Soul Seeker (35 page)

‘Look at this,' she suddenly said to Eisenmenger. He came to stand just behind her shoulder. She was looking at the picture of Darren with the Grange in the background. To the extreme left-hand side of the picture, at the side of the Grange, there was a small white object.

‘A white van,' breathed Eisenmenger.

They looked at each other. Andrew asked, ‘Found something?'

Beverley said to him only, ‘Probably not.' To Eisenmenger, she said, ‘We'd best go.'

They hurried downstairs, making their goodbyes as politely but quickly as they could. Antonia asked if they had found anything useful and Beverley replied as neutrally as she could that it had been very useful and that they were very grateful indeed for their indulgence. Andrew asked what they had seen in the photographs and Beverley replied neutrally that it had confirmed something that might prove to be of use.

Once in the car, she phoned Frobisher at the station. ‘You said that vehicles were parked at the back of the Grange.'

‘Yes. Land Rovers and tractors, and suchlike.'

‘Any vans? In particular a white van?'

‘Yes, I think there was a white van.' She looked at Eisenmenger and nodded to indicate Frobisher's affirmative. ‘How are you doing with the background on the Grange?'

‘Fisher's doing it now.'

‘Well, tell him to extract his finger for once in his miserable little life. I want him at the outer gate of the Grange in thirty minutes, and I want him there with the keys and with some useful information.'

She didn't appear to Eisenmenger to wait for an answer before she cut the connection. He asked, ‘What now?'

She pointed farther up the road. ‘Up the road is where Betty Williams lived. It's about time we had a look, don't you think? I should have done it a while ago, but things got busy.'

‘Is there likely to be anything left to find?'

She laughed, then shrugged. ‘You've got a long way to go before you make a policeman, John. Your clever-clever deductions are all very well, but in the real world, most of the time they mean sweet fanny-fucking-Adam. My job is to look, look again, and then look a third time. It's all about tedious, repetitive, arse-aching searching, looking and diligence.'

‘Sounds like histopathology,' he replied.

Lancefield was too befuddled to appreciate fully any relief that she was still alive. Her neck hurt and she felt as if her chest were on fire. She was stiff and sore all over and . . . and she was completely naked, bound by metal bands to an upright wooden chair.

An electric chair.

Suddenly the pain in her throat and chest didn't matter much anymore. She screamed as she had never screamed before.

There was nothing, as he had suspected, and as she had known. It was almost certainly in their imaginations, but it was more than just an empty house, it was a dead house, a small piece of a necropolis. They heard a silence that told them they were in a place lost to life, they saw shadows that hid not even ghosts, they smelled the damp and decay of a place no longer to be tended. Beverley said tiredly, ‘Well, we had to check.' They went outside into humid sunshine. ‘Let's have a chat with the neighbours,' she suggested after a deep breath to clear her body of the taint of death.

But this course of action proved initially unproductive. No one answered the rather shabby looking house on the left and, when Eisenmenger peered through the window, he saw that it was abandoned; a single chair lying in its side with just three legs was the sole occupant. The house on the right was in considerably better condition but again there was no response when they rang the doorbell. This time, however, they could tell that the house was clearly occupied; he was able to deduce this not just because there was furniture, but because sitting on a piece of it was a young man. True, he was staring fixedly at the television with his back to the window and seemed to be absent in a cerebral sense, but in a physical sense, he was most definitely there.

‘Fuckwit,' murmured Beverley. She leaned on the doorbell, seemed to be trying to drive it into the housing and, after a goodly while, this produced a result. Eisenmenger saw the figure rise slowly, still staring at the television screen, then move with even less alacrity towards the hallway. The door opened slowly to reveal a broad face of perhaps some twenty summers with features that were never going to illuminate a room. The dark grey eyes moved slowly to the identification that Beverley was holding up in front of the face; Eisenmenger could almost see the effort that went into focusing on it. She said, ‘DCI Wharton, Gloucestershire Constabulary.'

