The Serpent Pool (5 page)

‘Not your type?’

‘No, but I can see why some women might be smitten. Not that he and I had a long conversation. Wanda Saffell joined us and the look in her eyes said she wanted to speak to him on her own. I caught sight of Hannah chatting to
Stuart and made my excuses. A few minutes later, Wanda chucked a glass of red wine all over Arlo’s jacket and then flounced out of the room.’

‘Party-pooper, huh?’

‘Stuart discovered her sitting cross-legged at the foot of the stairs, sobbing her heart out. He had her taken home by one of his partners. Her nerves are in tatters, he said.’

‘Why did she attack Arlo?’

‘No idea. Stuart brushed it off, said she’d had a rough time lately.’

‘How could Arlo have upset her, a woman recently widowed in horrific circumstances?’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘He strikes me as a man who likes to provoke a reaction. Murder fascinates him. Maybe he suggested she knew something about her husband’s death?’

Louise shook her head. ‘You still believe historians make good detectives?’

‘Why not? I got a book and a television series out of it.’

‘Before you threw everything away.’

‘I needed to escape.’

‘I don’t—’ she broke off as her brother’s attention strayed. ‘What’s the matter?’

Daniel peered through the window. The rain was pounding harder. A dark figure in a hooded waterproof coat and hiker’s boots splashed through puddles towards the cottage from the tarn.

‘Someone has wandered into the garden.’

‘That will be Stuart. I told him about this place and he said it sounded fascinating. I dropped him off by the old
mill, so he could stroll along the beck. He could do with a breath of air, he didn’t sleep last night.’

Daniel stared at the figure outside. The face was masked by the hood, but the man must have seen that he was being watched. He raised a hand encased in a black leather gauntlet.

If Daniel hadn’t recognised Stuart Wagg, he’d have interpreted the gesture not as a greeting, but as a threat.

‘Louise tells me there was a bust-up at the party last night.’

Sprawled over the sofa, Stuart Wagg drained his tumbler of whisky. He hadn’t bothered to wipe his feet properly and he’d left a trail of muddy footprints on the carpet.

‘Something and nothing.’

‘How did Arlo provoke her?’ Daniel asked.

Wagg gave a shrug. ‘Christ knows. I invited him over because we’re sponsors of this Festival. Wanda’s as thin-skinned as a skeleton’s silhouette. They’d both had a few drinks. Maybe Arlo tried it on when she wasn’t in the mood, who knows?’

‘Wouldn’t that be pretty insensitive, given that she was so recently widowed?’

‘Tell you what, Daniel. My motto is:
Ask no questions, and you won’t be told any lies
. These things happen. Tomorrow it will all be forgotten. Nobody died.’

‘George Saffell died.’ Louise shivered. ‘Someone turned his lakeside retreat into a ball of fire.’

‘Nothing to do with what happened last night.’ Wagg’s jaw tightened. ‘Except that Wanda is grieving. She deserves to be cut some slack.’

‘You’ve known her a long time?’ Louise asked.

‘We were at school together. She was a few years younger than me, but even then, she stood out from the crowd. I remember taking her out to the cinema a few times when we were teenagers. All very innocent, of course.’

‘I bet.’

‘Believe me.’ He feigned injured innocence. ‘I never got further than a quick fumble on the back seats at the Royalty in Bowness. Very well-behaved young lady was Wanda. Single-minded, too. Obsessed with her hobby, nothing else mattered to her half as much.’

‘Her hobby?’

‘Vocation, business, whatever. She loves printmaking. As a kid, I promise you, she was much more interested in that than me. Still is, to this day.’

‘You knew her husband?’ Daniel asked.

‘Old George? Sure, we moved in the same business circles. And he loved books as much as I do.’

Louise arched her eyebrows. ‘Do you really love books, darling?’

‘What do you mean?’ Wagg sounded like a bishop accused of blasphemy.

‘I wondered…if what you really love is the thrill of the chase. Tracking down a rare first edition, then squirrelling it away, so nobody else can have the pleasure of owning it.’

