The Darkest Evening

seen her when she was walking from the Land Rover to the impressive front door. There was a track from the Kirkhill road, which the tractor must have taken, nowhere near as grand as the front drive. As Vera remembered, there was nothing to mark the turning but two cottages, owned by the estate, once let to workers. Vera supposed Dorothy and her partner lived in one. Perhaps the other had been sold off, or was rented out to provide income. Had the dead woman walked that way? If so, she must know the house, the lie of the land.
The snow was fine and powdery. She could see how the wind might have caught the tiny flakes. It was deep enough to trickle into her boots. Thank God for fat legs so there wasn’t much of a gap. The man in front of her stopped.
‘Sorry,’ Vera said. ‘I don’t know your name.’
‘Neil Heslop.’ It came out as a mutter. His focus was on the mound of snow ahead of him.
‘Can you just move away now? Let me see what we’ve got.’
He nodded and backed away, stood to the side so he wasn’t blocking the light.
‘Did you get down from the tractor to look?’
‘Aye. I couldn’t believe it and I had to check she wasn’t still alive.’
‘You did check?’
‘I’m a voluntary first responder. We’ve had training. To check for a pulse. And you’ll see the wound on the side of her head. She’ll have had no chance.’
Vera didn’t get any closer to the body. She’d do that when she was on her own. There was no sign of the man’s boot prints. The wind and the snow had cleared any mark that he’d made. Any marks that had been here before. There was no way to tell if the woman had walked here with the person who’d killed her or if she’d been dragged.
‘Did you recognize her?’
‘I’m not sure. Hard to tell when I could only see part of her face, but it could be Robert Falstone’s girl.’
Of course. We’re not going to have two young women disappearing into the night. Vera wondered how she’d let Constance Browne know. The woman was already guilty and distressed, and now it seemed that her neighbour, the ‘gentle soul’, was dead. She turned to Heslop. ‘Go back into the warm and wait with your girls. It’s time for me to take over. But if you could leave the engine running and the lights on? So I can see what I’m about?’
He nodded and turned away. The flurry of snow had passed and the night was clear again. So icy that Vera struggled to breathe. She walked towards the woman, then moved beyond her, so the tractor headlights wouldn’t throw her shadow on the body. As Heslop had explained, the face was only partly clear; a layer of hoar frost gleamed on the woman’s forehead and chin.
She reminded Vera of a child, buried in sand, but a beach scene would have been vivid and noisy and this image was monochrome, drained of colour and sound. Vera took photos on her camera. Heslop had said there was a gash on her head, and it was as he’d described, just above her left ear. It was more brutal than she’d expected: the bone and the brain exposed. Blood. Vera wondered if they’d find blood spatter under the top layer of snow to indicate that the woman had been killed here. She was glad that wouldn’t be a job for her. She needed Paul Keating, the pathologist, and Billy Cartwright, the crime-scene manager, here before the evidence melted away, and the difficulties of getting them to Brockburn preoccupied her for a moment.
From the house came the faint sound of music. A heavy bass line. The guests were partying, maybe they’d be dancing until dawn. The notion seemed disrespectful, obscene, but how could they know that a dead woman was lying here? Unless one of them was a killer.

Chapter Five
JOE ASHWORTH WAS AT HOME when the call came. They’d got the younger kids to bed and Jess was in her room on her phone. She spent more and more time hidden away from them these days. Sal said Jess was nearly a teenager now, only a few weeks to her birthday, so what could they expect? Sal said it was the age that caused the attitude too: the rolled eyes, the sullen silences, the slammed doors. ‘It’s all raging hormones. She’ll come through it.’ Joe missed the old Jess, though. The daughter who held his hand and giggled a lot, and lost herself in Harry Potter.
They’d decided to have a late supper on their own and to open a bottle of wine. He’d just poured the first glass. Sal had made a casserole that had been in the slow cooker all day, but they were relaxing for half an hour before she dished it out. There was a movie they wanted to catch on the television. When his work mobile rang, he didn’t recognize the number.
‘If that’s bloody Vera . . .’ Sal didn’t finish the sentence.
He shook his head. ‘It’s a landline I don’t recognize. Best answer it.’
Only of course it was Vera, shouting as if the phone had never been invented and she needed to yell to make herself heard. So Sal, stretched in front of the fire in the same room, could pick up every word.
‘We’ve got a body. I need you here. Brockburn House, just outside Kirkhill.’
He wondered what Vera was doing already at the crime scene, but looked at Sal’s face and knew better than to ask. ‘I’m not on duty tonight.’
The boss pretended she hadn’t heard that.
‘You might have a bit of trouble getting here with the weather, so I’ve arranged for a tractor to pick you up from Kirkhill. You and Holly.’ A pause. ‘Paul Keating reckons he’ll be able to get through with his fancy four-wheel drive and winter wheels and he’ll bring Billy Cartwright with him.’
Joe began to speak but Vera