Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

The printer whirled into life and disgorged a piece of paper. Sally Cartwright had pulled a few strings for me and got the technology wizards at the Met to see what they could do with the image of the label on the inside jacket of the man in the cave.

They had done quite a bit. There was presumably the man’s name — which was still illegible — but beneath some indistinct letters there were a few clear ones. Hxxtxn amp; MxxxS TxxxxRS

Laura looked over my shoulder at the printout.

‘What you got there?’

‘The label of the man in the cave’s jacket. Just have to work out what it means.’

‘Hoxton and Mears. Tailors. Norwich,’ she said.

‘How the hell do you know that?’

‘Amy’s uncle gets his suits made there. It’s quite well known.’

‘Do you mind if I borrow your assistant for a while, Amy?’ I asked as she came out of her office.

‘Not at all. I’ve got a meeting with a client for a couple of hours. We can discuss a fair splitting of her salary payment later. Pro-rata basis, I guess.’

‘Hang on — I’m employing her now?’

‘You’ve got to think of the future expansion. You have a young family to support now, Jack.’

‘I’ll want a rise,’ said Laura Gomez.

Hoxton and Mears was a very old and long-established tailor’s, or gentlemen’s outfitter as they preferred to be called, on Timber Hill in the cathedral city of Norwich. Timber Hill itself was very old and long-established as well. It had a square-cobbled street and inset flagstones rather than raised pavements. I pulled up outside the shopfront and turned the engine off.

‘You can’t park here,’ said Laura.

I put the Police on business sign behind the windscreen and opened the car door.

‘And that’s another thing,’ she continued as she got out on the passenger side.

‘What is?’

‘This car has got to go.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s all about appearances, Jack. It’s very important in our game.’

‘Is that a fact?’ I said, locking the car.

‘Darn tooting!’ she agreed. ‘You’ve got an office now, an executive assistant. That heap spoils the image that we present.’

‘I wasn’t aware I had hired a management consultant.’

‘I am hired, then. That’s good. Come on,’ she said and held the shop door open for me. ‘Let’s crack this case.’

Edward Prout, the head tailor of Hoxton and Mears, was himself ancient and established, if not quite as much so as the premises or the street outside.

He was examining the blown-up photographs quite closely. ‘Yes, this is definitely one of our labels,’ he said. ‘But I am afraid I am at quite as much of a loss as yourself about the name of the gentleman who commissioned this article.’

I pulled out another photograph, one showing the jacket after it had been removed from the dead man’s body.

‘Could you tell from this when the jacket was made?’

He looked again and shrugged. He was a little man with white hair and a natural tonsure. It made him look almost gnomelike.

‘It is a simple country jacket. It’s a classic design, inspector — you could go back to the beginning of the last century and see it, and you could also buy one close enough to it from us today.’

‘Pretty much as I figured.’

‘Perhaps if you could get me the buttons. It might throw some light.’

I nodded. It had been a bit of a long shot, anyway.

Outside in the street I would have walked back to the car but Laura held my arm. ‘Let’s get a bite first.’

There were two pubs side by side just along from the outfitter. One was called The Murderers and the other was called The Gardener’s Arms. I was going to open the door of the first one as we walked down the hill but Laura shook her head.

‘I much prefer The Murderers,’ she said and I wondered at her smile until I walked in the door. It was an old pub that had been built around 1530, was still family-owned and was full of different spaces — or nooks and crannies as they liked to call them. I could also see that this and The Gardener’s Arms was in fact all one building, with two separate entrance doors and signs. Hence Laura’s smile. Her little joke.

Sitting at the bar I sipped on a half-pint of the ale named after the pub, whilst Laura enjoyed a Bloody Mary with the somewhat vampiric delight I had predicted a few days before.

‘So are we on the case, boss?’ she asked.

‘Will you stop calling me that!’

‘Would you prefer “Gramps”?’

‘No, I would not. Might I remind you that I am going back to the police force in a matter of months.’

‘I very much doubt that.’

‘Mystic Meg, are you?’

‘Kate doesn’t want to go back to London.’

‘Yes, I do know that, thank you, Sherlock.’

‘And there are three women in your house, Jack. You’re outvoted.’

I was beginning to feel that there were more than three women in my prospective marriage, too.

‘So back to the case,’ Laura continued, as if the matter had been settled. ‘You have a murder that took place a number of years ago. You don’t know how long. Nigel Holdsworth was murdered sometime in the night or early morning after the stag party. The same murder weapon has possibly been used. Somebody has defaced the gravestone of Nigel Holdsworth’s grandfather, and Len Wright, the original suspect in his murder because the reverend was diddling his fiancée, has an alibi as he was busy beating up said fiancée at the time and then spending the night with a whore in our fair cathedral city.’

‘So far so good.’

‘So far so bad, I would have said. However, someone, maybe the murderer, has been defacing gravestones, first of a relative of Nigel Holdsworth and now of a relative of his buddy Len Wright who has since disappeared.’

‘True.’

‘So are the names on the gravestones being defaced as a way of ticking off the victims? Like a trophy?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Well, one thing’s for sure, at least.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You’re not a local. You can’t go on the Shannock killer’s list. As you don’t have any relatives in the cemetery.’

‘What the bloody hell is a Shannock?’

‘Sheringham born and bred. Third generation, technically.’

‘Anyway,’ I said, finishing my drink and smiling patronisingly at her. ‘Len Wright is on the run from the long arm of the law, not from any Shannock killer, as you call it. He’ll turn up somewhere sooner or later.’

The following morning and another early one at that.

I was with Sergeant Harry Coker down on the beach again. Superintendent Dean was thankfully nowhere in sight and was giving me a bit of a wide berth, apparently. She had phoned my old boss Diane Campbell but had not got quite the response she had wanted, according to the scuttlebutt that Harry had cheerfully passed on.

The council people who had been clearing the site had made a small entrance into the cave. There were barricades all around it and safety notices. The architectural engineer had stated that there was a very low probability of further collapse. It had been a confluence of extreme conditions that had caused the initial slide. Lightning striking the chalk blocks that had sealed up the entrance and been weathered and covered over time. Again, they were unable as yet to tell us how long. The cave, apparently, had been tunnelled into the cliff hundreds of years ago. One of a few tunnels, possibly, that had been dug back in the days when smuggling was a common occurrence on this part of the coast. Holland and continental Europe were relatively close across the North Sea, hence the history of raiding and invasion and smuggling going back more than a thousand years.