A Market for Murder (16 page)

‘Yes, I suppose they are,’ Maggs agreed. ‘Except
they could easily have
walked
away, back towards the church, then across fields, to a waiting car.’

‘Do you know exactly who came to the funeral? Did you make a list?’

She shook her head. ‘We hardly ever do that. I would think Julie knows who they all are. She was early, and watched everybody arrive. I counted thirty-eight, not including small children.’

Den’s attention was mainly on the policemen. Another two cars arrived, parking ostentatiously in the middle of the road. The men who got out quickly began to run tape across the thoroughfare, preventing any through traffic. ‘Good God, they can’t do that!’ said Maggs. ‘Nobody’s going to want to go the long way round, in and out of the village.’

Den just shrugged. ‘They’re going to have to,’ he said.

Maggs was jigging on the spot, worrying about Karen, terrified for Drew and the children, angry at what had happened and embarrassed at the sudden abandonment of the funeral. It felt as if she ought to be in six places at once. Drew, she supposed, must be in an even worse state of indecision.

‘I have to follow them to the hospital,’ he was saying loudly to Della. ‘Can you look after the kids for me? I ought to have gone with her in the helicopter.’ He was holding himself tight, hands
on elbows, shoulders hunched, as if trying to cope with a sharp abdominal pain. He’d somehow managed to remove the clinging Stephanie and pass her to Della. He looked round. ‘Maggs!’ he called, as if she was much further away, ‘Can you deal with things here?’

‘Course I can,’ she assured him.

‘Just a moment, sir,’ one of the policemen intercepted his jerky progress towards Karen’s car. ‘I need to speak to you for a few minutes first.’

‘But …’ Drew’s eyes grew wilder. ‘What if she
dies?
What if she dies when I’m not there?’

‘Just two or three minutes, sir, and then we’ll provide a vehicle for you. You might not be too safe to drive just now.’

‘But then I wouldn’t be able to get back. And the children will need me. And the funeral … oh God, the funeral.’ He let go of his elbows and clutched both sides of his head instead. ‘I keep forgetting the funeral.’

‘That can wait, sir,’ the policeman said calmly. ‘It’s unfortunate, but true, all the same. The lady …’ he nodded towards Julie Grafton. ‘She’s being very understanding. Don’t worry about that.’

‘They’ll do it themselves, Drew,’ Maggs said. ‘We’ve already got it sorted. They don’t need us, really.’

Another wail from Stephanie distracted Drew
yet again. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said curtly to the policeman, and went to his daughter, where she was standing next to Della, the woman’s arm around her shoulders, with the three little boys all clustered silently beside her. She looked like a symbolic statue of Motherhood. Her husband Bill was also part of the tableau, holding the hand of his son Finian. All the faces were white and expressionless. Except for Stephanie’s which was red and enraged.

‘Where’s Mummy gone?’ she demanded of Drew. ‘What did they do to her?’

It occurred to Drew and Maggs simultaneously that the little girl might have actually seen who shot Karen. She had been level with Karen when it happened, facing the same way. If the person had been visible at all, then surely Stephanie must have witnessed the shooting. But if she had, wouldn’t she have said? Wouldn’t she have at least pointed to the individual in accusation?

Maggs acted first. She knelt down beside the child, and pulled her gently towards her. ‘Steph, we’ll have to let Daddy go and talk to these policemen, then they’ll take him to be with your mummy. You and Timmy can stay here with Den. He’ll play with you until Daddy gets back.’ She glanced over her shoulder at her startled boyfriend. ‘Isn’t that right, Den?’

‘Well …’ he began, with a frustrated glance at the scene in the lane. ‘I thought Della …’

‘It’s probably best if they stay at home,’ Maggs said firmly. ‘Della’s going to have her hands full with her own boys. They look fairly shell-shocked to me.’

‘Oh, well.’ Den knew when he was beaten. ‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Sir,’ interrupted Drew’s would-be interviewer. ‘I really think we need to have a talk.’

But there was no real urgency in his tone. All the impatience was on Drew’s side. So long as nobody left the vicinity, the questions and examinations could go on all day and all night, for all the police officers cared. They were, in any case, awaiting the arrival of a more senior officer, to make decisions and give instructions. Plus a photographer, although nobody believed there would be anything useful to record now. They had already exchanged muttered remarks, to the effect that they had to find the gun, prevent people disappearing and try to dispose of the obtrusive cardboard coffin – preferably in that order.

