This way led through the old gate, which Robin shoved forward roughly into a hillock of dried mud. The gate closed off a paddock in the middle of which a huge conical shape rose into the sky, looking in the darkness like a spaceship come to land. This structure was on the highest point of ground in the surrounding area, and field after field fell away from it into the black on three of its sides while on the fourth—perhaps fifty yards in the distance—the shadowy form of a crumbling building near the road they’d driven in on gave testimony to a former dwelling.
The night was perfectly silent. A chill was in the air. The heavy smell of damp earth and sheep dung hung over them like a cloud about to burst. Barbara grimaced and wished she’d at least thought to bring a jacket to ward off the cold. The smell of the place she would have to endure.
They tramped across a heavy webbing of grass to get to the structure. As they did, Barbara raised her torch to shine against its exterior. She saw the bricks. They soared up into the darkness and were capped with an ice cream mound of white metal roof. Angling upwards and downwards from the circular eave of that roof were the splintery remains of four long wooden arms the length of which had once been covered by what looked like shutters. Now there were ragged gaps in the arms where storms had torn the shutters from their housings through the years, but enough of the original shape remained to make it instantly clear what she was looking at when Barbara shot her torchlight against it.
“Windmill,” she said.
“For the wheat.” Robin swung his unlit lantern out in a gesture that encompassed not only the sloping fields to the south, east, and west of where they stood, but also the unlit dwelling that hulked to the north of them, back near the road. He said, “Time was, there were flour mills along the River Bedwyn, before water was diverted to make the canal. When that happened, places like this sprang up and took over. They went great guns till there was factory roller milling. Now they’re falling to ruin, if someone doesn’t take an interest in saving them. This one’s been vacant for a good ten years. The cottage as well. That’s it back by the road.”
“You know this place?”
“Oh, I do.” He chuckled. “And every other place within twenty miles of home where a randy little bloke of seventeen used to take his favourite bird on a summer’s night. It’s part of growing up in the country, Barbara. Everyone knows where to go if they want a bit of trouble. I’d expect the city is much the same, isn’t it?”
She would hardly know. Neither spooning in the mooning nor snogging in the fogging had ever been among her regular pursuits. But she said, “Quite. Right.”
Robin grinned that sort of grin that says mutual background information has just been exchanged and another notch has been carved in the staff of friendship. If he knew the truth about her dismal love life, Barbara thought, he’d be categorising her as the anomaly of the century, not looking at her as if they had a common history of grope-and-clutch that was differentiated only by the trysting locations. She hadn’t groped and clutched with anyone as a teenager and what she’d done as an adult was so far removed from her memory that she couldn’t even recall with whom the rapturous moment had been enacted. Someone called Michael? Martin? Mick? She couldn’t recollect. She could remember only a great deal of cheap wine, enough cigarette smoke to pollute a small town, deafening music that sounded like Jimi Hendrix on speed—which was probably normal Jimi Hendrix now she thought of it—and floor space shared by six other couples all engaged in rapturous moments of their own. Ah, to return to the joys of one’s twenties.
She followed Robin beneath a rickety gallery that ran round the exterior of the mill at first floor height. They passed two worn millstones that lay on the ground growing lichen and stopped at an arched wooden door. Robin started to open it—hand raised to press against the wood—but Barbara stopped him. She shone her torchlight against the door, examined its old panels from top to bottom, and then directed her light to a deadbolt at shoulder height. It was brass, new, and not at all worn by the weather. She felt her stomach tighten at the sight of this and what it possibly meant in contrast to the disrepaired mill itself and the cottage that had once housed its owners.
“That’s what I thought,” Robin said into her quiet speculation. “When I saw it, after tramping through water mills, sawmills, and every other windmill in the county, I had to take a fast pee or I thought I’d wet myself on the spot. There’s more inside.”
Barbara dug her hand into her shoulder bag and brought out a pair of gloves. She said, “Have you—?”
