Blood on the Marsh Read online

  ‘What are you looking for, Guv?’ Fox had moved to her side, frustrated at the lack of anything to do.

  ‘Rope, maybe. Wire. Something that might have been used to attach Jim Wright’s leg to the track so he couldn’t get away.’

  There’s a train due in three minutes,’ Birch warned.

  But no one was listening to him. Holden and Fox had stopped by Lawson, who was crouched down on her haunches by the side of the track, ‘Take a look at this!’ she had said excitedly, just as Birch had been broadcasting his three-minute warning. ‘Is this what you’re looking for, Guv?’

  Lawson was pointing at a piece of wire that was looped twice round a sleeper. It was some eighteen inches in length, with a green covering, and it looked new.

  As her latest – and, without question, most irritating – customer exited the shop, Jaz Green pulled out her mobile, flipped it open, and frowned. It wasn’t the first time she had frowned at it that morning, but frown as she might, no text message, no missed call, no voicemail message displayed itself. It was very nearly eleven o’clock, and still David had not turned up. Normally, they’d have been fortunate to have had one customer by now, but it was Murphy’s Law that on the day David went AWOL four separate and very needy customers should turn up before coffee break time. She had been sorely tempted to strangle the last of these four with some of her very best picture wire after the woman had fussed endlessly and very vocally about the boards and frames for two of her own very ordinary paintings. She had asked for advice, and then dismissed it with such condescension that Jaz had had to count silently to ten. Now all she wanted was to nip outside for a cigarette, and then pop up the road for a nice cappuccino. Only she couldn’t because David still hadn’t turned up.

  It wasn’t like him. He normally warned her if he was running even five minutes late. He was very precise was David. She rang his number, but as had happened when she’d rung an hour earlier, it went straight to his answering service. She killed the call. There was no point in leaving another message.

  Jaz retreated to the yard at the back of the shop. If she stood by the small window – she really must get David to clean it – she could still spot anyone coming in the front door. She lit up, and waited for the tension to ebb. But she couldn’t help but worry. The thing about David was he was so reliable. It just wasn’t like him not to turn up. She took a final pull at her cigarette, dropped it on the ground, and crushed it under her heel. She flipped the mobile open again as she moved back into the shop. She hated ringing Maureen to ask whether she knew anything. It felt like a betrayal of David. She believed in treating him like an adult, and ringing his mother to check up on him was not treating him like an adult. But to do nothing seemed worse – suppose he had had an accident, or was so sick he couldn’t get help. Perhaps he’d lost his mobile and couldn’t call for help.

  Maureen answered almost immediately. ‘What is it, Jaz?’ She spoke brusquely, which was unusual. They were good friends, and their conversations were typically anything but brusque.

  ‘Is David all right? It’s just that he’s not turned up for work, and he’s not answering his mobile.’

  ‘He’s not the only one.’

  But Jaz failed to register the sharpness in her friend’s voice. ‘David is usually so reliable. Has he rung you?’

  ‘No he ruddy well hasn’t.’

  Jaz said nothing, taken aback by her friend’s answer and tone. It wasn’t like her at all, at least not where David was concerned.

  ‘Jim didn’t come home last night.’

  ‘What?’ She wondered if she’d misheard. ‘What do you mean? He’s left you?’ Mind you, she immediately thought, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if he had. He treated Maureen like shit.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s left me, maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he got as drunk as a skunk last night, and doesn’t plan on coming home until my shift has started.’

  ‘Maybe he’s with David?’ The thought had suddenly occurred to Jaz. ‘Have you tried ringing him?’

  But Maureen never answered the question. ‘There’s someone at the door.’ And then, in a loud whisper, ‘God! It’s that bloody detective woman again and her sidekick. I’ll have to go.’

  ‘Ring me when they’ve gone,’ Jaz said, but the line was already dead.

