The Troutbeck Testimony Read online

  ‘Thank you,’ said Moxon, looking as if he might well have abandoned all hope of retaining control of the conversation, without some help. ‘There is clearly some scope for confusion over what you saw and heard. But the fact that you supplied – yesterday morning – the registration number of a car belonging to a man who was killed yesterday afternoon makes you of considerable significance. Is there any more you can tell me about what you heard – or saw?’ The detective glanced at Simmy and she thought he might be wishing her elsewhere.

  ‘I heard two men, on the other side of a wall, when I came out of the Gents. I remember the exact words. I repeated them to Simmy minutes after hearing them, and they’ve stayed in my mind. “The old man’s always out on a Tuesday, so that’s our chance. Tim can be the lookout.” I’ve gone over it a thousand times, and can’t make any other conclusion than that it was a plan for a crime.’

  ‘And you’re sure they didn’t know you were listening?’

  ‘There was a wall between us,’ Russell repeated.

  ‘And you never saw them – while they were talking, I mean?’

  ‘I saw a shadow. I’ve just remembered that. You know how the garden’s on a different level – lower than the pub itself?’

  Moxon shook his head. ‘Sorry – I haven’t been there for years. I’ll take your word for it, though.’

  ‘Yes. Well, it is. There’s a curved wall and some steps. As I went down to find Simmy, I caught part of a shadow that must have been cast by one of the men. I did try to get sight of them, but there were bushes in the way. It’s difficult to describe,’ he finished regretfully. ‘I didn’t want them to see me, you see. They might have realised I’d heard them.’

  Moxon nodded patiently. ‘Did the shadow show anything that might be useful?’

  ‘A hat, with a peak. At least, that’s what it looked like. I imagine a defence lawyer might cast doubt on that – saying it could have been his hair or an overhanging branch or something.’

  ‘But you think it was a peaked cap?’

  ‘I do, Inspector. Yes, I do.’

  ‘The dead man was wearing a peaked cap,’ said Moxon heavily.

  Simmy’s mind performed a dramatic volte-face. From one second to the next, she began to care and to care seriously. Until then she had told herself it was all imagination and whispers, coincidence and distraction. Now it became real and sharply focused. She also drew instant deductions.

  ‘Only two men, then. The same two men each time. Except, the one I saw driving the car didn’t have a hat on.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘I think so. His hair was colourless, light brown. I wouldn’t have seen that under a cap, would I?’

  ‘He could have taken it off. The car would have been very warm inside.’ Moxon was plainly sticking to the same track, dismissing awkward objections. ‘Maybe he was wearing it as a sort of disguise, which he didn’t need any more.’

  ‘And he put it on again to go dognapping next day,’ said Russell. ‘Except you say he wasn’t a dognapper, after all,’ he remembered. ‘That’s a pity. How can you be sure?’

  ‘And you might never find the other man.’ asked Simmy. ‘Except … my friend with the beard probably knows him. He saw them both. I think he was actually waving to them, at the pub.’

  Moxon had been quick to observe the change in her. ‘Excellent,’ he applauded, ignoring Russell’s query. ‘We need as detailed a description of him as you can manage.’ And this time, he very nearly did rub his hands together.

  She managed rather poorly. Given that the man was quite possibly a murderer, her testimony was unnervingly important. ‘He’s about my age. Looks as if he works outdoors. Long, thin legs. The beard’s quite long and unkempt. And he said he worked with Travis’s brother!’ She recalled this detail triumphantly. ‘I think that might have been in Grasmere, but I’m not sure.’

  ‘Very good. What else did he say?’

  ‘That Travis was decent and harmless and nobody would ever have a reason to kill him.’ She shook her head. ‘He seemed really upset about it. I don’t think he did it.’

  Moxon pursed his lips. ‘Maybe he knows who did, though.’

  ‘I doubt it, somehow. He seemed bewildered by it. But he wasn’t really a nice man,’ she finished.

  ‘Why? What do you mean?’

