Whoever Has the Heart Page 6

  A man standing underneath a tree was illuminated; he was holding a couple of terriers on a leash. He waved with his hand and pointed to the inner wood. I recognized Dr Harlow with his Jack Russells.

  The van stopped, and still leaving the lights on, the vet leapt out to join Dr Harlow under the trees. They walked forward together. I walked faster towards the light and into the trees, not noticing if Humphrey was following or not. The constable got there before I did.

  Dr Harlow and Tim Abbey were staring down at something under a big oak. One of the dogs was whining. Without saying a word, the young vet took the leash and led the dogs to the van, put them in, and shut the door. I could hear the whining and scratching as I walked past.

  The lights of the van penetrated the belt of leaves and shone on the grass under the tree, shone on the earth where it had been turned over by the dogs as they had scrabbled. I saw Ellen Bean and her husband walking across from the road, leaning forward, faces keen and sharp.

  Where the strong light hit it the earth under the trees was very brown and the grass a very bright green. I could see something sticking out of the earth. The soil lay lightly upon it but I could make out a humpy shape.

  I walked over to look. The dogs had dug up the upper part of a human torso. There was no head, but we had the ribcage. We had the heart.

  Chapter Five

  I was late back to the house that night, as men from the Southern CID swarmed in to set up a centre in the village. The rain had stopped, it was a quiet night with a full moon. I was conscious as I walked through the village of curtains pulled aside, of curious faces behind the windows.

  I was on my own. I had not noticed at what point Humphrey went away. The BMW was gone from outside the front door, but someone had made up the fire so that it still blazed. This act from Humphrey, because it could be no one else, showed kindness and thought. But there was nothing else. No note, nothing. I poured a drink and sat by the fire considering the events of the night.

  Granted that we had no head, and assuming we had the remains of Chloe Devon, the Met would have to yield jurisdiction. By tradition, whoever has the heart gets the rest of the body.

  I did not know who would be working the case, but Clive Barney, a detective chief superintendent whom I had met, had arrived so he would probably keep control. I knew about him, of course, it was my job to know. He had had a good career, with quick promotions, and was said to be liked. His most notable case had been the last, a triple murder in the railway station at Slocombe Regis. He had got to the killer quickly, not difficult perhaps as the man had left an envelope with his name and address on it at the scene of the killing, but there had been some questions asked about the rough handling of the killer when in custody. The man had hanged himself. The general opinion had been that Barney would go far if he didn’t shoot his own foot off first.

  Muff arrived to sit by the fire and consider life with me. Her coat was damp, so I guessed it must now be raining. I didn’t envy the police team still working in the wood where the body had been found. Muff rubbed against me transferring some of the wetness to my left leg. The matter of the mouse was not raised. She was just one of the creatures with sharp teeth in the village, some domestic, some wild: dogs, rats, ferrets, and squirrels.

  Barney had his supporters with him, Inspector Church and Sergeant Mary Elchie, whom I knew. They were a part of a new Violent Crimes Unit which had been put together in some hurry from a number of different area CID squads. It was new, as yet untried, and said to have loyalty problems. They were just names but I fancied I had heard of Elchie as being a rising star. She was a sturdy young woman, not pretty but almost handsome. All three treated me warily; I was aware that they would have preferred me not to be around.

  But I had been there, on the spot from the beginning, and I could not be ignored. My position as someone who knew everything, who had to be told everything (even if on microfilm or discs) made me important. The newly acquired investigatory arm made me dangerous. A threat.

  I sipped my drink. I knew that was how they reasoned, and to a certain extent it was true. I didn’t intend to be a threat to anyone, but I did poke around. I was licensed to poke around.

  It isn’t human nature to like that, and most certainly not police nature.

  I had not told them that I knew Billy Damiani but I would have to do so and soon, before they found out for themselves. They would not like me any better for knowing him.

