The Marriage Hearse (9 page)

Rachel sensed there was something Marion was holding back.

‘Who was the builder?’

‘He was called Mike Dellingpole. It was just him and some gormless lad. There were others – plumbers and electricians and
that – but I think they were just subcontractors.’ She opened her
mouth and closed it again, as though she was about to say more.

Rachel sensed her discomfort. ‘Is there something else about these builders? Something Kirsten mentioned?’

There was a long pause. ‘I think she was a bit embarrassed. She said it was probably her fault for being too friendly.’

‘What was?’

‘It can’t be important.’

Rachel sat forward and looked the young woman in the eye. ‘Let me be the judge of that.’

‘Mike made a pass at her. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think he was threatening or … In fact she thought it was a laugh.’

‘Did Peter know about this?’

Marion shook her head.

Rachel pressed her lips together with disapproval. If it had been her, she would have been shouting the builder’s lecherous
ways from the rooftops. But perhaps Kirsten had done something to encourage him. No doubt when they questioned him, that’s
what he would claim. But it would be against Rachel’s feminist principles to believe a word of it.

They strolled round the house, Rachel waiting for Marion’s comments. When they reached the front bedroom, Marion hovered on
the threshold of the room where her friend had died, staring at the wedding dress that still hung there, a sad relic of hope.

‘It cost a fortune, you know,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Two thousand pounds.’

Rachel gave an almost inaudible whistle. ‘It’s very nice but …’

‘Georgina told her to wear ivory rather than white.’

‘Georgina?’

‘Her clairvoyant.’

Rachel frowned. ‘She went to a clairvoyant?’

‘It was her latest thing.’

Rachel said nothing as they made their way downstairs again; she waited until they were comfortable on the sofa before enquiring
further.

‘What made her go to this Georgina?’

‘Don’t know. I told her she was mad; that she was wasting her
money. But she was always a bit insecure. Perhaps she didn’t trust her own judgement.’

‘She wasn’t sure if she should marry Peter, is that what you mean?’

‘Oh, I don’t think Peter was the problem.’

‘So what was?’

Marion shrugged her shoulders. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘Do you know where I can find this Georgina?’

‘I think she lives in Neston.’

‘That figures,’ Rachel mumbled under her breath. The pretty Elizabethan town of Neston, eight miles upstream from Tradmouth
was awash with all things New Age and spiritual. Local farmers and the inhabitants of nearby towns and villages might scoff,
but Neston continued its gentle defiance of the material age and, against the odds, prospered. Rachel, herself one of the
scoffers, was comforted by the thought that Georgina shouldn’t be too hard to find.

Marion suddenly looked up. ‘There was something. I remembered it last night. Something she said. I don’t know if it’s important.
It’s probably nothing.’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’

‘I wasn’t really paying attention. I was trying on my dress for the wedding and she was chatting away. I was only half listening.’

There was a long silence but Rachel said nothing. It was best to let Marion tell her story in her own time. After a minute
or so, her patience was rewarded.

‘I can’t remember what she said exactly but it was something about work. Something she’d found out.’

‘What kind of thing?’

‘I don’t know. As I said, I wasn’t really taking that much notice. I was more worried about losing a bit of weight so the
dress didn’t cling to all the bits it shouldn’t cling to.’ She gave a weak smile. ‘Sorry. I don’t suppose I’ve been much help.’

Rachel stood up. ‘Thanks for coming. And if there’s anything else you remember …’

Marion remained seated, a faraway look in her eye. She suddenly looked up at Rachel, her eyes wide. ‘The dress.’

‘What about it?’

Marion leapt up and brushed past her, taking the steep cottage stairs two at a time. Rachel followed.

This time Marion found the courage to enter the bedroom where Kirsten had been found. Gingerly, she approached the wedding
dress. Rachel waited for her to speak.

‘I knew there was something wrong but I didn’t know what it was. She’d never have hung this dress up like this. Look.’

Rachel stared. One shoulder of the wedding dress was twisted on the padded hanger. And the skirt was caught up at the back.
Stored like this, the silk would have creased. No woman who’d just spent two thousand pounds on a dress she’d wear for the
biggest day of her life would have been so cavalier about its storage.

