Bitter Pastoral_A DCI Caleb Cade Crime Thriller of rural Ancaster County.

by John R Goddard

  “A bank, the masters of the universe. Want us checking, testing, improving their cyber security.”

  I nod, I know what he is about to say, “The D'Eysncourte Bank?”

  His turn to nod in disappointment and say brightly, “It shows we are worrying them, surely? Trying to get me in their tent?”

  My shake of the head is heavy along with my tone, “It shows they know about you, being here, helping me - how? It shows they know how to throw a spoiler.”

  I soften, “Are you going to take it?”

  Jerry’s optimism is lessened, “Lucre and insight, it gets us in, but it depends upon you?”

  He outlines the conditions: a large fee, tripling of his work force, a three-year contract, to begin immediately by meeting the Senior Vice President Hakluyt in America as soon as possible, continue to visit other officials in China thereafter, and then implement a devised strategy world-wide.

  He finishes, “Designed to put me out of the Ancaster game immediately I know. But we must be doing something that worries them surely.”

  I agree. Perhaps he and Daniel are right and something major lurks here, linking the five burglaries and the dead woman and my mother. I cannot see it but am sure it will be minor and local. We argue then.

  I do not want him to accept the contract. Why? A conviction that it is a dead end, a red herring. Certainty also that we are not equipped to even irritate such adversaries as this, especially without cause. They have wealth, ex-spooks, muscle, power, influence beyond measure. Even if it did turn out by some remote chance to be some dastardly conspiracy against a simple country copper, I explain, then the problem, the risks should be mine, not his.

  Jerry is dismissive, “You, Grace, Bess are my family, anyone harms you they harm me. I could find out things we can never know otherwise and can use. I told them I will think about it.”

  I know. His mind is already made up.

  Saturday

  63

  Cottage alarmed, gates shut and bolted, CCTV set to record, I drive forty miles east out of the county onto the A1 road south before dawn slowly seeps out of the darkness. Skirls of white cloud skip across a light blue sky as winter’s icy grip slips behind me for the first time in a week.

  The ancient saying goes that “Locals die a little whenever we leave Ancaster County.’ I feel elated, the weather is finer, the world coloured brighter, the woman who I pay for petrol even smiles at me.

  We had no unwanted visitors overnight. Whittle and Fenwick are clear of suspicion. Jerry and I slipped out before dawn. He woke me gently as I thrashed around in the dregs of my nightmare, before showering, as ever shaving with an imaginary Grace by my side and suiting up.

  As I journey, magical Cambridge memories instantly project in sepia. There Bess and I met again at twenty by pure chance after being parted aged eight. We fell in love if we ever were not so. Enjoyed our final University year together, a whirl in my mind of riverside pubs and cafes, studying together in rooms and libraries, formal dinners in our candle lit medieval college halls. A blaze of music, cinema, debating events, jazz by the sauntering river, May Week festivals and bedazzling College summer balls, and even my desultory attempts at punting before she took over far more efficiently to embarrass me.

  Regular visitors once, I have never been back to the city since I lost her. Despite my excitement now it may be a savage mistake. Many a street, building, college nook and cranny will pierce me with past joy and present grief, emotions etched on my mind like the carved sculptures of imps, religious and political lore that will be all around.

  We married here soon after graduation. It is the city where my own mother and father met and married. ‘He snatched me from the jaws of a dastardly villain and swept me away,’ my mother always joked when the subject arose while my father apparently pretended to glower that there might ever have been a serious rival. Now I know that family story covers a harsher reality; the real reason my mother always teared up whenever it came up.

  Bess and I never should have left. This city’s ancient streets, the University’s calendar of events laid out over centuries, should have been, could have been the backdrop for our gently meandering lives together. I wander the cobbled alleys and streets, dodging the endless bikes that already speed through and impatiently ding warnings of their approach and superiority.

  What is the saying? ‘Turrets, crenellations, lodges, fenestrations, cloisters, clerestories, porticos and porters.’ How I did love this place. Once.

  At nine the market place is already bustling with locals, tourists and Christmas shoppers weaving through the stalls. Sonorous bells ring out from the nearby church on Trinity Street, opposite the grandeur of Kings College. A busker is belting out reggae music on one corner of the market square, a school choir in harmony with carols on another and a Salvation Army brass band are gathering for their stint.

  Stallholders boom their pitch about their wares, faces anxious for the all-important Christmas sales to make all their efforts pay off. Fruit, veg, olives, locally made bread and cake stalls vie with others laden down by clothes, toys, music and keepsakes of Cambridge and its Fens. Coffee shops are full to overflowing, and I sniff the familiar seasonal smell of gingerbread and amaretto. Hot chestnuts give out a rich bitterness and the mulled wine truck has a queue even this early for folk who want warming in the bitter east wind.

  ***

  I sit in the market enjoying my coffee and croissant and take the call. The ACC has bumped the meeting with the Professors up an hour as I have an extra appointment: The Foreign and Commonwealth Office early afternoon.

  Her voice is layered with stress, “They wanted me or the Chief Constable too, but we said we had every confidence in you. Guy called Quentin Marmaduke, Director General of a section, so very senior, rang me at home at midnight for half an hour.”

