Murder in the Development Read online

  “Nothing good comes from lots of money being involved.”

  Diane frowned at Albert’s insensitivity and glanced over at Monique, who seemed to not have noticed.

  “So what’s the plan?” said Albert.

  “We’re heading to see the head of Shrewsbury Resort Development Company now, Eddie Tomkins. The planning office was able to tell us a current project they’re working on.”

  “Be careful,” said Albert, the concern evident in his voice. “Do you want me to call Inspector Crothers?”

  “No, not unless we get something solid. Just keep a watch on the house, and I’ll call you when we get done.”

  Albert confirmed his vigilance was undiminished and repeated his warning to Diane to be careful before ringing off.

  The car lapsed into silence for a short while during the ride to the construction site. Monique seemed focused on whatever was passing through her mind while Diane concentrated on the increasing traffic.

  After passing several signs for “Trucks Turning” and “Work Entrance Ahead”, there was an even larger sign blaring “Shropshire Resort Development Company” with a backdrop of sun-soaked bathers around a crystal pool surrounded by white Grecian columns. Diane sighed at the clichés contained in the sign. Anyone who knew Britain knew that sunny days like that were few enough to make the scene a beautiful dream.

  The construction site was surrounded by a tall sheet metal fence that was itself contained within a cordon of chain-link fence. A gate had been pulled aside to allow a large lorry with a load of gravel to enter. Diane slipped in behind, partially hidden in the billowing cloud of orange dust that trailed the lorry.

  She stopped the car outside of a large white building that looked official. The side had another large company label while the door was covered in several signs warning anyone that entered to remove their boots and hardhat, please be quiet, no food, and to knock before entering.

  Beyond the cabin steel struts protruded from concrete and beams spanned areas between. Scaffolding rose from several areas, and objects were being lifted manually or by a pulley in several places. Workers bustled everywhere, looking like ants scouring the bones of a metal dinosaur.

  A knuckle rapped on the driver’s window, and Diane rolled it down an inch. A sour-faced man with a poorly-fitting toupee above small round eyes squinted through the gap. A thick moustache covered the upper of a pair of thin lips while a nose that had clearly once been broken scrunched upward.

  “You’re not allowed ‘ere.” The man had placed his mouth over the gap in the window. “Private property.”

  Diane looked at the eyes that had reappeared at the gap and blinked slowly, letting the lenses of her glasses exaggerate the movement.

  “Oh, is it?”

  “Yeah, Private. Don't you see the sign?”

  Diane adjusted her glasses, implying that seeing anything clearly was a happy coincidence.

  “My daughter, she is here to see her young man. Doesn’t he work here?

  The eyes appeared in the gap again and looked past Diane at Monique.

  “You ain’t allowed ‘ere.”

  “But we came all the way from MizzenMount to see him.”

  At the mention of the housing company, the beady eyes shot to Diane and fixed her in an uncomfortable gaze.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Tomkins,” said Monique, attempting to relieve the tension. “My mother is trying to help me out.”

  “So you’re Eddie Tomkins,” said Diane as she opened her car door, forcing Mr. Tomkins to take a swift step backwards or get another kink in his nose.

  “Who are you?” Tomkins stepped up to Diane as she rose from the car seat. “I don’t know none of you.”

  “We’re looking for my daughter’s young man,” repeated Diane. “You know him, I believe. Jonathan Carstairs.”

  “Who?” There was an attempt to sound ignorant, which Diane thought should have been easier for him to achieve.

  “Jonathan Carstairs. He lives at the MizzenMount property that you want to buy.”

  “That’s business. I don’t discuss business with strangers. You need to leave.”

  “We were just wondering how the buyout was going.”

  Eddie stared at Diane and made no reply except to wave to someone over Diane’s shoulder. She knew she was running out of time.

  “Jonathan Carstairs has gone missing. Do you know anything about that?”