  The drink tasted sour on my tongue, so I put it aside and took myself out into the kitchen to make some tea. Muff looked at me, considered following and decided against. It was cold in the kitchen and smelt damp. I would have to do something about it.

  I took the tea back before the fire, kicked off my shoes, and crouched before the flames. It was a wood fire, smoky and deliciously scented with apple, but I was having some unpleasing thoughts.

  When bits of Chloe Devon had started turning up all over London, then it had looked as if she had been killed in London. That she had somehow got back to the big city and been killed there.

  Now it looked as if she had never got far from Brideswell after all. So where did that leave Billy Damiani?

  He was in trouble in any case and would certainly come in for more questioning; I could see the line the questions would take.

  Chloe Devon had left the Red Dragon on her own, she had been seen leaving, she had not been seen after that moment. Billy Damiani had waited for some time, half an hour so he had said, and then driven back to London. Had he met her on the road and picked her up?

  That was the question I would be asking. It would be interesting to see how he handled it. If I knew Billy Damiani he would already be calling his lawyers.

  Thoughts of Damiani brought my mind back to Humphrey, whereupon guilt flooded in at once. Guilt and then anger, because he had left me silently, hadn’t he, and marched off without a word? It was almost rage; I sat there relishing the rage for a moment.

  But I couldn’t keep up the anger and the guilt surged back. My fault, usually my fault. I did distance myself and maybe I had done it once too often this time. I drank the tea with a miserable sick feeling. Muff came up and rubbed her head against me, offering comfort and at the same time marking me as her property.

  The doorbell rang. I sat listening, then it rang again. I got up to open it, removing Muff from my foot. Two tall figures sheltering under one umbrella stood there.

  ‘Crick, David. Come in.’

  They hesitated, a polite pair as always. ‘Not too late, is it?’

  I held the door open wider. Muff took her chance to escape, a small fleeting figure, tail waving. ‘Damn. Come in, you two.’

  ‘She’ll come back,’ said David.

  ‘I always worry.’

  ‘I’ve seen her all over the village, she knows her way around … We had to come.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said, in surprise. Was this someone else trying to look after me?

  ‘Of course. It’s us that are all shook up … It was the girl, Chloe Devon?’

  ‘Can’t be sure. Probably.’ I didn’t want to talk about it to them. ‘I won’t be directly concerned, you know.’ Unless I wanted to be, and no need to tell them that fact. ‘I’m drinking tea, would you like some?’

  ‘Love some,’ said David. ‘ Shall I get mugs from the kitchen?’

  I nodded. ‘You know where they are.’ Not clean though, I thought, domesticity had taken a back seat lately.

  Crick looked around the room. ‘Your man not here?’

  ‘He had to go off.’ I could hear David sloshing water round the mugs. I grinned at him as he came back in.

  Crick nodded. ‘Nice car he’s got.’ The two men kept a very ancient and much loved Citroën. Crick said he had an aesthetic identity with it. The car certainly had an antique elegance. ‘Saw it had gone.’

  Of course you did, I thought, the village watched everything. Which made the way Chloe Devon had never been observed in that walk down the village street ev
en more incredible.

  Someone had seen her. Probably more than one village pair of eyes.

  ‘Does begin to look as if she never got away from the village.’

  I nodded, wondering what they had really come calling for.

  ‘So I suppose questions will be asked?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, keeping my voice neutral. ‘That will happen.’ Feet up and down the village street, a knocking on doors.

  ‘I kind of hate saying what we’re going to say … It’s why we came to you.’

  My expression began bleak. ‘I don’t do favours.’

  ‘Not looking for one. But you could tell us what we ought to do … Thing is, that night the girl disappeared, well, it’s true enough, we didn’t see her. But Harlow was out walking those dogs, all right, we can’t suspect the Doc, and he says he didn’t see her.’ He gave me an opaque look. And that means you think he did, I said to myself. ‘But Dryden was sitting on that bench in the churchyard for a long while … He ought to have seen something of her.’

