The Killings at Badger's Drift (21 page)

The lament escalated a notch or two, became almost a screech, then suddenly stopped. Immediately the crowd fell silent. Barnaby rapped the knocker hard again. The sounds were like pistol shots in the quiet street.

‘Shall I have a go at the door, sir?’ Troy was excited. He kept looking at the people by the gate, at Barnaby and at the house, underlining the importance of his position.

‘Window’s quicker. Try to find one open first.’ As Troy ran down the side of the house Barnaby looked again at the group. Instinctively they had drawn closer together. Their shadows fell, short and squat, on the warm pavement. One woman had a toddler in her arms. As Barnaby watched she turned the child’s face away from the bungalow and into her breast. The ceramic stork stared indifferently at them all.

Barnaby turned back and noticed, for the first time, a neat pile of mushrooms on the step. What the hell was keeping Troy? He’d been gone long enough to climb in and out of half a dozen windows. Barnaby was about to raise his fist again when he heard the click of the latch and the door swung open. Troy stared blankly at the chief inspector. He didn’t speak, just stood aside for Barnaby to enter. As the older man did so he felt his skin prickle as if someone had laid a frost-covered web against his face.

He walked through the hall past a red telephone dangling on its flex, past the scarlet-stippled wall and doors, glancing into each room as he went, finding them empty. He looked for the source of a silence more terrible than the sounds had ever been and found it in the lounge.

He stood for a moment on the threshold sick with horror. There was blood everywhere. On the floor, on the walls, on the furniture, on the curtains. But most of all on Dennis Rainbird. He looked as if he had been bathed in blood. His face, like that of a warrior brave, glistened with fingers of red. Red matted his hair and gloved his hands. He wore a red soaking wet tie and a red-flowered shirt. His knees and his shoes were red. Red tears rolled down his cheeks.

Barnaby turned back into the hall. ‘Don’t just prop the wall up. Get on the phone and get things moving.’ Then as Troy moved somnambulistically across the hall, ‘Don’t touch that, you bloody fool! Use the set in the car. And don’t open that door again without something on your hands. Anyone’d think you’d been in the force five minutes instead of five years.’

‘I’m sorry . . .’ Troy produced a handkerchief.

Barnaby returned to the lounge. He made his way towards the two figures in the centre of the room, placing his feet carefully on whatever unstained patches of carpet he could find.

How could one person have shed so much blood? Wasn’t there something vaguely theatrical about the scene? Surely an over-enthusiastic stage manager had been at work hurling buckets of the stuff about, preparing for a performance of
Grand Guignol
. And the strange thing was that over and above the sweep of disbelief and horror Barnaby felt his memory give a powerful kick.
Déjà vu
. But how could that be? Surely if he had experienced anything even faintly like this spectacularly nightmarish scene in the past he could hardly have forgotten?

‘Mr Rainbird . . . ?’ He bent down and saw, with a fresh wave of nausea, that it was only Dennis Rainbird’s encircling arm that was keeping his mother’s head on her shoulders. Her throat had been cut so deeply that Barnaby could see the bluish white gristle of the slashed windpipe. There were cuts all over her face and neck and arms and her dress was slashed open.

The room was in a hell of a mess. Photographs and pictures were thrown about, there were cushions and ornaments on the floor, two tables were overturned, the television set was smashed. Grey shards of glass were ground into the carpet.

Barnaby said, ‘Mr Rainbird’ again and touched him gently. As if this movement activated some hidden mechanism the man started to croon gently. He was smiling; a radiant wide mad smile. The cruel simulacrum of bliss seen on the faces of earthquake survivors or parents outside a burning house. A rictus of grief and despair.

Almost twenty minutes passed, then: ‘Good God . . .’ Barnaby got up. George Bullard stood in the doorway. He carried a small black case and looked around him, aghast. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘Careful where you step.’

The doctor stared at the two figures for a moment, his expression a mixture of pity and disgust, then picked his way gingerly across the floor. He knelt down and opened his bag. Barnaby watched as he cut into the stiff crimson cuff of Dennis Rainbird’s shirt and held his delicate wrist.

‘How long has he been like this?’

‘We got here around half an hour ago. I should think for at least half an hour prior to that. Did you sort out an ambulance before you came?’

