He’d been married to the same woman for eighteen years. They had the politically required two children, a boy and a girl, and when not away at school—which, of course, they were at the moment—they lived with their mother just outside Salisbury in the hamlet of Ford. The family farm—
“Farm?” Barbara interrupted. “Harvie’s a farmer? I thought you said he’d been a banker?”
The farm was his wife’s inheritance from her parents. The Harvies lived in the house, but the land was worked by a tenant. Why? Mrs. Howe wanted to know. Her nose quivered. Was the farm important?
Barbara didn’t have a conclusive answer to that question even when she saw the farm some forty-five minutes later. It sat at the very edge of Ford and when Barbara lurched to a stop in the farm’s trapezoidal-shaped courtyard, the only creatures who came out to greet her Mini were six extremely well-fed white geese. Their clamorous honking raised enough ruckus to alert anyone who might have been in the immediate vicinity. When no one came out of the steel-walled barn with pitchfork at the ready or out of the imposing brick and tile house with rolling pin rampant, Barbara concluded that she had the farmyard, if not its surrounding fields and pastures, to herself.
From her car, with the geese still furiously honking at a menacing Doberman volume, Barbara made her bow to scoping out the scene. The farmyard comprised the house, the barn, an old stone linhay, and an even older dovecote constructed of bricks. This last caught her attention. It was cylindrical in shape, topped with a slate roof and a glassless lantern cupola that gave birds access to the interior of the building. One side of it was overgrown with ivy. Gaps in the roof marked spots where tiles had either been removed or broken off. Its deeply recessed door was splintered and grey with age, crusty with lichen and looking as if no one had opened it within the last twenty years.
But something about it dragged at her memory. She catalogued the details in an attempt to decide what that something was: the slate roof, the lantern cupola, the heavy growth of ivy, the battered door…Something Sergeant Stanley had said, the pathologist had said, Robin Payne had said, Lynley had said…
It was no good. She couldn’t remember. But Barbara was troubled enough by the sight of the dovecote to ease the Mini’s door open into the beaks of the angry geese.
Their honking rose to a frenzied pitch. They were better than watchdogs. Barbara opened her glove box and rooted through its contents to see if she had something edible that might occupy them while she had a look round. She came up with a half bag of salt and vinegar crisps which she herself briefly regretted not having found the previous night when she’d been caught in traffic without a restaurant in sight. She sampled them. Slightly stale, but what the hell. She thrust her arm out of the open window and scattered the crisps on the ground, as a libation to the avian gods. The geese tucked in at once. The problem was solved, at least temporarily.
Barbara tipped her hat to formality by ringing the doorbell at the house. She did the same by calling a cheerful “Hullo?” into the barn. She walked the length of the yard, sauntering at last to the dovecote as if a perusal of it were the natural outcome of her wanderings.
The doorknob rattled loosely in the wood of the door. It was gritty with rust. It didn’t turn, but when Barbara pushed upon the wood with her shoulder, the door creaked open some seven inches before its movement was thwarted by its own rain-swollen condition and an uneven patch in the old stone floor. A sudden flutter of wings told Barbara that the dovecote was at least partially in use. She squeezed herself inside as the last of the birds escaped through the lantern cupola.
Light, thick with rising dust motes, filtered down from that cupola and from the gaps in the roof. It illuminated tier upon tier of nesting boxes for the birds, a stone floor lumpy with pungent guano, and in this floor’s centre a ladder with three fractured rungs which had once been used to collect eggs in the days when pigeons and doves were themselves raised as poultry.
Barbara did her best to dodge all bird droppings that were still shimmering with their youth. She approached the ladder. She saw that although it was fixed at its top to an upright pole by means of an extended rung, it wasn’t intended to be stationary. Rather, it had been designed to move round the dovecote, giving the potential egg-gatherer easy access to all of the nesting boxes that lined the circumference of the building from a height of about two feet from the floor to the roofline some ten feet above.
