Martin Edwards - The Coffin Trail

Leigh leaned forward so that their faces were close together. ‘Have you any idea of what you’re doing?’ she said bitterly. ‘Any idea about the can of worms you’re opening?’

For a split second he thought about Tash’s fear that Jean Allardyce had gone missing. Even if she had, it couldn’t be down to him in any way. Could it? ‘Sorry, I don’t follow.’

‘Can’t you imagine the disruption and upset this kind of thing causes?’

‘Hang on a moment,’ he said. ‘When we talked in the pub, I thought you agreed that Barrie was an unlikely killer.’

‘Barrie’s dead.’

‘Does that make everything all right?’ Miranda gave him a baleful glance, but he plunged on. ‘His reputation doesn’t matter, is that it? It seems to be a widely-held opinion in Brackdale. If he wasn’t guilty, fine, no problem. He was an oddball, anyway, a loser. So who cares?’

‘That’s not fair.’ Leigh flushed. ‘Okay, Barrie was one of life’s scapegoats, but it’s not the real issue. By encouraging the police to dig over old ground, you’re opening a Pandora’s box. Who knows what may fly out?’

‘The police are perfectly capable of turning up stones without my egging them on. Hannah Scarlett is a good detective.’ A good detective. He realised that he’d borrowed the phrase she’d used to describe his father and added quickly, ‘A woman her age doesn’t make Chief Inspector without being quick on the uptake.’

‘You’re right,’ Leigh said slowly. ‘She is a good detective.’

‘Well, then. What are you afraid of?’

‘Daniel,’ Miranda said. ‘This isn’t helping…’

‘It’s all right,’ Leigh said. ‘I’m not offended. In fact, you’re absolutely right. I am afraid, though not for myself. Afraid that innocent people will get hurt. People I care for. That’s why I came to ask you a favour.’

‘You can always ask.’ Daniel ventured a smile to take the chill off his words.

‘The favour is this. Can’t you give up on trying to fight Barrie’s corner? You know and I know what he was really like, why not leave it there? If you insist on re-opening old wounds, even more innocent people will suffer, and how can that help Barrie? I know your heart’s in the right place, and I don’t mean to be patronising when I say that. The truth is, though, you’re simply making matters worse. If you have any influence with Hannah, please try and persuade her to concentrate on something more worthwhile.’

‘Even if I wanted to do that,’ he said, ‘why should she listen to me? My only connection with her is that she worked with my dad. She strikes me as very much her own woman. You can bet she’ll make up her own mind about what she does.’

‘I suppose you’re right.’ Leigh swallowed the rest of her wine. ‘She is her own woman.’

‘In any case, if there’s one man who has a chance of talking her round, surely it’s Marc Amos. Or have you talked to him and got nowhere?’

When he’d met her previously, she’d seemed poised and self-confident, but now her voice was low with despair. ‘You don’t understand a thing, do you? Oh God, I should never have blundered in here. I’ve only made myself look ridiculous.’

Miranda reached out an arm, as if to offer consolation, only to find herself clutching at air as Leigh scrambled to her feet.

‘I must go. I’ve said too much already. Thanks for the drink. I shouldn’t have disturbed your evening. Sorry.’

Daniel watched as she pushed and shoved her way blindly past the makeshift barricade, scratching her arm on a protruding length of timber as she made good her escape.

‘Leigh,’ he called, ‘can we talk about this? Please?’

She didn’t look back, just shook her head and hurried around the corner of the building and disappeared from view. He was about to follow, but Miranda’s shaking voice halted him in his tracks.

‘Happy now? Or won’t you be satisfied until your obsession with what happened all those years ago has antagonised every single person in this bloody valley?’

After Eddie finished, they ate a scratch meal together in silence. The food tasted of dust. Whilst Daniel was filling the cafetiere, Miranda announced that she had a migraine and was going to bed. Left to his own devices, he swallowed a couple of mouthfuls of coffee, slung the crockery in the new dishwasher, and decided to go for a walk. The evening was mild and another hour’s exercise before darkness fell might help to set things in perspective. He felt a sort of kinship with those sci-fi movie heroes who slay the wicked alien only for the creature to spring back to life, more fearsome than ever, in the final reel. This new life was turning out to be even more complicated than the old.

Their bedroom door was shut. He tapped gently and said, ‘I’ll be out for an hour. Going to clear my head.’

No reply.

He padded down the stairs again and put on his jacket and boots. He’d decided on a circuit of the Fold, taking in the pack horse bridge, a stretch of the beck and the disused corn mill that Tash Dumelow was planning to paint. An undemanding ramble, a chance to sort things out in his mind.

A bright red tea rose was coming into bloom by the side of the path. The memory came back to him of his grandmother, who had stayed with the family the Christmas before she died. He would have been ten years old and he always associated her with the aroma of cigarette smoke blended with talcum powder. She was a shrewd Lancastrian who must by then have realised that her life would soon be destroyed by the cancer eating at her lungs.

‘Promise me this, you two,’ the old lady wheezed one night while he and Louise were reducing each other to tears of rage over some petty juvenile dispute. ‘Life is shorter than you realise. You must remember to stop and smell the roses.’

It was the last conversation he could recall having with her. Time to take her advice, he thought, pausing to inhale the rich scent. As he unfastened the gate, he turned over in his mind the conversations he’d had with Jean Allardyce and Tash Dumelow and Leigh Moffat. So much for being a stranger in Paradise. As a boy, life had seemed simple to him, no more than a steady and straightforward ascent of a mountainside to gain greater and greater heights. And then his father had deserted them and he’d discovered that the way forward was barred by crevasses as deep as they were dangerous.

From out of nowhere came the muffled blare of Elmer Bernstein’s theme from The Great Escape , wildly incongruous in the calm of the clearing. He hadn’t even realised that he’d left the mobile in his jacket. By the time he’d finished fumbling in his inside pocket and fished it out, the ringtone was silent.

Who could have called him? It was late for one of the tradesmen to get in touch and there weren’t many other possibilities. When they’d moved here, they’d bought each other new mobiles, ditching the old numbers that former colleagues knew by heart: all part of the plan to cut themselves off from the past.

As he pressed the button to check, the phone rang again.

‘So you’ve nothing further to add?’ Nick Lowther asked.

Tom Allardyce’s expression remained impassive. Except, Hannah thought, for a hint of scorn in the way the corners of his lips turned down. Grudgingly, he’d led them into the kitchen, a large well-proportioned room commanding a view of Underfell and the coffin trail that wound down from the slope beyond. At least he was house-trained to the extent of leaving his boots in the back porch before venturing on to the well-scrubbed green linoleum tiles. Half a dozen towels were hanging over a huge old-fashioned wooden clothes horse to dry and the rich smell of baked bread lingered in the air. Before taking a seat at the table occupying the centre of the room, Hannah had run her fingertips along the rims of half a dozen Port Meirion plates displayed on a tall pine dresser. Not a speck of grime. Whatever Jean Allardyce had done with herself, she hadn’t forgotten the dusting before her departure.