The Noble Murder (The Barrington Patch Book 5) Read online

  Cassie sat opposite him and smiled, a sincere one. “I’ve got to tell you a few things as they might be relevant to our next job, which is finding out who shot Mam and whether the shooter’s going to come for me next.”

  Jimmy nodded. He’d changed out of the suit he’d had on at the funeral and now sported grey trackie bottoms, a hoody, and some new trainers, so white they were blinding. She’d already told him earlier that he had to smarten himself up when he stood by her side for work—the parts of work where they visited people, had to look official. When they killed at the squat, he could wear whatever the fuck he liked, preferably cheap as it’d be burnt in the furnace after—providing blood was shed.

  “Now, I don’t need to say this but I will anyroad,” she said. “This is between me and you, got it? You can’t even tell Shirl.”

  “I won’t. She wouldn’t say owt, she’s wary of you, but I get why some things need to be kept quiet. She’s my girlfriend, but I don’t have to tell her the ins and outs of everything.”

  Cassie sipped some coffee. “When’s dinner arriving?”

  “Half an hour or so.”

  “Right, then we have a bit of time. Some of the shit I’m about to say, I’ve only recently found out myself, so it’s a bit raw. I’m going to preface this by being honest with you from the start, because fuck knows I’m aware of how upsetting it is to find out later down the line that someone wasn’t who you thought they were.”

  “Okay…”

  “I never open up anymore, so this is difficult for me.”

  “Take your time.”

  As usual, Jimmy calmed her just by the air he carried about him.

  “I struggle with who I’ve had to become,” she said, butterflies going haywire in her chest. “So I get what you’ll be going through in the coming weeks and months. I appear as this mad cow who’s hard as nails, and I am, but inside, when you dig deep enough, I’m the Cassie I used to be, before Dad trained me up to run the estate. I thought it’d take years before I had to do that. You know, I’d finish uni, become a teacher, do everything I wanted before…before this bollocks. And there’s another part of me who enjoys all the blood, the murder. It doesn’t make sense, and I’ve been asking myself if it’s nature or nurture.”

  “What’s that, like when you’re taught to do it versus having it in you already?” He scratched his head. “Think I saw something like that on telly.”

  “Hmm. Yours would be nurture—me and Glen will teach you to do whatever. My situation brings me to this. I think it’s both in my case. I used to think Lenny drummed it into me and Mam, that he was a puppet master who directed everything, but knowing that both my parents had it in them from a young age to kill… It’s got to be in the genes.”

  “Maybe, but what about the fact you didn’t want to go round doing what you do before you found out who Lenny really was? It wasn’t in your genes then.”

  “True.” Good old Jimmy for finding a loophole so I don’t have to blame my parents—or myself. “But they did enable me to become who I am today—they encouraged it. What kind of sick people were they, Jim?”

  He shrugged, appeared uncomfortable, as if he shouldn’t answer honestly if he thought Francis and Lenny were evil. That saying, however it went: I can slag my family off, but if you do, you’re dead. Did that apply here?

  No.

  “Talk freely with me,” she said. “If you have feelings on any matter, let me know.”

  He sighed. “Maybe it was all they’d known so it became normal to them. They must have thought you were like them but you didn’t show it, not until they brought it out of you.”

  “Did you imagine me doing shit like this? Honestly?”

  “The Cassie I knew at school? No.”

  “There you go then. So, back to the main point. I have to be this way in order to keep everyone on the Barrington safe—much as I’d like to walk away, I can’t, because people rely on me for housing, jobs, whatever. Then there’s the homeless fund, a good thing my dad did. I want to offer every homeless person on our estate a place to stay—the whole of Moorbury if I can. But I want you to keep an eye on me, make sure I don’t step over the line. If you think I’ve let my monster out to a degree where what I’m doing is over the top, say so.”

  He huffed out a laugh. “Like you’re going to listen. Jason springs to mind.”

  “Maybe I won’t if the bloodlust and anger is up, I’ll be too far gone, but I’ll have heard you, and next time, I might not be so violent. Jason encouraged me to show my worst side and, believe it or not, from what I’ve gathered, Mam encouraged Dad to do the same.”

