The Hanging Wood E-Book

Martin Edwards

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Lake District Cold-Case Mysteries
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 435

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Twenty years after her brother Callum mysteriously vanished, Orla Payne is still haunted by his disappearance. The case was closed after her uncle's suicide - the police believed he killed himself in the Hanging Wood out of guilt over murdering the boy, even though no body was ever found. Daniel Kind recommends Orla contact DCI Hannah Scarlett, head of the Lake District's Cold Case Review Team, to see if she can discover the truth about what really happened all those years ago. In spite of the DCI's doubt there is anything to be done on such a long-dead case, when Orla is found dead, she reconsiders, partly out of sense of duty and partly out of guilt, and discovers that investigating the past can throw up some very dangerous truths indeed.

Leseprobe

The Hanging Wood

MARTIN EDWARDS

Dedicated to the memory of Joan Edwards

Contents

Title PageDedicationCHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCHAPTER FOURTEENCHAPTER FIFTEENCHAPTER SIXTEENCHAPTER SEVENTEENCHAPTER EIGHTEENACKNOWLEDGEMENTSBy Martin EdwardsCopyright 

CHAPTER ONE

‘I must talk to Hannah Scarlett, it’s a matter of life and death.’

Orla shaded her eyes from the July sun. Her right hand trembled so much that she dropped her mobile into the shallow ditch and had to reach down to fish it out. In front of her stood the hedge marking the boundary of her father’s farm.

‘Life and death,’ she hissed into the phone.

‘May I have your name?’

‘Orla … Orla Payne.’

A long, long pause. ‘You spoke to DCI Scarlett yesterday afternoon?’

The detective constable sounded young and sceptical. Orla pictured her, pursing her lips, searching for a politically correct way to say get lost. A gatekeeper, tasked with making sure her boss wasn’t disturbed. She’d written Orla off as a drunken time-waster, just because her voice was too loud and she’d slurred her own name. So what if she’d downed a few cans? This was supposed to be a free country, it wasn’t against the law to drown your sorrows.

‘That’s right.’ Yesterday’s call had gone badly, but she’d summoned the nerve to try again. The last chance saloon.

In the hedgerow, a linnet sang. The summer air tasted sweet, and she could smell the fields. But her head ached; she couldn’t do this. It was too difficult.

‘Ms Payne. Are you still there?’

Legs swaying, Orla grabbed the handle of the car door and steadied herself. She’d parked next to the ditch. On the way, she’d cracked the wing mirror against a drystone wall, but who cared? People would say she was unfit to drive. Yet here she was, calling the Cold Case Review Team at Cumbria Constabulary. She wasn’t afraid any longer. Fear had become as pointless as hope.

‘Ms Payne?’

‘Just put me through, will you?’

‘I’m sorry—’

‘Am I talking to myself?’ Orla was trying not to scream with frustration.

‘DCI Scarlett is on leave today.’

The woman spoke with exaggerated patience. Orla’s cheeks were moist. Despair made her guts churn.

‘Can I help, Ms Payne?’

‘Too late,’ Orla mumbled into her phone. ‘It’s just ancient history to everyone else. Nobody cares about justice.’

People never listened to her. The warning she’d been given was true: nobody would believe what she had to say. She had no proof; talking to the police was a waste of time. The energy had drained out of her, like oil trickling from a leak in her car. She had no fight left.

‘Ms Payne?’

Orla killed the call.

She tried to crush the mobile in her hand, but it was impossible, so she hurled it over the hedge. The phone struck a black tank squatting on top of a small trailer, and fell into a trough filled by the tank with water for the cattle to drink. The trough was an old enamel bath, and her father hadn’t bothered to take the taps off.

Contacting the police was a stupid idea. She should never have listened to Daniel Kind. All he knew about murder came from books and dusty archives. He’d advised her to talk to Hannah Scarlett, but yesterday afternoon Orla’s brain was even fuzzier than it felt right now. She’d made a fool of herself when she was put through, and in the end, Hannah lost patience.

Orla kicked the car door, wishing it was the head of the detective constable. Her boots had steel tips, and they dented the paintwork. Didn’t matter. She’d never drive that old banger again.

The lane led to Mockbeggar Hall, and she saw its turrets poking up above the copper beeches. As a child, she’d dreamt of living in the Hall. In one of her favourite fantasies, there had been some mix-up, and in the end she proved she was no farm kid, but an unacknowledged daughter of the Hopes family, who had owned the Mockbeggar Estate for generations. But now the Hall belonged to the Madsens, who had made their money through selling caravans. Her father reckoned the Madsens always got what they wanted in the end, and he was right.

She walked to a point where the hedge gave way to a fence. In the field, a trio of plump Friesians grazed, each with a yellow tag in its left ear, bearing a number inked in black. Their eyes were dark, with no discernible pupils. They looked mournful, as if someone they knew had died.

Orla ripped off her headscarf and threw it into a clump of nettles. A splash of red and gold among the green. She no longer felt self-conscious about her bald head. The cows weren’t embarrassed, and neither was she.

A red sign stapled to a fence post said Danger – electric shock. She heard a faint tick-tick-tick. Throughout summer, the strands of wire were live. As she levered herself over the fence, her leg brushed the wire. The impact from the current felt like a blow from a mallet. It was years since a farm fence had shocked her, and she landed on the ground in a heap.