The ladder, Barbara found, was still mobile despite its age and condition. When she pushed upon it, it creaked, hesitated, then began to move. It followed the curve of the brick walls of the dovecote in a movement achieved by means of the upright pole. Fitted to a primitive gear-and-sprocket device in the lantern cupola, the pole revolved and thus rotated the ladder.
Barbara looked from the ladder to the pole. Then from the pole to the nesting boxes. Where some of them had collapsed over time and had gone unreplaced, she could see the unfinished brick walls of the dovecote behind them. They were rough-looking, those walls, and where they didn’t wear the speckling of bird droppings, in the subdued light, they looked redder than they had looked outside with the sun upon them. Odd, that red. Almost as if they weren’t bricks at all. Almost as if—
She remembered with a rush. It was bricks, Barbara thought. Bricks and a pole. She could hear Charlotte’s tape-recorded voice as Lynley had played it for her over the phone. There’s bricks and a maypole, the child had said.
Barbara felt the hair stir on the back of her neck as she looked from the bricks to the pole in the centre of the room. Holy hell, she thought, Jesus Christ, this is it. She made a move to go to the door, which is when she realised that the geese outside had gone completely silent. She strained to hear the slightest noise from them. Even a mild satiated honk would do. But there was nothing. They couldn’t still be eating those crisps, could they? she wondered. Because there hadn’t been enough to last this long.
This realisation suggested that someone had thrown them a handful of additional food once Barbara had gone into the dovecote. This in turn suggested that she wasn’t alone in the farmyard any longer. This in its own turn suggested that if she wasn’t alone and if whoever was out there was as intent upon silence as she, then whoever was out there was probably at this very moment creeping from barn to house to linhay. He held a pitchfork raised or perhaps a carving knife, his eyes a little wild, Anthony Perkins come to slice Janet Leigh to ribbons. Except that Janet Leigh had been in a shower, not in a dovecote. And she’d thought she was safe, whereas Barbara knew quite well that she wasn’t. Particularly not here, where the location, the structure, the bricks, and the pole all made a claim upon her powers of deduction at the very same time as they seemed to close in on her so that any moment with her bowels gone loose and her palms gone sweaty—
Bloody hell, Barbara thought. Get a grip, all right? Get a bleeding, flaming, sodding little grip.
She needed a crime scene team to go over this building in a search for anything that would place Charlotte here. The axle grease, a hair from her head, a fibre from her clothes, her fingerprints, a drop of her blood from the cut on her knee. That’s what was called for, and making the arrangements was going to take some decided finesse, both with Sergeant Stanley, who wasn’t likely to greet her directive with the joy of the newly converted, and with Mrs. Alistair Harvie, who was more than likely going to pick up the phone and place a call to her husband and put him on the alert.
She’d tackle Stanley first. No reason to hunt down Mrs. Harvie and get her knickers in a twist before concerted knicker-twisting was actually called for.
Outside, she discovered that the silence of the geese was due to the position of the car. She’d parked it in such a way that the sun reflecting off its rusting wings had created a patch of warmth on the earth, and upon this warmth the birds were basking contentedly among the remains of Barbara’s offering of salt and vinegar crisps.
She tiptoed to the Mini, alternating her eyes from the birds to the barn, from the barn to
the fields beyond it, from the fields to the house. Still, not a soul was in sight. A cow lowed in the distance and a plane flew overhead, but otherwise nothing and no one stirred.
She slipped into the car as noiselessly as possible. She said, “Sorry, old chaps,” to the geese and started the engine. The birds leapt to life, honking, hissing, and flapping their wings like a visitation from the Furies. They pursued Barbara’s car from the farmyard onto the lane. There, she thudded her foot onto the accelerator, shot through the hamlet of Ford, and headed in the direction of Amesford and Sergeant Stanley’s waiting embrace.
