The Dungeon House, page 16
The Loneys’ retirement bungalow was called The Cop Out. Desmond wasn’t devoid of a sense of humour, but most of his colleagues would say that his career had been one long cop out. Switching off the ignition, she spotted Desmond by the side of the bungalow, planting a wicker hanging basket with herbs. Tall, stoop-shouldered, and vaguely raffish in a panama hat, he’d put on weight since she’d last seen him. When he turned at the sound of her car, she could almost hear his body groaning with the effort. He beckoned with his trowel, and kissed both her cheeks by way of greeting. She caught a whiff of damp earth and stale beer. He’d always liked a drink, had Desmond, and his unsteadiness on his feet wasn’t accounted for solely by arthritis.
“We save a fortune growing our own,” he boasted, as he led her round the back to a tidy patio equipped with a table-cum-firepit, and four aluminium chairs. “See over there, behind the hydrangeas? Strawberries, potatoes, cucumbers, you name it.”
“Retirement’s suiting you,” Hannah said, as Pamela Loney served soft drinks and milk chocolate digestives.
“I need to lick the garden into shape in time for summer.” Desmond gave his orange juice a resentful glare, and Hannah guessed he wouldn’t need much of an excuse to bring out the booze.
“How lovely,” she said dutifully, although she much preferred the eerie wildness of Daniel’s cipher garden to these neatly striped lawns, and the regimented tulips in the weed-free borders.
“I keep that busy, I’ve no idea how I ever found the time to go to work,” he chortled. “Mind, I can’t do exactly as I please. Pammy insists on keeping me in order, don’t you, love?”
Pammy, a muscular ex-midwife with features as bleak as Scafell Pike, pursed icy lips before making herself scarce with the practised discretion of a career policeman’s wife. Hannah allowed Desmond five minutes to update her on the state of his diabetes, interrogate her about his least favourite former colleagues, and tut reproachfully at news of a couple of undeserved promotions, before turning to the deaths at the Dungeon House.
“It was a long time ago. These other cases you mentioned, the two girls who have gone missing. You’re surely not telling me they are connected to what Malcolm Whiteley did?”
“Gray Elstone was Malcolm’s accountant. Nigel is his nephew. What happened at the Dungeon House must have affected their lives. I’m looking to get a full picture.”
Desmond snorted. “You can have too much information. Clouds the issue more often than not, mark my words. When I hear all this bollocks on the telly about intelligence-led policing, I want to puke. You can’t beat an experienced copper’s gut.”
He patted his substantial stomach for emphasis.
“I’m interested in your view of how events unfolded that night.”
Lifting the panama, he scratched his shiny bald head. “It wasn’t much of a mystery to me. Whiteley was in financial trouble, and jealous over his missus. While she went out carousing after the barbecue, he drank himself into a rage. When Lysette and the girl arrived back from the pub, the kid went up to bed, and he confronted his wife about her affair. One thing led to another, and he shot her. Young Amber heard the commotion, came downstairs, and saw what her dad had done. My bet is, he threatened her with the rifle. She panicked, and made a dash for it. Poor kid was in her night-clothes, not wearing any shoes. She never had much of a chance. He followed her out to the quarry path, and pushed her over the edge.”
“Why not shoot her, same as he did his wife?”
“Perhaps he didn’t want to make such a mess of her,” Desmond said. “Trust me, Lysette’s face wasn’t a pretty sight. I’m not even saying he meant to kill the girl. Possibly all he wanted was to shut her up. On the other hand, he may have decided all of them would die. That’s the pattern in this kind of case. These blighters think their family can’t live without them. Absolutely bonkers, of course, but there it is.”
“There was no proof that Malcolm laid a finger on Amber,” Hannah said.
“What do you want, CCTV evidence?” He shook his head, and took another mouthful of coffee. “His body was found in the quarry, close to hers. Once she was dead—because he pushed her, or she slipped, or jumped to get away from him—he’d nothing left to live for. So he blew his own head off. Good riddance, in my book.”