Swearing, she clambered to her feet, vaguely aware that the booze had deadened her senses. She stumbled away from the fence in the direction of the farm buildings. Sometimes she kept to the tractor tracks, sometimes she veered over the grass. A single cow, black with a white blotch on its belly, trudged towards her. Its lumbering tread hinted at menace, but Orla wasn’t scared. She’d grown up with animals, and found their smells comforting. Cows don’t hurt anyone, unless you are stupid enough to let a dog scamper around and frighten their calves.

As she passed, the cow made a crooning noise. It didn’t take much imagination to believe the animal was pleading with her. Orla had never lacked imagination; she and her brother Callum shared that in common.

Lane End Farm stood four hundred yards ahead. On this side of the old higgledy-piggledy house was a long line of cattle sheds and outbuildings, along with a slurry tank and the grain silo. The back garden where she and Callum once played was overgrown. Most of the windows were at the front of the house, facing in the opposite direction. She remembered peering through each of them, gazing at the horizon, trying to make out the contours of Blencathra through the morning mist.

She’d come full circle; Lane End was where it all began. Her mother had given birth to her in the kitchen – her waters broke suddenly, and there was no time to drive to the hospital. Orla’s earliest memories were of playing hide-and-seek with Callum around the sheds and machinery while their father barked orders to his men and their mother stayed in bed with what she called a migraine and Dad called a hangover. Orla used to shut her eyes so tight they hurt, counting to one hundred and then calling, ‘Coming, ready or not!’ Callum always made it hard for her to find him, taunting her for the eternity it took to track him down.

Callum’s voice rattled around in her brain. The last time she saw him, he’d been so pleased with himself, teasing her by refusing to let her into a secret, laughing fit to burst when she ran off with tears in her eyes, saying she didn’t care.

Her foot caught on a hook protruding from a lichen-smeared stone cheese press long ago abandoned in the grass, and she lost her balance for a second time. This time her ankle wrenched, and she sat down to massage the tender flesh. For an instant, she had an impression of a flash of light, as if the sun had glinted on a pair of field glasses.

When she picked herself up, not a soul was to be seen. These days farms needed fewer people to do all the work. An engine roared into life behind the stone-built shippons; a tractor must be heading out into the narrow lane.

The grain silo loomed in front of her, linked to the farmyard by a dirt track rutted by huge tyres. The silo was forty feet high, a finger pointing to Heaven. A memory swam in her head of the silo’s arrival at Lane End Farm; it came in component parts, arched sections of steel. She and Callum watched the crane lifting the sections into place as their father yelled instructions, and waved his arms like a human windmill.

‘Silos are scary,’ Callum said. ‘We won’t be allowed in.’

Orla had dreamt of bathing in the harvest, letting the grain run down in rivulets over her face, breathing in the aroma she adored.

‘You’re lying to me!’

‘No, I’m serious. It’s too easy to become trapped. When the conveyor pumps the grain in at full blast, it works so fast, it can overwhelm you. There’s no way out. If you call, nobody would hear. Too much noise.’

Callum possessed curiosity by the wagon-load. He loved finding things out just as he loved to parade his superior knowledge, drip-feeding titbits to his sister to keep her hanging on his every utterance.

The back of her neck prickled. Was someone watching her? She glanced around, but if someone was hidden in the wych elms of the Hanging Wood, or lurking behind the buildings, she could not tell. Perhaps this sense of someone observing her every move was caused by feeling so alone. Loneliness was a cancer, eating up your confidence. After Callum vanished, she had nobody to turn to. Mum was wrapped up with her new husband, Kit Payne, who worked for the Madsens at the caravan park. The children were pawns in a bitter divorce, and Mum messed Dad about so he didn’t get the access she promised in court. Orla didn’t set eyes on him for weeks after Callum disappeared. By the time she was allowed to go back to the farm again, they had become strangers.

Before the silo tower was built, she loved to join Callum in the grain piled high in the barn. The pair of them took turns to swing on the rope that hung from the rafters and jump into the heap, where they would roll about, laughing without control as they pretended to bury each other. More fun than a seaside holiday and getting buried in sand. Sometimes they showered in the grain as the conveyor sprayed it down. As daylight faded, they emptied it from their wellies, squirming because it itched and had slipped down their shirts. The smell of dry grain fresh from the combine was the smell of summer. Not like when it was wet and fermented, and smelt like the beer her father drank.

The building of the silo tower ended the game, as Callum forecast. The children had to find other places to go, new stories to dream up. But Callum was never at a loss. They were like Hansel and Gretel, he announced. Their uncle’s cottage in the Hanging Wood became their very own gingerbread house.

She gazed at the silo. It might have been a religious monument, eerie yet inspiring awe. A shaft of light fell upon its walls as if a miracle were about to happen. For years, she’d disclaimed any faith, but now she had a fuzzy image of herself as a pilgrim, a devotee lured by the mysterious landmark. It wanted to draw her into its clutches.

Her boot crunched on something, and she came to a sudden halt. A scattering of tiny white bones lay beneath her feet. She peered at the skeleton for so long that her eyes began to water. The remains of a heron, chased to destruction by ravens or crows. She’d heard rumours that red kites were coming back to the Lakes, but if they returned, they too would be mobbed by birds determined to guard their territory.

‘Birds are like people,’ Callum once said. ‘They hate trespassers.’

Orla forced herself on. The closer she came to the farm, the more it resembled a surreal graveyard. Remnants of old farm machines were strewn around. Some must have lain here for years, dirty spikes and shards of metal like a parody of some weird work of art.

