Blood Lines Read online

  ‘The police came and everyone was questioned on the spot. Of course no one had seen any suspicious characters hanging about Feverel’s. No one ever has. Joe Peterlee has never been able to give a satisfactory account of his movements between six-twenty and six-fifty. Nor have Gary Wyatt and Grandma Peterlee.

  ‘The money was gone. There was no weapon. No prints, other than those of Tom, Heather, Carol Fox and Arlene were found in the house. The pathologist says Tom died between six-fifteen and seven-fifteen, a time which can be much narrowed down if Arlene is to be believed. Remember, she says he felt warm when she touched him at six-fifty.

  ‘I think she’s lying. I think she’s lying all along the line, she’s protecting someone, and that’s why I’m going to keep on talking to her until I find out who. Grandma or her boyfriend or her uncle Joe – or her mother.’

  Dora wrinkled up her nose. ‘Isn’t it a bit distasteful, Reg, getting a girl to betray her own mother? It’s like the KGB.’

  ‘And we know what happened to them,’ said Burden.

  Wexford smiled. ‘I may only be getting her to betray her step-aunt by marriage, or isn’t that allowed either?’

  Burden left them at about ten to ten. He was on foot, for he and Wexford lived less than a mile apart and walking was a preferable exercise to the kinds his wife suggested, riding a stationary bike or stomping up and down on a treadmill. His route home was to take him past the big new shopping mall, the York Crest Centre. He deplored the name and the place, all a far cry from what Kingsmarkham had been when first he came there.

  Then there was life in the town at night, people entering or emerging from pubs and restaurants, cinema visitors, walkers strolling, in those days before the ubiquitous car. Television, the effects of recession and the fear of street violence had all combined to keep the townsfolk indoors and the place was deserted. It was silent, empty but brightly lit, and therefore slightly uncanny.

  His footfalls made a faint hollow echo, he saw his solitary figure reflected in gleaming shop windows. Not a soul passed him as he entered York Street, not a single being waited on a corner or at the bus stop. He turned into the alley that ran along the side of the York Crest Centre, to cut a furlong or so off his journey. Does anyone know what a furlong is these days, thought old-fashioned nostalgic Burden.

  Into his silent speculation burst the raiders.

  It took him about thirty seconds to realise what this was. He had seen it on television but thought it confined to the north. A ram raid. That was what someone had named this kind of heist. The Land Rover first, turning on the paved court, reversing at the highest speed it could make into the huge glass double doors that shut off the centre by night. The noise of crashing glass was enormous, like a bomb.

  It vanished inside, followed by two cars, a Volvo and a Volvo Estate, rattling over the broken glass, the wreckage of the doors. He didn’t wait to see what happened. He had his cell-phone in his hand and switched on before the second car’s tail lights had disappeared. ‘No Service’ came up on its screen and ‘No Service’ when he shook it and pulled the aerial out. It had gone wrong. Never before had that happened but it had to happen tonight when he was in the right place at the right time.

  Burden raced down the alley to the phones on the post office wall, four of them under plastic hoods. The first he tried had been vandalised, the second worked. If he could get them there within five minutes, within ten even . . . He pounded back, remembered it would be advisable not to be heard, and crept the rest of the way. They were leaving, the Land Rover – stolen of course – with all its glass shattered, the two Volvos hard on its rear, and were gone God knew where by the time the Mid-Sussex Constabulary cars arrived.

  The purpose of the raid had been to remove as much electronic equipment as the thieves could shift in five minutes from Nixon’s in the Centre. It had been a tremendous haul and had probably taken twelve men to accomplish it.

  The phone on the post office wall was repaired and on the following day vandalised again along with all the others in the row. That was on a Monday, the date of Wexford’s second conversation with Arlene Heddon. He went along to the caravan on old Mrs Peterlee’s land in the late afternoon. Arlene sometimes had a cleaning job but she was always in during the afternoons. He tapped on the door and she called out to him to come in.

