Tainted Ground (16 page)

By the time we arrived and Patrick had been apprised of this information the body, wearing what looked like a dark T-shirt and jeans, had been placed face down on the concrete walkway at the bottom of the gated steps one had to descend in order to gain access to the weir. At least, it should have been face down for it was lying on its front but the open eyes were actually staring sightlessly straight ahead, the chin flat on the ground, the neck virtually severed.

‘For God's sake get the whole thing back from the edge,' Patrick ordered. ‘Or we might lose the head.' He turned to me. ‘D'you want to wait up top?'

I rather felt that I did. Besides, there was not enough room for everyone on this narrow access path just above the water. I went back up the steps, got back in the car and switched on the radio to try to take my mind off what I had just seen.

Dead fishlike eyes.

It seemed that I sat there for a small eternity, not really listening to a symphony concert, while the blue lights on the nearby vehicles revolved mesmerically, radios yammered and, gradually, the bystanders began to drift away. Carrick arrived, going from sight down the steps. Soon afterwards an ambulance that had attended the scene was driven away: they are never used once death has officially been certified. A little later the body was collected by undertakers in a fibre-glass ‘shell' coffin and loaded into a plain van. Then Patrick and Carrick came into view and approached the Range Rover. I switched off the radio.

‘Another nasty one,' James said to me through the open window.

‘How long had he been in the water?' I asked, really for something to say.

‘The pathologist thought no longer than twenty-four hours but obviously won't know more until he does the PM.'

Patrick said, ‘No ID on him, just like the others.'

‘Pure delaying tactics,' Carrick commented. ‘But it'll do the bastard no good at all – we'll get him.'

Someone called to him and he went off, his parting remark to us, ‘That was the kind of lowlife face that might be in a mugshots file.'

‘We might be looking at a copycat killing,' Patrick observed as he climbed aboard.

‘Or he could have been the man who drove the van and helped push the cars into the quarry,' I said.

‘We mustn't be in too much of a rush to make that link.'

Carrick's instincts were proved to be sound and the dead man was soon identified – initially from police records and then as a result of enquiries undertaken the following morning – as Peter Horsley, aged twenty-nine, from the district of Totterdown in Bristol. From truanting at school he had progressed to a life of petty crime and was known to Bristol CID for breach of the peace, assault and social-security fraud. In between short-lived jobs he had served a total of three years in prison, in bite-sized chunks, as Carrick put it when we met up with him just before noon. The local grapevine, in the shape of a snout referred to only as Taz, was insistent that Horsley had got above himself by becoming caught up in a turf war.

‘I'm cautiously leaning towards it being a copycat crime,' Carrick went on. ‘The method of killing does appear on the surface to be the only similarity to the Hagtop murders and, as far as I can ascertain, Horsley never drifted into the Bath area – from a criminal point of view, I mean.'

‘Could he have been an old oppo of Keith Davies's?' Patrick said.

I said, ‘But Davies came from London.'

‘Horsley could easily have visited London. It's quite possible they met there.'

‘Do you want to dig a little deeper?' Carrick asked him.

Patrick knew precisely what he was being asked to do. ‘OK,' he replied.

Carrick waggled a finger. ‘But Ingrid isn't in on this, and that's an order.'

‘Ingrid's been on far more dangerous assignments than drifting around a few iffy pubs, whether it's near Bristol docks or in the East End of London.'

‘I don't care. I wasn't responsible for her in those days. I am now and she's not going. Right?'

‘James, she's supposed to be under training.'

‘These were your Commander Brinkley's orders, one of the conditions. Didn't you have to take orders from him when you were with MI5?'

‘Like hell I did! No, never.'

Right from the beginning of this new venture Patrick had been keeping his temper beautifully, if not heroically. I now ratted things up by completely boiling over.

‘I'm bloody fed up with you discussing me as though I'm a loaf of bread!' I yelled. ‘Just allowed to follow along, nanny your bloody pathetic fragile egos, drive the car when you're over the limit, take notes and do the washing up. Balls to the pair of you!'

