Bones In the River

by Zoe Sharp

  He rubbed a hand around the back of his neck, took in a deep breath and opened his mouth. Just before he might have said anything he regretted, he glanced across again at Susanne.

  Her attention had already moved on, back to her task.

  He closed his mouth again, not sure if what he felt was disappointment or relief.

  “Not much to tell,” he said instead. “Staffing…concerns. You know the kind of thing.”

  “Hm?” Her eyes were still on the exercise book on her lap. “Oh, listen to this one, Chris. ‘Queen Elizabeth the First could never get any rest because Mary Queen of Scots was always hoovering in the background.’ Sometimes Year Eight’s spelling is priceless.”

  He mumbled his agreement and went into the kitchen to rinse the sticky residue from his hands. As he stood at the sink he glimpsed his reflection in the window over it, shadowed in the blackened glass. Perhaps that was what made him look so…furtive. Restless, even—like a man about to bolt.

  He turned away and refilled his glass with a more than generous measure.

  Susanne looked up as he returned to the lounge.

  “Sorry, love. I was listening. What kind of staffing concerns?”

  He took his time about retrieving her thrown cushion and sitting down again, all the while hunting for some less inflammatory but still legitimate topic.

  Eventually, he seized on: “You know when you first found out you’d got the Deputy Headship? It must have affected the way the other teachers behaved around you.”

  “Of course it did. The ones who’ve still managed to retain any shred of ambition were resentful that I’d beaten them to the punch, as it were. And the ones who’ve had it knocked out of them by years in the profession thought I was getting ideas thoroughly above my station.” She gave a rueful smile. “And, on top of that, all of them were worried I might use their old staffroom whinges against them. I could practically see them desperately trying to remember what they’d ever said in front of me—about going through the motions in class or calling in sick when it was really a hangover. Why, is that what’s happening with you?”

  “It’s a bit different, I suppose, in that we’re spread all over the county, so we don’t have a communal staffroom,” he said. Not that he had the sort of relationship with the other Cumbria CSIs that invited those kind of confidences, in any case. “It’s more that they don’t always respect my authority. I mean, it was a damn shame, what happened to Sibson, but after him I was the one with the most seniority. There should never have been any argument over who was going to take his place.”

  That was not entirely true, he acknowledged privately. He had enough self-awareness to know he wasn’t the most popular of people at work but, he reasoned, those who are good at what they do often invoked the jealousy of others.

  They’d told him anti-discrimination rules meant they had to advertise the Head CSI position widely, although he had his doubts that was the real reason. And whether his promotion was confirmed, in the end, because he was the top man for the job, or the only man for the job, that was another thing altogether…

  Susanne was nodding in agreement. “Oh yes, I had to put up with quite a bit of that kind of attitude. You’ve got to nip it in the bud, love. Show ’em who’s the boss. Is it anyone in particular, or do I even need to ask?”

  Now it was his turn to nod. “Yeah—that bloody McColl woman, mostly.” Susanne had never met his work colleagues but it was not the first time he’d voiced his frustration on the subject of Grace McColl. The outright favouritism his predecessor had shown the woman described as his protégé—if that’s all she was to him, and he had his doubts about that one, too—had always riled Blenkinship. Sibson had listened to her when she should have been doing all the listening and little of the talking. When she should have been making the tea and running the most mundane of tests, not being put in charge of important crime scenes.

  “What’s she got up to this time?”

  “She’s just not a team player. Take today, for instance. She goes haring off down to Kirkby Stephen for some minor offence—a simple theft, most likely—when she should have passed it on to the lads at Kendal instead. And that left only young Ty Frost to cover Penrith solo. I mean, he’s come on leaps and bounds since I took over, but he’s still a bit green for handling anything serious that crops up.”

  “And did it?” Susanne asked.

  “Did it what?”

  “Did anything serious crop up?”

  “Well, no,” he admitted, “but that’s not the point. She should have passed the job on. Or kept me in the loop so I, as her superior, could have allocated the most appropriate personnel.”

