by Joy Ellis
At twelve thirty precisely, Jon took the call to say that his parents were in reception. As he raced down the stairs he thought about his lovely mother, and what she had suffered with Isabel. She may not have been a natural daughter, but his parents had given her everything conceivable for a privileged start in life. She had a beautiful home in their country house in Frampton; private schooling; everything imaginable. And she killed herself. Since then, his mother’s whole life had changed. Everything ordered and to schedule. It had to run like clockwork. Nothing unexpected, nothing messy, and no surprises. Her brain, he suspected, had become as finely tuned as the exquisitely hand-crafted Italian cello that she taught so masterfully, and he was certain that it was not a heart that beat inside her anymore, but a metronome.
Unlike his father. Lawrence Summerhill was a senior lecturer in Earth Sciences, and he was inclined to measure his version of time in light years rather than GMT. But no matter how differently they had coped with their grief, they still stood together.
As he approached the foyer, Jon saw them waiting for him, and he felt a rush of something he could only think was love.
They had not yet noticed him, and the first thing that struck him about them, was that their body language exuded sadness into the air around them.
‘Hey, Mum, Dad.’ Jon drew his mother to him in a bear hug and breathed in the familiar fragrance of Lanvin Rumeur. Although she hugged him back, he felt a slight tremor in her grip. ‘My boss is in a meeting, so she said to use her office.’ He led them towards the lift. ‘It’s a tad more comfortable than an interview room.’
‘You’re busy, son. We won’t stay long, we just wanted to mark the day.’ His father smiled at him sadly. He may be at the tail end of sixty, but he still had a full head of iron-grey hair and a ram-rod straight back, even if his clothes did look two decades out of time.
Jon glanced quickly across at his beautiful mother. The usual placid smile was in place, but her grief showed through. It always did. When Izzie died, something of his mother died too.
In the privacy of the small office, they talked for a while. Not about Isobel. Just small talk. Then his father said that they would be going to the crematorium to take some flowers, then on to lunch at his mother’s favourite riverside inn. ‘Come for dinner next weekend, son. We should catch up.’
‘I’d love to, Dad.’ Jon knew it would not happen, and so did his father, but they said it anyway.
And then they were standing up and telling him not to work too hard, to eat properly, and to take care, to take great care.
From the end of the corridor, Kate watched Jon usher his parents into the lift. It was clear now where Jon got his looks from. She knew his mother was a classical musician, but Kate had never seen her before. Sophia Summerhill, who obviously would never see fifty again, was strikingly attractive. Shiny dark hair, hair that had never been in within ten metres of a bottle of Clairol, was swept up into a loose chignon, and her face, although almost devoid of make-up, had a natural beauty about it that is reserved for those of mixed race origin.
Kate smiled as she made her way back past the CID room. Jon was certainly his mother’s son. Then the smile faded. Even at a distance she had noticed that an almost visible aura of melancholy surrounded them. Jon had said something about the circumstances of his sister’s death? Was that what it was? Maybe she would ask, but not today.
As she pushed her door open she heard her name called out.
‘This has just arrived, ma’am. It’s marked urgent.’ The civilian handed her a brown envelope and turned back down the corridor. Kate went inside, closed the door, then flopped into her chair, placed the manila envelope on the desk in front of her and stared at it. Her name was scrawled across the front in Tommy Thorne’s strange slanted handwriting. An awful lot rested on what this brief report would tell her. Not least, the fact that she may have to break it to one of her own staff that her daughter was dead.
And from the moment she had seen the girl on the beach, Kate had had a nagging gut feeling about their little mermaid. She hadn’t fallen, and she hadn’t jumped.
She frowned and tore open the envelope.
The dental records confirmed the identity of the drowned girl as that of Shauna Kelly.
CHAPTER THREE
Superintendent Megan Edwards let out a loud despairing sigh. ‘Would you like me to speak to the parents, Kate? I know you have teenagers of your own.’
‘Thanks, but I’ve known Liz Kelly for over ten years, I need to go personally.’
