major factors in her rise to stardom – not to mention her many friends in politics and other influential spheres. He did not deny the inventive virtuosity of the theories that she propounded; indeed, he found them fascinating, because they lent to archaeology the very quality which for him it had traditionally lacked: the power to recreate the voices of the past. But her prose style was thumping and arrogant and she allowed no room for doubt that she was right. Some of her hypotheses were based on extremely tenuous interpretations of tiny examples of barely-decipherable scraps of ancient writings whose languages could not be fully reconstructed. It was therefore difficult to say that she was wrong (particularly as she was the pre-eminent ‘expert’ in her field), but for a trained mind it was equally difficult to swallow that all of her theories were irrefutable. Remarkably, no-one of either her own generation or the one succeeding it had publicly challenged her writings, though conversely she had never received much acclaim from her peers. He wondered if a new young crop of would-be famous archaeologists was now busily casting a sceptical eye on the corpus of her work and coming up with alternative explanations for her ‘findings’. If so, he hoped that they would be diligent in researching the many accounts of recent discoveries that could no doubt be cited to provide a legitimate pretext for undertaking such a project and, also, that they would apply absolute integrity to whatever counter-arguments they might come up with. Otherwise it would just be the usual academic tit-for-tat refined slanging match, of no practical use to anyone. Thank God he had turned his back on all of that and chosen to become a policeman.

The thought cheered him. His mood was lightened further when his mobile phone chirruped its ‘text message waiting’ ditty and, pulling over into a lay-by, he saw that the message was from Katrin. It read simply: ‘Sorry. XXX.’ He texted her back. ‘My fault. XXX’. The day was already beginning to look a great deal brighter.

The last leg of his journey took him deep into the country lanes beyond Helpston. He made a few wrong turns, cursing equally the inadequate map which he had printed from the Internet and the local council’s failure to signpost the maze of tiny lanes in which he found himself. Claudia McRae’s cottage, when eventually he reached it, stood at the end of a narrow unmetalled farm track which gradually petered out altogether, so that for the last two hundred yards or so he was just driving on hard mud.

The house itself was a confection, almost too picture-book pretty with its thatched roof and rose-coloured walls. Its walls were bowed with age and seemed to grow up out of the grass – there was evidently no proper garden, nor even a boundary fence – and it bore more than a fleeting resemblance to the picture of the cottage into which Hansel and Gretel had been lured in the edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales from which his grandmother had read to him as a child. Taking the analogy further would turn Claudia McRae into a witch. If the cap fits, thought Tim.

There was a police car and a battered Citroen parked in front of the house. Tim parked his own car – a BMW and also battered – at some distance from them and walked up the slight slope to the house. The front door was wide open. A police cordon had been looped through stakes set in a box shape around the entrance. Wary of contaminating evidence, Tim shouted out ‘Hello?’, feeling faintly foolish as he did so.

A uniformed policeman appeared from somewhere behind the house. He was carrying a plastic bag and was followed by a slightly-built man of about fifty who held up his head with an almost aristocratic bearing, although he was dressed in very shabby, dirty clothes. Tim recognised the policeman.

“PC Cooper?” he said. “Have they sent you out here as well? Don’t City of Peterborough Police have any coppers of their own, for God’s sake?”

Gary Cooper grinned. “It was Superintendent Thornton’s idea, sir,” he said. “He thought you would appreciate working with one of your own team, so to speak.”

Tim rolled his eyes. “Heaven preserve me if the Superintendent has started getting in touch with his feminine side. What next?”

“When you’ve finished your banter,” said the slightly-built man quietly, but with unmistakable, if contained, hostility, “my aunt has disappeared and I think that you should lose no time in setting about finding her. If you are able to, that is. It is already several hours since I first called for help and nothing at all constructive appears to have happened yet.”

Tim took an instant dislike to the man, but he knew he must guard against showing it. Both Katrin and Juliet Armstrong had told him that his opinions of other people could often be read only too clearly in his face. Not a good trait in a policeman.

“Mr Maichment?” he said, extending his hand. “Detective Inspector Tim Yates, South Lincolnshire Police.”

Guy Maichment placed his slight and none-too-clean hand in Tim’s and let it linger there limply for a moment before withdrawing it.

“Delighted,” he said. “Now, if you will come into the house, I’ll show you what I found when I arrived here during the night.”

“About what time was that, Mr Maichment?” Tim asked.

“Just before 1 a.m. Why do you ask?”

“Rather late to be visiting an old lady, wasn’t it?”

“I’ve already explained several times that I was trying to reach my aunt by telephone during the whole of yesterday evening. She’s in quite good health for her age, but obviously not strong. She usually has someone with her – Jane Halliwell, a sort of companion and secretary rolled into one – but Miss Halliwell is not here this week.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“I believe that she is on holiday abroad somewhere.”

“So you haven’t been in touch with her to ask if she might know where your aunt could have gone?”

