Stone Cold Stone Dead Read online

  Elspeth had been adamant that the family celebration of Christmas must not be curtailed in any way on account of John’s death, saying that such a move would have horrified him as it was about something far more important than he himself. Nevertheless, the three eldest children were downhearted because of his absence and Vicky had been asking where ‘Gan-Gan’ was for days. John had not been the sort of man to romp with his grandchildren and, always heavily involved with church matters, can best be described as having been a benevolent presence in our lives and, if necessary, a harbour in any storms. Later, on Christmas Day, I had found Katie in tears in her bedroom saying that she couldn’t bear the thought of him in a ‘fridge’ in a mortuary while they were enjoying themselves. I had felt a bit out of my depth but tried to explain that it was only Grandad’s body that was in the fridge, not the lovely man he had been. He was somewhere much better and one could only call it heaven.

  Carrick offered us his condolences again – he and his wife Joanna had attended the funeral – and then, glaring through the window at the murky morning as though taking the gloomy state of affairs personally, said, ‘I understand that you’ve been briefed about a man calling himself Julian Mannering.’

  ‘It was hardly a briefing,’ Patrick replied. ‘More a warning that something potentially nasty is going to land in my in-tray. I’m thinking of emigrating to New Zealand.’

  The DCI, a boiled-in-the-tartan Scot, blue-eyed and blond, very good at his job, once described by a friend of mine as wall-to-wall crumpet, nodded sagely. ‘I feel like that most mornings.’

  ‘Do you know anything about this character?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘No, but it appears I’ll soon have the job of finding out as much about him as possible, which I resent rather as no crime appears to have been committed. All I’ve had so far is a short email from a chief super at HQ who hinted that you would be the one in dark-blue long johns snooping on him from a tree.’

  ‘To hell with that!’ Patrick retorted. ‘I said as much to Dixon, the MI5 bloke I told you about. I’m not going to knock on this character’s door and try to sell him double glazing either.’

  ‘I’m only joking.’

  Patrick smiled reflectively. ‘Ingrid once flattened a guy I was working undercover with by galloping all over us when she’d hired a horse while endeavouring to be part of the scenery.’

  Carrick chuckled and said to me, ‘You’ve seen quite a lot of action on horseback in connection with cases since, haven’t you?’

  Monday morning? The distaff side of the family diverted from jobs that needed doing at home despite the employment of a nanny and two home helps? Was I a bit impatient with this blokeish repartee and failure to get on with the job?

  Too right.

  Ignoring the remark, I said, ‘According to the website of a business calling itself Mannering Luxury Cars, based in Great Mossley, which as we all know is a small market town not all that far from here, Julian Mannering is the managing director. Dixon told us that he lives at Upper Mossley, which I discovered is around two miles away almost on the border with Wiltshire, which would explain why he gets a train from Bradford on Avon when he goes to London. It seems to be a comparatively new company and sells high-performance cars as well as hiring out the more sedate varieties for weddings and so forth. Who knows what really goes on?’

  ‘Er …’ Carrick began as both men looked at me.

  ‘Not only that,’ I continued. ‘When I rang on Saturday morning – from my untraceable work phone obviously – pretending that I was pricing wedding cars, a girl answered and was telling me that she was new to the job when the phone was snatched from her – at least, that was the impression I got. A man came on the line and I’m convinced it was him.’

  ‘And?’ Carrick asked.

  ‘He very curtly told me to ring back this morning as no one was there who could help me.’

  ‘Magnificent way to run a business,’ Patrick commented. Then added, ‘You didn’t tell me about this.’

  The slight criticism had been more than negated by a smile of congratulation for my one-upwomanship. Even though Carrick is a friend, Patrick enjoys being one step ahead of what he refers to as ‘normal cops’.

  ‘You were helping your mother with paperwork and my call didn’t achieve much,’ I replied.

  ‘Are you really sure it was him?’

