Martin Edwards - The Hanging Wood

‘Would have been nice if the killer had dropped a credit card instead, but life’s never that simple, is it? We also found a butterfly knife nearby.’

‘You think the victim took it with him for protection?’

‘I guess so, given that it’s not the murder weapon. Sheikh must have dropped it when he was attacked, and either the killer didn’t see it in the dark, or wasn’t bothered about it.’

‘Any sign of Sheikh’s mobile?’

‘In the slurry tank, along with its owner.’

Hinds had insisted on taking a look at the body once it had undergone some rudimentary cleaning up, so that the bloodied features were discernible. He claimed he’d never seen the dead man before in his life. Nor did he have the faintest idea why an unknown corpse should have turned up at Lane End, days after his daughter had chosen the farm as the place to end her life.

Either he was guilty, or very, very unlucky.

Events moved fast following the discovery of the corpse. Hinds called Gareth Madsen for a recommendation to a shit-hot lawyer, and when his old friend heard that the body probably belonged to Aslan Sheikh, he dropped the bombshell that Aslan had told Purdey of his true identity. At that point, even the iron mask crumpled with shock. But Hinds refused to say anything more until the legal eagle showed up.

Mario had interviewed Hinds for a second time that morning, this time in the presence of a sharp-suited criminal solicitor from Carlisle, to be met with flat denials that Hinds knew his son was in the country, far less that he called himself Aslan Sheikh and that for the past few weeks he’d been working at the library across the fields from Lane End. Despite tough questioning, Hinds gave nothing away. He’d never had any further contact with the boy’s mother after he’d paid her to have an abortion and leave the country. He said she and her pregnancy were a nuisance that had cost him an arm and a leg to dispose of, and that he’d not given her any further thought from that day to this. Let alone imagined that his son was back in the Lakes.

‘Hinds is a hard man,’ Mario said. ‘No doubt who is the real bastard in that family, for sure, but is he hard enough to have murdered his own flesh and blood?’

‘Forensics reckon Sheikh was killed at the farm?’

‘Looks that way. There are bloodstains and clothing fibres close by the slurry tank, plenty for us to work on. This looks like a crime of desperation. The head wounds were severe, and it seems unlikely he was transported from somewhere else.’

‘Was he dead when he went into the tank?’

‘Not sure yet. He was hit on the head several times, hence the blood splatter — a single blow wouldn’t have done it.’

Sunday, very bloody Sunday. ‘So the culprit and the victim arranged a rendezvous at or close to the farm?’

‘Apparently. Assuming a prearranged meet, it looks like we’re not talking about a crime carefully planned out to the last detail.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘We’re spoilt for choice at present. Whether the blows to the head killed him straight off, or he died after he was inside the tank, we won’t know until the PM results are available. Just our luck it’s Sunday. Seems he had a thin skull, but if by any chance he wasn’t dead when he was bundled into the slurry, he’ll have inhaled the slurry into his lungs and drowned, or found it impossible to breathe under the weight of the stuff and suffocated.’ Mario grimaced. ‘I thought dying in a mountain of grain was bad enough, but …’

‘No sign of the murder weapon, you said?’

‘No, our culprit may have missed the things that the victim dropped, but he wasn’t considerate enough to leave his weapon lying around for us to fall over. The preliminary view is, it was a dumb-bell or something similar. Maybe from a gym.’

‘Plenty of people exercise with them at home. I do myself, though much less often than I ought to. Do Hinds and his wife have a set of dumb-bells?’

‘That isn’t how they get their exercise, apparently. The living room stank of booze and sex when we arrived. We found pornographic DVDs, and Deirdre was wearing a basque. She had a yellowing bruise around her left eye. When I asked about it, she said she’d walked into a door on Friday night. She’d shoved a mask and a couple of nipple clamps under the cushions on the sofa and I found them as soon as she asked me to sit down. I’m still trying to figure out whether she meant me to see them or not.’

‘So they were too busy to realise what was happening — literally in their own backyard?’

‘That’s their story, and if the legal eagle has anything to do with it, they will stick to it like limpets. A middle-aged married couple enjoying themselves on a Saturday evening in the privacy of their own home, too preoccupied with connubial bliss and a Swedish movie about orgies in a convent to hear someone being battered to death in the dark outside.’ Mario gritted his teeth. ‘Somehow the nipple clamps seem like a detail which make it just about credible.’

‘Or is that what we are supposed to believe?’

‘Yeah, for all I know, the sexy set-up was concocted in the space of five minutes to give Hinds an alibi.’

Hannah lobbed her apple core straight into the bin. Greg Wharf would have had a lot of fun with the vision of Deirdre wearing nipple clamps. Just as well he wasn’t here. Time to push him out of her mind.

‘And what do you believe, Mario?’

‘Wish I knew.’

‘Would Deirdre protect him if she thought he’d killed a man?’

‘He’s her husband.’

Hannah made a face. She wouldn’t lie to save Marc in similar circumstances. But what if their relationship hadn’t hit the buffers, what if she had nothing else in her life but him?’

‘She’s frightened of Hinds, but I’d say there’s still a spark between them too. God knows what she sees in him.’ Mario winced. ‘Terrible what some men do to women. Would she perjure herself on his behalf? You bet. All the same, the thought of a man killing his own son …’

‘He might not have known Aslan was his son.’

‘Isn’t that stretching things too far? The question remains — why murder him? And why ignore the oldest rule of all — don’t shit on your own doorstep?’

‘Suppose Aslan turned up at the farm, and announced himself as son of Hinds. Maybe he wanted to soak his dad for cash. Payback for leaving his mother in the lurch. Hinds would have been stunned. What if he lost the plot?’

‘And beat his own boy to death before tossing him into an iron box full of shit? You really think he’s capable of that?’

A picture came into Hannah’s mind of the sun catching the blade of Mike Hinds’ scythe. Never mind that he didn’t have a criminal record; he was no stranger to violence. Niamh had felt the rough edge of his temper, and so had Deirdre. Maybe he’d even hurt Callum, the boy who kept his name. What chance for a swaggering stranger who threatened to turn his life upside down?

‘I’d say he’s capable of pretty much anything.’

‘You haven’t told me if you’ve arranged to see Hannah again,’ Louise said.

Daniel blinked. ‘She took a message about the discovery of a dead man at a farm linked with a cold case she’s investigating, and she had to shoot off home. For all I know, she’s needed to go into work today. Not the ideal moment to consult our social calendars.’

‘Excuses,’ she snorted.

With a lavish sigh, she started to attack her dessert. Vanilla panna cotta with gooseberries. Daniel had found himself unable to resist the sticky toffee pudding, with toffee sauce and clotted cream. You might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb; at least he’d had a green-leaf salad to start.

Sunday lunch at The Tickled Trout, a welcome respite from a morning spent house-hunting for Louise. A cottage in Elterwater had looked perfect, with roses clambering around the door, but the rising damp would cost a fortune to eradicate. A swish apartment in Ambleside boasted every labour-saving gadget you could wish, but the block had been shoehorned in between a microbrewery and a garage, and if the exhaust fumes didn’t poison her, the smell of beer would make sure she had a permanent hangover. With houses, as with people, appearances deceived.