‘At least he had things in common with you.’
‘Our work, yes.’
‘More than that.’
Hannah coloured. As if to cover confusion, she checked her watch and scrambled to her feet. ‘God, it’s later than I realised. I’d better be on my way.’
He stood up. ‘Perhaps we can do this again sometime. You can update me with progress on your cold case.’
She considered him as if checking an ID card. ‘You’re fascinated by detective work, aren’t you?’
‘I’ll take that as a “yes”, shall I?’
She gave him a sidelong look. ‘You can take it as a “maybe”, Daniel. Anyway, good to see you again. Sorry I have to dash.’
They shook hands briefly and then she was gone. He stood beside the bench for a couple of minutes and watched her walking down the slope towards the road, brisk and focused as ever. As if determined not to look back.
He’d meant to drive home after seeing Hannah, but their conversation prompted a change of heart. Like a fat man deciding that a single doughnut couldn’t do that much harm, he set off over the footbridge across the Kent and past Abbots Hall before heading up the main street towards the Carnegie Library. He’d look up the newspaper records and read up on Warren Howe’s murder.
Earlier in the year he’d checked what the papers said about the killing on the Sacrifice Stone and found they devoted more ingenuity to an endless rehashing of facts released by the police at media briefings than to research giving an old story fresh legs. The murder of Warren Howe followed the same pattern. The vision conjured up by the abandonment of the gardener’s mutilated corpse in a hole of his own making slaked the thirst of the most ghoulish readers for a few days, but once the initial flurry of excitement died down, there was little else to say. There was no obvious culprit — or, if the reporters believed otherwise, they were too worried by the law of libel to come clean — and few leads to suggest an arrest was about to be made. Those who knew Warren Howe — his business partner, the woman who ran the local restaurant, the client who had found his body — seemed guarded, unwilling to yield anything beyond expressions of shock and horror. Opinion pieces moaned about the state of society and that decent people were no longer safe in their beds (or, presumably, their back gardens) but the arguments, like the police inquiry, lacked conviction. The savage manner of the murder meant nobody could sensibly suggest that he was a victim of random lawlessness. The papers were coy about speaking ill of the dead, but dropped hints that he wasn’t exactly an upstanding member of the community. The case migrated from the front page to anorexic paragraphs on page thirteen before disappearing with the emergence of a juicy local government scandal.
Daniel scrutinised grainy photographs of the victim’s family and friends. One shot showed Tina Howe dressed in black. The expression on her long face was as bleak as winter on the fells, but whether from grief or guilt he could not divine. Had Hannah received a tip-off suggesting that the widow had killed her husband? This might explain why the pictures had sparked her interest. It was the traditional explanation for murder. Relationship meltdown, one spouse murdering another.
His thoughts strayed. Why hadn’t Hannah married Marc Amos? They’d been together for years, but she was a strong woman, she could stand on her own feet. Even so, he couldn’t help wondering. He’d seen her smiling at the child up at the castle. She was at ease with kids; did she want some of her own? Plenty of time yet, but the clock never stopped ticking.
‘And what might you be looking for, Daniel?’
Good question. He turned to see the amiable moon-like face of a librarian with whom he’d enjoyed a chat on a couple of previous visits. An avid fan of his television series, she had an encyclopaedic knowledge of fell-walks in the South Lakes, Hugh Walpole’s novels and the Picturesque Movement of the late eighteenth century. Daniel told her that he’d heard of the murder of Warren Howe and been unable to resist the urge to look it up.
‘They never found who did it, you know.’
‘It’s never too late,’ he assured her. ‘There’s something fascinating about an unsolved crime, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, absolutely! My husband’s family comes from Hawkshead, they know the Gleaves. They’re the folk who owned the garden where the man was murdered. Roz publishes local books; we have a selection of her latest titles in the rack over there. Nice woman. She comes in every six months with her new catalogue; she doesn’t run to a sales force. Actually, Chris Gleave wasn’t around at the time. Poor Roz was there on her own.’
‘He wasn’t around?’
‘He’s a musician, and arty types can be temperamental, can’t they? Mood swings. Well, he disappeared for weeks and it turned out he’d gone off to London and had some sort of mental collapse.’
‘So he wasn’t even in the Lake District at the time of the murder?’
‘No, but then, nobody could ever imagine that Chris Gleave would hurt a fly. I only met him years ago, when he did a gig in Ulverston. I bought a CD of his songs and he autographed it for me. Very meek and mild, not the sort of chap who trashes his hotel room or runs around with young floosies. Roz must have been beside herself when he went off like that, without as much as a by-your-leave, and then she had to cope with all the trauma of policemen tramping through her house and grounds in their size twelves. For all I know, they suspected the poor woman of killing Chris as well and burying his body in the vegetable patch. It must have been hellish. But when he finally showed up and asked for forgiveness, she took him back without a murmur.’
‘And they both lived happily ever after?’
The librarian gave him a guileless smile. ‘Oh yes. They’d been through so much, it must have drawn them even closer together.’
‘Be honest with me, Kirsty,’ Bel Jenner said. ‘You look washed-out and tired. Are you sure you feel well enough to work this evening?’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Because if you’re not up to it, you’d be better off going home.’
‘No thanks, I’ll be OK.’
Bel’s face clouded. ‘It’s just that, if you are sickening for something, we don’t want the customers catching a bug, do we? It’s not just your welfare, it’s a question of health and safety.’
Typical. Bel was generous to a fault, and capable of charming and apparently spontaneous little kindnesses, but she took good care of herself and her business at the same time. Kirsty even wondered if she’d had an ulterior motive in starting her relationship with Oliver in the first place. Bel had lost a good chef around the same time as losing her husband. She’d needed someone to fill the vacancy in her kitchen as well as in her bedroom.
‘Honestly, I’ll manage.’ Kirsty lowered her voice. Confidential, woman to woman. ‘It’s just my monthly, that’s all. Sometimes it hits me very hard. You know how it is.’
‘Oh, yes. Of course.’
Bel gave a vague nod and bustled back to the kitchen. Probably to grope Oliver — she was so bloody tactile, that woman, it was past a joke. Kirsty reckoned Bel didn’t have the faintest idea how it was. Her life was so serene. It was impossible to imagine her suffering from period pains.
The blackboard listed the desserts in Bel’s neat, prissy italics. Kirsty picked up a duster and rubbed out the sticky toffee pudding with frantic zeal. If only she could wipe Bel off the map so easily. There’d been a run on the desserts at lunchtime, thanks to a coachload of wrinklies from Hexham. They were members of a Darby and Joan dancing club, on their way to a tournament in Preston, but judging by the amount of food they’d put away, they’d all keel over the minute they got up for a cha-cha.
Since Mum had told her about the anonymous message, she’d been tormenting herself with unanswerable questions. More than anything, she wanted to talk to Oliver. Share her fears with him, let him comfort and reassure her. But it wasn’t going to happen. She wasn’t a fool, she had to be realistic. The minute she started talking to him about the murder, he’d back right off. When she’d first worked here, once or twice she’d mentioned her father, but Warren Howe was a conversational no-go area. Oliver and her father hadn’t known each other well, and Kirsty guessed that Oliver’s distaste stemmed from the fact that Bel was one of the notches on her father’s bedstead. Probably, he was glad that her father was dead. Like Sam.