“I haven’t been in touch with anyone, except you people,” Guy Maichment said peevishly. “The policeman whom I spoke to on the telephone told me just to stay here and not touch anything until someone arrived to help.”

“Which policeman was that?” asked Tim, directing his question to Gary Cooper.

“Superintendent Little, of the City of Peterborough force, sir. Mr Maichment’s call was taken very seriously. Superintendent Little was alerted and dealt with the matter personally. He sent a panda car here straight away.”

“I would expect Roy Little to take a call from me ‘very seriously’,” said Guy Maichment. “He is a friend of my aunt’s.” He almost preened himself.

“Presumably there was a policeman – or even two – from Peterborough. Where are they now?”

“There was a policeman and a policewoman, sir. I’ve written down their names. They left just after I got here. They asked Mr Maichment some preliminary questions, I believe, and now they’ve gone to check the hospitals and old people’s homes in the area.”

“I see.” Tim didn’t actually see at all. If Superintendent Little was so keen to help, and a friend of the family to boot, why involve South Lincolnshire Police? And why had Superintendent Thornton agreed? Tim was here now, however, and there was work to do. He would get to the bottom of whatever Thornton was up to later.

“Let’s go into the house now, shall we, as Mr Maichment suggests?”

Gary Cooper produced some white overshoes from his plastic bag.

“Best to wear these, then, sir. SOCOs haven’t got here yet.”

“You’ve called the SOCOs in? That was a bit precipitate, wasn’t it?”

“You’ll see why, sir.”

Tim took the shoes and eased into them. PC Cooper lifted out more shoes for himself and Guy Maichment, who made quite a palaver of putting them on. Tim had the strange feeling that he was enjoying himself.

Gary Cooper ducked under the police cordon. Guy Maichment hopped over it nimbly, close on Gary’s heels. Tim himself hurdled it in rather an ungainly way and followed them both through the open door of the house. They each halted abruptly and stood a few paces back from the left-hand wall in the poky, corridor-like entrance hall. Both turned simultaneously to face the wall itself, as if to signpost to Tim what he was supposed to be looking at.

Tim prided himself on not being easily shocked, but the spectacle that confronted him made his heart turn over in disbelief. At first he could see very little: the entrance hall to the cottage was dark and gloomy. It was dingily painted and unlit by external windows. After a few seconds, his eyes adjusted a little, enabling him to make out the crescent of colour that arced across the wall as if daubed by an abstract artist or a naughty child. Exactly what he was looking at dawned on him at the same moment as PC Cooper switched on the light. The low wattage bulb cast shadows, distorting the daub so that the smear appeared to stand out from the wall like a bas-relief.

“Christ!” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said Gary Cooper. “There can’t be much doubt about what it is. The SOCOs will take swabs, of course, but I’d say that the fine spray of little droplets nearest to the door confirms it pretty well.”

“A trajectory of blood consistent with someone having staggered towards the wall after the cutting of a major artery – possibly in the throat?”

“Yes, sir,” Gary Cooper responded again. “That would be my opinion.”

“I’m glad that you both agree,” said Guy Maichment sardonically. “What I want to know is, whose blood? Is it my aunt’s? Did she hurt herself while running away from an attacker? And where is she now?”

“Whether it was your aunt or someone else who sustained the injury that resulted in that, Mr Maichment, it is unlikely that they were able to run anywhere. In all probability they collapsed or were on the point of collapsing as soon as it happened. As you see, the mark is quite high on the wall. Is your aunt a tall woman?”

“She’s well-built, but not particularly tall. I suppose that there’s a chance that the blood isn’t hers?”

Tim spent a second appraising Guy Maichment before he answered – not enough time to worry him, but long enough for Tim to note his expression and try to understand his demeanour. Despite his posh haughtiness, which Tim was beginning to think might be assumed, he seemed to be inappropriately excited, even gleeful, about the mystery that he had found himself caught up in. Correction, thought Tim: Guy Maichment had actually
announced
the mystery, though there was plenty of evidence, of course, to support the action that he had taken. Not everyone would stir themselves to visit an elderly aunt in the middle of the night simply because she wasn’t answering her telephone; measured by the norms of civilised society, someone who did so would normally be praised for sensitivity, not suspected for motive. Certainly, most responsible people would have telephoned the police, just as Guy had done, if they had found the old lady’s house empty, the front door open and what was apparently a significant quantity of blood smeared on the wall. There was something strange about Guy, nevertheless. Perhaps he was just behaving unnaturally because the adrenalin was still surging. Unlike PC Cooper and me, he can’t have had much experience of missing persons, let alone lurid blood stains, Tim thought. His innocence could be believed in; for now.

“We can’t even be certain that it
is
blood until some tests have been done,” he said, continuing to meet Guy’s eye. “But I agree that it looks like it. It will take more tests to establish
whose
blood – and then we shall only be able to use the results to eliminate people, rather than pinpoint the actual individual. Unless, of course, they have a criminal record and their DNA is recorded on the national database. I imagine that someone will know what your aunt’s blood group is?”