Gone to Ground (2 page)

There was a flat-screen TV in one corner of the room, digi-box and other accoutrements alongside. Framed film posters back down in the hall and on the stairs.

The middle room, with a window looking out over the side passage leading toward the garden, functioned as a study. Will doubted if it was usually in as much disarray. The lower section of a tall, three-drawer filing cabinet had been pulled open and a number of files lay close by on the floor; two of the desk drawers had been upturned, their contents strewn to all corners; papers were littered across the floor.

Someone searching for something worth stealing, Will wondered, or a wanton act of destruction?

There was a Hewlett-Packard laser printer to the left of the desk, an empty space where a computer might have stood. A mains lead hung loose toward the floor. Resting against the side wall by the desk's edge were several slim computer manuals, among them the white fronted User's Guide to an Apple iBook G4 laptop.

Worth stealing certainly.

But worth killing for?

The main bedroom, at the rear, had been made en suite, a small dressing room leading into the bathroom where the body had been found. Here again, everything was in turmoil. Cream-coloured sheets had been torn from the bed; the contents of both the wardrobe and the chest of drawers hurled haphazardly across the room. Shirts, jackets, boxer shorts, jeans. Some of the shirts had been ripped almost in two. A small photograph that might once have stood on the bedside table had been pulled from its frame, the glass splintered and smashed, the photograph itself torn in half then half again.

With care, Will picked up the pieces and reassembled them on the bed.

Two men in shirtsleeves, arms on each other's shoulders, smiling. Squinting a little because of the sun. One man, the older of the two but not by much—mid-thirties, nothing more—was stockier and dark-haired; the younger man was taller, lean, a fold of fair hair falling over his face, reminding Will of one of the posters on the stairs—Montgomery Glift or James Dean, he was never sure which was which. His mother had once confessed to having had a crush on one of them when she was younger; she had watched his films on the television on weekend afternoons. He thought it might have been Montgomery Clift.

Will looked at the photograph again, the way the couple's smiles radiated happiness.

What had Helen said? A lovers' tiff?

When he went outside, easing off his gloves and reaching into his pocket for a mint, Helen was standing on the far sidewalk, smoking a cigarette. It was cold, cold enough to see her breath.

"My lungs for your teeth," she said, seeing him pop the mint into his mouth.

"You can live without teeth," Will said.

"Clever sod," Helen said and poked out her tongue.

"Where do we stand with ID?" Will asked.

"Early days."

"Wallet? Driving license? Passport left lying around in some drawer?"

Helen shook her head, "Not so far. No sign of a wallet at all."

"Neighbours?"

"First name's Stephen—they think. Been living here less than a year. Keeps pretty much to himself. That's how the cleaning woman knew him, apparently, Mr. Stephen."

"That's all? No surname?"

"That's all."

Without meaning to, Will crunched the mint between his teeth. "How d'you want to do this? You want to stick around and talk to the pathologist or shall I?"

"It's Danebury?"

"Danebury."

Helen shrugged. "I could stay."

Edgar Danebury had once made reference, with a nod in Helen's direction, to officers endowed with, as he put it, pulchritudinous plenitude. Next chance she got, Helen had brought her boot down hard enough on Danebury's instep to make his eyes water, since which time he had kept any extraneous remarks to himself.

Back behind his desk, Will switched on his computer and accessed first the electoral roll, then the council tax records held at the Guildhall: the householder was one Stephen Bryan. Stephen Makepeace Bryan, to give him his full due.

Some forty-five minutes later, one of the scene of crime officers at the house found a pink British Library card bearing the name Bryan, Mr. S. M., inside one of the books in the upstairs room, and Helen had it biked round to Will's office. The face in the small square photograph matched that of the dark-haired man from the photograph Will had found in pieces in the bedroom. Matching it to that of the murdered man would not be so easy. And, without visual identification by a relative, and lacking any obviously identifiable external marks on the body—scars, birthmarks or tattoos—they could not be one hundred percent certain that Bryan and the victim were one and the same.

