The Dungeon House (Lake District Mysteries) (14 page)

‘Thanks.’ Her heart was doing somersaults. ‘I’d love to.’

‘There’s one thing I wanted to ask you,’ Joanna said. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

She was following Nigel along a curving path of stepping stones cut into the lawn, past a border blazing with crimson camellias, and toward a rock garden bounded by a low stone wall with aubretia spilling over it. He halted, but didn’t turn round. Was he afraid she was about to say
something lovey-dovey and embarrassing? ‘What is it?’

‘It’s about this house. I mean, it’s fabulous, of course, but I couldn’t help wondering …’

The stepping stone path led to an oak tree with a wooden bench running around it. Bright yellow celandines shone from the grass beneath the branches. He sat down, and gestured for her to join him. His face was stripped of any expression.

‘How I could bear to live here, after everything that happened?’

What a relief that he’d read her mind. Putting the question into words herself would have sounded judgmental, as if she were accusing him of not caring enough about Lysette and Amber, and their dreadful fate.

‘I don’t want to be nosey …’

‘You were always nosey, Joanna, but don’t lose too much sleep over it.’ His thin smile didn’t quite rob his words of their sting. ‘Okay, I’ll satisfy your curiosity. If you must know the truth, I’m here because of a promise I made to my Dad before he died.’

‘Your Dad?’

Ted Whiteley had succumbed to his cancer a few months after the shootings. She’d heard the news from her parents. Ted had died in the same hospice as Scott Durham’s wife. No flowers, by request, but Joanna scribbled a note of condolence to Nigel, and sent a donation to hospice funds. He hadn’t acknowledged either. Secretly, she’d been dismayed. He was grieving, of course, but she’d still hoped he would drop a line, or even, seeing that she’d put her phone number in the note, give her a ring. But … not a word.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Before he died, he made me promise not to sell up.’

Light dawned. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘After the shootings, your Dad was Malcolm’s next of kin. I suppose Lysette had no close family?’

‘It came as a total shock,’ Nigel said. ‘The lawyers told Dad that the house was in Malcolm’s sole name. He was a real male chauvinist, you know. With Lysette and Amber dead, the property passed to Dad. The final tragedy was that, after years of struggling to make ends meet, he became rich overnight, when he was too sick to enjoy the money.’

‘How ghastly.’

‘You said it,’ he muttered. ‘The last thing I wanted was to come and live here, in the house where my uncle had killed his wife and my cousin.’

‘I can imagine.’ She hesitated. ‘Poor Amber, she was so young.’

‘Yeah, she wasn’t such a bad kid. Vain as hell, mind.’

‘I liked her very much.’

‘Her dad spoilt her. No wonder she became such a diva.’ He looked her in the eye. ‘I suppose people say I made the same mistake with Shona. At least I have the excuse that her mother battled pancreatic cancer for a long time. I felt I had to make up to Shona for having her childhood torn apart.’

‘I’m sure you are a wonderful father.’

‘Not really.’ He finished his coffee. ‘You always see the best in people, Joanna. It’s a rare quality.’

Her cheeks were burning. Did he share her regret that things had not worked out between them? She was daring to hope.

‘I don’t know,’ he began tentatively, ‘whether you want to see the quarry garden?’

‘Oh. Well …’

‘Perhaps it’s not a good idea.’ He was studying her face with genuine concern. ‘After what happened there.’

‘I suppose … we all have to learn to confront our demons.’

‘I guess that’s right,’ he said quietly. ‘Is that why you’ve come back here?’

‘That’s part of it, I suppose.’ She hesitated. ‘I’d seen Scott Durham and Gray Elstone already before I called on Robbie.’

His eyes widened. ‘You have been busy.’

‘Are you still in touch with Scott?’

He frowned. ‘We’ve bumped into each other once or twice over the years. Good old Lake District, eh? You can never escape from the past.’