  Back at the police station, Wilson was feeling very sorry for himself. Sometimes life – not to mention DI Holden – could be such a bitch. He’d only been a few minutes late that morning, and it wasn’t as if it was his fault anyway. He’d been up half the night with his mother. She’d woken up feeling sick just after one o’clock, and she hadn’t made it to the loo. His dad was in Manchester on business, so he’d had to clean up after her. Thick carpet impregnated with vomit – it had been disgusting. Sitting there at his desk, Wilson sniffed at the back of his hand. He reckoned he could still smell it, rank and rancid.

  Eventually, he had got to bed, but he hadn’t been able to get back to sleep for ages, and then he’d gone and slept right through the alarm. So all in all, what with speed shaving, and speed showering, and grabbing a banana on the run, he reckoned he’d done well to get to the station only twenty minutes late. But as he had pulled into the car park on his bike, he had almost collided with Holden, Fox, and Lawson coming out. He had skidded to a halt, expecting Fox to stop, but he didn’t. Through the glass, he had seen Holden exaggeratedly tapping her forefinger on her wrist, and then they were past him.

  Inside the station, he had soon discovered what he was missing – a death on the railway line – and he had sworn loudly. Wilson was not normally a man who swore. But inside the office that he shared with Lawson and two others, there had been no one to hear anyway.

  There was a bright yellow sheet of A4 paper on his desk. It was Holden’s writing. ‘Find yourself something useful to do. We’re working.’ Terse, brusque and totally without sympathy.

  For maybe half an hour, Wilson had seethed. At the injustice of it all. At his mum for not making it to the loo. At the ferocity of Holden. What a cow she could be! It just wasn’t fair.

  And then his mobile had rung. It was his mother. She never rang him at work. Never. And for a couple of moments, he was scared to answer.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ she said quickly, ‘but I just wanted to say thank you.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Much better, thanks. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. I’m just sorry you had to clear up the mess.’

  ‘That’s OK, Mum.’

  ‘Bye, then,’ and she was gone.

  For maybe half a minute he sat there, staring into nothing. A single short phone call, and his self-pity had evaporated like the early morning mist. What a bastard he was to have thought like that. He had helped his mother, but who wouldn’t have in the circumstances? And then he had blamed her, just because he had overslept. How was that her fault?

  He looked down at the desk, at the yellow paper which stared up at him. ‘Find yourself something useful to do.’ He made a face. He’d show Holden. He’d bloody well show her.

  Holden was sitting on the same sofa as when she had first visited Maureen Wright, and she was feeling even more uncomfortable than the last occasion. This wasn’t the sofa’s fault; it was just that the impact of the morning was only now starting to kick in. She hadn’t anticipated the emotional shock of walking along those railway tracks, imagining what might have happened, and she certainly hadn’t been prepared for finding what they had found. And now she had to break the news.

  ‘So are you going to tell me something?’ Maureen had sat down in the armchair immediately opposite, and her hands were clenched tight together. ‘I presume you’re here because you know something?’

  ‘Last night someone was hit by a train. It was travelling to London, between Oxford and Didcot, and it hit and killed someone on the line.’

  ‘Someone?’

  ‘We believe it may be your husband.’

  ‘My husband?’

  ‘We believe
so. It’s hard.…’ Holden paused. How do you say this to someone? ‘In that sort of accident, identification is never easy.’

  She was expecting Maureen to break down, to burst into tears or hysterics. But the woman’s face was blank. ‘It can’t be him. What would he be doing on a railway line?’

  ‘We don’t know. Not yet. And maybe you’re right.’ Holden didn’t feel this was going to plan, whatever that plan might be. But she had to carry on. ‘It was on the line near Radley Village. We were wondering if he had any clients down there. Or potential clients.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Maureen shook her head, as it trying to clear it. ‘I don’t know. He sure as hell needed some more work.’ She paused. ‘He did say he was going to see someone about a job, but to be honest I wasn’t really listening.’

  ‘You mean he was going to see someone yesterday?’

  ‘I think so.’ She grimaced, trying to assemble her scrambled thoughts. ‘Look, I don’t—’ She stopped, took a deep breath, and then started again. ‘I didn’t always believe Jim. When he said he was going to do this or do that, that he’d met someone who was going to put work his way, well I took it with a large pinch of salt. He was a bit of a bullshitter.’ She paused again, looked down at her fingers, and then up again until her eyes met Holden’s. ‘Are you sure it was him?’

