Narrow is the Way

by Faith Martin

  ‘How well did you know Julia Reynolds?’ Hillary asked. But if she was hoping for a knee-jerk reaction, she was disappointed.

  ‘Didn’t know her from Adam. Or Eve,’ Gregory corrected, with what he no doubt thought of as a winsome smile.

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ Hillary said. ‘You just thought you’d latch on to the tail end of a murder inquiry and see what you could come up with? Even though nobody had hired you?’ She let the scepticism she felt leach clearly into her voice.

  Gregory again shifted unhappily about on his seat. He knew how lame it all sounded, but he wasn’t going to blow it now. ‘That’s right. I’ve got a living to earn.’

  ‘Yes. With Birmingham, the second biggest city in the UK right on your doorstep, I’d have thought there’d have been more than enough dirt and tragedy there for you to grub around in, Mr Innes. Why come to a small Oxfordshire village?’

  Gregory flushed. ‘There’s no law against me seeking work outside my catchment area, so to speak, is there?’ he demanded belligerently.

  ‘Did someone teach you that in PI school, Mr Innes?’ Hillary asked, patently amused now.

  Gregory flushed. Sarky cow.

  ‘All right. So you say you don’t know Julia Reynolds, and you just happened to cast your net this way. Tell me about Dr Lincoln Crowder.’

  Gregory felt the chair underneath him give a lurch. Or at least it felt like it had. Janine watched the colour seep out of Prince Charming’s face, and hid a grin. She had to hand it to Hillary, the DI knew how to land a good sucker-punch along with the best of them.

  ‘Who?’ Gregory finally managed to croak.

  Hillary slowly leaned forward on the table, resting her elbows in front of her and leaning her chin on her cupped hands. It had the effect of putting her face on a level with the PI’s and only inches apart. ‘Dr Lincoln Crowder.’ She repeated each syllable clearly and succinctly. ‘And, Mr Innes, please don’t bother to lie to me, I won’t be at all happy about it.’

  Gregory flushed again. Shit, what was she? Mystic Meg or something? How much more did the bitch actually know?

  ‘Sorry, don’t seem to recall the name,’ he said with an over-the-top apologetic shrug.

  Hillary sighed. ‘Then let me refresh your memory, Mr Innes. Dr Crowder works in one of our local health centres. You went to see him, about three to four weeks ago. What did you discuss?’

  Gregory Innes scratched his head. ‘I did?’

  Hillary sighed heavily. ‘Janine, go and fetch Dr Crowder here please. And then Mr Wallis. I’d like to urge Mr Wallis to press charges, and I’m sure Dr Crowder will be able to remember what he discussed with Mr Innes here.’

  Once again Janine half-rose, and once again, Gregory Innes suddenly had a miraculous breakthrough with his memory. At the same time, Hillary scribbled something on a note, and passed it to Tommy who read it, nodded, and left.

  ‘Oh, that Dr Crowder. Yes, I remember now,’ Gregory said, wondering uneasily what it was she’d got the big bugger doing. ‘Oh it had nothing to do with Julia Reynolds. How could it?’ Gregory said, suddenly beaming. ‘This was, as you said, about a month ago now. No, that was about another case entirely.’

  Hillary nodded placidly. ‘What case exactly?’

  ‘Oh I can’t possibly discuss cases,’ Gregory said, then added quickly, ‘except in very general terms, of course,’ as Hillary’s face tightened ominously.

  ‘General terms will do,’ Hillary smiled. ‘For now.’

  Innes nodded. ‘Well, as I seem to recall, it was to do with an inquiry I was making into paternity. The CSA were having difficulty with one of its runaway dads, and the mother called me in. Seems daddy-o was claiming the sprog wasn’t his, and she needed DNA testing to confirm that it was. One of Dr Crowder’s patients, obviously. I was there strictly in the course of legitimate business.’

  And, Hillary thought grimly, fighting back a quick stab of anger, this little shit-heel knew as well as she did that Crowder was hardly likely to breach patient confidentiality without a fight, and warrants and legal writs up the wazoo. Which was no doubt what Innes was counting on.