“These,” he replied, and pulled some crumpled work gloves from the pocket of his jacket. When their hands were protected, Barbara nodded towards the door and Robin shoved it open, the deadbolt currently not in use. They stepped inside.
The room was brick-floored and brick-walled. It was windowless. It was tomb-cold and damp, and it smelled of must, mouse droppings, old fruit.
Barbara shuddered in the frigid air. Robin said, “Want my jacket?”
She said no as he squatted on the floor and lit the lantern he’d brought. He cranked a knob on it until it was at its fullest illumination. With its glow breaking up the darkness, there was no need of the torch. Barbara switched this off and stood it on a stack of wooden crates at the far side of the little circular room. These crates were the source of the old fruit scent. Barbara prised up one of the slats. Dozens of someone’s long-forgotten apples lay wizened within.
Another, more subtle smell tinctured the air as well, and Barbara tried to identify and locate its source as Robin retreated to a narrow stairway that led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. He lowered himself to one of the steps and watched her for a moment before he said, “It’s waste.”
“What?”
“The other smell. It’s waste.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
He nodded towards the other side of the crates. “It looked to me like someone was meant to…” He shrugged and cleared his throat, perhaps displeased with his moment of failing objectivity. “There isn’t a toilet here, Barbara. There’s only that.”
That was a yellow plastic bucket. Barbara saw the sad little mound of faeces inside. It lay in a pool of liquid from which rose the acrid scent of urine.
Barbara blew out a breath on the words, “Right. All right.” And then she began to look round the floor.
She found the blood in the centre, on a brick that was slightly out of line with its brothers, and when she raised her head from the drops and looked at Robin, she saw that he’d found the blood on his earlier visit as well. She said, “What else?”
He said, “The crates. Have a look. The right side. Third from the bottom. You might want more light.”
She used the torch. She saw what he’d seen. A wisp of three fibres had become caught in a splinter at the edge of one of the crates. She bent to these, held the light closer to them. She couldn’t be sure because of the shadows beyond the crates, so she took a tissue from her shoulder bag and held it behind them for contrast. They were green, the same muddy green of Charlotte’s school uniform.
She felt her pulse increase, but she told herself not to count any chickens. After the dovecote in Ford and the garage in Coate, she wasn’t up for taking any hasty decisions. She looked back at Robin.
“On the tape,” she said. “She mentioned a maypole.”
“Follow me. Bring the torch.”
He climbed the stairway and pushed against the trapdoor in the ceiling. When Barbara followed him, he extended his hand and pulled her up behind him into the first floor chamber of the mill.
Barbara looked about, quelling a sneeze. Her eyes watered in reaction to the amount of dust in the chamber, and she rubbed them against the arm of her pullover. When Robin said, “I may have bollixed up some of the evidence round here,” she shot the torchbeam along the line of his arm and saw the footprints: small and large, child and adult. They overlapped each other and smeared each other. As a result, it was impossible to tell if one child or ten—or one a
dult or ten—had been in the room. He said, “I got myself in a lather when I saw the fibres and blood down below, and I charged up here straightaway. I didn’t think about the floor until it was too late. Sorry.”
Barbara noted that the floorboards were so warped that none of them had really taken a decent print. They displayed the shape of shoe soles, but not their markings. She said, “Don’t worry about it. They don’t look very useful.”
She directed her beam from the floor to the circular wall. To the left of the trapdoor, there was a single window that had been boarded up; beneath it lay a pile of old tools the likes of which Barbara had never seen before. Some were fashioned from metal and some from wood. These were the old dressing tools, Robin said. They were used on the millstones, which were a floor above them. That’s where the grinding had been done.
Dusty cogs lay near the tools, as did two wooden pulleys and a coil of rope. Above them, the brick wall was speckled white with lichen, and damp seemed to cling to the air. At the height of the ceiling not far above their heads, an enormous notched wheel was suspended on its side. Part of the mechanism for running the mill, this was the great spur wheel and it was centred between two matching gears. Running through a hole in this wheel, from the floor they stood upon up through the ceiling and presumably to the very top of the windmill, was a fat iron pillar that was knobby with rust.