  She pauses and I wait, “I am also awash today with the files on DCI Odling, Chief Superintendent Creel, two PCs at the ditch site when evidence must have been tampered with, and all their possible misdeeds - you have created quite a swathe in only a week DCI Cade. Or rather they have.”

  I remain mute as she goes on, “And now a note from the Head of Scientific Services that she wants to terminate the traineeship of one young man and impose early retirement on, in other words sack, a long-time officer. Again, you are involved.”

  I do not comment but the question comes, “It is her word against theirs, but I assume you, DC Fenwick and Whittle will back her up that their behaviour was unacceptable, broke procedure and disregarded the standing of a senior officer.”

  I agree and offer that my windscreen car camera was trained on the scene though with indistinct sound. I have already checked on the material that my face was turned away when I was blackly contemplating the head butts.

  The ACC sighs, “Fortuitous? Early word, the Chief wants just ‘a quiet warning,’ ‘benefit of the doubt surely’ the Chief says, for Messrs. Odling and Creel, they will be back at work shortly I expect - though without any control of your squad, that is now fully with me.”

  Small mercies as she tells that she is now under pressure from the media to solve the mystery of Pippa’s death. While the Cabinet Office have been in touch with the Chief and scared him about the Chinese women though only he knows what was said.

  My empty coffee cup and plate is cleared away as she stresses, “I am to be involved with your FCO talk via a conference call, but I shall say little, Caleb. Read the oily bugger if you can and discover what game is really afoot here.”

  I have a busy day ahead. After my brush with the powers that be I am to take a quick look at Pippa’s burgled London house with her friend Polly, interview the chauffeur Mark Castle and then be home by midnight to freeze the night away with Jerry while lying in wait for burglars and hopefully the answer to how all the events of this week fit together. The ACC does not know of this last element.

  ***

  For the moment, it will all wait. Heffers, the iconic bookshop for student an
d citizen since 1876, draws me into its cathedral like space where tens of thousands of books create their own hush. I meander the aisles, lost as always in this palace of words. Poetry and novels hold me for a much-cherished half an hour. When did I last read a book or anything but police files and reports? I see the names of writers I know, some I once loved; of no matter to me now. Out of habit, I pull out, scrutinise back covers, intrigued by some despite myself. Yet I do not buy; not yet, not until it is over will I return to books and ideas I once loved. When I can do so again with Bess, with Grace. If I ever return.

  I stand adrift then in the palatial basement surrounded by myriad books on shelves and tables. My mind once so alive and vibrant with words, lines, quotes and learning from poetry, novels, drama of the English, Ancient Greek and Roman worlds, politics, social affairs, international relations, history, matters of the intellect all. It has not seemed relevant these seven years. It is as though I took a decision to delete them all from my life and so I did; my mind acted of itself. Until recent days when some tiny seeds of quote and thought have strangely sprung anew. A lucky omen?

  I stumble upstairs and out of Heffers, wiping my tears, hardly apologising to crowds of people I almost crash into. I find myself by the meandering River Cam on a patch of college lawn where Bess and I often revised together, where we planned to bring Grace the following spring. Before it happened. It, always, it.

  I walk for ten minutes out of town, and stand by Canterbury Street’s row of small terraced houses, once homes to the labouring poor with front doors spilling onto the pavement. All now spruced up with the latest kitchens and bathrooms and new bedrooms sprouting in many roofs, window boxes galore and bicycles or smart cars outside every one. A mother with a young child in a buggy comes out of the one I am staring at, looks suspiciously at me and hustles away. Bess once lived here and cherished it. Perhaps we should have left Ancaster and come to live here?

  Work has been the only salve to my suffering. I return quickly to it now. For something, much, much more hazardous is broken. In my dream and nightmare last night, in the ghostly scenes glimpsed here of myself and Bess, I cannot see her beauty. For Bess is suddenly faceless even in my dreams and nightmares.

  ***

  The two eminent academics are in Professor Michael Bartlett’s wood panelled study, overlooking his college’s quadrangle where lawn and paths are neatly manicured and free from snow or slush. Bartlett is an English eccentric in tweed jacket and corduroy trousers. Professor Joe Tasker, an all-American college quarterback thirty years ago, wears a blue suit, pink shirt and a harsh bellicosity. Clearly, he is used to his word being law on anything and everything and hardly restrains his ill-humour at being questioned at all.

  The ‘loosener’ works for once. We talk of the state of modern Universities in both the UK and USA.

  Bartlett’s elegant turn of phrase deserts him as he says bleakly, “Bums on seats is all that counts, knowledge and learning and thought for their own sake have given way to courses that guarantee the highest paying jobs. A tragedy.”

  “Science is suffering especially, dictated to by sponsors who want fast commercial returns,” Tasker intones, with a cutting New York accent. “When Michael and I were in Grad School and then teaching at Harvard together, the work was all, seeking out truth and innovation. The technology, the applications and the commercial exploitation possibilities came later. They have to for anything truly ‘blue sky.’ Now it is the other way around. Even the Ivy League is tarnished. Irredeemably. After a thousand years here, and three centuries at home, we have to start again.”

