Undermined Read online

  “Don’t go there,” was all he said.

  Daniel thought that Barbara had a lot to lose if Roy wanted money out of the Spanish business to set up something new with Suzanne. He wondered why Barbara hadn’t divorced Roy, given that he’d left them so long ago - perhaps that was also about not wanting to buy Roy out of the bar. Vanessa had seemed to be committed to the bar too, but how much money could a beachside bar make anyway? Enough to kill for? He got out his phone and looked for the reports he’d been reading the day before. Two things stood out.

  “Sir, you said that Barbara let rooms as part of the business in Spain. The financials I’ve got show that she made quite a lot of money from those rooms. Can you remember how many?”

  “Rooms gives the wrong impression,” Kent said, “small apartment complex is nearer the mark. Pool and everything. It was nice, lots of privacy. Gardens. Views of the sea.”

  “Barbara gives the place as her address. Did you know she lived on site?”

  Kent smiled. “I went for dinner with Barbara. Really nice villa.”

  So there is no way you should be involved in any of this. You’re much too close to half the people.

  Daniel didn’t have to say it, because Kent got there first.

  “I’m not going to talk to Barbara or Vanessa. You are, and one of your team. I’ll talk to Marian, and her kids, with your sergeant.”

  “You’re still too close sir.”

  “Because it’s looking like Barbara has the most to gain, and I’m her friend? I’m not stupid Daniel. I’ve met her twice in almost twenty years. I like her, but it’s hardly a close personal relationship.”

  Silence fell again. Not a comfortable silence. Then Kent broke it.

  “It’s not all about motive. How on earth did a woman dying of cancer kill two people and move their bodies into the woods?”

  Daniel thought he knew the answer to that one, but he wasn’t going to share it. Not yet. He didn’t want it to be Barbara, he’d liked her, and he could see why Kent had liked her. He imagined most people would like her, but she had a motive for killing her husband if he threatened her ability to hand a viable business on to her daughter. She almost certainly had the means - sleeping tablets and wine - and now they knew she had the opportunity - she could have been in the right place at the right time, and she’d lied about it. Kent spoke again.

  “If it’s Barbara - and I don’t think it is - then I’m not going to try to protect her. I don’t look after my friends. Not if they break the law. And I don’t like the implication that I would.”

  That told me.

  Kent switched the radio on and they listened to an analysis of the impact of Brexit on farm subsidies until they were turning off for Melin Tywyll and Kent needed directions to the police station.

  The main road into town led steeply downhill past a supermarket and onto a narrow bridge over the river. On the upstream side of the bridge the river meandered through its own floodplain, used as a park, football and rugby fields, and a big pool for teaching canoeing. On the downstream side, the river narrowed into a steep sided gorge, overhung by trees. Canoe slalom gates were strung from wires over the water. In all but the driest weather, the rapids were exhilarating. After rain queues of paddlers and rafters formed by the bridge, hoping to make it to the end without too many bruises. A mile further down, where the sides were less steep, stood the remains of the mill after which the town was named. The rotting wheel showed where the owners had borrowed enough of the fast flowing water to power the cranks and belts to turn sheepswool into yarn and profit.

  On the far side of the bridge the town had grown prosperous, drawing in people from the surrounding area with regular livestock and produce markets. The ruined castle brought tourists and school parties. Half timbered buildings lined the main street and central square. On non-market days the square was given over to parking, and without warning, Kent pulled into a space and switched off the engine. Daniel heard the car tick as it cooled. Outside, a few people looked at them without curiosity, going into shops and cafes, reading the notices by the town hall, or standing and chatting.

  Daniel turned towards Kent to ask why they’d parked. Kent held his hand up to stop him.

  “I need to tell you about what’s going on in Glamorgan CID. Why I get no respect, why everything I ask for is done slowly or not at all, and why they would rather let Suzanne Price’s murderer go free than let me get the credit for catching them.”

