River Deep Read online

  “And the second question?” Martha asked.

  “What made that round mark on his chest? It was done shortly before death and was quite a hefty whack. It probably had nothing to do with his death. I’m simply curious. I can’t work out what did it.” He untied his long, rubber apron and spoke to the mortuary assistant. “Better tidy him up,” he said.

  Martha moved away while Peter did his job. Mr James Humphreys had been a well-dressed man who had died a violent death. Why?

  Shrewsbury was not a violent town. Its ancient buildings, unchanged for centuries, reflected a safe town whose inhabitants were largely peaceable. It stood on a hill, safe from marauders, encircled by the protective River Severn except for a narrow strip in the North East. And that was watched over by the Castle which nowadays houses the Regimental Museum. So in the streets people walked in security. It was as though the embrace of the river, combined with the geographical fortification of the town, made them feel insulated against the twenty-first century. Salopians still lived in a gentler, earlier era. Here there were no marauding gangs of vicious villains, little crime or drug dealing. No prostitution – unlike a century ago when areas like Mardol had been the haunt of drunken seamen, prostitutes and pick-pockets. Grope Lane had not found its name by chance! Neither had Butcher’s Row or Fish Street. People walked on history in this town. And yet there was enough blood in its past. There had been a bloody battle of Shrewsbury six hundred years ago and centuries before that Dafydd ap Griffith had been hanged, drawn and quartered at the spot now marked by the High Cross.

  And now there was another savage murder to add to its archives. How long would Humphreys have lain in the cellar of Marine Terrace if the River Severn had not flushed him out? The crime would have remained concealed for longer. For how much longer? And why had no one come forward to claim him yet?

  “Alex,” she said impulsively, “I’d like to visit Marine Terrace again. Can that be arranged? Maybe tomorrow?”

  He nodded gloomily, still tussling with the prospect of a major investigation on top of the problem of the floods. “Provided the river’s gone down and we get no more rain. The property’s been under feet of water. The cellars are still partially flooded. It’s a right mess. We’ve sent frogmen in. There doesn’t appear to be anything more down there except a few drowned rats but it’s a difficult crime scene to search completely. And potentially dangerous too. We’re really going to have to wait for the Severn to recede all the way back before we can be absolutely sure we’re not missing anything. And that could take a week.”

  He was distracted by his mobile phone. He frowned, spoke into it for a moment or two, flicked the off button, his face taut to make a significant announcement. “Well, we may have something like an answer soon. Mrs Humphreys has been located and picked up. She’s in a Squad car, on the M54 – less than half an hour away. We’d better get her husband cleaned up and ready for viewing.” The mortuary assistant busied about his work and the police officers clustered in the corner, talking.

  “Martha.” Alex’s eyes were on her. “I don’t suppose… It might be an idea…”

  She put the words into his mouth. “You want me to stay?”

  “You’re going to have to make contact with the family at some point.”

  She nodded. “OK.”

  It was less than half an hour later when they heard a car pull on to the mortuary car park. Minutes ticked by before the bell was rung and they heard voices. One loud, female, the other Peter, the mortuary attendant.

  They let Alex Randall deal with Mrs Humphreys. As the Senior Investigating Officer it would be part of his job to liaise with the family of the murder victim so it was helpful if he made early contact. And it didn’t seem quite right for the pathologist who had just carved up her loved one to have too much to do with grieving relatives. They heard her step, the clack clack of high heeled shoes, before they caught sight of her passing the window. A tall, well-built peroxide blonde, in her thirties. Alex led her into the viewing room. They could make out his shadow behind the curtain, head bent, hands lifting the sheet while she bent forward. Then suddenly everything changed. There was a shriek. The woman jerked back. Randall stiffened. Martha stood up. Mark Sullivan looked up from his notes. “What’s going on?”

  Alex told them what had happened. He had drawn the cloth away from the face. Mrs Humpheys had drawn in a deep breath, stared, then gasped and looked up, confused. “I’m sorry,” she’d said, “I’m so awfully sorry. But this man is not my husband.”

