Tainted Ground (20 page)

There was one cottage out of the eight that appeared not to have been modernized, still with what could be an outside lavatory and the garden a sea of weeds and rubbish. This, surely, was where the Tanners lived. It was strange that two grown-up brothers continued to live together in what must have been their childhood home.

The road climbed from where I had paused and then curved sharply round before dividing at a little green in front of the houses, the right-hand fork providing access to them and then rejoining the road at the far end of the terrace. I parked by the unkempt cottage. The rotting gate moved only reluctantly on its rusting hinges but I shoved it open and banged on the front door: the bell did not seem to work. Almost immediately a woman put her head out of an upstairs window of the house next door.

‘There's no one there, luv. The poor old dear's in a home now and it's going to be sold.'

‘I'm looking for the Tanner brothers,' I said.

‘Oh, they're right down at the end. Isn't this place a disgrace? My husband's trying to get something done about it. The council got rid of the squatters weeks ago but no one's come to clean up the mess the filthy little beasts made.'

I mentally apologized to the Tanners – whose names were Jethro and Vince, I had learned from the file – thanked her and walked down to the far end of the row.

This house too gave every appearance of being deserted, all the curtains drawn, and again I rang the bell to no avail. Banging on the door drew no response either. A sixth sense telling me that someone was at home, I went down a side way towards the rear of the house. The path was host to quite a few motorbikes, some seemingly intact, others in pieces, a lot of oily patches on the ground, tools everywhere.

The back door, within a small ramshackle porch, was ajar but virtually barricaded off by a strange collection of items; an ancient wooden clothes horse, sundry garden tools and what Patrick would call a ‘handrolic' mower. It occurred to me as I was forced to stop that they were arranged in such a fashion that the merest touch would send the whole lot crashing down. Was this, in effect, a makeshift burglar alarm?

I leaned carefully over and rapped on one of the glass panes of the door. Then, when nothing happened, took a hoe that was not part of the fortifications and pushed the door open wider with it, quite difficult as it was oddly heavy.

An enormous bundle of old iron weights, tied by their handles, crashed down from somewhere above it.

I stared at the hole in the kitchen floor in a kind of frozen horror for what seemed ages but it could have only been a couple of seconds for I had all guns blazing when two huge outlines materialized in the gloomy interior.

‘Are you bloody well trying to kill someone?' I bellowed at them.

The brothers sidled like nervous horses.

‘You got the other blokes with you?' asked one in what, for him, was probably a whisper but came out as a hoarse bark.

I tossed a mental coin. ‘No,' I replied, adding tersely and sarcastically, ‘You're quite safe.'

‘What d'you want?'

I gestured towards the splintered boards and the ironmongery – of the kind once used in greengrocers' to sell stones, if not half-hundredweights, of potatoes – which were slowly subsiding into the cavity beneath the floor. ‘What's all this about, then?'

‘Funny phone calls.'

‘Don't tell 'er!' bawled his brother.

‘Which one of you is Vince?' I asked.

‘Me,' said the one who had answered my first question.

‘Vince,' I said gently. ‘You could have been on a murder charge right now. What funny phone calls?'

‘Thought they might be from that bloke you were with who chucked the drill bit at us.'

‘That's Patrick. He's my husband – and a copper. We were with DCI Carrick.'

He registered surprised. ‘He looks like a hired killer.'

‘Only when he worked for MI5 – or if you harm one hair of my head.' Nothing was actually lost by bunging that one in, I decided.

Jethro burst out with, ‘Course he's a copper, stupid, he grilled me afterwards.'

Vince shrugged. ‘I got Carrick. How was I to know?'

‘Tell me about the phone calls,' I requested.

Silence.

‘I only came out here to show you a photograph,' I wheedled. ‘Please tell me about the phone calls. They're obviously threatening. You might need police protection.'

‘Some geezer said not to talk to the cops – or else.'