  ‘He had the same deep voice with the supercilious affected drawl that I remember.’

  ‘I think you achieved rather a lot actually,’ Carrick said thoughtfully. ‘You established that he runs a business and confirmed what the MI5 man told you with regards to the area where he lives. All we have to do now is find someone to watch him who he hasn’t clapped eyes on before.’

  ‘Which lets off everyone in this room but you,’ Patrick said with a grin.

  ‘And you know damned well that DCIs don’t do things like that,’ Carrick pointed out. ‘Leave it with me.’

  ‘There’s no choice until we get some definite orders.’

  When we got home – Patrick to have a quick coffee before heading off to interview someone in connection with a case – Elspeth came out to meet the car looking anxious.

  ‘Those people came back,’ she told us. ‘Just after you left. Mr Graves said he’d been doing some research into local history and despite my originally telling him that you’d bought the freehold, he’s discovered that there’s some kind of old deed which forbids the church authorities from selling the rectory and it is to remain for the use of clergy. He said he realizes that times have changed and there simply aren’t the numbers of clerics but feels the least I can do is move out of the annexe and rent it to them for a while. His wife added that I could either live with my family or find myself a little flat somewhere. They made me feel so … guilty.’

  And with that she broke down and cried.

  Putting an arm around Elspeth, I looked at Patrick and found myself wondering what the correct term was for killing someone who had been ordained. If the man was ordained, was the thought that then crossed my mind.

  ‘Please don’t worry,’ Patrick said to his mother, kissing her cheek. ‘And we mustn’t forget that it was the church authorities who originally put the place on the market. If they don’t know what’s what, no one does.’ Muttering that he would phone our solicitor, he went indoors.

  I asked Elspeth but the Graveses had not given her any hint as to where they lived at the moment, nor had they left a phone number so they could be contacted. Needless to say, she had no intention of doing anything of the sort and was very worried as she thought, probably rightly, that that meant they would return. My first reaction to this was that it would be necessary for someone to be with her temporarily during the times Patrick and I were not at home, as to have these appalling people pestering her again was simply intolerable. Having anyone to stay though was difficult as the annexe has only one bedroom and we have no spare rooms in the main house.

  The problem was unresolved even though our solicitor told Patrick that he had done all due research at the time of the sale. A deed had indeed existed and initially referred to a much earlier church house on the site – possibly first erected to house the men who had built the church – that had then been reserved for clergy but burned down in 1730. Another building, or perhaps more than one over the years, had been erected – the records were vague – but disaster had again struck in 1810 when a hay barn adjacent to the house of the time had caught fire, the flames had spread and both buildings had been burned to the ground. Some years elapsed before a replacement rectory was built, the present one in 1836, by which time the deed’s timescale conditions had lapsed.

  All Patrick could do for the time being was to arrange to have a ‘spyhole’ fitted into the front door of the annexe so his mother could see who was outside before she opened it. This would take place the following afternoon.

  Joanna, James Carrick’s wife, had at one time in her unmarried days been his CID sergeant but had left the police an
d now, a few years, a wedding and a baby daughter later, had successfully rejoined. At the end of November we had attended her passing out parade at HQ and she was at present stationed, as a probationer, in Frome. For several very understandable reasons her husband was hoping to get her posted to Bath and, by all accounts, they had made a very good team. This was not to say that he didn’t share his cases with her now, which was proved a little later in the week when the four of us met for one of our regular evening ‘briefing sessions’ at the Ring o’ Bells public house in our village, the Carricks living just a few miles away.

  ‘This Julian Mannering …’ Joanna began after taking a sip of her wine. ‘Can whatever he’s doing be traced through his contacts in London? I mean, the MI5 man said he’s been seen in the company of an ex-MP and serious criminals. Which ex-MP and serious criminals? Did he say?’

