Murder Most Merry (2 page)

Abigail Browning April 2002

A WINTER’S TALE – Ann Cleeves

In the hills there had been snow for five days, the first real snow of the winter. In town it had turned to rain, bitter and unrelenting, and in Otterbridge it had seemed to be dark all day. As Ramsay drove out of the coastal plain and began the climb up Cheviot the clouds broke and there was a shaft of sunshine which reflected blindingly on the snow. For days he had been depressed by the weather and the gaudy festivities of the season, but as the cloud lifted he felt suddenly more optimistic.

Hunter, sitting hunched beside him. remained gloomy. It was the Saturday before Christmas and he had better things to do. He always left his shopping until the last minute—he enjoyed being part of the crowd in Newcastle. Christmas meant getting pissed in the heaving pubs on the Big Market, sharing drinks with tipsy secretaries who seemed to spend the last week of work in a continuous office party. It meant wandering up Northumberland Street where children queued to peer in at the magic of Fenwick’s window and listening to the Sally Army band playing carols at the entrance to Eldon Square. It had nothing to do with all this space and the bloody cold. Like a Roman stationed on Hadrian’s Wall. Hunter thought the wilderness was barbaric.

Ramsay said nothing. The road had been cleared of snow but was slippery, and driving took concentration. Hunter was itching to get at the wheel—he had been invited to a party in a club in Blyth and it took him as long as a teenage girl to get ready for a special evening out.

Ramsay turned carefully off the road, across a cattle grid, and onto a track.

“Bloody hell!” Hunter said. “Are we going to get up there?”

“The farmer said it was passable. He’s been down with a tractor.”

“I’d better get the map,” Hunter said miserably. “I suppose we’ve got a grid reference. I don’t fancy getting lost out here.”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” Ramsay said. “I’ve been to the house before.”

Hunter did not ask about Ramsay’s previous visit to Blackstoneburn. The inspector rarely volunteered information about his social life or friends. And apart from an occasional salacious curiosity about Ramsay’s troubled marriage and divorce, Hunter did not care. Nothing about the inspector would have surprised him.

The track no longer climbed but crossed a high and empty moor. The horizon was broken by a dry stone wall and a derelict barn, but otherwise there was no sign of habitation. Hunter felt increasingly uneasy. Six geese flew from a small reservoir to circle overhead and settle back once the car had passed.

“Greylags,” Ramsay said. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t bloody know.” Hunter had not been able to identify them even as geese. And I don’t bloody care, he thought.

The sun was low in the sky ahead of them. Soon it would be dark. They must have driven over an imperceptible ridge because suddenly, caught in the orange sunlight, there was a house, grey, small-windowed, a fortress of a place surrounded by byres and outbuildings.

“That’s it, is it?” Hunter said, relieved. It hadn’t, after all, taken so long. The party wouldn’t warm up until the pubs shut. He would make it in time.

“No,” Ramsay said. “That’s the farm. It’s another couple of miles yet.”

He was surprised by the pleasure he took in Hunter’s discomfort, and a little ashamed. He thought his relationship with his sergeant was improving. Yet it wouldn’t do Hunter any harm, he thought, to feel anxious and out of place. On his home ground he was intolerably confident.

The track dipped to a ford. The path through the water was rocky and the burn was frozen at the edges. Ramsay accelerated carefully up the bank and as the back wheels spun he remembered his previous visit to Blackstoneburn. It had been high summer, the moor scorched with drought, the burn dried up almost to a trickle. He had thought he would never come to the house again.

As they climbed away from the ford they saw the Black Stone, surrounded by open moor. It was eight feet high, truly black with the setting sun behind it. throwing a shadow onto the snow.

Hunter stared and whistled under his breath but said nothing. He would not give his boss the satisfaction of asking for information. The information came anyway. Hunter thought Ramsay could have been one of those guides in bobble hats and walking boots who worked at weekends for the National Park.

“It’s a part of a circle of prehistoric stones,” the inspector said. “Even if there weren’t any snow you wouldn’t see the others at this distance. The bracken’s grown over them.” He seemed lost for a moment in memory. “The house was named after the stone, of course. There’s been a dwelling on this site since the fourteenth century.”

“A bloody daft place to put a house,” Hunter muttered. “If you ask me....”

They looked down into a valley onto an L-shaped house built around a flagged yard, surrounded by windblown trees and shrubs.

“According to the farmer,” Ramsay said, “the dead woman wasn’t one of the owner’s family....”

“So what the hell was she doing here?” Hunter demanded. The emptiness made him belligerent. “It’s not the sort of place you’d stumble on by chance.”

“It’s a holiday cottage,” Ramsay said. “Of sorts. Owned by a family from Otterbridge called Shaftoe. They don’t let it out commercially but friends know that they can stay here.... The strange thing is that the farmer said there was no car....”

The track continued up the hill and had, Hunter supposed, some obscure agricultural use. Ramsay turned off it down a potholed drive and stopped in the yard, which because of the way the wind had been blowing was almost clear of snow. A dirty green Land Rover was already parked there, and as they approached a tall, bearded man got out and stood impassively, waiting for them to emerge from the warmth of their car. The sun had disappeared and the air was icy.

“Mr. Helms.” The inspector held out his hand. “I’m Ramsay. Northumbria Police.”

“Aye,” the man said. “Well, I’d not have expected it to be anyone else.”