The sergeant was enthroned in the incidents room, receiving homage in the form of reports from two teams of constables who had been at work probing the countryside for the past thirty-two hours in their respective sections of Sergeant Stanley’s grid. The men from Section Number 13, the Devizes-to-Melksham patch, had nothing to report save an unexpected run-in with a caravan owner who apparently operated a thriving business in everything from ganja to bombers to blow. “Dealing from the car park in Melksham,” one of the constables said incredulously. “Right behind the high street, if you can believe. He’s in the nick now.” The team from Section Number 5, the Chippenham-to-Calne patch, had little more. But they were giving a detailed explanation of their every movement to Sergeant Stanley anyway. Barbara was about to wrest them from their chairs and drop kick them back out into the street to get on with things so that she could arrange for the crime scene team to be sent to the Harvie farm, when one of the constables from Section Number 14 burst through the swinging doors of the incidents room, announcing, “We’ve got it.”
His declaration mobilised everyone, including Barbara. She’d been practising patience by attempting to return a phone call from Robin Payne—which had apparently been placed from the call box inside a tea room in Marlborough, from what she was able to gather from the somewhat mentally deficient waitress who answered Barbara’s return call upon the twenty-fifth ring—and by directing a young female constable to do some digging through Alistair Harvie’s schooldays at Winchester. But now Sergeant Stanley’s gridwork looked as if it was about to pay off.
Stanley waved the remaining talkers in the room to silence. He’d been seated at a round table, arranging a collection of wooden toothpicks into the crisscrossing walls of a log cabin as he listened to the reports, but now he stood. He said, “Give, Frank.”
Frank said, “Right.” He didn’t bother with preliminaries. He just said with some excitement, “We’ve got him, Sarge. He’s in interview room number three.”
Barbara had a horrified vision of Alistair Harvie in leg irons without benefit of either caution or counsel. She said, “Got who?”
“The bugger that snatched the kid,” Frank replied with a dismissive look in her direction. “He’s a mechanic from Coate, works on tractors out of a garage near Spaniel’s Bridge. One mile exactly from the canal.”
The room erupted. Barbara was among those who stormed the ordnance survey map. Frank pointed to the location with an index finger whose nail had an arch of mustard imbedded beneath it.
“Right here.” The constable indicated a dogleg in the lane that led from the hamlet of Coate north towards the village of Bishop’s Canning. Along the canal, it was three and a half miles from Spaniel’s Bridge to the spot where Charlotte’s body had been dumped, one and a half miles to that same spot if one used lanes, tracks, and footpaths to reach it instead of relying upon the meandering motorway. “The sod’s claiming he doesn’t know a thing, but we’ve got the goods on him and he’s ready to be grilled.”
“Right.” Sergeant Stanley rubbed his hands together as if ready to do the honours. “Interview which did you say?”
“Three.” Frank added scornfully, “Bugger’s doing a real fine job of leaf-shaking, Sarge. You give him a good taste of muscle, and he’s going to crack. I swear.”
Sergeant Stanley settled his shoulders, preparing to take on the task. Barbara said, “What goods?” Her question went ignored. Stanley set off towards the door. Barbara felt her insides heat up. This wasn’t the way they were going to play it. She said sharply, “Hang on, Reg,” to Stanley, and when the sergeant did a deliberately slow pirouette in her direction, “Frank, you said you have the goods on this bloke…what’s his name anyway?”
“Short. Howard.”
“Fine. So what are the goods you’ve got on Howard Short?”
Frank looked to Sergeant Stanley for direction. Stanley gave a fractional lift of his chin as a response. The fact that Frank would need to get permission from Stanley infuriated Barbara, but she chose to ignore it and waited for his answer.
“School uniform,” the constable said. “This bloke Short, he had it in his garage. Planning to use it for a rag, he claimed. But the Bowen kid’s nametag is sewn into it, big as can be.”
Sergeant Stanley dispatched the crime scene team to Howard Short’s garage outside of Coate. He set off towards interview room number 3 with Barbara hard upon his heels. She caught him up and said, “I want another team in Ford. There’s a dovecote with—”
“A dovecote?” Stanley stopped in his tracks. “A bleeding dovecote, did you say?”
“We have an audiotape of the girl,” she told him, “made a day or two before she died. She’s talking about where she’s being held. The dovecote fits her description. I want a team of evidence officers out there. Now.”
