In Loving Memory

by Gerald Hammond

  That last statement Honey took with a whole barrowload of salt. She was about to respond with a fiction about her own affair with the predatory tourist when Sandy said, ‘The warden at the YWPA hostel was trying to reach you. Apparently something’s arrived in the post for your Harriet Benskin, AKA Cheryl Abernethy. Addressed personally this time.’

  Honey was not expecting to wait around for long enough for mail to catch up with her. ‘Do me a favour please, Sandy, and have it picked up, whatever it is. It’s probably somebody trying to sell her some double-glazing or next year’s hideous garden flowers, but I’ll have to look at it. With luck, it could be the next chapter of her autobiography.’

  The call finished with an exchange of endearments that are no concern of ours and Honey settled down to watching a play on television.

  Chapter Twelve

  Honey was sometimes at a loss when duty required her to sleep away from home. In younger days she had been quite accustomed to sleeping, like the proverbial log, in beds other than her own; but she had become addicted to comfort, to family life and to the warmth of his company although she would not have allowed Sandy to know it. Instead, without quite saying so aloud, she usually tried to suggest to him that her time away from home was spent in a round of conviviality.

  A totally uninteresting evening on television encouraged her to take to her bed with a book. After the early night she awoke, fully rested, with time in hand and no dog to walk. For once, she could afford to dawdle. She had a leisurely shower, dressed and took breakfast and, when she settled her account and left, her hair and make-up were impeccable. She believed in doing her utmost at her job but she also believed that to present herself to the world in her best possible state was a courtesy that she owed to the world in exchange for her living. Her light travelling luggage would not have allowed for a spare outfit without crushing, but her soft tweeds remained immaculate and she had brought accessories introducing a change of colours from pale moss green to a soft pink. She cleaned her shoes with the materials provided and when she left the hotel she was in a state that she considered fit to show the world.

  It was a bright morning but with a brisk and bitter wind cutting across the water from the general direction of Clachnaharry. She spared a minute for a glance around. The small town of Beauly was attractive, perhaps more so since the flow of traffic had been diverted over the new bridge. The remaining walls of the priory stood up, bravely red, out of the grass.

  She took the road along the side of the Firth again. The wind was whipping up choppy waves to break on the northern shore but with the tide low they could not reach the road. All the same, Honey was aware of the damage that salt spray could do to her car. The road was single-track with passing places and at commuting time it seemed to be in general use as a short cut so that her progress was not swift, but even so she was ten minutes early at the rendezvous. The sergeant arrived, very flustered, five minutes late. Honey, whose punctuality was notorious, was unimpressed. Nor was she mollified when offered a seat in a rusty Lada. Instead, she took Sergeant Bleeke into the Range Rover, thereby unintentionally completing that young lady’s discomfiture, and they set off back towards Beauly. The Range Rover, which had started at the top of the range, had later, at the command and expense of Mr Potterton-Phipps, been breathed on by experts and fitted with luxuries usually only to be found in stretched limousines and private jet aircraft. Honey’s father liked to have a go-anywhere vehicle but nothing would induce him to lower his standards. He worked hard for his comforts and intended to enjoy them.

  The DS was clearly aware that she had failed to shine and it was in a small voice that she said, just after they had passed the caravan site, that this was where the photographs seemed to have been taken from. She was pointing to the middle of a grassy field.

  Honey pulled into one of the passing places and stopped. ‘How did you work that out?’

  The sergeant fumbled out one of the photographs. As soon as she set eyes on it, Honey knew that the sergeant’s morale was due to take another tumble. ‘I lined up the boat’s mast with that whatever it is on Cnoc na Moine. And you can see in the photograph that the tide was high and I had to allow for that.’

  Honey tried to exclude both amusement and censure from her voice. ‘So you concluded that what was obviously an interior shot was taken in the middle of a field?’

  ‘I thought perhaps a caravan . . .?’

  Honey’s overstretched patience gave way. ‘If there ever was a caravan with that much space inside I’d have bought one. It didn’t occur to you that that’s a working boat, fishing or gathering mussels or taking out parties of salmon anglers, and that it could have been moved to a different anchorage since the photograph was taken?’

