Martin Edwards - The Frozen Shroud

‘Guilty conscience?’

‘Yes, he must have felt rotten about his affair with the girl.’

Melanie’s brow furrowed as she zipped herself into the jacket. Thinking about her own husband’s lapse with Shenagh Moss? Apparently, it hadn’t crossed her mind that Clifford might be a murderer as well as an adulterer.

‘Oz is due back soon,’ she said, as if reading his mind. ‘He’s spent the morning with our bank manager.’

‘Expanding the business?’

‘I wish.’ She locked the front door, and led him along a path which wound around the Hall. ‘This is between you and me, right? I’ve seen enough of you to know you can keep a secret.’

‘Sure.’

‘I hate to sound selfish, but this dreadful business about Terri has come at the worst possible moment. You’ve seen the newspapers, the TV bulletins?’ Daniel nodded. ‘Our names are all over them. People say no publicity is bad publicity, but that’s simply not true. Not when you’re running an events company, that is, and all of a sudden you find yourselves associated with a murder case. And this morning we hear that the Polish guy has been let out. Things are getting grimmer by the hour.’

The fog had cleared to allow them to see the bulk of Hallin Fell, looming up on the other side of the narrow strip of water separating it from the Ravenbank promontory, but patches of mist still obscured its upper reaches. Melody led Daniel under a pergola swathed in winter jasmine and honeysuckle, onto a paved area overlooking a fish pond, rose garden, and a huge spherical water feature made from stainless steel. Stepping stones meandered across a lawn cut in elaborate circular stripes before disappearing through an archway in a neatly clipped holly hedge.

‘Wow,’ Daniel said. ‘Even at this time of year, everything in your garden looks lovely.’

She sighed. ‘No expense spared, that’s our problem. Until August we had two gardeners working full-time. If things don’t look up, this time next year, I’ll be the one pruning the roses and feeding the Koi carp.’

Daniel murmured something vague and non-committal. Surely there were worse fates than pruning roses and feeding fish?

‘I tell a lie!’ she exclaimed. ‘We’ll be forced to sell the Hall before then, you wait and see. It’s what happened to Hodgkinson, all over again.’

‘Surely things won’t come to that.’

‘Oh, the economy is in such a dreadful state, I can’t see a way out. Don’t believe what you hear about recovery, people are still watching the pennies. Umpteen of the events we manage have been scaled down, others have been cancelled altogether. Oz asked you to speak on the Caribbean cruise, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, I …’

‘Well, forget it. We won’t be handling that contract after all. We heard this morning, we’ve been undercut on our tender. The truth is, the cruise line took fright because of what happened to Terri. Two other clients have cancelled their retainers. They come up with endless excuses, but it’s all about the murder. It’s done us untold damage.’

‘Nobody can sensibly blame you for …’

‘Business isn’t sensible,’ Melody hissed. ‘It’s stupid. Everything’s falling apart. We have two holiday homes abroad, mortgaged up to the hilt, and we can’t even sell them at a knockdown price.’

Her slim body was rigid with tension, and she looked to be about to dissolve into tears. He didn’t know what to say, a sure sign it was best to keep his mouth shut.

‘I’ve always hated it, to be honest. It wasn’t so bad when I started out as the hired help, with no responsibility except to schmooze the clientele. When you start worrying about whether the bank is going to renew your overdraft, fun goes out of the window.’

‘The Literary Lakeland conference was a huge success.’

‘Thanks, but we were hired for that job nine months ago. Business has been going down the plughole ever since. Why do you think I was desperate to get out? We found Terri’s salary by closing our office in Penrith, and running everything from here. It was never going to work, I see that now. When Terri announced she was leaving to go and live with Robin, it was a blessing in disguise. Otherwise we’d have had to make her redundant.’

‘I’m sorry. I had no idea.’

A bitter laugh. ‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you? In our line, it’s vital to keep up appearances. And we thought we managed that pretty well. Even Terri never guessed we were close to skint. It never rains but it pours. Now we can’t even host a small private party without having a guest battered to death at the end of it.’

The branches shivered in the wind, as if fearing for the owners of Ravenbank Hall. Melanie started down the low flight of steps to the lawn, and beckoned him to follow.

‘Watch your footing. The York stone is slippery when it’s damp.’ A brittle laugh. ‘You breaking your neck really would be the last straw.’

He followed her across the lawn. There were strict limits to his sympathy. He’d never forget discovering Terri Poynton’s ruined body, abandoned on a wintry night, for foxes and insects to do their worst. For Hannah Scarlett, Terri’s death was a personal tragedy, for the Knights, a flimsy excuse for financial headache caused by spending money as if it were going out of fashion.

Or was this all some huge kind of bluff? Making a fuss about the dire consequences of Terri’s murder to conceal the fact that Oz was guilty of it?

‘You disapprove of me, don’t you?’ she asked.

He dug his hands deep in his pockets. Melody might be naive, but she wasn’t stupid, and she didn’t lack intuition.

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

Two strides short of the archway, she stopped in her tracks, and looked over her shoulder.

‘Be honest. You think I’m a spoilt woman, playing at one thing after another, because I’ve nothing better to do. At one time it was knitting, now it’s journalism. If my husband and I have run out of money, it’s our own silly fault for being so bloody greedy, and borrowing up to the hilt to renovate the Hall at the same time as trying to run a small firm in a dog-eat-dog business environment.’

‘What I think is this,’ Daniel said in a low voice. ‘Crimes of violence, most of all murder, harm everyone they touch. Not just the victim, and the victim’s family and friends. Witnesses, suspects, people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘Collateral damage, eh?’ she sighed. ‘The woman in charge of this case, your friend Larter, we met her when Shenagh was killed. She interviewed Oz and me. She didn’t like us, specially not Oz. If Craig Meek hadn’t been so obviously guilty, she’d have made our lives a misery.’

‘She was only doing her job.’

‘Oz isn’t a murderer!’

‘I never said …’

‘No!’ She held up a hand. ‘Don’t say any more. We’ve talked enough about Terri — and Shenagh. Let me show you Letty Hodgkinson’s last resting place.’

A weathered slate slab bore Letitia Hodgkinson’s name and dates, nothing else. It stood beneath a copper beech at the end of a neat gravel path laid between vast, dripping rhododendrons. Through the trees, Daniel glimpsed Ullswater’s inky depths. The wind was rippling through Melody’s hair and she had to keep brushing it out of her eyes.

‘When we bought the Hall, this was a jungle. Nobody would believe it if we hadn’t kept before and after photographs.’ She waved in the direction of Hallin Fell. ‘The old boathouse is over there, can you see it through the trees? When we came here, it was a ruin, in need of complete restoration. Now it’s Oz’s pride and joy, he loves to go out rowing on his own. As for poor Letty’s headstone, it was invisible. Covered by a mass of bindweed and brambles.’