Peter Lovesey - Upon A Dark Night

‘You’re kicking me out, in other words.’

‘I’ve got my job to do.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Why put it off until tomorrow? Your sister’s offering you a comfortable room somewhere.’

Ada put a beefy arm around Rose’s shoulders. ‘Life’s a bummer. Like we said, petal, whatever, wherever. Let me know when you get home. Directly, right?’

Rose nodded.

‘In fact, I’ll give you one of my cards.’ Ada went to the cupboard beside her bed.

‘Your said Imogen. what ?’

Ada had been full of surprises from the start, but the idea of a homeless woman having cards to hand out was the most incredible yet.

The expression on Imogen’s face was priceless.

‘You can have one, too, if you like,’ Ada said. ‘I’ve got about two thousand.’ What she had was a handful of postcards. ‘Aerial views of Bath. Lovely, aren’t they?’

Imogen said, ‘Ada, you’re the limit’

Ada gave her a disdainful look, ‘They’re legit. I got them out of a skip, sweetie. They’re all fuzzy. Some cock-up with the printing. They were being chucked out. How many do you want?’

Imogen shook her head.

Rose told Ada, ‘You’ve been more than a good friend. You’ve kept me sane.’

‘Send me one of these as soon as you get back to Hounslow, right?’ said Ada, putting a bunch of them in her hand. ‘And when you’ve got yourself together again, come and see me. I’ll be here if I’m not doing another stretch – and if I am I’d still appreciate a visit.’

Rose couldn’t speak any more. She picked a Sainsbury’s bag off the back of a chair and started putting her few possessions into it.

The farm ‘at Tormarton’ turned out to be closer to Acton Turville than Tormarton, Diamond only discovered after cruising the lanes for three-quarters of an hour. This was a corner of the county he seldom visited, unless you could call racing through on the motorway a visit. On this bleak October afternoon, contending with patches of mist, he concluded that if any stretch of countryside could absorb a three-lane motorway without appreciable loss of character, it was this. The two people he met and asked for directions said they couldn’t help. Locals both, they hadn’t heard of a farmer called Gladstone. When eventually he found the farm (luckily spotting a police vehicle at the end of a mud track) he had no difficulty in understanding how the body had lain undiscovered for up to a week. The stone cottage looked derelict. The outbuildings were overgrown with a mass of soggy Old Man’s Beard, its hairy awns, silver in high summer, now as brown as if the Old Man smoked sixty a day.

The remoteness of the place meant that he could not in all conscience tell Wigfull that he merely happened to be passing. Instead he gave no explanation at all when he hailed the party of diggers.

‘Any progress, John?’

If Dracula himself had stepped out of the mist Wigfull could not have been more startled.

‘I said how’s it going?’

‘What are you…?’

‘Is there any progress?’

‘If shifting half a ton of soil is progress, yes,’ Wigfull succeeded in saying.

‘But you haven’t found anything?’

‘If you insist on standing there,’ said Wigfull, ‘you’ll get your shoes dirty.’ It sounded more like a threat than a warning. He was more sensibly clad than Diamond, in gumboots and overalls.

Diamond took a step back. Perhaps to make the point for Wigfull, one of the men at work in the hole deposited a chunk of soil where the big detective had been standing.

Pre-empting the next question, Wigfull said, ‘It’s an exploratory dig. We’re keeping an open mind.’

‘Sensible. How deep do you intend to go?’

‘When we come to the end of the loose stuff, we stop.’

‘Sounds as if you’re almost there.’

‘Possibly.’ Alerted to the fact that this was the critical point in the excavation, Wigfull bent over the hole and instructed the two diggers to take care.

Diamond, too, stepped closer and peered in. The depth was a little over four feet. ‘Difficult to see. You want some lighting on a day like this.’

Wigfull didn’t respond.

The spades were definitely scraping on the bedrock. One of the diggers climbed out and the other asked for a rake. It was increasingly obvious that nothing so bulky as a corpse was buried there. Diamond stepped away from the trench and took a few paces across the field. ‘There’s another hole here, by the look of it,’ he reported.

‘We know,’ said Wigfull with ill-concealed annoyance. ‘There are three, at least.’

‘I’ll see if I can find some more for you.’ Why, he thought after he’d spoken, did Wigfull bring out the worst in him?

In a penitent mood, he took a slow walk around the boundary of the late Farmer Gladstone’s land, in truth not looking for more evidence of recent digging. The methodical Wigfull could be relied on to find anything suspicious. Instead, he mused on the purpose of the holes. If they weren’t used to bury things, what were they for? A search? There was the stock story of the recluse who leads a frugal life and secretly has a hoard of money that he buries. Had someone heard of the old man’s suicide and come shifting earth on the off-chance? Three trenches suggested rather more confidence than an off-chance.

The neglected field was a conservationist’s ideal, the hedge bristling with small trees and shrubs, with mud-slides showing evidence of badgers along the far side. He stopped and looked over the hedge at the deep ploughing that presumably indicated someone else’s land. What had the neighbours to say about old Gladstone? he wondered. And had they noticed anyone digging on his land in recent days?

Having toured the field, he approached the house, which was open. The SOCOs had long since collected all the forensic evidence they wanted, and now it was in use as a base for the police. Some attempt had been made that afternoon to get a fire going in the range. He used the bellows on the feebly smouldering wood and soon had a flame, though he doubted if it would give much heat to the kettle on top. The range stood in what must once have been the open hearth, and the section where they had started the fire was intended for coal, but he didn’t fancy exploring the outhouses in search of some.

Here, as the fading afternoon gave increasing emphasis to the flickering fire, he felt a strong sense of the old man shuffling around the brown matting that covered most of the flagstones, seeing out his days here, cooking on the range, dozing in the chair and occasionally stepping outside to collect eggs from the hen-house, or to wring a chicken’s neck. His bed was against the wall, the bedding amounting to a pair of blankets and an overcoat. Thanks to the work of the SOCOs, the place was very likely cleaner at this minute than it had been in years.

The chair – presumably the one the body had been found in – stood in a corner, a Victorian easy chair with a padded seat, back and wooden armrests. He saw the chalkmarks on the floor indicating the position it had been found in. There, also, were the outlines of the dead man’s footprints and of a gun.

A shotgun is not the most convenient weapon for a suicide, but every farmer owns one and so do many others in the country, so the choice is not uncommon. Methods of firing the fatal shot vary. Gladstone’s way, seated in the chair, presumably with the butt of the gun propped on the floor between the knees, and the muzzle tucked under the chin, was as efficient as any. With the arms fully extended along the barrel, both thumbs could be used to press down on the trigger. The result must have been quick for the victim, if messy for those who came after. Diamond looked up and noticed on the ceiling a number of dark marks ringed with chalk. He recalled the rookie constables in their face masks assisting the police surgeon and was thankful that his ‘blooding’ as a young officer had not been quite so gruesome.