by Jo Allen
‘I found them in a little shop in Kandy. It was full of all sorts of stuff and I was just browsing, but as soon as I looked at the cards I thought of you. You’ll see why.’
He opened the box and fanned the cards out, and then he laughed. The cards were cheap and gaudy with stylised images of gods and goddesses, and in the bottom corner of each one a tiny, smoke-grey cat stretched or slept or yawned. ‘Well, well.’
Too late, she realised that it might have been a mistake. When she’d seen the cards in the shop she’d remembered a moment when she’d seen him with a grey cat just like that one, reaching his hand down to fuss it, and the cat had entwined itself around his hand in utter ecstasy. But Holmes wasn’t his. The cat belonged to his former girlfriend. ‘It was just a bit of fun.’
‘Thank you. But I know the real reason you bought them.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes. Because now I’ve got a set of tarot cards my credibility will be completely ruined as a detective if anyone finds out.’ He cut the cards, shuffled them, grinned at her. ‘And so I daren’t risk telling anyone that you read the bloody things seriously. You’ve stitched me up completely, Madame Vera. But don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.’
She relaxed. ‘It’s okay. I’m not going not lead you any further astray.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Not with the cards, at least.’ She sipped her wine. Reading the cards was an unconventional hobby, one she kept secret from her workmates. Once he’d found out about it Jude had teased her mercilessly, but she thought he was beginning, at last, to understand that it wasn’t the psychobabble he though it was. Thoughtful consideration of the cards had led her towards the solution to many a personal problem, not least of them the decision to end her toxic marriage.
If only she’d found a moment before she came out to quiz them over the problem of Faye Scanlon.
‘Why don’t you have a go at reading them?’
‘Because I’m a sceptic. I give off all the wrong vibes.’ But he looked at them with interest, shuffling them face up as if he were born to it. ‘And it’s all nonsense.’
The fortune telling side of it was nonsense, and there were plenty of charlatans who’d used it to take advantage of others, but today Ashleigh was in the mood to push it. It mattered that he understood her, why it was important. ‘I’ve told you endlessly. It’s about making you think. One card in isolation tells you very little, but a proper spread can lead you in the right direction.’
‘Not unlike your average criminal investigation,’ he said, in a tone that suggested he was humouring her. ‘Take all the bits of evidence, look at them in context, and see the answer.’
‘Just like that.’ She took the pack from him, carried on shuffling and then held them out. ‘Of course, each card can be read in isolation. I sometimes choose one just to give me food for thought.’
‘Like a thought for the day,’ he said, distracted from the cards and running a finger through the curling end of her pony tail.
‘Yes.’ She shook him off. There would be plenty of time for that later. ‘It’s probably a good place for a beginner to start. Go on. Take one.’
‘You’re secretly filming this, aren’t you? You’re going to show it to the team and I’ll be buying cakes till kingdom come on the back of it to shut them up.’ But he took a card from the pack and held it out to her. ‘What’s this?’
‘That’s the Queen of Wands. Look at it and tell me what you think of it.’
‘I don’t suppose it does any harm to get into the mind set of you spiritual people.’
‘There are more of us than you think. You might learn something about human nature.’ If you wanted to you could rationalise anything, and it amused her to see Jude peering down at the card with the intense concentration he applied to any other problem. ‘What’s your verdict?’
He laid the card down on the arm of the chair and took a quick check at the rest of the pack. ‘This card has two cats. The others have one.’
‘Yes.’ The black cat that was the characteristic companion of the Queen of Wands was, indeed, squaring up to the grey one that had drawn her to the deck, the two of them with their backs arched, their tails bushed out, their ears back. ‘The black cat signals domestication. That’s one interpretation for the card.’
In front of her, the card offered the most oblique of warnings. There were many tarot decks and this one was so different to any other that she’d seen that it almost made interpretation impossible. The usually-benevolent depiction of the Queen had no place here. Her narrowed eyes made her aggressive, thorns studded the stems of the flowers she held in her left hand, and she tilted the staff she gripped in her right towards the battling cats like a weapon.
