Samson and Delilah arrived back with an urgency which brought everyone in the building hurrying into Delilah’s office. Everyone being the entire Dales Detective team, who were all supposed to be on a day off.
‘What is it?’ demanded Ida, hastening from the kitchen, wet mop in hand. ‘Tha’s like a couple of scalded cats!’
‘The Irwin case,’ said Samson, ‘we’ve made a mistake.’
‘What kind of mistake?’ asked Nathan, his long legs propelling him up the stairs faster than Nina, who lagged a few steps behind.
‘We don’t believe Kevin Dinsdale is the real killer.’
‘Bugger me!’ Gareth was coming down from the top floor, Bounty on his heels. ‘That’s a mistake all right!’
‘But we saw his car had been moved on the video and everything,’ protested Nina. ‘And he admitted to it.’
Samson nodded. ‘Yes, and we all fell for it. But things don’t add up.’
‘Like what?’ asked Nathan.
‘The way Kevin described Irwin when we went to confront him, for starters. He was mild as milk until it came to Irwin himself and then he exploded. Said Irwin had got what he deserved—’
‘Happen he thought he had,’ said Ida.
Samson shook his head. ‘It’s more than that. I didn’t think anything of it at the time but today, that phrase – “got what he deserved” – it kept niggling at me. And then Delilah said something about grudges earlier and I realised Kevin had said the same thing about Irwin as some lass said on the Kendal Chat page when Irwin’s death was announced. Someone who sounded like she’d met the same predatory Irwin that Elaine had the misfortune to encounter above Malham Cove.’
The others shared confused looks. Apart from Delilah, who was nodding. ‘Someone who had real reason to be angry,’ she said, ‘whereas what did Kevin have to be so angry about when it came to Irwin?’
‘Exactly!’ said Samson. ‘It can’t have been the fact that Irwin was corrupt – that’s precisely why he hired him in the first place. And then there are the timings. Danny told us that Kevin confessed to driving the 4x4 which went past myself and Herriot on Saturday night. Only problem is, he’s also claimed he was on his way back from retrieving Irwin’s body in Malham at the time.’
‘So? Isn’t that what we thought had happened?’ asked Ida. ‘That the killer left the reception a second time to go and get the body?’
‘Indeed. Trouble is, we have footage of Kevin leaving the rugby club with his wife and Ali Metcalfe around half past eleven. Ali reckons she was dropped off on Ellershaw track about twenty minutes later, so—’
‘Kevin couldn’t have got to Malham and back in time to drive past thee at midnight.’ Ida was nodding. ‘So one way or another, he’s lying.’
‘All good and well,’ said Gareth, stroking his beard. ‘But if that’s right, why the heck would Kevin fess up to a crime he didn’t commit?’
‘Why would anyone?’ Samson asked softly.
‘For love,’ said Nathan.
Samson nodded. ‘We think Kevin knows it was his wife, Louise, who killed Ross Irwin.’
There was silence, stunned and disbelieving, until finally Gareth spoke.
‘Not Louise,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You can’t be thinking Louise did away with Irwin? Kevin, I could just about accept, but Louise . . . there’s no way. She wouldn’t hurt a fly!’
‘We wouldn’t be saying it lightly,’ said Samson. ‘Which is why we’re here. We need to find proof before we go making accusations.’
‘But surely if you’ve ruled out Kevin because of the timing, then the same applies to Louise?’ asked Nathan. ‘How could she possibly have got over to Malham and back after she dropped Ali off?’
‘Because we’ve been making an assumption, which any detective worth their salt should know is a sure-fire way to come a cropper. We assumed the murderer was coming from Malham Cove when they drove past me, which meant they’d gone back to get the body. We didn’t consider that they might have been coming from a different destination on that road, like the Dinsdale farm. I think Louise simply turned the car around after she dropped Kevin off and then headed straight for the kiln.’
‘So if she didn’t go back to Malham, what about the body—?’ Gareth broke off and went pale as he followed the logical progression of his question.
Samson gave a grim nod. ‘Louise had no need to go back to Malham because Irwin was already in the boot.’
‘You mean she was cold-blooded enough to return to the reception with him in there?’ asked Nathan incredulously, while Nina blanched.
‘Yes. Like the rest of us, however, Kevin presumed Irwin’s killer made two trips out to Malham. And in doing so, he revealed himself to be innocent.’
‘But what’s tha reasoning?’ muttered Ida, looking sceptical. ‘Why would the lass have done such a thing? To save the farm?’
Delilah grimaced. ‘We’ve reason to believe she knew Ross Irwin from years ago—’
‘But that can’t be true,’ said Nina, shaking her head. ‘Kevin and Louise were in our restaurant on the Friday evening, the same time Irwin was in there, and she didn’t speak to him all night.’