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t try to escape from it,’ she said. ‘I ran away because I couldn’t deal with what happened, but it didn’t make me happy.’

He was watching her closely. ‘You’d had a rough time. I should have been kinder.’

‘You were young. To have such a flaky girlfriend must have been a pain.’ Her throat felt dry. ‘I didn’t blame you for getting bored with me. Though I wish you hadn’t told Robbie about … the look-out on Drigg beach.’

Nigel flinched. ‘Tease you about it, did he? I’m sorry, Jo. It was just … lads talking. I suppose I boasted about my conquests. Not that there were many of them.’

‘Robbie is …’ She didn’t know how to describe him.

‘He fancied you, you know.’

‘No, he only had eyes for Carrie. Nobody could replace her, certainly not me.’ She paused. ‘He didn’t confide in you, did he?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I know he’s your friend, and you’ve always been so loyal to him. But there’s plenty you don’t know. Did he tell you about Seascale, for instance?’

He looked baffled. ‘What about Seascale?’

‘Not long before the barbecue, he and I bumped into each other one evening at Seascale. He bought me a few drinks in a seedy pub, and as it grew dark, he took me down to the beach. He’d always intimidated me, I could scarcely believe it.’

‘Like I said, he fancied you.’

‘Not enough,’ Joanna said. ‘He took me to a quiet spot below the cliffs, and pulled my knickers down. I was tipsy and in the mood. I’m not making excuses, it was just one of those things. But he couldn’t manage to …’

He stared at her. ‘Seriously?’

‘Yes.’ This was the first time she’d ever told anyone what happened that night, and at once the words came out in a rush.

‘It was incredible. Embarrassing. Robbie Dean, the glamorous football star, was impotent.’

For a few moments, they sat together in silence. ‘There,’ she said, ‘I’ve shocked you, haven’t I? The respectable Joanna.’

He gave her a wary grin. ‘You were never quite as respectable as you liked to crack on. But … how did he react?’

‘As you might expect,’ she said ‘Badly. He said some
very cruel things to cover his blushes. Blamed the way I looked, said I didn’t turn him on. It wasn’t even as if I laughed at him, or tried to make him feel inadequate. And then he put his hands around my throat. I was terrified he was going to strangle me.’

‘Steady on.’ Nigel swallowed. ‘Robbie’s not the easiest, but I’ve never known him attack anyone. Never.’

‘Looking back on it, I suppose it was just on the spur of the moment. He did hurt my neck, but I wriggled free, and when I ran off along the beach, he didn’t follow.’

‘Uh-huh.’ He took a breath, as if making a decision. ‘Still want to see what he’s done to the quarry garden?’

Linz Waller, a DC in Hannah’s team, had dug out the paperwork for the deaths at the Dungeon House. The witness who claimed to have seen a man dressed as a woman near the scene of the crime was called Anton Friend. Hardly a common name. Hannah asked her to see if Friend could be traced. If he hadn’t been inconsiderate enough to die in the meantime, she wanted to have a word. Would he stick to his story after all these years? And, if he did, would she find it as persuasive as Ben had done, or conclude that he was simply an alcoholic time-waster?

Desmond Loney had celebrated his retirement by moving from Carlisle to the coastal haven of St Bees. Hannah had arranged to see him before driving south for a meeting with Gray Elstone in Seascale. St Bees lay a few miles outside the National Park, but was the starting point for the coast to coast walk, and she cherished a vague
fantasy of trekking across England along with Daniel. If they stayed together long enough, if he didn’t get bored with her.

The clouds of early morning cleared during her journey, and by the time she arrived in the village, the red sandstone of the old and unexpectedly impressive priory church was resplendent in the sun. St Bees Man was buried here, she remembered, the perfectly preserved remains of a medieval knight, which had been discovered, wrapped in a shroud. He’d died a violent death, according to the experts, but that was one cold case she’d never be asked to investigate.

