A Narrow Return

by Faith Martin

  ‘You must be glad to be out of it,’ Dave finally said, draining his second glass of beer, and waving off Fred’s attempt at giving him a third. ‘Driving,’ Dave said and laughed. ‘Wouldn’t do to get nicked for driving over the limit by one of my lot. And there’s one or two sods who’d be only too glad to do it, too.’

  ‘Nah, never,’ Will said laughing. ‘You’re universally loved and admired, you.’

  ‘Buggered if I ain’t,’ the traffic man said. Then he glanced curiously at Andy. ‘Still, I’m not the only one who has to watch his back, eh, Andy?’

  Andy blinked. ‘Huh?’ Unlike Dave, he’d walked to the pub, and was well into his third pint.

  ‘You know. CRT.’

  ‘Huh?’ he said again. The CRT unit had been set up only after he’d gone, and he had no idea what Dave was getting at.

  ‘They’ve only gone and reopened one of yours, haven’t they?’ Dave said, who was well up on the current gossip at the station. ‘Given it to Hillary Greene, no less.’

  Andy may have been retired for some time, but even he knew of Hillary Greene.

  ‘I heard she’d retired too,’ he said, puzzled.

  ‘She had. But she’s working for CRT now as a consultant. And Superintendent Crayle gave her one of your cases to start her off with.’

  ‘Which one?’ Andy asked quickly.

  ‘That housewife and mum who got it in her own kitchen. Bashed over the head,’ Dave snapped his fingers in an effort to remember the name.

  ‘Anne McRae,’ the retired man supplied it quietly.

  Andy had no trouble at all in remembering her name. He might not have had quite as good a solve rate as Hillary Greene enjoyed, but he didn’t have that many failures either. So those few that had defeated him lingered on in his memory.

  And few plagued him with more regrets than Anne McRae. A pretty young woman, and a mother of three kids, he’d badly wanted to give her justice. But that sister of hers had just been too damned lucky. No matter how hard he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to bring it home to her.

  ‘So, Hillary Greene’s reviewing the McRae case,’ Andy said slowly.

  ‘Rather you than me, mate,’ Dave said, slapping him on the back in commiseration. ‘They say that Commander Donleavy reckons she can solve anything. It’ll mean a bit of egg on your face, though, won’t it, if she gets a result after all this time.’

  Jimmy Jessop grinned in triumph and quickly scribbled on his pad. He had the phone pressed against his right ear, his shoulder hunched up to keep it in place, and was rifling through the file in search of his notes from that morning. Although he could use a computer, he still preferred the feel of paper.

  ‘Right. And you say he’s still doing the same round?’ He listened to the voice on the other end of the line, and chipped in with the occasional ‘huh huh’ and ‘right’, before finally managing to get off the line.

  He went straight through to Hillary’s office. She was sitting at her desk munching on a banana, which was making do as her lunch.

  ‘Guv, I’ve tracked down Diane Burgess. Well, actually, to be more accurate, I’ve tracked down her husband, Mark. And you’ll never guess what he does for a living.’

  Hillary swallowed a mouthful of banana, and said cheerfully, ‘In that case, Jimmy, you’d better tell me.’

  ‘He does a butcher’s round. You know, in a van. I was just talking to his boss, who owns a chain of butchers’ shops. Apparently, Mark Burgess has been doing the same round for near enough the past twenty-five years. And guess what village he goes through, regular as clockwork, every Thursday afternoon?’

  Hillary smiled. ‘Chesterton?’

  ‘Right. Which means he would have been doing so twenty years ago. You reckon our vic used to buy her steak and kidney off him?’

  ‘And more than that, if his wife is to be believed,’ Hillary said dryly. ‘You got an address for them?’

  ‘Yes, guv. But there’s no one answering the phone at the residence.’

  ‘Hmm. You got details of his round?’

  Jimmy grinned. ‘Yes, guv. His boss was just giving me a right earful about him. A bit of a character it seems. I’ve got his schedule right here.’

  He handed over his hastily scribbled list and Hillary looked at it and checked her watch.