“Charlotte’s maypole,” Barbara said as she shone her beam along its length.
“That’s what I thought,” Robin said. “It’s called the main shaft. Here. Look up.”
He took her arm and led her to stand directly beneath the great spur wheel. He closed his hand over hers and steadied the torchlight onto one of the wheel’s cogs. Barbara could see that the cog bore a coating of a gelatinous-looking substance that had the appearance of cold honey.
“Grease,” Robin said. After making sure she had seen it, he lowered her arm and directed the light onto the spot where the main shaft was attached to the floor. The same substance lacquered this joining point. As Robin squatted by it and indicated a section, Barbara saw what had made him come racing home to find her, what had made him ignore his mother’s meaningful dialogue about his future bride. This was more important than a future bride. There were fingerprints in the old axle grease at the main shaft’s base. And they belonged to a child.
“Bloody hell,” Barbara murmured.
Robin got to his feet. His eyes were anxiously fastened on her face.
She said, “I think you may have done it, Robin.” And she felt herself smiling for the first time all day. She said, “Sod it all. I think you’ve gone and bloody done it, you twit.”
Robin smiled but looked abashed by the compliment. Still, he said eagerly, “Have I? You think?”
“I definitely think.” She squeezed his arm and allowed herself a quick hoot of excitement. “Okay, London,” she exulted. “This is it.” Robin laughed at her exhilaration and she joined him in laughing and shot a fist into the air. Then she sobered and guided herself back to her role as head of the team. She said, “We’ll need the crime scene boys out here. Tonight.”
“Three times in one day? They’re not going to be happy with that, Barbara.”
“Bugger them. I’m happy as hell. What about you?”
“Bugger them,” Robin agreed.
They descended the stairs. Beneath them, Barbara saw a crumpled blue blanket. She inspected this. She drew it out from beneath the stairs, and as she pulled upon it, something rattled from it onto the floor. She said, “Hang on,” and bent to inspect the small object that lay in a trough of mortar between two bricks. It was a figurine, a tiny hedgehog, ridged on the back, with a pointed snout. It was one-sixth the size of her palm, perfect to be clutched in a child’s small hand.
Barbara picked it up and showed it to Robin. “We’ll need to see if the mother can ID this.”
She went back to the blanket. The coarse material was damp, she noted, damper than the room’s moisture might have produced. And the idea of damp, of moisture, of water, quelled her spirits and reminded her of the manner in which Charlotte Bowen had died. There was a piece to the puzzle that remained elusive.
She turned back to Robin. “Water.”
“What about it?”
“She was drowned. Is there water nearby?”
“The canal’s not far and the river’s—”
“She drowned in tap water, Robin. A bathtub. A basin. A toilet. We’re looking for tap water.” Barbara thought of what they’d seen so far. “What about the cottage? The one near the road. How ruined is it? Is there water there?”
“I expect it’s long been turned off.”
“But it had running water when someone lived there, didn’t it?”
“That was years ago.” He removed his work gloves and stowed them in the pocket of his jacket.
“So it could have been turned on—even for a short time—if someone found the main valve on the property.”
“Could have been. But it’s probably well water, this far from the village. Wouldn’t that show up different to water from the tap?”
It would, of course it would. And the fact of that flaming tap water in Charlotte Bowen’s body just complicated matters another degree. “There’s no tap in here, then?”
“In the mill?” He shook his head.
“Sod,” Barbara muttered. What had the kidnapper actually done? she wondered. If this was the site where Charlotte Bowen had been held, then surely she’d been held here alive. The faeces, the urine, the blood, and the fingerprints all gave mute testimony to that. And even if that putative evidence of her presence could be explained away through another means, even if the child had been dead when she was brought to this site, what would have been the point of risking being seen in the act of carrying her body into the mill to stow it for a few days? No, no. She was alive when she was here. Perhaps for days, perhaps only for hours. But she was alive. And if that was the case, then somewhere close by was a source of tap water that had been used to drown the girl.