  Kent was looking out of the side window of the car as he spoke, but Daniel doubted he could see anything. He made to speak again, and again Kent stopped him.

  “A man, a boy really, killed himself after he’d been kept in the cells overnight. It was our fault - the police’s fault. We had a duty of care and we failed.” There was a pause, then Kent continued. “It happened on my watch. The evidence points to an officer abusing the boy. I want that officer charged.” Daniel saw the pain on Kent’s face and heard the determination in his tone.

  “Let me guess,” Daniel said, “everyone is talking about loyalty to stressed colleagues and not undermining public trust in the police?”

  Kent nodded.

  “And trashing the reputation of the victim?” Daniel asked.

  “That too. He was 19 and sold sex. I won’t let it go.”

  “Good,” said Daniel. He knew how the police closed ranks when one of their own felt threatened, and how little value would attach to the life of a teenage rent boy.

  “I thought you’d been sent down to Cardiff to derail the investigation. Or perhaps to catch me doing something I could be disciplined for. Discredit me and they can bury the whole mess. It seems I was wrong about you.”

  Daniel thought that if he hadn’t seen the way CID treated Kent, he’d have been skeptical. Except he had seen it. Either Kent was a top class manipulator, or he was telling the truth.

  “Just a typical day at the office,” he said, “sex and lies.”

  “There’s videotape too. Lots of copies. Which is why they haven’t just shunted me off to Traffic, or discovered a stash of cocaine in my car. I thought you should know.” There was a finality in Kent’s voice that told Daniel the subject was now closed.

  Kent put the car into reverse, and drove away from the town square, round the back of the cattle market to the uncompromising glass and concrete box of the Melin Tywyll Police Station, to the interviews with the two Mrs Edwards.

  “Mrs Edwards, Barbara if I may, why did you come to Wales?”

  Daniel didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed that Barbara was sitting next to a young woman solicitor from a national law firm. Barbara herself looked even paler and less well than when he’d spoken to her in Cardiff. Her Spanish tan looked yellow under the harsh strip lighting in the bleak interview room. Both she and her daughter were tall women, but Barbara seemed to be shrinking. He wished he could offer her a cushion to protect her from the hard chair, and something more than a cup of machine tea.

  “There were people I wanted to see. As I told you Inspector Owen, I don’t have long to live and I am, as they say, putting my affairs in order.”

  “Could you be more specific? Who exactly did you visit?”

  Barbara turned to her solicitor. “Do I have to answer?”

  “No.”

  Daniel asked if they’d like a minute alone. Barbara seemed to think for a moment, then shook her head.

  “You’ll find out anyway,” she said, “there aren’t any secrets in Cwmcoed, or even in Wales come to that. I went to see my husband’s mistress, and I planned to see my husband too, only someone killed him before I got there.”

  “Why did you want to see Suzanne Price?”

  “She needed to know that Roy was married.”

  “Suzanne Price knew Roy was married. Not to you perhaps, but she knew he wasn’t single. Why did you really go?”

  Suzanne Price wouldn’t have seen Barbara as a threat. She wouldn’t have known, as a newcomer to the village, that Barbara had stayed
in touch with her friends and family, that she would have been told all about Suzanne and Roy’s business plans.

  “I think you went to visit Suzanne Price to tell her that she wasn’t going to get her hands on any of Roy’s money without a fight.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Suzanne Price had been telling everyone in Cwmcoed that she and your husband were going into business together. That’s why you came over when you did isn’t it?”

  “Roy’s business plans were nothing to do with me.”

  “But they are, aren’t they? Roy still owns half your holiday business in Spain. He bragged about it. He told people that he was going to sell some ‘investments’ to set up a new venture with Suzanne Price.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  Barbara pulled her heavy cardigan round herself and slid her hands into her sleeves. He supposed that it must seem cold and dark here to someone used to a much warmer and sunnier climate, and she was ill. He offered more tea, but Barbara shook her head.

