Tainted Ground (21 page)

Patrick reappeared. ‘No?'

‘Apparently the RSPCA vet said that its fur was all matted and dirty and although on the thin side the animal hadn't actually been starved. It was a bit bruised on its back and one hind leg but that wasn't enough to prosecute the owner. They did interview Stonelake, who told them that he hadn't kicked or beaten it but it kept running back to the farm and he thought it had been hit a glancing blow by a car.'

‘He was still going to shoot it,' Patrick said.

Carrick grimaced. ‘Farmers shoot old dogs all the time.'

‘I gave him twenty quid for it.'

‘He doesn't appear to have mentioned that.'

‘So what'll happen now?'

‘Normally it would be put up for rehoming straight away.'

‘But it isn't going to be?'

‘No, it's got a problem with a claw that will mean a small op. And they'll neuter it at the same time as well as make sure its up to date with jabs so it'll have to stay in the kennels for perhaps a week longer.'

‘I see.'

‘I did tell them that you were interested in having it.'

Patrick came back into the room. ‘I don't usually do things like this,' he said and gave Carrick a bear hug.

After all the difficulties this small episode was gratifying. For the moment, being followed by someone driving a blue car faded from my mind.

T
he sense of relief was not to last for long. It actually existed for about five minutes and was extinguished by the arrival of the Area Crime Prevention Officer in the shape of an intimidatingly large superintendent from HQ at Portishead. Patrick and I were banished from Carrick's office with a dismissive flick of the great man's hand, the door virtually slammed on our heels. The ensuing grilling Carrick got on the progress of the murders-case investigation was absolutely nothing to do with the DCI being taken ill that night and admitted to hospital with a serious infection.

‘It's in the exit wound where he was shot,' Patrick reported, throwing on his bathrobe. He had taken the call from Joanna and it was very early the next morning. ‘The docs say it must have been brewing for ages and has never healed up properly. I shall go to the nick to do some brainstorming on the cases in hand and if that arrogant bastard who turned up yesterday arrives I'll interpret the “acting” bit of my title as permission to lop his bloody head off.'

‘Patrick,' I said, to a breeze as he departed downstairs.

‘Yes?' This came from somewhere out on the landing.

‘You're in sole charge of the nick if he doesn't roll up.'

‘Good, in the army I would have been permitted to command a soddin'
regiment
!'

Needless to say the crime, or crimes, did not get solved that day, Patrick having to take time to familiarize himself with everything else that was going on, things with which Carrick had not involved us. There were two phone calls from Joanna during the morning, relaying messages and information we ought to know about from her husband who, characteristically, was fretting about work. He was stable, she told us, but not yet responding to the drugs he was being given.

I spent most of the day in James's office, answering his phone and reading the case notes in the files on his desk. One useful piece of information did surface late in the afternoon when an email arrived from Interpol, obviously in response to an enquiry that Carrick had made. It related that just over two years previously, a dive boat working on the wreck of a Chinese junk that had gone down in 1746 in the South China Sea off Bunguran Island had been attacked by pirates, one of several raids on shipping in that area. A quantity of recently recovered gold ingots, probably around one hundred and fifty in number and including some of the rare Nanking shoes, plus several small pieces of gold-decorated porcelain had been stolen, the latter thought to have been snatched as souvenirs by the pirates as they escaped back to their boat. The Malayan captain of the dive boat had been killed and another member of his crew wounded in an exchange of shots as they tried to fend off the boarders. To the knowledge of the sender of the email none of the stolen goods had yet been recovered, although undercover sources suggested, tentatively, that criminals, fences, in Holland might have handled the gold en route to the UK.

I emailed back to ask about identification marks and also if, as the items had only just been raised from the seabed, there was a likelihood of tea still adhering to them – if indeed the cargo had been thus packed. An hour later I had my answers; there had been no time to clean it and it had left the dive boat in a wooden box where it had been tossed by the thieves together with sand, seaweed, no doubt a few small dead marine creatures and yes, tea. The pirate vessel had apparently been masquerading as a fishing boat that had, in hindsight, been shadowing the divers for days.