“Cheryl didn’t care for Malcolm, but even she struggled to believe he’d murder his own daughter.”
Desmond’s frown conveyed his opinion of Cheryl. “One way or another, he was responsible for the kid’s death.”
“What about the man who saw someone running away from the Dungeon House that night?”
“The drunk driver?” Desmond rolled his eyes. “Ben Kind harped on about that. What about him?”
“Perhaps someone else was there at the scene.”
“Doing what, exactly?”
Inspiration struck her. “Suppose Lysette’s lover showed up, to check she was okay. Malcolm had behaved badly at the barbecue that afternoon. The boyfriend might have worried about her, or even guessed what would happen. Or perhaps they had a late night assignation.”
“So he turned up in disguise as a woman?” Desmond was incredulous. “Pull the other leg, it’s got bells on.”
Hannah winced. On second thoughts, perhaps it wasn’t such an inspired piece of guesswork. “Did Scott Durham admit to being Lysette’s lover?”
“Denied it vehemently. So what? He would, wouldn’t he? Nobody wants to be blamed for three deaths.”
Desmond was a past master at dodging blame, so he was probably right.
“You weren’t convinced?”
“Nah. He claimed they were just good friends. Admitted to exchanging the occasional hug, but said it never went any further. They were just two tactile people, according to Durham. He must have thought I was born yesterday, but it wasn’t my job to put him in the dock. He’d not committed any crime.”
“And the drunk driver’s evidence?” Hannah chewed on a biscuit. “Why would he lie?”
“The clue’s in the word drunk. He was way off beam, trust me. I could feel it in my gut.” Desmond belched with smug sell-confidence. “The world’s full of attention-seekers. Perhaps he was mistaken. Or dreamed it. The story didn’t make sense. A bald man dressed as a woman? Who would that be? And why lurk around the Dungeon House at midnight?”
Put like that, who could argue? Yet something Cheryl had said surfaced in Hannah’s memory. A fresh idea formed in her mind, almost making her choke on the biscuit crumbs, but Desmond was too busy mounting an old hobby horse to notice.
“Look,” he said in the amiably patronising tone that reminded her why she’d always yearned to kick him. “Ben wasn’t a bad detective, but he had too much imagination for his own good, and when he got a bee in his bonnet, he could be a right pain in the arse. You were young when you worked with him. Impressionable. He wasn’t bloody Sherlock Holmes, I’ll tell you that. Anyone else would have spotted early on that Cheryl was bad news. But what did he do? She wasn’t bad looking, you could understand him fancying a bit of rumpy-pumpy on the side. But ditching his wife and kids, to waste the rest of his life on her? Way over the top, if you ask me.”
Hannah bit back her anger. Desmond knew she’d been close to Ben; had he been jealous? He’d had a reputation in the force for fancying a bit on the side himself. Her visit had given him the chance to take a shot at his dead colleague, and he didn’t intend to miss an open goal. What really hurt was that, for once in his life, his aim was true.
Giving her a crafty smirk, he said, “Good thing Ben Kind wasn’t on my team. Or maybe it’s a crying shame. I could have taught him a thing or two, young Hannah, I’m telling you straight.”
Hannah had planned to ask more questions about the investigation, and the people in the Whiteleys’ circle, but she couldn’t take any more of Desmond Loney. He wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t a bad man, just an indifferent detective with an inflated view of his own abilities and a fatal fondness for the easy way out. Her own failing, like Ben’s, was that she seldom even noticed easy ways out, far less took them.
Getting to her feet, she said, “Thanks for your time.”
“Going already? Thought you might like a spot of lunch. Pammy does a decent salad.” He contemplated his stomach with a rueful grin. “The doc has told me I need to lose a bit of weight. Says I enjoy the good life too much. Bloody spoilsport. Anyway, we can wash down the green stuff with a lager and lime or a spot of vino. What do you say, Hannah, love?”
“No, I’d better be off. Work to do. Grateful for your time.” She considered his fleshy, well-fed jowls. If he didn’t watch out, Desmond would soon become as pickled as the original St Bees Man. “I’ll let you get back to the good life.”
