Buried With Honours: A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crime Thriller Page 15

  “Can you make sense of it?” I asked.

  “I think so,” he said slowly. “Though I will admit it does look a little scrambled.”

  “Would it make sense to know that there’s the chance it was written in a hurry?”

  “That does make sense,” he said.

  “We have a few copies, should you need them,” I said. “And you’re welcome to use my desk. Can we get you anything else?”

  “Nothing else required, Inspector,” he said, shrugging his coat off and bending over the code, pencil in hand. “I shall get right to it.”

  “We’ll be just outside,” I told him, rising from my chair.

  Mills followed me outside, closing the door behind me. My stomach was in knots. The pressure that such a small slip of paper had was ridiculous. At least he knew what it was. At least he could crack it.

  “I might brush up on my codes and cyphers,” Mills muttered. “You never know when it might be useful.”

  “Not a bad life skill to have,” I replied. “A bit like skinning a rabbit or smoking a fish.”

  “You know how to do that?”

  “Skinning a rabbit, in theory. But my grandad used to smoke fish in the chimney.”

  “That’s gross.” Mills answered.

  “Hardly. Old houses used to have little things built-in for that very purpose. Bit of hand-smoked trout, very nice.”

  Mills shook his head, grinning. “Your childhood sounds like it was one picnic away from being an Enid Blyton novel.”

  “Thankfully not. I never really liked ginger beers or boiled eggs.”

  Mills blinked. “Boiled eggs?”

  “They eat them in the books,” I said. “Famous Five, lashings of boiled eggs.”

  “How many eggs would that be?”

  “Too many, quite frankly, hence my lack of interest.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the pride of the North Yorkshire Police,” O’Flynn appeared, her hands on her hips. “Discussing Enid Blyton picnics.”

  “Could be relevant to the case, Cora,” I said. She raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ve been on the phone with Sybil Riggs,” she told me. “Giving her an update vis-à-vis the body. Crowe has cleared him, so she’s arranging the funeral pickup and all that.”

  I grimaced, my mood souring a little. “Grim business that. How is she?” I asked, scratching my head.

  O’Flynn shrugged. “Just as you’d expect her to be, really. How goes it here?”

  “We’ve got an expert,” I nodded to the closed door. “Courtesy of the boss. Says he can decode the note we found.”

  Cora looked impressed. “Well, fingers crossed for you. Let me know if I can help at all,” she added before wandering off.

  “She’s a good egg.”

  “Enough with the eggs.”

  “Inspector?” The door opened, Dr Azoulay peering out at us with an amused expression on his face. “I’ve got it.”

  I straightened up, hope surging, and we followed him back into the room.

  “It’s a little confusing,” he admitted. “But I’ve picked it apart word for word, so I’ll let you grapple with the meaning of it.”

  “Thank you,” I said, looking over the page. It read:

  Man. We just do it. It’s up to us. Woman. How? Man. Make it look like accident. Quiet Woman. We do have to. To keep in business. Man. You know we do to solve problem. Nobody will be -. She’s always drunk and causing - and they’ll never know. Quiet. Woman. Stop bringing it up. It’ll be fine.

  “Is it just me, or does that make no sense at all?” Mills asked after a short pause. He stood up straight and looked at me.

  “What are these blanks?” I asked Dr Azoulay, tapping the empty spaces.

  “Words that I do not understand. Quite literally, not words, to be honest. He must have adapted the code in some way or another. But I assure you,” he added, hands held up, “the rest of it is word for word, letter for letter.”

  “We just have to make sense of them,” I muttered. “Well, thank you, Dr Azoulay, truly, you’re a lifesaver.”

  He waved a hand in the air. “It’s often I get to put my skills to real use like this. I’m happy to have been of assistance to you. I’ve got this for you,” he said, handing me a sheet. “The key, in case you need it.”

  The page of squares and dots and letters was confusing, but I took it anyway and handed it to Mills, who looked it over with the interest that it was due.

