Free An Early Grave by Robert McCracken Page A

Undoubtedly tragic, everything pointed to it being an accident, and in the three years since then Callum Armour had failed to come to terms with it. His claim about the sympathy card, however, still rankled with Tara.
    She wondered how she might help him, not in finding the murderer he claimed to be out there, but in more practical matters. Could she sort his problems with the local troublemakers who were causing him to live in constant fear? Could she arrange for the community policing guys to sit down with Callum and, for the first time, talk through his concerns? Perhaps she could find someone, or some organisation to help him put his house in order, clean it up and advise him on a healthier lifestyle. Did Callum really need some form of counselling? She was beginning to think more like a social worker than a detective. She would have a go anyway.
    Before leaving her research into Callum’s past, she typed his name into the search engine just to see what came up. The first few hits were impressive. Callum Armour: ‘ Matrix ion suppression in the detection of drug metabolites , case studies ,’ published in the Journal of Mass Spectrometry . There was a list of several other scientific publications: The Analyst , Food Chemistry , Journal of Chromatography , Analytica Chimica Acta , and Food Additives and Contaminants , all dating back at least three years, some as far as eight. There were a few references to the Department of Chemistry at Oxford University, a couple of links to children’s writer Tilly Reason, and one to a conference on drugs and food analysis held four years ago in Brussels. Finally, although she couldn’t recall the name of the victim, she typed in ‘Canterbury Cathedral murder’ only to see hundreds of hits referring to the killing of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. Scrolling down, however, she found a BBC news report on the more recent murder of the Cathedral Precentor and Liturgist, Peter Ramsey. As she mulled over the lack of evidence for the murder of the girl in Treadwater, so it appeared detectives of Kent Police were finding it difficult to establish a motive or to identify any suspects in the murder of the clergyman.
    Strange, she thought, that Callum Armour should think it plausible that she could and would help him, simply because she had been a student at Latimer College. Did he believe in some kind of brotherhood among the alumni, dedicated to helping each other through thick and thin? Or was he suggesting a direct link between the college and the deaths of three people? She now knew what he had studied during his time there, and perhaps he already knew she’d studied law, and had read all about her in the Alumni magazine. She was beginning to regret up-dating her profile and submitting the photograph of her in police uniform. Maybe she should get to understand Callum Armour a little better. Why, for instance, was he pointing an accusing finger for the murder of Peter Ramsey at this student who had disappeared? What possible motive? What motive to kill a children’s novelist? And there were years between the disappearance, Tilly Reason’s accident and the killing in Canterbury. If she were into pulling coincidences together, no matter how outlandish, why not consider Callum Armour as the link between his wife’s death, the murder of Peter Ramsey and, of much more relevance to Tara, the death of a young girl on the Treadwater Estate?

 
    CHAPTER 10
     
    She told herself on her way home that she wouldn’t go into the house alone, not without back-up outside. But this was not the route she would take from St. Anne Street to her apartment in Wapping Dock. She drove her own car, a Ford Focus, electric-blue, but she intended leaving a note inside for her colleagues to find if, for some reason, she didn’t make it out of the house.
    Tara’s decision to return home after Oxford had been in some ways disappointing enough for her mother Barbara, although now she had her daughter