  ‘He didn’t like me and Dad having seen him, and then getting the police involved. I think there really might have been something sinister in that black bag. And I think he’s worried he’ll get caught, because of us.’

  ‘We really need to find him.’

  ‘Isn’t there anyone at the Mortal Man who can help? Don’t they all know each other?’

  Moxon shook his head. ‘If they were farmers, all getting together on market day, that would be one thing. But we’re not aware of any sort of identifiable network that includes Mr McNaughton. Of course, it’s early days.’ He sighed wearily and Simmy was reminded that his health had not been especially good even before his troubles in Coniston. ‘He was thirty-three, often out of work, lived in a small rented cottage near Grasmere, by himself. Has an ex-partner and son still in Scotland, as well as his mother. Usual story. The boy sees his dad twice a year, if he’s lucky. Well, not so lucky for him that his dad’s getting murdered coincided with him being here on a visit.’

  ‘But he could afford to run a car,’ said Russell.

  Moxon nodded. ‘And not the sort of car you’d expect, either. Blokes like him generally have a van, or a pickup.’

  ‘For stealing things, you mean?’ asked Simmy.

  ‘He hasn’t got a police record,’ Moxon told her, with mild severity. ‘The idea that he was a burglar doesn’t have much traction. It doesn’t have any, other than what you overheard,’ he said to Russell.

  ‘So what was he doing in that farmyard?’

  ‘We’re still trying to work that out. The forensic bods think he might have been having a pee. They found traces behind a wall.’

  Russell grimaced. ‘Do you think his killer saw him and drove in behind him, then cornered him, before slashing his throat? Where would the car – cars, probably – have been? Wouldn’t somebody have noticed? And who drove the Renault away afterwards?’

  ‘Dad!’ protested Simmy faintly.

  Moxon seemed to think he owed it to Russell to engage in the speculations, even if it went against his inclinations. ‘It needn’t have made too much of a commotion. There wouldn’t have been many people about, anyway. Only one couple visited Town End yesterday afternoon, at the time we think it happened. The killer could quietly have driven away – but what happened to the Renault remains the big mystery. Poor Mrs Herbert, who found the body, chanced to coincide with a group of walkers who were meeting outside the house. She practically collapsed in their arms, and they took her into Town End as the closest place. That was at two o’clock. It made it worse that she knew McNaughton. He’d built a wall for her, apparently, only a few weeks ago.’

  ‘What was she doing in the farmyard?’ asked Russell.

  ‘She was picking elderflowers for a cordial she makes every year. She likes to get it as soon as it appears, and this week’s sunshine has got it going nicely. You have to pick the blossom the moment the buds open, before they go bitter.’

  ‘She told you all that?’

  ‘Couldn’t stop her. Some people react like that – they obsess about something totally other than violent death, as a means of coping. She hadn’t found much, mind you. Her basket was near the body, with three flower heads in it.’

  Simmy groaned, thinking that the woman might never face another elderflower, because of the associations. Moxon turned his attention back to her. ‘Would you recognise the other man in the car, if you saw him again?’

  She tried to conjure the face in her mind’s eye. ‘I don’t know. I probably could pick him out in an identity parade, but I don’t think I’d know him if I met him in the street. Not unless I was actually looking for him, if you see what I mean.’<
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  ‘Hmm,’ said Moxon. ‘That’s what people usually say.’

  ‘Perhaps I would know him in profile,’ she said. ‘He was rather pale and had a small chin.’

  ‘Clothes?’

  ‘No idea. I never notice people’s clothes.’

  ‘But tall, you think?’

  ‘How tall was the other one? Travis McSomething?’

  Moxon frowned and tapped a front tooth. ‘I don’t know exactly. I’d guess something like five eight or nine.’

  ‘I thought he was the shorter one, at the time. But you can’t really tell when a person’s sitting down, can you?’

  ‘It must be a strange business,’ said Russell thoughtfully. ‘The way you have to rely on something as precarious as human memory and observation. Even though Simmy and I made a little game of it, and even wrote things down, I’m not sure we’d give very dependable testimony in a court of law. The car number is the only hard fact.’