‘Okay, if you’re comfortable with that. Now, what do we know about Shauna Kelly’s death?’
Kate exhaled. Comfortable was not a word that she would have chosen. ‘We have no idea what happened to her yet, ma’am. Tommy Thorne has classified it a priority, but we just have to hope that something specific shows up in the post mortem that will determine whether foul play was involved.’ She pushed a hand through her thick auburn hair. ‘Apparently Shauna was always a handful, but not a bad kid. Six months ago her father left home, and things got worse. She started drinking, and Liz told me that she has had trouble keeping her away from some of the wilder kids in town.’
‘And the night she went missing?’
‘Scott and Rosie have located her three times on CCTV, all around the town centre area. The last sighting was of her laughing with a man, close to the Lincoln Arms public house on Brewer Street.’
‘Drunk? Alone?’
‘Certainly not paralytic, maybe tipsy? And yes, she was alone.’ Kate thought back to the footage that Rosie had shown her. ‘One thing stood out though; we are all certain from the way she was acting, that she knew the man. The image of him is poor, but Scott has enhanced it as much as he can, and uniform are taking out on the streets for us.’
Megan Edwards nodded tersely, then began sorting through a neat sheaf of papers that lay on her equally neat desk, leaving Kate some time to watch her boss.
It was common knowledge that she and the Superintendent were not best of friends. Megan seemed to need to remind Kate of her higher rank. Thrived on it, almost. But it didn’t bother Kate anymore. She knew that she had found her level within the Force. She was in a place that she felt comfortable, unlike Megan Edwards who unashamedly had taken the fast track in her hunt for large amounts of gold braid and embroidered pips.
Kate found the woman’s insatiable hunger for promotion both scary and funny. It was odd, in their own way they were both very good police officers, but the difference lay in the fact that Kate wanted to remain a police officer and not take one step too far and suddenly morph into an administrator, like the Super.
Kate came from jobbing copper stock, with the blood of street policemen flowing through her veins. Her grandfather had been the Saltpan Village bobby, and her dad spent his whole working life filling the same roll, patrolling the same marsh lanes. And he’d been chuffed as little apples when she decided to follow in their very big footsteps.
Superintendent Megan Edwards suddenly pushed the papers to one side and looked hard at Kate, forcing her to stop wool-gathering. ‘I’ve skimmed through your reports on the Jamie Durham case. You seem to have reached something of an impasse? What’s your next move, assuming you have one?’
Kate tensed. She didn’t, but she wasn’t going to admit it. ‘We still have some new people to talk to, ma’am. We’re not throwing in the towel yet, believe me.’
‘I shouldn’t think you would, Kate, not with your team’s recent, and very impressive, arrest record.’ The woman narrowed her eyes to little more than slits. ‘And that brings me conveniently to my next point.’
Oh hell, thought Kate. Not now, please!
‘Top Brass have noted that your team has out performed the rest of CID, right across the board.’ The cold grey eyes bored into Kate’s. ‘Somehow you have managed to attain the highest arrest record across the county. You’ve put Saltfleet at the top of the table.’
This was not how Kate had envisaged this meeting going. The
Super clearly wanted to know how they had achieved it, and she was in no position to tell her anything remotely close to the truth. The fact that Jon was giving them an advantage over the other sections because of a quirk of nature would be staying securely with them.
She struggled for a smile. ‘That’s great news, ma’am. But it’s just luck. I happen to have a team dynamic that really works.’
‘Mm,’ the superintendent looked at her shrewdly ‘We’ve had hot-shot teams before, but nothing in your league.’ She leaned forward, her small wiry frame dwarfed by the size of the hunk of oak that separated them. ‘So, we’d like you to go up to HQ next month and talk to some of the other team leaders. Perhaps you could instil a little of your magic into their management skills?’
Kate’s heart sank, and she allowed an audible groan to escape her lips. ‘That is so not my thing, ma’am. I have no magic formula, just a damned good team. Other officers would hardly welcome being told that, now would they?’
