Body in the Woods (A Reverend Annabelle Dixon Cozy Mystery Book 3) (16 page)

“Hiding what?”

“My guess is that he’s the murderer,” the Inspector said, marching off toward the car. Annabelle took one last look at the forlorn figure of Louisa, delicately rearranging the jewelry in the shoebox under the ominous gaze of that magnificent wedding dress, and turned around to run after him.

CHAPTER 8

ONCE AGAIN, ANNABELLE clung to the passenger-side door handle and hummed her disapproval at the speed and level of aggression with which the Inspector drove. He was even more erratic than before as he zoomed through the narrow streets of Upton St. Mary toward the police station.

“Inspector, are you sure this isn’t incredibly rash?” Annabelle managed to blurt out in between the sound of screeching tires.

“We’ll give him a chance to explain himself,” the Inspector replied, “but he’s going to need a hell of a good story to get out of these knots.”

Annabelle almost screamed as the Inspector brought the car to a stop inches away from Annabelle’s Mini, so sure was she that he would drive straight into it. He leaped out and sprinted up the steps and through the entrance of the station.

“Raven! Colback! Get another car, we’re going to arrest Daniel Green.”

“The butcher, sir?” Raven asked, confusedly.

“Yes.”

Raven and Colback exchanged brief looks before slapping on their hats and running outside.

Annabelle was standing on the pavement as the three officers jumped into their vehicles. Suddenly, sirens were blaring and flashing blue lights were blinding her. Before she could call out to one of the officers, the two cars – one containing Raven and Colback, the other the Inspector – had swarmed into the street and off into the distance. She hurried over to her Mini, miffed at the ease with which the police officers had left her behind and drove off to follow them.

Though she felt very much a part of this operation and was caught up in the noisy thrill and excitement of the racing police cars, Annabelle refused to break the speed limit. She quickly found herself left far behind. By the time she reached Daniel Green’s butcher shop, he was already exiting it, accompanied by the constables on either side.

The Inspector followed closely behind. A small crowd of shoppers and Daniel’s colleagues gathered at the door of the shop to observe the unexpected turn of events. Nobody, however, seemed more taken aback than Daniel, who had obviously been hard at work when the officers had found him. He was wearing his full butcher’s garb, bloodied and messy, and was staring about him at the flashing sirens and officious constables as if struggling to make sense of it all.

Annabelle watched from behind the wheel as they put Daniel into the back of the Inspector’s car and swerved briskly away again, back toward the police station. Bystanders quickly turned to one another to chatter and speculate on what it was all about as they watched the police cars race into the distance as quickly as they had arrived.

Seeing Daniel had given Annabelle an idea, though she wasn’t quite sure what it was. Her instincts told her that there was something terribly wrong with the arrest. Without having the time she needed to formulate her thoughts, she spun the Mini around and once again began her pursuit of the police vehicles returning to the station.

As she drove along, again minding the speed limit, her thoughts raced much faster than her car. The sight of the butcher in his blood-spattered butcher’s clothing was stirring some memory at the back of her mind, but what was it? She couldn’t quite catch it.

She reached the police station and locked her car carefully before running inside. Just as she was about to rush past the desk through to the back where the interview rooms and offices were, Constable Colback stepped in front of her.

“I’m sorry, Reverend. The Inspector is about to interview someone, I’m afraid you’ll have to—”

“Let her through, Colback!” came the Inspector’s distinctive, irritated voice from the back. “Lord knows I’d rather have her with me in the interview room than you!”

Annabelle shot the Constable an apologetic look, but he was too embarrassed to catch her eye and simply slunk off to the side. She stepped toward the hallway that led off in the direction of the interview rooms, where the Inspector was waiting impatiently.

“He’s waiting for us,” the Inspector said, triumphantly, “all we have to do now is get the confession. Shouldn’t be too hard considering how much we know.”

“I’m not too sure that—”

“Come on, Reverend,” the Inspector said, briskly, as he opened the door and gestured her inside.

“You!” Daniel said, as he saw the Vicar enter, followed by the Inspector.

Annabelle met his eyes and nodded a somewhat indecisive greeting. Daniel was sitting behind a table, his hands and clothes still bloody. At this close distance Annabelle could smell the freshly cut beef, pork and lamb emanating from him.

“What’s… What’s all this about?” Daniel pleaded, his eyes darting between the two visitors.

The Inspector glared silently at him as he pulled out a chair for Annabelle and then sat down himself. Daniel’s eyes bore the look of being found out that the Inspector knew only too well, his tense body language demonstrating signs that he was hiding something. The Inspector was suddenly very sure he had made the right choice.

“This is about the truth, Daniel Green. The truth behind what happened that day in the woods between you and Lucy.”

Daniel mouthed some words incomprehensibly, and his face turned from expression of fear into one of sheer incredulity.

“What?”

“Lucy’s murder. Your ex-girlfriend.”

“That was twenty years ago!”

“Justice doesn’t come with an expiration date.”

“This is crazy!”

“Why didn’t you tell us that you were planning to marry Lucy?” the Inspector said, calmly.

Daniel shook his head in a gesture of utter befuddlement.

“Marriage? I was nineteen! I never intended to marry her!” Daniel looked down at his hands, still shaking his head at the absurdity.

“Well, she seemed to be very much of the impression somebody was about to marry her. She was about to turn sixteen. Had herself a nice little wedding dress and a suitcase already packed.”

Daniel looked up at the Inspector.

“I don’t understand.”

“We just found them, over on the allotments. Her sister’s been keeping them all this time.”

“What… That… That doesn’t make sense…”

The Inspector looked at Annabelle, but her face was fixed upon Daniel’s in a look of pity. He waited for Daniel to add something meaningful to his confused mumblings, but the butcher only clasped his hands and glanced around him looking deeply perplexed.