  Patrick shook his head. ‘No, and presumably that info is to follow. But I haven’t received any orders from either Mike or anyone in this neck of the woods. Meanwhile, I shall carry on with the cases I’m working on already.’

  Commander Michael Greenway is Patrick’s boss at the NCA HQ in London.

  ‘One could take a trip and have lunch in Great Mossley or the village where this man lives followed by a little snooping,’ Joanna suggested.

  ‘Patrick and I can’t,’ I said. ‘He knows us by sight.’

  ‘James and I could.’

  ‘No, we couldn’t,’ her husband said heavily. ‘I haven’t received any official orders yet concerning this man and you’re not even part of the set-up here.’

  ‘Rats!’ Joanna scorned. ‘Can’t we have lunch together somewhere on a day off and then go for a walk without contravening some bloody police procedurals manual?’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ Patrick whispered.

  Carrick glared at him.

  ‘Or I could wear a false beard and go with Joanna,’ Patrick went on to propose, not terribly helpfully.

  Carrick said he would think about it, but nothing was decided just then.

  Justin was going through a ‘nature study’ craze, which meant that, a week previously, I had found a large toad in his bedroom, which he shares with Matthew. It was not the first time he had brought one indoors, and this was soon followed by a very dead mouse, green with rot, and some slimy fungi like decomposing fingers he had found growing on a tree trunk. Praying that he’d washed his hands with regards to the mouse, I had dealt with this as tactfully as possible as I did not want to put him off learning, but when Elspeth found a snake in her living room I hit the roof.

  Although not having a horror of them, she had kept right away from it. It was not very big, just over a foot long, and obviously not a native of the British Isles being brightly coloured in shades of orange and yellow. After having sent Justin to his room, despite his tearful denials, with a promise of fatherly justice pending, I rang the RSPCA, who sent an inspector round quite quickly. We learned that it was a corn snake, which are kept as pets and are non-poisonous. Thankfully, our little visitor, which had remained where it was under a radiator, departed to be handed over to a reptile specialist.

  ‘I know he’s naughty but please don’t be too hard on him,’ Elspeth entreated. ‘Patrick got up to some dreadful pranks when he was young.’

  Plus quite a few much worse ones since, I thought.

  I said that I had told Justin he must know that you don’t just let creatures like that loose in the house, never mind where Grandma lives, and they have to be kept under suitable conditions. My son was left to think about this and because of another couple of minor domestic emergencies – Vicky tripping and rolling halfway down the stairs, one of the kittens falling down behind a chest of drawers during one of their mad chases round the house and getting jammed, necessitating this heavy piece of furniture being pulled out – I forgot all about him until dinnertime, the younger children’s dinnertime, that is.

  Patrick arrived home early from work, just as I was serving up surrounded by steaming pots and pans.

  ‘Oh, God,’ I keened, ‘Justin’s still in his room.’

  ‘What’s he done this time?’ was the immediate query.

  ‘A snake in your mother’s living room.’

  ‘But aren’t they hibernating at this time of the year?’

  ‘It was a foreign snake!’ I bawled, having burned a finger on one of the Rayburn’s hotplates.

  ‘OK, keep your hair on,’ my husband murmured and left the room.

  The two youngest were having their meal, baby Mark with assistance from me after I’d run my finger under the cold tap, when Patrick returned, bringing Justin with him.

  ‘He didn’t do it,’ Patrick said to me quietly when Justin had been persuaded that everyone still loved him hugely and was eating his dinner.

  ‘But …’ I began, then stopped speaking, not wishing just then to question the verdict.

  Patrick said, still whispering, ‘No, look, he loves his grandma too much to do anything like that. And he doesn’t like snakes – Voldemort and all that. It could have escaped from a house nearby and came in out of the cold.’

  ‘Or someone put it through the letter box,’ I said, also whispering and mentally promising Justin a few chocolates from a large expensive box I had been given for Christmas that the children were banned from hoovering up when I wasn’t looking.

  ‘Who, though?’

