The Serpent Pool Page 22

  An eerily cheerful weathergirl warned of dense fog blanketing northern and central parts of the county. The best advice was not to travel if your journey wasn’t really necessary. Mrs Amos clicked her tongue and said she blamed global warming.

  Marc swallowed a last mouthful of tea and announced that he was setting off for a walk before he went into the bookshop.

  ‘Should you be driving at all if the fog—?’

  ‘Look outside, Mum,’ he said. ‘There’s even a glimmer of sun in the sky over the Bay.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you know best. But do wear something warm, dear.’

  Once a mother, always a mother.

  He kissed her leathery cheek and set off for the old promenade. Threads of mist gathered around the fells above the town, and he supposed that Undercrag would be wrapped in a cold grey shroud. Hannah’s problem, not his. She should never have set up secret meetings with Daniel Kind.

  He passed the causeway leading to Holme Island, nowadays separated from the mainland by yellow-brown spartina grass so rampant and powerful that some people said it was all that saved the promenade from destruction by the waves. Sheep grazed where once children built sandcastles. Eventually, they’d have to rename the town Grange-over-Grass. Even the metal posts from a long-gone pier had been engulfed by the salt flats.

  He leant on the railings at the spot which marked the end of an invisible route across the Bay. A month after his first date with Hannah, he’d taken her on the eight-mile walk from Arnside to Grange, led by a guide who knew the shifting sands like the back of his hand. At times, the water reached up to their thighs. One false move, and you were sunk. That summer Sunday afternoon, the hint of danger added a frisson as he squeezed her hand and whispered what they’d do when he got her back home.

  Along the way, they’d watched oystercatchers probing for shellfish, and ducks whirring overhead, while she’d listened to his stories about books with the intense concentration of a woman newly in love. He told her about chancing upon the handwritten manuscript of a famous mystery novel in a Lunedale junk shop and selling it to a Japanese collector for a small fortune. The murderer in the story constructed an ingenious alibi. It was only broken when the detective realised the suspect could have reached the victim in time if he travelled, not around the long and winding coast roads, but diagonally across the still waters of the Bay.

  Murder, murder, everywhere.

  Times changed, familiarity bred boredom. Hannah was weary of books, and his business. Weary of him, too; he was afraid he didn’t turn her on the way he once had. Cassie was different. She was younger, not obsessed with her own career, but the clues suggested she fell for men who adored her, yet let her down in the end. She was ready for kindness. Last night, he’d sent her a text the moment Hannah slammed the door behind her on her way for a tryst with Daniel Kind.

  What r u doing 2mrw?

  Cassie wasn’t down to work a shift at the shop; and he didn’t need her to provide cover. In addition to Zoe, Judith, a long-serving part-timer, was due in today. He craved Cassie’s company, the ache of emptiness like a physical hunger, chewing at his guts.

  Within thirty seconds, she texted back:

  Nada.

  Straight away, he asked if she fancied a drink, but she’d replied Sorry, no can do.

  Shit; was the boyfriend back on the scene? Feeling sick in the pit of his stomach, he punched out another message, wanting to know if they could meet in the morning.

  Another instant reply.

  Love to.

  She even added a couple of kisses.

  On a clear day, you could see Blackpool Tower from the crumbling promenade, but this morning he could barely make out the water stretching beyond Holme. The sun had fled, leaving the sky as grey and cloudy as a fortune-teller’s ball. But who cared? His spine tingled.

  Go for it.

  He fished his mobile out of his pocket.

  * * *

  ‘Daniel.’ Hannah’s voice was soft in his ear. ‘Sorry to disturb you.’

  He rubbed his eyes. Seven-thirty, and the phone’s relentless wail had dragged him from under the duvet. Thank God he’d resisted the temptation to let it ring. He’d not climbed into bed until three that morning. Too tense to sleep, he’d switched on his laptop, determined to chisel the final paragraphs of his talk for Arlo Denstone’s Festival. He hated missing deadlines, often labouring long and late into the night to meet an editor’s timescale, and he’d crafted a dozen fresh sentences to sum up Thomas De Quincey and the fine art of murder.

