A KILLING KARMA

Copyright 2007 Geraldine Evans

 

Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

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 Chapter One

'What did you say?’ Unable to take in what he was hearing, Detective Chief Inspector ‘Will’ Casey asked for it to be repeated, unsure that he'd believe his ears even then.

‘Two suspicious deaths?’ he queried. Two! They certainly didn't do things by halves. But then he knew that already. Such a proclivity had been the bane of his life for years.

He bit off a curse and said, ‘And you say you haven't notified the local police?’ He paused, hoping to gather both wits and patience, while he listened to the garbled explanation. But unusually for him, he succeeded in gathering neither, as his next words proved. ‘Are you both stupid, Moon, or just criminally irresponsible?’

Pointless, really, asking such questions, Casey told himself with a grimace that he tried and failed to turn into an ironic smile. When were they ever anything else?

Illogically, he thought, This can't be happening to me. Only he knew it was. He really must have been very wicked in a previous life to bring such bad karma with him to this one.

He stared unseeingly at his living room. Gradually, his eyes came back into focus. It was as if his mind needed to ground him, to calm him. Without will or conscious effort, his gaze travelled round his living room till it rested on the wall to the left of the chimney breast and the place where his favourite piece of scripophily had once rested. The rare and — to Casey — precious, old share certificate of the Stockton and Darlington railway had been sacrificed to pay his parents' debts. The certificate Rachel had bought him in its place was interesting in its way, but it would never replace the original which had had a special place in his heart. His gaze moved around as he listened to further garbled explanations from Moon. This time it rested on the carved Hindu elephant-headed god, Ganesh. His mother had pressed this on him just before she and his father returned home the last time they were here. For good luck, she had said. He had tried to return it to her, thinking she and his father had more need of the god's protection. Even though she had laughed aside his offer and pointed to a similar, much smaller carving at her throat, he wished now he had insisted she keep the larger carving of Ganesh. Being so much bigger, it must surely provide greater protection in keeping with its size.

Too late, he breathed on a sigh as he told Moon he would get there as quickly as possible and put the phone down.

This time his parents had — by a country mile — managed to surpass any of their previous lunatic stunts. And, for the life of him, he didn't see how he could begin to save them from the consequences of their actions.

But, he told himself as he jerked his unwilling body into movement, grabbed his coat and car keys and headed out into the unseasonably chilly July night, there's no one else to do it, so you'd better get up to the Fens and see if you can rescue something from the mire.

The word mire caused him to pause in the doorway of his neat semi-detached as he wondered whether he should change out of his new suit. But then, as he remembered his parents' two muck-attracting and neglected mongrels had both died within a month of one another earlier in the year, he decided such a precaution wasn't necessary.

As he climbed into the car, started it up and made for the Fens, he told himself it was fortunate he was on a week's leave. At least it gave him the time and freedom to try to sort the mess out.

God knew what he'd say to Rachel. He'd have to tell her, of course, he accepted that. Deception was no basis for a committed relationship and he and Rachel had been together now for some months. She spent much of the time at Casey's home, but kept her own flat on in the town. He was just grateful he didn't have to explain the situation to her while his mind was in turmoil and he was still trying to get his head around the grim events he had just been told about.

But as luck would have it, Rachel was out this evening. She had driven to Norwich with a woman friend to see a play that had been highly recommended. Casey hadn't wanted to go but had encouraged Rachel to do so, seeing as she was so keen. As a musician, between practising, performing and touring, she didn't get much opportunity to be on the receiving end of entertainment, and although he regretted the loss of her company, he didn't begrudge her the evening apart.

It wasn't that Rachel wouldn't sympathize if he told her what had happened — she had met his parents and would understand how they could have got into their current predicament almost as well as he did — it was just that he'd prefer to keep this business to himself until he'd extracted the full story. So he was relieved not to have been forced by her presence tonight to explain what the phone call was about.

Will Casey had always found the flatland Fens and their equally flat and empty approaches desolate, even during daylight hours. How had the Elizabethan writer Michael Drayton described them? Something about 'a land of foul, woosy marsh. With a vast queachy soil and hosts of wallowing waves'. Of course, much of the waterlogged land had been reclaimed since Drayton's day. But with the wide and moonless night sky louring darkly down at him through the mist that every so often lifted to reveal the flatlands stretching to the horizon on either side of the road as he drove with no light but cats eyes in sight, he couldn't help but share something of Drayton's feelings about the place. He reflected that on such a night as this the legendary Black Shuck might roam the Fens. A giant black hound, to see Black Shuck was once believed to bring death within a week. With a shiver not solely attributable to the legendary hound, Casey wondered what scenes were waiting for him at his parents' home; a commune of so-called happy hippies enjoying their own version of Utopia.

Now, reality had entered their ramshackle paradise and it had suffered a mortal blow. Two mortal blows, in fact. And he was expected to sort it out and make it all better.

In the next rising of the murk, Casey glanced briefly towards the huge, star-studded Fenland sky and wondered whether he should pray to the Almighty or the Hindu god of hopeless causes ...

 

 

 

Chapter Two

As Casey slowed his car for the approach to the commune's smallholding, he was surprised to see that the gate was shut. Not only shut, but locked with a large padlock and chain, as he discovered when he got out of the car. Casey presumed that with one body lying in a shallow grave in the smallholding's grounds and another presumably laid out in one of the outhouses, they had decided to exercise a rare prudence. Shame it was a little late, he thought.

Amongst the usual collection of rusting old wrecks littering the yard, two of them still balanced on bricks as they had been on his last visit, Casey was astonished to see a brand new 4x4 that gleamed in the sudden light as the front door opened. Where had they got the money for that? he wondered. Unless they had a visitor. That must be it, he concluded as Moon crossed the yard to unlock the gate. Some wealthy patron who thought their lifestyle romantic. Deluded fool, he thought. But it was going to be awkward. Would he have to wait for hours for their visitor to leave before he could talk to them about the two deaths?

However, when, after his mother had enthusiastically embraced him and — a rarity from either parent — thanked him for coming to their aid, he asked Moon who amongst their assorted on-benefits acquaintances could afford such a car, she just mumbled something he couldn't hear and Casey didn't pursue it. He came to another conclusion: that their visitor was someone they would rather he knew as little about as possible.

Almost immediately, Casey heard dogs barking. Worried for a moment that the commune members had obtained more mangy, mud-attracting mutts, he quickly dismissed the thought; acquiring more dogs would require an energy and purposefulness singularly lacking in the commune members given that they rarely found energy for anything other than smoking dope and making babies. On the still air of this flat and otherwise silent countryside, he knew sound could travel some distance and concluded that the dogs must belong to one of the commune's neighbours.

Just as he had satisfied himself that he was safe from the attentions of uncared for dogs, two hairy and muck-coated specimens came racing around the side of the house yapping frenziedly. To no avail, Casey tried to shush them, only too conscious of the unorthodox reason for his visit, he could do without the dogs drawing attention to his arrival. With his attempts at quietening the animals clearly doomed to failure, he hurried after Moon, squelching through the mud, hoping that his disappearance through the front door would shut the dogs up.

As he trudged back with her, fending off the curious dogs and their sniffing noses, Casey took a look round the smallholding. And although the darkness was kind to it, the commune's property still looked as uncared for as the dogs. Daylight would doubtless have revealed the level of ramshackle squalor that Casey recalled from his previous visits: rusted corrugated roofs on all the outbuildings; the broken windows in most of them which had never been replaced; weeds which sprouted with vigorous, unchecked growth all over the yard and the land that had been left uncultivated as well as amongst most of the cultivated area also, which received only a sporadic and half-hearted weeding. Several doors still hung off the hinges they had hung from on his last visit. They swung and banged in the suddenly stiffening breeze with an irritating relentlessness that would drive most normal people mad. He could only suppose the drug use endemic among the community transformed the banging into the tinkle of heavenly bells. Or something.

The house was no better, he saw as, by the light of candles that flickered in the sudden draught, he and Moon entered the large living room and he pulled the door to behind them. Candles provided the room's only illumination and, but for the hall light that had gleamed out into the yard, Casey would have assumed that the electricity had been cut off again. Through the candlelit gloom, he saw two new settees and a huge plasma television which took pride of place in the corner. Even the carpet was new, he noticed, and replaced the one with the multiplicity of burn holes. They really were looking remarkably affluent for people with no visible means of support and Casey's gaze narrowed suspiciously as he realized that not only was there no rich visitor immediately apparent, but that his normally impecunious parents hadn't tapped him for a loan for some weeks. It wasn't like them. So what had changed?

Moon must have noticed his astonishment, because she told him, ‘We came up on the lottery.’

‘How much?’ Casey asked before politeness stopped him.

‘Enough,’ Glen 'Foxy' Redfern replied for Moon from where he lounged full length on one of the new settees. His reply was abrupt and told Casey, clear as clear, that their lottery win was none of his business. But then he had always been a belligerent personality. Must go with his wild bush of red hair.

Their lottery win must have been more than enough, thought Casey, to judge from all the money they'd spent. And as there was no visitor in evidence, he surmised that the 4x4 in the yard was a new purchase of theirs as well. So why hadn't Moon and Star repaid him some of the money he'd lent them over the years? Disgruntled at this thought, Casey crossed the room, stepping over the bodies lounging on the large, grubby cushions that littered the new carpet.

One thing hadn't changed: like the outbuildings and grounds, everything was covered in a layer of dust, the original furniture a mismatched mix of colours and styles that no amount of brightly-coloured Indian throws could bring together.

Much like the inhabitants, he thought, as he looked around the circle of expectant, sheepish, drugged and out of it faces in their habitual well-holed jeans and shabby kaftans. He took the chair with the fewest stains and burn holes — the new settees having been appropriated by Star and Foxy Redfern, both sprawled out in such determined ownership that one would think they had never believed that property was theft.

While he gathered his thoughts, he examined the faces again; there were his mother and father, of course, Moon and Star Casey respectively, names which they had adopted long ago in their first hippie flush. They were by far the oldest of the commune members. Both were now pensioners, though one wouldn't have thought so from their irresponsible and ‘opt out’ lifestyle.

Sitting upright and tight-faced on one of the older settees was Dylan Harper, the bereaved thirty-something partner of the second victim, DaisyMay Smith; and across from him was Scott ‘Mackenzie’ Johnson, another, older, thirty-something; and beside him, sitting close, was his nineteen-year-old gay lover, Randy Matthews. Then there was Kali Callender, in her early forties, the widow of Kris ‘Krishna’ Callender, the first supposed victim; and Glen 'Foxy' Redfern, next oldest to Moon and Star, with the wild frizz of bright red hair that had earned him his nickname; and Lilith whom he called his wife, though as they had been married in a beachside ceremony of much spiritual significance, but probably spurious legality, Casey doubted their marital status. There were also still up, although the hour was late, several teenage children of the commune, whose names Casey had forgotten.

The missing faces — apart from the younger children who, amazingly, had tonight clearly been sent to bed at a reasonable hour — were those of the dead pair: Kris ‘Krishna’ Callender, Kali's husband, and DaisyMay Smith, Dylan Harper's girlfriend.

Casey cleared his throat and looked directly at Moon, his mother. ‘You were somewhat incoherent on the phone, Mum, so let me, first of all, make sure I've got this clear. You say one of you found Kris dead in one of the greenhouses and have yet to report his death?’

Moon nodded. Unsurprisingly, her normal, calm aura wasn't much in evidence this evening. Even under the flickering candlelight that lit the room but dimly, he could see her fingers moving restlessly at her throat as she fiddled with the little charm of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant-headed god of good fortune. This time, his failure to work his claimed magic had taken on epic proportions.

Moon's eyes, too, seemed restless; the gaze from the still vivid green eyes that were so like his own, kept sliding away from Casey's. He prayed this reluctance to hold his gaze wasn't an indication that Moon was guilty of rather more than just the concealment of two sudden deaths.

Casey continued. ‘And then, as if that wasn't enough to be going on with, for reasons that escape me, having failed to call for the police or an ambulance, you decided to move Callender's body to an outhouse before burying him in the garden. Have I got it right so far?’

His mother gave another reluctant nod.

But although Casey had claimed that the reasons for their actions had escaped him, he suspected that he understood the reasons only too well.

‘Were there any marks of violence on Kris Callender's body?’

‘None that I noticed, though I didn't look that closely,’ Moon admitted. ‘Besides, it was getting dark when I found his body.’

Casey felt a shiver of dread crawl down his spine. For that was the first time his mother had admitted that she had been the one to find Callender's corpse. Uneasily, he wondered what other unwelcome admissions would follow.

He already suspected that Kris's body had been found lying amongst the cannabis crop which he knew they grew behind the house, concealed by a hedge, in one of the larger greenhouses, which location, for Casey, went some way to explaining their bizarre decision to bury him quietly without notifying anyone in authority of his death.

‘Tell me,’ he went on, although he doubted they would tell him the truth, ‘how did you all get on with the dead man? Was he well liked?’

A jangle of voices broke out at this point, all seeking to reassure him that Kris ‘Krishna’ Callender had been variously 'a great guy’, 'a hard worker, who always insisted on manning the market stall where we sell our produce, rather than following the rota as we used to’, 'a gentle, benevolent, deeply spiritual man’ and one who was ‘in touch with the earth’.

Whatever else he might have been, Kris Callender was certainly the latter now, Casey thought. But, having met Callender a number of times whilst visiting the smallholding, he suspected the man's right to join the queue for sainthood.

‘If he was murdered, it must have been an outsider that did it,’ Foxy Redfern insisted.

'I don't think, at this stage, that we can rely on that theory,’ Casey warned. ‘Though I agree that someone could have come in from outside.’ Their previously lax security made that a distinct possibility. It was the only aspect of this worrying situation that gave him hope. But even as he voiced the words he recalled the barking dogs: how likely was it that someone could approach the smallholding without the animals making a similar racket to the one that had heralded his arrival? Unless the mongrels had arrived after Callender's death. They were certainly new additions. He questioned them on this point; reluctantly, they admitted the dogs had arrived before Callender's death.

His mother's next words echoed his own thoughts and removed the last trace of hope that a stranger was responsible for the deaths.

‘You're right, hon, the dogs would have barked. Especially Craggie, our latest arrival.’

Just then, as if he had heard his name and knew he was being talked about, the latest addition to the menagerie pushed the door open and entered the room.

Moon smiled, revealing stained, yellow teeth that, with the long, greying hair worn in its usual plait, marred what was, surprisingly, given the druggy life she led, otherwise still a pretty face. ‘He just sort of appeared in the yard one day and decided to stay. Our other dogs keep wanting to fight him so we're keeping him indoors till they get better acquainted.

‘Hey, Crags, honey,’ she called to the dog, ‘come and make my Willow Tree's acquaintance.’

Aghast, Casey could only sit and stare in horror as the biggest, ugliest, dirtiest mongrel he had ever seen loped with a rangy stride over various outstretched bodies. Before Casey could do anything to stop him, the animal launched himself towards him, landed like a dead weight in his lap and proceeded to rasp at his face with a huge and enthusiastic tongue.

Casey tried to hold him off as his nostrils were engulfed by the worst case of halitosis they'd ever encountered. Between rasps from a very rough tongue, Casey shouted furiously ‘Get him off me!’

'Aw, don't be like that, Willow Tree,’ Moon reproved. ‘He's taken to you. I can tell.’

Thankfully, Moon called the dog over to her and to make up for Casey's unkind rejection, she made a big fuss of the Hound from Hell. The beast was more than big enough to make one believe that the dog who had ‘appeared from nowhere’, was a descendant of Black Shuck. He'd certainly brought death in his wake.

Now that the beast was no longer literally ‘in his face’, Casey could see the mutt's long-haired coat was heavily clogged with mud — and probably other things that Casey didn't want to think about. To his dismay, he saw that some of this mysterious muck had transferred itself to his previously immaculate suit and shirt.

Casey sighed. He shut his eyes. When he opened them again, it was to find Craggie gazing adoringly at him from huge, golden, crust-rimmed eyes. In case this latest member of the commune should take the eye contact as an invitation to launch another love-in, Casey hastily averted his gaze, though he had to admit that whilst undoubtedly smelly, Craggie was not even the most unhygienic commune member or the most averse to water; Star, Casey's father, won the ribbon on both counts.

‘The dogs always bark at strangers,’ his mother went on. ‘Strangers on their own. We haven't been able to train them out of it.’

Only his parents would try to curb such a useful trait, he thought. Though, given the length of time any of their enthusiasms lasted, he doubted this ‘training’ had amounted to anything remotely likely to change the dogs' behaviour.

‘But suppose it was a stranger who wasn't a stranger to the dogs? You said yourself that Craggie, for instance, just turned up one day and decided to stay.’ Thinking of the commune's usual habits, he added, ‘He looks, to me, the sort of ugly mutt that a drug dealer might favour for protection.’

Craggie whined at this and put one massive paw over his eyes.

‘Now you've hurt his feelings,’ Moon reproved again. ‘Besides, you don't know him. Craggie's just an old softie, aren't you, boy?’

From beneath the filthy paw a deep ‘woof’ reverberated around the room.

‘And do you really think we'd allow some drug dealer to roam around at will? We've kids here, Willow Tree, in case you hadn't noticed.’ Striving for authentic indignation and failing, she added, ‘We're not that irresponsible, you know.’ This from a woman who had helped conceal one death and had doubtless considered concealing the second also.

If only her claim was true. But Casey knew that it wasn't. Neither Moon nor Star had hesitated when he was a kid to make their drug deals when he was around. They had dragged him halfway around India for months on the hippie trail of drugs and gurus, several times leaving him to fend for himself for days at a time while their attention was engaged by their latest wise man find. And, in his experience, their increasing years had made them no more responsible than they had ever been, as their current plight proved. In fact, sometimes, he thought they were getting worse — which he felt sure was something Rachel would tell him was an excellent reason to leave them to sort out their own problems this time.

Foxy Redfern used the pause in their exchange to enter the commune's case for the defence. ‘Whatever conclusions you two come to about Craggie and his fondness or other-wise for strangers, he and the other two dogs must have let someone in, man, without barking, as none of us had any reason to wish Kris ill.’

This brought another jangled chorus of agreement. It didn't convince Casey any more now than it had the last time and he made no attempt to conceal his scepticism. He had met the dead man briefly several times during his infrequent visits to his parents, and, though brief, the meetings had been enough to convince him that Kris Callender wasn't a man he could ever have liked. He also recalled hearing some muttered comments about Kris Callender, none of them complimentary.

‘If all that you say about him is true, it strikes me as odd that you should decide to deny this divine being a decent burial and instead just unceremoniously dump him in an unhallowed hole in the ground.’