‘How did she seem?’
‘A bit grumpy, if truth be told. Definitely tense about something. But then I wasn’t paying much attention as Irwin . . .’ Nina blushed. Shuddered. ‘Irwin was being super attentive to me, which I thought was nice at the time. Now that I know what he did to Elaine, it gives me the creeps.’
‘Attentive how, exactly?’
‘Making compliments, suggesting I go to him for help when it comes to applications for uni, things like that.’
Samson and Delilah shared a glance.
‘And Louise could hear all this?’ asked Samson.
Nina nodded. ‘The Dinsdales were on the next table.’
‘Christ. If we’re right about what we think happened in the past . . .’ Samson was looking at Delilah now.
‘Then Louise was hiding the fact she knew Irwin while having to listen to him probably trying the same thing on with a teenager a decade later.’
‘Not to mention watching him leave the reception with Elaine the next day.’
‘Tha thinks Irwin abused Louise in some way?’ murmured Ida, catching on faster than the others, who were looking puzzled by the exchange.
‘It’s highly possible,’ said Samson. ‘We’ve just discovered that she knew him when she was a fresher at university. And that she left after some unspecified incident which Sarah Mitchell seems to think might have been an assault, or worse.’
Silence greeted the statement, all of them putting the dreadful pieces together.
‘Oh no,’ groaned Ida. ‘The poor lass . . .’
Delilah nodded. ‘And then Irwin shows up here, demanding money from her husband, and she’s catapulted back into the trauma. God knows what she must have been going through. Or how it manifested itself.’
‘And we’re going to provide evidence to arrest her?’ Nina’s honest question brought the room to silence.
‘It’s what we do,’ said Samson gently. ‘Even when it doesn’t seem fair. Because if we don’t bring the truth to light, someone else will suffer.’
Nina stared at the floor, biting her lip, then nodded and reached for her laptop. ‘Right. So what can we do to help?’
DS Benson didn’t know what was going on when the door to the interview room flung open and Sergeant Clayton strode in, brandishing a sheaf of papers, his constable right behind him, face flushed.
‘We need a signature,’ the sergeant declared, not even giving the detective time to stop the interview tape as he thrust the papers and a pen on the desk in front of Kevin Dinsdale.
A bemused Kevin Dinsdale, who was looking from Benson to the sergeant and back again, even as he reached for the pen, doing as he was told.
‘What the—?’ Benson started to rise, but a solid palm was thrust on his shoulder, the sergeant pushing him back down into his seat.
‘This won’t take a moment, DS Benson, and then we’ll be out of your hair,’ he said. But his focus wasn’t on the detective. It was fixed firmly on the accused man, who was signing his name, in triplicate, in the spaces marked by post-it notes.
‘You’re right-handed,’ Constable Bradley finally spoke, a tremor of excitement in his words.
And DS Benson felt a swell of panic mixed with terror, a sensation he’d felt once before when he realised he’d been complicit in apprehending Samson O’Brien on false charges. A sensation many others in officialdom had experienced when having dealings with the folk of Bruncliffe. For there was something about the question. Something about right-handedness. He had a flashback to the forensic report which he’d had no time to read in depth. But in that brief perusal before the shout went up that a suspect had confessed, there had been something . . .
Unable to call it to mind, DS Benson watched on helplessly as Kevin Dinsdale nodded.
‘Yeah, I am. What of it?’
Sergeant Clayton leaned onto the desk. ‘You can stop the act, Kevin. We know it wasn’t you.’
‘I don’t know what you mean—’
‘Ross Irwin’s killer was left-handed.’ Danny Bradley’s voice brought silence to the room. Swiftly followed by pandemonium.
The duty solicitor started kicking off, Benson got to his feet and began demanding answers from the Bruncliffe coppers, Sergeant Clayton was arguing back, something about city-based incompetence and rubbish cake, and Danny Bradley was trying to make the peace between the two. All the while, Kevin Dinsdale kept protesting his guilt.
But it was a guilt no one in the room believed in any longer.
Herriot had died and gone to heaven. So what if the weather wasn’t exactly picnic-perfect? So what if he had a bit of business to conduct on the way? Lucy Metcalfe was sitting beside him in his van, there was a hamper in the back which smelled a lot better than most of the occupants he normally had in the rear, and Lucy had just told him that she’d cleared the whole afternoon so if he had time, she was free to spend it with him.
They’d opted to go to Skelbeck Foss at the far end of Bruncliffe, a spectacular waterfall which cascaded over a series of limestone ledges and was surrounded by gorgeous scenery. It was the perfect place to sit and while away an hour or two, even on a cloudy day. And it didn’t have the negative connotations of the much more rugged and dramatic Thursgill Force, just up the hill behind Lucy’s converted barn, a place which had featured so violently in events back in November. Events which had nearly taken Lucy from them all and which had made Herriot realise just how much she meant to him.