Maggs heaved a long steadying breath. The first shock was abating now. Things were beginning to settle down. She gave the crowd a hard look, examining the people one by one.

The first thing she noticed was the group of
three women, all oddly alike, standing together a little way removed from the rest. She knew their names: Geraldine Beech, Mary Thomas and Hilary Henderson. They were of a similar age, and there was an odd air of intimacy encircling the little tableau they made. Den followed her gaze.

‘The three witches,’ he murmured. ‘Now I can see why they call them that.’

The police did not find the gun that had been used to shoot Karen. The bullet was removed from her head in an operation that lasted three hours, and which left the surgeons trembling and sweating. They had expected her to die under their probing forceps at any moment.

It was a .22 bullet, and although cautious about making premature assumptions, it was suggested that it came from a converted Brocock airgun. This is what Detective Superintendent Hemsley told Den Cooper on Thursday evening. ‘There are quite a few of them around these days,’ Danny said. ‘It’s not terribly difficult to convert, if you’ve got access to the machinery. It makes a legal airgun into a powerful weapon. And it makes life very hard for us: they’re almost impossible to trace.’

‘Well, I can’t say I know anyone with a Brocock, converted or otherwise,’ admitted Den. ‘Not being very helpful, am I?’

‘You were pretty prompt getting to the scene this afternoon,’ Danny said.

‘I was on my way anyhow. I dithered about whether to go to Grafton’s funeral. You could say I was disgracefully late, in actual fact. I thought I’d hang back until it was mostly over, and then have a word with Maggs and Drew.’

‘I dare say they were pleased to see you.’

Den heaved a sigh. ‘I don’t think they’d have been
pleased
about anything,’ he said.

Investigations at the scene made little progress. It was always difficult when the victim hadn’t died immediately, and therefore had to be whisked away to hospital. Not only was there no certain evidence as to how the body had fallen, where the direction of fire had come from, who had been in what position – there was also massive disturbance of potential forensic evidence. In this case, as with the murder of Peter Grafton, there had been milling people, jostling and shuffling, coming and going, leaving almost nothing to reveal precisely what had happened.

But this time, the mystery was even deeper. How could a person surrounded by others have drawn a weapon from a bag or pocket or waistband and directed it at Karen, fired
it and subsequently hidden it, without being observed?

‘Must have been more than one person involved,’ was Detective Inspector Danny Hemsley’s conclusion. ‘Someone shielded the killer, and then took the gun and disposed of it in the confusion.’

‘It wasn’t in the ditch or the hedge,’ came the definite report. Both had been exhaustively searched. So had the mourners, and their cars, before they’d finally been allowed to go home. But all the police officers knew that there had been many minutes before they’d arrived, in which the weapon could have been concealed. Anyone who wanted to could have walked away, come to that. If the shooting had been planned, then the opportunities for concealment and escape were plentiful. And if the killer had been someone uninvolved in the funeral, hiding in a field opposite the Slocombes’ premises, he could have run off long before anybody could notice or apprehend him.

‘Except it must have made quite a noise,’ Hemsley remarked. ‘Wouldn’t you expect everyone to turn to the source of the sound? Wouldn’t you think they’d know more or less where it came from? Why are they all so vague about that?’

One of his officers had relocated from
Birmingham, where shootings were more frequent. ‘It echoes around, sir,’ he said helpfully. ‘And seems to come from all sides at once. Different people will tell you it came from entirely different directions, depending on where they were standing in relation to the shooter.’

‘Like when you hear a car backfire,’ added another. ‘You can never be sure which vehicle it is, even if you’re looking right at it. Funny, that.’

‘Bloody frustrating,’ grumbled Danny, thinking of the whole confused case.

But Den Cooper wasn’t feeling frustrated. It was a collection of far hotter emotions. Rage, passionate anxiety for Karen, and an inescapable excitement at this startling new turn of events. Being with Danny gave a further twist – the warm sense of being part of a team, the throb of a headache from all the hard thinking, the fear of failure: it all came flooding back.

‘Two different people to look for?’ he suggested. ‘Two different weapons used for the attacks, after all.’

Hemsley nodded, but he wore a dubious frown. ‘Not so different,’ he judged. ‘But I still don’t get how a person could fire a gun in a crowd without being seen. They certainly couldn’t have sighted it properly. Not unless they were behind the hedge.’

