by Faith Martin
Gregory again wiped his hand across his mouth. Hillary found it almost impossible to guess what he was thinking. She strongly doubted he felt any personal responsibility or remorse for what had happened to Julia Reynolds. But what else was going on behind those self-pitying eyes?
‘Naturally, I was anxious to see if the Ornes could have been responsible. That was what I was doing on the farm – trying to establish, one way or the other, any possible involvement by my former client. If I’d found anything, of course, I would have brought it straight to you.’
Hillary laughed. She couldn’t help it. Beside her, she saw Tommy look away, and out of the corner of her eye she could see his big fists clenching and unclenching in hidden anger. But she had no real worries that Tommy would lose control.
‘So what did you find out, Innes? You being such a hot shot PI and all? Sherlock Holmes having nothing on you, and all that. Were the Ornes involved?’
‘No. No trace of them.’
‘So when the search warrant arrives, we’ll find no records of any telephone calls to their house, say? After all, you finished with their case – what was it – two weeks ago? According to your files, it was all paid for, done and dusted. And if you found nothing to worry about at Three Oaks Farm, you’d have had no reason to call them back. Right?’
Innes felt the sweat begin to trickle down his back. This cow just wasn’t going to leave it alone. But Vivian Orne wouldn’t talk. She couldn’t. They could prove nothing. All he had to do was brazen it out.
‘I might have called, just to see how they were doing. Their little boy died, you know.’
‘Ah. A condolence call. How nice,’ Hillary said. ‘Tell me about Dr Crowder. Did you break into his files to find out the name of the donor, or just bribe him?’
Innes shrugged. ‘You’d have to ask him that.’
Hillary smiled grimly. ‘He wouldn’t happen to be someone else you’re thinking of blackmailing, would he, Mr Innes?’
Gregory flushed. How did the bloody bitch know? Was she reading his mind? ‘I think I’ve said all I’m prepared to say, Inspector. I’d like you to leave now.’
Hillary smiled. ‘I’m sure you would, Mr Innes. Knowing a search team, and a search warrant, are on their way, I’m sure you’d love to have some time to yourself. But I don’t think so. DC Lynch, stay here with Mr Innes. If he attempts to leave or use the telephone, you may arrest him on the charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.’
She rose, reached for the folder, and put it back in her bag. ‘I’m off to visit Mr and Mrs Orne.’
Tommy stood up. ‘Guv, you’ve got no back-up,’ he said, a shade desperately. He’d seen Hillary in this mood before. ‘Let’s wait until the locals get here. Take a couple of bobbies with you, at least.’
Hillary hesitated. ‘Tell you what, use the phone, and ask for a patrol car to meet me at their house.’
‘Right, guv,’ Tommy said, much relieved.
Hillary drove fast and made surprisingly good time to the Ornes’ address. She was pretty sure a local patrol car would have got there ahead of her, and hoped they hadn’t jumped the gun, but when she pulled up outside the house in the leafy suburb, there was not a sign of a jam sandwich in sight.
She got out of her car and checked her watch. She’d heard on the radio that there’d been a big smash up on the motorway not far from here. Could be her call had been given low priority – baby-sitting coppers from another force was hardly a plum job. Might be that the patrol car had simply got snarled up in traffic. It happened.
She’d just have to wait.
She reached into her bag for her mobile phone and checked back at HQ, where a bemused Janine filled her in on Mr Max Finchley’s entrepreneurial spirit.
From what Tommy had told her about Mrs Finchley, Hillary could guess what had driven the construction worker to such extremes. Men married to monied women who never let them forget it, tended to do stupid things. In Max Finchley’s case, playing – literally – with dynamite.
She grinned and wondered how many more such bad puns Janine had had to cope with from the others at the station. Word would have got around like wild-fire about her unusual bust.
She gave Janine a quick run-down on the situation and asked her to pass it on to Mel. Not surprisingly, the pretty blonde sergeant was spitting mad at not being in on it with her, and Hillary wouldn’t be surprised to see her turn up some time later that afternoon, depending on how things went.
