Martin Edwards - The Coffin Trail

Review Team’s office. The only snag was that the team wasn’t big enough to man the phone 24/7, so anyone calling outside normal working hours found themselves talking to an answering machine. Each morning the tape was studied and calls returned by one of the DCs. If the phone rang during the day, it would be picked up by whoever was nearest. Because the calls didn’t go to the main station control room, routine taping was out of the question. Too much grief under the human rights legislation. The DC had to scribble notes during the conversation and then decide whether they deserved to be written up.

‘So Maggie took this call,’ Hannah said to herself as she scanned the notes.

‘And she decided it was worth a further look, even though the woman didn’t give her name.’

Typical Maggie, Hannah thought. Of all the DCs in the team, she was the most painstaking. So much so that Bob Swindell regarded her as a pain. Even her typing, every comma in the right place, was so meticulous that it put full-time secretaries to shame. Whereas Linz and the two men tended to rely on instinct, Maggie Eyre didn’t believe in taking chances. She was a hoarder by nature: rumour had it that she’d never thrown away a school exercise book, recipe, or knitting pattern. In the course of an inquiry, she never discarded any scrap of information until she could be sure that it wasn’t viable as evidence. Better safe than sorry, she argued, although Hannah feared that if everyone were equally cautious, the investigation would become even more cluttered than Marc’s book-stuffed attic room.

According to the note, a redial established the call as having been made from a phone box in the square at Brack.

Caller: I read in the paper about those…cold cases. Something has been on my conscience all these years, although I never said a word to a living soul. Not even…well, I was just afraid of what would happen and besides, I didn’t want to believe…maybe I’m wrong anyway, wrong in what I think. There could be an innocent explanation for what I saw. I’ve always hoped so. All the same, it’s been weighing on my mind.

Eyre: Take your time.

Caller: Thank you. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be doing this.

Eyre: There’s no need to worry. You’re doing the right thing. I’m not going to hang up on you. This is all in strict confidence.

Caller: Well, you say that, and I’m sure you’re trained about confidentiality. But how can I be sure? This is serious. I don’t even think I ought to be talking to you at all. It’s not right. Oh God, all this time and worry and I’m still not thinking straight.

Eyre: One thing at a time. Can you just give me a few details? If you could just tell me who you are…

Caller: I can’t give my name. I’m sorry, I really am, but I don’t want to get involved, not any more than I am already. I shouldn’t even be making this call.

Eyre: You have some information about a crime, a crime that wasn’t solved?

Caller: Yes, a girl was killed here in Brackdale. Murdered. Her name was Gabrielle.

Eyre: When was this?

Caller: Seven years ago, it must be. You’ll have the records, anyway. The papers were full of it. The thing is, your people thought they knew who did it.

Eyre: Someone was arrested?

Caller: No, he died. An accident, I think, but some folk say he killed himself out of shame. Couldn’t live with the guilt.

Eyre: What was his name?

Caller: Barrie, Barrie Gilpin.

Eyre: And you say that Barrie Gilpin…

Caller: Everyone blamed him, said he’d murdered her because he was a pervert. But he wasn’t, he was kind, he just had problems, that’s all. It was so — so unfair. What I saw…oh God, I felt so terrible when I…

Eyre: Please don’t upset yourself. It’s all right, it’s not…

Caller: I’m sorry. I just can’t do this.

Eyre: Don’t cry, madam. You can take a break, we could speak later on, when you’ve had a chance to calm down. Please, would you just tell me this. How can I get back to you?

Call terminated.

‘Now you see why I thought you’d want to know straight away?’ Nick asked. ‘I remember you telling me how Ben Kind obsessed about the case. He didn’t buy the official line, that Gilpin was responsible.’

Hannah nodded. ‘He always said that our job in a murder case is to see justice done for the victim. It plagued him like an ulcer, the thought that he’d failed her.’

‘He was waiting for a call like that.’

‘One piece of information, that’s what he reckoned, we just need one little titbit of evidence to show that Barrie Gilpin couldn’t have been the culprit. Marc and I were talking about Barrie only the other night. And now a call has come, but Ben wasn’t here to take it. Question is — is this the call? Or just a red herring?’

‘What do you make of what the woman has to tell us? She doesn’t exactly give much away.’

‘She says here in Brackdale, which suggests she lives there. If Maggie’s note is accurate.’

‘It will be. And we’re told that the woman saw something.’

‘Which she may have misinterpreted. Or invented.’

‘Okay, it’s not much, but Maggie thought…’

‘She was right to make the note. What else does she have to say? You and I both know that most anonymous callers are just out to cause problems. Either for us or someone they have a grudge against.’

‘Maggie said the woman seemed genuine. Genuinely worried, anyway.’

‘Age?’

‘Maggie thought thirty-something. Flustered, but then plenty of people are when they call us. She spoke slowly, the sentences were nervous and broken. At least it helped Maggie to make a good note.’

‘She did well. Even so, the woman couldn’t have given us much less to go on.’

‘True.’ Nick nodded at the note. ‘Bin?’

‘Of course not. Listen, I’m not jumping to any conclusions. This may be a dead-end, probably is. Fingers crossed, she’ll ring again. Brief the team, just in case anyone else answers the phone if she rings back.’

‘Already done.’

‘And we need to dig out the old files on the case, see whether anything jumps out at us.’

‘I asked Maggie to set the wheels in motion. You’ll have them on your desk first thing tomorrow.’

‘You can read my mind.’

He winked at her. ‘Spooky, huh?’

She grinned. ‘Scary.’

After Nick had left, Hannah tried to finish entering up her replies to a diversity monitoring questionnaire. Impossible: the memory of Gabrielle Anders’ dead face blotted out everything else. She had been pretty once, even her passport photograph couldn’t conceal that, but someone had hated her enough to destroy her looks as well as her life.

Gabrielle had been killed a fortnight after Hannah’s promotion to sergeant. It was the first time she’d ever worked with Ben Kind on a murder. Until then, she hadn’t known him well. People tended to be wary of him and although she’d been advised to keep her distance, she couldn’t help being intrigued by his reputation. Everyone reckoned he was a good cop, tough and relentlessly honest. Too honest, Hannah decided, to make it right to the top. You needed to be a bit of a diplomat if you wanted to build a brilliant career. Professional competence could only take you so far. His Achilles heel was that single-minded focus on catching criminals. It didn’t allow time for winning friends or influencing people. Worse, he was famous for not suffering fools gladly, even if the fool in question was responsible for his annual performance review.

She would never forget that first day up by the Sacrifice Stone. The picture remained as vivid in her mind as a snapshot stuck down in an album, and at the same time as unreal as a dream. Even by mid-afternoon, the mist had not quite cleared. She remembered the cold bite of the winter on her cheeks as she patrolled the crime scene perimeter, watching scenes of crime officers in their white suits, moving along the slope of the fell like ghosts. She had to watch every muddy step. The downpour was washing traces of the crime away and yet the gathering of evidence could not be rushed, lest something was missed. Walkietalkies hummed, above the valley a helicopter droned. Whenever the photographer’s flashbulb popped, she shut her eyes, but each time she opened them again, the corpse was still there. Anger stabbed her like a knife in the ribs, at the sight of the naked limbs splayed across the top of the boulder. The victim’s face had been hacked at and her head almost severed at the neck and now the poor creature was exposed to all these prying eyes. She was being photographed and probed and measured while her sightless eyes stared up to the heavens. No one treated her any more as a living and breathing human being. She had become an exhibit, a problem to be solved.