Hilary Bonner

by Braven

  “Go on, Karen,” he said, now using her name quite naturally. “You may as well chuck it and finish the job.”

  She knew it wasn’t that funny. Cooper was right. None of it was that funny. But fuelled by alcohol, weakened by weariness and fired up with tension it seemed absolutely side-splittingly hilarious.

  They completed their meal and paid their bill in hopeless fits of giggles. And they were still giggling when they climbed a little unsteadily into the taxi Karen had ordered. Karen’s flat was almost on Cooper’s route home to Paignton, so she asked the driver to drop her off first and then go on.

  At West Beach Heights she turned to Cooper. “I really needed that, Phil, it was a great release. Thank you.”

  “I know, boss,” he said. “I mean Karen. And thank you, too.”

  He turned to her directly then, his grin cracking his face wide open yet again.

  “You’re great company. D’you know that?”

  “Not sure that I do, Phil.”

  He put one hand on her arm. He was deadly serious again.

  “We must do it again some time.”

  “Yes, we must.”

  Very deliberately Karen kept her voice light, but something made her touch Phil’s hand with her free one.

  “I really enjoyed myself,” she said quietly.

  “Me too.”

  They stared at each other for a few seconds, and for just a fleeting moment Karen considered asking him upstairs. At once she dismissed the thought, mentally giving herself a sound smack.

  “Goodnight then, Phil,” she said, pulling her hand and arm free, drawing away from him and opening the door of the cab.

  “’Night, boss,” said Phil, and the return to the more formal mode of address seemed to Karen to indicate the sergeant’s realization that that rather curious moment of special contact between them, whatever it had really been, had passed. But then, as she stepped out and was about to shut the cab door, he leaned quickly forward and kissed her briefly on the cheek.

  “Sweet dreams,” he said.

  And then he was gone. She could just make out his head in the back of the cab. He didn’t turn round once. It was almost as if that brief kiss hadn’t happened.

  She watched the cab until it disappeared towards Paignton round the first corner of the seafront road. Then she swung around and walked briskly into the building. She stepped into the old erratic lift which did its usual shaking and juddering act, but for once did not even consider its idiosyncrasies. Her head was buzzing.

  Attempting to pull herself together she gave herself a telling-off for even considering inviting Phil Cooper in. A much longed-for arrest and a skinful of alcohol were no excuse for such reckless stupidity. In her much younger days Karen had once come close to losing her entire career because of an unwise romantic liaison. Indeed, only the innate decency and judgment of that most unlikely of creatures, a tabloid journalist in the form of one John Kelly, then a top Fleet Street man, had saved her.

  She shook her head, partly to clear it and partly in disbelief at her behaviour. At her age, and with her seniority in the job, it was totally absurd even to have considered embarking on any kind of relationship with a married junior officer. And a much younger one at that. Even a one-night stand would be trouble. In fact, perhaps particularly a one-night stand.

  She had considered it, though. Very seriously. And she couldn’t help wondering if Phil Cooper would have accepted her invitation had she issued it. Something, maybe that goodnight kiss, light though it had been, made her pretty sure that he would have done.

  On the fifth floor she stepped out of the lift and made her way along the corridor into flat number 12, trying desperately to concentrate only on her work, which was after all currently rather important, and to think just of what needed to be done the next day on the Richard Marshall case. But it was no good. Phil Cooper would not go away. She could see his face far too clearly, feel his hand on her arm and his lips on her cheek. And as she undressed for bed she realized that she was feeling distinctly horny. It had been some months since she had had sex at all, and then it had been little more than a one-night stand with an old flame.

  Karen liked sex a lot. But she had never seemed to be very good at relationships, or indeed at picking the right man. Phil Cooper was most definitely not the right man.

  “What you need is a cold shower, my girl,” she told herself sternly.

  She had, however, no intention whatsoever of taking one. Instead she preferred to curl up in the warmth of her lone bed and imagine that Phil was there with her. She knew she shouldn’t, that she was entering into dangerous territory, but she couldn’t help it.

