Still Waters

by Judith Cutler

  Fran nodded without commenting. He had an idea she wanted to say something but wasn’t sure how to broach it. But, surprisingly, she said, ‘You know, this ought to be a special weekend, oughtn’t it?’

  What was he missing? He made a swift dive for safety. ‘Every weekend with you is special.’

  She gave a mocking bow.

  She’d said ‘weekend’, not ‘day’, so presumably it wasn’t her birthday. He flannelled again. ‘So how would you like to celebrate?’

  ‘How about a picnic out at the Rectory? I picked up some finger food yesterday at Sainsbury’s. I thought if it rained I could shove everything in the freezer for another day, but the weather forecast’s good.’ She sounded almost apologetic, asking for such an innocent treat.

  ‘Or we could try that pub at the end of Rectory Lane.’

  She was definitely shamefaced. ‘We can’t. It’s booked solid, as I discovered yesterday. I phoned, you see…I thought with all our removals we might not want to cook.’

  ‘It’s very hard,’ he declared, his voice as plaintive as he could make it, ‘to kiss a woman shovelling egg into her mouth.’

  ‘No, try again,’ Fran urged. ‘I’m teaching you to fish, Mark, not giving you just one meal.’

  He poked again at an invisible point on the trapdoor. At last it opened, the flap falling floorwards to reveal an aluminium ladder. One yank, and up he could go. The hatch was so small – how had she managed with it so long? – that he would have to get up inside while she stood below and passed him the cases. Not a lot of time for a quick inspection of the water system, then.

  ‘It’s a good job you had a floor put in,’ he called down. ‘Is there anything you want me to reach while I’m up here?’

  ‘I’ll come up and have a look. It’s ages since I had a poke round. I bet there’s at least another carload of stuff for Oxfam.’ Her head appeared through the hatch. ‘No, it’s not too bad, is it? I had a purge once when I… It was the thought of being like Ma and Pa, who never threw anything away…’

  What had she meant to say?

  As for the tank, he’d brazen it out. He peered into it, sniffing. In the general mustiness of an old roof space it was hard to be sure, but he could swear it did smell.

  ‘A galvanised tank!’ he said. ‘I thought they went out with the Ark.’

  ‘If this one ever springs a leak and has to be replaced, we’ll have to cut a hole in the landing ceiling or have it cut to bits. I’ve measured and it wouldn’t go through the hatch,’ she said, joining him. ‘You know, I really ought to have had all these lead pipes ripped out and replaced, oughtn’t I? And a plastic tank. What are you looking at? Or rather, for?’

  Now she had asked, he could tell her. But it would come more as an observation than as an accusation. ‘Sniff.’

  ‘Sniff the water?’ She looked at him quizzically. ‘Water isn’t supposed to smell, is it?’

  ‘All the same…’

  She sniffed, but shook her head. ‘Ian’s sister’s always telling me to take zinc or something to improve my sense of smell. That’s why I don’t wear much perfume – I can’t smell if it suits me or not.’

  ‘I shall buy you some today that suits you,’ he declared, suddenly realising why she had declared the weekend important. It was their first officially under just one roof. ‘After all, it’s our special weekend, isn’t it? I know Boots isn’t very romantic – hell, let’s go to France! Come on! We can pick up a ferry!’

  ‘Of course we can. But first tell me what you can smell. You’ve got me worried.’

  ‘Have you got a torch so we can have a look? It may be a bird’s found its way through a crack in the roof and committed suicide. I had a squirrel do it once.’

  But the water was clear.

  Their day in France had ended so late that for the first time in their joint lives they had overslept. But even the fact that Fran had to dash off to the village to buy milk didn’t stop breakfast being an amazingly good-humoured and leisurely affair, considering that they both had meetings in their diaries. In fact, it wasn’t until she was parking the car at police HQ in Maidstone that Fran said, ‘You know you thought the water in my tank smelt funny? Well, Mr Patel – you know, the lovely old guy at the at the corner shop – was saying a number of his customers were saying the same. I wonder what’s up?’

