In Loving Memory

by Gerald Hammond

  On the morning of her third day back at work, she was leaving the house when she met the postwoman almost on the doorstep. Honey would have shot past, uttering a quick ‘Good morning, postie’, but the lady stopped her, putting out an earnest hand well speckled with liver spots and reminding Honey of the Ancient Mariner. ‘Mrs Laird,’ she said, ‘somebody posted this in a box in Haddington. It has your postcode on it. As a police officer, I thought you’d maybe be the right person to take charge of it.’ She produced a memory card for a digital camera. The postcode was written on it neatly, in white ink.

  Honey was en route to a meeting with the fire officers and the forensic science team. These were in profound disagreement with each other. Honey hated above all things to be late for any engagement and she was preoccupied with what she would have to say in the hope of bringing the discordant factions together. She acknowledged the small device with a word or two, wrapped it in a paper tissue and dropped it into the suede shoulder bag that she invariably carried during the daytime. She refused to begin rejoicing. Digital memories can be copied and Kate’s image, in full colour and action, might already be circulating in some adult magazine. She put it out of her mind and concentrated on her arguments for the meeting to come, which turned out to be at least as fraught as Honey had feared. She managed to tiptoe between rival arguments and in the end sent both sides on their ways, each believing themselves to have gained the upper hand.

  The memory card might have remained indefinitely in Honey’s bag, forgotten among the handcuff and other keys, mobile phone, pager, notebooks, ball-point pens, old lipstick cases and suchlike trivia that tend to accumulate in the bags of even the most meticulous of female police inspectors. But the keys of the Range Rover had somehow escaped from the internal side-pocket, necessitating a more thorough search. Her eye passed over the tissue but a tiny mental bell began to tinkle and that evening, after paying her usual call on her daughter, she repeated the search and unwrapped the memory card, handling it carefully with gloved hands.

  At that moment, temptation raised its head. During her youth, Honey had been sure that temptation only existed for the pleasure of yielding to it. What else, she asked herself, was it for? Since her escalation in the ranks of the police and also her marriage to Sandy, she had modified her view and now believed that the pleasure entailed was the glow of virtue in resisting it. She had surprised herself by becoming quite resolute in her resistance to its lures, but after all it was neither greed nor lust that was tempting her now, but mere curiosity. Considering the question over her first G and T of the evening, she decided that curiosity was an essentially feminine weakness and that she was therefore entitled, almost obliged, to indulge it.

  She booted up the computer, inserted the card into the card-reader and waited for the images to load. The computer’s monitor screen began to show enlarged, sharp images. A few seconds sufficed to flick past Phil Ingliston’s photographs and to arrive at the subject of Kate’s concern. There could be no doubt that Kate and her paramour, whose face seemed vaguely familiar, had indulged themselves, running the gamut of sexual experience. Honey had just decided that this was too good to keep to herself when she heard Sandy’s key in the front door. Honey intercepted him in the hall and while he disposed of his coat, hat and outdoor shoes she gave him a brief résumé of her morning. The discovery of a body by a working detective, while not commonplace, is not unknown and Sandy, while Honey steered his slippered feet in the direction of the study, refused to get excited.

  ‘I have Kate’s memory card here,’ Honey said. ‘I was just wondering whether to have a quick look at it. Just to be sure that it really is hers, you understand. June says that dinner will be half an hour yet.’

  Sandy thought it over, showing rather more interest than he had in the fatal stabbing. Honey had kept him abreast of the story as it unfolded. ‘The proper course would be to offer it to Kate and let her tell you whether the images are hers,’ he said. He paused and his face took on that first pale hint of a grin that she knew to be his look of imminent mischief. ‘But that would entail allowing a member of the public to view images that may not be hers, or even her husband’s. We never cared a lot about proper courses. I’ll get a chair and a dram. Then let’s have a look and see what all the fuss was about.’

  ‘I hoped you’d say that.’

  ‘I knew you did.’

  Together they scrolled through the slide show. Phil had cleared most of the memory when he’d last printed the images and transferred them to floppy disc. The first few new images were his professional records of inspected work. Then they arrived at the meat. Considering the limitations of the light and the lens, the camera had done a remarkable job. Honey had already seen the images once but Sandy was stunned. ‘It’s the Kama Sutra in black suspenders,’ he said. ‘I’m seeing Kate Ingliston in an entirely new light.’

  ‘And seeing more of her than you’ve ever seen before, I hope, and from some rather unusual angles. Sandy, she must never know that we’ve peeped.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  The close of the bedroom series had been signalled by a shot of the frontage of a building. Sandy said, ‘Scroll on further. Somebody must have used the camera while it was in wrong hands. It could be relevant to your other case.’

  ‘By a considerable stretch of the imagination, I suppose it could.’ Honey scrolled forward. A few shots of buildings and scenery showed. The people seemed to be accidental inclusions until one figure kept turning up. It was that of a black girl in a white dress, showing very white teeth as she smiled at the camera.

  Honey’s finger moved again. The image on the monitor changed. A black girl, presumably the same one, lay face down on a bright bedcover in front of a window. She was naked and the handle of a knife stood up from her back. She had been stabbed once.

