A Narrow Victory

by Faith Martin

  ‘That’s exactly it, guv,’ he agreed. ‘I saw the cyber-space version of my supposed wealth, and didn’t really believe it could be real. So when my mates wanted to push on, and expand and build on what we had, I just wanted to make it … real somehow. To have the money in my hand, like. Or rather, in a real bank, with four walls. You know, the real, physical thing. To be able to go out and buy the Jaguar, or what have you. So I let them buy me out. Everyone thought I was mad, but as it turns out …’

  ‘You weren’t mad at all,’ Zoe said. ‘The Boy Wonder strikes again.’

  ‘But afterwards. You did stuff with the money you’d got, right?’ Jimmy said, not sure that he was following all this. His knowledge of computers was strictly limited to the utterly necessary. ‘I mean, normal stuff?’

  Jake laughed. ‘Yeah. I invested in stocks and shares mostly, and got out just before the economy crashed in 2008.’ Now that was something everyone could understand.

  ‘Lucky sod, ain’t ya?’ Jimmy mused, without malice.

  Jake laughed. ‘This time around quite a few of us could see the writing on the wall though. It was obvious the bankers were on a wing and a prayer and that it couldn’t last for ever.’

  ‘So what are you doing with all your dough now? I mean, any tips for us poor impoverished plebs?’ Zoe demanded.

  ‘Well, at the moment I’m buying property while it’s so cheap,’ Jake admitted. ‘I mean, prices are at an all-time low, and if you pick the right area …’

  ‘Yeah, right, like I can afford to buy a couple of houses.’ Zoe mimed a huge yawn, and Jake laughed again. ‘Want me to give you some tips on stocks and shares?’

  ‘No!’

  This time they all laughed, but while Hillary let the conversation meander away on to other topics, she didn’t lose sight of the fact that the Boy Wonder had very cleverly managed to avoid explaining just what it was about joining the CRT that had seemed so damned attractive.

  She picked at her lunch, aware of Jimmy casting her curious glances from time to time. Zoe held forth on her new insights on the Olliphant case, and Hillary was glad, but not surprised, to see that Jake Barnes was taking it all in.

  When they’d finished eating, they separated in the car park, with Jimmy and Zoe going back to HQ while Hillary followed Jake towards a long, low-slung, dark green E-type Jaguar parked protectively against the wall at the far end of the car park.

  As she stood in front of the iconic car, she let out a long, slow whistle as she eyed the wired wheels, the cream leather interior and the walnut-wood dashboard.

  ‘You weren’t kidding about the Jag, were you?’ she said, impressed. Like a lot of people who’d grown up watching that British classic film, The Italian Job, she’d always had a soft spot for the E-type Jag.

  Jake smiled, looking genuinely abashed. ‘It was the one boy-toy I always craved, guv. So when I first got the dosh, I couldn’t resist it, and treated myself.’

  ‘The wife didn’t get the car in the divorce then, I take it?’ she teased.

  Jake Barnes smiled that bland smile of his. ‘She knew better than to try and get it,’ he said lightly.

  Hillary filed that too, for further reference, and slipped into the passenger seat. When Jake started the car, it came to life with a satisfyingly throaty growl. ‘So, guv, where to?’ he asked.

  Hillary checked her notebook. ‘We’ll start with Felix’s best friend, Mitchell Harris. He lives here in town but he works in Aylesbury. A business park.’ She rattled off the name and address. ‘You know it?’

  ‘Think so, guv,’ Jake said, and set off.

  Unlike Zoe, he didn’t seem to need a sat nav.

  Back at HQ, Steven Crayle knocked on Commander Marcus Donleavy’s door and was bidden to enter by his secretary. A few minutes later, he sat down in the chair opposite the commander’s desk and accepted his offer of a cup of coffee.

  Donleavy was wearing his trademark silver-grey suit, which went so well with his silver-grey hair and silver-grey eyes. He was even wearing a stainless steel watch.

  ‘So, Steven, it looks like we weathered the fallout from the Tom Warrington case all right,’ he began, and Steven smiled briefly.

  ‘Looks like it,’ he agreed dryly.

