A Narrow Victory

by Faith Martin

  Now, though, she couldn’t help but wonder if Jake preferred to use his own machine in order to ensure privacy. She knew that she herself wouldn’t stand a chance of hacking her way through his passwords and security programmes.

  At some point, she might have to see if she could sneakily part him from it, and let the boffins in the technical department loose on it.

  Which was, of course, strictly illegal.

  So she’d have to be careful. And pick her man for the job carefully. He’d either have to owe her a favour, or be happy to have her owe him one. She began to mentally review the other staff in the building, when Jake interrupted her thoughts.

  ‘My car, guv, or yours?’ he asked, with a perfectly straight face. Hillary, who was well aware that he knew damned well just how much in love she was with his E-type Jag, childishly contemplated telling him that they’d take her car. But then she took pity on Puff, who might not be happy with the fairly long haul to the Roman spa town, and shrugged.

  ‘Sure, your car. Why not?’

  Zoe shot Jake a snort and an eye roll. ‘My Mini’s a classic as well, you know, guv. We could take her.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to be in on the foxy bartender interview?’ Hillary grinned. ‘Which, by the way, we’ll get around to tomorrow, so make sure you know where he’s gonna be all day. He can’t still be bartending at his age, unless he’s made a career of it.’

  ‘Oh, right. OK, guv, I’ll find out what he’s doing now.’

  Jake shot her a cheeky wave as they went.

  ‘Nice to see the troops getting on so well,’ Hillary commented dryly as they walked down the winding labyrinth of corridors towards the main stairs.

  ‘She’s a nice girl,’ Jake said, and meant it. He hadn’t realized, when he’d applied to join the civilian ranks of the Crime Review Team, that there would be any other newly installed probationers as well as himself, but he couldn’t see Zoe Turnbull presenting any problem. She was bright enough, certainly, but still young and wet behind the ears, so he didn’t think she’d be likely to cotton on to what he was doing. And thankfully, she didn’t seem interested in him romantically, either, which meant that she wouldn’t be constantly watching him or looking over his shoulder in any attempts to catch his attention. Which was just as well.

  ‘And how are you getting on with Jimmy?’ Hillary asked as they reached the top of the stairs and emerged into the lobby.

  ‘Fine. He’s obviously …’

  ‘Hey, Hill,’ the desk sergeant suddenly called out, and she motioned Jake to go on without her and detoured towards the chunkily built fifty-something currently manning the desk and drinking from an outsized mug of coffee.

  ‘Sarge,’ Hillary said, with a smile and a nod.

  ‘What’s all this I hear about your guv’nor taking off for parts unknown, then?’

  Hillary sighed. ‘You lot must be slipping. Donleavy only approached him a couple of days ago. You’re falling down on the job.’

  The desk sergeant’s slightly florid face creased into a grin, making his rather irregular features crumple into something resembling a boxer dog. And a rather grizzled, battle-scarred specimen at that. Hillary would have bet money that the old-timer had got most of his battle scars policing football games, and volunteering for riot duty.

  ‘Well, you know how it is. You can’t get the staff nowadays, can ya?’ He grinned at her over his coffee mug. ‘Mick got it from the cleaner that does Donleavy’s secretary’s office.’

  ‘Oh, an impeccable source then,’ Hillary countered dryly.

  ‘So he’s really going?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  The desk sergeant took another noisy gulp from his mug and looked at her casually. ‘So you’ll have to break in another super then?’ he asked, perfectly straight-faced, and making no attempt to hide the double entendre.

  Hillary grinned widely at him. Cheeky bastard!

  She let her face become woeful. ‘Somebody’s gotta do it, Sarge,’ she said with a heavy sigh and a confiding hand on his arm. ‘Let’s just hope the new boss, whoever it is, doesn’t have as ugly a mug as you. I might be willing to give my all for Thames Valley, but there’s a limit, even for me.’

  Some uniforms from traffic, who’d come in just in time to hear all this, broke out in raucous laughter, and the desk sergeant, who’d just taken another gulp of coffee, began to choke in a most satisfactory and spectacular manner.