  The television was on and she was watching, lounging on the seat that ran the length of the opposite wall. She looked so relaxed, even somnolent, that Wexford thought she would switch off by means of the channel changer which lay on top of the partition that divided living/bedroom from kitchen, but she got up and pressed the switch. They faced each other, and this time she seemed anxious to talk. He began to take her through a series of new enquiries and all the old ones.

  He noticed, then, that what she said differed very slightly from what she had said the first time, if in minor details. Her mother had not thrown herself on the body but knelt down and cradled the dead man’s head in her arms. It was on one of the counters, not against the wall, that she had beaten her head.

  The dog had howled at the sight of its dead master. The first time she said she thought she had heard a noise upstairs when first she arrived. This time she denied it, and said all had been silent. She had not noticed if the money was there or not when she first arrived. Now she said the money was there with the camera on top of the notes. When she came back from making her phone call she had not gone back into the house but had waited outside for her mother to return. That was what she said the first time. Now she said she had gone briefly into the kitchen once more. The camera was there but the money gone.

  Wexford pointed out these discrepancies in a casual way. She made no comment.

  He asked, with apparent indifference, ‘Just as a matter of interest, how did you know your mother was out with the dog?’

  ‘The dog wasn’t there and she wasn’t.’

  ‘You were afraid to use the phone in the house in case your stepfather’s killer might still be there. You never considered the possibility that your mother might have been dead in some other part of the house? That Carol Fox might have taken the dog out on her own, as perhaps she sometimes did?’

  ‘I didn’t know Carol very well,’ said Arlene Heddon.

  It was hardly an answer. ‘But she was a close friend of your mother’s, an old friend, wasn’t she? You might say your mother offered her sanctuary when she left her husband. That’s the action of a close friend, isn’t it?’

  ‘I haven’t lived at home since I was seventeen. I don’t know all the friends my mother’s got. I didn’t know whether Carol took the dog out or what. Tom sometimes took him out and my mother did. I never heard of Carol going with my mother, but I wouldn’t. I wasn’t interested in Carol.’

  ‘Yet you waited for them both to come back from their walk, Miss Heddon.’

  ‘I waited for my mother,’ she said.

  Wexford left her, promising to come back for another talk on Thursday. Grandma was nowhere to be seen but as he approached his car hers swept in, bumping over the rough ground, lurching through a trough or two, skidding with a scream of brakes on the ice and, describing a swift half-circle round the railway carriage, juddering to a stop.

  Florrie Peterlee, getting on for seventy and looking eighty, drove like an eighteen-year-old madbrain at the wheel of his first jalopy.

  She gave the impression of clawing her way out. Her white hair was as long and straight as Arlene’s and she was always dressed in trailing black that sometimes had a curiously fashionable look. On a teenager it would have been trendy. She had a hooky nose and prominent chin, bright black eyes. But Wexford couldn’t offhand think of anyone he knew who so intensely seemed to enjoy herself as Mrs Peterlee Senior. Some of her pleasure derived from her indifference to what people thought of her, apart of course from her need to make them see her as a witch; some from her enduring good health and zest for life. So far she had shown no grief whatever at the death of her son.

  ‘You
’re too old for her,’ said the old witch.

  ‘Too old for what?’ said Wexford, refusing to be outfaced.

  ‘Ooh, hark at him! That’s a nice question to ask a senior citizen. Mind I don’t put a spell on you. Why don’t you leave her alone, poor lamb.’

  ‘She’s going to tell me who killed your son Tom.’

  ‘Get away. She don’t know. Maybe I did.’ She stared at him with bold defiance. ‘I all but killed his dad once. I said, you’ve knocked me about once too often, Arthur Peterlee, and I picked up the kitchen knife and come at him with it. I won’t say he never touched me again, human nature never worked that way, but he dropped dead with his heart soon after, poor old sod. I was so glad to see the back of him I danced on his grave. People say that, I know, it’s just a way of talking, but me, I really did it. Went up the cemetery with a half-bottle of gin and danced on the bugger’s grave.’

