A Market for Murder (19 page)

‘Thank heaven for that,’ Den said fervently.

‘Now who do we have on the suspect list, again? It’s quite a number, because everyone was at both places. Nobody has an alibi.’

‘Except Sally Dabb’s husband,’ Den reminded her. ‘He was at work both times.’

‘Pity. He’s quite a likely suspect otherwise.’

‘Why would he shoot Karen?’

‘Um … well, maybe he thought she’d been encouraging Grafton and Sally’s affair. Actually, he isn’t so likely, now I come to think about it.’

‘So we’ve got the three witches, Mary, Geraldine and Hilary; Julie Grafton; the other stallholders – Joe Richards, Maggie Withington and the ostrich man. Some villagers, maybe, though I can’t imagine why. They were at the funeral and could have been at the farmers’ market. People like Della and the Westlake woman.’

‘Who?’

‘Della. The one who looks after Drew’s kids.’

‘Yes, I know her. Who’s the Westlake woman?’

‘Oh, she lives at the farm down the lane from Drew and Karen. Towards the village – that nice big farmyard.’

‘How do you know her?’

He smiled patiently. ‘Sometimes, if I get to you
early, I leave the car and go for a little walk. She’s often in the yard, and we have a little chat.’

‘Shit! You’ve got another woman. How old is she?’

‘Sixty-ish. Maybe a bit less. Nice brown eyes.’

‘Was she at the funeral?’

‘Oh yes. Hanging back, on the fringes, but there. She gave me a friendly nod when I arrived.’

‘Well, add her to the list then. She might have designs on Drew’s field. Or want to put them out of business for some reason.’

He puffed out his cheeks in admiration of her inventiveness.

‘Or,’ she added, ‘if she’s sixty, that puts her in the same age group as the witches. Yet another one from that little gang. What a time it must have been when that lot were at school together. I wonder what made it so special.’

‘Hilary said it was 1960, the year they left. I suppose that must have been some sort of turning point. Wasn’t that when Kennedy got to be president? And youth culture was born. And according to Hilary, the first signs of the rot setting in.’

Maggs was thoughtful. ‘All a bit vague,’ she judged. ‘I wonder if something a bit more definite happened – a bit closer to home. Don’t they say that most motives for murder go back well into the past?’

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘We could have a look at the newspaper archives. See if there was some big local crisis.’

‘That’s an Internet job,’ she decided. ‘Whose computer can we use?’

‘Danny’s. Though he might have already thought of it. He usually gets one of the DCs onto that job, in the first day or two.’

‘How do they know what to look for?’

‘They don’t. They just trawl through local papers for background. They learn to spot familiar names cropping up over the years. Plus big local events like protests against new developments. The sort of things that make people hate each other.’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘You didn’t think the police were that clever?’

‘You said it.’

‘So it would really be quicker to check with Danny first.’ A renewed eagerness caught his attention.

‘You haven’t met him, have you?’ Den realised. ‘You want to see what he’s like.’

‘I did see him, I think. When we first met. But I don’t remember much about him.’

‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘He’ll probably be there today, after what happened to Karen. The whole thing’s going to be ratcheted up quite a bit now. No rest for the SIO.’

‘The what?’

‘Senior Investigating Officer. Keep up, woman.’

Karen knew she was awake. She could hear and think, and feel something cool and smooth under her hands. But she couldn’t open her eyes, and certainly couldn’t speak. It alternated between being worse than the worst imaginable nightmare and being oddly restful. The complete removal of control should have been terrifying – and was at intervals – but it was also very liberating. Then as time went on, and her thought processes seemed to clear a little, stark terror began to filter in. What if she was going to be like this forever?

She found she could only think in short childlike phrases. Little ribbons of unjoined-up musings flickered through her mind. ‘
Drew-and-the-children
’ was a recurring one, because she could hear their voices close by. ‘I-can’t-move’ and ‘My-head-hurts’ came up quite often, too. Everything quite unemotional, except for the fear that lurked on the sidelines. The fear she knew would pounce as soon as she managed to understand what was going on. So she stopped trying to make sense of it. It could do no good, and only increased the pain behind her eyes.

Something was touching her hand, pressing warmly against her skin. It felt good, a contact
 
that went much deeper than words. But it was frightening, too. An insistence went with it, a demand that she make some kind of effort. And making an effort was so terribly risky. Something inside her gave up and she sank into a comforting greyness which was quite a lot like sleep.

