He drove into the double garage and parked alongside her battered Peugeot 205. He’d suggested more than once that she used the Mondeo and he the Peugeot because she had to do so much more driving than he, but her reply was always the same – provided a car went and stopped when she wanted, she didn’t care what it looked like. He was fairly certain that her attitude to life led some people to believe her a snob, but in fact she was both determined and shy and it was this shyness that was responsible for their misjudgement. Far from striving to keep up with the Joneses, she didn’t give a damn what they were doing or saying. Her reason for wanting Fourways Farm had not been because a country cottage was chic, but because from the moment she’d walked into the hall it had been welcoming and promised her and her family happiness. (She believed all houses developed character; beware of living in a hostile one.)
He left the garage and went down the gravel drive to the thorn hedge which encircled the garden, still colourful despite the month. As he opened the wooden gate – he’d promised to repair it; he would when he had the time – he recalled their first meeting. The force’s annual ball, held at county HQ in Rickstone, all ranks invited, but only those who could behave welcome … By chance he’d been introduced to the chief constable’s wife. She’d been a pleasant woman (unlike the present chief constable’s wife, who seemed to be understudying royalty) and had chatted for a while before introducing him to the daughter of friends whom her husband had invited … Love at first sight. The sophisticated laughed at it and until then he’d regarded it as a useful ploy to get a romantically inclined woman into the sack. But he’d fallen in love with Miranda during their first dance …
Her parents, relatively wealthy, had never said so to her, far less to him, but he was certain that they’d always hoped she would marry someone from a similar background to theirs, not a mere detective constable … It was this certainty which forever fuelled an already sharp ambition. He was determined to make high rank before they died.
She met him at the front door, kissed him hullo, said she’d bet he’d never guess whom she’d met that afternoon, then gave him no chance to win or lose her bet. ‘I came face to face with Madge at Boots.’
‘Madge?’
‘Madge Sexton.’
‘Should I know her?’
‘You really are hopeless when it’s not work,’ she said with good-humoured resignation. ‘The parents live near the Sextons and Bill and I were like brother and sister. He married Madge Parsons and after the wedding I didn’t see them again until that day they called in here on their way back from Dover. You must remember – we were picking the Bramleys and wondered who on earth we knew who owned a Bentley.’
‘I remember the Bentley, but not … Or was she the woman who looked like she’d just been frightened silly?’
‘At school we used to call her Parsley Tops because her hair was always such a mess.’ She ran her fingers through her lustrous black hair that held a natural wave and almost always looked as if it had just received expert attention. ‘I asked them back here, but they were on their way to the Continent and had only stopped off in town to see if Madge could buy something she’d forgotten. She told me they’ve bought a house near Auch.’
‘Wouldn’t Monte Carlo have been more their scene?’
She linked her arm with his. ‘Why so gritty? Has it been a hard day?’
‘Bloody frustrating.’
‘Then come on through and I’ll get you a drink.’ She uncoupled her arm, led the way into the square sitting room which had so low a central beam that he had to duck under it. ‘What’s the order, sir?’
‘G and T, please. And if your hand slips while pouring the G, don’t panic.’
She crossed to the very short, narrow passage that lay between the central brickwork of the back-to-back fireplaces and the north-facing wall, opened the cocktail cabinet that stood there.
He sat. ‘Where are the kids?’
She appeared in the doorway. ‘Ellen asked them over to play with her two and promised to run them back.’
‘She’s a glutton for punishment. Wasn’t it the last time that they were together that they all fought like Kilkenny cats?’
‘That was then, now’s now. Which reminds me. I remembered earlier on that you’ve only five years left.’
‘To do what?’
‘To become chief constable.’
‘You wouldn’t be rushing things, would you?’
‘Then you don’t remember promising me you’d be CC by the time you were forty?’
‘A man’ll say anything to get a woman into bed.’
She laughed, disappeared. A moment later, she stepped back into the room, a glass in each hand. She put these on the occasional table by his side, leaned over and kissed him. ‘Would you like to know what really got me into bed with you that first time?’
‘My irresistible sex appeal?’
‘Your woebegone expression after you and Father had had your little chat.’
‘It wasn’t woebegone, it was disbelief at being forced to behave like a nineteenth-century berk and list all my credits and debits because I’d proposed to you.’
‘I’ll bet the debits took a heck of a lot longer to recite than the credits.’
‘Which shows how little you know me.’
‘The little I do know, I like.’ She kissed him again, straightened, moved to the armchair on the other side of the table, sat.
He studied her. A connoisseur would probably criticize the depth of her forehead, the high arch of her eyebrows, the thrust of her nose, and the size of her full, moist lips, but surely could find no fault in her deep brown eyes that sometimes expressed her emotions more clearly than she wished, or in her figure that would have been a credit to a younger woman who had borne no children …
She half turned to face him. ‘A penny for them?’
‘Will you have them expurgated or interesting?’
‘I thought you were so tired.’
‘Not that tired.’