  Honey scrolled on. There were more images but only of people and buildings and nothing more to get a conscientious police officer excited.

  *

  ‘I never said that we should ignore it,’ Honey protested. She lowered her voice. They were in the middle of dinner but what they were discussing was not for the ears of June. ‘What I was trying to say, between interruptions, was that we now know of two fatal stabbings, which suggests either a connection or a remarkable coincidence. But pictures of our neighbour frolicking bare-arsed with an unknown fancy man can hardly be relevant to either case. If we let those pictures get into the public domain I give it two hours before they’re on the Internet.’

  Sandy put down his knife and fork, carefully aligned. ‘Even if that were true, and I can’t deny that it’s a possibility, that doesn’t entitle us to withhold evidence.’

  Honey had to clench her teeth to prevent her voice rising. ‘I have still not suggested that we withhold evidence. I am trying to point out to whoever will listen – a category of person that seems to be lacking here and now – that those specific photographs aren’t evidence of anything except the enterprise, ingenuity and immorality of our friend and her partner. It does seem a pity to shatter a marriage for so negative a reason.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Sandy, ‘those photographs are the best possible evidence that that marriage isn’t worth a damn. Were you prepared to chance your career for the sake of the obviously shaky marriage of somebody neither of us likes very much? What would you suggest?’

  ‘I was hoping to receive constructive suggestions from yourself, but that seems to be increasingly unlikely. My immediate thought was to erase that series of images and let our colleagues have the rest.’

  They were interrupted by June bringing in and serving the sweet course. When they had the room to themselves again Sandy said, ‘I couldn’t go along with that. Sod’s Law being what it is, the gentleman in those photographs would turn out to be the brother of the male corpse and the boyfriend of the female one. I could accept transferring everything except the sex shots to a disc or another card and letting them have that. You would then have to store away the original c
ard, admitting that it exists but declining to produce it unless evidence turns up to connect anything in those photographs to either case.’

  ‘I could do that,’ Honey said.

  ‘I admit that you have a stubborn streak as wide as the Firth of Forth but I don’t think you appreciate the kind of pressure you’d be under. I have a better idea. Copy the whole card but obliterate the two faces.’

  ‘There you are,’ Honey said triumphantly. ‘I told you that you’d come up with something constructive if I asked you often enough.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘Well, I was going to. Come into the study and you can give me a hand.’

  ‘Must I? You’re perfectly competent.’

  ‘Thank you. But I’m not very experienced. I couldn’t be sure of blurring the faces without doing more damage than that.’

  Sandy showed signs of embarrassment. ‘I don’t know that I could sit in front of those images for long without getting overexcited.’

  Honey looked at him sharply but he seemed to be serious. ‘So much the better,’ she said. ‘You don’t get overexcited as often as I could wish. Come on.’

  Chapter Six

  Honey’s return to Fettes Avenue HQ and duty was not a plunge into the excitement of a baffling investigation, but into dull routine. From the first, there had been no room to doubt that the proprietor of the premises had been responsible for the fraud and arson. He had not even contrived a credible explanation for an accidental fire and he had increased his insurance only a month earlier. Honey’s small team, comprising for the moment one sergeant, a constable, a civilian collator and occasionally a lady from the procurator fiscal’s office, was concerned with ferreting out the details of the operation and assembling legal proof. The next steps in this process were already obvious. Her part in the case was about as interesting, Honey told her husband, as being helmsman on a railway train.

  She escaped early from her morning’s progress meeting. DCI Gilchrist was still in his own meeting, struggling to ensure that every member of his team knew what every other member had uncovered and what to do next. A cautious phone call had revealed that Gilchrist was responsible, in this case, to Detective Superintendent Blackhouse. Honey decided to start with her bête noire.

  Mr Blackhouse was in the habit of keeping a short queue waiting for audience with him. He felt that it added to his dignity. For a similar reason, the room had been rather better decorated and equipped, at his own expense, than the average office for his rank. It was ten minutes or so before Honey was admitted to the sanctum. As usual, she was greeted as though she had been his personal invention although she was quite prepared for, and might even have welcomed, a sudden fall out of favour. But no. An invitation to be seated showed that she was still flavour of the month. Others, less favoured, would be left to stand. She first made a brief report on the fraud and arson case and the superintendent was pleased to approve the swift progress made towards a conclusion.

  Then Honey got down to her real business. ‘As you know,’ she said, ‘I was approached by a neighbour in connection with a missing camera. Following up information, I found the body of Jem Tanar. That’s now DCI Gilchrist’s case. The camera was recovered but the memory card had vanished. The memory card has now reached my hands. It had been dropped into a postbox in Haddington.’ She was about to explain the coincidence of postcodes but realized just in time that, given such information, any curious officer could easily home in on Kate Ingliston. ‘The postie brought it to me. In search of evidence, I examined it.’