A wail from a small shed chilled her spine. The cry of a calf, distressed by the absence of its mother. It sounded hoarse, and she supposed it had been wailing for hours. She remembered teaching the calves to drink from buckets so the cows were not distracted from producing milk for market. The smell of stale milk from the calf-pen lingered in her sinuses.

She limped up to the half-door at the base of the silo. Another memory slithered into her head. The first harvest after the silo was built, the weather was wet for weeks on end, and the grain became stuck. One afternoon, Dad took his shotgun out of the cupboard, and Callum and Orla followed him to the silo. He shouted at them to stand back when he opened the grain door. Holding her breath, gripping her brother’s arm, Orla watched as their father raised his shotgun and fired into the mass of damp grain.

The blast deafened her, and she clamped her hands to her ears with a wail of dismay.

‘What are you mithering about?’ her father demanded. He’d turned round grinning, as if expecting applause, and her feeble reaction annoyed him. Callum’s face was a sly mask, as usual. ‘That’s how you do it. Moist grain bridges, and it needs to be loose.’

Most farmers loosened grain with a pole, Callum told her later, but that wasn’t thrilling enough for Dad. He relished the sense of power. It felt like a drug coursing through his veins. Shooting turned him on, Callum said.

A bolt was fixed to the grain door, a nod to safety regulations, but it was rusty from lack of use. Orla wondered about crawling into the bottom of the silo. No, she had a better idea.

The ladder up the side of the silo was covered by a safety ring, a tube made of fibreglass. A belated safety measure, added after one of Dad’s men fell off the ladder on a windy day and broke his ankle.

Once you were inside the ring, nobody could see you mounting the ladder, until you reached the top of the silo. Orla surveyed the fields. Her only witnesses were the cows, and even they were losing interest.

She wriggled into the tube, and started to lever herself up the rungs of the ladder. Her head and ankle throbbed with pain. Those cans of lager had made her so woozy she found herself dreaming that someone had begun to shin up after her. What did it matter if she took a tumble? She managed to cling on to the cool metal all the way to the top.

Orla hauled herself from the ladder ring into the sunshine. At the top of the silo was a metal platform, and she sidled behind the pipework through which the grain was blown. Until the last moment, she wanted to be concealed from anyone who might emerge from the buildings and stare up at the silo from the farmyard.

A hatch on the platform led down to the inside of the silo. The hatch wasn’t padlocked, there was no point. A rubber seal kept the grain free from moisture, and the hatch was closed by wing nuts. Orla fiddled with the wing nuts, and slid them across.

Crouching by the side of the open hatch, she peered down into the silo. The grain was deep, a darkly golden mountain. Forty tons, minimum. Cattle needed feeding all year – that was why the silo was half-full at the height of summer. Inhaling, she sucked the smell of the grain into her lungs. The odour made her think she’d stuck her face into a barrel of bitter beer.

It was like gazing into a tunnel. The sun fell on the grain, casting light on darkness. What might you find at the end of such a tunnel? But her brain was a junkyard, and she didn’t want to guess. Better find out for herself.

Peacefulness enveloped her, warm as a blanket. No question, her instinct was right. Only one way to go.

Orla stood up straight, lifted her arms, and put her hands together. Her lips moved as if in silent prayer. The sun burnt her scalp but she felt no pain.

She thought she heard a hoarse voice. Was that someone close by, hissing her name? Too late to take notice. No second thoughts.

I’m coming home.

CHAPTER TWO

‘Don’t you care about justice?’

Hannah Scarlett took a sip from her mug as the question echoed in her brain.

The coffee scalded her tongue, but Hannah didn’t notice. All she felt was the sting of Orla Payne’s scorn.

Crazy, crazy, crazy. A summer morning on a rare day off, and she was sprawling on the sunlounger; yet she couldn’t stop thinking about work. She never should have taken that call yesterday. Over the years, she’d interviewed rapists, paedophiles, and murderers who felt no flicker of remorse for the harm they caused. So why succumb to guilt when she’d done nothing wrong?

If Marc were here, he’d roll his eyes and moan that the job mattered to her more than anything, and certainly more than he did. She’d insist he was exaggerating, refuse to acknowledge that he might be right.

Anyway, she was on her own now, out at the back of Undercrag, the sun warming her as Marc hadn’t done since the depths of winter. They had bought the house last year, before everything fell apart and he moved out. Six weeks ago, she’d lugged the garden furniture out of the shed, but this was the first time she’d found time to laze. Meadow browns and dark-green fritillaries flitted among the shrub roses; she heard the plaintive cry of an invisible lapwing. The wildlife garden of Undercrag was turning into a wilderness, her failure to do any gardening just one more shortcoming to prick her conscience. But there was nobody around to see the evidence of her neglect. A tall holly hedge and half a dozen huge horse chestnut trees afforded complete seclusion from the neighbours’ houses. Marc was keen on the privacy; knowing him, he’d had half an eye on the potential for al fresco sex. No chance of that now, mate.

She was wearing only the T-shirt she’d slept in and a pair of shorts. Soon, she must figure out what to wear for her meeting with Marc. Dress up or dress down? Remind him of what he was missing, or impersonate a bag lady, in the hope he’d abandon interest in winning her back?

She bit into a slice of toast, telling herself not to obsess about the job. Yet police work offered escape, and when she wasn’t on duty, thinking about it helped her to dodge decisions about what to do with the rest of her life.

Better stop beating herself up about Orla Payne. The woman had been pissed, but Hannah shouldn’t have let her temper fray. Blame it on Marc; she’d been psyching herself up for the challenge of seeing him again. Yet Orla wasn’t a routine time-waster. She’d been drinking, but the muddled desperation in her voice sounded genuine.

