The Moth Catcher (Vera Stanhope series Book 7) Read online

  ‘ID?’

  ‘Nothing yet. I’ve sent Joe back with a photograph to circulate. Our victim looks the sort who’d be reported missing, though. Respectable. You know.’

  Holly gave a brief nod.

  ‘The first victim is Patrick Randle. Aged twenty-five. He was employed by an agency to stay in the house while the owners were away. I’m presuming they wanted someone to walk the dogs and cut the grass, and they could afford to pay an outsider to do it, but we’ll need to check the details. Joe will phone them from the station.’

  Holly nodded again.

  ‘Shall we go up then?’ Without waiting for an answer Vera went inside the house. She locked the kitchen door behind them, then opened the painted door by the side of the Aga. ‘You go up first.’ She didn’t want Holly following her up the stairs, muttering when the progress was slow. ‘There’s a small passageway at the top. Wait for me there.’

  Randle’s flat was in shadow now. Vera flicked a switch and spotlights fixed to the beams in the sloping ceiling lit the rooms. For a moment she wondered if she’d imagined it all. She’d look into the bedroom and there’d be no body on the floor. The stripped pine boards would be clean. But the middle-aged man was still there, caught in the pool of artificial light.

  Vera stopped at the doorway and moved aside so that Holly could see into the bedroom. ‘I don’t want to go in there. I saw the body from here and haven’t been over the threshold. This is a fresh scene suit, but I was out near the ditch to look at Randle. We don’t want a defence lawyer screaming further down the line that we didn’t keep everything separate.’

  ‘You want me to go in?’

  Well, I didn’t bring you out here for your scintillating company. Vera took a breath, told herself again that she was probably just jealous. No other reason why this woman should get under her skin. ‘Yes please, Hol. It’ll take Billy a while to get a separate team of CSIs here and I’d like to see if there’s any ID on the body. And while you’re in there, have a look for the weapon. I’d say we’re looking for a very sharp knife and it might have been thrown under the bed or a chair.’

  Holly walked into the room. She made her way to the far side of the body so that Vera would have a good view of what she was doing.

  She’s bright, Vera thought, considers everything.

  The younger woman squatted by the side of the body, taking care not to move it or touch the skin, and reached into the pockets on the suit jacket. First the outside pockets, and then she lifted the cloth so she could get into those on the inside. She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Try the trousers.’

  ‘I can only get to the front pockets without moving him.’

  ‘That’ll do.’ Vera thought that only younger men carried important things in their back pockets anyway. Or middle-aged men in jeans. This man would have his wallet inside his jacket. A wallet and his keys. And that led her to wonder how the victim had got here and, if Patrick Randle had owned a car, where it might be kept. There had been no vehicles parked on the gravel outside the house. She was still thinking about that when Holly stood up.

  ‘Sorry, Ma’am. Nothing. That’s unusual, isn’t it?’

  ‘His pockets have been emptied,’ Vera said. ‘To delay identification, or for some other reason.’

  Holly kneeled again to look under the bed. ‘No sign of a knife.’

  Downstairs in the big kitchen Vera was on the phone to Joe. ‘Can you get me the registration details of Randle’s vehicle? We found a driver’s licence on him. There was nothing on the grey man’s body, so an ID for him would be brilliant.’

  ‘The grey man?’

  ‘The man in the flat.’ That was how she was thinking of him. As a grey man. Anonymous. She waited on the line while Joe dug out the details of Randle’s car. A small VW, only a year old. Would a young man be able to afford a car like that? Unless he had wealthy parents? She wasn’t sure. The young had always been a mystery to her, even when she’d been one of their ranks. She’d understand the grey man better and felt more sympathy for him, without knowing anything at all about him.

  They went outside. ‘There are some buildings at the back.’ Vera’s feet crunched on the gravel, slightly muffled by the paper overshoes. ‘I’m assuming one of those has been used as a garage.’ The light had thickened into dusk. A bat skimmed over their heads. Vera waited for Holly to scream, but she gave no reaction.

