Dancing On the Grave, page 15
“Help you?” he called across the yard, keeping it neutral, neither unfriendly nor encouraging her to linger.
She was frowning as if something bothered her, and swivelled at the sound of his voice, advanced a few steps.
“Hello,” she said, calm and easy, not intimidated by the size of him. “I’m looking for Edith Airey. I understand she works here. Is she about?”
Bardwell shrugged. “Dunno.” He jerked his head towards the farmhouse. “If she’s not up there, she’ll have gone home by now, likely as not.”
She gave him a nod and a brief smile. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll give it a try.”
Bardwell retreated inside while she made her fruitless journey. Motionless, he was still watching when she returned to her vehicle minutes later. She looked around again, nosy, before driving slowly out of the yard.
As she disappeared from view, he took a deep breath. Somehow, disaster had been averted. The gun was secure, the threat neutralised. Now, all he had to do was concentrate on the job at hand.
So why couldn’t he clear that image of the woman with the fox-red hair? The first time he’d seen her was through the scope of his rifle. It forged an intimate connection that would not be broken, whether she was aware of it or not.
Their paths would cross again. The patterns swirled and solidified inside Bardwell’s head. I’ll make sure of that.
Part III
31
Nick stood by the bedroom window of the flat he’d shared with Lisa, arms folded, hands clenched, glaring down into the car park. It was his first Saturday off in weeks and this wasn’t how he’d envisaged spending it—watching Lisa’s lumbering brother, Karl, struggling to load Sophie’s brightly coloured Wendy house into the back of a borrowed box Luton van.
It would have been easier to dismantle the awkward structure; it came apart in a few minutes if you knew how. But Nick’s offer to help had been roughly rejected.
Lisa was supervising, getting in the way, and Karl’s two boys—thugs in the making—were running riot across the flowerbeds. What else was new? They’d always regarded him, his profession, with a fearless insolence. Definite trouble there for the future.
Now, Karl came stamping up into the flat, Lisa following him in.
“That everything?” Karl’s triumph only slightly tempered by the sweat of his exertions. Nick was thankful for that, if nothing else.
Nick had preferred being on an upper storey, and not just for security. There were nicer views, and it was better not to have neighbours overhead. Even though Sophie was no longer in her pushchair Lisa had still complained about the climb.
Well, she doesn’t have to worry about that anymore, does she?
“I think that’s it for the moment.” Lisa wouldn’t meet Nick’s eyes. She gestured vaguely around the flat; the gaps on the bookshelf, the half-empty CD rack, the space where the microwave used to stand. “We’ll sort out the rest some other time, Nick, yeah?”
“Yeah, sure.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and found he couldn’t meet her eyes, either. “Whatever.”
“Need to be off, Leese,” Karl said, brisk, picking up the grubby sweatshirt he’d discarded earlier across the back of the cream linen sofa. “Promised the boss I’d have the van back before twelve.” He pulled out his cigarettes, stuck one in his mouth but knew better than to light up in front of Nick.
“Yeah, OK, I’ll be down in a minute.”
Karl frowned, as if not wanting to leave them alone together. Nick gave him his best Moss Side cop stare.
“I’ll be in the van,” Karl mumbled.
They listened to his heavy feet on the stairs. It was a wonder the old building had survived. Nick could hear him yelling for the boys as he reached the outer door on the ground floor. Lisa still hadn’t spoken.
Eventually, she sighed and pushed her hair back, then folded her arms, defensive, across her chest.
“Look, Nick, we need to get some things sorted out.”
“Sorted how?” You left. That sorted it.
Another sigh, like she was being reasonable and he was being deliberately difficult. “About Sophie.”
“Visiting rights, you mean?”
Her eyes slid away again. “No, child support.”
Nick felt his chest tighten, something boil behind his eyes.
“Yeah,” he said, a metallic taste in his mouth. “Yeah, right.”
