Shroud of Evil Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Pauline Rowson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Recent Titles by Pauline Rowson

  TIDE OF DEATH

  IN COLD DAYLIGHT

  FOR THE KILL

  DEADLY WATERS *

  THE SUFFOCATING SEA *

  DEAD MAN’S WHARF *

  BLOOD ON THE SAND *

  FOOTSTEPS ON THE SHORE *

  A KILLING COAST *

  DEATH LIES BENEATH *

  UNDERCURRENT *

  DEATH SURGE *

  SHROUD OF EVIL *

  * available from Severn House

  SHROUD OF EVIL

  A DI Andy Horton Mystery

  Pauline Rowson

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2014 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey,

  England, SM2 5DA.

  eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2014 by Pauline Rowson.

  The right of Pauline Rowson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Rowson, Pauline author.

  Shroud of evil. – (An Andy Horton mystery)

  1. Horton, Andy (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Missing persons–Investigation–Fiction. 3. Police–

  England–Portsmouth–Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9’2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8411-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-539-0 (ePub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  To my readers

  ONE

  Friday 19 October

  ‘Good result.’ Tim Shearer, the lean and rather dapper Chief Crown Prosecutor, addressed Andy Horton outside the courtroom on the Isle of Wight.

  ‘Would have been better if they’d pleaded guilty to begin with instead of wasting everyone’s time,’ Horton replied.

  Shearer nodded in agreement. ‘I’d give you a lift back to the ferry, only I’m staying over to discuss a couple of other cases.’

  And thankfully they weren’t Horton’s. The Isle of Wight was not his patch. That was under the control of the acerbic stick insect DCI Birch, currently off sick following a hernia operation, and his fat sergeant, DS Norris. But a robbery from Northwood Abbey, on the northern coast of the island, at the end of June had resulted in the villains being caught by Horton and Sergeant Cantelli, as they were trying to sell the stuff on in Portsmouth, five miles across the Solent, at the beginning of July. And that was his patch. The thieves, Jamie Maidment and Lewis Foreland, had been advised by their solicitor to plead not guilty, but thankfully they’d now seen the light – though not before it going to the Crown Court and a jury being sworn in.

  Horton told Shearer he had his Harley. As he collected his leather biking jacket and helmet from the witness waiting room he thought what a breath of fresh air the new CCP was. The last one had been counting the days until his retirement and had become disillusioned with the criminal justice system. Not that Horton blamed him for that: he often despaired of it himself. But Shearer was clever, cooperative and keen. He’d recently arrived from London and had told Horton that the loss of his wife, killed in a car accident, had prompted him to make a fresh start in a city where not every street, shop and restaurant would remind him of his Jenny. It was the same name as Horton’s mother, except he always thought of her as Jennifer. And while once he’d tried very hard to obliterate all memory of the woman who had abandoned him at the age of ten to the mercy of children’s and foster homes, now he thought of her constantly, or rather as frequently as his workload permitted. The change of heart had come about as a result of a case in December when he’d discovered that her disappearance just over thirty years ago was not because she’d got sick of having a kid in tow and had run off with a man, but because someone had wanted her to vanish. He didn’t yet know why or what had happened to her but he was getting closer to discovering the truth.

  The October sky was overcast, threatening rain, and a brisk, chilly wind had sprung up. In it Horton caught the smell of the sea coming off the River Medina which fed down to Cowes and into the Solent. He headed out of Newport on the Harley and made for the abbey, pleased for once to be able to deliver good news and relieved to get out of the stuffy overheated courts. Even stopping off at the abbey he would easily make the one o’clock sailing to Portsmouth, which would get him back to his office by about two. Time enough to clear up some paperwork and see what else had come in over the last few days while he’d been preoccupied with this case. But as the houses gave way to fields he sensed in himself a reluctance to head straight for the abbey. There was somewhere en route that he wanted to see. There would be another sailing at one thirty and again at two o’clock. Cantelli was more than capable of handling anything that had cropped up and, if it was urgent, the sergeant would have rung him. Or their boss, DCI Lorraine Bliss, would have been squawking down the line at him.

  He indicated off the main road and turned on to a narrow deserted country lane. Perhaps it was reading that newspaper article while waiting to be called into court that had made him think of Lord Eames who, it was reported, was leading a trade delegation to Russia. Or perhaps it was the fact that one of the stolen items recovered from Jamie Maidment and Lewis Foreland had been a wrought-iron weather vane made by the famous sculptor Albert Trostley and donated to the abbey by Lord Richard Eames, one of the abbey’s generous benefactors. But Horton didn’t need any article to conjure up thoughts of the trim and aloof aristocrat. Since meeting him in August he’d mentally replayed the conversation that had taken place between them in the exclusive Castle Hill Yacht Club in Cowes. Eames had denied any involvement in Jennifer’s disappearance but Horton didn’t believe him. Getting proof of that though was another matter. And he didn’t think he’d find it at Eames’ Isle of Wight holiday property, which was where he
was heading.

