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BILL FELT ANOTHER OF the telling shivers run down his spine. “So do we have any idea at all of the last time either of these charmers was seen alive?”
Ray winced. “We’re running into the same brick wall of the Costas’ caginess over what they’ve been doing – or rather my mate Likesh and his team have – but as best they can tell, Tufty has been missing since May, and Vijay since June. That’s the last time people in the area can recall seeing them, anyway.”
And there it was. The accounting for the hole in the dates between Damien and Justin. But would Bill ever be able to prove it?
“Has there been any kind of confirmation that either man went abroad?” he asked Ray, silently praying that they would have at least crossed the Channel.
Unfortunately Ray was shaking his head before Bill had even finished speaking. “No, not this time. And these two rogues had come up on the Border Force’s radar because we’d asked about them so often, so they’ve been on a watch list. Granted, it was more about whether they were bringing people into the country, but previously their passports have been checked over and over, and they don’t seem to have ventured out of the EU. So no strange trips to former Eastern Bloc countries for instance, nor even as far afield as somewhere like Turkey. All of which means that our oppo’s are thinking that there may well be some family link to Italy, even if it’s not the missing Mr Costa nor our missing men.”
Bill leaned back in his chair and stared unfocused at the ceiling as he thought aloud. “Not a hint of them going abroad, then. So if they have vanished, the chances are that it’s somewhere here in the UK. But where could that be? We’ve found not so much as a whisper of Sanay and his tribe going regularly to the area where he was dumped. Which means I can’t see any reason to start combing the hills around there for bodies – or at least not without a lot more hints in that direction.”
He sat back up straight. “What do we know about this Tufty character?”
“Aagh,” Ray groaned. “Another charmer. Did a stint in the Territorial Army and tried for the SAS.”
“What? That doesn’t sound right.”
“I said ‘tried’, gov’. He didn’t get past the first day of selection – for the Territorial side, as well, not the regulars. Oh he was above average in terms of fitness, but his kind of fit came from pumping iron in a gym, not the sort those guys need. Nonetheless, he used to sit in the local pubs telling anyone who’d listen that he’d been in the SAS. The old boys who’d been in the army knew it was all hot air and dismissed him as a braggart, but there are always the gullible ones – the ones who live in cloud-cuckoo-land themselves – who got sucked in by his stories. What Likesh’s team got out of them was that this guy used to go off rough camping on his own at times, and of course that doesn’t make it any easier to work out where he might be – could be the Outer Hebrides for all they know.”
“And do we have a proper name for Tufty? Please don’t tell me that his parents actually called him that.”
Ray laughed. “No, I’ve no idea where that name came from.”
“Really?” Then Bill realised how young Ray was. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Years ago there was a squirrel character who was used to promote road safety to school kids. He was called Tufty, and kids could join the Tufty Club. He was on TV a lot, but I’ve just realised that I knew about Tufty because of my older brothers. He wasn’t really around much even when I was a kid, but he’s kind of passed into urban legend.”
Ray’s eyes went wide. “Oh that makes sense now! Likesh said that he was in every damned club or team you could think of when he was around. Darts, pool, football, you name it, he’d play it. I guess someone older must have given him the nickname and it stuck. But in answer to your question, his real name is Gaylord Harbottle.”
“Christ almighty!” Bill guffawed. “What were his parents thinking? No wonder he went by Tufty! Can you imagine being called Gaylord in some scruffy inner city comprehensive? Poor sod must have had the living daylights persecuted out of him for that. No surprise he turned into a right tough nut. He must have had to fight his corner through every class he went into at school.”
Ray chuckled. “I know. Some parents are bloody cruel to their kids when it comes to names.” Then added more sombrely, “But that doesn’t help with finding him either, because the Costas at least admitted that if he had to book into anywhere, Tufty often used his maternal grandfather’s name, which was Harry Smith, or his half-uncle’s name, which is Josh Lee.”
“Travellers by any chance?” Bill guessed.
“Settled these days, but yes. And again, when Tufty was a kid in the early nineties, his family used to go all over Herefordshire and Worcestershire doing fruit and hop picking in season, even though they had a house in Walsall. So that means that Tufty probably has a good knowledge of some of the quieter parts of the counties, particularly if he’s gone back and camped in those places.”
“And of course that’s assuming he went of his own accord back to somewhere familiar to him,” Bill mused. “If he did and he really wanted to go underground, he could well have travelled up to somewhere like the Appleby horse fair with traveller families. The ones who’ve been up to Cumbria may well be heading back by now, but that doesn’t mean he’s automatically returning with them.”