“You know you can see Sophie whenever you want.” She tried a little smile, reaching. “’Course you can. She’s your daughter, too, isn’t she?”
Nick’s gaze swept across the flat, stripped bare of a child’s presence. “Is she?” he said, bitter, without thinking.
Lisa’s face dropped through disbelief straight into anger like a stolen car off a quarry edge. Her hand snaked out, cracked hard across his cheek. A flashbulb went off somewhere close to his left eye as his head snapped back, riding the worse of it.
“You bastard!” she hissed, and slammed the door on her way out, hard enough to rattle the glass in the kitchen cabinets.
Well, I guess I deserved that, didn’t I?
Nick slowly put a hand to his face. It was going to leave a bruise; they’d love that at work. Better ice it.
But as he turned away he caught sight of a smear on the back of the sofa, where Karl’s sweatshirt had been.
That grubby little…
But when he looked closer, Nick realised it wasn’t a stain. Face forgotten, he fetched a zip-lock sandwich bag from the kitchen and a pair of tweezers from the First Aid kit above the bathroom sink. Very carefully, he gathered a sample and sealed the bag, holding it up to the light and shaking the contents gently.
Unless he was very much mistaken, he’d just picked up dog hairs. Grace had found dog hairs at the crime scene in Staveley. It was lurking at the back of his mind. And much as he knew it was a very long shot, a part of him would cheer long and loud if, by some freak of chance, they turned out to be a match.
The rational half of his brain took over and his stomach sank. Because, if they did, the kind of problems that was going to cause, both personal and professional, didn’t bear thinking about.
“So,” he said aloud into the empty flat, “what else can go wrong today?”
32
Fourteen miles northeast of Kendal, on a flat, rough-mown field that ran alongside the River Eden above Tebay, the agricultural show was moving into full swing. Giles Frederickson cast a critical eye over his cadets as they scrambled across the main arena, setting out obstacles for the dog agility classes. Not a bad performance, he decided, but they could have done with another week’s practice.
In his time Frederickson had been involved in all manner of events from the Royal Tournament to the Winter Olympics. He tended to measure all other public displays by those standards and was rarely entirely satisfied. Still, not bad.
He recognised that the cadets were not responsible for his general ill temper. Even after he’d learned that the police were not going to pursue the shooting, he’d still told Angela it was time to end the affair. Besides, after today they wouldn’t have a legitimate reason to liaise quite so regularly and openly. Not without her dim-witted husband beginning to suspect.
The major still derived a certain satisfaction from the fact that Angela had given her husband’s gift—the dog—to her lover. And the poor cuckold had actually been grateful to him for having Ben taken off their hands. If only he knew.
He’d find Angela hard to forget. Under that icy exterior, she’d proved to be a woman of passion and stamina. Thank God for Viagra, he thought. He had no illusions that he was her first infidelity, nor any more than a fleeting diversion, but he liked to think she hadn’t been ready to let him go just yet. He’d learned things in the Far East that Western women seemed to find surprising in bed, and Angela had been no exception.
She’d assumed, scornfully, that coming under police scrutiny had made him turn tail, and he hadn’t disillusioned her. True, he’d been concerned about DC Weston. Frederickson could recognise a born hunter when he came across one. If he hadn’t been told to let it lie, who knows what the detective might have uncovered?
“Ah, Giles, there you are. I was beginning to think you were avoiding me,” Angela Inglis’s voice stroked a nerve down the major’s spine.
He turned. She looked perfect, as always, poised and cool despite the muggy summer heat, in a pale green dress that might have been raw silk, deceptively simple and ending demurely at the knee.
“Have you met Max Carri?” she asked, before he could speak. “Max is one of our wonderful sponsors.”
The public address system blared into life at that moment, calling all junior Working Hunter competitors to make their way to the collecting ring, and judges in the floral arrangement category to the handicrafts marquee.
