Authors: Judith Cutler
‘You’ve no proof—’
‘But Brian’s got suspicions.’ He’d turned away guiltily. ‘Isn’t that enough? Please, just talk to each other, and to Rob. And when you’re ready, just pick up the phone.’
Just as Mark was reaching for their Sunday night malt whisky, she had a text message. How like the young to choose a nice swift medium that the middle-aged needed their reading glasses to decipher. ‘It’s Tash. Natasha, I suppose. What looks like a website address. Nothing else.’
Abandoning the crystal glasses – Mark liked to make the nightcap an event – they switched on Mark’s computer, tapping in the website address almost idly. To get snow. Electronic snow, at least. He peered closer. Then leaned back. In irritation, she whipped off her reading glasses and handed them to him. Unable now of course to see herself, she pointed to the screen.
‘Password access only,’ Mark said.
‘Irritating to know all those little scrotes can access whatever’s here just like this,’ she said, snapping her fingers, ‘while we’re locked out. And if we play round with passwords, it’ll probably exclude us permanently. At least Tom and his mates should be able to sort it.’ She
looked at her watch. ‘It’s a bit late tonight.’
‘Surely it’ll keep till tomorrow morning.’
‘I suppose. And if our home grown geeky lads can’t suss it, there’s always the forensic computer scientists – if the budget will stretch that far?’ She eyed him hopefully.
Before he could respond, her phone sounded again. Another text, again from Natasha. This one said, ‘No Rob whole weekend.’
‘She must be worried to abbreviate so little,’ she said, trying to return the call and failing. She left a message asking for more details, and a request to phone back ASAP. ‘Do I phone Jill now or leave it till tomorrow?’
‘Neither, not after your reception yesterday. If she wants to report him missing, she’ll do it to the proper people.’
‘But he’s…and on Friday you were worried enough to drive round all the unlovely parts of Ashford looking for him.’
‘Not all, surely. OK, OK. And I admit I was worried enough to talk to Ashford nick about the missing silverware. But there’s a fine line between being there in time of trouble and interfering. You’ll kick yourself if you cross it.’
Sometimes she wished she were young enough to see anything to do with a computer as a manageable challenge, not as a matter of
ill-suppressed
terror. Tom and Harbijan Singh, who was about thirty, Tom’s age, and one of the few Sikh
officers Fran had come across in the Kent force, looked like children offered another Christmas when, sitting in Jill’s office at eight on Monday morning, she gave them the details.
‘Probably nothing too tricky,’ Tom said with the cheerful air of someone whose weekend has been a marked success. ‘Only schoolkids, after all.’
Harbijan gave a polite smile, which showed quite clearly that he disagreed. When prompted with raised eyebrows and a grin, he said, ‘Oh, my kid brother can beat me hollow, ma’am, at anything to do with computers.’
‘If you think it’s too problematic, then, get it straight to the forensic computer scientists – I’d rather you didn’t waste your time or bugger up the task. On the other hand, you could always draft your brother in, Harbijan.’
‘I doubt if the budget would run to him, ma’am. He’s already designed and sold his own computer games – his royalties are way over my pay cheque.’
They were returning to the Incident Room when she called Tom back. ‘Your weekend’s protection duties,’ she prompted.
‘Went very well, thanks, guv. Until her poxy fiancé turned up and got very snotty with me. And with her. I wanted to smack his head. So did Dilly. Eventually she went off to his place with him.’
‘When would that be?’
‘Sunday breakfast. He dragged her off to church. And made it quite clear she’d spend the rest of the day at his place.’
‘Well, they are engaged.’
‘Not engaged enough for him to invite her to stay the night. Just enough to snarl when one of my housemates said our spare room was always available. And there’s a funny thing, like. You know the Post Office is redirecting all her mail here? There’s been nothing since Friday. When those knickers turned up at TVInvicta. Nothing Saturday or today.’
‘Really?’
‘Perhaps the bloody pervert’s run out of quotations. Or he can’t gift wrap a machete. Do you want me to phone them to make sure no one’s slipped up and let anything through to TVInvicta?’
She grimaced. ‘That doesn’t require brains; the computer stuff does. In any case, I’m going across to Canterbury to talk to the vicar of St Jude’s, so I can pop in and check up for myself.’
