‘Can you bring me up to speed, Ben?’ she asked.
‘Sure. I’ve made notes.’
‘I thought you would have.’
Cooper ran through the details. Fry listened carefully, finding nothing to fault him on. He thought he’d done pretty well, considering he hadn’t been at the scene much longer than she had herself.
‘She sounds like a bit of a recluse,’ said Fry when he’d finished.
He wondered if Fry felt the same slight shiver of recognition that he did at some of the details. There were times in many people’s lives when they went to great lengths to avoid contact with anyone else. It wasn’t so unusual. Just a bit extreme, perhaps, in Rose Shepherd’s case.
‘Actually, I used to know a lady who was a real recluse,’ he said. ‘Old Annie, we called her. When I was a child, she lived in an old cottage near the farm. She must have been there for donkey’s years, because the place was getting very run down. But she didn’t seem to have any relatives – or if she did, they never bothered to visit her. Annie stayed in her house watching TV and listening to the radio, much like Miss Shepherd must have done.’
They began to walk towards the house. The front door stood open, officers still coming and going with bagged items for examination.
‘No one visited Annie at all?’ asked Fry.
‘Well, Mum used to call on her occasionally to see if she was all right. A few times a year, she was invited to our house. Boxing Day, that was a time when we always had to have her round. As kids, we used to dread her coming.’
‘Why?’
‘Annie was one of those lonely people who didn’t speak to anyone for weeks on end, then couldn’t help talking far too much when she finally got into company. It was as if she had to prove to herself that she could still hold a conversation, that somebody would listen to her when she was speaking. I suppose she needed to be sure that she still existed in other people’s eyes.’
‘Were you psychoanalysing people even then?’ said Fry. ‘Yes, I bet you were. I can just see you as an eight-year-old Sigmund Freud.’
But Cooper took no notice. He knew her well enough by now. She made those remarks out of a sort of defensive instinct sometimes. In fact, whenever he talked about vulnerable and lonely people, it seemed.
‘Of course, the result was that everyone tried to steer clear of Old Annie,’ he said. ‘It was probably why her relatives never visited her, and why even the postman kept his van door open and the engine running. Mum always said she had trouble getting away from the cottage once she was inside.’
‘No one likes being trapped by an old bore.’
‘Yes, I suppose Annie was a terrible old bore, but it was more than that. When I was a small child I found her quite frightening. She had that slightly hysterical tone to her voice that always makes people nervous. So people went out of their way to avoid her.’
‘God help me, but I hope I die before I get like that.’
They found Hitchens and Kessen at the edge of the field backing on to the garden of Bain House. The DCI seemed to be sniffing the air, trying to detect the scent of his suspect, like a dog. Wayne Abbott was walking across the field towards them, his boots crunching through the ridges of ploughed soil.
‘I was always taught to go around the edge of a field so as not to damage the crop,’ he said. ‘But I’m making an exception today, because the edge of the field is exactly where your tyre marks are.’
‘The tyre marks of what?’
‘A black car possibly, but a dark colour certainly.’
Kessen looked surprised, and perhaps a bit irritated. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, I’m betting if they drove openly across this field they were hoping that residents living nearby would think they were out lamping.’
‘Lamping?’
‘That’s when people go out into the countryside to shoot animals at night. Lampers use a bright light to dazzle their quarry.’
‘Yes, I know about that – rabbits and such like.’
‘Well, not just rabbits. Badgers, deer, sheep – you name it. Anything that’ll stand up and be shot at.’ Abbott’s eyes flickered around the group. ‘DC Cooper will tell you about it. I’m sure he must have done a bit of lamping himself.’
‘Well …’ began Cooper. But no one was listening to him.
‘But the thing is,’ said Abbott, ‘if local people thought somebody was out lamping that night, they probably wouldn’t have bothered to dial 999, even when they heard shots.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘It’s different in the country – you get used to hearing gunshots. In the city, someone might call the police, but out here you wonder how many brace they’ve potted.’
‘I understand that. But the colour of the vehicle …?’
‘Well, you wouldn’t go lamping in a white car, would you? You want your target to focus on the light, not on the paintwork of your bonnet.’
‘Nothing else, apart from the tyre marks?’
‘Nope. I was hoping for some shell casings. A brass casing could give us some prints, or there might be marks left by the weapon’s extractor or firing pin. But there’s nothing here that we can see.’
‘All right. Thanks.’
‘So it looks as though the suspect didn’t bother going into the house. Clever.’
‘Clever?’
‘Well, it makes it more difficult for us. We always have a better chance of coming up with something from a closed scene. Like the bedroom, for instance. But a ploughed field? And two days after the incident? Better start praying for a miracle.’
Kessen stared at the house. ‘All right, it was clever. But I wonder what the shooter did to get Rose Shepherd’s attention.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Hitchens.
‘Well, if he made the hit from the field, he must have found some way to get his victim to the window. I can’t believe he was prepared to sit out here all night on the off-chance that she’d decide to get out of bed and take a look at the stars.’
‘A phone call, I reckon,’ said Hitchens. ‘It’d be easy enough to phone her on a mobile from the car.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s starting to look like a professional job, isn’t it?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Kessen nodded. ‘Yes, he could easily have phoned Miss Shepherd and woken her up. But what did he say to get her to come to the window? What could he have said that would make her walk straight into his sights?’
While Abbott organized a detailed search of the field, Cooper took the chance to report what the postman Bernie Wilding had told him about never seeing Miss Shepherd’s face clearly.
‘I could understand it if she was physically disfigured,’ said Hitchens. ‘If she was a burns victim, or something. That would explain why she never went out, and didn’t want people to see her.’
‘But she wasn’t disfigured, either in real life or in her passport photo. How old is that passport? When was it issued?’
‘Issued May 2000. Expires 2010.’
‘What about motive?’ asked Fry. ‘Do you think someone in the village might have had a grudge against her?’
‘If she didn’t have contact with anyone in the village, how could someone have a grudge against her?’
‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe that’s why she didn’t have contact with anyone. We don’t know anything about her history, so we can’t guess. Where do we start?’
‘There’s one place we can start,’ said Kessen. ‘We need a list of individuals in the locality with firearms certificates. What about this farmer, what’s his name?’
‘Neville Cross?’
‘He’s a neighbour, isn’t he?’
‘He owns the land at the back of Bain House. But I think his farmhouse is way down there, two fields away.’
‘He’ll have a firearms certificate. Most farmers do – for a shotgun, at least. But maybe he has a serious rabbit problem and needs a rifle.’