  ‘How about the Graveses?’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Have you checked up on him yet?’

  ‘No, I haven’t had time.’

  ‘I think you ought to.’

  I suddenly became aware of Mark resembling a baby bird with its beak wide open and gave him another spoonful of food.

  Katie, who had just come into the room, no doubt hungry and to check on any recent developments in the situation, said, ‘Dad, did you do anything really naughty when you were young?’

  ‘I didn’t do it!’ Justin yelled.

  ‘I once stole a pair of very large knickers off someone’s washing line and flew them from a church flagpole,’ Patrick recalled happily.

  Small jaws dropped.

  A week and a half went by and there were still no official notifications regarding the man now calling himself Julian Mannering. All Patrick could do was research and write up everything that was known about him before and after his arrest in connection with the plan to kill Richard Daws together with his friends and acquaintances, adding his own knowledge and memories of events. Meanwhile, James and Joanna Carrick had driven to Great Mossley one Saturday and lunched at the Red Lion, a pub near the market. They had ‘strolled’ as Joanna put it, past the car dealership in question, which was housed in what appeared to be a converted engineering works of some kind on the edge of the town. Her husband, refusing to be seen any nearer to the place, had carried on walking and she had gone in and, as had I, made enquiries about wedding cars. There had been just a young woman in charge. The boss, she said was, ‘out on business’. Only he apparently could arrange things like that while she was under training but if madam would care to leave a contact number …

  Madam had politely declined.

  After consulting Crockford’s, the directory of Anglican clergy, and finding no record of Simon Graves, which could merely mean that he was newly ordained, Patrick had called the offices of the Bath and Wells diocese enquiring about him. But it appeared that kind of information could not be provided over the phone and, despite saying that he was a police officer, the woman he spoke to was adamant. He would have to attend personally, bringing proof of identity. Of the Graveses themselves there had been no sign, retired and visiting priests still taking the services.

  This presented Patrick, who was very busy, with a problem because, as James Carrick had said, no crime had been committed. Therefore to request someone at Bath police station to ask questions in connection with what was, in effect, a private matter, was a misuse of his authority. I volunteered to make the enquiries but Patrick said that he had a bette
r idea and phoned the vicar of Midsomer Norton, who had been a close personal friend of his father’s. This gentleman professed himself puzzled by the situation – Patrick mentioned the couple’s wanting to live in the annexe – and promised to make enquiries.

  ‘In the days when he was known as Sir Julian he lived in a large house, a mansion, near Maidenhead,’ Patrick said that same evening, looking up from his Mannering research on his iPad. ‘And as you’re probably aware he’d made his money in what’s described as financial services and ended up as the boss of a small bank in London where all the best people deposit their money and valuables. According to this secure police website I was also looking at earlier today, one of the NCA’s actually, he had dodgy friends even then. There was a suspicion that one or two of them were responsible for a heist in the Knightsbridge branch of another bank around ten years ago that netted around two million pounds in cash and jewellery.’

  ‘Hence the mansion in Maidenhead?’

  ‘It does make you wonder. Especially as he came from what used to be referred to as humble stock. His father was a bookmaker and his mother worked in a nightclub but died young after being knocked down by a car. At the time there was a question mark over whether it had been an accident or not. Neither the driver of the car nor the vehicle involved were ever traced.’

  ‘Was the house sold while he was in prison?’

  ‘It doesn’t say here – there’s very little detail about it.’

  ‘What about women in his life?’

  ‘His wife Gloria sued him for divorce shortly before he was arrested, citing another woman, and he didn’t contest it. Perhaps she got the Maidenhead pad.’

  One of the kittens – the female, a tortoiseshell and called after her predecessor Pirate – woke up suddenly, her ears pricked. She had been asleep on their blanket on a sofa with her brother Fred, a less exotic-looking black and white moggy. He also woke, jumped up and growled, staring in the direction of the window.