The Time and the Place

by Jane Renshaw

  She didn’t say anything, just pulled the cord out of the hoover and plugged it in.

  There was a roaring fire in the grate and the room was nice and cosy, with no lights on, just the flickering firelight. Very nice. Never mind the poor minions getting frostbite in the rest of the house. Let them eat cake – or whatever the equivalent would be if the French peasants had been freezing to death instead of starving. Let them wear twelve-ply cashmere.

  As she started to hoover the carpet, she was aware of him limping past her and thought he was leaving the room, but then the hoover cut out.

  He’d switched it off at the wall.

  ‘You’d better tell the police where you really found that phone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m assuming you found it at Kinty. Is the phone Ade’s?’

  Karen gave him nothing. ‘Turn that back on.’

  ‘Karen –’

  ‘I am never going to forgive you for this! You completely betrayed me! I don’t want to talk to you! Turn the fucking hoover back on!’

  ‘The bag needs emptying. That’s why it’s making that noise.’

  She looked at him, standing there in – yes, in his fucking twelve-ply cable-knit cashmere jersey – in his fucking stately home passing judgement on people he knew fuck all about and would never understand if he did. ‘You are unbelievable. Your own brother is a fucking criminal who needs locking up and the key thrown away, and you’re going round bad-mouthing Ade and practically accusing him of murdering Chimp just because he’s a bit unconventional and doesn’t always play by the rules, because – you know what? Some of the rules are broken. They’re fucking broken! You’re a self-.... self-....’

  ‘Self-satisfied?’

  God! ‘Self-deluded fucking control freak!’

  ‘Talking of which – have you told Ade about the phone?’

  She sooo wanted to hit him. ‘He’s going to find out about it now, isn’t he?’

  ‘And why does that worry you?’

  ‘It doesn’t!’

  ‘You don’t need to go back there. You could always just go home.’

  Karen took a deep breath. ‘It’s not Ade’s phone. It’s probably Hector’s! Your fucking psychopath brother probably killed Chimp!’

  And oh God, now Hector was standing up from one of the winged armchairs that had its back to her. He turned and smiled at her and said, ‘Good morning, Karen. Well done for finding that phone, by the way. I’m sure it’ll turn out to be an important piece of evidence. But you really do need to tell DCI Stewart the truth about where it was.’

  ‘I –’

  ‘And now if you’ll excuse me, I have the mother of all headaches and it’s not responding well to teenage angst, so I’ll be about my psychopathic business and leave the two of you to it. Please refrain, if possible, from physical violence. Cleaning blood off the carpets may be something I’m practised at, but in my current delicate condition I wouldn’t relish the task.’ And, grinning just like Damian, he left the room.

  ◆◆◆

  Claire needed to talk to Karen properly about that phone. Had she really found it on the drive? If it was Hector’s, it was very unlikely that he would be so careless as to leave it there, which suggested it was nothing to do with him, surely? Claire had a suspicion, though, that Karen had been lying about where she’d found it. She needed to talk to her again. But Karen seemed to have gone without telling Claire – off back to Kinty, presumably, and the controlling boyfriend.

  After lunch, Claire took some more photographs of potentially stolen objects, and then she recruited Damian to help her arrange the holly in the hall and vestibule. He turned out to be surprisingly bad at it, lining the holly up in regimented lines on the tops of the picture frames, so she had to go round after him rearranging it for a more natural look.

  ‘I’ve finally found something you’re terrible at.’

  ‘Harsh.’ He was contemplating the arrangement of cones and lichens she’d made in the blue bowl on the vestibule table. ‘If you’re going for a nature table look, I’ve got some skulls you could use. All sizes available, from shrew to horse.’

  ‘Mm, skulls. That well-known festive motif.’

  ‘Why should Hallowe’en have all the fun? Mrs Mac could knit Christmas hats for them.’

  ‘And maybe a robin to perch in an eye socket. I think next time I’ll have to press-gang Hector into helping me.’

