Cold Pursuit (18 page)

‘Also being stalked?’ he asked eagerly.

‘Calm down. She got married, Tom. As people do. Even lecturers.’ But not her and Mark, of course. ‘OK. Off you go.’

He looked at her under his lashes. ‘And would
you want me to phone Dilly to ask if any of the blokes made a move on her?’

‘Who better?’ she replied blithely. But wondered even as she spoke if she’d done the right thing.

He was half way out of the door when he stopped. ‘Almost forgot what brought me here, guv. We’ve shut down that obscene website. We couldn’t manage to trace it back to source, but we’ve got the forensic computer scientists on to it. I asked for Amy Lu: she’s the best. And I asked for it ASAP.’

‘Well done. Any news of Jon Binns and the CCTVs yet?’

‘Only that Farmer Giles went ballistic about him slipping out of that meeting and told him he should have been doing his own team’s work, not someone else’s. Tough, especially as it only took him two minutes to ask for a list of technicians by five tonight. So we can reckon on nine tomorrow, in my experience.’

She was ready for Mark’s phone call to say he was ready to leave, but there was something very odd about his voice when he made it.

‘Would you be kind enough to pop round to my office a moment? Thanks.’

It reminded her irresistibly of the way he’d prefaced any bollockings he’d had to deliver in their past. Trying to unclench her jaw and her stomach muscles, despite herself she started to review her activities to see if she’d broken any major rules. But her conscience was as clean as she’d known it, and
she wondered if he simply had some lovely surprise to spring.

So she was beaming when she put her head round his door.

He wasn’t.

He stood as she entered, but stayed his side of his desk. Then he leant on it, knuckles down and shoulders braced. ‘The Chief tells me you went on night patrol round Ashford. Would you care to tell me when?’

She replied easily, ‘The night there was an assault in the town. You were busy with some papers, weren’t you?’

‘So who did you patrol with?’

‘What do you mean? I was on my own, of course. Just casing the joint, as it were.’ And now getting uneasier by the minute.

‘Just putting yourself at risk. And putting yourself at risk at a time when you were far from fit, and probably even more vulnerable. What the hell did you think you were doing?’

‘What I always do.’ Unease had mutated to anger.

‘Did. When you were a middle-rank officer. And you’d have had a partner. I take it you didn’t bother with body-armour or CS spray or even a radio? For God’s sake, someone in your position being so cavalier! You should be setting an example, someone of your rank.’

‘An example to whom? And how?’ She’d moved to furious, in one breath.

‘We get the media to tell all women to be on their guard, to go nowhere ill-lit, preferably to take cabs and always to stick in groups. And you swan round disregarding our own advice! Wouldn’t it have looked good if you’d been a victim – not just of the rapist but even of a set of juvenile bag-snatchers? More happy-slappers? You’d have been a laughing stock. We’d all have been a laughing stock.’

Hell! All those years of conditioning – must accept a senior officer’s rebuke, mustn’t answer back. But her own lover speaking to her like this, her lover, her partner, the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. How dare he? How bloody dare he?

The conditioning swamped her.

‘Will that be all, sir?’

‘For now. Thank you.’

She’d have slammed the door off its hinges if it hadn’t been for three or four officers in the corridor outside discussing their forthcoming evening’s boozing. Boozing. When she’d be silently retrieving all her stuff from his house and knowing it was totally impossible to rebuild her life without him. She wanted to howl with the pain of it.

But women of her rank didn’t retire to a loo and sob. What did they do? And what did she do? She’d better get back to her office, because whatever her face was supposed to be doing, it wasn’t obeying orders. And she’d better take the shortest route, away from any casually interested eyes.

The last person she wanted contact with was the Chief, who emerged as if by magic from his office
as she went past. He was obviously seeing his Sussex opposite number off the premises.

But he hung back a second. ‘Harman, I hope Turner did a good job? You deserved every word. You know you did.’ He quickened his step and fell in with the other man.

Did knowing that Mark was acting on orders make it better or worse? Still staggering with the shock of it all, she made it back to her office. Her secretary was just shrugging on her coat.

‘Urgent message on your desk, Fran!’ she said. ‘I gather you’re looking at another house tonight. Let’s hope this is the right one.’

Fran hoped the muscles formed a smile, hoped the voice sounded as if Fran were merely thinking about something else. Yes, there was an urgent message on her desk. In a sealed envelope addressed to her in Mark’s writing,
Fran
, not
DCS Harman
.

At least she made it to the loo before she was sick.

As she blotted her face, she stared at herself in the mirror. Should she act on her first impulse and
end everything between them? Or – and this really hurt – should she admit that she had indeed been in the wrong and accept his remarkably gracious explanation? Was it just the implications for their lives at work if they broke up, all the covert glances, the open sniggering that were influencing her decision? Or was it something else?