  Tom Warrington had been one of theirs: a uniformed officer who’d taken to stalking girls. He’d also made the monumental mistake of roping Hillary into his nasty little hobby. For a while, Steven and Hillary had thought Warrington was responsible for a string of missing girls and had treated him as a murder suspect. This had turned out not to be the case, but before they’d caught up with him, he’d managed to kidnap Vivienne Tyrell, Zoe Turnbull’s predecessor, and holed up with her in a caravan in a deserted little wood. Luckily, they’d managed to rescue her before anything too bad could happen, but it had been a bit of a dog’s dinner of a rescue, with Hillary and Jimmy going strictly against orders, and Hillary all but offering herself as bait in order to create a distraction.

  Luckily, they’d managed to steer everyone clear of too much trouble in the inevitable shit storm that had followed. The media had, of course, made the usual splash about a cop-gone-bad, but since the CRT had solved two other missing girl cases, plus the murder of a third whilst pursuing the Warrington angle, professionally, at least, it hadn’t been too bad. And Vivienne Tyrell had, briefly, been made into a media star, and heroine-of-the-day, so even the top brass had been happy.

  ‘Yes, we were lucky all right,’ Donleavy said. ‘And the powers-that-be were impressed by the way you handled things,’ he added smoothly. Which meant, Steven translated, that they’d never been told the whole story – or at least had been spoon-fed a very edited version by the commander. No doubt Donleavy had managed to stand on the sidelines until he’d seen how things were going, before offering his own endorsement of Steven’s actions. Or was he being too cynical? Perhaps he’d stepped in to bat simply to keep Hillary actively employed in the CRT?

  He eyed Donleavy warily now and nodded. ‘I’m glad to hear things are settled, sir,’ he said, just a shade drolly.

  Marcus sipped his coffee, his eyes glittering. ‘And how is Hillary these days?’ he asked neutrally, catching Steven utterly off guard.

  He covered it smoothly, however, by taking a sip of his own brew. ‘She’s fine, sir,’ he said flatly.

  Before they’d identified Warrington as the man they were after, he’d attacked Hillary from behind in the car park near her boat, holding a knife to her throat and leaving her with a fine, silvery scar on her neck. She’d managed to talk him out of killing her on that occasion, but Steven, who’d raced to the scene after she’d managed to phone him for help, wasn’t about to forget seeing her crumpled body, lying in a pool of blood, in any great hurry.

  For a few moments back then, he’d thought he’d lost her, and he didn’t like to be reminded of the sick feeling it had given him.

  Now he eyed the commander with a brief smile. ‘No lasting damage. You know Hillary – I sometimes think she can cope with anything.’

  ‘Yes, I agree,’ Donleavy said, and obviously meant it. And once again, Steven, like many others at the HQ, found himself wishing that he understood just how their relationship worked.

  ‘You and she are getting on, I take it?’ Donleavy asked next.

  Steven instantly bridled. ‘Professionally, you mean? Yes, of course we are. She is, as you always said, one of the best investigators we have on the force.’

  Marcus nodded. He knew that, at the time, Crayle hadn’t been any too pleased to have Hillary Greene foisted upon him and his team, but he was too wise to allude to that now. Especially given the unexpected way things had turned out between them.

  ‘And, I understand, privately too, you’re becoming close?’ he probed delicately.

  Steven shifted a little uncomfortably on his seat. Commander or not, this was straying into territory that was strictly none of Donleavy’s business. ‘There’s nothing against that, sir,’ he pointed out stiffly. ‘Hillary’s a civil
ian now.’

  He was able to tell, from the way Hillary talked about Marcus Donleavy, that they weren’t, and never had been, interested in each other in any romantic way. Sometimes she’d sounded positively scathing about him but there was always a note of caution and respect in her voice whenever she mentioned Donleavy, and Steven had never quite had the courage to pick her up on it.

  ‘Oh, quite, quite,’ Donleavy said, blandly now, distracting him from his darkening thoughts. ‘No, I have no problem with you and Hillary becoming a personal item. But you can see why the top brass might feel a little uncomfortable with it. Which brings me on, as you can probably guess, to why I’ve called you in today.’

  Steven made the usual demurring noises.