He knew he had to make such observations in fairness to Ray, but in his heart of hearts, Bill knew that Tufty was dead somewhere in this area.
“What’s the Appleby horse fair?” Ray asked, proving that Bill needed to expand his knowledge.
“It’s probably the biggest gathering of gypsies in England,” Bill explained, “and especially the real Roma, not just the social dropouts. It usually takes place in June, and then the travelling families gradually work their way back to where they over-winter during August and September. It’s quite a sight, because they do still trade horses up there, so be glad we don’t have to police it! But if this Tufty character hasn’t been seen since May, then that makes the horse fair a genuine possibility, as some of the old sweats in your mate’s team ought to be telling him. Doesn’t make it any kind of certainty, but it would be worth checking up on.”
“I’ll pass that on,” Ray said gratefully. “I’ve been trying to find any reference to farmers complaining of someone rough camping on their land over the summer, just in case he came our way, but I’ve come up empty so far.”
“And what of Vijay Bose? Any thoughts from your pal as to where he’s gone?”
Ray shook his head. “He’s even more of a puzzle than Tufty Harbottle. I mean Tufty you can imagine clearing off on his own, but Bose always liked to have his gang around him, liked to be the big fish in his own small pond. And he was a city boy though and through. Everything we ever heard about him said that he liked his comforts. I can’t imagine where he’s got to if he didn’t go to whatever family he’s connected to in Italy. I mean, Italy I can understand. He’s the kind who’d love posing in a kerbside café by some tourist spot, because he was good looking in a rough kind of way, and he always wore designer clothes – or rather, good and expensive knock-offs of them, if still far from the genuine price.”
“Hmm. Very much the urban cowboy, then.”
“Definitely. He kept Tufty around as his hired muscle, and Tufty liked the prestige of being the right-hand man of someone like Bose. I suspect for Bose it was like knowing he had the biggest and nastiest Rottweiler in the neighbourhood – Tufty had his uses when it came to intimidation, because Bose never liked to get his hands dirty in that way.”
“But you say both mothers are now screaming the place down?”
Ray winced. “If anything Juliette Bose has an even bigger mouth than Marissa Costa, and that’s saying something. Poor Likesh had those two and one of the other sisters, Marigold Jankowski, all creating a scene together at one point.”
“Jankowski? Holy hell, the family’s like the bloody United Nations!” Bill snorted.
“Oh you wouldn’t believe!” Ray said with a wry grimace. “After what’s-his-name Jankowski cleared off back to Poland, Marigold – who seems to take her name literally and has the brightest orange hair I’ve ever seen – has since been shacked up for years with an Estonian by the name of Indrek Pahapill, who we think is connected to a people smuggling gang.”
“Good lord, you’re hardly short of possibilities for who Bose might have crossed and come to grief by, are you?” Bill sighed. “Given that you told me back when I first arrived that you thought Bose was involved with people trafficking, and now it turns out that both Vijay and Sanay’s aunt is knocking off someone else in that evil trade, you can’t help but think that there’s a connection there somewhere.”
“That’s what Likesh has been thinking,” Ray confirmed. “He rang me really to just double check that we’d not had any kind of connection to Sanay’s death out here. They think that maybe Vijay Bose got too big for his boots with these tougher guys, and that he’s been taught a lesson by them.”
“That sounds only too plausible,” Bill agreed. However, when Ray had left him, and he’d made his way to the privacy of his car, Bill couldn’t help but think that the bodies of Tufty Harbottle and Vijay Bose were out somewhere this way – they just hadn’t been found.
Once he was back in his room in the B&B, Bill spread his large scale map out across the bed once more and poured over it. Yet even with a map on this scale, he couldn’t see anywhere obvious to start looking. Large commercial orchards had their own symbols on the map, but the kind of places where the three known victims had been found weren’t big enough to show up, and of course technically, where Damien had died was more of a plant nursery than an orchard.
There’s only one thing for it, he decided, I’m going to have to go out to where Damien was found and see if I can find something that links that place to the others.
In the meantime, when he was in the next day, he made a point of finding time to read up on the farmer. Thomas Mulligrew was a different sort altogether. Elderly and reclusive, at first Bill couldn’t see anything which would tie him to the others. Then as he got deeper into the file, he found himself in very different territory. Attached to the notes pertaining to the finding of Thomas’ body were copies of some much older reports, going back into the 1980s and 90s. Thomas, it seemed, had been prone to knocking his wife about, but worse than that, there had been two daughters whom he’d described to social workers as ‘simple’.
