DCI Gorman didn’t recognise the waterfall, but then he didn’t claim to be much of a pioneer either. He liked the feel of concrete under his feet. He e-mailed a copy of the photograph to the nearest office of the Rivers Agency, but they didn’t recognise it either. Perhaps because the water-course was too minor to be on their radar; perhaps because it was on private land.
‘Aren’t most watercourses on private land?’
‘Apparently, some land is more private than others.’
‘So what are we looking for?’ asked Hazel, peering at the picture again. ‘A country estate, something like that?’
Gorman shrugged. ‘Maybe. Or a bit of farmland that’s too rough to be cultivated. I don’t know how you’d set about finding it without something more to go on.’
Hazel looked at him askance. ‘How I’d set about finding it?’
The DCI scowled. ‘That was a rhetorical you. The Queen says one – where I come from we say you. You, second person singular, Constable Hazel Best, are not to go looking for it on your own. If you see a picture postcard of it in the newsagent’s window, you will tell me and I will organise a reconnaissance.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Hazel said obediently.
Gorman never quite trusted her when she was agreeing with him.
Good instincts were part of what had earned him a measure of professional success. As soon as she came off duty, Hazel headed round to the council offices.
Norbold was not a spa town. It was not a seaside resort. Neither John Constable nor William Wordsworth had felt moved to immortalise its charms, and almost none of the tourists who flocked to Stratford made the comparatively short trip from there to Norbold. It had never, therefore, had much use for a Tourist Information Office. But hope springs eternal, and the town council had prepared for the possibility that one day an American president would find he had forebears in the district, or a Norbold lad would make it big in Hollywood, or – more likely – some major disaster would attract the world’s press, by setting up a desk in the Town Hall foyer with scenic views and Things to Do in Norbold pamphlets. These were, necessarily, brief pamphlets and a scant half-dozen photographs.
Nevertheless, Hazel studied them carefully. The old corn mill in Miller’s Lane, its dereliction rendered almost picturesque by the setting sun, might once have been water-powered: could there still be a water-course in the trees behind it? Might the stream in her photograph be feeding the local canal? The trees overhanging the waterfall were native broadleaves rather than commercial conifers, so it probably wasn’t forestry land; but there were several large estates in the area, any of which might have a wild and inaccessible corner such as this tucked away from common view.
Nothing she saw was of any help, so Hazel moved over to the desk to enlist the services of the receptionist. It was a short conversation. The receptionist was unfamiliar with the scene Hazel showed her, and wasn’t sure who might do better. ‘Have you tried the Rivers Agency?’
Hazel nodded. ‘They said it wasn’t one of theirs.’
‘Oh dear.’ She was a middle-aged woman who took her job seriously and didn’t like not being able to answer a question about Norbold’s scenic attractions. There weren’t so many of them as to require a lifetime’s study. But she had no information to contribute. ‘It’s quite a pretty scene, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is.’ Hazel couldn’t see how much further that got them.
‘Would it be worth talking to someone at the Art Club? I can give you a number for their secretary.’
Hazel was impressed. ‘Good idea. Yes, please – I’ll try them.’
‘And how about the Ornithological Society? They’ll go anywhere in search of a Lesser Spotted Godwit.’
Hazel scribbled down names and numbers, and thanked the receptionist. ‘You’ve done better than me and my DCI put together.’ The woman simpered with pleasure.
The chairman of the Art Club called her husband in from the garden and they pored over the photograph together, but ultimately without success. ‘I thought for a minute …’ murmured the chairman; ‘but no. I’m sorry, Constable Best, I don’t think I’ve ever been there, and I can’t remember seeing a painting of it. I suppose it is a local scene, is it?’
Hazel shrugged helplessly. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. It may even be a hoax – not local, and nothing to do with the case we’re investigating.’ But actually she didn’t believe that. The photograph accompanying it made this one significant. Whoever had beaten Ash had wanted her to know about this place, and thought she was capable of finding it. Otherwise, why bother?
The secretary of the birdwatchers’ association was distracted by a blur in one corner of the photograph that might possibly have been a tree creeper. The waterfall only interested him in so far as it might attract dippers. He didn’t think he’d ever seen it himself – though he admitted he was better at remembering what he’d seen than where he’d seen them. ‘You don’t take in much of the scenery if you’re looking for a Dartford warbler.’