The features did not move much – Beverley suspected that they could not – but there was a subtle shift, one that induced a distinct air of wariness. She was well used to that effect. He asked, ‘What do you want?'

‘Could I have your name, please?'

There was a moment when he appeared to be too reluctant to give this information but then he seemed to think better of it. ‘Carter.'

‘First name?'

‘Shaun.' Then, ‘What's all this about?' Beverley thought that she knew the type well; petty criminal with a million minor misdemeanours on his mind and without the intellectual ability to hide them. She gestured with her head to the left. ‘Your neighbour, Mrs Williams, has just died.'

‘What about it?' Was it her imagination, or was that wariness increasing, perhaps even being tinged by fear?

‘When did you last see her alive?'

‘Days ago.'

‘How many “days ago”?'

‘Dunno.'

‘Did you see her on the day she died?'

‘No.'

‘Did you see anyone visit her on the day she died?'

‘Dunno. I wasn't here.'

‘Where were you?'

‘At work.'

‘And where is that?'

The staccato duologue faltered and he hesitated. ‘On the estate.'

‘What kind of work do you do on the estate, Shaun Carter?'

Whatever he did, he seemed to find difficulty describing it. ‘This and that,' he offered eventually. She waited, a perfect paradigm of patience. As she knew he would, he found the silence intolerable. ‘Labouring and stuff . . . Fencing, digging, some stock work.'

Was he a murderer? She thought not, at least not
her
murderer; she found it impossible to imagine that he had any of the necessary skills – and, she had to admit, the Internet killer was undoubtedly skilled – to be her perpetrator. She had no doubt that he was capable of violence sufficient to hurt, to maim and ultimately to kill, but it would be a crude, unrefined act; something done out of frustration or shame, not because of a completely misplaced need to know, as her murderer seemed to be.

And yet . . .

Carter's mobile phone began to ring. For a moment he didn't react, was content just to stare, trance-like, into her eyes, then she said, ‘Aren't you going to answer that?'

He looked then briefly at the screen, putting the phone back in his pocket almost immediately without saying anything. An expression of puzzlement was manifest on Beverley's face. ‘Wrong number?' she asked.

‘It can wait,' was all Carter said.

She knew that there was something she was missing, but she could not identify it, and Fisher would be at the gates of the Grange soon. She glanced across at Eisenmenger who was looking at nothing in particular, as if caught by the same trance that had so recently entrapped Shaun Carter. Getting no help from him, she said merely, ‘OK, Mr Carter. Thanks for your help.'

He grunted and had closed the door before they had even turned away.

SIXTY-THREE

‘
I
nspector Frobisher's not happy,' announced Fisher as soon as he got out of his car. ‘Especially about you taking the keys to the Grange.'

Beverley might have been able to care less, but Eisenmenger doubted it considering her expression. As she opened the padlock and unthreaded the heavy chain free of the gates, she asked him, ‘What have you found out about this place?'

Fisher took out a notebook. ‘It was built in 1763 by Sir Thomas Hobbs. The family lived in it until 1856 when the grandson, Sir William Hobbs was declared bankrupt and the estate passed into the hands of a private consortium that turned it into a lunatic asylum. They, too, went bankrupt in 1911 and thereafter it's been empty, apart from a short spell during the Second World War when it was used as a rifle training school.'

While he had been speaking, they were climbing into Beverley's car and she was driving them along the gravel track. She asked, ‘Did you manage to get hold of any sort of plan of the place?'

Fisher's look of fleeting panic told the story. ‘I didn't know you'd want one,' he explained.

Beverley said nothing. They had come to the inner gate and she gave the keys to Fisher and told him to unlock it. This done, they drove on towards the Grange.

It had once been magnificent. A Regency style was still apparent despite the decay. Three stories high but the top two were clearly very damaged by the weather of the decades that had passed since it was last occupied. Few of the windows had glass, and the large holes in the roof and the floors below gave the impression of a bombed-out building, one that had seen the worst of the Blitz; even so, the scale of the structure impressed. That and the intricacy of the surviving stonework that spoke of thousands of man-hours and startling levels of dedication and skill.