  ‘Hmm. He’s due in Souldern in an hour,’ she mentioned a small village not far from the border with Northamptonshire. ‘What say we go over there and see for ourselves just how lean his minced beef is?’

  Jimmy grinned.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Souldern was a small village nestled at the northern end of the Cherwell Valley, and at just gone three o’clock in the afternoon in the middle of the week, it seemed, like most traditional villages nowadays, all but deserted. With the majority of its residents away at work, it had an eerily abandoned air, and could almost have been the setting for some post-apocalyptic film noir.

  But a fitful sun was trying to shine through the clouds, and innocuously cheerful birdsong filled the air. And when Hillary stepped from Jimmy’s car, the only thing on her mind was the more prosaic need to go second-hand car shopping at the weekend. She couldn’t keep relying on being chauffeur driven by her right-hand man.

  In the centre of the village was a small pond, at the moment bereft of ducks, and parked up beside it was a white butcher’s van, with the back doors standing open. Two middle-aged women were standing between the doors, chatting and laughing with a tall, well-built man with salt-and-pepper hair and a wide, handsome but somewhat florid face. He was well over six feet and just running to seed, but so far the muscle was still winning out over the flab.

  ‘That would be our Lothario then,’ Jimmy said cheerfully beside her, and Hillary nodded.

  ‘We’ll wait until he’s got rid of his customers,’ she said, and then rued that decision as the trio spent the next good ten minutes indulging in mutual flirting and banter. Eventually, however, the two women moved away and Hillary and Jimmy approached the van, both of them with their IDs at the ready.

  ‘Mr Burgess?’ Hillary asked pleasantly.

  Mark Burgess had his back to them, and visibly jumped at the unfamiliar voice coming from just over his left shoulder. He swung around, a silver weighing pan still in his hand. Beside her, she felt Jimmy tense, then relax, as the butcher smiled and hastily put the pan down.

  Hillary noted the old soldier’s still-good reflexes, and felt reassured. Not that she’d expected any trouble, of course, but it was good to know that with Jimmy along, she could rely on his back-up. Now that she was no longer a fully fledged DI, and didn’t have sturdy constables at her beck and call whenever she might need one, it was good to know that Jimmy had his wits about him. She’d taken a few self-defence courses herself, and between the two of them, she was confident that they could cope with almost anything that her new job at the CRT might throw her way.

  ‘Yes, luv, what can I get you? Got on offer on best British steak at the moment.’

  Hillary held up her ID.

  ‘We’re with the Thames Valley Police Service, sir,’ she smiled briefly. ‘But I might be interested in some of that steak anyway.’

  Burgess looked surprised. ‘Police? What’s up? Been some burglaries about, have there? You know, come to think of it, I did hear about that from one of my customers over Fritwell way. But I’ve had this round for donkey’s years, luv you can check. There’s nothing dodgy about me.’

  Hillary put her ID away in her bag. ‘We’d like to talk to you about the Anne McRae murder case, Mr Burgess,’ she said, still pleasantly, but getting straight to the point.

  ‘Bloody hell, that was, what, twenty years ago now. At least.’

  His red-complexioned face went a shade paler, and his eyes, a pale shade of grey, swivelled from Hillary to Jimmy and then back again. He was obviously expecting the male in the team to take the lead, but Jimmy merely looked back at him mutely, giving him no help.

  ‘I understand she was a customer of yours, sir
, back in the day?’ Hillary asked firmly, again giving him a brief smile when he reluctantly turned his eyes her way again.

  Hillary had dealt with men like this before. He liked his women kept firmly in one category – sexual availability. She would have bet her last pay cheque that this man was a serial philanderer who needed easy sexual conquests to bolster up a chronic lack of self-esteem. Perhaps he felt professionally thwarted; that running a butcher’s van was a job for a butcher’s boy, and thus needed to prove his masculinity in other ways. She wasn’t a shrink, and didn’t much care, but it was clear that, to Mark Burgess, any woman in a position of authority would automatically be a threat to him.

  And it made her wonder. Had Anne McRae threatened his self-image in some way? From what she’d learned of their murder victim so far, she was a strong-willed woman, and used to getting her own way. She could well see how two narcissistic personalities might clash, with potentially fatal consequences.

