Authors: Judith Cutler
She polished her halo and sat as upright as she could after two hours on the computer. And realised a whole section of her dratted report had got itself into the wrong order, no doubt while it was leaping about the floor.
The meeting finished earlier than she dared expect.
Gates had been perceptibly more efficient, sticking absolutely to the agenda and summing up each point well. To her discomfort, however, he fell into step with her was they left the seminar room she was coming to loathe.
‘How are Paula Farmer and her girls getting on with your new house?’ he asked with what might have been a smile.
What an opening! Dared she jump straight in? Despising herself for insisting she move slowly, she kept her voice neutral as she remarked, ‘They seem to be very efficient.’
He bowed as if she was complimenting him, not the women.
‘I was wondering how you came across them, actually,’ she fished. She’d had him down as much more a man to buy new property with a view to improving and selling it at a swift and excessive profit.
‘In one of my earlier incarnations,’ he said, with no smile at all. It was clear he thought the conversation closed.
‘He wouldn’t admit it, but Mark’s terrified of Paula,’ she fibbed, possibly, raising the stakes a little.
‘She’s a pussy cat really.’ Conveniently, his pager prevented any further questions. Why on earth should he head off at something approaching a trot? It wasn’t as if he was pursuing a major criminal.
But here was DCI Pearce, exposing rather less bosom but more leg than usual, through the medium of a deeply gored skirt stitched only halfway down the thigh. She also sported distractingly dangly earrings and a huge grin.
‘The Sureté have been delayed, guv – they seem to have found yet more cases to discuss with him. But he’s languishing in Maidstone Jail for the time being, and we’ve got clearance for any number of interviews with him.’
‘Maybe he’d like a welcome party,’ Fran said. ‘Could you contact his lawyer and fix it for early this afternoon?’ With a smile she turned on her heel and went to have lunch with Mark feeling, though she couldn’t have explained why, that the morning hadn’t been a total waste of time after all.
With no sense of déjà vu at all, accompanied by Sue Hall, Fran sat in an interview room facing a man accused of murdering his wife – plus, in this case, possibly half a dozen prostitutes. Unlike Roper, Dale Drury looked more than capable of
physical violence. If she wasn’t careful, he might dominate the room with his size – at forty, he must have weighed in at seventeen stone and been something like six feet one. He had a couple of tattoos, neither particularly offensive, just visible on his neck. His hands were surprisingly well manicured.
Why should she feel sorrier for a puny specimen like Roper than for this man? Drury hadn’t, after all, even been to court yet, let alone sent down for life. Had his wife been the only victim, he might even, disgracefully, have got away with manslaughter, arguing he’d hit her under provocation. Counsel would certainly make much of the fact that he’d made no attempt to run away when the police arrived, and had shown every sign of distress at momentary loss of control.
Had he wept for the others he would be accused of killing? All those prostitutes?
Suddenly she realised that she had the thinnest, the most tenuous of reasons to question him. Janine wouldn’t fit his pattern, would she? Fran grasped at intellectual straws. Had Janine become a part-time prostitute, like far too many young women, to service debts or a drug habit? She wanted to discount the first motive: Janine didn’t have huge student loans to pay off, and the contents of the house had suggested expenditure well within the Ropers’ income. All the same, something danced tantalisingly at the back of Fran’s brain – those red shoes and the bra set, no doubt.
In any case, she hadn’t been interviewing suspects without a shred of evidence all these years to let the lack of it inhibit her now. ‘Have a look at this, Dale,’ she said, casually passing across Janine’s photo in its evidence bag. ‘Do you know this girl?’
He looked, to do him justice, but, with a glance at his
solicitor, shook his head. ‘Not my type at all.’
‘Have another look. Tell me what you make of her.’
Shrugging, he picked it up and made a show of holding it this way and that, the better to peer at it through its polythene covering. At last he stuck out his lower lip. ‘Looks a bit of a goer on the quiet, don’t she?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Meet her at the pub, she’d have her knickers off before you could say shag.’
She shook her head and wrinkled her forehead in puzzlement. ‘I’m a woman – explain how a man can tell something like that from a photo.’
She didn’t like the look he gave her before staring at Sue.
‘Put you two together, now. Which would I rather fuck? Not her – she’s as tight-arsed as they come. But I reckon you’d screw all right, love.’
