Cuthbert's Way (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #17)(25)

“So, what do you think?” Patel asked. “Are there any similarities with Faber?”

They began retracing their steps along the plastic walkway.

“In the method of killing? Not really,” Ryan said. “Edward Faber was tortured with a knife but, unlike here, his killer used water beforehand.”

“Maybe they didn’t have an apple press handy,” Phillips said, and patted his belly as it gave a loud, ill-timed rumble. “Seems to me, whoever killed both men liked to travel light.”

Ryan nodded, acknowledging the truth of that. In both cases, all the killer seemed to have used was a knife, which hadn’t been recovered from either scene. The water and the apple press were opportunistic.

“You’ve got a point,” he said, and turned back to Patel. “Have the CSIs found much in the way of trace evidence?”

“Not yet,” she replied. “They were careful, by the looks of things.”

Just like Faber, he thought.

Ryan happened to agree with the old adage that killers always left traces of themselves behind—if not DNA or fingerprints, then something more subtle—which was why he looked at their mess and destruction with a discerning eye. In this case, he found the use of the cider press interesting; not merely because it was macabre, but because it was unnecessarily dangerous.

“I wonder whether killing Father Jacob in the cider mill was a matter of accident, or design,” he said. “After all, if somebody wanted to kill him quickly, they’d have been far safer finishing him in the boarding house.”

“But if the object was to torture, not to kill quickly, perhaps they didn’t know how long it would take for him to crack,” Patel remarked. “The question is, why torture him in the first place?”

Phillips opened his mouth to venture a reason to do with a forged cross, St. Cuthbert’s cult, but one look from Ryan reminded him that there were some things they could not share.

“Ah, do you have any ideas about why?” he prevaricated.

She looked up at the school, which rose above them from the summit of a gentle hill, and wondered.

“Generally speaking, ultra-violent torture of that kind is perpetrated for one of three reasons: retribution, as a warning to others—usually, in gang warfare—or in order to extract information,” she said, logically. “What was the reason in your case with Faber?”

Ryan and Phillips immediately donned blank expressions.

“Unfortunately, we’re still trying to get to the bottom of that,” Ryan said, making a rare exception to his rule about always practising honesty. “Our best guess is that Faber’s underworld past came back to haunt him, and it was a case of a good deal gone bad. The investigation is ongoing.”

In truth, they had a very good idea of why Faber had been tortured, and of the information he’d revealed under sufferance. However, telling Patel would be tantamount to a confession that the recovered cross—now reinstalled in its glass cabinet in Durham Cathedral—was nothing but a fake, and would blow their whole cover and the covert investigation that had been underway for months.

If Patel thought they were evasive, she said nothing of it.

“With his connection to Cuthbert and that cross having been stolen so recently, plus the fact he was tortured, I thought perhaps there’d have been something to link the two cases. Have you looked into the possibility of Faber having been connected to the theft of that cross?” she wondered, innocently.

Ryan gave her a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“We’ve considered most possibilities,” he said, blandly. “Perhaps there’s another reason for Father Jacob’s death.”

“At first glance, he seems to have been squeaky clean,” Patel said. “On the other hand, there’s a bit of a stereotype about Catholic priests, and—”

She paused, trying to find a polite way to put it.

“This is a school, the Catholic Church doesn’t have an exemplary track record where safeguarding is concerned, and there’s no smoke without fire,” Ryan finished for her.

“Exactly. As I said, we’re coming to this investigation with an open mind, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.

No truer word spoken, Ryan thought, and hoped she didn’t scratch too deep—for her own sake.





CHAPTER 12


Before they left Patel and her team to continue their investigation, Ryan made two requests. The first was to see St. Cuthbert’s boarding house, where the late Father Jacob had spent much of his time, which afforded a brief opportunity to search for any obvious clue about what the monk had known, or been in possession of, that was so important as to have cost him his life. The second was to meet the man who’d decided that one beagle’s nose was more reliable than the full force of North Yorkshire CID.

After an unproductive search of the dead man’s rooms, the three police officers made their way through a wide, marble foyer and along corridors that were noticeably quiet, passing gilt-edged paintings of dignitaries until Phillips was forced to ask an obvious question.

“Where are all the kids? And why isn’t their artwork on the walls?”

He’d expected to see a bunch of smart-looking boys and girls in straw boaters wandering around, but instead the place resembled a tomb.

Patel checked her watch, which told her it was shortly after four o’clock.