She’d know when she saw him. But it would be best to speak before they reached the car park. Surely it would. After all, as he’d said, they had their ban on shoptalk to consider.

Did that mean she’d made a
de facto
decision?

Hadn’t she once said that they must continue to treat each other exactly as they’d treat other colleagues in a similar situation?

And she’d been in the wrong. No doubt about that. She’d have said much the same to Tom.

She headed back to his office to apologise. She got as far as, ‘I’m sorry.’

He didn’t speak, but switched off the lights and locked the door.

Baying and snarling, the two Dobermans hurled themselves against what appeared to be a terribly frail wire barrier between the kitchen and their scullery.

The cottage must have been five miles from its nearest neighbour, and six from anything like a main road.

‘The rush hour would be two tractors, not one,’ she murmured into Mark’s ear.

The vendor – a pallid woman whose too-tight jumper showed the outlines of an inadequate bra – was working up huge enthusiasm for a klargester, a means of disposing of human waste neither had ever heard of. At the end of three minutes, both knew that they didn’t wish to push the acquaintance further.

The dogs certainly didn’t.

From time to time, the woman asked them to be quiet, in the hopeless tones some mothers use when addressing vile toddlers. The dogs took as little notice.

Would Mr and Mrs Harman like some sherry? It was time to declare themselves teetotallers on the way to an AA meeting and scoot. Even as they turned the car in the lane outside, the dogs hurled themselves at the gates. Another off the list, then.

‘I think we’ve taken a wrong turn,’ he said at last, the grass growing in the middle of the lane brushing the car’s suspension.

‘Best find a gate to turn in,’ she said absently, wrestling with an OS map and an inadequate torch – the oracle seemed to have thrown up its hands in horror.

‘What about this one?’ Cutting the ignition and releasing his seatbelt, he murmured, ‘Look at those stars.’

‘Careful how you get out – cowpats!’

‘Who said anything about getting out? Fran Harman, come here!’

‘Do you reckon Tom will have worked his charm and persuaded Dilly back into his care?’ Mark asked, as he drove them into work the following day. Neither had referred again to the bruising encounter of the previous day or to the sexual passion it had engendered. They’d been neither more nor less loving or tetchy with early morning irritation than usual. But he thought she was still wary; God knew he was. He’d meant to read her a reasonable lecture, but the thought of the danger to which she’d so blithely exposed herself without even talking about it afterwards had made him explode. Just as he’d have exploded to any other colleague doing something so stupid.

Possibly.

‘Technically, it depends whether he had any news to report about the Birmingham writing course,’ she said.

‘If I’d been him I’d have phoned her, even with nil returns!’

‘Are all men really attracted to pretty faces
rather than personality?’ she asked, almost wistfully.

He was glad the traffic had congealed into a solid jam: it meant he could look at her properly. This tone was getting familiar – nothing to do with yesterday evening. It dated from their Birmingham trip. What had happened in Birmingham to shake her self-confidence like this? Surely it wasn’t the simple fact that there had been no clothes in one shop that had been to her taste? Was she really so frightened of growing old? She was hardly
middle-aged
, and certainly didn’t look even that. Why, in any other profession than the police, there’d be no question of her retiring till she was sixty. The government were already talking about raising the national retirement age to sixty-seven, for goodness’ sake. Only talking, he hoped. It was all very well for people behind desks, but how could labourers or even front-line police officers for whom fitness was vital continue to such an age? And what a national outcry there’d be when the first 67-year-old officer died of a heart attack chasing a young yob. But would it be age discrimination to move older people on to permanent light duties?

Meanwhile, he must find something to lift Fran’s spirits, to prove to her that she was still attractive and desirable – though he’d have thought their sex life should have been demonstration enough of that. Or was she afraid that his long abstinence after Tina’s death was the reason he wanted her, not her
body? And her mind, of course. Fran, all of Fran.

‘I’d have thought most men would have wanted to wring Dilly’s neck. Men with any sense. Me, for instance,’ he amended, with a grin and a squeeze of her hand. ‘Helpless women don’t do anything for me. I’d bet that’s why Tom’s so fond of you. And – Dilly’s good looks apart – I’d guess he sees looking after her as an additional way to your approval.’

‘My God, I’m not his mother! Nor his head teacher.’

‘In a sense, you’re both. And a good friend, too. And I suspect he wants not so much to wring Dilly’s neck as to shake her into independent action. She’s proved she can do it, after all. It must have taken guts to embark on a new career, especially one where she actually talks to millions of people unscripted, after that cloistered existence of hers.’

‘She’s better at talking to the masses than one to one, you know.’

‘How strange. Perhaps she doesn’t see them as people. Perhaps it’s the camera lens she talks to. My God, what would a Freudian psychologist make of that?’