‘It was less hassle, man,’ Star, Casey's father, put in from where he was stretched out on the sofa. ‘Besides—' he broke off and a puzzled look entered his eyes.

Casey guessed that, as was a frequent occurrence nowadays, his father had forgotten what else he had been going to say. Not for the first time in his relationship with his father, he forced himself to count to ten; at the end of this time, he managed, along with the look of reproof, to simply nod wearily.

Star subsided to his usual sloth after making his exhausting observation.

‘Besides,’ his mother broke in, ‘we didn't bury him without any ceremony. We had candles and chanting and everything. Kris got a fabulous send-off.’

‘And that's supposed to make it all right, is it?’ Casey asked in a quiet voice.

One of the teenagers sprawled on the stained Indian rugs littering the new carpet sniggered.

From beneath black eyebrows, Casey fixed the youth with a stern green gaze. ‘You think something about this is funny?’ he asked the boy, a black-haired mid-teen who already sported heavy dark stubble. This growth was a recent addition; it certainly hadn't been evident on Casey's last visit and was so much the twin to Star's dark unshaven growth that Casey's eyes narrowed, the better to judge the boy's possible paternity. But then he decided he really didn't want to go there…

‘Must I remind you that a man is dead?’ He didn't add that a woman had also died. He had yet to question them about that. But he wanted to get the circumstances of the first death clear in his head before he started to question them about the second.

The youth — if he had sprung from Star's mostly indolent loins as Casey suspected — was certainly not a chip off Star's block and hadn't inherited his outlook, which was so slothfully laidback it was practically as horizontal as the man himself, for the boy defended himself with a vigour unknown to Casey's father.

‘Kris “Krishna” Callender was a total tosser. Misnamed too; although he might have followed the womanizing aspect of Krishna's character, he sure as hell wasn't put on this earth to fight for good and combat evil like Lord Krishna. The man was evil.’

The youth directed a look of defiance at Casey, a defiance he proceeded to share around the room full of adults who tried to shush him.

But the youth wasn't to be silenced. 'I don't see why all of you seem so determined to pretend Kris was a great bloke and destined for sainthood. Because he was neither — ask my sister if you don't believe me,’ he told Casey as he nodded to a very pregnant girl huddled in the far corner, who might, just — have scraped over the legal age of consent when she had conceived what, to judge from the youth's words, had to be the not-so-saintly Callender's baby.

‘What's your name?’ he asked the boy, having forgotten it.

‘I'm Jethro Redfern and my sister's called Madonna.’

Casey nodded. Apt, he thought. For hadn't the original Madonna been impregnated by someone other than her husband? It was ironic that a group of people who chose to follow the Sixties’ ethos of rebellion against the conventions of the previous austere decade and who had enthusiastically embraced such concepts as free love and taking drug-fuelled trips, should, in turn, themselves suffer from rebellious youth. But, as Casey noted from the set faces of the adults, the irony seemed to have escaped most of them.

Casey turned back to his mother. ‘Is this true? Was Kris Callender such an unpleasant man?’

She didn't answer. Neither did anyone else.

Casey looked pointedly at Moon. 'Mum,' he said, ‘you were the one who called me in. You were the one who asked me to pick up this poisoned chalice in order to help you all. How do you think I can do that if you won't tell me the truth?’

Casey's reasonable question brought only more silence. ‘Fine,’ he said as he stood up. ‘Have it your own way. I'm out of here.’ He turned towards the door, hoping to convince them that he was about to leave them to sort out their own mess. He hoped the shock of the two deaths and their current predicament had made his mother, at least, temporarily forget what a dutiful, responsible, totally unsuitable son he had turned into. But, in his heart, Casey knew he couldn't abandon them and as his mother let him know that she would cooperate he gave a brief sigh as he waved goodbye to that tiny window of opportunity when he might just have made his escape ...

Instead, he sat down again to become yet another part of this guilty conspiracy of concealment.

'Jethro's right,’ Moon now admitted. ‘Kris wasn't a nice man. He was trouble almost from the day he arrived.’

‘So why didn't you just kick him out?’

This reasonable question brought just a shrug of Moon's shoulders.

His father put in his second contribution of the evening. ‘Kris had bad karma, man.’

After that, it didn't take Casey long to add to what he had already learned about Callender from young Jethro. Kris's ‘bad karma' had basically consisted of most of the human vices of thieving, bullying, cheating and womanizing.

Jethro's sister wasn't the only young girl he had impregnated, Casey now discovered. Several girls in the neighbouring villages had also fallen victim to Callender's suspect charm; no wonder the commune members didn't get on with the locals. ‘Free love’, they called it. Yet, from where Casey was seated, the desolate look in young Madonna's eyes said that, for her at least, the 'love' she had shared with Callender had been far from cost free.

Now that he had forced them to tell him the truth about the first victim, he asked them about the second. ‘This DaisyMay Smith — was she also disliked?’

‘No, of course she wasn't,’ Dylan Harper, her newly-bereaved partner, said sharply from the corner of his settee.

Dylan was a slim-hipped, gypsyish-looking man with springy dark curls and an array of golden earrings. At the moment, he looked as tautly-sprung as his tight black curls. ‘My Daisy was the most generous of women. She was also carrying our first child.’ His voice broke on a sob as he added, ‘And now I've lost her and the baby.’

‘I'm sorry for your loss,’ Casey told him gently.

Dylan Harper's emotional outburst contrasted strongly with the behaviour of Kris Callender's widow. Kali Callender's face looked the opposite of tear-stained even though her husband was dead and already in his makeshift grave. Though given what the others had to say about him, Mrs Callender's calm acceptance of her husband's death wasn't altogether surprising. Still, it was strange that she seemed to accept the very pregnant presence of her dead husband's much younger paramour. Most women would surely have found Madonna's continued presence intolerable.

Casey asked her, ‘Did you know about your husband's secret burial? Did you agree to it?’

Kali Callender raised her chin a notch. Her gaze met his fearlessly — shamelessly, even.

'Yes,' she said. ‘Of course I knew about it. I agreed to it. Kris was the worthless shit the others told you he was. The only honest day's work he's ever done was on our stall at the local market, and since we discovered that even that work wasn't honest at all, but just a means to cheat us all, I had no illusions about my husband.’ She broke off, and in an echo of Jethro's youthful defiance, added, ‘Hey, pig man, I was glad someone had killed him. I just wish whoever did it had done so sooner and saved me grief.’

Casey let her words die away before he again stood up. An uneasy communal sigh passed around the room. He assumed they feared that after Kali's insulting 'pig' reference, he was about to threaten to abandon them for a second time. Reluctantly, only too aware of how deep in the mire he was already, he put them out of their misery. ‘I'd like to see where you found Kris's body and where you buried him,’ he told them. 'I also want to see the body of Ms Smith.’

The group all stood up, their expressions a mixture of relief, resignation and unease that even the cannabis-induced calm couldn't entirely eradicate. Led by Moon and Casey, they all trooped outside and made for Kris Callender's lonely grave. Casey was glad to get out into the fresh air, because the farmhouse smelled of a combination of unwashed dog, candle grease and the sweet, sickly odour of the cannabis that permeated the place. Partway there, and after tripping over he knew not what in the dark, Casey stopped them and suggested they would need a torch.

But as it seemed to be the general consensus that the commune didn't actually possess such a useful tool, they waited, huddled together against the chill night air while Casey walked back to his car, stepping carefully so as to avoid whatever other ready-to-trip-the-unwary rubbish the gloom might conceal, to retrieve his own torch from the boot.

The brief interruption in the grim night walk and the first solitary moments he'd had since his arrival gave Casey time to think. But as he considered the current situation and his part in it, he rather wished he hadn't. Because time to think tended only to increase his mental anguish, caused, not least, because if he hadn't suspected before he knew now that he wouldn't be able to trust even his parents to tell him the entire truth. Hadn't they already tried to mislead him about Callender's character?

Given this conclusion, for a few brief seconds, Casey was again tempted to abandon them and leave them to their fate. But just by making this one visit he had allowed himself to become too compromised to walk away. And although he liked to think that his parents wouldn't betray him unless it was when they were in a drugged-up, love-their-fellow-man, stupor, he had no illusions at all about the other members of the commune.

If one of them had murdered Kris Callender and DaisyMay Smith, which, given the presence of the barking dogs, seemed likely, and they thought he was getting close to the truth, they would surely shop him without question or hesitation in order to spread the burden of guilt.

Not for the first time, as he walked reluctantly back to the waiting group, Willow Tree Casey found himself envying the orphaned state of his DS, Thomas Catt.

 

 

Chapter Three

As they stood around the tumbled earth of the inexpertly dug grave, Casey questioned them all further and learned that — apart from his other assorted vices — Kris Callender had been a crack cocaine addict who had been found to be regularly exchanging a proportion of the commune's produce that he was supposed to sell at the local market to help support the community, for supplies of the drug to feed what had become an increasingly voracious habit.

It explained why Callender had been such a keen and dedicated stallholder, a realisation which only amplified the indignation of the others.

But while Callender's addiction added one more complication, to the commune members it meant only one thing — a let-off for them, for reasons they weren't slow to point out to Casey.

‘We all thought it probable that Kris got on the wrong side of his dealer and was killed for his pains.’ Foxy Redfern's enthusiasm for this explanation was such that he repeated it twice and then a third time with the slightest of alterations. ‘If Kris was murdered, which none of us know for sure — for all we know he could have died from an overdose — he must have been killed by an outsider rather than by a member of the commune.’

As they'd already been over this ground, Casey made no comment. In the gloom beyond the range of the torch, he could see little more than the circle of white faces bobbing up and down as they again showed a ready willingness to support Foxy's theory. They seemed to have forgotten the ‘barking dogs in the night time’ at his own arrival. Surely even their minimally-retentive memories wouldn't allow them to have it both ways and forget the dogs' barking at strangers?

As they set off again, away from Kris Callender's hastily-dug grave, they walked towards an array of outbuildings at the back of the house. Seeking enlightenment, Casey asked, ‘So why was it you decided to bury him rather than report his death? You still haven't told me.’

This time he got the answer that was, he judged, a deal closer to the truth than their earlier responses had been.

‘We found his body in one of the greenhouses amongst our cannabis plants,’ Foxy Redfern told him, stopping so abruptly that Star cannoned into him.

It confirmed what Casey had suspected.

Foxy pointed through the open greenhouse door.

Casey, in the limited light provided by the torch, hadn't recognized the plants.

‘No way we wanted the cops here, poking their noses into our business. They'd have done us for sure. They're just looking for an opportunity. That crop brings us in bread, man. We didn't see why that shit, Kris, should bring us more grief when he was dead. He brought enough when he was alive.’

Some of the cannabis plants lay flattened on the soil, presumably where Callender's body had crushed them. Even these cash crops were surrounded by weeds, though here at least some attempt had been made to keep them in check.

‘When did you find his body?’ Casey asked, expecting the answer to be sometime in the last few days. DaisyMay Smith, the second victim, had been found only this morning and had still been warm to the touch, as his mother had told him on the phone. DaisyMay had clearly been but freshly killed. Casey thought it probable the two deaths were connected, so he was stunned at Foxy's reluctant admission.

‘We found Kris's body two months ago.’ He paused and frowned as he searched his drug-damaged memory. Then he conceded, ‘Well, maybe it was a bit more than two months. I can't exactly recall.’

Clearly Foxy, helped by the light from the torch that Casey still held, had noted the look of shocked dismay on Casey's face, for he added laconically, ‘He'd have stayed in the ground, too, with no need to drag you into it, if it hadn't been for DaisyMay's death. You see that has definitely got to be murder. For, though in Kris's case the cause of his death was unclear, Daisy had obviously been beaten. Viciously beaten. It made us uneasy, man. Made us question who could have killed her. The thought that it might have been one of us unnerved the women. They persuaded Moon to phone you.’

‘It wasn't just the women,’ Dylan Harper insisted as his flashing gypsy dark eyes met Casey's. ‘The “dead woman” as you keep calling her, was my wife — or at least the next best thing to it — we'd talked about getting married once the baby was born.’

Better late than never, was Casey's silent response to this.

‘And even though she'll still end up in a hole in the ground, I wanted my wife to be properly buried, to have an official hole in the ground instead of a hole in the corner such as we dug for Callender. My Daisy's entitled to a proper burial and I insisted she got one. That's the main reason Moon rang you. Even though the women were spooked, they'd have been persuaded to get over it but for my insistence.’

Star butted in. 'Hey man,’ he said, ‘that doesn't vibe with my memory.’

With a degree of contempt evident in his voice, Dylan Harper said, ‘No. But then you rarely ever recall anything as it really was, do you?’ He sighed, and ignoring Star, he stared down at the crushed cannabis plants and added, ‘The rest you know,’ before he turned away.

This situation just got better and better, Casey thought as, from Kris's place of death, they made for the outhouse where DaisyMay's body currently lay. Casey made them all remain outside. Although if the worst happened and Casey's relationship to Moon and Star was discovered by the local police and thence conveyed to his own force, any stray DNA that he left in the house could be explained by his visits over the years, any found in the shed could not be so easily explained away, so he insisted, in spite of the ‘Hey, man’ protests, on donning a set of the protective gear that he had brought from the car before he entered the shed. As he said to himself, any reasonably competent SIO from the local force would be likely to wonder at finding traces of another, unknown set of DNA in one of the commune's outhouses. They would then spread their net wide, which would certainly include him once they found out the connection, even if it was simply for elimination purposes.

He was risking his career enough just by being here. But trying to help his parents and the others was an entirely different matter. There was no point in needlessly increasing the dangers to himself by being as careless as the rest.

But as Foxy Redfern had pointed out, they were as yet uncertain if the dead man had even been murdered. He might well have just died from natural causes or an overdose of the unnatural substances with which he had regularly abused his body.

Foxy Redfern had been right when he had said that DaisyMay Smith had been viciously beaten, as Casey saw when he lifted the sheet that covered her body and shone his torch at her.

She lay on a board propped on a couple of trestles in one of the sheds that had been turned into a makeshift morgue. Someone had surrounded her body with candles. Worn down to half-used stubs by now, their yellow flames gave the dead woman's face a healthy glow that was unnatural and so eerie, Casey felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

And as he played the torch over her and stared down at her poor, marked face that, for all the lifelike colour the candles gave it, was clearly no longer of this world, Casey saw that one of the bones in her right arm looked misshapen. Presumably, it had been broken during the frenzied assault while DaisyMay had tried to defend herself.

His examination of the body by the torch and candlelight revealed it had been moved after death; the dark post-mortem hypostasis made that self-evident, without the need for further corroboration, but Casey decided this was a case that needed all the corroboration it could get, given its location and his involvement.

‘So, where did you find DaisyMay's body? And when was she last seen?’

‘She was last seen by Madonna in the kitchen around ten-ish this morning,’ Moon replied. ‘No one else remembers seeing her after that.’

Casey wasn't surprised at this. Which of them, apart from the young and naive Madonna, would be foolish enough to admit to being the last to see DaisyMay alive?

‘She was found in the apple orchard,’ his mother, Moon, explained. ‘Lord Krishna knows what she was doing there as the apples aren't yet ready for harvesting. It's a good distance from the house and as there are several more outhouses between the orchard and the house the noise of any cries would have been muffled.’

Casey nodded. After he let the sheet fall back over DaisyMay's poor battered face he shone his torch on his watch. It was late. Rachel would certainly have returned home from her theatre trip by now. In his haste, he had forgotten to leave a note to explain his absence. Not wishing to be disturbed while he questioned his parents and the rest, he had switched his mobile off. But now, as he ushered them all ahead of him as he left the shed and followed behind them, leaving DaisyMay Smith and her encircling candle stubs alone again, he switched it on and gave Rachel a quick, reassuring call.

‘Hi, sweetheart,’ he said quietly for Rachel's ear alone. ‘Sorry I didn't leave you a note. I got an urgent call-out.’ More loudly, for the benefit of his fellow conspirators as well as Rachel, he added the rider, ‘I'll tell you all about it when I get home.’

As he returned the mobile to his pocket, Casey faced the commune members and said, ‘As you'll tell the local police all about it tonight as soon as I've gone.’

They seemed to be surprised by this instruction and a noisy hubbub of protests broke out.

What had they expected? Casey wondered grimly. That he'd be as keen as most of them had been to sweep two deaths under some convenient soil carpet, solve the murders himself in the space of an hour or so and leave them to go about their business as if the deaths had never happened? But while he marvelled at such an expectation, he thought it probable that was just what they had expected. It would be in keeping with their general laissez faire attitude.

Determinedly, Casey set about destroying any such lingering hopes. It took about ten minutes before their drug-and death-dazed brains managed to take in that he meant what he said. But at least by the time he was finished, he concluded from their silence that they had conceded they had no choice but to contact the police and formally report the two deaths.

Casey decided to leave it up to them to figure out what answer they came up with to explain the fact that Kris ‘Krishna’ Callender had been in his grave for two months or more without benefit of either death certificate or coroner's inquest. He didn't envy them the task.

Before he drove off, Casey raked his lights over the front of the farmhouse, first full beam, then dipped, then full beam again, as a reminder to them that, although he might be going away, their problems certainly wouldn't. He had told them it would look better if they did as he had forcefully suggested and report the two deaths themselves, rather than leaving him to make good their failure to do so, which was something he had promised them he would do if he had to. From their sullen expressions as he had climbed in the car, Casey knew they believed him.

Of course, it was a threat that he was loath to carry out. He hadn't spent years making sure that the reality of his parental inheritance didn't damage his career to step voluntarily into the limelight of a murder investigation now and announce to the world that the commune had called him in because he was the policeman son of two of the drug-taking hippie suspects.

Fortunately, he believed they were all even more dazed by the day's events than they usually were by drugs, and therefore incapable of the coherent thought necessary for such a conclusion.

But even if the various commune members failed to grasp this fact, Casey was aware that it was only by staying in the background and organizing an unofficial, behind the scenes, investigation away from the commune that he would both keep his career free from contamination and be able to try to find the killer, thereby helping his parents and the rest out of their predicament. Casey reflected on the damage that would be done to his career should it come out that the commune had called him in the belief that he would help them conceal the deaths. As it was, he had been persuaded not to reveal his relationship to Moon and Star to the police. He hadn't taken much persuading. Besides, as Moon had pointed out when she said, ‘Willow Tree, hon, the only way we'll get a fair hearing is if you look into the deaths. I realize you can't do it officially, but at least when the official pigs turn up and arrest us all you'll be able to find the evidence that we didn't kill our friends.’

