“Oh,” said Trisha, with an exaggerated shudder. “I didn’t know that. I wonder if she still stalks the corridors.”
“If you hear anything weird, let me know and I’ll get an exorcist in.”
“Thanks for that, Jennifer. Makes me feel much better. I probably won’t sleep Tuesday night now.”
“I’ll pop round with a bottle of something red, if you like.”
“Thanks, but I’ll be fairly late arriving. Maybe we can get together on Wednesday evening.”
“Righty-ho. Hey, this is great news, Trish. It’s already growing on me. By the way, remember that there’s a big storm blasting its way in from the Atlantic tomorrow. Take care on the road; the M1 can be a pig in bad weather. Oh yes, come off the M1 at junction twenty-five. It’s the best way into town for your hotel.”
“I’ll do my best, but it’ll depend on the mood of my satnav. We have a bit of a love-hate relationship and it’s dedicated its electronic existence to showing me the scenic routes of England. However, with my sense of direction, I’ve little option but to rely on it.”
Chapter Twenty
DC Gus Brooke was working late. He had to; he’d been letting things slip for far too long. Since Gregson died, he’d found that Crawford was a less forgiving boss, too insecure to be flexible, and the new DS, Jennifer Cotton, expected everything by yesterday. The problem was she had the ear of the DCS and the heart of one of the team of DCs, if not all of them. Brooke felt hemmed in by his own inefficiency, unable to do things the way he preferred. The casual way.
And to make matters worse, they’d been told yesterday that Gregson’s replacement was another woman, Detective Superintendent Trisha McVie. High flying, hard-hitting and hard-nosed if you crossed her, according to a number of ex-mates in the West Mids who had contacts in the Manchester Force. Brooke had never met her, but her reputation preceded her and she was arriving tomorrow to meet the team. With a number of high-profile cases on the books, she was going to be looking for any shortcomings; it was what all new bosses did to show how bloody clever they were. And Gus’s shortcomings had been gaining traction lately, branching out into uncharted territory where they hadn’t previously ventured.
Which was why he was working late. Trying to get back on track.
Another flash of lightning filled the Nottingham skyline with fleeting electric daylight, the angry sonic shock of battered air molecules following almost immediately as the storm raged overhead. Gus looked up at the sheets of rain blurring the windows. The forecast reckoned there would be no let-up for several hours and he not only needed his sleep to be fresh for the team’s nine o’clock summons, but he was also starving. He had missed lunch in an effort to gain momentum in the voyage of discovery through his files, only to be thwarted by Cotton mid-afternoon with an instruction to drive up to the suburb of Arnold to get more information from a reluctant witness. A valuable two hours down the drain in a down-at-heel dump trying to coax the memory of some old dear about what she might or might not have seen. The woman was far too nervy ever to be a reliable witness; Cotton should have understood that and not wasted his time.
He glanced at his watch: nine o’clock. Bugger it, he’d had enough. With Mo away at a sculptors’ retreat she was supervising in the depths of Croatia for over a week now and not returning for another week, Gus was fed up with looking after himself, fed up with the lack of company, fed up with living two miles from the nearest village in some ancient cottage Mo had insisted they buy because its ‘uninhibited authenticity’ gave her inspiration; just bloody fed up. Sod the files, he’d have to try his usual charm offensive in the morning and hope for the best. Perhaps McVie would be so keen to impress that she wouldn’t notice the little things, the important details that were the lifeblood of any investigation.
Whatever. He shut down his computer, grabbed his jacket and headed for the top floor of the car park, sprinting for his car in a brief slackening of the rain’s intensity while the clouds regrouped to maximise the impact of their next barrage.
With the wipers on full, Gus could just about see the road ahead as he gingerly made his way towards Trent Bridge, after which he took a minor road heading south of Nottingham towards the forgettable village of Rappington.
