Martin Edwards - The Hanging Wood

Daniel and Louise breakfasted in the garden, looking out to the reed-fringed tarn and the fell beyond. The water was still, with no breeze to rustle the leaves of the oaks and the yews. The air smelt fresh, and they heard the piping call of a wood warbler hidden in the trees. No mist clung to the upper slopes, the merest scraps of cloud drifted in the sky. Already walkers in shirtsleeves were striding along Priest Ridge, their voices drifting down from the heights. The Sacrifice Stone gleamed in the sun, for once benign, not sinister.

‘No regrets about abandoning the rat race, then?’ Louise asked.

Daniel’s eyes followed a flash of yellow as the warbler emerged from a tall oak before flying off towards Tarn Fold.

‘Need you ask?’

‘At first, I thought you were mad to give up your career,’ she said. ‘But now … this place is addictive, and I’m hooked too. All I need is to find a place of my own, so I can get out of your hair.’

‘Stay as long as you like.’

She grinned. ‘No, better quit before we start bickering all the time, like when we were kids.’

‘We’ve grown up.’

‘You think so?’

As soon as she went inside to get dressed and stiffen her sinews for a renewed onslaught on the local property market, Daniel fished out his mobile and dialled Hannah’s number.

‘Is it convenient?’ he asked when she answered. ‘If not, I can call again.’

‘I have a briefing scheduled in five minutes, but no worries,’ she said. ‘Great to hear from you.’

‘And did you hear from Orla Payne?’

‘I spoke to her, yes. And then she rang again when I was off work. I’m assuming you met her at St Herbert’s, where she worked?’

‘Yes, I’ve spent a lot of time there lately, trying to finish the book.’

‘You know what happened to her?’

‘She suffocated in a grain silo on her father’s farm,’ Daniel said. ‘That’s all I’ve heard. So she talked to you about Callum?’

‘I didn’t get much sense out of her. Certainly no clue about her brother’s fate. Linz Waller got nowhere either, when Orla called again. Each time, she sounded drunk.’

‘Sorry I’ve added to your burdens, but she was so screwed up about Callum’s disappearance, and I thought it qualified as a cold case.’

‘How much did she tell you?’

‘She talked a great deal, but if she had any firm evidence about what happened to Callum, I didn’t hear it. She rather liked to be mysterious. But she was emphatic that their uncle didn’t kill the boy.’

‘Was it wishful thinking? She was fond of her uncle, and didn’t like the idea that he was to blame.’

‘Possible. But …’

He hesitated, trying to put into words the intuition he had about Orla, and her quest for the truth about Callum.

‘Yes?’

‘Orla’s life was a mess. She reminded me of someone who has the pieces of a self-assembly kit, but doesn’t know how to put them together.’

‘I know that feeling,’ Hannah said. ‘My garage is full of segments of a kitchen trolley, and instructions written in Japanese with illustrations that make no sense to me.’

He wondered if she’d ask Marc to stick the pieces together, but said nothing. He heard someone speak to Hannah, and her muffled reply that she’d be along in a moment.

‘Daniel, I’m sorry, but I need to conduct this briefing. Can we speak again?’

‘Love to.’

Story time.

Hannah’s mentor, Ben Kind, was a grizzled teller of tales. As she stood and waited for Greg Wharf — as ever, the last to arrive — while Les Bryant chewed the fat with Maggie Eyre, and Donna Buxton nagged Linz about becoming more active in the Federation, her thoughts drifted back to her early days in the CID. How the briefing room fell silent as Ben took his team through the sequence of events leading up to the latest murder. How she listened, spellbound, as he highlighted scraps of information culled from page after page of witness statements, suggesting fresh lines of enquiry, and ideas about the culprit’s motive and MO. By the time Ben finished briefing you about a case, the victim was no longer a name, always a person. That cold corpse in the mortuary had once been flesh and blood. Ben made you care about the victim’s fate, strengthened your resolve to see justice done.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Greg said, marching into the room like a chief executive greeting members of his board. Donna, an arch-feminist recently drafted into the team, threw him a withering look, but Greg smirked in response, pleased to have provoked a reaction.

Hannah breathed in. She’d soaked herself in the old statements, and reckoned she had a handle on the main facts, but there was no denying that the mood today was so different from that at briefings from Ben. From the moment murder was done, every hour that passed reduced the chances of a result. Statistics proved the need for speed. Everyone felt an adrenaline rush. By definition, cold cases were rarely time-critical, and Hannah’s team knew it. They knew, too, that each of them was there for a reason. Most were misfits, as far as the brass was concerned. Some folk, and not just in the hierarchy, reckoned that cold case reviews were cushy and only fit for underachievers. Others regarded transfer to the team as a form of exile or punishment, the Cumbria Constabulary’s very own Gulag Archipelago. All of which meant the pressure was on her to motivate people to get results.

‘The body of Orla Payne was found buried in a grain tower at the farm of her father, Michael Hinds, near Keswick. An apparent suicide. She had been in touch with us about a cold case, the disappearance of her brother Callum twenty years ago.’

‘Is murder a possibility?’ Les Bryant asked.

‘Nothing is being ruled out, pending the inquest. Mario Pinardi up in Keswick is looking into the circumstances surrounding her death. He’s waiting on the results of toxicology and urine tests. Our focus is on the cold case. What happened to Callum Hinds?’

Hannah nodded at a black-and-white photograph on the whiteboard. A dark-haired boy with a hooked nose and deep-set eyes, reluctant to smile for the camera.

‘Callum’s mother came over from Donegal as a student. After she took a degree in Lancaster, she stayed in England. She was called Niamh, and her first husband was Mike Hinds. Three years before the boy went missing, the couple split up.’

‘Why?’ Greg asked.

‘Niamh’s story was that she wasn’t suited to being a farmer’s wife.’

‘It’s a vocation,’ Maggie said.

‘And the husband’s story?’ Greg was a city boy, scornful of the so-called pressures of rural life.

‘You can almost taste the bitterness when you read his statement,’ Hannah said. ‘He scarcely had a good word to say for her. She drank too much, cared only for herself. He blamed her for the boy’s disappearance. Obviously pissed off that she’d landed on her feet. Before the divorce was finalised, she’d moved in with Kit Payne, a manager at Madsen’s.’

‘The caravan park?’ Donna Buxton asked. ‘My uncle and aunt used to have a pitch there. We stayed with them when we were kids.’

‘They call it a holiday home park these days,’ Hannah said. ‘One of the biggest in the Lakes. The site borders Mike Hinds’ land. In next to no time, Niamh and Kit Payne were married, and instead of slaving away all hours cooking and cleaning, she had a husband with a well-paid job and free accommodation thrown in. Even if it was only a glorified log cabin.’

‘How did the stepfather get on with the kids?’ Greg asked.

‘Kindness itself, according to Niamh. There weren’t any issues between him and Orla, or so it seemed. Yet Callum resented the new man in his mum’s life, and refused to take Payne’s name.’