by Faith Martin
Hillary sighed. ‘I don’t know, but we’re going to have to track them all down. No sign of any names I suppose?’
‘No guv. No little black book, nothing.’
‘Well, we need to find them and interview them. Tommy, you and Frank get on to it first thing tomorrow morning.’
‘Guv,’ Tommy said. ‘Do you mind if I get off now? Only Jean’s picking up the bridesmaids’ dresses and she needs a ride out to Marsh Gibbon.’
Hillary nodded and Danvers watched him go, smiling. ‘The wedding’s next month, right?’ he confirmed.
Hillary nodded.
‘You’re going to miss him. He’s a good officer. Fancy coming for a drink?’
Hillary sighed, but nodded. It was easier than thinking of an excuse not to go.
She only hoped he didn’t choose a pub where anybody knew them. The last thing she wanted was for the gossip mill in this place to start linking them together.
chapter thirteen
Janine reached up and accepted the glass of red wine being offered to her. She smiled, and curled her legs up further under her on the big white sofa. Whoever would have thought she’d be back sitting in her favourite place in all the world?
In front of her, the empty grate was filled with a dry flower arrangement that was becoming a little dusty now, but it was still considered by the woman who came in to clean for Mel twice a week to be the last word in interior design. Oddly enough, Janine found that even the desiccated purple petals and dyed-orange grass stems looked good to her now – like long-lost friends, that you meet after a time, and find have improved with age.
‘So, how’s the case going?’ Mel asked smoothly.
‘Nowhere,’ Janine shrugged and took a sip of the Bordeaux. ‘Or maybe we’ll have it solved tomorrow.’ As she drank, she filled him in on the latest developments. Although, as a superintendent now, Mel had a wider field of responsibility and wasn’t, in any case, in overall charge of the Davies murder inquiry, he listened closely and nodded when she’d finished.
‘Hillary thinks the murderer is a blackmail victim, and it’s only a matter of time before pinning him or her down?’
‘It makes sense,’ Janine agreed. ‘It would explain why he was at the shed – because he’d arranged to meet someone there to put the bite on them – and why someone would want to kill a fifteen-year-old boy that doesn’t involve a sex-gone-wrong scenario. And we know there’d been nothing of that sort from the autopsy report.’
Mel sighed. ‘Let’s not talk about it now. We get enough of the squalid side of life at work. Try some of the brie.’ He pointed to the platter resting on the little coffee table in front of them, which contained crackers, biscuits, an assortment of cheese and a bunch of grapes. Janine looked at it and laughed.
‘The old seduction kit, huh? Have you forgotten that you offered me the same thing the very first night you brought me back here?’ Here being Mel’s place in ‘The Moors’ area of Kidlington, which comprised most of the old village, before Kidlington morphed into an anonymous town. It was one of the most elite areas going, and Mel had been awarded the big, detached house during his divorce from his second (and stinking rich) wife. In return, wife number two had left for London with Mel’s son. But father and son, as Janine knew well, seemed to stay in touch and keep close and, as far as she could tell, Mel had never questioned the arrangement. Like most men, he seemed to believe that children belonged with their mothers.
‘Of course I didn’t forget,’ Mel said now, rubbing the side of his face with his palm. ‘I wanted to remind you. It used to be good, didn’t it? Between us, I mean?’ he added softly.
‘I thought so,’ Janine said flatly, taking a sip of the wine, ‘until you dumped me to get your promotion.’ Oddly enough, the words weren’t angry, or even resentful, and Mel smiled grimly.
‘If the promotion had been going your way, you’d have done the same thing, and you know it.’ His words weren’t accusatory either, simply a statement of fact. ‘Let’s face it, Jan, we’re both as ambitious as hell. Or at least, I thought I was. Lately, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s all been worth it.’
Janine slowly put her wine glass down on the table in front of her, her heartbeat picking up a notch, and casually selected a grape. ‘That sounded curiously plaintive. Don’t tell me the air is too thin, up there with big boys?’ she mocked.
‘You’re a sarky cow.’
‘Job not all it’s cracked up to be?’