‘That's one piece of good news,' Patrick said after I had told him. He had appeared with two mugs of tea. ‘Can't we identify the gold any further – marks and so forth?'

‘Yes, I've just received the answer to that question. There are marks but they wouldn't necessarily be unique to the stolen ingots. We might get more information by consulting an expert.'

He seated himself. ‘There's more to running a nick than meets the eye. One thing's certain though and most people have mentioned it: Carrick's been under par for a couple of weeks now. Don't forget that when we saw him last, before starting this lark, was when he was really weak and just recovering. He came back to work far too soon. And because this nick's still a DI light …' He reached for the phone. ‘Bugger everything. I'm going to do what I would have done before landing in civvy street – raise hell.'

And he did. Listening to him, politely observing all the protocols, but acidly putting across his points to whoever was the superior officer of the man who had visited Carrick the previous day, I knew that he had found his feet.

‘That's it,' Patrick said, having slapped down the phone. ‘We're getting a temporary DI from Bristol CID as of tomorrow morning, someone whom apparently James knows.'

‘That still officially leaves you in charge.'

‘Only on paper. I'm to confer with him and to take orders if necessary.'

‘If necessary!'

‘I think that's meant as a substitute for pistols at dawn. But we've got to catch the murderer. Pronto. He made it sound as though it's a condition for my carrying on.'

DI Jonathan Bromsgrove was in his mid-forties, called Patrick ‘sir' and asked him if he would care to carry on with the murders case while he himself dealt with other outstanding work, assisted by Sergeant Outhwaite. Patrick replied that that would suit him fine but we would consult with him should we need advice and if everything became manic. This arrangement got everything off on a very nice footing.

‘I would like to tackle this in a less conventional way,' Patrick said to me quietly as we left Bromsgrove to get his feet under Carrick's desk on the grounds that that room was where all the general information was held, plus the DCI's computer for which we had asked James the password. He felt weak, he had told us in response to the second query. Lousy, in fact. Bloody horrible, no less.

It was Joanna who later told us that MRSA was suspected but not yet confirmed.

‘Less conventional?' I repeated.

‘Go sort of covert,' he whispered as though the walls might have ears and report the heresy.

‘Find the gold, you mean.'

‘We don't
know
that there is any gold. It's all guesswork.'

‘We can't do as we used to and break into places.'

‘It wouldn't matter if we broke into crooks' lairs.'

‘Yes, it would. Because now you have to obtain evidence by above-board means.'

‘OK. But the police do go undercover to try to buy weapons from illegal arms dealers. Or drugs from drugs traffickers.'

‘Entrapment,' I murmured.

‘Yes.'

‘So you want to pretend to be a dodgy sort of antiques dealer asking around in the wrong places to buy Nanking shoes? Patrick, the gold, if it exists, might not be in criminal hands by now but belonging to perfectly innocent people.'

‘This sting operation – I admit – rests on the supposition that whatever was in the coffin is still being hoarded by the ungodly. First though, before we do anything else, I think we ought to go right back to the beginning and return to Hinton Mill. That's where it all started. And then perhaps revisit the murder barn.'

In the ground-floor lobby of the mill we came upon an exceedingly tanned and smartly dressed elderly lady carrying in her shopping.

‘Mrs Dewitte?' Patrick asked.

Laden, she turned with a slight frown. ‘Yes?'

‘Police,' Patrick said. ‘Do let me take those for you.'

‘Oh God, I haven't exceeded some ruddy speed limit or other, have I?' she cried.

‘Not to my knowledge,' she was told.

He ended up by emptying the BMW's boot of shopping, mostly designer-label clothes and shoes by the look of the carrier bags, and carrying it all into the flat.