‘You don't have a lot of choice as you're already in trouble for digging up the coffin,' I told him impatiently, getting a bit fed up with talking to them across a palisade. These were, after all, the people who had desecrated the churchyard and so thoroughly upset my in-laws. ‘We've found what should have been the rightful occupant, by the way.'

The pair moved a little closer to the door.

‘You have?' said the other man, Jethro. ‘Where?'

I produced the photograph and held it out. ‘Buried in this man's mother's garden. Know him?'

It was snatched.

‘No,' said Vince.

‘The man who met you with the van,' I prompted.

‘No, that wasn't him,' Vince said again. ‘Not that we really saw his face. It was dark, like.'

‘Tell me the truth,' I pleaded.

Pointing to the photo, Jethro said in strangled tones, ‘That's the bloke who was fished out of the effin' river, innit? I wondered where I'd seen that 'orrible face before.' He drew himself up. ‘Lady, I don't care if your man is handy with all kinds of hardware, we ain't saying no more.' He thrust the photo at me. ‘We don't know nothing else. We didn't see who the bloke with the van was.'

‘But it wasn't him,' Vince added.

‘But if you didn't see his face how do you
know
that?' I bawled at him.

‘He was older. He spoke, like.'

‘Is it the same voice as whoever's making the threatening phone calls?'

But the pair had gone back into the gloomy interior, Jethro manhandling his brother out of the room to prevent him from saying more.

‘Look, we can put a tap on the line and trace the calls,' I shouted after them, not about to follow. You do not corner grizzly bears unless well armed.

There seemed nothing for it but to go and fetch a big gun and I was not in the least squeamish about unleashing him on them. Then I remembered that Patrick was no longer permitted to take people apart, not even a brace younger than him and almost twice his size.

‘Sod it,' I muttered and hurled aside the barricade.

The fanfare of collapsing impedimenta petered out as I went inside, and I found myself in a small kitchen. A short hallway led into a living room, probably at one time two but now knocked into one. That was where I found them.

A very, very old lady sat in an armchair on one side of the fireplace and on the other a young woman held a baby, her feet up on a battered sofa, sharing it with another woman who was probably about ten years older than me. Jethro and Vince stood nearby, propping up the walls. In the dim light, the curtains closed, the group looked like a peasant family in a Dutch painting.

‘I'll arrange police protection,' I promised.

‘Oh, the lads'll go for sure,' cackled the old woman in a flat loud voice that suggested she was profoundly deaf. ‘They'll do a runner and leave us women to fend for ourselves.'

‘No, we won't, Gran,' one of the men bellowed at her, I was not sure which one.

‘Well, your bloody useless father did and we never saw him again. What's different now?'

Lynn Outhwaite had reported to her boss the destination of my intended sortie. I did not blame or criticize her for this as it was her duty to prevent colleagues, even in the loosest meaning of the term, from coming to harm. There was yet another debriefing in Carrick's office but it immediately became clear that he had decided against getting really annoyed with me, not for the moment anyway.

‘Did you find out anything useful at the library?' he enquired of me in a fashion that suggested he did not think I had bothered to go there.

‘Quite a bit,' I replied, digging out the notes I had made. ‘The librarian found me a book that told me everything I wanted to know. There was a full account of one of the wrecks, the
Geldermalsen
, which I took particular note of as the ship carried gold ingots. But, obviously, those were all accounted for at the time and safely auctioned off.

‘I don't know how much you want to hear,' I went on, ‘but it's all very interesting. In the eighteenth century, porcelain, and tea, were transported from China's hinterland to Canton and from there to Java in Chinese trading vessels where they were loaded, the china actually packed into the crates of tea, into ships belonging to the Dutch East India Company. Sometimes the trading vessels caught fire or were hit by storms and sank before they got there or, as in the case of the
Geldermalsen
, the Indiamen suffered the same fate on the way to European ports, usually Amsterdam. The cargo of porcelain, plus anything else that was in the hold, ended up being buried by a thick layer of sand and tea. There were six hundred thousand pounds of tea on that ship alone, plus a hundred and twenty-five gold ingots, eighteen of which were the very rare ones referred to as Nanking shoes. Several wrecks have been discovered since, including one known as the Vung Tau Cargo that went down off the Vietnamese coast at the end of the seventeenth century. We must find out if any museums or private collections have been raided within the past couple of years and what was taken.'

