Shadows and Sins

by Andrea Frazer

Genres: Cozy Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The body of a woman has been discovered in Castle Farthing Woods, and it appears that although she had been dead for years; nobody had ever reported her missing. DI Harry Falconer of the Market Darley police is perplexed - and not only in his working life. He has recently resumed his relationship with psychologist Dr. Honey Dubois - but while visiting a local village in the course of his investigations, unsettling memories of a former love are revived. As Falconer's sidekick DS Carmichael is coping with the early birth of his twins, the DI is forced to form a closer bond with his new constable, as they try to solve a nightmare conundrum.

Release date: April 29, 2016

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 189

Sample

Chapter One

Early 2012

Christmas had come and gone, as had the enforced jollity of New Year and now, in late January, the countryside seemed to be wrapped in the dark hoar-cloak that was this time of year. Although the nights were, in reality, shortening, the impression was that on some days the sun barely cleared the horizon, and the landscape was almost in a constant state of frozen darkness.

‘Davey’ Carmichael, a detective sergeant with the CID in the small town of Market Darley, and who lived in the nearby village of Castle Farthing, had taken to walking his dogs very early in the morning, in the woods near his home. At this time of year, the dead bracken and the bare trees, either studded with frost or dripping a melancholy rhythm of cold water, seemed to match his mood.

Since the mid-winter celebrations of the previous month, the ultimate collector had paid a visit to the Market Darley police force with his scythe and hourglass, and made away with one of their own. It was unthinkable; not only because of the circumstances under which the passing had happened but also because it was someone young, with his whole future ahead of him.

Carmichael was only too well aware that he had almost been called himself, after a grave injury suffered while on duty the previous year, and he felt sobered and diminished by recent events. It could so easily have been him. His household was a particularly warm and cheery one full of life, and his wife’s body was bursting with new fruitfulness, as they had twins due later in the year – he couldn’t bear the thought of being parted from them.

The dogs snuffled around the scent-laden ground, tracking trails of other, long-gone creatures and local friends, occasionally pausing to add their own marks and messages to the territory, as their owner paused to reflect once more on recent events.

How would they all manage with the loss of an officer – a friend – so integral to all their working lives? The initial news of what had happened had been like a practical joke in bad taste. That this dedicated officer could have risked so much in his professional life, only to pass into the next in such a quiet, nondescript way, was as unexpected as it had at first seemed impossible. His absence was keenly felt and, for those who had worked with him, particularly hard to bear.

PC Merv Green had not perished in a car accident, a violent attack by yobs, or as a result of any serious crime. He had not died on the job doing his duty as an officer of the law nor protecting the public. He had merely failed to turn up for his shift one morning and his fiancée, fellow officer PC Linda ‘Twinkle’ Starr, had gone round to his flat in her lunch break when he failed to answer either his landline or his mobile phone. She had expected him to have quarantined himself to bed with a heavy cold or influenza, and just forgotten to phone in. At worst, she thought he might have had a fall and might not be able to get to a phone. What she had found there had destroyed her hopes and dreams, and all their plans for their future together.

She had found Green still in his bed. Too still. His body was pale, his skin as cold as marble, and she realised that the man she sought was not really there at all, not in spirit; that he had gone off on what has sometimes been described as the greatest adventure ever, but which was in fact the end of her life as well as his, at that moment. He was dead, had passed away some time during the night, as he slept, perhaps dreaming of the new day and all that it would never bring.

Dr Christmas, Market Darley’s Force Medical Examiner, had attended, and later carried out the post-mortem. It became apparent that PC Green had died from Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, and that there had been no way it could have been foretold, prevented or treated. It was just one of those filthy tricks that life sometimes plays when things seem to be going well.

This made the news no better, though, and the station was under a pall of gloom. Officers shuffled round without their usual optimism and hope that they would win the war against crime. PC Green had done a lot of work with CID, and his loss was felt well beyond the uniformed branch of the service. His fiancée, meanwhile, had been missing from work since finding his body. Her absence was as much of a reminder of his late status as his.

Claustrophobic, depressive January had certainly pulled no punches this year, and it had got off to a terrible start with the grim news of Green’s death. The whole station, shocked beyond belief, had gone into collective mourning. Where once every corridor and office had thronged with life and enthusiasm, staff now shuffled from room to room, their gazes downcast, their mood introspective.

Superintendent Chivers, in an unusually human gesture, had permitted the wearing of black armbands for the week of the funeral, which had taken place the day before, and merry quips were even off the menu in the canteen. The sobriety of the atmosphere in the station was an ironic contrast to the cheery colours of the flowers, sent in tribute to the station and displayed throughout the public areas of the building in Green’s memory.