Fran didn’t so much as glance at poor Sue, confining herself to kicking her foot lightly to register sisterly offence and also to prevent her speaking out. Should she snarl at the bugger? Nine-tenths of her wanted to. The other tenth insisted she say ironically, ‘Thank you kindly, Dale. But I’m afraid neither my colleague nor I need your sexual evaluation. It’s this woman here we’re interested in.’ She touched the photo.
‘Meet her on a street corner and I’d ask if she was doing business. And probably give her one anyway. Only joking,’ he added, as his solicitor hissed him down.
‘Of course,’ Fran agreed, with a gracious smile at the poor sap landed with the idiot as client. ‘You’re saying she looks like a tom?’
‘Doesn’t have to make a living by shagging. And all these
shrinks say toms don’t actually enjoy it, don’t they?’ he added, surprising her.
‘Good point,’ Fran said. She really ought to have shed some of her preconceptions after all these years, shouldn’t she?
‘So she might be just a housewife not getting enough and asking for it from someone else. Not me, though, love.’
‘What if she was prettied up a bit – you know, big hair, eye make-up, shiny lips?’
He narrowed his eyes, as if trying to be helpful. ‘You want to ask some of the local girls. You know, wherever she lived.’
‘You said “lived”.’ Sue pounced.
‘’Course I did, sweetheart.’
Fran’s toes curled at his easy use of one of Mark’s endearments.
‘You wouldn’t be showing me a mugshot of her if she was alive, would you now? I know you want to pin it on me, but I tell you, I didn’t kill her. Didn’t even poke her.’
‘You’ve poked a lot of prostitutes, Dale?’ Sue asked.
‘A few.’
‘A good few?’
‘Suppose.’
‘So you might not recall one among so many.’
‘Never forget a face, not me. Nor a place. Photographic memory they call it.’
‘Wow. You don’t meet many people like that,’ Fran said. ‘So if my colleague and I walked out of the room, you’d be able to describe us in detail to your solicitor next week.’
The solicitor looked as if it was a delight he would not press for.
‘Sure,’ Dale declared. ‘Try me, mate – it’s a date.’
‘So we might push harder on this idea that Janine might have led a secret life,’ Fran said, to break a seething silence as she drove back to HQ. She could understand Sue being furious, not just with Drury but also with her, for failing to make a stand against such personal observations.
‘You don’t have to take the suggestion of a psychopath, surely, ma’am.’
‘Lord, no. No more than his nasty little innuendoes against us.’
‘Why didn’t you…?’ Sue’s voice cracked.
‘Because I wanted him on our side, as much as a man like that can be, even more than to lecture him on the politics of gender. Believe me, Sue, you’ll hear far worse than that – and often from our colleagues, I’m sorry to say.’
‘But—’
‘But the interesting thing was that we hadn’t mentioned to him those anomalous undies and shoes,’ Fran overrode her, wanting progress not polemic. ‘There’s more to Janine Roper than met the eye, Sue. And I’d like you to find out what it is. In fact, what I’d like you to do is get on to the snappers. I want this image digitally enhanced with make-up and a tarty wig.’
‘But, guv—’
‘The moment we arrive. Get it? And then I want plain clothes officers, preferably those working with the women, to ask around. And not just the poor girls on the street. Lap dancers, pole dancers, belly dancers, any bloody dancers you can think of. OK?’
As for Fran, all she wanted was to make a cup of tea and metaphorically put her feet up. She would never, however great the need, do it literally, not when anyone might catch her
doing it. She permitted herself the tea, at least, and checked her emails. None.
No emails?
She padded out to her secretary’s office, where Pat held up her hands in exculpation. ‘The whole system’s been down all afternoon, Fran. But I did have a phone call from DI Pete Webb. He said he’d put the PM photos in the internal post for you.’
‘Thanks. I suppose tomorrow’s another day. I might as well go and pick up Mark, then – we’re off to see how things are moving on the Rectory. But if anyone wants me, I shall be back by six for another briefing.’
‘Have fun. But Fran,’ Pat added as Fran left the room, ‘you might want to put your shoes on before you go.’