  ‘You’ve done wonders within the CTR, Steven. Your progress has been steady and your solve rates are admirable. With Hillary’s help, naturally, as I predicted.’ Donleavy couldn’t resist just a little dig. ‘And every little bit helps when it comes to improving the crime figures. But perhaps now would be a good time for you to consider moving onwards and upwards?’

  Steven kept his face carefully blank.

  ‘Just what did you have in mind, sir?’ he asked smoothly.

  Hillary had read in the file that Felix Olliphant’s best friend, Mitchell Harris, now worked as the office manager in a supply warehouse that provided storage of dry goods for a major supermarket chain. Jake Barnes was able to find the industrial estate on the outskirts of Aylesbury where their main office was situated with very little trouble. A foreman overseeing an expansive forklift operation in one of the cavernous depths directed them to the boss’s office upstairs.

  His secretary, a young woman who looked fresh out of college, couldn’t seem to make up her mind whether to be impressed, alarmed or excited to have the police call on her boss. No doubt she’d always hitherto considered him to be rather staid and boring, and now she eyed them nervously as she used the intercom to inform him of their arrival. Her voice dropped a theatrical decibel or two when it came to using the words ‘the police are here to see you, sir’.

  But the voice that came back over the little tin box sounded not a whit theatrical in response as he ordered her to show them right in.

  As he rose from his desk, Mitchell Harris was just shrugging himself back into the jacket of his cheap suit that had been lying across the back of his chair. He was a large man quickly running to fat, but Hillary could see the echoes of an old rugby player in his physique. He was losing his hair but a combover was valiantly trying to fight back the evidence of the passing of the years.

  ‘Yes? This isn’t about the attempted break-in last month, is it? Only I thought the uniformed officers told my MD that they’d signed off on it?’

  Hillary held out her ID. ‘No, sir. We’re with the Crime Review Team, and we’re taking another look at the Felix Olliphant case.’

  Mitchell Harris frowned, his hazel eyes almost becoming lost in the folds of his face as they distinctly clouded. ‘Bloody hell, Felix,’ he said flatly, and sat back down, a shade heavily. ‘Funny how that never really goes away. I find myself not thinking about him for weeks at a time now, and then something reminds me of him – something not important, you know? Like someone ordering his favourite drink in the pub, and it hits me all over again.’ His eyes abruptly focused again and he looked at Hillary levelly. ‘It’s about time you lot pulled your finger out, I reckon. You never did find out who did for him, did you?’

  Hillary weathered the accusation stoically. He was, after all, quite right.

  ‘We’re going to do our best to rectify that, Mr Harris,’ she told him firmly, her voice flat and level. ‘Which is why we’re here. A case of murder is never closed, and we never give up trying.’

  Something about the look in her eye made him flush slightly, but then he nodded.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You weren’t at the party that night?’ She got straight to the point.

  ‘No, course I wasn’t. And he was only there because he and Greer had done the house up a few weeks before. Mind you, Felix was the sort who got invited to swanky dos at posh houses anyway. But I never was!’ Mitchell Harris suddenly grinned. ‘Even back then, I was only a pleb. Oh, go on, sit down, why don’t you? Hovering over me like that, you’re giving me a crick in my neck.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Hillary and Jake selected a couple of generic chairs that were littered around the office and drew them up to the desk. Jake surreptitiously set a tape recorder running in his jacket pocket but Hillary pretended not to notice when she realized that Mitchell Harris himself had not seen what was going on.

  She’d have to have a word with the Boy Wonder later. PACE had strict rules and guidelines about taping conversations. Since this was just a friendly chat, and it would be very unlikely indeed that they’d need to use anything from the interview in a court of law, she decided to let it pass.

  ‘You and Felix sound unlikely friends,’ she said pleasantly to Mitchell, as an opening gambit.

  Mitchell laughed. ‘Sure were. It’s only because we sat next to each other in infant school that we even met. I was strictly a working-class oik and Felix was middle-class through and through. But we just hit it off – don’t know why. Well, you don’t wonder about stuff like that when you’re kids, do you? Later we went to the same senior school and just hung out because we didn’t really know anybody else there. Besides, Felix was an easy guy to like, you know what I mean? He got on with everybody.’

  ‘Not really, sir, no. That’s why we’re here. We want you to tell us about Felix,’ Hillary said gently, when he looked at her, puzzled.