‘Mm.’ The doctor shone a light into Dennis’ pupils. He didn’t even blink. ‘Should be here in a minute.’

‘It’s vital I talk to him—’

‘For heaven’s sake, Tom, use your sense. The man’s catatonic.’

‘I can see that. Can’t you give him something?’

‘No.’ George Bullard rose to his feet. ‘He’s made a good job of this and no mistake.’

‘How long do these states last?’

‘A day. A month. Six months. There’s no way of knowing.’

‘That’s all I need.’

‘Sorry.’

Through the net curtains Barnaby saw the ambulance drive up followed almost immediately by three police cars. There was a murmur of excitement from the crowd. The ambulance attendants, perhaps inured to scenes of carnage by years of scraping people off the motorway, seemed much less shocked by what had happened in the lounge at Tranquillada than either Barnaby or Doctor Bullard. Whilst one of them talked to the doctor the other attempted to separate Dennis from his mother. He tugged gently at Dennis’ wrist but the fingers were clamped on to her right shoulder and left upper arm as tightly as if he were hanging for his very life on a cliff edge. Patiently the man prised the fingers away one at a time and unhooked the thumb. Mrs Rainbird’s head rolled back, attached to the neck only by a thin flap of skin. The torso tipped over and slid on to the carpet. Dennis’ crooning ran down, then stopped.

‘Can he walk d’you think?’

‘Let’s try him. Up you come, my lovely.’

Dennis rose to his feet, rubber limbed, still smiling. His face, always pale, was now almost albino-ish in its lack of colour.

‘Shall we clean him up a bit?’

‘Sorry,’ interjected Barnaby, ‘nothing must be touched.’

‘Right. On our way then.’ The three of them left the room, Dennis clinging trustingly like a child. Barnaby followed them out. The crowd, their wildest expectations more than fulfilled, played their part to the hilt, gasping aloud and crying out. One woman said, ‘And to think I nearly stopped in to watch the six o’clock news.’

‘Can you get everything he’s wearing bagged up?’ asked Barnaby. ‘I’ll send someone to collect it.’

‘Will do.’

Barnaby re-entered the lounge to find the doctor pulling down the corpse’s dress and shaking a thermometer.

‘What d’you think?’

‘Ohh . . . I’d say an hour . . . hour and a half at the most.’ He drew the slashed opening of her dress together. ‘He must’ve had some sort of brainstorm.’

‘I have to get a man over to the hospital. I don’t want Dennis Rainbird left alone.’

‘Well, Tom, you know your own business best. But I can assure you he won’t be going anywhere. Or doing himself a mischief.’

‘I’m not worried about him doing himself a mischief.’ He could hear the scene-of-crime men entering the hall. ‘But he might say something that could help us. He may even have seen something. He must have got home pretty soon after this happened.’

‘You mean . . . ? Oh. I seem to have been jumping to the wrong conclusions. Anyway - Dennis or no Dennis - whoever did this must have been clean off his rocker.’

‘His?’

‘Well,’ the doctor frowned, ‘it always is, isn’t it? An attack like this.’

‘Don’t you think a woman would be physically capable?’

‘Physically yes . . . I suppose so . . . if the rage is there. Psychologically and emotionally . . . that’s something else. It’d be a very peculiar sort of woman who could do something like this.’

Barnaby grinned. ‘You are an old chauvinist, George.’

‘So my daughter’s always telling me. Anyway’ - he stood aside to make room for the photographer - ‘I suppose murderers are peculiar.’

‘Not always. I only wish they were. It’d make catching them a lot simpler.’

‘Is this where the body was found, sir?’ asked the photographer.

‘I should imagine so,’ said Bullard.

Barnaby agreed. ‘I think he just lifted her up and held her. I don’t think he dragged her about at all. There’s more blood here than anywhere else.’

Doctor Bullard looked around the room again and shook his head. ‘Who’d believe we only had nine pints? And she’s still got plenty left.’

Barnaby looked at Mrs Rainbird’s bolstery legs which looked as plump and lifelike as they had a couple of days previously when he had talked with her. Her feet were bare. One tiny gold mule trimmed with white ostrich feathers lay, miraculously unstained, in the fireplace. The other was nowhere to be seen.

The room was filling up. Barnaby went into the hall, glad to escape from the rich metallic smell, and spoke to the principal scene-of-crime officer. ‘Are we going to have a pod out here?’

