Rooted in Evil: Read online

  Gordon, receiving no other reply, continued, ‘But what we have to decide now is, do we continue with the exhibition?’

  ‘It seems tasteless,’ muttered Debbie, ‘poor Sally lying there not able to speak or anything, and we just carry on as if nothing has happened.’

  ‘It’s been advertised and most of the pieces are already hung on display. We can’t just take them all down again,’ Ron Purcell pointed out.

  ‘I’m sure Sally would want us to continue,’ said Desmond Mitchell. ‘We shouldn’t be thrown off course—’

  ‘Couldn’t you find a different expression, Des?’ snapped Mike.

  Desmond reddened. ‘I only meant we should carry on as a sort of tribute to a fellow member.’

  ‘She’s not dead!’ burst out Debbie. ‘You’re talking as if she was!’

  ‘Well, let’s face it, she might – um – not recover for quite a while. She’s yet to come round. She could be brain-damaged—’

  ‘Des!’ yelled Ron, his thin features suddenly suffused with a scarlet flush. ‘Shut up! If you can’t say something acceptable, don’t say anything!’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ maintained Desmond, clearly taken aback by Ron’s outburst.

  ‘How about,’ suggested Gordon, who had been stroking his beard as an aid to thought, ‘we rearrange the display? We could group all of Sally’s work together in the centre and put—’

  ‘What?’ interrupted Ron sarcastically, ‘a black satin bow over the top?’

  ‘No! Just a little note saying something like, well, “This member of our group is currently in hospital and very much in our thoughts.”’

  Mike spoke briskly. ‘Look here! Sally would want us just to carry on. She wouldn’t want us to do anything like put a notice up telling the world and his wife that she’s been hospitalised.’

  With a palpable air of relief all round, the others agreed; even, with reluctance, Gordon.

  ‘So many things seem to be going wrong around Weston recently,’ said Debbie. ‘There was that poor man who shot himself in Crooked Man Woods.’

  ‘He didn’t shoot himself. Someone shot him,’ corrected Gordon.

  ‘That was Carl Finch,’ said Ron unexpectedly. ‘I remember him.’ Seeing them all turn enquiring eyes on him, he added, ‘Well, I’m a local man, aren’t I? So was Finch, in a manner of speaking, years ago. He used to live at the Old Nunnery, that big old place. You know it.’

  Mike gave a low whistle. ‘So it isn’t such a strange thing, him being found in Crooked Man Woods, after all.’

  ‘The Kingsleys live in that house now, don’t they?’ Debbie asked. ‘I see Mrs Kingsley from time to time in our little supermarket. I don’t know her to talk to, of course, but I know who she is.’

  Ron, the custodian of local knowledge, took it upon himself to continue his explanation. ‘The house belonged to John Hemmings in the old days. They were a local family, been there generations. My grandad had a little butcher’s shop in Weston back then, and he used to deliver meat up to the house. Some of the meat originated from Crooked Farm. Customers liked to buy local produce.’

  ‘I wish we had that sort of thing now,’ mused Debbie. ‘I know we’ve got that supermarket, but it’s not the same, is it? It would be nice to have local shops selling local produce. But I suppose they wouldn’t do enough business.’

  The men all stared at her. Ron took a breath and returned to his tale, ‘Well, Mrs Kingsley was a Hemmings. She was John’s daughter; her name’s Harriet. Now she’s Mrs Kingsley. Finch was part of the family, too. He certainly lived at the Old Nunnery when he was young. He used to turn out for the local cricket club sometimes, back in the days when I played, too. I was several years older than him, of course. He went to some public school or other and used to come home for the summer holidays. He was a big chap and, when he first appeared from school at the beginning of the summer vacation, his hair was fairly short. He’d let it grow and by the end of the summer it was down to his shoulders. Turned the heads of all the local maidens, I can tell you. He moved away to London later, after leaving school, and had to tell the cricket club he wouldn’t be able to play for them any more. Not long after that I left the place to work further afield, too far to drive each day from Weston. That’s what happens in villages. The younger people, and those whose jobs require willingness to relocate, leave. The cricket club found it couldn’t muster a side, and that was that.’