  “Well, a bit of fantasizing won’t do any harm, will it?” she muttered, as if finding a need to justify her actions even to herself.

  She knew all too well what lay at the root of the problem. She laughed too easily with Phil Cooper, much too easily. That night the laughter had been so very welcome. And when she laughed with a man like that, somehow it always did something to her heart. She pulled the covers up around her and in the warm and private darkness of her bed she gave in to all her fantasies.

  “To hell with it,” she muttered. With one hand she shoved a protesting Sophie off her usual sleeping place on top of the bed, as she did not really wish to share this moment with a cat. With the other she reached between her legs. And as the pleasure spread through her body there was no way that she could stop herself imagining that it was Phil Cooper touching her and driving her wild.

  Chapter Nine

  In the morning Karen woke with a hangover accompanied by a strong sense of foreboding which she couldn’t quite explain to herself. She just didn’t feel optimistic about the day or about anything much really. The euphoria of the night before had completely evaporated along with the happier effects of the alcohol. She was now left with the residuals, and it wasn’t a good feeling.

  She jacked herself out of bed and made for the shower. Her head ached. Her mouth felt like a cross between an ashtray and an old sack.

  Oh, God, she thought, remembering what she had so nearly done the night before. And indeed what she had done—admittedly, all alone.

  As she brushed her teeth she considered the tasks facing her that day. The biggest and most problematic was that she had to go and see the chief constable at headquarters in Exeter.

  Karen neither liked nor respected Harry Tomlinson, and she was quietly confident that the feeling was mutual. She thought the chief constable was a small-minded pedantic little man more interested in politics than policing. And she had a fair idea that he considered her far too much of a maverick, too much of a free spirit, not enough of a stickler for rules and regulations. She also reckoned he was enough of a dinosaur still to be prejudiced against women police officers in senior jobs.

  She peered at her somewhat red eyes in the mirror. Her mouth still tasted disgusting so she decided to give her teeth a second brushing. It didn’t help much but three cups of tea lifted her slightly. Unusually she gave the cigarettes a miss. She didn’t think her throat or her lungs could take any tobacco that morning. She had no idea how many she had smoked the night before, but she knew it was a lot.

  She kicked her favourite designer trainers out from under the bed and began to rummage amid the obligatory pile of clothes covering the little Victorian nursing chair while she decided what she was going to wear that day. Reluctantly she knew she must take the Harry Tomlinson meeting into consideration. It would help if she didn’t antagonize him just by her appearance. Karen justified her usual extremely casual look—her much-loved trainers, baggy shirts and jackets, roll-up cotton trousers, sometimes even jeans—by saying that she was, after all, a detective. Detectives were supposed to blend. Detectives were supposed to fit into the communities in which they were doing their detecting. Neat little business costumes and high heels were not only dated but set women who wore them apart from the vast majority. Anyway, she managed to force a grin even though it hurt, she didn’t l
ike those sorts of clothes. It didn’t suit her to be dressed up like a dog’s dinner, and she knew it. It made her feel old, too. She liked young funky clothes, slightly off the wall. One of her favourite pairs of trainers appeared at a glance to be made of plain white canvas, but was actually covered with tiny silver spangles which danced and glittered as she walked.

  However, for the chief constable Karen knew she must attempt to look the part of a detective superintendent—or rather the part as Harry Tomlinson saw it.

  She delved into the back of her wardrobe and emerged with a dark-grey linen trouser suit of the permanently-crumpled look she favoured for practical reasons as much as anything else—not quite the tailored outfit Tomlinson would prefer but something of a compromise—and a cream T-shirt. Trainers, she told herself sorrowfully, would never do, so she plunged into the assorted shoes piled high in the bottom of the wardrobe and eventually found a pair of tan-coloured suede mules with small built-up heels which she reckoned Tomlinson might almost approve of and which she could just about bear to have on her feet. Then she gritted her teeth and prepared for war, which is what her meetings with the chief constable were inclined to resemble. Picking up her bag she rummaged in it for her car keys and only then remembered.