As he drove back to King's Langley and its comparative sanity, Casey wished he could be sure on that point. Bemused, he stared through the still lingering mist on the road as he pondered how his mother expected him to come up with the goods, given that what the commune members had so far told him had been little enough and that a mixture of truth and lies, the little made less owing to the hazy memories of the long-term drug user.

He only hoped, with the smallholding about to be overrun by the forces of Lincolnshire's finest, that no member of the commune either deliberately betrayed him for newspaper money or accidentally let slip his identity or his unofficial, unreported actions of the last few hours.

 

It was after he arrived home but before he had a chance to make his own shamefaced confession about his recent activities that Rachel exclaimed at the state of his new suit.

At her look of horror, Casey looked down and saw she had reason for her exclamation. His new suit was ruined. Between getting caught on rusty wire that had ripped it in several places, coming into contact with deep, noxious puddles in the yard and suffering Craggie's mud-covered and drooling embrace, the suit was surely beyond salvage. Besides, Casey didn't think he would ever want to wear it again as it would never feel clean and  uncontaminated.

It was £500 down the drain, because he thought it unlikely he would be up to brazening out the insurance claim form and its inquisitorial demands as to how, where and when the suit had sustained such damage.

As expected, after he had told Rachel about his nocturnal activities, she told him what he already knew — that it hadn't been only his parents and the rest who had behaved foolishly. By taking their problems on to his own shoulders, he had shown himself to be the biggest fool of all. Worse, he knew she was right.

‘You realize you could lose your career over this if it comes out?’ she asked.

Casey nodded miserably, a misery only exacerbated as she added a rider.

‘Or worse.’

Because he knew she was right about that as well. Only, somehow, he'd not been able to leave his parents, Moon and Star, to deal with their own failure of morality and responsibility. He never had been able to. But maybe, if by some miracle he came through this current problem without a stain on his character or career, he might start to think differently in future.

As Rachel said before she stumped off to bed, maybe it was time he did.

 

 

 

Chapter Four

As expected, by the next morning, the story of the two smallholding deaths had surfaced. Casey had gone out early to learn the worst and as he scanned the shelves of the nearest newsagent, he saw that they featured as front page news in all the local newspapers as well as several of the nationals. He bought a selection and carried them home to read them more thoroughly and see if his name had escaped into the public domain.

As he sipped his breakfast coffee and quickly searched the lines of newsprint opposite a silently reproachful Rachel, he just hoped no one who knew both him and his parents decided to inform the papers of their relationship. At least, so far, his secret was holding up.

He had, of course, taken considerable trouble throughout his police career to keep an identity distance from his parents, aware that if the connection came out it would do his career no good at all. So far — apart from in one instance — it had worked well. But that one instance had involved his sergeant, so Casey wasn't altogether surprised when DS Thomas Catt rang his mobile shortly after.

‘Hey, Willow Tree,’ ThomCatt greeted him, chafing him by using Casey's given name instead of the ‘Will’ which he had taken care was the name by which he was commonly known.

It told Casey that Catt, too, had read the morning's papers.

‘Please don't tell me you're the same Casey whose parents are front page news this morning.’

'I wish I didn't have to, ThomCatt,’ Casey admitted. ‘Unfortunately, I am that very same Casey.’

Tom's piercing whistle caused Casey to grimace with pain and hold his mobile away from his ear. When he returned the phone to his ear, it was to hear Tom say, 'I presume you know all about it?’

After Rachel's reaction, Casey was unwilling to make a second admission about his nocturnal activities , unwilling, at first, even to confirm Tom's guess.

But ThomCatt, whose nickname had in part been bestowed because he shared the feline's cussed single-minded curiosity, wasn't to be put off.

‘Come off it, Will. We both know you're the patsy your parents turn to at the first whiff of trouble. It's inconceivable to me that they wouldn't have called you in to sort out this latest bit of bother, especially with you being on holiday and with time on your hands.’

Last night had proved that it had been inconceivable to his parents as well, reflected a more than rueful Casey. Reluctantly, as he accepted that Tom's logical assessment was unassailable, he admitted, ‘OK. Yes, they did call me in. But keep it under your hat.’

Tom whistled again.

‘Will you stop doing that?’ Casey asked irritably. Understandably, his normally calm demeanour had deserted him.

‘Sorry. But I want to help. So what's on the agenda?’

‘For you, work. You've got a job to do, remember? As you pointed out, I'm currently on holiday. Besides, I don't see what you can do all the way down here, especially when you're doing the usual full shift.’

Both men were based in King's Langley, a small market town of medieval origins in Norfolk that was situated midway between Peterborough and Norwich — a good distance from Casey's parents' Fenland smallholding.

'I don't see what you can do, either — officially,’ Tom retorted with his usual respect-for-authority failure, ‘seeing as you can hardly poke your nose into the Lincolnshire investigation. I suppose you've already questioned your parents and the other commune members?’

‘Last night.’

‘And?’

Casey explained what he had learned the previous night. In anticipation of another piercing whistle at the revelation of the months’-old burial of Kris Callender, he began to remove the phone from his ear again. But Tom must have thought better of it.

‘You're going to need help, Will,’ his DS insisted. ‘Checking everyone's motives and opportunities, not to mention finding out the identity of the dead man's supplier while keeping out of the way of the official investigation, is not going to be easy. Certainly, it's not a one-man job. I’ve got one or two contacts up that way, but as I'd guess you keep a low profile when visiting your parents, I very much doubt that you have. Am I right?’

Casey made another reluctant admission. Catt was right, of course, Understandably, he'd always done his best to keep the low profile ThomCatt had referred to on his infrequent visits to his parents. He had also kept these visits as short as duty permitted, without trips to the pub with the casual and nosy acquaintances such trips tended to strike up.

'So-do you want me to call these contacts and see if they can suss out the ID of Callender's drug supplier?’

Thomas Catt invariably had ‘contacts' all over the place. Many of them were retained from the youth spent in assorted children's homes when he had made some unlikely friend-ships — not all of them either unsavoury or without contacts of their own.

Grateful that ThomCatt had so willingly offered his services, Casey felt unable to do anything but agree, only too aware that he wasn't in a position to refuse such generously offered assistance.

‘But keep as low a profile as if you were me visiting Moon and Star at the commune, Tom,’ he warned. ‘They're my parents, so it's only right that my career should be put in jeopardy for their sakes. There's no reason why the same need apply to yours.’

‘Keep cool, Big Willy,’ Catt advised cockily. ‘And don't worry. Aint I a big boy now?’ Casey imagined him patting the beginnings of a paunch as Catt added, ‘And getting bigger all the time. Besides, I've always preferred my life to be enlivened with a little spice. I can take some of the load and keep a low profile at the same time. Smart as paint, me,’ he boasted with the confidence of a cheeky Cockney sparrow that Casey could, at the moment, only envy.

Casey hoped for Tom's sake, that his boast and his confidence didn't prove misplaced.

From what the newspapers said, it hadn't taken the Lincolnshire police long to charge all the adults at the commune with the less serious crimes of failing to report Kris's death, of burying his body without official sanction and growing cannabis with intent to supply. Further, greater charges were likely to follow unless Casey, with Catt's help, could come up trumps.

Because as the papers Casey had so feverishly scanned earlier had speculated with their usual careful libel-avoidance while still making their comments perfectly comprehensible, after the commune's unorthodox behaviour, they might well soon face further charges of a much more serious nature.

Aware, after his telephone conversation with Moon the previous night, that it would be impossible in the near future to again visit the commune, he had made his surreptitious trip to the Fens via a late night store and bought a new pay-as-you-go mobile. He had handed it to his mother with the instruction ‘Please don't lose this one.’

Anticipating the arrests and the listing of their possessions by the custody sergeant, Casey had also instructed her to conceal the mobile somewhere as secure as she could find on the smallholding in anticipation of their release on police bail. He had also instructed her to make sure the cannabis growing in one of the commune greenhouses was dug up and destroyed. The newspaper reports made clear the latter instruction had been ignored and he had little confidence his instructions about the mobile would have been noted and acted upon either. But he could only do so much. If Moon, Star and the rest chose not to cooperate there was little or nothing he could do about it.

He made another coffee and sipped it slowly. He just had to hope she had obeyed his first injunction, for he would need to be able to contact her regularly. He had told her that, once they were released on bail, he would ring her every evening around seven o'clock.

Meanwhile, he had instructed, she was to search her unfortunately drug-raddled memory for any clues as to who might have been responsible for the murder of DaisyMay Smith and the probable murder of Kris Callender. He wanted means, motives and opportunities, he had told her, ‘And you're the only one I can rely on to get them for me.’ And he wasn't too sure about her. He had good reason to doubt after such an interval that she would remember much more about Callender's death than she had already told him. Casey had discounted any chance of getting useful help from his father. Sloth-like, Star ambled his way through life, noticing little or nothing. Besides which, his memory was notoriously poor and he had difficulty stringing half a dozen words together before his brain faltered to a standstill. He would have enough trouble coming up with an alibi for himself even for DaisyMay Smith's very recent murder, or of providing clues as to which of his fellow commune members might be guilty of such violence, never mind demanding answers of his memory about Kris Callender's death which had occurred two months or more ago.

As for the drug supplier they had mentioned, he would have to leave identifying him to ThomCatt because, although he had questioned each member of the commune about the supplier's identity, they had all denied knowing anything about him. A denial that Casey didn't for a moment believe.

He assumed they were scared that if this dealer thought they had reported him to the police he might well decide to do to them what, in their insistence on their own innocence, they were determined to believe he had already done to Kris Callender and DaisyMay Smith. Though if this unknown outsider had killed Callender, it didn't explain why DaisyMay was the only one of the two who had been brutally murdered. She rarely left the confines of the commune these days, Moon had told him, and unless this dealer was the more obliging sort who went in for home deliveries, it was unlikely she had had anything to do with him or any other dealers. Besides, since her pregnancy, which was apparently a troublesome one which left her rarely feeling well, DaisyMay had given up drug-taking so was unlikely to require the services of a dealer.

Fortunately, Casey had been able to obtain, for his parents at least if not the rest, the services of an excellent solicitor and they had both been released on bail this morning pending further inquiries.

Casey was more wary than ever with the police probably still on site, and even though he had put her new mobile on a non-ringing setting, he was reluctant to call his mother at their appointed time that evening. Instead, he texted her and told her to ring him back but to find somewhere well out of police earshot before she did so.

Rather to Casey's surprise, she obeyed the instruction and rang five minutes later, clearly rattled by the invading presence of so many ‘pigs' on the commune's smallholding.

‘You've got to help us, Willow Tree,’ she told him with a trace of what sounded like hysteria evident in her normally laidback voice. ‘You know how little brotherly love the local pigs have for us.’

Casey suspected his mother was right about that. The commune's presence on the edge of the village was not liked by the neighbours, who, not unreasonably, thought that, with their irresponsible, druggy lifestyles, they attracted other undesirables. The local police had a down on them for a similar reason.

Casey thought it unlikely the local Lincolnshire constabulary would be able to pass up the temptation to get the whole lot of them out of their hair completely and permanently, by charging them with murder. And given the commune members' behaviour up to press, it wasn't unreasonable that DCI Boxham, the man in charge of the Fenland investigation, should feel confident of success. After all, they had buried Kris Callender — an indicator of guilt if ever there was one. And if the post-mortem on his remains proved conclusively that he had been murdered, their defence, already questionable and faintly surreal, would quickly become farcical. Not to mention unsustainable.

God knew that Moon, Star and the rest of their raggle-taggle band of brothers, sisters and kids of as many colours as Joseph's Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, wouldn't have endeared themselves to the investigating officers by firstly burying Kris without making any attempt to report his death and then by leaving it till hours after they had found Daisy May's body to actually contact the police. The fact that she appeared to have been brutally beaten to death would, for Boxham and his team, make this delay even more reprehensible.

Casey, listening intently as Moon poured out the details of what the local force had so far said and done, recognized that he'd been backed into a corner from which the only escape would be to find a solution to the deaths that would prove his parents' innocence. He suspected it would be a far from easy, maybe an impossible, task.

‘So, what did you find out, Thomas?’ Casey asked the following morning, with an unconscious formality as he opened the front door of his home and ushered Catt inside.

‘Thomas? Oh, dear. Have I been a naughty boy, then, to get my full moniker?’

‘What?’ For a moment, Casey had no idea what his DS was talking about. Then he realized and apologized for his distant manner. Casey supposed that it was only by adopting a formal air — even unconsciously — that he felt he had any control left at all.

‘That's all right. Stress takes us all in different ways. Rachel in?’ Catt cautiously enquired before he ventured any deeper into the house.

Casey shook his head. ‘She's gone shopping with a girl-friend to take her mind off my predicament,’ he told Catt. He wished the retail therapy of replacing his ruined suit could take his mind from his current seemingly insurmountable problems. But as there was no hope of that, he made coffee and they retreated to the living room to work on their unofficial murder inquiry.

Once settled in the living room — a large, tidy room with many books and neat piles of musical scores, which, unlike his parents' home, boasted no clutter — Casey began to question him again.

‘One of my contacts has been in touch,’ Catt told him. ‘He's talked to various people, some druggy and keen to remain friends with their supplier and some non-druggy and with no need to keep on the guy's right side. By the way, Callender's crack dealer is a bloke called Tony Magann. The usual nasty piece of work, so my sources tell me.’

Catt paused, took a sip of vodka-laced coffee. ‘There's no way of knowing exactly when that guy, Kris Callender, died, you said?’

‘No. All the commune could tell me was that it was around two months ago.’ Casey didn't add that nothing the commune members had told him could be taken as gospel. Besides, Catt was smart as a whip apart from being as familiar with the effects of long-term drug use as he was himself, so would be able to come to the inevitable conclusion.

'Okay,' he said, 'I get the drift.’ Proving to Casey that his own conclusion about Catt’s understanding had been tellingly accurate. ‘For the dead bloke, two months is the — very rough — timescale. Understood. But for the girl, we've got a reasonably accurate time of death, you said?’

Casey confirmed it. ‘The timescale's about three to four hours. DaisyMay Smith was last seen around ten a.m. in the kitchen of the smallholding. Apparently, she and Madonna Redfern were comparing notes on their pregnancies and arguing as to who was having the worst time. She was found dead in the apple orchard behind the farmhouse around two o'clock that same afternoon.’

‘Then this drug dealer bloke Magann can't have killed her,’ Catt told him. ‘He was, according to all sources I spoke to, including the hospital, visiting his sick mother from ten in the morning till after four that day.’

Appalled at the news that he had lost such a strong suspect so early in their shadowing investigation and even though the evidence of the dogs made the scenario of the drug dealer as the killer unlikely, wishful thinking was hard to eradicate. Casey could only stare at his sergeant in dismay. ‘Don't tell me that,’ he pleaded.

‘Sorry, boss. But even drug dealers can have mothers they love,’ Catt remarked, dryly. ‘And Mrs Magann is very, very sick. Practically at death's door according to the hospital. No,’ Catt told him decisively, ‘he can't have done that one, at least. And as you're convinced the two deaths must be connected in some way, it doesn't seem likely that he could have had anything to do with the first one, either.’

‘So, unless we or the official investigating officers can discover some other criminally-minded outsider who had dealings with one or more of the commune, someone who had ready access to the place and was known to the dogs, we're stuffed.’

Catt didn't need to add — ‘And so are your parents and the rest.’

This news brought Casey — and his unofficial investigation — squarely and inescapably, back, for his chief suspects, to the members of the commune. It didn't help that all of them had criminal records, as Tom didn't fail to remind him.

‘So much for the “Summer of Love” generation and their adherents,’ ThomCatt quipped. ‘It seems they're as keen on cheating, lying and stealing as much of the rest of humanity. More, it seems, in Callender's case. Just as well I've got a friend on the Lincolnshire force that's dealing with the commune killings and who owes me a huge favour. It means I have pretty much ready access to their discoveries.’

That was the one piece of good news Casey had heard since Moon had first telephoned. He, of course, already knew most of the commune's more grubby details. As ThomCatt had said, this loving brother and sisterhood did their fair share of wrong-doing, whether it was coveting their neighbours' asses or their wives and daughters. Certainly, a fair bit of the latter had been going on there, as Madonna Redfern's advanced pregnancy alone could testify.

Of course, all of them had drug convictions and now Tom told him that Foxy Redfern also had a very recent conviction for drunken assault and Kali Callender had one charge of soliciting against her, though it was several years back. At least Tom was sensitive enough not to mention Casey's parents' convictions.

Casey consoled himself with the thought that at least none of them had records for Grievous Bodily Harm, or worse. He disliked being dependent for all his information on Catt's favour-owing and possibly more than dodgy friend, but he dare not consult the police national computer himself or allow Catt to do so. Neither of them had any official involvement in the case, so it would be unwise to leave their technological fingerprints all over it. You never knew when such prints might come back and point the finger. He had cautioned Catt similarly. Not that he'd needed to, as Catt, who had spent nearly all his childhood in Council-run care homes, had grown wily at an early age in order to survive his upbringing. He knew better than to leave fingerprint or any other traces of himself behind.

‘Was your mother able to pin down the whereabouts of the other commune members between the times DaisyMay Smith was last seen and when her body was found?’

Casey shook his head. ‘Not really. Bits and pieces, that's all, which means that any one of them could have killed her.’ Including Moon and Star themselves, he reluctantly acknowledged. And although Casey had little doubt that Star was too idle to exert himself to so violently attack anybody, his mother had always been the more determined and energetic of the two — which wasn't saying a lot, of course, but even so ...

He took a gulp of his coffee, wishing now that he had laced it with spirits as he had Catt's and comforted himself with the thought that as far as he knew, Moon had no reason to kill either Kris Callender or DaisyMay Smith. Unless she had discovered that Star, her idle husband, had suddenly developed a new lease of life in the love-making department and had impregnated DaisyMay?

But that was another area Casey was reluctant to investigate too closely. He ran his hand through his neatly cut black hair and said, ‘OK. So what about the other death?’

‘It's my understanding that these hippie communes tend to attract transient types who prefer to pick up their sticks and little spotted handkerchiefs and take off after a while in one place. Were all the current inhabitants there when Callender's body was found?’

Casey thought back over what his mother had told him. Then he nodded. ‘But there was also another couple staying there around that time. Names of Honey and Ché Farrer. I remembered them and asked Moon about them.’

‘What reason did they give for leaving?’

‘According to Moon, they couldn't get on with Callender.'

'I presume he was still alive after this Farrer pair left?’

