The Case Has Altered (2 page)

She heard a sound behind her, a creaking board. And then the arms encircled her waist.
Romantic
was her first thought.
Something's wrong,
was her second thought, and she barely had time for the third before she felt the breath being squeezed out of her, not by hands but by a soft, silky thing tightening round her throat. For a few moments she tried to claw it away as she opened her mouth to scream, but there was no voice to do it.

Dorcas ain't willin'. Dorcas ain't

C
hief Inspector Arthur Bannen of the Lincolnshire police was in his late fifties, but looked ten years younger. His age was as enigmatic as the rest of him. If he resented Scotland Yard's turning up in Lincolnshire, he didn't show it. He was a man so soft-spoken one might wonder if anything could excite or harrow him. He said what he said with a smile, a small one, even a hurt one sometimes, as if it pained him his listener didn't quite agree. He was presently engaged in folding a length of paper accordion style, like a map.

“We haven't asked for your help, Mr. Jury,” said Bannen, finally, but in a perfectly friendly way, while snipping away at the folded paper with his scissors. His feet were up on the edge of his desk, giving the impression of lethargy. Jury thought he was probably anything but lethargic.

“I know you don't need mine. I'm asking for yours.”

They were discussing the murder of a guest who'd been staying at a small estate some forty miles away, called Fengate.

Bannen started cutting the paper carefully with scissors and, when he turned his attention to Jury, apparently found Jury the less interesting and turned back to his cutting. “I see. Well, then, how can I help you?” He didn't sound enthusiastic.

“From what I've heard, Lady Kennington's role in all of this is only—peripheral.”

“If you mean by that she's on the fringe, or, as they say, ‘out of the loop,' I'd say, no, she's definitely
in
the loop.” Bannen smiled slightly, as if delivering this news was not unpleasant. He continued cutting tiny triangles out of the paper.

“You're not saying that she's a suspect, are you?”

Bannen's eyes were a mild and unengaging shade of gray, the color of the brackish water in the drains Jury had passed on his trip from London. “Everyone's a suspect who was present at the time.”

“I expect I'd use the word ‘witness.' ”

“Use whatever word you like,” Bannen said pleasantly, continuing to snip his design into the strip of paper. “She had opportunity; she and the Dunn woman were outside when the others were inside the house. Add to that, Jennifer Kennington and Verna Dunn were quarreling. Add to
that
your friend Lady Kennington was apparently the last to see the victim alive. After she'd left the Dunn woman, Jennifer Kennington was quite by herself, taking a walk.” He paused, considering. “Or so she says.” He snapped the scissors a few times, like crocodile jaws, and looked coolly at Jury. “Now if you were I, Superintendent, would you place Jennifer Kennington out of the loop?” Slowly, Bannen shook his head. “I don't think so.”
Snip.

 • • • 

I
n the dream, Jenny was moving across the fen; others joined her, forming a procession. He heard the barely audible bells of a censer at a service in Lincoln Cathedral.

The telephone was next to his ear. Jury knocked it over groping for it. In his attempt to shake himself from sleep and retrieve it, he felt he was gulping down great droughts of air. His chest hurt, ached. A coronary? In a Lincoln B & B? If he was on his way out, he preferred to go in his own digs in Islington with Mrs. Wassermann and Carole-anne teary-eyed at his bedside. At last his groping hand found the receiver. “Yes?”

“Bannen. Thought you'd never answer. You still sleeping? I've been up for hours.”

Jury gritted his teeth. “Good for you. But what's taxing your Lincolnshire police at six
A.M
.?”

“Get your skates on and I'll take you somewhere interesting.”

“Where would that be?” Jury was rubbing what felt like glass dust from his eyes.

“Wyndham Fen.”

“Where's that?”

“I can pick you up in twenty minutes. Be ready.”

“I'll be ready.” This fell on empty air, as Bannen had already hung up.

The bedside clock stubbornly refused to advance its hands to a decent hour. It was six-ten on this February morning and dark as the grave.

 • • • 

J
ury hadn't expected they'd be driving forty miles southeast toward Spalding. But that's what they had done. “National Trust Property,” Bannen had told him and not much else.