  ‘He’s not great at this sort of thing either.’

  ‘Beggars can’t be choosers. Where is he, by the way?’

  ‘At the estate office. He’ll probably be there all day.’

  Good. In addition to letting her avoid an excruciating encounter, that meant she would be free to snoop undisturbed in his study. She had to just concentrate on the job in hand and accept that last night had been an aberration. There was no realistic prospect of any sort of relationship with this man, even if she’d wanted one. If he’d murdered Chimp – which was looking increasingly likely – there was no way she wanted anything to do with him, let alone...

  No, it had been an aberration and she had to just forget about it.

  ‘Mrs Mac has made some really nice-looking cheese scones,’ she said. ‘Shall we have a break and pinch a couple?’

  ‘Oh, that was me. The scones, I mean. Can’t guarantee they’ll be nice.’

  ‘It really is just as well you’re crap at Christmas, or you’d be so sickeningly multi-talented I would probably have to kill you.’

  ‘I think you’d have to get in line.’

  ‘Karen?’

  He made a rueful face.

  ‘She’s all over the place, isn’t she?’ Claire pushed away thoughts of Dawn. Karen was nothing like Dawn. ‘Her story about finding the phone – do you think that’s true?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, no.’

  She left a silence.

  He looked at her, eyebrows slightly raised. ‘I think the phone probably belonged to Ade,’ he said at last. ‘And, for some inexplicable reason, she’s covering for him.’

  Claire’s heart leapt. If the phone was Ade’s, that meant that Hector probably had nothing to do with John Innes’s death! Nothing whatsoever! She’d have to ask DCI Stewart if Chimp ever mentioned Ade in his reports.

  ‘But the phone was definitely wet,’ she said. ‘I saw it drying out on the Aga.’

  ‘Maybe Ade threw it away and she retrieved it. I’d be very surprised if Ade and Co.’s fingerprints aren’t on the Police National Computer. They’re bound to have criminal records. So hopefully forensics will tie Ade or whoever to the phone without the need for any more input from Karen or anyone else.’

  The feeling of shellshock brought on by a conversation with Damian was becoming familiar. In the kitchen, she buttered the scones and heated up the soup he had politely enquired about – like most teenage boys, he seemed to have an insatiable appetite – while he sat at the table and told her all about human speciation and how it was now thought that Homo sapiens had interbred with Neanderthals. ‘Europeans have about two per cent Neanderthal DNA. But the interesting thing is that no modern human male has been found to have a Neanderthal Y chromosome.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I know – pretty amazing! You’d expect some people to have them, because Y chromosomes are passed from father to son intact. There’s been speculation that, because genes encoding antigens involved in immune responses are present on the Neanderthal Y chromosome, the bodies of Homo sapiens women may have rejected hybrid Homo sapiens/Homo neanderthalensis male foetuses, so no lineage of Homo sapiens was ever produced with a Neanderthal Y chromosome.’

  ‘Right...’

  How had they got onto this subject? She had her intro to the What Do You Remember About the Accident conversation all worked out. She was going to say that she hadn’t realised that Karen had found Chimp’s body and that she felt guilty about not giving her more slack. Had Karen had counselling? Claire could talk authoritatively about this because all UCs had to s
ee a psychologist on a regular basis. She’d say she’d had counselling after being mugged in London and had found it really helped... then neatly segue into: Have you ever had counselling? Because surely he must have done. And then he’d tell her about the accident.

  But how to get this back on track and make it seem natural? Who the fuck wanted to know about Neanderthal DNA?

  ‘But I’m wondering if it could just have been a chance thing – lots of Y lineages just die out by chance. Or males with a Neanderthal Y chromosome could have been at an adaptive disadvantage in some way compared with those with a Homo sapiens one, so were weeded out by natural selection. It’s a pity there are so many ethical issues with cloning a whole load of Neanderthals and hybrids, and putting them with modern humans in a Stone Age environment, and seeing what happens.’

  ‘Damned ethics,’ she agreed.

