‘Well, that would be nice. Thank you very much,’ she said, ignoring Wilson’s scowl and muttered ‘Hey!’ as she took the drink he handed to her. What did the man think – that he’d bought her along with the drink?
They had just taken their seats at a table when a woman came in. She was slim and slight, and pretty in a sharp-featured way with a dark ponytail. She was looking round and then saw Jackson.
‘Hi Jas,’ she said. ‘Thought you’d be here. You coming home for supper tonight?’
He looked at her coldly. ‘Let me think, Kayleigh. Chef cooking three courses with free booze – going home to fish fingers that you’ll probably burn anyway? Tough choice.’
Kayleigh coloured, but held her ground. ‘If you’re not coming home, can you give me some money now? Danny needs new trainers and I’m skint.’
Wilson stopped glaring at Sascha. ‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘Jason’s girlfriend, right?’
She barely glanced at him, her attention focused on Jackson who was fishing in his pocket with bad grace.
Wilson tried again, stepping closer. ‘You work for Anna Harper, don’t you? What’s she like?’
Sascha had been listening but Sansom had been looking at the menu. His attention caught, he turned to look over his shoulder.
Kayleigh’s eyes flicked briefly to Wilson’s face. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Jason—’
Jackson had stopped hunting for his wallet. He was looking at her as if he’d never noticed her before and then he said, ‘Come on, I’ll walk you home.’ He finished his pint and put down the glass then ushered her out.
Wilson, abandoned, finished his own drink and with a resentful glance at Sascha left the pub. Sascha and Sansom looked at each other and then laughed.
‘Quite a little vignette there,’ Sansom said.
‘Oh, I love pubs! All human life is here.’
‘Is that where you get your ideas? I’m sure there’s a story there.’
‘Definitely. I’m just mentally writing the dialogue as Jason and his lady go off home. He’s definitely the bad guy. After about twenty pages a decent guy would come along and by the end of the book she’d have dumped Jason and been set up for happy ever after with the new one. His book would totally bomb as well. The nice thing about writing is you can make people pay for their sins.’
Sansom was amused. ‘I can see that must be very gratifying.’
The drinks arrived. She held up her glass, saying ‘Slainte!’ and gave him a long look under her eyelashes. ‘But it’s not what I want to do, really. It’s shallow. I’ve been given a talent for writing and I want to write the sort of book that changes people’s lives, like Anna Harper has.’
‘A tall order.’
‘Yes. But I’m sure she could help me, inspire me. I just need to catch her attention. You know her. Tell me all about her.’
‘You can’t expect me to dish the dirt on her, you know,’ he warned.
‘There’s dirt?’ Sascha said brightly. ‘I’ve always had the impression she’s squeaky clean.’
For a moment she thought he was tempted. But he only laughed and said, ‘Is it the smoked salmon? I’ll go across and order it.’
Sascha settled back in her chair. She hadn’t got much out of him yet, but the evening was young.
‘There’s a problem in Halliburgh,’ DCI Strang said to DCS Borthwick on Sunday morning. He hadn’t been sure she would be in, but she was frowning over a pile of files on her desk as she scribbled on a comment; now she put down her pen and looked up at him.
‘Why does no one ever come in and say there isn’t a problem somewhere?’ she asked with a sigh. ‘That’s a rhetorical question. So, what sort of problem? The sort we can handle or the sort that’s going to be on the front page of the tabloids tomorrow?’
‘Hope not. It’s under wraps at the moment, but if it came out it would go big. I had a long talk with Kate Graham yesterday.’
‘She was the one you remembered, then?’
‘Yes. I was surprised she was still a constable because she was considered one of the high-flyers. She’s had family problems – mother ill then died, father needing care – so she’s stuck in the family home. It was lucky I talked to her. She’s been very worried about what’s going on in Halliburgh. Do you know anything about DI Steve Hammond?’
Borthwick shook her head. ‘What’s he been doing?’
He repeated what Kate had told him and Borthwick’s expression grew more and more grim.
