Descent (A Kate Redman Mystery Novella)

by Celina Grace

  “What can you tell me about Karyn’s husband?” said Kate, once Louise had finally wound to a close.

  Louise looked surprised. “Tom? Tom Denver? What about him?”

  Kate wasn’t quite sure what she was fishing for. “Well, did you guys all socialise together?”

  “No,” said Paul White firmly. “Tom isn’t – he’s not very sociable.”

  That tied in with what little Kate had seen of Mr Denver. “Right, I see.”

  Louise was looking tearful again. “Oh, poor Tom. Poor, poor Tom. I’d better go and see him, or – or write or something.”

  “Yes. Yes, we should.” Paul White sat down beside his wife on the sofa and put a hand on her knee. Kate watched Louise’s eyes drop to his hand but there was no expression on her face. She looked exhausted, if anything.

  Remembering Tom Denver’s reaction to their arrival on his doorstep, Kate paused in the act of packing away her things. “Were Karyn and Tom having problems with their marriage?”

  Both Whites looked at her. Louise was the first to speak. “Problems?”

  “Yes.” Kate didn’t elaborate. She remembered Tom Denver’s words. She’s not my wife, she’s nothing to do with me anymore.

  The Whites exchanged a glance. “Well,” Louise began slowly – and with seeming reluctance. “They – they were arguing quite a lot. I don’t know that it was anything serious but – well, I think things had been a bit strained. I don’t really… Karyn didn’t mention anything specific but when she was here for Christmas, and Tom wasn’t – well, it was obvious that something was going on.”

  Kate had been scribbling busily. “Would you have said that Karyn was worried? Depressed?”

  Louise bit her lip. “I don’t know. It’s funny at Christmas, isn’t it? It’s always a bit – a bit fraught.” She looked down at her lap. “Karyn did seem a bit... subdued, I suppose is the word. Not depressed, exactly. Just maybe a bit quieter than she would normally have been.”

  Kate looked at Paul White. “What were your impressions, Mr White?”

  “Me?” Paul looked startled to be asked directly. “Oh, well, I think Louise is right. Karyn was a bit quiet. But then, it was hectic anyway, with the children running around overexcited, and my parents were here too. I think Karyn maybe felt a bit left out, not being family.”

  “Did she normally spend Christmas with you?” asked Kate, curious.

  “Not normally.” Louise wiped her eyes again. “I just thought I’d ask her this time around because – well, I knew things were a bit strained with Tom and I thought she might like a break. That’s all.”

  *

  Kate drove straight home after her interview with the Whites, determined to spend an evening at her own house for once, keeping Merlin company. She parked the car and made her way to her front door, shivering in the icy wind. Luckily, she had plenty of firewood… Kate hurried inside, flicked the switch on the boiler to turn on the heating and began to lay a fire.

  When she was home for the night, she normally tried to mentally switch off from thoughts of work. It wasn’t always possible. In the most wrenching and stressful cases, Kate had sometimes found it preferable to go back to the office and continue working, rather than pretend she was trying to relax at home.

  The Karyn Denver case wasn’t one of those cases. But… There was something intangible about it that was making Kate uneasy. But what? She slowly paced up and down before the flickering flames in the grate, watching her socked feet move back and forth on the rug. What was it about this case that made her pause? Kate came to a stop and stared at the fire. It sometimes worked for inspiration, watching the dancing flames and the glowing coals.

  Kate reviewed what she knew. It seemed likely that Karyn Denver had been out running and her death was the result of a fall from the top of Blackdown Gorge. Had she slipped? There was little physical evidence of that at the scene, although that didn’t necessarily mean it hadn’t happened. Had she deliberately thrown herself over? Kate thought back to the conversation she’d had with Louise and Paul White. From their words, it seemed as though Karyn had been a bit depressed. And clearly, things were not right with her husband. But was that sufficient motive for suicide?

  Kate blinked and looked away from the flames. Then, before she could forget, and also so she could start to attempt clearing her mind of the job, she fetched her notebook from her bag and wrote check medical records – any history of depression/mental illness? She thought for a moment and wrote interview Tom Denver. Kate paused, tapping the pen against her chin. Merlin sauntered into the room and made a bee-line for her lap, jumping up and curling up against her. Kate dropped an absent-minded kiss on his black head and, shifting slightly so she could still reach the notebook, wrote Paul White?

  She capped her pen and sat back, stroking Merlin. She had no real idea of where the thought of interviewing Paul White came from again. It was nothing more than a feeling. She’d had cases like this before, cases where her intuition had served her well, whispering ever more strongly as the case progressed, flowing through the undercurrents of what had really happened. Then again, she’d had cases where her intuition had led her completely down the garden path, so it wasn’t exactly a great substitute for normal police work.

  “A feeling is not evidence,” Kate remarked to Merlin, who flicked an ear in response. She smiled and sat back against the back of the sofa, stroking his silky black back and trying to think of something else.

  Chapter Six

  The next morning saw Kate, Chloe, Theo and Rav waiting expectantly (and with not a little apprehension) for the ongoing debrief with their new DCI. Kate had made an effort to get in early, so early that even Olbeck, a notorious early riser, hadn’t beaten her to her desk. Already primed with two strong coffees, Kate felt up to taking on whatever Nicola Weaver might throw at her.

