His grunt suggested he wasn’t convinced. She didn’t persist: she wasn’t here to score points but to get information. If it was to come to her for some reason best known to Stephen not in the civilised surroundings of the Edwardian Tea Room but in his office, so be it. Part of her rather hankered for gentle conversation with a pianist strumming familiar tunes as a background. As it was, lunch would be a sandwich across a desk, a familiar enough scenario. The desk was familiar enough too – a toppling set of filing trays and piles of folders. There were a couple of obligatory photographs.
She moved them aside so her sandwiches wouldn’t mess them. ‘Interesting,’ she said neutrally, adding, with a grin, ‘When we have photos they’re usually of scenes or victims of crime.’ These were of an old building.
‘You wouldn’t be far out, there,’ he said grimly, sitting the far side of the desk, and leaving her to drag up an old dining chair abandoned near a cupboard to sit opposite him.
‘Really!’
‘It depends on your definition of crime, I suppose,’ he conceded.
She waited, head on one side.
‘I mean, fancy not preserving a place like that. Nineteenth-century. Might even have been designed by Thomas Telford.’ He paused. ‘Though I must admit that’s open to discussion.’
‘It looks a bit like a toll-house,’ she suggested.
‘How do you know about toll-houses?’
He sounded as suspicious as Graham on a bad day.
‘We went on a canal holiday once when I was a kid. I think I had an I-Spy book of things to look out for.’
He nodded curtly. ‘There are quite a number of similarities between this and the toll-houses Telford designed for the Holyhead Road – no, not the city one, the one in Wales. But they are usually single-storied – this has two floors, see? And they’re much smaller than the Lodge.’
‘The Lodge?’
‘That’s what it’s always been called. Out by the reservoir—’ He broke off as one of his colleagues backed in, carrying a plate in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. ‘I suppose there’s still no sign of Rosemary, Sarah? It’s not like her to miss a meeting. We’ve had a Lodge Preservation Society sub-committee group here this morning.’
Sarah, a handsome woman in her forties, shook her head. ‘She didn’t leave a message with anyone that I’ve met.’ She sat at her desk, reached for a periodical, and settled to her salad.
‘Rosemary Parsons,’ he said parenthetically to Kate. ‘A stalwart of our committee. Nice woman. Lives not far from you. She’d give her back teeth to have had a button workshop in her garden.’
‘She could have mine?’ A couple of prawns slid out of the baguette. She retrieved them.
‘She could certainly fit it in. Between the fountain and the tennis court. It probably wouldn’t even be seen from the conservatory. Authentic Victorian, none of your nasty modern UVPC.’
What was this man’s problem with money? Him and his insistence on the worst coffee and all that crap. She fielded another prawn. ‘She can’t live very close to me.’
‘Oh, out on the Kings Heath–Moseley border, anyway. She’s really great. Her husband’s an academic – spends a lot of time abroad. Since academics aren’t usually swimming in money, I presume they’ve inherited a load. One of them. Some of which she spends on trying to preserve the Lodge. She’s organised fund-raising dinners, called in favours from her blue-rinse friends – and she must spend a fortune on paper and phone calls but she never asks for a penny expenses. Not a penny. Oh, by the way, this is my colleague Sarah: she can tell you all about your buttons—’
Rod Neville, taking the stairs down with more speed than sense, had to grab Kate to steady them both. Was it imagination, or did his hands linger longer than necessary on her shoulders?
He flashed his most brilliant smile before becoming almost stern. ‘Kate – this tennis club death out in Kings Heath. The place you play, according to Sue Rowley. Do you know the woman involved?’
‘If I did, I’d have been able to ID her, sir. And it’s not actually a club. It’s just a tennis centre, without a membership fee, so anyone can turn up and play. Even a rabbit like me.’
‘Anyone?’
‘That’s what their charter says. Anyone. Regardless of ability. They don’t even have a dress code.’
‘So you don’t know any of the individuals who might be involved?’
‘Only my coach. And he tells me he was teaching at a centre in Handsworth last night.’