‘So hard to handle,’ she said. ‘We can’t just dump the woman in it, so we’d have to have some excuse to investigate. If they’re up to all that there’ll be more going on than even she knows about.’
‘Something struck me at the conference. I think Kate was the only officer on the list who wasn’t CID. There were quite a number of inspectors, in fact – a couple of them were speaking about their own local problems. I sort of assumed that the reason Halliburgh had sent low-level representation was that they had no particular problem. But after what she said about him, I suspect he’s the kind that’s not too keen on finding that something’s less than perfect on his patch.’
‘That’s all we need,’ Borthwick said. ‘We’ll have to think about it and hope to come up with something. Can I leave it with you?’
‘Actually,’ Strang said, ‘I thought about it a lot last night and I have an idea.’
Borthwick brightened. ‘I like it when you say you have an idea. Tell.’
Strang explained and she listened intently. ‘I could certainly swing that. Everyone’s short of staff. Have you someone in mind?’
He told her and she laughed. ‘Well, well, Kelso. Come round to my way of thinking, have you?’
‘It’s always wise, boss,’ he said. But he was smiling too.
It was a grey day even for late February in Edinburgh, heavily overcast, and a few flakes of snow were drifting down past the windows of the Fettes Avenue police station. Depressing stuff, and DC Livvy Murray always hated to be assigned to Sunday duty anyway, but she’d made the best of it by finding a desk in the farther corner of the CID room, a large filing cabinet shielding her from the line of sight of anyone opening the door to find a constable who could be saved from the mischief Satan found for idle hands to do. She’d never have got away with it with her former sarge, an eagle-eyed and grizzled veteran, but his successor was still wet behind the ears.
She needed all the free time she could snatch if she wasn’t going to have to miss out on a social life altogether. She was working for her sergeant’s exams and it was tough, really tough. She’d bunked off too often at school to have acquired any habit of studying and she could think of a few teachers who’d get a good laugh out of seeing her now, with her face screwed up and muttering under her breath as she tried to persuade the facts to stay in her head. She had the nasty feeling that there wasn’t anything between her ears to stop them going in one and straight out through the other.
She heard the door open, but didn’t bend forward to see who it was. A couple of detectives were working at other terminals and they’d be spotted first if there was some random task to be allocated. Then she heard Angie Andrews’ voice saying, ‘Hi! Anyone seen Livvy Murray?’
She was hoping the others might not have registered that she was there but when one said, ‘Oh yes, she’s—’ she leant forward into view hastily, as if she’d been going to answer all along.
‘Hi, Angie. Something you want?’
Angie, the Force Civilian Assistant allocated to the Serious Rural Crime Squad for admin, made her way across. ‘Skulking, are you?’
‘Hard at work,’ Murray said with perfect, if misleading, truthfulness. ‘Ooh, like the hair!’
Angie was sporting a new hair colour, a sort of deep mahogany that was only a shade away from purple. ‘I really fancied magenta but I compromised. Not sure the DCI was taken with it, even so. Gave me a bit of an odd look, but since #MeToo we’ve got them too scared even to raise an eyebrow. Anyway, he wants to see yo
u.’
‘Oh, right!’ She got up with some alacrity. ‘Something on?’
‘Not as far as I know. He’s in his office.’
Murray followed her out. She’d hardly set eyes on Strang since the case in Caithness; ordinarily their paths didn’t cross. CID at Fettes Avenue was a big department and with Strang’s SRCS job he was quite often away in any case.
She was feeling more settled in Edinburgh now and she’d found a few party-minded mates. She still missed her native Glasgow with its cheerful friendliness – no one in Edinburgh ever asked, ‘Are you all right, hen?’ if you were looking a bit down – but the pull to get back had diminished since her schoolfriends had started having kids and babysitters that meant the evening had to stop at eleven, eleven-thirty if they were going completely wild, and they were all falling asleep into their drinks anyway. With the Glasgow force, too, she had previous, while here she was starting to get a bit of respect.