Drew tried to convince himself that Karen had responded to his touch. A tiny frown, a flicker under the eyelids. A nurse had been watching from the other side of the bed, and had silently nodded at him, sharing his hopes. But there’d been nothing further, and Timmy began to wriggle and complain, so they left the room.

A young doctor had been watching out for them. He ushered Drew and the children into a small room, and began to talk about different levels of unconsciousness and the difficulty of making meaningful predictions.

‘What usually happens?’ Drew asked clumsily.

‘There isn’t really a
usually
,’ the man explained. ‘Each case is different. There are too many variables, you see. The extent of the damage, the age and health of the patient – and something that looks like the desire to get better. It sounds a bit new agey, I suppose, but patients do differ in the amount of effort they’ll put in. It can be so tantalising, watching them. Some just
give up without much of a struggle at all. I’d give anything to know what goes on inside.’

Drew chafed at this, especially as Stephanie was paying close attention to the doctor’s words.

‘Well, she’ll be a fighter,’ he said robustly. ‘No doubt about that.’

‘I’m sure she will. And, as I say, she’s not as deeply unconscious as she might look. All the scans show a lot of brain activity. She could wake up at any time. Believe me, I’m not just saying that.’

‘I believe you,’ Drew assured him, with a smile at Stephanie. ‘We believe him, don’t we?’ he said to her.

The child frowned. ‘When will she wake up, then?’ she asked. ‘Why is she so tired?’

‘She’s not tired, Steph. She’s hurt. She’s poorly, and people always sleep a lot when they’re poorly. It’s nature’s way of making us better. If we lie still, all the poorly parts can mend more quickly.’

‘Mmm,’ came the dubious reply.

Timmy was clearly puzzled by events, and clung round Drew’s neck like a magnet.

‘We’d better go,’ Drew decided. ‘We can come again tomorrow.’

It felt almost violent to be leaving Karen there alone with whatever strange dreams she might
be having. His place was by her side, day and night, talking to her, urging her to emerge from the darkness back to her rightful life. But he had to consider the children, and instinct told him that they needed him more than Karen did.

The drive home seemed to shake him out of his dazed misery. Either the visit from Julie Grafton, or the sight of his injured wife, or simply a spontaneous recovery – whatever the explanation, by the time he pulled up outside the house, he was anxious to speak to people about the shooting. Maggs, Geraldine, the police, even Mrs Westlake from the nearby farm – they would all have vital information for him, or ideas and suggestions. He couldn’t drift uselessly any longer.

But first there was the matter of survival. The freezer was well stocked with fruit and vegetables from their own garden, and meat and bread from other Food Chain people. Karen sometimes bartered her produce for that of other people, which always gave her and Drew a buzz. ‘Wait till we do a funeral in return for a year’s supply of clothes for us all,’ Drew had joked. ‘
Handmade
, of course.’

Karen hadn’t been very amused. ‘We’ve already got the kids’ clothes exchange,’ she reminded him. ‘And I never need anything, now I’m not working.’

‘Well, something else, then,’ he insisted. ‘Surely you approve of money-free transactions?’

‘I do, of course,’ she nodded. ‘But it’s not as simple as you might think. When we explored the feasibility of a LETS scheme, we decided it wouldn’t work.’

‘LETS? Remind me.’

‘Local Exchange Trading Scheme. It just means bartering, really, but with an organised structure.’

‘Ah, yes. One of those things where you say the last word twice,’ he’d teased, determined to avoid getting too serious about the whole issue. ‘You said LETS scheme. The S stands for—’

‘Yes, Drew, I know. For heaven’s sake.’ He hadn’t really understood why she’d been so tetchy about it. Surely it was possible to live simply, and still be able to find some humour in it?

Now he winced as he remembered this and other occasions when he’d been irritating and deliberately derisive about Karen’s new-found philosophy. It wasn’t at all that he’d disagreed with her; he just wished she wouldn’t be so
solemn
about it. And for the first time, it dawned on him that because he’d been glib and seemingly unimpressed, she might well have been thinking and doing things that he hadn’t known about.