The Loneys’ retirement bungalow was called The Cop Out. Desmond wasn’t devoid of a sense of humour, but most of his colleagues would say that his career had been one long cop out. Switching off the ignition, she spotted Desmond by the side of the bungalow, planting a wicker hanging basket with herbs. Tall, stoop-shouldered, and vaguely raffish in a panama hat, he’d put on weight since she’d last seen him. When he turned at the sound of her car, she could almost hear his body groaning with the effort. He beckoned with his trowel, and kissed both her cheeks by way of greeting. She caught a whiff of damp earth and stale beer. He’d always liked a drink, had Desmond, and his unsteadiness on his feet wasn’t accounted for solely by arthritis.

‘We save a fortune growing our own,’ he boasted, as he led her round the back to a tidy patio equipped with a table-cum-firepit, and four aluminium chairs. ‘See over there, behind the hydrangeas? Strawberries, potatoes, cucumbers, you name it.’

‘Retirement’s suiting you,’ Hannah said, as Pamela Loney served soft drinks and milk chocolate digestives.

‘I need to lick the garden into shape in time for summer.’ Desmond gave his orange juice a resentful glare, and Hannah guessed he wouldn’t need much of an excuse to bring out the booze.

‘How lovely,’ she said dutifully, although she much preferred the eerie wildness of Daniel’s cipher garden to these neatly striped lawns, and the regimented tulips in the weed-free borders.

‘I keep that busy, I’ve no idea how I ever found the time to go to work,’ he chortled. ‘Mind, I can’t do exactly as I please. Pammy insists on keeping me in order, don’t you, love?’

Pammy, a muscular ex-midwife with features as bleak as Scafell Pike, pursed icy lips before making herself scarce with the practised discretion of a career policeman’s wife. Hannah allowed Desmond five minutes to update her on the state of his diabetes, interrogate her about his least favourite former colleagues, and tut reproachfully at news of a couple of undeserved promotions, before turning to the deaths at the Dungeon House.

‘It was a long time ago. These other cases you mentioned, the two girls who have gone missing. You’re surely not telling me they are connected to what Malcolm Whiteley did?’

‘Gray Elstone was Malcolm’s accountant. Nigel is his nephew. What happened at the Dungeon House must have affected their lives. I’m looking to get a full picture.’

Desmond snorted. ‘You can have too much information. Clouds the issue more often than not, mark
my words. When I hear all this bollocks on the telly about intelligence-led policing, I want to puke. You can’t beat an experienced copper’s gut.’

He patted his substantial stomach for emphasis.

‘I’m interested in your view of how events unfolded that night.’

Lifting the panama, he scratched his shiny bald head. ‘It wasn’t much of a mystery to me. Whiteley was in financial trouble, and jealous over his missus. While she went out carousing after the barbecue, he drank himself into a rage. When Lysette and the girl arrived back from the pub, the kid went up to bed, and he confronted his wife about her affair. One thing led to another, and he shot her. Young Amber heard the commotion, came downstairs, and saw what her Dad had done. My bet is, he threatened her with the rifle. She panicked, and made a dash for it. Poor kid was in her nightclothes, not wearing any shoes. She never had much of a chance. He followed her out to the quarry path, and pushed her over the edge.’

‘Why not shoot her, same as he did his wife?’

‘Perhaps he didn’t want to make such a mess of her,’ Desmond said. ‘Trust me, Lysette’s face wasn’t a pretty sight. I’m not even saying he meant to kill the girl. Possibly all he wanted was to shut her up. On the other hand, he may have decided all of them would die. That’s the pattern in this kind of case. These blighters think their family can’t live without them. Absolutely bonkers, of course, but there it is.’

‘There was no proof that Malcolm laid a finger on Amber,’ Hannah said.

‘What do you want, CCTV evidence?’ He shook his
head, and took another mouthful of coffee. ‘His body was found in the quarry, close to hers. Once she was dead – because he pushed her, or she slipped, or jumped to get away from him – he’d nothing left to live for. So he blew his own head off. Good riddance, in my book.’