***
The quarry garden had metamorphosed into a lush green paradise, tucked between the sheer rock sides of a steep ravine, in which majestic ferns flourished, and a graceful palm tree grew. Purple-chequered snakes’ head frittilaries nodded on either side of a stepping-stone path that led to a dark pool covered with lilies. As Joanna followed Nigel through the yews and limes she remembered so well, and down to the path that ran around the top of the quarry, she had her first glimpse of the garden spread out thirty feet below. Her flesh crept. Despite all the effort that Robbie Dean had put into making the quarry garden a work of art, for Joanna, it would always remain a crime scene. A man had died here, together with his daughter, her friend.
“Are you all right?” Nigel asked.
“Mmmmm.”
“Your teeth are chattering.” He hesitated, then slipped off his linen jacket, and put it around her shoulders. “Better?”
“Thanks.” She was so afraid she might drop down in a dead faint, or burst into tears, or find some other way of making a fool of herself. And then Nigel would want nothing more to do with her.
“Looks as though nothing’s changed here for a thousand years, don’t you agree?” He spoke in a loud, bright voice, smothering her anxieties with a blanket of bonhomie. “Yet if you cast your mind back, this was a wilderness. Overgrown with brambles, and strewn with boulders. You really had to watch your step, it…”
He let the words trail away, and his face creased with dismay. Joanna gritted her teeth. The fracturing of his self-assurance gave her fresh heart. Nigel needed her as much as she needed him. There was no hiding from the truth. Those violent deaths had ripped her away from Nigel, from that day until this.
Now they were back together again, and she simply refused to let what happened wreck her happiness all over again. This time nothing and nobody would stand in her way.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said. “I promise, Nigel.”
***
Hannah drove to the beach car park to catch up on her emails and phone messages before setting off for Seascale. A triumphant Linz Waller announced that it had taken her next to no time to track down Anton Friend. He was alive and well, and still living in the same property at Santon Bridge. Six or seven miles from Gray Elstone’s office, in other words. Perfect. Some days nothing went right, but today was shaping up nicely. Hannah decided to try and see Friend before her meeting with Lily’s father, but first she had another call to make.
“Cheryl, this is Hannah. Sorry to disturb you again, but I just wanted to check something about that pub meal on the night of the Dungeon House shootings. You mentioned the girl with alopecia, the PA to Gray Elstone.”
“Joanna Footit, you mean? What about her?”
“I don’t know much about alopecia, but doesn’t it sometimes cause you to lose all your hair?”
“That’s right, it happened to Joanna. After she was involved in a fatal car crash, apparently she had a sort of meltdown. Stress, depression, whatever you want to call it.”
“So Joanna was…bald?”
“Yes, poor thing. She was rather odd-looking to start with, tall and skinny with boobs the size of thimbles, but of course the hair loss made it a thousand times worse. Her embarrassment was excruciating, by all accounts.”
“You didn’t know Joanna well?”
“No, we only ever met in passing. Lysette told me her hair had been red and thick and rather luscious before it all fell out after the car crash. She was a bright girl, but she mucked up her A Levels, and didn’t go to uni. For ages, she refused to wear a wig, and became a virtual recluse. Eventually her mum and dad persuaded her to see sense.”
“So she wore a wig?”
“Yes. It never looked quite right, if you ask me, but it still made a huge difference. Little by little, she regained her confidence.”
“And she was wearing the wig at the barbecue?”
“Correct.”
“I don’t suppose you can remember what she was wearing that night, when you had the meal in the pub?”
“It’s not an evening I’ll ever forget, every little detail is engraved on my memory. The last time I saw my oldest friend.” Her voice trembled, and Hannah waited. “Joanna had on a lacy top and a very short red skirt. Her legs were very long, they were far and away her best feature, and she made the most of them that night.”
“Your memory’s brilliant. Thanks very much, Cheryl. I suppose you don’t know where Joanna lives nowadays?”
