While Vera sat in the sun Rachael was in Black Law farmhouse trying to convince Joe Ashworth that Bella’s suicide and Grace’s murder were related. The sergeant was polite but unconvinced.
‘The inspector doesn’t think that’s a profitable line of inquiry,’ he said. He’d made them tea, offered chocolate digestives but he was quite firm. ‘You should know her well enough by now to realize you’ll not shift her once her mind’s made up.’
‘OK,’ Rachael said. ‘So, what if it’s got nothing to do with murder, but Bella was being threatened before she died? Blackmail. She met someone who recognized her, or someone from the quarry found out about the manslaughter conviction and put pressure on her. That would be a criminal case, wouldn’t it?’
‘It might be but there’s no evidence of that. No complaint. Not our business.’
‘But it could be our business, couldn’t it?’ Edie asked. ‘I mean, if we were curious about what happened to a friend we could ask some questions. Inspector Stanhope couldn’t object to that.’
‘She wouldn’t like it.’
‘It wouldn’t be as if we’d be treading on any toes. As she’d dropped that line of inquiry anyway.’
‘God,’ he said. ‘Save me from forceful women.’
That was all the encouragement they needed to trace Bella’s younger brother, the boy who had gone straight from school into his father’s butchery business. It seemed that Alfred Noble’s meat empire must have collapsed because there was no shop of that name left in Kimmerston. There was only one butcher left – a smart establishment with a large delicatessen section which catered for visitors to the holiday cottages in the National Park. The owner remembered the Nobles. ‘They had three shops once. Must have been worth a fortune.’
‘Did the business go bust?’
‘No, he sold up just in time. Before the supermarket was built and people started getting faddy ideas about nuts and bean sprouts. It must have been after the old man died.’
‘He?’
‘The son. Charlie.’ The butcher turned away to provide a quarter of ham off the bone and some Brussels pâté for a well-dressed woman with a southern accent. He was persuading her of the quality of his home-made sausage and Edie had to shout to get his attention. ‘Do you know where the son is now?’
Rachael cringed, but he completed the transaction and then replied, ‘He and his wife run the stables on the way out of town on the Langholme Road. He bought it years ago from the profit on the business.’ He looked at his shop. Empty again of customers. ‘It was the most sensible thing he could have done. Do you know the place I mean?’
They knew exactly. It was set back from the road in a river valley surrounded by mature woodland. They passed it every time they drove back to Baikie’s.
They arrived at the stables in late afternoon. The place was overrun by girls in their early teens who had come straight from school. They seemed to be everywhere. They were humping bales of straw, pushing barrows of muck, hanging over stable doors to pat ponies’ heads.
‘I always wanted to ride,’ Rachael said. ‘You wouldn’t let me.’
‘I never thought it was you.’ Edie was dismissive. ‘Precious little madams with their jodhpurs and their gymkhanas and their pushy mums.’ She looked around, taking in the Range Rovers in the car park. ‘It doesn’t seem to have changed.’
I’d have loved it, Rachael thought. I wouldn’t have minded the snobbiness or having the wrong clothes.
The girls gathered round an instructor, clamouring for their favourite horses. She was a large young woman wearing a shapeless T-shirt. She shouted out names and the girls melted away. Rachael wandered across the yard to watch them tack up while Edie accosted the instructor.
‘We’re looking for Mr Noble.’
‘Can I help? If you want to book lessons . . .’
‘No.’ Edie gave a little laugh to show how ridiculous that idea was. ‘No, it’s personal.’
‘Oh.’ The woman had probably been told to keep punters away from the boss and was still reluctant. ‘He’s probably in the house. I know his daughter’s there.’
The house was of stone, long and low, closer to the river, separated from the road by a large indoor school and the breeze-block rows of stables. In front of it was a cobbled yard where a BMW was parked. The door was opened by a girl of about eighteen. She had glasses on her nose and a copy of Chaucer in one hand. She spoke with the rudeness of most adolescents.
‘Yes?’
