He could hear her crying and wanted to fling his arms around her. But she was far away and all he could do was scrape around for words.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Thanks,’ she said in a muffled tone. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t mind if I came to stay? The new term doesn’t start for ages. I have a few things to sort out here, but I could be with you on Friday.’
Miranda was checking her hair in the mirror for split ends. He covered the phone with his hand as he consulted her.
She shrugged. ‘If you’re sure you won’t be at each other’s throats.’
He said into the phone, ‘Louise? Yes, that’s fine. We’d love to see you.’
‘Warren Howe.’
Nick let the name hang in the air, for Hannah and Linz to absorb. Warren Howe, Warren Howe, Warren Howe. In murder cases, names of the dead echoed in your brain.
‘He was a gardener. Partner in a landscaping business with a man called Peter Flint. Tina Howe was Warren’s wife. They had two teenage children, Sam and Kirsty. They all lived in Old Sawrey, a stone’s throw from Esthwaite Water.’
‘Old Sawrey, isn’t that where Beatrix Potter lived?’ Linz asked. ‘So Warren Howe was a latter day Mr Macgregor?’
‘Warren didn’t chase rabbits. He preferred going after the ladies and by all accounts he usually caught up with them. As for the Potter house, it’s at Hill Top, a mile away in Near Sawrey. Old Sawrey is at the end of a lane that wanders around Claife Heights. There’s a restaurant and bar as well as a handful of houses.’
They were sitting around the small circular table in Hannah’s office. A whiff of peppermint came from the packet of sweets she kept in her top drawer. The icons on her computer screen were lined up in neat rows, Stone’s, Blackstone’s and the PACE manuals stood to attention on the single shelf. A pair of graceful palms arched over matching pots on the window sill. Nick said the room suited her craving for order, it was her refuge from the untidiness of the world outside.
‘How did he die?’ she asked.
‘The Grim Reaper called early. Warren was murdered with his own scythe.’
Linz wrinkled her nose, a favourite mannerism. ‘In his own back yard?’
‘No, he was working in a client’s garden, in between the Sawreys and Hawkshead, looking out over the lake. Lovely setting, Wordsworth probably wrote a poem about it, but the crime scene was a mess. Scythes may be old-fashioned, but they can do plenty of damage to soft human flesh. Trust me.’
Nick paused, letting their imaginations roam. In his twenties he’d acted in a local drama group. Charley’s Aunt and period thrillers like Gaslight, the occasional Oscar Wilde or Francis Durbridge. He’d given up because police work and marriage were incompatible with committing to weeks of rehearsals, but he hadn’t lost the knack of drawing an audience into his world.
He opened his mouth to speak again, but Linz beat him to it.
‘Who was he, the client?’
Obvious question, but Nick snapped, ‘She was Roz Gleave. Before anyone dreams up an exciting theory about her, let me tell you that she had a cast-iron alibi.’
Linz’s eyebrows zoomed up. Far enough to irritate Nick.
‘She ran a small press from home, literally a cottage industry. The day Warren was murdered, she was in Lytham St Annes, giving a presentation to a business that supplied books to libraries.’
Hannah said, ‘Did she live alone?’
‘Chris Gleave, her husband, wasn’t around at the time.’ Nick hesitated. ‘He’d disappeared from home a while before the murder and didn’t show up again until weeks after it. It turned out that he’d had a sort of breakdown and went off to London until he got himself straightened out.’
‘So. A woman on her own has given work to an inveterate womaniser. Perhaps he thought his luck was in.’
‘Warren Howe thought his luck was in every time any woman with a pulse exchanged a pleasant word with him. Single or not. Roz’s best friend, Bel Jenner, for instance, he’d always carried a torch for her. She ran the restaurant and had recently been widowed. But Warren didn’t get far with her. Bel had her eye on the young chef. Warren had more joy with his partner’s wife, Gail Flint. Gail admitted they’d had a fling, but claimed it was all over between them.’
‘Did she have the opportunity to commit the crime?’
‘We couldn’t prove it. She was laid up in bed at the time with a badly sprained ankle. No witnesses — and no evidence she was lying, either. The injury was genuine, but whether it was as serious as she cracked on was anybody’s guess.’
‘Would a woman have had the strength to kill him?’ Linz asked.
Nick nodded. ‘It looked as though he’d fallen or maybe been pushed, and attacked when he was on the floor. The scythe belonged to Warren, it wasn’t brought to the scene. The blade was a brute, you wouldn’t have needed to be Schwarzenegger to slash someone to pieces with it. The corpse wasn’t a pretty sight.’
‘An opportunistic crime, then?’ Linz asked. ‘The killer didn’t come equipped with a murder weapon. Presumably they quarrelled and the crime was committed on impulse?’
‘Not necessarily. Warren had used the same scythe for years, it was a prize possession. Roz Gleave’s garden was a jungle. Anyone who knew him might have expected he’d have it close at hand.’
‘Anyone seen in the vicinity around the time of the murder?’
‘The house is at the end of a track. We interviewed walkers, as well as the locals, but they gave us nothing to work with. The forecast that morning was bad enough to deter any faint-hearts and the all-weather fanatics kept their heads down, making sure they didn’t lose their footing in the wet. No reliable sightings of suspicious cars or vans around the crucial couple of hours.’
‘Any problems in the gardening business?’
‘Not if you don’t count Warren shagging his partner’s missus.’
Linz giggled. ‘Were they making money?’
‘Plenty. Flint was a studious type, a creative thinker, he specialised in garden design. Warren Howe provided the muscle and the green fingers. They were polar opposites, but the combination worked. If Flint knew Gail was sleeping with Warren, he didn’t open his heart to us. To listen to him, Warren Howe was the perfect foil.’
‘Tell us about Tina,’ Hannah said.
‘Some of the lads on the team reckoned she looked like a horse, nicknamed her Black Bess. But she was sexy. Strong, too. Had to be, to cope with Warren. My guess is that he could respect someone who stood up to him. If anyone was weak, he steam-rollered them. Tina knew what he was like, none better, but she coped. If his affairs bothered her, she didn’t let it show.’
‘Did she get her own back?’
‘During the inquiry, she played the loyal wife. I actually heard her saying that life with him had its compensations. Such as their kids. Kirsty was sixteen, Sam eighteen. And they looked after her. Both of them confirmed her alibi.’
‘Which was?’
‘Tina was a keen amateur photographer. The day of the murder, she took the SUV and drove over the Hardknott Pass towards Wasdale, looking for fresh scenes to snap. The kids came along with her for company. At the time her husband was killed, they were all up by the old Roman fort. No independent witnesses that we could trace, but she did show us the pictures she’d taken.’
‘Suppose the son drove and the daughter took the pictures?’
‘Quite a conspiracy.’
‘Stranger things have happened.’
‘You’re right. They could have been lying, but we couldn’t break their stories.’
‘Were the children suspects?’
‘We ruled nobody in and nobody out. Warren wasn’t exactly a caring father. But if there’d been sexual abuse, incest, whatever, nobody was admitting it. Kirsty constantly broke down in tears, but she was a kid and her dad had been murdered, so it wasn’t a surprise. We never got much sense out of her. When Sam was interviewed, he answered in sullen monosyllables. Chip off the old block. He’d felt the back of Warren’s hand more than once, even though he’d left school and was as big as his father. I could picture him retaliating with a punch or a kicking. But murder? We had nothing to pin on him.’