  As it was, DCI Weaver was late – not very late, just late enough for it to slightly inconvenience the rest of them, without being so late that it would attract comment. She didn’t so much sweep as sidle into the room, catching them all chatting amongst themselves and not even about the case; about the current shambles that the British government was making of Brexit (Theo), how the wrong person had won Strictly Come Dancing (Chloe) and the latest triumph of Manchester United (Rav). Kate, uninterested in most of these topics, was watching the leafless branches of a tree outside sway in the breeze.

  “Good morning,” said the quiet voice of DCI Weaver, which somehow managed to penetrate everyone’s consciousness in a way that almost made them jump. They all turned to face her. She bestowed upon them a smile that ran the gamut of warmth as it was turned about the room; from a fairly big beam at Theo, cooling rapidly as it swept over Rav and Chloe, before ebbing and failing altogether just as it got to Kate. Kate, conscious of this, breathed in sharply through her nose but kept her face in neutral.

  She doesn’t like me. Why? Kate pondered this just as she heard Olbeck’s office door open and his footsteps come over to join them.

  “Morning, Nicola,” he said cheerily, seating himself by Kate as was his custom.

  “Good morning – Mark.” DCI Weaver flared her nostrils for a second before speaking again. “I understand that you’re all used to a fairly informal debrief with your DCI. I work somewhat differently. From now on, we’ll be having weekly individual meetings to ascertain how you’re getting on and so I can monitor the progression of your cases.” She paused as if to allow a protest or comment. When none came, she gave a tiny cough and carried on. “My assistant will contact you to arrange a time that’s mutually convenient. We will also all have a more formal, minuted weekly group meeting.”

  “Um—” began Olbeck but Nicola forestalled him with a chilly smile.

  “You and I will also meet twice-weekly, DI Olbeck, at a time that suits us both. I know how busy you are.”

  Nicola paused and looked about the room. Ka
te could see Chloe struggling not to say something and beamed a thought towards her. Don’t make her make you say it. Chloe, like Kate, had a temper and Kate didn’t want her friend’s card further black-marked.

  Chloe must have sensed what Kate was trying to say – either that or she thought better of it. The silence in the room dragged out a few moments longer before Nicola cleared her throat and bent her head towards the clipboard that she held. “What else? Oh yes. As we’re new to working with one another, I thought it might be rather productive to have some training together – some team building exercises and so forth. Again, my assistant will be contacting you with the details, to make sure we can all be available for the event I’ve got planned.”

  Again she paused, but the team stared stonily back at her and remained silent. Kate wondered whether Nicola Weaver actually knew how much they disliked her, and just didn’t care, or did she genuinely think that they were happy to hear all this?

  “Well, I’ll let you get on with things. Look out for those emails, and I’ll be in my office should you need me. Just make sure you check with Linda first.”

  She bestowed another wintry smile around the room and glided to the doorway, shutting it quietly behind her.

  Kate held her breath, counting silently to ten. She’d reached seven before Chloe exploded.

  “What the hell?”

  “Now, now,” Olbeck rebuked mildly. “She’s got her own way of doing things. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a worse way.”

  Chloe paced up and down, shaking her hands in the air. “She keeps talking about teamwork but she won’t let us debrief together as a team? What the f—”

  “She did say we’re going to be doing some team building exercises,” Rav said hastily.

  Chloe shot him a look. “Yeah. Because we’ve all got so much free time and so little work, we can take a few days out to go to some wanky conference centre to learn how to work as a team when we already bloody do work as a team!”

  Kate, while agreeing with every word, thought it was possible that Chloe, right at the moment, wasn’t prepared to listen to any kind of reason. She got up, went over to the coffee machine, and began to prepare everyone a hot drink. Biscuits might help. They always helped Kate.

  By the time she came back with the drinks, Chloe had stopped pacing and had cast herself into her chair, pecking away at her keyboard in an irritated fashion. Rav and Theo had also started work. Kate distributed out her little hot beverage peace offerings. When she got to Rav, she thought of something.

  “Has anything come in from the witness boards? Anything useful at all?”

  Rav took the steaming mug from her gingerly. “Thanks for this. And yes, actually, something did come in. I was just about to run it past the boss when – well, it all kicked off.”

  Kate sat down on a nearby chair. “Tell me more.”

  “Right, well, time of death has been narrowed down to sometime around midday of Thursday twenty-eighth of December, right?”

  “Has it?”

  “Yeah, Andrew sent over the report earlier. I guess you haven’t read it yet?”

  “Next on my list,” Kate said hastily. “Anyway, if that’s the case, what’s the deal?”

  “Someone called in after seeing one of the boards in the forest. They were apparently walking their dog there on that day – the twenty-eighth – and they said they heard an argument and then a scream. But it was quite a long way off and so they thought they might have been mistaken. Anyway—” Rav stopped talking for a moment and began hunting around on his desk. “Where is it? Oh, here we go.” He extracted a piece of paper from a cardboard folder. “This guy, the dog walker, he seems legit.”