“Can we go in?” Hunter demanded. “It’s freezing out here.”

Without a word the farmer led them to the front of the house. The wall was half covered with ivy and already the leaves were beginning to be tinged with frost. The front door led directly into a living room. In a grate the remains of a fire smouldered, but there was little warmth. The three men stood awkwardly just inside the room.

“Where is she?” Hunter asked.

“In the kitchen,” the farmer said. “Out the back.”

Hunter stamped his feet impatiently, expecting Ramsay to lead the way. He knew the house. But Ramsay stood, looking around him.

“Had Mr. Shaftoe asked you to keep an eye on the place?” he asked. “Or did something attract your attention?”

“There was someone here last night.” Helms said. “I saw a light from the

back.”

“Was there a car?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t notice.”

“By man, you’re a lot of help.” Hunter muttered. Helms pretended not to

hear.

“But you might have noticed,” Ramsay persisted, “fresh tyre tracks on the

drive.”

“Look,” Helms said. “Shaftoe lets me use one of his barns. I’m up and down the track every day. If someone had driven down using my tracks how would I know?”

“Were you surprised to see a light?” Ramsay asked.

“Not really,” Helms said. “They don’t have to tell me when they’re coming

up.”

“Could they have made it up the track from the road?”

“Shaftoe could. He’s got one of those posh Japanese four-wheel-drive jobs.”

“Is it usual for him to come up in the winter?”

“Aye.” Helms was faintly contemptuous. “They have a big do on Christmas Eve. I’d thought maybe they’d come up to air the house for that. No one’s been in the place for months.”

“You didn’t hear a vehicle go back down the track last night?”

“No. But I wouldn’t have done. The father-in-law’s stopping with us and he’s deaf as a post. He had the telly so loud you can’t hear a thing.”

“What time did you see the light?”

Helms shrugged. “Seven o’clock maybe. I didn’t go out after that.”

“But you didn’t expect them to be staying?”

“No. Like I said, I expected them to light a fire, check the calor gas, clean up a bit, and then go back.”

“So what caught your attention this morning?”

“The gas light was still on,” Helms said.

“In the same room?”

Helms nodded. “The kitchen. It was early, still pretty dark outside, and I thought they must have stayed and were getting their breakfasts. It was only later, when the kids got me to bring them over, that I thought it was strange.”

“I don’t understand,” Ramsay said. “Why did your children want to come?”

“Because they’re sharp little buggers. It’s just before Christmas. They thought Shaftoe would have a present for them. He usually brings them something, Christmas or not.”

“So you drove them down in the Land Rover? What time was that?”

“Just before dinner. Twelvish. They’d been out sledging and Chrissie, my wife, said there was more snow on her kitchen floor than out on the fell. I thought I’d earn a few brownie points by getting them out of her hair.” He paused and for the first time he smiled. “I thought I’d get a drink for my trouble. Shaftoe always kept a supply of malt whisky in the place, and he was never mean with it.”

“Did you park in the yard?”

“Aye. Like I always do.”

“That’s when you noticed the light was still on?”

Helms nodded.

“What did you do then?”

“Walked round here to the front.”

“Had it been snowing?” Ramsay asked.

“There were a couple of inches in the night but it was clear by dawn.”

“What about footprints on the path? You would have noticed if the snow had been disturbed.”

“Aye,” Helms said. “I might have done if I’d got the chance. But I let the dog and the bairns out of the Land Rover first and they chased round to the front before me.”

“But your children might have noticed,” Ramsay insisted.

“Aye.” Helms said without much hope. “They might.”

“Did they go into the house before you?”

“No. They were still on the front lawn throwing snowballs about when I joined them. That’s when I saw the door was open and I started to think something was up. I told the kids to wait outside and came in on my own. I stood in here feeling a bit daft and shouted out the back to Shaftoe. When there was no reply I went on through.”

“What state was the fire in?” Ramsay asked.

“Not much different from what it’s like now. If you bank it up it stays like that for hours.”

There was a pause. “Come on then,” Ramsay said. “We’d best go through and look at her.”

The kitchen was lit by two gas lamps mounted on one wall. The room was small and functional. There was a small window covered on the outside by bacterial-shaped whirls of ice. a stainless-steel sink, and a row of units. The woman, lying with one cheek against the red tiles, took up most of the available floor space. Ramsay, looking down, recognised her immediately.

“Joyce,” he said. “Rebecca Joyce.” He looked at Helms. “She was a friend of the Shaftoe family. You don’t recognise her?”

The farmer shook his head.

Ramsay had met Rebecca Joyce at Blackstoneburn. Diana had invited him to the house when their marriage was in its final throes and he had gone out of desperation, thinking that on her own ground, surrounded by her family and friends, she might be calmer. Diana was related to the Shaftoe by marriage. Her younger sister Isabel had married one of the Shaftoe sons and at that summer house party they were all there: old man Shaftoe, who had made his money out of scrap, Isobel and her husband Stuart, a grey, thin-lipped man who had brought the family respectability by proposing to the daughter of one of the most established landowners in Northumberland.

Rebecca had been invited as a friend, solely, it seemed, to provide entertainment. She had been at school with Diana and Isobel and had been outrageous, apparently, even then. Looking down at the body on the cold kitchen floor, Ramsay thought that despite the battered skull he still saw a trace of the old spirit.