Martin Edwards - The Hanging Wood

‘She seemed to think someone else murdered him.’

‘But that’s ridiculous! Who else could have killed Callum?’ Fleur shook her head. ‘A passing tramp? I don’t think so. You’re not saying she had a suspect in mind?’

‘If she did, she never told me. I had the impression she was flailing around, trying to make sense of stuff she didn’t understand. Which is why I encouraged her to talk to the Cold Case Team. The woman who’s in charge of it is a friend of mine; I thought she’d give Orla a fair hearing, and see if there was anything worth investigating.’

Fleur arched her eyebrows. ‘You have friends in the Cumbria Constabulary?’

‘My father used to be a police officer here.’

‘I didn’t know you come from the Lake District?’

‘I don’t. We lived in Manchester, but he left my mother for another woman and came up to the Lakes with her.’

‘And now you’ve followed him?’

‘He died some time ago.’

‘I’m sorry, Daniel.’ Fleur considered. ‘Perhaps Orla was seeking attention. You’re a well-known person, and if I may say so, a bit of a catch for anyone, let alone a girl like her. She probably wanted to make a big impression.’

‘She was genuinely interested in history. And I am sure about one thing.’ As he spoke, Daniel’s intuition hardened into certainty. ‘Orla had good reason to believe that Philip Hinds didn’t kill her brother, even if she wasn’t sure who did.’

Aslan knew the man and woman he’d seen at Lane End were police officers. They didn’t have to be in uniform or to be driving a Panda car; he’d had enough to do with representatives of law and order to recognise that mix of watchfulness and assurance common to cops the world over. Ironic, deeply ironic. He’d taken so long to make it to Mike Hinds’ home, and the moment he arrived, he’d needed to beat a hasty retreat to St Herbert’s.

But nothing was lost. On the way back, he’d kept thinking about Orla, and some of the fuzziness in his mind was clearing. It was like groping your way through the mist as it cleared from the slopes of the Langdale Pikes.

Orla’s muddled thinking and lack of coherence, coupled with the fact that in her last few days alive she’d rarely been entirely sober, meant that people paid little attention to what she said. Her habit, no doubt learnt from Callum, of keeping cards close to her chest, made matters worse.

Now he was getting somewhere at last after a false start the other day. He’d taken it into his head on a whim to break into Orla’s room at the library while she was off sick, and see if he could find anything of interest. He’d committed a few petty thefts in his time, and never been caught, even though he’d had a few narrow squeaks; the secret of success was not worrying too much. Orla’s door was locked, and when, in his frustration, he climbed up on to the parapet outside, and began to prise open an ill-fitting window, Daniel Kind’s unexpected appearance in the garden, which was usually deserted in the morning, forestalled him. But once again, he’d got away with it. Daniel suspected nothing.

He’d toyed with the idea of picking Daniel’s brains, seeing if he could cast more light on what Orla had told him. It might be worth the risk. Or it might just be a big mistake.

With hindsight, he was unlikely to have found anything worthwhile in Orla’s room. She wasn’t the type to write stuff down, she just let things whirl around in her head, as she struggled to make sense of fragments of knowledge.

The last time he was with her, she’d talked about Callum, and Castor and Pollux. He was bored rigid with her fondness for talking in riddles; she only did it to make herself seem interesting, and the moment he showed any interest, she’d retreat into coy evasion. Typical Orla. Once she had your attention, she never made good use of it. As for Castor and Pollux, he didn’t have a clue who they were. But he meant to find out.

Orla was right about one thing: a library was the perfect place to learn stuff. He did a Google search the moment he got back to St Herbert’s, and supplemented his knowledge with a glance at a couple of reference books. Within minutes he discovered that, in Greek and Roman mythology, Castor and Pollux were twin brothers who had the same mother but different fathers. One boy was mortal, and the other immortal. One destined to live with the gods, another doomed to lie among the dead.

The librarian, a rotund woman in her sixties, had, since his arrival at St Herbert’s, formed a deep distrust of his lack of interest in the literary treasures under her care, and watched him conducting his researches with ill-concealed suspicion. When he bestowed a charming smile upon her, she scowled like a gargoyle. The ungrateful old cow was impervious to charm. He found himself patting the butterfly knife in his pocket. Orla’s reference to the old legend didn’t make any sense to him, but he found it strangely disturbing.

‘Provoking a deranged farmer to attack us with a scythe,’ Greg Wharf said as Hannah accelerated away from Lane End. ‘I’ll be honest, ma’am, when we were discussing suicide, that particular MO never occurred to me.’

‘Yeah, well, a close-up encounter with a wannabe Grim Reaper adds a touch of excitement to our tedious lives. What do you reckon to him?’

‘Bad, bad news. Went to Cambridge, did he? Makes me thankful I screwed up my A Levels. Don’t worry, his wrist won’t have broken, but with any luck he’ll sport a nasty bruise.’

‘It’s his wife I feel sorry for.’

‘She doesn’t have to stay with him.’

‘Might not be easy to escape. He’ll keep tight hold of the purse strings. More than likely, Deirdre would rather stick with the devil she knows. The question is whether that temper of his will get him into big trouble one day.’

‘You suppose he knows more about what happened to Callum than he’s let on?’

‘He never mentioned the boy’s last visit to him before today. But why would he want a cover-up?’

‘He’s not stupid. He wouldn’t incriminate himself so casually.’

‘What if he wanted to protect somebody?’

‘Can’t see it. Why help someone who has done away with your child?’

Hannah slowed the car, and nodded towards a high fence and clump of beeches to the right. ‘See the big houses through the trees? That’s where the Madsens live, and Kit Payne.’

‘Hinds was right — not far for Callum to go. From Payne’s house, he could have nipped over to Lane End and got back home inside a couple of hours, with plenty of time to sink a couple of pints of his Dad’s home brew.’

At a fork in the lane, they halted at a large sign for Madsen’s Holiday Home Park. A steel security barrier barred the way in. Visitors were told to report to a reception lodge in the style of a Swiss chalet, occupied by two smart men in uniform.

‘Not so much a caravan site as an exclusive gated community, by the look of it,’ Hannah said.

‘I checked their prices on the website before we came out,’ Greg said. ‘My eyes haven’t stopped watering. You could buy a three-bedroom semi in Kendal for less than one of their top-range caravans. Amazing. The Madsens must be rolling in it.’

‘Not a business you’d want associated with the publicity surrounding a teenager’s apparent abduction.’

‘He might have done a runner, you know. Happens every day. His parents had split up, he wasn’t on the best of terms with stepdaddy.’

‘But to disappear completely, for ever …’

They drove on past a recently created second entrance to Madsen’s park, close to its southern tip. Again, the way in was barred, but a large signboard proclaimed the glories of a ‘State-of-the-Art Leisure Complex in Historic Mockbeggar Hall’. The new route linked in with the original service road to the site, and crossed a bridge over the stream that once divided the Hopes’ estate from the caravan site. All this land had once belonged to a single family, and now it did again. Only this time, the owners were business people, not the landed gentry.