  He pulled up at a junction by a small copse and withdrew an Ordnance Survey map from the inside of his jacket. After consulting it and putting it back he swung right, heading towards the sea. The lane was narrower now, barely wide enough for one car to pass. The trees hadn’t yet lost their foliage and the leaves were deepening to a blaze of red and gold.

  Soon the tarmacked road gave way to a gravel track. A sign on his right said: ‘Private Road. No access.’ Horton ignored it. He noted a group of stone buildings in the fields on his left. They looked uninhabited and the tall chimney on one of them hinted it might have been used as a furnace at some stage. There was a small track on his right.

  The trees closed in again on either side of him and within seconds he was pulling up in front of a solid grey stone wall and a pair of sturdy wooden gates, behind which were more trees. The house was obscured from his view. Were there security cameras? If so then they were well hidden. Perhaps even now someone was inside the house viewing monitors and a police unit would arrive to ask him what he was doing here.

  He could press the intercom and see if Lord Eames kept a housekeeper or security guard on the premises, but he didn’t. Instead he swung the Harley around and returned along the track until he came to the fields now on his right and the track on his left. He took the track heading north, towards the sea. After about a third of a mile it petered out and in front of him was a dense wood. He silenced the engine and again consulted his map. There were no public footpaths and a sign bordering the woods told him they were ‘Private’ and that ‘Trespassers would be prosecuted’. He stuffed the map in his jacket and climbed the low fence.

  As he trekked through the undergrowth his mind roamed back to what he had unearthed about Jennifer since being given – or rather discovering – a photograph on his boat left by a man who had called himself Edward Ballard and who had alleged he’d been attacked while mooring up in the same marina where Horton lived. Since then Ballard had vanished – or rather he’d never existed to begin with, certainly not with that name. Horton had checked all the databases. He’d since learned that the black and white photograph had been taken on 13 March 1967 during the first sit-in protest at the London School of Economics, where Jennifer had been working as a typist. It was a picture of six young men, one of them Lord Richard Eames. Horton recalled their confrontation in the yacht club.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ Eames had asked him lightly but behind the jocular tone Horton had sensed anger.

  ‘From a friend,’ was all Horton had been prepared to say. Eames hadn’t asked which friend.

  ‘It’s a long time since I’ve seen it. I hardly recognized myself,’ Eames had to admit it. There was no denying it was him.

  Horton had asked if Jennifer had taken the picture but Eames claimed memory loss. Convenient. He’d told Horton that she’d been friendly with one of the men in the picture, James Royston, who, Horton had since ascertained, had died of a drugs overdose in 1970. The Coroner’s report said Royston had been found dead in a sordid bedsit in London with puncture marks in his right arm and enough heroin in his system to knock out a rhinoceros. No one claimed to have known that Royston had been a drug addict, but then no one had denied it either. The sister who had raised her younger brother after their parents had died hadn’t seen or heard from him for five years.

  Eames had told Horton he’d come down from Cambridge, where he was a student, to the London School of Economics that day to visit a friend, Timothy Wilson, the man beside him in the picture, who had later been killed in a motorbike accident in 1969 on a deserted road across Salisbury Plain on a calm, clear April night. It hadn’t been obligatory to wear a crash helmet back then, so Wilson had stood little chance of surviving. But what had caused the crash, Horton wondered. Wilson could have been startled by an owl, except there weren’t any on Salisbury Plain, and neither had there had been any army manoeuvres across the plain that night. The autopsy report confirmed there were no alcohol or drugs in Wilson’s system, and nothing was wrong with the bike. The Coroner had put it down to a moment’s lack of concentration. That was possible. Perhaps Wilson had been upset or angry about something. Perhaps he’d had a row with Eames, because Horton believed Wilson had been coming from Eames’ Wiltshire estate. Horton had travelled that route himself three weeks ago.

  The third dead man, Zachary Benham, had no living relatives. In fact, like Horton, he’d been illegitimate. But unlike him, Benham had been a product of a wartime romance or perhaps just a one-night stand, and his mother had given birth and handed him over to the orphanage. But Zachary Benham had proved himself to be resourceful and clever. He must have been, thought Horton, to have earned himself a place at the London School of Economics in 1966. But he had died along with twenty-three other men in a fire that had raged through their ward in Goldsworth Psychiatric Hospital in Surrey in 1968. The hospital had closed in the 1980s. The two night nurses on duty, Sheila Grover and Malcolm Bellings, were both dead. Nurse Sheila Grover had sounded the alarm ten minutes after the fire had started, allowing it to get a stronghold and it had spread rapidly, trapping the men inside the ward. They had evacuated the building but too late for those twenty-three men including Zachary Benham.