* * *
She was in bed and he was changing into pyjamas when she said: ‘What’s gone wrong today?’
‘Mostly a lot of little things.’
‘Such as?’
‘Minor villainy that we won’t be able to clear up and the clear-up rate will suffer.’
‘But there’s nothing major?’
He stepped into the pyjama trousers, walked round the bed, climbed in. ‘Not long before I left the station, I had a call from Jack Warren. Officially, he was asking for the expedition of some cross-border cooperation, unofficially, he was gloating over the fact that one of his crew nicked a villain that the whole country’s been looking for for the past six months.’
‘Which means a feather in his cap?’
‘A whole bloody peacock’s tail. And you know what? It wasn’t smart coppering, it was sheer sodding luck!’
3
Carr left the bus and walked the two hundred yards to divisional HQ, hurrying because the drizzle was beginning to turn into icy rain. Gloria’s brother lived in Sydney and every letter from him was filled with sunshine, golden beaches, warm sea, and why didn’t she persuade Mike to emigrate? Perhaps in Australia, she would not have been confined to a hospital bed …
He entered the ten-storey concrete and glass building and made his way up to the CID general room on the fourth floor. Illness, injuries, and courses, had reduced numbers and only one other DC was present.
‘How’s the missus?’ Buckley asked.
‘Much as before.’ He threaded his way through to his desk, sat. He was not a man who usually talked about his misfortune, but was grateful for the chance to do so now. ‘If only they could move her back to the maternity ward it might do some good, but they say they can’t because she’s become long term and they have to keep all maternity beds ready for immediate occupation.’
‘It’s a real bugger having kids. You’d have thought that whoever arranged things would have made it easier, like it is for the kangaroos.�
��
‘I don’t suppose women would welcome walking around with their kids in pouches until half grown.’
‘I suppose there’s a point there … Any news when they might let her out?’
‘Not until the baby’s born.’
‘And there’s no knowing when that’ll happen, except that it’ll be in the middle of the night. Makes it rough for her.’
‘Even rougher when she keeps getting someone in the next bed who’s either gaga or who pops it. Doesn’t help her depression to have someone carried off feet first.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘I’ve asked around to find out what it would cost for her to go into a private nursing home as she so wants.’
‘What’s the answer?’
‘Not all that short of five hundred a week. Where does a copper find that sort of money?’
‘Not in his pay packet.’
‘So it’s not on. And every time I go there and see her getting more depressed and know that if I had the money…’ He became silent.
‘I can imagine.’
Could he? Carr wondered. Could he even begin to appreciate his feelings of pity and self-condemnation as he tried to lift Gloria out of her latest bout of depression and to convince her that this pregnancy would go to full term and she would finally bear the baby she so desperately wanted?
Buckley said, happy to change the conversation: ‘The skipper was shouting for you.’
‘What’s the panic?’
‘Can’t say.’
‘Then I’d better find out.’ Carr stood, left, and went along to the detective sergeant’s room.
‘How’s Gloria?’ Wyatt asked.
‘Not too bad.’
‘Freda wants to know what she really likes most, fruit or chocolate?’
‘Chocolate, but she has to keep off it because she must keep her weight down and that’s hell when she’s not taking any exercise.’
‘Any particular kind of fruit.’
‘Everything but figs. Apples as much as anything.’
‘I’ll tell Freda to find some Coxes. Trouble is, most of the shops are filled with those French apples that don’t taste. The only thing the French are good for is garlic.’
In many respects, Carr thought, Wyatt was the archetypal John Bull. Likely to complain that it was impossible to understand the natives in France because they all jabbered away in French.
Wyatt opened a folder, picked out a single sheet of paper. ‘We had a complaint in yesterday, too late to do anything; you can deal with it now. As the guv’nor said, more of a PR job than anything. Miss Genevieve Varney, Flat 3, Easthill House, 36 Egremont Road. She’s been getting dirty telephone calls. We’ve advised the Malicious Calls bureau so there’s not much more we can do at the moment, but you can ask a few questions to make it seem like the whole division’s been put on the job. And if she’s the usual middle-aged, dried-up spinster, don’t overlook the possibility that she’s making the whole thing up.’ Then he said, with studied casualness: ‘I suppose that address isn’t far from the hospital.’
Which meant, Carr understood, that a quick visit to see Gloria afterwards would go unremarked. He left and returned to the general room to collect his mackintosh. Wyatt came from a breed of coppers that was dying out fast. His creed was stolid loyalty for and to the unit. And loyalty meant fostering the regimental spirit (to many, a concept fit only to be jeered at) and being prepared to be concerned in problems that lay beyond work. Normally, he would demand that rules be observed on the grounds that they were rules; but if someone within the unit needed help, then that observance might take on a flexible air. Which was why he’d dropped the hint about the nearness of the hospital …
Carr stepped into the general room. ‘D’you know if both CID cars are out?’
‘Couldn’t say, mate,’ Buckley replied. ‘What’s the news?’