‘She certainly goes in for unyielding and implacable men. So Tom may be on to a loser. Though of course, since he’s a policeman, albeit a plain clothes one, he could be an authority figure too. In which case the pattern will repeat itself and he won’t have an equal partner but a doormat.’

‘He might want that but I wouldn’t.’ Was that enough positive affirmation? Or should he go
further?
I want a woman like you, fierce in your independence but vulnerable, a woman I can talk to and take to bed with equal delight
. It was true, but too effusive for a traffic jam at eight in the morning. ‘I’d rather have you,’ he said, with a handclasp he hoped would make up for the lack of fine words.

She returned it, with a lingering smile. Perhaps it had been enough. But one day he’d try harder and find the time and the place to spell everything out.

‘I’m going to have to phone Jill,’ she said, doubtfully, almost as if asking for his approval.

He shot an anxious look at her. Where was his feisty woman?

‘Rob’s just a kid,’ she continued. ‘And she needs to see the evidence, too. We’ve got to be grown up about everything. Damn it, we’ve been friends for nearly thirty years.’

‘And you’re a senior officer she unleashed the old verbals on. So don’t expect too much of a welcome. But you’ll always get one from me,’ he added, with another squeeze of the hand. Suddenly he found himself lifting hers to his lips and kissing it. His reward was a blush as pink as any Victorian miss’s.

She got no response at all from Jill, just an answerphone. She left what she hoped was a neutral message and rang off.

‘You’re good on those things,’ Mark observed. ‘I always give too much information or sound as polite as a machine gun.’

‘Wow! Look at you. Don’t tell me, you’ve found the right house?’ Tom greeted her, an hour later.

Why on earth should he think that? She shook her head. ‘Alas, several Hounds of the Baskervilles had got there first. Redecorate? You’d have to fumigate the place. No, another dud. But we shall find the right one sooner or later. Now, what have you been up to? Did you find Dilly’s stalker?’

‘Have I buggery. The bloody college has just moved premises, and can’t find the paper records for so long ago. Paper records? I gave them paper records. And I gave them not find, too. Let me have the material by noon today, I said, or I’ll do the management team for concealing evidence. What I did get, however, is the married name of that Mary Walker woman. Mary Wolford she is now.’

‘Address?’

‘No idea. But – big but – apparently she’s a writer. You know, those that can’t, teach. Well, seems she can well enough to be published so I shall get on to her publisher soon as they wake up, like.’ His tone implied total disbelief that not everyone in the world of work was at their desk by eight-thirty.

‘Do that. No arguments about confidentiality. I want contact details by ten. And let’s hope her memory’s less selective than Dilly’s. How did she react to the college news, by the way?’

‘It’s always hard to tell with her, isn’t it? I couldn’t persuade her to stay over at our place again, and didn’t dare say I’d take her sofa if she wanted. But I did take her out for a meal. Before I
left I checked under the beds, in the wardrobes and anywhere else an intruder might have concealed himself and then I made sure she locked up after me. The intruder systems seem to be working. At least I hope so.’

‘You don’t sound sure.’

‘Funny how faulty devices seem to attach themselves to the world’s victims. If you had a system – you probably do? – every whistle would blow, every bell ring, absolutely to order, like. With someone like Dilly, you know her car’s going to break down the day after its warranty expires and that she’ll have completely forgotten to renew her AA cover.’

She laughed, but asked seriously, ‘How do you work that out?’

‘Look at that fiancé of hers. Any initiative, like, he’d be the one to take it. And if you don’t act on your own initiative, you get swamped.’

‘You’d still like it to be McDine that’s faking the stalking.’

‘Love it to be. But we’ve just had in a lab report on the paper you nicked from his waste bin.’

‘Nick? Me? I never! And it says?’

‘Different weight, different brand. Sorry.’

‘Bugger. OK. And – Tom – don’t forget to put that meal on expenses!’

‘Can’t, guv. She put it on hers. Honestly. You could have knocked me down with the proverbial.’

‘Me too.’

To Fran’s surprise he was back within minutes,
just as she was dialling Jill’s number. She hung up without waiting for a reply.

‘You’ve located Mrs Wolford!’

His face fell, but only for an instant. ‘I’ll get on to that in half a tick. But before you bawl me out, we’ve managed to locate the webmaster of that obscene website! A kid called Field. Noel Field. It took Harbijan all of yesterday, and probably most of last night, and don’t ask me how he sorted it…’

‘I hope to God that brother of his knows the words “strictly confidential”.’

‘You don’t think…? Shit. Anyway, Harbi says Field’s a kid living near Ashford. Does that figure?’

‘It certainly does. Any more details?’

‘I got on to the council, and they gave me the name of his school. It’s the Thomas Bowdler, quite an old established co-ed grammar. Grammar schools, guv! Like something out of Billy Bunter! Why do Kent have them?’

