It was Jeremy Higgins, a familiar face from only a few months before, as well as occasions prior to that. He smiled ruefully and said, ‘Me again, I’m afraid.’
‘What sort of time is this to pay me a visit?’ Her attempt at a lightly flirtatious tone was not a great success. Already she was asking herself how in the world he knew where to find her. And the effort required meant that this must be something serious; something professional to do with a crime. ‘Come in, anyway.’
Hepzie seemed to remember him – but then she did the same scrabbling at legs and frantic wagging with every man she met. She was a man’s spaniel at heart. Thea wondered whether she still missed Carl, who had known and loved her for the first few years of her life.
Higgins wasted no time. He stood in the hallway and said, ‘You met a man called Jack Handy yesterday. Is that right?’
She nodded, waiting with increasing foreboding.
‘What time would that have been?’
‘Afternoon. He gave me a lift because it was raining. We got back here around half past four.’
‘Did you ask him in?’
‘No, I did not.’
‘Did he talk to you?’
‘Yes, a bit.’ She was beginning to feel defensive of the farmer, for no good reason other than he had been cheery with her, and went out of his way to drive her home. If Higgins was thinking of him as a murderer, she wanted to show him the error of his thoughts as soon as she could, even if she’d entertained the same possibility herself not long before.
‘What about?’
‘Something to do with a field he’s trying to sell and how people are making objections. Listen, Jeremy – he was a perfectly nice and polite man. What’s all this about?’
‘You know I can’t tell you. Even if you and I do have a history, you still have to answer like an ordinary witness. Okay?’
‘A history? Is that what you’d call it?’ She and Higgins had never entertained a moment of mutual romance, as far as she was aware. She had been the lover of his superior, Phil Hollis. She had cried on him a time or two. He had rescued her from awkward situations. History was a fair word for all that, she supposed.
‘He says he was with you for half an hour or more, from four to half past.’
‘He’s right. You have to tell me why it matters.’
‘We’re trying to establish people’s movements between two and five yesterday.’
‘Because somebody died then? The man in the quarry? Who else can it be? I was there beside the quarry at about half past three. I didn’t see anything unusual.’
‘Which side of it?’
‘Um, the west, I suppose. The little lane joining Itlay to the road the map calls Welsh Way. There’s a viewing place. I stood there and looked down.’
‘He wasn’t far from there.’ The detective inspector rubbed his cheek and stared into the middle distance for a moment. ‘Along the northern side, actually.’
Thea tried to visualise it. ‘Off the Welsh Way, you mean?’
He nodded. ‘There are trees alongside it, and a steep drop.’
‘And you don’t think he just fell, of his own accord?’ There was an inevitability to his answer that she found depressing. She realised how much she had wanted this death to be a simple accident.
‘There’s plain evidence that he didn’t.’
‘But if you didn’t find him until today, how can you be sure of the time of death?’
‘We can’t. But there are indications …’ He stopped. ‘I’m telling you far too much.’
‘Okay. Sorry. But it sounds as if I was around at the crucial time. So were lots of people. The protesters, for a start.’
‘Which protesters?’
‘A couple of young women. And then another one – the dead man’s fiancée, actually.’
He closed his eyes and rubbed the flesh under his chin. It was developing into quite a dewlap, she noted. ‘How can you possibly know that? How long have you been here?’
‘A day and a bit. I just happened across them and heard them talking. I saw a few more of them today. People tell me things,’ she finished simply. ‘It’s not my fault.’
‘Nobody ever thinks it’s your fault,’ he said tiredly. ‘You’re like Typhoid Mary. It wasn’t her fault, either.’
Her heart lurched. ‘Don’t say that! That’s a terrible thing to say. It never has anything to do with me – as me. You know what I mean. Besides, you can’t generalise. They’ve all been so different. Until now I thought this one was an accident, anyway.’
He shook his head. ‘So did we, for about twenty minutes. But then we had a closer look at his injuries and … well, let’s just say the quarry was nothing more than a place of disposal.’
Thea frowned. ‘He was dead before he got into it?’
‘Looks that way. Signs of a scuffle, as well. Blood splashes. Nothing very subtle about it.’
She sighed. ‘I suppose I’m not really surprised. Strong young men don’t just fall into quarries on a calm Saturday afternoon, do they?’
‘Why do you call him strong? Did you meet him as well?’
