Martin Edwards - The Hanging Wood

What was it about women? The easier he found it to attract them, the sooner he wanted them out of his sight. His mother had doted on him, had given everything she could and asked him for nothing in return, but a heart attack had taken her away from him at a stupidly young age, while he was on board a ship in the Adriatic. At her funeral he’d wept, but no woman since had stirred his emotions.

A muck spreader thundered down the narrow lane towards him and he pressed against a hedge to allow it to pass. For a nanosecond, he understood the strange impulse that had caused Orla to take her own life. How easy to leap under the heavy wheels at the last moment, and put an end to everything. A cop-out, yes, but at least he’d be rid of his baggage for good. No more complications, no more crushed expectations.

How long had he dreamt of making his way back to Lane End Farm? Across three continents, and for as long as he could remember, yet now he saw the fields in the distance, he felt a chill that the sun’s warm rays could not dispel.

His nerve ends jangled, pins and needles pricked his fingertips. He patted the butterfly knife in his pocket, but for once it didn’t give him the warmth of reassurance. He wasn’t spoiling for a fight. But he was afraid.

DS Mario Pinardi was tall, dark and handsome. Unfortunately, as far as his female admirers in Cumbria Constabulary were concerned, he was also married, to a stunningly lovely lady, a fellow Scot of Italian descent. Hannah’s best friend, Terri, had met Mario at a Cumbria Constabulary charity dance years ago, and still asked after him, but she was wasting her time. Photographs of Alessandra Pinardi, along with young Roberto, Davide and Claudio, festooned the walls of Mario’s cubbyhole in the police station in Keswick. His family-man image might have been tedious if he were not such good company. Hannah liked him enough to push to one side the sneaking suspicion that he was in the same mould as Will Durston. Insufficiently driven to make a first-rate detective. She was prejudiced by her apprenticeship with Ben Kind. The job came before your private life, was Ben’s creed. Mind you, Ben had messed up his own private life, and hers was going down the pan as well. Mario was wiser than both of them.

‘Horrible way to go, drowning in grain,’ he said. ‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

Hannah and Greg shook their heads, and he grinned. ‘Good decision, it’s out of a machine and tastes like weasel pee.’

‘Any words of wisdom from the pathologist?’

‘Orla cracked her head on the side of the tower on her way down. Nasty gash, the blow probably knocked her unconscious. Otherwise, she might have been able to climb back up.’

‘If she wanted to,’ Greg said.

‘True, but the deputy coroner is a softie. If she can find a way of turning this into an accident, rather than suicide, she will. Easier for the family to bear, especially the father. Bad enough to find your one remaining child lying dead in a heap of grain. Worse if you torment yourself over whether you could have done anything to persuade her not to jump.’

‘You’re sure she did jump?’

‘If anyone wanted to do away with her on a farm, there are plenty of easier murder methods. You couldn’t drag an unwilling victim all the way up to the top of a grain silo.’

‘Might someone have talked her into making the climb?’ Greg asked.

‘To take a look at the interesting grain? I don’t think so. She’d been boozing, there were empty cans on the passenger seat of her car. God knows what was in her mind, but she wanted to climb that tower. The only reasonable assumption is, she intended to jump.’

‘She grew up on the farm,’ Hannah said. ‘If she had suicidal thoughts, she’d know there was no guarantee that she’d die. The cavalry might have ridden to the rescue. In the shape of her father, or his labourers.’

‘If they saw her go up there, or heard her yelling for someone to drag her out. If not …’ Mario made a throat-slitting gesture.

‘Might have been a cry for help,’ Hannah said. ‘People weren’t taking her seriously. She wanted Callum’s case reopened, nobody was listening …’

Mario winced. ‘Do you really want to go there, Hannah? I heard about those calls she put in to you and your team. Let’s not encourage the IPCC to get excited, eh? When those guys go off on a wild goose chase, you never know how long it will last, or where it will lead. Keep it simple, that’s my recommendation.’

He meant to be supportive, but her stomach wrenched with frustration. If she’d wanted an easy life, she wouldn’t have joined the police in the first place.

‘Orla didn’t give us enough to enable us to take any action. She was unhappy, and she’d had too much to drink …’

Greg said, ‘You don’t haul yourself up a grain tower just to enjoy the view from the top.’

‘Her father says she and her brother used to love playing in the grain,’ Mario said. ‘Once the silo was built, he put it out of bounds. Maybe she was reliving childhood memories. The mind can play strange games.’

He said it as though he’d read the phrase in a book. Hard to imagine sensible, uxorious Mario allowing his own mind to play games. Yet his theory was persuasive, if obsessing over Callum meant Orla wanted to relive their shared past. ‘How is the father? You’d think he’d be prostrate, but when I rang the farm, he was out working as usual.’

‘That’s farmers for you,’ Mario said. ‘On duty twenty-four/seven; it’s not so much a job as a way of life. Doesn’t mean Hinds isn’t gutted. But he’d never show weakness. Strong man, very proud. We offered him a leaflet about bereavement counselling, and he ripped it up without a word.’

‘Didn’t he realise Orla had come to the farm?’

‘He says not, it came as a total surprise. And nobody seems to have seen her climb into the silo.’

‘Do we believe that?’

‘Lane End isn’t swarming with workers, like most dairy farms these days. Hinds has cut back on headcount to keep turning a profit. His labourers are Polish, and they were scattered far and wide over two hundred acres. Given the path she took from the rear of the farm to the silo, it might have been more surprising if somebody had spotted her.’

‘Unless they were looking out for her?’ Greg suggested.

‘Nobody seems to have had the faintest idea she meant to come to the farm. The pathologist thinks the time of death was not long after she dived into the grain. We’ll know more once the PM is completed.’

‘The gash on the head,’ Greg said. ‘Any chance it might have been inflicted by someone else?’

‘There are blood traces on the inside of the tower, where we believe she banged her head,’ Mario said. ‘Indications are that the impact was severe enough to knock her out, and when she came round, she was up to her waist in grain and unable to free herself. It would have been dark inside, and the noise would have prevented her from attracting attention. The next load probably buried her. The one after that would have been fatal.’

‘Open-and-shut case?’ Greg asked.

‘Trust me, she killed herself. That’s the reality of what happened; whether she changed her mind when she recovered consciousness is academic. We don’t need to overelaborate, it’s simple. Same as your cold case, I guess.’

‘We’ll see,’ Hannah said. ‘I want to ask Michael Hinds if he still thinks his brother killed his son.’

‘Better wear your body armour, then.’

‘You think so?’

‘I’m sure so. Orla tried to persuade him that Philip didn’t murder the boy, and their conversation turned into a furious row.’ He lowered his eyes, as if struggling to comprehend why some families could never be happy. ‘Pity — that was the last time she and her father ever spoke to each other.’