Stanley leaned towards her. She realised for the first time that he was a truly unattractive man. At this proximity she could see the ingrown whiskers on his neck and the pockmarks round his mouth. He said, “You clear that with our guv. I’m not sending evidence officers round the countryside because you get an itch that you want scratched.”
“You’ll do what I tell you,” Barbara said. “And if you don’t—”
“What? You going to sick up on my shoes?”
She grasped his tie. “Your shoes’ll be fine,” she told him. “But I can’t promise much about the state of your balls. Now, are we clear on who’s going to do what?”
He blew a puff of stale tobacco breath in her face. “Cool down,” he said softly.
“Bugger you and enjoy it,” she replied. She released his tie with a shove against his chest. “Take some advice, Reg. This is a battle you can’t hope to win. Have some sense and know it before I have you pulled from the case.”
He lit a cigarette with his lady’s arse lighter. “I’ve an interview to conduct.” He spoke with the assurance of a man who’d had tenure on the force for too many years. “You want to sit in on it?” He walked down the corridor, saying, “Get us some coffee, room three,” to a clerk who was hurrying by with a clipboard in her hand.
Barbara told her anger to recede. She wanted to jump on Stanley’s pitted face, but there was no point to going eyeball to eyeball with him. It was clear that he was determined not to blink so long as his adversary was a woman. She’d have to use other means to neutralise the little bastard.
She followed him along the corridor and turned right to the interview room. There, Howard Short was seated on the edge of a plastic chair. A twentyish boy with the eyes of a frog, he was wearing the grease-splotched overalls of his profession and a baseball cap that had the word Braves scrolled across the front. He was clutching his stomach.
He spoke before either Stanley or Barbara had a chance to make a comment. He said, “This’s about that little girl, isn’t it? I know it is. I could tell when that bloke went through my rag bag and found it.”
“What?” Stanley asked. He straddled a chair and offered his packet of cigarettes to Short.
Howard shook his head. He clutched his stomach more tightly. “Ulcer.”
“What?”
“My stomach.”
“Bury it. What’d they find in the rag bag, Howard?”
The boy looked to Barbara as if seeking reassurance that someone was going to be on his side. She said, “What was in the bag, Mr. Short?”
“That,” he said. “What they f
ound. The uniform.” He rocked on his chair and moaned. “I don’t know nothing about this little kid. I just buy—”
“Why’d you snatch her?” Stanley said.
“I didn’t.”
“Where’d you keep her? In the garage?”
“I didn’t keep no one…no little girl…I saw it on the telly like everyone else. But I swear I never seen her. I never seen her once.”
“You liked stripping her though. You have a nice pop when you got her naked?”
“I never! I never did it!”
“You a virgin, then, Howard? Or a poufter? What is it? Don’t like the girls?”
“I like girls fine. I’m only saying—”
“Little ones? You like them little as well?”
“I didn’t snatch this kid.”
“But you know she was snatched? How’s that?”
“The news. The papers. Everybody knows. But I didn’t have nothing to do with it. I only got her uniform—”
“So you knew it was hers,” Stanley interrupted. “Right from the start. Is that it?”
“No!”
“Come out with it. It’ll go easier if you tell us the truth.”
“I’m trying. I’m telling you that the rag—”
“You mean the uniform. A little girl’s school uniform. A dead little girl’s uniform, Howard. You’re just a mile away from the canal, aren’t you?”
“I never did it,” Howard said. He rolled forward on his arms, increasing the pressure against his stomach. “Hurts bloody awful,” he grunted.
“Don’t play games with us,” Stanley said.
“Please, c’n I have some water for my pills?” Howard inched his arm away from his stomach, reached in his overalls, and pulled out a plastic pill box that was shaped like a spanner.
“Talk first, pills later,” Stanley said.
Barbara jerked open the door of the interview room to call for some water. The clerk from whom Stanley had ordered the coffee stood there with two plastic cups of it. Barbara smiled, said, “Thanks awfully,” with much sincerity, and handed her cup over to the mechanic.