A glimmer of amusement flickered across his face. ‘I thought you might have asked. Will you be joining us at the pub tomorrow?’ he added.
‘Everyone will, I should think, Gaffer.’
‘Glad to be rid of me, eh?’
It wasn’t quite a joke, was it? ‘No one likes losing a good gaffer, Sir. And you’ve steered us through some very tricky times. Yes, you’ll be missed.’
There was a pause. Perhaps he’d hoped for a different answer.
‘See you tomorrow, then, Kate.’ He ran lightly down the rest of the stairs and out of the building.
Fatima was on the phone when Kate reached the office. Kate flapped a hand at her, and another at Colin, who flapped a hand back. She headed over.
‘There’s a meeting about your sarbut at four, Graham’s office. OK?’
‘OK.’
‘And Guljar from Kings Heath was on the blower. Do you want to go to your tennis-player’s post mortem?’
‘Funny thing, Rowley’s already asked me. I said no.’
‘And someone else on the blower, too. Pat the Path himself. Would you like to go to your tennis-player’s post mortem?’
‘Shit! No, I would not! Damn it, it’s not like going to someone’s wedding, or even their funeral. It’s to see them bloody cut up! It was bad enough seeing her huddled on the floor of the shower – she was dribbling, as if she were asleep.’
‘Come on, I don’t buy that corpses look as if they’re asleep nonsense!’
‘Neither do I. Not when the body’s two shades of blue, as they are after that time.’
‘Very Picasso,’ he said.
Which reminded her of her lunchtime conversation: ‘Colin, you’re au fait with all things Brummie—’
‘No, I’m bloody not. I’m Black Country and proud of it.’
‘OK. Spare me your regional geography lecture. Do you know anything about the Lodge at the reservoir?’
‘The rezza? Out by the ballroom? I know I was conceived out there—’ His voice was suspiciously light.
‘You what?’
‘Oh, part of my dad’s man-to-man talk about birds and bees. How, despite the myths, a girl can conceive standing up. A matter of some moment to me, as you can imagine,’ he added in his campest voice.
But it would be a matter of importance, if not as a fact of life, to any child. What sort of man told his son he was an accident? ‘I was a mistake, too,’ she said. ‘My mum thought she was past it. I proved the hard way she wasn’t. Anyway, do you know anything else?’
‘Lovely spot. Sailing on the rezza itself. You can walk all the way round. Plenty of space for the kids. Interesting views from the top of the reservoir wall. There was talk of having some Rosie and Jim theme park or something near there.’
‘Rosie and Jim?’
‘Characters from some kids’ TV programme. Not on the site itself, but on an arm of the canal nearby. I’ve got an idea the land round the rezza is some sort of nature reserve.’
She asked off-hand, ‘Any idea who owns it?’
‘Could be British Waterways, I suppose. It supplies water for canals, not for the city. Or it could be the city. I take it you’d like me to find out?’
‘Yes, please – no! Don’t bother! It’s not police business after all. That guy Stephen Abbott must know. No point in reinventing wheels. I’ll get on the blower to him. When I’ve dealt with this lot, that is,’ she added, patting a toppling heap of paperwork.
So the powers that be didn’t th
ink they could get enough mileage out of Simon to make him an informant. Sarbut! Not formally. Not yet. Fuming, but knowing deep down that the decision made sense, Kate stomped back into the office, to find a note waiting on her desk. Guljar had phoned, suggesting half a pint at the Station, just opposite Kings Heath nick. Why not? She owed him if the CID boss was hassling him. She phoned to agree, then made another call, this time to Stephen Abbott. She got not him, but his answerphone, telling her to catch him on his mobile if the matter were urgent. She jotted down the number, but decided not to bother. It could wait till tomorrow, which the paperwork couldn’t.
‘Busy?’ Graham was smiling down at her, for all the world as if an hour ago they hadn’t had the gloves on over Simon.
She steadied a file and grabbed a Biro going roll-about. ‘Average.’
‘Equals busy.’ He smiled again. ‘I just wondered what you’d learned about those buttons.’ He perched on the edge of her desk, his thigh three or four inches from her hand.