I stormed out.

‘Attagirl!' said Derek Woods from the desk with a big grin, presiding over a reception area awash with strangers all wearing funny looks that pointed in my direction.

It would be satisfying to report that I went away, performed stunning undercover detective work, solved the crime and then swanned back into the nick with a bulging, neatly typed file and tossed it, with enormous nonchalance, on Carrick's desk. Real life is not like that. What actually happened is that I consoled myself with a lunch consisting of hundreds of cal-ories in very upmarket surroundings and then went back to the rectory for a feverish afternoon's writing.

At some time during the afternoon Patrick returned – he was still, with Carrick's permission, taking time off to help John with parish matters – by taxi, for I had ‘purloined' the car. This particular afternoon his task involved nothing more than taking his father to a meeting and then on to see an old friend, thus freeing Elspeth to have time for herself, who told me of the arrangement when I went down to make some tea.

‘I'm sort of dreading seeing him and James again,' I confessed, filling the kettle. ‘I sort of told them to go to hell this morning.'

‘Good for you!' she declared stoutly.

‘Worse, the entire police station heard me.'

She giggled. ‘Perhaps that's why Patrick came in a bit warily earlier on. I take it the case is a difficult one and everyone's tempers are getting a bit frayed – not that I want you to think I'm prying, of course,' she hastily added.

It was not giving away sensitive information if I revealed one aspect of the inquiry. ‘Elspeth, what do you know about tea?'

‘Tea?'

‘Dried used tea was found in Barney Stonelake's coffin. And in a box containing documents in the Manleys' flat.'

She sat down at the kitchen table. ‘How strange. What sort of tea is it?'

‘We don't know yet. Some samples have been sent to a professor of botany at Kew.'

‘But
used
tea.'

‘Yes.'

‘I suppose they know that because the leaves have unrolled – I mean, Earl Grey has huge leaves and we put them on the garden because they block the sink.'

‘Yes, it had been in water.'

‘That doesn't mean it'd been used to make tea to drink.'

‘No, you're right. I'm just quoting what the initial forensic report said.'

‘In Victorian times used tea was dried again by the big houses and given to the poor. Or even sold cheaply.' She brooded. ‘And now you say some was in the coffin and a box at the Manleys'. Coffins, boxes … You know, this reminds me of something but I don't know what. Perhaps I'm just thinking about the old tea chests in the loft …'

I worked until just before dinner, feeling all bloody-minded about continuing with the police work. OK, I thought, I'll stick out the initial period and then go home to Devon to write and help Patrick out over the phone, but only if he asks me to. To swing between two careers was madness and I would not see the children anywhere near often enough.

I had heard him return with John but stayed where I was for a while and then went down. There was no question of our having words in front of anyone.

My husband gave me a winning smile, a glass of wine and a kiss, in reverse order, and a little later after some general conversation we all sat down to dinner.

Elspeth was serving the dessert when she suddenly froze.

‘China!' she exclaimed, staring at the bowl containing fresh fruit salad. ‘That's it!'

‘What is?' John asked blankly.

‘Tea! China – only it was porcelain – was packed in crates of tea. And when divers went down it got into their air hoses and masks, even though it was hundreds of years later.'

‘Sunken wrecks, you mean?' I said. ‘The Nanking cargo and others like it?'

‘Yes.'

‘It's worth following up,' Patrick mused.

John said, ‘There have been quite a few wrecks found since – one of the chaps involved with several of them was Michael Hatcher if I remember rightly – but surely the china that was found wouldn't be so valuable that people would stash it away and be prepared to commit murder for it.'

I said, ‘Some of the larger pieces of porcelain might have been worth a lot of money. Were there any warehouse raids at Heathrow while Christopher Manley was a security guard there?'

‘No,' Patrick replied. ‘I checked. But I only had those wage statements we found to go on. He could have worked there a lot longer.'

We drove back into Bath after dinner as Patrick wanted to check on the post-mortem findings. He had announced his intention before we sat down to eat and had only consumed one glass of wine with his meal. Preparing to leave he had, however, glanced in my direction with a questioning look on his face.