Twinkle Starr had gone straight from the funeral to her parents’ house in the north of England, having dragooned a friend to collect all her personal possessions from her locker, and had already applied for a transfer, to be taken up after a suitable period of compassionate leave. She had decided that she would keep in touch with no one, as she felt she would never recover, and wanted to wipe all memories of the couple’s happy time together from her mind. She needed to reset the clock of her life and start from ground zero. It was unbearable for her to think now of the future she and Merv had planned together.

So every morning, DS Carmichael – particularly affected by the loss of PC Green, because of the man’s similar age to his own and because he, Carmichael, had had few personal rather than professional dealings with death – woke in the gloom of the month’s early hours. He put the dogs on their leads, and headed out into the misty chill of the dead woods where the surroundings matched his mood.

There were other early morning dog walkers and solitary wanderers to be found occasionally in the woods around the village of Castle Farthing. Carmichael would usually have waved, and called a cheery greeting to each person he passed, but recently this was not in his mood-span. He would merely give the briefest of nods and keep his eyes cast down in retrospection. There was a hole in his life where his colleague had been, and he did not comprehend how to fill it at the moment.

He was surprised by how shaken events had left him, as he dealt on a regular basis with the deaths of strangers and had felt himself a little inured to it. Even his immediate superior, Detective Inspector Harry Falconer, had become more morose and gloomy than usual. Never one of life’s ebullient people – unlike Green, who had been full of joie de vivre – Falconer’s serious and phlegmatic outlook on life had sunk almost into a miasma of gloom. There was little communication between them in their shared office, and most tasks were carried out with the minimum of conversation. The other officer who worked with them and who had not known Green well, felt excluded; not part of the club that constant professional contact with the deceased had engendered.

Giving a decisive tug on the dogs’ leads, Carmichael headed back to the metalled road that would take him home for breakfast, before facing another day in what felt like an undertaker’s establishment. In his less gloomy moments he did have the sensitivity to feel sorry for DC Tomlinson, who had not been there long enough to be part of ‘the gang’, but he didn’t spend a lot of time on this. His own sense of loss was too strong. How could a man so full of life, as Merv had been, suddenly not be there anymore? How could he just die?

The sergeant’s wife, Kerry, greeted him cheerily as she knew he needed all the encouragement she could offer to attempt to return his usually so sunny disposition to her. His adopted sons and year-old daughter greeted his return with equal enthusiasm, and the cheery glow of the log fire and the brightness of the lights soon improved his mood a tiny chink. Life was still good, he thought, noting his wife’s expanding figure as she coped with carrying their twins and looking after their already-existing family. He just needed to get back in touch with the good things he knew he possessed in life.

There was nothing to be gained in indulging in ‘what ifs’. No amount of longing would change what had happened. He just needed to accept it and move on, and not let the past scar his present, for he would never get this time of waiting and expectation back.

DI Harry Falconer had to drag himself out of bed these days. He thought he was immune to just about everything life could throw at him, given his years in the army and the police force, but this untimely death, so close to home, had left him floundering. He had been a fairly regular church attendee throughout his professional past, and always thought he had some sort of organic faith, but that had evaporated since the dreadful news of PC Green’s death had hit the station.

His life was generally solitary; his on/off relationship with Heather Antrobus having fizzled out and his only regular company his five cats, but he felt himself more in need of the comfort of human contact these days. He had recently renewed his association with Dr Honey Dubois, an old flame who was now providing some much-needed warmth in his life.

With the ghost of a smile he remembered when she had first come to his home and encountered the cats. How could he be expected to understand that she had an innate horror of felines? Her resultant hysterics had appalled him. But when they had met again, she explained to him that she was determined to beat her phobia. She had been working with a colleague and volunteering at the local RSPCA centre in her free time, and now felt much more comfortable in the company of the furry creatures.

He was, at times, anxious about the importance of these occasional meetings. DI Falconer saw this as a weakness in himself, although he would eventually recognise it as a smattering of emotional maturity, even though he was finding it almost impossible to come to terms with how their relationship had soured the first time round. She at least offered him someone to bounce his feelings off, and he sorely needed that at the moment.

He had physical symptoms of his grief and confusion, had lost weight due to the decrease in his appetite, and traipsed round the station with the air of a lost child, not knowing quite where to go for guidance or aid. Even Bob Bryant, the irreplaceable and irrepressible desk sergeant, had lost a lot of his banter and bonhomie and looked across the reception desk with an unaccustomed dour countenance.

The run-up to this sad time had been the usual trivia of policing over the Christmas and New Year period – mainly opportunistic break-ins, drunken affrays and domestic violence. There was no big case consuming everyone’s thoughts and actions, and therefore there was time to brood. If there was ever a time for a big case to break that time was fast arriving; even if only as a distraction and healing agent.

Falconer had taken to arriving at his office at an unheard-of early time. Not having the distraction of a wife, children, or dogs to walk, he would scuffle indolently through recent case histories, at sea as to what he could usefully apply himself to, in these doldrum days post-mortem.