“Okay. Let’s say for a second that you weren’t planning to marry Lucy. Who else could have been?”

Daniel shook his head once again, breathing deeply under the weight of the question’s implications.

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“You said that already.”

“No, Detective. I mean, it really doesn’t. You see, Lucy wasn’t the marrying type at all. She had so many things that she wanted to do. To be a singer, an actress. To travel the world. To meet new people. She never wanted to be tied down. She joked about marriage sometimes, but I think really she just thought it was very boring. She wanted to be young and free forever.”

The Inspector sighed deeply.

“Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you think you did.”

Daniel hung his head.

“I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know what to tell you, Detective.”

Suddenly, the Inspector slammed his palm upon the table loudly.

“Enough! We’ve got all the evidence we need to put you away, Daniel Green! This act won’t get you anything but a longer sentence! If you’ve got half as much brains in your head as you’ve got smeared over your apron there, then you’ll talk!”

“But I don’t know anything! I don’t know how she died!”

The Inspector leaped from his seat and grabbed at Daniel’s bloodied butcher’s clothes from across the table, pulling the man’s face up to his.

“You butchered her just like you butchered one of your animals! This time, though, it’s me who will be eating you for breakfast!”

“Inspector!” shouted Annabelle, as she stood up and pulled his arms away from Daniel. “Please!”

The Inspector looked at her for a moment and then, like he were an uncooperative child, Annabelle gently but firmly ushered him out of the interview room, though he kept his stern glare fixed upon the frightened butcher all the way. She pushed the detective outside with a gentle shove and closed the door, leaving Daniel alone in the room behind them.

“This guy knows we don’t have much to go on,” said the Inspector, pacing up and down while rubbing his brow in frustration, “but he’s hiding something. Of that I’m sure.”

“Perhaps, Inspector, but you’ll not get anywhere if you frighten him half to death!”

“I don’t see how else we’re ever going to put this case to bed.”

Annabelle sighed as she watched the Inspector pace himself into a modicum of calmness. Suddenly a thought flashed across her mind like a bolt of lightning. She realized that the peculiarly familiar feeling she had had when seeing Daniel emerge from the butcher’s shop mid-arrest could provide the answer to another question that had been plaguing her for a while. She clicked her fingers, and with a tone of sudden enthusiasm said:

“I have a strong suspicion that I know what our butcher may be hiding.”

The Inspector stopped dead in his tracks and looked at Annabelle.

“But it may not actually help us in this case,” she added.

“Right now I don’t think anything will. But if it explains that man’s behavior in any way, then it’s worth a shot.”

Annabelle nodded as she reopened the door to the interview room.

“Daniel,” she said, calmly, as she sat opposite him. The Inspector decided to stand in the corner, hands in pockets, and subject Daniel to nothing but his focused glare. “Did you do anything.... um, peculiar, one night about a week ago?”

The change in Daniel’s expression was impossible not to notice. His teeth clenched and his eyes fixed unblinkingly on the Reverend’s face.

“I… Don’t know… No. I didn’t.”

“You weren’t outside? After midnight?”

“No… I…” he gulped, “What night was this? I’m sorry. I would have to check.”

Annabelle looked over toward the Inspector, who was now wearing a look of intense anticipation, not unlike the one Biscuit wore when she was about to pounce.

“I think you may remember this. You were over by Hughes House, where Philippa lives. I believe you know her.”

Daniel’s eyes widened, and the shortness of his breath was visible in the rapid rising and falling of his chest.

“You were wearing your butcher’s clothes,” Annabelle continued, “and they were as bloodied and messy as they are now. Philippa saw you.”

Daniel slumped over in defeat, before raising his eyes to greet Annabelle’s.

“You know, don’t you, Reverend?”

Annabelle remained silent.

Daniel shook his head, and with a deep intake of breath, began talking.

“It was an accident. A stupid one, but an accident nonetheless.”

“What was?” came the Inspector’s gruff tone from the corner of the room.

“I was slaughtering a couple of pigs over on Hughes’ farm. I do it a couple of times a week on the quiet, see, and I’ve done it hundreds of times,” Daniel said, as if excusing himself, “but that night I got a little… distracted.”

“By what?”

Daniel shuffled in his seat, awkwardly.

“I’d had a few beers. Maybe a few too many,” he said, before loudly exclaiming: “It was the night of the England game! We’d played so well! I mean, you’d be hard-pressed to find a man in the country who wasn’t three sheets to the wind after that!”

Annabelle frowned and turned toward the Inspector, who was hiding his eyes under his hand. She turned back toward Daniel.

“So what happened?”

“I prepared everything as usual, and after doing one pig, I heard some loud squealing. Then I remembered that I’d left the pen open. I turned around and saw the other pig streaking away like a thoroughbred!”

“You chased after it?”

“Of course! I damn near ran a marathon trying to catch it, and it still got away when it went into the woods. I’ve searched and searched for days and nights but I’ve no idea where it is now.”

“I have,” Annabelle said, sighing deeply. “I had to swerve to avoid it just a few nights ago. I even saw it on the hills at the back of the church the other morning!”

If ever there was to be an explanation for Philippa’s vision, this was undoubtedly one of the strangest, though Philippa would find a drunken butcher chasing a pig a lot less terrifying than a murderous ghost.

“Why is this important?” said the Inspector, stepping forward. “Are you telling me that the reason you’re acting so suspiciously is because a bloody pig got the better of you!?”

“My business is my life, Detective,” Daniel pleaded, “I could lose my slaughtering license. If this got out, the local gossip would destroy me. I’ve got competitors who’ve waited for years for such an opportunity. Meat is a cutthroat business.”