Bricks and Mortality: Campbell & Carter 3 (3 page)

This was true. Jess made a note of her address and said, as she had told Trenton, someone would be round to speak to her.

As for the travellers, wherever they were camped, it was unlikely they had been responsible for the blaze. They’d have left the area immediately if so. Having sighted Jess, they were probably packing up and leaving even now. If tracked down and questioned they would have seen and heard nothing.

There were people who wanted to talk to the police but didn’t know anything. Roger Trenton would probably prove one of those. There were those who, if they did know anything, wouldn’t tell you out of sheer contrariness and Muriel Pickering might well fall into that category. Then there were the people such as the travellers who didn’t want to talk to the police, whether they knew anything or not. Occasionally, one pearl in a whole bed of oysters, there was someone who actually knew something and was prepared to come forward. Jess crossed her fingers and hoped they found such a witness soon.

One other person had been present, but unnoticed, and had left shortly before Jess’s arrival on the scene. Alfie Darrow had set out at first light to check his snares. Alfie was not a countryman, although he’d lived most of his life in Weston St Ambrose. But his grandfather had been skilled in country ways and it was he who had shown his grandson how to make a simple snare. Alfie’s grandfather had been the male presence in the family when Alfie was a child. His father had run off when Alfie was in the cradle. There was an ancient rabbit warren extending over a large area in a field on the edge of a copse of tangled native woodland, which formed a border between the single-track lane called Long Lane and the ‘rabbit field’ as Alfie knew it. Over the years the rabbits had made little paths all over the copse and through the undergrowth, each one leading back to their warren. They were creatures of habit. As they scurried back along these narrow tracks to their burrows, they had to pass under a wire fence half buried in nettles, thistles and dock, and it was to this fence Alfie fixed his most successful snares, just where the rabbits emerged.

Today, when he’d set out, he’d soon become aware of the activity around Key House. The smell of burning hung in the air. From time to time a flame would shoot upward into the lightening sky as some still-remaining beam or upper floorboards of the house fell victim to the remorseless progress of the fire. Alfie concealed himself behind the untidy hedgerow by the road and watched it all, spending the most entertaining and exciting couple of hours he could remember. The fire crew were the real-life action heroes of the computer games that were Alfie’s favoured amusement. Uniformed and helmeted, they bellowed instructions and warnings to one another as they played the hoses over the fire, and sent great jets of water into the air. When the burning remains of the upper floor crashed down into the interior, filling the air with a meteor shower of golden sparks, Alfie had to press both hands to his mouth to stop himself whooping aloud with joy. The water fell on to the crackling timbers below and they cracked and spat like cornered wild beasts. It struck the hot stones of the building with a great hiss, and sent up clouds of steam to mingle with the smoke. Alfie’s mouth now hung open in wonder. Burning embers flew across the road like rockets. It smelled like Bonfire Night. Alfie continued to watch it all entranced, heedless of his cramped hiding place and the awkward way his limbs were bent to squeeze into it.

Then the first police car had arrived, with two uniformed officers, and put an end to the fun. With the arrival of the law on the scene, Alfie decided it was time for him to go. He was not unknown to the local police and he thought he recognised one of the coppers. The plod would recognise him, if he spotted him, and the next thing Alfie knew, he’d be accused of starting the fire. The police were like that, in Alfie’s view, they grabbed the first familiar face and pinned whatever they could on its owner. He could come back the next day to check the snares. He crept out of his den, stretched his stiffened limbs, and set off over the field home. What a story he had to tell. If he’d waited a little longer until the body had been discovered, he’d have had an even more dramatic tale.

The best laid plans of mice and men seldom work out. Had they been contemporaries, Ian Carter thought, the Scottish bard who penned the words might have had him in mind.

Sitting in his one and only armchair with a mug of instant coffee in his hand, he felt a moment of reflection creep over him. It was very early, only just light enough to see without electricity, and the house was quiet. It was that hour when, for a brief interlude, events weren’t rushing by while he laboured to keep up. He had time to think.

He sipped his coffee, which managed to be hot, bitter and tasteless all at once, and considered his life. To start at the top, a really big plan to have gone astray had been that in which he’d envisaged Sophie and himself growing old together, peacefully. Arm in arm, they’d have watched their daughter mature into a poised, graceful and charming young woman. The sort of young woman Sophie had appeared to him, when all was going well at the beginning of their relationship.