  “I don’t fucking believe it,” she said aloud.

  Until that moment she had completely forgotten that she had left her car at the police station. It had seemed such a good idea the night before. But then, so had quite a lot of activities which most definitely would not have been. Now it seemed she had drunk so much that she was suffering from alcoholic amnesia.

  Still cursing colourfully she grabbed the phone and dialled the number of her local minicab firm.

  “What do you mean, twenty minutes?” she cried frantically. “I need a car now. Right away. All right, all right. Just do your best, will you?”

  Her head was beginning to ache. This really was a wretched start to the day. Karen slumped into a chair. She had no choice but to wait. Perhaps a black coffee would help. She hurried into the kitchen and checked her watch for the umpteenth time. Unfortunately she could not turn the hands back.

  It was five minutes past eight. Her appointment with the chief constable and the locally based CPS chief prosecutor was for 9 A. M. She had planned to allow an hour for her drive to HQ at Middlemore thirty-five miles away. There was all that holiday traffic to contend with, too. All too often in the summer, particularly in the mornings and evenings and even more so in the days close to a bank holiday, the first stretch of the journey, the road between Torquay and Newton Abbot, could be jammed solid. She realized she would now be lucky to have half an hour to get to Exeter, and that was never going to be enough. Why, oh why, did she always contrive to put herself at a disadvantage?

  There was absolutely no way she was not going to be late.

  The cab made it in fifteen minutes, not twenty. But the five-minute reprieve did not help much. It took ten minutes to get to the police station. That could have been a much longer journey on a bright sunny August morning in one of the nation’s holiday capitals, but it still didn’t help.

  By the time Karen had retrieved her car it was 8.35 A. M. She was in deep lumber. She was about to put herself on the back foot, that was the worst of it, and how she hated that. The traffic at least moved after a fashion all the way to Newton Abbot, but it was a crawl. And although she broke every speed limit on the brief stretch of the motorway-standard A3 8 leading to Devon’s ancient county town, she did not arrive at the Middlemore HQ until 9.15. By the time she reached the CC’s office, having run across the car park and along the corridors, it was nearly 9.25, and she was sweating, flushed, out of breath and generally in a state of dishevelment.

  “Go straight in,” said Tomlinson’s secretary. “He is waiting for you.”

  The emphasis was heavily on the word is. The bloody woman didn’t quite sniff as she spoke to Karen, but she actually did contrive to look down her long nose.

  “Thank you so much,” Karen responded icily.

  She thought she probably disliked Tomlinson’s secretary, a neat-looking creature, superior in manner, with a geometric yellow haircut, every bit as much as she disliked the man himself. The secretary was of that extremely irritating species who had taken on an aura of self-importance even more highly developed than that of her employer.

  She knocked on the door to Tomlinson’s office. His voice boomed at her.

  “Enter.”

  Karen reflected that it was like something out of Oscar Wilde. Enter indeed. Who did the bloody man think he was?

  She entered.

  Tomlinson, a small trim man, every bit as neatly made and turned out as his secretary, was sitting at his overly large desk directly facing the door, cup of coffee in his hand, immaculately shiny-shod feet propped up on the desk before him.

  The chief prosecutor, James Cromby-White, with whom Karen had had many previous dealings, all too many of them tricky to say the least, was sitting to Tomlinson’s right in one of the squashy black-leather armchairs which lined the chief constable’s spacious office. He grunted a greeting at Karen, but made no attempt to rise. As he was grossly overweight, a man of moderate height of five foot seven or eight maximum, weighing in at around eighteen or nineteen stone, Karen reckoned, he probably had great difficulty manoeuvring himself out of the low-slung chairs.

  However, Harry Tomlinson, a deceptively agile little man, swung his legs off the desk and positively bounced to his feet as Karen closed the office door behind her.

  “Ah, Detective Superintendent, you’ve decided to grace us with your presence after all, have you?” he boomed.