Like any daily job, though, it wasn’t exciting. The two investigations she’d been on with Strang had left her with an addiction to the rush of adrenaline that came with high-profile cases. If he was sending for her, could it be another major one? He’d seemed relatively pleased with her last time, apart from a few occasions when she’d overstepped the mark, and it would be a real feather in her cap if he actually wanted to work with her again. When she worked with him she learnt a lot, and Murray had ambitions.
Certainly he greeted her warmly enough. ‘Good to see you, Livvy! How’s it going?’
She’d never been in his office before. If you were into cat-swinging it would present a serious problem and the chair she sat down on was so near the desk that she had to sit sideways.
‘Fine thanks, sir. I’m just starting to work towards my sergeant’s exams.’
‘Glad to hear it. Are you managing to find time for your studies? It’s hard to settle in to work again when you come home from a long shift.’
‘It certainly is,’ Murray said without a blush. There was a pile of papers on his desk and she tried discreetly to read the top one upside down for a clue about what might be going on, but the heading ‘Crime and Justice Statistics’ didn’t look promising.
‘I think I might have a job for you,’ Strang said. ‘It would be highly confidential, with a lot of working on your own in quite a tricky situation.’
To her surprise, she felt a bit of a pang at the thought that they wouldn’t be working together but it sounded like an interesting assignment. ‘Undercover work, sir?’
He laughed. ‘I hadn’t really thought of it in those terms but yes, I suppose it is. Would you be up for that?’
‘Absolutely, boss,’ she said with a beaming smile. ‘Where would it be?’
‘The Borders. A place called Halliburgh – do you know it?’ She shook her head and he went on, ‘The thing is, you’d be undercover in the police force. We have reason to believe that there are some problems there. I’m going to give you the details, but I’m not going to tell you who supplied them. There’s a lot at stake.’
‘Is it an officer?’
‘Yes, and the position they’re in means they can’t afford to be a whistle-blower. I’ll be relying on you to gather evidence that lets us take action. The super is very keen to root it out before there’s some sort of scandal.’
Murray listened carefully while he told her what she needed to know. On the face of it, it didn’t sound as if it would be hard to blend in. Rural CIDs were notoriously understaffed and with all the fuss there was at the moment about county lines, they wouldn’t be surprised if they were allocated extra manpower. Or even woman power.
‘So what am I tasked to do, sir?’
‘Well, I hesitate to say this, Livvy, but you’ll have to use your initiative.’
She grinned. ‘Never thought I’d live to hear you say that, boss.’
‘Within reason,’ he said, showing definite signs of alarm. ‘Keep it low-key, remember. At the moment we’re only talking about fairly low-level corruption and for that all you have to do is keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut and log everything. But there are one or two things that suggest they may be turning a blind eye to the drugs situation to keep their slate clean so don’t go stirring up that particular hornet’s nest. A murdered DC might be convincing evidence that there was a serious problem, but it seems to me rather too high a price to pay.’
‘Can’t argue with that. Will I need to stay there, boss?’
‘I don’t think so. It’s just a little over an hour’s drive and I can allocate you a car. Weather’s the only problem and they’re muttering about a nasty system coming in, but we can arrange that you stay there if it comes to that.’
‘That’s fine. When do I start?’
‘I’m sending out a general email to the Borders forces as a follow-up to the conference, saying extra manpower is being allocated and the super has just spoken to the Borders District Commander who actually suggested Halliburgh off his own bat – he thinks he has a hotshot DI there who might make a difference with a bit more backup. Ironic, really.
‘So I’ll sort out the formal side so you can pick up a car tomorrow and get down there on Tuesday. They’ll have been in direct touch with Hammond by then. I think that’s all. Good luck! I’m on the end of a phone, remember.’ He paused. ‘Have you any special assignments today?’
‘Not at the moment, sir.’
‘Well, tell your sergeant I’ve approved letting you off your shift since you’ll be having a long commute for the next while. You can use the extra time for studying.’
He had kept his face straight but she had a feeling that he knew perfectly well that the minute she left the room she’d be on the phone to see what she could arrange as a farewell if she might be going to get stuck out there in the sticks.
