Caroline Graham - The Killings at Badger's Drift

‘Can he walk d’you think?’

‘Let’s try him. Up you come, my lovely.’

Dennis rose to his feet, rubber limbed, still smiling. His face, always pale, was now almost albino-ish in its lack of colour.

‘Shall we clean him up a bit?’

‘Sorry,’ interjected Barnaby, ‘nothing must be touched.’

‘Right. On our way then.’ The three of them left the room, Dennis clinging trustingly like a child. Barnaby followed them out. The crowd, their wildest expectations more than fulfilled, played their part to the hilt, gasping aloud and crying out. One woman said, ‘And to think I nearly stopped in to watch the six o’clock news.’

‘Can you get everything he’s wearing bagged up?’ asked Barnaby. ‘I’ll send someone to collect it.’

‘Will do.’

Barnaby re-entered the lounge to find the doctor pulling down the corpse’s dress and shaking a thermometer.

‘What d’you think?’

‘Ohh ... I’d say an hour ... hour and a half at the most.’ He drew the slashed opening of her dress together. ‘He must’ve had some sort of brainstorm.’

‘I have to get a man over to the hospital. I don’t want Dennis Rainbird left alone.’

‘Well, Tom, you know your own business best. But I can assure you he won’t be going anywhere. Or doing himself a mischief.’

‘I’m not worried about him doing himself a mischief.’ He could hear the scene-of-crime men entering the hall. ‘But he might say something that could help us. He may even have seen something. He must have got home pretty soon after this happened.’

‘You mean ... ? Oh. I seem to have been jumping to the wrong conclusions. Anyway - Dennis or no Dennis - whoever did this must have been clean off his rocker.’

‘His?’

‘Well,’ the doctor frowned, ‘it always is, isn’t it? An attack like this.’

‘Don’t you think a woman would be physically capable?’

‘Physically yes ... I suppose so ... if the rage is there. Psychologically and emotionally ... that’s something else. It’d be a very peculiar sort of woman who could do something like this.’

Barnaby grinned. ‘You are an old chauvinist, George.’

‘So my daughter’s always telling me. Anyway’ - he stood aside to make room for the photographer - ‘I suppose murderers are peculiar.’

‘Not always. I only wish they were. It’d make catching them a lot simpler.’

‘Is this where the body was found, sir?’ asked the photographer.

‘I should imagine so,’ said Bullard.

Barnaby agreed. ‘I think he just lifted her up and held her. I don’t think he dragged her about at all. There’s more blood here than anywhere else.’

Doctor Bullard looked around the room again and shook his head. ‘Who’d believe we only had nine pints? And she’s still got plenty left.’

Barnaby looked at Mrs Rainbird’s bolstery legs which looked as plump and lifelike as they had a couple of days previously when he had talked with her. Her feet were bare. One tiny gold mule trimmed with white ostrich feathers lay, miraculously unstained, in the fireplace. The other was nowhere to be seen.

The room was filling up. Barnaby went into the hall, glad to escape from the rich metallic smell, and spoke to the principal scene-of-crime officer. ‘Are we going to have a pod out here?’

‘All lined up. Should be here within the hour. And I’ve got on to Technical Services ... do a video for you.’

Barnaby nodded and looked around for Troy. On the pavement two officers were placing a cordon and the crowd, now monstrously enlarged, was being forced some distance from the gate. In spite of the emergence of Dennis Rainbird, a sight surely gruesome enough to satisfy the most ghoulish expectations, murmurs of dissatisfaction at this realignment could be heard. Troy, his colour back to normal, came down the path which ran along the side of the house.

‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘I was just checking round the back, sir. I found something a bit unusual.’

‘You should know better than to go trampling about at the scene of a murder, Sergeant.’

‘I didn’t trample ... kept to the concrete path. But look.’ He led Barnaby to a small cedar shed a few feet from the gazebo. All around the path and the step adjacent was damp. Barnaby looked for a dripping tap or faulty hose and saw neither. ‘I mean ... it hasn’t rained for days, has it, sir?’

‘No.’ The chief inspector glanced through the window. On the floor next to the lawnmower was a huge puddle of water. He couldn’t see any containers that might be leaking. Well, all the outbuildings would be checked. No point in wasting time at this stage in fruitless surmise. Troy was looking both smug and hopeful of praise, like a dog who has successfully returned a stick. It was very irritating.

‘Are you feeling all right now?’ asked Barnaby unkindly.

‘Me?’ His sergeant looked first blank then intensely puzzled. ‘I’m fine.’

The end of the back garden was marked by a double hawthorn hedge with a green gate in the middle. Behind the hedge was a narrow path bordered by a dense tangle of wild dog roses, hazels and cow parsley. The path and the last few feet of the garden were overlooked by the upstairs windows of number seven Burnham Crescent, glass eyes with cataracts of grubby lace. Mrs Rainbird wouldn’t have liked that. Barnaby heard footsteps approaching, and stepped through the gates.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Lacey.’

‘Whoops.’ Michael Lacey stopped in his tracks and stared at them. ‘It’s our friendly neighbourhood sleuths. Leaping out of the hedgerow to startle innocent passers-by.’

‘Would you mind telling me where you’re going?’

‘I’m taking a short cut to the Black Boy. Still, as far as I’m aware, not a criminal offence.’

‘A little early, isn’t it?’

‘She opens the jug and bottle if you knock on the shutters. ’ And before Barnaby could reply he had walked quickly away.

‘I don’t believe this,’ murmured Troy. ‘Not a single question as to what we’re doing here. Why, half the village is gawping outside the house. How uncurious can you get?’

‘Incurious. And he wouldn’t know about the crowd if he’d come straight from Holly Cottage through the woods and up Church Lane.’

‘Still, why dash off like that?’ Troy pursed his lips shrewdly before adding, ‘The murderer returns to the scene of the crime.’

‘Hardly ever, Sergeant,’ replied the chief inspector, ‘at least in non-domestic matters. As your experience should have taught you by now.’

‘But they are connected aren’t they, sir?’ continued Troy. ‘The two deaths?’

‘Oh yes.’ The two men stepped back on to the concrete path. Barnaby could see through the french windows into the lounge. It seemed to be crammed with people milling aimlessly about. In fact, as Barnaby knew, the most precise cataloguing and analysis were taking place. And today the scent was warm. Discoveries would be made. No one killed without taking something (usually unintentionally) from the scene. Or leaving something behind.

He made his way to the kitchen door, stopping when he got there, glancing back the way he had come. He thought how impossible it was for a gardener to attempt to conceal his personality. Telling one’s dreams could hardly be more revelatory. Unsophisticated harmony for Miss Simpson; tangled exuberance for Miss Bellringer; whilst here ... He looked at the showy shrubs, the billiard-table-baize lawn, the pond with a concrete cherub peeing mechanically on a plastic lily. Here was ostentatious vulgarity, literally in full bloom.

He entered the hall. A pair of black Oxfords appeared just above his head and made their way down the pine steps from the loft, followed by tweed trousers, a short-sleeved shirt and a bearded, hot-looking face.