Where Death Lies, page 9
part #1 of Megan Rhys Crime Mystery Series
In the conversation that followed she asked none of these questions. Instead she learned that Lili had been more of a lodger than a girlfriend. She was staying in one of the caravan’s three bedrooms and helping Ty with the bills. His outgoings were apparently fairly low anyway, as this was his parents’ holiday home.
‘She wasn’t going to be here much longer,’ he explained. ‘She’d bought an old barn and she was doing it up. Spent most of her time there when she wasn’t working. All her stuff’s there.’ He sniffed. ‘Course, I didn’t tell them that.’
By this Ceri assumed he meant the police. ‘Lilike’s an unusual name, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Where did she come from?’
He took another long drag on the joint. ‘Parents are gypsies.’ He exhaled, filling the small space with smoke. ‘Lili decided to settle here. She wanted a proper house and a job and everything, but she still had a lot of gypsy ways. ‘
Ceri’s eyebrows signalled her interest in this last remark.
‘You know,’ he fiddled with one of the silver hoops in his right ear. ‘She was very superstitious, for one thing. She loved her job, but it kind of freaked her out. Know what I mean?’
Ceri used her eyebrows again. This time they conveyed puzzlement.
‘She had this book.’ He frowned and pulled the joint from his mouth. Seeing that it had gone out, he rummaged in his pocket for a box of matches.
‘What kind of book,’ Ceri ventured. She suspected he was about to go off at some strange tangent, but decided that for the moment it was best to humour him.
‘She kept their hair in it.’ He lit the joint and stared out of the window, an odd look on his face.
‘Whose hair?’ Ceri felt her stomach churn. She wasn’t sure why. It was a sense that he was about to tell her something very disturbing, but something that, nonetheless, she would savour like a bird with a fat, juicy worm.
‘The ones she cut up.’ He was still looking out of the window. ‘She was scared of them, see. Thought their souls would come back to haunt her ‘cos of what she’d done to their bodies. So she’d take a lock of their hair and put it in her book.’
‘I see.’ Her voice had the same tone she used to soothe the children when they were in danger of throwing a tantrum. She had the feeling Ty was building up to something, that he was about to explode. ‘Did she think the hair would protect her? Like a sort of talisman?’
Ty nodded vigorously. ‘She prayed over it. Prayed for their souls. You know?’
Ceri nodded back. She was thinking of the body in Borth Bog. Wondering if a lock of that strange, orange hair had made it into Lili’s book before she died.
‘Did the police take the book?’ she asked.
‘No chance.’ He inhaled sharply and blew out a ring of smoke. ‘It’s at the barn, along with most of her stuff. Didn’t tell them that, though!’
Ceri glanced around the caravan. There was nothing lying around that looked as if it might belong to a woman rather than a man. Something on a corner shelf caught her eye. It was a large framed photograph of a boy in school uniform. He looked about fourteen.
‘Is that you?’ She cocked her head at it. It didn’t look like him, but she was curious.
He shook his head. ‘It’s my lad. Sam. Lives with his mum.’
‘Oh, right.’ She smiled to cover her confusion. How could he have a teenage child when he didn’t look much more than a teenager himself? ‘I thought that maybe Lili...’ she trailed off, hoping he’d fill in with something that would flesh the woman out a little more.
‘She didn’t have any kids.’ He exhaled again, this time with a grunting cough. ‘Plenty of boyfriends, but no kids.’
‘Really?’ Ceri held her breath, willing him to go on.
‘Her boss, number one.’ He held out the thumb of his right hand. ‘That’s how she got the barn so cheap - it’s on his land, see.’ He stuck out the rest of his fingers in quick succession, muttering names under his breath. ‘Half a dozen guys in the village plus a load more at the hospital. In fact,’ he said, sucking on the joint, ‘pretty much every bloke round here except for me.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘You’re too nice, Ty - that’s what she always said to me. Too fuckin’ nice! Can you believe she said that?’
Ceri watched a large tear escape from the corner of his left eye and land with a plop on the pale green Dralon.
