The Marriage Hearse

Book 10: DI Wesley Peterson

by Kate Ellis

Genres: Police Procedurals

Synopsis

When Kirsten Harbourn is found strangled on her wedding day, DI Wesley Peterson makes some alarming discoveries. Kirsten was being pursued by a stalker and she had dark secrets her fiancé knew nothing about. But Kirsten's wasn't the only wedding planned to take place that day. At Morbay register office a terrified young girl makes her wedding vows but a few days later, her bridegroom is found dead. Wesley suspects that his death and his bride's subsequent disappearance might be linked to Kirsten's murder. Meanwhile a skeleton is found buried in a farmer's field – a field that once belonged to the family of an Elizabethan playwright. Is his bloodthirsty play, "The Fair Wife of Padua", a confession to murder?

Release date: January 20, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 304

Sample

One of the highlights of this year’s Neston Arts Festival will be a newly discovered play dating from the time of Queen Elizabeth
I. The Fair Wife of Padua was penned by Ralph Strong, a Devon man who worked in Elizabethan London alongside the likes of William Shakespeare.

The Fair Wife of Padua was lost for centuries until a manuscript was discovered by chance by a librarian cataloguing the library of ancient Talford
Hall near Exeter. Lord Talford is said to be thrilled by the discovery and he and Lady Talford are looking forward to attending
the play’s premiere at Tradington Hall on Saturday 13th August.

The play will be performed by the Tradmouth Players (renowned for their annual outdoor Shakespeare performances in Tradmouth
Memorial Park). A spokesperson for the Tradmouth Players described the play as ‘perhaps not as accomplished as Shakespeare
but nevertheless a challenging and powerful tragedy’.

Tickets for The Fair Wife of Padua are available from Neston Arts Festival Box Office.

Neston Echo, 26th July

The bride carried a small bouquet of sad flowers. Yesterday’s rusty rosebuds, slightly past their best, pulled from the reduced
bucket that stood at the entrance to Huntings Supermarket. She held the blooms in front of her like a defensive shield as
she gave her bridegroom a shy half-smile. It was two o’clock. Time to go in.


Morbay’s registry office was tucked away at the rear of the Town Hall. But despite this handicap, the staff did their best to make the place as welcoming and attractive as possible to those
couples who chose to marry there and to those joyous or grieving souls who entered its portals to register the birth or the
death of a loved one.


Joyce Barnes, the motherly registrar, was adept at fitting her manner to the occasion; cooing with proud new fathers or giving
unobtrusive sympathy to bereaved relatives. Over the years she had perfected the knack of joyful solemnity, so appropriate
when she was pronouncing that a couple were bound together till death – or in some cases boredom – did them part.


Joyce gave the young bride what she considered to be an encouraging smile. ‘Are you ready?’ She studied the girl. Thin with
a slightly olive complexion and brown eyes. Straight brown hair scraped back into a ponytail. She wore a cream silk skirt,
cut on the bias, which clung flatteringly to her slim hips and a little silk top, red to match her bouquet. In Joyce’s opinion
she looked as though she could do with a good meal.


‘Are your witnesses here?’ Joyce asked, trying to sound cheerful even though she had a headache coming on.

Two girls stepped forward. They were around the same age as the bride and one sported a dark ponytail, the other a fair. They
were wearing jeans. But then Joyce had seen some sights at weddings over the years and she was hardly fazed by a glimpse of
denim.


The girl glanced at her bridegroom and smiled nervously as he took hold of her hand, raised it to his lips and kissed it,
his eyes aglow with desire. He was a swarthy man, rather stocky and probably ten years her senior. But then, thought Joyce,
love is frequently short sighted, if not blind. She thought of her own ex-husband and suppressed a shudder before forcing
herself to smile.


‘If you’d like to come through …’

She began to lead the way into the thickly carpeted marriage room, glancing back after a few seconds to make sure they were
following.


She caught the young bride’s eye and was about to smile but something stopped her. What she saw wasn’t pre-nuptial nerves.


It was fear.

The joyous clamour of the bells fell silent.

The tower captain glanced at the small electric clock on the wall. ‘Twenty minutes late.’

