Martin Edwards - The Coffin Trail

‘So glamorous young women are constantly stopping off here on their own?’ Nick’s eyebrows went up. ‘Only to blend in with the mahogany in the snug?’

They could hear Kylie Minogue warbling on the saloon bar jukebox, the dance rhythms thudding through the thin partition. The three of them were closeted in a cubby-hole piled high with cardboard boxes full of potato crisps, perched on stools around a formica-topped table that might have been at the cutting edge of contemporary design forty years earlier. The air was ripe with the aroma of cheese and onion and smoky bacon.

‘I can’t understand why you’re asking these questions.’

‘As I explained on the phone,’ Nick said, ‘we’ve been tasked with reviewing the original inquiry.’

‘Everyone knows Gilpin killed her. Your boss was involved, weren’t you, love?’

‘I’m not your love, Mr Dowling,’ Hannah said in a frozen voice.

‘Well, anyway, there’s nothing more I can tell you now. It’s old news as far as I’m concerned. Gilpin’s dead and buried, but he killed her, you mark my words.’

‘Pure speculation,’ Nick said. ‘Barrie Gilpin was never charged, let alone convicted. And now further information has come to light.’

‘What information?’

Nick returned his gaze. After a few moments, Dowling lowered his eyes.

‘This is all down to that Daniel Kind, isn’t it?’ he grumbled, turning to Hannah. ‘His dad was your boss, wasn’t he?’

‘Why do you mention Mr Kind?’

‘He’s stirring up bother.’

‘What sort of bother?’

‘He was in here the other night, insinuating that Gilpin was set up. Which is another way of saying that the girl was killed by someone else. Maybe someone who’s still around in the village. That’s not very nice, is it? And no good for my business, either. People take offence.’

‘People?’

‘Tom Allardyce, for one. This Daniel Kind was pulling his plonker, so to speak. Big mistake, in my book. Not a good idea to get the wrong side of Tom.’

‘He has a violent temper, doesn’t he?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s no secret, cousin Jean’s felt the back of his hand more than once. Though maybe sometimes she asks for it. Not the brightest button in the box, isn’t our Jean.’

Hannah strove to keep her tone civil. ‘It isn’t impossible that Barrie Gilpin was innocent.’

‘Oh, for Chrissake,’ Dowling said. ‘Ask yourself what game Kind’s playing. You know he bought Mrs Gilpin’s cottage for a song? Nobody wanted it, because of what happened. Now he’s aiming to up the value of the place by persuading everyone that Gilpin didn’t kill the girl.’

‘You seriously believe that?’

‘Yes,’ he said, all righteous defiance. ‘I seriously do. He’s having you on. All this isn’t about sorting out some old miscarriage of justice, it’s about a property speculation.’

Nick said, ‘You haven’t told us anything about the girl yet. What was she like?’

‘Pleasant enough, as far as I can remember.’

‘She was a looker.’

Dowling shrugged. Over-elaborately, Hannah felt. ‘Plenty of good-looking women come to the Lakes, Sergeant.’

‘She’d spent time in America, hadn’t she?’

‘Las Vegas. I recall we spoke about the weather one morning at breakfast, when it was pissing down outside. The city’s slap bang in the middle of the Nevada desert, isn’t it? She loved the year-round sun, said it made such a change from the long, dark winter nights she’d grown up with.’

‘So why come back to England?’

He picked at his nose, as if as an aid to thought. ‘She’d made a few quid working on the Strip and she said she wanted a holiday. The climate here may be lousy but at least you don’t keep tripping over Elvis Presley impersonators. As far as I know, she was touring round and looking up friends.’

‘Did she tell you anything else?’

‘We talked about slot machines. At the time I was thinking of hiring a couple of one-armed bandits for the saloon. She’d worked in bars and hotels, she’d even trained as a croupier at one point. The tips they get are unbelievable. I remember asking if she thought Blackpool would ever take off as a casino resort, but she laughed fit to burst. Said it would need more than a spot of global warming for the Fylde Coast to match Vegas.’

‘Apart from that?’

‘Nothing springs to mind. She’ll have chatted more to the staff than to me. I was rushed off my feet, since my wife wasn’t around to share the load.’

Nick made a show of leafing through papers on a clipboard. ‘You said in your statement that Mrs Dowling was on holiday. Did she not return?’

‘Oh aye,’ Dowling said. ‘I suppose there’s no harm telling you now. Glenda had got herself mixed up with a bloke who owned a bed and breakfast in Coniston. Don’t they say love is blind? No sour grapes, but the man was built like a brick shit-house and he looked like one and all. She came running back here in the end.’

‘This was after Barrie Gilpin’s death?’

‘Yeah, a fortnight later, maybe. It didn’t work out. In the end she moved in with a salesman from a car showroom in Barrow. I’m well rid of her, to be fair. ’Sides, I fell on my feet with Lynsey. Lovely girl. Very giving.’

‘You told us before that on the day of the murder, you didn’t see Gabrielle Anders after breakfast.’

‘Right. I served her, that I do remember. She asked for hash browns, said she’d developed a taste for them in the US of A. I said we only did a full English. It was like a little joke we had going.’

Hilarious, Hannah thought, a real rib-tickler. ‘Did she say what she’d be doing that day?’

‘Let me see.’ He made a pantomime of trying to collect his thoughts. ‘I think she was going to see the Dumelows. As you know, Mrs D was an old pal. I don’t recall anything else.’

‘And what did you do later that day?’

‘I was here all the time, as far as I can remember. Matter of fact, I wasn’t feeling well.’

‘You told me last time your stomach ulcer was troubling you.’

‘Been a martyr to it for years,’ he insisted. ‘Off and on. Too much to worry about, that’s my problem.’

‘You served behind the bar from half-five to six, according to your statement. After that, the pain was too much and you had to go up to bed. You said you left the staff to look after everything downstairs.’

‘As far as I can remember.’

‘So you don’t have a witness who can account for your movements after six o’clock?’

‘I don’t need one. I never touched that girl. I was in bed.’

‘Alone?’

He treated her to the foxiest grin in his repertoire. ‘Unfortunately.’

‘So no one can vouch for where you were or what you were doing?’

‘Trust me, you’re barking up the wrong tree.’

‘Trust you, Mr Dowling? All right, which tree should we be barking up?’

Dowling pursed his lips, as though measuring the likelihood of being penalised for what he intended to say. They could almost hear the grinding of cogs in his brain.

‘Far as I’m concerned, Barrie Gilpin killed that girl, end of story.’

‘But if he didn’t?’ Nick asked.

Hannah watched as he wavered before speaking, like a poor swimmer hesitating on the edge of a deep, deep pool.

‘If he didn’t…then my money’s on the chap who was pouring vodka and lime down her throat the night before she died.’

‘Tom Allardyce?’

A throaty chuckle. ‘No way, that girl was out of Tom’s league. Whatever he may have liked to believe.’

‘Who, then?’

Joe Dowling’s face folded into a nervous smirk. ‘His lordship.’

‘His lordship?’

‘Well, that’s how he’d like us to think of him. The squire of Brack Hall, I mean. Simon Dumelow.’