  ‘Do you know anything about the Denisovans?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’re also really interesting. They had a common origin with the Neanderthals, and contributed DNA to modern Melanesians, Australian Aborigines and Papua New Guineans. Maybe five per cent of their DNA is –’

  ‘Here you go,’ she said, bringing the scones to the table and placing a bowl of Tesco’s Finest carrot and coriander soup in front of him.

  That shut him up for all of three seconds. Then:

  ‘This is very good. What’s in it?’

  God. ‘Well, carrots. And coriander.’

  ‘And what else?’ He was looking over his spoon at her.

  ‘That’s all,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Really? No onions?’

  ‘Oh, well yes, of course onions.’

  ‘Vegetable stock?’

  ‘Tesco,’ she blurted. ‘All right, it’s made by Tesco.’

  He smiled.

  28

  When dusk had fallen, Claire ventured out into the yard. She could see one of the ‘goons’ as Karen called them, the shaven-headed tattooed one called Chris, up in the flat above the coach houses, moving about in a kitchen, the flicker of a massive TV screen behind him. He seemed to be watching Pointless. Hopefully he wouldn’t be able to see much out of the darkened window.

  Nevertheless, she moved cautiously, slowly, as she searched the yard around where Hector’s Land Rover had been parked. In dim light it was movement, she knew, that generally attracted the attention. But Chris seemed to be dividing his attention between Pointless and whatever he was doing – cutting something up on a chopping board?

  She had to scrabble around a bit in the newly fallen snow, but eventually she found the tracker. The magnets mustn’t be strong enough, she supposed. She put it in her pocket. She’d text DCI Stewart later to let him know what had happened.

  Right. Now to search Hector’s study. Damian was in the kitchen helping Mrs Mac with preparations for dinner, so she would hopefully have the rest of the house to herself for an hour or so at least.

  In the study, she shut the door behind her and contemplated the possibilities. The oak filing cabinet next to the desk was probably a good place to start. It was locked, but she had her picks in her pocket and it was a matter of a few minutes to free the slatted roller shutter thing that pulled down over the drawers.

  The top drawer contained stuff relating to Damian. There were school reports – academically glowing, and there were comments like ‘A great kid with a very original take on things. Lots of fun to have in class’ and ‘Thinks he knows more than I do about biology. Unfortunately, he’s probably right.’ But also: ‘A destabilising influence’... ‘Seems to feel the curriculum doesn’t apply to him’... ‘Damian takes the term “subversive” to a whole new level.’ And there were certificates for music exams – all distinctions – and medical stuff which she wasn’t going to look at.

  The next drawer contained print-outs of spread sheets. Accounts going back ten years. Four thousand pounds to Bridget Anderson, with a note saying ‘Holiday’; ten thousand pounds to Bill and Jean Mason (‘Wet room etc.’); over twenty thousand pounds to Sandy Bell (‘Consultations and treatment’); sixteen thousand pounds to The Woodland Trust... This year alone, the total came to one million, four hundred and thirty-six pounds and nineteen pence.

  She replaced the print-outs in the file and shut the drawer.

  This was money he had given away.

  Bridget Anderson was probably some local woman who had really needed a holiday, who had been through a bad time and needed to recharge her batteries but couldn’t afford it; the ‘wet room etc.’ for Bill and Jean Mason – maybe one of them couldn’t manage a bath or even a shower cubicle any more; Sandy Bell had some sort of medical need, like Geordie, Unty’s brother-in-law, for whom Hector had paid for private health care after his cancer diagnosis...

  He was helping all these people.

  Not just helping them – saving their lives, probably, in some cases.

  Of course this was, potentially, dynamite. If he had income from crime which couldn’t, obviously, be declared to the Inland Revenue, and his legitimate income wasn’t high enough to cover this sort of charitable giving...

  They had him.

  And, unless he bought everything himself so that any receipts for holidays or materials or labour were in his name, the recipients would presumably have had to pay tax on the money he gave them as the amounts would be well over the allowed threshold for gifts within a twelve-month period. There would be a paper trail.

