Simon Beckett - The Restless Dead

No wonder Lundy was looking tired. It must have been nearly dawn by the time he got home. ‘Does he have any other family?’

‘A son in the army. He was overseas but he’s back in the UK now. I dare say he’ll get leave after this.’

I was glad Coker had someone. It wouldn’t make it any easier, but it was better than being alone.

‘What about Edgar?’

Lundy grimaced, bringing over the tea and a packet of chocolate biscuits. ‘It’s hard to get much sense out of him. There’s going to have to be a full psychiatric assessment, but from what we can gather you were right about him being in the road. Stacey Coker must have swerved to avoid him — the tyre marks show it was a sudden manoeuvre — and cracked her head when the car went in the creek. We’re fairly certain Holloway pulled her out and took her back to his house, but things get a bit confused after that.’

‘Confused how?’

He spooned sugar into his tea. ‘There’s a question over why he’d rescue and take her back to his house if he was going to kill her.

That could have been his intention all along, but it doesn’t seem likely that he was capable of that sort of planning. So then you’re left with the idea that he started off trying to help, maybe getting her mixed up in his mind with his own missing daughter, maybe not. Then once he got her back home and saw how helpless she was, he got carried away.’

‘Is that what you think?’

He pursed his mouth to take a sip of hot tea. ‘It’s possible.’

‘But?’

‘There are a few things that don’t add up. Did Frears tell you there’s no sign that she was sexually assaulted?’ He dabbed his moustache and set his mug down. ‘Well, that was surprise number one. When you find a young woman who’s been strangled and stripped from the waist down, it generally means one thing. And even if Holloway didn’t assault her, we should have found some evidence from when he undressed her. But we didn’t.’

That surprised me as much as the lack of assault. ‘Nothing at all?’

‘Not below the waist. There were Edgar’s hairs on her sweater, and his fingerprints were on her watch, probably from either pulling her from the car or carrying her afterwards. But that’s all. Even though her jeans had been unfastened rather than torn off there weren’t any prints on the fastener or zip. And the gold chain she wore round her throat had been bunched up and twisted when she was strangled, but there wasn’t even a partial fingerprint on it.’

‘He could have worn gloves,’ I said, although I doubted that it would even have occurred to Edgar to cover his tracks.

‘The only gloves we’ve found were in his pockets, and they were a manky pair of mittens covered in bird muck. If he’d worn those there’d be traces all over her.’

An unpleasant feeling was uncoiling in my gut. ‘So how do you explain it?’

‘I don’t. Not yet. And then there’s the bruising on her throat. Have you seen the size of Holloway’s hands? They’re bony, but big . Like shovels.’ Lundy held up his own hand, which was thick and stubby. ‘His fingers are half as long again as mine, but the bruises we’ve found don’t have anything like that sort of span. OK, that sort of thing is open to interpretation, maybe he bunched up his hands or something. But the measurements suggest she was strangled by someone with much smaller hands than his.’

Someone wearing gloves . The feeling in my gut was growing stronger. ‘What would anyone else be doing at Edgar’s house? And why kill an injured girl?’

‘Beats me.’ Lundy absently took a biscuit from the packet and dunked it in his tea. ‘But if someone was there, chances were they wouldn’t have been expecting to find Stacey Coker. Must’ve given them a nasty shock, seeing her. And, more to the point, if she was conscious she’d have seen them.’

I thought it through, examining the theory from different angles. They all pointed the same way.

‘You think Leo Villiers killed her? So she wouldn’t tell anyone?’

Lundy finished the biscuit and brushed the crumbs from his moustache. ‘Honestly? I don’t know. It seems like we’re starting to lay a lot of crimes at the door of a man we thought was dead a few days ago. But if we’re right and he is still alive, then he’s far and away the likeliest suspect. The notion of a third party killing Stacey Coker to keep her quiet makes more sense than Holloway pulling an injured girl from a car, carrying her all the way home and then strangling her. Or taking off her clothes without molesting her or leaving any traces of himself. That just doesn’t sit right with me.’

Me neither. ‘So the fact she’d been partially stripped...’

‘Window dressing.’ His tone was hard. ‘Someone killed her and then staged it to send us haring off in the wrong direction. Same as they did with the body on the barbed wire, making it look like it had been hit by a boat.’

Lundy’s scenario had an awful plausibility about it. Stripping Stacey Coker made it look as though her murder was sexually motivated. And Edgar was the perfect scapegoat. Not only had he already been under suspicion for his own daughter’s disappearance decades earlier, he lacked the capacity to explain and perhaps even comprehend what had really happened. We’d assumed that when Rachel and I found him he was running from what he’d done. But if he’d returned home to find the girl he’d rescued dead and half naked, he could just as easily have been running from what he’d found .

Even so, there were still elements that didn’t fit. I could believe that Leo Villiers might have faked his own death after murdering Emma Derby, perhaps even killed her ex-boyfriend as well. From there it wasn’t a big leap to suppose that he’d also murdered Stacey Coker so she couldn’t tell anyone he was still alive. That still left one unanswered question.

‘What would Leo Villiers be doing at Edgar Holloway’s house?’ I asked.

Lundy offered me the packet of chocolate biscuits, helping himself to another when I declined. Evidently his throat wasn’t bothering him too much after his procedure. ‘Good question. When we were searching the place we found a shotgun cartridge at the back of one of the cupboards. Bismuth-tin number five birdshot, same size and brand we found in Villiers’ house. Looked as though it might have rolled out of a box and got stuck in a crack.’

‘Just one cartridge?’

‘Just one. No fingerprints on it, and no sign of any shotgun either. But the dust in the cupboard was disturbed, as though something fairly big had been moved from there recently. We’re still searching the rest of the place. There’re still some floorboards to take up and we’ve barely even started in the garden. If there was a shotgun, though, I doubt it was Holloway’s.’

I thought about the ramshackle house, with its unlocked front door and nothing inside but cages of sick and injured animals. ‘So Villiers was using it as... what? Some sort of safe house?’

‘More likely somewhere he could hide things he didn’t want anyone else knowing about. There’s no sign that anyone except Holloway was living there, and no one in their right mind could stand the stink anyway. Christ knows how even Holloway managed to get by as long as he did. He wasn’t getting any help from social services and the house didn’t even have any power. There was an oil-fired generator but it hadn’t been run for Christ knows how long. And what did he do for food?’

‘He could have foraged.’ There was no shortage of eels and shellfish, and I knew from Rachel that sea vegetables grew in the saltmarsh. Edgar would know the Backwaters better than anyone, and if he’d once been a naturalist he’d know what was edible and what wasn’t.