‘Perhaps one of the forensic team knocked it down and weren’t too careful about putting it back,’ Rachel said, thinking it
the most likely scenario. ‘I’ll ask.’

But as she left the cottage, she pondered the other possibilities. Maybe she was on to something.

Simon Jephson, the teacher, wasn’t at home. Or at least he wasn’t answering the door to the police. His address turned out
to be an ex-council maisonette in a down-at-heel suburb on the edge of Morbay next to an industrial estate. But then Wesley
imagined that his income from teaching at the Morbay Language College would hardly stretch to anything more salubrious. He
decided against pushing a note through Jephson’s front door asking him to contact Tradmouth CID. He preferred the element
of surprise.

He called Carla Sawyer to ask her to let him know if and when Jephson turned up, before driving Gerry Heffernan back to the
station, hoping that by the time they got there, Stuart Richter, the dead woman’s persistent ex-boyfriend, would be waiting
for them in the interview room.

Wesley was thirsty. He wanted coffee, strong and hot. Pam told him he drank too much of the stuff and he knew she was probably
right. But after getting out of bed twice to see to Amelia in the night, he needed something to keep him awake.

He helped himself to a coffee from the machine in the corridor and when he reached the office he was told that Gerry Heffernan
had been summoned on high to inform Chief Superintendent Nutter of their progress … or lack of it. The murdered bride seemed
to have captured the public imagination and the press weren’t so much sniffing around as baying for information like a pack
of hounds in full cry. In spite of leaden hints from Nutter that, as a member of the ethnic minorities, Wesley would make
a first-class spokesman who would give the force a more inclusive image, he had resisted stubbornly the chief super’s attempts
at persuasion. He had no time for the top brass’s politically correct games or for playing cat and mouse with a room full
of reporters. He had more important things to do.

He sat down at his desk. There was no sign of Steve, or Rachel for that matter, and Paul and Trish hadn’t yet returned from
interviewing the staff and students at the language college.

He had almost forgotten about the call from Margaret Lightfoot until the sight of a message on his desk from the constable
who’d been sent over there saying that the skeleton was possibly human, and that the scene had been sealed off awaiting the
attentions of CID and the pathologist, jogged his overcrowded memory. Cudleigh Farm at Lower Cudleigh. As Gerry Heffernan
had quipped, it sounded a cosy sort of place: a farm from a children’s story book populated by smiling cows and cheeky pigs.
The reality, he knew, would be somewhat more gritty. Farms were dirty, smelly places in his experience and the farming community
had never had it so bad. But at least the skeleton at Cudleigh Farm would give him a break from thinking about the murder
of Kirsten Harbourn.

As all the officers under his command were either out pursuing enquiries or busy with their paperwork, Wesley decided to drive
to Lower Cudleigh alone. The skeleton had obviously been there some time so the case, if there was one, lacked the urgency
of a fresh murder enquiry. But it still had to be investigated. If the bones were more than seventy years old, they were a
problem for an archaeologist rather than the police. But if they turned out to be recent, then his workload, rather than Neil’s,
was about to
increase. He sent up a silent prayer that he wouldn’t find the skull grinning up at him, flashing a fine set of modern fillings.

After leaving a note on Gerry Heffernan’s cluttered desk to say where he was going, hoping the message wouldn’t get lost among
the melee of reports, files and dirty cups, he drove out of Tradmouth, past the imposing bulk of the naval college and the
white painted council estate. Once he was out in open country he began to look for signposts. To his right he noticed the
lane that led to Little Barton Farm, Rachel’s family home, farmed by Traceys for several generations. But he drove on, concentrating
on his destination.

It would have been easy to miss the sign to Upper Cudleigh if he hadn’t been on the lookout for it, as it was half obscured
by an overhanging tree. He signalled at the last minute, earning himself an irate hoot from the motorist behind, and turned
down the narrow lane, hoping he wouldn’t encounter a slow-moving tractor.

He drove two miles down winding single track roads before he spotted Cudleigh Farm’s faded sign. As he turned into the gate,
he wished his Vauxhall would transform itself into a Land Rover – the unsurfaced, pot-holed drive was playing havoc with his
suspension. He chugged slowly past a huge corrugated-iron barn filled with hay and farm machinery and brought the car to a
halt next to the house. A mud-splattered patrol car was parked on the cobbles near the front door. The wheels of investigation
had been set in motion.