‘Domestic discord,’ he said, reviewing the card again, this time sitting back for a different perspective. ‘A very strong woman.’
Had he seen what she’d seen? ‘Yes. It’s usually a card associated with benevolence, but this particular depiction doesn’t look very benevolent to me.’
‘And what should I learn from that?’
‘Nothing. It’s a thought to hold. Something for you to turn over in your head and come back to when you have an issue.’
‘Come back to when I have an issue. Right.’ He laughed. ‘Is it me, or does she look like our new Super?’
‘I thought that, too.’ So he had seen it. Now, then, was the moment to confess, offered to her on a plate by a cheap pack of cards, bought at random in a junk shop. All she needed to do was find the right form of words. She picked up the card and looked at it, at the narrowed eyes that so clearly represented Faye’s expression when they’d met outside the canteen, at the confrontational body language, even at the short dark hair and the unrelenting scowl. ‘And do you know the funny thing about Faye?’
She said it quietly so that it was a whisper and she’d turned away from him as she spoke. He didn’t hear, and perhaps she hadn’t really wanted him to.
‘I’ll take that as a warning to mind my Ps and Qs,’ he said, still looking at the card. ‘Or I should say, a reinforcement of the warning she’s already given me.’
For all her authority and confidence, Faye was insecure. That might be the reason she’d rushed into a same-sex relationship with a junior officer. From a position of power, she could pretend they were equal partners and yet exert a measure of unspoken control. There was a hint of insecurity behind the Queen’s scowl, too, a woman who would choose a pre-emptive strike rather than wait for the past to catch up with her. ‘What warning?’ Did Faye know about her and Jude? Was the warning to her as well?
‘She’s concluded I’m over-promoted and the beneficiary of privilege. As such, she doesn’t need my entitled presence getting in the way of her new order.’
‘It’s just what she’s like.’
‘We don’t know what she’s like. She’s only been in post for one day. That’s my point. She doesn’t know what we’re like, either. I’ve no issues at all with anything she said, in principle, but the woman could at least have given me a chance to prove I’m in the job on merit.’
He was young for the job and his rapid rise through the ranks had almost certainly been facilitated by a preference for the traditional, but he delivered. Maybe there were others who could perform equally well, but you couldn’t argue that he wasn't capable. ‘She’s a bit sensitive about her position. That’s all.’
‘She’s no need to be.’ He looked down at the card and his scowl turned to a smile, most probably at the sight of that feisty grey cat. ‘Let’s put her back in the pack. I don’t want to talk about her just now.’ He shuffled Faye Scanlon, Queen of Wands, back into the deck, replaced it on the bag and dropped it on the floor beside the sofa.
She should tell him about Faye now, while the subject was up, but her courage failed her. Instead she put a hand on his forearm to tease him. ‘What have you been up to while I’m away? Chatting up all the chicks?’
He slid his arm around her. ‘I wa
s thinking while you were away. It’s maybe time I took you along to meet my mum.’
‘You think?’ It was a curse to be born sensuous, to love smell and touch and colour. She closed her eyes and pressed her face against his chest. They’d been together for four months and if it had begun as a fling, an affair for each of them to get an obsession out of their system, it was taking a long time to clear.
‘Yes. It’s Mikey’s twenty-first in a few weeks and I’m going to have to show up. I thought I might take you along for some moral support.’
Jude’s relationship with his brother was rocky at best, but she suspected that wasn’t why he’d want her with him. The real source of his annoyance was the ex-girlfriend, who was bound to be there. He wouldn’t be human if the Queen of Wands, with her hints of at jealousy, hadn’t made him think of her, just as every card Ashleigh turned up when she carried out a reading for herself always hinted at the loss of Scott, her only love. ‘Will Becca be there?’
