Chapter Five
JEN RAFFERTY WAS FEELING OVERWHELMED. A double murder was unusual – and this was surely what it would turn out to be – but two young lasses being killed in a fancy house with high-profile parents seemed unreal.
She’d started work as a detective in Liverpool.
There’d been shootings and knifings and a mindless gang culture, wrapped around money and drugs.
Hard and gritty and soul-destroying. This seemed even more immoral to her.
Murder dressed up in smart clothes, talked about in educated voices.
Paul Armstrong had been on his phone for most of the morning.
She’d overheard him talking to some media adviser, as if all that mattered were the optics.
Then Matthew had disappeared, leaving her to deal with the Armstrong family on top of the chaos of an investigation.
Cath falling apart. Two young boys hurt and confused.
Paul Armstrong seeming to hide any real feelings by worrying about what the press would make of it.
Trying to devise a story to explain a tragedy.
Finding it easier to think about work than about his wife and his daughter, perhaps.
That might be one explanation. If she was feeling charitable.
She was standing on the terrace, hoping to arrange her thoughts.
Lottie’s body had already been taken to the mortuary and the swimming pool was clear and still, waiting for the search team to drain it and filter the water.
Jen could see the girl’s mobile, lying on the bottom.
Usually, much of the investigation by the forensic pathologist would take place at the scene, but Lottie had already been moved by the family, and anyway, now there was another body to consider.
Armstrong had been standing in the shade thrown by the house, talking again on his phone. He switched it off and came up to her.
‘What do you think, Sergeant? Did this start out as a burglary? Did the girls disturb someone?’ She could understand why people liked him. He spoke as if he genuinely wanted her opinion, even though she suspected that he was hoping to spin a story to throw to the press.
‘Too early to say, sir.’ She paused. ‘Is there somewhere you and your wife could go with the children? It can’t be easy for them to be here with everything that’s going on around them.’
And it’s a bloody nightmare for us.
‘Do you think we should go back to London? Cath wouldn’t hear of it. It was hard enough to keep her away from Hannah’s body. You saw that.’
‘Perhaps we could find you a hotel room nearby?’
‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘That might work.’
‘Would you like me to look into it for you?’
‘No, someone in my office will sort it out.’ Armstrong turned away from her, back to the shade and his phone as if that were some kind of lifeline, hooking him back to a world where he felt comfortable, where his daughter was still alive.
Matthew appeared then, walking through the cordon on the gate. He’d caught the sun on his forehead, and that made him look hot and a little feverish. He paused for a moment, looking over the garden, checking out Paul Armstrong, then he joined her.
‘Is there somewhere we can talk without being overheard?’
‘The CSIs are in the house, though they’re keeping out of the boys’ room for a while.
Ross is still there with the kids.’ Jen shrugged.
‘They’d already gone up before Lottie’s body was found, so it was compromised anyway.
Cath thought they might have a nap. There are lots of toys and a smart telly to keep them entertained and they’ll be knackered after the overnight drive.
’ A pause. ‘If you don’t mind another walk, we could go to the beach.
We’re not letting anyone go down the footpath close to the body. We’ll have the place to ourselves.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sounds good.’
They sat where she’d found Cath earlier in the morning, but they perched on a large flat rock rather than the sand.
Venn wasn’t a sand kind of person. This was the place where the women had chatted while there was still hope that Hannah Armstrong was alive.
There was a smell of seaweed and Lundy was very big on the horizon.
It must be a trick of the light, but it seemed to have grown since she was last here.
It was midday. It occurred to Jen that they’d have to think about feeding the troops.
The boring details that could swamp an investigation clicked through her mind, like old-fashioned slides into a projector’s carousel.
Her father had kept all the family holiday photos like that and bored the relatives with a show every Christmas.
‘I’ve suggested to Paul Armstrong that the family find a hotel to stay in. Somewhere nearby. Their boys can only stay cooped up for so long, even with Ross to entertain them, and Cath is falling apart.’
‘Good plan.’ But the boss seemed preoccupied.
‘How was the boyfriend?’
‘He seems shattered. He really appears to have loved her. They were planning their life together. She was going to do environmental science at Exeter Uni, then they were planning to run the farm together, turning it into an ecological paradise.’ A pause.
‘Teenage dreams maybe, but real enough to them.’
Jen smiled, but this was all a bit close to home.
She’d married the first love of her life, expecting that her dreams of wedded bliss would all come true.