‘Debatable.’ From somewhere, Casey managed to find a wry smile. It felt unnaturally forced. ‘Moon can't remember. She knows the two events were close together, but she's unclear in which order they occurred. She takes drugs, used to take a lot of them. Regularly,’ he spelled out to the already clued-up Catt. ‘She's asked the others, of course. Most of them can't remember, either. And the ones who said they can, according to Moon, gave off a distinct whiff of wanting to spread the collective guilt as widely as possible.’

‘You've primed her to mention this Farrer couple to the investigating coppers?’

'Of course. And to avoid the distinct possibility that she'll forget all about them by the time she next sees DCI Boxham, I told her she might consider getting a bit of exercise and walking the half-mile into the village to telephone him from the public phone box. No way do I want her contacting DCI Boxham from the secret mobile. If he gets its number, he might just think to track down her other calls.’

Casey had felt he had to tell Catt about this after he'd done so much to help. His warning to Moon about using this mobile for such a call had been emphatic. If it occurred to Boxham to trace her call back to their sole means of communication it would put paid to any hope that Casey had that he would be able to remove his parents' names from the list of murder suspects.

That this mobile was the only means of communication between himself and his parents was another anxiety to Casey. Because, as he confided to Catt, it could surely only be a matter of time before Moon either forgot where she'd hidden it or, as had happened to the previous mobiles he'd bought his parents, lost it altogether.

‘She could always take up smoke signalling,’ Catt joked.

But while aspects of this case might amuse ThomCatt, Casey couldn't afford such levity. As he said, ‘With the number of smoke signals her and Star's illicit substances have sent up over the years, I'd rather my parents stayed away from such things. With his local knowledge and his familiarity with the commune and their ways, Boxham would be only too likely to read such signals. And then where would we be?’

‘Mm. So what now? Do you want me to put the word out that we'd like to trace this Farrer couple?’

‘No. Let the official team do that. You'd have to spread the word way too widely to find them as they could be anywhere in the country, maybe even abroad by now. Leave it to the Lincolnshire force.’ Casey hesitated, then, because it was so important, found himself breathlessly — anxiously — asking, ‘Your contact there isn't beginning to fight shy of sharing further information, I hope? Because without his input we're likely to flounder.’

‘No,’ Catt reassured in his best breezy manner. ‘He's fine. Besides, he used to be a bit of a hippie himself in his younger days; did the whole bit — the travelling around India; the meditating; the drugs. Anyway, he loathes DCI Boxham, so would be only too pleased to help us prove his determination to pin these deaths on one or other of the commune members is wrongheaded and probably, nowadays, politically incorrect as well.’

Catt drained the rest of his vodka-laced coffee, rose, clapped a consoling hand on Casey's shoulder and said, ‘I've got to get back to work. I'll keep you posted on what I hear from my various sources. And stop worrying. I can't see either of your parents murdering anybody.’

Casey nodded and let Tom out, watching as he made his carefree way down the path and out of the gate. He just wished DCI Boxham proved equally as magnanimous on the subject. But, for the life of him and as hard as he tried, he didn't think it at all likely.

 

 

 

Chapter Five

After Catt had left, Casey made himself some more coffee and settled down to write up his notes while events were still fresh in his mind until Rachel returned and he had to pretend to be interested in continuing with their much looked-forward to holiday. Various days and half-days out had been planned which he felt unable to get out of.

Even though they had a habit of periodically going off on trips, he had known all of the more long-standing members of his parents' commune for a number of years. Now he set about recalling as much as he could about them all.

Kali Callender, the tear-free widow of the late Kris, had struck him on the few occasions he'd encountered her as being almost as unpleasant a character as her dead husband was reputed to be. Not for nothing had she been nicknamed for the Hindu goddess Kali, known as ‘the Black One’, one of the most fearsome of the vast array of pleasant and not so pleasant Hindu deities which he had learned about during his parents' hippie treks around India in his childhood and youth. As Kali Callender had metaphorically done to her husband, the goddess Kali was most often depicted dancing on the ‘corpse’ of Shiva while garlanded with a tasteful array of human heads. Not a goddess the more pacifically-minded Casey would be willing to bow down and worship, particularly as her bloodlust for war and carnage had, until it was outlawed in the early nineteenth century, only been appeased by human sacrifice of the more brutal kind. Had Kali sacrificed her husband and DaisyMay from some vengeful bloodlust for which only she knew the reason? He hoped not as he suspected the widow the most likely of the bunch to be able to keep her own counsel.

Certainly, as Moon had reluctantly confided, the widow Callender had an unfortunate tendency to argue. This trait would presumably be exacerbated by having to live so closely with the others in the commune who all had drug habits of various extents and expense and who could also be as argumentative and selfish as she was herself. There was a definite possibility that Mrs Callender herself had decided to ‘off’ her husband, tiring of waiting for one of the others to lose their drug-addled heads sufficiently to do it for her.

As for the rest and their possible motives, Glen 'Foxy' Redfern, he of the belligerent manner and the fiery frizz of bright red hair, had shown himself as the most eager for the blame for the murders to be laid on an outsider. Whether he was hoping to conceal his own guilt by blaming an outsider was unclear, though the rest, probably just as eager for any blame to be apportioned elsewhere, had backed him up quickly enough. Then there was Foxy's wife, Lilith, and their son Jethro; strangely, it had been Jethro, Madonna's older brother, who had seemed most cut up about her early pregnancy. Not that Casey could hold that against the youngster, who would perhaps blame his parents for his sister's situation almost as much as he had blamed Callender himself.

That their parents had chosen to rear their children in an atmosphere of sleaze and moral bankruptcy didn't mean their teenage offspring would necessarily find such an atmosphere appealing. Witness Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous, who had certainly not approved of her maternal parent's lifestyle and who lived her life in as opposite a manner to it as she could.

Much like me with my parents, Casey thought as he recalled the necessity of keeping himself fed whilst in India, after his parents had abandoned him while they sought the wisdom of yet another guru. He'd been all of ten that first time. And although feeling frightened and alone, he'd managed, necessity being the mother of invention.

All three of the Redferns might well have felt antagonistic towards Callender for impregnating the teenage Madonna, as well might Madonna Redfern herself.

Certainly Madonna had looked miserable enough about the situation in which she currently found herself. And as for Jethro, perhaps for all that he seemed familiar with the Indian culture that had so absorbed the older generation in their youth and presumably still did, perhaps, like Casey himself, he had merely absorbed it in much the same way as one does language or anything else that surrounds one every day and it meant no more to him than that.

As for Dylan Harper, the other bereaved commune member, Casey considered the short-of-stature gipsy-dark man. Like a lot of smaller men, Dylan appeared to hold a lot of anger in his slim frame. An anger that seemed to Casey all too likely to explode if he felt he had reason to believe one of the other commune members had killed his partner. If he suspected he knew the guilty party, he might well take a violent, gipsy revenge  —  a murder waiting to happen. Casey hoped Moon and Star weren't on Harper's list of potential suspects. With this thought in mind, he had warned Moon to stay away from him as much as possible, certainly not to provoke him in any way.

Scott ‘Mackenzie’ Johnson and Randy Matthews, his much younger lover, had said little during Casey's last visit. Both were relative newcomers to the commune: Scott had moved in first, with his partner, Randy, whom he had met some time after, moving in only six months previously. Their failure to voice any opinion about the deaths struck Casey as odd. Such deliberate low profiles might indicate that they were intent on concealing something.

But then, he realized they had said little during his previous visits either, though in Randy's case at least, he hadn't been there for most of them, having only taken up with Scott Johnson some six months earlier. He was the newcomer in an established set-up and was probably still feeling his way.

 

It was around lunchtime, just before Rachel was due to return from her therapeutic shopping trip, when Catt rang.

‘I've just learned the results of the two post-mortems,’ he told Casey. ‘Hang on to your hat.’

‘Go on. It's not as if I haven't been expecting the worst.’

‘That's all right, then. So you're not going to be disappointed. Much as we expected, both Kris Callender and DaisyMay Smith were murdered. Callender died from a blow to the head with the proverbial blunt instrument. So did Ms Smith, for that matter, though Callender didn't endure the assault she sustained before death. As in Callender's case, the blows caused a cerebral haemorrhage.’

Although the cause of death was the same in each case, which in such an enclosed location would usually indicate the same murderer, the two killings were completely different in other ways. As ThomCatt had said, the killing of poor DaisyMay had been a far more brutal one. There had been real savagery there. Was it really possible that one or more of the so-called peace-loving members of the commune could be guilty of such violence? But, he told himself, of course they could. They were an argumentative lot. It was but a small step from arguing to physical violence as the many knife murders in modern society made clear.

‘So, what's DCI Boxham's thinking on the case?’ Casey asked.

‘He's being very cagey,’ Catt reported. ‘My source was able to tell me little of his boss's thoughts. As to the plan, I gather that is to continue their questioning of the commune members until one of them loses their nerve and blurts out the truth. Apparently, the questioning has been pretty relentless since the investigation began.’

Casey hadn't expected anything else. He wondered how they were all standing up to it. He thought Moon would hold up pretty well. He just wished he could say the same about his father. Star would find such relentless questioning difficult, particularly as he would be deprived of the several regular daytime naps he was used to and — given his general inability to complete a sentence — was unlikely to be able to answer most of the questions anyway, which would only incline DCI Boxham to increase the pace still further. Casey stifled a worried sigh. ‘Thanks for letting me know, Tom.’

'I just wish I had better news for you. Still, look on the bright side, hey? They haven't yet charged anyone with murder.’

‘True.’

But as he thanked Tom again and put the phone down, Casey reflected that that was surely likely to be only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, he would badger his memory and carry on with noting down all that he knew about each of the commune members. Firstly, it was clear that the commune smallholding was far from being a latter-day Sunnybrook Farm. The discovery of Callender's treachery over the sale of their limited and ill-cared-for produce had clearly caused a lot of bad feeling. The Redferns, because of Madonna's teenage pregnancy, all had reason to wish Callender ill, as, presumably, judging from her caustic comments, did Kali, his wife. And to judge from what Jethro Redfern had said, none of the rest of the commune had reason to love the man either, though again, their dislike — hatred, even — of Callender didn't explain Daisy May's murder. Her death was something of a conundrum. But Callender's death at least was easily explained. In fostering hatred amongst the rest it seemed probable he had brought about his own death. From the little Moon had let escape and from what he had observed, it had become evident that the commune was a hotbed of hatreds and partisanships rather than the Utopia of popular imagination.

Young Jethro, for one, apart from holding the adults in low esteem, had been vociferous in his contempt for the dead man. Had that been simply the cry of outspoken and foolish youth? Or was he canny enough to speak of his dislike of Callender as a form of double bluff? Did he believe that his very outspokenness would render the police — and Casey himself — less likely to consider him a major suspect? It was possible; he was young enough to try such a bluff, unaware that the police had plenty of experience of such tactics.

So far, Casey had reduced the motives to three possibilities: that Callender had been killed by one or more of the commune because they had found out about his thieving from them; that either Kali Callender or one or more of the Redferns had killed him for impregnating young Madonna; or that he had cheated another, as yet unknown drug dealer, and had been on the receiving end of the usual reprisal, though in this latter case, Casey was surprised that he hadn't been shot or knifed rather than bludgeoned to death.

Three of the commune members, Foxy and Jethro Redfern and Dylan Harper, had shown themselves to have hasty tempers. Kali Callender struck him as the devious sort who would seize her opportunity quietly and efficiently and most likely get away with it.

As for Scott ‘Mackenzie’ Johnson and Randy Matthews, Moon had implied they were both too wet to bludgeon someone to death. Though that didn't mean they wouldn't do it if sufficiently provoked. Maybe Callender had continually taunted them about their homosexuality. In spite of his ‘right on’ membership of a hippie commune, Callender, as the nastiest sort of red-blooded heterosexual male, struck Casey as the type to goad pitilessly. Had he goaded the pair once too often? Scott Johnson had seemed very protective of his much younger lover: had he struck out in his defence?

Casey sighed, because while he could ponder all he wished he was still powerless to effect an arrest or even to check much out except at a discreet distance. It frustrated him unendurably, a frustration increased all the more by Moon and Star's hopeless attempts to recall the movements of the rest during the critical hours before DaisyMay's body was found.

Because of all this, the case looked like proving a long haul. But, as Casey heard the front door bang, heralding Rachel's return from her shopping trip, he knew he had to put the case aside for now. With the long hours he worked he had always striven to keep his promises to her. And this afternoon he had promised her a trip to one of the local stately homes. He had also promised her a picnic if the weather was fine and one look out of the window told him the day was set fair.

For now, he abandoned his notes and set to putting the food together. It didn't take long; it was a simple meal of chicken, salad and French bread. He had made the salad earlier and he had cooked the chicken the previous night.

Maybe time away from thinking about the commune murders would help him come to the truth.

Rachel must have glanced into the living room on her way through to the kitchen because she said, ‘Not been working on the deaths at the commune all morning?’

'Just jotting things down while my mind was fresh,’ Casey defended himself. ‘Everything's ready for our day out.’ He picked up the picnic basket from the kitchen counter and held it aloft as proof.

‘Let me have that bread,’ she said, as she peered around him to the worktop where Casey had left the heel of the loaf. ‘I’m starved.’

‘Too busy spending to have a bite to eat?’ he teased. To judge from the quantity of carrier bags, he wasn't far wrong.

'A girl has to replenish her wardrobe, Will. It's a feminine necessity.’ She took the piece of bread on which Casey had quickly spread a generous helping of butter and took a large bite. She said nothing more till the bread was but a memory. 'Mmm, I was ready for that. Are we all set?’

‘All set.’

‘Good. I'll just go to the bathroom and we'll be off. And,’ she reminded him in case he had forgotten her earlier instructions, ‘this afternoon is ”us” time. No wandering off to thoughts of murder.’

'I hear and I will obey, oh mistress.’ Since he had already promised he was hers for the afternoon, he would have no compunction about relegating his parents and their problems to the back of his mind. Maybe it would even be the best place for them. It might, as he had earlier thought, throw up some possibilities which his conscious mind hadn't thought of.

He opened the front door as Rachel descended the stairs and he slammed it firmly behind them and on any further anxious thoughts about the commune. Soon enough, the worry thereof.

 

 

Chapter Six

On the following Monday, Casey and Rachel's short break came to an end. It was as Casey was getting ready for work that Catt rang him to report there had been a vicious killing on their home patch, so now, along with their unofficial investigation, they had the long hours of an official one to contend with. Casey had no idea how they were to cope with both.

And as he hurriedly dried after his shower and threw his clothes on, Casey suspected that things were about to get a whole lot more difficult. His return to work would naturally severely curtail whatever time he had to continue with the shadow investigation of the two commune deaths. And ThomCatt had been carrying out his part of the inquiries after duty hours, which would be few enough now with this latest murder.

Casey found a moment to regret the loss of leisure hours. Such precious time had enabled him to think. But now the demands of work would impinge. Not that he'd been thinking with razor sharpness anyway since Moon had broken the news of the commune deaths, though that was more down to lack of solid information than lack of effort. And given his limited ability to contact his mother, as well as his lack of contacts in the Boston area, he was heavily dependent on his streetwise and frequently maverick sergeant. But, to be fair, so far, ThomCatt had done a sterling ferreting job; much better, certainly, than he had been in a position to do.

That was the frustration, of course. Casey desperately needed to be able to do something. Anything. But as he drove to the latest murder scene through the narrow streets of the medieval centre of town that was the bane of modern-day motorists, past the timber framing and over-hanging first floor jetties that shaded out most of the light, Casey warned himself against such unwise desires. Following their natural instincts was what had landed his parents in their current unfortunate predicament, never mind a number of preceding ones. Was he now, after so many years of trying to avoid following in his parents' foolhardy and irresponsible footsteps, to start to backtrack in his determinedly opposing path? Such a move would be foolhardy indeed.

The King's Langley murder victim had been found half an hour before Casey returned to work. It looked set to become an unpleasant case. Not only did the victim have the knife wound to his groin, but his penis had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth as a last hurrah.

And when, shortly after, Casey stood at the scene, biting wind and rain painfully slapping his trousers against his chilled legs, he had to force himself to treat any weakening emotion as dispassionately as the wind treated his legs. But, as a man, the manner of this victim's death cut to his soul, not to mention cutting his masculinity to shreds.

The victim, who looked to be around his late thirties, had certainly died an unpleasant, lonely death if the wounds to his body and the body's location were indicative. Dr Merriman, the pathologist, when he had finally arrived from his home twenty miles distant, told Casey in his thin, unemotional voice, that the knife had severed the femoral artery, causing the victim to lose a large quantity of blood.

‘Doesn't look like he was killed here,’ he added as he knelt beside the half-naked victim. ‘And though you'll have to wait for the post-mortem to get confirmation, I think I can safely say he bled to death.’

Casey nodded. But, like Dr Merriman, he wouldn't jump to hasty conclusions. The victim had probably bled to death, possibly in the alley where he had been found, though both the thoughts of Dr Merriman and the shortage of blood would seem to indicate this was not the case — but as the doctor had remarked, the post-mortem would confirm whether or not the body had been moved after death.

Casey found himself wishing the victim had been found in a more pleasant location. Surrounded by the fly-blown litter of takeaway cartons and used condoms, the alley was altogether too squalid and depressing a place for anyone to die. Even though he often, morbidly, contemplated his own death, Casey had never considered a death like this one.

'A gangland killing, you reckon, boss?’ Catt asked as he came up behind him.

Casey heard Merriman tutting to himself at this supposition, but he ignored him and turned to answer Catt. He noticed his sergeant's hair, his pride and joy, had been liberally plastered with hairspray this morning to keep it in place whatever the weather might do to dislodge the perfectly coiffed locks. It looked as stiff as a board and about as movable.

‘The viciousness certainly makes that a strong possibility, ThomCatt.' Casey had checked, but no identification had been found on the corpse. Either he hadn't carried anything or his killer had removed the victim's wallet in an attempt to delay identification. For now, at the start of the case, anything was possible.

For several more moments, Casey studied the body. The dead man was lying amongst the alley's detritus, curled into a foetal position. It was as if the body had accepted that death, and as many of the indignities it could contrive, would come for him on swift-winged heels and had tried to prepare for its arrival by protecting his remaining in situ private parts.

Casey took Catt's arm and drew him aside. They walked to the end of the alley, away from the busyness of the immediate scene and its milling forensic and photography teams. Away, too, from the shelter the alley provided. Catt pulled a face as the keening wind, stronger now away from the protection afforded by the alley's fencing, tried again and with a little more effect, to disturb his hairstyle. Even though Casey was anxious to have a word with Catt in private, he was too wary of the listening ears of the hovering cordoned-off neighbours and the even more acute ears of the stringers who fed stories to the national press to stray beyond the police cordon.