Quite what that meant in medical terms was harder to discover since they never seemed to have gone near a doctor, much less a hospital. Thomas had been born in 1953 and had married young in 1970. The first daughter, Grace, had been born the year after, and the other one, Hannah, two years later in 1973; but in the seventies there had been far less social awareness of abuse within families, so nothing had been reported in connection with the girls, and it hadn’t helped that the Mulligrews’ tiny sheep farm was out in the wilds south of Clun, down a long track that went to nowhere else. The only reason Thomas’ body had been found as fast as it had, was due to the fact that he’d ordered some more coal for the ancient range he still cooked on and used for heating, and the delivery man had spotted him as he’d been turning his wagon around to leave.
As soon as they could, both girls had left school, and that had been pretty much the end of them being seen in public. Again it was Lucinda who had made the sharp observance that the fact that nobody seemed able to trace either woman – as they were now, being in their mid thirties – did not necessarily mean that they had escaped and gone off to live better lives. However, with there being no reason to think that Thomas had died of anything other than natural causes, there was nothing to cause either Wally, as the leading investigator on this case, or Lucinda, to waste manpower looking for something untoward.
Yet those two young women bothered Bill from the moment he read about them. Had they been kept as virtual prisoners up at Thomas Mulligrew’s farm? And what of his wife? When Bill delved deeper into the file and found that she had died in a hospice, with a note from the head nurse there, who had remembered Maureen Mulligrew and saying that she had not once had a visit from any member of her family in the year and a bit she’d been in there, he could feel the hairs on his neck standing up. The poor woman had collapsed in the Co-op and an ambulance called, and that had been the first time that anyone had been aware of how ill Maureen was, which had Bill wondering whether Thomas would have bothered calling for one if she had done that at home. Or had she already, and just been ignored? Social workers had called around to see the family when it was decided that Maureen was incapable of being returned home – especially once the social workers had seen the state of the house – but of course the daughters had both been adults by then, and with them saying that they wanted to stay at the farm, there wasn’t a lot to be done about it. They weren’t obviously mentally disabled, and despite the social workers contriving to get them alone and ask again if they wanted to leave, whatever hold Thomas had over them was enough that they still professed that they wanted to stay.
But why wouldn’t the girls have come to visit their mother? Even if Thomas had been a brute of a husband and father – given that the police reports catalogued her multiple beatings, which had heavily contributed to the Parkinson’s Disease she had died of – Bill couldn’t imagine why the girls wouldn’t have felt some sympathy for their mother. Maybe she hadn’t been able to stop their father mistreating them, but she certainly hadn’t got away scot-free herself, and had suffered badly at his hands, so why wouldn’t there be some feeling of solidarity between her and her daughters? And given that Maureen had died eight years ago, both daughters would have been well into their twenties by then, so not kids at home who couldn’t get away from Thomas to go and visit had they wanted to – unless they couldn’t because they were his captives. Yet when it had come to Maureen’s funeral, after much pestering by the much frustrated social worker assigned to the family, Thomas had gone for the cheapest possible option, which had been a non-attendance cremation, so the sisters hadn’t been seen out in public for that either, and Bill was now wondering when had been the last time they had left the farm. Had they declined to leave because by now the outside world was so alien and scary that they preferred the devil they knew to the totally unknown?
At that point Bill thought to look for a National Insurance number for either Grace or Hannah Mulligrew, but realised that Lucinda had beaten him to that.
You had a bad feeling about this too, didn’t you, Lucinda? No National Insurance number for either girl. That means that they never went out to work, and if they couldn’t get work, how would they have got the money to leave home? The only thing the poor wretches could have done was start walking and hope that they found a refuge somewhere. And would girls who’d been kept that cloistered even know about such things as women’s refuges?
Bill noticed that Lucinda had also checked to see if the Mulligrews had ever had a TV license, and there was a handwritten note in the margin when she hadn’t found one, saying that the girls could have known very little of the outside world. Despite being on the Welsh border, and in an area at least heavily populated with small hill farms, this was still as remote a place as you could get without heading into the mountains of central Wales or much further north into the Scottish mountains. And then he saw it on the map. Caer Caradoc – the old Iron Age hill fort which dominated the highest hill in this part of Shropshire.