  ‘Well, yeah, she bought off me regular, like. I was well shocked, I can tell you, when I heard that someone had killed her,’ Burgess confirmed warily. ‘Why are you digging all that up again now anyway?’

  ‘We periodically review old cases, sir,’ Hillary said blandly. ‘What can you tell me about her?’

  The older man’s eyes went back to Jimmy again, but the wily Jimmy Jessop was ostensibly studying a robin, which was singing its heart out in a just-greening weeping willow at the side of the pond.

  ‘Well, she liked her lamb and pork. Bought a lot of chicken too, not so much beef or offal though,’ Burgess said, being, Hillary was sure, deliberately obtuse.

  Wearily, she smiled again. Smart alecs gave her a pain in the backside. ‘I wasn’t thinking so much of her dietary habits, sir, as her personal life. You and she were close, weren’t you?’ she added casually.

  Burgess shifted from one foot to the other. ‘Huh? What do you mean?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘I mean that we have it on good authority that you and Anne McRae were on intimate terms, sir,’ she persisted doggedly.

  ‘Hey, you can’t go around saying things like that! I mean, it’s libellous.’

  ‘Slanderous sir,’ Hillary corrected him mildly. ‘Libel refers to written material. Slander is verbal.’

  ‘I don’t want a bloody grammar lesson,’ the discomfited butcher said, rather loudly, then glanced nervously around the deserted streets. ‘Who’s been telling lies then?’

  Hillary cocked her head slightly to one side, allowing herself to look slightly incredulous. ‘Are you going to deny it then, sir?’ she asked, her voice slightly raised in disbelief.

  As she knew it would, her amused surprise instantly made Burgess feel acutely unnerved and full of self-doubt. She could almost hear his mind working, trying to pick out where the pitfalls were. Was he being stupid? Would any other man simply boast about it and make out it was nothing, having been caught out doing the horizontal tango with some bird who later got murdered? Or should he already be denying it, and threatening to bring in his solicitor?

  ‘Well, I … What does it matter now anyway?’ he temporized. ‘It was all so long ago.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Perhaps you can tell me about her. Were you her only bit on the side?’ Hillary asked, letting the amusement grow. Then she shook her head. ‘Oh no, sorry, of course you weren’t. DI Squires, the SIO – sorry, that’s senior investigating officer – at the time established that Anne was also having an affair with her own brother-in-law, wasn’t she?’ Hillary continued blithely, thus lumping the butcher into being one of a crowd. And a not particularly discriminating crowd at that. His ego wouldn’t like that, she was sure.

  ‘Here, you’re making her sound like a right slag. But she wasn’t like that, Anne wasn’t. She was class. A real beauty, and everything,’ Burgess said defensively, his voice level once again rising. His point being, of course, that he was to be commended on his choice. And, naturally, to point out that he had his pick of beautiful, classy women.

  Jimmy watched the robin fly away and then turned back to looking at Burgess, his face bland. He had to hand it to the guv – she’d already got him worked up good and proper. Now maybe they’d hear something interesting.

  ‘Oh, so you were in love with her?’ Hillary asked softly. ‘It wasn’t casual. Were you going to leave your wife for her then, sir?’

  ‘What? No, course I wasn’t. I’m a happily married man, me. Nearly thirty years now,’ Burgess contradicted.

  ‘But not so happily married that you’re above extra-marital affairs? Come on sir, you can’t have it both ways. Do you make a habit of sleeping around?’

  ‘No of course not!’ Burgess lied huffily.

  ‘So Anne McRae was special then, was she? Did you find out about Shane Gregg? Did that upset you, is that it?’ she pressed him hard now.

  ‘What, who?’

  ‘Her other paramour, Mr Burgess. Did it dent your ego to find out that you weren’t the only one? Did you quarrel with her? Perhaps things got out of hand. That can easily happen. The rolling pin was just lying there, to hand, and you picked it up and swung it before you even knew what was happening. Is that how it happened?’

  Burgess staggered back, and sat down heavily on a tray of chicken fillets, lying in the back of the van. His face was now ashen.

  ‘You’re trying to say I did it?’ he squeaked, looking frantically to Jimmy, as if hoping he would deny it. ‘Me?’