  Alex had tried to persuade her that she was shocked, asked her to look again, to make absolutely sure. Was there any possibility that she could be mistaken. But Mrs Humphreys, whose name, they learned later, was Cressida, was adamant. The dead man was not her husband. He was not James Humphreys.

  So who was he?

  4

  They had a brief, whispered discussion in Sullivan’s office while Mrs Humphreys was given a cup of tea by Peter.

  “He fitted the description,” Randall said defensively. “And he was found in the house Humphreys was renting. It seemed so obvious.”

  “Humphreys could be our killer,” Martha suggested. “Or alternatively it might have been a case of mistaken identity. Someone thought he was Humphreys.” The two men looked at her. “In which case where is Humphreys now?”

  Blank faces stared back at her. This had been an unexpected turn of events.

  Alex opened the door to leave. “We’d better take Mrs Humphreys round to the garage and see if we can shed any light on her husband’s whereabouts.” But he halted in the doorway, his face still displaying incredulity. “I just couldn’t believe it when she said it wasn’t him. I kept saying, You’re sure? You’re sure? She got quite cross in the end. ‘I know my bloody husband’, she said. Then she kept asking us where he was. We could hardly excuse ourselves by saying that we thought we’d had him here – on the slab. Now we could have a missing man on the books as well as an unidentified murder victim. All we could tell her with confidence was that the properties had been finally evacuated on Monday evening when we’d known the river was going to burst its banks. None of the officers on duty remembers seeing anyone in number seven. Humphreys could have gone off to stay with a friend – although when we asked around the garage no one volunteered any information. I got the feeling they hadn’t got to know him that well. It makes it more difficult that she doesn’t know any of her husband’s colleagues at the new job. We’re taking her up to the Jaguar garage now.”

  When he’d gone Martha was thoughtful about the phrase Randall had quoted, “I know my bloody husband.” A certain amount of venom seemed attached to Cressida Humphreys’ words. Admittedly she had had a shock. But surely relief that it was not her husband’s corpse she was looking at would have been her primary emotion? Not, “I know my bloody husband.” But in mitigation her husband was still missing. Perhaps it was a little premature to expect her to feel relief.

  Mark Sullivan was watching her.

  “This is an intriguing little problem,” she commented.

  “Yeah. Glad it’s not mine.”

  She left then, followed the squad car out of the car park and turned south. She had a full day’s work ahead of her.

  Thursday 14th February – St Valentine’s Day

  Martha awoke at seven to the sounds of Dancing Queen.

  She’d known she was asking for trouble to hire an Abba lookalike, soundalike Swedish au pair. But unfortunately Sukey had spotted Agnetha over the banisters when she had come for interview, shrieked at her name and silky blonde hair, slipped her hand into hers and insisted the post had been filled. The subsequent interview had been a bit of a farce, the outcome a foregone conclusion. The two had bonded and were usually to be seen sporting flares, crocheted hats and tacky, shiny party dresses. Added to that the house permanently reverberated to the sound of Abba hits while they became spiritual sisters with only a few years between them.

  Poor old Sam was thoroughly left out. But betwee
n football practice, rugby practice, cross country, hockey and American football practice he lay on his bed, read magazines about acquiring fitness, strength and muscles, took the occasional shower and fell asleep, usually with a plate of crisps balanced on his bed. When he wasn’t doing this he was walking the dog or riding his bike.

  In contrast Sukey was all party energy. Martha often watched her and wondered where her blonde mane had come from. Not from her. Her hair was thick, dark and unruly “with a touch of the red”. Must be her mother’s Irish blood. While Martin’s hair had been – well – even putting it kindly – wispy and mousy. Not his best feature. That had been his eyes. Warm and brown as Thornton’s toffee. Cream – not the black treacle variety. And his teeth had been like Sam’s, crooked, irregular, very unique. She had sometimes mused that had Martin committed a crime and left a bitten apple core at the scene he could have been identified by his bite as precisely as through a DNA trace.

