Martin Edwards - The Hanging Wood

‘One step at a time, huh? What did Orla have to say?’

‘She was pissed out of her brain, you can hear it for yourself on the tape.’ Linz folded her arms tight across her chest, hugging herself for comfort. ‘All I could make out was that she had to speak to you, and nobody else would do. When it finally sank in that you weren’t around, she rang off.’

‘All right.’ Hannah exhaled. ‘How did they find the body?’

‘While Hinds was out in his fields, he caught sight of the top of a car parked in a lane at the back of his land. It was so unusual, he went to investigate, only to see it was Orla’s motor. On the way he spotted a brightly coloured headscarf, caught on a bramble. He recognised it as Orla’s. She wore headscarves all the time.

Hannah blinked. ‘Even in the height of summer?’

‘Yeah, seems she’d lost all her hair. Stress-related, apparently.’

‘She suffered from alopecia?’

‘I guess.’ Linz shrugged, a healthy young woman who didn’t know much about illness. ‘When he found her mobile in a drinking trough, panic set in. He and a couple of his men started searching the farm. It was Hinds himself who looked inside the grain tower.’

‘And there she was?’

‘Yeah.’ Linz’s face twisted as she pictured the scene. ‘God, what a way to go. And his own daughter, too …’

‘Suicide?’

‘Or accident.’

‘Strange accident. What else do we know?’

Linz’s expression said Isn’t that enough to be going on with?

‘All right, make sure the tape of the phone call is on my desk in five minutes. Once I’ve listened to it, I’ll decide if we need to make a report to the PSD. Chances are, we will.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Linz bowed her head. The Professional Standards Department would liaise with the IPCC. ‘I suppose I may have been the last person she spoke to before she died.’

‘You weren’t to know.’

As Linz scuttled out, Hannah slumped back in her chair. If only, if only — her life sometimes seemed full to bursting with ‘if onlys’. If only she could have persuaded Orla to talk sense to her, the woman might be alive now. Allowing her a chance to answer that contemptuous question, ‘Don’t you care about justice?’

‘I must talk to Hannah Scarlett,’ Orla Payne said, ‘it’s a matter of life and death.’

The muffled voice of a woman about to die. DC Maggie Eyre paled, listening in silence until Orla rang off, and Hannah stopped the tape machine.

‘She may not have intended to kill herself, ma’am,’ Maggie said. ‘Jumping into a grain silo isn’t a sure-fire way of killing yourself, and if she’d grown up on a farm, she’d know that.’

Maggie, a member of the Cold Case Review Team since its inception, was the same age as Linz, but they had little else in common. Square-jawed and down to earth, she came from a family which had farmed in the county for generations, while Linz was a townie to the tips of her painted fingernails. Linz came up with flashes of insight that Maggie, for all her sturdy common sense, could never match, but the combination of their talents helped to make the team effective despite being starved of resources. This afternoon, Hannah wanted to pick Maggie’s brains. Investigating Orla’s death was miles outside her bailiwick, but she couldn’t bear to wait for information to seep out from Keswick.

‘No?’ Hannah raised her eyebrows. ‘Haven’t I heard stories about farm workers being asphyxiated by grain?’

‘It can happen, but if you’re hell-bent on committing suicide on a farm, plenty of methods guarantee the right result, no messing.’ Maggie looked as though she was about to mount a soapbox. ‘More than one farmer I’ve known has killed himself. Call it an occupational hazard. The work is stressful and tough, the financial pressures can be horrific.’

‘From what I’ve read, the average farm is a death trap. All that dangerous machinery, countless heavy vehicles roaming the fields.’

‘People on the outside don’t have the faintest idea how many farmers take their lives in their hands seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. It’s the nature of the job.’

Maggie’s scrubbed cheeks turned pink whenever she spoke from the heart. Hannah knew her joining the police hadn’t gone down well with her parents, and guessed Maggie still felt a pinprick of guilt for turning her back on their way of life.

‘So if Orla Payne chose to die on her father’s farm, she picked an odd way to set about it?’

‘It wouldn’t be my choice. But the cushioning effect of the grain would break her fall. It’s not quicksand, ma’am. More like ordinary sand. You can walk on it, or lie on it. It’s only if you find yourself deeply buried in it that you’re likely to have a serious problem.’

‘So she wouldn’t necessarily be buried in the stuff?’

‘No, though she’d probably find it difficult to haul herself out of the silo, even if she tried to climb up by way of the bolts holding the steel sheets together. She might be able to make her way up to the top by treading through the loads of grain whilst the silo was being filled. Not so easy if she was drunk. If she couldn’t get out, she’d run the risk of dying of thirst. Definitely not a nice way to go.’

‘What if she banged on the walls of the silo and called for help?’

‘Depends. If the silo was being filled, the noise from the machinery would drown her cries. And she might not have been conscious, and able to make herself heard, if she hit her head on the way down and knocked herself out.’

‘Is that likely?’

‘Absolutely. If it didn’t, do you know how far the silo is from the farm buildings, and the spot where the grain is loaded on to the conveyor?’

Hannah shook her head. ‘I’m just trying to get an idea of what might have happened before I break the news to the ACC that the dead woman called us twice before she died.’

‘On the day of the awards dinner?’

‘Mmmm. Not ideal timing.’

‘Rather you than me, ma’am.’ Maggie was no fan of the ACC.

‘You said it.’

‘I can put out feelers if you like. In the farming world, everybody knows everybody else. You say this farm belongs to a man called Hinds? I bet my dad has come across him.’

‘Would you mind having a word? It’s not our case, but I’d like to learn more about Orla’s background. In particular, any feedback on this story about the brother who disappeared twenty years ago.’

‘Will do.’ Maggie nodded. ‘So the farmer lost both his children?’

‘Yes.’ Hannah could not comprehend what it must be like to have both your kids die young. ‘Unlucky man, Michael Hinds.’

Gaby Malcolm, in the PSD, was one of Hannah’s favourite people in the Cumbria Constabulary. The keepers of the force’s conscience were never likely winners of any popularity contest, but nobody could dislike this small birdlike woman from Bermuda. Her manner was so calm that ten minutes in her company felt as soothing as a session with a skilled hypnotherapist.

‘I’ll talk to the IPCC, but there’s really no need for Linz Waller to get her knickers in a twist,’ Gaby paused. ‘Or you, come to that. Ten to one, they won’t want to get involved. You know the drill. As long as nothing improper seems to have occurred, and there’s no hint of the force sweeping the crap under the carpet, they will pass it back and tell us to decide what to do for ourselves. I doubt there will be a need for a local investigation, so we can make a short report to stick in a file, and everything will be sorted.’

‘And if they insist on a local investigation?’

‘Whatever happened to looking on the bright side, Hannah?’ Gaby smiled. ‘Look, you’ve acted immediately, and from the tapes of the two conversations, there’s nothing much more that could have been done. The woman was obviously drunk. There’s no way the IPCC will want to investigate themselves, that’s only if the shit really hits the fan with a bang. Local enquiry? I’d be very surprised.’