  I nod. They are describing the neo-liberal world of globalism writ small. The markets and money, giant corporations, take all, control all, even thought. Our collective future is dictated by the vaunting ambition of senior executives and shareholder greed rather than any notion of public good.

  Bartlett interrupts in all seriousness, “Of course, in our own specialisms we have been much involved with the developments that have helped protect our countries and democracy.”

  Their specialties being theoretical physics, especially relating to weapons and digital technology, according to my own research.

  Bartlett actually coughs in delight as he pulls out a pipe from a tobacco pouch on a table, “Forgive the pipe, I do not light it, more memory lane that I can taste even without actually smoking.”

  He returns to his theme, “Science is being degraded for profit, but at least it survives, it has to – while the diminution and loss in some places of the Humanities, your own areas of English and Classics, is short-sighted obscenity. Nothing less.”

  Both Tasker and Bartlett smile at me to signal they too have done their research. When I turn to the business at hand, they return tightly to script. The US Embassy, the Foreign Office, their Universities all advised a lawyer to be present for this meeting they say, but they have demurred.

  But they know their lines. The dinner party was just ‘general chit chat,’ ‘nothing untoward’ happened save for excellent food, wine and company. The names of the diners?

  No hesitation here as Bartlett responds with a full list from memory, finishing with, “Two Chinese women, Shi, the mother, and Bai Yen, the daughter, delightful, wonderful English too.”

  The women are back in China so these men have been told they can admit their presence, talk relatively freely about them, up to a point.

  I cannot divine the need for secrecy about the Chinese women, unless one of them was actually driving the car that killed. But even then, an accident is an accident, and with a good lawyer it would be a fine and possibly a suspended licence in the UK for someone who seldom drives here. Or was the reason for secrecy more to do with finance, politics and possible public scrutiny?

  If there is a major project in the UK that the Chinese might be financing, surely our own government would welcome that with open arms. Indeed, given their protective attitude to the Chinese, that must be exactly what is going on. I pause, staring at Tasker. If there is a similar plan for the USA, the Trump administration might not take kindly to Chinese finance in sensitive projects such as science and weapons technology and could block it. And what the US does today, the UK mimics in the blink of an eye whether it can afford to or not. But if the projects are signed and sealed, it would be too late, hence confidentiality is all. Certainly, the minor incident of a hit and run would not be allowed to derail things.

  Neither man recognises Pippa when I show them the unsullied photograph of her face. They detail the exact time they left Albion House and confirm they saw nothing out of the ordinary on their drive back to Cambridge with Mrs Bartlett driving the family car and the Taskers in a chauffeur-driven Jaguar supplied by the bank.

  As with most academics I have ever met, these two are confident and clear in their narratives and replies with a fair trace of the inevitable arrogance of men who think their depth of knowledge makes them very special. They stick to the point and answer succinctly, and meet my eye directly. It is an accomplished performance. As they relax I begin to enjoy myself, knowing that I am about to embitter the sweet mix that they have created.

  “Do you know, have you met Pippa Langstaffe?” I ask sharply then.

  Both Professors shake their heads, saying nothing but there has been hesitation from both. I pause, staring from one to the other, noting that both are now looking away at the glowing coal fire in the sumptuous book-lined study. The only sound is the scraping of my pen on my notebook.

  “Professors? Has she been to see you, contacted you at all?”

  Tasker is impatient, wanting me gone but each answers in turn as I wait them out. Neither man has met the dead woman but both have had several letters from her in the past three months asking to do a research interview with them about the state of modern Universities. Neither responded to her.

  ***

  Rising to leave I note their slight relief even as I pause and try harsh words to disturb their sensibilities.

  “Bare bones here. A yo
ung woman is dead. I will spare you the details. The photograph of the mutilated blood and gore. It may be a hit and run, it may be reckless driving, we cannot rule out murder, homicide at this point.”

  I let the thought linger, “But we do know a vehicle from Albion House was responsible. Likely driven by someone you had dinner with.”

  Again, they say nothing, stare at their hands as they sit, “So I ask again, and it may be relevant, it may not, and it will be confidential to me unless and until it proves relevant to our case, what projects were being discussed?”

  There is a silence and only the coal can now be heard with its light putter as the two Professors look at each other and then at me.

  “We simply cannot tell you, Detective Chief Inspector,” says Bartlett in a stiff voice.

  Tasker is more confident as he says, “Your Foreign Office, my Embassy and State Department, even your Prime Minister’s office, say it is confidential at present and not relevant to your dead woman.”

  “Pippa,” I say quietly.

  Tasker strains to hear and barks, “Say again?”

  “Pippa Langstaffe, she is called Pippa Langstaffe.”

  “Of course,” Bartlett says quickly as Tasker bridles at the implicit criticism of his crassness.

  Biting softness makes them strain to hear, “And how on earth can any of those august bodies know what is relevant to my case, Professors?”

  Bartlett feigns embarrassment. Tasker simply shrugs, his large face tinged with red, his huge fists slightly clinched. I do not remind them about the purity of truth and their distaste for the commercial.