  ‘We found his wallet. With a bank debit card, two credit cards, and driving licence.’

  ‘Someone could have stolen it from him!’ Maureen’s voice had intensified. ‘Then done a runner and got knocked down by the train. You can’t be certain it was him. He could still be alive.’

  Holden was watching her closely. Only DNA comparison could prove it beyond all doubt, but as far as she was concerned the victim had to be Jim Wright. The poor woman was clutching at straws – or possibly she was a very cool woman playing a very calculating game. If Maureen Wright had had even an inkling of what her husband and Greenleaf had been getting up to, then she had one hell of a good motive for murder. Genuine shock or crocodile tears? Holden needed to know. ‘What size are your husband’s feet?’

  ‘His feet?’ The surprise in her voice seemed genuine. ‘Size ten.’

  Holden turned slightly towards DS Fox, who was sitting to her right, an A4 envelope in his hands. He pulled out a photo and slipped it onto the coffee table around which they were all perched. It was a photo of a single brown boot. Holden opened her mouth to ask the question, but there was no need. Maureen Wright stood up from the table, staggered towards the kitchen door, and vomited.

  Less than five hundred metres away, Wilson had, for the first time that day, a look on his face that denoted pleasure. Not intense pleasure, admittedly, and certainly not the pleasure of someone who has, maybe, just won the lottery. Rather it was a look of quiet satisfaction, one which his mother would have recognized, a look which indicated that Detective Constable Colin Wilson was on to something.

  When he had finally recovered his equilibrium that morning, Wilson had started with a sheet of blank paper, pushing the yellow one with its terse message from Holden to the side. On the white sheet, he had written the names of Nanette Wright, Paul Greenleaf, and finally Jim Wright. He had then added a question mark next to Jim’s name, conscious that the identity was not certain.

  His own initial theory, fuelled by his interviews of Nanette’s solicitor and accountant had been that it was all about money, and that Jim Wright had slipped the morphine into the flask to bring about her early demise. But if it was Jim Wright who had been hit by the train, where did that leave his theory? Had Jim Wright committed suicide? After he had killed Greenleaf? But that didn’t make sense. After all, Greenleaf had been paying him way over the odds for minor building work on his Otmoor house, and it was Greenleaf who had hired him to do some jobs at Sunnymede. So why on earth would Jim have killed Greenleaf? Was it something to do with the photos of Ania and his daughter, taken after that Hayes and Yeading game? He frowned, wrote ‘Photos?’ on the right hand side of the white sheet of paper, and tried to think.

  And it was while he was thinking that Holden’s text had arrived, as blunt and to the point as ever: ‘Hayes and Yeading – who was in the box? Complete list. Pronto.’

  So her thoughts were going along the same lines as his. He felt a sudden glow of pleasure, and picked up the phone.

  The guy at Oxford United was helpful, and yet not helpful. There had been ten people in the box. At least he assumed there had been because they were designed for ten people and no more. But no, he couldn’t give a complete list of who the ten people were because that wasn’t how it worked. He could, however, confirm that it was Paul Greenleaf who had hired the box.

  ‘He paid for it himself?’

  ‘He paid with a business card – Sunnymede Care Home.’

  ‘Right. But you can’t tell me who actually came?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about CCTV?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Was there any in the room?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Outside the room?’

  ‘No. Look, let me explain.’ There was more than a tinge of irritation in the man’s voice. ‘We’ve got CCTV, of course we have, but we use it to spot troublemakers in the crowd, not spy on our corporate clients. Right? The boxes are for watching the football. They aren’t part of the Big Brother studio.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Wilson said quickly, conscious that he was in danger of losing the guy’s co-operation. ‘It’s just that my boss wants a complete list of everyone in the box that day and—’

  ‘So get your boss to ask Mr Greenleaf. He’ll know, won’t he?’

  There was an obvious answer to that, but Wilson had had enough. He thanked the guy for his time and rang off.