‘Only some woman who’s been receiving hot telephone calls.’
‘Seems like more and more people are getting their kicks in strange ways. Makes you wonder if being normal isn’t odd.’
Carr went down to the courtyard and found that one of the CID Escorts was parked there. A good omen? Perhaps Gloria would have cheered up since the previous evening. He sat behind the wheel, started the engine, backed out, turned, drove to the exit and waited. The traffic did not thin and as his impatience grew, he suffered an abrupt swing of emotion. It was a shitty world! The hospital staff were competent and caring, but the endless pressures of their jobs left them unable to appreciate the unique problems of individual patients. ‘When you’re with her, try to be more cheerful. Laugh and joke,’ one of the doctors had recently said to him, almost as if prescribing a dose of ipecacuanha. Did the stupid bastard think he spent his time with her detailing all his own woes and miseries? Couldn’t any of them understand that however illogical it was for her to be so affected by conditions in the ward, since they were by most standards good, if they did depress her with an ever-growing intensity, then logic had no part to play … And on top of his fear and vicarious suffering, there was the added pain of knowing that could she be moved to a nursing home, she might slough off her depression whether this was logical or illogical. He’d tried to find the money by raising a second mortgage. But the building society had been very quick to point out that their house had become trapped in negative equity by the falls in value of property. So Gloria was condemned to remain in hospital because he’d no other way of raising the money to be able to move her. In bitter contrast to his position, each day there were reports of politicians putting up their pay above the rate of inflation, of incompetent directors being given platinum handshakes, of City workers expecting Christmas bonuses that would ensure they kept drinking champagne, of sportsmen earning hundreds of thousands on the final putts, even – and bitter irony here – of servicewomen being paid fortunes for having become pregnant … An oncoming lorry stopped. He flashed the headlights as a thank you, drove on to the road. Reason returned. All right, life wasn’t fair, but that was hardly news. Adam had discovered this truth when Eve had cajoled him into eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. All her fault, but he’d been just as severely punished as she.
The area around Bullock Common, named after a mid-nineteenth-century philanthropist, had once been the smartest part of Everden and the houses reflected that fact – large, three-storey Victorian and Edwardian buildings with the blunt, forceful character of the age. Even now, when the motor car had caused so much to change, it was still a road suggesting prosperity. He parked between a Volvo and a Mercedes.
Number 36 had a small, well-tended front garden. He passed through this, climbed the three steps to the front door, checked the name tags on the entryphone unit, pressed the button for flat 3.
‘Who is it?’
The loudspeaker had distorted the voice too much for him to make even a guess at the speaker’s age. ‘Detective Constable Carr, divisional CID. Is it convenient to have a word?’
‘Come on up.’
The door lock buzzed and he entered. The hall was large, but sparsely furnished and the flowers in a vase on the table were looking distinctly tired. He climbed the two flights of poorly carpeted stairs and as he stepped on to the top landing a door opened and Genevieve said: ‘Hullo.’
So much for Wyatt’s dried-up, middle-aged spinster! She was in her early twenties. Her figure was outlined, but not too closely defined, by sweater and jeans. Jet-black hair framed an oval face in which the most noticeable feature was large, deep blue eyes; her complexion was peaches and cream, her nose impishly inclined, her mouth shapely and only a muscle twitch away from a smile. She made him think of his lost innocence.
‘Do come in.’ Free of the tinny distortions of a loudspeaker, her voice was soft and warm.
He followed her across a small hall into a large sitting-room, furnished in modern style, which offered a view of the common.
‘Will you have a drink?’
‘Thanks, but no than
ks.’
‘Then it’s true! Policemen on duty don’t drink.’
He returned her smile. ‘Not before midday.’
‘Do sit.’
He sat, waited until she was seated on the settee. ‘What can you tell me about the phone calls?’
‘Not very much, I’m afraid. Now I just put the receiver down when I know it’s him.’
‘When was the first?’
‘I suppose it was roughly three weeks ago.’
‘Yet you’ve only just reported them?’
‘There was a break after the first one and I hoped he’d gone away. It’s only in the last few days they’ve become such a nuisance. As a matter of fact, I’ve been making a note of dates and times – would that be of any use?’
‘It might very well be.’
‘I’ll get it for you.’ She crossed to a small table on which stood a phone and answerphone unit. She opened a notebook, brought out a loose sheet of paper, handed this to him.
He briefly studied the dates and times. There was no readily discernible pattern to suggest the caller had some sort of routine. ‘What has he said to you?’
‘What you’d expect.’
‘Could you be more specific? If some of the words embarrass you, just use some sort of symbol, like XYZ.’
‘I’m not embarrassed – after all, one hears them on the television all the time – it’s just that I don’t like speaking them.’ She looked anxiously at him. ‘Does that sound really stupid?’
‘Far from it. It’s how my wife thinks.’
‘Then here goes.’ She repeated what the caller had said.
‘Fairly standard, I’m afraid.’
The Price of Failure Page 2