‘Okay, it’s not much, but Maggie thought…’
‘She was right to make the note. What else does she have to say? You and I both know that most anonymous callers are just out to cause problems. Either for us or someone they have a grudge against.’
‘Maggie said the woman seemed genuine. Genuinely worried, anyway.’
‘Age?’
‘Maggie thought thirty-something. Flustered, but then plenty of people are when they call us. She spoke slowly, the sentences were nervous and broken. At least it helped Maggie to make a good note.’
‘She did well. Even so, the woman couldn’t have given us much less to go on.’
‘True.’ Nick nodded at the note. ‘Bin?’
‘Of course not. Listen, I’m not jumping to any conclusions. This may be a dead-end, probably is. Fingers crossed, she’ll ring again. Brief the team, just in case anyone else answers the phone if she rings back.’
‘Already done.’
‘And we need to dig out the old files on the case, see whether anything jumps out at us.’
‘I asked Maggie to set the wheels in motion. You’ll have them on your desk first thing tomorrow.’
‘You can read my mind.’
He winked at her. ‘Spooky, huh?’
She grinned. ‘Scary.’
After Nick had left, Hannah tried to finish entering up her replies to a diversity monitoring questionnaire. Impossible: the memory of Gabrielle Anders’ dead face blotted out everything else. She had been pretty once, even her passport photograph couldn’t conceal that, but someone had hated her enough to destroy her looks as well as her life.
Gabrielle had been killed a fortnight after Hannah’s promotion to sergeant. It was the first time she’d ever worked with Ben Kind on a murder. Until then, she hadn’t known him well. People tended to be wary of him and although she’d been advised to keep her distance, she couldn’t help being intrigued by his reputation. Everyone reckoned he was a good cop, tough and relentlessly honest. Too honest, Hannah decided, to make it right to the top. You needed to be a bit of a diplomat if you wanted to build a brilliant career. Professional competence could only take you so far. His Achilles heel was that single-minded focus on catching criminals. It didn’t allow time for winning friends or influencing people. Worse, he was famous for not suffering fools gladly, even if the fool in question was responsible for his annual performance review.
She would never forget that first day up by the Sacrifice Stone. The picture remained as vivid in her mind as a snapshot stuck down in an album, and at the same time as unreal as a dream. Even by mid-afternoon, the mist had not quite cleared. She remembered the cold bite of the winter on her cheeks as she patrolled the crime scene perimeter, watching scenes of crime officers in their white suits, moving along the slope of the fell like ghosts. She had to watch every muddy step. The downpour was washing traces of the crime away and yet the gathering of evidence could not be rushed, lest something was missed. Walkietalkies hummed, above the valley a helicopter droned. Whenever the photographer’s flashbulb popped, she shut her eyes, but each time she opened them again, the corpse was still there. Anger stabbed her like a knife in the ribs, at the sight of the naked limbs splayed across the top of the boulder. The victim’s face had been hacked at and her head almost severed at the neck and now the poor creature was exposed to all these prying eyes. She was being photographed and probed and measured while her sightless eyes stared up to the heavens. No one treated her any more as a living and breathing human being. She had become an exhibit, a problem to be solved.
It didn’t take the forensic specialists long to break the news that the victim hadn’t died here. Trouble was, this information provoked more questions than it answered. Most murderers move their victims for the purpose of concealing their crime. Not this one. If fell-walkers hadn’t been deterred by rain and the thick morning mist, Gabrielle’s body would have been found even sooner. So what was the purpose of bringing her here? A symbolic ritual? An ironic nod to the myths of a godless past?
Hannah remembered wild conjectures jumping in her brain like fire crackers. She knew better than to voice her ideas. Ben Kind was a Puritan amongst detectives, addicted to facts and scathing about enthusiasts who got off on theories. Speculation was a dangerous self-indulgence in his book, draining an investigation of time and resources, leeching all the energy out of it. No one ever solved a crime by guesswork. You might as well hire a psychic or peer into a crystal ball.
As Hannah exchanged a word with the DC recording the scene on video, she kept an eye on Ben Kind. He was standing on the fell-side, arms out-stretched, directing his team to their tasks as though conducting an orchestra. Nothing about his gestures was flamboyant, but his self-assurance was unmistakable. She didn’t see anyone to whom he gave an order hesitate or ask questions. They did what they were told, not out of fear, nor even out of unthinking self-discipline, but because they knew that he was very good at his job. Although he might not have made it quite to the top of the greasy pole, Ben Kind commanded loyalty from those who liked him and respect from those who didn’t. His face was a mask; you would lose a lot of money playing poker with him. But as Hannah moved away, she caught a hint of suppressed fury in the set of his mouth and jaw.
Within hours it emerged that Barrie Gilpin, who lived in the nearest dwelling, had disappeared from home. He was the obvious suspect and before long his body was found. Mystery solved? The powers-that-be were content: the Press climbed off their backs and turned their attention to other stories. Ben Kind was unhappy, but there was little he could do. The inquiry ground to a halt. Barrie’s death had cheated them all.
Hannah hauled herself out of her chair. While wading through the reports about the most promising calls to the hotline, she’d missed her lunch and now the hunger pangs could no longer be ignored. Maybe she’d cope better with the bureaucracy if she had something in her stomach.
In the canteen, she bit into a Cox’s orange pippin. In her head she could hear Ben’s voice.
‘Everyone remembers who was in charge of an undetected murder.’
He never spoke a truer word. Failure to trace a murderer gnawed away at any senior investigating officer who cared about the job. Sometimes he’d talk to her about it and once she asked how he squared his doubts about who had killed Gabrielle with his mistrust of intuition.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but is it just because your son played with him as a boy?’
Without flinching, he said, ‘I never said that there’s no room for a detective’s instinct. Gut feel, based on experience, it’s the most valuable asset we’ve got. When you analyse it, a sound instinct is always based in fact. Like Barrie’s record of violence.’
‘He hasn’t got a record of violence.’
‘Shades of the dog that didn’t bark in the night-time. A crime like this doesn’t come out of the blue. Ask any profiler.’
‘I thought you loathed profilers.’
‘The ones who let their imagination run away with them, sure. Barrie Gilpin was a mystery to most folk in Brackdale. He could seem cold and he was often rude. It’s the nature of the condition, I’ve read up on it. But none of that makes a young man a murderer.’
‘We know that he fancied Gabrielle.’
‘And that he’d made a play for a number of girls in the village, most of whom turned him down flat. Sometimes mockingly. Each time he crept away with his tail between his legs. He must have felt wounded, but he didn’t threaten any of them, let alone harm a hair on their heads.’
‘One witness said he was a Peeping Tom.’
‘Okay, so he might have liked to hide in the bushes and wait for a pretty woman to take her clothes off without bothering to draw the curtains. Not very nice, but it doesn’t mean that he was a murderer.’
‘His body was found near the scene.’
‘He was the sort who was always likely to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If that’s what happened here, someone took advantage of him to get away with murder.’