‘Could we speak to your father, please?’
‘If it’s about riding you should see Andrea in the yard.’
‘No,’ Edie said. ‘It’s not about riding.’ She spoke pleasantly. She had spent her career with rude adolescents and knew better than to let them wind her up. ‘If he’s busy we could talk to your mother.’
‘God, she won’t want to see you. She’s got a dinner party tonight and she’s locked in the kitchen.’
‘Your father then.’
‘I think he’s in the study. I’ll see.’
They watched her disappear into the shadow, bang on a door and yell: ‘Dad, there are two women to see you. I think they’re selling or JWs.’
He was dark, angular. Rachael could see the resemblance to Bella but he was lankier, thinner faced. She had been expecting someone athletic and weather-beaten but he looked more like an absent-minded academic.
‘Yes?’ He was cross about being interrupted, only slightly less rude than his daughter.
‘We’re not selling anything, Mr Noble. And we won’t try to convert you. My name’s Edie Lambert. This is my daughter, Rachael. She was a friend of your sister’s.’
‘There must be a mistake. I don’t have a sister.’ He began to close the door.
‘Not now, Mr Noble,’ Edie said gently. ‘But you did until recently.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘We’re not reporters, Mr Noble. As I explained, Rachael was a friend of Bella’s.’
He seemed to come to a decision. ‘I don’t want to talk here,’ he said quietly. ‘Wait outside.’ He went back into the house and they heard the shout, ‘Lucy, tell your mother those people from the Tourist Board have arrived. I’m taking them over to the cottages.’
On the opposite side of the cobbled yard was an older stable block, grey stone, single storey. There was evidence of recent renovation. A pile of paint tins stood outside. There was a small skip full of rubble. He led them towards the block chatting as if they were who he had claimed them to be.
‘We’d wanted to expand the business for some time. In the summer we cater for a lot of tourists – beginners who want to go for a ride into the hills, even for full-days treks. We thought it would be a good idea to provide quality self-catering accommodation too. We’ve just raised the capital to convert these.’ He paused at the door, still split like a stable’s. ‘This is where we started off. There was no office or indoor school then. It’s taken years to grow the business to this point.’
He showed them into a kitchen with a quarry-tiled floor, separated from the living space by an oak breakfast bar.
‘Very tasteful,’ Edie said.
‘There are four self-contained cottages.’ By now he seemed convinced by his own fiction.
‘When did you last see Bella?’ Edie asked.
‘The day before she killed my father.’
‘Not the same day?’
‘No, I didn’t see her before I went to work. I couldn’t face breakfast with Father. I still have nightmares about those family meals.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t blame Bella, you know. You mustn’t think that. If I’d been with him all day I’d have killed him.’
‘But you didn’t go with her to court?’
‘I was supposed to be there. A witness.’
‘For the prosecution?’
‘I didn’t volunteer! I suppose I could have refused but I was only nineteen. I did as I was told. And in the end I wasn’t needed. They changed the charge from murder to manslaughter and Bella pleaded guilty to that.’ He paused. ‘I went to the secure hospital to visit her but she wouldn’t see me. Perhaps she thought I’d betrayed her by agreeing to appear for the prosecution. I had to come all the way home.’ He walked through the living area and sat down, beckoning the women to follow. ‘Is Bella dead? Is that what you meant before?’
‘Yes,’ Edie said. ‘Hadn’t you heard?’
‘I told you. I didn’t hear anything of her. She didn’t answer my letters and eventually I stopped writing. So far as I knew she was still in hospital but if she’d died there I suppose they would have informed me. I was down on all the forms as her next of kin.’
‘She left hospital more than ten years ago. She married a farmer – Dougie Furness of Black Law.’
‘She lived at Black Law Farm?’ He gave a sad little laugh. ‘I lead treks past there every summer. I might even have seen her in the distance. She must really have hated me not to have got in touch. She knew where I was. I wrote and told her when I bought the stables.’
‘I think she just wanted to start again. New life, new identity.’
