‘Anyone talking to the people he worked with at St Herbert’s?’
‘My DS is there now — apparently the library is open seven days a week. I’d no idea people still read so much. What we’ll learn, God knows. Sheikh doesn’t sound the bookish type to me. There are no books at Crosthwaite except a battered copy of one of the Narnia books and a paperback of
‘Last night he took one chance too many.’
Aslan had made two 999 calls. The first cut off after three seconds, with nothing said. In the second, moments later, a man had shouted something. It was wild and unintelligible and on the recording it sounded to Hannah like a bitten-off yelp. A crashing noise was followed by a low groan that reminded her of the air hissing out of a punctured tyre. Another crash, then the line went dead. By identifying the mobile phone mast which picked up the strongest signal from the phone, the call had soon been tracked to the vicinity of Lane End Farm. The same area from which Michael Hinds had called earlier in the week to summon the emergency services after he discovered his daughter’s corpse in a tower of grain. But the call had not come from the same phone.
Mario was finishing his shift when he was alerted, due to his familiarity with Lane End Farm. He’d decided to call there himself, along with a young DC. The lights were on behind curtained windows, but Hinds and his wife took an age to answer the door. When they did, it was clear they’d been interrupted in the middle of a drunken sex session. They denied any knowledge of a 999 call, and insisted they’d heard nothing. The Polish workers had long since finished for the day and headed back to their rooms in Keswick in Hinds’ van. Leaving Lane End to just the farmer, his wife and their animals.
Hinds wasn’t happy about being disturbed, but he didn’t have his scythe to hand, and it’s difficult to get too stroppy when you’re naked under a grubby old dressing gown. Mario insisted on taking a look around outside, and after a short argument, Hinds bowed to the inevitable. When Mario climbed a ladder to shine a flashlight into the slurry tank, he saw that the crust on top of the slurry had been smashed through.
‘When I realised there must be a body in the tank,’ Mario had said, ‘I watched Hinds, to study his reaction. Fear, horror, shock, guilt? Not a muscle in his face moved, I swear. Not so much as a twitch. He might have been the Man in the Iron Mask, for all the emotion I saw.’
They’d needed to summon support and special equipment to fish the body out of the tank, and it wasn’t recovered until the early hours. By then, Mario had obtained a provisional ID. There had been some sort of struggle on the cobbles close to the slurry tank, and a bank debit card had slipped out of the dead man’s pocket. It bore the name of Aslan Sheikh.
‘Would have been nice if the killer had dropped a credit card instead, but life’s never that simple, is it? We also found a butterfly knife nearby.’
‘You think the victim took it with him for protection?’
‘I guess so, given that it’s not the murder weapon. Sheikh must have dropped it when he was attacked, and either the killer didn’t see it in the dark, or wasn’t bothered about it.’
‘Any sign of Sheikh’s mobile?’
‘In the slurry tank, along with its owner.’
Hinds had insisted on taking a look at the body once it had undergone some rudimentary cleaning up, so that the bloodied features were discernible. He claimed he’d never seen the dead man before in his life. Nor did he have the faintest idea why an unknown corpse should have turned up at Lane End, days after his daughter had chosen the farm as the place to end her life.
Either he was guilty, or very, very unlucky.
Events moved fast following the discovery of the corpse. Hinds called Gareth Madsen for a recommendation to a shit-hot lawyer, and when his old friend heard that the body probably belonged to Aslan Sheikh, he dropped the bombshell that Aslan had told Purdey of his true identity. At that point, even the iron mask crumpled with shock. But Hinds refused to say anything more until the legal eagle showed up.
Mario had interviewed Hinds for a second time that morning, this time in the presence of a sharp-suited criminal solicitor from Carlisle, to be met with flat denials that Hinds knew his son was in the country, far less that he called himself Aslan Sheikh and that for the past few weeks he’d been working at the library across the fields from Lane End. Despite tough questioning, Hinds gave nothing away. He’d never had any further contact with the boy’s mother after he’d paid her to have an abortion and leave the country. He said she and her pregnancy were a nuisance that had cost him an arm and a leg to dispose of, and that he’d not given her any further thought from that day to this. Let alone imagined that his son was back in the Lakes.
‘Hinds is a hard man,’ Mario said. ‘No doubt who is the real bastard in that family, for sure, but is he hard enough to have murdered his own flesh and blood?’
‘Forensics reckon Sheikh was killed at the farm?’
‘Looks that way. There are bloodstains and clothing fibres close by the slurry tank, plenty for us to work on. This looks like a crime of desperation. The head wounds were severe, and it seems unlikely he was transported from somewhere else.’
‘Was he dead when he went into the tank?’
‘Not sure yet. He was hit on the head several times, hence the blood splatter — a single blow wouldn’t have done it.’
Sunday, very bloody Sunday. ‘So the culprit and the victim arranged a rendezvous at or close to the farm?’
‘Apparently. Assuming a prearranged meet, it looks like we’re not talking about a crime carefully planned out to the last detail.’
‘Cause of death?’
‘We’re spoilt for choice at present. Whether the blows to the head killed him straight off, or he died after he was inside the tank, we won’t know until the PM results are available. Just our luck it’s Sunday. Seems he had a thin skull, but if by any chance he wasn’t dead when he was bundled into the slurry, he’ll have inhaled the slurry into his lungs and drowned, or found it impossible to breathe under the weight of the stuff and suffocated.’ Mario grimaced. ‘I thought dying in a mountain of grain was bad enough, but …’
‘No sign of the murder weapon, you said?’
‘No, our culprit may have missed the things that the victim dropped, but he wasn’t considerate enough to leave his weapon lying around for us to fall over. The preliminary view is, it was a dumb-bell or something similar. Maybe from a gym.’
‘Plenty of people exercise with them at home. I do myself, though much less often than I ought to. Do Hinds and his wife have a set of dumb-bells?’
‘That isn’t how they get their exercise, apparently. The living room stank of booze and sex when we arrived. We found pornographic DVDs, and Deirdre was wearing a basque. She had a yellowing bruise around her left eye. When I asked about it, she said she’d walked into a door on Friday night. She’d shoved a mask and a couple of nipple clamps under the cushions on the sofa and I found them as soon as she asked me to sit down. I’m still trying to figure out whether she meant me to see them or not.’
‘So they were too busy to realise what was happening — literally in their own backyard?’
‘That’s their story, and if the legal eagle has anything to do with it, they will stick to it like limpets. A middle-aged married couple enjoying themselves on a Saturday evening in the privacy of their own home, too preoccupied with connubial bliss and a Swedish movie about orgies in a convent to hear someone being battered to death in the dark outside.’ Mario gritted his teeth. ‘Somehow the nipple clamps seem like a detail which make it just about credible.’
‘Or is that what we are supposed to believe?’
‘Yeah, for all I know, the sexy set-up was concocted in the space of five minutes to give Hinds an alibi.’
Hannah lobbed her apple core straight into the bin. Greg Wharf would have had a lot of fun with the vision of Deirdre wearing nipple clamps. Just as well he wasn’t here. Time to push him out of her mind.
‘And what do you believe, Mario?’
‘Wish I knew.’
‘Would Deirdre protect him if she thought he’d killed a man?’
‘He’s her husband.’
Hannah made a face. She wouldn’t lie to save Marc in similar circumstances. But what if their relationship