  Kate took it and skim-read it. The witness, an Alan Abercrombie, seemed to be a frequent dogwalker in that part of the woods. Kate read through the rest of the notes. Apparently, Abercrombie had overheard raised voices over on the other side of the gorge to where he’d been walking. A few minutes later, he thought he had heard a scream but when he listened out for more, he heard nothing and had concluded that perhaps he’d been mistaken or, in his own words, ‘it was just teenagers messing about’. Once he’d seen the police notice boards, he’d realised that he might actually have been a witness to a crime.

  “I’m going to go and see him today,” said Rav, taking the report back from Kate as she held it out to him. “It probably doesn’t need two of us, unless you want to come?”

  “Thanks.” Kate was thinking of the long list of things that she had to do herself. “I don’t think I’ve got time, Rav. I’m sure you’ll get all the information that could be useful.”

  Back at her own desk, Kate ran her eye down her ‘to-do’ list. Medical records, that was first on the list. Or should she interview Tom Denver first? Knowing from previous experience how difficult it was to try and catch a GP between patient appointments, Kate pondered and then got up, gathering up her bag and coat.

  It was slightly warmer outside than it had been for a while and the patches of frost on the ground were shrinking. It felt very damp, though, and the sky sagged like a heavy grey blanket. Kate turned the car heater up and felt the welcome warmth on her face as she drove out of the station carpark. She was chancing her arm with Tom Denver, having not rung ahead to make an appointment, but perhaps that was for the best.

  When she drove up to park outside the Denver house, she could see there was a car already in the driveway, a silver Ford. Perhaps he was home… Quickly, Kate pulled her coat on and got out of the car.

  Tom Denver took so long to answer the door that Kate almost gave up and turned back. Eventually, after several rings at the doorbell and multiple knocks with the doorknocker, the door slowly swung open.

  Tom Denver stood there silently, much as he had the first time Kate and Theo had visited him. He looked scruffier than he had done then, the grey sweatshirt he was wearing stained and marked. Kate could smell stale alcohol fumes even from three feet away. For a second, her mother reappeared in her memory; all those mornings before school, breathing whiskey fumes over Kate when she kissed her goodbye. That’s when her mother was actually up and awake in the mornings. Half the time, it had been Kate getting her younger brother and sisters ready for school.

  Pushing the memories away, Kate smiled neutrally and introduced herself again. She dropped the smile quickly, reminding herself that she was addressing a widower. Or was she? She needed to get to the bottom of the Denvers’ relationship, but it was going to be tricky with this man.

  “I’m very sorry to bother you, Mr Denver, but I was hoping to come in and speak to you for a few moments.”

  For a second, she thought he was going to refuse and then he stepped back a little, just as silently, and made a faint gesture with his hand to the open doorway.

  “I haven’t got long.” His voice was deep, abrupt – he sounded as though those could have been the first words he’d spoken all day.

  “Thank you.”

  Kate walked into the house, conscious of a prickle of unease. It was partly the darkness of the house – all the curtains and blinds that she could see were drawn – but it was mostly the brooding presence of Tom Denver, with his forbidding frown. Kate, swallowing her nerves, heading for what she assumed (rightly, as it turned out) to be the living room.

  She seated herself on the edge of the leather sofa, taking in her surroundings whilst seeming to busy herself with the contents of her handbag. It was a room that had probably once been quite cosy and welcoming but now it had that indefinable air of neglect that characterised a house where nobody was making much of an effort anymore. Whilst not exactly dirty, it was messy, cluttered; dust was clearly visible on the blank screen of the television. Fluff, crumbs, and other detritus littered the carpet.

  Tom Denver sat opposite her in an armchair. “Well?”

  Kate cleared her throat and gave him the standard words of condolence. She
deliberately used the words ‘your wife’, to see if he’d return the same, strange answer as he had when they’d first come to break the news to him.

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I told you, she wasn’t my wife anymore.”

  “I’m afraid, in the eyes of the law, she still was, sir. I understand you’d recently separated.”

  He moved a little in his chair and Kate, nerves singing, managed not to flinch. “Who told you that?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say, sir. Is it not true?”

  Tom Denver looked at her. “Oh, yes, it’s true. We split up a few weeks ago.”

  “I’m sorry.” Kate looked down at her notes, giving herself time. “I’m sure you understand, Mr Denver, in the case of a suspicious death we have to look into all sorts of things. The personal relationships of the victim, their family background, their history.”

  “This is suspicious, is it?” Tom Denver sounded just a shade wrong – just a tiny bit too casual – in stark contrast to his previous mood.

  “At the moment, we’re proceeding on that basis, sir. We’ll know more as further evidence comes to light.” Kate looked at him fully, realising he was actually quite good-looking, if you could see past the scowl. “I was wondering if you could tell me a little more about Karyn. Had the two of you been married long?”

  Tom Denver clearly realised she wasn’t going to give up easily. He sighed and sagged back in his armchair, his arms loosening in a gesture of defeat. “Almost fifteen years. It’s our wedding anniversary next month.”