Martin Edwards - The Coffin Trail

‘No, I shouldn’t keep harping on Barrie Gilpin.’

‘Like you said, it’s about your father. If you do want to talk to this woman, this police officer, I can understand. If it’s important to you, it’s all right. You can go ahead.’

She was looking at him expectantly. The thought sneaked into his mind: she wants me to say that I won’t ring Hannah Scarlett, that nothing else matters to me but her. At once he dismissed it as shameful and wrong.

‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘I shouldn’t have ranted,’ she said. ‘It’s just that…well, you know.’

‘Things will be fine.’

‘You’re right,’ she said eagerly. ‘Let’s put it all behind us. Wayne, the argument, everything. Let’s forget all about them.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Go and have your bath. It’ll do you good.’

‘I was wondering,’ she said. ‘Do you want to join me? My hair needs a wash and I remember that time in Oxford, you did it so well, it really turned me on. Afterwards, we can make up properly, if you like.’

Doubts stilled, he brushed his lips against her cheek. Already the tears had dried. ‘Yes, I would like.’

In his dreams, he was lying at the foot of the Sacrifice Stone. His hands and legs were tied with rope and there was a gag in his mouth. Twilight cloaked the fells, but he didn’t feel cold. He was trembling because he was afraid what would happen next. As he waited, a blurred face entered his line of vision and a knobbly finger wagged at him.

‘I warned you not to come up here.’

The woman he’d met walking on the fell had turned into a witch. Her nose was beaky, her cheeks speckled with warts. She began to cackle, baring huge yellow teeth.

‘You only have yourself to blame, young man. You did not heed the legend.’

She glanced beyond him, as though something had caught her attention. He strained hard so that he could turn his head. The muscles in his neck were sore and tears stung his eyes.

A small crowd of people was approaching along Priest Edge. Tom Allardyce was at the front, manhandling a naked girl towards the Sacrifice Stone. Her hair was long and blonde and he knew that it was Miranda, Miranda in her teens. Some of the faces in the gathering were familiar: Wayne the builder was there, and the Moffat women, Tash and Simon Dumelow, and Joe Dowling and his wife-to-be from The Moon under Water. Their faces were alight with excitement, but on the fringe he saw Jean Allardyce weeping quietly. Her husband grinned at Daniel, then ran his hands down Miranda’s sides. Her legs were matchsticks, her breasts mere buds.

‘Tonight she is a virgin once again,’ the witch hissed in his ear. ‘It is as if you’d never touched her.’

Miranda’s face turned to him. Her complexion was pale and flawless, her eyes wide with terror. As he tried in vain to move, she cried out in despair.

‘Why did you have to do this? Why couldn’t you let well alone?’

He wanted to answer, to explain and to apologise, but the gag made it impossible to speak. Exhausted, he could do nothing but watch as the mob lifted Miranda up on to the top of the Sacrifice Stone. Wayne and Joe Dowling stepped aside and a man garbed in a flowing robe emerged from the middle of the crowd. A shaft of moonlight fell on him and Daniel recognised Marc Amos. In one hand he held an open leather-bound tome and he was chanting something incomprehensible. In his other hand a sharp blade glinted.

Miranda screamed, shattering the night.

At once he was awake, clutching her warm bare body, saying a prayer of thanks under his breath as he ran his fingers over her back and thighs, proving to himself that they were safe together after all.

‘What is it?’ she murmured dozily.

‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘just a bad dream. Everything’s going to be all right.’

Next morning he headed off towards Kendal before eight, stopping on the way at the builder’s. He’d told Miranda about his meeting with Hannah Scarlett, but she seemed more bothered about Wayne losing his job as a result of her complaint to his boss. She even said that, having slept on it, maybe she’d overreacted, perhaps she should have been flattered.

The yard was an Aladdin’s cave of timber, bricks, and breeze-blocks, overseen from a hut in the corner by the proprietor of the firm, Stan Mustoe, a stout and balding Geordie in outsize denim jeans and a gravy-stained T-shirt. Over the racket made by two brawny youths loading a pick-up truck with planks, he proffered apologies for Wayne’s behaviour and said he’d given him the sack by way of a text message the previous evening.

‘Tell you the truth, I was glad of an excuse to get rid. He’s bone idle, leaves all the graft to Eddie.’

‘We noticed.’

‘Trouble is, reliable labour’s like gold dust round here. He’ll walk straight into another job, if he wants one.’

‘So what did he have to say for himself?’

‘You know what these lads are like, Mr Kind.’ The builder shook his head sadly. The image of social responsibility was marred by the faded words tattooed on the knuckles of either hand. Love and Hate. Shades of Night of the Hunter; in his younger days he must have fancied himself as a latter day Robert Mitchum. ‘Ten minutes later, he called back and said he was only messing. Having a laugh with the lady of the house, that’s the way he put it. Cheeky bugger. In fairness, though, there’s no real harm in him.’

‘So he didn’t deny it?’

Mustoe’s meaty shoulders rippled in a dismissive gesture and he took a swig of tea from a chipped Newcastle United mug. ‘Must have read the signs wrong, he said, the stupid sod. Mind you, speaking as one bloke to another, we’ve all read the signs wrong in our time, haven’t we, Mr Kind?’

Reading the signs wrong. Men did it all the time. Very often, there weren’t even any signs to be misread, but that didn’t stop them. There was nothing more to say. As he reversed out of the yard, Daniel couldn’t help asking himself if Gabrielle Anders had died because Barrie Gilpin had misread the signs.

He drove down the hill into Kendal and squeezed into the last vacant parking space on top of the Westmorland Shopping Centre. Outside, a straggly-haired, dungaree-clad Joni Mitchell wannabe plucked at a guitar and wailed about the big yellow taxi that had taken away her old man; presumably he wanted to flee from her singing.

On the opposite side of Stricklandgate stood the Carnegie Library, where an affable assistant found him copies of the local papers from the time of Gabrielle’s murder. The reports told him little he did not already know about the case, but carried a couple of photographs of his father that he’d never seen before. One was a close-up, a head and shoulders shot revealing tired eyes and a fleshiness of the jowls that suggested too many nights in smoky bars. The other was taken at Underfell, close to the crime scene, and showed Ben Kind issuing directions to his subordinates. At his side was a slender young woman officer with a pageboy haircut, paying close attention. Hannah Scarlett?

At ten fifteen he set off for their rendezvous. Kendal was a fiendish maze of courtyards and ginnels, but he was learning his way around the grey limestone buildings. Stramongate was a couple of minutes from the library, an ancient thoroughfare leading from the main shopping street over a bridge crossing the Kent. As soon as he’d spotted the church, he identified the benches that Hannah Scarlett had mentioned, scattered around a stretch of grass by the bend in the river. On a hillock overlooking the scene stood fragments of a ruined castle. It was starting to drizzle as he sat down facing the no-fishing signs by the weir.

A woman in a leather jacket was striding along the path from the bridge. Medium height, short brown hair damp from the rain. The pageboy cut was no more, but he was certain this was Hannah Scarlett. As she came nearer, her gaze locked on him. In his stomach he felt an unexpected jab of apprehension. Maybe Miranda was right. This woman might know stuff about his father it was better for him not to know.