His thoughts flew back to the bomb at the supermarket, and how surprised he’d been that
she’d been there at the time. Karen did not go to supermarkets. So why had she suddenly deviated from her own rock-solid stand? And how come she’d been there at the very moment that a bomb exploded?

It wasn’t a clear thought, but a mere nudge at his awareness. As soon as he felt it, he wrapped it in a thick blanket and packed it away out of sight. But the nudge had been enough: what if Karen had known about the bomb? And if she had, then perhaps that would go some way towards explaining why she’d been shot.

Stephanie and Timmy ate their lunch with no ructions, and Drew put his mind to how he should spend the remainder of the day. He couldn’t go anywhere unless he took the children with him, but he could phone people. He could alternatively try to find someone to babysit. Della was the obvious first port of call, especially as he didn’t know for sure that she’d gone with her family on the usual Saturday outing. The events of Thursday afternoon must have shaken her up, just as they had everyone else, and perhaps she and Bill wouldn’t feel like going anywhere.

But, as with Julie Grafton, Drew felt an odd reluctance to leave his children with Della. Who, he asked himself,
could
he trust? Well, Maggs, of course, but she wouldn’t want to be summoned
back to North Staverton on a Saturday unless it was on a funeral call. Apart from her, he really couldn’t think of anybody. All the obvious candidates had been there when Karen was shot, and any one of them could theoretically have done it. And that meant the same person might take it into their head to murder Stephanie and Timmy as well, unspeakable as the thought might be.

So he started telephoning, first having set the children up with a chaotic assortment of toys on the kitchen table. He supposed it was the strangeness of the situation that ensured that they played quietly, and with no visible enthusiasm.

‘Maggs? Is Den there? Has he seen his Inspector friend today? Does he have any idea what’s going on?’

‘We’re just back from seeing him, actually,’ she said.

‘We?’

‘Yes, I went as well. I’m not going to be left out of this. You know how good I am at coming up with theories about what must have happened.’ Then she seemed to remember something. ‘Oh, Drew, listen to me. Are
you
all right? Have you seen Karen?’

‘I’m much better than I was. And yes, we paid a quick visit this morning. No change, really. They think she’ll be OK, though.’

‘Really? Is that what they said?’

‘They say she could wake up at any moment.’

‘Thank goodness for that.’

‘And I want to know who shot her,’ he said emphatically. He told her about Julie Grafton’s visit and her offer to look after the children.

‘And you wouldn’t let her?’

‘No. I can’t trust any of them. How can I? Any one of them could have shot Karen.’

‘Not Julie, surely?’

‘Yes, of course Julie. She was walking alone behind the coffin. Everybody had their heads bent …’

‘How do you know? You couldn’t see them.’

‘Well, they probably did. Anyway, she could have hidden the gun in her jacket, whisked it out and back again before anybody noticed.’

‘I can’t really see it,’ she said. ‘I
like
Julie Grafton.’

‘She’s OK. But it was funny, her showing up like that. What did she
want
?’

Maggs snorted. ‘Well, I know it won’t have occurred to you, but I think she might possibly have her eye on you.’

‘What?’

‘Well she’s on her own now, isn’t she? Some women can’t cope with that, even for five minutes. They’re out trying to find a replacement before the first husband’s body’s cold.’ 

‘But surely not
me.
I’m not available.’

Maggs’s silence was eloquent. Drew’s could feel trickles of ice right through his system. ‘That’s horrible,’ he said faintly.

‘I expect I’m wrong,’ she said, sounding apologetic. ‘Forget I said it. She’s much too nice for that.’

He inhaled deeply, and tried to get back to the central issue.

‘She talked about the shooting,’ he said. ‘Her suggestion was that it must have been someone at the very back of the crowd. Maybe they lagged behind on purpose, knowing nobody was going to turn round and look behind them.’

‘They would when they heard the shot, though. How could anybody fire and then hide the gun in that tiny second before everyone turned to look?’

‘Have it under a coat? Pretend to be turning and looking as well?’ Drew felt himself become fully engaged in the conversation. He could visualise the scene as he spoke: the scene from another angle, for a change. His flashbacks and re-livings had so far all been an image of Karen falling, her head whipping back from the impact of the bullet. Now he mentally scanned it from all sides, trying to capture the entire scene.