  Martha rolled over in bed and realised the phone was ringing. She sat up. Jerked out of her reverie. Maybe it was Alex. The shockwaves caused by yesterday’s statement from Mrs Humphreys had taken them all by surprise. And left them with a pile of unanswered questions. She was curious to know what had happened next. It could be one of the frustrations of her job that while she was informed at the discovery of a corpse she was not always kept up to date as the police investigations proceeded. This left her with burning unsatiated curiosity.

  An unidentified murder victim lay in the mortuary and the rule was: no identity, no inquest. For the identity of the victim was just as significant as the pathologist’s evidence. Unsatisfactory it might be but there had been occasions when this rule had dragged a case out for years. The police were not bound to keep her informed how their investigations were faring.

  But from about a year ago Alex Randall had fallen into the habit of keeping her up to date with his progress and this in turn had made her intrigued by their investigations and bold enough even to make some suggestions of her own. She was fast learning how the police worked. How they thought. The first case in which she had played this more active role had been old bones discovered in the Abbey which had proved to date from the eighteenth century. It had been the first time she and Alex had developed anything more than a very brushing acquaintance and she grew to welcome his clipped, informative phone calls. Since then they had been involved in a few more cases. Like any old, small town Shrewsbury had its secrets. So she picked up the phone with a recognised frisson of excitement. Maybe he had tracked down the real Mr Humphreys. But she was in for a disappointment. An irritating click returned her greeting. It was a bad start to a strange day.

  “My last summer …” The two “sisters” were warbling together in the kitchen. She could hear Sam’s heavy footsteps clomping wearily down the stairs. She wrapped her maroon satin dressing gown around her, tucked her feet into a pair of M&S black mules and made her way downstairs.

  The two girls were swaying in time to the music, pieces of toast in their hands smothered in Vegemite. Agnetha swore by the stuff. And the scent permeated the entire kitchen – always. It turned Martha’s stomach. Sam was shovelling a bucketful of crispy nut cornflakes dampened with milk into his mouth, intermittently swigging orange juice from a pint glass at his side. He had a thing about vitamins and hydration. His sports bag lay bulging at his feet.

  She greeted them all with a blanket, “Morning,” and plugged the kettle in, wiping her hair out of her eyes in a thick handful. She needed a coffee fix. Quickly.

  “Good morning, Mrs Gunn.” Agnetha’s smile was wide, welcoming, difficult to fault. Sukey ignored her mother by pretending to be too absorbed in the music to respond to anything that wasn’t Swedish. Sam carried on munching doggedly as though in danger of missing out on a calorie or two. Only Bobby’s ears pricked up. He sensed he was due a walk and she would oblige as soon as the twins had left for school. Agnetha and Sukey finished their toast and their song and stacked the plates in the dishwasher, all done gracefully in time to the music. Sam simply abandoned the battle scene, leaving his dishes still on the table.

  By eight-fifteen the house was eerily quiet, Abba blissfully silenced for the day. Martha threw on a pair of jeans and an anorak and unhooked Bobby’s lead from the back of the door. He shrieked out a couple of ear-piercing barks and leapt high enough to bump her hip. Pointless ordering him to calm down. She opened the back door and Bobby whisked out of sight while she fumbled her feet into a pair of wellingtons.

  At the back of house was an area of protected forest, largely spruces and pines, criss-crossed with a myriad of soft, sandy paths, populated by rabbits and a delight to Bobby who found much to sniff at and chase. It was one of the reasons why she had bought this house, a fake Georgian mock-up which had begun life as a farmworkers’ cottage, been extended, whitewashed and pretentiously called The White House. In fact the name would have been fine had it not shared it with the official residence of the President of the United States. But when she and Martin had first viewed the house she had fallen in love with the woods behind and relished the space in which to exercise one of the world’s friskiest dogs. Bobby was his successor but just as frisky. Mongrels, in her experience, usually were. Also the seclusion of the property had seduced her. Neither she nor Martin could ever imagine chatting over the garden fence to their neighbours. She shoved her hands deep down in the oilskin pockets and pondered. The trouble was that elected seclusion when you were half of a couple could feel dangerously like isolation when you were alone.

  She stepped quickly through the woods, her eyes focused on some far off point ahead. It was a great time to think. The dew dripped off the branches and there was a fresh, crisp feel to the day.