‘It’s a good job it’s been so dry,’ Caffy said, ‘or the garden would be like a jungle. Mind you, we do need the rain – they say we’re going to have standpipes in the streets unless we have a wet summer. Which is a bugger when you’re painting exteriors, of course. At least with a site this big we can all nip indoors and carry on there when it rains.’
‘All? I must say I thought there’d be more of you.’
‘There are. The rest of the team are finishing smaller projects until everyone else is off site. Then you’ll find the place crawling with us. Meanwhile, I get on with specialist stuff like stripping paint and restoring plasterwork in rooms you don’t propose to change. All the plasterwork that’s been chipped and scuffed – I’m looking after that. My special project’s the ceiling in the old drawing room – have you seen what I’ve discovered under all that gloss paint?’
They could scarcely decline the implicit invitation. And Fran for one was pleased they had followed the young woman. What had been an ugly indeterminate lump of peeling gloss paint was now a delicate piece of plasterwork.
Caffy’s face glowed with the sort of delight that Fran had seen when new mothers looked at their babies. ‘I’ve had to rebuild that edge – you can see it’s still not quite the same as the rest. And then I shall work on that beautiful section over the door. Didn’t our ancestors do a wonderful job of their domestic architecture?’
‘And you’re doing a wonderful job, bringing it back to life,’ Mark said, his voice full of more admiration than even Fran would have expected. He traced a curve with his finger. ‘Look at that…’
They left Caffy perched on a stepladder, her work lit by a sort of miner’s light strapped to her forehead, to find Paula scrubbing her hands in the scullery sink.
‘Those shoes are better but you really need lace-ups,’ she informed them.
It took Fran a second to register the problem. ‘No, I’m not here to shin up the scaffolding. Isn’t it a bit windy?’
Paula clearly thought such an excuse beneath contempt.
‘We’re actually here because of the security footage,’ Fran continued. ‘There’s one particular car—’
‘Yes, that black Beamer. Rather a regular visitor, isn’t it?’ Paula leant back against the sink, crossing her arms. ‘Should we be worried?’ It was clear she meant all three of them.
Mark, however, showed an unnatural interest in his shoes. At least he managed to say, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think it’s anyone going to strip lead off the roof or rip out fireplaces. At least, I’d be very surprised if he did. You see, the driver’s a police officer, Paula.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘It’s not that bloody copper that fancies Caffy? Shit! I think way back she might have found him
attractive – for half an hour or so – but he was absolutely smitten. What was his name now?’ She clicked her fingers in irritation. ‘Dawes? Gates! Worked for Police Standards or something – you know, fuzz checking up on other fuzz. Do you know him?’
‘It was he who recommended you, remember,’ Fran said, weak with relief that their conversation was going so easily.
‘Shit, so it was. I thought it was out of the kindness of his heart. And all the time it was because he could sneak over and ogle poor Caffy whenever he felt like it. The poor bastard.’
‘Except it’s called stalking,’ Fran said quietly, ‘if the woman doesn’t want to be ogled. Don’t get me wrong, Paula. There’s no law against some lovelorn bloke – or woman – leaning against a gate in the hope of seeing his beloved. It’s if he does it against the woman’s will or starts doing other things that the law takes an interest.’
‘Which would be a bit of a problem if he’s a policeman himself,’ Paula reflected. ‘Do you want me to talk to Caffy or would you rather do it?’
This was blissfully easy. All the same, Fran wrinkled her nose, as if in doubt. ‘It might sound a bit official, a bit intimidating, if we did – at this stage.’
‘I can’t think of anything that would intimidate our Caffy,’ Paula declared. ‘Not after what she’s been through. Tell you what, to spare her the trouble of telling you all about it, you check up a guy called Clive Granville in your records. Caffy’s surname’s Tyler, in case she hasn’t told you. And if you read carefully you’ll work out why she always wears dungarees when she’s working. Meanwhile,’ she continued, overriding Fran’s obvious question, ‘I’ll ask her
what she thinks about the visits from this here mate of yours.’
‘Colleague, not mate,’ Fran said with too much emphasis.
Paula’s eyes narrowed. ‘You mean he’s your boss? Well, I can quite see why you’d rather do nothing.’ Her voice oozed scorn.
Mark stepped forward. ‘If the chief constable himself was breaking the law, the Home Secretary, even, I’d want him dealt with.’