  Her work done, Hillary left the now scarlet-faced and still-hacking desk sergeant to his duties, nodded sombrely at the uniforms, who went mock-respectfully silent as she passed.

  She knew, of course, that now that she had confirmed the rumour of Steven’s departure, it would be all over the Big House before she got back. Just how many of them would be feeling pity for her, guessing that the writing was on the wall for her and her personal relationship with her boss, as well as the end of their professional one? She knew the Big House fed on gossip like sea lions on fish, and anyone and everyone was a legitimate target.

  She also knew that she and Steven had been a nine-day wonder, back in the beginning, mostly because her private life had been practically non-existent for so long that the gossip mongers had had nothing to gnaw over. So when she’d come back, and become an item with a superintendent over half a dozen years younger than herself, they’d had a field day.

  Oh, she knew it hadn’t been malicious – she was sufficiently self-aware to know that she was well liked and that most of her comrades wished her well.

  Even so, she’d always hated the thought of being the object of gleeful gossip. Or, worse still, become an object of pity.

  She walked rapidly across the car park, unaware that she was scowling ferociously. It was only when she passed a startled-looking Sam Waterstone, a sergeant from her old office back when she had still been a DI, that she realized what she must be doing. She forced herself to smile and greet him, but deliberately didn’t linger. They swapped a few reminiscences and general good wishes, and then she carried on. She wouldn’t have been surprised, had she turned around, to see her old colleague was watching her with a mixture of curiosity and slight anxiety.

  By the time she’d reached the Boy Wonder’s beautiful E-type Jag, however, her face was as neutral and composed as it usually was.

  ‘Right then. You’ve got the address from Zoe?’ she said, slipping in to the weirdly low-down depths of the leather-lined bucket seat.

  Jake started the car with a classically throaty roar of the engine. ‘Yes, guv.’

  It was a beautiful afternoon, sunny and bright, and Hillary watched the impressive scenery pass by as they crossed the Oxfordshire border and headed towards the beautiful spa town most famous for its Roman baths and Georgian architecture, epitomized in The Crescent.

  It turned out, however, that the small market town where Margaret Brandt now lived was on the right side of the county for them, which meant that they didn’t actually have to go through Bath itself. Instead, the sat nav directed them to turn off about six miles from it, which would no doubt help them avoid the worst of the rush hour when it came time to leave.

  Pulling out the file from her case, Hillary re-familiarized herself with the witness statements the Brandts had given to DI Varney. From the file photographs, William Henry Brandt had been sixty-one years old at the time of Felix Olliphant’s murder. At five foot ten, he’d been a heavy-set man, round faced and balding, with deep-set brown eyes and the florid broken-veined face that sometimes denoted a heavy drinker.

  There was no photograph of his wife.

  William Brandt had died of alcohol-related natural causes in the autumn of 2007. And if Varney had not been able to break the couple’s alibi or prove their involvement at the time, Hillary had no real hopes of being able to do so now. She was not a bloody magician, she thought, a shade mutinously. So she had no real hopes of anything solid coming from the next hour or so.

  Unless, of course, the Brandts had been guilty, and after all this time the w
idow was willing to confess. It was extremely unlikely, but such things had been known to happen.

  Looking out of her window to check if there were any squadrons of flying pigs whooping it up outside, Hillary saw that there weren’t, and went back to the paperwork.

  Billy, the little boy who’d been killed in the collision with Felix’s vehicle, had been the oldest son of the Brandts’ son Matthew. Matthew and his wife had also had a little girl, aged two at the time.

  Hillary sighed and put the paperwork away. As a young constable, she’d done her share of attending RTAs – road traffic accidents – and didn’t need to call on her imagination to understand how just a split second in time had managed to explode the Brandt family apart.

  Not only would they have lost Billy, but his parents’ lives would have been shattered too. And William Brandt had gone to jail, and all but drunk himself to death afterwards. And what of the grandmother? Would her loyalties have been with her shattered, stricken, guilty husband? Or with her grieving, probably angry and resentful son? Either way, the emotions would have run deep. Shame. Guilt. Anger. The desire for revenge.