  The other woman flushed and bit her lower lip. ‘No, it didn’t,’ she said at last. ‘I’m not used to boats. Colour me stupid.’

  At once, Honey felt disarmed by such a frank admission when some officers would have struggled to justify themselves or to pass the blame. She took back the photographs and selected two of them. ‘This one’s the sharpest,’ she said, ‘and it seems to agree with what you can make out of the view through the window beyond the dead girl. If you line up the thingummy on the hilltop with that white building instead of the boat, the line hits the shore west of here. I’ll drive on. You keep an eye on those two marks. Tell me when they come in line.’

  She drove on with the broad estuary on her left. The commuter traffic seemed to be over. When DS Monica Bleeke said, ‘That’s about it,’ there was again a field on the right, but this time a strip of trees and bushes angled up the slope away from the road and the water. It was half hiding a rough track. A roof was showing above a swell of the ground.

  Honey parked in the mouth of the track. ‘From here we walk,’ she said. ‘We may want to preserve any tracks. And if there’s anybody there, alive, I’d prefer that they didn’t drive away until we’ve had a serious word.’ DS Bleeke, who had seemed to be on the point of issuing her senior with a traffic ticket for blocking the lane, nodded and relaxed.

  The day had turned bitterly cold. The wind was still gusting off the water. The lane was muddy and there was dark cloud beginning to loom from the south; but Honey had her good sheepskin coat and hat and she knew that her soft suede, calf-high boots were watertight. The DS, evidently trying to keep face with the detective inspector, wore a thin coat and pointed shoes. Honey decided to take pity. She dug out the Wellingtons that were permanently in the back of the Range Rover and lent the girl her spare Barbour waxproof coat. The boots were a reasonable fit but the coat looked tight across the shoulders and chest. Honey, who sometimes felt that a little more bosom would not have come amiss, was unsympathetic.

  The track led uphill towards a cottage, most of which had been hidden from the bottom of the track by an undulation of the field. On a better day it would have been an attractive scene, the unpretentious cottage with its air of comfortable seclusion, set in the fields against a background of evergreens, with its own trees nestled around it. As they came closer they began to recognize features that had appeared in the photographs. In one shot, the girl had been seen seated on the upturned log that stood beside the front door; in another she was leaning against the same doorpost.

  ‘Go ahead and knock,’ Honey said. ‘You’re the local officer.’

  DS Bleeke knocked without getting an answer. She tried the door and found it locked. She looked at Honey questioningly, evidently having adopted the more senior lady as a guide, philosopher and friend.

  ‘Now we walk round, looking in at the windows,’ Honey said.

  They did not have to walk very far. In the photograph that included the dead girl, although the window area was over-exposed and out of focus it had suggested an oblique view across the Firth. The window to one side of the door revealed a dark sitting room without people alive or dead. Honey stood back and let DS Bleeke look through the other front window. She had seen enough corpses for the moment. The ability of this on
e to shock had been lessened by the photographs. On the other hand, Honey found that the uncertainty of wondering brought a new stress. Was the girl still there? Had she moved? Been removed? A serving police officer, particularly a detective, has to learn detachment but there remains always the atavistic fear of the apparently deceased. In Honey’s experience, that dread would vanish as soon as the body was pronounced or found to be incontrovertibly dead.

  Monica Bleeke was less trammelled by an active imagination. After a single, horrified squeak, she said, ‘There she is. What do we do now? Break in?’

  ‘Better not,’ Honey said. Reassured by Monica’s obvious certainty that the grim reaper had finished the job, Honey studied the corpse from this fresh angle. The light was poor and her study told her very little. ‘She’s obviously dead and the SOCOs will want a clear run at it,’ Honey said. ‘What you do now is to take a look through the other windows, just in case there’s somebody else in there who’s still in need of help or arrest, and then report in. Where are you based? Headquarters?’

  The DS shook her head. ‘Burnett Road nick,’ she said.