  “Do you take benzodiazepines Barbara? Perhaps a sleeping tablet, or as something to help with pain or anxiety?”

  “I take a lot of things.”

  “Would you give me a list please?”

  “Now?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  Barbara looked at her solicitor, and this time when Daniel asked if they wanted some time, Barbara nodded. Daniel and DC Charlie Rees left them together.

  “If we get a list, go and check with the autopsy report. Suzanne was drugged with a mixture of alcohol and benzodiazepines, and it’s possible so was Roy.”

  When they went back, Barbara handed over a list of medicines including sleeping tablets, and Charlie took it and left.

  “I’d like to ask you about your relationship with your husband, Barbara. How would you describe it?”

  “We didn’t have a relationship. He left me on my own with a small child, in a foreign country.”

  “But why didn’t you get a divorce? Or come home yourself?”

  Barbara smiled, and Daniel was reminded how much he had liked her when they met in Cardiff.

  “The answer to both those questions is the same - because I was stupid. I was stupid enough to think he’d come back, for Vanessa even if not for me. And I was too stubborn to come back to Cwmcoed as a single parent and have everyone see me as a failure. Then the recession hit, and I couldn’t have sold the business anyway.”

  “But you could have divorced Roy without coming back here to live.”

  Barbara just looked at him.

  “Could it be that you didn’t want to divorce Roy because you’d have to buy him out of the business? Whereas now the business is all yours, and Vanessa’s.”

  This time it was the solicitor who replied.

  “What are you implying Inspector? My client has already said she didn’t see her husband before he died.”

  “I’m not implying anything,” Daniel said, “I’m simply pointing out that divorcing Roy could have had unpleasant financial consequences for your client, and that those consequences have been avoided now he is dead.”

  The door opened and Charlie Rees came back in and handed Daniel a piece of paper. Barbara’s sleeping tablets were an exact match for the benzodiazepines found in the two bodies. There was also a note in an unfamiliar handwriting: BE’s hire car pinged ANPR cameras north on the A470 and on the Melin T roundabout on Tuesday night. MK.

  “Barbara, when did you first meet Mrs Marian Edwards?”

  “You know the answer to that. Yesterday. I came up here yesterday with Vanessa.”

  “So who were you visiting on your earlier trip to Melin Tywyll? On the evening of Suzanne Price’s murder?”

  “I...”

  “Were you visiting for the first time? Or perhaps you were taking someone home?”

  “I don’t want to say anything else.” Barbara turned to her solicitor, “I don’t have to say anything do I?” The solicitor confirmed that Barbara was under no obligation to answer questions. “Then I’m not going to say anything, and I want to go home.” The solicitor rested her hand on Barbara’s arm, clearly expecting Daniel’s next step, and ready to offer comfort.

  “Mrs Barbara Edwards, I am arresting you on suspicion of involvement in the murders of Suzanne Price and Roy Edwards.” He cautioned her and explained that she wouldn’t be going home.

  “So was it Barbara on her own, or both of them?” Daniel was sitting with Kent and Bethan in his little glass walled office.

  “Well Marian’s a liar, I’m sure about that,” said Bethan, “but I don’t see her lowering herself to anything as common as murder. She’s Secretary of the Melin Tywyll Conservative Association, and a regular churchgoer, as she kept reminding us.”

  “But I can’t see Barbara managing it on her own.” This from Kent. Kent was visibly relaxed in Bethan’s company, as if his protective spines had been lowered once he was away from Cardiff. Daniel was determined not to say anything to raise them again. He asked Bethan what she thought Marian had been lying about.

  “She met Barbara before yesterday, I’m sure of it.” Bethan looked towards Kent who nodded his agreement.

  Daniel said, “Someone in Cwmcoed told Barbara about Suzanne and her business plans, Barbara told Vanessa she was going to Granada but came to Wales to confront Suzanne. Suzanne told Barbara about Marian and gets murdered for her pains, then Barbara comes up here to meet the oh-so-respectable Marian and they both agree that Roy has to go. Then one or both of them go back to Cwmcoed and murders Roy. Barbara meets us and pretends surprise that her husband hasn’t been living like a monk for the last twenty years.”

