Death in the Family

by Jill McGown

  But now he wasn’t even fooling himself, never mind his conscience.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  There had been too much stuff for the little van; while Ian went off to the cottage, her mother had crossly filled her car up with the overflow, complaining as she did so that if they had got the removal firm to do it none of this would be necessary.

  Now she was looking for something, picking things up, checking under furniture, in drawers, in coat pockets.

  Kayleigh, who had been ready to leave for some time, wearing the jeans and sweatshirt that her mother had decreed was the right gear for unloading vans—giving adequate protection from possible cuts and bruises—was sitting on the sofa, a small case packed with what she would most immediately need, and watched the search without apparent interest.

  “Kayleigh? Did Ian give you the keys?”

  Kayleigh frowned. “Which keys?”

  “The house keys.”

  “No.”

  “Well, where are they?” Her mother came over. “Stand up, dear. You might be sitting on them.”

  Kayleigh knew she wasn’t sitting on them, but she stood up as requested. Her mother lifted the cushions, felt down the sides of the chair. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I thought they were on the hook.”

  “Maybe Ian took them with him by mistake.”

  Her mother looked perplexed. “Why would he have been using them in the first place?” she asked.

  Kayleigh shrugged.

  “Oh, it’s too bad!” said her mother. “What am I supposed to do now? I can’t lock up, and I can’t ring him.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not! She had the number transferred.”

  Her mother had taken that personally, but Theresa ran a business—she wanted to keep the number, naturally.

  “Why can’t you ring him on his mobile?”

  “He’s left it somewhere, and he doesn’t know where. It’s probably in his car, but he didn’t tell me he couldn’t find it until it was too late to do anything about it.”

  Because he had lent his car to the friend whose van he’d borrowed. What with one thing and another, Ian was losing a lot of brownie points today. Kayleigh had found that she did like him; he was, as her mother had assured her, a likable man. But Kayleigh knew that his heart wasn’t in this move to Australia, and so did her mother.

  “Can’t you just use the Yale lock?”

  “No, it’s too vulnerable. All the stuff here belongs to the new people now, and the removal van’s been standing outside the door all morning—every burglar in the area knows the house is going to be empty. I have to lock up properly.” She threw her hands up in the air, a gesture of impatience with the world that Kayleigh knew well. “Oh, why does everything have to go wrong at the last minute? If these people had just stuck to the date they agreed . . .”

  If these people had stuck to the date, if Ian kept his phone clipped to his person like her mother did, if other people always put the keys back on the hook that she had had put up for the purpose . . .

  But life, Kayleigh was glad to say, wasn’t like that, and as far as she was concerned, everything had gone according to plan.

  Lloyd’s car had been off the road for a couple of days; Tom had given him a lift to the meeting and was now taking him to pick it up, but for the moment he was waiting in the car while Lloyd broke the news about his nonretirement to Judy. He had thought it best to do that as soon as possible, in view of how fast word got round. He didn’t want her hearing it from someone else.

  “Well?” he said as Lloyd got back into the car. “How did she take it?”

  “Pragmatically. How else?”

  Tom grinned. “Let’s see,” he said. “I remember asking you before—it means dealing with things as they are, and not as you’d like them to be, right?”

  “Right. She’s going to see what she thinks of the nursery Liz mentioned—the one that takes babies under six months. She thought she might try leaving Charlotte there for a day while she’s still on maternity leave and see how they both got on with that. But I think she’s in two minds about the whole thing, especially now.”

  “It’s only natural,” said Tom. “Do you think there’s a chance she won’t go back to work?” Liz had intended going back when she had their first, but when it came to it, she had decided to stay at home.

  “Only if she feels there’s no alternative. She was very interested to hear about Malworth.”

  “Do you know how they’re going to do it, guv? I mean, are they going to advertise, or what?”

  After the meeting, Lloyd had had a brief chat with the ACC in the car park, and Tom was hopeful that he might get some inside information.

  “I think they’re hoping to recruit from within the force, but I don’t know that for certain. All I really know is that I’m to head Stansfield CID—officially, at last.”

  Lloyd had been acting head of Stansfield CID at least twice; it was time he got to run it his way, Tom thought.

  “And I suspect that Judy will get Malworth if she wants it, whoever else they interview. She’ll have some say in who her DI is to be.”

  Tom smiled, then shook his head. “Bob Sandwell’s bound to apply,” he said. Bob had been acting DI for months, and he’d been waiting over a year for a vacancy. It wasn’t likely that Judy would recommend Tom over Bob, even if he and Liz had become close friends with Lloyd and Judy during Judy’s pregnancy, Liz being someone whose advice Judy trusted. Especially since they were friends, he amended; she wouldn’t want to look as though she was playing favorites. And Bob had, of course, been right about the CID vacancies, proving that he was a better detective than Tom into the bargain. “I think I’d better be pragmatic, too,” he said.

  He came into the outskirts of Stansfield and left the main road to enter the maze of roads that constituted the industrial estate, down one of which operated the one-man outfit that Lloyd used for car maintenance. Tom could never remember which road it was; they were all called after industrial pioneers, and he had a tendency to get his McAdams and Telfords and Brunels confused. “Which one is it, again?” he asked.