‘Probably the traffic,’ said the girl who’d been ringing the treble, a rosy-cheeked student in shorts and T-shirt. ‘Tourists,’
she added in a tone usually reserved for the mention of vermin.


The other ringers nodded in agreement, apart from the tall elderly man tying up the rope of the third bell. ‘She’ll be exercising
her prerogative. Keeping him waiting. Starting as she means to go on.’


All eyes focused on the red light bulb fixed to the tower wall. When the wedding car pulled up, the bulb would flash once
and when the bride finally reached the church porch after her customary photo-call, the bulb would light up, a signal to the
ringers to stop. There was a similar bulb next to the organ to cue the wedding march. An ingenious system that had never let
them down yet.


But today there was no flash of light. The ringers resumed their places and embarked on ten more minutes of fast Devon call
changes, their eyes on the naked bulb, before deciding to take another break. Half an hour late now. This was getting ridiculous.


The bells were rung from a wide balcony at the back of the church and the ringers drifted over to the wooden rail where they
customarily congregated to watch the bride’s progress down the aisle.


From their lofty vantage point they could see the congregation and they sensed an uneasy atmosphere down in the nave. Men
in dark morning dress darted in and out of the church while women in large hats held hushed conversations. By tradition brides
were supposed to be late. But not this late.


With each minute that passed the volume of anxious chatter increased and the bellringers, in common with those down below,
began to speculate amongst themselves, the breakdown of the wedding car being the favourite explanation. They saw the vicar
in his snowy white surplice speaking to the anxious bridegroom in the front pew before hurrying outside. In this age of mobile
phones, surely someone would have heard something by now.


The hum of conversation grew louder still, filling the nave, drifting up to the bell tower. Where was she?

‘She’s stood him up. Jilted the poor sod at the altar,’ the elderly pessimist on the third bell said with inappropriate relish.

The tower captain, an amiable man, gazed down at the bridegroom’s anxious face and felt a wave of sympathy for the young man’s
public humiliation.


‘She’s here,’ the boy ringing the fourth bell hissed. At the age of sixteen the comings and going down in the church didn’t
interest him. He had been texting his friends on his mobile phone whilst keeping an eye on the bulb.


Sure enough the light was flashing. The wedding car had arrived. The ringers rushed to their ropes and the happy clamour of
the bells began again. First an octave. Then the bells began to swap their places, creating elaborate and rapidly changing
music. The light had gone out now. Soon it would come on again and the bells would fall silent until it was time to ring the
happy couple out of church.


Five full minutes passed and there had been no signal for the ringers to stop. But then some photographers took their time.

Suddenly a figure in white appeared at the church door. But it wasn’t the bride who was entering to the accompaniment of the
bells but the vicar, in his snowy surplice, supporting the arm of a middle-aged man. The confused and impatient organist,
spotting the flash of white out of the corner of his eye, embarked on the first few notes of Wagner’s wedding march. But he
stopped suddenly as he realised his mistake, as did the bells.


The vicar was shouting to make himself heard over the din of voices, clapping his hands like a schoolteacher trying to calm
an unruly class. ‘Please, ladies and gentlemen. If I can just have your attention …’


The bellringers, sensing excitement, rushed over to their rail and leaned over to get a better view as the congregation fell
silent


The vicar’s voice was shaking as he began to speak. ‘I’m afraid there’s been a tragic accident.’

But he was interrupted by the middle-aged man next to him – the man most of the congregation recognised as the bride’s father.
‘Kirsten’s dead,’ he shouted, his voice unsteady as tears streamed down his face. ‘Some bastard’s killed my little girl.’


He sank to his knees and let out a primitive wail of grief as the bride’s mother issued a piercing scream.

Detective Inspector Wesley Peterson stood at the bedroom door and watched the forensic team going about their work. He avoided
looking at the contorted face of the young woman lying on the bed. She was only wearing a bra and a ridiculous pale blue
garter and Wesley fought a strong urge to cover her up; to at least give her some dignity in death. But his training had taught
him that contaminating a crime scene is a cardinal sin. She would lie there to be examined and photographed, her nakedness
exposed to a group of complete strangers until they were satisfied that her silent corpse could safely be taken to the mortuary
in a discreet black van.