He thought back to the people he’d met while over here, who’d been connected to the double homicide he’d worked not long after arriving. What had the one man said about Caer Caradoc? Something about a native chieftain called Caractacus by the Romans, and Caradoc by his native Welsh, who had fought a great battle with the Romans there. Then looked at the map harder, and saw that the houses he’d gone to then were literally across the deep river valley from where the Mulligrew’s farm was.
“Oh shit!” he muttered, remembering the strange element to that case. “Is there something in this ancient landscape that’s significant?” He looked to where he’d pencilled in the sites on post-its where Justin and Sanay had been found, and now noticed that down by the river by where Sanay had died, there were the remains of ancient tumuli. “More really old sites,” he sighed. “Hmph, can’t get away from it, there’s some relevance to them dying so close to these old places, though what that might be is beyond me at the moment. Oh hang on, though, there’s nothing like that around where Damien died. Or is that just because whatever it was hasn’t survived?”
Feeling that he needed some clarification on this, he picked up the phone and rang Dr Nick Robbins.
“Hi Nick, how are you?”
“Not bad. Yourself?”
“Ha! Stuck in Shropshire until the end of the week, but that’s why I’ve rung you in work time. Nick, I’ve got three suspicious deaths all with connections to – or rather, all deposition sites close by – ancient monuments. I can’t call them murders as yet, but there’s something very odd going on. The trouble is, I’ve got a fourth body, but I can’t see any ancient site on the map, and that’s got me wondering. Is it possible that there was once something like tumuli or standing stones, or even a hill fort, there that hasn’t survived? And if so, how easy would it be for an average member of the public to find out about that?”
He heard Nick huff on the other end of the phone. “That there are lost sites? Absolutely! God knows how many standing stones and stone circles have got pulled out by farmers in the last three or four centuries, mostly because they were in the way of their ploughs and nobody told them they couldn’t. It doesn’t bear thinking about. So you could say with a reasonable degree of certainty that there would have been many, many times the numbers that survive nowadays. You only have to look at what an undisturbed landscape like Orkney looks like to get an idea of that.
“But even archaeologists like me have trouble identifying those potential sites. Occasionally we get lucky when someone flies over a site in a drought, and the parch-marks show it up, but that’s a rarity, too. There are surveys for some places, but they tend to be pretty dry reading unless you know all the technical terms. I can’t imagine that many members of the public would wade through them.”
Bill sighed. “You’ve pretty much confirmed what I’d been thinking. Damn.”
“Does that muck up your theory?”
Bill laughed. “I think calling it a theory is being a bit grand. It’s more this nasty itch in the back of my mind that I’m missing something. But every time I try to find a unifying element, there’s always something that sticks out as an oddity. God knows I could never go to my boss with any of this. It’s beyond fuzzy. So I’m hardly breaking any rules if I tell you that all four seem to have died from heart-attacks rather than being obvious murders, but if you want the low-down on that, have a chat with Carol.”
“Oh!” Bill could practically hear Nick’s mind making the connections. “That kind of ‘odd’, eh? Hmm. I might just do that. I owe them a social call anyway. Look, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go – there’s a bunch of school kids coming in for a talk in ten minutes – but why don’t we meet up for a pint sometime?”
“As soon as I’m back in Worcester, you’re on!” Bill promised, letting his friend go.
But what the hell am I going to do about these cases, he wondered morosely, as he tried to focus on more ordinary and down to earth cases. I don’t want to let them go, not least because I’m getting seriously worried that they might be someone developing a habit of killing. How many more would we need before a Serious Crime Squad started looking at them with real interest? There isn’t a scrap of forensic evidence which points to foul play, and if Carol and Jeff can’t find it, then I’m bloody sure that nobody else would. And yet I’m as certain as I’ve ever been over something that all of these cases connect.
So what am I going to do? Once I hand back over to the regular guys over here, it’s really up to them how much they follow these cases up. And if Si is even half as accepting as Wally, they’ve neither of them got the imagination to make the kind of weird connections these cases have got. If Lucinda was coming back any time soon it might be different. She, at least, seems alert and curious, even if she hasn’t had my experience of the strange and peculiar.
Hmph, there’s only one thing for it. You’re going to have to go back and then ask for some leave. God knows you’ve got enough backed up. So why not ask for a fortnight off after doing this? Then you can come back over here on your own and do a bit of walking around the various sites and see if anything leaps out at you.