‘How much did the stuff from the
Geldermalsen
fetch at auction?' Carrick asked.

‘Over ten million pounds.'

‘That is not peanuts.'

‘It wasn't,' I agreed. ‘The porcelain was just about as valuable as the gold.'

‘Thank you.' There was a little silence and then he went on, ‘I understand you went to see the Tanners afterwards.'

‘Yes, I did. I showed them the picture of Peter Horsley and they said he wasn't the man who met them with the van to pick up the coffin.'

‘Do you believe that?'

‘Yes, I think so. Vince was all for saying more but Jethro is the one really twitched by some phone calls they've been getting. He—'

Predictably, James interrupted with, ‘They've received threats?'

‘I was coming to that in a minute.'

‘Sorry.'

‘Vince thought the man they met was older than Horsley. From his voice. They both refused to say whether it could be the same person who's been making the calls, which have told them not to talk to the police, or else.'

‘They could be making it up.'

‘That crossed my mind too but I think you ought to ask someone to keep an eye on the house. Three women and a child appear to live there as well and Grandma thinks the men'll do a runner just like their dad did. Oh, and I was followed all the way there and back by someone driving a blue hatchback. I couldn't get the number – I think it had been partly obscured in some way, or muddied up.'

Patrick, who was present but so far had taken no part in the proceedings, emerged from deep thought: or it could have been one of his most-systems-awake cat-naps that he perfected while serving as an undercover soldier. ‘Where was this vehicle while you were inside the Tanners' place?' he wanted to know.

‘I'm not sure. I only realized it was following me on the return journey. I mean, it's quite common for someone behind you to be going to the same destination on one leg of a journey. So I did a couple of small detours when I noticed it again on the way back and he, or she, stuck with me.'

‘And when you turned into the car park here?' Carrick said.

‘Just paused and then speeded off.'

‘It was a pity you couldn't get the registration.'

‘Did you get anything out of Brian Stonelake?' I went on to ask.

Patrick stretched his long frame. ‘He came clean on the stolen horse harness and other bits and pieces we found in his tractor shed by the house. He admitted eyeing up places where he sold logs or hay, casing the joint as they say in old movies, and either lifting things there and then when no one was looking or returning during the night. A bloke in Gloucester usually took the stuff off his hands but he's apparently helping the police with their enquiries right now into something more serious and is on remand – he is, James checked – so Stonelake was stuck with the booty.'

Carrick said, ‘But, according to him, he didn't steal the silverware and equestrian figures and was merely looking after them for someone else. For a consideration, of course. He gave us a name but it means nothing to me or the computer, so until he comes up with something better he's down for those thefts too. But as far as the murders are concerned, which of course we're much more interested in, he's still insisting he knows nothing about them and was not remotely involved.'

‘If it is true that he's tricked his mother into changing her will so he gets everything, the sooner the place is sold and he can squirrel the money away somewhere,' I said, ‘perhaps abroad, the better for him in case his sisters find out. The last thing he needs is a protracted murder investigation at the property.'

‘I'd forgotten about that,' Carrick admitted. ‘But we don't know if it's gospel that he's swindled his sisters out of their share. And, frankly, is it any of our business?'

‘The police aren't the nation's conscience but upholders of the law,' Patrick intoned. ‘No, it isn't any of our business.' He smiled sadly. ‘Sorry, just quoting a lecture we raw recruits were given.' He leapt to his feet. ‘That reminds me!' He headed for the door.

‘Where are you going?' I called.

‘To find out what happened to that dog!'

‘There wasn't sufficient evidence of cruelty for a case to be brought against Stonelake,' Carrick shouted at the open doorway.