‘It’s all about angles again, isn’t it,’ Den said.
‘Have we got a report on that? The point of entry, I mean?’

Hemsley overlooked the
we
, but Den had heard it as soon as it left his mouth.

‘It wasn’t fully head on, as far as they can tell. But of course she could have turned her head to look down the road, and been hit in the middle of her forehead by someone standing at ninety degrees to her. Do you follow?’

‘Perfectly. I don’t suppose anybody was watching her when it happened?’

‘Not with any degree of attention. Nobody’s come up with anything so far, anyway. They’re all too gobsmacked at how it could have happened.’

‘If the gunman fired from the hip, or even chest, the angle would be upwards,’ Den realised. ‘Wouldn’t it?’

‘Yeah. But she was standing at the top of a few steps, already above the road. So we have to factor that in. It’s all horribly imprecise.’

‘Poor Drew,’ Den sighed. ‘He must be going through hell.’

Maggs would never have believed the strength of her feelings for Drew, until forced to face them. His grief and fear were ravaging her, making words like
sympathy
and
concern
laughably inadequate. And although she worked heroically
to save him from having to think about the job or the house or the children, nothing could protect him from the terror he felt at the prospect of losing his wife.

Den in his turn was also afraid. Not for Drew, or even Maggs, but for himself. He knew himself to be lacking in some way, to be falling short of expectations.
If he can’t make Karen better,
he could almost hear Maggs thinking, then he
should at least be able to locate her attacker.
There should be
something
useful he can do
.

And so he understood where his main role lay. He had to continue to conduct his own investigation, either together with the police or independently, and never rest until the job was done.

Den knew a little about motives for murder, from repeated experience, and top of his list came ‘Jealousy’. People could be jealous of a number of things: a preferred sibling, a good name, money, health – and it often made them mad enough to kill. It could spark a sudden rage, or creep up on you in a long slow burn. It could be mixed with pride or hatred or greed. It could disguise itself as something else. It could arouse a desire for revenge. Whatever form it might take, Den had learnt that it was an excellent place to begin when searching for a motivation in a killing.

Logically, it seemed right to begin with the
death of Peter Grafton. He and Maggs had agreed that Karen had most likely been shot because she had discovered the identity of Grafton’s killer, whether wittingly or not. And he also agreed with Maggs that they’d both been dilatory in consulting Karen about the whole business. They’d given it less attention than they ought to have done, leaving her to carry the burden of witnessing the man’s death as well as some aggravation afterwards from people like Mary Thomas. Along with all the other feelings, there was a simmering guilt on both their parts.

‘She wanted to talk about it,’ Maggs had said sadly. ‘She knew the people involved. She wanted us to help her work out what was going on.’

‘I went to see Mary Thomas,’ he defended himself half-heartedly. ‘But I let her sidetrack me into a lot of stuff about her sons. I don’t think she was taking me very seriously.’

‘So what now?’ Maggs had wondered.

‘We find the killer,’ Den had said emphatically. ‘Before anybody else has to go through what Drew’s going through.’ The depth of Maggs’s gratitude was painful when he said that.

They’d drawn up a list of potential suspects. Everyone at the farmers’ market, for a start. Maggie Withington, Joe Richards and Oswald Kelly were no more than names, gleaned only after Den had dropped into the Incident Room
and cribbed from the notes on one of the whiteboards. ‘Maggie sells bread, and Kelly sells ostrich meat,’ he told Maggs. ‘And Richards must be the man I bought our chops from. Very organic and very expensive.’ Sally Dabb was in a category on her own. She had been too close to Grafton to be on a list of suspects for that killing, but she had as much opportunity as
anybody
else, when it came to the attack on Karen.

The list of those in the frame for killing Grafton had seven names on it: Geraldine Beech, Hilary Henderson, Mary Thomas, Sally Dabb’s husband, Julie Grafton, Humphrey Thomas (son of Mary) and – because Den knew the police could not entirely rule this out – Karen Slocombe. Plus, of course, an unspecified number of people, who might have had unfathomed reasons to want Peter Grafton dead, and who could have lurked in the public lavatories with a crossbow.

‘I know it’s crazy,’ Den agreed, when Maggs gave a shout of protest at the inclusion of Karen on the list. ‘But they don’t know her like we do. They only have her word for it that she was where she said, and saw the bolt strike. They’re sure to think it at least possible that she invented it all as a cover for herself.’