  ‘Oh. Right. Well, that shouldn’t be hard,’ Mitchell said with a sigh, and the beginnings of a gentle reminiscent smile. ‘He didn’t have any side to him, you know what I mean? Some blokes, they’re full of bullshit, yeah? Trying to make out that they’re smarter than they are, or have more money, or prettier girlfriends, or you name it. It’s all about bolstering the old ego, yeah?’ Harris shrugged. ‘Nothing wrong with that, we all do it, I suppose. But not Felix so much. He just seemed happy to fit into his own skin.’

  ‘Sort of laidback?’ Hillary said.

  ‘Yeah. That too. But he wasn’t lazy, and he didn’t really have any sort of a hippy-like attitude to life – I don’t want you to get me wrong.’ Harris reached up to scratch his jaw. ‘I reckon Felix saw it like it really was. Most people, when they heard he was an interior designer, like, thought … I dunno, that he didn’t have much of a clue. That he was all style and no substance, I suppose.’

  ‘And he wasn’t?’

  ‘No. I mean, he was good at what he did, don’t get me wrong. He could talk colours and fabrics and what have you until I’d go cross-eyed. But he made it pay, see? He was never short of money because Greer and him were always at the top of the game.’

  ‘He was sharp? Yes, his father struck me as being a businessman type. It makes sense he’d have grown up to respect money,’ Hillary agreed, being deliberately a shade obtuse. Sometimes you got more out of witnesses by pretending to be just a bit slow off the mark. There was often nothing people liked more than to put you right.

  ‘Yeah,’ Harris said, but his frown told her that she still hadn’t quite got it. ‘But money wasn’t his god, either. I mean, Felix wasn’t driven to succeed as if that was the be all and end all. I mean, we might have been living in the late eighties, early nineties, yeah? The Maggie Thatcher era and all that, and greed is good and what have you. But Felix had a heart where a heart should be, and a head where a head should be. You’d trust him if you got in trouble to talk sense and see you through, and not give you a load of bullshit.’

  ‘You and he were close,’ Hillary said quietly, and with genuine sympathy.

  ‘Absolutely. Hey, no! Not like that. I mean, not in any funny way,’ Harris said, going a shade red and sitting up straighter in his chair. ‘I’ve been married for nearly fifteen years and have got two kids.’

  Hillary instantly held up a placa
tory hand. ‘You’re referring to the suggestion that Felix was gay, right? We’ve been coming across it from time to time in the course of our inquiries. His father didn’t believe it, but then parents don’t always know, do they?’

  ‘Huh!’ Harris grunted, a shade aggressively. ‘His old dad got it dead right, don’t you worry none about that. If Felix was gay then I’m a monkey’s uncle.’

  Hillary smiled. ‘You don’t look like much of a baboon to me, sir.’

  Harris blinked at her, and then grinned, instantly settling back down more easily in his chair.

  ‘Right. No, I don’t know when that rumour started to get around. I mean, when he died, he’d been with Becky for nigh on two years. And there were plenty of girls before her, believe me. He was a really good-looking bloke, so it just don’t make sense, does it? In the sixth form he was a real babe magnet, let me tell you. Being his best friend was a sweet deal for me – I got to go out with more girls than I would have otherwise.’

  Hillary smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure you did well enough.’

  Beside her, Jake Barnes listened and marvelled. She had the big man eating out of her hand.

  Harris grinned. ‘Well, modestly forbids, right?’

  ‘So who do you think started the rumours that Felix was gay?’ she asked casually. ‘And how did he react to them?’

  Harris sighed. ‘You know, I’m not really sure. It must have been … what …’ He paused, obviously deep in thought and trying to work something out. ‘I dunno, a couple of years, maybe three or four years, before he died, that I first heard it mentioned. Some other pal of mine in the pub said that he thought it was weird, me being pals with a gay bloke, and I nearly choked on my beer. I mean, as far as I knew, I didn’t have any bent mates. Not that I’ve got anything against them, mind.’ He gave the almost inevitable knee-jerk response without a hint of irony. ‘So I asked him what he was on about, and when he mentioned Felix I laughed out loud. Told him he’d been sold a pup.’

  ‘But you heard it from someone else again, later?’