‘The job’s fine. And you know damned well what I’m trying to say. I miss you. I miss us, being together, like this.’
‘Forget it, Mel,’ Janine said flatly. ‘The brie could be imported from France for all I care, I’m not getting into bed with you again. Is that what dinner the other night was all about? And now this quaint little trip down memory lane?’
Mel sighed heavily and turned to face her on the couch. He was wearing jeans that were almost white after so many washes, and clung to his thighs in a way he knew Janine really liked. He was also wearing one of his Ralph Lauren silk white shirts. His hair was freshly cut and he’d shaved before going out to meet her, and had splashed on the cologne she’d given him for his birthday, just weeks before they split.
Slowly he reached out with one finger and pulled a strand of her long blonde hair from the side of her face. Janine watched him, smiling slightly, her eyes the eyes of a cat wondering whether to play with the mouse or simply kill it. It made his stomach clench in that old, familiar way.
‘It was always good between us,’ Mel said blandly.
‘Granted,’ Janine shot back tartly. ‘But not good enough for you to give the brass the two-fingered salute and keep me with you.’
‘Come on, how would you like it if some chancer waltzed in and snaffled your promotion right out from under you? Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.’
‘What’s the matter,’ Janine jeered. ‘Did the man from the Met put your nose out of joint? So this is all Detective Superintendent Jerome Raleigh’s fault is it? And now he’s not around anymore, you want things back the way they were? Only with you getting to keep the big new job, and still have the little woman back in your bed giving you your jollies. Well, I don’t think so,’ Janine swivelled her legs around and put them on the floor, preparatory to getting up and leaving. ‘You don’t get to do that to me again, Mel. How stupid do you think I am?’
Mel didn’t move from his position on the sofa. In fact, he didn’t react to her angry words at all. It was almost as if he hadn’t heard them. ‘No, I don’t want things to go back to how we were; the same problems would still exist. Donleavy and all that crowd will start looking down their noses at us again, and all the old rumours will start up, and the sniggering. I don’t fancy that any more than you do.’
Curious now, Janine slowly leaned back against the sofa again. ‘So what are you saying?’
‘You like this place, don’t you, Jan?’ Mel asked, waving a hand around the living room. It was a large, high-ceilinged room, with original pelmets and mouldings, and a large set of French doors that opened out on to a beautiful garden complete with pond and weeping willows.
Janine, thinking of the cramped semi she shared with her two housemates, laughed grimly. ‘What’s not to like? What’s your point, Mel?’
‘You were always angling to move in here permanently. You gave out enough hints that you wanted to do the whole settle down, maybe start a family, thing. Did I misread the signs?’
Janine laughed again, but her heart had once more picked up a quicker beat. ‘And much good it did me. You made sure I never quite got my second foot through the door, didn’t you?’
‘The time wasn’t right,’ Mel said, shaking his head. ‘But now I think it is. Or could be, if you wanted.’
Janine licked her lips and slowly reached for her wine glass again, giving herself time to think. She watched him narrowly for a moment, then tossed back the contents in a single gulp. ‘Let’s get this straight. You’re asking me to move in with you?’
Janine demanded, twiddling the empty wine glass and then swearing graphically as Mel began to shake his head.
‘No, that’ll just put us back where we were before,’ he pointed out. Then he reached out and took one of her hands in his, and began to rub the tops of her fingers with his thumb. ‘I want you to marry me, Jan.’
Hillary Greene woke up when a sound like nothing else on earth shattered the early morning silence. It sounded a bit like a car exhaust backfiring after a baked spud had been rammed up it, or like some kind of machinery that had been choked with a century’s worth of grime giving its last death-call. When it sounded again, Hillary groaned and turned over in her bed and yelled out the open, round, port-hole window, ‘Shut up for Pete’s sake.’
The heron that had landed in the field opposite, no doubt to digest its early morning breakfast of stickleback and to proclaim to one and all that this was his territory whilst he was at it, took off in alarm and flapped nosily away. Although the name of her boat, the Mollern, was the Old English country word for heron (in the same way that a badger was a brock, or a fox was a Reynard), Hillary didn’t particularly appreciate her boat’s namesake waking her up at 4.30 in the morning.