  So far, of all the people she’d talked to, the Brandts were clearly the ones with the best motive for wanting Felix dead.

  Sure, she could see the greedy and ambitious Greer Ryanson being happy with the big insurance payout due on her partner’s death. Felix’s demise would also mean that she’d have the company to herself, and could bring in her spouse to take Felix’s place, leaving them in marital bliss to enjoy the big monetary reward that would ensure their future.

  But would she kill for it? And risk prison, if caught? Somehow, Hillary thought Greer was too careful of her own comfort and skin to be inclined to chance it.

  And OK, Felix’s girlfriend Becky had obviously been the needy, clinging type, and might well have realized that while she was fathoms deep in love with the good-looking interior designer, Felix hadn’t been half so keen.

  But again, would she kill him because of that?

  Hillary couldn’t really see it. You needed to be either pathologically egotistical or clinically desperate for attention and love to do that. And she hadn’t seen any signs of that in the housewife and mother she had then gone on to become. Which didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t been that mentally ill at the time of the murder, of course. But she was fairly confident that Varney would have spotted it. From all she’d read of his case notes, the man had been competent and thorough and experienced.

  ‘This is the place, guv.’ Jake Barnes’s voice interrupted her darkening thoughts, and she gave a mental head shake as he turned off the engine. Time to concentrate on the task at hand.

  They were parked outside a modest, semi-detached house in a small cul-de-sac of similar council houses, which had probably been built in the early sixties. Uniform, small front gardens fronted grey-clad houses that had been painted various hues of pastel colours, signalling that most of them were now privately owned.

  The house Jake pointed at, however, still retained the original, somewhat ugly and dismal grey colour, and the same type of doors and windows as three of the other grey-clad houses. Which meant that Margaret Brandt hadn’t been one of the lucky ones who’d been able to buy their own home. It made sense: her husband had been a labourer all his life and Hillary doubted that he’d had any big insurance policy to see her through to her old age after his death

  As if reading her mind, Jake said, ‘I think Zoe mentioned that she has a part-time job, guv, working in a newsagents. Even though she must be in her early seventies by now. So if she’s not in, we might have to have a wander down the high street and chat to her in the shop.’

  Hillary gave a silent grimace. ‘Let’s hope not.’ Having to talk to the woman while she sold fags, magazines and chocolate bars to her customers wasn’t exactly conducive to a good interview.

  However, after they’d walked up a narrow flagstone path, bordered on both sides with a sparse square of lawn with no floral representatives at all, the door opened quickly after Hillary’s first knock.

  Margaret Brandt was a small, round woman with short grey hair that had been permed into tight, neat curls. She wore one of those loose, floral-printed dresses that was tied in the middle with a belt of the same material, and she was wearing warm and comfortable-looking blue slippers on her feet.

  ‘Yes?’

  Hillary showed her their ID and explained what they were doing there. Margaret’s button-brown eyes darted quickly around the street, checking no doubt for nosy neighbours, and stepped aside quickly to usher them inside.

  ‘Better come in then,’ she said. She didn’t sound particularly surprised or resentful to find them on her doorstep. Nor was she particularly welcoming either, but then Hillary supposed she didn’t have any reason to be.

  Margaret Brandt had probably been brought up working class and respectable all her life. She’d married, produced children, held down jobs and done the best she could, and probably never imagined she’d have anything to do with the police or the judicial system in all her born days.

  ‘Come into the kitchen, if you don’t mind. I don’t use the living room much and I was just about to get my tea on.’

  ‘That’s fine. We’re sorry to interrupt you, Mrs Brandt,’ Hillary said politely if not strictly truthfully. ‘We’ll try not to keep you too long.’

  Margaret nodded, and showed them into a small kitchen with a view of an equally flower-less back garden. One dismal tree sat in a square of lawn and was even now in the act of shedding its leaves. Hillary wasn’t sure whether that was because it was a variety that dropped its leaves earlier than most, or whether it was dying.

  Predominantly blue and yellow, the room was small but clean, and a tiny table by the far wall had been set for one. It had two chairs tucked under it, and the woman of the house nodded to them briskly. ‘Better sit down. Want some tea then?’