All he had learned about her so far was that she had been identified as Kirsten Harbourn, aged twenty-three. And that her
father had found her body.


He looked around the room where she’d died. A feminine room – pink and frills. An ivory silk wedding dress with a full skirt
hung against the wardrobe door like a hooked parachute and an elaborate tiara sat in the middle of the white dressing table
next to a wispy veil. A CD player stood on a matching chest of drawers, a glowing red LED suggested that the victim hadn’t
switched it off before her death. Perhaps she had died to a musical accompaniment. Wesley found the thought macabre.


He turned and made his way down the hallway, careful to walk only on the metal plates placed there to protect any footprints
the young bride’s killer may have left, invisible to the naked eye but potentially detectable with the SOCO’s box of magic
tricks. Detective Chief Inspector Gerry Heffernan hovered in the open doorway, his large frame blocking the light from outside.


‘So what do you think?’ Heffernan asked anxiously. Wesley had noticed that his Liverpool accent seemed to deepen in times
of stress. And he certainly looked more stressed than normal.


Wesley thought for a few moments. ‘Looks sexual.’

‘That’s all we need, some sex maniac on the loose.’ He scratched his head. ‘When we get back to the station we’ll draw up
a list of all the sex offenders on our patch – especially any who’ve attacked women in their own homes. But there’s so many
ruddy tourists around at this time of year it could be someone from London … or Manchester … or Aberdeen … or Timbuk ruddy
tu.’


‘Perhaps there’ll be DNA,’ said Wesley optimistically. ‘Has Colin arrived yet?’

Heffernan shook his head. Dr Colin Bowman, the pathologist, was in the middle of a postmortem but he’d promised to be there
as soon as possible.


‘Her father found her, is that right?’ Wesley asked. He had only just arrived at the murder scene, having been enjoying a
quiet Saturday at home with his wife, Pam, and the children. His sister, Maritia, who was staying with them for a couple of
weeks while she helped to decorate the house she would be moving into when she married in a month’s time, had left first thing
that morning armed with a wallpaper scraper and a pot of white gloss paint, so he and Pam had been experiencing a rare interlude
of domestic peace. Pam had said nothing when he’d been called out. But the expression on her face had said it all.


‘It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? Finding your own daughter dead like that.’ Heffernan shuddered. His own daughter,
Rosie, was around the dead woman’s age. Somehow it made it personal.


‘I expect he’s in a hell of a state. Have the rest of the family been told?’

‘The rest of the family and all their friends and acquaintances.’ He hesitated. ‘She was getting married today. Everyone was
dressed up in their finery waiting for her in Stoke Raphael church, looking forward to cracking open the champagne. When she
didn’t turn up, everyone assumed she’d changed her mind.’


Wesley shook his head, lost for words. The thought of all that joy and anticipation turned suddenly to grief was almost too
much to bear.


‘As soon as he found her, her dad called the police on his mobile then he got the wedding car to rush him over to the church.
Well, he had to break the news, I suppose. Couldn’t leave them all sitting there.’


‘No, don’t suppose he could,’ Wesley said quietly. He stepped outside into the sunshine. He needed some fresh air. He noticed
the house name on a rustic wooden plaque to the right of the front door. Honey Cottage. A pretty name for a pretty place.
But now it would always hold sinister connotations. The papers would call it ‘the Honey Cottage murder’. They would love the
juxtaposition of the sweet and the horrific.


He turned to his boss. ‘If she was getting ready for her wedding, why wasn’t anyone with her?’

Heffernan shrugged. ‘She went to the hairdresser’s in Neston at nine this morning with her mum and her bridesmaid, Marion
Blunning. Marion’s dad’s just had a suspected heart attack so she went off to see him in hospital.’


‘And her mum?’

‘She dropped her off here at eleven o’clock. Kirsten asked her to go to the hotel where they were holding the reception to
check that everything was in order before going on to the church. She said she’d be fine getting ready by herself. Her dad
was picking her up in the wedding car at twelve thirty and when he arrived he found her … Well you’ve seen how he found her.’


‘So she must have died between eleven when her mum left and twelve thirty when her father found her. How did her killer get
in?’


