Blood On the Wall (9 page)

T
ennyson followed Diane Moody into her office, the same one he and Georgiou had been in the day before.

‘Would you like coffee, or tea, or anything?’ she asked.

‘No, thank you,’ he said.

She gestured him to a chair. As he sat down, he said: ‘You said on the phone you had information about the latest murder.’

‘Not just the latest, all of them,’ she said. ‘It was when I heard about the latest murder this morning that I understood the connection.’

‘The connection?’ queried Tennyson.

Moody reached into her bag and took out a map and spread it on the table. Tennyson recognized it as the area between the Solway Firth on the east coast and Newcastle on the west. A line had been marked along it, and on the line three crosses had been made in pen.

‘Stanwix, Birdoswald, Haltwhistle,’ said Moody, indicating the three crosses.

‘Yes?’ said Tennyson, none the wiser. The feeling that Diane Moody may have seen something and come in with
real and hard evidence was definitely evaporating. It’s another history thing after all, he said to himself gloomily.

‘They are all the points on Hadrian’s Wall.’

‘Hadrian’s Wall?’ repeated Tennyson.

‘Yes,’ said Moody, nodding. ‘Whoever is doing these killings is doing them along the line of Hadrian’s Wall.’

Tennyson looked at her, and it struck him that Diane Moody was enjoying this. It was as if this was an academic puzzle to be solved. Then a kind of detective antenna inside Tennyson’s head registered that there might be a hint of something else behind Moody’s relish. She was treating this like playing a game. Maybe, just maybe, she might be part of the game. Tennyson’s eyes were drawn again to Moody’s large, strong hands, and now he registered her broad shoulders. Moody could be strong. How strong? Strong enough to hang a body from a tree? Or maybe there was more than one person involved?

‘Tell me about Hadrian’s Wall,’ said Tennyson, and he pulled his chair closer to the desk.

Georgiou pulled his car into the space in front of the lock-up garages that backed onto Mardale Road. Three cars were on the space; two of them with flat tyres. Abandoned, he guessed. A glance at the third showed no tax disc on the windscreen. Stolen, or abandoned, or left to rot.

He sat behind the steering wheel for a moment, waiting and watching. There was no one around. He wondered if she was watching him, whoever she was. If so, where was she?

He got out of his car and looked across the road to the houses on the other side. Neat little houses. Small front
lawns kept short and trim. Low fences. One even had window boxes with a display of brightly coloured flowers. He could see a notice on the gate of one of the houses: ‘Beware of the dog’, with a picture of a fierce-looking Rottweiler. The house next door also had a sign on its gate, but this one read: ‘Never mind the dog, beware of the householder.’

Georgiou grinned. He liked odd notices, variations on traditional themes. Like those stickers in the rear windows of cars that instead of saying ‘Baby on Board’ said ‘Beware: Lunatic at the Wheel’. Politically incorrect, and also possibly illegal if the Health and Safety obsessives had their way, but they amused Georgiou.

He guessed that the householders across the road weren’t amused by the lock-up garages they looked out on. The large metal doors were covered in graffiti; some of it obscene, some of it intelligible only to local knowledge. ‘PT duz it,’ said one. Does what? thought Georgiou. Who was PT? Or what? And why spell ‘does’ as ‘duz’? It was the texting generation, writing in some form of abbreviations.

The abandoned cars added to the feeling of run-downness and general depression.

When he first came to Carlisle, his colleagues had warned him about the Raffles estate. They told him it was a no-go area. Dangerous. Many of the houses had been boarded up and used by drug addicts. Needles hidden in the grass and lying on the tarmac were a major hazard. And don’t leave your car on the estate, his colleagues had said. They’ll have your wheels off and sell them back to you within the hour. Things had changed since then. Many of the old houses had been demolished. Some of the difficult tenants had been
removed. The new ones who had taken their place had been vetted, it was claimed. Raffles was going upmarket. But it still had people on it like Ian Parks and his family. They were so firmly entrenched they’d never leave, not unless they were forced out. And with someone like Councillor Maitland protecting them, that was unlikely to happen.

Georgiou looked around. He’d give it five more minutes and then he’d go. No one was around. No one was coming. No, wait! There was someone coming: a young woman wheeling a baby-pusher. Was this her?

Georgiou watched as the woman approached … and then she walked straight past.

Georgiou wondered if it was a hoax. A joke of some kind. Bringing him out here in a false errand to waste his time.