Her uncle had once told her that herons were often referred to as ‘Old Croak’ in old English literature, and it hadn’t taken her long to realize why. They had a call that could raise the hackles on a dead dog.
She heard the same ghastly sound again, this time coming from only a hundred or so yards down the canal where the heron had re-landed, and gave up. Sitting up, she threw back the covers on the bed and put her feet to the floor, yawning widely.
It was Saturday morning, but it was not one of her days off. She took a quick shower and made herself some porridge for breakfast. Most mornings, she didn’t have time for more than a snatched cup of coffee and a crust of toast, but since she was up at such a freakish hour, she supposed she might as well make the effort.
The sky had just lost the last of its pink-tinged sunrise as she pulled into the parking lot at HQ, and she’d finally managed to stop yawning by the time she pushed open the swing door and walked through the foyer.
‘Bloody hell, don’t tell me the Martians have invaded and all leave’s been cancelled,’ the desk sergeant said as she walked by, doing a slapstick double-take of the clock, which showed it to be ten minutes past five in the morning.
‘If I’d had any damned sense, I’d have gone back to bed,’ Hillary snarled back by way of cheery greeting, and headed for the stairs without breaking stride. She had to suffer similar comments from the nightshift as she crossed the big, open-plan main office, but by the time they’d begun to filter out, and the day shift had come in, Hillary had cleared her in-tray (which was miraculous in and of itself) and had reread every scrap of paper generated by the Davies case.
Tommy was first in, and after checking her notebook for the ‘to do’ reminders, gave him the name of the school boy who’d been so keen to watch the naked lady sunbathing. ‘Find out her name from him and then interview her. Find out if she had an alibi for the afternoon of the murder. Oh, and since the hubby is apparently less than pleased with his wife’s tan-lines being so seamless, find out where he was too. If Billy Davies had approached him, he might not have been in the mood to take it lying down. You never know just what the outraged jealous types can do in a fit of temper.’
‘Right, guv. I’ll make a start on identifying the odd couples in the pictures as well, yeah?’
Hillary nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s top priority. And get that lazy git Frank to … hold on.’ She picked up her ringing phone, listened for a moment, frowned in puzzlement, and said, ‘OK Mel, I’ll be right up.’
Tommy gave her a questioning look and she shrugged. It was unusual for a DI to be called to a super’s desk, because it implied he was by-passing the chain of command. In this case, Danvers.
She felt her mouth go dry as she got up, wondering if someone had seen her and Danvers in the pub last night, and told Mel about it. But surely word wouldn’t have travelled that quick? Besides, ‘The Duck and Drake’ in a small village out near Weston-on-the-Green hadn’t exactly been a hot bed of CID activity. Unless one of the two octogenarian darts players had been undercover narks, or the busy barmaid somebody’s snout.
‘The moment you find out the identity of one of our couples let me know,’ Hillary said to Tommy. ‘I want to be interviewing at least one of them by the end of the working day.’
‘Guv.’
Hillary walked up the stairs to Mel’s office, and went straight through, as his civilian assistant (posh word for part time secretary) wasn’t in on a Saturday morning. At his office she tapped on the door and went in without waiting for a summons. She noted at once that he was alone, which came as something of a relief. If DCS Marcus Donleavy had been there as well, she’d wonder what kind of shit she’d landed in.
As it was, Mel was smiling that particular smile he favoured when he knew she wasn’t going to like something, and she felt her stomach give a distinct dip. She began to wish she’d given the porridge a miss.
‘I don’t have time for messing about, Mel,’ she started, without preamble. ‘You’ve got that little-boy-caught-with-his-fingers-in-the-biscuit-tin look, so what the hell have you done, and why is it any of my business?’
‘And good morning to you, what a lovely day it is and why don’t you take a seat. Coffee? It’s that new Brazilian blend I told you about.’ She watched him pour her a mug and felt her stomach do a further nose-dive into her shoes as he came up with a Nash’s bakery box. Inside were two, plump, chocolate éclairs.