  “Crompton Court.”

  Tom frowned. “What did he do, then?”

  “What did who do?”

  “Crompton.” When he got a puzzled silence, he made his request clearer. “You know—like Telford built bridges or canals or whatever it was; what did Crompton do to get famous?” He’d got unfamous again as far as Tom was concerned.

  “I think he was the one who produced the spinning mule. And I don’t know what that was, before you ask, but I know they called it the mule because it used bits of the spinning jenny and bits of some other textile machinery.”

  Tom frowned as he kept an eye out for Crompton Road. “Why does that mean it was called the mule?”

  “It was a sort of pun. Because jenny is another name for an ass, and the offspring of an ass and a horse is a mule.”

  “I’ll bet that had them rolling in the aisles. Why was the other one called a jenny, anyway?”

  Lloyd sighed melodramatically. “It had something to do with Hargreaves’s daughter’s spinning wheel overturning—it gave him the idea, and his daughter’s name was Jenny. Second on the right,” he instructed. “May I ask why on earth you want to know all this?”

  Tom indicated the turn into Crompton Court. “Because,” he said, “if I do get the promotion, I’m going to have to hold my own with all these fast-track graduates, and if they ever taught me all that stuff at school, I wasn’t listening.”

  Lloyd laughed. “And you think they were?”

  “Well, they’ve got degrees in something.”

  “Probably in corporate strategy and information technology. I really don’t think you have to bone up on the industrial revolution. And—that’s it on your left—you might not have to be pragmatic, either, because I think Bob’s more interested in duty inspector. Talk to him about it—he won’t mind.”

  �
�When’s it all going off, guv?”

  Lloyd sighed again and looked pained. “I take it you are asking me when I think that the posts will be advertised. And the answer is I don’t know.” He got out and bent down to speak to Tom. “You can get back to the main road more quickly if you turn right out of here and go along Arkwright Way,” he said. “Eighteenth-century inventor and factory owner, industrialized the cotton industry.”

  Tom grinned and hooted as he left, already composing his CV.

  Judy was walking through Riverside Park to the Riverside Nursery, whose very name proclaimed just how much it was likely to cost.

  Malworth had two public parks, linked by the river Andwell; one was on the other side of the new bypass that cut through the town and was run-down and bleak, like Parkside itself, the area beyond it. The Riverside area had an altogether grander park, overlooked by opulent houses. Riverside was the jewel in Malworth’s crown; it had had its town houses preserved, and the new development on Bridge Street included luxury flats and high-class businesses. The Riverside Nursery in Andwell House was one such business.

  She was having to rethink everything now that Lloyd wasn’t going to be at home after all. Turning Charlotte over to strangers was going to be difficult enough when she had thought it would be only for a few weeks; long-term was bothering her. She wasn’t at all sure why, because it was still the case that anyone who looked after babies for a living would be far more knowledgeable than she was.

  It might, she thought, have something to do with her father dying like he had, with no warning, no illness, nothing. She blinked away the tears that still came to her eyes whenever she thought of him; Lloyd said that when his mother had died, he had thought he would never be able to think of her again without the sadness, but that it really did pass, and Judy hoped he was right, because she knew her father would disapprove of the tears. But it had been so sudden, so unexpected.

  He had been in his late sixties, which was much too young, but that sort of thing sometimes happened to people younger than that. And what if it happened to her or Lloyd? The plain truth was that no one knew how long they had to go. It could be fifty years or five minutes. She and Lloyd were what the maternity unit had rather unflatteringly called elderly parents, and if Charlotte’s time with either of them was, heaven forbid, unduly curtailed, Judy didn’t want her to have spent it being farmed out to strangers.

  And, Judy thought, the even plainer truth was that she had meant it to be Lloyd, and not her, with whom Charlotte spent her time. Selfish, as ever. And it was selfish, she supposed, wanting to go back to work. But then, you could just as easily argue that it was selfish not wanting to go back. Bartonshire Constabulary had invested a lot of money and time in her; they expected an operational detective chief inspector for their trouble. Not someone who wanted to stay at home and look after her baby.

  “What do you think?” she asked Charlotte. “Would you like being in a nursery with people who know what they’re doing looking after you?”

  Charlotte blew a raspberry.

  “Oh. Not keen, huh? But you didn’t really give yourself time to consider the idea, did you? There’ll be other babies there—you’ll be able to network. The assistant chief constable is very strong on networking. Making the right contacts. I’m sure you’ll be very good at that.”

  “Ba-ba-ba-ba.”

  “How about ‘Ma-ma-ma-ma?’ That’s me. Mama. You say it.”

  “Ba-ba-ba.”

  “Baba. That’s you.” She bent down and put her face close to Charlotte’s. “You baba. Me Mama. Other one Dada.”

  Charlotte caught her nose.

  With some difficulty, Judy persuaded her to let go and straightened up. “And the thing is, if I had to do this forever, I’d go ga-ga. You said so yourself, this morning. And you don’t want a ga-ga mama. You really don’t.”