For a moment, there was silence.

He shook his head. ‘You’re wrong.’

‘How many of your precious tomes have you actually read?’ She turned to Daniel. ‘You should see his library. It’s a miniature Bodleian. But I doubt if he’s read a tenth of his collection.’

‘One of these days,’ Wagg muttered. ‘When I have more time.’

‘Meanwhile, you still have to keep Marc Amos in business, I suppose?’

‘You know Marc’s partner.’ Daniel wanted to change the subject, stop Louise from needling Wagg. It was her habit to be provocative, but he sensed the man had a temper to match Wanda Saffell’s. ‘DCI Scarlett.’

‘The lovely Hannah?’ Wagg grinned. ‘Your sister tells me that you managed to get yourself involved in one of Hannah’s cases.’

More than one, actually, but Daniel kept his mouth shut. He wished Louise hadn’t talked about him with Stuart Wagg. Even more, he wished she hadn’t fallen for the man. He didn’t like the way the whisky had loosened Wagg’s tongue.

‘Her career ran into the buffers, did you know? After she messed up over a major trial, they sidelined her. It was all presented in a positive light, needless to say. Young woman detective on the fast track? They could hardly throw her overboard. Not with all those politically correct diversity targets to meet.’

‘She’s in charge of the cold case team,’ Daniel said. ‘A high-profile job.’

‘Not exactly at the cutting edge, though. Zero pressure. No need to race against the clock when a victim’s spent years mouldering in the grave.’ Wagg gave a theatrical sigh. ‘But Hannah will be fine. If she keeps her nose clean until she’s got her years in, she’ll have a nice fat pension. No need to rely on the money Marc makes from sad bibliomaniacs like me.’

Daniel felt his cheeks reddening as he counted to ten.
Hannah didn’t need him to defend her, but he couldn’t help it.

‘She doesn’t strike me as a time-server.’

Wagg yawned and stretched his arms. ‘Well, who cares? I’d better be getting home. Thanks for the booze.’

As Louise stood up, he turned to her and said, ‘Are you staying over, or coming back here after you’ve dropped me off, darling?’

‘Staying over, of course. Why do you ask?’

‘No reason.’

‘You’ve taken the week off work.’

‘Yeah, I was thinking of getting up among the fells.’

‘Term doesn’t start for another week, we can explore the fells together.’

‘It’s not what I had in mind. For me, fell-walking is a solitary vice.’ Wagg got to his feet. ‘I assumed, now your brother’s back in England, you’d want to spend some time with him.’

‘Daniel and I can see each other any time.’

She sounded as though Wagg had smacked her face. Daniel clenched his fists behind his back.

‘Fine, fine. Let’s go, then.’

Daniel saw them to the door, and watched them climb into Louise’s sports car without a word. Her face was as bleak as Scafell. She crashed the gears, the ugly noise breaching the peace of the wooded valley.

The car sped off, Louise driving too fast for the little lane through the wood. Daniel stared after them.

He found himself loathing Stuart Wagg.

‘Bethany Friend’s body was found by a group of half a dozen fell-walkers,’ Hannah said. ‘A damp winter morning almost six years ago. February 15th, to be precise. She’d been dead for less than twenty-four hours.’

Greg Wharf swung back and forth on the plastic chair. Not quite insubordination, not far from it. Her new detective sergeant was testing her patience, but Hannah was determined not to let him win the game. They were alone in the briefing room. It was newly refurbished, with lots of greenery in posh stone pots, and a couple of abstract daubs on the wall. The money came from a budget surplus at the end of the last financial year, though the Police Federation would have preferred cash in their members’ pay packets.

Hannah hardly knew Greg Wharf. He was a Geordie with bleached hair and an incipient beer gut. Dark rings under his eyes testified to intensive New Year partying. He’d spent most of his career in Newcastle, where he’d married a highflying colleague. Once his wife discovered him
in
flagrante
with a community support officer, a messy divorce followed,
and he transferred to Cumbria’s Northern Division. Most of Hannah’s female colleagues fancied him, and one had even dubbed him Gorgeous Greg. No accounting for tastes. Some poor soul was probably responsible for ironing that white shirt to crisp perfection. He was the sort of bloke who regarded doing the laundry as women’s work.

