A Willing Victim (19 page)

‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Ballard, when Stratton had shut the door behind them and they were standing in the cold night air. ‘What is it?’

‘Couple of fishermen, sir. Found a body in the woods on the edge of Mr Tynan’s place. It’s a woman, and she’s been shot in the head.’

‘We don’t know how long she’s been there, sir,’ said Parsons, when they were in the car. ‘The fishermen who found her – they’re staying at the pub, as a matter of fact – said they’d left it a bit late packing up and got lost on the way back from the lake. They’d been blundering around in the wood for a good half hour before they stumbled across her, and then of course it took some time for them to get back to the village and find me and explain where she was … The desk sergeant was trying to contact the police surgeon when I left, but he’s coming from Ipswich, so that’ll take some time.’

‘So no one’s identified her?’ said Ballard, from the back seat.

‘No, sir.’

Stratton twisted his head to look at him. ‘Mary Milburn?’ he asked. Then, ‘You’ve still got someone looking after Michael, have you? Overnight?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because if it is her, then—’

‘Yes,’ said Ballard tersely. ‘I know.’

Shut up, Stratton told himself. It’s his first suspicious death and he doesn’t need me stating the bleeding obvious. After a couple of minutes’ tense silence, Ballard said, ‘Who’s there with her?’

‘PC Harwood, sir,’ said Parsons, adding, apologetically, ‘apart from the desk sergeant, he was the only one at the station.’

Stratton was surprised when Ballard tapped him on the shoulder and murmured, ‘Our version of Arliss.’

‘Ah,’ said Stratton. That explained Parsons’ tone. PC Arliss had been, until his retirement a couple of years earlier, notorious as West End Central’s most incompetent policeman. Dim-witted, ignorant and unplagued by apprehension, responsibility, doubt, or anything else except his bowels – with which he was presumably still locked in mortal combat – Arliss’s working life had been one gigantic skive. ‘Everyone’s got one, I suppose.’

Parsons turned off the road and onto a rough track, where they bumped along over ruts and furrows for several minutes before the way became too narrow for them to continue. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to walk from here, sir.’

They squelched across waterlogged ground in the dank and chilly darkness. Although there was a full moon and a clear sky, the density of trees, even at this time of year, made torches very necessary. As they entered the crude, narrow path through the wood, Stratton, dodging thorny bushes that dragged at his clothing and swiped his face, wondered how the hell they were going to get the body out, never mind the car, which had seemed, as he’d got out, to be sinking into the sticky mixture of black mud and leaf-mould that was all around them. They tramped on for several minutes before Parsons said, ‘Over here,’ and motioned them towards a small clearing on the edge of which a stout constable – obviously Harwood – stood leaning against a tree, wearing an expression of vacant moroseness with which Stratton was only too familiar. Thinking he was unobserved, the constable was amusing himself by shining his torch on different parts of his anatomy. On the other side of the clearing, a pair of orange eyes appeared in the darkness – a fox – and then vanished, soundless in the undergrowth.

‘Where’s the body?’ asked Ballard, causing Harwood to jump and drop his torch, which shattered on a protruding root. ‘See what I mean?’ he muttered to Stratton, while Harwood grovelled about on the ground.

‘At least he’s managed to stay awake,’ said Stratton.

‘Only because it’s too bloody wet to sit down. For God’s sake,’ he added to Harwood, ‘Parsons’ll help you find it in a minute.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The constable straightened up with a grunt. ‘Just behind there.’ He indicated a tree to his right.

The woman was lying face down. Her hair was covered by a headscarf, and she was wearing a camel-hair coat, stockings and wellington boots. On the bare nape of her neck, in the gap between coat and brightly patterned scarf, Stratton saw, by the light of his torch, a neat round hole that looked as though it had been made by a small calibre bullet.

‘Entry wound, presumably,’ said Ballard, ‘seeing as she’s fallen on her face. Doesn’t look as if anyone’s tried to move her – no drag marks.’

‘Doesn’t look like an accident, either,’ said Stratton, staring at the dark staining and peppering of propellant particles around the edge of the wound. ‘I’d say that was done at close range. Not touching, but pretty damn near … There should be a shell case somewhere, unless whoever did this picked it up,’ he added, shining his torch on the leaf-mould around the woman’s head.

‘Or unless Harwood’s gone and trodden it in.’ Ballard squatted down and peered intently at the ground. ‘Oh no, here we are.’ He pointed to a small object a couple of inches away from the woman’s feet.

Stratton shone his torch on the tree directly in front of the body. ‘This is the logical place if she was shot from behind … Yes, here’s the bullet, embedded in the bark. Must have come out through her face.’

