Most of all, though, she’d been kind.

  De Bruin had been an ugly child, weedy of build, with bad skin, protruding ears and crooked teeth. He’d been hopeless at games, slow to learn and with an unfortunate habit of saying exactly the wrong thing when trying to fit in. His bullying had been incessant. Perhaps it had only been because Carmen had lived a couple of doors down, and their mothers had been friends, but she’d been the one person at school ever to treat him with decency, or to stand up for him against his small army of tormentors. For that alone, he’d have worshipped her. But it hadn’t been for that alone.

  His body had been changing in the most confusing ways. He’d had endless fantasies of wrestling Carmen to the ground, their bodies hotly pressed, their cheeks and mouths. Walking home together after being dropped off by the school bus one afternoon, a violent summer squall had set them sprinting for shelter beneath the old oak at the foot of their street. Her cheap white cotton blouse had been drenched to a pearly translucence, clinging beguilingly to her skin, while dribbles of rain had trickled down inside her collar, causing her to undo her top buttons to brush it away. Still panting from their dash for cover, she’d put her hands on her knees to recover.

  Her blouse had fallen open from the throat. Her young breasts had swung free inside her bra for a few heart-stopping moments. The shape and colour of them, the way they swelled and then sank again with each breath, the chilled rose bumps of her nipples, all framed by her frazzled long dark hair. He’d never seen anything remotely as erotic, either before or since. He’d suffered the inevitable teenage reaction. Terrified she’d notice, he’d tried to adjust himself before she looked up, only to draw attention to it instead, so that she’d caught him with his hand down his trousers, and had given him a look of such utter revulsion that it had stamped itself deep into his psyche, so that he’d never quite been able to lose himself completely to a woman since, however beautiful, unless she had about her that same sense of contempt and loathing.

  An English rose with bedraggled hair in clinging wet white cotton regarding him with horror and disgust. No wonder he’d frozen last night in Anna Warne’s bedroom. No wonder she’d become lodged like a splinter in his mind ever since. And, like a splinter, the harder he tried to squeeze her out, the harder he found it to think of anything else. ‘Do you know where I went yesterday evening, Mr Calder?’ he asked, gesturing south across the Wash.

  Calder shook his head, bewildered. ‘Warne Farm?’ he hazarded.

  ‘Correct, Mr Calder. Warne Farm. And do you know why?’

  ‘You never told me. I’d have gone there myself if you’d said what for.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said de Bruin. ‘I expressed myself poorly. I didn’t mean: Why did I go there? I meant: Why did I go there last night?’

  ‘Oh. Because the police had left. Because it was empty.’

  ‘Not exactly, no. Not because it was empty, but because you told me it was empty.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said Calder. He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself with a series of short fast breaths. ‘I never actually said it was empty, if you recall. I only ever said that the lights were off and all the cars had left.’

  ‘A little late to be revising your story now, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not revising it. I just—’

  ‘I asked you if there was anyone there,’ said de Bruin. ‘You told me no. You told me they’d all left.’

  ‘I meant the cars,’ said Calder, in desperation. ‘I mean we don’t have cameras everywhere. Only on the roof and in the barn and covering the drive.’

  ‘The time to tell me that would have been yesterday, don’t you think?’

  ‘I did, I did. I swear to god, I thought I did.’

  ‘No,’ grunted Andrei. ‘You said there was no one there.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said Calder again, risking another glance down at the sea beneath, the white spume reaching up for him like the hands of drowned sailors. ‘Please. Please. I beg you. My boy. He’s sick. He needs me. His mum can’t do it alone.’

  ‘You know my policy, Mr Calder. I’ve always made it clear. My employees are allowed one honest mistake. I’ll always forgive one honest mistake. I’m not a monster. But you’ve now made two. Two serious mistakes. Two costly mistakes. Two mistakes, moreover, that might almost have been designed to do me harm.’

  ‘No. No. Never.’

  ‘And I should just believe you, should I?’

  ‘It’s the truth. I swear it is.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said de Bruin. ‘I don’t buy it anymore.’ And he gestured at Andrei to push him to his death.

  ‘Please,’ wept Calder. ‘I beg you. I don’t want to die. I’ll do anything. Anything.’

  De Bruin frowned as if undecided. Not that he was. Calder didn’t have the balls to betray him deliberately, and he still had value, both as his link to the bikers and as a fall guy to toss to the police should the need arise. But he’d been careless twice now, and so he needed to be reminded of his place in the world. ‘Anything?’ he asked.

  ‘Anything,’ vowed Calder.

  ‘Good,’ said de Bruin. He gestured for Andrei to haul him back inside the cabin. ‘I’ll be holding you to that.’

  SIXTEEN

  A robin redbreast was trilling away in the trees as Penny Scott trudged back to her home. It was a fight song, or so she’d been told by an elderly birdwatcher who’d once stayed at the hotel, designed to warn rivals off their patch; yet Penny couldn’t help but hear a certain euphoria in it too, perhaps because she herself was so buzzing that, without the crunch of gravel beneath her feet, she might have thought herself floating.