Paula looked him in the eye. ‘I believe you. But I’d guess,’ she added shrewdly, ‘that you’d rather it was the Home Secretary – someone nice and remote, not someone you know and presumably trust.’
‘If someone steals your lead, you’d rather it was someone nice and remote, not someone you know and trust.’
‘Touché! OK, I’ll trust you,’ she said, leaning lightly on the word, ‘to do the right thing, if doing anything is necessary, of course. Caffy might be quite touched. She might even want to go out to dinner with him occasionally. He was quite a nice-looking bloke, I thought. But I do recall her saying she didn’t like his eyes. Like granite or something.’
Fran nodded. ‘I know what she means,’ she said softly. And wished she hadn’t.
Paula quietly patted her on the arm, as if praising her for her honesty. ‘Bring those shoes next time,’ she said. ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t,’ she added, clearly dismissing them.
Mark at the wheel, they were returning to work, Fran for the latest Lady in the Lake briefing and Mark to check out this Clive Granville’s connection with Caffy. Fran’s phone rang. She’d have been tempted to let the caller leave a message, but
it was Maeve Burton, to whom she undoubtedly owed a favour.
‘Fran, I was wondering if Bill and I could come and see you both this evening,’ Maeve said, the preliminaries out of the way. ‘Unless you’re tied up in some high-profile case?’
‘I can untie myself,’ Fran said equably. ‘But if you’d like to join us for a meal, it’ll have to be a takeaway, I’m afraid. We won’t be back much before nine.’
Mark groaned.
‘Nine and just a drink would be fine. See you then!’
‘Which scuppers our chance of a leisurely meal,’ Mark grumbled.
‘So it does. But who has leisurely meals in the middle of a murder case?’
‘Someone who isn’t running it? Sorry. Only joking. Why didn’t you put her off?’
‘Because of our history, Maeve and me. She wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. Anyway, I don’t expect the briefing to run for long – it’s just a matter of collating updates, after all – and it won’t take you five minutes to check on the guy who did whatever it is to Caffy.’ Bloody names.
‘Clive Granville. OK. See you at seven-thirty. Though that isn’t half tempting Providence. I bet your team have come up with vital evidence and you have to go out and make an arrest.’
In the event, Mark got grabbed by the chief, who demanded to be talked through the document he had delegated to Mark to prepare. Fran’s meeting went on longer than she would have liked, but it wasn’t very productive, with only nil returns coming in from the team that had been working at the
reservoir site itself, and she sent her colleagues off with the instruction to have an early night and come back with a few brain cells ready for action. ‘I might have some myself’, she added, ‘by then.’
‘Buy my cottage? Our cottage. You mean now? Just like that?’ Fran put down her glass very carefully. Now Bill’s thorough inspection of the place on his previous visit was making sense.
‘If everything works out, yes, just like that,’ Maeve said. ‘You know, have a couple of independent valuations for a start, and if we agree a price, subject to all the usual surveys and searches. And we’d be paying cash – did I mention that?’
‘The only thing is’, Bill said, ‘that we don’t want to hang around. We’d want to be in here by July.’
Mark said, ‘You’ll excuse us if we don’t make a decision tonight? After all, it’s Fran’s home—’
‘But you’ve got the new place, haven’t you? And don’t tell me conservation and restoration don’t cost an arm and a leg,’ Maeve declared.
‘And take time,’ Fran said quietly. ‘The Rectory doesn’t have an operative bathroom or kitchen at the moment. Mark’s right, I’m afraid. We’d need to give it some thought.’
Which included, when their guests had finally left, the possibility of moving to Mark’s house in Loose, whether on their own or with Sammie and her children still
in situ
.
‘Because that’s the obvious thing to do,’ Mark reflected, watching in the mirror as Fran took off her make-up. ‘Especially if Lloyd’s overtures the other night worked.’
‘Didn’t you ask her? When you saw the kids?’ Fran’s voice was sharp with a mixture of disbelief and accusation. She turned for a moment to face him, but then resumed her task.