Eight months on, he was finally doing something about those feelings. He’d never been called a quick mover but right now he didn’t care if he was mocked for his dallying when it came to romance. He was on his first date with Lucy, and hopefully it would be the first of many.
Before that, though, he had something to do.
‘So you’re sure you don’t mind if we drop in at the Dinsdales’ place on our way past?’ he asked again as he drove down Hillside Lane from Lucy’s towards town. ‘It’s just I promised Kevin I’d have a look at that tup of his and the last thing Louise needs is the worry of a sick animal on top of everything else.’
Lucy nodded. ‘I think it would be a very caring thing to do. Poor Louise must be going out of her mind with stress.’
‘To say the least,’ murmured Herriot, indicating for the turn to the Dinsdale farm.
They pulled up in the farmyard, and got out into a silence that felt devoid of life.
They started with the wedding videos. The entire team on either laptops, computers or mobiles, combing through footage to find something to prove Louise Dinsdale had been absent long enough from the reception to commit the crime they were about to accuse her of. It took them less than half an hour to find what they were looking for.
‘I think I’ve got it!’ Delilah announced, turning her screen around so everyone could see, Nathan and Nina on the couch, Samson next to her and Ida and Gareth on the other side of the desk.
They were looking at a frozen shot of the reception, taken about eleven thirty. The camera was focused on a group of lads from the rugby club, larking around on the dance floor, but in the background were two women, Louise Dinsdale and Sarah. Propped between them was Kevin as they helped him out of the room. The faces of the women were hidden from view but Delilah wasn’t bothered about their expressions. Her finger was pointing at Louise’s feet.
‘Her shoes!’ she declared.
‘Oh my God,’ muttered Nina, staring at the light-blue slingbacks peeking out beneath the flares of Louise’s elegant green velvet trouser suit. ‘How did I not see that?’
Samson looked at the pair of them and then at Nathan. ‘What am I missing?’
His nephew shrugged. ‘Search me.’
Ida too was looking perplexed. But Gareth was nodding.
‘They’re a different colour. In fact, a completely different style,’ said the gamekeeper.
Samson looked again while Nina was frantically scrolling through footage.
‘Here, see!’ she said, twisting her laptop so it was next to Delilah’s screen. ‘This is from earlier on in the evening.’
She clicked play and there was Louise, sitting with one leg crossed over the other, displaying a pair of dark green satin shoes with a buckle strap and a block heel which perfectly matched her outfit. Samson looked at Delilah’s footage and sure enough, those shoes had become blue slingbacks.
‘Is this enough?’ he asked. ‘That she changed her shoes? Maybe her feet got tired?’
Delilah was shaking her head. ‘Louise is super stylish. Even if her feet were killing her, she wouldn’t have put on a pair of blue shoes with green trousers.’
‘Not unless she had no other choice,’ said Nina.
‘Seriously?’ Samson looked at Nina and Delilah. ‘You’re willing to accuse a woman of murder simply because her shoes don’t match her outfit?’
Delilah shrugged. ‘We’ve got to start somewhere.’
‘How about,’ said Ida, arms folded across her chest, ‘tha starts with the horse’s mouth? Head up to the Dinsdales’ and just ask her. Happen as if tha’s right about Irwin and what he did, that lass has been to hell and back, and even more so since yesterday with Kevin taking the hit for her. She might appreciate a bit of straight talking.’
‘Sounds like sensible advice,’ said Gareth.
Delilah was already reaching for the keys to the Mini.
‘Hello?’ Herriot called out as he walked with Lucy towards the Dinsdales’ farmhouse.
The curtains were closed on the front rooms, upstairs and down, and as they walked around to the side, the porch door had been left wide open, swinging gently on the breeze which was gusting up the dale.
Something wasn’t right.
A sound from one of the barns at the back made them both turn. Another sound. Something almost feral.
‘Louise?’ called Herriot, changing direction now and heading around the rear of the house, Lucy behind him. Into another yard, two barns built off it. In the closest one a tractor had been left dismantled, bits strewn all over the ground. Bits which had been there a while judging by the wisps of straw covering some of them.
Herriot started walking towards it but a sharp keen of grief sliced the silence and made him pause. For this wasn’t a good noise. It was a noise which made his spine rigid with fear.
‘The other barn,’ said Lucy, hurrying across the yard to the furthest one, face concerned.
‘Wait for me,’ he said, turning after her, a sixth sense he didn’t even know he had screaming at him. Telling him there was danger. But Lucy had already reached the huge doors and entered the dark interior.
‘Lucy! Wait!’
The blast of the shotgun cut through the morning air and sent a cluster of pheasants in the field beyond clattering and squawking into the sky.