  He hauled himself out and said, ‘Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait. I’ve got one of Simon Gates’ financial policy meetings in ten minutes, and I’ve an idea he’s a long meetings man.’ Long meetings? Long knives too, and most of them in expensive senior officers’ backs, he suspected, though he wouldn’t burden Fran with his fears yet.

  His reward was a sunny smile. ‘Don’t you believe it. I taught him, remember. It’ll all be done and dusted in an hour.’

  What was all this smelly water business? In the ladies’ loo along the corridor from her office, Fran filled a hand bowl and bent down to sniff. No. Nothing. Maybe the tiniest hint of chlorine? She gathered some in her hands and sniffed again. Chlorine and the faintest hint of that exceedingly expensive perfume Mark had bought for her the previous day. What a wild pair they might end up in their old age, if they started acting on impulse. She had a feeling that she and Mark had always responded – as he had done on Saturday – to the demands of others, not themselves.

  She had a meeting of her own to go to, this one about devolved budgets. Then this afternoon, after lunch with Mark, she’d talk to Pete Webb about the Mondiale suicide. The only thing she had to do was find an excuse to bomb down to Divisional Headquarters in Folkestone to talk to him. Since Hythe only boasted a police office working fewer than shop hours, any serious crime was dealt with by Folkestone CID.

  As detective chief superintendent, she was entitled to visit and talk to any CID unit in the county to appraise its current performance. Some visits were formal, involving chewing off the ears of recalcitrant officers. Others resulted in her carrying desperate appeals for extra funding, equipment or personnel back to HQ. But she’d like this to be altogether lower key, though she didn’t know Pete Webb well enough to admit that she was simply being nosy on Jim’s behalf. Perhaps Mark would have an idea. Or maybe she’d think of something during the dratted meeting she was about to be late for.

  ‘You could say you’re in the area – unspecified reasons – and just thought you’d pop in to congratulate them all on the success of Jim’s leaving do,’ Mark suggested, trimming fat off the ham with his salad.

  She did likewise. At their age flirting with cholesterol didn’t seem an option. ‘Pete only went to the first half.’

  ‘You were in the area and just thought you’d drop in? Come on, Fran, with your seniority and reputation you can do pretty well what you want.’

  ‘I don’t want to acquire a reputation for eccentricity – at least, not yet.’ She felt her chin go up in something like defiance.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t want them to think I’m gaga,’ she admitted, chin going down again. ‘Every time I lose my specs, Mark, I think of my parents. And no, I won’t buy one of those cord things to hang them round my neck. It’d be support tights next!’

  ‘So you tell him that you were in the area buying a Zimmer frame and thought…’ He broke off to respond to his beeper. ‘The chief. I’d better be on my way.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It would have been nice simply to drop into a CID office and see what was really going on. However, that was no longer possible. Obviously, these days unauthorised people off the street must not stroll beyond police station front desks. Moreover, Fran’s rank made her recognisable to most CID officers and a lot of reception staff too. So the element of surprise was lost, and before she was within yards of it a whole CID room could be transformed from a bantering gang of rowdy teenagers to a particularly docile and industrious group of professionals.

  As she popped her head into the office of Folkestone CID, she gave DI Pete Webb the benefit of the doubt. His desk looked as if its
owner had been toiling since dawn on a variety of projects, most of them no doubt unrelated and many incompatible.

  Webb struggled to his feet, making a feverish attempt to adjust a non-existent tie. ‘Ma’am.’ He looked older by daylight than in the pub, perhaps forty-five, and decidedly less lecherous.

  ‘Hi, Pete. How’s things?’ She patted the paperwork. ‘There are obviously plenty of them.’ When he didn’t reply, she continued, ‘The new DCC’s making everyone dance, is he?’

  He managed a grin. ‘And Mr Gates has got a very complicated tune, ma’am.’

  ‘Guv. Or, since I’m here not on official business but because of something Jim Champion said, Fran will do. Good party, wasn’t it?’

  He flushed to his ears.

  Dimly Fran remembered a Mrs Webb, who had been big with twins last time they’d met. And Pete was already playing away from home, was he? Fran would have to make sure he was too exhausted at the end of his working day to do anything other than sink into his wife’s arms. Not that it was any of her business, of course, she told herself, moving a pile of files from the visitor’s chair and sitting down.