‘Who found him?’ Casey asked quietly.

‘Some old bloke out walking his dog,’ Catt told him. ‘Name of Cedric Abernethy. Eighty if he's a day. He only lives along the way.’ Catt nodded towards the line of terraced houses that backed on to the alley. ‘Number fifty-two. He found the body at seven thirty. He said he always goes the back way, via the alley, when he takes his dog for his daily walks and the body wasn't there when he set off just before six.’ In an undertone, Catt confided, ‘And although this Mr Abernethy is a World War Two veteran, and made in the stiff-upper-lip tradition, I'd go easy on him. He was so shaken up by his discovery that the uniforms first on the scene let him return home. One of them is with him now.’

Casey nodded. ‘Quite right. We don't want another death on our hands, particularly not that of a veteran.’ Not in addition to the John Doe in the alley and the two unofficial bodies they already had. He paused. ‘Do we know if this Mr Abernethy touched the body at all?’

‘According to what he told uniform, he just checked the pulse in the victim's neck, but otherwise didn't disturb the body. He immediately got on the phone and rang nine-nine-nine.’

Casey nodded. ‘We'd better speak to him now. Is he fit to be questioned?’

'I think so. But if you hang on a tick, I'll send one of the girlies along to check on him.’

Casey's green eyes showed his disapproval at this non-politically correct wording.

ThomCatt held up his hands in admission of guilt and said, ‘Sorry, boss.’ But the tiny grin which hovered at the corners of his mouth made a mockery of his own apology and of the PC brigade and all its works. Catt's insincere apology was further belied by his calling, 'Hey Annie, my darling, do me a favour?’

His non-PC approach did not seem to Casey to have caused the young female constable offence. On the contrary, she hurried towards Catt as if eager for more of his ‘darling’s. But that was Tom: whatever he had that the female of the species liked, he had it in spades as the never-ending procession of girlfriends through Catt's bachelor flat proved. It was a talent that didn't win over Superintendent Brown-Smith, who was PC through and through and who heartily disapproved of Catt's easy ways.

The young woman officer was soon back with the information that Mr Abernethy was fit to be questioned.

Catt led the way around the corner to the front of the row of terraces, nodded to one of the uniformed officers outside Mr Abernethy's home and walked up the short path. Casey followed him.

Another uniform answered their knock and showed them into the small front sitting room with its solid, dark furniture which made the room seem even smaller than it was. Thickly patterned nets screened the windows and half their surface was covered by heavy drapes which made the room even darker. The room was like a cocoon against the modern world and Casey wondered, since he had found the bloodied remains of their John Doe, how safe Cedric Abernethy felt now behind its protective shell.

Mr Abernethy sat, looking quietly composed, in a well-worn, straight-backed armchair to the right of the meagre fire. Although certainly elderly and looking thin and frail, he sat with a military bearing and was clearly made of sterner stuff than he appeared.

But then, Casey reminded himself, their witness was of that generation who knew about hardship, be it on the battlefield or elsewhere. After quietly eliciting a few more brief facts, Casey, having been invited to sit in the matching and equally well-worn armchair on the opposite side of the fire, said, ‘You told the uniformed officers that the man was dead when you found him, Mr Abernethy. Is that correct?’

Cedric Abernethy nodded. ‘I've seen enough dead bodies in my time to recognize when the spirit has left.’ The old man raised thick-veined and age-spotted hands from his knees before he let them fall again. ‘No one could lose as much blood as that man must have — to judge by the stains on his trousers — and still survive. He was dead all right and had been for some time, I think.’

‘Did you see anyone else around when you found the body?’ The man's assailant, having sliced open a main artery, was likely to be heavily blood-stained.

But, Casey soon learned, they weren't destined to have an early suspect in the investigation, because Mr Abernethy shook his head and told them, 'I saw no one. Not a soul, from the time me and Timothy left home to the time I returned and rang nine-nine-nine.’ He stroked the rough, greying head of his terrier. The old dog gave a gruff ‘woof’, though whether this was to offer doggy comfort to his master or to confirm his words, Casey couldn't tell.

'I wondered, Mr Abernethy,’ Casey said tentatively, ‘whether the location of this man's death might indicate he was local. Did you recognize him?’

Again, Cedric Abernethy shook his head. 'I don't believe so. But I know few young people; they have little time for an old dodderer like me. Besides, so many young men look alike, don't they? With their heads half-scalped by the barber and with that scruffy stubbly growth of beard that simply looks slovenly. Grow a beard or don't grow a beard. That in-between look just appears messy and indicates a sloppy lack of personal hygiene. Shame they've done away with National Service. Some of today's young men could do with a sharp burst of military discipline.’

Mr Abernethy met Casey's gaze and gave a brief smile. ‘Sorry. It's one of my hobby-horses. But the appearance of young men these days is, I suppose, the same rule that says all old men look the same — bald, jowly and with glasses. The same rule seems to convince all old women that they have to perm their hair. Some sort of generational unofficial uniform.’

Mr Abernethy — neither bald, nor jowly, and with piercing grey eyes that wouldn't have shamed a bird of prey — clearly hadn't either voluntarily or involuntarily adopted the uniform of the aged male.

But, for all his composure, he was able to tell them nothing more. After thanking him for his help, Casey, anxious the question might be construed as an insult by the old soldier, tentatively asked if he was okay after the shock of finding the body or whether he would like them to contact his doctor.

‘Thank you, no. I'm fine. Anyway, all he'll do is give me a sedative, thereby postponing any nightmares from tonight to tomorrow. What's the point of that? Not that I'm likely to suffer nightmares, anyway. I'm long past them now. Don't trouble yourself, Chief Inspector. I'll be all right. I've seen a lot worse in my time. But thank you for your concern.’

After he had handed Mr Abernethy a card and had extracted a promise that their witness would contact him if he recalled anything more, Casey left, with Catt at his heels.

‘There's CCTV in the High Street and Carey Street,’ Casey commented as they returned to the scene. ‘Worth checking to see if our victim shows up.’

Catt nodded. ‘I'll get straight on to it.’

By now, forensic and uniform between them and doubtless having struggled against the wind, had erected protective screening around the body. Having pronounced life extinguished and given his preliminary findings, Dr Merriman was on the verge of departure. He nodded a brisk goodbye to Casey and set off to the mortuary without another word.

Since they had left the scene to speak to Cedric Abernethy the number of gawping bystanders had grown. But as Casey had instructed, they and the press were herded to the far ends of the street in which the alleyway was found. Further guards were set at both ends of the alley in case some enterprising journalist attempted to gain an advantage over his colleagues. Such a precaution was a bit late, though, Casey noted. Already, one or two of the more forceful of the Fourth Estate were stationed at bedroom windows in the houses facing the alley; he could see their cameras jutting brazenly through the wide-flung windows and recording every movement. They must have bribed the householders to gain such a grandstand view. Casey, imminently expecting word of his connection to the commune killings to leak out through the sieve of careless talk, was surprised he didn’t already feature prominently in their sensation-hungry rags.

After watching forensic go about their painstaking routines for a few minutes, Casey said to ThomCatt, ‘We can do nothing further here. I'll see you back at the station. Finding our victim's identity is our first priority.’

They fought their way through the crowds to their respective cars and drove to the station.

 

It didn't take long to retrieve the CCTV tapes and get the house-to-house questioning set in motion. But after viewing the tapes, Catt told Casey that the victim didn't feature on any of them.

‘Must have been brought the back way and avoided the cameras,’ he said.

Casey nodded. ‘We'll just have to hope the house-to-house teams discover something, though as it seems he was dumped in that alleyway before most people stir out of their houses, the possibility of getting information from such a source is likely to be slim at best.’

Casey hated John Doe cases. At least with an immediate identity they had something to start from. But here, he would just have to hope the pictures of the dead man he had instructed the photographer to forward to the media brought forth some results.

As it happened, and though he had yet to discover this, finding out the victim's identity turned out to be the easy part. Unfortunately, discovering who had wanted the man dead and in such a way, looked likely to be a far more lengthy job.

 

 

Chapter Seven

Catt perched on the corner of Casey’s desk. He must have paid a visit to the gents' toilet since returning to the station, because his hair was now so immaculate one would never have thought the wind had dared to play with it. He swung his right leg as he awaited the allotment of another job. ‘By the way,’ he said to Casey, ‘there's a woman in reception I think might interest you.’

'Oh yes?’

'I overheard her reporting her husband missing as I came back from viewing the CCTV footage and I hung around to earwig. Said husband sounds an awful lot like the John Doe we found in the alley. Even down to the clothes he was wearing.’

Casey snatched up the telephone and got through to the front office. ‘You've a woman in reception who's reported her husband missing. Don't let her leave. I'm coming right down.’ He asked the woman's name, replaced the receiver and hurried to the ground floor.

Casey entered reception and saw a tall, well-built woman at the counter. He walked towards her. ‘Mrs Oliver?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘I'm DCI Casey. I understand you've just reported your husband missing?’

‘That's right.’

‘Perhaps you'd like to come up to my office and we can talk?’

For a moment, Mrs Oliver looked vaguely alarmed at this invitation as if she would have felt easier talking to some junior officer. She certainly seemed surprised that an officer of his rank should concern himself with her missing husband. Then she gave a faint shrug and followed Casey to the keypad-controlled door that led to the main body of the station. She waited while he keyed in the entry code. He opened the door and held it for her to go through.

Once in his office, he asked if she had a recent photo of her missing husband.

‘Yes. I thought it would be useful, so I brought this.’ She reached into her capacious handbag and, from one of the side pockets, pulled out a glossy eight by ten inch photo and handed it to him. ‘That picture was taken last year. It's a good likeness.’

Casey nodded as he stared at the photo. There was no doubt that it was their John Doe. He stared for a few moments more at the photo as he gathered his thoughts and decided how to best break the news of her husband's violent death. But before he did that, he checked on what her husband had been wearing. As he'd expected, the clothing was a match for their cadaver.

‘I’m afraid, Mrs Oliver, that from the evidence of the photograph and clothing, I have some bad news for you. A man answering your husband's description was found dead in an alley in the town this morning.’

She stared at him without uttering a sound, but her shock showed in the tightly-clenched fingers on the handles of her bag.

‘Of course, to be certain, we need someone to identity the body. Is there someone, a relative, say, who could do that?’

Mrs Oliver shook her head.

‘What about friends who know your husband well?’

She shook her head again and said, ‘There's his work colleagues, of course, but I'd rather not trouble them. Besides, if the man you found is Gus, then I'm his widow.’ She sat up straighter in Casey's visitor's chair and said with a determined edge to her voice, ‘I’d prefer to do any identifying that's necessary.’

‘Very well. If you're sure.’ Defeated in his desire to spare her the ordeal of identifying the man who seemed likely to be her husband, Casey tried another friendly overture. ‘Have you a neighbour who could stay with you?’

‘No. There is no one.’ She hesitated, then said, 'I need to know, Chief Inspector. One way or the other. I need to see him and know for certain.’ Her voice became stilted as she added, ‘If I don't see the body I'll always wonder if it was really my husband. If he’s really dead.’ Her voice petered out and she sat still and silent, her head bowed.

Casey broke into her reverie. 'Of course. Don't worry. We'll take you along to view the body shortly, seeing as there is no one else to do it. I'll get it organized. But before I do that, I need confirmation of your husband's name. You called him Gus. I presume that's short for Augustus?’

‘No. It's short for Gustav.'

'I see. Your husband was foreign, perhaps?’ He hoped not or it could widen the extent of the investigation considerably.

‘No. He is as English as you or me. The name was just a fancy of his mother's.’

Relieved, Casey nodded and said, ‘If you'll wait here, I'll get that viewing arranged. I won't be long.’ Casey left his office and made for the main CID office; he didn't want to talk about her dead husband in her presence. Perhaps he was being unduly sensitive, but he thought a degree of sensitivity was called for in the circumstances, especially as she seemed to have no one to turn to, no friends or family to support her.

Catt was hovering outside the door and he waylaid Casey as he came out. ‘So, what's the verdict?’ he asked. ‘Is our cadaver this woman's missing husband?’

Casey nodded. ‘Seems so. Mrs Oliver brought a photo in and it's the dead spit of our John Doe. Our guy's name is Gustav Oliver. Gus for short.’

Catt raised his eyes on hearing the dead man's first name and through pursed lips he asked, ‘Foreign, was he?’

‘Not according to his widow. His mother just had outlandish taste in names.’

‘Good to get a confirmed ID so quickly, anyway.’

Casey nodded again and headed for the nearest CID desk to ring the mortuary.

The visit to the mortuary was soon organized and they were shortly on their way. As well as Catt, Casey had collected Shazia Khan, one of the station's female officers, to accompany them and provide support for Mrs Oliver during her identification ordeal. Dr Merriman had rung to tell them the post-mortem was scheduled for that afternoon. For Mrs Oliver's sake, Casey was thankful she would view the corpse before the post-mortem. Even though such viewings were arranged with as much delicacy as possible, the PM would naturally leave its mark and many found the ravages left behind on the body upsetting.

The journey to St Luke's, the local hospital, didn't take long. Neither did Mrs Oliver's examination of the body. After staring intently for several long moments, she confirmed the dead man's identity. She pulled a handkerchief from her coat pocket and dabbed at her eyes before turning away for some much needed privacy. After giving her several minutes in which to compose herself, Casey took her arm and ushered her gently out of the viewing room. ‘I’ll take you home,’ he told her.

Once back in the car, he said, ‘I’ll need to ask you some questions about Mr Oliver's movements, but that can wait till tomorrow if you prefer.’ For himself, he would like to find out as much as possible as soon as possible, but Oliver's widow was entitled to some consideration. Even so, he was relieved when she declined his offer.

‘I’d rather get any questioning over and done with, Chief Inspector,’ she replied. ‘Get all the unpleasantness over in one go.’

‘As you wish. But we can take you home and interview you there.’

As Alice Oliver gave directions to her home, Casey realized how shockingly close her house was to the alley where her dead husband had been found; she might have stumbled over his corpse herself. She would now have to pass the alley every day as, although in different streets, her home and the alley where her husband's body was found were separated by little more than fifty yards, the alley being in a quiet road which led to the centre of town.

Mrs Oliver's home was an imposing detached house with a double garage situated in a short cul-de-sac. It was a modern house but featured several Georgian adornments, like a pedestal over the front door and a uniform allocation of expensive modern sash windows. The house was in a mixed neighbourhood with large, detached properties mingling cheek-by-jowl with cramped Victorian terraced houses similar to the one around the corner in which Cedric Abernethy lived.

According to Alice Oliver, once they had arrived at her comfortable but plainly furnished home and were seated in her double-aspect drawing room, her husband had left the house around nine o'clock on Friday evening. It was now Monday.

Puzzled, Casey asked, ‘Why didn't you report him missing earlier, Mrs Oliver? You must have been worried.’

‘Yes. Of course I was, but I didn't think you would take my worries seriously when he'd been missing such a short time. Only children merit such immediate concern. Gus is — was — an adult, after all. It was only when another night came and went and he still hadn't returned that I felt justified in reporting him missing. He often stayed away from home overnight, you see. Sometimes for two nights, without telephoning me, so I wasn't unduly concerned. But, of course, when two nights stretched into three, I knew something must be badly wrong.’

'I see.’

Now that they had a confirmed ID, Casey said gently, ‘There are one or two matters we need to put to you.’

She frowned. ‘What matters? I've already told you what time he left home. What else can you possibly want to know? Unless I was mistaken about his identity?’ She broke off and stared at Casey. Tell me,’ she said, ‘tell me, please. Could I have been mistaken or is the man found dead in that alley really my husband?’

Casey was quick to dispel any rising hope. ‘I’m afraid the similarities are too apparent for there to be any doubt. I'm sorry.’

She nodded and gave him a brief, wavering smile. 'I just hoped—' She broke off. ‘Never mind. I suppose everyone in my position indulges in some wishful thinking. But I see I must face facts.’ She got up and made for the door. ‘I’ll put the kettle on. I'm sure you'd like tea.’

Once she had left the room Casey turned as Catt touched his arm. Catt whispered that he had rung the station from the mortuary to alert the murder team that they had a definite confirmed ID. During the call he had learned that several women had rung in after they had seen the dead man's photograph on the news bulletin — the media hadn't rested on their laurels — but then neither had Casey. He had asked the police photographer to forward the man's photo plus the bare details, which was all they had themselves, to one of his contacts amongst the local television news team. The item had featured in the final slot that morning.

It had certainly hit the target, because these women, too, had given the dead man's name as Gus Oliver.

Mrs Oliver came back with the tea. She had even troubled to fill a plate with biscuits. It was a thoughtful gesture in the midst of her grief and Casey was touched.

It was clear she had been thinking whilst in the kitchen, because as she placed the tray with the tea things on a small side table, poured the tea and passed the cups, she said, ‘If my husband is dead, murdered, surely, isn't it more important for you to set about finding who killed him than questioning me?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Casey answered. ‘But your answers to my questions will hopefully help us find his killer, so they’re important. For instance, we need to know of anyone who might have had reason to harm your husband. Do you know if he had any enemies?’

‘Enemies? No. Everyone loved Gus. He was a very popular man.’

Casey was careful to avoid meeting Thomas Catt's eye, as he helped himself to milk, certain he would see the message ‘popular with the ladies, anyway’ writ large there. According to the information Catt had whispered, the late Mr Oliver wasn't of a retiring nature where the ladies were concerned. Of course that might mean they had just been friends or business acquaintances of Oliver's. Casey would not let himself be influenced by Catt's knowing wink. As yet, he had no way of knowing if Gus Oliver's widow had been aware of her husband's extra-marital activities — if such they were — and now was not the time to question her on the matter. Certainly she was unaware of the number of women in his life who, like her, had already contacted them and identified him. But given the apparent number of them, he found it improbable that she could have remained in ignorance. He frowned as he realized that Catt's knowing wink and manner were already influencing him towards the extra-marital romances scenario. She must at least have suspected what her husband was up to. Determinedly, he added to himself — if he was up to anything.

Still, for now, he would give her the benefit of the doubt. They were likely to find plenty of indications from other witnesses as to whether Mrs Oliver had known of her husband's women friends.

Mrs Oliver hesitated, sipped her tea as if she hoped to gain strength from the hot liquid, then added, ‘Though, I suppose, as he was such a successful businessman, he must have attracted some ill-wishers. After all’, she shivered, then continued, ‘someone hated him enough to murder him.’

‘Do you know where he went on these all-night trips?’ Casey questioned.

‘Rarely. Gus didn't confide in me about business matters. Why do you ask? Do you suspect that he might have been killed by a business rival?’