Her ex had turned out to be a controlling bastard, and she’d ended up leaving home with two young kids.
A single mother in a strange place fighting to do well at work and to bring up her family without any major domestic disasters.
Feeling a failure at both. Now she was still single, and soon both the kids would be independent, and she’d be alone.
She was trying to recapture the freedom of the youth she’d never had.
Maybe trying too hard. She was almost middle-aged after all.
It was time she started behaving like a grown-up.
‘You don’t see him as a suspect?’
Matthew shook his head. ‘Not at the moment, but we can’t rule anything out, can we?’
‘Hannah’s death makes more sense to me than Lottie’s.
’ Jen had been worrying at this since they’d found the second body.
‘Hannah at least had some links to the community here. Everyone in the district would know that the Armstrong family owned the house. That would have caused resentment and there’d have been connections.
But Lottie had never been here before. She was a stranger.
I’m wondering if Hannah was killed first, and Lottie got in the way. ’
‘It’s possible. We’ll have to check out the political angle. Appleyard will be on top of that. Armstrong said he’d received threats. Nothing specific, but we know there are crazies out there, looking for revenge or celebrity.’
‘Would they target the daughter, not the man himself?’ Jen found some kind of terrorist killing hard to imagine, here in North Devon.
Matthew shrugged. ‘It sounds ridiculous, but who knows? The digital team will get on to it. Appleyard thought the secret services might have intelligence about that side of it too.’ He paused. ‘Anything else I should know?’
‘Lottie’s phone was in the pool. It must have gone into the water with her. No sign of Hannah’s, though, which seems a bit odd. You know teenagers and their phones.’
‘She might have dropped it while she was running. If she was running away from the potential killer. Get the search team to look out for it as a priority. It might help with timings.’
‘Of course.’ Jen thought the boss was telling his grandmother to suck eggs. ‘What did you find out at the farm?’
‘Both girls were at the festival,’ Matthew said. ‘Lottie left early. Perhaps she’d met someone and brought him back here, knowing they’d have the place to themselves. If she was aware that Hannah would be staying at the farm with Jake.’
‘So, we need to track down everyone who was at the festival? Is that possible?’
‘Tickets were sold online, so the Brennans should have a record. I assume there was some sort of security, a ticket check at the entrance. There might have been a way to gatecrash, by crossing the fields at the back of the farm, but it wouldn’t have been easy.
I’ve checked the map. It would be a six-mile walk from the nearest road coming in from that direction, and this wasn’t the sort of festival that would attract the wild young things.
Mostly folk. A bit of jazz apparently. Nobody famous. All local bands.’
‘You seem to know a lot about it. Was Jake the organizer?’
Matthew shook his head and smiled. ‘No, the father was behind the whole thing. I only know what was going on because Jonathan went with some of his Woodyard friends. I’ll get a full description tonight.
’ He paused. ‘Once the Armstrongs have left Tide House, could you and Ross go back to the farm? Take a statement from each member of the family. Get as much info as you can about the weekend. An American couple is still camping in one of the luxury tents. I can’t see them as suspects at all, but they’re potential witnesses. ’
She nodded. ‘Before that, I thought I’d go to the pub. See if I can persuade them to make up a bunch of sandwiches for the guys. Buy a load of soft drinks.’
‘Check what they’re charging first! We might be better sending someone back to Aldi in Barnstaple. You know what our budget is like this year.’
She grinned. ‘I’ll appeal to their better nature. See if we can get a discount for bulk buying.’
‘While you’re there, have a bit of a background chat. Encourage a gossip. Find out what the locals really thought about Armstrong and the family. Apparently, Jake worked behind the bar there occasionally, so they could have a useful take on him too.’
‘Might be worth paying a bit over the odds on the butties then? For inside info.’ She started back up the path, then turned back. ‘How much do I tell them?’
Matthew took a little time to answer. ‘Say there’s been a family tragedy.
An unexplained death that we have to investigate, and we’ll be here for a while.
They’ll have seen all the vehicles in the lane, so they’ll know something’s happened.
It’ll be all over the media tonight anyway.
Even if the Brennans haven’t spread the word, it’ll get out. ’
For a moment, she thought he was planning to stay where he was, staring out to sea, but he got to his feet and followed her up the path, past the old watermill where the girl’s body still lay, with its guardian officer, back into the garden and the glaring sunshine.