Martin Edwards - The Hanging Wood

She needed to talk to him.

So Orla was dead.

Aslan Sheikh lay on his bed in his underpants as a rapper boomed from his iPod dock. A tap never stopped dripping in the washbasin, and the music drowned the sound. Even at the height of summer, this scruffy little bedsit in Crosthwaite was draughty, the breeze from the fells sneaking in through the cracks in the window frame. A yellowing house plant festered in a beige pot, a perfect advertisement for botanical euthanasia. The place smelt of damp and last night’s curry. He’d smoked a couple of joints in quick succession to calm his nerves. Funny how Orla had refused that time when he brought her back here, insisting that she didn’t do drugs. Naive to a fault, for what was alcohol but a drug that had killed her mother?

The sun’s rays caught the blade of the small knife on his bedside table. When it shone so brightly, he barely remembered the damage it could cause. It was a silver butterfly knife, or ‘balisong’ as the Filipinos called it, and he’d picked it up in London after he’d had to leave its predecessor in the States for fear of arrest at airport security. This little fellow was over a hundred years old and counted as an antique. It fitted snugly into the pocket of his jeans; he carried it everywhere. A balisong had helped him extricate himself from some of the tight spots he’d got himself into. He’d made a few mistakes over the years; he supposed his mother was right when she said he was too headstrong, too wild.

He couldn’t get over Orla’s death. Suffocated in grain, what a shitty way to go. Sham Madsen had shaken uncontrollably as she broke the news, and he’d thrown an arm around her by way of comfort, but when she clung closer to him, he managed to disengage. Her tears were self-indulgent, and he knew enough about phoniness to recognise it when he saw it. She seldom had a good word to say about Orla when she was alive. The spoilt rich kid, scorning the stepdaughter of her father’s right-hand man. Surely not even she could be jealous; a bald woman with barely a penny to her name was no competition for one of the heirs to the Madsen millions.

Sham was gorgeous — more so than Purdey, with her unfortunate chin and micro-boobs — but she was a drama queen whose sole topic of conversation was herself. He humoured her, but the endless stream of me, me, me became a bore. She didn’t disguise her lack of interest in St Herbert’s, and he was sure she’d only taken the job because she wasn’t keen to play second fiddle to Purdey at the caravan park.

He’d no experience of sibling rivalry, let alone everything else that had happened here since his arrival. Even though he’d spent so little of his life in Britain, he liked to think of the Lakes as home. How many times had he dreamt of this homecoming? He’d never settled anywhere for long. The first place he could remember was in Istanbul, and then his mother had moved to Germany, where her cousins lived, and they’d lived in a cramped flat in Berlin before moving out to Rostock, eventually finishing up in the small coastal resort of Warnemunde, where his mother worked in one of the bars that served crew members coming ashore from the big ships. When she entertained at home, he’d make himself scarce and go to watch the cruise ships sailing out of the harbour and beyond the lighthouse, into the wide blue yonder. At sixteen, he took a job with one of the cruise lines, lying about his age and what he could do, and over the next few years he moved from ship to ship, but he never found what he was searching for. Perhaps the truth was that he didn’t know.

He’d travelled far and wide before drifting around the States, but he’d never bought a share of the American dream. Women, drink, drugs, he tried them all, but none of them meant much. He’d as soon smoke a cheap fag as a joint, and the money he earned or stole never lasted long. In the end, he persuaded himself the way to change his life was to come back to England. This was to be where he finally discovered himself.

But he’d never expected things to turn out like this. Orla was dead, and the Lakes didn’t feel anything like home.

Half a year without Marc should have acclimatised Hannah to waking up alone, but as the radio woke her, she still put out an arm, an instinctive searching for the warm body that had lain by her side for so long. Instead, her fingers clutched at emptiness.

The weather forecaster said today promised to be the sunniest of the year so far. After a cold shower — not from choice; the hot water system was on the blink — she dressed hastily so as not to keep Maggie Eyre waiting. A true farmer’s daughter, Maggie was an early riser, and the doorbell rang as Hannah swallowed her last mouthful of toast.

‘How was the awards dinner?’ Maggie asked as her little Citroen bumped over the potholes of Lowbarrow Lane.

‘I managed to stay awake. In fact, it wasn’t a complete waste of time.’ Hannah told her about meeting the Madsens. ‘Even if they aren’t thrilled about the prospect of our looking into Callum Payne’s case, at least they didn’t put any roadblocks in the way.’

‘They are convinced the uncle killed the boy?’

‘A neat solution is best for their business. The ACC has given us the green light, but wants an outcome by this time next week.’

‘A week?’ Maggie nearly swerved into the path of an oncoming tractor. ‘A proper investigation takes months. Sometimes years.’

‘She’s taking it for granted nothing new will turn up. It’s not as if we have any DNA to retest with the benefit of improved technology. Her thinking is that if we talk to the main witnesses who are still around, we’ll have done the necessary. She’s not worried about the IPCC complaining about Orla Payne’s calls to us. So the game plan is, we give the file a quick once-over, and move on.’

‘And if we find something worth investigating?’

‘The ACC would say, let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.’

Eyes on the winding lane, Maggie said, ‘Surely we wouldn’t give up if there was evidence that Philip Hinds wasn’t guilty?’

Hannah gave her a sidelong glance. ‘Let’s find the evidence before we worry about that, shall we?’

Enough said. Maggie fell silent until they reached the main road.

‘My father reckons Mike cast Philip as a scapegoat.’

‘He knew the Hinds family?’

‘It’s not surprising. Farming is a close community, everybody knows everybody else. People bump into each other at shows and markets and National Farmers’ Union events — can’t avoid it. By the sound of it, my dad prefers to avoid Mike Hinds, that’s for sure.’

‘They don’t get on?’

‘Dad says he’s a maverick, always arguing the toss, whether about bovine TB or compensation for foot-and-mouth disease or anything else. Thinks he’s clever because he won a scholarship to Cambridge, even though he soon dropped out. I suppose he sees Dad as a pillar of the establishment because he’s held office in the NFU. And Mike doesn’t think the union does enough to protect its members’ interests. Dad said, if it was left to Mike Hinds, tractors would be parked permanently across Whitehall, in protest about the way the government has wrecked the industry.’

‘Does your father know much about Callum’s disappearance?’

‘Only what everyone knew. Of course, I didn’t go into detail about why I was interested in the Hinds family, confidential police business and all that. Dad never met Philip, but said he felt sorry for him. For Mike Hinds too; it is terrible to lose your son like that. Dad heard that Philip was simple, but decent enough. People were too quick to jump to conclusions, in Dad’s opinion.’

‘If their conclusions were wrong, we’ll find out,’ Hannah said. She couldn’t forget what Orla Payne had said about justice. ‘If Philip was innocent, we’ll clear his name.’