‘Listen,’ said Murfin. ‘My dad worked for a company once where they were up against a serious business rival. One day, the rivals put personalised number plates on all their vans. I thought that was pretty impressive myself. But Dad told me that when you saw someone put personalised plates on, you knew they were in trouble. In business, you have to pretend you’re doing well. You’ve got to find some way of putting out a message, like. And he was right, too. The rival firm went bust a few months later.’
Cooper turned at a sudden flurry of excitement in the grounds of the lodge. One of the officers in the search team had raised a hand, and had become instantly the centre of attention. He was standing near the long rhododendron hedge that marked the boundary of the property.
‘Sergeant Cooper!’ the officer called urgently. ‘Over here.’
‘What is it?’
‘There’s a body.’
It lay half on the lawn and half under the rhododendron bushes. Legs in brown corduroy trousers, torso in an old brown anorak. Cooper knew who it was before he had seen the face. Barry Gamble. Lacerations on his face, thorns embedded in his flesh, the hair on the back of his head matted with blood.
Cooper and Murfin stood watching as the scene was taped off.
‘He was attacked from behind,’ said Cooper. ‘From the way he fell, it looks as though he was running, and pitched forward on his face when he was struck.’
‘So he was running away from someone.’
‘Seems like it. Someone a bit quicker on his feet than he was, too.’
‘Do you think someone caught him snooping again, and overreacted?’ asked Murfin.
Cooper nodded. Gamble had seen something, without doubt. What it was, he hadn’t been telling. At least, he hadn’t told the right people. Talking to the wrong person might have been what got him killed.
‘You know what?’ said Murfin. ‘Some people would give anything for their last testament not to be “found wearing a brown anorak and brown trousers”.’
Cooper remembered that Gamble was a keen amateur photographer, and that Riddings was his chief subject. Somewhere there ought to be photographs. Lots of photographs.
At Chapel Close, Monica Gamble had already been informed of the death of her husband, and a female officer was sitting with her. Monica didn’t look quite as shocked as many people would in these circumstances. Perhaps living with Barry for all those years had led her to expect an outcome like this.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Gamble,’ said Cooper, ‘but we have to take a look in your husband’s shed again.’
‘I don’t know what you expect to find in there. It’s just rubbish.’
‘Not to your husband, perhaps. I think Mr Gamble knew a lot of things he wasn’t telling.’
‘Of course Barry knew things. He knew things about everybody. It was his interest. All right, his obsession. But he never meant any harm. Never.’
‘Why didn’t he just come to us with his information?’ asked Cooper. ‘It would have been so much simpler.’
‘After the way he’d been treated?’ said Mrs Gamble. ‘He knew he was under suspicion from the start. It was obvious none of you believed what he was saying.’
‘Well, that was because he was lying,’ said Cooper. ‘Mrs Gamble?’
She nodded slowly. ‘What is it you want particularly?’
‘Your husband’s camera. And any CDs, memory sticks or storage devices he might have kept his pictures on.’
‘Will it help?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ said Cooper.
There were so many uses for a laptop these days that Cooper carried one in his car. He opened it up and loaded the memory card from Barry Gamble’s camera.
The card held about two hundred pictures. The first were shots of the derelict farm building and the two abandoned slurry pits, no longer simply suggestive of picturesque decay, but carrying a greater significance.
And there, of course, was the guide stoop. It had been photographed from all angles, with each of its faces depicted and the inscriptions clearly legible. Sheffeild Rode, Hathersich Rode. One of the pictures showed the stone in the foreground, with the slurry pits behind it. It was as though the stoop was pointing towards the exact location where Zoe Barron’s phone and wallet would be found. Sheffeild Rode.
Cooper wondered if the next step in Gamble’s campaign of anonymous communication would have been to send a copy of this photograph. The last stage, just to make the point clear for those who were too dim to put two and two together.
He didn’t intend to go through all two hundred images on the memory card. He sorted the files into date order and looked for shots that had been taken on Tuesday.
From that night, he had expected pictures of the Barrons. But the shots he found weren’t of Valley View, or its grounds. They had been taken nearby, yes. But the house they showed was Riddings Lodge.
Cooper scrabbled around until he found a copy of the Riddings map. It seemed that the only spot where Gamble could have got some of these views of Riddings Lodge was right on the boundary between Edson’s property and the Barrons’. There was only a narrow strip at that point where the two properties bordered each other. To the west was the Hollands’ garden at Fourways. Eastwards, there was only the rough sloping ground at the base of the edge. The rock-strewn heath cut a slice between the manicured lawns and almost looked as though it ought to continue along the boundary line as far as Croft Lane.
Eagerly Cooper swung round to his screen and called up the aerial view. When he zoomed in, it became obvious. There was more than just a boundary line between Riddings Lodge on one side, and Valley View and Fourways on the other. The satellite image had captured a wider, darker area that connected the base of Riddings Edge with Croft Lane. A sunken lane, surely? But why hadn’t it been visible on the ground?
Then he remembered the dense rhododendron hedge, yards and yards of it along the bottom of Edson’s garden. He’d stood and admired it from Edson’s lounge. He recalled thinking that many keen gardeners would have tried to get rid of the shrub. Rhododendrons sucked minerals out of the soil and prevented anything else from flourishing near them. But Edson hadn’t cared about that. He had no interest in gardening. He probably never went near the hedge – not near enough, anyway, to see that it hid the remains of a sunken lane under its dense foliage.
But Barry Gamble had known about it. Gamble had sneaked into the old lane to take photographs of Riddings Lodge. He still had rhododendron twigs sticking to his fleece days later. But why did he want to photograph the house so secretly?
Cooper turned back to the photographs and scrolled through them. Figures started to appear now. Glenys Edson taking a stroll in the garden. The housekeeper, Mrs Davies, walking round the house. Mrs Davies pictured talking to the odd-job man, whose name Cooper had forgotten. There was Russell Edson himself, standing in the conservatory, apparently doing nothing. Waiting, perhaps.
And who was that? A younger man, talking to Edson. Now there were several shots, taken by Gamble in quick succession. The two men seemed to be arguing, judging by their arm gestures. Finally there were two frames capturing Edson and the other man coming outside, stepping out of the conservatory and turning towards the garage on the other side of the drive. A moment later and Gamble would have lost them from sight. But those last two frames were good ones. Edson was clearly recognisable in both, his hair swept back, his expression upset or angry – Cooper couldn’t be sure.
And the other, younger man? With a jolt, Cooper realised now that he’d seen him before. Edson hadn’t been joking when he’d said he’d got a man in. This man might have been called in to do the gardening. But he’d come even further into Edson’s life, judging by the close, affectionate embrace that Barry Gamble had captured in the very last frame.
It was funny how a photograph could strike so much more directly to the memory. Perhaps there were too many distractions when you met someone on the street, or saw them at a showground. The voice might sound familiar, the mannerisms might ring a bell, but the brain just didn’t have enough focus to put the features together and make that leap of recognition. Yet when you sat down and studied a photo of the same person, suddenly it was all there.
Cooper jumped at a loud rapping on his window. His heart pounded in shock. He must be in a more nervous state than he’d thought. Normally he would have noticed someone approaching his car. Normally he wouldn’t have