It was about eighty metres long, and built as a gentle curve at the centre of which was the main entrance that was about three metres high and closed by two doors that had once been painted in black paint, but were now peeling so badly that they were almost down to the original oak; heavy wooden struts had been nailed across them to make sure that even the most enthusiastic of visitors was deterred. In front was a semicircular gravel drive bounded by a low stone wall dotted with impressive urns that now sprouted only grass and weeds. In the centre was a bronze statue of a man in a frock coat and top hat; it was covered in verdigris and oxidized almost to jet. Grass and tall weeds grew everywhere, while much of the stonework was inexorably being covered and eroded by ivy and bindweed. It might have been a post-apocalyptic Britain that they saw before them.

There was quiet as they got out of the car; there were still the sounds of birds, still the breeze flitting through the trees, still the sound of their footfalls on the gravel, but these were still merely noises in a silence. There was a sense of deadness about the place, as if the air of decay was more than a passive creation of neglect but was an active thing, and one that seemed to be made by badness.

They whispered; what else could they do? Eisenmenger asked in a low voice, ‘What do we do now?' Beverley reflected that he sounded unsure and even afraid, and that she did not recognize this particular John Eisenmenger.

‘We look around,' she said simply.

They made their way to the side of the house, seeing nothing but elegant decay, a peculiarly British scene. There were huge glasshouses there set among wide pathways; Eisenmenger could imagine that once a veritable army of gardeners had worked in them and that the weed-strewn rectangular beds around the decrepit buildings had once been perfectly laid out in arrays of bedding plants, roses, lettuces, carrots, onions and a hundred other plant types. There was a distant red brick wall that might have been made by Winston Churchill himself and that seemed to glow in the afternoon sunshine.

A very, very British scene indeed, but one that was somehow past and no longer part of reality.

When they made their way to the back of the Grange, they came rudely back to their present, for on a wide deep back patio they saw four tractors, three trailers, two Land Rovers, two white vans, two motorbikes, two quad bikes and a single orange, flatbed truck; one of the white vans had a registration number that corresponded with the one written in Len Barker's blood. Beside these were piles of fencing posts and rails, bundles of stock fencing and barbed wire, huge bags of sand and gravel, and a large number of moveable steel stock fences. The back of the Grange was little better than the front; in front of them was a long low conservatory stretching away into what had once been cultivated gardens, but were now almost like pampas.

It was an impressive conservatory, not quite the kind of thing that might be found at the back of the average two-up, two-down terraced in Middle England. This one stretched for a hundred metres, was made of perhaps a thousand panes of glass, and had clearly once housed a formidable arboretum. Beverley considered options. ‘There's no way that those videos on the web were shot in there,' she said, indicating the ruined building.

‘There's bound to be a cellar,' decided Eisenmenger. ‘Places like this always had extensive wine cellars and the like.'

She turned to Fisher. ‘Does it?' He just looked slightly scared and very lost, which led her to turn away in disgust; Fisher didn't need to hear her imprecations to know that he was not her favourite sergeant. With not a little asperity, she told him, ‘Take a look on the far side of the conservatory.'

He was eager to comply and eager to make sure that he did nothing wrong. ‘What do I look for?'

It was an innocent question, but then all of Fisher's questions were innocent, and innocence was not a thing that Beverley had much truck with. ‘Jesus Christ on a bicycle, Fisher. We're on the trail of a serial killer. What the fuck do you think you're supposed to look for? Liquorice bloody Allsorts?'

As an answer it didn't give him much in the way of a clue, but he knew enough by now to shut up and try to look knowledgeable. He walked off, trying to give the impression that he knew exactly what he was doing; Eisenmenger looked after him with some sympathy, then asked her, ‘And what do we do?'