At seven-thirty in the morning, Wyndham Fen was steeped in gray silence, except for the occasional hoot of an owl or saberlike rattle of the tall reeds in its narrow canals. Crystal cobwebs hung between post and rail of the boardwalk; out in the distant pastures, the rime-caked sheep looked as if they were dressed in glass coats. Morning might have been the time when the fens were most picturesque; Wyndham Fen would have been, except for the body.

She was lying face upward in one of the canals, around her neck a blue bracelet of skin that told the manner of death—she'd been garroted. Floating there, her body moving gently, she was surrounded by rush grass and water violets, and Jury thought of the Burne-Jones painting of Ophelia. But unlike the beautiful Ophelia, this young woman was anything but pretty. Her face was engorged and blackened with blood; the eyes and tongue protruded. But he could tell, even before this disfigurement, she probably hadn't been pretty. The face would have been pudgy, the body more so. He bet she hadn't had many chances in her short life and now she'd have none at all. She might have bloomed later in life, but there would be no later life for her.

Bannen walked back along the narrow boardwalk that spanned the canal to consult with one of his men. A dozen cars and a couple of vans were pulled up near the small building which served as a tourist center, a place to disseminate brochures and pamphlets about the fens. Police who'd been in the cars were now fanned out over the spiky, frozen grass and the dirt road.

It was cold; Jury shivered. He wasn't dressed for a February morning in
the Lincolnshire fens. Jury couldn't take his eyes off the girl floating in the water. Bannen returned with the medical examiner, who set about getting his bag open. Jury thought he was probably not on the payroll of the constabulary, but was a simple country doctor.

Bannen rocked back slightly on his heels and said, “Dorcas Reese.” He sighed and puffed out his cheeks.

“Did you know her?”

“I knew her slightly. She was housemaid and vegetable cook at Fen-gate.”

Jury stared at him, shocked.

Bannen frowned as the medical examiner directed the removal of Dorcas Reese's body from the water. “You couldn't do that
in situ,
could you?” When the doctor gave him a look, Bannen added, “No, I expect not.” He sighed. These provincials.

Jury was dismayed by Bannen's apparent sanguinity. “You're saying that this is the second death connected with that house.”

“Um. Yes, it is, isn't it?” Bannen was still looking down at the water closing over the place where Dorcas Reese had floated. Bladderwort and water violets swayed on their delicate antennaelike stems. “She should have been looked at where she lay.” Bannen's tone was disapproving, as if it were really difficult to get good help these days. “Strange, isn't it?” he said, ambiguously. They were hoisting the body onto the board for the doctor's examination. Bannen walked round the body, studying it, exchanging a few words with the doctor.

Back with Jury, he said, “He thinks it was a length of material, a scarf perhaps. She was garroted. Beyond dumping her in the canal—or she could simply have fallen in after death—no attempt was made to hide her.”

Jury looked behind him at the Visitors' Center. “Is this open now? Middle of February? I expect in the warmer weather there's quite a lot of tourists.”

“It's open, yes; that is, would be, if we weren't shutting it down.” Bannen looked off into the distance. “The fen is about halfway between Fen-gate and—” He turned to look behind him. “—the pub where she worked some nights. Just away off there on the main road. Called the Case Has Altered. . . . Um.” He ran his thumb across his forehead, reflecting.

“You don't appear especially surprised.” Jury thought Bannen probably never appeared surprised.

He turned to look at Jury out of his cool gray eyes, smiling slightly. “Oh, I'm surprised. Yes. I'm surprised she was strangled. Verna Dunn was shot.”

“Killed by the same person, you mean?”

Bannen turned his head slowly to regard Jury. “This is Lincolnshire, not London. That we would have two murders in the space of two weeks, both targeting women from one house—” He shook his head. “Yes, it would be hard to think two killers were moving about the fens.” He ran his finger under his collar as if the collar was too tight. “Usually it's the same method. When one's compelled to kill, it would be in such a way and by such means as would relieve some sort of anxiety . . . You think that's funny?”