He pulled her closer. ‘Yes. But she doesn’t bite.’
Becca Reid didn’t bark, either. She was the mildest-mannered pillar of her community. There was nothing to fear from her. ‘Then it sounds like a plan.’
‘Good. Maybe we’ll pop in and catch Mum some time before then, if we’re passing.’ And his lips touched the top of her hair, an offer she wouldn’t refuse.
Chapter 7
The search for Len Pierce’s killer moved with infuriating slowness. Whoever had murdered him must have taken advantage of Sunday afternoon traffic, perhaps even counted on it in a carefully-worked plan, and slipped easily from the side road on to the main arterial route to make their escape. Work on the case had slowed to a mosaic of shaken heads and blind alleys, of apparently random intervention by Faye Scanlon and a run of unrelated activity elsewhere in the county which had to be dealt with immediately.
In his office Jude checked his watch as an email pinged into his inbox. Half five. He scanned the email, hit the print button and got up to collect the sheet from the printer before heading into the corridor.
Faye was walking along towards him. In a week she’d established the habit of being visible, one that attracted irritation from others apart from him. She slowed as she reached him and he, perforce, had to stop. ‘Jude. I’ve observed from my past experience that walking about carrying a piece of paper is a useful screen for doing nothing on a Friday afternoon. But of course that’s not the case with you.’
It had to be a joke, or he thought it did, but it annoyed him nonetheless, as though there was something about him that brought out the most waspish side of her character. ‘It’s an email from the Intelligence Unit, about the Pierce case. I was taking it down to talk it through with the team before we finish. Routine and almost certainly futile, but I like to make sure I know everything that’s new before I go off.’
‘A good idea. Regular briefing meetings help keep us all fresh, don’t they?’ As if he was a probationer in need of constant supervision. ‘I saw you did the TV appeal. Any joy from that?’
‘Not so far.’ He checked his watch again, so that she saw it, but she wasn’t a woman to take that kind of a hint when she could assert her professional superiority over him. Instead she stood there looking at him, nodding. In her gaze Jude, who was attracted to confident women, recognised a suppressed sexuality without falling victim to it. When she didn’t reply, he nudged a little further. ‘They’ll be waiting for me.’
‘Who’s your meeting with?’
As he named Ashleigh, Doddsy and Chris he sensed a shift in her expression, as though she’d changed her mind. ‘I wondered if I should sit in, but perhaps not this time. It’s been a long week. You’ll all want to get home as soon as you can.’
Occasionally on a Friday the late afternoon team meetings led on to a drink or two in the pub with some other strays from the office. Today was one of those days and if it had been someone other than Faye he might have invited her along, but he wasn’t in the mood for her judgemental presence. If he mentioned it without an invitation, she'd probably commend him for his team-building and he didn’t need her approval for the way he worked. ‘We’ll stay until the work’s done.’
‘In which case, none of us will get away. Don’t work yourself into the ground.’ Still she lingered. ‘You’ll have seen my email about the diversity workshops.’
‘I saw it.’
‘It’s a matter of priority. Of course I wouldn’t suggest that anyone here is guilty of any conscious level of discrimination but it’s the unconscious bias we need to work at. And from a public perspective it’s very important that these processes are visible. You’re reasonably high-profile it seems to me, so it’s important to me to have you on board.’
‘Obviously I’m on board.’ Would the woman never stop talking and let him get on? ‘I’ve cleared Monday morning.’
‘Good. I’ll see you there. No excuses.’
At last she moved on, the click-click of her low heels fading away behind him as he headed down to the incident room. She’d made him late. The place was all but deserted except for the last of the detective constables working away at the background of the case, and even they were packing up their bags and putting on their coats. Around the table under the whiteboard, Doddsy, Ashleigh and Chris were waiting for him.
‘Sorry.’ He slid into his seat and laid the printed email down in front of him. ‘I bumped into Faye and she wanted to go over things.’