He nodded. Almost as an afterthought he asked, ‘What about you, guv? How was your weekend? See DCI Tanner, did you? I hope you sent her our best. I’m organising a bit of a whip-round, by the way. I suppose I couldn’t touch you for a quid?’
Fishing out a couple of tenners, she said, ‘If it looks a poor haul, let me know.’
He removed an A4 envelope from a pile in a filing stack and tucked the notes inside. ‘How’s the house hunting?’
She smiled in recollection. ‘We found a lovely black and white timbered house near Hythe. Right in the middle of our range. Perfect in every way.
Except right next door, and I mean right next door, is a used car lot. Cars all over the verge everywhere. And loud music from a ghetto-blaster meant to help a bored lad valet the things. Perfect.’
‘You’ll find the right place one day soon. You mark my words. OK, guv, we’ll have this sorted by lunchtime, with a bit of luck.’
As she left, Acting Detective Chief Superintendent Joe Farmer was deep in conversation with Jon Binns, the DI she’d briefed to check CCTV installers. Farmer was shaking his head so emphatically in disagreement she decided it would make Binns’ life a lot easier if she put off talking to him till she’d got back from St Jude’s.
Why the silence from Chummie? Yes, it was only a couple of days, but he’d not missed a single one before. And this business with an Ashford-based courier? On impulse, she turned back and asked the nearest DC how the sexual assault tally was going. It was still rising, apparently, with an especially frightening attack in a village just outside Canterbury on Thursday.
‘The victim didn’t get a chance to ID him or anything like that. And there’s no CCTV, of course. And no mobile reception, so she couldn’t dial 999. She ran home and her brothers were so furious they went looking for him and totally messed the scene. So nothing new – except it’s definitely the same man. He left a hair on her coat.’
‘Nothing since?’
‘Not with the same MO. But there has been
something else. The Acting DCS is going to make an announcement.’
So why hadn’t the bugger chosen to tell her? Was there time to wring his neck now? But apparently he was in with the Chief, so she’d better restrain herself. It wasn’t her case, after all. Was it?
Canterbury had some of the oldest and most beautiful churches in the country, possibly the world, Fran amended generously, and she was quite looking forward to seeing this example. It would make a welcome contrast to poor St Philip’s, back in the Midlands. But as she got deeper into the sadder side of the city, out to the east, she became less optimistic. With a sinking heart, she saw a Fifties concrete bunker mercifully half covered by a wind-torn Alpha Course banner. Yes, that was St Jude’s. What perversity made Dilly and Daniel come here when they could have worshipped in any number of inspiring buildings?
Perhaps the answer lay in the priest in charge. Kicking herself for not phoning ahead, or even getting the number from Tom, Fran tried to decipher the number from the notice board, so thickly sprayed with graffiti that hardly any of the original colour was visible. As she keyed it into her mobile, however, a woman materialised at her elbow.
‘I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but that’s a terribly posh looking piece of equipment to be waving round just here.’ She emphasised the point with a jut from a very solid jaw. In fact, everything
about her seemed solid, reassuring in an auntish sort of way. Fran realised with a pang that that was much as others might see her. Auntish. When she felt seventeen inside.
Fran pocketed the mobile. ‘Leading into temptation, am I?’
‘Not me personally.’ She pronounced it
pairsonally
.
‘What’s brought a Glaswegian this far south?’
‘Work. Not just mine. His.’ She nodded her
Pre-Raphaelite
shock of rusting red hair at the church.
‘So you’re the Reverend J something-or-other Falkirk?’ Fran sounded doubtful: there was no odour of sanctity about her, not even a dog-collar as far as she could tell.
‘Janie. And you are?’
Fran flipped open her ID. ‘Fran Harman.’
Janie Falkirk narrowed her eyes. ‘A Detective Chief Superintendent? Out on the beat, are you? Are they short of PC Plods? Ah yes, of course they are: that’s why we never see one round here.’
‘I’ll get on to that,’ Fran assured her. ‘Actually, I was looking for you.’
‘Not for speeding in my Beamer on the M2 again!’
‘Don’t you just wish? Alas, I need information about someone in your flock.’
