The Killing Season (20 page)

‘Give me the dentist’s address.’

‘Sir, yes sir!’

Laura did as she was told, finally. I wasn’t quite sure how she had got on my payroll, so to speak. Mind you, Amy Leigh had had pretty much the same experience. Collusion, to my mind. Amy, Kate, Laura, Siobhan – all colluding to keep us in Sheringham. Thank God for Superintendent Susan Dean, I thought. At least that was one woman who would be glad to see my sorry Irish arse kicked back down to London. She would also, no doubt, be glad to do the booting herself.

William

THE MAN SMILED
as he looked at the headstone. He put out a strong finger and traced the words, running its tip into the grooves. It was a fine headstone in the graveyard of an old Catholic church in East Beckham, a small village just outside Sheringham.

There were floral decorations at the corners of the stone and a verse from the Bible, an inscription in a flowing italic hand beneath the name of the dear departed.

He smiled again as he read the inscription.

And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

EPHESIANS 6:4

And then he smiled once more, picked up the old and rusted sixteen-pound sledgehammer that he had brought with him for the purpose, and smashed the headstone into small pieces.

‘Rest in peace, Tony Carter,’ he grunted under his breath. Then he shouldered the sledgehammer and walked away.

I TURNED ALONG
Addlestone Road, a tree-lined residential street.

Robert Carter’s dental practice was at the far end on the right. A finely built Edwardian detached house that had been converted into the surgery. There were five partners in the practice as far as I could tell from the nameplates set into the brick wall by the reception door. Robert Carter’s was at the top of the list but I could see that that was probably on the basis of alphabetical order.

There were two women sitting behind the long counter in the reception room as I entered. One of them was in her fifties and was tapping, in a businesslike manner, on a keyboard, scowling at the monitor and paying me no attention at all. The other, a younger, happier-looking woman in her thirties held a finger up to me as she finished her call.

‘Can I help you?’ she said after hanging up.

I showed her my warrant card. ‘I’d like to speak to Robert Carter, please.’

‘Oh my God. Is it to do with the murders?’

That got the elder woman’s attention. Her fingers ceased their tip-tapping and she turned round to look at me, suddenly full of curiosity.

‘It’s just a routine matter,’ I replied. ‘Is he available now or is he with a patient?’

‘He’s gone out,’ replied the older woman.

I looked at my watch. ‘When will he back?’

‘He didn’t say.’ The younger woman answered for her. ‘He took a call about half an hour ago and flew out in a bit of a rush. He said to rearrange his appointments for the day.’

‘Where was he going?’

‘Didn’t say.’

‘Who was the call from?’

‘A priest. Can’t remember his name.’

I wrote my name on a piece of paper, along with my mobile-phone number, and put it on the counter.

‘Can you get him to call me when he comes back?’

I was opening the door when the younger woman called out. ‘Father somebody he was.’

A Catholic priest called Father somebody. Fancy that! I smiled in thanks and went out the door.

I SPENT THE
rest of the afternoon taking care of a few outstanding issues.

I’d had a quick meeting with Brian Stenson, the owner of the caravan park. The petty vandalism seemed to have stopped, no incidents for well over a week. Maybe the fact that I, and now Laura Gomez, whom Stenson had met, had been looking into it had scared off whoever it was. Either way the owner seemed happy enough, and I was happy enough to sign off on it too. Then I went back to the office. Checked my mobile for messages, as I had gone out of signal range for a while. But there had been no calls. I called Robert Carter’s surgery again but he hadn’t returned from his trip out. I asked for his mobile number but it cut into his message service when I dialled it, so I did as requested at the tone and left a message, asking him to call me and giving my own mobile number. I tried to sort out some paperwork, but I was distracted so I soon gave up and headed to The Lobster. It was dark now and the wind was whipping off the North Sea hard enough for me to zip my jacket up to my neck.

The makeshift CID incident room in the double-storey function room of the pub was abuzz with activity as I entered. Lots of people talking on phones, lots of people typing on laptops. I had a word with a female police constable on DI Walsh’s team but they were no further forward than they had been the last time I had checked in with them.

