Chapter 15
It was a deflated little procession that made its way down the passage, past the stern-faced oil portraits, into the wood-panelled entrance hall, Garforth still sniffing.
‘Come along, Julia,’ said Hayley. ‘I’ll drop you at home.’
Julia had been so caught up thinking about the strange relationship between Garforth and the colonel that she’d forgotten, for a moment, that she didn’t have a car.
Only when she saw Jake’s dear little face grinning happily at her from the open window of Hayley’s car, did she remember that they’d driven together, the three of them, from the Buttered Scone.
‘Hello, Jakey boy,’ she said, walking towards him. She opened the back door and he jumped out, heading straight for the dense thicket of bushes and trees on the far side of the driveway.
‘Oh, Hayley, Jake needs a minute. Won’t be long.’
‘Okay,’ Hayley said, getting into the driver’s side.
Jake ambled along next to the rhododendron bushes, nose to the ground and tail wagging, then made a sharp right turn and disappeared into the deep, thick foliage.
‘Looks like he needs a bit of privacy,’ said Julia.
A minute ticked by, and then another. She could hear rustling in the bushes and saw the leaves moving as he passed by inside.
Beyond the bushes were trees. And where there were trees, there were squirrels, and other interesting things. Hayley was starting to look impatient.
‘Come on, Jake,’ Julia called. The leaves stopped moving. Had he decided to have a bit of a sniff, or perhaps a lie-down? Or perhaps he’d come out the other end of the bushes. She walked the length of them, calling. There was no sign of him.
‘Jake, here!’ she said in her most authoritative voice.
He let out a short sharp bark, and then another. She knew that bark. Jake wasn’t much of a barker, so when he did bark, it meant he was scared or in trouble.
‘Come, Jake,’ she said, in a more encouraging tone, slapping her thigh the way she did when a walk was on offer. ‘Let’s go.’
Two more barks.
Julia followed the sound and peered into the dense hedge, hoping for a glimpse of him, or an opening she could walk through.
There was a lighter patch where two bushes met, and she could squeeze in between the branches.
It was fairly uncomfortable, but doable.
After a few steps, the foliage was less dense, and after a few more, she found herself in a clearing between the tall rhododendrons.
Sunlight filtered through the leaves, and in their dappled shade someone had set out a few upturned logs.
In its centre it was just tall enough for her to stand without stooping.
She tried to imagine Greg and Clara as children, sharing tea parties with their dolls and teddies in their secret club house.
‘Jake,’ she called. ‘Come on, where are you?’
His bark came from her right. She took a few steps towards the sound.
The rhododendron bushes ended in a big flower bed, which seemed in the process of being cleared.
There she saw Jake, between some low shrubs and a pile of prunings and weeds.
He stood still, and looked up at her with a worried expression.
‘There you are, Jake. Come on. What are you doing? We need to get…’
The sentence trailed off.
In front of the pile of weeds was a square, green weeding cushion, not dissimilar to the one Julia had at home to protect her knees. Beyond the pile jutted a pair of olive-green wellies. Beyond them, long legs encased in loose khaki work trousers. Someone was lying there, hidden by the shrubbery.
Next to the legs lay a rake, and a small garden fork that had been dropped at an angle from an open hand as the man fell. She took a step forward and bent down to look under the shrubbery to see the man’s face, even though she had a horrible feeling she knew who it was.
‘Hayley!’ she shouted. ‘Help! Hayley! Come here!’
‘Oh hell,’ said Hayley, who had materialised next to her. ‘Who is—’
‘It’s Ian. The gardener. And Hayley, I think he’s dead.’
‘No doubt about that,’ said Hayley. Beneath the man’s head, the newly cleared ground was glossy and wet, and a dark, reddish hue.
It was some time later that Bob Jones, who had been squatting next to the body, stood up, straightening his knees with an audible creak followed by a sharp crick. Hands on hips, he arched his back to work out a few more kinks, and gave a satisfied ‘Ah!’
‘Well?’ said Hayley impatiently.
‘Oh, dead, I’m afraid,’ said the forensics examiner, matter-of-factly.
Julia, a retired social worker, and not any kind of forensic anything, had reached that conclusion herself.
‘I was hoping for slightly more detail than that,’ said Hayley, somewhat tetchily.
‘Blow to the head,’ said Bob.