  But his heart was no longer in his subject. It was one thing to play witty and imaginative games with the notion of murder for pleasure, quite another to stumble across its cold reality. There was nothing exhilarating about murder in the flesh. For all its brilliance, De Quincey’s gleeful prose was streaked with cruelty, and Daniel saw something repellent in his morbid fantasies of vengeance. De Quincey was a voyeur, ogling murderers from a safe distance. His addiction to violent death might have been cured if he’d ever looked down into a disused well, and seen and smelt a rotting corpse.

  ‘Hello, Hannah.’

  He squeezed the phone so tight it hurt. To prove he wasn’t dreaming? His brain was sluggish, he needed a cold shower and a hot coffee. But she wouldn’t call at this hour unless it was urgent.

  ‘You said something about Stuart Wagg last night. I was knackered, otherwise I’d have picked up on it at the time.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t—’

  ‘It hit me at half four this morning. Woke me up.’

  He blinked hard. ‘What’s bugging you, Hannah?’

  ‘You mentioned he suffered from claustrophobia.’

  ‘Louise told me. It was no secret. Apparently, he never even used the lift at the office, he always took the stairs up to his room on the top floor.’

  ‘So, that’s why his architect designed Crag Gill with such vast rooms, and archways instead of doors?’

  ‘Yes, even though he made a joke of it, the fear was real. Louise said that when he was at school, another kid locked him in a cupboard as a prank, and Stuart was scared witless. He never quite got over the trauma. Hard to imagine a more agonising death for him. To be trapped underground, with no hope of escape.’

  While Hannah absorbed this in silence, he moved to the window and nudged the curtains apart. Fog shrouded the cipher garden. Trees and bushes were dark, shapeless forms. The tarn was invisible. He might have been anywhere.

  ‘Perfect,’ she said at last. ‘Thanks for your help.’

  ‘What is this about?’

  ‘The link between Stuart’s murder and the other two deaths.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Me neither. But believe me, I will.’

  Her voice hardened. Raw anger, he thought, on the behalf of the victims. He’d heard the same edge of furious determination before, in the days when his father lived at home.

  ‘What do you think it means?’ When she hesitated, he said. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t ask.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘If you really want to know.’

  A moment of intimacy, like the night before. He had to give her the chance to change her mind, and back away.

  ‘I don’t want you to breach confidentiality.’

  ‘It’s not against the rules to think aloud,’ she said. ‘OK, here goes. Bethany Friend was afraid of water, George Saffell was terrified of pain and dreaded losing his book collection, and Stuart Wagg was claustrophobic. Their lives all ended in circumstances that they would have found truly appalling.’

  Hannah’s heart beat faster as she dropped the phone into its cradle. Mustn’t let thoughts of Daniel distract her; she had enough on her plate. It had seemed strange, to wake up alone, even though Marc often stayed away from home, when exhibiting at book fairs, or visiting collectors with books to sell. But this morning was different. The draughty, echoing house felt too big for her. She didn’t know when he’d be back. Or if.

  She checked her mo
bile to see if he’d sent a text. Nothing. The mean sod. If he was staying with his mother, he’d soon tire of the tug of her apron strings. OK, let him sweat. No way was she going to make the first move. Not today, at any rate.

  Number one priority was to report that Bethany Friend had worked for Amos Books before moving to the university. Whatever she said to Daniel in rare moments of bravado, if she screwed this case up, her career would be flushed down the pan. Lauren would have to be told that Marc knew Bethany, but first she wanted to break the news to Fern Larter. She texted Fern, asking to see her before the joint team briefing. The reply was instant. Fern was in a buoyant mood, pleased with her crack-of-dawn radio interview and that the investigation into George Saffell’s death, stalled for so long, was at last on the move.

  The grass outside Undercrag did not look frozen, but when she stood on it to de-ice the windscreen of the Lexus, it felt as hard and crunchy as icing on a cake. The frost had preserved countless deer slots and Hannah wondered if, while she slept, a large number of the animals had roamed outside her home in the moonlight. Or maybe a handful of them had danced round and round in ever-decreasing circles. She knew exactly what that felt like.