‘Same reason they don’t have proper roads, I should imagine. Right. I think this is where I sally forth.’

His face fell so hard she almost laughed.

‘I’m sorry, Tom: I told you from the start that this was need to know only.’ It was like denying a favourite dog walkies.

He looked her full in the eye. ‘It’s young Rob Tanner, isn’t it, in some of those shots? Pictures of him on DCI Tanner’s desk, guv. Harbi noticed first, but I swore him to secrecy, and I know he likes the DCI too, so he won’t say anything.’

‘Of course he won’t, any more than you would. But I want this to be as low-key as possible, and even when you’re dressed for the allotment, Tom, as you are today, you still look like a police officer.’

He laughed. ‘You think you don’t! There was something in this A Level book I had to read once: “Every inch a king”. And I always think of you, like.’

Fran supposed she should be flattered by the comparison with a senile old monarch, but shook her head nonetheless. ‘To paraphrase another A Level text: to have one police officer on the premises may be regarded as a misfortune; to have two begins to look as if a crime has been committed. And that’s the last impression I want to give. I need you to organise surveillance of his home and make sure his computer stays where it is. And, come to think of it, he can’t even touch it when he comes home.’

‘Plain clothes?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Of course plain clothes. But you can take your mobile and make the calls to that novelist’s publisher while you lurk. OK?’

‘OK,
ma’am
!’ he said, saluting and exiting at the double. He popped his head back. ‘You do realise he doesn’t need to touch his own computer to change the website, don’t you, guv?’

‘Doesn’t he? Bloody hell. I suppose you’d be able to tell if someone had tampered with the site?’

‘Oh, yes, both the time and date of any changes. Possibly even the computer originating the changes.’

She shook her head. ‘Time I went to college again. OK. Maintain an unobtrusive presence, then. But if I say move, you bloody move.’

He gave a mock-salute. ‘Bloody move it is, guv.’

She had two swift visits to make before she left, the first to the Incident Room.

‘Jon, how did you get on with the people fitting the CCTV cameras?’

‘They promised to phone back last night with a list of employees. I thought I’d give them till nine this morning before I roasted them.’ His mouth turned up like a banana.

‘But it’s after ten, Jon.’

‘Sorry, ma’am.’ And he was reaching for the phone before she turned her back.

The second errand was to update the Chief Constable. His office door was open as she went past, so she popped her head into the room. When he nodded, she stepped inside, closing the door firmly. But she suspected neither would refer to the previous day.

‘I’m fairly certain I have a lead in the business of DCI Tanner and drugs,’ she announced. ‘But a stink may follow.’

‘Stink?’

‘At a good grammar school.’

‘Not the one where the animals that assaulted you come from? Any news of that, by the way?’

‘None yet, sir. I’ll make sure you have a full report—’

‘Fran, you were the victim.’ He made a note. ‘It’s your colleagues who should be presenting a full report to you! Anyway, if there’s going to be a stink about the other business, let there be.’

‘It’s the school where your son’s doing his A Levels,’ she said quietly.

Grammar school Thomas Bowdler might have been but Greyfriars it was not. There were probably some older elements lurking beneath the Sixties façade, but nothing to dilute the blue painted concrete and blank windows frontage identical to that of endless cheaply built education establishments. Was there some firm that had prided itself on producing blinds that drooped so despairingly?

She surveyed it as she got out of the car. Had she seen a single attractive public building during this case? Houses apart, of course – and goodness knew none of them was without imperfections. Why didn’t she take Mark off to Bruges when this case was over? Bruges or for that matter Bath – some decent civic and domestic architecture was definitely called for.

It was a long time since she’d had to visit a school in anger, as it were, and she was nonplussed by the security buzzer system. It seemed she wouldn’t be admitted till she’d given her name and title. ‘Doctor’ sounded altogether more convincing in this scrubland of Academe. But it got her nowhere.

‘We’re not aware that any of our pupils has medical needs,’ came the flat voice.

‘You mean, needs to see a doctor?’ she snapped back. ‘This is Detective Chief Superintendent Fran Harman of the Kent Constabulary, and I need to speak to the headmaster now.’

‘I thought you said you’re a doctor.’

‘I happen to be both a doctor and a police officer. Kindly open the door.’

‘Put your ID through that flap.’

‘My ID card never leaves my person.’ She could feel her blood pressure shinning up the little silvery column, waving as it went. After such atrocities as Dunblane and Wolverhampton, tight security was admirable, but this was taking it to absurd and discourteous heights.

Having at last penetrated the sacred portal, she now faced what appeared to be a bullet-proof Perspex screen, through which she had to speak to what was presumably the uncooperative woman who’d admitted her with such reluctance. The smell of new wood and paint was overwhelming.