*
The car Megan and Jonathan were travelling in took a sharp right turn by a buff-coloured building with a modern stone turret. The heavily barred windows just visible above the manicured lawns were the only clue that this was the town’s police station.
The officer driving them pulled into the car park and jumped out to open the door for Megan. He looked about sixteen. Far too fresh-faced for a policeman, she thought. She wondered how he’d look in ten years’ time, when the horrible sights that inevitably lay in store for him had taken their toll.
She stepped out, thinking about the man she was about to interview. Mick Stubbs sounded like a very unpleasant individual but, she reminded herself, being guilty of sexual harassment didn’t necessarily make him a murderer.
The more she thought about it, the more concerned she was about the speed with which Arwyn Barry had acted. The crime scene was a mess. The whole mortuary should have been sealed off, but he had only isolated the part of the corridor where Lili’s body had been lying. Fingerprints had been found around the fridges, but they hadn’t yet been checked against the known users of that part of the building. It was all too quick. There should have been a case conference with the forensics people presenting their findings before any arrest was made. What was Barry playing at?
As they approached the heavy glass doors they could hear shouting. Megan wondered if it was someone in the lock-up. She glanced at Jonathan. He’d heard it too. ‘Sounds like some fun and games going on down there!’ He cocked his head at the barred windows.
The shouting suddenly got louder. Not just one voice, but three or four, and a screaming, choking sound. Megan stopped dead. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’
Chapter 11
It was all over the papers the next morning. ‘HOSPITAL HORROR’, screamed The Sun’s three-inch high headline, while The Guardian’s front page had the rather more restrained ‘PROBE AFTER MAN DIES IN POLICE CUSTODY’.
The West Wales News prided itself on taking the middle way while playing up the local angle. ‘ABER MAN DIES IN POLICE CELLS’ was the headline, with ‘Dead Man Suspect In Hospital Killing’ as the strap underneath.
HTV had a reporter doing a piece to camera outside Aberystwyth police station. Ceri watched him as she poured cornflakes into a bowl for Emily’s breakfast. There was nothing new in his report. It simply restated the bald press release issued by Dyfed-Powys police last night. The suspect, Mick Stubbs, had tried to escape after being charged with the murder of Lili Jonas. He’d died while being restrained by four policemen, one of whom was DS Arwyn Barry. All four officers had been suspended pending an inquiry.
Ceri stared at the TV screen, shaking her head. ‘God, I hope he bloody well did it, the poor...’ she trailed off as Emily ambled into the kitchen rubbing her eyes.
Megan was behind her, already dressed, with her running shoes in her hand.
‘You going jogging?’ Ceri gave her a puzzled frown. Her sister was supposed to be on holiday, but last night she’d made it quite clear that relaxation of any kind was off the agenda. They’d been up well beyond midnight talking about the deaths of the mortuary technician and the porter. Megan’s frustration at being on the sidelines had been obvious. Now that DS Barry was off the case her only source of information was the media. Last night she’d been talking about driving to police headquarters in Carmarthen to find out what on earth was going on.
‘I’m going to find Lili Jonas’ barn.’ The look on Megan’s face reminded Ceri of childhood games of French cricket on the beach. This was the look her sister used to give when taking up the bat and planting her feet firmly in the sand. It was a mixture of defiance and determination.
‘How are you going to get away with that?’ Ceri’s stomach fluttered. She knew that Lili’s barn must be one of those she’d seen when she went to visit Griff. The thought of Megan going there unsettled her. Was it because she was afraid for her sister or jealous at the thought of her encountering the archaeologist? Not trusting herself to answer that question, she concentrated on mixing hot water with the powdered porridge Joe liked for breakfast.
‘I’ll get onto the land the back way, from the causeway that runs across the bog,’ Megan said. ‘If anyone spots me I’ll pretend I’m house-hunting. One of those barns is for sale.’ She pulled the property section of the West Wales News from a pile in the corner of the kitchen and held it under her sister’s nose.
Ceri glanced at the picture, rolling up the sleeve of her dressing gown to stop it trailing in the porridge. ‘I think you’re mad. I mean, even if you manage to get in, what are you hoping to find?’