  She carried on toward the nursery, talking to Charlotte, while Charlotte tried to hit the toys strung across the pram, shouting with delight when she accidentally succeeded and they spun round.

  Judy rather liked having the excuse of a baby for talking out loud; it helped her to think. And she had decided the first time she took Charlotte to visit Liz Finch that it would be on foot—she wasn’t popping her into a car every time she took her somewhere. They would both benefit from the fresh air, and she, with her post-Charlotte figure, would benefit from the exercise. And she had been right; she was almost back to her fighting weight. But Lloyd had discovered that if you wanted to get Charlotte to sleep, then driving her round in the car worked every time, just like it did with her mother, he had added, in a dig at Judy’s tendency to drop off when Lloyd was at the wheel.

  “And it’s all very nice when you’re like this,” Judy went on. “You’re a very cheerful baby, by and large, but you’ll be teething any day now. And that hurts a bit, so you won’t like it, and you’ll probably cry a lot. Don’t worry—you won’t remember a thing about it; take it from me. But your mama and dada will. And I think I’d rather have some time off from that if possible. I think I’d rather be running Malworth CID, where almost no one will be teething. You do understand, don’t you?”

  “Ba-ba-ba.”

  “So you say, but you might be like your dada, and say whatever you think will produce the reaction you want.”

  She had considered a child minder, rather than a nursery, on the grounds that they didn’t cost as much and it might be more personal care, but she wasn’t too keen on that, even before she had looked into it properly. She had asked Charlotte’s opinion and had felt that the “ba-ba-ba” was at best noncommittal.

  They could afford a nanny of sorts, just about. Judy didn’t really like the idea of someone living in, but she supposed it would be all right if she picked her very carefully. That, of course, meant more house hunting, which had been put on hold recently. She wasn’t looking forward to that, either.

  And she wasn’t particularly looking forward to the rearranged wedding day; Saturday, the first of August, at Stansfield Registry Office, with a reception that was going to cost the earth. He had chosen Stansfield for the nuptials because that’s where all their friends were and, he had added, they would probably be living there by then. Judy felt sheer dread at the idea of practically the whole of Stansfield Police Station turning out to watch her tie the knot and she really did find it very hard to be unselfish, but she was going along with what Lloyd wanted, mainly because she had realized just how much he wanted it—enough to reveal, after years of keeping it secret, his name to everyone who knew him.

  He had told her once that he had changed it by deed poll, but that, of course, hadn’t been true. Not only hadn’t he done that; he had never changed it at all; all his official documents carried his full name, as she had found out when they had originally given notice of their intention to marry. She had discovered at the same time that he had a perfectly good middle name that he could have used if he had wanted, but he hadn’t, so part of him was proud of this unusual, if embarrassing, French first name, and she could understand that. But telling everyone what it was . . . that would, she knew, be giving him sleepless nights. And since getting married was that important to him, she had given in over the wedding arrangements and let him have his extravagant head.

  She could see the nursery, and she stopped walking, crouching down so that she was on Charlotte’s level. “It’s like this, kid,” she said. “Your choices are relatively inexpensive child minder, more expensive nursery, second-division nanny, which is all we can really afford, but I expect we’d both like her better than a premier-division one anyway, or a ga-ga mama. Which of the above would you prefer?”

  Various people came and went from the nursery as Judy watched. A woman not much younger than her, pushing a twin buggy. She looked tired; Judy wasn’t in the least surprised. As they passed, one of the twins started to cry, and so, of course, did the other. And why were they crying? Because the woman was leaving them at this nursery? Because she was abandoning them to their fate w
ith strangers, instead of looking after them herself like she should be doing?

  Don’t be ridiculous, Judy told herself. Babies cry. The thought that Charlotte might have been twins horrified her, because that would have been more than her common sense could have coped with.

  A blonde passed them, an expensive fashion statement pushing a pram that had seen better days, and Judy watched as the blonde pushed open the door of the nursery and went in. There was nothing wrong with that, she told herself. If she chose to spend her money on child care and clothes for herself rather than a pram, that was perfectly reasonable. Logical, even. She would need the pram for only a few months—why buy a brand-new one? Though Judy suspected the clothes would no longer be fashionable this time next week, so the argument probably fell down there.

  She couldn’t believe that she was mentally tutting at someone because she hadn’t spent money on her baby’s transport. But Judy knew that she wasn’t, not really. She was transferring her own guilt. Worrying about what other people would think of her. She wanted to pursue her career instead of being with Charlotte, that was the top and bottom of it. For all she knew, that girl had no option but to work; she was very probably a single mother. Judy didn’t have to work—Lloyd was perfectly capable of providing for her and Charlotte.

  A young man, carrying a baby from his car. Judy wondered about him. A widower? Someone whose wife just up and left him holding the baby? A working couple, and he was the one for whom it was least inconvenient? Perhaps they took it in turns to drop the baby off, like taking it in turns to drink or drive. A man whose wife was in having the next one? She was being a lot more charitable about him than she had been about the young woman, she realized. For some reason men with children to look after always seemed heroic.