Martin Edwards - The Coffin Trail

‘Someone had hidden it. Even Mrs Gilpin couldn’t deny that it was Barrie’s axe. The only question was whether it had been stolen to commit the crime. Not impossible.’

‘But unlikely.’

‘Stranger things have happened. Ben kept pointing out that if you wanted to frame someone for a murder, Barrie was an ideal candidate.’

‘He didn’t like to be proved wrong.’

‘Nothing was proved either way,’ she snapped. At once she wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Why must she always rise to the bait whenever he had a dig at Ben? In a calmer tone she added, ‘He wanted everyone to keep an open mind, that’s all. Which is precisely what we ought to do now.’

He yawned and stretched out a hand for the TV remote control. ‘Best of luck.’

‘You might like to rack your own brains.’

‘What do you mean?’ he murmured.

‘Well, you were walking in Brackdale yourself that day, remember? Gabrielle was staying at The Moon under Water. Was there anything you noticed, anyone you saw, that was a little out of the ordinary? You might not have paid attention at the time, but with hindsight…’

The theme tune of his favourite quiz show was playing on the television. ‘I’m sure I’d have mentioned it,’ he said absently, his eyes shifting to the screen. ‘It was just a normal afternoon as far as I was concerned. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.’

What if she’d been my sister?

Half a dozen file photographs of Gabrielle Anders were fanned out on her desk, but instead of inspecting them, Hannah was staring through the rain-streaked window. In her head she could see her father’s pale face as he bent to whisper bad news in her ear. On the morning of her fourth birthday, her mother had miscarried. Years later, Mrs Scarlett told her that the baby had been a girl. Hannah had longed for a younger sister, not least as an ally in the daily skirmishes with her insufferably superior elder sister, but Mum had never been able to carry a third child to term. Had the lost child lived, she would have been the same age as the dead woman.

That thought had sneaked into Hannah’s mind during the dreadful afternoon up at the Sacrifice Stone. Gazing at Gabrielle’s ruined face, she’d dug her nails into her palms, fighting to suppress her anger at such cruelty. A detective needed to remain detached. Soon she would have to attend the post-mortem, when the cold flesh would be cut to the bone, when organs and tissues would be explored with relentless attention to forensic detail. But Hannah could not bring herself to think of Gabrielle Anders as an exhibit and a source of clues. A few hours before, Gabrielle had lived and breathed.

She might have been my sister.

Who was she trying to kid? Turning back to the photographs, Hannah was forced to admit that she and Gabrielle were scarcely lookalikes. No point in bitching that it was wonderful what you could do with make-up, subtle lighting, and cosmetic dentistry. There was a gulf between them in attitude. You could see it in Gabrielle’s almond eyes and in her high cheekbones, you could see it in the way she held her head. She was a predator. In one of the studio photographs, taken when she’d been an aspiring model, she gazed straight into the lens while her tongue peeped out and touched her upper lip. This was a woman savouring power, the power to stop a man in his tracks and make him do her bidding.

Hannah had always lacked that confidence. She could never tease men into watching her every move and the thought of screwing her way to the top made her gorge rise. Anything that she achieved in her career would be thanks to her own efforts. The wild life hadn’t been kind to Gabrielle in the long run. Easy to imagine that she had acquired the dangerous habit of thinking herself irresistible and that in the end it had cost her life. If the two of them had ever met, they’d have had nothing in common. Probably loathed each other on sight. They weren’t sisters at all — yet Hannah could never quite rid her mind of the notion that fate had forged a bond between them. Victim and detective, thrown together by sudden death.

The door swung open, rocking on its hinges as Les Bryant strode in. As usual, he dropped into a chair without being asked. The little discourtesies were a habit, gestures to make the point that she might be in charge, but he had no intention of tugging his forelock to her. Fair enough, as long as he stayed on-side.

‘Nice bit of stuff,’ he muttered with a nod at the photographs.

‘Not when I saw her,’ Hannah said, sliding out of a plastic wallet a set of photographs taken at the post-mortem and shuffling them on to the desk. The corpse’s face was scarcely recognisable, the lovely hair matted with blood.

He winced at the wounds on the swollen face. ‘Vicious bastard. If Gilpin did kill her, what happened to him was poetic justice.’

‘And if he didn’t, then he’s another victim.’

‘You’re not suggesting he was thrown into the ravine?’

‘We never found a scrap of evidence that suggested his death was anything other than an accident. Suicide was an outside bet, so was murder. But the verdict at the inquest was accidental death and Ben Kind didn’t disagree. He wondered if Barrie might have had a close encounter with whoever had killed Gabrielle. There were traces of her blood on his hand and sleeve…maybe he’d come across the body during a nocturnal ramble and fallen to his death while he was running away in panic.’

‘Speculation,’ Bryant said.

‘Yeah, Ben had to admit he was pissing in the wind. Apart from any other consideration, Barrie was a strong, fit young man. Even if he’d stumbled across someone armed with an axe, he’d have had a good chance of showing him a clean pair of heels. But if Barrie was set up, we never came close to showing who did it, or how. We couldn’t argue against the decision to run down the inquiry.’

‘So what’s changed? Yesterday’s phone call doesn’t take us too far.’

Us. At least he was thinking as a team member, not a devil’s advocate whose first priority was to scoff at any fresh initiative. ‘All I’m doing is taking a second glance. Nothing more. I can’t justify devoting too much resource to something as nebulous as the message that Maggie took.’

Les Bryant leaned back in his chair. ‘Time to look at the case from a different angle, then?’

‘I think so.’ Hannah pointed to the photographs. ‘Starting with the victim.’

‘How much do you know about her?’

‘Not a lot.’ Hannah sighed. ‘Born and raised in the East End. Home a tower block, mother an occasional prostitute. She was one of four kids with three different dads. Before her tenth birthday, she was bunking off school. At fifteen she moved out and no one kept in touch. She seems to have followed a boyfriend up to Yorkshire.’

‘The Promised Land,’ Bryant said in his broadest West Riding accent.

‘If you say so. She modelled a bit, tried a little acting. She’d ditched the boyfriend early on and he went back to London. We checked and he died of a drugs overdose a year before Gabrielle was killed. She mixed in bad company. The old story, plenty of men were keen to take a pretty girl to bed in exchange for a slap-up dinner and a few quid to help with the rent.’

Les Bryant plucked at a hair growing from his nostril. ‘My daughter wanted to be an actress. Christ, the day she signed up with an agency, I hit the roof, but would she listen? They ripped her off something rotten. At least she finished up with an Oscar.’

‘Really?’ Hannah was startled.

‘Yeah,’ he said, deadpan, ‘while she was resting, she took a job as a dental hygienist in Batley. Finished up marrying the dentist. Oscar Padgett.’

She laughed. ‘There are worse fates.’