‘Well, nothing has been formalised, but I’d like you to give it some thought. You might have more to offer than you realise, and with all the impending cuts, morale in some areas is pretty low right now.’
She looked mildly vexed at Kate’s refusal to co-operate but not actually angry. They had bounced off each other so many times before, that she would have known exactly what Kate’s reaction would be. ‘Well, I suppose it’s time for you to alert the family liaison officer, and get yourself over to the Kelly’s house.’ She pulled two fat files towards her, ‘And I must get my teeth into these new initiatives and related budgets.’
‘I don’t know how you cope with all that, ma’am.’ said Kate, pushing back her chair. ‘Your job would have my brains turning into minestrone in five minutes flat.’
The super shrugged. ‘Someone has to. And what I do, I do well. At least you guys have someone fighting your corner. For instance, last time I looked, you still had radios, Kevlar vests and cars, or has something changed since I went downstairs last?’
Kate was forced to smile. She may not like Megan Edwards much, but she did have a grudging admiration for anyone who could juggle budgets and targets like a street entertainer’s balls. ‘No, we’re still communicating, protected and mobile, thank you.’ She stood up. No good putting off the inevitable. This was the worst part of her job, but it had to be done, and although twenty years on the Force had knocked a lot of things out of her, at least she had managed to retain compassion.
As she closed the super’s door and made ready to visit the dead girl’s family, she felt very glad that she had.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was close to six o’clock but Jon had no inclination to go home. Home didn’t mean much these days. Certainly it was comfortable; any riverside apartment towards the centre of Saltfleet town would be comfortable, especially one that cost as much a small rural farmhouse. To Jon it was just a place to get your head down when you could no longer find an excuse to stay at work. And right now, finding something new in the Jamie Durham enquiry was a very good excuse.
Jon gazed across the CID room and saw DC Rosie McElderry talking animatedly to her colleague, the fourth member of Kate Reynard’s team, DC Scott Verdun.
Jon watched Rosie for a while, and couldn’t help but smile. With her long blonde hair caught back in a casual pony-tail, she looked more like an American cheerleader than a detective. But Jon knew that looks could be deceiving, and was certainly the case with Rosie. For a start, she was well into her twenties, even though she still looked like a sixth former. Plus she was an integral part of their small team, and a woman with a heightened sense of understanding people. Somehow, reading body-language came as naturally to her as playing the cello did to his mother. And that meant she could spot a liar at forty paces, which was a very useful string to the team’s collective bow. Along with Scotty of course. Every team needed a techno-wizard, and he was theirs.
Jon looked at the youngest member of their team almost fondly. DC Scott Verdun’s expertise with technology was something of an enigma. He seemed to talk to the machine as if his brain was a brother computer. If it held back secrets, he could coax it into giving them up, with just a few light touches on the key pad. And thankfully he did not look like your average techno-nerd. Scott was ultra trendy, sported designer clothes; expensive shoes, a Max Stuhrling watch, and a modern-cut hairstyle that would have made a premiere league footballer chew his boots with envy.
Jon dragged his eyes reluctantly away from the outer office and tried to focus on the evidence that they had accumulated regarding Jamie Durham’s last hours. And it wasn’t easy, because he’d been over it so many times before and found nothing new.
With a muttered curse, Jon stood up and began pacing his tiny cupboard of an office. He paused at his computer desk and picked up the note that Kate had left him earlier. Things had gone badly with the Kelly family, and she had decided to go back and sit with them for a little longer before heading for home. And Jon knew that his boss felt exactly as he did, that Shauna had not died accidentally. He may not have picked up anything clairvoyantly from her body, but he had felt instinctively that her death was suspicious.
He paced again. They desperately needed to be free of the Jamie Durham case, and not just for their own sakes. The man, Cullen Payne, who had without a doubt killed the boy, was a scum-bag, and he needed to pay the highest price for what he’d done.
Jon bit hard on his bottom lip and felt a salty taste on his tongue. He had to do something, and he needed to do it soon, because if Shauna Kelly was indeed a murder victim, all their efforts would be directed on her and Payne would walk free.