Seeing her out, however, he had one helpful suggestion. ‘Have you tried the Woodsmen?’
Hazel shook her head. ‘Who are they?’
‘Pretty much what the name says – tree huggers. They camp out and plant saplings and carve walking sticks out of fallen branches – that kind of thing. Somebody told me they give the trees names and sing to them. All a bit New Age for me. I mean, I’m all in favour of trees – where are the birds going to nest without them? – but giving them names is just plain silly.’
‘Where would I find a Woodsman to talk to?’
The ornithologist shrugged negligently. ‘Beats me. I don’t know any personally.’
Hazel hung onto her patience. ‘All right. Then who was it told you about them?’
‘A fellow birdwatcher, of course,’ he said, as if she should have known. ‘Chap from the council. Works department. Name of …’
‘Benny,’ she said, arriving home in time to find the road crew filling in the last of the hole outside her door. ‘The very man I’m looking for.’
Benny Price didn’t know whether to be pleased or alarmed. ‘I am?’
‘I want to contact someone from the local branch – chapter, whatever – of the Woodsmen. A twitcher I asked thought you knew something about them.’
‘Not really,’ said Benny regretfully. ‘Not for a long time. I used to do a bit of bush-craft when I was young. You know, living off the land, taking nothing you can’t carry on your back, leaving nothing but footprints. There were half a dozen of us, all young lads from the town. It was a chap from the Woodsmen got us started – showed us how to make a fire, how to keep it safe, what plants we could eat, even how to trap and skin a rabbit.
‘We managed to catch a rabbit once.’ He smiled fondly, run over by the traffic in Memory Lane. ‘We looked at one another, and we looked at the rabbit; and we stroked the rabbit; and then we let the rabbit go, hiked back into town and bought fish and chips.’
Hazel chuckled. ‘Do you know if there are any Woodsmen around still?’
Benny thought about it. ‘I expect there are, but I don’t know any. The chap I’m talking about must have gone to the great Campfire in the Sky by now.’
‘You don’t remember his name?’ But Benny Price shook his head. ‘What about the other lads you mentioned?’
Benny rolled his eyes. ‘It’s twenty years ago! Some of them I haven’t seen since. Jacko Warren joined the Army – I never heard where he ended up. Miggsy went to London – did The Knowledge and bought himself a black cab. I saw Ginger in town a couple of years ago, doing the weekend shop. He’s married with five children. Five children,’ he repeated in tones of awe. ‘But if you’re wondering if I’d know how to contact any of them, I’m afraid the answer’s no.’
‘They probably couldn’t be much help anyway,’ said Hazel. ‘It’s not that I’m desperate to find a Woodsman per se, I’m just trying to identify a bit of woodland from a picture. You’re a tw …’ She reconsidered the frowned-on term just in time. “Bird-watcher, aren’t you? I don’t suppose you recognise the place.’ She showed him the photograph.
Benny Price shook his head regretfully. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Best. It doesn’t ring any bells.’
‘Maybe I should post it on Facebook and see if anyone can identify it.’
Benny looked shocked. ‘Don’t do that, Miss Best! You’ve no idea who’d contact you. There are some real weirdos on social media sites.’
Hazel tried not to smile. ‘So I’ve been told, Benny. So I’ve been told.’
She searched Gillian Mitchell’s files for any reference to flowers, wine or chocolates. There were many. The woman wrote for a living, using the same computer for the last six years: there probably wasn’t a word in the Oxford English Dictionary that she hadn’t employed time and again. Hazel sighed and resigned herself to checking them all in turn; but the longer it took, the more convinced she became that no unexpected presents had appeared on the murdered woman’s doorstep.
Which was reassuring. Perhaps what had looked like a connection between her stalker and the murders – and it had only ever been a tenuous one, considered but by no means accepted by a tired and worried DCI with no other leads to focus on – was nothing more than a coincidence. Everyone who’d ever been hit over the head with something hard could probably show a wound similar to Ash’s.