  Wexford could see her, hair flying, black draperies blowing, the bottle in one hand, her wrinkled face dabbled with gin, dancing under the rugged ilexes and the yew tree’s shade. He raised his eyebrows. Before she had more chances to shock him, or try to, he asked her if she had thought any more about telling him where she had been in that lost hour on the evening of her son’s death.

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  She said it, not as a figure of speech, but as a genuine undertaking she could astonish him. He had no doubt she could. She grinned, showing even white teeth, not dentures. The sudden thought came to him that if she had a good bath, put her copious hair up and dressed in something more appropriate for a rural matriarch, she might look rather wonderful. He wasn’t too worried about her alibi or lack of one, for he doubted if she had the strength to wield the ‘blunt instrument’ that had killed Tom Peterlee.

  He was very certain he knew what that instrument was and what had become of it. Arriving at Feverel’s within the hour, he had seen the wood splinters in Tom Peterlee’s head wound before the pathologist arrived. With a sinking heart he had taken in the implications of a basket full of logs just inside the back door and the big wood-burning enclosed stove in an embrasure of the wall facing the door into the house. They would never find the weapon. Without being able to prove it, he knew from the first that it had been an iron-hard log of oak, maybe a foot long and three or four inches in diameter, a log used to strike again and again, then pushed in among the blazing embers in that stove.

  He had even looked. The stove had been allowed to go out. Could you imagine anyone making up the fire at a time like that? A pale grey powdery dust glowed red still in one patch at the heart of it and as he watched, died. Later on, he had those ashes analysed. All the time he was up there the dog howled. Someone shut it up in a distant room but its long-drawn-out cries pursued him up the road on his way to see Joseph and Monica Peterlee.

  He remembered wondering, not relevantly, if she dressed like that to sit down at table, to watch television. At nine o’clock at night she was still in her crossover overall, her black wellies. Her husband was a bigger and heavier version of his brother, three or four years older, his hair iron-grey where Tom’s had been brown, his belly fat and slack where Tom’s had been flat. They alibi’d each other, uselessly, and Joe had no alibi for the relevant time. He had been out shooting rabbits, he said, produced his shotgun and shotgun licence.

  ‘They done Tom in for the money,’ he told Wexford sagely. He spoke as if, without his proffered information, such a solution would never have occurred to the police. ‘I told him. I said to him time and again I said, you don’t want to leave that laying about, not even for an hour, not even in daylight. What you got a safe for it you don’t use it? I said that, didn’t I, girl?’

  His wife confirmed that he had indeed said it. Over and over. Wexford had the impression she would have confirmed anything he said. For peace, for a quiet life. It was two days later that, interviewing them again, he asked about the relationship between Tom and Heather Peterlee.

  ‘They was a very happy couple,’ Joe said. ‘Never a cross word in all the ten years they was married.’

  Wexford, later, wondered what Dora would have said if he had made such a remark about relatives of his. Or Burden’s wife Jenny if he had. Something dry, surely. There would have been some quick intervention, some, ‘Oh, come on, how would you know?’ or, ‘You weren’t a fly on the wall.’ But Monica said nothing. She smiled nervously. Her husband looked at her and she stopped smiling.

  The ram raiders were expected to have another go the following Saturday night. Instead they came on Friday, late shopping night at Stowerton Brook Buyers’ Heaven, less than an hour after the shops closed. Another stolen Land Rover burst through the entrance doors, followed by a stolen Range Rover and a BMW. This time the haul was from Electronic World, but it was similar to that taken the previous time.

  The men in those three vehicles got away with an astonishing thirty-five thousand pounds’ worth of equipment.

  This time Burden had not been nearby, on his way home. No one had, since the Stowerton Brook industrial site where Buyers’ Heaven was lay totally deserted by night, emptier by far than Kingsmarkham town centre. The two guard dogs that kept watch over the neighbouring builders’ supplies yard had been destroyed a month before in the purge on dangerous breeds.

