by Mari Hannah
So why now?
Stone was in two minds whether to answer. Frankie wondered if the persistent caller was the reason he’d fled the south in such a hurry. She was convinced it was something to do with a woman. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut when it came to her old boss but David had never once spoken of his. This contact represented a major trauma for him, as had his initial meeting with Alex Parker. Like a rabbit caught in headlights, he’d frozen, and that bugged her. The time had never been right to tackle him on the subject . . .
Luke dying had put paid to that.
‘Go on!’ She tried to make amends. ‘Maybe you won the force lottery.’
Reluctantly, he pressed to accept.
‘Sinead?’ He cleared his throat. ‘Great to hear from you.’
His expression told another story. It was blatant lies. There was nothing great or even good about this call. Whoever Sinead was, she represented a memory too painful for him to share, even in loose terms: old boss, girlfriend, mate? In all the time Frankie had been working with him, the name had never once come up.
Unless Sinead was THE woman?
‘Yes,’ Stone appeared on edge. ‘I spoke to her quite recently . . . last Wednesday, why? . . . What? . . . No!’ He was getting more and more tense the longer the conversation went on. He listened for what seemed like an age. By the time the caller paused for breath, he’d lost his appetite. ‘Yes, of course . . .’ His food hit the bin. Frankie’s followed soon after. His eyes gave nothing away as he hung up. ‘We need to get to the Parkers’ house now.’
56
Of all the scenarios conjured up in their heads on the way to Scots Gap, what greeted Stone and Oliver was unexpected. As they turned off the main road, the driveway was crammed with high-end vehicles, lights on in every room in the house, a party going on, inside and out. As they got out of the car, music drifted in the air from the garden, the smell of a barbecue, the sound of chatter and laughter. No one came when they rang the bell, so they walked round the side of the house.
The garden was stunning, lights twinkling from every tree, guests spilling out of a marquee with champagne and canapés, staff in uniform walking round with trays of fizz and more food. Alex and Tim Parker were in the centre of the lawn, clinking glasses with another couple, his arm around her waist. A picture-perfect scene, the first time that either detective had seen the couple genuinely at ease in each other’s company. No one noticed the detectives standing in the shadows.
‘Jesus!’ Frankie said. ‘Talk about making our job more difficult.’
Stone nodded to the patio doors. ‘Go inside. Clear the house so we have somewhere to take them. This is going to be hard enough without an audience.’
Frankie left him.
Less than a minute later, she emerged from the house, moving curious guests outside. Stone gave her the nod. Independently, they made a beeline for the Parkers. Over her husband’s shoulder, Alex caught Frankie’s eye as she strode across the lawn. Daniel’s mother was instantly on her guard. Like the first time they had met, another moment of menacing clarity passed between the two women. Whatever had prompted the detective sergeant’s visit was not news Alex Parker wanted to hear.
Making her apologies, she drew Tim away from their friends, a look of trepidation wiping away the joy Frankie had witnessed on her face moments earlier. Tim Parker wasn’t keen to leave his conversation until he saw Frankie. When he clocked the DI approaching, his reaction was one of disdain. He was angry that the pair had the effrontery to visit in full view of his posh mates.
Before he could create a scene, Stone politely asked them both to step inside.
They went into Alex’s study, closing the door behind them, less chance that someone might stumble in there unaware that the detectives had come to deliver yet another death message. Stone invited them to sit. The couple declined. Their hands came together, a show of solidarity in the face of they didn’t know what. Someone had turned the music off outside, the jungle telegraph informing guests that Tim’s fortieth birthday party was over.
Frankie waited for Stone to begin.
He hesitated.
She chanced a quick glance in his direction. His body language was rigid, eyes fixed on Alex. To anyone who didn’t know him well it was impossible to detect. Frankie knew that he’d come apart at the worst time possible.
She had to cover for him . . . yet again.
‘Alex, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘We’ve been informed by the Metropolitan Police that your sister Kathryn Tailford Irwin was found dead in her apartment yesterday.’