The interruption gave Frederickson a chance to study the man whose arm his former mistress grasped with such a light yet proprietary touch. Sweet-talking sponsors had been very much Angela’s bag, so he’d heard about Carri but hadn’t met him during the run-up to the show. He wasn’t pleased by what he saw.
In contrast to the tweeds and florals so beloved of the natives, the man wore a Panama hat and a cream linen suit with the careless flair of someone who spent a good deal of time and money on his wardrobe. In Frederickson’s instantly formed opinion, he was altogether too sleek, too smug, too…predatory.
Frederickson didn’t like the purr of satisfaction in Angela’s voice, either. Nor the fact that the two of them looked well matched.
Replaced me so easily, have you?
Carri, meanwhile, returned the scrutiny with only a twitch at the corner of his mouth giving away some inner amusement. Frederickson squared his shoulders inside his dress uniform and held out a leather-gloved hand. Carri shook it without any attempt at bone-crushing heroics.
“I must say, Angela’s been singing your praises,” Carri said.
Frederickson had been half-expecting an Italian accent to go with the colouring and the name, but the voice was classlessly English. Elocution lessons, he thought nastily.
“She’s too kind.” Frederickson’s voice was bland.
“You’ve certainly got your boys well drilled.” Carri nodded to the swarm of cadets. He gave a rueful smile. “If only my people could work with such coordination, I’d be a rich man.”
“Oh, Max.” Angela gave a breathy laugh. “You are a rich man.”
He gave a self-deprecating shrug. “Comfortable, certainly. Enough to keep the wolf from the door and for indulgences such as this.” He smiled at her and Frederickson felt his hands tighten. “But what’s paying for a few trophies and a token of prize money without all your hard work to make the whole thing happen?”
Angela fluttered at the praise. Then, duty done, and possibly objective achieved, she began to turn away, stopping only to favour Frederickson with a final, gracious smile. “You’ll join us in the refreshments marquee for lunch, Giles, of course?”
So I can watch you fawn over him some more? “No, I don’t think so.” He offered a slight smile to take the sting out of the refusal, nodding to the cadets. “Have to keep an eye on my chaps if everything’s to run to schedule. The timings are pretty tight. Thank you, anyway.”
To her credit, she managed to conjure disappointment. “We’ll need you on the main stage for the prize-giving,” she said firmly. “Three o’clock sharp. No excuses.”
“No, ma’am. I’ll be there.”
33
“Richard, can I run something by you?”
Thirty miles away, at his desk in the Hunter Lane station, Richard Sibson looked up to find Grace in the office doorway.
He eyed the papers in her hand. “Does it involve looking at pictures of naked women who are not actually dead?”
Grace smiled. “Now I understand why you’re working on a Saturday morning. You really ought to get out more.”
He grunted, holding out a peremptory hand for the sheet. “Oh, let’s have it, McColl.”
“You remember I did an FDR test on Edith Airey?” she began.
Sibson pushed his chair back and let out what might be mistaken for an annoyed breath. “You’re not still on that, are you? Did you not get the message from on high that we were to take no further action?”
“Of course. And I paid absolute attention to it,” she said, unperturbed. “But I’d already sent the residue I collected from Edith off to the lab, together with a sample of the .22 ammunition we retrieved from her parents’ house. Don’t give me that look—you know as well as I do that it’s standard procedure.”
“Yes, yes, all right. And?”
“They don’t entirely match.” She finally relinquished the printout. “There was no doubt Edith had been shooting that morning, as she claimed, but the residue I recovered from her hands and hair had additional indicators to those present in the bullets she gave us.”
Sibson frowned, intrigued in spite of himself. “Different batch perhaps?” he suggested.
“The box was half used.” Grace hesitated fractionally. “I wondered if it might have been a different gun.”
Sibson shrugged and handed the papers back. “Water under the bridge now.” He started to turn back to his desk, paused and glanced back at her. “Weren’t you going to have a quiet word, anyway? You and Weston thought there might be some funny stuff going on at home, I believe?”
