He put himself to bed, folding his clothes meticulously but forgetting to remove his socks. He fell immediately and deeply to sleep.
Chapter Ten
Amelia Wood’s body was found by a jogger at eight in the morning while Dennis Wood was still sleeping off the excess of the night before. The jogger, a PE teacher at St Martin’s High School, took the same route every day: through the village, across the hill, and down the footpath through the dene. When he crossed the hill it was still dark and the ground was hard. There was no pleasure in the running and he wondered what crazy obsession prompted him to maintain the daily ritual. In the solid houses which backed on to the hill the lights in the bedroom windows reminded him that he could be still at home, drinking tea, reading the paper. The sky was clear and by the time he reached the path into the dene it was light enough to see where he was going. A high wall marked the boundary of the gardens and gave some shelter from the frost.
Amelia Wood lay only yards from the open hill. The teacher thought at first she was a pile of summer rubbish blown into the undergrowth and left to rot. He even began to develop in his mind a lecture on the subject of litter to be delivered at the morning’s assembly. But as he approached he saw that it was a woman’s shape. She was lying on her side, dressed in a dark velour track suit, her buttocks curved towards him. She was quite close to the path and little attempt had been made to hide her.
He ran back on to the hill looking for someone to help, someone with whom to share the responsibility of the discovery. There was no one in sight. He could have returned to the village, used the phone in Front Street, but that would have taken time and the situation seemed urgent. He chose instead to go through a gate in the high wall which bounded the common, into one of the gardens, and up to the house beyond. He had time to think, even in his panic, that he was in the wrong job and he wished he could afford a place like this. At first he could find no way into the house. There was no light and when he banged on the back door there was no response. He ran round the house over a lawn scattered with leaves, past bare fruit trees. On a semicircle of gravel a BMW was parked. Presumably then, someone was at home. As he ran to the front door he was joined by a Labrador which appeared from nowhere. He leaned on the door bell with all his weight until he heard movement upstairs, then stood, suddenly breathless and shaky waiting for someone to answer it.
Dennis Wood was wakened by the shrieking of the door bell below him and by the barking of the dog. He groaned and turned over, hoping that Amelia would be up and would answer it. But it continued, making his head pound, and eventually he padded downstairs, still wearing the socks of the night before, pulling on a dressing-gown and tying it around his paunch. When he opened the door he saw a madman in a track suit and running shoes who yelled incoherently about an emergency, about needing to use the phone. As a good citizen he let the man in, but showed no interest. He thought the incident had nothing to do with him.
Ramsay was sitting at his desk at Hallowgate police station when he received the news of Amelia Wood’s death. He had been there since seven, reading through the statements taken the day before from people who had been at the Grace Darling Centre on Monday evening, realizing with increasing frustration that no one had seen anything unusual. His first reaction to the discovery of the body was anger, directed not at the murderer but at Hunter. He had told the sergeant that someone should interview Mrs Wood. What had happened? It was the sort of incompetence that irritated because it was unnecessary. Hunter disliked the routine of statement taking and avoided it. He claimed it was boring, usually a waste of time, but Ramsay thought it was the listening which he found so irksome. He could not bear to give someone else his full attention. He had assumed apparently that like all the other witnesses Amelia Wood had no useful information to give. Her murder contradicted the assumption.
Ramsay drove to Martin’s Dene alone, leaving instructions that Hunter was to follow him when he got in. He drove down the wide avenue of Martin’s Close looking at the smart houses without envy. The Woods’ home was at the end of a cul-de-sac, 1930s mock-Tudor, large, separated from the street by a row of trees. A police car was blocking the drive so Ramsay parked in the street and walked in. The front door was open. He shouted and stepped into a wide hall, then went through to the kitchen where he could hear voices.
The kitchen was sleek and expensive and gave no sign that food was ever prepared there. Dennis Wood was perched ridiculously on a stool by a breakfast bar-there was nowhere else to sit. He was dressed in a grey suit and striped shirt, but the shirt was unbuttoned at the collar and he wore no tie. After letting the jogger into the house he had gone on to prepare for work. The policeman called first to the scene had recognized the woman as Amelia Wood-he had seen her in court-and broke the news to him.
‘Didn’t you notice,’ the policeman had asked, polite but incredulous, ‘that she’d been missing all night?’
‘No,’ Wood had said, still fuddled by the hangover, by the shock. ‘She was a busy woman. I’d assumed that she was still out when I got in last night. There was no sign of her car, you see. She must have put it away in the garage as soon as she got home. Then this morning I thought that she’d left early.’ Seeing the young policeman’s disbelief he added: ‘She wasn’t the sort of woman, you know, that you worried about.’
The PE teacher was obviously still in shock. He was standing by the window, staring out into the garden. Ramsay introduced himself but the man hardly seemed to register his presence.
‘I’ve never seen a dead person before,’ he said, almost to himself. A policeman handed him a mug of tea and he took it absently, turned to him, and repeated the phrase like a chant.
‘I want someone on the front door,’ Ramsay said. ‘No unauthorized access. We’ll need back up. Immediately. I want to get to the scene of crime as quickly as possible. If my sergeant arrives send him on down to me. Tell him no interviews at this stage. I’ll talk to Mr Wood myself later.’
The last thing he needed after the cock-up of failing to see Mrs Wood the night before was Hunter bullying the witnesses.
‘Which is the quickest way?’ he asked.
‘Through the garden. There’s a gate in the wall with access straight on to the hill. You won’t miss it from there.’
Ramsay thought that the Woods must have paid for help with the garden. Apart from a few beech leaves on the lawn it was immaculate. The vegetable plot had been dug over for the winter, the paths were clear, the trees and shrubs regularly pruned. He could not imagine Dennis Wood getting his hands dirty and even with her ferocious energy Amelia would hardly have had the time. Besides, from what he had learned of her, horticulture would have been too tame an interest. The door through the wall was arched. It could be bolted from the inside but had been left ajar. Ramsay went through it and stood for a moment to take his bearings.
The hill was a piece of windswept common surrounded on three sides by houses and bordered on the fourth side by the dene. There was a view over roofs to Tynemouth and the sea. Ramsay stood now at the corner where the dene and the houses met. There was access to the hill from a number of points but a well-trodden footpath led from Martin’s Dene village opposite him to the corner, where a cinder track had been created through the trees down the steep side of the valley. At the village end of the footpath was the Holly Tree restaurant.
There was already a considerable police presence by the body and he was impressed by the efficiency of at least some members of the Hallowgate force. A Land-Rover had been driven over the hill and a policeman in a navy anorak was marking the area with blue and white tape. As he walked towards it Ramsay caught the jolly Scottish voice of the pathologist unnaturally loud in the still, clear air. It was still cold and the grass and each branch and twig were covered with hoar. At the bottom of the dene a pool of mist lay over the burn. He stepped over the tape and joined the group of people looking down at the body. Among them he recognized Hallowgate’s chief superintendent, a quiet, studious man, nearing retirement. He was considered soft by some of his subordinates, too liberal by far, but Ramsay liked and respected him.