Silent As The Grave. Paul Gitsham

raised a hand at the back. “Does that tie in with the time of death?”

      “We don’t know yet. The PM is scheduled for this afternoon. They’ll try and get an accurate time for us; at the moment we’re operating on a time frame of about forty-eight hours. What we do know is that nobody had seen him since about eleven p.m. Wednesday night when he left his local—the Merchants’ Arms. Apparently he was in the habit of taking his dog for a long walk most evenings, often up the common, then stopping in for a nightcap.

      “Regulars didn’t think anything of it when he didn’t come in for his evening pint on the Thursday, but when he didn’t show on Friday or Saturday either, a couple called his mobile but were diverted straight to voicemail. One of them bumped into his niece Sunday morning and mentioned it, so she took the spare key she keeps for emergencies and went around to see if he was all right. There were pints of milk on the doorstep and Friday’s newspapers stuck in the letter box. That’s when she started to worry and reported him missing.”

      Warren looked around the room. “I want you to all keep an open mind. Don’t just assume it was a random mugging gone wrong—start canvassing his friends, family, neighbours. Let’s see if he had any unusual visitors or mentioned anything that was worrying him. Dig into his background and look at his lifestyle.

      “Meanwhile, let’s see if we can scare up any witnesses. It’s been a pleasant few days. There were bound to have been a few folks in and around the park in the hours before and after the murder. Did they see anyone or anything suspicious?”

      As the meeting broke up Warren crossed over to Tony Sutton, who made a sour face, before commenting.

      “It sounds as though your gut’s asking the same thing mine is. ‘Why would someone kill a retired gardener in a public place, then conceal the body and try to make it look like a mugging gone wrong?’”

       Chapter 3

      The first twenty-four hours of any murder investigation are crucial. Assuming the clock had started the moment the couple found the body, over sixteen hours had elapsed. Add to that the time that the body lay concealed, and several days had probably passed. It was now almost nine o’clock on a Monday morning and the world was awake and at work; Warren was hopeful that this would mean things would start moving faster. The killer—or killers—had a large head start on the team and they needed to start chipping away at that advantage.

      A few preliminary interviews had been conducted the previous night as they’d tried to establish the victim’s identity, but now a team from headquarters in Welwyn Garden City had joined them and the interviewing could start in earnest. The landlord of the Merchants’ Arms had been shocked to hear of the death of one of his regulars and had furnished Tony Sutton with a comprehensive list of the locals who drank with Reggie, as he was known.

      Whilst Sutton and DS Hutchinson organised interviews with the man’s two dozen or so drinking partners, Warren and Detective Constable Karen Hardwick visited Reggie Williamson’s grieving niece.

      Tabitha Williamson was a young-looking thirty-something who lived alone in a small flat only a few hundred metres from Hardwick’s own apartment. A teaching assistant at the local primary school, the door of her fridge-freezer was covered in crudely hand-painted artwork, most with some variation on ‘Get Well Soon, Miss Williamson’. Tabitha Williamson’s pronounced limp and the crutches leaning against the kitchen table hinted at the cause of their concern. The diversity of spellings for “Williamson” brought a slight smile to Warren’s lips as he and Hardwick waited patiently for Tabitha Williamson to finish fussing over the kettle and coffee pot.

      Truth be told, the last thing Warren needed was more coffee and if her bloodshot eyes and shaking hands were anything to go by, Tabitha Williamson had consumed more than she should have as well. The old stereotype of the British, “Whatever the crisis, boil the kettle”, was based on solid, empirical evidence in Warren’s experience.

      “Why don’t you tell me about your relationship with Mr Williamson?” started Warren gently, when the three were finally seated around the cramped table.

      “Please, call him Reggie. He hated formality of any sort; he was just a gardener he always said.”

      “Of course. Tell us about Reggie.”

      “He was my dad’s big brother. The two of them were best friends, although you’d never have known they were related.” She smiled sadly. “I didn’t get my red hair from my mother’s side.

      “Anyway, Dad taught French at a secondary school in Cambridge, Mum used to be a special needs teacher at the same school, but Uncle Reggie always preferred to work outside and he used to be a landscape gardener until he retired a few years ago to look after Aunty Una, when she got too ill to care for herself.

      “He refused to let her go into a home and he ended up as her full-time carer until she passed away about three years ago.”

      “Were you and Mr…sorry, Reggie, close?”

      She nodded, her eyes filling with tears again. “Uncle Reggie and Aunty Una never had kids of their own and I was an only child.” She laughed quietly. “I was so spoilt! Two sets of parents doing my every bidding!

      “Anyway, Mum and Dad died when I was at college. A car accident in France…” Her voice broke off and she took a fortifying gulp of coffee. “I’m sorry.” She placed the mug down with a thump, her hands shaking.

      Warren and Hardwick waited patiently until she regained control.

      “I guess I’m lucky really. Nobody could ever replace Mum and Dad but Uncle Reggie and Aunty Una did their best. Anyway Uncle Reggie had a job with the council as their senior gardener and landscaper, but about six or seven years ago Aunty Una started getting forgetful. They tried to shrug it off at first—people always do, don’t they?—but pretty soon she was losing her keys, getting on the wrong bus and leaving the gas on.

      “One afternoon we got a call from the police, who said that she had been found distressed outside their old house, wanting to know why she could see strangers through the living room windows and why her keys wouldn’t work in the front door. They hadn’t lived there for nearly thirty years.

      “Anyway, pretty soon she wasn’t really safe to leave on her own—she had always been a fit woman who loved to go for long walks and you never knew where she’d end up—so he gave up full-time work for the council and took his pension early. He used to do a bit of handyman work and the odd gardening job when he could find someone to sit with her for a few hours, but in the end even that was too much.

      “I finally persuaded him to consider moving her into a care home and we were in the process of choosing one when she died suddenly in her sleep.”

      She drained her coffee and sighed deeply. “It was a mercy I suppose. We were all very upset of course, but I think in the end we were mostly relieved.”

      “That was three years ago. What did do Reggie afterwards?” asked Karen Hardwick.

      “He went back to gardening. Aside from Aunty Una it was his true love. I was a bit worried at first about how he’d cope, but he told me one day that he’d been grieving the loss of his wife for years before she died and she wouldn’t want to see him moping around. Anyway, he didn’t go back to work full-time—he said he was too old for that—but he has a few regulars in the local area and he does a couple of days most weeks.

      “He missed her terribly of course, but he was generally pretty happy.” She turned to Warren and her tone became pleading. “Why would anyone kill him? He was a lovely man. Nobody had a bad word for him.”

      “We don’t know yet. That’s what we hope to find out.” He paused delicately. “Do you have a list of his clients? What about friends and family who didn’t drink with him down the Merchants’ Arms?”

      “I don’t know all of his clients, but he was pretty scrupulous