‘All lined up. Should be here within the hour. And I’ve got on to Technical Services . . . do a video for you.’

Barnaby nodded and looked around for Troy. On the pavement two officers were placing a cordon and the crowd, now monstrously enlarged, was being forced some distance from the gate. In spite of the emergence of Dennis Rainbird, a sight surely gruesome enough to satisfy the most ghoulish expectations, murmurs of dissatisfaction at this realignment could be heard. Troy, his colour back to normal, came down the path which ran along the side of the house.

‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘I was just checking round the back, sir. I found something a bit unusual.’

‘You should know better than to go trampling about at the scene of a murder, Sergeant.’

‘I didn’t trample . . . kept to the concrete path. But look.’ He led Barnaby to a small cedar shed a few feet from the gazebo. All around the path and the step adjacent was damp. Barnaby looked for a dripping tap or faulty hose and saw neither. ‘I mean . . . it hasn’t rained for days, has it, sir?’

‘No.’ The chief inspector glanced through the window. On the floor next to the lawnmower was a huge puddle of water. He couldn’t see any containers that might be leaking. Well, all the outbuildings would be checked. No point in wasting time at this stage in fruitless surmise. Troy was looking both smug and hopeful of praise, like a dog who has successfully returned a stick. It was very irritating.

‘Are you feeling all right now?’ asked Barnaby unkindly.

‘Me?’ His sergeant looked first blank then intensely puzzled. ‘I’m fine.’

The end of the back garden was marked by a double hawthorn hedge with a green gate in the middle. Behind the hedge was a narrow path bordered by a dense tangle of wild dog roses, hazels and cow parsley. The path and the last few feet of the garden were overlooked by the upstairs windows of number seven Burnham Crescent, glass eyes with cataracts of grubby lace. Mrs Rainbird wouldn’t have liked that. Barnaby heard footsteps approaching, and stepped through the gates.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Lacey.’

‘Whoops.’ Michael Lacey stopped in his tracks and stared at them. ‘It’s our friendly neighbourhood sleuths. Leaping out of the hedgerow to startle innocent passers-by.’

‘Would you mind telling me where you’re going?’

‘I’m taking a short cut to the Black Boy. Still, as far as I’m aware, not a criminal offence.’

‘A little early, isn’t it?’

‘She opens the jug and bottle if you knock on the shutters. ’ And before Barnaby could reply he had walked quickly away.

‘I don’t believe this,’ murmured Troy. ‘Not a single question as to what we’re doing here. Why, half the village is gawping outside the house. How uncurious can you get?’

‘Incurious. And he wouldn’t know about the crowd if he’d come straight from Holly Cottage through the woods and up Church Lane.’

‘Still, why dash off like that?’ Troy pursed his lips shrewdly before adding, ‘The murderer returns to the scene of the crime.’

‘Hardly ever, Sergeant,’ replied the chief inspector, ‘at least in non-domestic matters. As your experience should have taught you by now.’

‘But they are connected aren’t they, sir?’ continued Troy. ‘The two deaths?’

‘Oh yes.’ The two men stepped back on to the concrete path. Barnaby could see through the french windows into the lounge. It seemed to be crammed with people milling aimlessly about. In fact, as Barnaby knew, the most precise cataloguing and analysis were taking place. And today the scent was warm. Discoveries would be made. No one killed without taking something (usually unintentionally) from the scene. Or leaving something behind.

He made his way to the kitchen door, stopping when he got there, glancing back the way he had come. He thought how impossible it was for a gardener to attempt to conceal his personality. Telling one’s dreams could hardly be more revelatory. Unsophisticated harmony for Miss Simpson; tangled exuberance for Miss Bellringer; whilst here . . . He looked at the showy shrubs, the billiard-table-baize lawn, the pond with a concrete cherub peeing mechanically on a plastic lily. Here was ostentatious vulgarity, literally in full bloom.

He entered the hall. A pair of black Oxfords appeared just above his head and made their way down the pine steps from the loft, followed by tweed trousers, a short-sleeved shirt and a bearded, hot-looking face.

‘Finished up there?’ asked Barnaby.

‘We have. Lots of prints. Looks as if they’re all from the same person, though. Soon see.’