Again, this seemed obvious to even the untrained eye, given the blood.
‘A young man like that; it’s such a sadness.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Still, death will have his day, as the Bard would—’
Hayley looked as if she might explode. Instead, she cut in: ‘What can you tell me about the circumstances of death? Time of death? Weapon?’
‘It’s a strange one,’ said Bob. There was a long and painful pause. Julia suspected that Bob was rummaging through his brain for a relevant Shakespeare quote, which would – she feared – propel DI Hayley Gibson over the edge into fury.
Hayley took a long, audible breath in through her nose, as if preparing to speak.
‘You see,’ said Bob, just in time, ‘the blow is right on the top of the head. Very unusual. So what could be the reason?’
He looked at the two women as if this were some sort of quiz to which he expected an answer. After a pause, Bob answered his own question. ‘The attacker must have been very much taller than the victim, or perhaps the weapon was long-handled – like a hoe or a hockey stick, that sort of thing.’
Bob Jones clasped his hands together, interleaving his short, blunt fingers as if holding an imaginary stick.
He lifted them above his head and made a downward slashing sort of movement.
Julia imagined it coming down on a man’s skull, and she shivered at the violence of it.
Jake, who was now on a lead, didn’t like it either.
He leaned into Julia’s leg for protection and looked up at her with worried brown eyes.
‘Could it be the rake, do you think?’ asked Hayley, motioning to where it lay, next to the body.
‘I’d say not,’ said Bob, bending down. ‘That rake is quite a lightweight one, with a slim wooden pole for a handle. It doesn’t have the heft to it that you’d need to… In fact, with that force, the force to kill a man, to break the skull, I reckon the wooden handle would have broken.’
The two of them peered down at Ian’s head. Julia looked deliberately away, trying not to see the matted mess of hair. Jake pushed even closer.
‘And there’s no blood on the handle,’ said Hayley. ‘You’d see blood, at least.’
‘True. We’ll take the tools in for forensic examination, but I’m close to a hundred per cent sure the rake wasn’t the murder weapon,’ said Bob.
‘It’s hard to tell without a proper examination, but looking at the wound, I reckon the weapon would have been something harder and heavier, probably something metal. ’
‘I would agree,’ said Hayley. ‘So we’re looking for something long and thin and heavy. Time of death?’
‘An hour or two ago,’ said Bob. ‘The blood still looks quite fresh.’
‘Right,’ said Hayley.
‘I have a question,’ said Julia, drawing an irritated look from Hayley. The detective accepted Julia’s presence on the scene, and even, occasionally, sought her insights. But nonetheless, she preferred her to maintain a bit of distance. Certainly not to ask direct questions at a crime scene.
‘Fire away,’ said Bob, who never seemed to question Julia’s presence, or her right to information.
‘Could the weapon have been the same one? For the colonel, I mean, and then for the gardener?’
‘Indeed it could,’ said Bob. ‘We’ll have to wait for lab results, but the wounds look similar, although this one broke the skin.
I’d say there’s a reasonable chance that whatever was used on the one, was used on the other.
But one thing’s for sure – you’re looking for someone tall and strong.
’ Bob closed his eyes for a moment, and then said, in his special Shakespeare voice, ‘O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.
’ He opened his eyes again. ‘Measure for Measure,’ he said, cheerfully.
Likely not one of the garden tools, then, thought Julia, completely ignoring Bob’s theatrics.
She closed her own eyes and tried to picture it, but the scenario that Bob had described just didn’t make sense.
She pictured Ian standing next to the flower bed, someone quietly approaching him and hitting him over the head.
The mental image would not gel. A person would have to be incredibly tall or have a very unusual weapon to have hit Ian over the head in the way that Bob described.
Unless…
Julia opened her eyes and looked at the scene again. ‘Hayley,’ she said, pointing at the gardening mat. ‘I think he was kneeling when he was hit. It could have been anyone, of any height.’
Bob cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. ‘Good lord, you’re right, Julia. I hadn’t thought of that. Oh, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool, the Bard will tell us. Indeed, I was wrong. The murderer could be anyone. It could be a large man, or even a small woman, there’s no telling.’
Hayley sighed. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you are any help to me at all, Mr Jones,’ she muttered, but Bob was scribbling something in his notebook, and took not the slightest offence.
Behind them, the bushes rustled, and a woman’s voice called from the rhododendrons.