  Her mind flicked back to the anonymous corpse. There were several interesting points to mull over. Whoever the man was, he had been found in the house James Humphreys was currently renting. And James Humphreys had disappeared. She picked up a twig, absently chucked it into the undergrowth, sending Bobby scuttling after it and bringing back a quite different twig a few seconds later, while she wondered whether the real James Humphreys had turned up yet – dead or alive. By now Alex might have tracked him down. At work even. The Jaguar garage was outside the town so not threatened by the floods. There was no reason to stop business continuing as usual. Humphreys’ colleagues might even have been able to shed some light on the dead man’s identity. She picked up another stick and threw it in response to Bobby’s eager, lolling tongue. Maybe Humphreys had not been the sheep but the wolf in this case. Not victim but villain. She was suddenly very curious to know how far DI Randall had progressed in his investigations.

  She sensed the regret in the dog when she turned around at the top of the hill, but she had a full day ahead of her with many cases to sift through. Her area of jurisdiction extended far beyond merely Shrewsbury to include Church Stretton and Oswestry, Market Drayton and Whitchurch and all the little villages within these points. And winter was a time of a surging death rate which supplied her with plenty of work. She paused for a moment, savouring the whipping breeze, hoping it did not carry more rain to add to the town’s sufferings and looked back at the house. It hit her then quite suddenly what an isolated place it was, half a mile from the nearest road, reached only by a potholed track, surrounded by unpopulated farmland and backed by trees. Her nearest neighbour was nearly a mile away.

  From the top of the hill she watched the red Post Office van wind up the track and minutes later when she was almost back she saw it thread its way just as gingerly back down towards the main road. As she rounded the back of the house she recognised a second car approaching. This time an elderly Ford. It was Vera’s day to give the house a clean up.

  She greeted her cleaning woman guiltily, ignored her despairing look at the pile of washing dumped by the machine, had a brief chat about what wanted doing in the house and ran upstairs to shower. Half an hour later she was driving her Mercedes towards her office, in Bayston Hill, an area to the south of Sh
rewsbury, down the A49, the road that finally led to South Wales. And her parents’ house in Cardiff.

  Her offices were in a large Victorian house, invisible from the road, up a secluded drive lined with rhododendrons and dark firs. She pulled up at the front and ran up the steps. Jericho was waiting for her with his catalogue of things to be dealt with: telephone calls to doctors and the police, correspondence, a sheaf of new guidelines for coroners she needed to browse through, appointments in the diary to speak with relatives. She worked her way through steadily until three, her lunch a sandwich and coffee on her desk taken between telephone calls. She always vowed she would emulate the Continentals, meet a friend, have a proper lunch, but somehow she never did. It always was a sandwich grabbed between phone calls, a quick swallow when the phone on the other end was picked up. Continental lunches were like the extravagant suppers she always meant to cook the children. The menu invariably had to be changed to something easy and quick at the last minute. She never had enough time. Not simply quality time. Any time. But the job was demanding, the responsibility enormous. She loved the work. She also loved her children. She chewed her ham salad sandwich thoughtfully. Relationships, she thought, making the same, tired old excuse. No time. But even forming the thought made her feel empty.

  She was halfway through an after dinner coffee when at three-fifteen a call was put through from Alex Randall.

  “Believe it or not the rain’s stopped, the river’s receding and the sun’s out,” he said, almost jauntily. “Marine Terrace is safe to visit. The water level in the cellar’s down. We’ve made some headway into the case. I wondered if you would like to revisit the scene, Martha. It might inspire you.” The briefest of pauses. “I know what a hands-on coroner you are.” He was reading her mind.

  For the first time that day she did look out of the window. Bayston Hill was, as the name implied, on an elevated site. Her window faced back towards Shrewsbury. She had a prime view of the spires of St Chad’s and St Mary’s, the green fields of the tennis club, the enveloping river, spilling across the fields. Alex Randall was right. The sun was beaming down, golden, on the world as though apologising for the few days’ foul weather which had caused so much mayhem. She needed no persuading.