‘It's one possibility.’ Casey paused, then, thinking of the viciousness of the murder that, as Catt had remarked, held the hallmarks of a gangland slaying, asked as delicately as he could, ‘Did he have any dealings with shady types? People on the fringes of crime, perhaps? So many of the more clever criminals nowadays have bona fide businesses alongside their illegal ones, so it's possible he might have, unknowingly, done business with one or two.’

‘I've no idea. As I said, my husband didn't confide his business dealings to me.’

That was a pity, was Casey's immediate thought. It meant they would have to do some serious digging into these presumed violent business rivals.

‘You might contact his secretary,’ Alice Oliver said. ‘She should be able to give you more information. She's a nice young woman, by the name of Caroline Everett. I believe she's worked for Gus for several years. '

Casey nodded as Catt noted the name, then asked, ‘Did your husband have a home office? Somewhere where we might find an address book of friends and business contacts?’

‘Yes. It's in the spare bedroom. I'll show you.’ She put her cup down and led them across the hallway to the stairs. But before they ascended, Casey said, ‘We'd also like to see your husband's bedroom, Mrs Olive.’

‘If you must. It's the door at the top of the stairs.’

‘We'll look at the office first. Have we your permission to take away with us anything we think might be relevant to your husband's death?’

‘Take what you like and welcome,’ she said. 'I have no use for any of it.’

Fortunately, Gus Oliver had been a tidy man; everything was neatly compartmentalized — much like his love life, thought Casey. They quickly found a business address book. A search through his filing cabinet and desk drawers revealed little of interest. He seemed to use both just for household bills and other domestic paperwork.

Next, they investigated the bedroom. Catt eyed the single bed with a narrowed gaze. ‘Looks like things weren't hunky-dory on the marital front.’

‘Not necessarily. Lots of married people prefer to sleep separately. Perhaps Gus Oliver was a champion snorer?' Still, it was, as Catt had said, an interesting aspect of the Olivers' life together, though he refused to give a fillip to ThomCatt's salaciousness on the matter. But, taken together with the other women who had telephoned ...

As in the office, they found little of interest in the bedroom. There were no incriminating slips of paper in the pockets of Oliver's jackets or trousers or anywhere else; either the dead man had memorized his women friends' addresses and telephone numbers or he kept such incriminating details at work. After obtaining the location of Gus Oliver's business premises, they asked Mrs Oliver if she would like Shazia Khan to stay with her. She refused the offer, telling them she preferred to be alone. ‘After all, it's something I'm going to have to get used to.’

They bid her farewell as there was nothing else they could offer by way of comfort and made for the station.

‘It's unfortunate that Gus Oliver gives every appearance of being a serial philanderer,’ Catt commented as they drove away. ‘Just think of the number of jealous women and angry husbands who could have wanted to off him. Not to mention a possibly jealous — with reason — wife.’

‘Don't,’ Casey pleaded. ‘I’m trying not to think about the potential number of suspects. Don't forget, there's also the business angle. Mr Oliver, to judge from his home, was a wealthy and successful man. It's possible he didn't always use nice methods to bring in the cash.’

‘Judging from the ugliness of his death, it looks like he wasn't the only one with less than nice ways to him.’

Once back at the station, Casey stopped off at the newly-set-up incident room. Several more women had rung up to identify the dead man during the time they had been out; foolishly, although failing to give their names or other details, in their distress, they had rung from their home telephone numbers and were thus easily traced. He handed the details to Catt. ‘Go and see them and the others who have rung in. Find out if any of them have alibis for the relevant times. Check if they hold water. Take Shazia Khan with you. Meanwhile, I'll go to Oliver's business premises and see what I can find out.’

Catt nodded, took the list and left the office.

Casey shrugged back into his coat and set off for Oliver's work place.

 

The business premises of Oliver's International was on the edge of King's Langley, on the industrial estate that had been built five years ago just off the bypass. The building was three stories high. Sleek, black and glossy, it was starkly modern with lots of glass and with a car park for around thirty cars in front.

The glossy theme continued inside. The floor was black marble, as was the large reception desk. Casey thought it somewhat funereal, as all the black was only relieved by modern, abstract pictures which, from what he gleaned by a quick peer at the paintings, were by Jackson Pollock. Piles of the firm's literature were heaped on the small tables dotting the reception area. He helped himself to one of each before he crossed to the reception desk. After producing his ID and telling the elegant, much-painted young woman behind the desk that he needed to speak to Mr Oliver's secretary — thinking she would be the quickest route to finding out about Oliver's business affairs — he was instructed to sit down while she rang through to the secretary’s office. He settled down to reading the firm's literature while he waited.

It seemed Oliver's International dealt in the import of decorative exotica from around the world; everything from African wooden masks to rugs and other textiles, as well as skilfully crafted metalwork from India and the Middle East. The business was aimed at the wealthy and successful and its goods seemed to be priced accordingly, as per a separate price list which Casey had picked up. Briefly, he wondered if their imports had included drugs: it would certainly explain the gangland appearance of Oliver's killing. But before he ventured down that road he wanted to find out a lot more about the victim and his lifestyle. Certainly, from what they had learned so far they had a more than sufficient number of potential suspects for the moment without seeking out Colombian drug barons.

The office of Caroline Everett, Oliver's secretary, was also large and glossy. It adjoined Oliver’s. She proved very helpful once she got over the shock of her boss's murder. She was an attractive girl, a strawberry blonde with a willowy figure, but given Oliver's propensity for numerous affairs, which propensity Casey was gradually coming to accept, he supposed it was a prerequisite that his female staff should be young and good-looking.

Once seated in her office, Casey asked Ms Everett if Gus Oliver had had any rancorous disputes with one or more of his rival business acquaintances that might have led to his brutal death.

To Casey's surprise, she said, ‘I’m afraid so.’ Her accompanying smile was long-suffering and wry. 'I don't like to speak ill of the dead and he wasn't a bad boss to work for, but if you were a business rival who trod on his corns — look out.’ She sat down behind her desk and invited Casey to take a chair.

‘Mr Oliver could be ruthless. He liked to get his own way and often played dirty. He loved nothing better than a good row, the more acrimonious the better. He was always involved in some dispute or other. In fact, we're currently involved in several court cases.’

‘Is that so?’ Casey sat up and whipped out his notebook. ‘I'd appreciate the details of the other parties and what the disputes were about.’

They didn't take long to produce. Casey returned his notebook to his pocket as Caroline quickly typed the details and the nature of the various disputes and printed them out. Attractive and efficient, was Casey's thought. Not a common mix. Beautiful people, in his experience, were seldom expected to be other than decorative. But he supposed Gus Oliver had been the sort of man to demand the best in all things. Competence, like beauty, was undoubtedly another prerequisite.

‘You said Mr Oliver wasn't a bad boss to work for,’ Casey remarked.

‘That's right. Most of the time, anyway. It was only when he got deeply involved in some rancorous dispute that he could become snappy. But, on the whole, once he'd got over the fact that I had no intention of joining his harem, he wasn't a bad boss to work for.’

‘So you knew about his infidelities?’

‘Hard not to as I was the one deputed to buying Valentine's cards and birthday flowers and jewellery.’

‘What about his wife? Did you know her well?’

Caroline shook her head. ‘Hardly at all. She rarely came to the office and telephoned almost as seldom. As far as I could tell they mostly seemed to lead separate lives.’

‘Did she know about her husband's affairs?’

‘I've no idea. But she must have done, surely? As I said, I can't know for sure, but it seems likely given the amount of time he must have spent away from home at evenings and weekends. I know the frequency because, of course, I booked the flights and hotel rooms. But Mrs Oliver is not a gossipy woman. She's always been perfectly civil to me but we never got on first name terms. Not that she rang very often. I've always thought her quite a formal, reserved type. Maybe the neighbours will know more?’

Casey doubted it from what Alice Oliver had said. ‘Perhaps you could supply me with a list of your boss's lady friends?’ It would be interesting to see if the list Caroline supplied matched the list they had already compiled from the phone calls made by Oliver's various female acquaintances.

List in hand, he thanked Caroline Everett for her help and made for the car park. Later, they would have to go through Oliver's office files and see if they discovered more likely killers amongst the paperwork. But, for the meantime, they had enough, between his love trysts and his business disputes, to keep them busy.

 

 

Chapter Eight

As Casey, assisted by the wind which was still blowing with gusto, walked back to the car to return to the station, he acknowledged that he and Catt would need to speak to Mrs Oliver again and find out what — if anything — she knew about her husband's extramarital affairs.

But first, they would concentrate on the ladies who had so carelessly telephoned without taking the precaution of using a public phone or of dialling 141 on their home phones to conceal their identity. He'd let Catt finish checking them out before he spoke to Mrs Oliver again and see if they could provide alibis. It would be interesting to get Catt's take on the women. Any who failed to provide a verifiable alibi he would go to see himself.

On the drive back to the station, he mused about the case. On the face of it, by ringing the incident room to tell them of the dead man's identity, these women friends of Oliver's had given themselves the aura of innocence. 'I rang you as soon as I recognized him,’ they would say, ‘but as for knowing anything about his death ...'

But it was an innocence Casey put no trust in. Because innocent or guilty, each of the women must secretly believe that their liaisons with Oliver would come out. If one of the women had murdered him, by phoning in, they were covering their tracks and making themselves appear virtuous by helping the police in their investigation. More suspicious for them not to telephone, they would surely have thought, when Gus Oliver's photo had received such wide publicity in the local media and their identities had been known to Oliver’s secretary.

Once back at the station and before he left again to attend the post mortem, Casey rang the three business rivals with whom Oliver had been in dispute to make appointments. He wondered how Catt was getting on in questioning Oliver's harem. More ladies had since rung in, so he hoped Catt would be able to quickly eliminate one or two of those from the first list. But he didn't worry about it unduly. He'd find out the results of Catt's interviews soon enough. Meanwhile, he had interviews of his own to arrange. He'd told Catt he'd see him at the mortuary. He would speak to his sergeant after the PM and find out what he had discovered.

 

Dr Merriman adjusted the microphone under his chin and began the post-mortem. Not by nature a garrulous or sociable man, he didn't pause to provide asides to Casey and Catt; rather, once he'd identified the cadaver on the slab and given his measurements, he directed all his words to the mike.

‘Deep knife wound to the left groin area. Femoral artery severed, which is the probable cause of death. A kitchen carving knife could have done it. He would have bled to death fairly rapidly. The removal of the victim's penis looks to have occurred after death, but I'll confirm that one after toxicological analysis. The hypostasis evidence shows the victim was moved after death and didn't die in the alleyway where his body was found.’ Dr Merriman's thin, dry voice droned remorselessly on. As usual, he had been noncommittal at the murder scene, but now, with the post mortem underway, he confirmed his previous suspicions with that irritating, lecturing tone that had always grated on Casey. But he didn't let his feelings show any more than Merriman. He simply watched, impassively, as Merriman made his first, long incision, from chest to groin.

Unusually for him, Casey had begun to drift off. He now had a definite cause of death as well as the identity of the victim. Dr Merriman had already confirmed his findings that the victim had been dead for between forty-eight and sixty hours when he had been found. Now all he lacked was the location of the murder and its perpetrator. Although he had little liking for the pathologist, Casey was grateful to him for confirming the body had been moved after death. It might just reduce the number of suspects who could have relocated it. And even if it didn't do that, any car used in its transportation would surely not escape without some bloodstains.

 

The post mortem eventually drew to a close. Casey and Catt left immediately, Merriman being no more inclined to chat after the procedure than he was during it. Anyway, they had their answers.

There had been no chance to talk during the post mortem, Dr Merriman disliking what he called idle chatter while he worked, but once they got into the fresh air and away from the abattoir stench, Casey asked Catt how he'd got on during his interviews with Oliver's lovers who featured on their earliest list.

‘All three are doing shocked, stunned and saddened to perfection,’ Catt began brightly. ‘Though funnily enough, if one or more of them are merely friends of Oliver’s, they're all very attractive, which I thought a bit of a coincidence. But we don't have to rely on supposition as it was clear from the wary manner of all three that their friendships with Oliver were rather more than platonic. Amanda Meredith, Sarah Garrett and Carole Brown all claim to have been at home between nine and midnight on Friday night,’ Catt told him.

‘Any witnesses?’

‘Amanda Meredith claims her husband was at home, too, working in his home office at the top of the house.’

‘Easy enough for her to slip out then. Mrs Garrett and Ms Brown were both home alone?’

Catt confirmed it.

‘That's a shame. It would have been good to remove some of these women from the suspect list early on.’

'Mmm. By the way, I thought it might interest you to know that Carole Brown's partner is Max Fallon — no connection to the couple at the commune who did a bunk — you know, the bloke who owns King's nightclub in the town, along with several more nightspots round and about. He flags up on the system as having a tendency to violence, though he's only been charged with the odd petty offence. And, talking of women, let's not forget Mrs Oliver herself. She had even more reason to be jealous than the members of Oliver's harem and their partners. And she's got one hell of a motive. We know she was home alone, too.’

‘True. But he'd been unfaithful many times over it seems. Probably for a number of years, too. Why would she suddenly decide to do something about it, particularly something as violent as this particular murder? It would make more sense for her to sue for divorce and take him  to the cleaners financially.’

‘Perhaps the quantity of extramarital activities became too much to bear and she just flipped.’

Casey shook his head. ‘No. it doesn't feel right. Besides, taking him for a large chunk of his fortune in a divorce sounds like a far better revenge to me: each time you spent some of it you could enjoy the revenge all over again. And I think, in her case, there would need to be something else other than his women friends to persuade her to murder. Anyway, Tom, good work.’ Casey handed Catt the latest additions to the list of Oliver's lovers. ‘You've done so well I'd like you to check out these ladies also.’

‘No hardship if they're anything like the first lot of lovelies.’ Catt took the list and put it in his pocket.

‘And I'll need to speak to all three of Oliver's so far un-alibied harem, of course. Set up appointments for me, please.’

Catt nodded. ‘What about their husbands or partners? They would have a strong motive for wanting Oliver dead. The partners of the women with alibis will also need to be checked out. I wasn't able to speak to any of them as they all work in London and commute. But if I make the first appointments for mid-evening this week, hopefully most of them will be home.’

Casey nodded. ‘Do that.’

 

Casey rang Moon again that evening. He was alone in his office; Catt had still not returned from interviewing the latest batch of Oliver's lovers.

‘Anything happened?’ he asked Moon once they'd exchanged the usual greetings.

‘Not a lot,’ Moon replied. ‘Apart from the fact that one of the kids has been sent home from school with suspected mumps.’

Casey swallowed his irritation with this inconsequential information as Moon went on. ‘We're waiting for the doctor to call.’ In spite of her current predicament, Moon managed a laugh. ‘You should see the carry on of the men here,’ she told Casey. ‘They insisted Billy was confined to his room. Apart from Dylan, who’s got other things on his mind since he lost DaisyMay, they’re all terrified they’ll lose their libido, even Star, who lost his a long time ago.’

Too much information, mum, Rafferty felt like saying. Instead, he said, ‘Understandable, I suppose,’ realizing he would have to humour her if she was to supply anything useful. Moon was not a woman to be rushed. ‘Mumps can have an unfortunate affect on a grown man's fertility.’ He edged the conversation around to the area he did want to discuss. ‘Are the local police still there?’

‘Only a solitary constable. And the forensics people are still working on the apple orchard where DaisyMay was found, but I expect they'll finish for the night shortly.’ Moon gave another sly chuckle. 'I think maybe the mumps frightened the rest off.’

‘Have there been any more arguments in the house?’ When he had last spoken to her, Moon had told him that everyone at the smallholding was blaming each other for the deaths.

‘You could say that. There's been nothing but rows. So much for brotherly love, hey hon? The atmosphere is so lacking in the spiritual that if we were allowed to leave here me and Star would invite ourselves to your place for a bit of peace and love.’

Casey thanked God for the rigorous restrictions of a police investigation: his home had barely recovered from their last visit. It wasn't that he didn't love his parents; he just preferred to save himself potential career embarrassment by keeping them well-distanced from his colleagues. He was aware that he had been lucky so far, in that only ThomCatt knew of the drugged-up hippie parents. He wanted it to stay that way.

Casey told Moon to stay calm, bid her goodbye and rang off after reminding her that he would ring again the next evening.

At least she hadn't managed to misplace the mobile, which was a minor miracle in itself. But they were still making little progress in the murders at the commune. Hardly surprising, given that ThomCatt was kept busy on the official enquiry. But Catt had at least managed to remove Callender's main drug dealer, Tony Magann, from the list of suspects. He still had feelers out with various of his contacts and Casey was hopeful that something might be shaken loose. Meanwhile, he awaited Catt's return from interviewing Gus Oliver's other girlfriends.

 

Gus Oliver really had turned out to be something of a local Lothario Catt confirmed on his return. And since a copy of the photo Alice Oliver had produced had been released, the number of ladies ringing the incident room claiming to be his girlfriend had crept into double figures.

‘So, what have you got, Tom?’ Casey enquired. ‘Not too many more decent suspects, I hope?’

‘Your hope is fulfilled, oh master. All of these latest women that I was able to see were able to provide alibis that were verified by more than one person.’

Casey was relieved to learn they were beginning to reduce numbers.

‘I've got another few yet to see. I'll do that tomorrow.’

Someone had started a book on how many girlfriends would eventually claim the dead man as their lover. Catt had placed a bet before the likely numbers increased still further. Not having gained his 'ThomCatt' nickname for his sense of curiosity alone, he was moved to observe, ‘Better make sure I never end up dead in an alley, boss, or you'll all be doing eighteen-hour days.’

Casey smiled. ‘True. But, I suppose, given my knowledge of your habits, I might have the best chance of winning the pot.’

‘You might if you actually gambled. No, to avoid you losing out, I'll just have to stay out of dark alleys.’

‘Good of you.’

'I aim to please.’

 

By late afternoon the next day, Catt had interviewed the rest of Gus Oliver's lovers and their partners. The latest additions had all managed to provide alibis that had, so far, checked out, as had their partners'. That left the original three to be re-interviewed.

‘Even with this latest batch of females seemingly out of the running, we've no shortage of suspects,’ ThomCatt remarked laconically. ‘We've still got three jealous, cheated on husbands, ditto girlfriends jealous of each other, or women spurned, the betrayed wife, ruthless business rivals. Seems like we've got ourselves the full clutch.’

Casey nodded. ‘There's also the possibility that we're on the wrong tack altogether. This killing could be a mugging gone wrong and the cutting an attempt to suggest otherwise, especially with the victim's wallet missing.’