  ‘I’ve seen him there myself. He spends a lot of time in the churchyard.’

  David said: ‘ Only since his wife died.’

  ‘Yes, what exactly happened there?’

  ‘What I’ve heard—’ began David.

  ‘You can’t trust village gossip,’ said Crick, ‘ we don’t really know.’

  ‘I know it must be connected with the deaths of the Beasley family,’ I said.

  ‘The story that went round was that Mrs Dryden brought home a wicked virus from the hospital where she worked, she had natural immunity but she was a carrier to this bug which killed off all the Beasley family.’ He took a deep breath. ‘And then she killed herself, accidentally on purpose in a car crash.’

  It was more or less the story Ellen had told me, except she had hinted that she had brought in the idea of poison and that Dryden bore some responsibility for his wife’s death, so it was certainly the accepted village tale.

  ‘There must have been an inquest.’

  ‘I expect there was one, but I don’t know.’

  I shrugged. ‘It explains Dryden haunting the churchyard, I suppose, and if he was preoccupied, then it explains why he didn’t see Chloe Devon.’

  ‘Says he wasn’t there,’ said Crick. ‘ But he was. Thought we ought to say. Bit of a womanizer.’

  ‘Not the only one in the village you could say that of,’ said David. ‘ I mean look at Geoff Harlow, lovely chap but not exactly a one-woman man.’

  ‘We don’t know why the girl was killed. Sex may not come into it.’

  ‘Do you have to have a motive?’

  ‘One of some sort is usual,’ I said drily. ‘Unless madness is involved. It doesn’t have to be much sometimes, but a reason is needed.’

  ‘Dryden attacked a man once when he was drunk. For making a comment about him sitting in the churchyard.’ David looked ashamed. ‘Me, actually.’

  ‘Well, when asked you can tell the CID man who calls.’

  ‘He will call?’

  ‘I’ll tell him to do that, shall I?’

  ‘I don’t like passing it on.’

  ‘She was a nice kid,’ said David sadly.

  I was surprised. ‘Did you know Chloe?’

  ‘Not well, and not here. Met her in Rome, at a party at the British School. She was working there.’

  And that, I thought, is the real reason you came here tonight. But knowing her is not a cause for suspicion in itself, and Billy Damiani certainly knew her better than I guess you did. At the moment he is the one doing the worrying.

  ‘I shouldn’t be too concerned about Dryden,’ I said. ‘Just say what you know and leave speculation out of it.’

  ‘Right,’ said Crick with relief. He gave David a quick look. ‘We ought to be off. Mustn’t keep you up.’

  David stood up politely. ‘ It’s always been a welcoming house.’

  ‘It is a happy house,’ I said. ‘I wish I’d known Mrs Armitage. Mary Erskine tells me you knew her of old, Crick?’

  ‘So I did, so I did. A lovely lady.’

  I saw them to the door. As they departed, Muff rushed in, her coat wet again.

  ‘Told you she’d be back,’ they said with one voice.

  I dried Muff, and carried her upstairs.

  On the middle of the bed was the sapphire ring. A declaration, I thought, if I ever saw one.

  Chapter Six

  I set my own operation in action the next morning.

  I telephoned my assistant, George Rewley, formerly sergeant and newly promoted to inspector, who had just joined the Independent Investigation Unit, which we called the IU, and which local wags called the IOU, because we were always demanding information but not trading much back.

  George Rewley was a good officer. He was sensitive, intelligent, and ambitious. He worked hard and with perception, closing some tough cases. I won’t name them or describe them, that’s like writing about Sherlock Holmes, isn’t it? (Dr Watson: ‘How well I remember the Case of the Strangled Strangers which Holmes had just completed so successfully, when we were plunged into another mystery …’ and so on.)

  Rewley had also had the good sense to marry a girl I was very fond of.