‘You've no idea how ghastly it is to come back into this horrible weather,' Mrs Dewitte declared. ‘I've left my husband out there. That's in the Drakensberg Mountains area of South Africa in case you don't know already. We've a house there. Alastair's older than me and not very well. But we've a buyer for this place so someone had to come home and deal with it. D'you want some coffee? I'm dying for a cup. I know I mustn't offer you anything stronger as you're on duty,' she finished by saying with a mischievous smile.

At nine thirty in the morning too.

The coffee was superb, freshly roasted and ground from a grocer's in Green Street, Bath, which she made a point of recommending to us. ‘So handy, you've no idea. You can buy shotguns, lovely fish, the best sausages in the world and coffee all in about ten yards.' Then she laughed, a big masculine guffaw. ‘So what's this all about then?'

‘How long have you been back?'

‘Since the night before last.'

‘So you might not have heard that your neighbours directly above you have been murdered.'

She hardly batted an eyebrow. ‘What, Mr and Mrs Misery? No, have they?'

‘And their acquaintance across the landing, Keith Davies. We think they might have been involved in criminal activities.'

‘Well, you don't have to be terribly intelligent to work that one out. I've never seen a more skulking, secretive bunch of no-hopers. Not even in Africa, and we had the Mau-Mau to deal with there when Alastair was in the colonial service. How did it happen?'

Patrick told her, not sparing details. He then followed it up with a short résumé of what had occurred since.

‘But it's just like a ruddy novel!' she exclaimed. ‘Oh, I know whom you mean by that farmer. He's the one who sells logs, isn't he? We don't have an open fire here but the Manleys did – stored them in their garage and trailed all the bits of moss, twigs and mud across the hall and up the stairs. No, I caught farmer chappie trying to peer into one of my windows when he delivered some logs one day. Gave him a real piece of my mind, I can tell you and he took himself off at the double. Mr Brandon across the hall came out to see what was going on and backed me up.'

‘Did you ever see any visitors the people upstairs had?' I asked. Stonelake had lied about that, then.

‘No, it was like a grave up there, if you'll excuse the expression. Two of our windows are on the side where the cars are parked so one can't help but be aware of people's activities sometimes. I never saw them out there with anyone else who might be a friend or relation. The residents do tend to leave their cars outside in the bit reserved for visitors and not put them away and I suppose I'm just as guilty of that.'

‘Do you know the people who live on the top floor?' I asked.

‘Yes, sort of, but we are away a lot. Pascal and Lorna asked us up for drinks once when we were around. They seem a nice pair but you don't really get to know people at one meeting. I have to say I did find Pascal a trifle – what shall I say? – saturnine. But he might have just been having an off day. I met the other young lady, Tamsin, I think her name is, up there too. She's hoping to marry something in uniform. More coffee?'

We declined and prepared to leave, thanking her for her time.

‘Oh, my pleasure. And people say nothing ever happens in the countryside! I hope you find the gold. Have you looked in all the garages?' She grinned at us. ‘Where there's mucky logs …'

‘They did, didn't they?' I said when we were back in the lobby.

‘Not all of them. Carrick's team searched the Manleys' and Davies had rented his out to someone else but they didn't get warrants to look in all the others.'

We went outside, pausing in the parking area. A couple of inches of snow had fallen overnight and it was still very cold.

‘Let's retrace their final footsteps working with what we know took place,' Patrick said. ‘It's possible they didn't go directly to the barn but met up with others first. Peter Horsley, for example. By no stretch of the imagination was he Mr Big. Nor were the Tanner brothers, not that we've yet thought they were implicated in the murders. There was also the man who drove the van and met them to take possession of the coffin, an older man if one is to believe them. He might have been at the barn. Was he the person behind it all?'

‘I still wonder why they took two cars,' I said. ‘Davies often drove the Manleys around.'

‘The cars were disposed of afterwards so I reckon someone suggested they went independently. It meant that no risks were run of being spotted by coming back here to collect the remaining one.'

‘She didn't actually say so but Mrs Dewitte doesn't seem to have liked Pascal Dupointe when she first met him.'