  ‘The part about the cap has been helpful,’ Moxon reminded him.

  Russell smiled faintly. ‘But not much else. If they were planning a burglary, that doesn’t seem especially relevant. Either they were new at it, or they were highly successful at getting away with it, given that they didn’t have a police record.’

  ‘He didn’t have one – McNaughton, I mean. The other chap could be different. That’s why it would be useful if Mrs Brown could have a look at some mugshots for us, just in case he or the man with the beard are in our system.’

  Simmy groaned again at the prospect. Time was going to be very short the next day as it was, without spending hours looking at photos of hardened criminals. ‘The people at the pub will have got a much better look at both of them,’ she argued. ‘And they probably even know who they are. I only got a quick glimpse of them through a car window.’

  ‘Nobody’s got anything helpful to say,’ he sighed. ‘They can’t even remember who we’re talking about.’

  ‘You showed them a picture of Travis?’

  ‘Nobody recognises it. And they’re all adamant that there has been no sign of any dogs being kidnapped in Troutbeck. It’s a very dog-friendly pub, and they seemed to take exception to the very idea. Personally I’m starting to doubt that it’s relevant – dognapping, I mean. The frustrating fact is, we were within an inch of making some arrests on that front, when all this blew up. Now we haven’t got enough pairs of hands for both that and the homicide. If we could find some link between the two, that’d help, of course,’ he added reflectively. ‘Which your observations led me to hope for, briefly.’

  ‘It really did look like a dead animal in that bag,’ Simmy insisted. ‘Heavy, lumpy. I was even sure I could see where stiff legs were making the whole thing awkward to carry.’

  ‘There’s nothing to say there couldn’t have been two dead dogs,’ said Moxon with a sigh. ‘To my knowledge, at least five have going missing this year, just from our local area. But they all date back to March or earlier, and they were all returned safe and sound. All the same, their people were extremely upset about it.’

  ‘It’s a rotten thing to do,’ said Russell feelingly. ‘The dogs must be so bewildered and frightened. I don’t imagine they look after them very well.’

  ‘They seemed to survive pretty well, actually. It’s the people who suffer lasting trauma.’

  ‘And you haven’t caught anybody?’

  ‘Not yet, no.’

  All three fell silent, as they contemplated the limitations of the police and the wickedness of humanity.

  Simmy left her parents’ house at eight-thirty and was home fifteen minutes later. It was dark, with rain predicted for the following day. The uncertainty of May evenings was all part of the Lakeland experience, she was discovering. One day it might be light until nine, and the next, it was dusky gloom at seven. It all depended on the degree of cloud cover. It comprised a substantial proportion of many a conversation in the village shop and other points of local contact. Nervous drivers would dither as to whether to venture out, not knowing what level of visibility they would meet on the way home.

  She switched on the lights in both the downstairs rooms and pulled the curtains closed. This was not a regular routine, but she had found herself, in recent months, disliking the idea that persons outside might see into the house and track her movements. She could not rid herself of the image of the man in the passenger seat of the Renault as it left the pub on Monday. In his forties, with dark hair cut short and taller than his companion. She had lodged those few details by voicing them aloud to her father, and in so doing had irrevocably lost many others. She had admitted to Moxon that she was far from sure that she would know him again, which made her virtually useless as a witness.

  It all went round and round in her head, the presence of the murder scene feeling a lot closer than the half-mile it actually was. Her mind dwelt obsessively on the mystery of violent death. Once before she had witnessed the death of a man she had known, albeit briefly. This time it was even more brief, but the impossible change from living to dead carried the same impact. Accepting Moxon’s certainty that it was the same man she had seen, she kept recalling his hands and strong forearms on the steering wheel, swinging the car around the gravelled area and out into the little road. Muscle and blood and all five senses alive and fully functioning – and now not. Now he was inert and in all essentials gone forever. It happened every minute of every day, around the world and it remained as profoundly inexplicable as it always had. No wonder that nobody willingly dwelt on it, that the conspiracy to ignore and conceal it explained a great deal of human behaviour. It made one’s head turn to jelly and one’s flesh crawl with dread.

