‘Noakes and I called on Cheryl Palmer today, Liv.’ Markham’s deep baritone was hoarse.
The candid eyes regarded him expectantly.
‘You didn’t tell me there’d been an,’ he stumbled over his words, ‘an incident with a sixth former.’
The words felt like pincers, but somehow he got them out.
Olivia looked at him incredulously.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
Then the mist cleared. She sprang up from her chair, the unread book falling to the floor.
‘Ah, now I see it!’ she cried. ‘An incident with a sixth former!’ Her face was hard and set – something quite new in Markham’s experience of her – with a rigid animosity that made him recoil with a sensation close to fear.
‘I—’
‘You’re saying that I had an affair with a schoolboy. Well, what if I did? It’s none of your business. Are you now going to pry into my early life? I don’t suppose your life story is all good clean fun! You think—’
The hot blood rushed to her face before receding, leaving her deathly pale.
Markham felt wretchedly jarred. ‘In God’s name, Liv, what’s got into you? I never said—’
‘I suppose that bitch Cheryl set out to make mischief, and you believed all that she told you! Well, if you want to take the word of a malicious trouble-maker whose marriage has broken down, that’s your privilege. You can believe what you like.’
Olivia’s words were like the cut of a lash, her eyes dangerously bright as though lit by vindictive fire. She was in the grip of a rebellious anger that Markham had never seen before, almost as though she was reliving some long-buried scene from her past, from before he knew her. Had this happened before in another time and place? What other secrets had she kept from him? He felt a new rush of gall and wheeled round to the other side of the room, his mind struggling to take in these new impressions.
Pain rippled across Olivia’s face like the shadow of a sob. ‘Right,’ she cried, ‘I’ll leave you to your mean-minded speculation. Much good may it do you!’
Eluding his outstretched arm, she flung out of the room and the next minute he heard the key turn in their bedroom door.
Markham sank into the chair she had vacated, feeling with a clutch of despair at his heart that he had handled the whole scene disastrously. The faint scent of Olivia’s perfume only increased his torment.
He must have been sitting there a full quarter of an hour staring blankly before him when he heard Olivia emerge.
Moving swiftly into the hallway, he found her wrapped up in coat and scarf, a bulging tote bag on her shoulder.
‘Where are you going, Liv?’
‘It’s none of your business. You don’t own me.’
Something in his stricken face must have touched a chord.
‘I’m going to stay with Wendy for a bit. You and I … need a break from each other.’
Markham felt that he had too much to bear that day and his head fell.
When he looked up again, she was gone.
The door had barely closed behind Olivia when Markham’s mobile rang. It was Noakes with news that there had been a development.
Looking sadly round the apartment, which seemed already to bear a lonelier aspect, he instructed the DS to send a driver because his own car was at the station.
Then he steeled himself to return to the fray.
Hope was eerily quiet when Markham reached it some thirty minutes later. No sign of pupils, though it was not yet going-home time.
‘They’ve given the kids the afternoon for Enrichment,’ Noakes told him.
Yet more educational patois. ‘What’s that when it’s at home, Sergeant?’
Noakes grinned sheepishly. ‘Just means they’ve bussed ’em off to the Hoxton Sports Centre for extra PE.’
‘Good.’ Markham savoured the unexpected calm. ‘The more time they spend off-site the better right now.’
Burton looked up from a pile of paperwork. ‘It’s half term next week, sir, so they’re winding down anyway.’
Noakes scanned Markham’s face for any clue as to how it had gone with Olivia. The DI had his usual air of self-possession but, on closer observation, looked wiped out.
Markham slumped into the nearest chair and stared moodily across at the window, running a hand through his thick dark hair and trying to ignore the bitter, incessant murmur within him. Olivia, Olivia.
The DS read the runes. Trouble at Mill.
They’ve had a fight, he thought. An’ no making-up neither from the look on the guv’nor’s face.
Obscurely bothered, Noakes abandoned his half-finished bag of cheesy Wotsits, debating with himself how he could best discover the lie of the land. Something about the set of Markham’s mouth suggested that any enquiries were likely to be repelled.