There was a moment’s silence as both men contemplated what this might look like, before Ballard said, ‘Those’ll help us, anyway. No sign of a gun, though. We’ll keep Harwood here overnight – he’ll love that – and make a thorough search in the morning. You know …’ He stared down at a curl of hair which had escaped from the scarf. ‘It definitely could be Mary Milburn, although I don’t think her hair was quite so dark.’

‘But it was brown, wasn’t it?’ asked Stratton, remembering the photograph.

‘Yes, but this is almost black. Mind you, she seems to be the right shape and size, although it’s hard to tell in that thick coat.’ Ballard shone his torch on the surrounding tree roots. ‘No handbag that I can see. Odd to come out without one, I’d have thought.’

‘Perhaps whoever shot her took it away with him. Did Mary Milburn have a handbag when you saw her?’

Ballard thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Can’t remember. She did have a coat on, but she was wearing shoes, not boots.’

‘So you noticed her legs, then?’

‘Hard not to.’ Ballard, looking sheepish, avoided Stratton’s eye. ‘She was climbing over a stile.’

‘Very observant,’ said Stratton, wryly. ‘It sounds,’ he added, lowering his voice in deference to the dead woman, ‘as though you got quite an eyeful.’

‘Yes.’ Ballard drew away from the body as he said this. ‘It was rather hard not to. If this is her, then … Well, she may have been an absolute bitch, but she was lovely, you know … Captivating.’

‘She’d have to have been standing up,’ said the police surgeon, Trickett, who’d arrived twenty minutes later, accompanied by an assistant who was struggling with a portable lamp and a stretcher. Trickett, a stocky, elderly man with the face of an unlucky boxer,
was immediately proprietorial, refusing to engage with either Ballard or Stratton until he’d completed his examination, sketched, photographed and recovered the bullet and shell case. ‘Trained by Spilsbury himself,’ Ballard had murmured, when they’d withdrawn to the clearing, leaving him to it. ‘And never misses the opportunity to remind you of it.’

They stood in silence, smoking, until Trickett beckoned them forward to look at the body, which he’d turned over. Despite the bluish-white colour of her face and the leaf-mould that clung to the edges of her hair, Stratton could see that she’d been attractive, with neat features and long, dark eyelashes. As they’d guessed, there was a hole to the side of the woman’s right nostril, larger than the one at the back of her neck, but almost as neat. As Stratton looked down at her, an earwig detached itself from the muck by her ear and began crawling across her cheek. Averting his eyes, he looked a question at Ballard, who responded with a tight shake of his head followed by a slight raise of the eyebrows and a barely discernible shrug. They hadn’t found Mary Milburn, but an unknown woman.

‘Entry wound at the back,’ said Trickett briskly, as if delivering a lecture. ‘Came out there,’ he pointed a stubby finger, ‘point three two, Eley shell case. I’ll pass them on to the lab. You’ve not found the weapon yet, have you?’ Without pausing for a response, he continued, ‘The ballistics people’ll tell you if it was a pistol or a rifle, but I doubt it was a hunting accident because she’s been shot at close range. No apparent marks of the muzzle touching the skin, but whoever shot her couldn’t have been more than a few feet away. She was standing up at the time – the track of the missile is horizontal – and she fell forwards. I understand she was found at around seven o’clock.’ Here, Trickett shot a look at Ballard, who nodded confirmation. ‘She could have been killed at any time up to three hours before that.’ Putting his hand up in a traffic stopping gesture, he added, ‘Can’t tell you anything more at this stage.’

‘So that’s any time after four, is it?’ asked Ballard.

‘I’d say so.’

‘Still be light at four,’ said Stratton. ‘Starts getting dark about half-past, though.’

Harwood, who had limited his contribution to the occasional grunt and sniff, said, ‘Mr Tynan takes potshots at rooks out of the windows.’

‘Wrong direction.’ Ballard jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Tynan’s house is that way.’

‘Well,’ said Harwood sulkily, ‘There’s poachers come in these woods all the time.’

‘As I said,’ snapped Trickett, ‘an accident is extremely unlikely.’

‘But if she’d come up on them unawares …’ said Stratton. ‘I suppose they might have thought it was an animal, but people make a hell of a lot more noise than foxes—’

‘I’m off now,’ said Trickett, peeved that he was no longer the centre of attention. ‘Can your man help with the stretcher?’

‘Just a moment.’ Ballard squatted down and, wrapping his handkerchief over his hand, began examining the pockets of the woman’s coat. ‘Nothing here … I wonder if whoever killed her went through her pockets as well … Wait a minute, there’s a tear in the lining – something behind it … Here we go. Shine your torch down a bit, Stratton, can you? It’s a library card for a Mrs Rosemary Aylett. Local … well, Suffolk, anyway. That should narrow things down a bit.’