  In addition, he had a rare skill. He could lip-read. The only member of his family with normal hearing, since his parents and his sibling lip-read then so did he. In certain cases this had been extremely useful. It also created a certain awe among his colleagues. Yes, he was a useful man. People came and went in my professional life: you chose them to work with you, or they were wished on you (not so often with me these days), you trained them in your ways, then they got promotion and moved on. I hoped Rewley would stay.

  I interrupted him at his breakfast. I could hear the clink of china and the sound of the early morning news on the radio. ‘Sorry, I want some information.’

  I told him to talk to Billy Damiani, question him more closely about the quarrel with Chloe. Then to talk with the girl’s friends, to get what he could on her background. It might be that her death was a chance affair, that she had wandered into the ambit of a killer and died because of it. But it might be that the cause of her death lay in her own life. I wanted to know more about that life.

  Find out about her stay in Italy, I instructed. Billy Damiani and her meeting with Crick and David in Rome did not a summer make, but I thought her past would bear looking into. Rewley had muttered something about this keeping him busy for some days.

  I knew that Chief Superintendent Clive Barney was the type to keep his nose to the ground, scrupulous in his attention to the physical details, like the forensic evidence and the times and movements of parties concerned, but not likely to lift his imagination far beyond the present. And I did not think this was a case for doing just that.

  I could trust Barney to worry around and about Dr Harlow, if indeed there was anything to worry about. He’d be doing that anyway: Harlow had found the headless trunk of Chloe Devon and the finder always aroused suspicion. Harlow would come in for scrutiny.

  I would get all the straightforward reports that went through the normal channels, but I could take a look at other areas.

  I was walking in where I was not wanted, but I had been doing that almost all my working life and I knew I could face out Clive Barney. He might be in trouble himself for the Slocombe Regis case and it was possible I could help him there.

  Just for a second the picture of the man I had killed flashed into my mind. Crumpled, broken, bloody. Well, he had killed himself, but it had been my mind, my spirit, that had forced him to open the window and jump. I had got a confession out of him and he couldn’t face himself or his punishment. He had looked at me as he jumped.

  I made myself some coffee, a rich dark brew, and considered other matters closer home. I had a few personal thoughts to clear in my mind.

  I hadn’t slept well, too much adrenalin pumping round the system, and it wasn’t only the discovery in the wood.

  It was the matter of the r
ing. Left behind by the donor who had gone off without a word. I’m not sure if I could forgive that. But perhaps it was myself I could not forgive; I had forgotten Humphrey last night, absorbed in the unfolding drama beneath the trees by the church.

  I tried to remember what had happened between us. I thought I had said something like ‘Give me a few minutes,’ but I could not remember what Humphrey had replied. Perhaps he hadn’t said anything. Had he even been there with me under the trees?

  The fact that I could not remember reproached me.

  I drank some coffee, deep in thought. Kate did not like my relationship with Humphrey. It was not her business, she had made enough bad choices herself in the past, and I hadn’t asked for her judgement, but that did not stop Kate.

  ‘He’s not right for you,’ she had said, ‘he’s too safe.’ She had sought for a word. ‘He’s too constricting … You always get hitched up with that sort of man.’

  I wasn’t quite clear what sort of a man Kate thought I needed, but I was aware that Kate never made a play for safety. If there was a risky choice, she took it. Her marriage had to be put in that category. It might go either way, and I suspected that Rewley knew it. I also knew that he was man enough to match Kate.

  Time to dress, a working day stretched ahead. I looked at my diary: a late morning committee in London, then a meeting back in the Berkshire HQ, that was just the skeleton, plenty more would have to be done.

  Hanging on a hook in the bathroom was the dress I had taken off last night, there was mud on the hem of the black corded silk. The shoes, from Ferragamo, had dark earth and grass plastered all over them. They would clean but I was doubtful about my suede shoulder bag which seemed to have met some dark sticky something that I trusted was not blood.

  I dressed quickly, did a brisk tidying-up operation in the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, then I filled Muff’s food and water bowl, left her litter tray immaculate, and checked where she was.