He looked at the grassy patch next to the garages. As well as a collection of litter, drink cans, there were two supermarket shopping trolleys and a ripped mattress. He guessed that after dark this patch of land became the gathering place for one of the many gangs of feral youths that haunted the city’s estates. And not just the estates: the underpasses, the parks, school yards. It wasn’t just in Carlisle, it was a national problem. At least Carlisle didn’t suffer from the same levels of gang violence that places like Nottingham and Bristol did. Gun crime. And don’t even start me on London and Birmingham and Manchester, he thought. Drive-by shootings. City estates out of control run by gangs of all ages, from old-time thugs down to nine-year-old kids on bikes and drugs. Most of them armed to the teeth.

He looked at his watch. Another eight minutes had
gone by. OK, that was it. A false errand. Or maybe she’d chickened out at the last minute? Whatever it was, if she was genuine, she’d phone again.

He walked back to his car and opened the door. As he was ducking his head down to get in, he sensed rather than saw a movement behind him. He started to turn, but it was too late, something heavy crashed down on the side of his head, and he felt himself tumbling down, banging his face on the bottom of the doorway of his car.

He Tried to stagger up, forcing himself out of the car, trying to swing his arms, but something had been dropped over his head, a cloth of some sort. He couldn’t see; all he could feel were blows and kicks forcing him down. He tried to tear the cloth off his head, but arms gripped him, pinioning his arms to his sides. Something hit him hard on the head, through the cloth, and he felt sick, felt himself sliding into darkness.…

He was aware of the ground hard and cold beneath him. There was the sound of a shout, the thud of feet running away … and then Georgiou was falling … falling … falling.…

T
ennyson watched Diane Moody as she talked, her large fingers pointing out illustrations in the books she’d taken down from the shelves, and pointing out places on the large map of Britain she’d spread out on her desk.

‘But you say the Romans didn’t cut off and collect the heads of their enemies,’ he queried.

Moody nodded.

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘The head cult was practised by the ancient Britons, as I mentioned before. But there was one noticeable exception: Suetonius Paulinus.’

‘Who was…?’ queried Tennyson.

‘Governor of Britain from AD 58 to 61. In AD 61 there was a major uprising by Queen Boudicca against the Roman occupation. An army of 250,000 Britons rose up against the Romans, but Paulinus defeated them with a force of just 10,000 men.’

‘And he cut their heads off?’

‘No,’ said Moody. ‘He cut off the heads of his own men on a campaign just prior to this in AD 61, when he drove the Druids out of Anglesey, in north Wales. You see, contrary
to general opinion, the majority of the Roman army was not made up of Roman soldiers. Thousands of the troops came from different parts of the Empire: Germany, North Africa, Gaul. And it was the Gauls in one of Paulinus’s auxiliary companies that caused him concern when he was preparing to attack the Druids hiding on Anglesey, because many of them still followed the pagan religions of the Celts and believed that the Druids were all powerful. So he had every tenth man in the Gaulish auxiliary beheaded. You may have heard of the word “decimate”. That’s where it comes from: killing every tenth man in a Roman military unit, as an example to the others. From the Latin ‘deci’, or tenth. Which, of course, is also where we get the word decimal from.’

‘And what happened?’ asked Tennyson, intrigued in spite of himself.

‘Paulinus led his men across the Menai Strait to Anglesey and they slaughtered every man, woman and child on the island. They also burnt the sacred groves of oak trees to wipe out any trace of the Druids.’

A sudden thought struck Tennyson.

‘You said this happened in AD 61?’

‘Yes,’ said Moody, nodding.

‘But the Romans didn’t start building Hadrian’s Wall until AD 122, sixty years after that.’

‘That’s right.’ Moody nodded again.

‘So … how is it connected with Hadrian’s Wall?’

‘In one way it isn’t,’ admitted Moody. ‘But in the cutting off of the heads, it is: either because of the ancient British connection, or the example of Paulinus instilling discipline into his troops by beheading his own men. Either way, these
murders have taken place along the line of Hadrian’s Wall. Now, that could be coincidence, or it could be deliberate. But if it is deliberate, then I believe you’re looking for someone who has an obsession with either the Romans, or the Ancient Britons.’

As Tennyson headed back to his car, he wasn’t sure whether he’d just wasted valuable investigating time listening to yet another of Diane Moody’s historical lectures, or whether he was on the fringe of putting her in the frame as a suspect. She’d said it herself: they were looking for someone with an obsession with either the Romans, or the Ancient Britons. And that certainly summed up Diane Moody.