  “Thank you,” I repeated, shaking the doctor’s hand. “It almost seems silly to have brought you all the way from Lancaster now.”

  “Nonsense,” he replied. “I have friends in the city who I am always happy to see.”

  I nodded. “I’ll walk you out,” I told him, reaching for the door. He pulled his coat back on, grabbed his bag and shook Mills’s hand before following me.

  “Do you want to see Mara?” I asked him, looking over to where her office door was closed.

  “That’s alright. I’m seeing her later for dinner. Best not to bother her when she’s working in my experience,” he added with a chuckle.

  “Wise words,” I replied, walking him to the stairs and down, holding the front door open for him. He pulled a scarf from his briefcase and wound it around his neck with a slight grimace.

  “Nasty weather,” he muttered to himself. “Well, Inspector, best of luck.”

  “Thank you, Dr Azoulay,” I said yet again, watching the man bustle off into the street.

  Our code was cracked. Now we just had to figure out what in hell it meant.

  Eighteen

  Thatcher

  When I got back upstairs to the office, Mills was already at work, bent over the note, trying to make sense of it. It was still on my desk, so he was squatting funnily on the floor, his arms braced on the edge of the table.

  “You look comfy,” I commented as I walked in. He glanced at me over his shoulder.

  “Bit of squatting never hurt anyone.”

  “I disagree.”

  “There are definitely bits missing, more so than the missing chunks themselves,” he said, standing up straight and turning his attention back to the page.

  “I think so too,” I agreed, walking over to look over the page with him. “Whatever it is, I think it’s paraphrased. He just jotted down the bits that were important.”

  Mills nodded. “Dr Azoulay get off alright?”

  “He did. Thankfully, he has other business in the city. Else I’d feel bad for dragging him out here just for this.”

  Mills scratched his head. “The speed with which he did it did make me feel a bit stupid.”

  “I know, but at least it’s done,” I clapped my hands together. “We might have the last words ever written by Major Alexander Riggs, Mills, and I know that we can get somewhere with that. Wait here,” I told him, walking back to the door. I’d given Sharp my word to fetch her when Azoulay was gone, and I didn’t want to waste time dithering about.

  Striding over to her office, I’d lifted my hand to knock on the door when it swung open, and she looked out at me expectantly.

  “Is it done?”

  “Yes.”

  She brushed past me, making me jog after her as she glided through the desks and officers that skittered out of her way, narrowly avoiding dropping their piles of paper and mugs of coffee as they did. I trailed after, giving them apologetic looks, which was hard given Sharp was steaming along. She pushed open the office door, making Mills jump from where he’d taken back his squatted position on the floor. Our chief looked him over with a raised eyebrow as he quickly rose to his feet, stepping aside as she approached my desk and looked down at the sheet.

  “This is it?”

  “That’s it,” Mills confirmed.

  “There are gaps.”

  “We know,” I said, walking over to join them. “Azoulay said that he couldn’t understand those particular words, but the rest of it is exact.”

  “Still gaps,” she commented, looking the page over. She to
ok her jacket off, handed it to me to hang up on the rack, cracked her knuckles and grinned brilliantly.

  “One of you get the kettle on then, and let’s get stuck in. It’s been a while since I got to do some work like this.”

  “Tea or coffee, ma’am?” I asked, feeling like a waiter.

  “Coffee.”

  “Mills?”

  “Please.”

  I shook my head at the pair of them, turning and walking from the room to quickly grab the coffees. If they figured it out without me, I’d be absolutely fuming. I made the drinks, carefully carrying all three mugs and a packet of biscuits back to the office, kicking the door shut behind me with my foot. I placed everything on the desk, then grabbed a clean whiteboard, propped it on the wall and wrote down, word for word, the code that Azoulay had translated.

  Sharp sat on my desk, looking bright-eyed and eager to do some proper police work for the first time in a long time. Mills leant next to her, and the three of us, mugs in hand, stared at the board.