I tracked Harry Coker down having a bacon sandwich and a half of lager in the lounge bar. The landlord had closed that bar off to the general public and more particularly to the press who had descended on the town like a plague of biblical insects.

‘Making any progress?’ I asked as I slid onto the bar stool next to him.

‘I am with this sandwich,’ he said as he finished it with a large bite and chewed thoughtfully. ‘But that’s about all.’

I gestured to the barman and ordered the same for myself and another half for the sergeant.

‘I tracked down the people manning the lifeboat the night David Webb was murdered – tracked ’em down on paper, obviously,’ I told Coker.

‘What were your thoughts?’

I shrugged. ‘Loose threads. Pull at enough of them and sometimes the mystery unravels.’

‘Is that what they teach you at Hendon?’

‘It sure as shit wasn’t needlework classes, Harry. I can tell you that.’

‘So did you learn anything?’

‘Well, either David Webb was lost at sea and the man in our cave was just wearing his watch. Or . . .’

‘The men who said he was lost at sea were lying?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So what has that got to do with the murders here this week?’

‘I don’t know. But they happened after David Webb turned up after all these years very much not lost at sea. I went over to speak to the grandson of one of the men in the boat. The only surviving relative: Robert Carter. He’s a dentist here.’

‘Yeah, I know. He’s on the lifeboat crew too.’

‘He was out. I’ve left a message. Long shot, but I don’t know. Maybe his grandfather told him something. Or his father.’

‘What?’

‘I have no idea. But that’s what we do, isn’t it? Ask questions because we don’t know what the answers are. Get enough answers and sometimes things start to make a bit more sense.’

‘So you’re pretty sure that none of what has been going on here in our own century is coincidental.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe in coincidences like this. Somebody found out that David Webb was in fact murdered and not killed at sea when his body was uncovered. And is doing what, exactly . . .?’

The sergeant shrugged. ‘Going after the people responsible? But they presumably died years ago.’

‘That’s why the gravestones are being vandalised. The sins of the fathers visited on the children. Is that the quote?’

‘I don’t know – the Bible’s not my strong suit, Jack.’

I took a sip of my lager as Sergeant Coker’s phone trilled. He answered it and grunted a few times. ‘OK, boss,’ he said finally. He closed the phone and looked at me thoughtfully.

‘Your sandwich will have to wait a while.’

‘What’s up?’

‘Catholic church in a little village just off the top road.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Another grave desecrated. The headstone smashed up.’

‘We know whose?’

‘Oh yeah – Tony Carter’s. Your missing dentist’s grandfather.’

YOU HEAD SOUTH
from the roundabout by the Sheringham steam railway and up the Holway road to get to what the locals call the Top Road or Cromer Road.

When we got to the T-junction there we turned left for Cromer, went a little way down the road and then turned right for the small village of East Beckham. It was farmland there mainly, with a few houses dotted around: no shops, no pubs, no restaurants but it still had a church. You couldn’t throw a stone in this part of the world, after all, without hitting a church. Most of them dating back to the Normans when building them was a kind of hobby round here, I guess. Like stamp collecting.

The lights were on inside the ancient building of Saint Mark’s, shining through the equally ancient stained-glass windows like an illuminated Christmas card. The Norwich police had got there a while before us and erected floodlights outside. The usual
POLICE DO NOT CROSS
tape had been put up at the entrance to the cemetery and a couple of uniformed officers were standing guard inside.

Sergeant Coker and myself ducked under the tape. DI Walsh was there with his sergeant and Superintendent Dean was looking, as usual, as if a wasp had stung her on her admittedly trim arse. We walked over to the smashed headstone and kept back as the crime-scene photographers did their thing.

‘Looks as if you were right, Delaney,’ said Rob Walsh – which didn’t improve Susan Dean’s mood any. ‘If it is the same person and this is his calling card, then the modern murders are connected to the past and probably have nothing to do with the stag-night shenanigans.’

‘Possibly,’ said Susan Dean. ‘And if it
is
the same person.’