‘The door was unlocked. He probably just walked in on her while she was getting dressed.’

‘Lucky timing.’

‘Maybe he’d been watching the house. She didn’t draw the curtains.’

‘She probably didn’t think she needed to.’ Wesley looked round. ‘It’s hardly overlooked, is it?’

The cottage where Kirsten Harbourn had encountered death stood on the edge of the hamlet of Lower Weekbury, three miles out
of Neston. A small whitewashed building with a fringe of neat brown thatch. A cottage from a picture postcard, adjacent to the grounds of Tradington Hall. Lower Weekbury had no church,
no village shop, and its one and only pub had shut in the 1960s. Once, its small dwellings had housed farm workers but now
a few were occupied by commuters who worked in nearby towns and the remainder were second homes or holiday lets.


‘Was she renting this place or …?’

Heffernan shook his head. ‘No. They’d bought it, her and her fiancé.’

‘Did he live here with her?’

‘No. He lives with his parents at Garbenford – halfway between Neston and Tradmouth. She’d been staying at the cottage while
they had some building work done. Kitchen extension apparently. They’ve had the place rewired, a new bathroom and they’ve
decorated from top to bottom.’


Wesley raised his eyebrows. ‘Pity she didn’t live to enjoy it. You’d think she’d have wanted to get married from her mother’s
house.’


Heffernan shrugged. No doubt she had her reasons.

‘Know anything about the fiancé?’

‘Not a thing. But no doubt we’ll find out.’

‘I wonder where he was between eleven and when he turned up at the church.’

Gerry Heffernan scratched his head. ‘I wonder.’

Maritia Peterson, Wesley’s only sister, was the house guest from heaven rather than the other place. She entertained the kids,
helped to clear up their mess and cooked the occasional meal. And she spent a great deal of time out of the house, redecorating
the old vicarage in the village of Belsham where her fiancé, Mark – Belsham’s new vicar – was already living under rather
chaotic conditions. She was hardly a young woman who got in the way. But this didn’t stop her sister-in-law, Pam, finding
the presence of another adult in the house a strain after a hard day’s teaching.


When Wesley had received the phone call early on a Saturday afternoon summoning him to deal with someone who’d been thoughtless enough to die in suspicious circumstances, she had experienced a pang of resentment. And when Maritia had returned
from the vicarage to get changed, Pam had left her to entertain the children. She felt restless, discontented with her lot
but she wasn’t sure why. She had told Maritia that she had to go out, not saying where to, and left her holding the babies.


Pam had been brought up in a household quite unlike that of the churchgoing Petersons from Trinidad. She had been raised by
a feckless mother who taught sociology at a local college – a woman with an eclectic taste in men, alcohol and the occasional
illegal substance – and she wasn’t altogether comfortable with the Petersons’ brand of Christian virtue. Usually she tried
hard, for Wesley’s sake, but today she felt the strain. She had to get out of the house. And the first person she thought
of was Neil Watson.


As she drove towards Neston, she gripped the steering wheel, concentrating on the slow-moving traffic stuck behind a parade
of caravans and coaches. It was Saturday at the start of the holiday season. Wesley should be home on a sunny Saturday. Home
with her and the children. But he was at work again. Sometimes she imagined that he arranged with a network of tame criminals
for their offences to take place outside normal office hours just to spite her.


Neil was working at Tradington Hall and she knew that the fact it was the weekend meant nothing to him. In his own way, she
supposed, Neil was as work-obsessed as Wesley. But archaeologists, unlike police officers, are rarely called out after midnight
to view some stinking corpse. If Wesley had stuck to his original choice of career, she might not have had to put up with
the ruined meals and the worry. And the constant, tiny voice in the very back of her mind telling her that somehow the job
was more important to him than she was.


She turned the car into the drive of Tradington Hall and took her foot off the accelerator. She had been there many times
before. When she had studied English at university she had attended a creative writing course there. And she had seen many
plays, good, bad and indifferent, in its intimate theatre. The hall itself was a substantial stone house, arranged around
three sides of a large rectangular courtyard. If dated from the late fourteenth century and the guidebooks boasted that it was one of the most important
examples of medieval domestic architecture in the south-west, if not the entire country. To Pam it had always looked pretty
impressive.