‘Military. Early Victorian, they think, though the design was still in use up to eighteen seventy-one. Made for the – let me get this right – the Twenty-fourth (Second Warwickshire) Regiment of Foot. Mine would be for officers. The other ranks got pewter instead.’ And now she was sounding like Stephen.
‘So someone wearing buttons made in your garden could have worn them – where?’
‘Probably in the UK suppressing incipient trades unionism or crushing goings on in far flung bits of the Empire. Wasn’t the Indian Mutiny some time in the fifties? And then the Boer Wars? And would the Twenty-fourth Regiment of Foot have been involved in that?’ She bit her lip. ‘God, I’m so ignorant.’
‘Aren’t we all? And the more you know, the more you realise how much there is to know. And how much you want to know it.’ He looked her straight in the eye. But he had slipped from the desk and left the office before she could register the meaning of his words. Or the gaze that accompanied them.
‘This is such a luxury,’ she said, drawing on the half of mild which Guljar assured her was a Midlands speciality and wasn’t too bad at all, ‘drinking without having to worry about the limit. Nice pub, too.’
‘Parked at home, are you?’
She nodded. ‘I’ve even got myself a parking space near to my house!’
‘So you can drink the bar dry.’
‘Quite. And on the way back home, I can pop in to Safeway, to see if they’ve anything on their shelves which Sainsbury’s lack.’
‘You might make all sorts of interesting choices with a skinful inside you,’ Guljar said. ‘God, what a day!’ He stretched: she could hear a crunch as he eased his upper back.
She frowned: it must take a good deal of tension to make joints as stiff as that. ‘Your DI being a problem?’
‘You can say that again. That’s why I suggested a drink here, not the canteen. You convinced me there’s a rat to smell. But the more he talks to me, the less I can smell it.’
‘Why should he be hassling you? It’s CID’s business now, whether he likes it or not.’
‘Which he doesn’t. I gather they’ve spent all day pestering the folk at the Tennis Centre, but they’ve still not got an ID. Their computer’s well and truly sick; the manager’s flat on his back with a slipped disc; the reception staff are down with a gastric flu bug, so they’ve brought in relief people from other centres.’
‘None of the players any help?’
‘None. But I gather it’s a different clientele in the evening. We’re going to have to do some sort of reconstruction, I suppose. We’ve got a big item on the regional TV news – both channels – so that should produce some results. “Do you know this woman?” That sort of thing. There’s a team lined up to take the calls. In the meantime, I wondered if we could have a quiet brainstorm.’ He produced a notepad.
Kate blinked. Unorthodox or what? ‘OK. So what do we know about her?’
‘Fifty-five-ish. Healthy – until she croaked, that is. Exercised regularly. Married – well, wears a ring, anyway.’ He checked the facts on his fingers.
‘So why hasn’t her husband reported her missing?’
‘Hasn’t noticed?’
She pulled a face. ‘So maybe separated or divorced but still wearing a ring for social protection … Possible, I suppose. Just. She took care of her skin – not a lot of wrinkles for her age. And dyed her hair. No, probably had it done professionally – it looked pretty well-cut.’
‘Her tennis kit was expensive. Racquet’s the make Tim Henman uses, apparently.’
She snorted. ‘Not that his did him a lot of good this weekend.’
‘Stylish gear. Good quality towel. Epitomised the well-off Moseley-ite. What’s the matter? Something bad in the beer? Told you not to drink mild.’
She burrowed for her mobile. And for the line in her diary with Stephen Abbott’s number. ‘I’ve just got this weirdest suspicion,’ she said.
Chapter Nine
‘My God, poor Rosemary,’ Stephen said, biting the back of his index finger. ‘And to think I was cursing her for not turning up this morning. My God, if only I’d known.’
‘You couldn’t have known,’ Kate said, steering him to a seat in the morgue foyer. He hadn’t thrown up, but looked very close to tears.
She was followed by Nigel Crowther, Guljar’s bête noir, and a sergeant in his forties she thought was called Tony.