  Susanne frowned. “To be honest with you, love, it sounds to me like she took the most logical option. Didn’t you tell me Steve Scott was away on that Home Office course? You were complaining about the timing of it—clashing with Appleby Horse Fair. So, if you were down a man at Kendal—”

  “Yes, yes, all right,” he snapped, levering out of his chair as the frustration zipped along his nerves. He clutched the glass tight, almost hoping it would shatter between his fingers. He needed something sharp, sudden, shocking, to cut through the helpless rage. “Hell fire, it’s bad enough that they’re constantly second-guessing me at work, never mind the same damn thing when I get home!”

  Susanne blinked at him for a moment, then said with careful precision, “I know you’ve had a difficult day, Chris, but so have I. All I’m doing is trying to look at the situation as a whole so I can help you reach the best solution.” She shoved the marking aside and got to her feet with dignity. “Throwing a tantrum will not achieve anything except you spending a night in the spare room, so I’ll thank you not to take that tone with me, hm?”

  For a long moment their eyes cut, thrust, and parried across the coffee table. Eventually, Blenkinship let his gaze droop in surrender.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’m just on edge at the moment, what with the Fair about to start and being a man short—”

  “And I’ve got three members of staff off long-term sick with stress, another who’s just announced he wants paternity leave, and an Ofsted inspection due any minute,” she shot back. “Either accept my help in the spirit in which it’s offered, or deal with it yourself!”

  Part III

  Thursday

  16

  When Queenie woke the following morning, she lay watching the play of shape and shadow across the wood-lined ceiling of the vardo. She was both at peace and tickled by a nervous anticipation. Same as every year at the Fair. Every year going back the last ten, anyway. Beside her, Bartley snored on gently with his arm anchored across her. The weight of it gave comfort.

  Down in the lower bunk, the children slept top to tail, as they always did. Ocean closest to the rear wall and Sky to the inside. She was restless, that child, no demure little princess to be dressed up in ribbons. As often as not, she’d be up before any of them so much as cracked an eye. But the journey yesterday had tired her. For once, their curtain stayed drawn and all was quiet below.

  Queenie gauged the time of day from the angle of light slanting through the windows that ran along each side of the central raised mollicroft roof. It was a little after six, she reckoned.

  No rush yet.

  Today they were due to go the last stretch to Fair Hill, to the field she’d been coming to since the year she was born. Never missed a single one. First in her grandfather’s wagon, then her father’s, now her husband’s.

  Bartley had built this vardo himself, not long after they married. He’d based it closely on the one she’d grown up in. Tradition didn’t allow for inheritance, not of possessions. She and her brother had taken a keepsake from among their father’s things, then everything was smashed and his wagon burned, as was the way.

  If the heads of the clans used the Fair this year to select the next Shera Rom, then this adherence to tradition would sit well with them.

  Vano was playing on that commitment to th
e old ways, too, like an election campaign. Didn’t matter that he lived half the year in brick, or that he’d trailered his horses and his bow-top wagon up as far as Scotch Corner, just the other side of the Pennines, and come on from there.

  Vano had tried to brush it off by saying his new daughter was less than six months in the world. Reading the spaces between the words, Queenie’s opinion was that Vano’s wife, Nell, had got more used to her luxuries than was good for her—an indoor bathroom, if you please!

  Queenie had more sense than to voice that belief. Vano had been quick to temper as a boy. Now near thirty, age had not served to mellow him. Like as not, Nell had kept him wanting to force the issue. He’d been horny with youth and the years had not slowed him much in that respect, either.

  Queenie lay on her back, eyes roaming the familiar design of the interior. Her parents’ wagon had been almost exactly the same as this, and her mother had kept it gleaming. After she died, it had fallen to Queenie to step into her shoes. She’d taken pride in it—still did. There was a dash of her mother’s taste here, some of Queenie’s own. Others might think it gaudy, with the clash of pink and red, yellow roof, green tiles around the stove, dark polished wood. And gilt and brass everywhere, highlighting carvings and decorating doors and the detail around the mantel, all polished to a high sheen.

  And all of it dipped in memory and meaning. The plates and the figurines and even the coal scuttle, painted by hand, and the copper kettle she laboured over until she could see her face in it.