  She stood staring at her reflection in one of the darkened windows, her hand on the smooth wooden top of the cabinet. She felt as if she was someone else, looking at DC Claire Castleford and wondering what the hell she was going to do now.

  If Hector was obtaining all the money that he spent in this community by criminal means, there were victims whose suffering enabled it to happen. If Phil had been here, he’d have pointed that out. Hector wasn’t some sort of Robin Hood. He was taking what didn’t belong to him and using it to prop up the family estate, with a bit of money chucked at good causes to assuage his guilt.

  She opened the drawer and removed the print-outs, spread them out on the desk and began to photograph them with her phone.

  She didn’t hear him come in. She didn’t hear anything until:

  ‘Can I help you with something?’

  She didn’t look up. She scrabbled at the sheets of paper and tried to slip her phone back into her pocket, but she couldn’t find the opening; ridiculously, it kept sliding down the outside of her trousers –

  Her gaze still on the desk, she saw Hector’s chestnut-coloured leather shoes come into the room. Cross to the desk.

  ‘I –’

  Finally, she got the phone into her pocket and looked up.

  Hector was setting a folder down on the desk.

  He looked, eyebrows raised, from Claire to the open filing cabinet.

  There was a clock in this room too, she realised. Tick, tock... tick, tock... It seemed to beat on the cold air, to fill the room with its voice, its marking of the passing of time. Time falling away, time in which she could have said something, made something up, offered a plausible explanation. And as the clock ticked on, she couldn’t look away. She couldn’t break the gaze of his soft brown eyes.

  She had no defences against him. No chameleon skin to put on.

  ‘I’m an undercover cop,’ came out of her mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  29

  Gently, he took the sheets of paper from her hands. ‘Find anything of interest?’

  She couldn’t speak.

  She edged away from the desk.

  He was standing between her and the door.

  Her hand went, instinctively, to the phone in her pocket but then he was on her, grabbing her arm, pulling the phone from her and tossing it down on the desk with the print-outs and saying, ‘Not a good idea.’

  What was wrong with her?

  Why on earth had she told him? The words had just leapt from her mouth as if he had some supernatural
power over her –

  How could he possibly have known?

  But she believed him. There had been no surprise, only – only a sort of suppressed amusement. Like an adult entertained by a child suddenly coming clean, suddenly owning up to a misdemeanour he’d known about all along. It had happened again. Somehow, just like with the Bristows, she had given herself away.

  He moved back, away from her, leaving her exit clear. ‘I’m not going to stop you, if you want to leave. All I ask is that you hear me out first.’

  ‘How did you know?’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘I’m hardly going to tell you that, am I?’ As if it was a game, an extension of their flirtation.

  ‘What are – what are you going to do?’ She backed away until she was almost standing in the hearth.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘I’m perfectly happy with the status quo, if you are. That’s my proposition. You think I killed Chimp, and committed who knows what other crimes? You’re welcome to try to prove it. Snoop away. Go through the rest of the filing cabinet, if you like. Just don’t expect me to make it easy for you.’

  This wasn’t happening. This made no sense.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m guessing you haven’t found anything, or Campbell would have descended with the Miranda rights and the handcuffs by now.’

  She swallowed. ‘All that money... That you’ve given away...’ What was she even asking?

  ‘Yes, thanks to a general efficiency drive, the estate’s outgoings have been incredibly low for many years, allowing us to make various donations. If you look in the next drawer down, you’ll see that it’s all accounted for and declared to the tax office. There’s tax relief on charitable donations, of course.’ His smile widened. ‘Did you think I was some sort of Robin Hood character?’

  It really was as if he could read her mind. He and Damian both.

  He waved a hand to encompass the room, with its bookcases of antiquarian books; the House, the grounds, the estate. ‘I wouldn’t let that inhibit you. I’m not exactly living in a hut in the woods.’