  “What? She was the driving force?”

  “She was. Like I said, I didn’t know this until recently, but when she had me and supposedly sat back and didn’t interfere, she wouldn’t have been able to resist sticking her oar in. That became apparent when she started poking her nose into what I was doing. And there was me thinking the estate had been left to me, but Francis comes along and makes suggestions. Now I look back on it, she was trying to control me like she did with Lenny, getting me to think it was my idea at first then outright taking over. I’d already planned to cut her out before she was offed. Tell her to step away.”

  “How would she have taken that?”

  “She’d have had no choice. She even said Dad was the puppeteer to steer me away from thinking otherwise, but no, it was all her.” Cassie took a deep breath, and her chest juddered. “This is what a sicko she was.” Fuck, this is so hard. I feel like I’m betraying my own mam. “There was this kid, I won’t tell you his name unless I have to further down the line, but he fancied Mam. She told my dad that the lad touched her up, so of course, Lenny being Lenny, he went mad.”

  “Right…”

  “You know that smaller skull down the well?”

  “Fuck.” Jimmy slapped a hand over his mouth.

  “Hmm. It was him. He was murdered and thrown down it, which was why Mam bought the house, why she was desperate to have the bones brought up so no coppers looked into why there were more bodies down there than they’d think if they got wind via Clive Zander doing his little investigation into Lou and Doreen. As you know, it was only supposed to be one set of remains, Steve Zander, not the others and the boy.”

  He lowered his hand and curled a finger around the cup handle. “Boy. How old are we talking?”

  “Fifteen, but he must have been small for his age.”

  “Christ. So what does this have to do with Francis’ murder?”

  “I don’t know if it does. Maybe whoever ‘B’ is found out she’d been involved in the kid going missing. Maybe her saying he’d ‘found’ her doesn’t mean literally, but that he uncovered that it was her. The thing is, I don’t know how to go about it, because the family think the boy just walked out and went to live elsewhere—the police closed it off as a missing person case, him going of his own accord. I’ve already been to see a family member with some crappy excuse about putting a bench up on the green outside the high-rise in his memory, just so I’ve done something to make me feel better. Now, Mystic warned me about a bloke wearing a ring, one with a lion’s head on it. I’m to watch out for him, apparently. It could be related to the shooting or not. But the ring bloke, he’s a cousin of the kid in the well. The initial doesn’t fit with ‘B’, though—his name begins with V.”

  “Do I know them?”

  “Most likely. They live in the high-rise.”

  “Ah, the only bloke with a V name is Victor. And the kid in the well was called Micky Jennings. My mam said she was scared when he went missing in case other kids were nabbed an’ all.”

  There went Cassie keeping the name under wraps. “Right, I’m not going to repeat myself and say this stays between you and me. Whatever I tell you now that you’re my right hand, you don’t tell anyone unless I say you can.”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s another lad.”

  Jimmy paled. “Oh shit.”

  “Lee Sc
rubs.”

  “Fuck, the kid whose body they found on Handel Farm’s land? Dumped by a hedge?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did they kill him?”

  “This is the bit that sickens me the most. Mam lied, made up rumours that Lee felt someone up at swimming. A little girl. Dad went mental, as you can imagine. Stabbed him nineteen times. So much Lee’s head nearly fell off.”

  “Fucking hell.” Jimmy swallowed a couple of times. “What did they do, abduct him?”

  “No, Lenny told Lee there was treasure out on Handel, and the poor boy believed him.” She swallowed as well, nauseated by the image of what Lee’s neck must have looked like. “That’s not all.”

  Jimmy paled even more. “Go on.”

  “Someone saw them with him, taking him over the fields. It was in the paper. Mam went to the witness’ house. Killed him. Cut a fucking square hole in his chest and took the heart out, leaving it on a wall outside a corner shop. Who was she, Jim?”

  He shook his head, eyes wide in shock. “I don’t know. Nowt like this. I mean, I know she was a hard bitch, but this, it sounds like she enjoyed murder for the sake of it. Do you know how Lenny felt about it?”