  Hillary frowned. Wait a minute though. Crowder had told her that the PI had brought with him written permission from a patient to discuss his or her case. But exactly which patient would that be? According to Innes’s story, the would-be father would hardly be likely to give his own doctor permission to bandy about samples of his DNA, would he? The trouble was, she couldn’t see how any of this fitted in with the Julia Reynolds case anyway.

  ‘So, is that all, Inspector Greene?’ Innes asked, sensing that now might be a good time to chance his arm and see if he could wriggle out of here. He’d obviously given the cops something to think about. But nothing, he was fairly sure, that could disrupt his own nice little arrangement.

  Behind him, he heard the door open and glanced around to see that the big black constable had returned.

  ‘For the moment, Mr Innes,’ Hillary said softly. ‘For the moment.’

  She sensed both Janine and Tommy’s disappointment as the PI walked out, giving a cocky little swagger as he went past Tommy. The moment the door shut behind him, Janine snorted. ‘What a scuzz bucket.’

  Hillary smiled at the Americanism.

  ‘He’s lying, right?’ Tommy said, just to make sure.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Hillary mused. ‘Porkies of immense size and density.’ The real question was, though, what was he lying about exactly?

  ‘He’s not trying to get himself hired by the Reynolds that’s for sure, boss,’ Janine said. ‘When I talked to them on the phone, they were quite adamant that they wanted nothing to do with him. Mr Reynolds seems to be quite a good judge of character and had him sussed right from the get go. He all but threw Innes out on his ear.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘Good for him.’

  So, the PI had nothing to do with Julia Reynolds’ family, and claimed to know nothing about her before her death. And there was no obvious way to tie Julia Reynolds’ killing in with a visit to her doctor by a PI more than a month before she was strangled in a cowshed.

  ‘Janine, I want you to find out all you can about Dr Crowder. See if he has any skeletons in his cupboard that we should know about.’

  ‘Boss,’ Janine said, gathering her things together and slipping out.

  ‘The DNA came back as a no-match with any known villain, right, Tommy?’ Hillary mused, following suit and getting her stuff stowed away.

  Tommy, by the door, nodded. ‘The skin scrapings under the vic’s fingernails, you mean? No, guv, no match.’

  ‘So our perp hasn’t got a record.’ She pointed to the empty plastic cup of tea. ‘Tommy, take this to the lab. Ask for a comparison with the saliva to the DNA the vic had under her nails.’ It was not exactly standard procedure, but sometimes it paid to cut corners.

  Trouble was, that could take time, and she had the rather distressing feeling that this case was getting away from her. Fast.

  Tommy grinned. ‘Right, guv.’ He no doubt hoped that it would put the PI in the frame. But, as they walked back upstairs, Hillary had very little confidence that they’d be a match. That the PI was up to something went without saying. That he was an avaricious and lying little toe-rag also went without saying. But that was still a long way from being the sort to strangle a girl in a cowshed.

  She spent an hour re-reading forensics, paying special attention to the ‘results pending’ notations, then reached for the phone to get her favourite technician on the line.

  ‘Liz, it’s Hillary Greene. About the Reynolds case. That’s one of yours, right?’

  ‘Right, how’s it going?’ Liz’s cheerful voice faded as she grabbed some relevant documents then came back to the phone. ‘Got it here. What do you need?’

  ‘Pending. Anything in yet?’

  She heard rustlings on the other end of the line. ‘Let’s see. OK, we identified fibres from an anorak, found on the wedding dress, and we’ve tracked them down to a specifi
c kind … hang on. Oh, not much use, I’m afraid. Sold by the thousands, all over the UK. Three years old, too.’

  Hillary groaned. No luck there then.

  ‘The shoe size - yep, a size eight confirmed, but again, sold by the gazillions. Bog-standard trainer.’

  Hillary frowned. A size eight wasn’t big. So they weren’t looking for a tall, or particularly big man. Unless of course, the sneaker footprint had been left there by a passing walker sheltering from the rain, or by one of the local villagers who’d popped in to say hello to the cows; maybe the wife of the cowman, or one of their teenage kids, or any other Tom, Dick or Harry who might have passed through the cowshed within a few days of Julia’s murder.

  ‘You’re depressing me, Liz,’ Hillary warned, and heard the other girl laugh.