‘I suppose I can understand that. Sometimes I just feel like running away.’ He smiled. ‘All this money and investment scares me. My wife’s the business woman, though you wouldn’t think it if you met her.’
‘But you started the stables soon after your father died. Your wife wasn’t involved then.’
‘Then it didn’t seem like a business. I enjoyed horses so I bought a stable. That was all there was to it.’
‘Why did you sell the butcher shops?’
‘I hated being a butcher.’ Charles Noble was looking out of the small window towards the river. ‘Father knew I hated it. I wanted to stay on at school. I had dreams of being a vet. I envied Bella for getting out.’
‘But then she came back.’
‘Yes. Poor Bella.’
‘It sounds almost as if you hated your father too.’
‘Oh, I did,’ Charles said. ‘I always had.’
There was a clatter of hoofs on cobbles as Andrea led her party of girls out on their ride.
‘A week after the court case I was approached by a local businessman who made me an offer for the shops and the slaughterhouse. He wasn’t interested in keeping the butchery going. He wanted to develop the property and the land. I could probably have stuck out for more but I signed at once.’ Charles paused. ‘He knocked down the slaughterhouse and built that office block by the river. He must have made a fortune over the years but he paid me enough to buy this place and that was all I wanted.’
‘Was the business yours to sell?’
‘Father left it to me, if that’s what you mean. There was a will. And I was a junior partner. The old man wouldn’t have liked it, but it was legal.’
‘What about Bella?’
‘She wasn’t involved in the business but I put the profit from the sale of Father’s house into a separate account in her name. She knew what I was doing. I wrote to tell her.’
‘Did she ever use the money?’
‘No, it’s still there.’
‘Weren’t you ever tempted to use it yourself?’
He blinked up at Edie, hurt. ‘Of course not. I hoped one day she’d get in touch.’
‘Her husband’s disabled. He needs constant nursing care.’
‘So perhaps I could help with that.’ He considered the idea, seemed pleased. ‘I should have made more effort to persuade Bella to see me but I was very young. The whole business with Father had been horrible. Not just the way he died – I told you I could understand that. But all the publicity that followed. I felt hounded. Everywhere I went people were talking. I suppose I turned into a bit of a recluse. Horses were less complicated.
‘Then I married and Louise, my wife, thought it would be foolish to get in touch with Bella. I’d told her about the case but she couldn’t really understand what led up to it. Her attitude was – why get mixed up in it all now when people have forgotten about it. Bella could find me soon enough if she wanted to.’
‘And she definitely didn’t try to contact you recently?’
‘No. I wish she had.’
‘If she had tried to contact you but got through to your wife instead, would Louise have passed on the message?’
‘Of course.’ But despite the reply he seemed uncertain. ‘What are these questions about?’
‘Bella committed suicide, Mr Noble. We think she was troubled. No one at Black Law knew about the manslaughter charge. She was living under an assumed name when she met Dougie Furness. It occurred to us that someone might have discovered her secret, threatened her with exposure.’
‘And that’s why she killed herself?’
‘We think it’s possible.’
‘I wouldn’t do that to her.’
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t. But can you think of anyone from that time who has suddenly appeared in the area again. A friend of Bella’s. Someone who might recognize her.’
He shook his head.
‘You’ve not told Bella’s story to anyone?’
‘Actually, I don’t often think of her now.’ He looked at them over thick glasses, demanding their understanding. ‘Isn’t that a terrible thing to say?’
‘What about your wife? Could she have mentioned it to one of her friends?’
‘I don’t think it’s really the sort of thing they discuss at the Conservative Ladies’ coffee mornings.’
‘If you remember anything which might help would you mind giving me a ring?’ Edie said. ‘It’s my home number. I’m not often there but there’s an answering machine.’ She lowered her voice to a stage whisper. ‘You see, Rachael found the body. It was a terrible shock. I really think that only finding out what led up to the suicide will help her come to terms with it.’
Good God, Edie, Rachael thought. You were doing pretty well until then.