In the 1950s Tradington Hall had become a centre for the arts, internationally renowned. And over the years the demands on
its delicate medieval fabric were such that more space was needed. New art studios were to be built near the old stables and,
as was normal at such an historically sensitive site, Neil’s team had been asked to conduct an excavation before the construction
began.


She left the car in the public car park and walked up the drive until she reached the stables which now served as recording
studios. At the side of the stables she could see a tall wire fence, erected to prevent members of the public from stumbling
into deep trenches, breaking limbs and suing the trust that owned the hall for obscene sums of money. Pam stood behind the
fence watching as three figures – two women, one young, one middle aged, and a long-haired man – knelt in the deepest trench,
absorbed in their task of scraping at the red earth.


She called out, ‘Neil,’ and the man looked up.

He grinned. ‘What brings you here?’ He straightened himself up, put his trowel down carefully beside a bucket full of soil
and climbed out of the trench. When he reached Pam he kissed her cheek. Then he took a step back and looked at her. ‘What’s
the matter?’


‘Nothing. Why should anything be the matter? How’s it going?’

‘We’ve got a bit of medieval pottery and some building debris from when a section of the hall’s west wing was demolished in
the eighteenth century. A couple of very nice clay pipes – quite early. And an Anglo-Saxon brooch – not sure how that got
there. Is this a social call or …’


‘Wesley’s working. There’s been another murder.’ She was aware of the mounting anger in her voice. She’d told herself time
and time again that it wasn’t his fault if he had to follow the dictates of his work. But then he didn’t have to field Michael’s
constant questions about the whereabouts of Daddy.


‘That’s police work for you,’ said Neil. ‘When I come across human remains at least nobody expects me to find the culprit.’ He smiled and put a comforting hand on her arm. ‘Fancy a cup
of tea? The café in the hall’s open.’


‘That’s just what I need. How are you, anyway?’

‘Fine.’ He hesitated for a second. ‘But I had a call from Hannah last night. She can’t come over next weekend. Her father’s
been taken ill.’


Pam made the appropriate noises of regret, suppressing a vague feeling of relief. It was really none of her business if Neil
embarked on a relationship with some woman he’d met a few months back when he was on a dig over on the other side of the Atlantic
in Virginia.


When they reached the main house Neil stopped to study the huge notice board in the entrance hall. A section was dedicated
to advertising the various courses the centre offered. But the lion’s share of the available space advertised the forthcoming
Neston Arts Festival.


Pam scanned the notice board and one thing in particular caught her eye. A poster the colour of fresh blood advertising a
new play. The Fair Wife of Padua. Well, not a new play exactly. She had read about it in the local paper. It was an Elizabethan play, written by one of Shakespeare’s
contemporaries and lost for centuries until a copy turned up in some dusty archive. Quite a story. Perhaps she should make
the effort to buy tickets.


If Wesley didn’t prefer the company of the wicked or the dead.

An incident room had been set up at Tradmouth Police Station. A large bright room on the first floor next to the main CID
office. Two pictures of Kirsten Harbourn were already pinned to the notice board – one showing her alive and smiling, standing
on the quay-side at Tradmouth against the background of tall yachts’ masts, the other showing her lying dead, her pretty features
contorted. It was an image Wesley Peterson found offensive. But this was a murder investigation and squeamishness wasn’t going
to help them catch her killer.


When Wesley reached the station he longed to sit down and collect his thoughts, but Gerry Heffernan had called a meeting of the investigation team. Once it was over and tasks had been assigned, he summoned Wesley to his office. Wesley could guess
why. Heffernan was a man who liked to throw ideas around.


When Wesley opened the office door the chief inspector was sitting with his feet up on the desk. His shoes needed heeling
but then that was probably the last thing on his mind.


‘So what have we got, Wes?’ he said as Wesley took a seat.