A DNA match with the dead man's mother, or, failing that, with siblings, might give them the desired result, though Will thought dental records could be their quickest and best bet, the lower part of the face not having suffered as badly as the rest. An initial check of dentists in the area, however, failed to show Bryan as a patient, meaning they would have to look further afield.

All those books on film, Will thought, magazines, DVDs—a hobby or something more? A quick check on Google told him there were more courses in the area involving some kind of film studies than he would have thought possible. Having noted the numbers of the various departments, he began ringing round and struck pay dirt on his fifth call.

Stephen Bryan had been appointed to the Department of Communication Studies at Anglia Ruskin University in the autumn of the preceding year, and was currently teaching courses in British Cinema, Class and Culture, and Sexuality, Gender and Identity.

No, he did not have any classes that day.

Just as well, Will thought, all those students missing a lost hour of vital education. More time to lounge around in bed, sad bastards.

He rang back the department administrator and learned that prior to taking this post, Bryan had done some part-time teaching at De Montfort University in Leicester. Yes, the woman said, her accent pleasantly northern, not East Anglian at all, she believed Leicester was where Mr. Bryan had lived before. As for a previous address, well, it was, of course, outside normal university policy, but in the circumstances if she could call him back...

Within ten minutes, Will had Bryan's old address in the Clarendon Park area of Leicester and very soon after that the name of the dentist with whom he had been a patient. Or should that nowadays, he wondered, be customer? No matter. A copy of Stephen Bryan's dental records would be put in the post that afternoon, guaranteed delivery by 9 a.m. the following day.

Will rose from his desk and stretched his arms, thought about fetching coffee from the machine, changed his mind and sat back down, reaching for the phone.

"Mr. Bryan," he asked the administrator, "you don't happen to know if he was married or anything do you?"

"Oh, no," the woman said, something of a smile in her voice, "I don't think he was anything like that at all."

"He's gay, then," Helen said. "That's what you think?"

They were in the police station car park, standing close to Helen's VW, the end of a long day. Headlights were showing clearly now on most of the passing cars. The moon like a thumbprint, faint in the sky.

"Don't you?" Will said.

"Based on what? One photograph? A little bit of innuendo down the telephone?"

"When you first saw him ... the body ... it was what you thought then."

"Yes."

"And why?"

Helen shrugged. "The scene ... the force with which he'd been bludgeoned."

"Bludgeoned?" Will raised an eyebrow. "That's a good old-fashioned word."

"You know me, Will. Just an old-fashioned girl."

He grinned. "Home by eight, a little gentle needlepoint before Ovaltine and an early night."

"That kind of thing."

"Not what I've heard."

"Oh, Will," fluttering her lashes, "you'll never know."

"Can we," Will said, "get back to the matter in hand?"

Helen grinned. "In hand, certainly."

"A lovers' quarrel, that was your suggestion."

"Or the obvious."

"Which is what?"

"A bit of rough trade. Bryan goes out cruising, picks up some bloke and brings him home. Things turn nasty round about act four."

"You don't think that's a bit of a cliché?"

"Clichés are clichés for a reason."

Will nodded. Sexuality, Gender and Identity: perhaps there were a few lessons to be learned there. "The wallet turn up?" he asked.

"Not so far."

"Credit cards? Cash?"

Helen shook her head.

"The laptop would be too much to hope for."

"Wouldn't it just?"

"Robbery the motive, then, you think?" Will asked. "Or a little add-on after things went wrong?"

Helen pointed toward the backseat. "Maybe we'll know more once I've been through all those. Letters and diaries from the house."

"You want me to take half?"

"No need. Go home and be nice to Lorraine and your kids."

Halfway across to his car, Will turned. "First thing tomorrow, if those dental records match, we're going to have to track down the family, next of kin."

"I know."

As he waited for a gap in the traffic he could see her behind the wheel of her VW, lighting another cigarette.

***

Will drew the car slowly onto the gravel, locked it, and walked toward the house, the downstairs curtains already drawn against the dark. Lorraine was sitting in the half-light, the sound of the Cowboy Junkies, languorous and slightly spaced-out, coming low from the stereo; Jake was curled on the settee beside her, his head in her lap, the baby held high against her shoulder, sleeping.