  He looked so astounded, his voice so comically squeaky, that Hillary felt the urge to laugh. She squashed it ruthlessly.

  ‘Someone killed her, Mr Burgess,’ Hillary pointed out calmly. ‘And at the time of her murder, you and she were having an affair, and yet you never came forward. You must have followed the case in the local papers, you must have seen and heard the many appeals for witnesses and information broadcast on the radio and the local news stations. Yet you never came forward. That makes us wonder why, you see. It makes us ask the question, “What is he trying to hide?” You can understand that, surely?’

  Burgess ran a shaking hand across his mouth.

  ‘I’m not hiding nothing – honest! I just didn’t come forward because, well, I just didn’t have any information, see? I didn’t know who killed her. I still don’t.’

  ‘What were you doing on the afternoon that Anne McRae died, Mr Burgess?’

  ‘Eh? Well, I must have been working, mustn’t I. Doing my rounds like, as I always do.’

  ‘I need you to be a bit more specific than that, sir.’

  ‘How can I be? It was twenty years ago, for pity’s sake!’

  Hillary smiled grimly. ‘Come now, sir, that won’t do. By your own admission you were having an affair with her. When you heard about her death you must have been shocked. Surprised. Stunned, even.’

  ‘Of course I was. I said so, didn’t I?’ Burgess said edgily.

  ‘And you must have followed the case keenly. Read all the newspaper reports, listened to the local gossip, all of that?’

  ‘Well, that’s only natural isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it is, sir,’ Hillary said smoothly. ‘It’s only human nature. It’s also human nature to think about what it must have been like for her. To imagine her in her kitchen, cooking her family’s tea, maybe hearing the doorbell go, and perhaps letting someone in.’

  ‘I don’t have much imagination, not like that,’ Burgess denied flatly. ‘Besides, I didn’t like to dwell on it. On stuff like that, I mean. It makes me feel sick.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘But the day she died must have burned itself onto your memory, sir,’ she carried on, not about to let it go. ‘You must have seen that her time of death had been put at between 2.30 and 3.30, on the afternoon of 6 June. When you heard that you must have wondered just what it was that you were doing at that time. Everybody does that, sir. You know how Americans say that they know exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about Kennedy getting shot? Are you really telling me you didn’t do the same when you heard about
the death of your lover?’

  Once again, Hillary allowed herself to sound incredulous.

  Burgess flushed, sensing reproof, and responding to it like Pavlov’s dog. ‘Course I did.’

  ‘So where were you?’

  ‘In Wendlebury. That day, that time, I’d have been in Wendlebury. One of my regular villages.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘So you were working. Can you remember the names of the customers you served that day?’

  ‘Now you’re taking the piss,’ Burgess said, with a flash of defiance. ‘Course I don’t. How could I remember that? Nobody would.’

  His eyes moved away from her, but this time didn’t seek help with Jimmy. Instead, his eyes settled on a group of daffodils by the pond. His lips tightened, and she knew what that meant. He’d made up his mind not to talk.

  Hillary sighed. He was lying to her, of that she had no doubt. But it would be useless to press him on it now. Instead, she changed tack.

  ‘So, what was Anne like? How did you and she get started?’

  Burgess took his eyes from the daffodils and thought about it for a second or two. ‘Well, she had regular orders, like, and after a bit, I got to know the sort of cuts she’d like best and I’d put them aside for her, so that she didn’t need to come to the van to choose them for herself. So after I’d finished serving from the van, I’d take the meat to her door. She started offering me cold drinks in the summer, and then, well, you know. It went on from there. There was no harm in it. That husband of hers was always away on that bloody coach of his, living the high life in Europe and what have you. And she was bored there on her own, what with the kids in school and nothing to do all day. It was just a bit of harmless fun. We never hurt or bothered anybody.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘And did she ever tell you about any of her worries?’

  ‘Huh? No, she didn’t have any. I mean, what worries could she have?’ Burgess sounded genuinely surprised. ‘It’s us men who have to work, and pay the bills and fix the gutters and what have you. What do women have to do but a bit of housework and take care of the kids when they’re little?’