“Mm. I called in at her work a few days ago, on my way back from the Staveley break-in, but she’d already gone, apparently. I’ve tried her at home a couple of times since, but no joy. I’ll try again this afternoon, perhaps. Might stand more chance at the weekend.”
“Speaking of the Staveley job, I’ve another just come in.” Sibson searched his desk for the paperwork. “Ambleside this time, which should be a pleasant little run out for you. Looks like the same MO—repair shop, four quads taken this time, sometime during the night. Our little gang of bike thieves is getting more ambitious.”
Grace took the sheet he offered and managed, he noted, to suppress her dismay at the prospect of having to fight her way through the weekend tourist traffic. “All right, I’m on my way,” she murmured, scanning the page as she turned for the door. “And this could just mean they’re using a larger van.”
Sibson watched her leave, not shifting his gaze as she walked down the corridor until she reached the staircase and disappeared from sight.
34
Road safety! I’ll give ’em road safety!
Jim Airey sweated inside his stab vest and helmet as he manned the Cumbria Constabulary display at the back of the main arena. Black was not the colour to be wearing in this heat and there was no shade, unless he lurked behind the raised stage affair where they were going to present the prizes.
Airey resented being asked to cover events like the agricultural show. Waste of his time and expertise when, in his opinion, he could be out catching real criminals. That was his kind of work.
Danny Robertshaw came ambling towards him across the cropped grass, sucking an ice cream with a flake in it. It had melted down the sides of the cornet and dribbled across his hand. He held it awkwardly so it didn’t drip onto his uniform, stopping every few yards to lick his fingers, and only succeeding in spreading the ice cream around his mouth like a five-year-old.
Airey rolled his eyes. Least it’s not chocolate.
“All right?” Robertshaw called as he approached. “Anything exciting been happening?”
“What do you think?” Airey eyed the gooey mess sulkily. “And where’s mine?”
35
A little over a mile away, eye hovering behind the Unertl sight, Patrick Bardwell tracked the young policeman’s progress until he disappeared from view.
He lay behind the long gun in a hollowed-out hide that veed into the hillside above Bowderdale. A latticework of spindly branches holding up a roof made from turf cut from beneath him. In front was a partial curtain of nettles. From above, even close to, he blended into the terrain almost perfectly. Just a narrow pocket, like he’d opened up a piece of the earth and slipped inside, safe as the womb. Did it all before the sun came up. They’d have to be almost on top of him before they realised he was there.
Not that anyone was looking.
With the benefit of the hide, Bardwell had abandoned his ghillie suit. Good job, the way he was sweating. Instead, he wore nondescript hiking clothes, same as a thousand others out on the Lakeland fells on a Saturday in June when the weather hung slumberous and heavy.
Three water canteens were stacked by his right hand; two full and one sacrificed onto the hard-packed ground just in front of the muzzle to damp the telltale dust from the flare. The canteen had a wide mouth, too, just in case the need arose. Not that Bardwell expected he’d have to use it. Wouldn’t be there long enough. But if so, a full bladder was a distraction he could do without.
He had the familiar feeling of slipping outside his skin, acutely aware of the atmosphere around him, of each lazy breath of wind that ruffled the grass between his position and the killing ground beyond. Everything else narrowed down, filtered out like distant background chatter as other senses came to prominence. It always happened, the outside world softening down until the only thing he could see clearly was the target, and even the beat of his own heart matched the trance-like pace he’d set. They’d tried to explain it to him as a form of self-protection, so he could make each kill without the reality of it troubling his conscience.
He’d nodded, impatient to be done with them, but in truth, he’d never had any trouble in that regard.
Even so, he recognised that this one was different. This was not the result of orders passed down, of tactical objectives decided further up the chain, of risks evaluated by some nerdy little analyst crouched safe in a bunker, miles from the fight.
