Chapter Thirteen #2
‘I thought I’d told you. He just had bad fatigue, a sense that he was stumbling a bit, messing things up. Middle age, I thought.’
‘He wasn’t much older than me.’ Edward stopped walking. ‘We are now right at the middle of the cross they showed on the TV report. It’s where we’re standing.’
They were beside a stream fifteen feet wide. The water flowed at speed, jumping and bubbling at their feet. Set back from the stream, twenty yards to their right and in a state of disrepair so total its original function was barely recognizable, were the remains of a bandstand.
The pair looked around miserably. They were both in waterproof coats.
The spit had turned to drizzle, so thin you almost could not feel it, but gradually making their clothes damper.
In places where the trees parted, the sky was a miserable grey and the canopy offered virtually no light.
Occasionally one of them had been hit by what felt like a cupful of rainwater dislodged from the thick leaves and branches above them.
He looked at the screenshot on his phone again, shook his head and pushed it deep into the pocket of his raincoat.
‘Someone doing the graphics just found a map with an existing cross on it. Probably an intern at the TV station. They had no more clue where it happened than us. The cross was probably for the bandstand over there.’
They trudged on. Now he was dependent on the Ordnance Survey map alone, criss-crossed with erratic lines drawn with a biro (thank God he had a pen on him, just sheer good fortune), while it rested on his thigh or a fallen tree.
Eventually they came to the stump of an oak, cleanly cut.
‘Wendy, I’m going to struggle finding the place.
’ He unfolded the map and spread it across the smooth surface. ‘Could you—’
She knew instinctively what he wanted, and produced her brolly as she stood above him. Edward sank to his knees, immediately feeling damp seep through his jeans. He was conscious of her silence as the rain pattered on the surface of the small umbrella.
He spoke to the map. ‘The first black line is the direction we were pointed by the chap with that yellow croissant on his head.’
‘My husband struggled with his own hair loss; quite sudden it was too.’
‘Apologies. That is the sightline from the shed he works in.’ Edward put his thumb on a second line, finding the paper damp. ‘Although he didn’t realize it, the angle changes the end point.’
‘A clearing?’ she suggested. ‘They all said a clearing.’
‘That doesn’t help, does it?’
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘His body was found below a tree in a clearing.’
Now Edward stood, leaving the map spread across the tree stump. ‘I don’t see what you mean.’
‘A clearing is a place without trees.’ She looked at the canopy, thick with leaves and branches.
‘But this was a clearing with a tree. It had a tree. He was underneath the tree, and they could see him. How do you see a guy from the air if he’s underneath a tree?
’ She looked at the ground, tugged at the knot in her scarf and shook her head, as if the thought had taken off and left her behind.
He said: ‘I work in a garden centre once or twice a week. I have friends there who helped me when my son died. A clearing,’ he repeated.
He was back on his knees, staring at the map, spreading his hands across it until the damp from the tree stump threatened to tear the thick paper. ‘When did your husband die?’
‘October the twelfth, the year before last,’ she said bitterly.
He produced his phone again. A fleck of rainwater hit the screen.
He checked the exact location of the cross on the screenshot against the Ordnance Survey map.
Then he stood and looked around them, chose a tree with large, low branches and started to climb it.
When he was fifteen feet up, he spent five minutes looking in all directions.
By the time he descended she was walking in circles, staring at her feet.
‘You’ve had an idea?’ she asked.
‘I know where it happened. I’m certain actually. This way.’ And he led her through the forest.
He had worked it out. She had not understood the clue she had given him. But he knew. The doctor was found beneath a tree which had shed by October.
He explained as they walked. ‘I don’t know that I’m right.
’ Yet he felt some pride. He had brutally applied logic.
‘A clearing. Tree leaves not in the way. An ash. We’re heading for the tallest ash, because it needs to have stopped competitor trees from growing near it.
This time of year it won’t look like a clearing at all. ’
They came to the foot of an ash that reached high into the sky.
‘Good God. Could be fifty feet,’ said Edward.
‘I’m a bit overwhelmed and I think I need to sit this out,’ said Wendy.
She tore the scarf off her head, and the crimped hair beneath it sprang out as if an illustrator had created it with a sudden slash of fountain pen.
She retreated to a fallen tree and put her head in her hands.
He started walking over to her, desperate to say or do something that might make this less painful, but she spoke without looking up from the forest floor.
‘Please just examine the scene if you need to. Take your time. Anything you can find might help me. It’s not easy for me, being here, but I need your help, or this will always be the place that ended two lives. Jonathan’s and mine.’
Edward paused. A chill wind blew, and the leaves around them shivered. What if the real killer of Dr Wrigley was here, hidden in the trees, watching them? The killer had successfully stitched up the widow. Whoever did the crime would surely not allow him to prove her innocence.