  “I don’t know nothing about it. And you need to quit pokin’ your nose in, lady.” Eddie tapped his nose with a thick finger. “Accidents can ‘appen. Keep out of business that ain’t yours, if you know what’s good for ya.”

  A large heavy hand landed on Diane’s shoulder, and Eddie shifted his gaze above and beyond Diane to the hand-wielder.

  “Get ‘em out of ‘ere.” Eddie turned on his heel and started to walk away as the hand gripped firmly on Diane.

  “So you don’t know where he is?” yelled Diane as her last attempt to question Eddie Tomkins.

  “I don’t know nothin’,” Eddie said over his shoulder. “Would be better for you if you know nothin’ too.”

  The hand guided Diane down and into the car seat, closing the door for her. A broad pair of trousers stood at the window and waited while Eddie moved off into the metal framework, picking up a hardhat from a wheelbarrow.

  Diane started the engine and pulled slowly away from her guard, turning to the gate.

  “He wasn’t much help, was he,” said Monique, sounding defeated.

  Pausing at the gate, Diane looked at Monique, who was looking at her hands folded in her lap.

  “No… no he wasn’t.”

  “He threatened you though. That’s important. He sounds like a dangerous man to mess with.”

  “Maybe,” said Diane, her mind starting to play with the conversation, trying to pull out the critical pieces. Was this reaction important? Or those words?

  “You think Jonathan was mixed up with him?”

  “He knew your husband,” affirmed Diane. “But how? That’s the question.”

  Monique cringed and rubbed her hands together.

  “Jonathan, what did you get yourself into?” She sank into silence and stared sadly at the dashboard of the car.

  A blink of dirty white t-shirt in her rear-view mirror announced to Diane that her guard was coming to help her off the site again. She drove through the gate in her own feeble cloud of dust and out onto the road.

  “Let’s head home and see what the Inspectors have uncovered,” said Diane, who was quickly becoming distracted by her own thoughts.

  Chapter 6

  “Anything on the gate codes?” asked Crothers. Mills had been poring over the pages given to him by Matthew Buchan, and he was holding two of them side by side.

  “It’s a blur of numbers and dates and timestamps, but I think I’ve got the last couple of days here for comparison. It looks like Mrs. Carstairs was telling the truth about when she arrived home. You see, here and here.” He leaned over and placed the two documents against the centre of the dashboard with his thumbs next to one entry on each sheet. “Her usual time for arriving home was around 6pm, except for last night when their code wasn’t used at all until late in the evening. You see, around 10pm.”

  “She did tell me that she went to the station later in the evening to make sure he wasn’t sitting there waiting for her to arrive. Maybe with the surprise he got for her.”

  Mills grunted derisively.

  “She’s not a bright spark, is she? He’d have walked home before then.”

  Crothers shrugged in response.

  “You’re ascribing rational behaviour to a human, you know.”

  “Right, right. If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s people acting irrationally when things get out of a routine.” Mills shook his head, still bemused by Monique’s reaction to the situation. For all the years he had been a policeman and all the people, criminals, and witnesses that he had interacted with, they could still act in ways that
confused him.

  “Anything out of the ordinary otherwise?” asked Crothers, who was scanning his phone for messages from Detective Sergeant Barnes.

  “Nothing leaps out at you. We’ll have to run a timeline with the neighbourhood, though. Someone else could have picked him up after all.”

  The implication was clear. Anyone whose timeline did not match the codes would have some serious questions to answer about their interactions with the Carstairs. Jonathan had probably made some enemies, other than Matthew Buchan, with his plan for the estate. You don’t kick people out of their homes without making people angry at you, thought Crothers.

  “Ready to look at the house?” asked Mills as he put the papers into a folder on the backseat of the car.

  With a nod, Crothers and Mills exited the vehicle and walked up to the house, past the formerly-harassed constable. Crothers noted the twitch of a blind at the house across the street, just enough for someone to get a glimpse of the police activity but not to show a face.