Maggs waited a few seconds, then said, ‘It’s pretty unlikely, isn’t it? I mean, that someone
could do that, and nobody else notice? I think there must have been at least two of them. One to shoot and the other to stage some sort of diversion – make sure everybody looked the wrong way. Something so clever that we can’t remember it now.’

‘The obvious answer,’ he said slowly, ‘is that it was the three women. You know, Hilary, Geraldine and Mary.’

‘The three witches.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what the village people call them, apparently. Den’s been to see all three, since Thursday. He’s worked his little socks off, bless him. He knows all about them now.’

‘And does he think they conspired to murder my wife?’ His voice thickened. ‘She thought they were her friends.’

‘No, he doesn’t. He told his Inspector Hemsley all about them, and he agrees. They do have strong feelings, but not that strong. They all genuinely liked Karen, he’s convinced.’

‘He can’t know that for sure. They’ve got means and opportunity, for Grafton’s killing as well. And some sort of motive to do with food politics, I suppose.’

‘There’s something odd about Mary,’ Maggs remembered. ‘She’s the one he isn’t really sure about.’

‘The supermarket,’ Drew said, with another wave of ice washing through his veins. ‘Karen was there …’

‘So?’

‘So nothing, Maggs. It’s just—’

She read his mind instantly. ‘Drew, you don’t believe she had anything to do with that, do you? I admit the thought did occur to me, and then I remembered she had Stephanie with her. That in itself should tell us she’d never have been involved with setting a bomb off.’

‘You’re right,’ he said, feeling miserable and relieved at the same time. ‘But I realise now that she hasn’t been talking to me about the market stall and the whole food business for a long time. I’d rather lost interest in it, if I’m honest. I feel quite bad about that.’

‘Has she been taking an interest in Peaceful Repose?’ Maggs flashed back. ‘Come on, you idiot. That’s the way it goes. You and Karen are a great couple, with great kids and independent lives. You’re beating yourself up for nothing. It’s good that she’s got something of her own to do.’

Drew sighed. Maggs was twelve years his junior, but she’d always felt it part of her duty to lecture him on life, relationships and feelings. He sometimes had a vision of her taking the same role with her long-suffering parents, from
the moment they adopted her as a small child.

‘I want to be doing something,’ he said, gathering what scraps of dignity and energy he could manage. ‘Have you any ideas?’

‘You should get back to Julie Grafton,’ she said without hesitation. ‘Talk to her, but keep in mind that she could have done it. And Sally, too. She was at the funeral, and hanging back, as I recall. You could give her a ring.’

‘But she couldn’t have shot Peter Grafton. Karen said she was right next to him when it happened.’

Maggs made a cynical sound. ‘Maybe she’s just very clever,’ she said. ‘Or maybe she has an accomplice.’

‘Which is where we began,’ he reminded her. ‘And all that theory does is make for a lot more very confusing permutations.’

‘Well, now you’re on the case, we’ll unravel it in no time,’ she said robustly.

Despite Maggs’s advice, Drew did not phone Julie or Sally Dabb. The mere act of bracketing them together made him uncomfortable.

Peter Grafton’s two women, in effect, in some kind of unwholesome relationship that he was not keen to explore. And if he was going to talk to them about the attack on Karen, then he would also have to ask about Grafton’s shooting, and
that could lead down paths he’d prefer to avoid.

Settling down to watch a video with the children, he tried to create some mental order out of the scraps of knowledge concerning Karen’s activities. She had taken her lead from Geraldine Beech, right from the start. Geraldine had advised her on what to grow, how to prepare it, what to charge for it, and what to say to her customers. She had encouraged Karen to attend the Food Chain meetings, and bullied her into showing up at a few local schools to talk about their initiatives. Karen had shown every appearance of wholeheartedly endorsing all the opinions, practices and ideologies of the people in the group. Drew could not long entertain any theory that involved Karen being a traitor to the cause.

There were, however, several uncomfortable ironies attached to Karen’s evolution as an ecological proselytiser. Drew, after all, had been the one to establish Peaceful Repose Burial Ground, making the disposal of the dead as natural a procedure as he could. Drew had called for biodegradable containers, shallow graves and new trees. He and Maggs had given talks to groups across the region, sowing the seeds in receptive minds, to the effect that cremations were not merely lacking in spiritual content, but they were bad for the environment. When he arrived
in North Staverton, it was to a deafening lack of reaction amongst the local people. They had continued with their own lives for quite a while before the significance of his service dawned on them.