‘He deserves justice,’ Orla said. ‘“How could you do that to your own brother?”’

‘What do you mean?’ Hannah asked.

‘Those were Callum’s words. Our uncle was a scapegoat. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone Callum. He loved us both. Why does nobody understand?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You’ll say that Callum hasn’t been seen for twenty years,’ Orla muttered. ‘But I’m only asking for justice for my brother. Is that too much to ask?’

‘Your brother’s name was Callum Hinds, and he disappeared all those years ago – is that what you’re saying, Ms Payne?’ If this was a cold case, it was slap bang in her territory – but very, very cold after a couple of decades. ‘Ms Payne, if you want my team to consider looking into a case, we must have something to work with. Can you provide new evidence? Facts not available until now?’

‘He said you would listen,’ Orla muttered.

‘I am listening.’ Teeth gritted. ‘But I’m not clear what you’re telling me.’

‘For God’s sake. How many times …?’

The woman’s voice trailed away.

‘Ms Payne?’

‘He was wrong. I should have realised. You’re not interested.’

Ever-decreasing circles. Impatience gnawed at Hannah.

‘Who was wrong?’ she demanded.

‘Daniel Kind.’

Hearing Daniel’s name out of the blue snatched Hannah’s breath away. For a moment, she could not think what to say.

‘I’m wasting my time, aren’t I?’

‘Ms Payne—’

‘Don’t you care about justice?’

The line went dead.

Leaving Hannah to wonder about Orla Payne, her brother’s disappearance, and Daniel Kind.

A grey squirrel crouched on the grass in front of her, its eyes bright and inquisitive. Hannah offered it a small piece of toast, but the squirrel took one look and scampered off up a tree trunk, leaping from one branch to another before disappearing into the thick mass of leaves. Oh well, so much for bonding with nature. When she and Marc first looked round Undercrag, he said the grounds would be lovely in the summer months, a haven of peace and quiet two miles from the traffic jams in the tourist trap of Ambleside. They mustered the purchase price and cost of renovations thanks to money Marc had inherited, yet he hadn’t set foot inside the house since early January. His fault, so why did Hannah feel a pang of remorse? That was as stupid as fretting because a boozed-up woman she’d never met accused her of not caring about justice.

After Orla’s call, Hannah asked Chantal, the team’s latest admin assistant, to dig out the file on Callum Hinds. He’d disappeared when Hannah was still at school. The name rang a bell – no doubt she’d seen it in the papers or heard it on the TV news, but she couldn’t recall any details. In her mind, his story was blurred with those of all the other teenagers who went missing, never to return.

Once she started reading, she became so absorbed that she took the buff folders home and trawled through each and every one of them, staying awake till the early hours. Callum Hinds’ parents were divorced. Niamh, his mother, had remarried a man called Kit Payne, but Callum kept the surname of his father, who ran a dairy farm near Keswick. One day, his mother raised the alarm when she discovered that he had gone missing. A search was mounted, but no trace of Callum was ever found.

Soon after the police were called in, his uncle – Philip Hinds, brother of Mike, the farmer – committed suicide. His body was found dangling from a branch of an old elm tree, a stone’s throw from the cottage where he lived.

‘He died somewhere called the Hanging Wood,’ Chantal had said, unable to resist a nervous giggle at the irony.

‘So how old was Orla Payne when Callum vanished?’

‘Seven.’

Only seven. Had life treated her roughly since then, had drink or drug addiction led her to fantasise about her brother’s fate? The call gave the team nothing to latch on to; there was no reason for Hannah to feel wounded by the jibe that she didn’t care about justice.

Gulping down the rest of her drink, she stretched out on the lounger. But the caffeine made her nerve ends tingle, and she had plenty to do. Forget Orla Payne. This was meant to be decision day, when she finally summoned up the nerve to tell Marc they were finished.

‘You’re looking fantastic,’ Marc said.

She shrugged, determined not to respond to flattery, even though she’d experienced a zing of triumph when she first pulled on her jeans. Trophy jeans, a pair she’d kept long after she’d last been able to squeeze herself into them. Over the past six months, she’d lost half a stone. Living on her own must suit her.

She closed her eyes, listening to the water crash over the weir. They were lunching out at the back of Marc’s second-hand bookshop. He’d cordoned off a space that overlooked the stream. Hannah had suggested meeting elsewhere, on neutral ground, but he’d persuaded her to come here. The bookshop was his kingdom – but not, these days, exclusively his. He’d gone into partnership with Leigh Moffat, who ran the cafeterias here and at Marc’s other shop in Sedbergh. Food and drink lured more customers than the stacked shelves of books. All over the country, second-hand bookshops were closing their doors as customers migrated to charity shops and online buying, but Marc was contrary. Besides, even people who hated reading needed to eat. Earlier in the year, when the bank manager started to make menacing noises about cash flow and overdraft limits, Marc had sold a half-share in the business to Leigh. Years back, Marc had had a fling with her sister, but he insisted this relationship was about business, nothing more. Would she care if he was lying?

‘Busy at work?’ Marc was determined to keep trying.

‘Uh-huh.’ Hannah tasted her soup. Carrot and coriander, seasoned with garlic and a touch of black pepper. Warm, sweet and spicy.

Marc smeared low-fat spread on a wholegrain roll before passing it to her. Talk about buttering her up.

‘Still flogging yourself to death, I suppose.’

‘We’re short of staff. You must have read about the row over cutbacks.’