It was as she was putting away the phone that Hillary spotted Janine’s car, and had one of those brief Twilight Zone moments, when she wondered if her junior officer had somehow magicked herself north.
Then she realized that it was Frank who was been using Janine’s car today.
Frank!
Shit! What was he doing here? Now she thought about it, he’d been conspicuous by his absence at the bank. But how the hell had he known to come here? He hadn’t been able to see the file in the safe deposit box. Or had he?
‘You stupid git!’ Hillary whistled between her teeth, and quickly sprinted for the gate. If she knew Frank – and unfortunately for her, she did – she wouldn’t put it past him to have pulled a fast one. Do a bit of the dirty, trying to get ahead of the investigation and put one over on her. Frank would dearly love to be able to show her up in front of the team – and anyone else who might be watching. Like the new super for instance. But if the Ornes were killers, the stupid clot might just have got himself killed. And think of all the paperwork she’d have to do then!
She ran along the side of the path, instinctively forgoing the front door. She was sure that Frank wouldn’t have gone in all guns blazing, and she wasn’t about to either. She slowed down as she rounded the back of the house and, her back to the wall, took a quick peak around the garden.
In spite of everything though, she wasn’t really expecting trouble. Not real trouble. She expected to see a garden as well kept as the front patch was. A shed, maybe some garden furniture. A cat. A woman pottering about with the autumn pansies. Something of that nature.
She didn’t expect to see her sergeant peering in through a window, hands cupped around his face to keep out the light, while someone else sneaked up behind him, eyes fixed on the back of his exposed head with a raised garden shovel in his hands.
‘FRANK!’ she yelled, launching herself around the corner, and heading straight for the man with a shovel.
In her time, Hillary had come in for her fair share of physical confrontation. By far the worst had been back in the old station house in Headington, when she and two other constables had confronted a man with a six-inch long butcher’s knife. He’d sliced one of her fellow constables’ forearms right to the bone, and she could still remember his angry cry of pain, and the sickening sight of gushing blood.
But this seemed almost as bad.
In spite of the rush of adrenaline to her head, she could plainly hear the voice of the retired sergeant major who’d been her physical training instructor back in the old days. His method of fighting had been dirty and extremely politically incorrect. And he’d taught her to think just like him. So she was going through her options even as she ran.
She saw Frank jump out of his skin and turn, but his gaze stopped on her as she hurtled towards him. He looked guilty. No doubt he knew he’d been rumbled, and must have always dreaded his boss catching him out in something really bad.
The silly sod! It wasn’t her he had to worry about for once.
‘Behind you,’ she yelled in clarification, still pelting forward full tilt, wondering if she should do a slide and ram her thighs into the back of the perp’s knees, up-ending him, or go straight for the raised arm. The shovel was the immediate threat, but her upper arm strength would be no match for a man’s. She might not be able to prevent him from delivering a blow.
At least she had one thing going for her. Terry Orne had frozen on the spot. Her yell had had as paralysing an effect on him, as it had on his intended victim.
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br /> Now Orne’s mouth gaped stupidly as a smartly dressed woman in a dark two-piece suit, with a sleek cut of brown hair and a fiercely angry face, rushed at him like an approaching valkyrie on speed. Terry Orne, like most decent men, wouldn’t have dreamed of hitting a woman. So he quite simply had no idea what to do next.
Hillary, however, did.
A man with both arms upraised over his head was just asking for it. Still running, Hillary turned sidewise, jamming her two hands together to form one huge fist and, swinging back, hit Terry Orne with a massive whump in the middle of his belly.
Orne dropped the shovel with a gurgling ‘ooofff’ and dropped to his knees. And promptly began to lose his meagre breakfast of conflakes and toast.
Frank, now turned all the way around, saw the man drop the shovel and went white. He abruptly sat down on the patio, ignoring the dampness seeping into the seat of his trousers and sucked in a huge breath.