For a moment, Will thought his heart had stopped.

Lorraine turned toward him in slow surprise, and, as he reached down to take the baby from her, his fingers grazed the back of her neck and then the baby's face was against his, the familiar musky smell of her breath, the bewildering smallness of her bones.

Lorraine lifted Jake, the boy barely waking, and together they carried the children up to bed.

"You know how long it has been," Will said, unhooking the fastening at the back of her blouse, "since we made love?"

"A long time?"

Will laughed. "Unless you count a couple of assists."

She dug her elbow sharply into his ribs and he cried out louder than was necessary and rolled back on the bed, taking her with him, her dark hair, as their mouths met, falling across her face and his.

STEPHEN BRYAN'S PARENTS HAD MOVED FROM CHESTER-field to a new-build bungalow on the outskirts of Kirkby Stephen, pitched perfectly between Swaledale and the Lakes. His father, early retired from a medium-grade administrative post with Derbyshire County Council, was only too happy to potter in his garden, slowly knocking it into shape; a former midwife, his mother now volunteered at the Citizens' Advice Bureau three days a week. Still fit, they walked a good ten to twelve miles each weekend, rain or shine.

The request had come from the Cambridgeshire Force mid-morning, and the local sergeant had waited until there was a woman officer free from other duties to accompany him. Never a task to be relished and this one, by the sound of it, worse than most.

Delaying the inevitable, the sergeant parked at the end of street.

Ted Bryan was digging a trench beyond last year's set of onions; his wife, Grace, sitting, coat on, reading a Margaret Forster novel in the weak afternoon sun. As the two officers passed through the side gate, the book slipped from her lap, unnoticed, to the ground.

"Ted, Ted..." She called her husband's name, and, resting one foot on the spade, he looked around. "Oh, Ted..."

"Perhaps we should go inside?" the sergeant suggested, as gently as he could.

Reaching out, Grace Bryan gripped the sleeve of his uniform just above the wrist. "It's Lesley, isn't it? Something's happened. Or is it Stephen? No, it's Stephen. Our Stephen. There's been an accident. Ted, there's been an accident."

"Mrs. Bryan," said the constable, stepping forward, "let's go inside."

"Just tell me, is he all right? He is all right?"

Reading the answer in the young constable's eyes, the older woman's face collapsed inward, like a balloon sucked short of air.

Ted Bryan looked into the sergeant's face, then turned away. "Bastard!" he said. "Bastard! Bastard!" Driving the spade hard into the ground.

Helen Walker had begun reading Stephen Bryan's diaries the previous evening while eating her supper—a cheese and tomato pizza pried from the freezer and then microwaved, sliced into manageable sections and washed down with a glass of quotidian chardonnay. Not finding anything either salacious or especially revealing, she had shifted her attention to a batch of some thirty or so letters, stretching back several years and ranging from the sheerly practical—an acceptance by the gas company that he had been overcharged for the first quarter in his new accommodation—through the academic to the more intimate and personal—family, lovers, friends. Helen had saved these for last; poured a second glass of wine, ran a bath.

There was some lengthy correspondence, entertaining and chatty, sent from New Zealand by someone whom Helen thought at first might be an old girlfriend, but later realized was Stephen's sister, Lesley; a letter of congratulation from his mother, sent on the occasion of his new university appointment, her happiness allayed by an anxiety that was never spelled out; and finally, some half a dozen love letters, the erotic content in places detailed to the point where Helen felt she was being told more about the specifics of man-on-man byplay than she really wanted to know.

Back downstairs and wrapped in an oversize white toweling dressing gown, the television switched on though she was neither watching nor listening, Helen smoked a final cigarette of the evening, drank instant coffee, and went back through what she'd read, noting down those names and dates that seemed, on early sight, to be important. Between midnight and the quarter hour she felt her eyes closing, pushed her notebook aside, turned the key in the front door, switched out the last of the lights, and went to bed.