  ‘Please,’ Hillary said.

  Margaret looked at Jake, her eyes running over him thoughtfully, no doubt taking in the superior quality of his clothes and the aura of easy money that Jake Barnes seemed to generate without even trying. She frowned very slightly, but said amiably enough, ‘And you, young ’un? Tea?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Brandt,’ Jake said, and took the seat opposite Hillary. She was pleased to notice that he didn’t try to tape this conversation, but instead reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a neat notebook and a tiny retractable pen. It was, of course, gold, vintage and a Parker.

  Hillary watched the old woman make tea, then open a packet of oven chips, sprinkle some on to an old tin plate, and put them in the oven and turn it on. She opened a can of peas and whilst the kettle was boiling, emptied them out into a saucepan, but made no move to heat them up. An unopened tin of Spam sat on the sink draining board.

  When the tea was made, she brought two cups over to the table and put them down, one each in front of them, and then withdrew to the sink, where she pulled out a battered yellow-topped stool. She dragged it over to the table and sat down with a weary sigh.

  ‘So, how can I help you?’ she asked. As she blew across the top of her own cup to cool the liquid down, Hillary glanced at her own brew and saw that it was as dark as ink, the kind of tea that dried up your mouth and left the bitter aftertaste of tannin lingering on the tongue.

  She turned the cup in its saucer but made no move to drink any of it. She could see that Margaret Brandt had brought out the best china for them, a pretty, rather fussy set that had gild-edged pink roses on it, and felt a momentary pang of pity.

  Then she smiled gently across at the stiff-backed old lady watching them.

  ‘We’re taking another look at the Felix Olliphant murder, as I said, Mrs Brandt,’ she began quietly, but without any sugar-coating. ‘We were wondering if, after the passage of so many years, you had anything new that you wanted to tell us about that? Now that your husband has passed on, you might feel more able to talk freely, perhaps?’

  Margaret’
s brown eyes blinked rapidly in succession, and then her rather chubby face gentled into a near-smile.

  ‘If by that you mean you want me to tell you that my Willy did it, then no. I don’t have anything new to tell you,’ she said uncompromisingly. ‘I can only tell you what I told that other inspector before. Neither of us had anything to do with that man’s death. We didn’t know where this party was that he was living it up at, and if we had, we had no way of getting there. We stayed in all that night, and watched the New Year in on the telly. Then we went to bed.’

  She took a small sip of her tea, and said, ‘You want a biscuit, love?’

  ‘No, thank you. It was a very special night, though, that night, wasn’t it,’ Hillary pressed on. ‘Not just any old New Year, was it? A whole new millennium. Everybody was pushing the boat out a bit.’

  Margaret sighed and definitely smiled this time. But it was a sad, infinitely weary smile. ‘So they kept on saying. Everybody you’d meet in the streets said it, and them telly people, what do you call ’em? Presenters? All going on about how unique it was and all that. And I remember everyone was going on about how all the computers were going to go haywire, and there’d be pandemonium.’ She gave a sudden chuckle. ‘Not that that happened, did it? Not that we’d have known if it had. Willy and me never owned a computer in our life. Of course, the kids all did.’ Margaret shrugged and took another sip of the inky brew. ‘But for us, it weren’t nothing special. So it was a new millennium, whatever that was supposed to mean. For us it was just more of the same.’

  Margaret took another sip of tea, then went off in search of a digestive, and came back with it, munching it slowly before carrying on as if she’d never left the table. ‘Yes, just more of the same old thing. Willy couldn’t get a job after he came out of prison. I was working in the garage then, behind the till. It was all we could do to pay the bills. Didn’t have no money to go partying or making a fuss. Like I told the inspector, we stayed in, watched the telly and went to bed. I don’t know who killed that man, or why.’

  Hillary nodded. It was the second time, she noted, that Margaret Brandt had referred to Felix as ‘that man’. Did she hate even his memory so much that she couldn’t bring herself to use his given name? Or was that just how she’d always thought of him? As that anonymous, maybe even nightmarish figure, who had ruined her life and that of her husband and son?