  “It fits, pretty much, and some of it might even be true,” said Kent.

  “I sense a ‘but’ coming,” said Daniel.

  “Barbara is terminally ill. How did she get the victims through the woods and into the sinkholes? According to the pathologist, they were unconscious or dead when they were dumped, so they couldn’t have walked there and jumped in by themselves.”

  Bethan looked at Daniel and raised her eyebrows. OK clever clogs, get out of this one.

  “Firstly we only have Barbara’s word for it that she’s dying,” said Daniel, “she doesn’t look well and Vanessa obviously thinks her mother is very ill, but how ill we don’t know. She’s tall and has spent most of her working life running a bar, which can be hard physical work. I think she’s tougher than she looks.”

  “Tough enough to carry an unconscious person through those woods? I don’t think so.”

  “She didn’t carry them. I tried to think about any way that she could get a trolley or something with wheels through the woods, but we’d have seen the tracks. And it’s too rough. No, I think she zipped them into a sleeping bag and dragged them.”

  Chapter 7

  Bethan and Kent stared at Daniel as if he was mad.

  “I’m not saying it would be easy, but it’s possible. It’s the only way I can think of that it could have been done. If the body had been dragged without some kind of protection, the marks would have shown - a sleeping bag protects the body as well as making it easier to pull. The abrasions on Roy’s feet? Where the sleeping bag wore through. The pathologist said he expected more, so maybe there were just a couple of tears in the fabric. And don’t forget that Barbara was brought up in Cwmcoed. She would know her way around the woods. She had access to drugs and if she crushed her tablets into a glass of wine, the effects would be exactly what the autopsies found. And, neither Suzanne nor Roy would have been wary around Barbara.”

  Kent said “I can see your reasoning, but I don’t believe she’d do it.”

  Daniel opened his mouth to start arguing but Bethan recognised the warning signs and got in first.

  “Barbara is better off without Roy, but I don’t see why she’d kill Suzanne. Or come to that, why she’d attack you. Marian though…if they were working together, I could see her wanting to get rid of anyone who she thought undermi
ned her respectable image, including you.”

  “Only Marian couldn’t have done it on her own,” said Daniel, “because she didn’t know the woods, and there’s no way Suzanne would have let her into the house. So Barbara has to have been involved.”

  “It’s all circumstantial,” said Kent. “Never mind that I don’t believe it, we’ve got no evidence that can’t be explained away. The CPS won’t charge on a neat theory.”

  “I don’t want to believe it,” said Daniel, “and you’re right about the CPS. We’ve just got to find the evidence.”

  “The evidence may point in a different direction.” Kent said, and the prickles were back.

  “As you say sir. We mustn’t let our personal feelings influence our investigation.”

  For a moment he thought he’d gone too far, and maybe he had, but Bethan came to his rescue again, with the offer of sandwiches and decent coffee from the bakery in the High Street. Daniel’s instinct was to refuse, and he saw that Kent was shaking his head, but Bethan carried on like a cheerful steamroller, smoothing the tension in the room with talk of local cheese and homegrown salad until Kent offered to go with her, and Daniel recognised that he’d been outmanoeuvred. Five minutes later he got a text.

  Bethan D: WTF boss, stop needling him.

  As Daniel debated replying to Bethan’s text, the phone rang - the Custody Officer.

  “We’ve had to call an ambulance for Barbara Edwards sir. Collapsed in her cell.” Daniel was running down the stairs while the officer was still speaking. He got there at the same time as the paramedics, and was pushed out of the way without ceremony. He could see Barbara lying on the floor in the recovery position, eyelids fluttering and looking paler than ever.

  “What happened?”

  “We don’t know,” said the Custody Officer, “we came round with some tea and found her like that. Thank God the ambulance station is next door.”