In the Moors (23 page)

“Both parents. But the mother died.”

“And the exhumation of the corpses?”

“I think he had this gut feeling she'd be there. Even so, he told me Patsy was too clever to get caught … he was unable to express what he really felt. Arnie's sort of ‘soft centre, hard exterior', you know?”

“Sounds like you got on with him.”

“I did. I'd go back. I feel I'll have to, after … if there is an
after
. To tie things up.”

“There's always an
after
in my experience.”

“As a professional, do you get gut feelings about things? Can you guess how cases'll turn out?”

“Not always. The ending can come as a shock. But more commonly, you've evaluated the odds and are going for the best result within them.”

I suspected she'd already evaluated Cliff's odds. Was she going to recommend he plead guilty? I shuddered. There was no mitigation for child killers—they went down for life. I tried to straighten the thoughts in my head, but before I could ask her about this, she began to talk.

“It's the nasty shocks that stay in the memory. I'm in a hard-nosed profession, but I don't mind admitting things sometimes get to me. I was remembering a case I had in Aberdeen. The victim, the way she'd been treated … well, she would never bear children, let's put it that way.”

I blanched. “And you prosecuted this man?”

“Yup.” Linnet gulped at her wine, as if all the shock endings had choked up inside her over the years.

“Successfully?”

“He got the result he deserved. His victim watched justice being done. But these beasts—monsters—they leave scars that are impossible to recover from, ones not on the body. Flashbacks, constant apprehension. But this victim had physical repercussions.”

“You couldn't do anything to help her.”

She shook her head, fast, once and looked across the room, studying the décor.

The image wouldn't leave my mind, either. “I'm not sure if I'll ever have children, but I'd hate to know I never could.”

“Have that ripped away from you.” She took a fast swallow of Shiraz and laughed suddenly. “Make you want a child all the more, probably.”

“Is that what happened? To that man's victim?”

“No idea. I left Aberdeen after a line of gruesome cases in a row. I fancied a change. Thought about my roots. Sent out a few feelers and came up with Hughes and Heaven.”

Whatever she thought about her strong constitution, the wine was getting to her. Her lips were pale, almost white, and her mouth was beginning to move involuntarily, the stage before you start to slur your words.

“It's our gain.”

“Actually, Sabbie, take a tip from me: never try to find your past. Worst thing you can do.”

“All I know is that you're working hard to do your best for Cliff.”

She grinned, emptied the bottle into our glasses, and raised it in the air, without turning round. In seconds, the dishy barman had left a replacement on the table.

“Whoa, I'm driving!”

“I tend to take a taxi. Drop you off, if you like?”

“Better not. I've got an early start, don't want to overdo it.”

“How nauseatingly dull you are.” For a moment, I thought she was being bitchy, but then she flicked on a grin that gave me a momentary glimpse of the person underneath the proficient façade. “We've done nothing but talk about me. What about you? We've probably got a lot in common.”

“I dunno. I was a bit of a late starter. I bet you were fed through some posh school and straight into university. Hot house and all that?”

She shrugged. “Don't worry. I took a well-earned gap year.”

“Blimey, I don't blame you!”

“And it turned into three years. South America. It's an amazing place. Very cheap. Very cheerful, in an odd sort of way. You can get lost in it. I liked it, anyway. I didn't get back until I was twenty-one.”

“So you were a mature student, like me?”

“I believe it only benefits a person. There's more to life than being force-fed qualifications.”

“How true. Well, I should know, took me ages to get going.”

“What? You're a mere kitten. Loads of time left for you to carve out a career
and
have babies.”

“I did say I wasn't sure yet about babies. My sister's got two, so I make do with them.”

“And me, two nephews. I adore them.”

“Hers are a boy and girl. They're pickles, but I only see them in small doses.”

“I'm the same,” said Linnet. “I love their company, even when it's exhausting—kids are like grownups but without the veneer of polite society, don't you think? All you want to do is make them happy, but it's never that easy.” She looked down at her hands, turning her silvery ring. “Anyway, it's too late for me to have babies of my own. I'm off the chart.”

“Nowadays, there isn't a chart, is there?”

She straightened her back. “Okay. You can see into the future?”

“Actually, shamans tend to see into the past—”

“Past, future, what the heck. Tell me what you see about mine.”

“I couldn't.” I shook my head, laughing. “Not unless I began working with you.”

“Couldn't? Or won't? You never get a sudden glimpse?”

