The Goldenacre

Episode 64

“Don’t break that phone, now,” Reculver said. The policeman sat down heavily. He was in a threepiece suit, with red socks and well-polished brown shoes.

He had a long coat on and a trilby. In fact he looked like he had stepped through a portal from the 1940s – with added mascara.

He had a large pale plaster over one ear. “Another domestic?” she said, pointing to his ear.

“Plook,” he said.

“Not every wound has to be an injury, Shona.”

“Good place to be bitten,” she said. “Shona – are you drunk? How are you? What a curious business down there in Haddington. I assume you’re not too traumatised.”

“Nah, I’m fine. Very curious,” she said. “What do you know about it?”

He sucked his teeth and peered into the cafe.

“I fancy a cuppa,” he said.

“Well, the answer is no, we don’t know much about it. But I can tell you we have found the car.”

“The four-by-four?”

“Yes,” he said.

“It wasn’t hard to find: it was full ablaze in a lay-by off the A1. Completely incinerated. The Fire Service ladies and gentlemen had a job containing it – the hedge beside it had caught fire. So had an overhanging tree. The boys in the lab think they might have something with the tyre marks, but it’s an old model and hard to track, and the mud on that site was liquid. It was like paint. We will have the engine number, of course, but it was all very professionally disposed of. Fast burn, high temperature. Nothing much there. Thoroughly immolated. A lot of fires around at the minute.”

“Was there anyone in it?”

He grinned and pulled at his injured ear. “Shona Sandison – no. There was not. I may have mentioned that first. Anyway, so there we are.”

“That it? Well, at least it shows they were trying to hide something.”

Reculver rolled his eyes. He picked at lint on his collar.

“Yes, someone was. This whole Peters business,” he said, “what do you know of it? Tell me everything.”

“Why?”

“Because some of my tetchy colleagues in financial crimes are interested.”

“Oh, really,” she said, reaching notebook in her bag.

“None of this is on the record,” he said, looking around.

“Or anywhere near the record.” There was no one near.

An old couple stopped to stoop and point at flowers.

“This name, Peters, has come across their radar,” he said.

“That’s all I am saying. I can’t say any more. This name, I mentioned it to a colleague. It set off some alarms. Some recognition. For starters, there is little to no digital imprint for this woman. No social media at all. You have probably already checked that. I am not telling you anything new, on that score.”

She nodded.

“So, tell me everything you know about this woman.”

He put his hands together on the table. They were broad and hairless.

“For what reason?” She put her hands on the table too.

“Because you can have the eventual story, if it leads to anything.”

“So, you are investigating – or someone is?”

He smiled.

“Tell me everything.”

“Get me an espresso and I might do.” for a

Bribery

He sighed, stood up and stomped over to the cafe door. “This is bribery,” he said.

When he returned with two hot cups, Shona told him what Robert Love’s daughter had said.

She told him about a Ms Pieters who had ordered a commission from the artist, and that her driver sat in a white four-by-four. It had been a commission that seemed to bother Love.

Reculver nodded and made notes in a small red notebook. His handwriting was as square and linear as ancient cuneiform.

Then she told him about what Stricken had found, and how a Ms Peters was listed as a director on the companies run from, or by, the Melrose family.

He made more impassive.

The brim of his hat laid hard shadows on his face, lines down from his nose to his jowls, and across one painted cheek.

She finished, and he fell into silence and toyed with the edge of his hat.

“Is that some kind of fancy-dress hat?” she said.

He looked at her fiercely. “This was handmade in Italy. To order.”

He tapped the table with his pen. “Curiouser and curiouser,” he eventually.

“Reculver,” she said.

“I have been curious. Where is that name from? It’s unusual.”

“You’re unusual. It is quite simple. My dear father was a man of Kent. Or a Kentish man, I cannot remember the exact phrase, it all depends on your relation to the Medway. The name is very old, from down that way.”

“I always assumed it was made up,” she said.

“Every name is, at some point, made up, Shona,” he said.

She rapped her phone on the table top again.

“It’s weird, isn’t it, that a Pieters and a Peters seem to be connected to both Love’s death and Cullen’s, too?”

“I admire your imagination. But there’s sod all to connect her to the Cullen murder,” he said slowly.

“In fact, the Oldmeg Reach people were going to reapply for planning permission, and I think Cullen knew about that, and had some contact with them over a revised offer. So, it’s a big jump to somehow connect that little affair to his death. I still suspect some low-life jumped him in the pub. The Love case, though: we don’t have much. We have the boot stamp. It’s from a standard man’s boot. We have a savage murder, quite nasty, quite unusual.”

More tomorrow. notes.

His face was said

Philip Miller lives in Edinburgh. An awardwinning journalist for 20 years, he is now a civil servant. The Goldenacre, published by Birlinn, follows his previous novels, The Blue Horse and All The Galaxies. His latest novel, The Hollow Tree, is to be a sequel to The Goldenacre.

By Philip Miller