Frank had seen what a shovel on the back of someone’s head could do. He had never been that close to death before. A punch up at a football pitch with your colleagues at your back and a hoard of pissed off Millwall supporters in front of you was fun. But unless a bastard pulled a knife, not life-threatening. Handling antsy suspects at the nick could be exhilarating, but you knew you always had back up, if you called for help. Negotiating domestics was a pain, but Frank knew how to handle himself with the worst of boozed up, fist-happy husbands.
But having a shovel walloped down on the back of your head when you weren’t looking – now that was staring eternity in the eye.
He swallowed hard, his gag reflex kicking in as he watched the man who would have killed him, being sick all over the lawn. He leaned forward, letting his hands dangle between his knees and hung his head low, taking deep breaths. Little black dots danced on the back of his closed eyelids. He felt definitely iffy. Like he was going to pass out.
‘Frank, you all right? You got any pains in the chest?’
He opened his eyes abruptly and lifted his head, only to find Hillary Greene crouched in front of him, one eye on the dropped shovel, one on the suspect, and one (how the hell did she have three eyes?) on him.
‘What?’ he said hazily.
‘Are you having chest pains?’
‘No.’
‘OK. I’ll ring for an ambulance anyway,’ she said, and got up, bringing the phone to her ear.
And in that moment, Frank suddenly realized that his misery was only just starting. Because now the fact that he’d only been a second or two away from death was nothing when he compared it to the fact that it had been Hillary Greene who’d saved him.
Hillary Greene.
No, this was just too much. This just wasn’t fair. For two pins, Frank could have cried.
The sound of the ambulance arriving within three minutes – Hillary wondered if that was a record – was what finally brought Vivian Orne out of the house.
She’d been on her way to the front window in the lounge to see where the ambulance was going, and which of her neighbours was in trouble, when she’d been side-tracked by the sight of strangers in her back garden.
Now, as she stepped out into the cold autumn air, her gaze went from the fat man sitting comically on her patio, to the poker-faced woman watching her and then, finally, to her husband, who was kneeling on the grass, alternately retching and groaning.
‘Terry, love, are you all right?’ she heard herself ask stupidly, starting towards him. ‘What’s going on. Who are you people?’ Then, with a sharp edge of fear, ‘I’ll call the police.’
Hillary reached for her ID and held it up. ‘We are the police, Mrs Orne. I’m Detective Inspector Hillary Greene, this is Sergeant Frank Ross.’
At this, Terry Orne’s head shot up and he regarded Frank with a look of surprise. ‘You’re not the bastard on the phone?’
‘Eh?’ Frank said, also lifting his head to look across at the man who’d tried to kill him. The man who would have killed him. Curiously, Frank felt no desire to rip the bastard’s head off.
He was still trying to come up with ways and means of turning this around. Suppose he told everyone back at the nick that he’d laid out Orne? No, it wouldn’t wash. Orne himself would probably deny it. Besides, Frank knew, Hillary would have her own version and he had no illusions as to who would be believed.
But there had to be a way to down play it some. After all, there was not a mark on him. He could say Hillary was blowing things up out of all proportion. Yeah, that might work. Play the hysterical-woman card. There’d always be some who’d believe it. Not many, but enough to raise doubts. Right now, that was the only crumb of comfort he had.
The thought of being grateful to Hillary Greene never even crossed his mind. And Hillary, for one, would have been astonished if it had.
Right now, though, she had other things on her mind as she looked at Vivian Orne, a lean, stringy-looking woman with surprisingly wide shoulders and large feet. What had Innes’s file said about Vivian Orne’s occupation? Aerobics and dance instructor. Which meant muscles. You had to be strong and fit for that. And Julia Reynolds had been drunk and smaller and not at all physically a match for Vivian Orne.
Back at the bank vault, she’d assumed the Ornes were in on it together. Now, she believed it possible that Vivian’s husband really had no idea of what she’d done.
‘I thought you were the one who’d been bothering my wife,’ Terry Orne said, gasping a bit through blue-tinged and vomit-speckled lips. He was still staring at Frank as if it was all his fault.