Outside, blustery rain was still coming down in sheets, the bushes outside twisting and flailing violently as though in the grip of Saint Vitus Dance.
Suddenly Markham was jolted out of his lethargy. ‘What the hell!’
‘What is it, sir?’ Burton sprang to attention.
Markham was at the window in three swift strides.
Nothing.
‘I could have sworn there was someone out there just now. Watching us.’
‘Not when it’s pissing down!’ said Noakes, ‘That’s Hound of the Baskervilles, Guv!’
The DI forced a smile. The glimpse of hate-filled eyes locking onto his and lips contorted in a snarl was so fleeting that he could not be sure he hadn’t imagined it – hadn’t somehow conjured up the image of a voyeur, a shadow man stalking them from the sidelines, a fox watching the hunters. Yet he couldn’t shake the conviction that the killer was close at hand, adapting his steps to theirs with the stealthy precision of a subtly constructed reflex machine. He blanched at the thought, but then noticed Burton’s anxious scrutiny. Better pull himself together or the DC would go all mother hen on him. With consciousness of the earlier scene still sharp within him, he writhed under the idea of anyone pitying him.
The DS narrowed his eyes at Burton’s solicitous expression. What was it about the boss that made women come over all unnecessary? The silly cow was looking at Markham as if he’d come down from heaven. From the sly grin on Doyle’s face, he figured the lad had noticed it too.
Noakes was the unlikeliest of troubadours and could never have explained what it was about Olivia Mullen which compelled his tongue-tied devotion. She’s good for the guv’nor, was as far as his reasoning ever took him. But one thing was for sure. He wasn’t going to let some snot-nosed DC get between the boss and his girlfriend. If Burton needed setting straight, then he was the man to do it.
The DI was looking at him expectantly. Putting thoughts of knight-errantry to one side, Noakes hastened to update him.
‘A letter’s turned up, Guv. Looks like it was written by JP to Ashley. Typed, no signature, but it’s obvious that’s who it’s from.’ Noakes cleared his throat uncomfortably.
‘Come on, man, spit it out.’ Markham was peremptory.
‘Well …’ The DS looked hopefully at Burton and Doyle but neither of them came to his aid. ‘It was very lovey-dovey, Guv.’ Noakes blushed and appeared fascinated by his stubby finger tips.
‘I see,’ Markham replied patiently. ‘Explicit? Pornographic?’
Noakes turned a deeper shade of magenta, now fiddling with the buttons of his none-too-fresh shirt.
‘Nowt like that, Guv. Just said how much he, er, cared for Ashley an’ all about what he’d done for him … proper soppy till the end—’
‘That’s when he threatened to kill himself and Ashley too.’ Burton decided it was time to cut to the chase.
Noakes drew himself up and shot her a withering look.
‘I was just coming to that bit,’ he said huffily. ‘He said if Ashley ever two-timed him, he’d do for them both.’
Markham held out his hand.
‘Let’s see it then.’
‘Ms
Kavanagh’s got it, Guv,’ piped up Doyle.
Markham stared at them.
‘Why?’ His tone was several degrees below zero.
Noakes offered a deprecating smile. ‘The caretaker brought it to the Forensics lads earlier today. Said he found it when he was checking Ashley’s locker. We were looking at it when the Kavanagh crone swooped by on her broomstick.’
‘She said she needed to see if there were any implications from an HR point of view.’
Burton’s voice trailed off in the face of Markham’s stony displeasure, thunder and lightning gathering about his brow and eyes.
Bloody Kavanagh. And bloody Jim Snell. That locker should have been checked at the outset.
‘Right, Noakes, let’s pay Ms Kavanagh a visit, shall we?’
The other two did their best to look invisible as the DI stalked off with Noakes at his heels, but once the door had slammed behind them, Doyle let out a long whistle.
‘Phew, that was a close call! I wonder what’s eating him.’
Burton glanced at him repressively, but the young PC simply flashed her a good-natured grin, rumpling his ginger quiff until it stood on end like the quills of a porcupine.