Hannah had called him in early for a briefing on the Friend case before the rest of the team arrived. Ten minutes in, she suspected the less she got to know about Detective Sergeant Gregory Wharf, the better. That mocking light in the blue eyes made him look like a beach bum humouring a parish priest.

He wasn’t overjoyed to be here. Lauren Self, the assistant chief constable, had moved him from Vice after he procured a confession to the rape of a prostitute from a recidivist sex offender. It seemed like a neat piece of detective work, until the man hanged himself and it turned out that the woman had made up the complaint to take revenge on an ex-boyfriend. Greg wriggled out of it without a disciplinary hearing, but he’d taken one chance too many. Exile to Cold Cases was the price he had to pay.

‘So, Bethany died on 14
^th
February.’ A laddish snigger. ‘Valentine’s Day.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Is the date supposed to be significant?’

‘That’s for us to find out, isn’t it?’

‘Sure.’ His eyes narrowed, like a chess player figuring out the next move. Trouble was, she’d never had the patience for chess, and he wouldn’t bother to follow the rules of the game anyway. ‘Do we have any theories? Any leads?’

‘Nothing to suggest that her death was linked to a
romantic entanglement. Of course, she may have killed herself because her love life went wrong.’

‘Flaky, was she?’

His grimace implied that, with women, flakiness was an occupational hazard.

‘Bethany was quiet, bookish. A very private person, everyone agreed on that.’

‘We could spend months reinterviewing reluctant witnesses and finish up back where we started.’

‘Suicide is possible, but it seems unlikely.’

He nodded at a close-up shot of the corpse pinned on the whiteboard. ‘Because she was gagged?’

The face of the woman in the photo was bruised and swollen. Eyes shut, mouth open, as if she were biting the woollen scarf. Hannah looked away. Nobody should finish up like that. Not only dead, but degraded.

‘The gag was the tightest knot, but physically, she could have done it herself. Same with the tying-up.’

‘Mmmm. Sounds kinky.’

‘Her hands were bound behind her back.’ Hannah wouldn’t rise to the bait. ‘Spark plug cables wrapped around her wrists. They were quite loose.’

‘Not easy to truss someone up efficiently with jump leads.’ He grinned, as if to hint that he’d tried it himself.

‘Her ankles were tied together with a tow rope. It was never established whether the rope and the cables belonged to her or someone else brought them. There was bruising on the neck, from some sort of ligature. Probably the scarf. Perhaps she tied it around her throat, then thought better of it.’

‘So, she could have done all that and then chucked herself into the water?’

‘All eighteen inches of it, yes. Or so the investigating team was told by one of the country’s leading experts on knotting techniques.’

Greg Wharf’s face made clear what he thought of anyone who devoted a career to studying the methodology of tying knots.

‘No sign of rape?’

‘No evidence whatsoever that she’d had sex lately. She was dressed, but not fully equipped for a long hike over the fells. Blue jeans, shirt and body warmer. Marks & Spencer bra and pants. Boots. No injuries or signs of a struggle – if you don’t count the neck bruises.’

‘Bondage game gone wrong?’

‘Out in the open air?’

‘All the more fun.’

‘The weather was lousy. A rainstorm would dampen anyone’s ardour.’

‘Takes all sorts.’

He made a performance of stifling a yawn. She decided to allow him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was recovering from the festivities. Better not kill their relationship on the very first morning. Though right now she didn’t give it more than forty-eight hours before she’d have to slap him down hard, and no doubt earn his enmity for good. Bloody Lauren. This was a decent team, why did the ACC have to sabotage it by parachuting in a misogynistic egoist?

‘Can you reach the scene by car?’