“You sound like a psychiatrist, Chief Inspector. I expect I don't believe much in solving murders with mind-games. Basically, it's all plodding—” Jury caught himself, thinking, My God, I'm beginning to sound like Chief Superintendent Racer:
“It's one foot in front of the other, police work is, Jury; it's plodding, Jury, not your slippery-minded conundrums. . . . ”
And here he was with this detective chief inspector, whom he hardly knew, and who had, clearly, solved cases in just the way he said—or he wouldn't be saying it. Why was Jury adopting this condescending manner?

Yet Bannen didn't appear to take offense. Perhaps he thought there were more important things to think about. He looked around him at Wyndham Fen. “It was all like this once.” Bannen looked at the ground, at the wet grass and the scarves of silver cobwebs stretched across it. With his foot he separated the tall reeds. A field mouse skittered off. “I'm driving along to the Wash now, to have another look. I expect you might like to see it.”

Jury was surprised by the invitation. “Yes. I certainly would like to.” He wondered if Bannen were, indeed, soliciting the help of Scotland Yard. The Wash had been the site of the first murder.

“There's a public footpath that borders this part of the fen, and she probably took that because it goes right past Fengate.” He turned his head
to the tree above them, where starlings whicked upward from the branches and knit a black pattern across the whitening sky, then vanished in the seconds it took to mark their flight. Bannen watched them. “Always makes me feel rather sad, the flight of birds.” Then he continued talking about the footpath. “On the other end, it passes the Case Has Altered. The Owens were surprised she had this job moonlighting. Is that what they call it? Moonlighting?” He smiled. “Pretty word.” Bannen scratched his neck again, seeming to afford this point as much deep thought as any other that had come up that day.

They turned from the drainage ditch and made their way back along the boardwalk to the small car park.

Bannen said, “My sergeant is down with some godawful allergy. He's violently allergic to whatever the stuff is that comes off the alder and hazel trees.”

Jury smiled. “Your sergeant would get on with my sergeant like a house afire.”

“Oh? Is he allergic to the stuff?”

“He's allergic to all stuff.”

 • • • 

Y
ou can see the difficulty,” said Bannen, with his characteristic gesture of rubbing a thumbnail across his brow. As if he'd spent the last two weeks seeing the difficulty.

Jury could believe it. They stood together on the saltings, looking out over that part of the Lincoln-Norfolk coast called the Wash. The public footpaths only went so far, stopping before the seawall. They had walked farther—up over the seawall and down again. Bannen had said there was no danger here of quicksand, as there was much farther out. Like an interior shoreline, the saltings, composed of mud and silt, stretched to meet sand that formed the protective barrier between land and sea. Bannen had pointed out the narrow, choked end of the River Welland where it ran no wider than a stream, into the waters of the North Sea.

There were a number of “danger” areas, legacy of the war. “Mines,” said Bannen. “The Wash is littered with them.” He pulled the collar of his
windbreaker tighter. “This is where we thought the invasion would come.” He nodded toward the North Sea. “There were gun platforms out there, big things, like oil rigs, garrisons with heavy artillery. Still there, some of them.”

Jury looked at him, speculatively. “ ‘We'? You weren't in that war, surely. You must have been a kid.”

Bannen smiled. “I was, but old enough to remember how the beaches were mined, and we weren't to get near them.” They stood in silence for a minute. Then Bannen said, “Difficult. Our M.E. put Verna Dunn's death down to between ten the night of February first to one
A.M.
the morning of the second, Sunday. Though she wasn't found until afternoon. So the body'd been lying here in all of this muck. Hellish cold and windy. Brutal.” He made it sound as if Verna Dunn had been alive to suffer through this exposure. “She might not have been found at all if the sands had shifted a certain way. They do, you know. We're still finding wrecks, hulls of ships. Over on Goodwin sands they found the propeller of one of the Sword bombers. Sand covered it up for all of these years.”

“You think that was her killer's intention? To bury the corpse?”

“I would do, only it's a bit iffy. He might have been counting on high tide. Spring tide's twice as high, and if you noticed the seawalls behind us”—Bannen hooked his thumb back toward the walls—“that's one of the reasons for them. Neap tide—low tide—comes twice a month and the moon was in third quarter that night. It's the pull of the moon . . . ” Bannen grew contemplative.