That plan had gone out of the window when Sophie met Rodney Marsham. Rodney! I ask you! Not for the first time, Carter asked himself how his then wife could have been swept off her feet by someone so pale, podgy and thoroughly dull; a man whose permanent air of bonhomie Carter found intensely irritating. A man, moreover, whose business interests, undeniably profitable, appeared to Carter elusive, if not dodgy.

‘That’s the copper in you, Ian,’ Sophie had retorted when he’d made this last objection to her, at the time of their break-up. ‘You suspect everyone!’

To be fair, she’d accused him of that many times during their marriage and not just at the end of it. He supposed she was probably right. He had not been the husband for Sophie. Things had been going wrong between them long before Rodney appeared on the scene, smiling and looking satisfied with life. Who wouldn’t give up a cantankerous policeman who spent his working days contemplating all that made man vile, and came home at night tired and disinclined to party? Why not change him for a cheery, sociable fellow with a golden touch in business matters? Rodney and Sophie were probably made for each other. He should not begrudge them their contentedness. But Millie, that was another matter altogether.

There was a faint clatter and then the sound of small footsteps padding towards the living-room door. It creaked open and Millie’s face peered through the crack. Seeing her father sitting there with his coffee, she pushed open the door and came in, hopping across the floor in bare feet and nestling into the beanbag opposite him. She’d put on her dressing gown over her pyjamas, even if she’d forgotten her slippers, and clutched MacTavish to her.

MacTavish was a disconcertingly humanoid bear, acquired on a visit to Scotland in their days as a family. He wore a tartan beret sewn between his ears and a tartan shawl slung rakishly across his furry tummy. He had originally had a plastic buckler and claymore, but Sophie, in one of her anti-war phases, had detached his weapons and disposed of them. It was typical of Sophie, thought Carter, that her contribution to world peace consisted largely of symbolic gestures of that sort. On the other hand, she would organise the occasional coffee morning to raise funds for a charity to help those whose lives were disrupted by conflicts; and he had to admit that probably did more good than waving home-made placards and hanging effigies of politicians. In any case, MacTavish’s smile, embroidered on his plush countenance, was hardly warlike. He had a smirk that reminded Carter of Rodney Marsham’s.

His daughter had fixed him with a direct accusing stare that reminded him of Sophie. What had happened to the daydream of graceful, charming …

‘Why have you got up so early?’ demanded Millie.

‘I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ Carter apologised. ‘I tried to be quiet.’

‘I heard the tap running in the kitchen. It sort of groans when you switch it off. You ought to get it mended.’

Yes, that was Sophie’s voice all right.

‘I’ll get round to it,’ he said defensively. He had the horrible feeling he’d had this conversation many times in the past with her mother.

‘MacTavish heard it too.’

He opened his mouth to argue that MacTavish had, literally, cloth ears. But there was something about her relationship with the toy that both touched him and made him feel guilty. MacTavish had never let her down.

‘Sorry, MacTavish,’ he said. ‘Did you sleep all right, both of you, before I made a racket in the kitchen?’

‘Mmn …’ murmured Millie, her gaze travelling critically around the room. ‘Mummy and Rodney are calling in an interior designer.’ She spoke the last words with respect. ‘An interior designer,’ she explained kindly, ‘picks out your furniture for you.’

Stung, Carter retorted, ‘I can pick out my own furniture.’

‘Why did you pick this?’ asked Millie with that innocent candidness that renders any question unanswerable.

‘I was in a rush. I just needed some furniture. By the next time you come, I hope I’ll have got the place fixed up.’

Her visit had not been planned. Sophie had rung up and told him that it was an emergency.

‘My school has asbestos in the roof,’ said Millie now, obviously expert at picking up thought waves.

‘Yes, your mum told me. I’m surprised. I thought all the asbestos had been taken out of buildings.’

‘They didn’t know about it,’ Millie explained. ‘They’d got a false ceiling in the hall and it was discovered when the decorators came to paint it. You have to do special things when you remove asbestos. So we can’t use the school because we might get ill. They’re taking the asbestos away this week. Then we can go back.’