  ‘So what was he doing in Crooked Man Woods, if he’d left the place?’ asked Desmond. ‘Apart from getting himself shot, of course.’

  ‘He used to come back from time to time,’ Ron told them. ‘He may have been visiting up at the Old Nunnery. I bumped into him, only a year ago, here in Weston. He was coming out of the Royal Oak. I recognised him at once; you couldn’t mistake him. His hair was even longer, still blond, and he looked like a Viking. He seemed quite pleased that I had spotted him and we chatted a bit about the cricket club and what a pity it was it folded. He said he was living in London.’

  ‘Public-school man? Got himself a top City job with a big salary, no doubt,’ mused Desmond.

  ‘I don’t know about that. All I know is that, back in the cricket-club days, there was some sort of barney on one occasion, with Hal Briggs. Hal used to turn out for the cricket team as well. Do you remember him? His family farmed at Crooked Farm when it was a proper farm. Hal’s wife still lives there. She got the house when she and Hal divorced, so she did all right.’

  There was a note of bitterness in Ron’s voice. They all understood that it had nothing to do with the Briggs’s divorce settlement but with Ron’s own.

  But now he cheered up because, as a local, he knew a lot of old gossip the others didn’t and had been given a chance to display it. ‘But Hal wasn’t married way back when he played cricket,’ he explained to his audience. ‘He must have been in his late teens, his father was still alive and Crooked Farm was still a proper farm. It’s not now, of course. The land’s been sold off and just the house remains.’

  ‘What sort of a barney?’ asked Mike curiously.

  ‘A pretty spectacular one; they had a real old punch-up in the bar at the club and nearly wrecked it. They were young, but both big guys. There was blood and broken glass everywhere. It’s a wonder they didn’t do each other serious damage. I didn’t remind Carl of that outside the Royal Oak!’

  ‘Police called?’ asked Mike.

  ‘Lord, no! That would have been bad publicity for the club. We managed to separate them; told them to go home and come back when they were sober.’

  ‘Over a girl, I suppose?’ asked Gordon in a worldly-wise sort of way.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Ron spoke unwillingly, as if there was something he’d have liked to say but had thought better of it. Instead, he leaned across the table and added in a low voice, ‘I do know that John Hemmings came down to see the club captain and paid for all the bottles of booze that got smashed.’

  ‘That was very good of him!’ exclaimed Debbie.

  ‘Was it, heck!’ retorted Ron. ‘He did it to hush up the whole business. Someone had to make good the losses, didn’t they? You couldn’t expect the other members to pay the bill. Word was’ – Ron’s voice sank conspiratorially again – ‘old John Hemmings was always paying out hefty sums to cover up trouble Carl was in. He could afford it, mind you!’

  Ron sat back, and they kept silence for a few minutes. Then Desmond spoke.

  ‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? John Hemmings isn’t around any longer to pay hush money and someone blasted Carl Finch in the woods. So what else was going on?’ Desmond drained his coffee mug. ‘Leopard doesn’t change its spots, does it?’

  ‘It’s my fault!’ declared Tom vehemently.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Tom, how can it be your fault?’ Jess protested. ‘Unless you knocked Sally off her bike.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t knock her down!’ Tom rubbed at his mop of black hair, as he often did when agitated about something. ‘I mean, I talked to her in
that library, where anyone could have overheard, and someone did! The place was packed out, Jess! There were people picking over the books and others who just seemed to have dropped in for a chat in a warm spot . . . and all those people arranging the paintings on the wall.’

  ‘It sounds unlikely to me,’ Jess argued, ‘that in such a mob anyone could have eavesdropped on you and Sally.’

  ‘Yes, they could!’ retorted Tom. ‘Because when she decided to tell me about what she’d heard in the woods, on the day of the murder, she drew me aside into a little den where they make the coffee. It wasn’t private, because there was no door, just a bit quieter than the main room. We could be seen, and it would be obvious to anyone who did notice us talking in there that she had something to tell me. So, if that person was interested or curious, he or she could have sidled up and found a spot to eavesdrop, stood flat against wall beside the entrance, for instance.’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up over it, Tom,’ Jess tried to persuade him. ‘You can’t know that for sure.’

  But Tom only gave a sort of growl and sat hunched and angry.