‘Oh c’mon, Kate, lighten up. The guvnor looked like death warmed up. And if looks could kill …’ He winked expressively. ‘Trouble on the domestic front, I reckon.’
‘We don’t know that.’ Burton’s voice was cold.
‘Got to be. She’s older than him. Cloughie in Traffic saw them together the other day. He said—’
‘Aren’t you supposed to be checking out Hope’s finances?’ Despite an almost painful hunger to hear more about the woman who had stolen Markham’s heart, the DC was brisk.
Doyle rolled his eyes. ‘All right, all right, you win! I’m on it.’ Reluctantly, he turned his attention to the sheaf of papers in front of him.
A wistful shadow fell across Kate Burton’s face. Suppressing a sigh, she resumed her perusal of staff witness statements.
There was something up with the thermostat in Helen Kavanagh’s office. The room felt like a sauna, Markham thought irritably, as he registered the toasty ambience. As his feet sank into the thick pile of an expensive-looking aquamarine carpet and he noted the deputy head’s top-of-the-range workstation and country-house overstuffed armchairs, he felt more convinced than ever that Kavanagh had been feathering her own nest to the detriment of the school. While the staffroom possessed all the allure of a dilapidated rest home for the terminally bewildered, her quarters resembled a five-star hotel penthouse. No doubt Tracey Roach and the other serfs were detailed to provide room service on tap.
‘Welcome to my home from home, Inspector!’ Kavanagh cooed. Almost as if she had been able to read his thoughts, she added pointedly, ‘I would have settled for something utilitarian and no-frills, of course, but the dear governors wouldn’t hear of it. They positively insisted it should be nothing but the best for Hope’s officer corps!’
Markham was willing to bet Kavanagh hadn’t put up much resistance. No way was she going to slum it with the rank and file.
With a sudden pang, Markham recalled Olivia’s withering commentary. ‘Kavanagh’s such a champagne socialist!’ she had scoffed, her eyes emitting sparks. ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. JP’s another lord of the swill-bucket. Snouts in the trough, the pair of them!’
What if he had lost Olivia forever? The thought rushed through him in an agony of terror.
A polite cough recalled him to his surroundings.
Harry Mountfield came forward diffidently to meet him.
‘Harry’s the Staff Wellbeing Rep.’
Mountfield somehow managed not to look ironic. Markham and Noakes regarded him with sympathy as they were ushered towards three armchairs so vast and chintzy that they looked like giant anemones from a David Attenborough nature documentary.
‘I wondered if Harry could shed some light on JP’s …’ Kavanagh heaved a theatrical sigh, ‘inner torment.’ She swivelled to fix Mountfield with her beady, porcine gaze. Clearly, Palmer’s meltdown, along with the whiff of scandal about him, offered a boost to the deputy head’s own career prospects.
The head of religious studies looked somewhat askance at the deputy head’s penny dreadful mode of proceeding.
‘I think there was some special feeling between JP and Ashley,’ he said quietly. ‘You could see it in the way they looked at each other.’ A spasm of emotion – pity? disgust? – crossed his bluff features.
‘Might he have been jealous of Ashley’s affection for someone else? Jealous enough to kill?’ Markham asked tentatively.
Mountfield looked troubled. ‘Who can say what any of us is capable of, Inspector?’ He hesitated, visibly wrestling with himself. ‘If you’re asking me could JP have done it, then the answer’s yes. If you’re asking me did he do it …’ He threw up his arms helplessly. ‘And now Audrey …’
I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.
Markham heard Olivia’s clear, sweet voice in his inner ear. God, the pain was like a knife in his guts.
Back to the present and Helen Kavanagh, who was brandishing two sheets of typescript at him. Silently, he absorbed their contents before handing them to Noakes.
‘It doesn’t follow that Mr Palmer actually wrote the letter. If indeed it was a letter,’ he said.
‘But who … why…?’ Kavanagh did a passable impression of bewilderment, though Markham was sure she had already worked it out.