  ‘Sorry. Oh, hang on, this might cheer you up. Then again, perhaps not. We identified those traces of powder in the vic’s hair. It’s face powder, women’s cosmetic face powder, fairly common or garden too, but it’s not the same kind the vic was wearing. She had on one of those expensive liquid-that-turns to powder kind. This other stuff was a Max Factor product, fairly old powder, I’d say, and for a woman with dark hair, rather than for a fair-skinned blonde.’

  Hillary sighed. ‘OK. I suppose I’ll be getting the full report soon?’

  Liz chortled. ‘In your dreams, girl,’ and hung up.

  Hillary, who hadn’t been called a girl in a long time, hung up with a grin.

  Face powder.

  Could Julia’s killer have been a woman? It seemed very unlikely on the face of it. But the size eight sneaker could belong to a tallish, well-set-up woman. More likely, though, the face powder had come from whoever it was who had done Julia’s hair that night.

  She called Mandy Tucker and asked who did Julia’s hair on special occasions.

  ‘There was a girl who used to work in a fancy salon in Summertown that she knew. It might be her. I’ll ring back the moment I find out,’ Mandy promised.

  Hillary thanked her and hung up.

  It would probably turn out to be nothing, but in this game, you never knew.

  chapter twelve

  Frank Ross, driving too fast down an A-road, finished his packet of cheese and onion crisps and tossed the empty packet down beside him. There it joined all the other debris that had accumulated in the passenger-side foot well of his ancient Ford Fiesta over the past few months and gave a faint rustle, making him glance down and almost rear-end the minibus driving in front.

  Like most of the rest of the world, Frank wanted to buy a new car. He wanted to move out of his crummy flat above a noisy shop and move into something decent. He wanted enough money to go to Amsterdam whenever he wanted and maybe play a few hands in a little illegal casino he knew out Stepney way. He wanted, in fact, to get his hands on his old pal, Ronnie Greene’s, money.

  If only he knew where the cunning old bastard had hidden it, life could be good once more. He’d heard all the rumours that Ronnie had made an absolute fortune from his illegal animal parts smuggling, but he was almost sure that they were more due to legend than reality. And, after all, he should know. Ronnie had cut him in on the odd deal or two – when he’d needed an extra set of hands or pair of eyes. So he knew for a fact that his pal had made the odd thousand out of it here and there, but he couldn’t have been raking in hundreds of thousands, like everyone said, surely? Ronnie was a hard bastard, but he wouldn’t gyp a mate.

  Here Frank pondered. Others, he knew, would think he was mad to believe it, that Ronnie would sell his grandmother’s body to Burke and Hare had they been about, and there was some truth to that, to be sure. On the other hand, he and Ronnie were of the old school. They’d been tight. Hell, Ronnie had even once saved his neck during a football riot gone bad, when he’d been cornered by four Millwall supporters high on booze and adrenaline.

  Frank was almost convinced Ronnie would have cut him in for half. Almost. But not quite. After all, being loyal to a mate’s memory was one thing, being a bloody fool was another.

  Ronnie had always been cleverer than himself, that Frank had always known and accepted. Well, in certain ways, anyway. Like in how to handle money, for instance. So, whilst he, Frank, had been pissing away his extra dosh on trips to Amsterdam, playing the gee-gees and other such delights, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Ronnie hadn’t been putting his money away into some clever nice little earner that would now, years later, have accrued a big interest bonus on top.

  If only he could figure out where it was.

  It was driving him nuts.

  But now that the internal investigation was all over and done with and the dust settled, it would be a good time to nose around and try and find the still undiscovered dosh.

  Nobody would be watching him now, right?

  He knew for sure Hillary bloody Greene had no idea where it was. For a start, Ronnie had been adamant that he wasn’t going to let his soon-to-be-ex-wife get her mitts on it, and had more than once hinted that he’d left the secret of it with Gary, his son by his first marriage, just in case. And secondly Frank was half-convinced that if Hillary Greene had found it, she’d have turned it in by now.

  It was the sort of thing the silly cow would do.

  But that didn’t put him much further forward. He couldn’t exactly come right out and ask Gary about it. Suppose the boy had already have found it and stashed it, for a start. He wasn’t likely to tell good ol’ Frank Ross, his dad’s best buddy, where it was, let alone cut him in on it, was he?