  The fog clutched at her throat as she locked the front door, and turned the journey to Kendal into a nerve-wracking crawl. Hannah hated fog, and the way it stagnated in the valleys, transforming the Lakes into a cold and alien land. And she hated driving through it even more. You could never tell what lay round the next bend. A car without lights, a multi-vehicle pile-up.

  The twists of the road demanded all her concentration. But she couldn’t rid her mind of a single image: the rictus of anger on Wanda Saffell’s face, on New Year’s Eve, as she threw red wine over Arlo Denstone’s white jacket. Wanda was drunk that night, and a woman scorned. But did the incident reveal a dangerous lack of restraint? Was she capable of much worse than making a scene at a party? Or was Hannah simply hoping so because she’d hinted that Marc had slept with Bethany?

  She made straight for Fern’s office. Fern organised a coffee for each of them and spent five minutes putting things into perspective. Marc needed to be interviewed, for the record. If he could contribute anything more to the inquiry, fine. But Bethany had finished at the bookshop months before her death. She’d had countless previous jobs if you included all her part-time stints behind bars or waiting on table. It was no big deal.

  ‘Marc has moved out,’ Hannah said.

  Fern swallowed a mouthful of coffee. The slogan on her coaster read Well-behaved women seldom make history.

  ‘After you read him the riot act?’

  ‘He ought to have been upfront, and admitted that he knew her. Not leave me to find out from Wanda Saffell.’

  As she spoke, she realised she sounded flinty and uncompromising. Mulish was how Marc described her in this kind of mood.

  ‘Yeah, but we don’t always do the right thing, do we? He must have worried that you’d react badly.’

  ‘He was right to worry.’

  Fern put her head on one side, as if this might help her read Hannah’s mind. ‘You’re not seriously thinking that he might have anything to do with Bethany’s death?’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Well, then.’ Fern stood up. ‘With a bit of luck, he’ll come to his senses. And so will you. All right, let’s marshal the troops.’

  The joint team briefing threw out questions like sparks from a Catherine wheel. None of the radiators were working, but for once nobody complained. The detectives working for Fern on the suspected murder of George Saffell had run into a brick wall. Discovering fresh lines of inquiry gave them an adrenaline rush.

  Fern reported that CSIs continued to swarm over Stuart Wagg’s home in the hope of finding forensic evidence to link his murder with the fatal fire in the Ullswater boathouse. Differences in the MO did not disguise similarities between the cases. Two wealthy professionals, who moved in the same social circles, and even shared the same expensive hobby, both killed at home. Nobody believed the choice of victims was random. The murderer must be known to both victims. Throw into the mix a possible sighting of the culprit’s car, and no wonder the room buzzed with anticipation.

  A farm worker had spotted a small purple car parked across the road from Crag Gill for three-quarters of an hour shortly after the last known sighting of Stuart Wagg by Louise Kind. The car was tucked away among the trees, but the man had seen it from his tractor cab, as he travelled to and from a nearby field. The windows were steamed up and he’d supposed a couple of teenagers were getting it together inside. If only he’d given a more precise description; in a perfect world, he’d have noted the registration number too. But the world wasn’t perfect, and he knew more about tractors than cars. Maybe it was a Nissan Micra, maybe something else. Even so, the sighting was a break.

  Now Hannah had raised a possible link with the unexplained drowning of Bethany Friend in the Serpent Pool. Bethany, like the two men, had a passion for books – and she’d worked for both their firms. And then there was the connection between the psychology of the victims. Each of the three victims had died in terror.

  ‘Should we call in a profiler?’ asked a young DC called Ciaran who had the manner of an eager puppy.

  Hannah ignored the mutterings from the sceptics, Greg Wharf among them, who stood at the back of the room. For some detectives, psychological profilers ranked with witch ball-gazers and folk who offered racing tips, but you couldn’t ignore any tool in the box.

  ‘We’ve put a call in to Trudy Groenewald at Lancaster University. She’s due here to look over the files this afternoon.’

  ‘Why the six-year gap between the crimes?’ a DS in Fern’s team asked.

  ‘Of course, we’re keeping an open mind about whether the deaths are connected. Bethany’s hydrophobia might just be a coincidence. But if the same person or people are responsible for all three deaths, there may be various explanations for the years of inactivity.’