‘I never even met your wife, dummy,’ Frank snarled. In his ears, he was beginning to hear the jaunts and jibes that would ring around the Big House. Frank Ross, the one who needed to hide behind his boss’s skirts. And worse. Much worse.
It was more than he’d be able to bear. Perhaps now was the time to quit. He’d put in enough time to get his full pension. Maybe eke it out with a part-time job. Night watchman was a doddle, they said. Yeah, maybe now was a good time to quit. He could devote all his time to tracking down Ronnie’s loot. Perhaps put a tail on his kid.
‘The man you’re thinking of is a Mr Gregory Innes,’ Hillary said, looking from husband to wife. ‘Isn’t that so, Mrs Orne?’
Vivian Orne slowly reached her husband, and, ignoring the wet and muddy grass, knelt down beside him. Wordlessly, she put her arms around him. She wasn’t sobbing, but Hillary could clearly see huge tears running down her face.
‘Who’s Gregory Innes?’ Terry Orne said.
‘Do you want to tell him, or should I, Mrs Orne?’ Hillary asked. She knew that now was the optimum time to strike. They were off balance and vulnerable. Briefly, she felt a flash of distaste for what she was doing. Had Tommy Lynch been here, she knew he’d have looked away with a hastily hidden grimace of disgust.
Had Janine been here, she’d be scribbling in her notebook, but even she, Hillary suspected, wouldn’t have felt any sense of satisfaction about this situation: the Ornes had been through so much already.
But long ago, a mentor of Hillary’s had said something to her that had stuck with her, and remained inviolate, through all the shit life in this job had thrown at her. He’d been an old desk sergeant, retired from the field, but too bored to quit altogether. He’d been like a sage to Hillary back then, she and others of her generation, this man who must have been on the fringes of many a murder case.
Quite simply, the old man had told her, a victim of murder could rely on no one but the investigating officer to fight his or her corner. The family and friends of a murder victim might, for some reason, abandon them. The victim might never even be identified. The case might be open and shut, or never solved. But the dead can’t ask questions, or justify themselves, or hunt the guilty, or prosecute, or do any other thing a living person could. The dead needed you.
And, right here and now, Julia Reynolds needed Hillary to do her job. And do it she would.
‘Mr Innes is a private investigator, Mr Orne,’ Hillary said softly, but
quickly closed her mouth when Vivian Orne raised one hand.
She had a long, strong face, that went well with a no-nonsense cut of dark hair and brown eyes. Her arms, hard with muscle, still bore the traces of a late summer tan. But she looked gaunt. She looked like a woman who’d just buried her child.
‘I hired him to find a donor, Terry. One of the nurses at the hospital let it slip that one had been found, but wasn’t going to go through with the surgery.’
Terry Orne began to wretch again. But his stomach was already empty, and he began to cry instead.
‘And he found her,’ Vivian carried on, her voice as dead as the look in her eyes. ‘It was a girl. A girl out Oxford way. She wouldn’t go through with the procedure though. The doctors tried everything to persuade her. But she just wouldn’t. She let our Barry die. I couldn’t take it. I had to see her, face to face, to let her know what she’d done. To show her our Barry’s picture. I wanted to hear what she had to say for herself.’
‘What do you mean? Who?’ Her husband stared at her with a growing fear in his eyes that made even Frank look away.
‘The girl. The one whose bone marrow would have saved Barry,’ Vivian said. ‘Mr Innes gave me her address. I went to her house, but she was being picked up by this man. She was going to get married. Or at least, that’s what I thought. She came out dressed like a bride. Can you believe it, Terry? A bride? Our Barry was dead, would never grow up, would never have a bride of his own. And here she was, this heartless bitch, going to get married.’
Terry Orne looked dazed, as if he was unable to follow what his wife was saying.
‘But of course, she wasn’t getting married. I mean, it was dark. You don’t get married at night, do you? No, she was going to a party. A bloody party!’ Vivian’s lovely sense of numbness finally went as she wailed the final words with a cry of anguish.
Terry Orne closed his eyes then shook his head. ‘Viv,’ he said wretchedly, urgently, ‘Shut up. Don’t say another word.’