Limestone Cowboy (23 page)

I cautioned her. If she insisted on telling me all the details without being cautioned the whizz-kid lawyer would pick it up and make trouble. “We’ll take a
statement
from you at the station,” I said. “Can you come with me, please?”

“Do I need anything?”

“No. Just the key to lock the door.”

Driving through Hebden Bridge she turned and looked out of the window at my side of the car. “I hate this place,” she said. “Can you believe that? It’s such a beautiful place and I hate it. Do you know what the happiest day I’ve had was, for months and months?”

I shook my head, not wanting to hear, not interested.

“It was last Thursday. Morning coffee with you in that quaint little café, then sitting by the river watching the birds and talking. Simple gifts. I felt happier than I’ve done in a long while. I… I thought I’d found a friend.”

If it was meant to make me feel good it didn’t work. “If it’s any consolation, Debra,” I said, “I think Sir Morton is every kind of fool I’ve ever known.”

But that didn’t help, either.

The Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) was delighted, and when he’s happy we’re all happy. The troops who were out knocking on doors, studying CCTV footage or skulking round supermarkets were pulled in and told that the job was solved, they could have the
weekend
off. We were sitting round in the big office,
drinking
more coffee, when Gilbert came down to tell us of the ACC’s pleasure at clearing up two high-profile cases in one week. He then immediately destroyed the euphoria by asking what we were doing about
burglaries
. Two cases, no matter how big or high-profile, didn’t have much impact on our figures.

“Oh, we’ll sort them out Monday morning,” I assured him, reaching for another chocolate digestive.

“Before elevenses,” Jeff added.

Mrs Grainger had made a full confession, in the
presence of a solicitor, and was released on police bail on condition that she brought her passport in. When her case came to trial medical reports would be
presented
to the court by the best in the job, all the way from Harley Street. They’d claim that trying to poison half the population of Heckley was a plea for help after years of mental cruelty. We’d try for a section 18 assault – grievous bodily harm with intent – but settle for a section 47 actual bodily harm after her lawyers plea bargained. She’d probably get a community service order and a large fine, before fleeing back to the States and screwing Sir Morton for half his fortune.

Mrs Norcup was remanded to a safe institution while her state of mind was investigated, and a GBH charge would stay on her file. She’d be inside for a long time before being pronounced cured and released to whatever society had to offer her. Another dismal flat in the Project if she were lucky. Whether she’d ever see Rory again was in the hands of the gods and social services.

“How about a celebration curry?” somebody was suggesting.

It was a great idea, everyone agreed, and numbers were counted.

“I’ll ring the Last Viceroy,” Jeff said, “and tell them to expect us. Six o’clock?”

“You coming, Charlie?” Dave asked.

I’d intended ringing Rosie on the off-chance that she’d baked another chocolate cake, hoping for an invite round, but I’d been dodging Dave for the last fortnight. The heat was off, now, and I didn’t see how I could refuse. “Yeah, fine,” I said. “Six o’clock it is.”

When it comes to curry I like them hot, but the following night I was seeing Rosie, taking her to the theatre, so I stayed with the mild ones. There were fifteen of us and the proprietor of the restaurant was overjoyed to have so much custom so early in the evening. Prodigious quantities of rice, naan bread, popadoms and samosas were consumed, washed down with Kingfisher beer. I stayed sober, not wanting to have to abandon my car and take a taxi home. When talk started of moving on to a club we older ones made our apologies and split.

The answerphone was bleeping as I opened the door and I pressed the play button with unseemly eagerness.

It was Rosie, just as I’d hoped: “It’s Rosie, Charlie. Give me a ring, soon as you can. It doesn’t matter how late.” She sounded breathless.

Her number wasn’t committed to my memory, yet, so I tried the 14713 shuffle and was rewarded with a ringing tone.

“Is that you, Charlie?”

“Yes. What’s happened?”

“I’ve heard from First Call. The samples don’t match. Dad is innocent. Isn’t it wonderful?”

I said: “Wow! That’s fantastic. Really fantastic. When did you learn this?”

“About six o’clock. I rang you at home and at the station but you weren’t there.”

“Did they say anything else?”

“No. I tried to ring the producer earlier in the
afternoon
but he’d taken the afternoon off. His secretary said she would try his home number. She came back to
me and he’d told her that he’d seen the report from the lab and it said that the samples didn’t match and my dad was in the clear. Oh, Charlie, I’m so excited. I wanted to tell someone but there was only you and you were out. I’m… I’m… I don’t know, it’s all a bit too much for me.”