‘So far? Not much. Deceased is a twenty-three-year-old woman called Kirsten Harbourn who was due to marry a …’ He looked down
at a sheet of paper in his hand. ‘Peter Creston at one o’clock today at Stoke Raphael church. She went to the hairdresser’s
with her mother and her bridesmaid first thing this morning, then the bridesmaid left to visit her father in hospital and
her mother went off to see to some last-minute arrangements at the hotel. The dead woman was left alone in the cottage at
eleven when her mum dropped her off and she was due to be picked up by her dad in the wedding car at twelve thirty.’


‘That’s unusual, isn’t it? A bride getting ready on her own. Usually you get all the female relatives buzzing round like wasps
at a picnic.’


‘It seems she insisted. She told her mother to go to the hotel to check that everything was just so for the reception. It
sounds as if she was a perfectionist – or perhaps it was just a manifestation of pre-wedding nerves.’


‘The door was unlocked. No sign of forced entry. Opportunist attacker, do you think?’

Wesley shrugged. ‘Too early to say. But it’s possible. In all the excitement she might have been a bit careless with her security.
Or she might have known her attacker. Perhaps she was expecting him or her. Maybe that’s why she got her mum out of the way.’


‘It’s possible. But I reckon some passing sex maniac saw her through the window in her posh wedding underwear and her blue
garter. He tries the door and finds his luck’s in. Strangles her with the flex from the bedside lamp.’


‘Was she raped?’

‘It looks likely. Colin’ll be able to tell us for certain at the postmortem.’

‘Which is when?

‘Tomorrow morning. First thing.’

‘No Sunday morning lie in then.’

Heffernan’s chubby face turned bright red. ‘Well I …’

‘Something the matter?’

The chief inspector shook his head. ‘I’m just going out tonight, that’s all.’

Wesley watched his face. He was keeping something back. Which, for a man who was normally so transparent, was unusual. Perhaps
it was a woman, Wesley thought. Maybe Gerry Heffernan had got himself a date. He hoped his guess was right. His boss was a
widower who had been without the love of a good woman – or any kind of woman come to that – for much too long. And Gerry wasn’t
one of nature’s bachelors.


Heffernan’s phone rang and he picked it up. From his martyred expression, Wesley guessed that it was Chief Superintendent
Nutter on the other end of the line, wanting to be apprised of the latest developments, such as they were. Wesley tiptoed
out of the door into the main CID office, where he spotted DS Rachel Tracey.


Rachel had just picked up her shoulderbag. She looked up, flicked her fair hair off her face and gave Wesley a shy smile.
‘I’m going to see the dead girl’s mother. I’m taking Trish with me.’


‘I take it her husband’ll be there too.’

‘Apparently not. They’re divorced. He’s at home being consoled by his new wife. I’ll pay him a call after I’ve seen the mother.
She’s gone to the hotel where the reception was to be held, would you believe.’


Wesley raised his eyebrows. ‘Really?’

Rachel shrugged. ‘It was going to be a big wedding by all accounts. I suppose there’s a lot to see to. Perhaps she wants to
keep busy to take her mind off things. They say it sometimes helps.’


Wesley looked down at her desk. Beside a pile of witness reports was something that looked like a playscript. ‘Taken up acting
again?’ He couldn’t resist asking.


Her cheeks turned an attractive shade of pink. ‘It’s only a small part. A maidservant. My mum’s been helping with the costumes
for the Neston Festival and she persuaded me. I used to be in the divisional amateur dramatic society and …’


‘What’s the play?’

‘An Elizabethan tragedy. Someone found the manuscript in a library somewhere. Never been performed before – well not for a
few hundred years. It’s called The Fair Wife of Padua. We’re doing it in modern dress.’


‘Any good?’

She pulled a face. ‘Not really my cup of tea. Reminds me too much of work.’

Wesley waited for her to explain but DC Trish Walton had returned from the ladies and was standing in the office doorway,
watching Rachel expectantly.


‘I’d better go,’ Rachel said. ‘You and the boss are going to talk to the bridegroom, is that right?’

Wesley nodded.

‘Good luck.’

He watched her leave the room with Trish and felt a fresh pang of guilt that he wasn’t at home with Pam.

Joyce Barnes was glad to get out of the office. In the warmer months, Saturday was always a busy day for weddings and it took
a great effort of will on her part not to let it feel like a conveyor belt. She looked at her watch