‘Anything that gives me a better idea of what sort of person Lili was.’ Megan sat down on one of the pine chairs and laced up her shoes. ‘It’s where I always start when I’m trying to build up a profile of a killer. I have to know as much as I can about the victim.’
‘So you don’t think Mick Stubbs did it?’
‘I don’t know.’ Megan stood up. ‘But I have to find out. The police are running around like headless chickens after what happened yesterday. I phoned Jonathan Andrews a few minutes ago. They won’t even let him take a dental impression from Mick Stubbs’ body now Barry’s off the case. I imagine they’re bringing someone up from Carmarthen to take charge and by the time they get their head round things, well...’ She shrugged, heading for the door.
‘You think it’s someone else?’ Ceri persisted. ‘You do, don’t you?’
Megan sighed. ‘Like I said, I don’t know. But Lili’s the key to it and as far as you and I know the police aren’t even aware of the stuff in that barn. ‘
‘Do you think we should go to them? Tell them?’ Ceri was staring into space, the porridge spoon halfway between the bowl and Joe’s mouth.
Megan shook her head. ‘To be honest, at the moment I simply don’t have any faith in their ability not to balls things up. What they did to Mick Stubbs... ‘ she shrugged, biting her lip. ‘Completely over-the-top. They get that in basic training, you know - how to restrain someone without putting them at risk.’
‘So you think you’ve got more chance of solving this than they have?’
‘Well, the way things are at the moment, yes, I do.’
*
It was humid and overcast outside. Megan jogged for about twenty minutes before slowing to a walk. She took a bottle of water from her backpack. As she raised it to her mouth a flash of electric blue caught her eye. She paused for a moment, fascinated by the sight of a kingfisher gulping down a small, wriggling fish. A few seconds later it darted off along the river that snaked across the marshland to the sea.
As she walked on she noticed driftwood and other flotsam lying in the soft mud at the water’s edge. Within a few yards she spotted a baby’s dummy, a single flip-flop and a can of Coca-Cola, its familiar red bleached to a pale grey. Further on a bottle of bathroom cleaner lay among a pile of tiny, dead crabs. All these things had been washed upriver by the tide, strange bedfellows in this wild landscape.
It struck her that the river-bank was like the village in microcosm; the crabs and the driftwood conveyed the natural beauty of the place, while the human detritus...well, it was exactly that. People washed up in Borth the way these objects had washed up on the tide. It was that kind of place. A strange mixture of born-and-bred Welsh, English hippie drop-outs turned respectable, and the others, mostly down on their luck, lured to the sea in search of a better life.
A heron rose majestically from the water a few yards ahead of her. Following its flight path she spotted the bird hide away to her left, its sloping roof just visible above the bulrushes. Police tape hung limply from the metal poles that had been stuck in the causeway leading up to it. The Bog Body case had been totally eclipsed by the events of the past two days. Megan wondered if the results of the carbon dating test had come through yet. She thought about Griff Abdulla. Was it a coincidence that the man who had found the body lived within half a mile of the bird hide? And that the woman found dead in the mortuary would have been his next door neighbour?
She was still pondering this when she caught sight of the row of barns on the edge of Cors Fochno Farm. All that separated the estate from the causeway was a low barbed wire fence. She pressed it down and climbed over, taking care not to snag her jogging pants. Pulling her cap down to shade her eyes she scanned the buildings in front of her. Only two of the barns looked habitable. As she drew closer she recognised Griff Abdulla’s from the description Ceri had given of the cow’s skull mounted above the front door. She skirted round the back of it and made her way to the door of the other building. There was scaffolding round two sides of it, but glancing through one of the downstairs windows, she saw furniture and rugs on the floor. She tried the front door and, to her surprise, it opened. She stood on the threshold for a few seconds, listening.
‘Hello?’ Her voice ricocheted off the bare plaster walls.
There was no reply; no sound at all She tiptoed from room to room. There were only four - a living room with a tiny kitchen off it and upstairs one bedroom and a bathroom. The living room cupboards contained nothing but CDs. The kitchen was bare apart from a few items of crockery and cutlery and a plastic bag full of what smelt like old fish and chip wrappers. It was in the bedroom that she found the book of hair.
