The Late Lord Thorpe

Book 16: A DC Smith/Kings Lake Investigation

by Peter Grainger

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

During DC Smith’s third investigation with the Diver and Diver Associates agency, they have been asked by a member of Norfolk’s aristocracy to look into the tragic death of her younger brother, Freddie, the late Lord Thorpe. The inquest verdict was of misadventure, but it isn’t long before Smith begins to suspect there has been a serious miscarriage of justice. 

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 496

Sample

Smith had asked how long it would take for her broken ribs to mend, according to the doctors. She said she’d been told about six weeks, as long as she was careful. Smith didn’t go as far as shaking his head but there was a dubious sort of look on his face, and so she had to ask.

He said, ‘It must be getting on for thirty years ago, not long after I joined Lake Central. There was a bit of a hoo-ha one Saturday night and I ended up with that injury. I don’t think they used to give us six weeks off in those days… But anyway, the point is I still get a twinge there. If I sleep on it wrongly, first thing in the morning I can still tell exactly where it cracked. I’m not sure they ever heal completely.’

Serena Butler stared back at him, and then Smith realised Jo had on her face an expression identical to the one on the face of his former detective constable – an expression which seemed to be saying, really? You have to say that right now?

He said, ‘Nobody’s mentioned that? Perhaps mostly they do mend. My case is probably quite exceptional.’

Jo looked at Serena and said, ‘No surprises there, then’ and both women shared a smile, and some sort of private joke, by the look of it. Smith decided to move the conversation along, and asked their visitor how much longer she would have to stay at home and rest.

She said, ‘Only one more week, thank God. They’ve said I can go into the office before the six weeks is up. Denise has said she’ll arrange a special chair for me. I don’t know if that involves some sort of a wind-up. I wouldn’t be surprised if it does.’

She looked as if she was longing to be back there as the target of some good-natured banter and clowning around. He remembered it, of course, the laughter and the dark humour which comes from sharing with like-minded people the sometimes awful work one has to do – he remembered it and sometimes he missed it still. After all, the word nostalgia only means the pain of longing for home.

Layla had taken up her usual position when they had a guest, lying close to Serena’s feet – this dog was particularly fond of female visitors, and Smith had decided he was probably the only man in her life. When Jo stood up, so did Layla’s ears, as if she knew what was coming next.

Jo said, ‘Well, I’ll take her for a walk along the bank and leave you two alone.’

There were protests from Serena but to no avail – hadn’t she already told them she was supposed to be resting? And anyway, didn’t they all know the real reason for her visit? That she needed to talk to her old detective sergeant about what had happened to her just a couple of weeks ago? Jo understood that was a conversation which could only take place between the two of them.

Smith had had some of the story from Waters but he let her begin at the beginning, and he listened without interrupting – telling and retelling the story is a part of the healing process just as much as resting those broken ribs. He watched her face and read the changing expressions, read, if you like, between the lines on the face of the woman who had been the last detective to join the last of the many teams he had managed in his time on the Norfolk force. Getting on for thirty years… He’d already said that today. He’d begun when they still thought of themselves as a force rather than a service. Just a word, some might say, and after all, what’s in a name?

He’d made the coffee in a French press for a change. When Serena had finished speaking, he leaned forward and poured more into her cup, and then into his own. He said, ‘Let me know if it’s too strong. It’s better to add hot water rather than more milk. Not a lot of people know that.’

She was watching him and waiting, and he remembered again how difficult she was when she first arrived in Lake Central. She’d been angry at the way she had been treated by senior officers, well aware they would have preferred her to resign instead of taking the transfer to another county. After a couple of days, he’d told her to take a car from the pool and drive around on her own, just looking at the town which would become her new patch if she was able to get over herself – he hadn’t said those exact words but his meaning had been plain enough. She had taken him at his word and didn’t come back into the office that day. Alison Reeve had come to him in the afternoon and asked whether they had broken the record for the shortest service ever given in Norfolk. But the next morning Serena Butler was at a desk when he arrived, and she never missed a shift until the day Smith retired. On the night he was stabbed, she had been there, the first to arrive along with Murray and Waters, and when someone has helped to save your life, you’re rather inclined to trust them with it henceforth.