‘Ohmigod, no!’ Her hands flew to her face. There followed a moment’s silence. ‘I don’t understand . . . Was there some kind of accident?’
‘We believe that she died at home sometime in the afternoon. Detectives in the south are treating her death as suspicious. Her little girl is safe and with the childminder.’
‘What?’ Anguish instantly turned to relief, then anger. Alex took a deep breath, unable to express her feelings. ‘You better check your facts, DS Oliver. Kat has no children.’
Now Frankie was floundering. Without Stone in support, she had to think on her feet. The only reason she could imagine keeping a secret as big as that had just put an arm around his wife. Suddenly, it all made sense: Timothy Parker’s anxiety; large amounts of cash disappearing from his business account; the so-called bad blood between them. Kat’s attempt to blacken his name was the only thing that didn’t fit. If she was convicted for Justine’s murder, she could kiss goodbye to child support. And now she too was dead.
Frankie would debate this when Stone got his shit together. She couldn’t think about that now. She had a job to do. All that mattered was conveying the awful news as sensitively as she could, offering support to a woman who currently looked like she was losing her mind.
‘Alex, we wouldn’t be here discussing this if there was any doubt,’ Frankie said gently. ‘I spoke to the childminder myself. She’s known Kat since before the child was born—’
‘I don’t give a shit who you spoke to. You’ve got this wrong! As you know only too well, I recently spent a week with my sister. She said nothing about a child. Why would she keep a thing like that from me?’
‘That’s a question I’m unable to answer. If you’d prefer to speak to the Senior Investigating Officer, I can give you her contact number. All I can say is, the facts have been checked and rechecked. The child’s birth certificate was found in Kat’s apartment. I really don’t know what else to say.’
Alex palmed her brow. ‘How old is this child?’
‘Three.’
‘No, I don’t believe it. Kat and I have had our problems, but she would have told me if she was a mother.’
Frankie knew of only one way to ram the message home. It would hurt Alex deeply.
It had to be done.
‘Her name is Ali.’
Alex wept openly. Tim Parker did absolutely nothing to help her. With her eyes on Alex, Frankie was unable to gauge his reaction. She hoped, for both their sakes, that Stone was getting some of this.
57
Having taken the seven fifty-five Virgin East Coast train out of Newcastle, Stone and Oliver arrived at King’s Cross shortly before eleven. He led the way along the platform, an overnight bag slung over his shoulder, Frankie following close behind. Once through the barrier, he turned right, heading for the taxi rank. It was a lovely day outside. After sitting all morning, and with a couple of hours to spare before meeting the Metropolitan Police SIO at one o’clock, Frankie would rather have walked than taken a cab, but David was on a mission with no stop button.
The news had shaken them both. They had spent the last three hours in complete silence, scanning electronic documents on laptops, familiarising themselves with a murder investigation instigated by a Detective Superintendent whose incident room was almost three hundred miles from
their Northumberland base. At no point had Frankie felt able to bone him about stalling the night before. When they left the Parkers to their grief last night, he’d made it abundantly clear that the subject wasn’t open for discussion.
‘Burlington Arms,’ he told the cabbie.
Frankie looked at him. ‘Have we got time?’
‘We’ll make time.’
‘We shouldn’t drink—’
‘Then don’t. I need one.’
‘Your funeral.’
He looked away.
He wasn’t the only one who needed a drink but Frankie kept that to herself. She stared blankly out of the window, a world alien to her. Last time she was in London, she was in and out in a couple of hours. It had taken forty minutes to travel half a mile. Though traffic was light this morning, the closer they got to their destination, the busier it got.
Deciding to walk the rest of the way, they abandoned their cab on Regent Street, an area teeming with visitors, even on a Sunday morning. The West End Central nick wasn’t far away, a five-storey stone structure situated in the heart of Mayfair, one of the Metropolitan Police’s busiest stations, Stone’s former workplace. On the junction of Savile Row and Boyle Street, Frankie glanced up at the building, the Met flag flying on top. An old-fashioned blue lamp caught her eye, beneath it state-of-the-art CCTV, the old and the new, side by side – like her and granddad, Frank.
