Martin Edwards - The Hanging Wood

His eyes flashed with amusement; for an instant, he was a teenager again, relishing a half-forgotten pleasure, the chance to tease his impatient sister.

‘Seriously? You still don’t see it?’

‘Utterly gorgeous.’ Hannah waved towards the sun-soaked cipher garden and the slope of the fell beyond. ‘You’ll find it a wrench to leave, Louise.’

Louise, in cropped top and denim shorts — the severe business suits that used to be her uniform had been consigned to the charity shop — was bustling around the table at the back of Tarn Cottage, filling their tumblers with cranberry juice. She’d produced a chicken salad they could eat outside while Hannah and Daniel discussed what he’d found in the library. When he’d called her, she said at once she was free to come over. The invitation was Louise’s idea; hopeless as she was with managing her own love life, the control freak in her relished matchmaking for her brother.

‘I’ve inflicted myself on Daniel for long enough. He doesn’t need a sister cramping his style. It was my fault he started spending time at St Herbert’s.’

‘Just as well you did,’ Hannah told him. ‘I bet you’re right about Castor and Pollux.’

‘I’d have got there sooner,’ he said, ‘but the painting has been moved during the renovations of Mockbeggar Hall. It hung in the dining room until recently. Purdey Madsen mentioned it when we were there on Friday night — she asked where were the pooches — but I didn’t realise what she was talking about.’

‘So you reckon Callum’s body is buried in the old pets’ graveyard?’ Louise asked.

This was Daniel’s theory, the only explanation that fitted the facts. Why else would two dogs dead for more than one hundred years mean anything to Orla, and consequently to Aslan?

Hannah nodded. ‘While we were interviewing at the caravan park on Friday, the CCTV picked up a man in the grounds of Mockbeggar Hall, an area closed to the public. They assumed he was a caravan-dweller whose curiosity had got the better of him, but he looked very much like someone DS Wharf and I had seen loitering around the entrance to Lane End Farm.’

‘Aslan Sheikh?’ Louise asked.

‘I’ve seen Aslan’s passport photos, two of them, one for each of his identities. Those little snaps are hardly ever good likenesses — least I hope not, mine makes me look like Rosa Klebb — but I’m sure it’s the same bloke. Orla had told him about Castor and Pollux, and he wanted to see the pet cemetery for himself.’

Daniel chewed on a celery stick. ‘I wonder what else Orla told him? Did someone decide they had to kill him, to preserve a secret?’

‘Looks that way,’ she said. ‘So, what secret could be so dangerous?’

The three of them ate without speaking for a minute or two. The atmosphere was heady with the scent of potted lavender and roses scrambling over the trellis nailed to the cottage’s rear wall. Daniel was conscious of Hannah’s presence beside him, and her long slim legs an inch away from his. Wearing a short, semi-floral, belted summer dress, she was displaying much less flesh than Louise, but in sitting down, he’d brushed against her, and the contact sent a jolt of excitement through him, as if he’d touched a live fence at a farm.

At this time of evening, they no longer needed to shield their eyes from the glare. Barely a thread of cloud lingered over Priest Ridge, and the fell was bathed in a mellow light. The cipher garden was alive, and never wholly quiet, but the only sounds were the scurrying of squirrels in the undergrowth and up the trees, and the piping call of a redshank concealed by reeds beside the tarn.

‘When I lived in the city,’ Louise said, ‘I took crime pretty much for granted. The month before I moved out, my next-door neighbour was mugged on a tram, and a woman who lived half a mile away was dragged into a park and raped by a teenage thug with a knife. But the Lakes should be different. A place so lovely shouldn’t be disfigured by cruelty and violence, it feels like an offence against nature.’

‘There’s nothing gentle about nature.’ Hannah blinked at the tartness of the cranberry juice. ‘It’s wild and unsentimental. Ask any farmer.’

‘Speaking of farmers,’ Daniel said softly. ‘I can’t get out of my mind what has happened to this man Hinds. If I ever had children, it would break my heart if one of them were to suffer pain. But to have three, and lose them to violent death, one by one …’

‘He lost his brother, too.’

‘You don’t suppose someone hates him so much, they want to make him suffer?’ Louise asked.

‘Over the space of twenty years?’ Daniel spread his arms. ‘Who could hate a man that much?’

‘And you are assuming Callum did die a violent death.’

‘What’s the alternative? Whether or not he was buried in the same grave as Castor and Pollux, he must be dead. In the end even Orla lost hope that he was still alive. If he was killed accidentally, somebody covered it up. Why do that, if they weren’t afraid of being arrested, or if they weren’t responsible for his death?’

‘All right, but as for Mike Hinds, it’s unthinkable that he was the culprit. Surely?’

They turned to Hannah, who was leaning back in her chair while her eyes followed the flight of a buzzard over the trees on the lower reaches of Tarn Fell. She dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin.

‘Of course you’re right. A father, murdering his offspring? Straight out of a Greek tragedy.’ She toyed with a slice of lettuce she’d speared with her fork. ‘But it was your father who taught me that being a detective means being ready to think the unthinkable.’

Louise paled. ‘I hear the man has a foul temper, but even so …’

‘Let’s not run ahead of ourselves,’ Hannah said. ‘Aslan was murdered, but Callum might have been the victim of some kind of accident, and there’s still a strong likelihood that Orla committed suicide. Daniel, I’ve been mulling over what you said about getting a handle on the sequence of events.’

‘It begins twenty years ago, with Callum’s disappearance,’ he said. ‘The past colours the present.’

His sister feigned a yawn. ‘There goes the historian again.’

‘The snag is,’ Hannah said, ‘we know much more about what’s happened over the last week. Not one, but two prodigals returned to their roots and finished up working side by side at St Herbert’s.’

Daniel nodded. ‘Coming back set Orla thinking about Callum again. She spotted a family resemblance in Aslan — it wasn’t a neurotic fancy. But when Aslan denied that he was Callum, her last hope of finding her brother alive went up in smoke. Hard to take.’

‘And Castor and Pollux?’ Louise asked.

‘She was familiar with the Hopes archive, she must have been aware of the pet graveyard. In fact, given that she spent the first eighteen years living a stone’s throw away from Mockbeggar Hall, first at Lane End, then with Kit Payne in his home in the caravan park, she almost certainly knew about it for years. Yet she never mentioned the dogs to me until that last time we talked.’

‘There may be something else in the archive that we didn’t have time to read,’ Louise said. ‘Some clue that set her on a fresh track.’

‘Such as?’ Daniel shook his head. ‘How could a memoir a century old explain what happened to her brother? Orla picked up new information, for sure. But where from, God knows.’

‘Whatever the new information was,’ Hannah said, ‘it must have pointed to whoever was responsible for Callum’s disappearance.’

A crow’s wings flapped above the roof of the cottage. Daniel put down his knife and fork.

‘It’s all about history; the answer lies in what happened twenty years ago. Understand that, and you understand why Aslan finished up in a tank of slurry.’