Originally one of the rural feeder roads leading to the M1, its inadequacies as a conduit for busy traffic had been forgotten with the creation of a new road through farmland that bypassed Rappington. The village had been left in peace with no further thought about and certainly no funding earmarked for straightening out a slew of tight bends on both sides of the village. Gus assumed the inadequate roads followed ancient cart tracks, but why even cart tracks would be quite so eccentric in their traverse of the countryside was beyond him.
After Rappington, there were two almost ninety degree bends separated by a hundred metres of teasingly straight road guaranteed to fool the unwary into speeding up too much. Gus knew the road well enough to treat it with respect: he had slowed for the first bend and was maintaining a careful twenty miles an hour as he approached the second.
With much of their light reflected back at the car from the wall of rain ahead of him, Gus’s headlights were doing a poor job of showing him the way. As he peered through the windscreen, he became aware of another pair of headlights approaching fast from the opposite direction and he instinctively slowed some more. He was rewarded by the spectacle of a red Volkswagen Golf executing a tight anticlockwise spin as it careered across the corner in a whirlwind of spray and sparks as a wheel rim and the road made reluctant acquaintance. The car rocked wildly on its suspension as the driver fought to regain control before shuddering to a jarring halt two feet short of a huge oak tree, an immovable object that would have inflicted terminal damage on the Golf’s bodywork should the two have collided. But they didn’t and the Golf remained intact but listing over a rear nearside wheel bearing the shredded remains of a deformed and useless tyre.
Gus brought his car to a halt a few feet from the Golf, left his headlights picking out the car in stark relief and switched on his emergency hazard lights. As he jumped out of the car, he remembered there was an umbrella on the back seat, but one blast from the swirling wind told him not to waste his time. He was soaked to the skin in seconds and no umbrella was going to help.
Leaning into the wind, his head down, he hurried as far as the driver’s door and rapped on the glass. Peering closer, he could make out a woman staring ahead while still clutching the steering wheel. He rapped on the glass again and the woman turned her head, her eyes seeking his through the waterfall drowning the window.
“Are you all right?” he yelled, but his voice made little headway against the force of the storm.
The door opened, forcing Gus to take a step backwards. The woman got out, halting briefly as Gus shouted at her. “Better to stay inside; you’ll be soaked in seconds out here.”
The woman looked down at her clothing. “Too late for that, I think.”
She took a deep breath. “That was a bit close. I wasn’t going particularly fast, but that corner came out of nowhere and at the same time, something weird happened to the steering.”
“Looks like you got a puncture at the wrong moment,” shouted Gus, pointing at the rear wheel. “If you hit the brakes on the corner, chances are that you’d lose control.”
He bent down to assess the damage. “The tyre and wheel are both wrecked,” he said, as he stood up again. “The tyre was probably running almost flat for a few hundred metres until it gave up on the corner. Have you got a spare?”
He looked into the woman’s eyes, making a rapid assessment. Good looking, late thirties, laughter lines around the eyes. He glanced at her hands. No wedding ring.
The woman turned and opened the Golf’s tailgate, bending under it to get some shelter. Gus leaned in next to her and the noise of the storm lessened enough for them to stop shouting.
“Under there, last time I looked,” said the woman, pointing to the boot floor covering.
“Jack? Wheel brace?”
The woman lifted up the floor panel. “Here, next to the wheel.”
As Gus reached forward to release the jack, the woman touched his arm. “I can’t ask you to do that, not in this weather.”
He snorted a short laugh. “I’m hardly going to stand and watch. And I couldn’t get any wetter if I walked back into Rappington and jumped into the village pond.”
“Well, if you insist. It’s really very good of you.”
“Shouldn’t take long,” said Gus, letting his eyes close slightly as he smiled at her. He knew from experience it was a winning look, and he was already making plans.
The woman held out her hand. “Emma Carrington,” she said, smiling back at him, a suggestion of interest in her eyes ticking another box on Gus’s mental assessment sheet.