‘You got a lot of people going around smashing up headstones recently, Susan?’

‘You know as well as I, Delaney, that there has been a spate of vandalism in the area lately.’

‘In the caravan park. Some graffiti and minor damage. Hardly anything like this.’

‘What’s your gut feeling on this, then, superintendent?’ asked DI Walsh diplomatically. ‘I mean this is your territory, your patch, and I know we are sailing in uncharted waters here, if I may mix my metaphors. But what’s your take on it?’

‘Well, seeing as we are unable to contact Robert Carter, and nobody seems to have any idea where he is, then yes, we certainly have to consider the possibility that he has been taken by whoever was responsible for the deaths of Nigel Holdsworth and Len Wright.’

‘The question is, what do we do about it?’ I said.

The superintendent glanced at me, as though she didn’t like my use of the word ‘we’, but I didn’t much care. The time for petty local politics and power games was long gone. Had gone when David Webb turned up murdered after seventy-three years and buried in a cave, if you ask me.

‘Something connects all these people,’ added DI Walsh.

‘Something that happened in 1941.’

He nodded, agreeing with me. ‘We just need to find out what it is, before more names are chiselled out of headstones.’

I recognised a face over by the church entrance and left the official investigation forces to walk over and talk to him.

‘How’s it going, Solly?’ I asked.

He grunted and muttered something in a thick Norfolk accent that I couldn’t make out. He didn’t seem too happy, was the gist of it. He was in his seventies, stooped but with a full head of long, still-dark hair that the wind was wrapping around his face. He used to be a fisherman so maybe the salt air had preserved the colour of his hair.

‘You do the grounds here as well, then?’

‘Yeah, voluntary.’

‘Voluntary?’

‘My church,’ he grunted again.

‘You see anything that happened?’

‘No. And I just want to get home. Those people told me to wait.’ He nodded dismissively at the police team.

‘They take a statement?’

‘No, just asked a couple of questions and told me to wait, like I got nothing better to do with my time.’

‘Did you know the guy whose headstone was smashed up?’

‘No, before my time. He was in the ground before I even came to Sheringham. I ain’t a Shannock, you know.’

‘Nor me,’ I said.

He laughed at that, a short, bitter chuckle. ‘No, I should say you aren’t.’

‘You see anybody looking around the graves?’

‘Only her,’ he nodded, scowling again at Superintendent Dean. ‘Bloody bluebottle, telling me I got to wait.’

‘Not tonight. I meant earlier.’

‘Yeah, I know what you meant. She was here yesterday, having a look around.’

‘You were doing the rounds yesterday?’

He grunted again. ‘Evening Mass. We come out and she’s there, peering at the graves.’

‘She look at Tony Carter’s grave?’

‘Oh yeah. Bloody bluebottle.’

I WAS SITTING
behind my desk, waiting for Laura to bring me my morning cup of java and a croissant. Hell, if I was going to have staff on my payroll I might as well get some benefit from them. Maybe I should take a leaf out of Amy Leigh’s book and get a glass panel in the door to my office and have
DELANEY & ASSOCIATES
etched onto it.

Outside the wind, as ever, was whistling, and the clouds were scudding in the sky like sailing ships. It was sunny, though. One of those rare breaks you get in England sometimes in October and early November, when it is bracingly cold but the light is bright – dazzlingly bright sometimes when the sun sits low in the sky. The sort of weather when wrapping a scarf round your neck, putting on gloves, duffel coat and hat and going for a long walk in the forests and kicking up leaves doesn’t seem such a bad thing after all. Kate on one side, Siobhan on the other, the baby safely wrapped up warm in a buggy. Maybe a dog. A big mad enthusiastic Labrador to throw sticks for.

Damn, I thought, catching myself. I had better get back to London soon.

The door swung open, by virtue of a kick to its base from a small-sized Doc Martens boot and Laura Gomez entered, a large styrofoam cup of coffee in each hand and a paper bag clenched between her teeth.

She dropped the paper bag on my desk by opening her mouth, much as my imaginary Labrador friend might have returned that imaginary stick.