  It was Greenleaf who had hired the box, using money donated by some grateful son or daughter. And it was clear from Ania’s evidence that she, Greenleaf, Jim Wright, and Vickie Wright had been there. So who were the other six? And who could he find out from? Vickie maybe. But he couldn’t just ring her up. So how…?

  And then a thought occurred to him: Greenleaf’s laptop. Maybe there was something on it. Mind you he’d already given it a pretty good once over. But Holden would want only answers, not excuses. He extricated the laptop from its case, and powered it up again. Then he logged on and opened up the email. The only problem with the email was that Greenleaf had been very careful when using it. Wilson had already discovered that. When he had cracked the password at Greenleaf’s house in Charlton-on-Otmoor, he had discovered nothing in the deleted items folder, nothing in the sent items, and only three in the inbox, and they had all been marketing ones. But maybe, just maybe, there might be some new ones that might give a clue about something.

  As he waited for Microsoft Outlook to do its check for new emails, he did a search for any file on the computer with the word ‘Hayes’ in it. Maybe, just maybe, Greenleaf had kept a file for the game. But the search revealed nothing. He flicked back to Outlook. Six emails had come in: two from Expedia with details of cheap flights to Minneapolis; one about parking at Heathrow; special offers from two supermarkets; and one from a money advice website. And then, as he looked at the screen in frustration, another one came in, from Facebook.

  ‘God!’ It wasn’t a prayer. Wilson didn’t pray. But it should have been, at the very least, a word of thanks to a higher being. ‘Roy Hillerby wants to be your friend’ the email said. Wilson clicked, confirming that he – or rather the dead Paul Greenleaf – would be happy to be a friend. So did that mean that Roy Hillerby didn’t know about Greenleaf’s death? But Wilson didn’t dwell on the thought, because he was staring at Roy Hillerby’s Facebook page, and a photograph. He clicked on it. It was one of only two in Hillerby’s album. They weren’t going to win any photographic awards, but they were clear enough. Nine people sitting round a table, each with a drink in his or her hand, and the same nine people sitting down in two rows of seats. Excitement flooded through Wilson: It was the Hayes and Yeading game. It was a resul
t.

  ‘What happened to you, then?’ Wilson looked up to see Lawson standing smugly in the doorway.

  ‘I overslept.’ He had no intention of going into detail, not to her anyway.

  ‘It looks like Jim Wright was tied to the railway.’

  ‘Tied to it?’

  ‘With garden wire.’

  ‘Shit!’

  She walked over to Wilson. ‘Checking your Facebook, I see,’ she smirked. ‘Naughty boy!’

  ‘Not mine, actually. Greenleaf’s.’

  ‘Greenleaf’s?’

  ‘Yeah, Roy Hillerby from Sunnymede has asked Greenleaf to be his friend, and look at these photographs he posted. From the Hayes and Yeading game.’

  ‘Hey, that’s Jim Wright and his daughter, and Greenleaf and Bella Sinclair.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m not sure about the others. Hillerby hasn’t tagged anyone or written any names, so I was thinking we should go and show it to Fran Sinclair. She ought to know everyone on it.’

  ‘OK, let’s go.’

  ‘I ought to speak to the guv first.’

  ‘She won’t want to be disturbed. She and Fox have gone off to tell Maureen her husband has been marmalized.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘She wants a list of names of everyone in that Oxford United box. If you want to avoid a bollocking, I suggest you ring her when you’ve got them, not before.’

  Maureen Wright had changed her clothes. The pink blouse and black slacks had been thrust into the washing machine, and had been replaced by a blue T-shirt and jeans. She had brushed her teeth to get rid of the taste of the vomit, applied some perfume, and brushed her hair. She was ready for whatever came next, as long as it didn’t involve photographs.

  ‘When did you last see your husband?’ Holden asked. She was sitting opposite on the sofa as before, leaning forward, eager to get on with it, a terrier worrying at a bone.

  ‘Yesterday morning, just before I went to Reading.’

  ‘What time was that?’