‘It would be easy enough for anyone who’d watched Ashley and the head together – stalked them, even – to produce such an account and then plant it in Ashley’s locker to which,’ here Markham shot a baleful glance at Noakes, ‘every Tom, Dick and Harry potentially had access. Jim Snell has a master set of locker keys, all labelled, so a thief could have done the business in minutes.’ Ignoring Kavanagh’s look of consternation, the DI continued remorselessly. ‘Or it might be that Mr Palmer confided his thoughts to paper as a private exercise – never intending Ashley to see what he had written – only for someone to use it after the murder to frame him.’
‘That’s a powerful hatred,’ murmured Mountfield.
‘Or love,’ countered the DI. ‘Two sides of the same coin, remember.’
The teacher turned his eyes on Markham with a melancholy, almost reproachful look quite at odds with his normal merry demeanour. Recalling that Mountfield was Olivia’s friend, Markham felt sadly as though he was hurting her anew.
Before Kavanagh had time to recover her equilibrium, Markham said firmly, ‘We’ll be speaking to Mr Palmer just as soon as he’s fit to be interviewed. In the meantime, I would ask you to keep this confidential.’ Some hope.
Out in the corridor, the DI instructed Noakes, ‘Chase up Doyle and the accounts. I’ve a hunch Kavanagh and maybe one or two others may have been lining their own pockets.’
‘D’you think this is about money, Guv?’
Markham shook his head. ‘No, Sergeant, I think it’s something so twisted and warped that God knows where it will take us.’ He felt sure, with an insistent sense of foreboding pressing down on him like an iron bar, that these murders did not spring from mammon. No, it was more the voice of Moloch that he heard hissing sibilantly in his ear. Vengeance is mine, I shall repay. But Vengeance against whom and for what?
As Noakes’s stocky form receded down the corridor, Markham was hit by a wave of exhaustion so strong that he reeled against the wall.
God, they were up against it with this case and no mistake. The team needed a break before the vultures of the press began circling in earnest. He shuddered at the thought of the lurid headlines. Top cop outed as lover of sexy suspect in school slayings. The fact that Olivia hadn’t even been on the premises at the time of Audrey’s murder would no doubt be conveniently overlooked in the quest for a juicy backstory. If that happened, DCI Sidney would jump all over them. They might as well forget nailing the k
iller and getting justice for the victims. Slimy Sid would join the conga behind Helen Kavanagh, Hope’s governors and Bromgrove LEA to ensure that neither the town’s flagship academy nor its police force was tarnished by any inconvenient scandals.
‘Ten to one, they’ll try to pin it on some local nutter, just like Kavanagh suggested,’ he muttered.
Again, the exhaustion hit him. He felt like a somnambulist, but there was no point going back to the Sweepstakes for some shut-eye. He couldn’t bear the thought of the apartment without Olivia.
Listlessly, he wondered what she would tell Wendy about their quarrel. Of course, her friend would take Olivia’s side and regard him as a shit of the first water.
But, dammit, he hadn’t been such a brute, had he? What was he supposed to think when Cheryl Palmer sprang that story on him? He had thought there were no secrets between himself and Olivia, but she hadn’t thought it worth her while to share those details of her personal history with him despite roaming far and wide on other aspects of Hope.
Suddenly the voice of conscience seemed to whisper in his ear.
Olivia’s implicit trust in the integrity of her own behaviour, together with her faith in him, was such that she could never have anticipated his jealous reaction.
Jealousy. For that is what it was. The thought of his lover having ever been involved with another man was like imagining that someone else had breathed on the crystal that he wanted to keep untouched and unclouded.
By what right had he challenged her behaviour when she had never probed his past – had never attempted to unseal the trauma that he carried from his abusive childhood?
Self-disgust surged like venom through his system. What wouldn’t he give to speak to her now. The scene in their apartment would have a very different ending.
Markham began to pace up and down the corridor with the restlessness of a wild animal that sensed its prey near at hand.
The killer was close by, he could feel it.
Unless he moved quickly, tragedy would strike again!
9. Fear and Loathing
THE CAR PARK OF Our Lady of the Angels was overflowing when Noakes and Markham arrived the following morning for the Requiem Mass of Ashley Dean.
Detective Markham Mysteries Box Set Page 31