With a grunt, he dropped down into his chair.
There was of course one thing he could try. It was risky, and it was something that the Boss had expressly forbidden him to do. In the silence of his room, he sucked in air and weighed up the consequences.
After a while he stood up, grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair, waved a swift goodnight to Rosie and Scott, and hurried down to his car.
What did they say? Desperate times called for desperate measures?
A few hours later, as darkness shrouded the fen, two youngsters, unsteady in their high heels, tottered along the uneven pavements of Harlan Marsh town.
‘Are you sure this is the place?’ Jasmine drew her thin top closer to her equally thin body, and shivered.
‘This is it.’ said Chloe. ‘I followed Paul here last week. I watched him go in.’
The two girls looked dubiously at the rusting wrought iron fencing that surrounded the concrete steps, and saw the peeling paintwork on the heavy old door down in the shadowy basement area.
‘Well, nothing is happening tonight, that’s for sure. Let’s go home, Chloe. This place is a dump, it gives me the creeps.’ Jasmine had been unenthusiastic about gate-crashing the party from the outset.
Chloe frowned. ‘But I sneaked a look at his mobile. There was a new message saying that it was on tonight. And I know this is where my brother came before.’
‘Maybe it was cancelled at the last minute.’ Jasmine shifted from foot to foot. It had been a stupid idea anyway. So what if there was free booze? She didn’t even like the taste of alcohol, and if her Dad ever found out, he would go ape-shit and probably ground her for the rest of the year.
‘Can I help you young ladies?’
The voice was friendly enough. Jasmine turned around to see an older man smiling at them. He had a short modern haircut, trendy clothes and was carrying a large case of wine bottles.
‘You the geezer who runs the parties?’ asked Chloe brashly.
The man narrowed his eyes. ‘What parties?’
Chloe jabbed a finger towards the case of wine. ‘So you are going to drink that lot all on your own, are you?’
‘Smart kid.’ He grinned at her and placed the heavy box on the ground. ‘So, are you two club members?’
Jasmine felt a stab of anxiety, and suddenly wished they had never left home.
‘Course we are.’ said Chloe, trying to look bored. ‘Why else would we be here? And my mobile phone message definitely said it was on, so…?’
The man sighed. ‘But you never received the venue change. Ah, well, I’m sorry about that. Must have been some sort of mix up.’
‘Oh great!’ Chloe snorted. ‘So if it’s not here, where is it? We don’t want to spend all night on the friggin’ pavement.’
The man looked from one girl to the other. ‘Funny, I’ve never seen either of you before, and I’ve got a pretty good memory for faces.’
Jasmine took hold of Chloe’s arm. ‘Come on, Clo, just leave it.’
‘No way!’ Chloe pushed Jasmine away and placed her both hands on her hips. ‘These guys have cocked up, end of. Just because we’re new members and have only been once before, doesn’t mean we should miss out on a party.’ She turned aggressively to the man and said, ‘Does it, granddad?’
The man, who in honesty couldn’t have been more than thirty, tilted his head and stared at them for a moment. ‘How old are you?’ He asked.
‘I’m seventeen.’ said Chloe quickly. ‘And she’s sixteen, if it’s any of your business.’
‘ID?’
An odd look of interest, or maybe it was amusement, passed across the man’s face when Chloe told him they had left it at home. And Jasmine began to shiver again. She hated it when Chloe lied about their age. She knew that they looked much older than their fourteen years, and she knew the way they dressed didn’t help, but this was beginning to get uncomfortable. ‘Sorry, but I’m going, Chlo. You do what you want.’ She turned to walk away.
‘Okay, okay.’ The man shook his head and grinned at them. ‘You win. The venue is in Carters Way tonight. There’s an old warehouse, it’s about half way down on the left hand side, there’s a side door and..,’ He stopped and gave a little sigh. ‘Oh, wait here, I’ve got another of these crates to collect and then I’m going down there myself. I’ll take you if you like, by way of an apology for the muddle with the text.’