Saturday was sprawled on the sofa, reading last week’s Norbold News, amused by the reporter’s attempts to describe Trucker Watts in terms that were suitably respectful to a murder victim. Saturday had been loitering on the edge of Trucker’s gang when Hazel and Ash first met him. He hadn’t had much good to say of Trucker when he was alive, but dying at the hands of somebody even more unpleasant had vested his memory with a tint of rose.
‘You can say what you like about Trucker,’ he began.
Hazel waited, but nothing followed. ‘But?’ she prompted.
‘No, that was it,’ said Saturday. ‘You can say what you like about Trucker. The poor bastard can’t do anything about it any more.’
Hazel pushed the laptop in his direction. ‘OK, Hackmeister. You’re the one with the expensive skills. I’m going to have a shower – you winkle Gillian Mitchell’s killer out of her files. I want three viable leads by the time I’ve dried my hair.’
‘Only three?’ he asked sardonically.
In fact, opting for a long soak in the bath instead, she was hoping for at least five viable leads by the time she went downstairs again, wrapped in her dressing-gown and with her hair turbaned in a towel. ‘Well? Solved the mystery, have you?’
‘It was the monk what did it,’ said Saturday, deadpan.
‘The mediaeval monk?’ Hazel’s scepticism would have pickled gherkins. ‘Brother James, the mad monk, who’s been dead for seven hundred years, killed two people in Norbold in the last month and may have been leaving pressies on my doorstep?’
‘Ah, well,’ said Saturday complacently. ‘There are some unwarranted assumptions in there. As you probably noticed, these are notes rather than a finished article, so she doesn’t spell everything out. She’s just reminding herself of what she knows – bullet-points rather than details. But nowhere does she state that these are historic events. She uses the present tense throughout. She makes no reference to the mediaeval period, or any other timeframe. I think she was talking about current events.’
‘You’re serious?’ But Saturday had lied to her enough in the past that Hazel thought she could tell that he wasn’t lying now. She edged behind the sofa to look over his shoulder at the screen. ‘There really are mad monks still around?’ But there was a problem. ‘Even if there are, Norbold doesn’t have a monastery.’
‘And that’s another of those unwarranted assumptions,’ said Saturday breezily. ‘Nowhere does she say he’s a monk.’
‘She calls him Brother James. What are you suggesting – that they’re members of the same trades union?’
‘In fact,’ said Saturday, ‘she calls him Brother Jam. It’s not a typo – she wrote it that way three different times. It could be his name, it could be a nickname, it could be his initials, but it isn’t a mistake.’
Hazel reached down to scroll through the notes. It was the first time she’d read them properly. She’d dismissed the file as irrelevant when she’d first opened it and thought it was a baroque history piece. ‘No, it isn’t,’ she conceded. ‘All right, so if he isn’t a monk, who is he?’
‘I came up with four possible reasons for her to refer to him as Brother, some more likely than others. One, he really is a monk. Seems a shade unlikely, but there are such people and I bet they’re at least as likely to turn homicidal maniac as, for instance, bus drivers and dairy farmers.’
‘“If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, God’s blood, would not mine kill you!”’ Hazel murmured.
Saturday swivelled to look at her. ‘What?’
‘Sorry – a bit of half-remembered poetry welling up from the fountains of youth. I’m sure you’re right: if a dog-collar can’t always stop people going over to the dark side, I don’t suppose a cowl can either. On the other hand, if he really is a monk, he shouldn’t be too hard to find. There aren’t that many of them – and very few called Jam. Jam?’ She still didn’t quite believe it.
‘Jam,’ confirmed Saturday. He highlighted the text in all three places.
‘You thought of four reasons she might call him Brother. What were the others?’
‘He could be an evangelist rather than a monk. They call one another Brother and Sister, don’t they? The ones you see in films do, anyhow.’
‘I suppose it’s possible. So, come to that, is the trades unionist.’
Saturday nodded. ‘He was number three. Number four is a bit of a long shot …’
‘Those weren’t?’ marvelled Hazel.
The young man ignored her. ‘… But suppose she’s telling us exactly who he is? She calls him Brother Jam because he is, in fact …’
Hazel’s eyes flared wide. ‘Her brother? Gillian Mitchell was murdered by her brother? Her actual brother?’