  He cursed as Gregory Innes’s car turned right at an orange traffic light, and gritted his teeth as he was forced to go through on red. He only hoped that some eager beaver bastard in a panda didn’t pull him over for a talking to. It would be the ultimate humiliation.

  He’d been doing the crossword puzzle at his desk when that smug git Tommy Lynch had given him a handwritten note from the guv, telling him to tail the PI when he left the police station. It was nearing the end of the shift, which meant he’d probably be riding around all night following some Sam Spade wannabe through sodding Birmingham, and sod any chance of overtime. He knew from his file, Innes was raised in Leamington Spa but now lived in Solihull. And if there was one place Frank despised above all others, it was bloody Birmingham.

  He saw the PI’s sandy-coloured head check his rear-view mirror as a car horn tooted at Frank, no doubt pissed off at nearly being hit, back at the traffic light. Frank cursed again. It had been a while since he’d done a tail in a car. Contrary to police drama series and murder mystery novels, the police rarely did work like this. It was nearly all paperwork, research, interviews, keeping narks happy, the occasional rough stuff and then more paperwork.

  But he was damned if he was going to lose a tail on a snotty PI. A bloody private dick, of all things. Also, contrary to the world of entertainment, PIs were few and far between in the real world, and this was the first time Frank could recall ever running across one. And a poor species they were, if Gregory Innes was an example. Frank, as a loser himself, had no trouble spotting others of his ilk.

  He swore again as Innes hit the motorway heading north and accelerated away. His car had slightly more guts than his own, and Frank hoped the Fiesta wouldn’t konk out on him.

  For a half hour the pissed-off sergeant kept a steady gap between them, then almost lost him when he suddenly pulled a lane change and took an exit. And not the exit to Solihull, either, he was almost sure. Wasn’t it too early for that – and too far east? Geography wasn’t his strong point, and he felt the sweat pop out on his forehead. It was clear the PI knew he was being tailed, and Frank had his reputation to think off. Knowing in his heart of hearts that the bitch from Thrupp could out-think him, and the bastard Tommy Lynch could out-computer him, and Janine Tyler could out-blonde and out-sex him, Frank had always known that his own particular strong point was his army of narks, his rep as a good man in a punch-up and his old-fashioned street-wise skills.

  To lose his tail on
a PI would be something he would never live down.

  He hunched over the wheel, his shoulder blades tense. His chins wobbled as Innes went twice around a roundabout, and then shot off towards his old hunting grounds of Leamington Spa.

  Where Frank promptly lost him.

  It was obvious the PI knew the side streets, the one-way systems, the traffic light patterns and all that jazz. But it was a bus, a blue and cream double decker that he used to shake his tail. And not even Frank was stupid enough to argue with a double decker bus. He pulled up at the side of the road and snarled and cursed and felt like getting out and kicking the shit out of his car. Or, better yet, some purse-snatcher or random mugger of old ladies who just happened to chance by.

  But the respectable citizens of Leamington Spa seemed in no mood to oblige him, and only a young mum pushing a toddler in a pushchair watched as a fat man, who looked a bit like Winnie the Pooh in a foul mood, spat into the gutter.

  She tut-tutted under her breath and wondered why there was never a policeman around when you wanted one.

  Janine knocked on Mel’s office door and pushed it open as he called to her to come in. He was dressed in his usual dark suit, his handsome face rather tired and lined. She knew what was ragging him, of course: the arrival of Jerome Raleigh.

  Still, she knew how to help him get over that! She moved to his desk, smiling at the way he watched her hips swivelling and then, with a small ‘tah-dah’ put the brochure for the hotel on his desk.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘I’ve booked us in for the weekend. Next weekend after next, that is. It’ll be perfect. We can watch the ponies, feed the squirrels, take advantage of the spa, and chill out.’ She walked around the back of his chair and looped her arms over his shoulders, letting her hands wander under his jacket, all the while keeping a careful eye on the door. She kissed his ear. ‘It’ll be great, I promise.’

  Mel felt his stomach clench as her hand rubbed across his lower abdomen, and he reached forward and dragged her hand back up. ‘Not here, for Pete’s sake. What if the brass came by?’