He had just reached his car when his mobile rang.

Georgiou was sitting on a bed in the A&E department at Cumberland Infirmary when Tennyson walked in. Georgiou’s face looked a mess. There was a livid purplish bruise starting just above his left eye that spread across his forehead, with a gash in the flesh at the centre of it. Another bruise was on his left cheekbone.

‘Bloody hell!’ said Tennyson.

Georgiou groaned ruefully. ‘OK, Mac, you can tell me I was stupid to go there alone,’ he said.

Tennyson shook his head.

‘Not me, sir,’ he said. ‘But then, I never contradict a superior officer. If you say you were stupid …’

Georgiou tried to get up, then groaned and sat down again.

‘The doc thinks they might have broken a rib or two,’ he
said. ‘We’re just waiting for the X-rays to come back.’

‘If it’s any consolation, we’ve got one of the bastards,’ said Tennyson.

Georgiou looked at him, impressed.

‘Already?!’ he said.

Tennyson nodded. Then he added: ‘Well, we haven’t got him
as such
, but we know who he is. His name’s Billy Patterson. A local teenage hoodie. He lives on the estate. We were lucky that one of the people who lived opposite the garages saw what was going on, and he recognized him. It seems there were four of them, and they all had hoodies on. But luckily Patterson wears a very distinctive top which he’d painted himself, including misspelling “anachrist” instead of “anarchist”. Also his hood fell off at one time during the attack. Luckily for us, the witness is an ex-soldier who says he’s fed up with these teenage thugs on the estate – that’s why he came forward. We warned him he might be in danger from other thugs for giving evidence, but he just said, “Let ’em try. They know me around here. Anyone messes with me I’ll tear their head off.”’

‘Pity there aren’t more like him around,’ said Georgiou. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Wilson,’ said Tennyson. ‘Former sergeant in the Parachute Regiment.’

‘Right, remind me to buy former Sergeant Wilson a pint when this is over,’ said Georgiou. ‘But not before,’ he added hastily, seeing the look of concern on Tennyson’s face. ‘We don’t want the defence accusing us of bribing a witness with beer. What’s happening about Patterson?’

‘Seward and Taggart are on their way to his house to pick
him up.’

‘They’ll need a search warrant if they want to find this top of his,’ said Georgiou. ‘Remember what Stokes said: everything by the book.’

Tennyson nodded. ‘That’s all in hand, guv,’ he said. ‘They’re getting the warrant as we speak.’ He sat down next to Georgiou. ‘So?’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘This is nothing to do with the murders, Mac,’ said Georgiou.

‘Ian Parks?’

Georgiou nodded.

‘It has to be. Raffles estate. Parks’s home territory. ‘Ruefully he added: ‘And I walked right into it.’

‘The question is, can we connect this Billy Patterson to Ian Parks?’ said Tennyson. ‘You know what that lot are like: they clam up. The threat of a sentence doesn’t frighten them because they know it quite likely won’t happen, it’ll just be a hundred hours’ community service, or an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. And these kids treat ASBOs like some kind of badges of honour, proving they’re hard nuts. And even if they do get sent down, with fifty per cent remission, plus the time spent on remand, they’re out in a month. It’s a joke.’

Georgiou nodded.

‘I agree,’ he said. ‘But it’s up to us to make that connection. And by the book. Which we’ll do once we’ve got Billy Patterson in custody. So, apart from me getting myself beaten to a pulp, what else is new?’

Tennyson told him about his latest meeting with Diane Moody, and her theory about Hadrian’s Wall and the
Romans.

‘A little bird nagging at the back of my brain wonders if she mightn’t be a bit more involved than she lets on,’ he added.

‘In what way?’

‘Well, for one thing, look at those hands of hers,’ said Tennyson. ‘If you ask me she’s strong enough to do it. And maybe she feels superior to us, all this history stuff she spouts. Maybe she’s making fools of us, which is why she’s told us about Hadrian’s Wall. Making us run around in circles.’

‘She kills three people just to make a point about her superior mind?’ queried Georgiou.

Tennyson shrugged.

‘People have been murdered for lesser reasons,’ he pointed out.

‘True,’ admitted Georgiou. ‘OK, we’ll look into her. God knows, we’ve got few enough suspects in this case. So far it’s her, the would-be student film-maker, and our ranting hooded friend on the website.’