  The door of the house stood wide, and Crothers could see several individuals in white plastic suits taking photographs and working with fine brushes. One officer was scraping the wall where the spray paint had been used to spell out ‘TRAITOR’ in jagged lettering. He held a small plastic bag under the scrapings to capture anything he dislodged for later analysis. Cases had been broken on less than matching paint to a paint can.

  As they entered the living room area, a figure rose from pondering an oil painting covered in a translucent layer of black powder. He placed his gloved hands on his hips and addressed the Inspectors without looking away from the painting.

  “One set of prints on all the hanging art, Ollie.” He rotated in place using a hand to indicate all of the paintings that were sitting on the floor around the walls. “The thumb seems to match the ones I got from a frying pan that hadn’t been touched. So that would suggest it’s one of the homeowners, which isn’t unusual.”

  “We’ll get the wife fingerprinted as soon as possible to get them ruled out. Anything missing that you can tell?” Mills stood rooted to the spot just inside the doorway with Crothers standing at his shoulder. “This is Inspector Crothers from Telford. He’s looking for the missing husband. Crothers, this is Tim Mayhew, best Crime Scene Investigator I’ve ever met.”

  Mayhew waved a hand vaguely in the direction of Crothers while his gaze continued to sweep over the room.

  “Nothing of value missing that we could find. We were able to find a list of property for the insurance company in the study. Upstairs was untouched. One or two necklaces are missing which I bet we’ll find on the wife.”

  “Nothing at all? Doesn’t that seem a little odd?”

  “A little,” replied Mayhew as he ran his gloved fingers through a thin covering of hair. “A lot. I don’t know, there’s something….“ He smacked his lips loudly. “A bad taste from everything I see.”

  “Mixing your senses, Tim. Old age finally getting to you.”

  “Synesthesia can be a very powerful tool,” replied Tim without a trace of humour. “Blues are cold, sounds are soft or hard, it’s embedded in our society. And something I see doesn’t taste right.”

  “Crime scenes have a taste. And I thought I’d heard everything,” said Mills as he looked over his shoulder to give a sly wink to Crothers. “I said he was a good Crime Scene Investigator. Licks all the evidence, though.”

  “Scoff all you will, Ollie. I’m telling you that this is an unusual scene. I just can’t tell how.”

  Mayhew looked down at the painting he had been examining.

  “Is this the only room that was damaged?” asked Crothers.

  “Hmmm,” said Mayhew after a moment. Another moment had lapsed before he replied. “The study, a total mess.” He pointed past their shoulders. “You can reach it along the hallway, door at the end. I’ll meet you there.”

  The Inspectors backed out of the door and headed along to the study.

  “It sounds like Tim needs to clean his teeth,” said Mills quietly. “Last night’s pizza making his breath a crime, I bet.”

  Crothers smiled back as if joining in on the joke, but the living room was having a similar effect on him. It certainly looked like someone had ransacked the room. There was something about how it had been done that did not sit right with him though. Not a bad taste; more of a distant dull headache, a confusion that would not resolve into view.

  The study door opened, and a gloved hand restrained them at the threshold. Once he was sure they would not enter, Mayhew stepped backwards and, with a slight bow, allowed them to view the devastation.

  “Christ, it’s like a tornado hit a paper factory!” said Mills.

  There was no floor visible, so thick was the covering of papers of all kinds. Bills, letters, contracts, lists, and so much more were strewn around as though an overstuffed filing cabinet had exploded. There was even a filing cabinet with drawers flung outward, papers hanging over the edges like seasick passengers on a cruise. A dark wooden desk jutted out of the mess and across the surface, on top of even more paper, were scattered shiny metal pieces that clung to a board case by what appeared to be black and red veins.

  “That used to be a computer,” said Mayhew, spotting where their gaze had fallen. “The hard drive has been obliterated; with a hammer is my guess.”

  “Nothing salvageable?” asked Crothers. Someone had wanted that computer destroyed because of its contents. Was the rest of the house a decoy for that?