  “Reads like a conversation,” Sharp said. “Man and woman, that must have been people talking, and he overheard.”

  “No names?”

  “Might not have known them,” I suggested. “Could only make out who was speaking. That makes sense, though.” I put my mug down and walked over, rearranging the lines so that it followed like a conversation, the man speaking, then the woman. It still looked odd, still sounded odd.

  “There are definitely two speakers there,” Sharp said. “Maybe a third? That might explain some of the jumping around it’s doing?”

  “He just says man and woman,” I added. “No clue as to whether or not it was the same man and woman talking each time.”

  “Likely to be, though,” Mills said. “People wouldn’t make that distinction if they didn’t need to. Two’s a given, any more and he would have probably made some note of that.”

  “What are these “Quiet’s he put in there?” Sharp wondered, loudly sipping her still very hot coffee.

  “Lulls in the conversation?” I asked.

  “But it doesn’t follow right,” Mills shook his head. “How do you go from ‘they’ll never know’ to ‘stop bringing it up’? Stop bringing what up?”

  “Maybe he couldn’t hear that,” Sharp mused. “Though this whole, ‘make it look like an accident’ business is interesting. You think they were referring to killing Riggs himself?”

  “They say ‘she’,” I pointed out. “She’s always drunk and something else. Who’s always drunk?”

  “Well, whoever it is, apparently it’s a problem,” Mills said.

  Sharp hummed thoughtfully. “If I didn’t know any better, boys, I’d say this sounds like someone planning a murder. Riggs must have overheard. Or he was drafting himself a crime novel, one or the other. And this was found in his room in the inn?”

  I nodded. “Balled up under the bed.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe he was done with it, whatever it is. Crumpled it up and tossed it aside.”

  “But didn’t throw it away,” Mills said. “And didn’t take it with him. Why wouldn’t he take it with him?”

  “Maybe he hoped he’d be going back,” I said. “Same reason he didn’t take his car or anything. He was planning on returning to the inn. Then it wouldn’t matter what he’d done with the note.”

  “But he didn’t make it back,” Sharp said coldly. “Do we think this could be what drove him out? Maybe he heard this and wanted to confront someone about it? Someone from Saturday, he did spend the entire day with lots of people for his sister’s wedding, maybe a few he didn’t know.”

  “The ‘she’ they mention might even be Sybil,” Mills pointed out. “Someone wanting her out of the way for something. Marrying Ernest?”

  “A nasty thought, but plausible,” Sharp nodded.

  “What about the mention of the business?” I asked, nodding to the board again. “They want her gone so that they can look after the business.”

  Sharp put her mug down, folding her arms. “Do we know the family business there?”

  I reached around, grabbing O’Flynn’s report and flipping through the pages. I scanned down the page, running my finger along until I spotted it.

  “Apparently, Ernest works in environmental engineering,” I said. “But his family are wealthy, old money, it seems. No mention of a family business.”

  “I doubted they thought it would be that relevant,” Mills said.

  “The timing of it would make sense,” I had to admit. “This weekend when he happened to be up here to see his sister. The people who were at the rehearsal would have known that he’d be staying out in the village.”

  “If he thought someone was plotting to kill his own sister,” Sharp said sternly, “I highly doubt he’d have left her at home and gone back to the inn. I like to think he’d have called us.”

  “We all would, but people don’t normally think like that,” I said. “If he had overheard it, that is.”

  “Where else would it have come from?” Mills asked. “It’s a conversation; I think we can see that pretty clearly.”

  “But what we don’t know is who was speaking and where he had heard them. Was it in the city, in the village, where?”

  “I’m more interested in the gaps,” Sharp said, tapping her foot on the ground. “I mean, there are what, two words, in there that Azoulay didn’t understand, but I doubt it was gibberish given his otherwise clear account. So, did he use random words? A code within a code? And what about these big gaps? Something was happening during ‘Quiet’, something that carried on the conversation.”