‘I’m taking you up to Highfield,’ Davy Armstrong said as he drove Cassie Trentham away from her cottage. ‘Your mum wants to have a word.’
‘Davy!’ Cassie was outraged. ‘I have a job, remember? I agreed to be driven to and fro but I never agreed to being transported anywhere on my mother’s orders. Just stop when you reach the Foundation and let me out and then you can go and tell my mother that she can reach me in the normal way, by telephone, and we can make a mutually satisfactory arrangement. I’m all grown-up now – Davy!’
She gave a shriek of annoyance as the car swept smoothly on downhill into the town and past the Foundation. Davy gave her an apologetic glance.
‘I know, I know. You’re all like that when you get a wee bit older. You don’t think you’re a child any more, but you have to remember that your mum thinks you are and she’s worried about you. I know what my Elspeth would be like. What does it cost you to let her see with her own eyes that you’re all right? It’ll not take long and I’ll be waiting to whisk you back whenever you’re ready.’
‘I’m ready right now,’ Cassie muttered but there was no point in arguing about her mother’s sensibilities. Inspector Hammond hadn’t denied that it was Anna who’d reported her accident and that was characteristic: when her children had a problem Anna’s reaction had always been to call in appropriate experts – even if, in Felix’s case, they’d been worse than useless. She accepted that Anna would want to know that her daughter was all right, but it was hard to believe that she was feeling maternal enough to want the reassurance of seeing her. Elspeth Armstrong she wasn’t.
When the car stopped in front of Highfield’s door, Cassie got out saying witheringly, ‘You’ll notice I’m not saying thank you, Davy,’ but he only laughed.
The alarm was usually off at this time of day, but she had to punch in the code to open the door. There was a woman crossing the hall who looked startled as Cassie came in.
Cassie didn’t recognise her – fairly new, probably. With Marta’s demanding standards, cleaners tended to come and go. ‘Morning!’ she said. ‘Do you know where my mother is?’
It was clear that the cleaner hadn’t known who she was either. She said
, a little hesitantly, ‘I haven’t seen anyone, but I’ve cleared the breakfast.’
‘Probably the study, then. Thanks.’
Cassie walked through the hall, and under the gallery, to reach Anna’s study and opened the door.
The two women were sitting by the fire. ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Anna, her hand going to her throat, and Marta jumped visibly. ‘Good gracious, you gave me a fright!’
‘Who did you think it was? You sent for me, after all. Did you expect me to ring the bell and wait?’
‘No, no of course not,’ Marta said. ‘This is always your home, cara, you know that.’
‘I have a home, Marta. My own cottage. Burnside – remember? And I have a job, Mother, and I don’t appreciate being forced to come here instead of doing it.’
Anna said tartly, ‘Oh, don’t be silly. I don’t believe for a moment that Davy actually strong-armed you though the door. Come and sit down. Do you want some coffee?’ She indicated the Nespresso machine in the corner of the room.
‘No thank you.’ Cassie sat down. Her mother had seen her now, if that truly was what she wanted, but she didn’t seem much interested in the scar and the bruising. On the other hand, when she looked at Anna, and Marta too, there were more visible signs of stress than she’d ever seen before – heavy eyes, and dark circles underneath. There was a little bloody line on Marta’s lip that looked as if she’d been biting at it. Perhaps she’d been too quick to judge her mother for showing so little emotion about Felix. Emoting had never been Anna’s style.
‘So – why did you want to see me?’
‘I’m sure Davy explained that I’d be happier if you came and stayed here, just for a bit. I know you turned it down, but I—’
‘Why?’
The two women exchanged glances. Marta spoke first. ‘The weather, Cassie. It worries your mother. You would be safer here.’
Surely that was nonsense. This morning she’d managed to shake off the worries of the previous night but now the bad feeling was creeping back. ‘Look, I’ve agreed to let Davy drive me, so I don’t see what the weather has to do with it. And I take it that it was you who told the inspector about what happened? Richard Sansom told you, I suppose.’
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