‘Assuming it’s hers, of course,’ said Trickett. ‘
Can
we get moving, please?’

‘Back to square one,’ said Stratton, when they were back at the George and Dragon. Ballard had telephoned his boss from the station and, as it was after hours, they were drinking in Stratton’s room, having spoken to the two fishermen, who were rather the worse for wear after downing several restorative whiskies each. The men had explained that they were after an enormous pike which, having managed to evade the attentions of anglers for years, had become an object of fascination to the fishing community, and George Denton had confirmed the truth of this. They’d heard several shots during the time they were fishing, but assumed them to be sportsmen or poachers.

‘Which they probably were,’ said Ballard. ‘All but one, anyway.’

Stratton, who’d kept quiet during the interview because it wasn’t his investigation, said, remembering the guns his father and elder brothers had had on the farm, ‘You’d use a twelve bore for partridge or pheasant, but that would usually be a shotgun. A rifle’s more for deer, but I should think there’d be some of those round here.’

‘I’ll talk to Tynan about it tomorrow,’ said Ballard. ‘And I need to find out what the hell Mrs Aylett – if that’s who she is – was doing in the wood.’

‘Back to London for me,’ said Stratton. ‘And I’ll just have to hope there’s been some response to the house-to-house enquiries, because there’s bugger all else to go on.’

After a queasy breakfast, avoiding Pauline’s eye – they’d put away far too much of the bottle of Scotch Denton had sold Stratton after hours – Ballard rang the station to tell Parsons to contact the library service about Mrs Aylett’s address, and headed off to see Ambrose Tynan. Neither he nor his staff knew who she was, and none of them had seen or heard anything strange on the previous afternoon or evening. Tynan had condescendingly confirmed that yes, he did own – amongst other things – several shotguns, which were all licensed and, as he put it, ‘present and correct’, and that he did ‘pot the odd rook’ from an upstairs window, adding that the boy Michael frequently came over for lessons in shooting outdoors, although he had not done so yesterday. He’d said this with a teeth-baring smile of statesmanlike
noblesse oblige
, so that Ballard was left in no doubt as to the superiority of his marksmanship. Tynan had even taken him up the grand staircase to show him the best place to shoot from, which proved to be on the opposite side of the house to the wood where they’d found Mrs Aylett’s body.

He was about to leave when Tynan’s manservant, who was quite as stiff as Stratton had said he was, with a good long nose for sneering down as well, told him there was a call from the
station and directed him to the telephone in the kitchen corridor.

‘Found an address for Mrs Aylett, sir – Wickham Market,’ said PC Parsons. ‘The librarian was most helpful. Confirmed the description – says she’s a big reader, keen on romances. A widow, she said, lives by herself, always stops to chat.’

‘Wickham Market’s what? Forty miles away?’

‘I’d say so, sir.’

‘What was she doing coming all the way up here for a walk, then?’

‘No idea, sir. If she was keen on romances, perhaps she liked nature, too. Or she was visiting someone.’

‘Did this librarian happen to know if Mrs Aylett had any relatives?’

‘A sister, sir, a Mrs Curtin. Muriel. She’s a member of the library, too.’

Before Parsons could list the sister’s literary preferences, Ballard said, ‘Address?’ and took it down in his notebook. ‘Does she have a telephone?’

‘No, sir. I checked with the exchange.’

‘Right, I’m on my way.’

By the time Ballard arrived at Wickham Market, driving with the car windows open to get a good blast of fresh, cold air, his hangover was beginning to wear off and with it, the concomitant feelings of lethargy, self-disgust and the rest. Anxiety, it was true, remained, but that was the case – wanting to prove to himself that he could investigate a suspicious death without fouling it up – which was probably the main reason he’d drunk too much Scotch in the first place. The main reason, he thought, but not the only one – his father’s death, Pauline and the baby she couldn’t conceive and fancying Mary/Ananda so much were all factors too, no matter how hard he tried to put them out of his mind. The other, and for the time being, more pressing, reason was that
he was about to tell this poor bloody woman that in all probability her sister was dead, and ask her to identify the body. He’d never actually uttered the words himself, but he’d been present enough times when they’d been said, and he could remember all of them, clear as day. That soundless split-second – often before the officer had opened his mouth – when they
knew
. The bad news. The end of hope. The moment that kept coming back to you whether you wanted it to or not. When he’d heard that his dad had died, Ballard had felt an actual physical jolt, as if he’d just stepped off a merry-go-round while it was still in motion, a horrible sensation he’d never forgotten. At least he’d known that his father was ill – for poor Muriel Curtin, he thought grimly, it was going to be a great deal worse.