  “Mam wrote it down, which is how I know.” She didn’t add that Mystic wasn’t a psychic fraud after all and had told her exactly where to find a ledger Mam had written in—taped beneath the desk in the office. “Apparently, he said the boys were practise, and from then on they’d only kill people who got in his way regarding the takeover of the Barrington. I was thinking earlier, before the meeting with the watchers, about something he said to me when he used to ramble while he was ill. About feeling ashamed over what happened with Micky—well, he said MJ, but it’s obvious that it’s Jennings. Maybe that’s why he told Mam they wouldn’t kill anyone just for the fuck of it anymore.”

  “But it wasn’t for the fuck of it with Micky. Your dad would have seen it as a slight, Micky fancying your mam.”

  “But it was for the fuck of it with her, don’t you see? She made it up that Micky touched her, made it up that Lee fiddled with a girl at the swimming pool.”

  Jimmy stared at the worktop for a while, eyebrows bunched, then raised his gaze to Cassie. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Cassie frowned, her heart beating out of time. “What…”

  “That she might have been crying out for help.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  Jimmy sighed. “She could have invented stories about child abuse because someone might have been fiddling with her.”

  Chapter Two

  Before the funeral service, Michelle Forster had been nattering to Brenda Nolan about how sad everything was—Michelle had lived on the Barrington since she was a kid and had known Doreen and Lou, albeit vaguely, and to find out they were both dead—killed, no less—had shit the life out of her, to be honest. She’d privately wondered whether someone was going round knocking off older women and whether she ought to be worried, but Brenda had assured her that wasn’t the case.

  Apparently, Doreen’s death was the result of a mugging and, as Brenda had whispered, drawing her black coat around her, “Keep it under your hat, but DI Branding told me Lou Wilson’s killer was some fella into stealing animals.”

  “Stealing animals?” Michelle had slapped a hand to her chest. Animal lover that she was, those words had poked a spear of hurt into her lungs, sending them all tight. “What sort of animals?” She’d thought of her beloved dog; if anyone hurt him, well, fit to be tied was what she’d be.

  Brenda had smiled sadly. To be fair, it would be a bit rude to flash a ruddy great grin in the circumstances, wouldn’t it.

  “Well, obviously pigs, what with Handel being that type of farm, but there was an incident out in Tuxford, a bloke with a gun stealing cows. He must have wanted pigs, too. Lou spotted him in Joe’s barn, went to confront him, and he shot her.” Brenda had mimicked Michelle, a palm to the skin just below a nice onyx pendant that glittered in the March sun. “A bullet in the eye by all accounts.”

  Michelle had gone colder than she already was; it had been nippy again, although some nice bouts of sunshine had burst through recently, once the snow had buggered off. “Oh… No wonder they said no one could go and view the body.”

  She’d wanted to do that, say goodbye—or, more likely, it was morbid curiosity, but no one needed to know that. Even though she hadn’t been buddy-buddy with Lou and secretly thought she was a weirdo with a face like a slapped rear end, not to mention the demeanour of a cardboard cutout, it would have broken up her day to have something different to do.

  “So now you know,” Brenda had said.

  “Now I know.” Curiosity had visited Michelle. She could sniff a story out a mile off; it was in her blood. “Why would the DI tell you?”

  “Maybe he felt he could trust me.”

  Or maybe you’ve let him rip your leopard-print leggings off now his wife can’t give him what he needs in the bedroom.

  Oh. That was an uncharitable thought, but it made sense. A woman in The Donny had mentioned Brenda had a new fella, someone younger than the norm. She usually went for old dodgers—like, wrinkly ones with dentures.

  Michelle found out a lot by earwigging. It was a leftover from her working days, listening in, gathering intel. Now, she didn’t do owt except live off the payment her ex-employer had given her—to shut her up—but she’d taken it once she’d seen all those lovely zeroes. It was amazing what bosses could come up with when you spouted things like ‘unfair dismissal’ and ‘ageist behaviour’, as well as other things. Illegal things.