  Horton pushed aside a menacing-looking shrub that blocked his path through the dark woods and pressed on. During the last two months he’d checked the Police National Computer, and the databases of the Inland Revenue, National Insurance and vehicle licensing authority for traces of the last two remaining men in the photograph. Both had long hair and beards, and Antony Dormand had his right arm draped around the shoulders of the man on his right, Rory Mortimer. There was no record of Antony Dormand or Rory Mortimer of ever having married, divorced or died, paid taxes or worked, in the UK at least. He didn’t have access to international databases unless he enlisted the help of Agent Harriet Eames, who was based at Europol in The Hague, and he couldn’t do that because he was certain she would report back to her father, Lord Richard Eames.

  Suddenly Horton was out of the trees and on a shingle beach. Across a choppy grey sea he could see a small sailing yacht heading west towards Cowes, a motor boat going east towards Fishbourne, and further out a container ship and a fishing boat, and in the distance the buildings on the shores of the mainland of Gosport and Portsmouth.

  He turned westwards, keeping the line of the woods on his left, which after a short distance gave on to a wall beyond which were more trees and clearly the rear of Eames’ property. Ahead Horton found his progress impeded by a long and sturdily constructed pontoon. It was almost high tide and the sea was lapping under and against it. The pontoon was roped off on both sides with a sign that declared it was a ‘Private Beach’ with ‘No Permitted Entry’. He guessed the sign on the other side and at the end of the pontoon said the same. The pontoon led up to a sturdy wooden gate in the wall. Horton knew that anything below the average high-water mark belonged to the Crown and therefore anyone was permitted to walk on it. Unfortunately though the length of the pontoon prohibited that because even with the tide out the sea would still reach the end and no one but a limbo dancer would be able to get under the pontoon.

  ‘You won’t be able to get round it, not unless you fancy getting very wet.’

  Startled, Horton spun round to find a solidly built man scrutinizing him with curious and intelligent grey eyes in a bronzed weather-beaten face that sported a close-cropped greying beard. He was about six feet tall and wore shabby, soiled shorts and old leather sandals over bare feet that matched the sun tan on his face, arms and hands. He looked to be in his mid to late fifties but could be older.

  ‘His Lordship likes his privacy,’ the man added.

  Horton thought he heard a hint of a Welsh accent. ‘His Lordship?’ He decided to play dumb.

  ‘Lord Eames, landowner, property tycoon, yachtsman, businessman and lots more besides.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Do I look as though I’d know someone like that?’ the man answer
ed with a smile, gesturing at his clothes. His lined faced crinkled up as his grey eyes studied Horton keenly.

  Horton returned the smile. ‘You never know.’ He began to head back to the woods. The man fell into step beside him.

  ‘And you don’t look as though you belong here,’ he said, eyeing Horton’s motorcycle jacket not with hostility or suspicion but with interest.

  ‘I took a wrong turning. I thought this was the way to the abbey.’

  ‘That’s the other side of Wootton Creek and the ferry terminal, about seven miles to the east,’ the man answered, examining Horton disbelievingly.

  He didn’t blame him. It had been a pretty feeble excuse.

  ‘If you fancied a spot of robbery, casing the joint and all that, my advice is don’t. You’d be wasting your time. It’s better protected that Fort Knox.’

  ‘You’ve tried?’ Horton teased.

  ‘No, but a man who protects his privacy that fiercely has to have good security. Not that Lord Eames is a recluse when he’s here – on the contrary, he entertains. I’ve seen his guests arrive.’

  ‘Where do you live?’ Horton tried not to sound like a policeman asking questions but to his ear he always did.

  ‘Not far. I often come this way; you never know what you might find washed up on the beach. I look for flotsam and jetsam to turn it into art, or anyway that’s my excuse for bumming around beaches. It beats having a metal detector at the end of your arm and things clamped to your ears. I like the sound of the sea.’

  Horton did too. ‘And do you sell what you make?’

  ‘When and where I can.’

  ‘You have a studio?’

  The man laughed. ‘Nothing quite so grand.’

  They had reached the edge of the woods. Horton halted. Clearly the man was reluctant to divulge where he lived and why should he to a complete stranger? No, he was wise to be cagey. ‘And what name should I look out for if I’d like to buy any of your flotsam and jetsam?’ Horton asked.