  There were two garages. One was a small open-fronted barn, rickety and in need of repair. Against one wall stood a neat stack of logs, depleted after the winter. That was where they found Randle’s car. ‘We won’t be able to get into the vehicle,’ Vera said. ‘There was a bunch of keys on Randle’s body, and Billy has those.’ Holly put on new gloves and tried the handle. The car was unlocked. Was that carelessness or a sense that crime would be unusual out here in the valley? Again Vera thought that the boy must have money, if he cared so little about security. They looked through the windows, but didn’t get into the vehicle. There were two empty Coke cans on the passenger seat. In the back a brown Manila file was stuck in the side pocket.

  ‘I want to see that,’ Vera said, ‘as soon as the CSIs have finished with it.’ She paused. This was where the gravel ended and the vegetable garden began. There was no sign of another vehicle and the second garage was locked. So how had the older man arrived at the house? The nearest public transport would be the bus to Gilswick, and she guessed they’d be as common as hens’ teeth. Then there’d be the walk down the lane. A good two miles, possibly more. In his grey suit and his city shoes. Someone would surely have seen him if he’d made the journey during daylight. Otherwise he must have got a lift. That would have been organized in advance. The grey man wouldn’t be the kind to hitch-hike. Or a taxi. Or – and as Vera considered the possibilities, this seemed most likely – Randle had brought him here. And that meant there must be some connection between the two men. They’d arranged to meet.

  The second garage was more solid, stone-built to go with the house, but put up more recently. A padlock held the two doors together. Vera tried the smallest key on the bunch given to her by Susan and it opened as smoothly as if it had just been oiled. Inside there were two cars: a new Range Rover and an elderly Morris Minor estate, obviously much loved. The women stood at the door and looked in.

  ‘The family that lived here had money,’ Holly said.

  Vera nodded. Money, but class. Nothing too showy here. Nothing ostentatious. Then she remembered that nobody had spoken to the Carswells yet. She needed to know that they really were in Australia, and they might have more information about Randle. She’d had the impression they’d already left when the house-sitter arrived and that Susan had managed the handover, but one of them had probably talked to Randle on the phone. She called Joe again and left him more instructions. ‘See if any of the local taxi firms brought our second victim to the big house. Have you talked to the Carswells in Adelaide yet?’

  ‘I’ve tried, but there was no response. It was still early morning there then and they might have been asleep. I was going to give it another hour.’

  ‘I’d like to know what contact they had with their house-sitter. Did they meet him before he started work? The cleaner settled him, so the Carswells weren’t here when he arrived.’

  Suddenly the garden was flooded with light. Two lamps on black iron stands set along the drive and one fixed outside the main front door had switched on. Presumably they were on a timer or had a light sensor. Was that a security measure or just about convenience? Holly was walking away from the garage and back towards the house. A tawny owl started calling from the trees behind them. It seemed to have become night very quickly.

  ‘Ma’am.’

  That word again. Vera remembered a line from one of the cop shows that she pretended never to watch on the telly. Don’t call me that! I’m not the bloody queen. She took a breath. ‘Got something, Hol?’

  Vera walked over to her colleague. Holly looked as insubstantial as a ghost,
but Vera’s shadow was very sharp in the white light. Sharp and even bigger than usual, because she was still wearing the scene suit. Holly was looking into a small pond. It was surrounded by flagstones, slippery with lichen. The water looked black and oily. Everything monochrome. Now there was a half-moon and that was white too.

  In the mud at the side of the pond, only visible because one of the lamp stands stood right beside it, was a knife. Thin-bladed, with a black handle. Vera thought it was similar to the ones she’d seen in the kitchen of the flat, slotted into a wooden block.

  ‘What do you think?’ Holly sounded very pleased with herself. ‘Could this be our murder weapon?’

  Before Vera could answer, before she could shower Holly with the praise the DC obviously felt was her due, headlights swept across the black grass. This would be Paul Keating and the new team of CSIs. Again, the cavalry arriving just in time.

