Martin Edwards - The Coffin Trail

‘Obviously you’ve never been to Batley.’ He saw her glance at the post-mortem photographs. ‘Matter of fact, I spoke to Jenny on the phone only last night, but you know something? It’s six months since I last saw her face to face. Kids, bloody hell. You have any?’

His conversational swerves kept catching her on the back foot. She was starting to like the crusty old bugger, but she’d hate to be interrogated by him.

‘Never got round to it.’

He puffed out his cheeks. ‘Not bothered about the ticking clock?’

She shrugged and said, ‘Neither of us is exactly desperate to start a family.’

Bryant said, ‘Take it from me, there are more important things than the job.’

‘Actually, I worked that out a while back.’

‘Well, then.’ His dour features were expressionless. Challenging her to get uptight, but she wouldn’t be provoked.

‘We were talking about Gabrielle.’ She cleared her throat. ‘While she was in Leeds, she met up with Natasha Litvinov. Tash Litvinov, as she was known. They had plenty in common, both struggling for a break.’

‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’ Bryant grunted. ‘I told my Jenny, but would she listen?’

‘Both of them became disillusioned, they decided to start again. Tash came up to this neck of the woods, met a rich man and settled down. Gabrielle wanted to get right away. She fancied trying her luck in the States.’

‘Hollywood?’

‘She never seems to have made it beyond Las Vegas. For a couple of years she lived with a croupier from one of the casinos. Most of the time she spent as a waitress, serving free booze to gamblers to keep them at the tables or the slot machines. The pay was nothing special, but a pretty girl can make a good living out of tips from the punters.’

‘Why come back to England?’

‘According to Tash, her relationship had broken up and she was getting homesick. She’d earned a few quid and had this idea of travelling around Europe. Britain was her first stop.’

‘And her last.’

‘Uh-huh. She’d only been back a week when she turned up on her old mate’s doorstep. Tash had done well for herself, she’d married a property developer called Dumelow. He bought a mansion in Brackdale and played the local squire. After all those auditions, she finally landed the part of lady of the manor.’

‘How thrilled was Tash to see a face from the past? A reminder of the dark days, before she met her sugar daddy?’

‘She told us she was thrilled to have someone around she could gossip to about the past. She does her best, but the truth is, she doesn’t exactly have a lot in common with the good folk of Brackdale. Though she did introduce her friend to an odd-job man who worked on the estate.’

‘Don’t tell me. Barrie Gilpin.’

‘Got it in one. Barrie took a shine to Gabrielle from the moment he set eyes on her. He kept turning up at the pub in the village where she’d taken a room. According to the landlord, he was a bit of a nuisance. Constantly offering to buy her a drink, not taking no for an answer.’

‘Did she show him up in public? Take the piss?’

‘As far as we could establish, she humoured him, let him buy her the occasional orange juice.’

Bryant groaned. ‘You can’t help wondering if it would have been safer to be rude. He might have felt encouraged. Stalkers are like that. They take the slightest pleasantry as a sign of lust.’

‘Men are like that, never mind stalkers.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t think he was stalking Gabrielle,’ she said. ‘He was just lonely and out of his depth. This glamorous woman with a Nevada tan had turned up out of nowhere and she didn’t make him feel small when he tried to make friends. Of course he was excited. That doesn’t make him a murderer.’

‘Easy for him to have become carried away. If he tried it on and she lost patience with him, who’s to say that he wouldn’t have snapped? He had access to the axe that killed her.’

‘There’s more. All the evidence pointed to the body having been moved. The Dumelows had a four-wheel drive that was stolen the day before Gabrielle’s murder. We found it burned out in a remote wooded area. Barrie could have killed her and then used the vehicle to transport her up the coffin trail, within spitting distance of the Sacrifice Stone. Headlights in the dark can be seen for miles in a valley like Brackdale, but we couldn’t find any witnesses. No big surprise, at that time of night, probably nobody was looking. Afterwards, so the official theory went, he hid the axe, dumped the four-by-four, and set off across the fell-side. In the dark, he slipped into the ravine. He broke his legs in the fall and in any event the sides were too steep for anyone to climb out if they weren’t kitted out with the proper gear. Death by exposure, everything neatly tied up.’

‘Why go back up the fell? Why not go home and tuck himself up like a good mummy’s boy? If Ma Gilpin was besotted by her only child, she might even have come up with an alibi.’

‘Not her. She was so honest it hurt to take her statement. Trust me, I interviewed her. From the word go, she admitted that he’d been out most of the evening.’

‘Do you think she was afraid he’d killed Gabrielle?’

‘No way. She was convinced of his innocence, she never wavered for an instant. He wasn’t capable of hurting anyone, she was adamant about that.’

‘Not exactly evidence to stake your reputation on,’ Bryant said with a weary sigh. ‘I can see why pinning the crime on Gilpin was the only game in town.’

‘But it wasn’t,’ Hannah said. ‘Ben Kind was no fool. He’d have faced up to reality if nobody else was in the frame, but there were other candidates for the murder of Gabrielle, men with access to the four-by-four and the axe…’

‘Tash Dumelow’s husband, for one?’

‘Simon Dumelow’s made a lot of money in a rough business and when he was twenty, he picked up a conviction for actual bodily harm. But he’s much older and apparently more civilised now. For a long time he’s been paying other people to do his dirty work for him. We wondered if he’d made a pass at his wife’s mate and reacted badly to rejection. But by all accounts he’s always been genuinely crazy about Natasha and even though she was laid up with flu at the time, she swore he never left the house that night. Then again — what if she was lying to protect him?’

‘Who else?’

‘Tom Allardyce, the tenant of Brack Hall Farm, Ben’s suspect of choice. Tash had introduced him to Gabrielle Anders, just as she had Barrie. Eight years before Gabrielle was killed, he was charged with raping a girl he’d met in a nightclub in Carlisle. But the prosecution fell apart.’

‘The way prosecutions do,’ Bryant said grimly.

‘Yeah, tell me about it.’

‘Did he have an alibi for Gabrielle’s murder?’

‘You bet, again conveniently provided by a mate of his, the local publican. Man called Dowling. The investigating officers couldn’t shake him and the CPS advised that if the case went ahead, Allardyce would walk out of court without a stain on his character.’ A tinge of bitterness entered her voice. She couldn’t help it; she was thinking not so much of Allardyce as of Sandeep Patel. ‘Actually, those were the very words the lawyer used. I looked up the file.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ Miranda’s cheeks were crimson, her eyes packed with tears. ‘What do you want to speak to her for?’

He placed the receiver back in its cradle and turned to face her. Sun was streaming into the kitchen through the narrow blinds, making him blink in the glare. The most beautiful morning since they’d moved in — and all of a sudden she’d lost it, absolutely lost it. He wanted to say what’s the problem? but his mouth had dried. This was a landmark, as striking in its way as the Sacrifice Stone: their very first row. It had flared without warning, an explosion from an unsuspected spark. She’d walked in to the kitchen as he was dialling and when she asked, he said he was calling Hannah Scarlett. Thinking nothing of it, so that he was rocked on his heels when she cried out as though he’d smacked her. A mug of coffee slipped from her hand and crashed to the floor, splintering in jagged fragments, brown liquid eddying across the new diamond-shaped tiles.