  Trying to sound casual, he said, ‘Decent bloke, Jim. One of the old school.’

  Whatever that meant. It probably included her, come to think of it.

  ‘I just hope he lives to enjoy his retirement,’ Pete was saying.

  ‘Is there any reason he shouldn’t?’ she demanded, anxious.

  ‘Only the statistics,’ he said. ‘Longer you work, sooner you die.’

  ‘Well, there’s an encouraging fact,’ she said. ‘Actually, Jim was talking about someone else’s death. Possibly a suicide. But maybe not.’

  He stared, clearly not placing the case immediately. Then light dawned. ‘Ah! Alec Minton. The old guy who topped himself in Hythe. Ten days back.’

  ‘Definitely topped himself?’

  ‘No evidence so far to the contrary at least.’

  She nodded. ‘Any idea why? It was his choice of venue that intrigued Jim – and now, of course, me. It’s infectious, isn’t it?’

  Pete looked as if curiosity was a bug he didn’t have time to catch.

  ‘I suppose the hotel room is no longer preserved as a scene of crime?’ she prompted.

  He shook his head. ‘The SOCO team gave it the spring-clean of its life. Considering the hotel’s only been open a year, there was a remarkable amount of grime. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Anyway, there was no evidence at all of any foul play, so it’s back in use, I should imagine.’

  ‘But not popular with the punters, unless they happen to have a dust allergy!’

  ‘His flat is still as he left it, though. No relatives that we can trace.’

  ‘Any chance of a conducted tour? OK, an unconducted one, since you’re clearly going under.’

  He shook his head and reached for his jacket. ‘Maybe a breath of sea air would clear my head – and I mean literal sea air. The place is right on the front at Hythe, one of those modern blocks you pass if you walk eastward along the promenade. And maybe seeing the place with a fresh pair of eyes would cast some light.’

  ‘Great. Meanwhile, can you get someone to photocopy the file on him? Just the main pages, at this stage. I can pick them up when we get back.’

  Fran had always liked Hythe, a small town that still managed to clutch some vestiges of individuality about it, though every time she walked down the pedestrianised High Street a familiar shop seemed to have gone belly up to be replaced by another charity outlet. Some obliging author had included the place in a book of crap towns, presumably because it didn’t have much appeal for youf. Fran, however, whose career had taken her to many towns she thought far more deserving of inclusion, thought it had a great deal to offer the retired, with all the shops – including a couple of supermarkets – being within walking distance and more or less on the flat, too. The town was bisected by the Royal Military Canal, a relic of the Napoleonic war, with broad paths either side to tempt cyclists and joggers, or even wheelchair users. The seafront, on which the supposed suicide victim had lived, looked out to Dungeness to the west, Folkestone to the east, and, on a clear day, to France. It was always windy, and thus bracing. What must put families off was the fact that the beaches were steep and shingly, though there was always an angler or two with huge lines on stands, the owners as often as not huddling in mini-tents. They certainly needed shelter today.

  Pete held the communal door open for her, and headed purposefully up the stairs. At least he didn’t consider her decrepit enough to need a lift.

  Fran’s mother had always augmented the last-minute packing and milk-cancelling preparations for their annual jaunt to Burnham on Sea with a rigorous house-clean. Her rationale, if such it was, was that if a rail crash, or, later on, when a Ford Anglia became their proudest possession, a car accident should wipe out the entire family, at least the place would be decent for those left. Who those might be, Fran had never known.

  It seemed as if the late Alec Minton had followed the same philosophy, even to a couple of air-fresheners, so powerful that even Fran could register them, to stop the place smelling musty.

  ‘Unusual, those, aren’t they?’ Fran said quietly. Even after all these years, it always seemed natural to speak in lowered tones in the house of the dead. Reverence was hard, however, if you were padding round in protective gear, to avoid contaminating the scene.

  Pete didn’t share her sensibility. ‘Smells like a polecat’s boudoir, doesn’t it?’