‘Cheryl didn’t care for Malcolm, but even she struggled to believe he’d murder his own daughter.’

Desmond’s frown conveyed his opinion of Cheryl. ‘One way or another, he was responsible for the kid’s death.’

‘What about the man who saw someone running away from the Dungeon House that night?’

‘The drunk driver?’ Desmond rolled his eyes. ‘Ben Kind harped on about that. What about him?’

‘Perhaps someone else was there at the scene.’

‘Doing what, exactly?’

Inspiration struck her. ‘Suppose Lysette’s lover showed up, to check she was okay. Malcolm had behaved badly at the barbecue that afternoon. The boyfriend might have worried about her, or even guessed what would happen. Or perhaps they had a late night assignation.’

‘So he turned up in disguise as a woman?’ Desmond was incredulous. ‘Pull the other leg, it’s got bells on.’

Hannah winced. On second thoughts, perhaps it wasn’t such an inspired piece of guesswork. ‘Did Scott Durham admit to being Lysette’s lover?’

‘Denied it vehemently. So what? He would, wouldn’t he? Nobody wants to be blamed for three deaths.’

Desmond was a past master at dodging blame, so he was probably right.

‘You weren’t convinced?’

‘Nah. He claimed they were just good friends. Admitted
to exchanging the occasional hug, but said it never went any further. They were just two tactile people, according to Durham. He must have thought I was born yesterday, but it wasn’t my job to put him in the dock. He’d not committed any crime.’

‘And the drunk-driver’s evidence?’ Hannah chewed on a biscuit. ‘Why would he lie?’

‘The clue’s in the word drunk. He was way off beam, trust me. I could feel it in my gut.’ Desmond belched with smug self-confidence. ‘The world’s full of attention-seekers. Perhaps he was mistaken. Or dreamt it. The story didn’t make sense. A bald man dressed as a woman? Who would that be? And why lurk around the Dungeon House at midnight?’

Put like that, who could argue? Yet something Cheryl had said surfaced in Hannah’s memory. A fresh idea formed in her mind, almost making her choke on the biscuit crumbs, but Desmond was too busy mounting an old hobby horse to notice.

‘Look,’ he said in the amiably patronising tone that reminded her why she’d always yearned to kick him. ‘Ben wasn’t a bad detective, but he had too much imagination for his own good, and when he got a bee in his bonnet, he could be a right pain in the arse. You were young when you worked with him. Impressionable. He wasn’t bloody Sherlock Holmes, I’ll tell you that for nowt. Anyone else would have spotted early on that Cheryl was bad news. But what did he do? She wasn’t bad looking, you could understand him fancying a bit of rumpy-pumpy on the side. But ditching his wife and kids, to waste the rest of his life on her? Way over the top, if you ask me.’

Hannah bit back her anger. Desmond knew she’d been close to Ben; had he been jealous? He’d had a reputation in the force for fancying a bit on the side himself. Her visit had given him the chance to take a shot at his dead colleague, and he didn’t intend to miss an open goal. What really hurt was that, for once in his life, his aim was true.

Giving her a crafty smirk, he said, ‘Good thing Ben Kind wasn’t on my team. Or maybe it’s a crying shame. I could have taught him a thing or two, young Hannah, I’m telling you straight.’

Hannah had planned to ask more questions about the investigation, and the people in the Whiteleys’ circle, but she couldn’t take any more of Desmond Loney. He wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t a bad man, just an indifferent detective with an inflated view of his own abilities and a fatal fondness for the easy way out. Her own failing, like Ben’s, was that she seldom even noticed easy ways out, far less took them.

Getting to her feet, she said, ‘Thanks for your time.’

‘Going already? Thought you might like a spot of lunch. Pammy does a decent salad.’ He contemplated his stomach with a rueful grin. ‘The doc has told me I need to lose a bit of weight. Says I enjoy the good life too much. Bloody spoilsport. Anyway, we can wash down the green stuff with a lager and lime or a spot of vino. What do you say, Hannah, love?’