And it had been Geraldine Beech who called in one day, with no other motive than curiosity. She who had eyed the burial field with favour, but who had become really excited when she noticed Karen’s burgeoning vegetable plot. This, Drew felt, was where the ironies began. Suddenly it was Karen who joined the mainstream of village life, with her involvement in Geraldine’s Food Chain organisation, and her awakening to the potential of her home-grown produce. Although people referred routinely to ‘the Slocombes’ as both being in the forefront of the newly energetic environmental initiatives, Drew could never avoid the suspicion that he’d been usurped in some way by his wife.

And this feeling, if he was honest with himself, went some way towards explaining why he took less of an interest in what Karen was doing than he could have done. He and Maggs were the true pioneers. They were the ones who had made people think, and who had struggled for years with minimal reward and numerous setbacks. They had endured the active hostility of Plant and Son, the undertaker in Bradbourne who
stood to lose business to Peaceful Repose. They had been treated with mockery and suspicion at times, forced to defend the shallowness of the graves and the simplicity of their practices.

But Geraldine had clearly seen things differently. She had talked as if
she
was the driver of the bandwagon, the leader of the wagon train, and everyone else was falling in behind her. Pleased to have her support, Drew was nonetheless irritated by her.

Now, there was a sense again of being usurped – this time by Den Cooper. Maggs had implied that Den was now actively pursuing his own investigation into what had happened to Peter Grafton and Karen, and discovering leads and connections that Drew knew nothing about. Handicapped by the needs of his children, as well as having to keep the business going at least on a minimal basis, he wasn’t going to have time to keep up. Even if Maggs related everything that Den told her, it would all be too pre-digested to make him feel directly involved.

And besides, his rightful place was with Karen. His stoical wife, who worked so hard, and seldom complained and tolerated his pathetic income and unsocial working hours. The mother of his children, the person he most enjoyed talking to. He conjured the image of her lying there in hospital, her face oddly unrecognisable
on the white pillow. She never lay like that, flat on her back, chin up. She curled on her side, chin tucked down, hair all messy. The real Karen liked brightly coloured pillowcases, and a duvet that would wrap itself tightly round her by morning. The thought, that he had until now managed to keep at bay, finally thrust itself through, causing him to clutch both children tightly to his sides. What if she never woke up? What if that familiar Karen was lost forever?

‘Daddy!’ Timmy complained, wriggling crossly.

But Stephanie seemed to read his mind. She huddled herself closely to him, her thumb in her mouth, her eyes fixed unseeingly at the television screen.

Den was not thinking about Drew at all. He was aware of no competition between them, no reason why Drew should feel resentful. After all, any success that Den might achieve would only be good news for the husband of the injured Karen. Maggs, who might well have understood the sensitivities, was too excited to lend them her attention.

‘It’s
got
to be about the supermarket connection!’ she insisted. ‘Grafton signs a deal with SuperFare to sell his fruit juice to them. The Food Chain people get to know about it, and
decide he has to be stopped. He’ll undermine the whole shebang, if he goes on like that. Terrible publicity, dreadful betrayal of all they hold dear. Maybe someone talks to an activist – one of their sons, even. Haven’t they got four or five sons, between them? So, he sneaks into the gents behind the farmers’ market, sticks his crossbow out of the window and does the deed. But Karen sees too much, somehow. He knows she’ll eventually twig, and go to the police. Can’t risk it. So Karen has to be stopped.’

Den held up both hands, as if to arrest an oncoming juggernaut in full flight. ‘Whoa!’ he pleaded. ‘Hold your horses.’

She laughed. ‘Keep up,’ she said. ‘Where did you lose me?’

‘Crossbow. Gents. Son. Karen.’ He ticked them off, finger by finger. ‘Who says anybody’s sons would be interested?’ Then he remembered. ‘Ah! Mary Thomas’s twins. Humphrey’s an animal rights activist, or something. Did I tell you that?’

‘More or less,’ she confirmed. ‘Except I thought he was against GM crops.’

‘Right.’ Den nodded. ‘That’s what I meant.’

‘Didn’t they teach you to get the details right? Surely accuracy was quite important for police work?’

‘Shut up. I wasn’t on a police investigation,
was I? I just chatted to the woman, and tried to remember all the stuff she told me.’