  Life had been a nightmare since word had broken of Dunstan Warne’s murder. Now, thank god, it was over.

  It was still early, yet she’d surely earned herself a tipple. Her hands trembled as she uncapped a fresh bottle of Chardonnay and poured herself a glass, then fell still as she knocked it back. That intoxicating perfume. That delicious chill. Was there anything quite like it? She refilled her glass then took it through to the sitting room where her husband Gregory was as she’d left him, seated lumpen in his armchair, checking his portfolio on his laptop. He’d happily spend all day at it when the market was hot, explaining at tedious length why he’d chosen some particular stock over another. But a crash soon shut him up.

  ‘It was our Anna Warne,’ she told him.

  ‘Ah,’ he said.

  ‘And those sirens last night were at the farm. Intruders.’ She took another sip of her wine, now warmed enough to taste the strawberry that her merchant had told her of. ‘The same ones who killed poor Dunstan.’

  This time he did look up. ‘She told you that?’

  ‘Who else could it have been?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose.’

  ‘Is that all you have to say?’

  He sighed and set down his laptop. ‘What else would you like me to say, sweetheart? Then I’ll say it and we can move on.’

  It was his attitude that did it. She’d have bitten her tongue otherwise. But she wanted him to know the stress she’d been living under. ‘Don’t treat me like a fool,’ she said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking about how you went out that damned night.’

  ‘Out?’ he said, feigning bewilderment. ‘You’re imagining things.’

  ‘I heard you on the stairs.’

  ‘Come on, my love. You know how this place creaks.’

  ‘Stop it!’ she cried, her fears returning in a rush. ‘I won’t be lied to. I won’t.’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ he insisted, though his sudden pallor said otherwise. ‘I assure you.’

  ‘I heard you on the stairs and then the door opened and those damned intruder lights came on. I saw you. I actually saw you. You were going towards the shed with that wretched metal detector on your shoulder. Then you woke me again when you came back in. I heard you on the stairs. You were over there exactly when it happened! You must have been!’

  ‘That was a different night,’ he said desperately. ‘That was the night before.’

  ‘Stop it!’ she cried. ‘Don’t lie to me. I’ll tell the police, I swear I will.’

  His face had drained completely of colour by now. He looked fit to collapse. ‘Okay,’ he said, dropping his voice to a whisper. ‘Yes, you’re right, I did go out. But not to that field, I swear it on my life. I’d already checked that field. I was down by the seawall instead. I didn’t see or hear a thing.’

  ‘How could you not?’

  ‘It’s a big farm. It was a dark night.’

  ‘Have you told the police?’

  ‘Told them what? If I knew anything, I’d have gone to them already, I swear I would. But I didn’t. All it would do is put us both in the spotlight.’

  ‘Both!’ she exclaimed. ‘What do you mean, both?’

  ‘We discussed me going to check his fields. You were all for it.’

  ‘Only to see if they were worth buying. Not for that.’

  ‘And I didn’t do that. It was the intruders. The ones who broke into Warne Farm again last night. Or have you forgotten them already?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Penny, as some measure of relief returned. ‘Yes. Them.’

  ‘Yes, them,’ agreed Gregory. ‘Because they’re the ones who killed him. So please, please, please, not another word on the matter. Let’s never talk of it again.’

  SEVENTEEN

  The pine rocking chair in the corner of Warne Farm’s kitchen looked so old and worn that it might almost have been there as long as the house had. Elias lowered himself carefully into it, to make sure it would hold, then closed his eyes as he pushed himself gently back and forth, enjoying its rhythmic creaking as he contemplated what he now knew.

  The vault beneath the oil tank had surely been used for the smuggling of both people and drugs. Dunstan Warne must have known about it, making him at least partially complicit. Last night’s intruders had also known about it, as well as about the likely human remains out in the fields. They’d likely lost something at one or other of the sites, and so had come looking for it last night. It was hard to imagine them taking such a risk unless it was highly incriminating. They hadn’t found it, or they’d have left before being spotted by Anna Warne. So maybe they hadn’t lost it here at all, or maybe it had been ploughed into a field and was effectively gone for good.

  It was also possible, however, that Dunstan Warne had found it himself and – realising that it gave him some kind of hold over these people – had hidden it somewhere safe. Elias had already had the farmhouse searched, of course. But Warne had been killed several hundred yards away, while this place had been securely locked, so they hadn’t expected much. And maybe they’d been looking for the wrong things.

  He stopped his rocking and pushed himself to his feet. Warne’s study was the obvious place to start, a long, thin room made even thinner by the two filing cabinets and the leather armchair set against the right hand wall, and by the fitted bookshelves against the left. A battered walnut desk stood in front of a sash window with its heavy floral curtains half closed. There were books on the floor all around it, while its top was covered by a mess of pamphlets, maps, old excavation reports and correspondence, presumably in preparation for his interview with Oliver Merchant.

