The ACC had appointed DCI Fern Larter to head the latest inquiry. Large and jolly with dyed red hair, Fern had a fondness for unsuitably short skirts and a flair for giving good quote. The Press adored her. After the fiasco of the Rao trial, she’d taken Hannah out for a fish and chip supper and helped repair her shattered self-confidence over a couple of bottles of Mateus Rose. Fern didn’t do sophistication; it was one of the things Hannah liked about her.
‘Help yourself,’ Fern said, waving to a packet of chocolate chip cookies on the table.
‘Better not.’
‘Go on, be a devil.’ Fern started chomping. ‘They aren’t fattening, promise.’
‘Get thee behind me, Satan. So what have you got so far?’
Fern pointed a stubby forefinger at a whiteboard in the corner of the room. Names of people and places were scrawled over it in marker pen of bilious green hue and half a dozen post-it notes had been stuck around the edges. Her team had been busy, knowing that the first 24 hours of a murder inquiry are the most crucial.
‘The body was found at seven o’clock this morning. A couple of elderly tourists whose idea of getting up an appetite for breakfast is an early morning walk in the cold and drizzle. Weird, or what?’ Fern laughed noisily and treated herself to another cookie. ‘Anyway, they were walking along the shore from the pier at Monk Coniston when they spotted a bag of rags just under the surface in shallow water. Only it wasn’t a bag of rags, but a dead man.’
‘Cause of death?’
‘He was clubbed on the head. Chances are, the weapon was a torch. We’ve found one that someone chucked into the lake near the pier. They didn’t hurl it far enough and it drifted back to shore. We need to match up the bloodstains and matted hair on the torch with the victim, but it’s a formality. Looks like the killer panicked and tried to weight the body down with a couple of house bricks, but didn’t tie them securely. A twenty pound boulder would have done the trick, but we’re not talking a professional hitman here. It’s possible someone disturbed the murderer and that’s why the job was left half done. Lucky for us. At least one murder victim spent twenty years on the bed of the same lake before divers dredged her up.’
Another thing about Fern, she was a mine of information, a unanimous choice to captain the division’s pub quiz team.
‘When was he killed?’
‘Still waiting on Jepson, but the signs are, within the past 48 hours. You know how it works when someone is dumped into the water? The lungs fill up and the body loses its buoyancy. As it decomposes, gases start to inflate the corpse again and it comes back up. Timing depends on water temperature and stuff like that. The warmer the water, the sooner the body will rise.’
Hannah reached into her memories of a long-ago seminar on forensics. ‘Didn’t someone once tell me Coniston Water is bitterly cold?’
‘Dead right, if the murderer had bothered to row the body out in a boat and bung it overboard a hundred metres from the shore, it would have taken much longer for it to be found. By the time we’d dug the victim out of the silt, he’d have been unrecognisable. As it is, we have a clear idea of what he looked like before the side of his head was bashed in.’ Fern grinned. ‘Quite tasty, provided you use a bit of imagination.’
‘Have you managed to ID him?’
‘We have a promising lead. A woman called Welsby who runs a B amp;B on Campbell Road called in here yesterday to report her boyfriend missing. She’d only known him for about a week. He arrived on her doorstep as a paying guest and wormed his way into her bed in next to no time. Two nights ago, he said he was going away on business, but he went out around seven and didn’t come back to collect his bag. Causing poor Sarah Welsby to sob her heart out to the PC on the desk yesterday morning. At first he reckoned she was a neurotic time waster, but the moment he heard about the man in the lake, he had second thoughts.’
‘Sounds like the chap used Sarah as a meal ticket, then got bored and did a runner.’
‘We’ve found a taxi driver who was supposed to pick him up from the village at nine that evening — but he never showed. Which is where the plot thickens. You don’t mind if I have another biscuit? I missed out on lunch and I’m starving.’
‘I’ll join you, make you feel better.’
Mouth full, Fern made an appreciative noise. ‘This chap was known to Sarah Welsby as Robert L. Stevenson. The taxi was hired by someone called Pirrip. His destination was a posh hotel in Ullswater. He was booked into a de luxe suite for one night only. Not quite what he’d suggested to Sarah. And when we went through his bag, we found an old cheque book in the name of Guy Koenig.’
‘A con man with a love of Victorian literature, huh?’
‘Yeah, he’ll have nicked the name Pirrip out of Great Expectations. Not often you come across a corpse with a highly developed sense of irony. He didn’t expect to finish up bobbing under Coniston Water, that’s for sure. We’ve done a check and hey presto! Guy Koenig is known to us. Plenty of previous, but nothing recent. A string of convictions on charges of deception. He served sentences in Preston and Haverigg. And this will make you prick up your ears.’
Hannah finished her biscuit. ‘Keep talking, the suspense is unbearable.’
Fern beamed, showing a lot of closely packed white teeth. ‘Guy Koenig came out of prison for the last time just over ten years ago. A few weeks before your Emma Bestwick disappeared.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sylvia Blacon was such an assured hostess despite her age and frailty that it came as a shock to Daniel when, twenty minutes into their conversation, she told him that she was almost blind. Her body was twisted with the effects of arthritis and brittle bones and she had to hobble around with a frame, but he admired her determination not to surrender to self-pity. She lived in a large, overheated bungalow in a quiet cul-de-sac on the outskirts of the village and had a companion called Geraldine, a no-nonsense Geordie with the build and charm of an armoured personnel carrier. Geraldine had served them both with tea and now marched back into the room bearing a plateful of calorie-laden goodies.
‘You’ll have a cake?’
Black Forest gateau, meringues or profiteroles, Daniel was spoiled for choice. He helped himself to a profiterole. Very tasty and besides, Geraldine looked ready to slap him if he turned up his nose at her home cooking. He relaxed in his armchair. In summer this room would catch the sun in the middle of the day. The pastel colours of the curtains and the floral coverings on the armchairs and settee were faded, and even the ebony sideboard and bookcase had lightened in tone. It was an old person’s room, but Sylvia was an old person who loved books and history and he’d warmed to her. Uniform editions of Wordsworth and Walpole’s Herries Chronicles sat above two rows of history books, classics from Macaulay, through Trevor-Roper and on to Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson. There was even one of his own early efforts.
‘So you talked to young Jerry Erskine?’
Sylvia’s deep voice contrasted with her skeletal frame. Her forehead and hands were covered in bruises. She hadn’t been beaten up by Geraldine, she’d explained with a throaty laugh, the marks were caused by minor bumps to skin worn by the years until it was as thin as cellophane.
Nobody else, Daniel suspected, would call the man Jerry, let alone describe him as young. ‘Yes, he was very helpful.’
‘Competent historian, Jerry. Doesn’t mean to be a prig.’
Sylvia had made it clear that she was a Daleswoman who prided herself on plain speaking. After a lifetime telling people what she thought about them, she wasn’t about to change now. The late Mr Blacon, who had lured her to the Lakes from her native Leyburn, had passed away thirty years ago, but he’d made a packet from a dental practice in Windermere and left her well provided for. He suspected she’d engaged the intimidating Geraldine because no one else was strong enough to cope with her. Already he’d learned that the grammar school she’d taught in had been swept away by numbskulls who mistakenly despised academic elitism and why almost every reform since the 1944 Education Act had been a retrograde step. She had a degree from Cambridge, but she was prepared to concede that his Oxford pedigree wasn’t a bad second best. If she hadn’t had a sense of humour, she might have been intolerable. When he complained that Hattie Costello had beaten him to it with the Ruskin book, she said Hattie Costello was a painted trollop and even if now she couldn’t see what she looked like, she still sounded like a painted trollop.