“I can’t begin to imagine how you feel, Rosie, but I’m so pleased for you.” I wanted to say something about all we had to do was prove it was the right grave, but I didn’t. It seemed churlish to cast doubts on the results, and the church records had been quite
specific
.

“Are we still going to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream tomorrow?” I asked, “or would you prefer some other celebration?”

“No,” she replied, firmly. “The Dream will be
perfect
. It will be like picking up my life again, from where it left off. I’ve put a bottle of champagne that I’ve been saving in the fridge. We could have a little celebration here, after the show.”

“That sounds a good idea,” I agreed.

“Oh,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’d want to drink and drive, would you?”

“It’s OK, there’s always a taxi,” I replied.

“That’s an unnecessary expense, but… you could always sleep on my settee.”

“Another good idea. Thanks, I’ll pack my
toothbrush
.”

The office was quiet Saturday morning, the troops having a well-earned weekend off, probably nursing hangovers. I called in as usual to tidy a few things and
do any jobs that required more attention than I’m capable of giving during the hubbub of a normal day. I like being there in an empty office, surveying the blank screens and the heaps of papers, marvelling that order can come out of such chaos. It’s my domain, and I feel a little tingle of pride when I survey it.

At nine o’clock exactly I rang the lab at Chepstow. He was in. “It’s DI Priest,” I said, “about the Glynis Williams case. Apparently First Call TV have had their samples profiled and it’s good news. Can you confirm it, yet?”

“Haven’t you received my report?” asked the
scientist
who’d extracted the DNA and done the tests.

“No. The mail hasn’t arrived yet.”

“Well, we’ve completed the profiles and I sent the results to your home address. I knew you wanted them ASAP and there was less likelihood of them being lost in the system.”

“That was thoughtful of you. It’ll probably be
waiting
for me when I go home. So what did you find?”

“Bad news, I’m afraid, Inspector, not good news.”

Something churned in my stomach and I felt as if my legs had been kicked out from under me. “Bad news?” I echoed. A picture of Rosie flashed into my brain and I thought of how her happiness was about to be smashed.

“Yeah, that’s what I said. You got the wrong man. The tests show that the blood from under the girl’s
fingernails
didn’t come from Abraham Barraclough.”

My emotions were being blown around like a
newspaper
in a hurricane, plunging earthward one second only to be sent soaring a moment later. I let the words
sink in and when I was certain of their meaning I yelled a silent “Yabadabadoo!” She’d done it. Rosie had done it. The scientist, I realised, had a different agenda to me. He was looking at the case from the inside, objectively and impartial. But now I was up there with the birds again, with one final obstacle before we could once and for all declare Rosie’s dad innocent.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “And what about the grave? Have you verified that it was the right grave?”

“Oh, yes, we got the right grave, no doubt at all about that.”

Hallelujah. 

I dashed home, not content with the verbal report. I wanted to see it written down, neatly typed in
appropriate
language. Only then would I believe it.

My job is to catch criminals. Juries determine who is guilty, parliament decides on the penalties, judges apply them, prison officers carry them out. I just catch them. All the rest has nothing to do with me. A
jobsworth
, that’s what I am; just another jobsworth.

Yesterday I came within an ace of handing Debra Grainger her gloves and telling her to take more care of them. Walking away. But then I remembered Mrs Norcup, banged up in some smelly secure ward with nothing to walk away from, no one to give her a break, so I did my job and left things to the courts.

And now this. The envelope was lying on the mat when I opened the door. I ripped it open and unfolded the single sheet of paper. I read it and re-read it, standing in the doorway. Then I read the conclusions again,
looking
for the weasel words or double negatives or a
misplaced
not, but there was nothing there. What it said was what it meant, and that was exactly what the cocky young scientist had told me on the phone. I re-folded the sheet, ran my thumbnail down the folds until they were as sharp as a blade and replaced it in the envelope. I pulled the door shut and walked back to the car.

I don’t know why I came all the way up here. I had to go somewhere, get in the car and drive, and this was
where it started. I parked at the end of the track and ducked under the barrier. The grass was longer and browner and the trees looked heavier, more sinister. Bethesda quarry is wedge-shaped, like a piece from a cake laid on its side, and a track made by a
big-wheeled
vehicle runs down one edge all the way to the bottom. Two burnt out cars stand at the top of the slope, slowly returning to nature. The body shells have disintegrated but the oil-covered engines are resisting change. They might last out for five or ten years, even twenty or a hundred, but in this temple to evolution that was nothing.

Long time ago I heard a definition of eternity. Imagine a rock a thousand miles high. Once every
thousand
years a bird lands on the rock, wipes its beak on it and flies off. When the bird had worn the rock away, that will be the first second of the dawn of eternity.

