Martin Edwards - The Coffin Trail

‘You can’t blame yourself,’ Simon said.

‘But Barrie met her through me. You can’t deny that.’

Her husband shrugged. ‘He didn’t have a history of violence. Nobody could have foreseen the murder.’

‘How did you come to introduce Barrie to Gabrielle?’ Daniel asked.

‘We’d asked him to varnish the pergola. He’d finished for the afternoon just as I came home from Ennerdale. When I drove into the courtyard, he was filling the bins. He always liked to chat and we were having a word when Simon came out with Gabrielle. When I saw her, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was so much to catch up on, but of course I introduced Barrie before the three of us went back inside. His jaw dropped at the sight of her. I could see at once that he was smitten, but it never occurred to me that there might be any harm in it.’

‘He used to watch you,’ Simon said. ‘I guess he fancied Gabrielle just as much. I suppose there was a resemblance. Two tall, glamorous blondes, both totally out of reach so far as he was concerned.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t realise that Gabrielle was out of reach,’ Miranda suggested.

‘In his own funny way, he was rather sweet.’ Tash nibbled at her lower lip, casting her mind back. ‘Always trying to do little kindnesses for me. Trouble was, he was so clumsy that he usually made a mess of things. He made sure he bumped into her the very next morning. When he offered to show Gabrielle round Brackdale, it sounded like a ham-fisted chat-up line. She turned him down nicely, but I could tell he was upset. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

‘It’s a fault of our sex,’ Simon said lightly, giving Jean Allardyce an affable nod as she returned to clear the coffee cups. ‘Let’s not spend the whole evening discussing the murder. Too depressing. Take it from me, Daniel, Tarn Cottage is a bargain, even with all the work it must need. I saw the price the agents were quoting and I’d have put a bid in myself, if it hadn’t been for the memory of Barrie Gilpin.’

‘So you believe he was guilty?’ Daniel asked.

Simon drained his glass. ‘He was the obvious suspect.’

‘The obvious suspect isn’t always the right one.’

A dismissive wave of the hand. ‘Don’t let it worry you. By the time you want to consider selling the cottage, his name will be long forgotten and there won’t be any need to factor a discount into the price.’

Tash said quietly, ‘You’d like to think that Barrie didn’t kill Gabrielle?’

‘I’m not convinced he was capable of it,’ Daniel said.

There was a clatter as one of the cups slipped off Jean Allardyce’s tray. Simon picked it up off the carpet and said, ‘No harm done, Jean, it was empty already.’

Turning to Daniel he said, ‘This is nothing to do with the fact that you’re making a big investment in Tarn Cottage, by any chance?’

‘Nothing whatsoever. I don’t like trial by innuendo, that’s all. Barrie Gilpin is everyone’s favourite suspect, but he never had the chance to defend himself. It seems unjust.’

‘He was never charged because he fell into a ravine before the police caught up with him, simple as that.’

‘Maybe that was very convenient.’

‘Who for?’

Jean Allardyce banged the door shut after her. Perhaps alarmed that the conversation had acquired a prickly edge, Tash said, ‘I’ve been wondering, Daniel. I suppose it’s pure coincidence, but…’

‘What?’

‘When Gabrielle was killed, Simon and I both talked to the police, as you’d expect. They needed to check on her movements and how she came to know Barrie Gilpin. I’ll never forget the stink of the mortuary when I had to identify her poor broken body. I remember being comforted by the detective in charge of the case, he was called Kind too. It’s not such a common surname…’

‘It’s not a coincidence,’ he said. ‘Ben Kind was my father.’

‘I don’t think it’s the best way to make friends, that’s all,’ Miranda said an hour later. She’d driven back to Tarn Fold with an elaborate caution intended to compensate for the effects of a couple of drinks, but without any luck. In the darkness she’d clipped a jutting wall with her bumper, and her humour had suffered even more than the paintwork.

‘They were happy to talk,’ Daniel said as he unwrapped Tash’s gift from its packaging. It wasn’t a bad picture, he decided, but probably best not inspected too closely. ‘All I did was ask a few questions.’

‘You sounded like a bloody police officer yourself,’ she grumbled. ‘As for happy, I wouldn’t count on it. Simon looked distinctly pissed off and poor Tash seemed quite embarrassed by the end.’

‘We’d had a few drinks.’

‘Even so. They obviously couldn’t understand what had prompted Ben Kind’s son to move to Cumbria and buy Tarn Cottage.’

‘I did try to explain.’

‘Well, I’m not sure they believed you,’ she snapped. ‘It must be very hurtful for Tash, when the woman killed was an old friend. They obviously feel responsible for having introduced Barrie Gilpin to Gabrielle. People want to forget a tragedy like that, not be cross-examined on it.’

‘I spent years teaching students to challenge assumptions,’ he said. ‘I’m sure the Dumelows can take it.’

Miranda snorted. ‘I don’t want us to finish up without a friend in Brackdale. Surely you’ve found out as much as you need to about Barrie Gilpin and his murder? There can’t be any more questions to ask.’

‘There are always more questions to ask.’

‘But why? It’s not as if you’ve been commissioned to write up the case for an academic journal.’

He laid the painting on the table and gave her his full attention. ‘I want to know if Barrie Gilpin really was guilty.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Hey, I thought you always took the side of the underdog.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘Well, then. I’ve explained why it matters.’

‘Oh yes, I understand about your dad and everything. But it was such a long time ago.’

‘It’s what I do, looking into what happened a long time ago,’ he said patiently. ‘I’m a historian, remember?’

Tears were forming in her eyes. ‘You came here to get away from all that.’

‘No.’ He hated to see her cry, but she wasn’t thinking straight. Why didn’t she understand? ‘Sorry, darling, but we discussed this endlessly before we even put the deposit down on the cottage. I wanted to escape from all the stuff that surrounded me in Oxford, and in the media. As well as the business with Aimee. Just like you wanted to get away from problems at work and your affair with Richard. But you weren’t escaping from writing, any more than I was escaping from history. I couldn’t do that.’

‘So,’ she said wearily. ‘Are you going to keep on upsetting people?’

‘You mean, am I going to keep asking questions?’ he said. ‘Well, yes. I can’t stop now. Not until I start getting answers.’

Hannah was on the phone, trying to unravel the mystery of why her computer had crashed for the fourth time since lunch, when Nick Lowther strode into her room, flourishing a sheet of paper. Later, she mouthed, but he stood his ground. Drumming her fingers on the desk as she listened to a jargon-freighted explanation as unfathomable as it was unconvincing, she found another outlet for her frustration by glaring at her sergeant and shaking her head.

‘You’ll want to see this,’ he murmured. ‘Promise.’

At last the technical guru surrendered with a grudging promise to look into the problem. Hannah hung up and said, ‘What have you got?’

He handed over the sheet and she saw it was a typed note of a telephone conversation. A dedicated telephone hotline had been set up with some fanfare, as part of the awareness campaign surrounding the launch of the cold case review unit. Members of the public with information about any unsolved serious crimes in Cumbria had been urged to call. Predictable as rain on a bank holiday, the response had been a deluge of crank messages and hoaxes. Baseless hints, malicious allegations and wildly improbable confessions to felonies both known and hitherto unimagined had flooded in. The team had anticipated this in discussion before the media conference. The tedious task of sifting out time-wasters was the price to be paid for soliciting the community’s help. Infinite patience was essential when panning for gold. The hotline was a direct dial-in straight to the Cold Case