‘What’s going on?’ Sam sounded mildly curious.
‘I don’t know. I saw it from upstairs. Perhaps some TV company filming?’
‘Don’t tell Nigel,’ Sam said. ‘He’ll drag us all down to be in it. You know how he loves to be the centre of attention.’ He had the slow, soft accent that belonged to that part of Northumberland; sometimes she thought his voice was unique to the valley, and that he was the only one of them who truly belonged here.
They paused for a moment outside the farmhouse window and looked inside. Nigel and Lorraine were already playing host, pouring Prosecco into tall fluted glasses. They did love their fizz. The professor, another of the neighbours, was there already. A big presence. Hair still mostly dark, despite his age. Eyes that were almost black. Lorraine had once said, ‘John O’Kane looks like a poet, don’t you think?’ Speaking with something like admiration in her voice. Annie had wondered if there could be an attraction there. Nigel was lovely to Lorraine of course, but certainly not poetic. You certainly couldn’t describe him as soulful.
As they watched, the professor’s wife Jan appeared in the room. She must have come in through the back door. She was wearing a dress that she might have owned when she was a student: long, with flowery prints in blue and green, frilly at the neck and very Laura Ashley. Now it didn’t suit her. Her hair was wiry and curly and streaked with grey and she looked like an eccentric Edwardian grandmother. John looked at her, not exactly with disdain; more like disappointment. Annie wondered how she would feel if Sam looked at her like that.
Sam had already knocked at the door. He wasn’t comfortable with the Valley Farm residents’ habit of letting themselves into each other’s houses. Nigel Lucas came to answer. He was a short man. Of all of her neighbours, Annie thought he was the hardest to get to know and wasn’t sure how else to describe him. She thought he was ambitious and a social climber, but very kind.
‘Come in!’ Below the voices in the room beyond there was music. Jazz. A double bass, insistent like a heartbeat. ‘You know you’d be welcome, even without Sam’s delicious offerings.’ It seemed Nigel couldn’t speak without flattering, and it came to Annie that he was less confident even than Sam. Nigel was desperate to please, but Sam didn’t really care what other people thought.
As they walked into the living room a phone rang in the distance. Lorraine Lucas went to answer it, shimmying to the music, the silk of her loose trousers catching the candlelight.
When she returned she stood inside the door. They fell silent and looked at her. She had that kind of presence.
‘You’ll never guess.’ Her eyes were huge. ‘That was Susan. She heard it from her father. There’s been a murder in the valley.’
Chapter Six
The three detectives met up late that evening at Vera’s house. It was just across the hill from Gilswick, closer than the police station in Kimmerston, and Joe was summoned to bring pizza and beer on his way home. He caught the takeaway-pizza place just before it was closing and had to pay over the odds for beer in a small convenience store. He was surprised to see that Holly was there, sitting in the chair that he thought of as his own. He couldn’t remember her ever being invited to Vera’s house before and she seemed uncomfortable, a bit nervous. There was a wood fire in the grate, but the logs must have been damp because it soon fizzled into nothing and Vera made no move to revive it.
Holly sat in her coat and nibbled at a slice of pizza. She’d refused the beer and now held a mug of instant coffee. He couldn’t see her drink from it; perhaps the mug hadn’t reached her standards of hygiene. He hadn’t really wanted alcohol, either, though he took a bottle to keep Vera company. To prove his allegiance? He still felt weird, disengaged. Two murders in a valley where nothing happened, where smart people lived. He couldn’t take it in.
Vera was talking. She seemed to have a personality transplant when they were in the middle of an investigation. To become younger and more energetic. She stopped grizzling about her health, her itchy skin and the aches in her legs. Joe thought that Billy Cartwright knew her too welclass="underline" there was something ghoulish about her passion for her work; for suspicious death and other people’s tragedies.
‘We have ID on the boy in the ditch. Patrick Randle. Joe, what do we know about him?’
‘He only registered with the house-sitting agency six months ago. He looked after a place in Devon for a month and then a flat in Hampstead.’
Holly looked up. ‘That’s in London.’
‘Yes, Holly, we do know that.’ Vera was at her most imperious. A pause. ‘Do we know if Randle was offered the Carswell job just by chance? Or did he ask to come to Northumberland?’
Joe thought Vera had a knack for making them all defensive. ‘Oh, I’m not sure. The woman I spoke to didn’t seem to know the details. The agency owners were out for the evening.’ He realized that he sounded like a schoolboy making excuses because he hadn’t done his homework. ‘But I did find out a bit more about Randle and the agency.’
‘Go on.’
‘The owners of the agency are a couple called Cunningham and the company’s based in Surrey. As I said, Randle had only been on their books for six months. Because the house-sitters are put into a position of trust, they’re all vetted pretty carefully. They need a CRB check, at least two references and an interview. Randle had no criminal record and he provided two good referees. One was the supervisor of his PhD and the other was the priest in the village where he’d grown up.’
‘Which was?’
Joe checked his notes. ‘A place called Wychbold in Herefordshire.’
‘Is he still a student then?’ Vera finished the beer in her bottle and set it on the floor beside her chair.
‘No, he recently completed his doctorate and was taking some time out, before heading straight back to academia for postdoctoral research. A bright lad apparently.’
‘What subject?’ This was Holly, who seemed to be feeling left out.
‘Ecology.’
‘Family?’ Vera asked.
‘Mother, still living in Herefordshire. The locals have informed her of her son’s death. Randle was an only child, and his father died when he was a teenager.’
Vera smiled at him, the closest she’d get to telling him he’d done a good job. Then she lay back in her chair and raised her eyes to the ceiling, which was nicotine-brown and hadn’t been decorated since her father, Hector, had died. Smoking was one of the few vices in which she didn’t indulge. ‘Of course it’s important that we find out if Randle asked to come to Northumberland. We need to find out if he had a specific reason for being in Gilswick, or if this was random.’
There was a moment of silence.
‘Could it have been a burglary gone wrong?’ It had crossed Joe’s mind that some of those paintings downstairs in the big house might be valuable, and there could have been bits of jewellery in the master bedroom. His Sal made him watch Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday night and he was always astounded at the value put on stuff he wouldn’t give house-room to.
‘Well, that might work, if Randle’s was the body in the house and we didn’t have a second corpse.’ This time Vera made him feel like the stupid kid at the back of the class. ‘Besides, I didn’t get the feel that anything had been taken, and there was no sign of a break-in.’
Holly shot Joe one of her superior looks.
There was a moment’s pause.
‘Do we know anything about the older man?’ Vera asked at last. ‘The man in the flat. Anything from the second CSI team, Joe? Holly didn’t find anything in the pockets that she could get to easily.’