‘Yeah, don’t the newspapers reckon that twice as many Tesco supermarkets open twenty-four/seven as police stations? But I see that congratulations are in order. Your team has been shortlisted for an award. Isn’t the ceremony tomorrow?’

Hannah almost choked on a mouthful of bread roll. Give him credit, he was making an effort.

‘You’ve done your homework.’

‘I’m interested, believe it or not.’

Then why leave it so late?

‘It’s nothing to get excited about.’

‘Typical Hannah. Underselling yourself.’

‘No false modesty – we aren’t going to win. I’ve been tipped off that we finished as runners-up for the Contribution to the Community Award. The girl who types for the judging panel fancies Greg Wharf. She told him that we lost out to a bunch of litter collectors.’

He laughed. ‘Don’t tell me – the Cleanliness in Cumbria Partnership?’

‘Yeah, their press releases get everywhere. They emptied more bins than we solved rapes and murders, I think that’s how it works.’

‘Hey, it’s not about winning, but the taking part.’

She couldn’t help grinning. ‘If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.’

‘Any major cold cases on the go?’

‘Only if you count a miserable old sod in his seventies who lives in Lancaster, but spent most of his life in Barrow. We spent six months searching for a match to DNA from a rape at Millom thirty years ago. The victim has been in and out of mental hospitals ever since. Eventually, we found our man, but the CPS are digging in their heels, they don’t want to prosecute. He has advanced Parkinson’s disease, and the medics say he’s unfit to plead.’

‘Frustrating.’

‘Life’s rich tapestry.’

‘No more murders?’

‘I needed a break from murders.’

He nodded. At the start of the year, he’d found himself mixed up in one of her cases. They’d reached a tacit agreement not to speak about it again. The wounds were too raw.

‘I guess so.’

‘Matter of fact, I took a call yesterday. A woman whose brother disappeared, his name was Callum Hinds. Their stepfather managed Madsen’s caravan park, up at Keswick.’

‘The caravan park?’ He pondered. ‘Aren’t Madsen’s the people who sponsored your award?’

‘The award we didn’t quite win, you mean?’ Of course, that was why she knew the name. ‘As a matter of fact, you’re right.’

‘Successful company. I’ve bumped into the Madsen brothers at Commerce in Cumbria events. Bryan Madsen is a big wheel in local politics, and once upon a time, Gareth was a racing driver. If they can afford sponsorship money in the current economic climate, they must be worth a packet.’ He paused. ‘As it happens, I do recall a boy going missing somewhere near the caravan park.’

‘Your memory goes back that far?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my memory,’ he murmured. ‘My parents talked about the case, because they’d discussed buying a caravan at Madsen’s. In the end, they settled for a timeshare in Majorca. Kept it for five years and went out there only twice. The lad and I were much the same age. You don’t expect to die in your teens.’

‘No trace of Callum was found. There’s nothing to prove he died.’

Marc pushed a hand through his thicket of fair hair, a habitual gesture. As she finished her soup, it struck her that this was one of his mannerisms that she found appealing. She’d actually missed it.

Weird, very weird.

He looked into her eyes, and she averted her gaze, focusing instead on sheep traipsing across the fells. She understood how much effort he was making to appear relaxed, indulging her with small talk. Marc fizzed with nervous energy and, beneath the surface affability, his insides must be knotted with tension. He was as photogenic as ever – she’d felt familiar stirrings of desire, unwelcome but undeniable, when he greeted her – but there was no masking the dark rings beneath his eyes. The legacy of a sleepless night, fretting that he was about to lose her? He hated losing, something else they had in common. No way would she let him soft-soap her. Her heart was hardened. At least, as much as it ever could be.

When it dawned on him that she would not break the silence, he said, ‘How’s your new sergeant shaping up?’

‘Greg Wharf? An old hand by now. Smart guy. Almost as smart as he believes he is.’

‘Not as smart as Nick Lowther, though?’

Nick had left the force and emigrated with a new partner before last Christmas. Marc had been suspicious of their relationship for years. If only he knew how wrong he’d been. Before that, he’d imagined she lusted after her old boss, Ben Kind, though their relationship was never more than platonic. This winter, Marc had got it into his head that she’d started an affair with Ben’s son, Daniel. His jealousy tore them apart. That, plus his pathetic swooning over a girl who had worked for him, downstairs in this very shop.

‘There’s no comparison. Nick was quiet and thoughtful. Greg is noisy and relies on what he calls his “gut”.’

‘Not your type?’

She frowned. ‘I’m not sure I have a type.’

He knocked back the rest of his wine and said, ‘Thanks for coming, Hannah. I wanted to apologise to you.’

‘You apologised before.’

‘And you said you accepted my apology. But I don’t think you did.’

She focused on the grazing sheep. What were apologies for? They were empty words, devalued currency. Spouted by politicians who were keen to say sorry for sins of the distant past, but lacking the courage to admit mistakes of the here and now.

‘I meant to ask your forgiveness.’

She’d never heard him speak with such humility.

‘What for?’

‘For everything. The way I treated you when we lived together. Spending too much time on the shops, not enough on you. Accusing you of shagging Daniel Kind.’

He lowered his voice. A couple of elderly women in raincoats, who had spent too long living in the Lake District to be fooled by sunshine and a cloudless sky, plonked themselves down at a table on the other side of the chain, and he was desperate not to be overheard. He didn’t want witnesses to his mortification.

A wild instinct seized her.

‘What if I did shag him?’ she whispered.

She’d never before said anything to him that was meant to hurt. Grief was scrawled all over his face, as plain as if a vandal had sprayed it with paint.