‘So I understand.’

‘Mummy and Rodney couldn’t put off the trip to New York—’

‘Millie,’ Carter interrupted. ‘I’m very happy that you’re here. I’d like to see you more often … It’s a bit of luck, your school finding the asbestos and Rodney having a business trip to New York and – and all the rest of it. It gives you a chance to visit me here.’

MacTavish’s black, shiny eyes were fixed on him. His embroidered smirk suddenly appeared more a snarl.
Can’t you do better than that
? he seemed to be asking.

‘Am I going to Auntie Monica’s again today?’ Millie homed in on the weak point of his defence.

‘Yes. I have to go to work, I’m afraid. We have investigations underway. I could’ve arranged some leave if I’d had more notice—’ He broke off. ‘You like staying with Auntie Monica for the day, don’t you?’

‘Oh, yes, she’s got two cats. You ought to get a cat.’

‘I wouldn’t be here all day to look after it.’

‘Auntie Monica’s back door has a cat flap in it, so her cats can go in and out by themselves. So if it’s sunny and they want to sit in the garden, they can. And if it rains and they want to go inside, they can do that, too. She’s my great-aunt, you know. She’s Mummy’s aunt, so that makes her my great-aunt. But she doesn’t like to be called that because she says it makes her feel old. She is old, isn’t she?’

‘Oldish. I’ll go and make us some porridge; it’s just about breakfast-time. Why don’t you and MacTavish lay the table?’

‘What are you investigating?’ asked Millie moments later as she rattled the cutlery in his untidy knife drawer. Ten year olds are not deflected from a topic that interests them, however unsuitable. He was finding that out.

‘There was a big fire yesterday, at an old house in the country, an old empty house,’ Carter emphasised quickly from his place at the porridge pan. No need to trouble her young mind with thoughts of a dead body.

MacTavish had been propped up on the draining board alongside the stove and was watching him in the way a Scottish bear could be expected to watch an Englishman make porridge.
Listen, MacTavish, I’m not putting salt in it, just to satisfy you!

‘Did someone start it on purpose? Will you find out who it was?’

‘I hope we shall.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

MacTavish’s smirk mocked him.
Watch it, MacTavish, or I might drop porridge on that tartan pancake on your head … and then you’ll have to go in the washing machine again!

‘They might have been playing with matches,’ said Millie censoriously. ‘You shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t play with fire.’

‘You’re absolutely right,’ said her father.

After breakfast he drove her, with MacTavish, to Weston St Ambrose where his former wife’s Aunt Monica lived. She was a retired primary school headmistress and pleased at having a child around the place again, if only for a few hours.

‘Don’t worry about us, Ian,’ she assured him. ‘I have plenty of things planned for us to do. I’ll give her lunch and her tea, and then you can come and pick her up tonight when it suits you.’

Carter glanced to where Millie was introducing MacTavish to a pair of suspicious cats. Millie was wearing a white fake fur gilet. It struck him the cats were a tad suspicious of that, too.

‘I really appreciate it, Monica. I’d have taken some time off if I’d known.’

‘It’s fine, Ian, really. Off you go.’

So he kissed Millie and left. MacTavish, manipulated by his owner, waved him goodbye.

I can’t communicate with my child, he thought sadly. She probably finds it difficult to communicate with me. That’s why MacTavish has been brought along. He’s our intermediary.

The reason he had to go in to work today was because Tom Palmer, the pathologist, had conducted his examination into the body found at Key House and was ready to come up with his conclusions. The luckless Sergeant Phil Morton had attended the procedure, but it was Carter and Jess Campbell who later found themselves in Tom’s tiny office, down at the morgue.

The pathologist rustled papers and eventually, giving up finding what he sought, scratched his mop of black hair and announced, ‘This one was a challenge.’

‘Too badly damaged?’ Carter asked.

‘Badly damaged, certainly. But I like a challenge. Let’s see … Deceased is male and about thirty years of age. I’ve got it on my tape recorder but it’s not all up on the computer yet. You’ll have it all nicely printed out for you eventually but we’re short handed here.’ Tom gazed at them as if they were somehow responsible.