  “I’ve got a lad working on it but we found a magnet stuck on the side of what remained of it, so I’d say the chances of anything meaningful being pulled off are slim to none.”

  “Someone didn’t like the latest Windows update, I guess,” said Mills as he turned away from the room and looked at Crothers. “Done here?”

  “If there’s nothing out of place upstairs…“

  Mayhew shook his head slowly while rolling a mangled bracket around on his fingers.

  “Then I’ve seen enough.” Crothers backed against the wall to let Mills through, and both men thanked Mayhew as they made for the front door.

  “It certainly looks like the computer was the main target,” said Mills as they strolled back to the car. “So why not just steal it? Why do the rest? It’s not like they’re covering it up.”

  “Decoy for burglary, maybe,” pondered Crothers. “Though if it’s something that’s not easily missed, then you’d just steal that without spending so much time destroying the place.”

  “It looks, smells, and tastes unusual. Hell, it probably sounds weird too.”

  Crothers inclined his head to the house opposite to the Carstairs’ home.

  “We should probably talk to the nosey neighbour. They’ve been watching us since we arrived.”

  Chapter 7

  A precisely-dressed woman, Mrs. April Mullins, in her mid-fifties answered the detectives’ knock. She had a round head with waves of firm brown hair cut to a style that was two decades past. A crisp beige blouse merged with the parallel lines of a pair of light brown trousers, which blended seamlessly with tan house shoes. Her manner was as clipped as her style.

  Within twenty minutes, Crothers and Mills emerged having been subjected to a bland, watery tea and a thin solid biscuit that would have been more at home as roofing material. But, with their damaged taste-buds, they had gathered enough information to muddy the investigational waters like an off-roader through a mountain stream.

  Sergeant Barnes had called as they walked through the door, allowing Crothers to stay behind in the hallway while Mills was given clipped instructions that were disguised as questions such as, “Would you like to sit down?” Mills did not reply before more sharp words were fired at him.

  “Like being interrogated by a grim business mannequin,” he had commented afterwards.

  Jonathan Carstairs had made the train at Birmingham but had not left the train at Telford. Barnes had gone over the footage from the period his train would have arrived, and no-
one matching Jonathan’s description had left the train unless he had disguised himself thoroughly. The surveillance footage had been examined for the later train that Jonathan was supposed to have been catching and, again, no-one seemed to match the description.

  Crothers joined Mills’ torture-by-tea and helped turn the tables on the situation. They asked the rudimentary introductory questions:

  “Where were you yesterday evening?”

  “At dinner. Salarino’s in Shrewsbury.”

  “Who was with you?”

  “My husband.”

  The responses came in an almost aggravated tone, as if the role-reversal was not something to which she was accustomed. Her words were fired back rapidly and in a direct manner.

  “Do you know Mr. and Mrs. Carstairs?”

  “Yes.”

  After the last response, Crothers and Mills waited, partially stunned by the unhelpful situation they had become embroiled in and partly due to the answers giving no direction to move off in. However, the silence seemed too much for Mrs. Mullins, who began to elaborate.

  “He seems a decent young man. Always working and busy. Even if he is selling our property. It’s all good business, though. So we cannot fault him. His wife is a harridan. I see her snapping at him in the mornings from the front door.”

  Her tone did not change during any of the statements to indicate her emotions. Just short, sharp responses fired off like a ticker tape disgorging stock prices.

  “They were having marital issues?” asked Mills.

  “That is unclear. They always turned up to meetings together. Never apart. So how bad could it be?”

  “Did you see anything unusual around here yesterday? Or perhaps this morning?”

  “No. The same cars and people. Until your police arrived.”

  “Nothing at all?” queried Crothers. “No-one leaving unexpectedly, lingering too long?”

  Mrs. Mullins paused for a moment, and her eyes twitched from side to side while she stared over Crothers’ left shoulder. Finally, with a blink, she returned to the real world.