Martin Edwards - The Frozen Shroud

Hannah smiled. ‘Not exactly what the doctor ordered, but if it works …’

‘Yeah.’ He rubbed the livid scar on his neck. ‘Sorry to hear about your mate.’

As usual when she was with Josh, she felt ashamed of being unnerved by his gaze. One glass eye, one that didn’t seem focused, peering out from damaged flesh. He could be moody, Josh, he was well known for it, but nobody had more right. He was a man she admired, and whose company she enjoyed, yet whom she always found strangely intimidating.

‘Thanks. I’m still in denial, to be honest. But like you say, getting your head round bad stuff takes time. The unfairness of it all, the sheer … finality. I’ve often wondered how you’ve coped.’

‘Me too. You can’t simply rely on the passage of time. You need to force yourself to carry on. However reluctant you are. If that seems tough, trust me, it’s better than the alternative.’ He studied his fingernails. Badly bitten, she noticed. ‘As you can probably guess, I did think long and hard about the alternative, but life’s short enough as it is.’

‘You were on the team with Fern five years ago when another woman was murdered at Ravenbank. Shenagh Moss, an Australian.’

‘You know something? The last major case I worked on before …’ He gestured at his face. ‘I’ll never forget it. When I heard someone else had been killed in Ravenbank, I couldn’t believe my ears. It’s so tiny, you wouldn’t expect two bike thefts, let alone two murders.’

‘Last time, the assumption was that Shenagh was killed by her ex, but Fern wasn’t convinced.’

‘Me neither. But Fern didn’t agree with my theory.’

Hannah felt her heart pounding. ‘Who did you think killed Shenagh?’

‘The bloke who kept pestering her. Not Meek, the neighbour.’

‘Which neighbour?’

‘The smarmy bloke she’d dumped for old whatsisname who lived in the big house. Knight, he was called. Oz Knight.’

The Armitt Museum and Library stood just beyond Ambleside’s constantly photographed Bridge House, on the route to Rydal Water and Grasmere. Set back from the road, it was a modern stone building, designed to house an eclectic assortment of books, manuscripts, paintings, geological specimens, and miscellaneous unclassifiable bits and pieces. There were even second-hand books for sale.

A young Dutch volunteer called Trijntje was on duty. She recognised Daniel from his television series, which had been screened across Europe, and five minutes spent chatting about historians as detectives was the perfect prelude to the questions he wanted to ask.

‘This man you’re interested in, Roland Jones, what would you like to know?’

Good question, not easy to answer. ‘I want to know more about him. What sort of man he was.’

‘He was an educator, yes?’

He nodded. ‘It’s a long shot, but I wondered if he features in the papers you keep in the archives?’

Charlotte Mason was already well known in the world of education when she moved to Ambleside in the late nineteenth century. Here she’d established the House of Education, dedicated to training governesses and others who taught the young; to this day, homeschoolers follow the methods she advocated, seeking to educate the whole child, not just the mind. Mason lived to a ripe old age, dying five years after the end of the First World War. Roland Jones had become prominent in liberal education, and Daniel wondered if the tutor had studied Charlotte Mason’s pioneering methods. Might he even have had a personal connection with her, and the training institution she’d founded, which once occupied premises next door to the Armitt? But this was tougher than looking for a needle in a haystack; Daniel wasn’t sure what to do with the needle, even if by a stroke of luck he found it.

‘We have so much material upstairs,’ Trjnitje warned him. ‘Even to skim through will take many hours.’

‘I’ve got all day. If I don’t find what I’m after, I’ll come back tomorrow.’

She treated him to a brilliant smile. ‘So Roland Jones is a famous man in the history of Cumbria, yes?’

‘Not famous, no, but finding out about him might just help me to rewrite a page of that history.’

‘Amazing!’ She was thrilled. ‘Then we must give you all the help we can!’

The PACE detention clock kept ticking. Fern could obtain an extension of the basic twenty-four hours for which Stefan could be held without charge, but ninety-six hours was the absolute maximum, and she’d want to make a decision long before then. Over a coffee, she reported to Hannah that she was losing hope of making the case against him stick.

‘Looks like we’re back to square one. This time yesterday, I’d never have believed it. When he claimed Terri texted him, asking for a meeting, I thought he’d overreached himself. Then what happens? His story checks out.’

In his haste to catch the train down south, Stefan hadn’t noticed that his mobile had slipped out of his pocket. An honest passer-by had found it lying in the road in Oxenholme, near to where he’d parked his car, and handed it in at a nearby shop. A lucky break — but for Stefan, not the detectives aiming to prove his guilt. He’d deleted the text message, but the techies had retrieved it easily enough.

‘It might all be some elaborate stunt to throw us off the track.’

Fern made a face. ‘No point in wishful thinking.’

‘Any joy with the murder weapon?’

‘Nothing. It’s over to the lab people. The plan is for them to mock up the scenario. They’ll try to replicate Terri’s injuries, along with all the evidence from the scene, and experiment with all kinds of possible blunt instruments.’

‘There must be cast-off marks on the ground, near where she was lying, and maybe on the sacking?’

Drips of blood from the weapon, Hannah meant. Her gorge rose every time a picture of Terri’s body swam into her mind. Sometimes in the lab, they used slabs of pig meat to mimic the wounds. She couldn’t bear the thought of it.

‘Yeah, yeah. Should give us something to go on. Eventually. The snag, of course, is time. Even if I persuade the powers-that-be to pay whatever is needed to prioritise the lab investigation, it’s bound to take several days. Worst case scenario if the work takes its place in the queue is — weeks.’

‘They have to pay,’ Hannah snapped. ‘This isn’t a case of a teenager nicking a car, it’s a murder.’

Fern stifled a yawn. ‘’Scuse me, it’s been a long, long day, and if I take in any more caffeine I’ll turn into a junkie. We need a lucky break. Without that, or Deyna changing his tune, we won’t know about the murder weapon any time soon. Certainly not before it’s time to decide on whether to charge him on the basis of what we’ve got.’

‘You’re not going to release him?’ Hannah’s voice was tight; she was struggling to contain her fury.

‘Not yet,’ Fern said. ‘We worked so hard to find him. I hate the thought of him slipping through our fingers. Fact is, though, it’s even worse if he’s not the man we’re looking for, and the real culprit is getting away with murder because we can’t see beyond Deyna. We can’t overlook the fact that this isn’t the first case of its kind in Ravenbank.’

‘We don’t have a shred of proof that there’s any connection between the deaths of Terri and Shenagh Moss.’

‘You’re right. For the moment, anyway.’

‘But?’

‘I don’t believe in that level of coincidence. Think about it, the MO is identical. Attractive woman abandons no-good lover for a better bet, only to finish up battered to death in the manner of the village legend. The only difference this time is that the obvious suspect lived to tell the tale. Doesn’t seem like a copycat to me.’ Fern exhaled noisily. ‘I’d say we have a double killer on our hands.’