The sound of the brass knocker reverberated, but the door scraped open over a worn stone step before anyone could react. Bill Lamb looked over his shoulder at the entrance to the parish hall. ‘Well, well, boss, look what the wind blew in.’
‘Remember what we talked about earlier,’ Dan said. ‘We need co-operation in a community like this. Antagonizing people won’t get us anywhere.’
He half-rose from his seat and waved Tony and Alex over. They looked bedraggled and exhausted.
Tony helped Alex with her hop-and-swing gait, but gave O’Reilly and Lamb a wave. ‘At least it’s not raining,’ he said, nodding at the team members they passed. ‘That’s sun coming through those dusty windows. Busy bees in here.’
O’Reilly wanted to see a whole lot more activity in the hall. They had a ton of incidents but the leads were thin.
The windows were high in the walls. Green, yellow and red patchworks of leaded glass festooned with cobwebs. ‘Come and have a seat,’ Dan said, getting two more folding chairs to pull up to the desk.
‘Coffee?’ Bill asked, and Dan came close to guffawing. His sergeant was already on his feet and heading for the coffee maker Hugh Rhys had brought over from the Black Dog only half an hour earlier.
‘Thanks, Bill,’ Alex said as she dropped into a chair and leaned her single crutch against his desk. ‘We came because we think we have to, even though no one’s making a complaint. Doc James dropped us off. He’d like to talk to you a bit later.’
Bill arrived back with the coffee on a tray with a jug of milk and a plate of chocolate digestive biscuits. ‘Who should be making a complaint? Doc James said we’d get a full explanation … or is this something different?’
That didn’t get a reply.
‘What’s gone on at that cottage?’ Dan asked. ‘What’s the woman’s name there?’ He started leafing through his notebook.
‘Radhika Malek,’ Alex said promptly. ‘She’s Tony’s assistant at the small animal clinic here in Folly.’ She narrowed her eyes to get a better look at the whiteboards the team had installed.
Case notes, photographs, comments, spiders’ webs of lines joining leads and subjects of interest, but unfortunately all fairly tentative still. Alex was obviously too far away to make out anything she might not already know.
‘She’s been taken into a hospital for X-rays,’ Tony added. ‘She insists she’s coming back home as soon as they’re done with her but I don’t think she should be in that place alone. She needs someone to care for her and … she’s too vulnerable there.’
‘You haven’t said what happened,’ Bill put in.
‘Just what my father must have told you. She was beaten up – badly. I think she’d been lying on the ground a long time when Reverend Davis found her.’ Tony looked sideways at Alex and cleared his throat. ‘Fingers deliberately broken. Ends of some were crushed – the nails. You’ll be the people to take some guesses at what he used to do it. I didn’t see any metal gratings lying around.’
‘Which hospital?’ Dan said without commenting on Tony’s reference to Pamela Gibbon’s murder and the obvious similarity between some of their injuries. He wouldn’t be tolerating further attempts at secrecy. ‘We need someone there with her now.’
‘I’m not sure where they took her,’ Tony said. ‘There was so much confusion.’
Dan was inclined to believe him. ‘Williams,’ he called to a woman DC, ‘find out which hospital a Radhika Malek has been taken to from Folly-on-Weir.’
‘On it,’ the officer replied. ‘Probably Cheltenham or Gloucester unless it’s something really minor.’
‘I can call my dad,’ Tony said, punching at his mobile. ‘He’ll know.’
Watching the man’s easy rapport with his father caused Dan a twinge of envy.
‘Cheltenham,’ Tony said.
‘Cheltenham.’ DC Williams said from her desk. ‘Primary Care Center.’
‘You people are quick but you won’t make her say anything she doesn’t want to say. She’s terrified of something and she obviously has good reasons.’
Only a fool would refuse opinions from someone who might be useful. Dan rubbed the side of his nose. ‘Any ideas about those?’
‘I think she’s hiding something because she can’t afford not to,’ Alex said. Her expressive eyes held the shadows of her lashes and deep anxiety. ‘She thinks if she died it would be a good thing. She said so. I don’t think that means she wants to die … I don’t really have any idea what she means.’
‘Tony,’ Dan said, ‘do you have employment records for Radhika? You must.’
‘Yes, of course. I can’t recite them but there was nothing that stood out negatively. She came from another veterinary clinic with good references. She’s a fine employee.’
‘We’ll want to take a look at those records,’ Bill said. ‘I’ll see to putting a guard on her right now.’ He went to his own desk and got on the phone.
There was something he was missing. Dan splayed his fingertips on his forehead.
‘When she first came here, Radhika stayed with Pamela.’ Alex sounded faraway, as if she were thinking aloud.
Tony murmured, ‘Didn’t everyone know that?’
Dan dropped his hands to answer Tony. ‘I didn’t. Williams! Find out who interviewed Radhika Malek about Pamela Gibbon – after the victim died. Je-sus, not one word have I seen about anything like that.’
‘Pamela recommended her to me,’ Tony said. ‘She spoke to me up at the Derwinter stables first. She told me her friend was staying with her and wanted to move to Folly. Radhika had done some veterinary work at a clinic in Cornwall … St Kew, I think that’s where Pamela and her husband lived before they came here.’
Alex braced her supported elbow on the desk and frowned unseeingly at Dan. ‘It doesn’t take a great brain to work out there are connections and similarities here. How are you doing with the things that were left in the tower at Ebring Manor? Have you traced any of them?’
Bill cleared his throat. ‘We can’t discuss those details.’
Tony shot out his feet and leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head. His smile set O’Reilly’s teeth on edge. ‘Okey dokey. Alex and I were really taken with the binoculars. Expensive and left behind in an old bag like that?’ He tutted. ‘They must have had other fingerprints on them, in addition to Alex’s and mine.’
O’Reilly looked at Bill who gazed blankly back.
This was touchy. ‘Binoculars?’ he said.
‘Zeiss. Fancy – very expensive.’ Tony was giving him a puzzled look. ‘In a green canvas bag.’
Alex shifted irritably, or more likely she was uncomfortable. ‘In the bag in the tower, with some glacé chestnuts or something. There was a box of those.’
‘Shit,’ Bill said, ‘We didn’t find a bag, or any binoculars.’