The sky was heavy with clouds the colour of
ditch-water
except for one patch of blue off to the south, almost perfectly rectangular in shape and edged in
silver
. If you painted a sky like that people would tell you it looked wrong. Rosie had said that these rocks were laid down three hundred million years ago. The bird had hardly started its work.

I was at the bottom. I searched until I found it, standing on end in a crack in the rock face like a
miniature
statue in a cathedral wall. It was smaller than I remembered, less impressive. Three nondescript
fossils
of long-extinct creatures crushed together in a chunk of limestone, enjoying their five minutes of fame after a long, dark wait. I rubbed my thumb over them and over the marks left by Rosie’s chisel. One
thing was certain: nobody would be doing the same to any of us after that length of time.

It was hot down there in the secret world of the quarry, the stone walls radiating the heat they had stored in the last few days. A square of rocks and a pile of ashes marked where someone had lit a fire, their empty beer cans mixed in with the dead embers. It sounded fun. A campfire and a couple of beers; what could be nicer? What was it Debra Grainger had said? Simple gifts? I turned and hurled the clump of fossils as hard as I could into the trees at the far side. It arced through the air, spinning, until I lost it against the shadows and then found it again as it rustled the leaves in its fall to earth, its return to obscurity. No birds flew away, startled by the intrusion, or maybe they couldn’t be bothered.

A spot of rain fell on me. I found a boulder and sat on it, near where the class of ’02 had hung on to every word the teacher said. Well, one of them had. I reached into my inside pocket and removed two envelopes. One of them held the tickets for that evening’s performance at the Playhouse. I took them out, studied them for a long minute and then tore them into thin strips that I let
flutter
down around my feet. If nature could return a car to its organic state it would make short shrift of a couple of theatre tickets. The Dream had turned into a nightmare, and it fell upon me to deliver it.

The next envelope held the report from the lab,
sitting
on my doormat as innocently as a newborn
sparrow
when I returned home.

“The bad news,” the scientist had told me on the telephone, “is that you got the wrong man. Abraham
Barraclough didn’t kill Glynis Williams.” Then, when I’d finished wittering about the right or wrong grave, he’d added with an air of triumph: “But would you like me to tell you the good news?”

I preferred the dispassion of the report to his
gloating
tones, and unfolded the single A4 sheet.

The bones from A, it said, were examined using a sex test and ten variable regions of DNA. They were male in origin.

The blood B from under the fingernails was
examined
and also found to be male in origin but it did not match the profile obtained from A, indicating that this blood could not have come from A.

That’s all we wanted to know, but there was more:

However, the profile obtained from B did show 5 of the 10 alleles present in the sample from A. These are the results we would expect if B were the natural father or son of A.

The DNA from sample C was examined and found to be female in origin and also showed half of the
alleles
present in sample A such that the results fully
support
the allegation that C is the natural daughter of A.

My head ached with the clunking of pieces falling into place. Rosie’s father was everything she believed he was, and a lot more. He was kind and courageous, compassionate and wise, and he burned with a love for his children.

But her brother, who ran away to sea, was a
murderer
.

Abraham Barraclough had seen his son come off the
hillside that fateful evening, and later, after the girl’s body was found, he’d seen the scratches on the boy’s neck. When they started testing for blood groups he knew it was only a matter of time before the truth was revealed, so he took action to protect those he loved.

He probably grilled the boy – I didn’t even know his name – until he dragged out of him a few intimate details, like the colour of Glynis’s underwear. Then he scratched his own neck and went to the police station to confess to a murder. A joyful DCI Henry Ratcliffe recorded his statement and later that night Barraclough hanged himself. The case was closed.

I may have had a few details wrong, but there was no doubt about the overall truth of my theory. The son would be about forty-three now. Tomorrow, or the next day, or next week, wherever he was, two detectives from Dyfed would walk up his garden path, or ask his captain if they could see him, and he’d be arrested for a murder that he thought was long forgotten. Big blobs of rain were falling on the dry grass around my feet, stirring the stalks, promising a renewal of life.

And it was my job to tell his sister. A dog barked and I heard children laughing, somewhere outside the
quarry
. In a few days they’d all be back at school. It was the gala tomorrow but I wouldn’t be there. I didn’t know where I’d be. A magpie landed about twenty feet away, saw me and flew off, complaining loudly about the intrusion. I turned my face upwards to catch the
raindrops
. The square of blue sky had stretched out into a rhombus and a jetliner was crawling across it, leaving a silver trail behind like a snail across a window.

I’d have given my pension to be on it.