He said, ‘What’s the latest on the girl? Angel?’

‘She’s still in hospital and still poorly but she’s conscious and talking. She’s in a private ward under some sort of protection.’

Smith said, ‘Any permanent damage?’ and Serena said she didn’t know for certain but it looked as if the girl had been lucky for once in her young life.

He went on, ‘The protection is good. They might have her down as a possible witness. If she gives evidence, she could get a new start somewhere.’

Serena didn’t look convinced, and he asked her why.

‘Give evidence against who, DC? They’re clever bastards. She’ll know her handler, and maybe one more along the line. Small fry, not worth investing in her for them. She’ll end up back where she started.’

Smith said, ‘She’s fourteen, you said. Still very much a minor. That’s in her favour, believe it or not. Some other agency might get involved…’

He felt the weakness of his attempt to reassure her, and he knew Serena was right to doubt what he’d suggested; if this was a war they were fighting, the civilian casualty rate was climbing, not falling. In towns and cities across the land, it felt as if the backstreets had become battlefields.

‘But obviously,’ he continued, ‘that someone cannot be you. I know I’m only saying what others have already told you. Even so, it bears repetition. You have to keep clear of it all now.’

Serena looked away from him and said nothing. Chris Waters had told him they thought the main reason Serena had stayed undercover as long as she did was because of the teenaged girl – that she wanted to hurt them for what they were doing to children like that. Knowing her as he did, Smith found this easy to believe but it seemed she was still struggling with the outcome.

When she looked back at him, he said, ‘So, how are those new people doing at Central? I know they’re not really new at all now – I mean the ones I’ve never met. You mentioned Denise. Although I’ve a feeling I did come across her once on a training day…’

Serena said, ‘Oh, we get on like a house on fire.’

‘And so sometimes there are a few sparks?’

A lucky guess? No – he was lucky too often for that. Someone must have said something, probably her detective sergeant – she knew the two of them stayed in touch. And then, of course, there was John Murray. Smith had been gone for a couple of years now but he was most certainly not forgotten, and his intelligence gathering seemed as good as it ever was.

She said, ‘We have our moments, but Denise is a pro. Not much gets past her out on the streets. Clive is funny but there’s more to him than meets the eye. He’s a Level 1 driver and an AFO.’

Smith said, ‘Firearms officer? Not much call for that in Lake, not in my time.’

‘I don’t think he’s drawn a weapon since he arrived but I expect Freeman thinks it’s useful to have him around. And there’s Fordy, who you do know – he’s pretty much full-time with the squad now.’

‘What about your DI?’

She had relaxed again, talking about the people she worked with every day – the people she was desperate to re-join. Smith knew there had been boyfriends since she arrived at Lake Central, and by all accounts Mike Dunn had been serious about her, but she was still single. There was something missing – something unfulfilled – and he felt a little guilty that he had never discovered what it might be.

She said, ‘Greene’s a legend! He never gets into a flap, he never seems to miss a beat. He’s so organised it’s scary. Clive reckons he’s a prototype robot run by AI.’

Smith sat back, a little disconcerted. She asked him what was the matter.

Smith said, ‘AI? Are you sure? I can’t see what that has to do with anyone’s organisational skills.’

‘Er, yeah. Chris says policing will be unrecognisable in five years’ time because of AI.’

He shook his head, and she asked him why he found the idea so strange.

‘Are you sure you mean AI? Because the last time I heard anything about it, it was farmers doing unthinkable things with long rubber gloves at the rear ends of cows. I dread to think what’s going on at the College of Policing these days if…’

She remembered the dead straight face that could catch you out every time, and she began to laugh, even though she knew that’s exactly what he’d intended, and why. He stood up then and said he was going to make some fresh coffee. She watched him go into the kitchen, and then eased herself back into the armchair. Laughing had hurt her a little but it had been worth it. She closed her eyes for a moment and listened to the silence of the late autumn morning which surrounded the cottage on the edge of the saltmarshes.