  There was no distracting him but she could stop him brooding like that, thought Jess. She had to try to persuade him that the incident wasn’t his fault. But it wasn’t the moment to tell Tom that the police also suspected it might be a deliberate hit and run.

  Instead she said: ‘Those roads around Weston St Ambrose are narrow, the hedges are high or there are stone walls bordering the fields. There’s no lighting after dark, only moonlight. I’m not surprised she was knocked off her bike. Frankly, she should use a car to get back and forth to Weston at this time of the year. She does have one. I’ve checked. She drives to and from her work in it.’

  ‘Yes, she’s got a car, but she rides her bike locally, she told me. She’s probably trying to save on petrol. You can’t blame her.’ Tom sprang to Sally’s defence.

  ‘All the same, at this time of the year, she should have been using her car if she meant to travel after dark, even locally. It’s only sensible,’ concluded Jess. She knew as she spoke the last words that they would spark indignation in Tom, but they slipped out and couldn’t be recalled.

  ‘Now you sound like a moralising old biddy! Look here, that woman Kingsley was in the Royal Oak earlier, having lunch with that other female, the one who was in the woods with her dog. Mrs Kingsley nearly pushed me into a wall the day I found the body. If she drives like that all the time round those narrow roads, she could well have knocked Sally off her bike!’

  His eyes glowed with the memory of his grievance. Now then, thought Jess, I think Madison has left it too late to return to the UK! But Tom’s fraught love life was not the issue. The murder investigation was.

  ‘Be fair. When Harriet nearly pushed you into a wall, she had just found her stepbrother dead in the woods. We don’t know, or have any reason to believe, that she drives like that all the time. Listen, when you left the Royal Oak after lunch, was her Range Rover in the car park there?’

  ‘There wasn’t a black one like hers,’ he admitted reluctantly.

  ‘So she’d already left. Was there a jeep in the car park?’

  Tom looked surprised. ‘I can’t remember. Who owns one of those?’

  ‘Tessa Briggs. If that wasn’t there either, both women had left before you decided to go wandering into that library.’

  ‘I might not have noticed a jeep, especially if I was looking for the Range Rover. I did notice a spanking new Merc there, in the car park,’ added Tom. ‘I reckoned that belonged to the couple of loud-mouthed townies I saw in the restaurant.’

  ‘It did – does. Ian Carter saw it out at the Old Nunnery. They were both there, and giving Harriet a bad time. The woman, her name is Natalie, is – was – a sort of girlfriend of Carl Finch. The car belongs to the chap with her.’

  ‘Henry,’ said Tom. ‘I felt a bit sorry for him. So they were heading for a showdown with the Kingsleys, were they?’

  ‘Apparently Natalie had brought Henry down with her for protection.’

  ‘Protection!’ yelped Tom. ‘That woman, Natalie, from what I saw and heard of her, doesn’t need protection. She would be well capable of knocking a cyclist into a ditch.’

  ‘You’re overwrought, Tom,’ Jess advised him. ‘Calm down, for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘Well, I feel so damn guilty!’ Tom gave her an apologetic smile. ‘I don’t mean to yell at you or call you an old biddy. Sorry about that. What did they say at the hospital about Sally?’

  ‘They are confident she’ll come round. Things aren’t as bad as first feared. But she had very nasty knock on the head and has a broken arm. They have promised to inform us as soon as she can be interviewed.’

  Tom looked briefly more cheerful, then thoughtful. ‘That woman Natalie, was she really Finch’s girlfriend? Well, if she took the trouble to come down and tackle Harriet Kingsley, I suppose she must have been.’

  ‘Don’t ask me. All these people say whatever suits them. I’m getting pretty fed up with the lot of them, and so is Ian.’

  Jess was also getting rather tired of encouraging Tom out of his state of gloom. She’d done her best. It had been a long day and she needed to get home. ‘Things will look different in the morning,’ she said, automatically repeating a favourite phrase of her mother’s. She immediately regretted it. What am I doing? I’m not his mother!

  ‘So cheer up, Tom!’ she added aloud, before he could call her an old biddy again. Heck, she and he were much the same age! Old biddy, indeed.