  Chapter Five

  Tuesday night. Annie was ready to go next door for the drinks party. They were supposed to take it in turns to host, but somehow they usually ended up at Nigel and Lorraine’s house. And this was unusual, a midweek celebration because it was Lorraine’s birthday. Sam had made a rabbit terrine and a pudding, a chocolate tart that managed to be rich but not too sweet. One of his signature dishes from the old days. He’d much rather cook than have his home invaded. The food was standing on the bench in the kitchen, and Sam was in the kitchen too, waiting for her. Annie wasn’t sure what he made of their Valley Farm social whirl. When they’d had the restaurant she’d always done front-of-house and Sam had never seemed to need friends. Now every week it seemed there was an excuse for a party. She knew she should go downstairs to see him, because he fretted about being late. Waiting made him nervous.

  Instead she went into Lizzie’s room. Lizzie would be home soon, but they didn’t talk about her. The silence had become a wall between them. Their daughter had been the only cause of stress in their marriage. Now, Annie thought, Sam preferred to pretend that she’d never existed.

  It was almost dark and there were lights in the valley. Strong white lights, which enabled her to see that there were cars parked along the lane close to the entrance to the Hall. Annie thought the others at Valley Farm would be interested to know about that. In the quiet days of their retirement they all loved a drama. She took Lizzie’s last letter out of her bag. It was written on cheap lined paper, with the name of the prison stamped on the top. It would have been an ugly object, but for Lizzie’s writing, which was strong and rather beautiful. Annie read it again. There was nothing much of significance. News from the farm, which was more like a smallholding, where the prison grew vegetables for its own use and kept a few rare breed pigs. Then: I’m looking forward to seeing you both. Had she ever expressed any affection for her parents before? Annie certainly couldn’t remember. Lizzie had been prickly even as a baby, turning her head away when they tried to stroke her hair to make her sleep, lying rigid under the pretty quilt when they leaned over the cot to kiss her goodnight.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Sam had moved to the bottom of the stairs and was shouting up. Wanting information, not grumpy or impatient. He was the most patient man Annie had ever met.

  ‘Just coming!’ She returned the letter to her bag. When it had first arrived in the post she’d left it on the kitchen table for him to read, while she went out into the garden. If he had read it, he hadn’t said. Perhaps he was still angry about the way Lizzie had behaved. Perhaps he only contained the fury by shutting down all his emotions.

  He’d packed the food into a wicker basket and covered it with a clean tea towel. Very WI. Annie thought he’d make a much better member of the institute than her. There was a bottle of good red under his arm. Outside in the clear air they heard distant noises, shouted voices from the cars on the track.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Sam sounded mildly curious.

  ‘I don’t know. I saw it from upstairs. Perhaps some TV company filming?’

  ‘Don’t tell Nigel,’ Sam said. ‘He’ll drag us all down to be in it. You know how he loves to be the centre of attention.’ He had the slow, soft accent that belonged to that part of Northumberland; sometimes she thought his voice was unique to the valley, and that he was the only one of them who truly belonged here.

  They paused for a moment outside the farmhouse window and looked inside. Nigel and Lorraine were already playing host, pouring Prosecco into tall fluted glasses. They did love their fizz. The professor, another of the neighbours, was there already. A big presence. Hair still mostly dark, despite his age. Eyes that were almost black. Lorraine had once said, ‘John O’Kane looks like a poet, don’t you think?’ Speaking with something like admiration in her voice. Annie had wondered if there could be an attraction there. Nigel was lovely to Lorraine of course, but certainly not poetic. You certainly couldn’t describe him as soulful.

  As they watched, the professor’s wife Jan appeared in the room. She must have come in through the back door. She was wearing a dress that she might have owned when she was a student: long, with flowery prints in blue and green, frilly at the neck and very Laura Ashley. Now it didn’t suit her. Her hair was wiry and curly and streaked with grey and she looked like an eccentric Edwardian grandmother. John looked at her, not exactly with disdain; more like disappointment. Annie wondered how she would feel if Sam looked at her like that.