According to Mrs Oliver, whom Casey had telephoned, the wealthy victim had been known to habitually carry large sums of cash in his wallet. ‘Probably didn't want to risk his wife checking his bank and credit card statements for fancy hotel interludes,’ Catt commented before he added, ‘though the mugging gone wrong scenario wouldn't surprise me. Our Mr Oliver strikes me as having been one of life's takers. I don't suppose he'd relish handing over his fat wallet to some thug. Maybe he would have kept his life if he'd been a giver rather than a taker.’

‘Maybe so. Still, if that's what happened, it's odd that the body was moved.’ But Casey put that niggle aside for the moment. He would think about it later. ‘Before we conduct a second interview of Oliver’s lovers and their partners, we should question his wife again. It will be interesting to discover whether she admits to knowing about some of these ladies. Let's get ourselves around there to speak to her. Now that we know more about his love life, Mrs Oliver might be more forthcoming. Find Shazia Khan to take with us, will you, Tom?’

Casey was surprised, when they rang the Olivers' doorbell, that Mrs Oliver herself opened the door. Even though she had laid claim to no family, friends or helpful neighbours, Casey was surprised she hadn't managed to rustle someone up. He decided he would insist on leaving Shazia Khan with her so she wasn't bothered by reporters. Casey, thinking again of the number of women who had rung in to say it was Gus Oliver's body which had been found in the alleyway, waited till they were seated once again in the large, plain drawing room before he attempted to ask any questions. He soon began to feel over-heated by the fires burning in the grates at either end of the room.

Mrs Oliver apologized for the furnace heat. 'I can't seem to get warm since my visit to the mortuary.’

Casey nodded understandingly. It was something that often affected him similarly: Catt seemed impervious to the chill factor of such places. ‘We're quite all right,’ he assured her. He paused, and was wondering how best to broach the subject of her husband’s infidelities, when she saved him the trouble.

After directing a sad smile at him, she said bluntly, ‘As I imagine you've already discovered, Chief Inspector, since you issued his photograph to the media, my husband was a very popular man. Perhaps I should clarify that statement? He was popular with one gender. The female one. He had a lot of lady friends. I imagine that, by now, you must have heard from a number of them?’

Casey simply nodded and lowered his head in embarrassed acknowledgement.

‘There's no need to be uncomfortable, Chief Inspector. I've known about my husband's weakness for a long time. Not that I could be sure with which of his various lady friends he was disporting himself at any one time.’

'I see.’ Casey glanced at Catt, who raised his eyebrows. Possible motive? the raised eyebrows asked in repetition of his earlier theory. Casey gave a slight shrug of the shoulders that said: Wait and see.

Now Alice Oliver changed tack and went off in a different direction. It was as if she dismissed her husband's women as no more than his shallow playthings and unlikely to feature on their suspect list. ‘You asked before about possible business enemies. And although my husband never said anything, there must have been some. After all, when a man repeatedly cheats on his wife he's likely also to cheat others. That he had a whole host of enemies seems a likely possibility.’ She frowned then and, as if she regretted her earlier easy dismissal of them, added, ‘Including women he dumped or otherwise treated badly.’

‘And do you know the names of any of these ladies?’

'I can give you some of them. But there are likely to be a few with whom I am unfamiliar.’

She reached across to the desk beside her armchair, pulled out a pad and pen and proceeded to jot down names and addresses.

There were half a dozen women on the list. Casey had to admire Gus Oliver's energy and his financial well-being; keeping so many women satisfied on the sexual and spending fronts must be costly in both. Several of the women already featured on their latest lists and had been exonerated.

‘There's also his illegitimate daughter, of course. Caitlin Osborne. She was adopted and lived in Liverpool until about two weeks ago. When I rang Caitlin's adoptive parents so they could break the news of her father's death, I learned that Caitlin had left home around then. They have no idea where she might be. I'm afraid she had become rather fixated with Gus. When she was eighteen she managed to trace him. But he didn't want anything to do with her and refused to see her or answer any of her letters. She's something of a sad case. In and out of psychiatric hospitals since her early teens according to her adoptive parents. She's had a few psychotic episodes owing to her drug-taking.’

Casey, already too familiar with drugs’ unfortunate side effects, nodded sagely and asked, ‘Do you have Ms Osborne's address?’

She nodded and gave it. Catt noted it down. ‘Though as I said, you won't find her there.’

‘Tell me, Mrs Oliver,’ Casey asked, ‘how did you find out the identities of your husband's women friends?’

'I make — made — it my business to know who they were, Chief Inspector, and what kind of threat they pose —-' again she quickly corrected herself — ‘posed to my marriage.’ She found a smile; it was bittersweet with the pain of her knowledge. ‘I had the advantage over his other women. I knew that Gus was commitment-phobic. Once any of them became clingy and demanding, Gus dropped them. It was strange that he committed sufficiently to marry me. But then, I imagine he sensed that I would be the sort of wife who would put up with his extramarital activities. And having a wife already provides a fine excuse for a man like Gus to avoid deeper entanglements.’ Her voice became even more pained as she admitted, 'I suppose you could say that I was perfect for him. As to how I found out about these women, I hired a private detective, Chief Inspector. I thought, as his wife, I was entitled to know what my husband was doing. Still, it was a shock to discover the extent of his infidelity. I've been planning to divorce him since I received the private detective's report. My husband, of course, had no idea I knew of his doings. He carried on with his infidelities in blissful ignorance that I was aware of them.’

‘You said nothing to him?’ Casey asked after obtaining the name of the private investigator. He was incredulous that any woman could keep such knowledge to herself. Perhaps his incredulity was evident in his voice because Alice Oliver shrugged and said, 'I saw no reason to give him time to provide himself with some spurious excuses before I instigated divorce proceedings. I wanted to get my own case ready first and make sure I knew as much about his investments as I could for the financial settlement in the divorce.’

It sounded remarkably cold-blooded to Casey. But perhaps, with the increasing years of marriage and similarly increasing infidelities, she had become as inured to her husband's behaviour as any woman could be and was, as he had suggested to Catt earlier, determined simply to make sure she was nicely set up for a comfortable future.

But the way her fingers knotted together in her lap indicated how hurt and diminished she really felt, as did her next words. 'I was never enough for him. I suppose I suspected it from the beginning. But I loved him, so up till now I've put up with his straying.’ She gazed down at her hands, unknotted the fingers and looked up. 'I suppose you think me a foolish woman for cleaving to him through all his infidelities?’ Her voice faltered as she added, ‘And now I've lost him anyway.’

Casey tried to offer some words of comfort. ‘We all, I suppose, do what we feel we need to do, in relationships as in life.’ His thoughts briefly strayed to his own relationship with his parents. As with Alice Oliver and her husband, Casey knew he had never been enough for his parents. A fact of which he had been conscious for most of his life. But now was not the time to dwell on that. As the victim's widow, Mrs Oliver was entitled to his full attention.

But Mrs Oliver had little more to say. She had laid her pain bare for them. Casey thought that all three of them were relieved when they left shortly after, Mrs Oliver's list of her husband's paramours in Casey's pocket and Detective Constable Shazia Khan left behind to fend off the press and to render Mrs Oliver some womanly comfort.

 

 

Chapter Nine

The next morning Casey had a number of appointments strung out over the day. He had been able to fix up interviews with all four of Oliver's business rivals with whom he was in legal or other disputes. It would be interesting to meet the men involved in these slanging matches with the late Gus Oliver. It would be good if he were able to exonerate most of them. At the moment, between Oliver's now reduced harem, their partners, his unhappy daughter and his business rivals, Casey still had far too large a load of suspects for comfort.

The first on his list was a Mr Patterson of Kincaid and Co. Like Oliver, he, too, had his offices on the industrial estate. Kincaid's was a smaller concern than Gus Oliver's to judge from the size of the building, but like the others on the list, according to Caroline Everett, they and the other firms dealt in the same line and were forever trying to undercut one another with their suppliers or nobble each other in some other way.

Mr Patterson turned out to be a tall man and muscular, too, if his handshake was anything to go by. He didn't seem worried about the reason for Casey's visit, which Casey had explained to him over the phone. In fact he was quite welcoming and jovial in his manner.

‘Come in, Chief Inspector, come in. Sit down,’ he invited. 'I gather from my secretary that you're here about Gus Oliver's murder?’

‘That's right, sir. I'm currently checking into his movements and those of any acquaintances.’

Patterson nodded. 'I supposed that's why you wanted to see me. Given my various court battles with Oliver, I imagine I must be a prime suspect?’

Casey kept a discreet silence.

'I gather from the newspapers that he was found in an alleyway here in King's Langley early on Monday morning?’

Casey nodded, but said nothing more.

‘Well now, let me see.’ He stared off into space in recollection, then he nodded as if in remembrance of the day, turned back to Casey and said, 'I had a late start that day and was still at home with my wife till gone nine. Check with her if you like.’ He rattled off his address and phone number.

‘And what about Friday evening around nine and into the early hours of Saturday morning, which is the time we believe Mr Oliver to have been killed? Perhaps you could tell me where you were between those hours.’

‘Certainly. I was again at home with my wife. There were again just the two of us, I'm afraid.’ He shrugged and stood up, adding a little joke: ‘Hope she's good for the alibi.’

And suddenly he became very business-like, all joviality vanishing. It was as if he wanted to make clear what a busy man he was and even murders of business rivals mustn't hold him up.

‘Now, if that's all, I have a very full day ahead of me. I don't see why I should allow the dead Oliver to disrupt my day any more than I did the live Oliver.’

Casey nodded and allowed himself to be ushered out. He would take a harder line if Mrs Patterson failed to corroborate her husband's story.

The other three rival businessmen with whom Oliver had been embroiled in court battles all turned out to have firm alibis, being at the same conference in the Midlands. The information they supplied was soon checked out. It felt good to be able to cross some more names off their now diminishing list of suspects.

After another day of full-on checking and eliminating, Casey called the team to the incident room for a well-deserved pat on the back.

‘You'll be glad to know that, of the suspects known to the victim and who might have reason to want to kill him, because of your hard work we've eliminated many and these suspects are now reduced to nine in number.’

‘Unless some more ladies come out of the woodwork,’ Catt pointed out from where he was propped against the wall combing his hair. ‘And always supposing it wasn't a stranger murder — a mugging gone wrong.’ Catt always liked to look his best, but his fiddling with his comb was a bone of contention between him and Casey. However, for now, Casey ignored it.

‘Yes, we're still not able to discount that possibility, though given that the pathologist has confirmed the victim was moved after death, that seems increasingly unlikely. Anyway, to get back to what I was saying, Mrs Alice Oliver, the victim's wife, who readily admitted she knew of his serial infidelities, is one of our suspects. As are Amanda and Roger Meredith, Sarah and Carl Garrett and Max Fallon and his live-in partner, Carole Brown, all of whom are numbered amongst his lovers and their partners. Like Mrs Oliver, Fallon and Carole Brown only live around the corner from the alleyway where Oliver was found. Max Fallon, Carole Brown's partner, is obsessively jealous according to what Catt found out from the neighbours. He had supposedly learned about his girlfriend's affair only a few days before Oliver's death. He's had a few run-ins with us but little has come to anything.’

‘Another indicator of possible guilt is the fact that Ms Brown claims she and the dead man were going to leave their respective partners and set up home together,’ Catt put in. ‘She rang up earlier with this titbit,’ he told Casey. ‘Wonder if she thought it a good excuse to take her out of the running? If this Max Fallon found that out also—'

‘Quite,’ Casey broke in. ‘Always supposing it's true. It doesn't sound likely, given that Mrs Oliver claims her husband was commitment-phobic.’

‘Perhaps, as Sergeant Catt said, it's just a crude attempt on Carole Brown's part to make us believe she had no reason to kill him?’ Constable Jonathon Keane put in from the back of the room.

‘Maybe,’ Casey said. ‘Certainly, we found nothing at either Mr Oliver's home or his business premises to indicate he had plans for a new life with Carole Brown or anyone else.

‘Max Fallon is something of a ne'er-do-well. He has criminal associates and is known for being violent. There are rumours from Sergeant Catt's sources that a knife is his weapon of preference. Carole Brown is much younger than Fallon and reputedly flirtatious. We've yet to question any of these men as to their whereabouts when Gus Oliver was killed, though Mr Meredith was, according to his wife, at home at the time and working in his office at the top of the house.

‘Then there's Mr Patterson of Kincaid's. The only person he was able to produce to confirm his whereabouts was his wife, though we've yet to question his neighbours. One of them might have noticed him going out. Lastly, we have Caitlin Osborne, the victim's illegitimate daughter. When we questioned Mrs Oliver about the identity of anyone else with a possible grudge against her husband, she mentioned the girl and that Oliver had refused all attempts by his daughter to have a relationship. The daughter sounds a troubled girl. She's apparently left her adoptive parents' home in Liverpool during the last few weeks and is now alone in the world and probably nursed a grudge against her father. She's a known drug user and has been in and out of prison for the last few years owing to thefts she used to support her drug-taking. She has also been sectioned in psychiatric hospitals several times as she suffered some psychotic episodes. We've still trying to trace her, but it's possible she travelled to King's Langley to make one last ditch attempt to persuade her father to let her into his life.’

‘Or to remove him from it permanently,’ Catt put in. ‘Maybe the method of murder was symbolic,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe, if Cally the Scally was the one who cut off her father's tackle, she was ensuring, in some way that appealed to her crazed mental state, that he couldn't father any more unwanted children. It could be the kind of violent action that would appeal to the psychotic mind.’

‘And not just the psychotic mind,’ Casey quietly pointed out. ‘This was a man, remember, who went in for sexual betrayal on the grand opera scale. Any one of his lovers who have failed to provide sustainable alibis might have been tempted to emasculate him, once they discovered they were merely one in a long line of convenient females. So might their various partners.’

He paused and glanced at Catt. ‘As to the other possibility — that he was killed by a mugger — since the post-mortem results, as I said, that's looking less likely, as the victim didn't die in that alley as was originally thought possible. His body was clearly moved after death, as Dr Merriman makes clear in his report on the hypostasis — the blood that sinks to the lowest extremities after death,’ he explained for the benefit of the younger members of the team whose experience of death was limited.

‘Muggers tend to have more interest in fleeing the scene of their crime than in concealing the body of their victim, so I suggest we concentrate our efforts on digging deeper into those known to the victim and who lack an alibi: his wife; his three unalibied lovers; their partners; Mr Patterson; and the victim's daughter, Caitlin Osborne.'

‘There's still the fact that his wallet was missing,’ Catt pointed out, like a dog after a particularly juicy bone. As so often, he had chosen to play the role of devil's advocate.

Casey nodded. 'I hadn't forgotten. But as I said, his killer could have taken it simply in an attempt to delay any identification. The mutilation could have been done to muddy the waters. We really can't afford to discount anything at this stage, but for now I'd like to concentrate our efforts. Time enough to cast our net wider if the more likely suspects prove innocent of this crime.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘let's get moving. I want our suspects' friends, neighbours and family questioned again. The suspects themselves will be firmly questioned, too, of course. Sergeant Catt and I will take on that role. The rest of you, closely question everyone else — you can sort out the details between you. I want to know any gossip you can extract, indications of temperament and, given the level of violence perpetrated against the victim, anyone else, apart from Fallon, with an inclination to violence.

‘Although only one of our suspects has a criminal record — Fallon, the nightclub proprietor — ask around to discover if any of them has a reputation amongst their neigh-bours for aggression. Most people, in my experience, unless they have mental health issues, tend to build up to the kind of violence that was used here. They don't just start at this kind of level, not even nowadays with the rising levels of gratuitous violence in modern society. Okay. Off you go.’

As the team filed out, Casey glanced at his watch. It was approaching the time for him to ring his mother to find out if there had been any developments at the commune that ThomCatt's Lincolnshire police friend hadn't already confided.

He nodded at Catt and tapped his mobile. Catt immediately grasped the significance of the gesture, as his grin confirmed. ‘I'll wait in the car,’ he said. ‘Remember me to your parents.’

As soon as Catt had left, scared of prying ears, Casey removed himself from the confines of the police station to the street around the corner to make his call. He found an empty doorway and rang Moon, praying that the murders in her midst would have encouraged a degree more responsibility than she had ever previously displayed. It was important to find out what interactions and revelations had gone on between the commune members when they were on their own. They could yet prove revealing.

To Casey's surprise, his mother answered her mobile on only the sixth ring: a veritable model of efficiency for her.

‘Willow Tree, hon. I almost forgot you were ringing. What time is it?’

‘It's seven o'clock, Mum. The time I arranged I'd ring you.’ Although Casey did his best to keep disapproval from his voice, from his mother's reply it was clear he hadn't entirely succeeded.

‘Don't hassle me, son. There's been enough hassle here to last me and Star through any number of karmic incarnations.’

‘And will be until DCI Boxham finds out who killed your friends,’ Casey reminded her, in the hope that it would incline her to face up to the reality that she and Star were witnesses — suspects Casey reluctantly corrected himself — in a double murder inquiry. And that the sooner they provided him with some evidence that pointed to one of the other commune members being the murderer, the sooner the hassle would stop. ‘So tell me, what's been happening?’

‘Like I said, hassle, man. Accusations. More arguments. Jethro's started most of them.’

Jethro Redfern, Casey recalled, was the brother of the pregnant Madonna and the teenage son of Lilith and Foxy Redfern — unless, that was, the evidence of his own eyes that he bore a marked resemblance to Star Casey meant he was his own half-sibling.

‘That boy's got so much anger in him,’ Moon complained. 'I said to him, “Stay cool. Chill out. Smoke some weed,” but he wouldn't listen.’

Good for Jethro, Casey thought. ‘So what were these arguments about?’

‘Apart from these two deaths, it was the usual stuff. He was hassling his father for not taking better care of his daughter; hassling Kali Callender because it was her old man who got his sister pregnant.’

‘Why did the boy blame Mrs Callender for the fact her husband made Madonna pregnant?’

‘He seemed to think Kali should have been able to control her husband.’ Moon laughed. ‘Kid's got a lot to learn.’

‘Anything else?’

There was a silence on the other end of the line. It lasted all of ten seconds, then Moon said, ‘The commune has a real bad aura now, Willow Tree. It's not the same place at all.’

As far as Casey was concerned the commune had always had a bad aura. It didn't smell too sweet, either, but he let the comment pass.

‘Some of the others are talking of moving on.’

‘That would be very foolish,’ Casey warned. There was no one else to try to stop them doing something stupid that would, to suspicious police minds, be as indicative of guilt as running away. ‘Tell me you and Star aren't thinking of joining this would-be band of travelling hippies.’