  Burden had been five miles away, talking to Carol Fox and her husband Raymond. To Burden, who never much noticed any woman’s appearance but his wife’s, she was simply rather above average good-looking. In her mid-thirties, ten years younger than Heather, she was brightly dressed and vivacious. It was Wexford who described her as one of that group or category that seems to have more natural colour than most women, with her pure red hair, glowing luminous skin, ivory and pink, and her eyes of gentian blue. He said nothing about the unnatural colour that decorated Mrs Fox’s lips, nails and eyelids to excess. Burden assessed her as ‘just a cockney with an awful voice’. Privately, he thought of her as common. She was loud and coarse, a strange friend for the quiet, reserved and mousy Heather.

  The husband she had returned to after a six months’ separation was thin and toothy with hag-ridden eyes, some sort of salesman. He seemed proud of her and exaggeratedly pleased to have her back. On that particular evening, the case not much more than a week old, he was anxious to assure Burden and anyone else who would listen that his and his wife’s parting had been no more than a ‘trial’, an experimental living-apart to refresh their relationship. They were together again now for good. Their separation hadn’t been a success but a source of misery to both of them.

  Carol said nothing. Asked by Burden to go over with him once more the events of October 10, she reaffirmed six-twenty as the time she and Heather had gone out. Yes, there had been a basket of logs just inside the back door. She hadn’t seen any money on the counter or the dresser. Tom had been drying dishes when she came in. He was alive and well when they left, putting the dishes away in the cupboard.

  ‘I should be so lucky,’ said Carol Fox with a not very affectionate glance at her husband.

  ‘Did you like Tom Peterlee, Mrs Fox?’

  Was it his imagination or had Raymond Fox’s expression changed minutely? It would be too much to say that he had winced. Burden repeated his question.

  ‘He was always pleasant,’ she said. ‘I never saw much of him.’

  The results came from the lab, disclosing that a piece of animal bone had been among the stove ashes. Burden had found out, that first evening, what the Peterlees had had for their evening meal: lamb chops, with potatoes and cabbage Tom had grown himself. The remains were put into the bin for the compost heap, never into the stove. Bones, cooked or otherwise, the Peterlees weren’t particular, were put on the back doorstep for the dog.

  What had become of the missing money? It wasn’t a large enough sum for the spending of it by any particular individual to be noticeable. They searched the house a second time, observing the empty safe, the absence of any jewellery, even of a modest kind, in Heather’s possession, the
absence of books, any kind of reading matter or any sign of the generally accepted contributions to gracious living.

  Heather Peterlee shut herself up in the house and when approached, said nothing. Questioned, she stared dumbly and remained dumb. Everyone explained her silence as due to her grief. Wexford, without much hope of anything coming of it, asked to remove the film from the camera that had weighed down the missing notes. She shrugged, muttered that he could have it, he was welcome, and turned her face to the wall. But when he came to look, he found no film in the camera.

  Burden said Wexford’s continued visits to Arlene Heddon were an obsession, the Chief Constable that they were a waste of time. Since his second visit she had given precisely the same answers to all the questions he asked – the same, that is, as on that second occasion. He wondered how she did it. Either it was the transparent truth or she had total recall. In that case, why did it differ from what she had said the first time he questioned her? Now all was perfect consistency.

  If she made a personal comment there might be something new, but she rarely did. Every time he referred to Tom Peterlee as her stepfather she corrected him by saying, ‘I called him Tom,’ and if he spoke of Joseph and Monica as her uncle and aunt she told him they weren’t her uncle and aunt. Carol Fox was her mother’s great friend, she had known her for years, but she, Arlene, knew Carol scarcely at all.

  ‘I never heard of Carol walking the dog with my mother but I wouldn’t. I wasn’t interested in Carol.’

  Sometimes Gary Wyatt was there. When Wexford came he always left. He always had a muttered excuse about having to see someone about something and being late already. One Monday – it was usually Mondays and Thursdays that Wexford went to the caravan – he asked Gary to wait a moment. Had he thought any more about giving details of where he was between six-forty-five and seven-thirty that evening? Gary hadn’t. He had been in the pub, the Red Rose at Edenwick.