“No idea. After she left the Lakes, I never heard any more about her. Her parents lived at Holmrook, you could try them, if they’re still alive.” A sigh. “I spent long enough living with Ben to know I’d be wasting my time asking you what this is all about?”
“Probably nothing. But I’m grateful for your help.”
“Just don’t get it into your head that Joanna was mixed up in anything dodgy. She was one of life’s victims, that girl, you only had to look at her to see that for yourself.”
Hannah ended the call, and made for the tearoom, where she succumbed to the temptation of Hartley’s ice cream. A treat she deserved, she assured herself, after Desmond Loney’s sniping at Ben, and her brainwave about Joanna Footit. But a fresh question nagged at her. If Joanna was the person Anton Friend had seen outside the Dungeon House on the night of the shootings, what on earth was she doing there?
As she drove past the menacing bulk of Sellafield, a possible answer struck her. Joanna and Amber Whiteley were friends. When Malcolm Whiteley went berserk, the girl might have rung Joanna for help. Her friend came from Holmrook, which was close by. Dialling 999 would have been a more sensible plan, but nobody from the Dungeon House had contacted the emergency services that night. Had Joanna stumbled on the bloodshed, and fled in panic? If so, why hadn’t she told anyone? Was it because she’d had a second nervous breakdown?
Santon Bridge straddled the River Irt, and its main claim to fame was that, each November, the local inn hosted the World’s Biggest Liar competition, in honour of a former landlord renowned for tall tales. Politicians were presumably barred from entering because they’d have an unfair advantage. Anton Friend’s cottage was across the road from yet another Lakeland tearoom, and luckily he was at home, mowing his postage stamp lawn. An affable, burly man with a plump, grey-haired wife who insisted on supplying tea and scones, he told Joanna that he’d been in a sorry state at the time of the Dungeon House killings. His first wife had recently left him for an Australian, and taken their three young children with her to the other side of the world. Having been made redundant from his job in the labs at Sellafield, he’d spent a large chunk of his pay-off drowning his sorrows in the pubs of Wasdale.
“In a funny kind of way, you could say that Whiteley’s rampage saved my life,” he said. “What he did was so shocking that somehow it brought me to my senses. You don’t expect crimes like that in such a lovely part of the world. It seems…wrong. A chap I knew at the cricket club persuaded me to get some help, and I’ve not drunk a drop of booze from that day to this. I found myself a job in Whitehaven, where I met Moira, and I’ve never looked back.”
So it was true, Hannah thought grimly. Every cloud really did have a silver lining. Yet there was something quietly impressive about this man in his early sixties who had managed to turn his life around as a result of a brief encounter with a human tragedy.
“That chap wasn’t Ben Kind, by any chance?”
“That’s the fellow! Decent bloke, and not a bad cricketer. Bowled a mean off-cutter, did Ben. I was sorry we lost touch after he and his girlfriend moved from Gosforth. She didn’t fancy being a cricket widow, so that was that. He was a policeman, probably retired by now. Name of Kind. Did you know him?”
“I’m afraid he died a few years ago.” Hannah cut short his expressions of regret. This wasn’t the moment to be sidetracked by sentiment. “Can you tell me again about the person you saw that night?”
“It’s a very long time ago, obviously. But I can still picture him. As I drove past the entrance to the Dungeon House, he came racing out from the drive. Panic-stricken, I’d say. I had the shock of my life. You don’t get many transvestites in this neck of the woods. I had to swerve to avoid hitting him as he ran into the lane. Thank Heavens I missed him, there were only inches in it.”
“Can you describe the person you saw?”
“Tall and skinny, and as bald as a billiard ball.”
“You said in your statement that he was wearing a jacket, but it wasn’t buttoned up, and you could see he was wearing a skirt underneath.”
“Yes, it was bizarre. It was a short skirt, and his legs were bare. I think he had some kind of sandals on his feet.”
“Can you recall the colour of the skirt? It doesn’t seem to be mentioned in your statement.
“It was red.”
“Are you sure? There were no streetlights, and it must have been pitch dark.”