She put her hands up. ‘No, no. But he sounds very capable and outdoorsy. Doing something with badgers. He can’t have been anything else but strong.’
‘He weighed ten and a half stone, and was five feet nine. Well nourished, apparently. Not exactly a bodybuilder, but capable of putting up a fight, I’d say.’
‘How did you establish the time of death?’ She was pressing him, hoping he hadn’t noticed that he was revealing a lot more information than he was supposed to.
‘He was in the Bathurst Arms in North Cerney until two o’clock. So it must have been after that. And he didn’t show up for a date with his girlfriend at five, so we assume he was incapacitated by then, if not dead. She was expecting him and he never showed at the time agreed.’
‘You’ve spoken to her?’
‘She spoke to us. Making a fuss, demanding to see the body. The name got out much too soon.’ He rubbed his neck again.
‘They listen in to police radio. They’ve got an app.’
‘Names aren’t sent over insecure radio frequencies, for that very reason. I think they must have been watching through binoculars from the other side of the quarry. The victim was wearing a distinctive cagoule type thing. I imagine they recognised it and ran with it. They operate like MI5, you know. There’s a whole big network of them – more so since the badger thing. You can’t hope to keep track of them. It’s terrorism,’ he finished darkly. ‘They run rings round us.’
‘And they’re all quite respectable citizens most of the time. With jobs and houses and cars and money. Tricky for you.’ Looking at him, Thea wasn’t at all sure where her sympathies lay. The police were handicapped by so many rules and regulations, so vulnerable to accusations of bias and heavy-handedness. No wonder they spent so much time staring at computer screens, trying to catch villains that way. It was far less likely to lead to trouble.
‘Yeah. Anyway, there’s a problem with this chap’s identity. Or there would have been, if the girlfriend hadn’t barged in and told us who he was. Nothing on him to give a clue as to who he might be.’
‘Fiancée. She’s his fiancée,’ Thea corrected. ‘Nella something.’
‘Fenella, actually. Fenella Davidson, she’s called. And he’s Daniel Compton. She says his parents are working in Dubai. Still married, apparently, with a younger brother who’s at school there. Haven’t traced them so far.’
As if poked in the back, Jeremy suddenly stiffened, lifting his chin. ‘Hey! I’m not meant to be telling you all this, damn it. You didn’t hear it from me, right? All I want from you is confirmation that you can account for Mr Handy’s movements, for at least part of the afternoon.’
‘Because somebody told you he was the most likely person to bash Danny over the head and chuck him into the quarry? All I can say is, he didn’t look like someone who’d just done a murder. He was angry, in a general sort of way, but also rather nice.’ She thought about the man, and what she had just said. ‘Although he was very cheerful at first. As if something pleasing had just happened. Maybe it was relief to be rid of a pest.’ She laughed. ‘Ignore that. It’s not evidence, is it?’
‘It’s helpful. Anything that adds detail to the picture comes in useful. Well, that’s it for now. How long are you here?’
‘Two weeks. How did you find me, by the way?’
He gave her a patient look. ‘Jack Handy told us, of course. We questioned him two hours ago.’
‘That was quick.’ She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I suppose you’ve been interviewing people all afternoon.’ There was something unsavoury about the whole idea of a hasty police investigation with the intrusive questions and horrible suspicions.
‘Sooner the better,’ he nodded. ‘I expect I’ll be seeing you again.’
And he left. She hadn’t even asked him to sit down, she realised. They’d been standing in the hallway for fifteen minutes and Higgins hadn’t made a single note of what she’d told him.
The regular encounters she’d had with the police over the past three years still left her hazy as to the details of how they went about a murder investigation. The body would not have been properly examined by a pathologist yet – that much she was sure of. So they had no conclusive evidence as to cause of death … except it did sound as if the fatal injury was of such a nature as could not possibly have been inflicted by a fall down a steep slope lined with trees, to land on sharp-cornered rocks at the bottom. She tried to imagine the various likely scenarios – the most credible that there was a large hole in his head, caused by his killer, who hoped it would look like damage from the fall. Or perhaps he had been stabbed or shot, with the killer making no attempt to conceal how the deed was done. So, as Higgins had already indicated, the quarry was more or less incidental. Somewhere to hide the body, or a final vicious shove for good measure, sending him over the edge.
She recalled DI Higgins promising that he would see her again soon. With a sigh, she braced herself for further involvement in the violence and mayhem that never failed to accompany a murder.