Barbara said, “Go back to the village, Robin. There was a call box outside the pub, wasn’t there? Phone for the scene-of-crime team. Tell them to bring lights, torches, the works. I’ll wait here.”
He looked to the door, to the darkness beyond it. He said, “I’m not keen on that plan. I don’t like your being here by yourself. If there’s a killer round—”
“I can cope,” she said. “Go on. Make the call.”
“Come with me.”
“I need to secure the scene. That door was open. Anyone can come along and—”
“My point exactly. It’s not safe. And you’ve not come out here armed, have you?”
He knew she wasn’t armed. No detective was armed. He wasn’t armed himself. She said, “I’ll be fine. Whoever took Charlotte has Leo Luxford right now. And since Leo isn’t here, I think it’s safe to assume that Charlotte’s killer isn’t here either. So go make that phone call and come right back.”
He mulled this over. She was about to give him a helpful shove towards the door, when he said, “Right, then. Keep the lantern lit. Give me the torch. If you hear anyone—”
“I’ll get one of the dressing tools and pound him a good one. And I’ll keep him pounded till you get back.”
He grinned. He headed for the door. He paused for a moment before turning back to her. He said, “This sounds a bit out of line, I suppose, but—”
“What?” She was immediately wary. Having Sergeant Stanley out of line was enough. She didn’t need Robin Payne to join him. But the constable’s words—and the way he said them—surprised her.
“It’s just that…You’re not exactly like other women, are you?”
She’d known for some time that she wasn’t like other women. She’d also known that what she was like wasn’t particularly attractive to men. So she looked him over, wondering what he was getting at and not completely certain she wanted the point clarified.
“What I mean is, you’re rather s
pecial, aren’t you?”
Not as special as Celia popped into Barbara’s mind. But what dropped off her tongue was “Yeah. So are you.”
He watched her across the width of the windmill. She swallowed against a sudden lump of dread. She didn’t want to think of what she suddenly feared. She didn’t want to think of why she feared it. She said, “Go make that call. It’s getting late and we’ve hours of work ahead of us here.”
Robin said, “Right.” Still, he hesitated a long moment in the doorway before he turned away and headed back towards his car.
The cold swept in. With Robin’s departure it seemed to seep outward from the walls. Barbara wrapped her arms round herself and slapped her hands against her shoulders. She found that her breathing had become erratic and she stepped outside the door to take in the night air.
Forget it, she told herself. Maintain a grip. Get to the bottom of this case, tie up loose ends, and head back to London as soon as possible. But don’t—do not—engage in idle fantasy.
The point was water. Ordinary water. Tap water. In Charlotte Bowen’s lungs. That’s what she ought to be considering at the moment and that’s what she was determined to do.
Where had the girl been drowned? Bathtub, wash basin, kitchen sink, toilet. But which sink? What toilet? Which bathtub? Where? If every clue they’d uncovered was tied to London, then the tap water was somehow tied to London as well, if not geographically then personally. Whoever had used tap water to drown Charlotte was someone who was also associated with London where she had been taken. The principals were her mother—with her prison site in Wiltshire—and Alistair Harvie—with his constituency here. But Harvie was a blind road; he had to be. As for her mother…What kind of monster would arrange the kidnapping and the murder of her only child? Besides, according to Lynley, Eve Bowen was poised on the brink of losing everything now that Luxford was going to run the story. And Luxford—
Barbara drew in a quick breath at the sudden recollection of a single fact from among the many which Lynley had given her over the phone a few hours before. She strode away from the windmill, into the paddock. She moved out of the carpet of light that poured forth from the windmill’s door. Of course, she thought. Dennis Luxford.