When he was seated opposite her once more, Smith said, ‘Would you go undercover again?’

She must have asked herself the same question a dozen times by now. The pause before she answered suggested she had yet to come to a firm conclusion.

‘Probably. But I’d ask more questions the next time, before I said yes.’

Smith said, ‘Good. Experience is an exacting sort of teacher, isn’t it?’

Serena nodded, and he continued, ‘Different people do it for different reasons, I think. I liked the intellectual challenge. I know that sounds a bit pompous – what I mean is, I enjoyed figuring it out, how to make the character I’d become as convincing as possible. To make them perfect. I used to go into that side of it pretty deeply, like one of those method actors. Is that still a thing in the thespian world? It used to be all the rage. Anyway, I prepared a lot, read and memorised everything I was given. But the other side of it is, you have to be able to think on your feet, to handle the unexpected and make literally split-second decisions, which is a different skill altogether. It’s not for everyone.’

She was listening intently, and when Smith paused she nodded but made no reply.

‘From what you’ve told me, you did a good job. No one can expect to bring down an entire enterprise – what you did will have seriously disrupted it, and that’s probably the best we can hope for, here in the real world.’

He sensed this was what she had come for – his judgement. He felt the responsibility, felt the weight of it.

‘And by the sound of it, you were unlucky. Events beyond your control aroused someone’s suspicions. The same thing happened to me, in the end. I had to make a run for it.’

That as a soldier he had been undercover in Belfast, infiltrating a cell of the Provisional IRA, was not a secret among the detectives he had worked with in Kings Lake Central, but it was only John Murray who knew the whole truth – that on the night he had ‘made a run for it’ Smith had, in self-defence, shot and killed the younger brother of one of the leaders of that terrorist organisation, a man who had later become an important figure in the politics of Northern Ireland.

Serena said, ‘I made a mistake. I let the girl get too close to me. We both paid the price.’

He sensed her pain, sensed that for her this was the crux of the matter – her guilt at what had happened to the teenager used by the gang. Smith picked up his coffee cup and drank a little more. He looked at the clock on the wall and thought Jo would be back soon.

‘How other people feel about us is one of those beyond-our-control things. She just fell for your natural charm. We all have at some point or other, before we realised the truth.’

He was wearing his philosophically rueful expression and she half put up her hand with the appropriate one-fingered gesture, as if they were still back in the offices they had shared in Central. His eyebrows went up in mock surprise and then he asked her what the girl, Angel, had been like.

‘Just a kid. She’d been a victim all her life – you know the sort – but somehow she’d survived. She was bright enough. If she’d had support at school, she’d have done all right. Maybe she could have done well enough to climb out of the pit… You should have seen her in the sea. It was bloody cold but she was straight in, and she could swim. To see someone like that being so used… Yeah,’ she said to him with a defiant look, ‘it got to me.’

‘And by the sound of it,’ he said, ‘you got to her. Maybe you’re right, maybe you were careless. But with someone so young, it’s not easy to be cruel, is it?’

Her eyes were brimming a little, and Smith had to conceal his surprise – that she had strong emotions he had never doubted but they were rarely so close to the surface. And then he saw a change in her face when she looked up at him, as if he was gazing at someone he had never met before. She said in an odd, quiet voice, ‘She’s fourteen. I’ve never told anyone else at Central this DC, but…’

She stopped when the latch lifted at the back door, and two seconds later Layla bounded back into the room. Serena reached down and made a fuss of her. Smith waited but when she looked back at him he caught only a glimpse of the other person – the one who had been about to share a great secret – before she slipped away. In response to a question from the kitchen, Serena said yes, she would stay for lunch if it wasn’t too much trouble.

He watched and waited but Serena made no attempt to return to their previous conversation. The three of them ate lunch at the oak table in the kitchen – homemade tomato soup using the last of the crop grown in the small greenhouse, with wholemeal bread and two or three cheeses from the local shop. Smith made yet more fresh coffee.

Serena asked him what it was like to work for Diver and Diver Associates – she said she knew they were friends of her detective sergeant but she’d never met them in person. He told her it was a demanding, high-pressure environment with many deadlines to meet but she was watching Jo, and she knew most of his tricks by now.