That he had lost a lively, funny and enthusiastic member of his team, he was well aware, and the loss was doubly hard with the departure of Green’s erstwhile fiancée, Twinkle. They had been a good double act, and would have made a fine fist of being married and raising a family. What a black joke life had indeed played. Considering what Twinkle had been through recently, sometimes he felt glad that he wasn’t that close to anyone yet and therefore didn’t have to face the destruction of his future through someone else’s demise.

Listlessly riffling through his desk drawers in search of distraction, he settled down to await Carmichael’s arrival and, maybe, the ringing of the telephone. He felt in desperate need for something to get his teeth into, although he would regret this wish later. He had always been told to be careful what he wished for, for he just might get it.

His restless and mainly pointless reverie was interrupted as a figure entered the office. It was the six-and-a-half-feet of Carmichael; considerably broadened in build since the beginning of their partnership a few years ago, when his huge hands and feet made a giant scarecrow of his silhouette. He was not much like this at the moment, as he wore an impossibly long black coat, black leather gloves, and a similarly midnight-like fedora hat. He was a nightmare on legs: Detective Sergeant Freddy Krueger. The Elm Street figure’s jaws were moving rhythmically, but the inspector didn’t have the heart to ask him to dispose of his bubble gum. Anything that gave him pleasure was OK at the moment.

Falconer barely nodded at him, having been confronted by this grim apparition since they had lost their colleague, and was now so used to it, he would have been surprised if his sergeant had turned up in normal garb – not that Carmichael had ever subscribed to what the world in general considered to be everyday clothing. The sergeant mumbled a greeting, shed his sinister outer garments, and slumped down behind his desk to begin listlessly looking through his emails.

‘How’s things?’ murmured Falconer.

‘A’right,’ replied his sergeant.

‘Kids?’

‘A’right.’

‘Kerry?’

‘A’right.’ Good Lord, he was low. Even his computer screen had a little black drape round its edges.

‘How’re the cats, sir?’

‘All right.’ He was similarly in low spirits.

And that’s how things were. Morale in Market Darley Police Station was at an all-time low: a nadir it had not previously reached in his occupancy there.

Chapter Two

Seven o’clock the next morning found Carmichael back in the woods, his dogs snuffling around as had become their habit recently. They relished being given this glorious opportunity to communicate with other dogs and pick up their pee-mails. The owner’s mind was miles away, remembering his lost colleague and assessing how he should be grateful that he was still living and breathing after his experience the year before. He had never fully recovered mentally from his brush with death and, at times, was very glad to still be alive, at others, depressed by how close he’d come to losing his life, and how easy it was to cease existing.

Shaking his head to fling off the mental fog, like a dog emerging from water, and realising that it was now time for him to head back to Jasmine Cottage and his breakfast, he looked around, to find that the dogs had disappeared out of his view, which was very unusual. He gave a low whistle, then stilled to listen for the sound of them among the dripping trees. It was unusual for him to be so distracted that he actually lost physical sight of them.

After about thirty seconds he became aware of a slight scuffling away to his right behind a clump of withered bracken, and a little whine of excitement broke on the chilly air. What were the little devils up to? He wasn’t in the mood for any of the usual games, and he headed towards where he had heard the sound.

‘Little devils’ wasn’t exactly an accurate way of describing his pets, as their builds were disparate: although one was very low to the ground, the other was gigantic. Dipsy Daxie the dachshund had originally been the property of a suspect from a previous case, and Carmichael had adopted him when his owner no longer had the liberty to do so.

Mulligan was a Great Dane who had previously belonged to some neighbours. The Carmichaels had looked after him on several occasions when their neighbours had gone away, but the beast had grown to such enormous proportions that his former owners, being advanced in age, were unable to cope with him anymore.

Over the recent festivities, they had asked Carmichael if he would be willing to take on this monstrous beast. They were going to their daughter’s for Christmas. She refused, point-blank, to have the creature in her home because of his sheer size – and had thought of the sergeant, as man and dog had always got on well together in the past. Carmichael was severely tempted, but somewhat concerned as he already had three dogs. A bit of thinking and bartering, however, produced the solution. The neighbours would take his little Yorkie and Chihuahua, Mr Knuckles and Mistress Fang, in exchange for the hulking thing the size of a small horse, with the proviso that Carmichael’s adopted sons could take the small creatures for walks whenever they wanted to.

It was something that had been discussed at length in the Carmichael household before any action was taken. Kerry Carmichael had agreed: as much as she loved the little dogs, they were not ideal pets for her at that moment in time – tripping over them at that stage of her pregnancy was not an option.

Carmichael could visit his one-time dogs whenever he wanted, as could Mulligan’s former owners visit their almost-horse. With Kerry as heavily pregnant as she was, the little dogs had got under her feet; God forbid that she should fall and harm either herself or the twins. The older boys had rather lost their interest in such little pets and so were much less concerned than they would have been a year ago: Mulligan was much more fun for a b. . .