  Out of a strong but opaque instinct, she phoned the one person who might have a reassuring approach to such musings. He answered promptly.

  ‘Sorry to call so late,’ she said. ‘It’s probably past your bedtime.’

  Ben’s snort of derision made her feel better already. ‘What do you want?’ he asked, not quite rudely.

  ‘I saw Moxon a little while ago, at my parents’ place. I thought you might be interested.’

  ‘Yeah? Yeah! I am. Of course. What did he say?’

  ‘The dead man is called Travis McGinty – something like that. He must be the man my father and I saw on Monday, driving away from the Mortal Man. So our descriptions are important to the investigation.’

  ‘Okay. Didn’t we know all that already? They put his name on the news today anyway. It’s McNaughton, not McGinty. Scottish not Irish. Why do you sound so excited all of a sudden?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess it just took a while to realise that it matters. I mean – that if I can help catch a murderer I should do all I can. And it’s very local, after all. It’s making me nervous to think he’s out there somewhere.’

  ‘Presumably he has no idea you and your father saw him and can describe him. Make sure Moxon doesn’t visit you in a cop car and make it obvious to the whole of Troutbeck.’

  ‘Too late. And there are two men to worry about. Not only did I see one of them very clearly, I actually talked to him last night. And he might easily have seen Moxon coming here. The other one probably didn’t notice me, thank goodness.’

  ‘Well, I expect you’re safe enough. They’ll be off and away, miles from here by now.’

  ‘You don’t sound very surprised.’ She wasn’t sure whether to sulk or be glad about that.

  ‘I already worked out that the men you and your dad saw must be right in the middle of it all. Otherwise, why would Moxon take any notice of what you told him? You’re telling me now that the victim was one of them? So the other one has to be the prime suspect. Doesn’t sound very complicated.’ His disappointment was palpable.

  ‘There’s a lot they don’t know yet. In fact, I keep reminding myself that the only actual fact is the car. If Dad and I hadn’t mucked about taking its number, there’d be no proof at all.’

  ‘They’ll find plenty, don’t worry. There’s sure to be lots more stuff goi
ng on that we haven’t caught up with yet.’

  The yet and the we both reverberated. Again she had difficulty in reading her own reactions. The prospect of Ben conducting his own amateur investigation with every expectation that she would share each step of his reasoning was wearying. Ben knew a lot about the law and obscure police practices, but he could not claim to have ever actually solved anything. He made suggestions and drew diagrams and hovered as close as possible to the action, but seldom anything more. Moxon tolerated him far more patiently than any other senior detective would, probably because Ben was, in the final analysis, extremely serious. He wasn’t getting involved for thrills or mischief, but because he wanted to learn as much as possible before embarking on his degree course. ‘Think of it as work experience,’ he had invited Moxon, more than once.

  ‘I’m going to be horribly busy over the next two days,’ Simmy told him. ‘So don’t expect much backup from me.’

  ‘Backup? In what sense do you mean that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I won’t even manage to listen to you, and certainly won’t be able to take you anywhere.’

  ‘So why did you phone me?’ He seemed genuinely mystified.

  ‘I’m not sure, really. I got myself in a bit of a state, I suppose, and wanted to hear your sensible voice.’ The anomaly of a mature woman seeking solace from a teenage boy was impossible to ignore. But there had been other occasions when Ben’s friendship had proved therapeutic, however strange that might seem to other people.

  ‘So what’s with Bonnie Lawson?’ He suddenly changed the subject. ‘Have you any idea what you’ve taken on?’

  ‘Probably not, but if Melanie vouches for her, it’s got to be all right. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Melanie’s sister was Bonnie’s best friend, a bit ago. There’s sure to be an agenda, and I’m not sure your interests are on it.’

  ‘Don’t say that. She asked if she could use the rooms over the shop.’ This was a continuing niggle that Simmy couldn’t shift.