Jo said, ‘He gets to pick and choose his cases. Jason Diver has given up thinking he might do a forty-hour week. There are weeks when he doesn’t do forty minutes. But to be fair, he has made a serious effort with a couple of things since he joined them.’

Smith said, ‘Damned with faint praise. I sometimes think that’s the story of my life.’

Serena said, ‘You found that missing businessman. How did that end up?’

‘Well, it hasn’t yet – ended up, I mean. Gerald Fitch will be a wealthy man when it does. He’ll sell the lot and make a new home on the east coast – I’ve no doubt about that. I imagine his daughter and granddaughter will go with him.’

Serena said, ‘I know Central has been told to present a case against his wife. I don’t know the details, so I can’t break any rules – I’m a bit out of touch, for obvious reasons. But I think the DCI has passed it on to your old friend, DI Terek.’

Smith cut another thin wedge of Wensleydale and took another piece of the bread. He said, ‘Whether or not she faces a conspiracy charge, she won’t see much more of the Fitch money, and rightly so. Still, she had a good run at it – five years leading a life to which she was not accustomed.’

After some reflection, Serena looked out of the kitchen window and said, ‘It doesn’t sound too bad, the private work. I sometimes wonder what I’ll do when the day comes.’

When her attention returned to the room, she found both of them staring at her with similar expressions – surprise mixed with a little concern. After all, both listeners had been senior career police officers in their time.

Serena said, ‘I don’t mean I’m quitting. God, I couldn’t afford it! The way prices are going, forty minutes a week would buy me half a dozen tins of baked beans. I was just thinking – policing isn’t an old person’s job, is it?’

She looked at Smith and said, ‘I know you went on well into your fifties but most go before that, and…’

He finished the last mouthful before he said, ‘Whereas private investigations are? Are an old person’s job?’

Serena began to laugh and remembered just in time. She contented herself with a smile at both of them, and the thought – which was not at all a resentful one – that they were lucky to have found each other and this place, which seemed to suit them so well.

Smith still had his serious face on as he said, ‘I’ll have you both know that my most recent and well-deserved break might soon be coming to an end. It so happens that in an hour or so I must leave you. I have an appointment, courtesy of Diver and Diver Associates.’

There are some very fine houses to be found in the North Norfolk countryside. Some are well-known, visible from nearby roads and signposted – others are not. There are not now so many estates, of course; modern economics, more egalitarian politics and the taxman have seen off most of them, but a few remain. One or two have become successful businesses in their own right, attracting thousands of paying visitors every year, showing off the family silver instead of selling it – others live on quietly behind high walls and fences, among the trees the ancestors planted a century ago, and they keep their gates closed.

Smith had thought the directions sent to him that morning by Jason Diver were a little odd; as he drove along the single-track road through the woods, with head-high stands of rust-coloured bracken so close to the verge it was impossible to see around the tight corners, he concluded his original thought had been an understatement. He hadn’t said it aloud, though, so it wasn’t exactly a statement… Can one have an underthought?

Nevertheless, he was as usual a few minutes early. When he rounded another bend and saw the wall and the gated entrance some seventy yards ahead, he slowed and found a passing place. The verge was mostly grass and earth, wet after the recent rains, and he pulled onto it gingerly, keeping the two offside wheels of the Volvo on the gravel track. No other tyre marks were visible. He turned off the engine and lowered the two front windows with the electric switches. Straight away he could smell what he’d hoped for – the soft, green, earthy scent of an English wood in autumn, the scent of leaf mould, damp bark and strange fungi in secret glades where the sunshine had penetrated only for an hour or two on already long-forgotten May mornings.

He thought he knew where he was now but he opened the maps on his mobile anyway. Zooming in, he saw he’d been correct – he was at a back entrance to Burnham Park. From the main coast road as one heads east, Burnham Park is on one’s right but one would never know it – the name appears on no signposts. Two minor turnings lead off towards it but one of those says “No Through Road” and the other “Unsuitable for Large Vehicles”. Smith knew nothing about the people who lived here – presumably it was owned by a family who liked their privacy and who had had nothing to do with Kings Lake Central police station during his time there. But these days you can never be sure – it could equally well be a private school for the offspring of Chinese billionaires or a yoga retreat.

