‘If they saw her go up there, or heard her yelling for someone to drag her out. If not …’ Mario made a throat-slitting gesture.
‘Might have been a cry for help,’ Hannah said. ‘People weren’t taking her seriously. She wanted Callum’s case reopened, nobody was listening …’
Mario winced. ‘Do you really want to go there, Hannah? I heard about those calls she put in to you and your team. Let’s not encourage the IPCC to get excited, eh? When those guys go off on a wild goose chase, you never know how long it will last, or where it will lead. Keep it simple, that’s my recommendation.’
He meant to be supportive, but her stomach wrenched with frustration. If she’d wanted an easy life, she wouldn’t have joined the police in the first place.
‘Orla didn’t give us enough to enable us to take any action. She was unhappy, and she’d had too much to drink …’
Greg said, ‘You don’t haul yourself up a grain tower just to enjoy the view from the top.’
‘Her father says she and her brother used to love playing in the grain,’ Mario said. ‘Once the silo was built, he put it out of bounds. Maybe she was reliving childhood memories. The mind can play strange games.’
He said it as though he’d read the phrase in a book. Hard to imagine sensible, uxorious Mario allowing his own mind to play games. Yet his theory was persuasive, if obsessing over Callum meant Orla wanted to relive their shared past. ‘How is the father? You’d think he’d be prostrate, but when I rang the farm, he was out working as usual.’
‘That’s farmers for you,’ Mario said. ‘On duty twenty-four/seven; it’s not so much a job as a way of life. Doesn’t mean Hinds isn’t gutted. But he’d never show weakness. Strong man, very proud. We offered him a leaflet about bereavement counselling, and he ripped it up without a word.’
‘Didn’t he realise Orla had come to the farm?’
‘He says not, it came as a total surprise. And nobody seems to have seen her climb into the silo.’
‘Do we believe that?’
‘Lane End isn’t swarming with workers, like most dairy farms these days. Hinds has cut back on headcount to keep turning a profit. His labourers are Polish, and they were scattered far and wide over two hundred acres. Given the path she took from the rear of the farm to the silo, it might have been more surprising if somebody had spotted her.’
‘Unless they were looking out for her?’ Greg suggested.
‘Nobody seems to have had the faintest idea she meant to come to the farm. The pathologist thinks the time of death was not long after she dived into the grain. We’ll know more once the PM is completed.’
‘The gash on the head,’ Greg said. ‘Any chance it might have been inflicted by someone else?’
‘There are blood traces on the inside of the tower, where we believe she banged her head,’ Mario said. ‘Indications are that the impact was severe enough to knock her out, and when she came round, she was up to her waist in grain and unable to free herself. It would have been dark inside, and the noise would have prevented her from attracting attention. The next load probably buried her. The one after that would have been fatal.’
‘Open-and-shut case?’ Greg asked.
‘Trust me, she killed herself. That’s the reality of what happened; whether she changed her mind when she recovered consciousness is academic. We don’t need to overelaborate, it’s simple. Same as your cold case, I guess.’
‘We’ll see,’ Hannah said. ‘I want to ask Michael Hinds if he still thinks his brother killed his son.’
‘Better wear your body armour, then.’
‘You think so?’
‘I’m sure so. Orla tried to persuade him that Philip didn’t murder the boy, and their conversation turned into a furious row.’ He lowered his eyes, as if struggling to comprehend why some families could never be happy. ‘Pity — that was the last time she and her father ever spoke to each other.’
Until now, Aslan had always found it easy to take decisions. Go there, say this, pretend to do that. Perhaps the secret was that none of it seemed to matter. Once he’d arrived at the Lakes, decisions became harder to take. In the past he’d scoffed at ditherers, people who were afraid to act. But did they hesitate simply because they cared too much?
Outside Lane End Farm, he’d encountered a couple of labourers who had sneaked out for a crafty smoke. The men exchanged a few words in a foreign language, and wandered back into the farmyard. Maybe they thought he was an undercover snooper from the Border Agency, checking up on migrant workers. If only they knew his own visa was phoney, bearing a made-up name, and that his knees were knocking with apprehension.
So far he hadn’t caught sight of Mike Hinds. He knew what the man looked like, he’d memorised his appearance thanks to Orla. A sentimentalist, she’d kept dog-eared photographs of her parents as well as Callum, and she’d shown them to Aslan over a drink in a bar. For once, he hadn’t needed to fake interest.
No matter how many times he rehearsed what he might say when they came face-to-face, it never sounded right.
You don’t know me, but …
I know this will come as a shock …
Sorry to disturb you, but we need to talk …
Please don’t slam the door in my face, please …
Shit, he was no good at this. He hated his own weakness. People who knew him would never believe it; everyone thought he was brash, so why had confidence deserted him, when he needed it most?
He heard a car with a quiet engine, coming down the lane. Even before he set eyes on it, instinct told him the police were coming. Surely they could not be on to him?
His stomach felt queasy. This was all too difficult. He wanted to run away and hide.
Hannah smelt the farm before she set eyes on it. She had the sunroof open, making the most of the weather. Sitting behind her, Greg had spread notes about the Callum Hinds case over the back seat and was studying them in uncharacteristic silence. The lane traipsed around a forbidding hawthorn hedge, and petered out in a tight turning space. North of the lane, woodland stretched towards the slopes of the fells. The caravan park was masked by trees. Lane End might have been in the middle of nowhere, rather than five minutes’ drive from the centre of Keswick.
Crumbling stone pillars guarded a dirt track leading to the stone farmhouse. Ugly single-storey extensions had been added on either side of the building, as if to remind visitors that this was a workplace, not the setting for some rural idyll. No front garden, just an open space where a mud-spattered estate car and a couple of farm vehicles were parked.
As Hannah reversed in the turning space, she caught sight of someone in her rear-view mirror. A tall man with a thick mass of hair and a beard, standing next to one of the stone pillars. He wore a T-shirt and shorts, and she’d have assumed he was one of the myriad walkers who swarmed over the Lake District, if he’d had a rucksack on his back. But there was no rucksack. As the car swung round, the man stared at them, before turning on his heel. Within moments, he rounded the hawthorn hedge and vanished from sight.
‘What do you suppose he was up to?’ Hannah asked.
‘I’ve heard of trainspotters.’ Greg shrugged. ‘But farmyard spotters?’
The only greenery this side of the fields was the thick ivy curtain around the entrance porch. A cobbled yard separated the house from a slurry tank, a straggle of steel-framed sheds and a two-storey L-shaped brick outbuilding. Two swarthy labourers watched from behind a tractor as the two detectives got out of the car. They muttered to each other in a language that Hannah recognised as Polish. You heard it spoken a lot in the Lake District nowadays; the place was a magnet for people who wanted work and didn’t expect to be paid the earth. She caught the word policja, and for a moment she thought they were about to come up and buttonhole her. But one of the men put a restraining hand on his companion’s wrist, as if he’d had second thoughts. Before Hannah could approach them, they hurried off towards the sheds.