‘I … I wouldn’t be surprised.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘Good-looking successful man. Good-looking successful woman. Both let down by their lovers. Who could blame them?’

On the drive from Undercrag, she’d rehearsed this conversation, expecting resistance, bitterness, anger. Conceivably, for he was an emotional man, a torrent of tears. Self-abasement wasn’t in the script. She didn’t want to humiliate him, or lie about her relationship with Daniel.

‘For what it’s worth, we haven’t done anything.’

One of the women at the nearby table brayed with laughter, enjoying a bit of salacious gossip. Marc’s hands shook. He was unsure whether to believe her.

‘You don’t have to say that.’

‘It’s true.’ She hesitated. ‘Well, he kissed me once. In the car park of The Tickled Trout, not the ideal spot for a romantic tryst. If you must know, I haven’t seen him for months. The last time we bumped into each other was at a lecture given by a professor of criminology at the University of South Lakeland. All about the narratives that criminals weave, to justify their behaviour to themselves. Daniel was with his sister – she teaches law at the uni, remember? The three of us had a chat over a glass of orange juice, and then went our separate ways. All right?’

Marc swallowed a mouthful of baguette. ‘You can see whoever you like. Specially a good friend like Daniel. As a matter of fact, I got you something.’

She stared as he reached into a shoulder bag that he’d dumped on the decking underneath their table. He pulled out a parcel in gift wrapping and put it in her hands.

She tried to hand it straight back to him, but he’d folded his arms and it was impossible.

‘Marc, I can’t accept—’

‘Don’t be so hasty. Unwrap it and have a look, before you turn it down,’ he said.

Unwilling to be churlish, she tore off the wrapping. Inside, the present was packed in tissue paper. She slid out a slim hardback book, with gold lettering on the front and spine. The title was Hidden Depths, the author D.B. Kind.

‘Is this by Daniel?’ she asked. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘You won’t find Hidden Depths mentioned in his bibliography. I think he prefers to forget about it, but he’s too modest. It’s a collection of poetry that he published when he was a student. Not exactly Coleridge, but definitely not McGonagall, either. Quite a few of the verses deal with rifts between parent and child – read into that what you will. Maybe he needed to put it down in black and white to get the bad stuff out of his system. And writing poetry doesn’t pay the rent – you can see why he gave it up for popular history.’

She opened the book. ‘A first edition?’

‘Yep, it was never reprinted.’ He gave the engaging grin she’d always liked. ‘The publishers went out of business shortly afterwards, but I’m sure it wasn’t Daniel’s fault.’

‘You shouldn’t give this to me.’

‘This copy took a hell of a lot of finding, trust me. I tracked it down to Manitoba. After all that effort, you have to accept it. No way am I planning to flog it on the Internet.’

She shook her head.

‘Peace offering,’ he said. ‘No strings.’

‘Whenever anyone says there are no strings, there are strings.’

‘Put it in your bag, Hannah.’

She considered him. He was pleased with his coup, and it would be childish to spurn the gift. He’d been riven by jealousy, first of Ben, later of Nick, finally of Daniel, and people didn’t change. But he’d striven for generosity, and the little book was worth more than any protestations that the leopard had changed spots.

‘Thank you.’

Again the grin. This was more like the old Marc – low-fat spread wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Hannah pictured her oldest friend, Terri, a self-certified expert on the opposite sex, warning her it wouldn’t last – it never did. Terri ought to know, after three marriages and half a lifetime deluding herself that she could transform some of the most unsuitable men in Cumbria, possibly in the western hemisphere, into a cross between Mr Darcy and George Clooney.

Time to seize back the initiative.

‘So what about you and Leigh?’ she asked.

‘Nothing to tell. She made it very clear when she put up the money, it’s an investment, because she believes we can make it work. Books and food, nourishment for brain and body, a magical combination. We’re partners, sure, but it’s only in business.’

The cynic in Hannah wondered if that meant Leigh had rebuffed his overtures. Whatever, their teaming up didn’t offer her an easy escape route.

Time to look him in the eye.

‘I don’t want us to get back together again,’ she said.

‘I know.’

She’d steeled herself for a protest, perhaps an eruption of fury.

‘So, there are things to decide. Arrangements to be made.’

‘Hey, not so fast. We’re not married, remember?’

‘I haven’t forgotten,’ she snapped.

‘Well, then. There’s no question of a divorce. No legal stuff. We can take our time.’

‘Marc, it’s more than six months already.’

He leant across the table, putting his face close to hers.

‘I’ve counted the days. I can give you the calculation in minutes and seconds if you like.’

‘That won’t be necessary.’

Her cheeks tingled. The two old women had stopped talking. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw them studying her with thrilled curiosity.

‘Half a year of numbness,’ he muttered. ‘What happened was terrible, it was bound to take an age for us to get over it.’

‘I’m over it,’ she said. ‘I’ve moved on.’

‘Bollocks,’ he hissed. ‘You need more time.’

‘The great healer?’

She meant to strike a sardonic note, but her voice sounded scratchy and she felt embarrassed. The old women were loving this. Lunch in the sun, with free reality entertainment thrown in. Who needed daytime TV?

‘I’ll give you all the space you want,’ he said. ‘There’s no rush.’

She was about to say: forget it, I won’t change my mind. But the words stuck in her throat. How could she be so sure?

He bent forward, and brushed his lips against hers. As her body tingled, he sprang to his feet. Crushing his paper napkin in his fist, he hurled it into the bin on the edge of the decking. His eye was good, it was a perfect shot. She wondered that their audience didn’t break out into applause.