  ‘For example, that the killer hasn’t been inactive,’ Hannah added. ‘There may be other deaths in the meantime where a connection hasn’t been identified. Think of the MO in the Bethany Friend case. Drowning didn’t exclude the possibility of suicide. With Saffell, the killer didn’t try so hard to disguise the murder. And Wagg couldn’t have killed himself. We have a progression, a murderer becoming increasingly reckless. And we can’t rule out that there were other victims, after Bethany and before Saffell.’

  ‘Ciaran, I want you to check the records,’ Fern said. ‘Do any other cases fit the pattern? Remember, assumption is the mother of all cock-ups. But if we’re just looking at these three deaths, we need to focus on sadists who spent the past six years out of circulation. In prison, for instance – anyone released last autumn who fits the bill? A job for you, Roz.’

  Roz nodded. A dark-haired DC with a toothpick figure, she’d attracted a couple of glances from Greg Wharf. Whether she fancied him or not, she was smart enough not to give the slightest hint that she was aware of his existence.

  ‘Nathan Clare was in Ambleside yesterday evening.’ Hannah indicated his photograph on the whiteboard, a shot in which he looked more like an apeman than ever. ‘Locked in an embrace with Wanda Saffell. Nathan was Bethany’s lover, although he left her to start an affair with Wanda. And Wanda worked with Bethany, claimed to be her friend. All this was long before she met George.’

  ‘And the connection with Wagg?’ asked Ciaran.

  ‘She had a fling with him during her marriage to Saffell. And she was a guest at his New Year party. She was pissed out of her mind, and threw wine all over a man who was rude enough to say no when she propositioned him.’

  ‘Donna and I broke the news that her husband was dead,’ Ciaran said. ‘She didn’t shed a single tear.’

  ‘She’s a flake,’ Donna diagnosed. ‘Alcoholic too, if you ask me.’

  ‘Stuart Wagg had a history of dumping his lovers,’ Hannah said. ‘He was pretty brutal about it: his policy was to go for a clean break, no
t to let the woman down gently.’

  ‘He got away with it,’ Fern said. ‘Until the day before yesterday, when his luck ran out.’

  ‘Suppose Wanda had a grudge against him,’ Maggie Eyre said. ‘What motive could she have for harming Bethany Friend? She was a gentle soul. People liked her.’

  ‘But she was confused about her sexuality. Maybe the relationship she had before Nathan Clare was with a woman,’ Hannah said.

  ‘You think she and Wanda slept together?’ the puppy asked.

  ‘The original investigation never picked up anything. But Wanda isn’t short of charisma, and Bethany was pretty and impressionable. She’d had a crush on a teacher when she was at school, and she liked older lovers. Nathan Clare, for instance. Maybe she and Wanda fancied an experiment.’

  A furrow appeared in Maggie Eyre’s forehead. She wasn’t the quickest thinker in the room, but she gnawed at problems as if they were chicken legs.

  ‘If we put Wanda in the frame, doesn’t the connection between the cases break down? The relationships ended in different ways. If Stuart dumped Wanda, revenge might be a motive for her to murder him. But Bethany was dumped by her lover, we were told. Not the other way around. Just like she was dumped by Nathan Clare.’

  ‘We don’t know for sure there was a relationship between Wanda and Bethany,’ Fern said. ‘But DCI Scarlett and I agree about the importance of close liaison. Assuming a link between the cold and current cases, we’re not going to be territorial about this. Maggie and Liam will cross-check the lists of people who had a connection with Bethany against those associated with Saffell and Wagg. Meanwhile, DCI Scarlett will question both Nathan Clare and Wanda Saffell again.’

  ‘Pissing in the dark, aren’t we?’

  Greg Wharf’s murmur was so audible, he must have meant everyone to hear. His hands were behind his head. For the past half hour, he’d been leaning so far back in his plastic chair as to be in imminent danger of tipping over onto his backside. No such luck, but that was Greg for you. Never quite as unbalanced as he seemed. He’d kept so quiet, Hannah wondered if he was sickening for something. But he’d just been biding his time, waiting for the chance to make waves.