‘May I ask a question? Was he insured, your husband?’
She was too far away to hear. He asked again, more loudly.
‘Oh yes. Not that I’ll ever see a payout.’
‘Why not?’
‘Long story,’ she called. ‘Small print.’
Of course. No policy would pay out if there was even the smallest suspicion she was the killer.
He stepped closer to her. ‘But you haven’t been convicted. How can they say that?’
‘They’ll say anything to avoid paying,’ she said. ‘I don’t think about it much. True, if we find out he was murdered by a passing crazy person, and they get done for it, then they might just pay.’
Edward asked: ‘And would they pay out for suicide?’
‘Yes. But he wouldn’t want to end his life. Why would he do that? And dispose of the crossbow after his death? Come on.’
She spoke bitterly. Almost too quietly for him to hear. They were fifty yards apart now. It was drizzling. Wendy was sitting on a huge fallen tree, innards opened like a patient in theatre, and he was staring up at the massive ash, thinking: It must have been here.
And then he saw it.
A hole in the trunk of the ash, cleanly drilled, not even a centimetre wide.
In the car, she was silent. Until, just as they approached the edge of Sidmouth, she said: ‘You took a lot of photos.’
‘I found something. But I don’t know what it means.’
‘Do you want to tell me?’
‘Do you mind if I keep it close to my chest just for a few days?’ he asked. ‘Because I don’t want you thinking I’ve solved something if I haven’t. I won’t know the meaning until I’ve checked.’
‘Checked what?’
‘The spot. I just need to be a hundred per cent that we were at the right location. I know how to find out.’
‘Okay, but …’ She tailed off. ‘I thought you were eating the tree bark at one point.’
‘I had to get close.’
‘Whatever comes of it, Edward, you’ve listened and you’ve given me a little hope.
’ They were on Station Road, heading towards the centre of Sidmouth, and she stopped by the Woodlands Hotel where the lane narrowed and a sign with a red arrow told drivers arriving in the town they must give way. ‘You do know I would pay you for this?’
‘I don’t want you to pay me anything,’ said Edward. ‘I just like finding out the truth of things, that’s all. I’m not a professional detective. I’m just a …’
‘Sleuth.’
‘Yes, maybe. Along with my friends Kim and Stevie. And I need to meet them before I say any more. They’ll have ideas.’
‘I’ll pay you five thousand pounds if you can solve it.’
‘What?? But I …’ Five thousand? He hesitated.
He knew what he’d do with the money, even if taking it wouldn’t be right.
‘If we get the new inquest, which I guess is what you want, and you’re happy with my work, there are a group of listeners to my radio show who would welcome a payment. I would hand it over to them.’
‘Wow. Okay.’
As they came into Sidmouth and the phone signal reconnected, his mobile beeped so much it almost jumped out of his hand.
‘We have to slow down, I think,’ she said. ‘Look – bad traffic.’
‘Bad traffic in Sidmouth?’ he said thoughtfully. In high summer, or during the folk festival, maybe. But not now, not at the start of the season.
They crawled along, past the entrance to Thirdfield Terrace. Edward ducked forward to see the apartment Kim was so attached to. It sat at the top of the white-painted block, looking down onto the cricket green. It would be, he thought, a lovely location.
He remembered the couple’s conversation he had overheard from underneath the car. The odd use of ‘parachute’ – what was that, a code?
Wendy said, ‘Look.’
When he took his eyes off Thirdfield Terrace and sat back up, he saw the police cordon. ‘They’ve closed the promenade,’ he said. ‘They never do that.’
‘Maybe that’s why my phone keeps vibrating.’
He looked at his. Twenty-one text messages had suddenly arrived in his inbox. ‘I have to go left,’ he said. ‘Can you drop me off?’
‘At least tell me what you found.’
She was desperate to know. But he was focused on the chaos being caused by the cordon.
For a moment, the line of traffic was completely stationary.
‘I can’t get closer to the radio station in the car.
I’ll have to go around the back on foot.
I need to see what’s happening. I’ll call you, I promise. ’
‘You found something? Something helpful?’
‘I think so, Wendy,’ he said, wondering if this was the first time he had called her by her first name.
Edward stretched his legs and straightened his back.
He bent again, just as the car moved forwards slightly, and when he saw Wendy he wondered if she was about to cry.
Her gaze was fixed ahead, and he saw her jaw was clenched and her lower lip trembled.
‘One more thing.’ He was leaning through the passenger window, going with the fractional forwards movement of the car by performing a kind of grapevine.
‘Anything.’
‘Did your husband’s mother or father suffer from Motor Neurone Disease?’
She looked at him, dumbstruck, and then looked back at the road. Her mouth opened but no words came out.