  Sam had already knocked at the door. He wasn’t comfortable with the Valley Farm residents’ habit of letting themselves into each other’s houses. Nigel Lucas came to answer. He was a short man. Of all of her neighbours, Annie thought he was the hardest to get to know and wasn’t sure how else to describe him. She thought he was ambitious and a social climber, but very kind.

  ‘Come in!’ Below the voices in the room beyond there was music. Jazz. A double bass, insistent like a heartbeat. ‘You know you’d be welcome, even without Sam’s delicious offerings.’ It seemed Nigel couldn’t speak without flattering, and it came to Annie that he was less confident even than Sam. Nigel was desperate to please, but Sam didn’t really care what other people thought.

  As they walked into the living room a phone rang in the distance. Lorraine Lucas went to answer it, shimmying to the music, the silk of her loose trousers catching the candlelight.

  When she returned she stood inside the door. They fell silent and looked at her. She had that kind of presence.

  ‘You’ll never guess.’ Her eyes were huge. ‘That was Susan. She heard it from her father. There’s been a murder in the valley.’

  Chapter Six

  The three detectives met up late that evening at Vera’s house. It was just across the hill from Gilswick, closer than the police station in Kimmerston, and Joe was summoned to bring pizza and beer on his way home. He caught the takeaway-pizza place just before it was closing and had to pay over the odds for beer in a small convenience store. He was surprised to see that Holly was there, sitting in the chair that he thought of as his own. He couldn’t remember her ever being invited to Vera’s house before and she seemed uncomfortable, a bit nervous. There was a wood fire in the grate, but the logs must have been damp because it soon fizzled into nothing and Vera made no move to revive it.

  Holly sat in her coat and nibbled at a slice of pizza. She’d refused the beer and now held a mug of instant coffee. He couldn’t see her drink from it; perhaps the mug hadn’t reached her standards of hygiene. He hadn’t really wanted alcohol, either, though he took a bottle to keep Vera company. To prove his allegiance? He still felt weird, disengaged. Two murders in a valley where nothing happened, where smart people lived. He couldn’t take it in.

  Vera was talking. She seemed to have a personality transplant when they were in the middle of an investigation. To become younger and more energetic. She stopped grizzling about her health, her itchy skin and the aches in her legs. Joe thought that Billy Cartwright knew her too well: there was something ghoulish about her passion for her work; for suspicious death and other people’s tragedies.

&nb
sp; ‘We have ID on the boy in the ditch. Patrick Randle. Joe, what do we know about him?’

  ‘He only registered with the house-sitting agency six months ago. He looked after a place in Devon for a month and then a flat in Hampstead.’

  Holly looked up. ‘That’s in London.’

  ‘Yes, Holly, we do know that.’ Vera was at her most imperious. A pause. ‘Do we know if Randle was offered the Carswell job just by chance? Or did he ask to come to Northumberland?’

  Joe thought Vera had a knack for making them all defensive. ‘Oh, I’m not sure. The woman I spoke to didn’t seem to know the details. The agency owners were out for the evening.’ He realized that he sounded like a schoolboy making excuses because he hadn’t done his homework. ‘But I did find out a bit more about Randle and the agency.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The owners of the agency are a couple called Cunningham and the company’s based in Surrey. As I said, Randle had only been on their books for six months. Because the house-sitters are put into a position of trust, they’re all vetted pretty carefully. They need a CRB check, at least two references and an interview. Randle had no criminal record and he provided two good referees. One was the supervisor of his PhD and the other was the priest in the village where he’d grown up.’

  ‘Which was?’

  Joe checked his notes. ‘A place called Wychbold in Herefordshire.’

  ‘Is he still a student then?’ Vera finished the beer in her bottle and set it on the floor beside her chair.

  ‘No, he recently completed his doctorate and was taking some time out, before heading straight back to academia for postdoctoral research. A bright lad apparently.’

  ‘What subject?’ This was Holly, who seemed to be feeling left out.

  ‘Ecology.’

  ‘Family?’ Vera asked.