James shook his head. ‘It’s yet another intriguing development that’s going to make our job even more difficult. I’ve never known a case like it.’

‘Me neither. Shall I tell the rest of the team what we’ve found?’

‘Get them together again while I pop back inside the house. I want to have a look at the wall under the stairs.’

Less than a minute later he was staring up at the raindrop wallpaper and looking for the peephole. The SOCO was right, he realised. It wasn’t easy to locate.

Eventually he saw it though, framed by one of the large raindrops about fifteen inches down from the ceiling.

Who had put it there, he wondered. And why? Did the Batemans ever know it was there? Could the ghostly sounds that Mary Bateman told people she heard coming from behind the walls have been made by the person who was watching them through the peephole?

CHAPTER TEN

James checked his watch and found it was one o’clock already. He didn’t usually stay so long at a crime scene, but the time had positively flown by because Oaktree Farm was the strangest crime scene he had ever visited. Three dead bodies, shoeprints in blood, a sinister peephole in a wall, and the fact that something disturbingly similar had happened there decades earlier.

James touched on all these points and more with his team and they were as baffled by it all as he was.

‘Okay, it’s time we shifted the investigation away from the crime scene. We know that Robert Bateman was at The King’s Head pub in the village on Christmas Eve,’ he said. ‘I intend to go there now. I know the couple who run it so hopefully they’ll remember seeing him. I’d like you to go with me, DC Abbott. DS Stevens, you stay at the farm and oversee the forensic sweep. There’s a lot to be done and we need answers quickly,’ he said. ‘I’ll arrange for someone to relieve you later.’

The other two detectives were ordered to work with the uniformed officers and visit the properties closest to the farm to find out if anyone had any useful information to offer up.

‘Then go into the village and ask around, but try not to say too much about what’s happened,’ he said. ‘Mind you, by now I expect the media vultures will have got wind of it and it won’t be long before it hits the airwaves.’

James got Stevens to give Abbott the keys to the pool car and then phoned headquarters with an update. He was just about ready to depart the scene when his phone rang. He saw it was Annie calling and feared that she had somehow learned about the killings.