  ‘You’d better report to your immediate boss and ask for instructions. You can say that I’ll wait around as a witness until they’ve got my statement. We may as well wait in the car where it’s warm while you do it.’

  The sergeant, less experienced in murder enquiries and so less blasé than Honey, seemed slightly shocked by this cavalier approach, but they walked back to the Range Rover together, leaning against the wind. Monica made her call, standing to attention beside the car except for a quick look at the Range Rover’s number plate, while Honey ran the engine for long enough to restore a little warmth through the heater.

  When the other had settled in the passenger seat, Honey asked, ‘What did they say, Monica?’ Honey felt that a limited IQ was no more the girl’s fault than that she had been promoted in spite of it and that she had better be put at her ease before she was surrounded by superiors who could be expected to be in a snappy mood after the disturbance to their placid routine.

  ‘I’m to wait here, keep the public away and show the place to . . . all the usual people, whoever they may be.’

  This was ancient history to Honey. ‘Police surgeon, pathologist, photographer, SOCOs, detectives,’ she said. ‘Probably the procurator fiscal.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Usually. Forensics usually wait to have samples brought to them for analysis but you never know, and you sometimes get specialist experts called in even this early. Then later the mortuary wagon. I suggest you get on the radio again and call the local woodentops – I must stop using that expression,’ Honey corrected herself. ‘It’s a habit left over from the Met and even there they don’t like it. I mean the uniformed branch. Get the local bobby to come. You, Monica, will be wanted to make or take statements and to dogsbody for absolutely everybody; and you can’t do that at the same time as trying to keep control of the parking and chase the nosy parkers and the media away. I’ve been a detective sergeant myself. And if you’re thinking that I’m getting out of my nice warm car to direct passers-by to pass on by, you can put it out of your mind. I’m here as a witness and that’s all.’

  Monica Bleeke made a sound that was not far removed from a giggle. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. But if you’re going to call me Monica—’

  ‘No,’ Honey interrupted, ‘you cannot call me by my nickname.’

  ‘I didn’t even know that you had a nickname,’ Monica said plaintively. ‘I only wanted to know if it was all right to call you Mrs Laird.’

  Honey was abashed. ‘Thus far and no further,’ she said.

  The first rain rattled against the car. ‘Do you want your coat and boots back now?’

  ‘Keep them on. You’ll need them. Get them back to me when you can. I’ve spares at home.’ Honey reached behind her for her laptop computer and plugged its cord into the cigarette lighter socket. Luckily the statement that she had prepared earlier was still in its memory. With spasmodic assistance from Monica Bleeke, she set about amplifying and extending it.

  *

  An hour later, the police surgeon had arrived and departed. Monica had had to break a small window to let him in. Now, rather green about the face and ears, she was dancing attendance on the photographer and the pathologist. Three SOCOs were straining at the leash, waiting to be let loose on the crime scene.

  Honey was quite accustomed to the pace of murder enquiries, which tend to start with frenzied activity before slowing right down to allow time for the various experts to plod along their well-worn paths. She moved her Range Rover out of the lane and into a nearby passing place and used her mobile to bring Mr Blackhouse up to date. Then she settled down with a magazine. Nearly another hour had passed before an enormous 4X4 of American construction pulled in behind her. Two men emerged. From their confident demeanour she judged that these were the senior detectives who would be taking over. The younger, a sandy-haired man in what she recognized as a tweed overcoat with a Gore-Tex lining and a waterproof cap with integral earflaps, strode up the track towards the cottage. The other, a heavily built man with a Barbour and an aggressive strut, arrived at the door of the Range Rover. Honey lowered her window.

  ‘Detective Superintendent Largs.’

  ‘Detective Inspector Laird,’ Honey replied.