  “Whatever it was, he must have been unable to hear it. Maybe it was too noisy?” Mills suggested. “This could have been the sort of conversation you only just overhear in a crowded room, around a corner or something. Too loud for him to get all the details. Maybe that’s why some words are missing too. He just couldn’t hear them.”

  Sharp nodded. “That sounds reasonable to me, Mills.”

  “The page came from the notepad at the inn,” I reminded them. “So, he waited until he got back to the room to write this down.”

  “Then there are gaps because he forgot?” Mills suggested. “Knew that someone said something, but the word itself slipped his mind by the time he got access to paper?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, pacing around the room a little, stopping briefly to crack the window open a tad. I could feel all the hope I’d come in with this morning start to fizzle out, to my annoyance. Or maybe I was getting hungry. I leant against the wall by the window, letting the cool air sweep in and brush my skin.

  People were down in the street below; their voices rose faintly up to me.

  “I was saying only the other day that it might be worth just taking the whole floor out and starting again,” a man was saying.

  “Cheaper in the long run,” a woman answered. “But the house will be a building site for a few months, so it’ll have to wait for January, anyway. I’m not suffering with that over the holidays, no chance.”

  The man replied, his voice muffled by the wind, and I straightened up eagerly.

  “You alright, sir?” Mills asked.

  “Come here, stand here,” I said, reaching out and grabbing his arm as he got close, pulling him towards the window. He stood there, a frown on his face, listening. Sharp came over, too, hands on her hips.

  “Eavesdroppers never prosper,” she muttered.

  “What can you hear?” I asked enthusiastically.

  “Bits and pieces,” Mills replied. “Wind’s too strong.” He froze, his eyes winding. “The wind’s too strong!”

  I nodded, grinning, and pulled the window shut. “He couldn’t hear because he was too far away. Standing outside or by an open window?”

  “He had cigarettes on him,” Mills recalled. “He went out for a cigarette; half overheard a conversation?”

  “Or he opened a window,” I countered, “and heard people talking outside. If it was in the village, then he wouldn’t h
ave known who any of them were.”

  Mills nodded, walking up and down the length of the office, his hands twitching down by his sides.

  “Words missing because he couldn’t hear them,” Sharp said slowly. “Gaps in the conversation because he couldn’t quite hear them.”

  “No. So, where was he when he heard this? The inn, the city? And if this is someone plotting a murder,” I tapped the board with a finger. “We need to know who they’re talking about.”

  “Slow down,” Sharp walked towards me, her hands held upright. “Don’t go looking for another murder when you’ve got one on your plate already. If this is the reason that Riggs died, then they knew that he knew. So, he must have confronted them, must have tipped them off somehow, that he had heard the conversation.”

  “But the conversation—”

  “Thatcher,” she cut me off sharply. “We have a dead Major washed up in our river. Find out who killed him, don’t go running around following threats and plots hastily written down in code and stuffed under a bed. You have a real murder and a real lead, and you will follow it through. Leave the threat for now. Focus on Riggs. That’s an order.” With that proclamation, she grabbed her mug and took a deep drink.

  I sighed internally, nodding my head. “Yes, ma’am. Any ideas for what we should do now then?”

  “Even if we don’t need to find out who ‘she’ is just yet,” Mills said peacefully. “We do still need to figure out who the people having the conversation are. Might be worth doing some digging around, seeing if anyone has any business beef with anyone else?”

  “We should probably start with Sybil,” I said, scratching my head.

  “She’s arranging collection for the body today, remember?” Mills said. “I reckon we hold off until she’s done with that.”

  I nodded. The delay was annoying but sensible.

  “Any word on that blood sample you found?” Sharp asked.

  “Not yet. I’ll check in with the lab soon.”

  “Sir?” Mills began, sitting down in his chair. I gave him a nod. “The business they’re talking about, it could be the baroness. Maybe some of her tenants, some farmers or something, want to actually have their land, get her out of the way. She’s old so it could easily be made to look like an accident.”