Jason had sent the details of the place he was to be – where he was now – by text but there had also been a telephone conversation the previous evening. Jason had told him it was all a bit hush hush – ‘I invited her in to the office but I got the feeling she wanted more privacy than we could offer. She insisted we go to her place. It looks rather out of the way, so naturally I thought of you, Smith.’

Jason Diver was not beyond a touch of ironic humour these days, now they’d got to know each other better, but one couldn’t always be sure; he viewed the pair of them, the brother and sister who had inherited a private investigations agency and against all conceivable odds had begun to make it work, as terminally eccentric.

Diver continued, ‘I said to the woman we’d both come to see her and she declined that as well. She said she didn’t want a crowd, she wanted to see whoever would be working on the case, if there is one. I’ve no idea what it’s about… Not the faintest. So this rather leaves you to represent the agency and to negotiate whatever needs negotiating. I did tell her I was sending my most experienced man.’

Smith had given this due consideration before he responded with, ‘Unless there have been developments of which I remain blissfully unaware, I’m your only man, I believe.’

Yes, said Diver, quite unfased, but they had taken on a promising young woman who was training with Polly Coverdale. Polly had even said this one wasn’t entirely clueless.

‘Things are looking up, then,’ Smith had said, and then, ‘All right. I’ll go and speak to the mystery woman. What’s her name?’

‘Caroline Thorpe. If it’s any help, she sounds educated and intelligent. I’d say she’s in her forties or early fifties.’

This was Jason entering into the spirit of private investigation. His expertise – and for all Smith knew it was his genius because he seemed to make a great deal of money at it – lay in advising clients all over the planet about their online security. In the brief time Smith had spent in the DDA office, he’d noted calls from the States, Australia and Scandinavia. But a part of Jason Diver wanted to be a gumshoe like his uncle Bernie, whom Smith had known back in the day. Thus far, Smith had done his best to discourage the young man, and he was already feeling a little grateful to Caroline Thorpe for insisting she deal with the man and not the management.

He was typing into his search engine the words “Burnham Park” when he noticed movement ahead of him; the gates had been opened. A burly man wearing the tweeds of an old-fashioned gamekeeper stood at the entrance, watching him. Smith put away his phone, started the engine and drove on towards what might be his third case as a private detective.

‘Follow me,’ the man said, and Smith obliged. The Land Rover looked like an original, a proper boneshaker, and he recalled riding in something similar all night around Salisbury Plain about forty years ago. There had been no exchange of names, nor questions to ascertain what business the visitor was about – clearly the man had been told to open the gate, one not opened often, Smith had noticed, and to escort him to a preordained meeting place. The keeper, for he could be nothing else, was of a similar vintage to the vehicle he was now driving, and he was dressed accordingly. Smith thought the man closer to seventy than sixty years of age, but he was of a recognisable type: unsmiling, barrel-chested, tough as old boots, hard as nails. The sort of man who makes few concessions to age and never retires – he’d already decided he would just drop dead one day.

The track this side of the gates was worse, little more than a wide footpath through more wet woodland. At one point the Land Rover slid a yard or two to the left on a bend, and clouds of blue smoke appeared as the driver revved his way through a marshy patch. Smith slowed, found the button for the four-wheel drive and made sure he was travelling quickly before he arrived at the worst spot – when the old girl made it through, he gave her a pat on the steering wheel and told her it was a good thing he didn’t bring that other car.

He was rather enjoying himself. The trees thinned ahead and he could see the big house – that’s what they were always known as locally and colloquially. It was like arriving on a film set, an Agatha Christie-like affair – murder at the manor and all that, complete with taciturn gamekeeper. If a uniformed maid appeared between the columns of the portico, his arrival would be complete.