‘No, I’d better be off. Work to do. Grateful for your time.’ She considered his fleshy, well-fed jowls. If he didn’t watch out, Desmond would soon become as pickled as the original St Bees Man. ‘I’ll let you get back to the good life.’

The quarry garden had metamorphosed into a lush green paradise, tucked between the sheer rock sides of a steep ravine, in which majestic ferns flourished, and a graceful palm tree grew. Purple-chequered snakes’ head frittilaries nodded on either side of a stepping-stone path that led to a dark pool covered with lilies. As Joanna followed Nigel through the yews and limes she remembered so well, and down to the path that ran around the top of the quarry, she had her first glimpse of the garden spread out thirty feet below. Her flesh crept. Despite all the effort that Robbie Dean had put into making the quarry garden a work of art, for Joanna, it would always remain a crime scene. A man had died here, together with his daughter, her friend.

‘Are you all right?’ Nigel asked.

‘Mmmmm.’

‘Your teeth are chattering.’ He hesitated, then slipped off his linen jacket, and put it around her shoulders. ‘Better?’

‘Thanks.’ She was so afraid she might drop down in a dead faint, or burst into tears, or find some other way of making a fool of herself. And then Nigel would want nothing more to do with her.

‘Looks as though nothing’s changed here for a thousand years, don’t you agree?’ He spoke in a loud, bright voice, smothering her anxieties with a blanket of bonhomie. ‘Yet if you cast your mind back, this was a wilderness. Overgrown with brambles, and strewn with boulders. You really had to watch your step, it …’

He let the words trail away, and his face creased with dismay. Joanna gritted her teeth. The fracturing of his self-assurance
gave her fresh heart. Nigel needed her as much as she needed him. There was no hiding from the truth. Those violent deaths had ripped her away from Nigel, from that day until this.

Now they were back together again, and she simply refused to let what happened wreck her happiness all over again. This time nothing and nobody would stand in her way.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said. ‘I promise, Nigel.’

Hannah drove to the beach car park to catch up on her emails and phone messages before setting off for Seascale. A triumphant Linz Waller announced that it had taken her next to no time to track down Anton Friend. He was alive and well, and still living in the same property at Santon Bridge. Six or seven miles from Gray Elstone’s office, in other words. Perfect. Some days nothing went right, but today was shaping up nicely. Hannah decided to try and see Friend before her meeting with Lily’s father, but first she had another call to make.

‘Cheryl, this is Hannah. Sorry to disturb you again, but I just wanted to check something about that pub meal on the night of the Dungeon House shootings. You mentioned the girl with alopecia, the PA to Gray Elstone.’

‘Joanna Footit, you mean? What about her?’

‘I don’t know much about alopecia, but doesn’t it sometimes cause you to lose all your hair?’

‘That’s right, it happened to Joanna. After she was involved in a fatal car crash, apparently she had a sort of meltdown. Stress, depression, whatever you want to call it.’

‘So Joanna was … bald?’

‘Yes, poor thing. She was rather odd-looking to start with, tall and skinny with boobs the size of thimbles, but of course the hair loss made it a thousand times worse. Her embarrassment was excruciating, by all accounts.’

‘You didn’t know Joanna well?’

‘No, we only ever met in passing. Lysette told me her hair had been red and thick and rather luscious before it all fell out after the car crash. She was a bright girl, but she mucked up her A Levels, and didn’t go to uni. For ages, she refused to wear a wig, and became a virtual recluse. Eventually her Mum and Dad persuaded her to see sense.’

‘So she wore a wig?’

‘Yes. It never looked quite right, if you ask me, but it still made a huge difference. Little by little, she regained her confidence.’

‘And she was wearing the wig at the barbecue?’

‘Correct.’

‘I don’t suppose you can remember what she was wearing that night, when you had the meal in the pub?’