It was lying on top of a large black holdall of women’s clothes. The book’s cover was red silk inlaid with tiny mirrors; the sort of thing on sale in the souvenir shops on the seafront at Aberystwyth. Megan opened it carefully. Each page bore ten locks of hair arranged in two rows. They were fixed with clear tape and most were grey, apart from one of wispy blonde curls that looked as if it might have belonged to a baby. Beside each sample was a handwritten entry giving a name and the date of death. Turning to the last page she saw a substantial lock of coarse hair the colour of marmalade. The words ‘Bog Body’ were written beside it, with a blank space after ‘Date of Death’.
Megan’s finger moved across the page. She couldn’t resist touching it. It felt tough and springy, like fishing line. Would hair really feel like this if it had been lying underwater for two thousand years? She couldn’t believe it.
‘Hello!’ A man’s voice rang out in the room below her, giving her such a fright she almost dropped the book. With shaking hands she replaced it on the holdall and tiptoed onto the landing. She could see the top of his head through the banister rail, black hair tied back in a pony-tail.
‘Hello.’ She tried to keep her voice light. She had rehearsed this in her head, what to say if she was rumbled. ‘The door was open - hope you don’t mind me letting myself in.’ He was looking up at her now. She recognised his face from the photo in Ceri’s article. This was the archaeologist, Griff Abdulla. She could see why her sister was so smitten. ‘You must be from the estate agent’s,’ she said, stepping onto the staircase.
‘No.’ The word sounded like an accusation. His glittering black eyes travelled up and down her body, lingering on the place where her lycra vest stretched across her breasts. ‘I’m from next door. ‘
‘Oh.’ Megan reached the bottom of the stairs, pulling the property section of the newspaper from her backpack. ‘Have I got the right one?’ She pointed to the photo of the barn and he leaned forward. He was slightly taller than her but probably weighed less. His skin and hair were the same colour as hers.
‘It’s the one across the way.’ His voice had lost its threatening edge. He looked up at her and shrugged. ‘I can show you round if you like - it’s my father who’s selling it. ‘
Megan put on a disappointed face. ‘Is this one sold, then? What a shame - I really like it.’
‘Well it is, but it might be up for sale again soon.’ He gave her a conspiratorial grin.
‘Really?’ His expression unnerved her. He must know about Lili’s death. Before she could frame a question he launched into an explanation. He told her, without a trace of emotion, that the current owner had died suddenly before being able to move into the bam. He said Lili was a friend of his father’s and because of that money hadn’t actually changed hands before she died. That meant that technically, the barn was still on the market.
‘This...what did you say her name was?’
‘Lili. Lili Jonas.’
‘Not that poor woman they’ve been talking about on the news?’
He nodded. ‘She worked at the hospital. Dad was her boss.’
‘How awful.’ She looked away, unsure how convincing her face looked. ‘He must be devastated.’
Griff Abdulla’s mouth turned down as if he was pondering this. ‘Well, they’d only worked together for a year or so. But Lili was a great girl.’
‘You knew her as well, then?’ Megan held her breath, wondering how much further she could push this.
‘Oh yeah.’ There was a trace of a smile on his lips. ‘We had a lot in common, actually. I’m an archaeologist and my specialism is death rituals.’ He looked at her as if expecting a reaction. She looked back, showing nothing but polite interest. ‘Lili used to let me into the mortuary some nights and we’d sit with the bodies.’ He blinked, but she held his gaze. ‘Did you know,’ he went on, ‘that prior to 1852 it was considered unfeeling to leave a dead body unattended? Night and day the corpse was watched and candles burnt in the death chamber. Lili did that sometimes. It bothered her, you see, the thought of the bodies lying there all alone.’
‘How ironic,’ Megan said. ‘Presumably she’s lying there herself now?’ Had he been to see her body? Lit candles for a midnight vigil? With his father in charge it wouldn’t be difficult to gain access to the mortuary at any time of the day or night.