Hillary took a long, fortifying breath. ‘OK, not a word until I’ve finished it. If it’s this bad, I need the chocolate fix to fortify me.’
Mel smiled thinly but let her eat and drink, whilst doodling on the report of next month’s projected crime figures. When she’d licked the last of her fingers free of cream, Mel leaned back in his chair.
‘I know Tommy’s leaving next week, so you’ll be getting a new DC, which means this probably isn’t the best time to spring this. But how would you feel about losing Janine as well?’
Hillary stared at him flatly. ‘She got a promotion already? Hell, that was quick work, even for Janine. You know she’s not ready for the responsibilities of being an inspector, don’t you?’
Mel shook his head. ‘No, it’s not that. But she won’t be able to stay at Kidlington after we get married.’
Hillary stared at him for another second or two, then said shakily, ‘You should have made that a whole boxful of éclairs, Mel. What the hell are you using for brains? No, scrap that.’ She held up a hand. ‘I know what you’re using instead of the old grey matter. Mel, you’re not serious are you?’
Her old friend grinned at her and reached for his mug. He looked young and carefree, and Hillary wanted to stretch her foot under the table and kick him on the shins.
‘Donleavy and the rest of the brass will have a fit,’ she said plaintively.
‘Not necessarily. Think about it, Hill, all their old objections go out the window if me and Janine get spliced. It makes her legit, it means she has to transfer out of my station, so there can’t be any conflict of interest so she’s not always on their radar, and, besides, now that I’ve got the promotion, they can go whistle.’
Hillary opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, and was about to say something – she wasn’t sure exactly what – when his phone rang. He picked it up impatiently, listened, then frowned and nodded. ‘Right, I’ll tell her. Yes, right away.’
He hung up. ‘That’s downstairs. A Mr Francis Soames has rung up in a right state, claiming that his daughter has gone missing, and wanting to speak to you. That’s your murder vic’s girlfriend, isn’t it?’ he asked, but Hillary was already halfway to the door.
Francis Soames was pacing his living room carpet like a demented chicken when Hillary arrived a half hour later. Debbie Soames opened the door, looking pale and wideeyed. ‘Dad�
��s going spare,’ she said, unnecessarily, as she stood back to let Hillary pass. ‘You don’t think anything’s happened to her, do you? I mean, she’s a silly cow, but she’s only fifteen, and she’s my sister and …’
‘Debbie! Is that them?’ Francis Soames threw open the door and stared at Hillary as if expecting her to have Heather with her. ‘Where is she? Have you got people out looking for her? You don’t think it’s just l-like B-B-Billy, do you?’
Behind her, she heard Debbie Soames draw in her breath sharply.
‘Mr Soames, calm down,’ Hillary said loudly. ‘Now, let’s go and sit down. Debbie, perhaps you could make us some tea.’ Hillary turned briefly to the young girl and nodded. ‘And then you, Mr Soames, can fill me in on what’s happening.’
Francis Soames let her lead him back into the living room, but instead of taking a seat, he commenced pacing again. ‘I told you she was going back to school for the afternoon, then staying on at a friend’s house, right? Well, apparently, she didn’t. The school tells me she never registered in afternoon assembly, and now Mary-Beth’s mother has confirmed that Heather didn’t stay the night with her at all. In fact, she knew nothing about it. When I called her this morning to speak to Heather, she didn’t even know what I was talking about.’
He was shouting by the time he’d finished, and Hillary had to spend the next ten minutes getting him to calm down, sit down, drink some tea and start listening to her.
‘Right,’ Hillary began grimly. ‘It sounds to me as if I need to speak to this Mary-Beth Chandler right away and see if she knows what’s going on. It wouldn’t surprise me if your daughter didn’t arrange it with her, to set up a cover story. Mr Soames, try not to worry just yet.’
‘Not worry? What if that maniac who killed the Davies boy has got my daughter!’ Abruptly, the man started to cry, deep, wracking sobs. ‘I’ve just lost my wife. I can’t lose a child too!’
Debbie Soames immediately came to sit next to him on the sofa and hug him. She looked at Hillary silently, misery written all over her face.