  ‘As if – and I’m only thinking out loud here, Pete – he might have expected his body to be found here, and wanted to overcome the smells of mortality? Though the fresheners would have to be pretty pungent to do that for long.’

  ‘And he’d have needed automatic fly-sprays too. Unless he meant to pack his own cadaver with ice.’

  She laughed as she had to at the gallows humour. ‘No sign of a bath full of ice cubes? You’d need industrial quantities.’

  ‘More than for your average party, all right.’ He stopped short. ‘Guv – er, Fran – what you saw on Saturday, it wasn’t like it seemed.’

  She gave a snort of dry laughter. ‘It’s no business of mine who you shag, so long as it’s not in police time.’

  ‘But I’m not shagging her, Fran. Not with Elaine and the twins at home. Honestly. We’re friends, that’s all,’ he pleaded.

  Since he’d raised the topic, she’d let him have it. ‘If you ask me, friendship that close’, she leant on the word, ‘can be just as hurtful as a full-blown affair if you’re a woman at home whose life is dominated by two kids. How old? Four? Three! God, nervous breakdown time! But as I said, it’s none of my business. And Alec’s kitchen is. Shall we have a look?’

  It had the same unused look as her own before Mark came on the scene. But the cupboards were stocked with china and glass and there was a set of good saucepans. But when it came to food, the cupboard – together with the fridge-freezer – was bare. The pedal bin had been emptied.

  Back to the living room. It was dominated by a state-of-the-art TV and hi-fi system, with very few books. A stack of DVDs suggested, at a quick glance, a fairly conventional taste in both music and film.

  ‘Those newspapers – how do they correlate with the date of his death?’

  He peered with the air of a man who ought to be wearing glasses. ‘The Telegraph for the day before. The local rag – the previous weekend. Radio Times…’ He flipped it down.

  ‘Can I look? Is he the sort of man to mark the programmes he means to see?’

  ‘So we’d know if he meant to go on living beyond the day he seems to have topped himself?’

  ‘Exactly. And here we are. He dies on a Tuesday and he wanted to watch The Bill on Wednesday and Thursday. What’s that?’ She picked up an A5 magazine. It looked strangely familiar.

  ‘A freebie from another part of the county, up your way. Lenham Focus. God knows how he got hold of that. And why.’

  ‘Have you got a really junior
kid you could put on to finding out? Just out of interest.’ She gave it a quick glance. She never got round to reading it at home, always consigning it to the paper collection in her scullery and wishing she could intercept the person delivering it to tell him or her to omit her cottage from their round. She bagged it for him, watching him jot down the details. Come to think of it, she might have a copy for a more recent week still in the recycling sack at home.

  ‘The bedroom next?’

  ‘There are two. This one seems to be the spare – overlooking the road, no balcony, rather small.’

  ‘And as tidy as if he never used it.’

  ‘He did, as a matter of fact. He used it as his office. That cupboard opens to reveal a desk.’ He pointed but didn’t open the door.

  ‘How clever. And you’ve checked his computer?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ll get one of the lads on to it.’ He made a note, then realised her eyebrow was raised. ‘Or one of the g—women.’

  She nodded. Everything seemed to be pointing to a suicide, except for that business with the newspapers, which slightly puzzled her. ‘And the master bedroom?’

  ‘Here. He’d stripped the bed and left it as you can see.’

  The duvet was neatly folded and topped with two pillows.

  ‘So what has he done with the bed linen?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You could get someone on to that, too. What a lovely room.’ She wondered over to the window, a huge affair with double doors leading onto the balcony. Green shoots were already poking out from the pots he’d planted. Only one of the chairs was left without a green waterproof cover, the one he regularly used, no doubt, as he sat and scanned the sea and watched passers-by strolling along the broad promenade. ‘Bathroom?’

  He led the way. Once again, it was immaculate, giving nothing away. She was glad when he said, ‘I wonder where his dirty towels are? Same place as the sheets, no doubt.’

  ‘Which sounds like a launderette. Possibly one with service. All this fossicking around! Why didn’t the wretched man have the grace to leave a suicide note? Sorry!’ He stepped to one side to take a phone call. ‘Sorry, Fran. There’s an urgent problem back in Folkestone…’