Burnham House has the original, imposing building of yellowing gault bricks, and a slightly lower-roofed wing to its left – a long wing with ten windows in both storeys. Above the entire structure are slate roofs, and between and edging all those must be a ton or two of lead flashing. Every window, including the tall arched ones on the ground floor of the main house has Georgian glass. If these had been replaced with modern equivalents, the glaziers had done a first-class job, because it was impossible to tell from where Smith stood after he had climbed out of his car.

The man hadn’t got out of the Land Rover. He leaned across and spoke to Smith through the open passenger window.

‘I’ll be back ’ere to take you out the way you come in.’

Smith thanked him and asked whether he should simply go up the steps and into the house; there was an imposing wooden double door with some substantial iron work.

‘They’ll know you’re ’ere. Someone’ll be out.’

And with that the man restarted the engine, a new cloud of blue smoke formed on the chilly autumn air and he drove away. Smith took another look at the house – impressive as it was, he wouldn’t have swapped a square foot of Drift’s End for it.

He began to walk towards the steps but before he had reached the first of them, a latch was lifted and one of the oak doors began to open. A woman appeared and watched as he approached. She was dark-haired, bespectacled and of a suitable age to fit Jason Diver’s deductions, and so Smith said, ‘Good afternoon. Mrs Thorpe?’

She was tall. The pitying smile that followed his question meant she seemed to be looking down on him in more ways than one. Without answering, she indicated he should follow her into the house, and he did so – the thought occurred that the two people he had met so far might well be a married couple. If so, the Sunday lunches must be uproarious affairs.

They were standing in an immense entrance hall – the outside of the building gave no hint of its inner proportions. The ceiling was up there somewhere, and from it hung a huge crystal chandelier. The floor had an intricate pattern of tiny, pinkish, black and grey marble tiles which must have taken weeks to put down. A wide oak staircase curved away to the right, and doors led off in different directions. Smith noted enormous ancient houseplants in matching brass pots, chairs of various antique vintages and some appropriately gloomy portraits in dark corners.

The woman said, ‘Please take a seat,’ and she pointed towards a Regency bergère chair at one side of the hall. Smith had concluded by now that questions would be pointless – destiny herself seemed to be moving the pieces around the board just at the moment. He did as he was told and then the woman said, ‘Lady Caroline will be with you shortly.’

She was a little above the average height for a woman but so slender she seemed to be taller than that. Smith followed her into a room she called the main study – this time he found himself seated in one of a pair of wing-backed Queen Anne armchairs in green linen. Lady Caroline Thorpe took the other and they faced each other from either side of an ornate iron fireplace – unfortunately, thought Smith, it had not been lit for the occasion. Sheila would have loved this place – she had grown up in her father’s antiques business and knew all sorts of things about furniture. For himself, he was simply surprised at how comfortable the chair was considering the design must be at least three hundred years old.

There were fine streaks of grey in the woman’s dark hair, held back in a simple pony tail, but these only added to her air of distinction – unless he was much mistaken, in her youth she had been a striking beauty. Her eyes were blue, much the same colour as his own, and they were regarding him frankly. She seemed to be in no hurry to begin the interview.

He said, ‘You have a remarkable home.’

Her lips tightened into an ironic half-smile.

‘Remarkable? Not one of the words I’m used to hearing when someone sees it for the first time. You might mean it’s remarkably bad…’

He said, ‘Well, I haven’t seen enough of it to come to a conclusion of any sort – other than it is remarkably interesting.’

She sat back in the chair but kept her eyes on his as she said, ‘I can tell you it’s remarkably difficult to keep it warm. I gave up trying years ago. We shut down most of it every winter and live in two or three rooms. One bedroom, one kitchen, one bathroom and this one. So that’s four – we manage with three or four rooms from October to April. No different to millions of other people.’

Smith said, ‘If it’s not too obvious or rude a question, three or four out of how many altogether?’

‘The answer to that,’ she said, ‘rather depends on what one counts as a room. But the standard response for Burnham is thirty-four.’

The one they were in was not warm. Smith still had on his tweed jacket, and Caroline Thorpe wore a blue Aran jumper. Her jeans were faded denim and a tear was appearing on the left knee. She was we