“Not often.”

“I don't understand how it works. Does it happen when you're just sitting with someone, or brushing past them in the street?”

“Actually, it's quite random. And it's all mixed up with what I learnt about psychology at Uni—body language, that sort of thing.”

“I think I see.” She leaned back in her chair. “Go on, tell me what's coming off me at this very minute.”

What I was getting was that hotshot Linnet was already fairly pissed, but I kept that to myself because I was beginning to covet the feeling. I hadn't got drunk on a girlie night out, where you giggle over nothing and talk about men's dangly bits, for a long time. “The vibes are rising …” I twitched my fingers like a sham medium. “The vibes are saying … that the ring on your right hand means a lot to you.”

Her reaction was instant. She wrapped her left hand around the ring. She was clutching the finger so tightly that, even in the low pub lighting, I could see the tip of it turn red then blue. “You're right.” Her mouth gave a tight smile. “Go on. Tell me more.”

I leaned right over the table. “You have a past lover. You came back to find him. That's why you left Aberdeen.”

A laugh hiccupped from inside her. Then another. She was dissolving in giggles. “And have I found him? Or maybe her?”

“I don't know. I don't think so.”

Linnet covered her face with her hands until the laughter subsided. She wiped her eyes with her fists. “That was a guess—right?”

“Yeah. Well, it gave you a laugh. You don't look as if you get enough of those.” I raised my glass to her. “Oh hang it. How about I take you up on that offer of a taxi. I can jog back in the morning to get my car. It'll do me good.”

Linnet pulled her mobile out of her bag and switched it off, signifying that her business day was at an end. “Great,” she said. “Let's get down to some serious drinking.”

EIGHTEEN

I woke up on
Thursday morning in exactly the state I deserved. I lay on my back for a minute, remembering the night before. We'd both got slaughtered, Linnet and me. That woman had a committed attitude to partying. We'd stayed at the Admiral, as they do nice food, and Linnet said the tax man would foot our bill. We shifted closer to the big screen to watch a game. Linnet had got keen on footie while in Aberdeen. I don't know my off-side from my off-centre, but by the end of the evening I was yelling and singing along with everyone else—I was pretty good friends with Shiraz, too, although right now, with the strange way the ceiling was behaving, the idea of taking even one sip of its rich redness made me feel like puking. I rolled out of bed and stared at the carpet instead of the ceiling.

Get going girl
, said Gloria's voice, far too loudly, in my head.
Get that bread machine on, then get out in the fresh air.

The greenhouse lifted my spirits, little green shoots bobbing under the spray of my watering can. The hens were looking their cheerful selves again, and they'd hidden two bronze eggs in their straw. I cradled them in the palms of both hands, walking with care as I took them into the kitchen.

I was downing a big glass of water straight from the tap when the doorbell sang at me. I checked my watch, terrified that it was already time for my first client. But at ten to eight, it was probably nothing more exciting than parcel post. I wasn't even looking properly as I opened the door.

“Sabbie,” said Rey, swinging round from scrutinizing the side path.

I held on to my lip muscles, forbidding them to light up into an embracing smile. “Detective Sergeant,” I said, and inclined my head like a geisha.

“I thought I'd catch you early …” His gaze swiveled from my grey, shadow-eyed face down my grubby, malodorous, and shapeless garments, each a total passion exterminator.

“You'd better come in.”

“You look a little bit … wasted.”

“I don't stay in doing macramé every evening, you know.”

“Macra—” He shook his head, a grin struggling for supremacy. I led him into the kitchen.

“Actually, you could do me a massive favour, if you're going back to the station, and give me a lift. I've left my car by the marina.”

“Right! So you do have sensible brain cells tucked under that mane of hair.”

“Just a few. Probably countable on one hand, but—”

“Sabbie, I've come to let you know the results.”

“The results?”

“The pathology results on the bones you found.”

I heard myself gasp. His words had swung me back to the moment when I'd levered up the bare boards.

“I've brought a copy of the report with me.” Rey rested his briefcase on the carpet and sat down on the sofa while he shuffled through the files it contained. “Certain things are beyond doubt. You discovered a man and woman. They were both fifty-plus at the time of death, and that's estimated at between eighteen and thirty years ago. They were deliberately placed side by side under the floorboards in the cottage. So either this was a suicide pact with intervention from a third party, or it was murder.”

Rey silently skimmed through the pages of the report while I leaned against the sink, reeling from his words.