  She produced an envelope and took out a wad of 10 x 15cm paper. ‘The first four shots are the work of my friend’s husband, recording work that he was supervising.’ She passed them over. The superintendent leafed through them quickly and pushed them aside. ‘The next nineteen,’ Honey said, ‘are the reason why my friend was so anxious to recover the camera.’

  The detective superintendent took some time leafing through the second set, his eyebrows rising ever higher towards his bald pate. It was several minutes before he suddenly asked, ‘What happened to the faces?’

  ‘I purposely blurred all the features. I felt that I had to bring you the photographs because of what follows but I am not prepared to reveal the identity of my friend unless and until it is shown to be relevant. You see, while the camera was out of our hands, somebody took another twelve photographs. You should look at them.’

  Mr Blackhouse looked quickly through the set of photographs showing the black girl until he came to the last of those images. He uttered a strangled snort. ‘Good God! Is this genuine?’

  ‘I’ve looked at it in full magnification. If it’s a fake it’s a very clever one.’

  ‘Why come to me instead of to DCI Gilchrist? It seems to tie in with his case.’

  ‘DCI Gilchrist,’ Honey said, ‘would undoubtedly insist on knowing the identity of my neighbour, which I am not prepared to reveal. I hoped that you might support me in allowing an otherwise respectable member of the citizenry, whose husband has a certain position to keep up, to remain anonymous. I don’t mind giving the rest of the world a cheap thrill but the least I can do for a friend is to hide her identity unless it turns out to be relevant – which at the moment seems inconceivable.’

  The detective superintendent seemed amused. He could thunder with genuine indignation when citizens stepped outside what the law allowed but he was inclined to betray cynical or even salacious amusement when the sexual frailties of the respectable were brought to his attention. ‘I’ll back you that far,’ he said. ‘I only hope you’d do as much for me.’

  ‘Of course I would,’ Honey said, her fingers crossed under the desk. ‘But I can hardly believe that it will ever be necessary.’

  Mr Blackhouse hesitated. Honey thought that he might be considering whether to accept her comment as praise for his morals or resent it as a slight on his sexual appeal. ‘What did you make of the scenery?’ he asked

  Honey had spent some time in studying the background. Recognizing a scene can be difficult until the viewer is oriented, but those few shots in which the sun was shining gave her the first clue. As soon as she was sure that the main focus of the photographs was looking south across a large stretch of water, the answer became obvious. ‘Moray and Beauly Firths, looking south,’ Honey said promptly. ‘You can recognize Inverness and the new suspension bridge in the distance. I know the area well.’

  Mr Blackhouse closed his eyes for most of a minute. The uninformed observer might have thought him asleep, but Honey knew that he was thinking hard. She also knew that, while he was not a great detective, he was an able administrator. He was a rare example of a man promoted into, rather than out of, what he did well. Whatever he came up with would make sense. ‘Who’s assisting you on the arson?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Jessop.’

  ‘And the procurator fiscal?’

  ‘Mrs Bland.’

  ‘Do they work well together?’

  ‘They make a good team.’ Honey had sometimes thought that if the two made any better a team she would have to throw a bucket of water over them.

  ‘Then leave them in charge of putting together the case for the prosecution. You’re the only officer available who knows the territory and you’ve liaised with the Northern Constabulary before now. You take on the case of this black girl and do the liaison with Northern. Work with DCI Gilchrist on the other killing, but our end of this one is your case. You’ll have to walk very carefully if you’re not going to tread on the corns of either Northern or DCI Gilchrist. And – Inspector – the last time you stayed overnight in the Inverness area . . .’ Mr Blackhouse broke off. He seemed unsure how to proceed. His bulk was fidgeting uncomfortably.

  ‘Sir?’ Honey could guess what was coming. A whisper had reached her from a friend in the audit office.

  ‘You slept in what must be the most expensive hotel in Europe. You won’t get away with that again. I had to fight tooth and nail to save your skin last ti
me.’

  Honey brought her mind back from contemplation of the lovely night she’d spent in that hotel. ‘I didn’t know that,’ she said. ‘I’m grateful. But I paid for the upgrade myself.’

  ‘Oh.’ Clearly the superintendent had not been told. Somebody in Finance had been using her journey as an excuse to make his life difficult. Now he was smiling. The Somebody in Finance, she thought, was going to get his head in his hands. ‘Did you indeed? Go and spell it out for the arson team,’ he said. ‘Come back in about an hour.’

  *

  Detective Sergeant Jessop and Mrs Bland were still in earnest discussion. The sergeant was placidly accepting her instructions. They were surprised but neither seemed unhappy about the altered responsibilities.

  Honey returned to the superintendant’s room at the conclusion of the allotted hour. Mr Blackhouse seemed more animated than usual. ‘There was a black girl reported missing from the hostel run by the Young Women’s Presbyterian Association,’ he announced.

  ‘I’ll check,’ Honey answered.

  The switchboard connected her to a number for the police headquarters in Inverness. But no, there had been no reports of a young black woman being stabbed, to death or otherwise, not in recent years or indeed anywhere north of Grampian where, the voice seemed to suggest, anything could be expected to happen. Honey thanked her informant and obtained both a fax number and the email address before disconnecting.