‘An off-road vehicle could get close, but it’s not as if she was killed somewhere else and then brought to the water to be dumped. Bethany’s VW was parked at the end of a
lane which peters out three-quarters of a mile away from the pool. She’d driven there herself, either with suicide in mind or to meet someone else. The forensic evidence was conclusive about cause of death. Drowning.’

‘Did she have suicidal tendencies? Any family precedents?’

‘None. Her father was long dead, and an elder brother was run over by a lorry a year before Bethany was born. She was studious, didn’t have many relationships. A long-term crush on a woman who taught her English in the sixth form ended when the teacher died of meningitis during Bethany’s first year at Lancaster Uni.’

‘Unlucky lady. A lot of people she was close to kicked the bucket.’

‘Not her mother, she’s alive to this day. She was forty when Bethany was born. I don’t think she ever understood her daughter, but she idolised her.’

‘Was there a history of depression?’

‘Nothing known. Bethany had few friends, but the people she knew found it hard to believe she’d want to end it all.’

‘Friends and family are often the last to know.’

‘According to the mother, Bethany couldn’t swim. She hated putting her face under water, so why would she choose to drown herself?’

‘Another way of tormenting herself?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

He shrugged. ‘So, why are we bothered?’

Good question. Hannah was ready with an answer. Though, as when she’d talked with Marc up at the Serpent Pool, it wasn’t a complete answer.

‘The SIO who led the inquiry wasn’t satisfied. He mentioned the case to me before he retired. He always believed she was murdered.’

‘Yeah?’

She remembered Ben Kind telling her about the investigation into Bethany’s death, after he was told to run it down. She’d been embroiled on another inquiry at the time. Even now, she could hear Ben’s voice.

I can’t get her last moments out of my mind. A woman who hated water, drowning herself like that? She must have been terrified. Why would anyone do that to themselves
?

‘Bethany had a lover called Nathan Clare. The SIO wondered if Clare knew more about Bethany’s death than he was prepared to admit. But there was no proof, and plenty more pressing cases where there was no doubt a crime had been committed. He had to give up. But letting go rankled with him. Unfinished business.’

‘This SIO.’ His white teeth gleamed. ‘Not Ben Kind, by any chance?’

Shit
. If this was chess, he’d placed her in check. She gave a quick nod, praying that she wasn’t blushing.

‘I used to work with him.’

‘Yeah, I heard.’

His knowing smile grew broader. The bastard. What had people said about her and Ben?

‘What he told me about the case convinced me that Bethany’s death was worth looking into, once we had the capacity.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, your arrival is the lucky break I’ve been waiting for.’

Take that, you cheeky bugger.

Greg Wharf frowned.

‘What do we know about her, then?’

So he was interested, after all? Better not let point-scoring wreck things between them from the start. For an ambitious guy with a high opinion of himself, Cold Cases must seem like a dead end. In the absence of material yielding fresh evidence thanks to the advances of DNA technology – the sort of stuff that had the Press Office salivating at the prospect of sexy headlines – only a minority of investigations made progress.

Leaning against the whiteboard, she closed her eyes. No need to consult her notes. After hours poring over witness statements and a transcript of the inquest, she knew the key points off by heart.

‘Bethany was twenty-five. She had countless short-term jobs after she graduated. Writing was her passion, but she needed to earn enough to pay the rent while she spent every spare moment scribbling. She often worked as a temp, and she spent a whole term as a secretary in the offices at the University of South Lakeland. Until shortly before her death, she was seeing a man who gave lectures in English from time to time.’

‘This Nathan Clare, her shag buddy?’

She ignored his leer. ‘Clare’s phrase was “lovers without commitment”.’

‘Don’t tell me, he was married?’ She shook her head. ‘Commitment wasn’t his cup of tea.

He never tied the knot.’

‘Unless it was around Bethany’s neck?’

‘The sort of man who enjoys his freedom, by the sound of it.’

‘My sort of bloke, then.’

‘Yeah, he’s keen on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and all that. You could chat about Xanadu over a pint of real ale.’