‘There’s not a lot to go over.’ Doddsy gave a petulant, Friday-afternoon sigh as Jude pulled up a chair in front of the white board. ‘Whoever he is, he’s vanished. Into thin air. I haven’t any leads.’
‘I might have something to add. I’ve been on at the guys in intelligence about Len Pierce’s computer all week, but they’ve waited until five o’clock on a Friday to get back to me.’
‘That’s quick for them.’ Doddsy sniggered. Jude wasn’t the only detective to have trouble extracting information from the Intelligence Unit.
‘They must have been bored. I haven’t had time to look at it in detail. Talk us through what we’ve learned this week, would you, and I’ll see what information they’ve got for us. If anything. The sooner we can all get down to the pub, the better.’ He dared to flash a smile across the room at Ashleigh in a way he wouldn’t have done if Faye had been present.
‘There’s the post-mortem results. They don’t show us anything that we couldn’t have guessed from the body, other than that we know Len had had sex, with an unknown man, shortly before his death.’
‘And didn’t resist his killer.’ Other than the single knife wound that had ripped into his heart the body bore no signs of violence, and all the evidence from the post-mortem suggested that whoever had killed Len Pierce had surprised him so completely that he couldn’t have seen the death blow coming even though it had been struck from in front of him, a sharp, right-handed thrust to just below the heart. ‘And there’s no match for the DNA, either, so the other man obviously has no criminal record.’ Irritating. The cigarette had been Len’s, too.
‘None. So, to the car.’ Doddsy ran down his list like the expert meeting-manager he was, one eye on the agenda, one on the clock and a good chunk of his concentration almost certainly already in the pub. ‘Chris, what can you tell us about it?’
‘Just about everything except its colour, reg and chassis number.’ Chris shook his head. What he had wouldn’t help to trace the vehicle, only to confirm it had been on the scene once they’d finally found it — if they ever did. ‘A Toyota Rav, probably heavily loaded, left rear tyre more worn than the right. The left tyre was illegal. Tammy’s reasonably confident she’s identified a trace of very similar tyres elsewhere on the verge, which suggests that this wasn’t the first time that person had been there. There were indications from tyre tracks — degraded but just about usable — that Len Pierce’s car had been there before. The only other tracks at that end of the lane were from a tractor, and they’ve been matched to the one at the farm. The
farmer had been along the lane on the Saturday morning.’
Jude nodded and took a moment to scan the email a second time. ‘That implies a regular meeting place, and it ties in with Maisie Skinner’s claims that Len met men online. But she didn’t offer any evidence for it and according to this,’ he tapped the printed email, ‘there isn’t any suggestion of that on his laptop, either.’
‘What about the dark web?’ Chris would do well in the tech team, if he ever wanted to go there. ‘Have they looked a bit deeper?’
‘I imagine they have.’
‘Yes, but if he’s meeting—’
‘We don’t know that he is.’ Ashleigh joined in. ‘Just because Maisie falls into the trap of thinking being gay makes you dangerous and promiscuous, there’s no reason why we should. The opposite, I’d say.’
‘We can’t let political correctness obscure the possibility, either. Everything suggests he was meeting someone in secret.’
‘It’s a public place. Hardly secret.’ Ashleigh glared.
‘Okay.’ Jude lifted a warning hand. ‘Chris. You have a good point. The tech team haven’t finished. They may find something else.’
‘What about his phone?’
‘Not that we’ve been able to access. There are a couple of cryptically named WhatsApp groups but they could have been group conversations, or just Lenny and a mate. He didn’t bother to encrypt any messages to his sister. They’re straightforward texts, and there’s nothing in there that goes beyond the mundane.’ Jude consulted the next paragraph of the email. ‘They’ll keep digging.’ The slenderness of information in the email disappointed him, but it was hardly unexpected. He turned to Ashleigh. ‘I imagine if the door-to-door inquiries had come up with anything I’d have heard, but at least you can run me through what we don’t know.’