To his own ears he sounded defensive. ‘Of course I did. But I didn’t want to put her under pressure and start asking awkward questions. Not in front of the children, anyway. In any case, it’s not really our business, Fran. Or,’ he conceded, in the face of her continued silence, ‘it wasn’t until this offer came up. Do you really want to sell? The original idea was that we should rent it out to provide an income for our old age,’ he added, in a quavery voice.
‘Circumstances change.’ She got up and came to sit on the side of the bed. ‘The longer we’re here the more obvious it becomes that you’re not going to grow any shorter, so I foresee permanent scars on your forehead and on that bathroom beam you never see. Selling this to pay for Pact’s work and living in Loose would be the obvious solution. And Loose can pay for our old age.’
‘So we put everything in train? You’re sure you don’t want to sleep on it?’
‘Whoever said anything about sleep?’
The photographic section had come up with what looked like cracking shots of an attractive young woman, dolled up for a night out. In some she was blonde, in others brunette and in yet more she was a stunning redhead. It wasn’t just her hair that had received attention; she might have been in the hands of a professional make-up artist, not someone with a digital touch-up programme. Someone had arranged the details like a halo round the original
penny-plain
photo.
‘Monday’s a dead quiet night in the clubs and pubs,’ Coveney complained on Tuesday morning, ‘so we got zero take-up. But we’ll push on with it.’
‘The trouble is, people who were the right age for clubs three years ago may have moved on – got babies and mortgages,’ Fran said.
‘Not some of the clubs I have in mind. If she was a pole dancer or stripper, or even a high-class call girl, she might have been operating in gentlemen’s clubs—’
‘What a misnomer!’ Sue snarled.
‘So we’ll be concentrating our efforts there until Friday. If that’s OK with you, guv?’
‘Sounds good to me.’
Sue’s hand shot up. ‘Will there be men and women on this particular team?’
Dan looked to Fran for help.
‘Volunteers, I’d have thought,’ she said crisply, though her heart sank. Of course, Sue was right – hadn’t Fran and her generation fought for just such opportunities? Except the older she got, the more Fran thought about compromise. ‘So long as the team members bear in mind that they’re there to elicit information about what the men involved may think is of a delicate nature, not make political points themselves.’ Damn, that had been really heavy-handed. ‘But I can trust you all on that count, can’t I?’ Worse and worse. Time to rush on. ‘Any news of the reservoir key-holders? Not the gates, but the manhole cover thingies.’ At least people were laughing at her now.
‘There’s no record of any having gone missing in the last five years, guv,’ another young woman put in, only to earn a glare from Sue. ‘And we’ve interviewed all the blokes entitled to use them. Nothing suspicious in any of their statements at all, though of course we’ll double check. They’ve all got completely unblemished records to date, anyway.’ She threw
the last sentence down as a challenge, rather foolishly, Fran thought.
But no one took her up on it.
‘OK, the perimeter fence, with special reference to the side facing the allotments?’
‘We’re still checking that, ma’am. But it’s a bit of a
no-hoper
, I’d have thought. A lot of families go up every weekend, and you know what kids are like. The new one’s already sagging in places, and little tunnels run under it in others.’
‘OK. And what about the plot-holders themselves?’
Coveney said, ‘We’re about halfway through the list, so far. As you say, they all seem to know each other by sight, even though they all insist they keep themselves to themselves. Trouble is, some of them are very elderly indeed, and it’s always possible several have died since the relevant date.’
‘Tell you what, Dan,’ Fran said, ‘why don’t you check on those who’ve given up their allotment but not pegged it? Just in case.’
‘What about the ones who have pegged it?’ some wag asked.
‘You could send someone to heaven to question them there.’
‘Or “seek him i’ the other place yourself,”’ another voice concluded.
The chief!
He nodded pleasantly to his surprised colleagues, and especially at Fran and Coveney. ‘I understand what you’re doing may expose the weaknesses in the performance of one of our former colleagues,’ he said. ‘This is unfortunate, but
shouldn’t inhibit you in any way. The truth is sometimes inconvenient, I’m afraid.’
Would he say the same if they ever had to talk to him about Gates and Caffy?
Pat, whom the chief would probably describe as twice blessed, greeted her on her return to her office with the news that she could visit Maurice Barnes the following day, and that the internal post had arrived, bringing, amongst other mail, a packet from Folkestone. She handed it over with a smile.
Fran opened it like a child expecting a Christmas present.