  He checked its drawers. A plain white envelope in the bottom right contained a ticket stub for a London musical along with a hotel receipt, both for the same night. With anyone else, Elias would have thought nothing of it. But Warne hadn’t been a West End kind of man. Besides, the performance had taken place only a few days after that list of names had been scratched into the vault wall.

  He checked the undersides of the drawers and the cavities they left behind. He looked beneath the rugs, tested the floorboards, shook out the folders in the filing cabinets, flipped through the books on the floor and on the shelves. Finding nothing further, he went back to the kitchen and was up on a chair looking behind tins of beans and soup when WPC Quinn, the redhead with the steely eye from earlier, called him on his mobile. ‘Yes?’ he asked, jamming his phone between shoulder and ear. ‘What?’

  ‘Is this a bad time?’ she asked. ‘I can call back later.’

  ‘No,’ said Elias. ‘It’s fine. Just a bit distracted, that’s all.’ He stepped down from the chair to give her his full attention. ‘Maria, isn’t it? How can I help?’

  ‘There’s something I’d like you to look at, sir. But I need to explain first.’

  ‘Sure. Go for it.’

  ‘Okay. You know how I helped find Mr Warne? Well, it was easy. His van was parked right there.’

  ‘I am leading the investigation,’ said Elias dryly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I’m not sure you realise how it was parked. The way its wheels were angled, I mean, and the tracks it left on the grass. It was only ever so slight, but they made it look like Mr Warne had been heading towards the farmhouse when he pulled off the drive, not away. As if he’d been coming home from somewhere, that is, not setting off.’

  Elias froze. It was absolutely true. Yet somehow he’d missed it. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Quinn, ‘if he’d been coming back from any distance, he’d pretty much have had to pass through Holbeach or Wisbech or Sutton Bridge, all of which have traffic cams. It was a bit quiet around here this afternoon, so I thought I’d check.’

  ‘And? You’ve found him?’

  ‘I think so, yes. Heading south on the A17 where it joins the A151.’

  Elias closed his eyes, the better to visualise. That was surely the road he’d been taking himself all week. ‘That’s near Holbeach, right? Meaning he’d have been coming back from Sleaford or maybe even Lincoln?’

  ‘Exactly, sir. Yes.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Four minutes past three in the morning.’

  ‘Four minutes past three? And you’re sure it’s him?’

  ‘That’s not what I said,’ protested Quinn. ‘I said I think it’s him. The resolution on that camera is rubbish. You can’t see his face properly and his licence plate is spattered with mud and half hidden behind his bumper, which is falling off at one end, as you’ll remember.’

  ‘Can you email me the clip?’

  ‘Already did. It should be with you by now.’

  ‘Let me check.’ He opened his email and there it was. It was only a few seconds long, dark and grainy, but Quinn was surely right that it was Warne’s van, even though he couldn’t make out the front plate. It was the right model with the same empty roof rack, the same scrape down its side, and its front bumper hanging loose in the same way too, as if it had hit a wall. He gave a grunt. ‘This makes me look like a right tit, you realise?’

  ‘Sorry, sir. I was only trying to help.’

  ‘Don’t apologise. It’s a good thing. Just not too often.’

  ‘No, sir. And I did try to tell you earlier.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you did.’ He played the clip again, wondering where Warne had been, to be coming home that late. Logic would suggest a dinner party or maybe a secret lover, except that he hadn’t eaten, drunk or had sex for at least several hours before his death. ‘Are there other cameras you could check?’ he asked. ‘Up towards Sleaford, say?’

  ‘To find out where he’d been?’

  ‘Or even narrow it down a bit. If he didn’t pass a camera, that would be helpful too. And maybe look for his outward journey, if you have time. When he set off. Whether his van was already banged up.’

  ‘I’m off out in a minute,’ she said. ‘Then I’ve got the boys to pick up from school. Would first thing tomorrow do?’

  ‘That’s fine. And, may I say, excellent work. You’d make a top detective.’

  Quinn laughed. ‘Me a detective. I’d like to see that.’

  ‘I’m serious. You’ve shown observation, intelligence, resourcefulness and a willingness to make me look like an arse. All qualities my superiors value highly.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ She sounded stunned yet wary, so that he couldn’t help but worry that she’d read too much into his earlier glance at her ring finger. ‘But I love what I do now. My family all lives around here.’ Then she added pointedly: ‘My husband’s family too.’

  ‘Good to hear. Good to hear.’ He felt like shit suddenly. ‘I mean I wasn’t… All I’d be doing is having a word in an ear. No more than that.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I know. Thank you.’

  He finished the call then stood there clutching his phone, angry with himself, at how clumsy he’d become around women. But maybe it simply meant he was finally getting his appetite back. He could only hope.

  He replayed the traffic cam clip again and again, trying to make out the driver’s face or its licence plate. But the poor resolution, the dazzle of oncoming headlights and the broken bumper made it impossible. Yet surely it was Warne, which meant his jigsaw puzzle had been given a right good shaking. He returned to the rocking chair and closed his eyes once more, then began the engrossing task of fitting its pieces back to a different pattern.