  She now found herself in an old quandary. A junior officer is expected to stand in the presence of a senior until invited to sit. On the other hand, the ancient custom that a gentleman stands for a lady still remains in vestigial form among old-fashioned officers. If both rules were to be followed between a female junior and a male senior, neither would ever be seated. If any solution had ever been promulgated on the subject, Honey had never seen it, so she had compromised. All else being equal, she would stand up out of respect for any male officer on the second grade above her own. The sole exception was Mr Blackhouse, for whom she had little respect and who had long stopped expecting it. For a female superior, she would stand. But for a male superintendent belonging to a different force who was standing in the wind and rain outside her vehicle, wearing a long waterproof coat of waxed cotton while she had already removed her sheepskin, she decided to stretch the rules of both courtesy and discipline. ‘Do please get in out of the rain, superintendent,’ she said.

  Mr Largs grunted and walked round the car. He hesitated before opening the passenger door, but obviously there was no way for him to get rid of his wet coat and sit down without getting soaked, so with another grunt that she could take for apology if she so wished, he brought the rain with him and shut the weather outside. Honey could see what her father meant about regretting not having insisted on all-leather upholstery. Detective Superintendent Largs looked around the interior of the car, the Sat Nav, the top-of-the-range hi-fi, the leather and the polished woodwork and he grunted for the third time. ‘Lothian and Borders seem to look after their inspectors,’ he said.

  ‘This,’ Honey said, ‘is my own car.’

  He looked at her in surprise and suspicion. ‘Laird,’ he said, ‘Laird. Of course. I’ve met your father, Robin Potterton-Phipps. They call you Honeypot, don’t they?’

  ‘My father does, sometimes,’ Honey said. ‘Nobody else still living.’

  After a pause he laughed, a deep bark of laughter. ‘I’ll remember. Now, inspector, tell me about this case.’

  ‘You can read my statement, if you wish,’ Honey said. She opened her laptop and booted up the statement that she had prepared. He scanned through it with total concentration. When he looked up, she handed him the doctored set of prints of the photographs. ‘The couple seem totally unconnected with the case,’ she said, ‘so I have removed their faces. If anything occurs to suggest that either of them has any link with the case I can print them again complete with faces.’

  He surprised her by saying, ‘That seems reasonable.’ She had expected him to be a stickler. He returned the photographs to her, retaining only the prints featuring the girl, liv
ing and dead. ‘I’d like enlargements of these.’

  ‘No problem. I’ll email the originals.’

  ‘And send me a printout of your statement.’

  ‘I can email that to your office right now, if you like.’

  He sighed. ‘I keep forgetting about this modern technology. Go ahead.’

  He gave her the address. She connected her mobile phone to the laptop and despatched the statement.

  ‘If there’s anything else, I can reach you,’ he said. He put his hand on the door handle.

  ‘I can go?’ She was amazed. She had expected to be kept hanging around for hours or even days. ‘I’m supposed to be still on maternity leave, but HQ can put us in touch. You’ll let us have sight of any forensic results? And the path report?’

  ‘Certainly. My regards to Mr Potterton-Phipps.’

  ‘Your sergeant’s car is at North Kessock.’

  ‘I’ll see that she gets lifted back to it.’

  A few seconds later he was stamping through the rain towards the cottage and the corpse. She turned the Range Rover in the mouth of the track and set off back towards Edinburgh, rather relieved to leave the death scene and all the fuss and flap that usually went with it. She encountered a heavy shower that would not make the investigation any easier.

  Chapter Thirteen

  So the black girl had been right to suspect that she might be in danger. Honey’s mind was so full of permutations on the known events that she was arriving in the fringe of Perth before she recognized the ache in her midriff as being hunger. She pulled in at the Isle of Skye Hotel and took a bar snack before sweeping onward, along the motorway and over the big bridge.

  Daylight was giving way to street lighting as she crossed the ring road and entered Edinburgh. It was hardly worth going into ‘the factory’ for what little was left of the usual working day, and a call from her mobile had assured her that Sandy had already got Cheryl’s mail to be delivered to their home. With luck this would include the rest of the girl’s statement, although it would be a great rarity if it were to extend close to the time of her death. Anyway, Honey was supposed to be on leave; and Finance would probably limit her travelling expenses to the amount of the rail fare. If she had travelled by train she would not have been back for hours yet.