“Martin,” he said, taking her hand and holding it for slightly longer than necessary. “Mart. Mart Burton.”
“Please to meet you, Mart. Your timing was perfect.”
The spell was broken by another clap of thunder.
“Better get a move on,” said Gus. “The wind’s picking up now. Don’t want to add chill factor to being soaking wet.”
He bent to loosen the wheel nuts before locating the jack beneath a bracing point forward of the rear wheel, noticing out of the corner of his eye that rather than taking shelter under the tailgate as he had suggested, the woman was standing immediately behind him, seemingly oblivious of the rain.
Trisha McVie’s drive up to Nottingham had been a pig from the moment she drove out of the underground car park into the foulest storm she could remember.
The day had actually started well. Some case review meetings at the Yard followed by a light lunch with her boss and the assistant commissioner. She didn’t like either of them much, but they liked her, and that was all that mattered. She was on their radar as a future star and if the occasional lunch was all that was needed to keep the flame burning, she was prepared to go with it. They both had speech defects which entertained her when she lapsed into bored silence while they swapped self-congratulatory snippets, speech defects she would enjoy mimicking at a later date on a boozy night with Jennifer.
In the late afternoon, she had treated herself to an adventurous new hair style and colour to match. Ash blonde. She’d experimented with streaks of the colour before, but this time she’d taken it a stage further, combining it with a shorter, layered look. A change of style for a new city full of new opportunities. Jennifer would be surprised but positive, as she always was; she was that sort of woman.
As the miserable drive out of London worsened with the fading light and the storm showing no sign of abating, Trisha’s mood darkened. She had hoped to drive up on a bright September evening, the sun disappearing somewhere to her left as she headed north, a warm glow across the fields. Instead, it was slate grey fading to black, the spray from the trucks and massive lorries relentless, like driving through one car wash after another.
To make the drive even more uncomfortable, her partner of six months, Steven, persisted in continuing with a series of acrimonious phone calls that had started the previous evening.
When Steven had called the night before with the news that he had been held up on his trip to the States, Trisha had finally told him about her new job. An hour of apoplexy later, her response had oscillated between indignant rebuttal of his anger and regret that surprised her: it hadn’t occurred to her that she might actually have feelings for the man. Steven had finally slammed the phone down on her after calling her a shallow, unfeeling and heartless fucking bitch who wouldn’t recognise honest commitment if it slapped her around her arrogant head.
The second part had stung. She had been in meaningful relationships before, plenty of them. It was just that ultimately they weren’t right.
Later, when it was time to get up in New York, he’d called again, and he was clearly hung over. She told him she couldn’t talk until later when she would be in the car, forgetting that the weather would require all her concentration. She hoped he might have work to do but as she passed Luton, the phone buzzed again.
“Christ, Steven, give me a break. Do you realise what the weather’s like here? It’s like the end of the bloody world, swirling oceans of rain crashing down on all sides, headlights picking out weird shapes and massive trucks trying to kill me. I really don’t have time to carry on from where we stopped last night.”
“Well, bloody make time! I thought you people went on advanced driving courses. You are supposed to be experts.”
“Even if I had been on one of those courses, which I haven’t, I’d still need to concentrate. Shit! Get out of the way, wanker! Bloody lorries, they should be banned in this weather.”
“Listen, Trish.” Steven was trying a different, more humble tack. “I’ve been thinking. If you’re serious about this transfer to Nottingham—”
“Which I am. I’m on my way there now,” interrupted Trisha.
“Right. Well, as I said, I’ve been thinking. I could, at a stretch, get a transfer to somewhere around there.”
Trish snorted her derision. “How could you possibly do that? You’re more or less the boss. You work in head office. You said yourself the Midlands office was a waste of space.”
“Yeah, well, perhaps I was overstating it. With a good shake up, the sort that I could give it, it could perk up considerably.”