Built of mellow stone, Cudleigh Farm seemed as ancient as the rolling Devon landscape and Wesley knew enough about local architecture
to recognise it as a longhouse, a rural dwelling built with accommodation for humans at one side and animals at the other,
separated by a central passage. It probably dated from medieval times, although it was hard to know with such a rough, vernacular
building, uninfluenced by the vagaries of fashion and style. It would always have been home to farmers, to those connected
to the earth and the seasons. And Wesley found himself hoping it would always stay that way.

He stepped inside the stone porch and knocked. Seconds later the door was answered by a capable-looking woman in jeans and
a sleeveless checked blouse. She was well built rather than fat and looked as if she’d be good in a crisis. She regarded
him warily at first but when he introduced himself he was invited in and offered tea, which he accepted. Local rituals had
to be observed.

‘I’m Margaret Lightfoot. It was me who rang,’ she said as she led the way to the large, stone-flagged kitchen. An ancient
Aga glowed away in one corner, making the low-ceilinged room over-warm on a fine summer day.

‘Where’s the skeleton?’ Wesley asked.

‘Down in the bottom field. A constable’s down there standing guard. Ever such a nice lad … I know his mum. Everything’s as
we found it. I told Brian not to touch anything until the police had seen it. I watch all the detective shows on telly, you
know.’

Wesley smiled. The public’s appetite for crime fiction certainly had some advantages. ‘You did the right thing, Mrs Lightfoot.
Perhaps if I could see the remains …’

‘Jason – the constable – he mentioned a pathologist …’

‘All in good time.’ He took a sip of strong tea, the kind Gerry Heffernan always claimed puts hairs on any chest. ‘So who
found the skeleton?’

Margaret looked exasperated. ‘Brian – that’s my husband – gave someone permission to use a metal detector in one of our fields.
He got a signal and he started digging. Turned up some bones.’

‘And the signal? Was there anything metal with the bones?’ Wesley’s imagination conjured up daggers or even firearms.

‘There was a ring. Pretty little thing. I thought you’d want to see it.’ She bustled over to a huge pine dresser and took
a small cardboard box out of one of the drawers. Wesley opened it and there, lying on a bed of snowy cotton wool, was a gold
ring set with a dark red stone, the colour of fresh blood. Wesley picked it up and examined it.

‘No hallmark. But it certainly looks like gold.’

‘Oh yes. It wasn’t tarnished at all, even after all that time in the ground. Gold doesn’t tarnish, does it? Not like silver.’

Wesley walked to the small mullion window and held it up to the light. ‘It looks very old. There’s something written on the
inside but you’d need a magnifying glass to see it.’

‘Really? I hadn’t noticed. But then my eyesight’s not what it was: that’s aging for you. My patients are always complaining
about it.’

Wesley looked at her enquiringly.

She smiled. ‘I’m a district nurse.’

Wesley nodded. This woman could tell a human skeleton from an animal’s. He wasn’t here on a wild-goose chase.

‘And from the size of that ring and the look of the bones I think it’s a woman. Although I can’t be a hundred per cent sure.’

‘We’d better take a look then.’ Wesley finished off his tea and followed her out of the back door. It hadn’t rained for some
days but he still wished he’d worn wellingtons as the ground was muddy in places. He really should have learned by now that
in Devon, unlike London, you had to be prepared for anything.

There was no sign of Brian Lightfoot. Margaret said he was worried about one of his ewes and he’d arranged to meet the vet
in one of the far fields. Skeletons couldn’t be allowed to interfere with the day-to-day running of the farm. But if this
one turned out to be the subject of a murder investigation, then disruption would be inevitable.

Perhaps, he thought as he followed Margaret downhill to the lower meadow, Brian Lightfoot, fancying a change from his down-to-earth
wife, had befriended a young hitchhiker. In a moment of madness, he had attempted to assault the girl and, when she had threatened
to make a fuss and destroy his domestic stability, he had strangled her and buried her in his field. He smiled to himself.
He was letting his mind wander into the realms of fantasy. But then again, stranger things had happened.