Thinking about him made her smile.
The pub was at the rear of the station. Whoever had named it the West End’s best-kept secret wasn’t wrong. It was much less busy than she expected, a traditional London pub on a quiet street, occupying the ground floor of a yellow-brick building, its window boxes stuffed with greenery above a red awning, THE BURLINGTON ARMS picked out in gold lettering.
On the corner of Coach and Horses Yard, empty beer barrels waited on the pavement for replacement and collection. At Stone’s request, Frankie took a seat outside, facing the rear of the nick, police vehicles with Met insignia lining the street in front of her. She savoured a moment alone. Time to chill before facing what was undoubtedly the single most important moment of her career. Liaison with the Met was a big deal for any detective, except Frankie had the distinct impression that it wasn’t her nerves Stone was trying to quell, the beer in his hand testament to his reluctance to cross the road and go inside.
‘Now there’s a sight for sore eyes.’ A local accent.
Frankie looked up to find a detective standing over her.
It took one to know one.
For a moment, she assumed that Stone had arranged to meet an ex-colleague for the low-down on the case they had travelled to assist, a misjudgement on her part, as it turned out. Stone got up and shook hands but Frankie wasn’t feeling the love between the two men, and so it proved . . .
‘How’s it going, Dave?’ the Met officer said.
‘Good. It’s great to be back.’
‘Yeah, right. I heard—’
‘I said I’m good. Let’s leave it there, eh?’
The local detective put his hands up as if Stone was holding a gun.
David drained his pint, wiping froth from his upper lip with his hand. ‘I’d love to chat but I’m running late. Frankie, we need to go.’
The Met officer gave her the once-over. ‘Nice meeting you, Frankie.’
‘Detective Sergeant . . . Oliver.’
‘Come to help us out, have you?’
‘Don’t we always?’
The man flicked his head in Stone’s direction. ‘He was a good DCI . . . once.’ It was a spiteful dig at David’s reduction in rank. ‘I’ll see you around, Frankie.’
‘Not if I see you first.’
His grin was superficial.
Stone practically frogmarched Frankie over the road, making no comment on what had transpired outside the pub or the nature of the unsettling exchange. They were given visitor passes and shown to an office on the third floor. The name on the door said: DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT SINEAD FRIEL.
Stone knocked and waited.
‘Come!’ The woman they had come to see was around forty years of age. Sitting behind a large desk, she looked up as they entered the room, a pair of green smiley eyes seizing on Stone. ‘David, welcome back!’ She didn’t get up to greet him.
‘Guv, this is DS Frances Oliver,’ he said.
‘Frances?’ Frankie made a face. ‘That’s my Sunday name, ma’am. Frankie is fine. I’m very pleased to meet you.’
‘Nice to meet a kindred spirit.’ Friel’s was a firm handshake. ‘Let’s dispense with the formality then, Frankie. Two expats are now three, so we are. In my case Dublin, should you need to brush up on Irish accents. We stick together – right, David?’ Stone nodded a reply. ‘He probably told you that we landed in London in the same intake.’
‘He did.’ Frankie lied out of politeness.
‘Oh yes, 2001 was a good year.’ Sinead smiled warmly, a brief glance at her office door. ‘We formed a secret partnership at training school so we could bitch about the locals. We’ve since learned that they’re a good bunch, on the whole.’
Fifteen years was a lifetime in policing.
This was more than mutual respect.
They were close.
Very close.
Some people you are drawn to instantly. Sinead Friel was one of them. It didn’t take long for Frankie to realise what a popular guy David was down south and what he’d left behind when he returned to his Northumberland roots. Almost every detective in the Murder Investigation Team came to shake his hand, offer a kind word, a friendly pat on the back, each one genuinely pleased to see him . . . bar one. The female DS hung back, her reticence obvious from across the room. Frankie couldn’t make her mind up whether there was bad blood there or they were close and trying to hide it. An unspoken message passed from the Met detective to Stone: Not now. Later? Maybe. Yup, there was unfinished business in the capital. Something that might cause a problem for him. Whatever it was, as his new sidekick, it was Frankie’s job to ensure that it didn’t.
