The Darkest Evening

you so. ‘A car had come off the road up the bank not far from the main entrance to this house and there was this bairn on his own in the back.’ A pause. ‘I know the folk who live here. At least, I know Harriet, who must own it since her husband Crispin died, and her daughter Juliet, the lass who took away the baby just now. They’re distant relatives. On Hector’s side.’
Joe was astonished. Vera lived in the cottage which had once belonged to Hector, her father. It was small and scruffy, a hovel perched on the edge of a hill. There’d never been any indication that she might belong in a place like this.
‘You can shut your gob,’ Vera said. ‘You just look gormless, staring like that.’
Joe heard Holly snigger beside him, but he sipped his coffee and waited for Vera to continue. There was no point talking to the boss when she was showing off.
‘So, there was a kiddie in one of those child seats. I thought the mother must have gone to get help or a phone signal. But what worried me was that the door had been left open. I couldn’t see that a woman would do that.’
‘You were sure it was a woman driving?’ Holly asked. Holly saw it as a mission in life to challenge Vera’s outdated sexist assumptions. ‘It could have been the father.’
Vera shook her head. ‘The driver’s seat was pulled right forward. It must have been a small woman. I drove on and brought the baby here and arrived in the middle of a social gathering. A kind of weekend house party. There are three couples staying overnight . . .’ Vera looked down at her notes, ‘. . . the Blackstocks and the Wallaces, and Jennifer Abbot and Peter Little. Juliet gave me a list of names and addresses. The only locals at the party were the priest and her husband and they left straight after dinner, before the body was found. We can get someone round in the morning to take a statement. We can chat to the others tomorrow too, see if any of them has any connection with the dead woman.’ She paused and eyed up the remaining pieces of flapjack. ‘Then of course there are the family – Juliet, her husband and her mother Harriet – and Dorothy Felling, the wonder woman who’s been feeding and watering us.’
Joe shifted in his seat. ‘What’s the husband’s name?’
‘Mark Bolitho. I don’t know him. He arrived on the scene long after I had any contact with this side of the family. According to Dorothy, he ran a theatre in Newcastle before moving out here, still does, part-time. He’s a writer and director, apparently. She thought I should have heard of him . . .’ Vera’s voice tailed off.
‘I know his work,’ Holly said. ‘He’s done some film and television too. I heard him speak at the Tyneside Cinema.’
Of course you did, Joe thought. Holly saw herself as the office intellectual.
‘Well, you can do the interview with him in the morning then, pet.’ Vera’s voice was bright. ‘It seems he’s dreaming up some scheme to set up a theatre here and the party last night was all about tapping his mates for cash to support it.’
Holly nodded. ‘Did you speak to the car owner? Was it stolen?’
‘Nah. It belongs to a retired woman, a former schoolteacher called Constance Browne. She thought a neighbour called Lorna Falstone might have been driving. Apparently, they had an arrangement. A kind of informal car share. Neil Heslop, the farmer who gave you a lift, found the body and thought he recognized her as Lorna too. We’ll need confirmation – her parents live at Broom Farm further across the valley between here and Kirkhill – but all the indications are that it’s her. It wasn’t an accident or hypothermia. There’s severe blunt-force trauma to the side of the head.’
‘That couldn’t have happened when the car came off the road?’ Holly had been taking notes and looked up, pen poised.
‘I’ve looked at the body too.’ Keating was an Ulsterman, precise and a little dour. Sentimental when nobody was watching. ‘There’s no way anyone could have staggered nearly a mile from where her car left the road with an injury like that.’
‘And there was no sign of damage to the vehicle.’ Vera reached for a flapjack. ‘The kiddie wasn’t hurt at all and nor was the car. It just seemed to have slid off the road. It can’t have been going at any kind of speed.’
‘So definitely murder then?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Vera said, and Joe caught the gleam in her eye. ‘Definitely murder.’

Chapter Six
JULIET SAT IN THE BEDROOM SHE shared with Mark and looked out at the garden. She’d heard Vera talk about bringing in a generator to light the patch of lawn where the body had been found, but there was no sign of that yet. No rumble of the engine or intense white light. Already a tent had been erected, flimsy enough for Juliet to see a shadow of a person inside, backlit by a torch.
Their room was on a corner and she could see both to the front – the formal garden – and along the side track that led up to the cottages on the Kirkhill road. She watched a small group of people at work, lifting equipment from the back of a large SUV. Everything was lit by the security light fixed to the wall above the kitchen door. It felt unreal, like wandering into one of Mark’s film sets. She could imagine him following the action from a distance, completely focused, shouting the occasional note, before someone yelled, ‘Cut.’ Now, he was still downstairs in the drawing room drinking with his friends, more interested, it seemed, in their promises of money than in a murdered young woman.
Thomas was on her knee, wide awake, squirming. Juliet put him on the carpet and he scuttled away, exploring. It was a strange crab-like crawl; the child used his feet rather