  It was amazing what ex-employees could come up with, too, but that was another story.

  “Maybe he does trust you,” Michelle had said to drag herself out of the scenario her mind had created: Brenda standing against a wall, her leggings and knickers around her ankles, the copper giving her one.

  Brenda had nodded sagely then glanced over to the left, her face brightening in a smile. “Ay up, Cassie love.”

  Michelle had grown nervous, the sexual imagery scarpering. Cassie was a mad bint and no mistake, and Michelle was never quite comfortable in the young woman’s presence. She’d shrunk back into a topiary hedge in the shape of a cross, hoping Cassie wouldn’t spot her, but it was too late. Cassie’s gaze had zeroed in on Michelle, her eyes pinning her with their blueness.

  “Ah, just the woman I wanted to speak to,” Cassie had said.

  “Me?” Michelle had cursed inwardly. She’d squeaked the word and felt all kinds of dickhead about it. She’d cleared her throat and tried again. “Me?”

  “Yes, you. Didn’t you used to work for The Moorbury Times?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fancy becoming the new writer for The Barrington Life? I’ve got big plans for it and need someone who knows what they’re doing.”

  Michelle had fair shit herself, what with Cassie appearing so…domineering. Michelle had long since wanted to write for the leaflet Karen Scholes had started years ago, then Lenny had taken over it, using Karen to type articles informing residents of what was going on, sending secret messages, and Sharon Barnett had edited them.

  “I thought Sharon had taken that over on her own?” Michelle had queried.

  “She has, but I want someone else on it. As I said, I’ve got plans. Yes or no?”

  Michelle hadn’t dared to ask if there were wages involved. “Okay…” Like she could say no anyroad.

  “Five hundred a week, paid in cash. Someone will drop it round every Friday evening. You’ll meet up with Sharon once a week to discuss things, what should go in The Life, and I’ll be in contact if I want messages included. I don’t have to say the kind I mean, do I?”

  “No.”

  Cassie had gone on to explain in more detail until the vicar had appeared and asked them all to go inside, his dress thing wafting in the breeze, a Bible clutched to his beach-ball belly.

  Now, Michelle sat in front of her trusty computer and stared at the k
eyboard. She had power with all those letters and punctuation marks, and she felt needed again since the editor of The Moorbury Times had turfed her out in favour of some young thing who wouldn’t know reporting if it bit her on her gym-toned arse.

  Michelle had a new purpose, a snippet she had to pass on for Cassie, who’d apparently let Sharon know she was to step down as sole writer and return to just being the editor. How Sharon had taken that Michelle didn’t know, but for five hundred a week, she didn’t give much of a monkey’s chuff. She’d soon find out later, after she’d emailed the content to Sharon. If she got a terse reply, she had no qualms about telling Cassie.

  For years, Michelle had wanted an in, to find out who the elusive Marlene was, a woman who murdered people for the Graftons. Maybe, if she got on Cassie’s good side, she might be taken into the patch leader’s confidence and meet the killer at last.

  She hugged herself in excitement.

  Life was looking up.

  The Barrington Life – Your Weekly

  FRANCIS GRAFTON

  Michelle Forster – All Things Crime in our Time

  Sharon Barnett – Chief Editor

  THURSDAY MARCH 18TH 2021

  First off, Cassie would like me to introduce myself as the new writer of The Barrington Life. I’m Michelle Forster, as many of you know, but for those who don’t, I was a journalist for The Moorbury Times for twenty-five years, three months, and four days. I have two children, both reside in Spain, and I live with my Rottweiler, Fangs, and a two tropical fish — Fin and Gills.

  Cassie wants to expand The Life, so I’m happy for you to send me things you think would be good articles (email address at the end of this post). Let’s make ourselves a little newspaper, shall we, rather than just an information pamphlet for when things go wrong or messages need to be sent out. We’re after community spirit on our estate, a coming together of souls.

  “Oh, that was a lovely line,” Michelle muttered, pleased she still had it in her to write good copy. “A coming together of souls.”