‘But
we
know she didn’t,’ Maggs insisted. ‘Why is she on
our
list?’

‘Just in the interests of completeness,’
he assured her. ‘And because she was at the supermarket when that bomb went off.’

He should not have added this last remark. He knew he’d blundered as soon as the words were out. Maggs stared at him through narrowed eyes.

‘You think there’s a chance she shot Grafton!’ she accused. ‘Don’t you?’

Den shook his head. ‘No, really I don’t. But there is a logical possibility. I was trained never to make assumptions, always keep an open mind. That’s all I’m doing here.’

‘But hardly any of these people could have popped into the loos and out again without someone noticing,’ Maggs objected, realising as she said it that it was feeble. People were coming and going all the time, inevitably, and it would be hard to pin down witnesses who would swear to precisely who was where at the exact moment the bolt struck home.

A second perusal of the list confirmed that everybody on it, except for Sally’s husband, Archie Dabb, had been at the funeral. ‘And he might have been hiding behind the hedge,’ Maggs pointed out. ‘If we’re aiming for a process of elimination, there’s an awfully long way to go.’

Den had retained enough of his police training to know that close attention to the murder weapon would repay the time and trouble spent. He recalled Hemsley’s cautious remarks about
a ‘Brocock conversion’. This was a new one on Den, and he was conscious of the deficiency in his understanding. As far as he could remember, a Brocock was a relatively harmless airgun, beloved by hobby shooters. He was very hazy about what a ‘conversion’ might entail.

‘Look it up on the Internet,’ Maggs suggested.

‘They’re not going to describe the whole process, in detail, are they?’ he scoffed.

‘You might be surprised.’

But when he’d logged on and done a search of the Web, he’d found nothing more than some plaintive statistics from a shooting webpage, claiming that Brococks were seldom converted, rarely implicated in criminal activity and undeserving of their bad reputation with the police.

‘They would say that,’ he muttered to himself, but he did wonder just how sure forensics could be that this was what they were dealing with. The bullet in Karen’s brain was a .22, as Danny had already revealed. It would normally have been fired from a rifle, rather than an airgun. The conversion, he suspected, was not as simple as Hemsley had implied. If his assumptions were correct, it would need someone with a metal lathe to make and then insert some sort of sleeve, which could deal with the explosive ‘rimfire’ method of expulsion used for a .22 bullet, rather
that the airgun which employed a gas. One practical consequence of this conversion was that firing the thing would produce a far louder noise than it would have done as an airgun.

But Den knew from experience that the entire community was full of people with very handy practical skills. They probably did have metal lathes, some of them, tucked away in their workshops or garages. They recycled as much as they could, turning unwanted objects into something useful. Karen took her lawnmower just down the road somewhere to be overhauled; Drew knew a chap who could provide metal nameplates occasionally for the coffins if the family demanded it. And wasn’t Sally Dabb’s husband some sort of mechanic? Den jotted a brief note beside the man’s entry on his lists.

Den had phoned the Social Services office and told them he wouldn’t be back until Monday at the earliest. They hadn’t seemed concerned. That gave him three days to pursue his enquiries. Or two and a half now: already it was the middle of Friday and all he’d done so far was talk to Maggs and sit over his notepad, deep in thought.

Unfortunately, concentrated thought proved elusive. Images kept intruding of Karen undergoing brain surgery to remove a bullet, combined with Drew’s ravaged expression and Stephanie’s desolate wails. It was a calamity almost too
huge to grasp. Like a boxer’s punchbag, it kept swinging back and bashing him in the head. How was it
possible?
How could their own Karen have fallen victim in that way? What – what –
what
– had she seen or heard that made the killer strike her down so ruthlessly?

She’d spoken to Geraldine Beech and Hilary Henderson, according to Maggs. And had tried to visit Mary Thomas, to argue the point about the woman’s presence at the supermarket. Den recalled his own session with the last-named, and came to a decision: he was going back to Cherry Blossoms in Ferngate, to speak to Mary Thomas again.

It was as if she’d been expecting him. Before he could reach the front door, she had thrown it open and was standing waiting for him, unsmiling and pale. Her small eyes had shrunk even further into her head, and her hair was wild. Her clothes looked strange, too. In place of the long skirt there were tight jeans, which he could see were not properly fastened at the waistband. A wedge of flabby beige flesh protruded, clearly visible beneath the incompletely buttoned shirt she wore over the jeans. She seemed entirely unaware of the figure she presented.