  He looked at her like a puppy that had been reproved for something it didn’t understand it had done wrong.

  Ian Carter was driving slowly towards Weston St Ambrose through the twisting lanes. He was mindful that Sally Grove had been knocked off her bike around here somewhere. Tonight, the rainclouds had cleared and the moon shone as a bright disc in the night sky. Visibility was better than it had been the previous evening. Nevertheless, Carter could well imagine how easily an incident, like the one that had put Sally in hospital, could occur. If, of course, it had been an accident. The hedgerows cast deep shadows, pits of blackness. From time to time, his headlights picked up a pair of startled eyes in their glare.

  Jess was unhappy with the careless motorist theory, and so was he. It was just that he disliked coincidences, and Biddle, the farmer, had told a very odd tale to Phil Morton. If someone had been searching the body of the injured cyclist, what had that person hoped to find? Or had the farmer been mistaken? Had the driver been checking the girl for the extent of her injuries? That might have looked as if he was searching the body. The light had been poor. Yes, Biddle could have been wrong.

  Yet Sally Grove had been in the woods on the morning of the murder. Damn it, if she had any information, why hadn’t she come forward at once? Because witnesses often don’t, he told himself gloomily. They fear they will be disbelieved or, worse, cross-examined. And there was the natural disinclination to be drawn into anything unpleasant. It was so easy for such witnesses to persuade themselves that they really hadn’t got anything important to say. Murder was well outside most people’s experience. No wonder they kept their heads down.

  But later, Sally Grove, given an unexpected meeting with Tom Palmer, had spoken of her unease. And Sally Grove now lay unconscious, unable to speak of what she might have seen or heard. Tom, said Jess, was distraught. It now began to appear almost certain that the accident was no such thing but rather a deliberate attempt to knock Sally down and recover – what?

  Carter felt a fleeting sympathy for Palmer, who seemed to be very unlucky these days. However, he was one of those people who usually manages to land on their feet. Carter just hoped that Jess wasn’t worrying too much about Tom in his present predicament. That was what really niggled. Every time Palmer had a broken relationship or was feeling lonely, or had a cold, he picked up the phone and rang Jess. When he had first met them both, Carter had imagined some sort of romantic link between them. But he now knew this wasn’t the case. T
he knowledge ought to have made him feel better about it, but it didn’t.

  Carter had developed a theory about Jess’s willingness to run round and comfort the pathologist. She missed her twin brother, who was out in some danger spot abroad, working with a medical charity. She worried about the risks her sibling ran. She couldn’t do anything about it, but she could listen to Tom Palmer’s woes. It made her feel better. This, anyway, was Carter’s theory, and he knew he must never, ever, let her suspect it. She’d be furious. When Jess got angry, she was like a fizzing firework.

  Then there was the other lead, suggested when he learned that Guy Kingsley had borrowed the carpenter’s van early on the morning of the murder. He’d sent Phil Morton haring down that track, and it had got them nowhere.

  ‘The people at the builders’ suppliers remember him, sir. He was definitely there and collected laminated board previously ordered. But he couldn’t have had enough time also to drive to a meeting with Finch, either in the woods or nearby, kill the bloke and drag the body to the place it was found. Plus, he would have needed to get back to the Old Nunnery before his wife returned. She’d told him she was only going to the supermarket in Weston. No one has mentioned seeing a tradesman’s van in the vicinity of the woods,’ Morton had added.

  ‘Or the Renault belonging to Finch. We have to find that,’ Carter had growled. ‘We concentrate on that.’

  Right now, he wanted to put the murder to one side and think about something else. To that end, he had phoned Monica Farrell, Sophie’s aunt, earlier to ask if it was all right to call by that evening. She had been delighted, offering him a casserole supper. He was quite looking forward to it. They would talk about Millie, his daughter, of course, and that was all right. They would inevitably talk about Sophie as well, and that was not all right, but it was necessary. Sophie was always hatching up some plan, and he had a strong suspicion that her proposed visit to sort out some unspecified problem with the rented-out house veiled some other project. His headlights picked up another pair of eyes beneath a hedge, wild eyes reflecting green: a fox. He had a moment’s superstitious feeling that it was trying to warn him, before the animal slipped away into the undergrowth.