“I’m not going to tell you how to run your life, Steven, but if you think that moving to the Midlands will change the downward spiral we’re in, you’re mistaken.”
“What downward spiral? Two weeks ago you were saying how great everything was.”
“I was pissed. Merlot-coloured glasses. Right now, I’m just pissed off. I’ve nearly had three accidents since you called. Are you deliberately trying to kill me?”
“Stop bloody exaggerating, Trish. You’re such a fucking drama queen.”
“Bollocks!” screamed Trisha, as another wall of water hit her car. “That was too close! What did you just call me?”
“I said—”
“I don’t bloody care!” She hit the end call button on her remote and snarled though the windscreen. “Stupid man.”
With no let-up in the storm, and the endless heavy traffic, it was almost two hours before Trisha pulled into Watford Gap services on the M1 for a much-needed coffee. She snatched her phone from the hands-free cradle, stuffed it into her handbag and ran for shelter. As she burst through the doors into the steamy, stale air of the entrance to the coffee outlets, fast-food chains and mini-supermarkets selling little of nutritional value, she glared menacingly at three smokers taking surreptitious drags in the shelter of the entrance rather than go outside where they were supposed to be. She was about to lecture them when her phone rang again.
“Bugger it, Steven, don’t you ever give up?”
“Sounds quieter. Has the rain stopped?”
“What? No, of course it hasn’t. It’s never going to stop. I’m just taking a caffeine break.”
“Then you can talk.”
“No, I can’t, or at least I don’t want to. I’ve had it up to here. Don’t you get that?”
“No, Trish, I don’t. I thought we had something.”
“We did. It was called lust. But lust doesn’t always last, Steven, and ours got lost.”
“I suppose you think that’s clever. You rolled it out so smoothly that it must be a line you’ve used before.”
“Oh, for God’s sake! Look, I’m getting a coffee and then I’m off. I really don’t want to talk.”
“But—”
The phone went dead as Trisha closed the call. She stared at the screen for a few seconds, sighed and switched the device off. It was contrary to protocol, but it was the only way she’d keep her sanity for the last part of the journey, especially since the rain appeared to be getting heavier, if that were even possible.
When she got back into the car clutching her coffee, she tossed the phone into a well on the dashboar
d, switched on the engine and glanced dismissively at her satnav.
“OK, Dolores, let’s see if I can find my way out of this bloody maze and back on the sodding motorway without your help.”
Dolores, the soft Irish voice Trish had chosen for the device, purred back at her. “After fifty yards, turn right, then keep right, then ta—”
“Are you bloody listening, Dolores?” screamed Trisha. “I said I can do it! Just shut it and save your voice until we get back on the motorway.”
Dolores said nothing further as she waited patiently for Trisha to find her way to the slip road.
Forty-five minutes later, there was less traffic, but the response of those drivers still heading northwards was to speed up in total disregard of the hazardous conditions.
When Dolores burst into life, she gave Trish a start. “In two miles, take the exit.”
Trish frowned. “Really? Are you sure?” She glanced at an approaching overhead sign to see the next exit was number twenty-four. “I’m sure Jennifer said twenty-five, Dolores. Has the rain affected your contacts?”
“Take the exit.”
“OK, you know best. I certainly don’t fancy trying to navigate this place without your help.”
She looked at the time-left-on-journey read-out and it seemed about right. “Let’s do it, Dolly,” she said.
Leaving the roundabout after crossing over the motorway, Trisha noticed the signs to Nottingham took her onto a new-looking dual carriageway. She winked at the satnav. “Soon be there.”
But Dolores had other thoughts. Not half a mile down the road, she surprised Trisha by telling her to take the next road on the left.
“You’re joking, Dolores, aren’t you?” said Trisha, peering at the satnav screen and then at a signpost. Rappington 4. “Never heard of it,” she grumbled. “But I must bow to your superior knowledge, Dol; perhaps you know a shortcut.”
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