He glanced up. “Sorry. I'll summarize first—the pathology report has given us this—two people died around the time of the Wetland Murders, and in a locality close to where the bodies were discovered; very close. Whether or not they died of natural causes, they didn't put
themselves
under the floorboards.”

“What about the hair you found?”

“The problem with that is we won't have any DNA stored on the original victims—too long back, I'm afraid. But it's only too clear that it's from several different sources.”

“Some of it will be Cliff's. That will be conclusive, won't it? And I bet you've got his DNA already.”

Rey gave a nod, stiff to the point of reluctance. “We've traced ownership of the cottage. At the time of the murders, a local businessman was renting out a few of these country properties. Apparently, the final tenants did a runner, and the owner died in his seventies only a year or so later. It's my guess that the cottage hung around as part of an inheritance for a long time, until it was too run-down to bother with.”

“It's that all right.”

Rey turned the pages, quick, flicking at them. “I'm just trying to find the relevant bits. Here we are.
Cause of death difficult to establish conclusively. A single trauma in the male victim—an abrasion on the fifth left vertebro-costal rib, indicative of a knife stab …
” he glanced up. “Straight between the ribs. Either someone knew what they were doing or just a lucky stab.”

The knife came out of him and into me.
I would never forget those words.

“Intruder?” I asked.

“Or
intruders
.”

“Sorry?”

“There is nothing substantial to clarify who these people are, but the dates and location suggest this must have something to do with the Wetland Murders. If a child murderer lived in this house, the logical assumption is that these are further victims, killed, perhaps, because they'd discovered the truth.”

“But … wouldn't someone need to have gone missing?”

“People go missing every day of the week. It's only children we can actively investigate. Adults have a right to disappear.”

“Patsy disappeared.”

“Neither of these bodies is that of a fifteen-year-old, but we will continue to look.”

A tremor passed through me. “What, pull up all the floorboards?”

“Forensics will take that cottage apart brick by brick. And the garden.”

“Those bodies are not victims. I heard them talk. It was horrid. They were Kissie and Pinchie.”

Rey scratched at an eyebrow. “Oh, whatever, let's run with it, you found them after all. I'm sorry to say that the obvious motive for killing two ruthless sadists might be that someone escaped their clutches and returned. Cliff admits he was in that house and got away. It's looking possible that he has a very long history of murder.”

“Typical! So convenient to pin every dead body in sight on the same person.”

“We examine all alternatives—”

“Cliff didn't kill the Wetland Murderers, Rey. He was just a puny kid.” A better theory flashed into my mind. If a parent of a missing child had gone searching … found that cottage of horrors. Who wouldn't attack the people who tortured your child?

But then I thought about Arnie. I had assumed I'd tell Rey about Arnie but found I was clamping my jaw shut. He had been at the wetlands when the bodies were exhumed, but I was sure there was nothing more hidden behind that story. I'd caused Arnie enough grief. The thought of him being hauled in for questioning made my knees lose their strength. I snatched at the kitchen surface to hold myself up.

“You're in shock,” said Rey. He got up. I felt, rather than saw, his approaching figure. My body tingled, as if he'd caught me in a ring of magnetism. His hands came down onto the corners of my shoulders, where the bones lift and round. I tried to control my breathing, which was rising to Watt's steam engine levels. The gentle touch of his warm hands slid around me until I was leaning into him. I could smell the aftershave he'd sprayed on earlier that morning, even pick out the sandalwood and vetiver. I rested my forehead on his chest, as comfortable as my own pillow. The warmth of his face was right above me, and I knew he had brought his lips to within a millimeter of my hair. A butterfly kiss, a secret one that I was not supposed to know about. I lifted my arms and rested them on his back, subtly pulling him closer.

“Sabbie …” he said, his voice hushed and trembling.

Into the slow-motion encounter came a persistent bleeping. I hadn't put Rey down as the jumpy sort, but his clavicles hit his ears and he bounced away from me.

“What the hell is that?”

I managed a grin. “My bread machine.” The magic moment was over, and I didn't think we would regain it. “Fancy some breakfast?”

I was impressed with Rey, who clearly knew his way around a cafetieré. He made the coffee while I knocked the loaf out of the tin.

“Got the breadmaker from a boot sale.” I hoped I would remind him of that happy Sunday morning we'd spent, which now seemed a long time ago. He was standing so close, his presence was making the hairs on my skin stand erect. “It was still in the packaging,” I waffled on, hardly knowing what I was saying. “Don't suppose they'd worked out why they should stop buying their sliced white from Sainsbury's. Their loss is my gain—the bread tastes like angels' wings.”