58
The SIO called for order: those that were standing, sat down; phone calls were ended; conversations abandoned; other work cast aside by the Murder Investigation Team. Detective Superintendent Sinead Friel waited patiently. Only when she had the full attention of her team did she formally welcome Stone back into the fold and introduce Frankie.
‘There’s a lot to get through,’ she said. ‘As you all know, Kathryn Tailford Irwin – known as Kat to her friends – was found murdered in her flat the day before yesterday in the early afternoon. Post-mortem results are in. Time of death around noon, give or take. The IP was found by the caretaker at Montagu Square who was checking the building after the fire alarm went off. A false alarm, as it turned out. According to the pathologist, there were no injuries associated with sexual assault, although there was semen present, so maybe forensics will be able to assist us in that respect. One can hope. DI Stone is here at my request. His number is one that Kyra recognised instantly. It was stored on Kat’s mobile device and appeared on her call list on Wednesday, June twenty-ninth, a conversation lasting just twenty seconds. A few minutes later, DI Stone called her, a call lasting four minutes and twenty-five seconds.’
‘So why is he not in cells, guv?’ The facetious comment had come from the arsehole they had encountered in the street.
Stone took it on the chin.
Frankie didn’t. ‘Because at eleven o’clock on Friday, July the first we were briefing our SIO at Northumbria Northern Command HQ. We were doing police work. You should try it sometime. Virgin trains are good, but they ain’t that good. And, as far as I know, my guv’nor doesn’t own a private jet to get him to the capital in time to murder Kat Irwin.’
‘I see you’ve met DC Connor,’ Sinead Friel said.
Everyone laughed.
The
SIO moved on. ‘David, you are always welcome here. The floor is yours.’
Frankie was giving the arsehole the thousand-yard stare. There was a Connor in every office. While Stone had given up a rank to move north, it was his choice to do so. He hadn’t been demoted for neglect of duty or discreditable conduct and she’d defend him come what may. Addressing his former team might be difficult for him but he was up to it.
He took a moment to gather his thoughts, ignoring Connor’s attempt to belittle him, treating the untimely interruption as if it hadn’t taken place. ‘On June seventeenth, DS Oliver and I began investigating the disappearance of Kat Irwin’s nephew, Daniel Scott. Kat and the child’s mother, Alex Parker, are sisters. They were in Majorca at the time, leaving the lad in the care of his stepfather, Timothy Parker, a well-connected entrepreneur who lives on our patch.’
A hand went up.
It belonged to the female DS who hadn’t come to greet Stone earlier. Nicknamed ‘the reluctant detective’ by Frankie for giving Stone a wide berth when they first entered the incident room, she stood up, the better to see and be seen. She was around the same age as Stone, approximately mid-thirties, average height, dark sultry eyes, hair worn in a messy side braid that appeared a simple look to achieve, only Frankie happened to know that it wasn’t.
Stone was smiling at her. ‘Kyra? You wanted to say something?’
‘Just that Parker’s home and mobile numbers are listed in the victim’s contacts.’ Kyra held up a blown-up image of a man she hadn’t been able to identify. ‘Forensics found this photograph while sweeping her apartment. I was hoping you or DS Oliver might be able to help.’
‘That is Timothy Parker,’ Frankie said.
‘How odd,’ the SIO said. ‘Who keeps a photograph of their brother-in-law?’
‘I think I know the answer,’ Kyra said. ‘There are ranting, vicious texts between Parker and Kat on her phone. She was putting the bite on him to increase child support and cared less that indirectly it was being paid for by her sister. Kat saw it as her due. Reading between the lines, she was left out of her parents’ will after falling out with them. Alex got the lot.’