‘What we have is precious,’ he said. ‘Don’t be in such a hurry to chuck it away like a piece of litter.’

With the same lithe ease that so often set her pulse racing in their early days together, he moved past her, and disappeared down the stairs and into the darkness of his shop.

As she stood up to go, her eyes met those of one of the elderly women. She waved towards Hannah’s table.

‘Don’t forget your book!’

CHAPTER THREE

Daniel Kind swung off the lane at the entrance lodge. On either side of the narrow drive, oak trees spread branches to form a tunnel with a roof of green. Daniel slowed the car to walking pace. It felt like passing through a portal into a different world. He loved travelling back in time, even if only in his head; for a historian, the past was a perfect destination. The drive curved, and through the thick leaves, he glimpsed the mysterious bulk of his destination.

The magic of the extraordinary building lifted his spirits. In his imagination he was transported to fifteenth-century France, approaching a strange chateau, hiding place of treasures and countless dark secrets. St Herbert’s was constructed of freestone, tinted a greenish grey that seemed dour even on the brightest morning. The slate roofs were dark and austere, the design eccentric. The architect had let rip with flights of Gothic fancy, a confection of steep mansards and conical turrets jostling on the skyline with the parapets of a huge square tower. Above the tower’s battlements, a wrought-iron balustrade ran around the cut-off top of a roof in the shape of a pyramid. In the middle of the front elevation, a carriage porch had been elaborated into a two-storey gatehouse flanked by octagonal pilasters, with an oriel window jutting out above the arch. This was a residence fit for a marquis, viscount or duke.

A grubby white delivery van shattered the illusion, tyres screeching as it hurtled around the building from the loading bay by the kitchens. It headed past him to its next drop-off in the real world, and Daniel spotted a slogan scrawled in the muck on the rear doors: I wish my girlfriend was as dirty as this. Not the level of literary sophistication associated with St Herbert’s Residential Library, but it brought him down to earth. Appearances were deceptive; this wasn’t the Loire Valley – St Herbert’s was English, through and through. The freestone came from Low Furness and the slate from Westmorland quarries.

Daniel reversed into a marked space at the end of a row of parked cars. No sign of Orla Payne’s rusty old banger. Taking a second day off work in succession, by the look of things. Had she mustered the courage to speak to Hannah Scarlett? God, he hoped so. If anyone could make sense of Orla’s ramblings about her lost brother, it was Hannah.

Lifting his laptop case from the passenger seat, he flicked the remote fob to lock the car. The Mercedes was a new toy; he’d treated himself after his agent sold translation rights to his next book throughout Europe. All he needed to do now was to finish writing it. Deadline only three weeks away. Fifteen thousand words and who-knew-how-much revision to go.

As he’d sweated over the manuscript, he found it suited him to work at St Herbert’s. He was writing a study of Thomas De Quincey’s influence upon the history of murder. The library kept a small archive of De Quincey’s correspondence from his time living in Dove Cottage, together with a collection of nineteenth-century manuscripts so obscure that the online monoliths had neglected to digitise them. Each time he came here, Daniel found himself not wanting to pack up as darkness fell and set off home to Brackdale. St Herbert’s possessed a unique charm, a residential library where you could read by day, sleep by night, and then wake to stroll through gardens boasting some of the finest views in Britain. He’d stayed over a couple of times, sharing Laphroaig and conversation with the principal in front of a log fire in the drawing room before resuming work until the small hours.

He wanted to fill his lungs with fresh air before finding a table in the library. Such a gorgeous summer afternoon was too precious to squander. A path curled past a yew hedge to the rear of the building. Beyond a neat lawn and a fountain with a cherub lay a walled garden. A wooden door in the middle of the stone wall was kept open during daylight hours. Gertrude Jekyll had presided over the planting, and the bulk of the garden was devoted to dozens of rose cultivars, sequenced by colour from red, through pink and white, to yellow, apricot and orange. Where the cross paths met in the centre stood a rondel of timber posts covered in climbing roses and clematis, alongside a tiny pond inhabited by fat goldfish.

Daniel inhaled the fragrance of the blooms. The garden was deserted, and he imagined himself striding out like Sir Milo Hopes of Mockbeggar Hall, taking a morning  constitutional around the monument he had built to celebrate his love of literature. Sir Milo, who fancied himself as a man of letters, had compiled an archive of memoirs and other family papers, as well as trying his hand at fiction. Having skimmed a couple of the historical romances which the squire of Mockbeggar had privately printed and expensively bound for display in the library, Daniel understood why Sir Milo was remembered for his munificence, not his plodding prose.

‘Daniel!’

He spun on his heel. Above the wall, the upper part of the building was visible. On a narrow parapet, outside a first-floor window, a tall lean man with a wild mane of thick black hair and a flowing beard stood. His arms were held aloft, forefingers pointing to the sky. He might have been a demagogue in mid rant, intent on whipping up a frenzy in a raging mob. Or a zealot about to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Jesus, what is he doing?

The man’s dark eyes stared down and met Daniel’s.

‘Aslan!’ Daniel bellowed.

He burst into a run, desperate to avert disaster. The man on the parapet stood motionless, as if deciding what to do, before relaxing, as if the tension had been squeezed out of him like paste from a tube.

He shook his mane, and let his arms fall.

‘Sorry!’ he called. ‘Did I give you a scare?’

‘How did it go?’ the voice on the phone asked.