“What—feathers?”

I stuck my tongue out at him (just the prettier half inch), put the steaming loaf onto a rack to cool, and put a pan of water on to boil for the two eggs I'd collected earlier. I dashed upstairs to slip into something more clean. I took a few deep breaths and sat on the bed, trying to think. My whole body had fizzed when Rey held me. I'd managed to fool myself into believing we were in a mutual state of flirting. But now I knew it—I was falling for the guy. And probably, he would never fall for me back.

I gave the eggs three and half minutes then lifted them out of the rolling water and dropped them into eggcups. Neither of us spoke as we tucked into breakfast. Finally, Rey pushed away his empty plate. “A rocket's been going round the station since you found that cottage.”

“What d'you mean?”

“Both investigations—the original one and this one now? We should have found those bodies ourselves.”

“You mean the police—”

“Never entered that cottage.”

“No one would ever have known there were bodies down there.”

“So how did you know?”

“I felt it, I guess.”

Rey didn't reply. He swallowed the rest of his coffee and set the mug down with utmost caution. I took the silence as a go-ahead.

“Whether the bodies are victims or killers,” I said. “It is definite, isn't it? Brokeltuft was the epicentre—”

Rey was pushing at the handle of his empty mug with one finger, turning it in a circle. I saw the picture of Bugs Bunny followed by the words
What's up Doc?
over and over like a mini movie show. “We still have no idea how closely these two sets of crimes are linked. I'm not part of the investigation into what happened at Brokeltuft. We've had to draft in more officers and hand most of this over to forensics for now.” He was addressing the mug, as if it was the least threatening listener. “My team must stay clear about its brief: Josh Sutton and Aidan Rodderick.”

“The children buried in the moors back then were around the same age as Josh and Aidan.”

“Okay.” Rey glanced up, and I could see that the detective inside him could not resist picking at the puzzle. “We seem to have established that the original murderer started by enticing a teenager. No doubt she's a handful, so next time they go for a younger boy. It does make sense—a sado-sexual motivation was verified by the autopsies on the four original victims.” My face contorted at his words, but he didn't notice. “The boy escapes, and the girl's giving them so much grief, they do away with her. She might not have been the only older victim. There is a time gap between Cliff and this girl being reported missing and the snatching of four smaller children.”

I thought about this. “Maybe they deserted the cottage for a time, in case Cliff reported his ordeal to the police?”

“Maybe.”

“So, you agree with me, then? The two bodies are murderers, not victims?”

“Your average murderer doesn't usually go for decomposition under their sofa area. Which is why the garden has to be dug up next.”

I was thinking about Cliff. How he'd returned to his home and never even told his mother. He'd got into trouble because those brutes had shaved his head, but he still never told. “Little Josh—did he have his hair shorn? If he did, then it's a true copycat crime.”

“I'm sorry, I can't give you that information.”

“The public don't know very much, do they? They don't even know how Josh died.”

“We need to keep some facts quiet. It's the way the investigation operates.”

I went rigid. “You're just waiting to find the body of Aidan Rodderick, aren't you? You've given up before you've started.”

Rey looked stymied by my outburst. “You should take a look inside our incident room. The guys are working into the night, every night.”

“
But you're not getting anywhere! You're fixated on Cliff, and on where I get my information from.” We were leaning across the breakfast bar, almost touching. The air was charged. “Sometimes, the spirit world knows things. You think Cliff told me where the house was, but he'd forced everything out of his mind. He was just a
kid
. A lost kid.”

“Okay. I'll give you that. Besides, why would Houghton want to lead to you to these bodies? The discovery reinforces his connection with the original murders and only makes him look guiltier.” He showed me big, creamy teeth. “Which is why we've got him banged up.”

My temper flew away from me. “Right. You've got him banged up. But no sight of Aidan. Does Cliff look to you the sort of man who would sit quietly in a cell while a child slowly dies somewhere?”

Rey's eyes flashed. “Don't you cross-examine me, Sabbie. These people have a substratum inside them. They hide all their evil in it and go walking around the world as if nothing is amiss. They fool most people. That's why we go on
evidence
. Evidence is how we compile a watertight case and get justice for the victims, and the evidence against Houghton is damning. It would be nice to get a confession from him, but frankly, we don't need it.”