He pushed a lock of hair off his forehead and looked round, as if in search of a mirror to preen before. ‘Xanadu? That’s a nightclub in Whitehaven, isn’t it?’

Hannah followed his gaze. It lingered on a second photograph of the victim, this time a head and shoulders snap taken by her mother twelve months before her death. Bethany was quietly pretty, with shoulder-length brown hair. Her skin was clear, her teeth strong and even. A Mona Lisa smile suggested she was enjoying a private joke at the photographer’s expense. No question, Hannah thought, something about her compelled interest. There was more to Bethany Friend than met the eye.

But she wasn’t Greg Wharf’s type. ‘One thing’s for sure,’ he said. ‘Nathan Clare must like a challenge.’

Back in the sanctuary of her own office, Hannah closed her eyes and imagined herself on the brink of the Serpent Pool. Pictured a woman in despair, unable to escape her troubles. A woman who saw only one way out.

So on a wet winter’s day, had Bethany driven from Grasmere to Ambleside and walked up the fell on her own? Tightened her scarf around her neck before having second thoughts and stuffing it into her mouth? Brought the rope and jump leads from the boot of her car and tied them around her ankles and wrists? Conquered her fear and thrown herself into the water? Thrashed around for a few moments, or remained still, content to wait for the end?

Imagine the coldness of the water. Swilling over her
face, filling her nose and mouth, choking her lungs.

No, no, no.

Something was wrong with the picture. Why the Serpent Pool? It wasn’t as if the Lake District was short of places to drown yourself. Ben Kind thought it had been chosen because of its secluded setting. He’d never believed she’d killed herself and his failure to prove she was a victim of murder, let alone find the culprit, troubled him to the end of his days. He had a detective’s nose for the truth, sensed it in the way a seasoned experienced walker knew the right way down a mountainside, even when the mist descended.

Hannah opened her eyes again. Bethany Friend wasn’t a quitter. She’d kept writing, despite years of nothing but rejection slips. Suicide made no sense at all.

Ben was right. Someone had murdered her.

‘Sorted the new lad out?’ Les Bryant asked.

Hannah stood next to him in the cafeteria queue as he asked the girl at the counter for an all-day breakfast, only to be told it was no longer on the menu (‘ACC’s orders, Les. All part of the new healthy-eating culture.’). She pointed to a glossy wall poster which showed a smiling group of models posing as police officers, as glamorous as they were ethnically diverse, beside a caption that proclaimed
EAT YOUR WAY TO FITNESS
and extolled the virtues of parsnips and pomegranates. The message was likely to induce a coronary in Les, if his crimson cheeks were any guide. With a muttered curse, he settled for a double helping of Shredded Wheat and a filter coffee into which he deposited two heaped spoonfuls of sugar.

‘He isn’t a happy bunny. Neither am I, come to that.’
Hannah bought a bowl of muesli, a slice of melon and an organic cranberry juice, more to provoke Les than because she was addicted to fruit. ‘Bloody Lauren sent him to Cold Cases as though it’s the naughty corner.’

They didn’t have any trouble finding a table. A virus was sweeping the county and a lot of people had called in sick. Les slurped some coffee and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘It will be all right as long as you show him who’s boss. If you don’t, he’ll trample all over you.’

‘Thanks for those words of encouragement.’

‘Listen, I had a bellyful of management before I retired. I know it’s a pile of shit. But you’re in charge, not me. Better get on with it.’

Les was a veteran of countless major inquiries in his native Yorkshire. He’d been persuaded out of retirement to lend his experience to the newly formed Cold Case Review Team. After his wife left him, he had no incentive to go back home. Six months ago, he’d bought a bungalow in Staveley, and even though a thirty-year pension meant he didn’t need the money, he’d signed an extended contract. Given Nick Lowther’s emigration, Bob Swindell’s move to Lancashire, and Gul Khan’s decision to leave and join the family retail business, Les’s presence in the team gave Hannah much-needed continuity. Cold cases were never solved overnight, and staff turnover coupled with budget cutbacks made the task even tougher.