Hannah switched off the ignition of her Lexus. Even though Terri was her closest friend, it had been a mistake to confide, in a moment of weakness, that she was planning to make the break with Marc.

‘We talked, which is progress.’

‘And?’

‘We’ll talk again, I suppose.’

‘So he’s fighting to keep you?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘It’s taken long enough for him to realise what he’s throwing away.’

Hannah’s head was starting to hurt. She hadn’t realised how much she’d been building up to this face-to-face encounter with the man she’d loved for years, the man she thought had loved her. It shouldn’t be a spectator sport, and she wasn’t in the mood for a bout of post-match analysis.

‘Listen, I’ve got to go. Sorry, things to do.’

‘You’re still OK for tomorrow?’

Hannah had forgotten they’d arranged an evening out together, listening to a folk band. The last thing she needed was a bunch of amateur troubadours serenading her with songs about heartbreak, but Terri was not to be put off.

‘Sure.’

‘Try not to be late for once. You never know, that hunky Polish barman might pick me up, and you’ll wind up listening to the band on your own while Stefan and I make wonderful music in his bedsit.’

‘Be careful what you wish for.’

‘What was all that about?’ Daniel demanded.

They were outside the rear entrance to St Herbert’s, in front of the mullioned windows of the deserted dining room. Aslan Sheikh had shinned down to the ground by way of an iron drainpipe. Shades of Spiderman; agile and fit, he’d not even broken sweat. The sight of him standing on the ledge had left Daniel’s stomach weak and his knees feeling like mush. A flashback took him to the day his partner Aimee fell from the Saxon tower in Oxford’s Cornmarket. Daniel had arrived too late to save her, but he was haunted by a picture in his mind of the young woman, teetering on the brink, before she took a last breath and jumped.

Aslan was not to know that. He was indulging in high spirits, not twisting the knife.

‘It began as a fag break, would you believe? I came out for a smoke, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t climbed for years. I was curious. Wondered what the view was like from the parapet.’

‘Curious?’ Daniel shook his head. ‘You could have borrowed a key and taken a look from inside one of the offices up there.’

‘Where’s the fun in that?’ Aslan pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his jeans, and lit up. ‘Hey, I’m a creature of impulse. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. A break, a chance of excitement.’

For a creature of impulse seeking excitement, choosing to work at St Herbert’s was pretty counter-intuitive, Daniel thought. Aslan’s shock of hair, beaky nose and swaggering gait, coupled with his olive skin and handsome cast of features, suggested he was cut out for somewhere much more exotic than St Herbert’s. But he worked here as a part-time conference and events organiser. He’d explained to Daniel that he was half-Turkish, accounting for his unusual first name, and that he’d spent the last few years travelling, working in tourism and on cruise ships as well as having a spell in the United States. His late mother had once worked in a Keswick pub, and although they had deserted the Lakes for Istanbul when he was a baby, he’d vowed one day to make a pilgrimage back to the place of his birth.

‘So was the view worth it?’

‘Need you ask? You can see Mockbeggar Hall, the farmland owned by Orla’s father, and the fells in the distance. The caravans are the only blot on the landscape. They are supposed to blend in with the landscape, and priced to match, but it doesn’t quite work. The Hall is due to reopen any day now as a leisure complex, would you believe? Old Sir Milo must be revolving in his grave.’

‘Speaking of Orla Payne, I didn’t see her car. Is she around today?’

Aslan clicked his tongue in mock disapproval. ‘It was my day off yesterday, but Sham tells me she didn’t show up then, either. Yet she hasn’t called in sick. AWOL two days running, naughty, naughty. The principal won’t be a happy bunny.’

‘I bet.’ Professor Micah Bridge could never understand how the conscience of any member of his staff allowed them to show less dedication to the library than his own. People management gave him palpitations. ‘She hasn’t been in touch?’

‘Sham hasn’t heard a peep from her. Nobody has any idea what’s up. Let’s hope she isn’t lying behind a pile of garbage down some back alley in a drunken stupor, eh?’

‘I thought the two of you are friends?’

‘We’re not seeing each other, if that’s what you mean.’ Aslan sniggered. ‘As communications manager, she showed me the ropes, and we went out to a pub in Keswick once or twice, nothing heavy.’

An unexpectedly brutal denial. Orla was a nice-looking woman, but perhaps Aslan had his eye on Sham Madsen, with her anything-goes grin and very rich parents.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Don’t get me wrong, I really feel for Orla, you have no idea. Nothing can replace the loss of a brother or sister. Nothing in the world …’ Aslan’s voice trailed away for a moment before he collected his thoughts. ‘Saying that, it’s no solution to obsess about stuff. And you must admit, she does have an obsession. I’ve noticed her buttonholing you in the dining room.’

‘You’ve heard the story about Callum, then?’

‘Hasn’t everyone? As a matter of fact …’

‘What?’

Aslan seemed to change his mind. ‘I don’t mean to sound harsh, not knowing what happened to her brother was horrible. But for goodness’ sake, it was twenty years ago. The world goes on, you know?’

‘Sure.’

Daniel moved towards the main entrance, but Aslan stubbed out his cigarette, and caught him up with quick loping strides.

‘Hey, she’s making a mistake to dwell so much on the past, don’t you agree?’

Daniel halted under the archway. ‘I’m a historian, remember? Dwelling on the past is what I do.’

‘Yeah, right. I only meant …’

Daniel pushed open the double doors. He was worried about Orla, and he didn’t want to show how much. If Aslan was distancing himself, she needed all the friends she could muster.