DI Crowther said sharply, ‘OK, sir. So you can positively identify that woman as Mrs Rosemary Parsons?’
Stephen looked up, blinking hard. ‘Yes, she lived in Springfield Road. Can’t remember the number. But I could take you to it. Oh, my God, I was really laying into her this morning, calling her everything under the sun. And she was dead!’
Kate put her arm round his shoulders.
‘It’s OK, Stephen. You mustn’t blame yourself,’ Tony said quietly.
‘I think we’ll take you up on your offer to show us the house now, sir,’ Crowther said. He might have been a couple of years older than Kate, but not much more. So he must be very bright, very hard-working. He looked bright, too, with that indefinable gleam around the eyes that said a good brain lurked behind them. ‘If you’re ready, sir?’
Kate straightened. Why was the man being so damned officious? As if guidance for such situations had never been given!
And now he was looking obviously, if not ostentatiously, at his watch.
Come to think of it, that neat-featured face under its well cut hair looked, in fact, thoroughly rattled. Perhaps it was the thought of all that TV publicity being in vain. Perhaps he felt he should have been with the team fielding the calls. Now, of course, he’d want to take a look at the house, instead, wouldn’t he? And he’d have a hell of a lot of paperwork to round off. But all in all he’d been saved a lot more effort than he’d been caused. Surely he wasn’t the sort of person to resent help?
Tony helped Stephen to his feet. ‘You OK, now, mate?’
‘Sure. Kate – it’s such a shock—’
‘Of course it is, sir.’ Crowther again. ‘Now, I think we should make a move, don’t you, sir? Thank you, Sergeant Power.’
Thank you and goodnight. Kate nodded in reply. ‘Goodnight, sir.’
She might as well head for home, then. Suddenly she was weary with no adrenalin to drive her. How about supper from that brilliant chippie on the High Street? But before she started out, she had a phone call to make. Yes, she rather thought she’d like to talk to Pat the Path about the autopsy the next day.
So here she was, sitting opposite Patrick Duncan in a Chinese restaurant. It turned out he hadn’t eaten either, so they might as well kill two birds with one stone, he said.
Neither of them had ever alluded to an embarrassing incident before Christmas, when Kate had declined to play his sexual games. And now sex was off the menu, they had no difficulty sharing a table and some conversation.
‘So have you changed your mind about the p.m.?’ Patrick asked, through a mouthful of spare-rib.
‘Nigel Crowther, is it? He’s a bright guy – lives with a linguistics teacher at one of the universities. Male,’ he added, his voice neutral.
‘Do you know him well?’
He shook his head. ‘Not socially. I just know he’s sharp – quick on the uptake and asks the right questions. Rather like you, really.’
‘Thank you kindly, sir. He and I don’t seem to see eye to eye about this stiff. He’s going for death by natural causes, I – well, I won’t tell you it’s intuition – we all know how wrong that can be. Even mine!’ she said, grinning and toasting him with her saki glass to show she’d got over his being right in another case. ‘It’s just a funny combination of circumstances. And I’ll tell you what, it’s an even funnier coincidence that helped us ID her …’ Her explanation was brief: she didn’t want her soup to go cold.
‘It’s not unknown for apparently healthy people to drop down stone dead,’ he reflected.
‘You will check every possibility – sorry, I know you will.’
‘You know if I find any suggestion of foul play I have to stop and get the Home Office pathologist in?’
‘Of course. But you will take every available swab, get the blood checked for absolutely – shit, I’m not being very tactful. You can see why I can’t be there tomorrow.’
He dipped his hands in the finger bowl, drying them carefully before he said, ‘Just between ourselves, yes. At least now we know who she is we’ll be able to check her medical records to see just how fit she was. Not that people axiomatically go to their GP if they suspect something’s wrong. I had this guy the other week who’d dropped dead with heart failure in his local Tesco. He was so riddled with cancer he shouldn’t have been able to stand, let alone push a trolley. And he’d not been to his GP for months, except to complain about a fungus infection under his thumbnail which he could have cured with a proprietary preparation.’
Power Games Page 7