Ann Cleeves - Hidden Depths

‘This is a murder investigation.’ Her voice was sharp. ‘I’ve every right. Are you sure you never came across her?’

‘I don’t remember her. The town’s full of students.’

‘You didn’t meet her while you were working?’

‘I don’t mix business and pleasure.’ He couldn’t understand why she was picking on him, felt an irrational panic. The mellowing effect of the wine had quite left him. ‘I’m serious about my work.’

‘Tell me about that.’

‘I’m a sound engineer. Self-employed. It could be anything from an opera gig at the City Hall to the Great North Run. There are a couple of bands I do the sound for and I go on tour with them.’

‘Glamorous.’

‘Not really. Folk clubs, small arts centres. The same mediocre musicians singing the same boring songs. A night in a Travelodge before unloading the van somewhere equally forgettable.’ Until he’d started talking he hadn’t realized just how much he’d come to dislike it. He reached a decision he’d been hesitating over for a week. ‘I’m giving it up. The freelance work. I’ve been doing quite a lot of work at the Sage Music Centre, Gateshead, and now they’ve offered me a permanent job. Regular wages, holiday pay, a pension. Suddenly it seems quite attractive.’

‘So you’re going to settle down? Why now?’

‘Age,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s it. The late-night curries in small towns have lost their appeal.’

‘Not a woman, then?’

He hesitated for a moment, then thought: What business is it of hers? ‘No, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Not a woman. Certainly not Lily Marsh.’

He wondered if the use of the name was a mistake. Did that imply previous knowledge? But Vera Stanhope let it go and turned her attention to the others gathered at the table. Gary was relieved that he’d had to go first. He took a drink from his glass, surprised to find it still almost full. Now it was his turn to be the audience. Vera was about to speak when her phone rang. She got up, walked away from them to take the call and stood at the end of the veranda in complete shadow. They began to talk among themselves to prove that her conversation was of no interest to them, but when she returned they fell silent.

‘Sorry, folks,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’ll have to go. Don’t worry, though, I’ve got all your addresses. I’ll catch up with the rest of you another time.’

But she stood there, not moving.

Felicity stood up. ‘I’ll just see you to the door.’

‘Are you interested in how she died?’ Vera asked, looking at them all.

‘I thought suicide,’ Felicity said, shocked. ‘It was all so dramatic, so arranged.’

‘She was strangled,’ Vera said. ‘Hard to manage that by yourself.’

They stared back at her, silent.

‘One last question. Does the name Luke Armstrong mean anything to any of you?’

Nobody replied.

‘I’ll take that as a no, then, shall I?’ she said irritably. ‘Only he was strangled too. Not so far from here.’ She looked at them, waiting for someone to answer. ‘And the cases have certain things in common. I don’t want you talking about this. Not to anyone and certainly not to the press. I hope you understand.’

Still there was no response and she followed Felicity into the house. Watching, Gary, who’d had one or two brushes with the law, thought he’d never come across police like her.

Vera Stanhope drove back to the crime scene. It was a bugger to work, the Crime Scene Investigator said. They just didn’t have the time to deal with it properly. The body had been found at low water. They had four hours before that stretch of the shore would be covered completely. And though it was mid-summer the light had started to go almost as soon as they arrived.

Vera parked by the lighthouse and saw that they’d almost finished. The body had been removed and the sea had slid up the gully and covered the pool. She wondered if they’d managed to retrieve all the flowers, imagined them floating out into the North Sea, tangled in the propeller of the DFDS ferry.

Billy Wainwright, the CSI, was still there, loading his bag into his boot. He was a pale, thin man and seemed not to have aged in the twenty years that she’d known him. She thought now that he had one of those faces which always look boyish. She got out of her car and wandered over to him. Even now, in the early hours, the air was heavy and mild. The beam of the lighthouse swept over their heads.

‘Anything unusual?’

‘A young woman. Strangled. Laid out in a public place in broad daylight. Flowers scattered over her body. Pretty unusual that, I’d have thought. What more do you want?’

‘Would it have been broad daylight?’

‘Must have been. Think of the tide. And anyway she can’t have been there long. The place would have been crawling with people during the day, with the weather we’ve been having. I know it’s a weekday and not school holidays, but all the same the sun always brings people out to the coast. My guess is she was put there not long before she was found.’

Not that public, Vera thought. You had to be right on the lip of the gully before you could see in. Getting her there, though. That would be quite a different matter. Someone must have seen that. And the killer must have wanted her seen before the tide washed all his elaborate stage set away. How would he have felt if James Calvert hadn’t got bored and gone exploring?

‘Do we know how long she’d been dead before she went in?’

‘Sorry, you’ll have to wait for the PM for that. John couldn’t really do much at a scene like this. By the time he arrived we had to be thinking of moving her.’

‘Are they doing it tonight?’

‘I hope not. At least until I’ve had time for a pizza. I was just sitting down in front of a vindaloo when I got called out. I’m bloody starving.’ Billy’s appetite was a standing joke. He was as thin as a bean pole, but voracious. She pondered briefly on the injustice of genetics. ‘We might leave it till the morning,’ he went on. ‘I’m waiting to hear from Wansbeck.’

On cue his phone buzzed. He walked away from her to talk. There were rumours he was having a fling with a new young pathology technician at Wansbeck General and Vera, who was a great one for gossip and saw it as a tool of the trade, tidied away the information about the whispered conversation to pass on to Joe Ashworth. Her sergeant would pretend he didn’t want to hear, but she knew he’d be interested. She wondered how Joe was getting on. They’d tracked down Lily Marsh’s parents to a village just outside Hexham and Joe had volunteered to tell them that their daughter was dead. He’d said he didn’t want just anyone doing it. He was a father himself. He couldn’t come close to understanding what it must be like to lose a child, but thought he’d make a better fist of it than some in the team.

Wainwright finished his conversation and came back to her. Even in the dark she sensed a studied nonchalance which made her want to tell him not to be a muppet. He was a married man. Happy enough, she’d thought. The young technician was lonely, playing games with him. Then she told herself it was none of her business and she was hardly a candidate for relationship counsellor.

‘John would like to do it soon,’ he said. ‘He’s tied up later in the morning. Say an hour?’

‘Fine. I’ll be there.’

She stood, leaning against the bonnet of her car, listening to the waves breaking beneath the watch tower, until he’d driven away.

Her mind drifted back to the group sitting outside that strange white house which seemed so out of place in the Northumberland countryside. She’d gone to visit them because she’d had nothing better to do while the scene of crime team was working. They’d found the body, they’d all be together for the night and after that they’d disperse. The PC first at the scene had established that much. She thought she’d catch them while they were still in the area, check if they’d seen anything odd. She’d been hoping, she supposed, for the description of a car similar to the one Julie had seen in her road the night Luke was killed. But they’d caught her interest. It wasn’t just that there was a connection to the dead young woman. Or that the men reminded her of her father, sitting in the kitchen at home with a bunch of cronies after an illicit raid on the raptors’ nests in the hills. Something about the conversation had made her feel they’d need closer looking into. A smugness which irritated her and had something of a challenge in it. She tried to work out which of the individuals had so got under her skin, but couldn’t pin down the source of her unease. In the end she got into her car and followed Wainwright down the track to the road.