‘Hey, Willow Tree, I'm not stupid, you know. Besides, Star's got no appetite any more for a life on the road, moving from place to place. He likes the creature comforts of the commune. Don't worry, hon, we're staying put.’

Casey was glad to hear it, not relishing a manhunt for the pair, though he smiled as he thought of the ‘creature comforts' of their dilapidated and much neglected smallholding. It was as well that Star was easily pleased. ‘Good. Make sure you do. Doing a flit would concentrate DCI Boxham's eye quicker than an eagle on a running rabbit. Let the others run away if they must.’ He paused. ‘So who was it, exactly, who was so keen to leave?’

‘Oh, I don't know. They were all talking at once, so it wasn't clear, though I think Foxy Redfern would have gone like a shot, only Madonna's near her time and not feeling well and when he suggested they leave, she started to cry. That caused another row between Foxy and Lilith, Madonna's mum.’

‘Any others who said they wanted to leave?’

‘Young Randy wanted to go. He's a sensitive soul. But Scott talked him out of it. He said that, with them both being gay, neither of them had any argument with DaisyMay. And it's true, they didn't have any. We all know one another's business in the commune. And another thing, you wouldn't believe how much they were looking forward to the two babies being born. Madonna's and DaisyMay's. Randy even taught himself to knit and made the most fab sets of booties. So cute.’

There wasn't much of anything to help solve the case amongst what Moon had told him, Casey realized. So he probed deeper. ‘You said there were accusations bandied about,’ he reminded her.

‘Did I?’ Moon asked, her voice so vague, that Casey suspected he would be lucky to have his question answered.

‘Come on, Mum. Try to think. You're my only source of information.’ This last wasn't strictly true, of course. He had ThomCatt's channel into the Lincolnshire force. Not that he was about to confide that to Moon. Thomas Catt was already risking a lot to help him and his parents; he wasn't willing to have him put further at risk by letting Moon know of his involvement.

‘Help me here, Mum. Try to remember. If I'm to help you and Star, I need you to help me. And for you to do that, I need you to keep your wits about you. It might be an idea to lay off the weed,’ he suggested. And whatever other noxious substances she took.

‘Lay off the weed?’ For once, his usually laidback mother sounded put out. But then a combination of being a murder suspect and being asked to give up a favourite vice would be likely to do that to a person. ‘I've got no choice about that, have I? The pigs not only took the growing plants, they took my private stash too. And everyone else's. I won't have any money to buy more till my pension comes. I don't suppose ...' she began, in a wheedling voice.

‘You don't suppose right,’ Casey told her firmly. ‘Anyway, what about the money from your lottery win? Surely you haven't gone through that already?’

When there was no answer to this, he added firmly, 'I want you to have a clear head.’ Or as clear as it ever got, anyway. ‘Now about those accusations you mentioned—'

'I told you,’ she said flatly, 'I forget what they were about. Something and nothing, probably.’

Exasperated, Casey for the moment admitted defeat. Before he bid his mother goodnight, he reminded her again to conceal the mobile somewhere safe and away from the house. ‘Until I ring you at the same time tomorrow evening. Seven o'clock,’ he reminded her. ‘Don't forget.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’

The phone went dead. She hadn't even said goodnight, which was unlike the generally good-natured Moon. And if the situation at the commune was getting under her skin, it showed how bad it must be.

 

 

Chapter Ten

Casey dropped his mobile into his pocket and returned to the back entrance to the police station and the car park where Catt was waiting for him. He was hopeful that this evening would move them further forward. And even though their unofficial inquiry was making small progress and receiving little assistance to help him extract his parents from their self-induced difficulties, he couldn't afford to let it make him neglect the Oliver investigation.

‘So, what did your mother have to say when you spoke to her?’ Catt asked as Casey climbed into the passenger seat.

‘Very little. And none of it much help. Though she did say there have been plenty of rows amongst the commune members.’

‘Brotherly love: it was ever thus,’ Catt intoned. ‘Though that's hardly surprising in the circumstances with a double murder hanging over their stoned heads.’

‘True.’ Casey fastened his seat belt while Catt manoeuvred the car out of the yard and on to the road, before he pointed the bonnet towards the park and Mrs Oliver's home.

Casey was wary of letting ThomCatt know just how little cooperation he was getting from Moon. He might just conclude that if she couldn't be bothered to make some effort on her own behalf, why should he trouble to try to help them.

Casey wouldn't blame him if he did come to such a conclusion. It was a conclusion that his own mind had played with intermittently. But, as he couldn't afford to have his limited posse of helpers diminish to nothing, he kept his mouth firmly closed and concentrated on reading over his notes prior to re-interviewing Mrs Oliver. It provided him with an excuse for his silence.

When they arrived at Mrs Oliver's house, a lorry was backing into the drive. It was piled with rolls of new turf.

After they had edged their way past the press pack crowding the gates, Catt glanced at Casey and raised his eyebrows as he parked up. ‘Strange thing for a supposedly grieving widow to get the garden re-laid at such a time.’

‘Probably forgot all about it until the men turned up. I had my turf re-laid last year and I had to order it in advance. I imagine Mrs Oliver didn't feel up to the likely row if she cancelled the job.’

Catt shrugged and climbed from the car.

They watched as the gardeners heaved the rolls of turf on to their shoulders and made for the side gate. The last of the three-man band — presumably the foreman — carried just a green tarpaulin.

Casey called to him, 'A bit late for gardening work.’

‘Yeah. We're running late. We're just dumping the turf for now and will set to and lay it in the morning.’ He disappeared through the gate after the other men. They were quickly back and all three piled into the lorry and headed off.

Shazia Khan, the female officer whom Casey had left behind with Mrs Oliver to fend off reporters, had since been relieved and, after he'd had a few words with her replacement, Casey made for the drawing room, knocked on the door and entered at the ‘Come in’ invitation.

Mrs Oliver didn't look as well-groomed as she had on their previous visit. Understandable if the effort required to make herself presentable was too much. As Casey knew, many of the recently bereaved let themselves go for a time. Her eyes were red-rimmed, too, he noticed. The reality of her husband's death was clearly sinking in. She seemed brittle, with a distant air about her as if she wasn't really taking much notice of anything any longer.

‘I'm sorry to bother you again so soon, Mrs Oliver,’ Casey began once they were seated in the over-heated drawing room.

She came out of her reverie to say in a firm voice, ‘Don't be, Chief Inspector. You must “bother” me, as you call it, as often as you need. As Gus's wife—' she grimaced and corrected herself. ‘As Gus's widow, I understand you have a job to do. I expect nothing less and neither would Gus.' She found a shadowy smile and added, 'Gus would probably haunt me if I let you get away with a less than rigorous investigation into his death. And rightly so.’

Casey inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘It's just a few more questions and then we'll leave you in peace. If you're sure you feel ready to answer them?’

Tm ready. What is it you want to know?’

‘You said you last saw your husband around nine o'clock on Friday night?’

She nodded. ‘Give or take ten minutes or so.’

'I also understand that it was his custom to stay away from home for one or two nights on a regular basis?’

‘As you have discovered, Chief Inspector, my husband was a law unto himself. He never liked me to question him about his movements. I suppose, over the years, he's trained me not to do so. I learned the lesson well.’

‘So I don't suppose he gave any indication as to where he was going?’

‘No. You asked me that before,’ she said sharply. So she wasn't in quite such a faraway place as he had thought. ‘Apart from saying it was some business meeting.’ She forced a smile. ‘But then he always said that. It didn't make it true, as I have discovered.’

‘Strange time for a business meeting,’ Catt remarked, ‘even if that was just an excuse for meeting one of his lady friends.’

‘Quite. As I imagine your inquiries will reveal, his appointment that evening was unlikely to have been of a business nature. Gus had the ability to trot out excuses as well as any confidence trickster.’

Casey let her answer slide past him, but he continued his questions on the same theme. 'I get the impression that Mr Oliver was in the habit of going out on his own in the evenings quite frequently.’ Smoothly, Casey resumed. ‘You didn't mind?’

‘Over the years we evolved our own interests. Once I would have minded that he liked going out without me, but those days are long gone. Besides, I wouldn't have wanted to play gooseberry while he romanced his latest woman. I suppose you can say we slipped into a routine, one that suited both of us to a degree. Gus has always been gregarious; he thought an evening wasted if he wasn't socializing. I'm rather reserved and not keen on social gatherings so we compromised. As long as I accompanied him to important functions he was happy for me to stay home the rest of the time.’

‘Still, it must have been lonely for you here on your own, night after night.’

‘Not really. I'm quite a self-contained woman. And, as I said, I have my own interests.’

Casey paused briefly before he returned to the painful subject of her husband's infidelities. ‘You said that you knew about your husband's affairs and accepted them.’

She nodded. 'I can see that it must seem a strange thing for a wife to accept. But it has been the normal thing in our marriage for many years now. Gus was a very—' she hesitated before selecting the word — ‘athletic man. Very physical. Whereas I have always been more inclined to cerebral pursuits.’ She gave a tiny shrug. 'I suppose, in that way, we were ill-matched.’ She nodded towards the floor to ceiling bookcases that lined the fireplace walls at both ends of the large room. The shelves were so tight-packed that it would be only with difficulty that one would be able to prise a book from the clutch of its neighbours.

A quick glance over some of the titles certainly indicated that their owner had an intellectual inclination. There was little fiction, Casey saw, but there were shelves on sociology and psychology, which Mrs Oliver explained she had studied at university.

She had gone to Durham, which, she told them, was where she had met her husband.

‘It was quite a surprise for his crowd when we got together.’ She gave a short laugh. 'I confess, it was quite a surprise to me, too. Gus was, I suppose, what is nowadays termed an “Alpha Male”, even when he was young.’

Casey nodded, then drew her back to the point. ‘We have reason to believe your husband died some time on the evening he left here; before midnight rather than after. He certainly didn't die in that alley.’ Dr Merriman had been quite clear on this point. ‘It's plain that someone took a risk in moving him. I'm afraid I have to ask everyone where they were from nine on the Friday evening to around midnight and from six to seven thirty on Monday morning, between which hours we have reason to believe he was dumped in the alley.’

She looked shocked to be asked such a question. But then she nodded slowly, as if accepting his right to ask it of her. 'I was at home during both relevant times, Chief Inspector. On the Friday evening I was alone, but as far as the Monday goes, I suppose I have a witness. Mrs Clarke, Mrs Mary Clarke, my cleaning lady was here.’

'I see. What time did she start work?’

‘She was here just before six and worked for three hours. She's an early bird, like me, and likes to get started on her chores as soon in the day as possible. We're a perfect match in that way and I fit in nicely with her more lie-abed customers. She always starts her working day here and then goes on to clean the houses of the lie-abeds afterwards. She has her own key so can let herself in without disturbing me if I'm busy.’

Once he had obtained the cleaning lady's address, Casey decided to leave it there. He would question this Mrs Clarke and get her version of events for the Monday morning when Gus Oliver's body was found. But if she confirmed that Alice Oliver was at home when she arrived and didn't leave the house during the following hour and a half it looked like Mrs Oliver was in the clear — at least as far as dumping the body was concerned. And as it seemed certain that Oliver was murdered and later dumped by the same person, that would appear to exonerate her from both.

But, he reflected, as he stood up, thanked her for her time and followed Catt out, they still had enough other potential suspects to keep them busy.

Mrs Clarke, Alice Oliver's cleaning lady, lived in a tiny terraced house about five minutes' walk away from Alice Oliver. She confirmed what Mrs Oliver had told them. The house was as neat as a newly planted flowerbed, with a place for everything and everything in its place. It certainly seemed to sum up Mary Clarke's attitude to housework.

She was a stout woman, over retirement age and looking it, with work-worn hands and a vaguely resentful manner.

As they followed her along the short, narrow hall to the back kitchen, Casey asked, ‘Have you worked for Mrs Oliver for long?’

She invited them to sit, her lips pursing slightly as she watched the two big policemen as if annoyed at how untidy they made her very clean and well-scrubbed kitchen. 'I suppose you want tea?’ she asked.

They both nodded and thanked her as she turned away to fill the kettle.

‘I've worked for Mrs Oliver for coming up three years now. Since just before I was divorced,’ she told them as she crossed to the fridge and took the milk out. It was in a much polished silver jug, which she placed on the table before bringing out the sugar. 'A very nice lady, Mrs Oliver, very considerate.’

She made the tea and brought it and fine bone china cups and saucers to the table before she sat down. She had said nothing about Gus Oliver, Casey noticed, but then, he supposed she could rarely have seen the man during her working hours as she went on to reveal that Gus Oliver had generally had a working breakfast in his study, which his wife prepared and where he was not to be disturbed.

‘You got on well with Mrs Oliver. How about Mr Oliver? I know you said you saw little of him, but you must have gained some impression.’

Mrs Clarke sniffed, stirred the pot and poured the tea. ‘It's not for me to speak ill of the dead. I cleaned for them, that's all. I wasn't invited to their dinner parties. As long as I was left to get on with my work without interference — and I was — we generally got along just fine.’ She reached for a washing-up sponge from the sink tidy and ran it over the table where Catt had spilled a few drops of tea from his dainty cup, before she added, 'I like my routines, Chief Inspector. I don't like them upset. Mrs Oliver understands that. Not like some of my ladies.’

‘And Mr Oliver?’

‘As I said, I didn't see much of him. He didn't interfere, if that's what you mean.’

She seemed reluctant to discuss Gus Oliver. Perhaps she hadn't liked the man and given her quoted adage about not liking to speak ill of the dead, she preferred to say as little as possible. If there was any ill-speaking due it was clear that Mrs Clarke didn't intend to break her silence on the matter, even if her manner spoke volumes.

‘You saw Mrs Oliver on Monday morning?’

'Oh yes. She was up when I arrived just before six. I was in the kitchen giving the cupboards a good clean out. I could hear her computer printing out. It's rather an old-fashioned one and makes quite a bit of noise. Like me, Mrs Oliver is a lady who dislikes wasting time. She keeps herself very busy. Unsurprising, of course, with—' she broke off abruptly before she said anything incriminating.

Had she been going to say ‘with a husband like him’? Casey wondered.

‘You saw her? You didn't just hear her printer?’

‘Of course I saw her.’ Mrs Clarke bridled at the question. ‘You surely can't suspect Mrs Oliver of murder? She's a fine lady. Besides, she came downstairs about seven o'clock and made us both some tea. She didn't go out. I'd have seen her as the kitchen faces the front door and the back door is in the kitchen. I can see the whole of the back garden from there so I would have seen her if she'd gone out through the patio doors in the lounge.’ She sat back, with an expression that said ‘Make something of that if you can’ etched clearly on her face.

That let Alice Oliver pretty well off the hook when it came to dumping the body, Casey acknowledged. According to Cedric Abernethy, there had been no body in the alley when he had left home to walk the dog just before six on Monday morning.

‘We'll need you to come to the station to make a formal statement,’ he told her.

‘When? Only, as I told you, I have my routines. My days are pretty full with all my ladies. If I'm late getting to one it will throw my entire day out.’

‘Fit it in at a time to suit you. Let us know when and we can send a car to collect you.’

‘That won't be necessary. I have my own car. I learned to drive after my husband left me. It's only a cheap little runabout, but it does me. Now—' she glanced at the clock on the wall —. 'I need to get on. I promised Mrs Townsend that I'd give her spare room a good do before her visitors arrive and I'm keen to get on with it.’

She followed them out and bustled hurriedly off to her car.

‘Amazing what some people can get enthusiastic about,’ Catt remarked as they climbed into their own car. ‘Would you ever feel that eager to sort out a spare room? Particularly one that wasn't even your own?’

Casey smiled. And although he liked a tidy home — a trait clearly not inherited from his parents — he said, 'I can think of other pursuits that would be more welcome. But her evidence seems pretty conclusive, so that's one suspect down and seven to go. By the way, I was going to ask you if you've had any more news from your friend on the Lincolnshire force.’

‘Yeah. I texted him while you were on the phone to your parents.’ Catt put the car into gear and pulled away from the kerb. ‘Meant to tell you. Anyway, that couple, Honey and Ché Farrer, who left your parents' smallholding a while back, are out of the running for DaisyMay's murder at least. They both have rock-solid alibis. So even if they can't recall exactly where they were or what they were doing around the time we've roughly estimated that Kris Callender died — and, surprise, surprise, they claim to have left before it occurred — it seems unlikely they had anything to do with that killing either, seeing as you're convinced the two deaths are connected.’

Casey wasn't convinced of that, not completely, though it seemed most likely. But for two murders to occur within a few months of each other and amongst such a small circle seemed too much of a coincidence for them not to be connected.

‘Thanks, ThomCatt. You do know how much I appreciate your input on this, don't you?’

Concentrating on the road ahead, Casey sensed rather than saw Catt's grin.

‘That's all right, boss. Don't sweat it. Maybe you can do the same for me one day?’

That didn't seem likely. As an orphan, Thomas Catt had been spared the parental traumas that currently rocked Casey's world.

 

When Casey rang Moon the next evening, she reported that all the police had now departed. ‘Even the runty young one they had posted at the gate.’

‘You're sure?’ Casey questioned. ‘There's not any still lingering in one of the back lanes to watch the comings and goings?’

‘No. I sent one of the boys out on his bike to scout around. They've definitely gone.’

‘In that case, maybe it would be a good time for me to pay another visit. I need to speak to everyone again; maybe a few memories and tongues will have loosened in the interim. I won't arrive till fairly late, as I have another couple of interviews on the Oliver murder to fit in before I can drive up to your place.’ The first was with Roger and Amanda Meredith — Amanda being another of Gus Oliver's multiplicity of lovers. 'I should be with you some time after ten.’ He paused, then asked, ‘Have there been any further developments?’

‘There's been no more murders, if that's what you mean.’

That hadn't been Casey's meaning, but he was relieved to hear it all the same.

‘How did Star bear up during the questioning?’ He'd already asked this question several times, but Moon was patient with him and simply repeated what she'd already told him.

‘He didn't let anything slip. But you know Star, with a memory as poor as his, he wouldn't have been able to even if he'd wanted to.’

That was true. Casey let the knowledge comfort him. If Star managed to complete a sentence more than a few words long it would be the first time in several years.

‘Anyway, I'll say goodnight for now. Just don't let anything slip that you haven't already told the police. And make sure Star knows he's to say as little as possible if — when — the police return.’

‘You said. You worry too much, Willow Tree. I've already told you we don't know anything about Kris or DaisyMay's deaths, so we can't say anything.’

As reassured as he was likely to be, Casey bade his mother a second goodnight, reminded her he'd see her later and ended the call.