  “Sorry, sir,” said Karen, who already had her excuse to hand. “Car trouble, I’m afraid…”

  She may as well not have bothered to prepare herself. Tomlinson wasn’t even listening. Instead, the diminutive police chief pointedly tapped the face of his watch with the fingers of his right hand.

  “Time, Detective Superintendent,” he told her. “Time. Time and discipline. The very key to policing. If you can’t discipline yourself, how can you expect to discipline others?”

  Karen winced. She couldn’t believe that the bloody man was giving her a dressing-down as if she were a badly behaved schoolgirl, in front of Cromby-White, the leading light of Devon and Cornwall’s Crown Prosecution Service. Her head hurt. Her hangover was still raging. What she wanted to do was to square up to Tomlinson and tell him a few home truths—like, with the hours she worked and the pressures she had to carry, it shouldn’t really be the end of the world if she got herself wrecked occasionally and on this occasion had been a few minutes late for a meeting. To Tomlinson, of course, such a thing was the end of the world. And this was not a day for confrontation. Karen wanted and needed a result.

  She saw that both men had her Richard Marshall report to hand. All that mattered was that she got the go-ahead to charge the bastard. She could not allow herself any self-indulgence.

  “You’re absolutely right, sir, and I really am very sorry,” she said, making no attempt to elaborate on her carefully crafted excuse. She was aware of James Cromby-White looking mildly surprised. Her intrinsic lack of respect for authority was well enough known, after all.

  Tomlinson, too, looked surprised. He would certainly not have expected that kind of response from her. Indeed, she thought, he may have been deliberately trying to wind her up, to make her react in the confrontational way she had been tempted towards, to make her put herself at a further disadvantage. He was, after all, a prime operator when it came to political manoeuvring.

  Whether or not that had been the CC’s intention, Karen’s meek reply, even though it had nearly choked her, might, she thought, prove to be her first halfway intelligent move of the day. Tomlinson seemed instantly appeased. She knew well enough how he liked servility—or respect for your superiors, as he would no doubt phrase it.

  “Good, I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “Right.” He consulted the watch he had so pointedly ta
pped. “As we have lost almost half an hour of the time I can give to this meeting I suggest we get on with it. OK? James and I are both familiar with what is going on, Superintendent. No new developments since you filed this report, I don’t suppose?”

  Karen had completed her report of Marshall’s arrest and interrogation to date just before leaving Torquay Police Station the previous evening and e-mailed it to the chief constable.

  “No, sir.”

  “And still not any joy from interviewing the man?”

  “Not really, sir. Marshall’s a pretty cool customer, as you know, or he wouldn’t have got away with what he did for this long.”

  “Indeed. So the question is—” Tomlinson glanced towards the top CPS lawyer who was so far giving nothing away. “—do we have enough to charge him?”

  “I’m sure we do, sir,” said Karen quickly, determined to have her say before Cromby-White started to point out the shortcomings of the prosecution case so far. “We have a body that we can already identify beyond all reasonable doubt as that of Clara Marshall, chiefly because we have found her Rolex watch. We know that Marshall had the means to dump a body at sea, in that he had a boat and is an experienced sailor. It is possible that this case may have been reopened eventually simply on the grounds of time, even without bodies. It would, after all, be without precedent I think for a woman and two children to disappear in the way that Clara Marshall and her children did and then to be discovered safe and well after this length of time. But we now have much more than that. We have a body at last, and don’t forget we have witnesses who saw Marshall take his boat out and set off on a course towards Berry Head at around the time of his family’s disappearance.”

  “That’s all very well, Karen,” said the chief constable. “I admit that superficially we now have a decent case but the evidence is still circumstantial. If only Marshall would crack. Do you think there’s any chance of that?”

  “What, after twenty-eight years?” Karen realized as she spoke that she probably sounded challenging, something she had been trying so hard to avoid. She couldn’t help it. What did Tomlinson expect, for God’s sake? There was something about his manner which always made it difficult for her to maintain professional distance, and with this case and her involvement in it she was finding it even more difficult.