‘D'you want me to come with you?' I had asked.

‘I always enjoy your company.'

‘So what were the findings of the inevitable debriefing with James?' I persisted mulishly.

‘If you get killed he's going to say that, as he put it, you were outwith his control.'

‘Look, I'm quite prepared to forget it if my presence is throwing a spanner in the works.'

‘No, it's not. And if it comes to the crunch, you're
my
responsibility.'

Men.

Carrick was having a well-overdue evening off and taking Joanna out for a meal as it was her birthday. The report was in his in-tray and Patrick switched on the desk lamp and sat in the DCI's revolving chair, swinging gently from side to side as he read.

‘Horsley had been belted over the head with something like an iron bar before his neck was slashed,' he said. ‘The former probably killed him outright as there was still sufficient blood in his body for testing that revealed he'd been drinking heavily up until the time of death. Hardly any water in the lungs so he was dead when he went in the river. We need to find where he was killed. Someone will have had to do some fairly meaningful clearing up.' He glanced up. ‘Fancy a trawl round some dodgy Bristol nightlife?'

‘It would mean getting changed into dodgy nightlife clothes or we'll stick out a mile. I assume you mean to work undercover.'

‘No, I was thinking of going in twenty-four-carat Bill and spreading unending terror.'

I was not so sure of the wisdom of this. ‘Do we know if he was married or had a girlfriend?'

‘Apparently the latter. Kylie Walker. We could go and see her first.'

It was the kind of housing estate where, in the words of my Scottish friend Linda, social workers wipe their feet on the way
oot
. No visiting car would escape being dismembered as soon as the owner was safely out of sight, alarm systems or no, so we parked in a slightly more salubrious area about a quarter of a mile away and walked back.

People skulked, I knew, just out of the brightest of the ghastly illumination provided by the orange-tinted street lights, by rows of lock-up garages and in doorways. A few youths slouched on a street corner. I had those back-of-the-neck prickles engendered by the certainty that one was being watched, taken stock of, evaluated. I jumped out of my skin when a dog suddenly threw itself at a gate we were passing, baying to get at us, its teeth bared, crazed with a hatred of strangers.

Patrick made for the youths who had started kicking around an empty beer can in desultory fashion. One, seeing our approach, sent it hurtling viciously in our direction at head height. Patrick caught it one-handed and carried on walking, an amiable smile on his face.

‘Can you direct us to Brunel Court?' he asked the kicker, profferring the can, but not necessarily as a peace offering.

The can was ignored and a severe case of acne pondered on the advisability of replying before visibly deciding that his personal safety could well depend on it. ‘Yeah, over there.' A jerk of the head. ‘That block, wiv the white van outside.'

Patrick manoeuvred himself subtly so that he could note our destination while keeping a weather eye on the present company. ‘Thanks. Did any of you know Peter Horsley?'

‘'E's dead.'

‘I'm aware of that.'

‘You the fuzz?'

‘Yes.'

There was a general edging away.

‘We need to catch his killer,' Patrick pointed out.

Another, younger, boy piped up. ‘Well, it's no good comin' 'ere. The bloke wot topped 'im ain't one of us. Pete 'ad got 'isself caught up in big-time stuff.'

‘Shuddup!' snarled the first youth.

‘Well, 'e's got to know, 'asn't 'e?' protested the other. ‘An' then 'e'll bugger off an' leave us alone. Someone told our mum an' our mum der go, “It'll be the end of 'im.” Last month, that woz. Mum's always right,' he finished triumphantly.

‘Who was the someone?' Patrick asked.

‘Dunnow. Could've been Kylie, his girlfriend.'

‘And you don't know any of Horsley's chums?' Patrick asked.

‘'E didn't 'ave no chums 'ere,'said the first youth. ‘Bragged of posh bods who called 'im on their mobiles.' He spat in the gutter. ‘Pathetic git.'

‘Thanks,' Patrick said again, tossed the can unerringly in a nearby bin and we left them.