In contrast to the church, the vicarage was a huge sprawling Edwardian edifice. ‘A bomb got the church, but not this. I could wish, in the cold, that it had been the other way round. Actually, all the
time. The church was Norman, very lovely, by all accounts. This pile could never have been anything except a refrigerator. I inhabit the kitchen, as the only place I can afford to heat, if that’s OK by you?’ She slipped off her a hand-knitted scarf, revealing under her duffel coat a polo-necked jumper that either supported her chin or became another one. ‘Tea or coffee?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
There was not a mod con to be seen, though perhaps the scullery was large enough to accommodate a washing machine and a fridge, even a freezer. But there was something pleasing about the wooden slatted drying rack hanging from the ceiling and the big rectangular table, once scrubbed by armies of minions and now by this
practical-looking
woman not much shorter than herself. Everything about that round, slightly pugnacious chin and the strapping frame inspired confidence. Perhaps that was why Dilly and Daniel worshipped in such an unfashionable place, when she’d have seen Daniel as very much a cathedral man.
‘Now, how can I help you?’ From somewhere – how could such a sturdy woman move so silently? – Janie produced a tin of shortbread. ‘I’ve got to be out in half an hour, so we can’t settle for a nice chat, not this time, anyway.’
No unnecessary explanation. Fran liked that in a person. ‘We speak in absolute confidence?’
‘Is there any other way?’ Janie sounded amused rather than pious.
‘One of your congregation is being stalked. There’s no reason to believe the stalker is known to her, but I’m checking all eventualities.’
‘You? Aren’t chief supers a bit like bishops? Desk bound?’
‘The victim is high-profile, so the officers dealing with it are strictly need to know.’
‘High profile? Are we really talking about St Jude’s, Ms Harman? We have a congregation barely reaching a score most of the time, and many are known to the police in quite a different way.’
‘The young woman in question came to the Alpha Course about a year ago. Dilly Pound.’
‘Ah, before she became the face of crime on TVInvicta. So she did. And that man who’s since become her fiancé, I understand.’ She crunched her face and snapped her fingers in an effort to recall his name.
‘Daniel. Daniel McDine. You don’t sound very enthusiastic about him.’
‘It’s not I who am engaged to marry him. Neither worships here any more, I’m afraid. I think they prefer the anonymity of the Cathedral, and who can blame them, now she’s public property.’
‘Funny – he implied he still came here. But – since your time is limited—’
‘I’m due at the prison, Ms Harman. Not a very flexible institution.’
Fran nodded. ‘Do you keep records of people who come on your courses? Names, addresses?’
‘We tend to know regular attenders, but people
drop in off the street, and some distinctly prefer anonymity. Who are we to argue if they just give a Christian name? Some might not even have addresses – we’ve had people sleeping rough come along, more for the warmth and the tea and bikkies than for God’s word, I suspect.’
‘Why don’t you chuck them out?’
Janie shook her mop of hair. ‘Chief Superintendent, that’s a disappointingly conventional question. You wouldn’t expect the Sally Army to throw out street people: why should we? Remember what Christ said about the poor.’
‘Not that bit about them being always with us,’ Fran laughed.
‘Touché.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘You look up all the other references yourself, as penance.’
It might have been a joke, but Fran suspected the intention was not. ‘I just might. They may turn out to be the reasons I joined the police,’ she said seriously. ‘Now, would you recall – I’m aware that this is a stupid question, but bear with me – would you recall any oddballs on that particular course? Any man obviously attracted to Dilly?’
‘Her fiancé apart, you mean?’
‘An oddball? That’s a bit unkind.’
‘We are talking in confidence, are we not?’ Janie chortled. ‘OK, let’s just call him a control freak.’
‘Agreed. But the logistics of the stalking make it hard to put him in the frame, much as I’d like to.’
Janie frowned. ‘I don’t remember any poor souls that might turn to stalking. Have you tried Dilly’s
writing group? I seem to recall from my own attempts to write the Great British Novel that such things attract what you might call psychic cripples.’
‘I didn’t know she went to a writers’ group.’
Janie shook her head. ‘Maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe it was someone else. Senior moments, Chief Superintendent. But, tell you what, I’ll have a wee root round in the records and if I come up with anything I’ll contact you on the instant.’
TVInvicta in the form of Huw Venn greeted her like a long-lost cousin, but had no mail to pass on. ‘We’ve hired a bodyguard to accompany her when she has to go out for a story, ’ he beamed, settling behind his desk, hands across his stomach. ‘He accompanies her right back to the office. And if you want, he can drive her back to her home. She’s a very popular part of our team, both with viewers and her colleagues.’