  It was the texture of home. Of belonging.

  Queenie watched the impromptu sundial ease around the walls. Its fingers seemed to touch the frames of every family photograph and linger with affection, until at last it sparkled in the mirror at the foot of the bed. She breathed out softly, tried to wriggle onto her side. She’d thought Bartley still asleep, but as she moved his grip tightened almost in reflex, using the curve of her hipbone as a hand-hold. Before she knew it, his stubbled chin was burrowed into the crease between neck and shoulder. That and his deliberate outward breath riffled the hairs, sending them rising all over her body. She quivered, tried to squirm out from under his touch.

  “And where d’you think you’re off to, me warm wee wife,” he murmured.

  She twisted, landing a not-quite-accidental elbow to his ribs, and hopped down out of the bed.

  “A cuppa tea and on the road,” she said firmly, felt his eyes roving her back as she pulled on a robe. “If we want to stay off the A66 over to Appleby, it puts another six miles on the journey. More than five hours, all up—and that’s without a stop to rest the horse. Vano will be getting restless to be off—”

  “Oh, he’s gone already.”

  She stilled in the midst of pulling her hair into a plait, glanced over her shoulder.

  “When?”

  “Off at the crack of daft, he was. You know what he’s like when the urge is upon him.”

  “No…when did he tell you he was starting out early?”

  “Last night, it was—after you’d gone to your bed. Why? What difference does it make?”

  He sat up, shoving a pillow between his back and the carved bed head, then sprawled against it and regarded her. He should have looked less than he was, with the white broderie anglaise sheet bunched at his narrow waist, but the feminine in the linen only emphasised the masculine in the man.

  She averted her eyes.

  “Without the colt to worry him, Vano will go the straight way. He’ll be there by noon.”

  “Ah, don’t you worry about that, me darlin’. If your brother wants to slink in ahead of us, let him. It’s not a race now, is it?”

  But it was, in a way. A race for the good opinion of the other clans. A race to secure their approval and support. And this for a man who was no blood relation to the Romany her father had been. Her brother already had a head start, and she worried that Bartley was too damn stubborn to see the dangers.

  “No, but—”

  “Ah, but nothing. I know how to time an entrance. He’ll arrive with the nobodies and I’ll be stridin’ in with your father’s last colt and his lovely daughter.” He smiled. A grim smile that made her shiver despite the summer warmth. “Trust me, darlin’. There won’t be a man’s eye fixed on me who wouldn’t sell his very soul to trade places.”

  17

  “You’re in early.”

  Grace was sufficiently engrossed in her work that she had not heard the door to the workshop swing open behind her. But she had no trouble picking up the disapproving note in the man’s voice.

  “Good morning, Christopher,” she said, without looking up from her task.

  The bicycle—now confirmed as belonging to Jordan Elliot—lay on its side on the large examination table in the centre of the workshop floor. Grace had rigged up spotlights from every angle to eliminate any possible shadows. She was going over every square centimetre of the frame with a magnifier. Her cameras, one with a macro lens attached for extreme close-ups, lay near to hand.

  She straightened, noted down the number of the last shots, and finally glanced over at the man who was now her boss.

  Chris Blenkinship was a big Geordie—tall, and wide across the shoulder—who still moved like the footballer he’d apparently been in his youth. Grace sometimes suspected he made the most of that aggressive physicality to ride roughshod over people who didn’t quite see eye-to-eye with his way of doing things.

  She didn’t know if he’d been told to tone down his somewhat confrontational management style but, since taking over as Head CSI, he was growing out the military buzz-cut he’d always favoured to disguise his rapidly receding hairline. In Grace’s opinion, the softer style did not suit his blocky features, but she would be the last to tell him so. But, as he would have been the last to listen to her, she considered that only fair.

  “Was there something I can help you with?” she asked now, keeping her voice perfectly pleasant.

  There was a twitchiness about him this morning. As though he was on the cusp of telling her something he knew she wasn’t going to like. She mentally braced herself.

  “No, no, just thought I’d check in, seeing as how I had to be in Penrith anyway,” he said quickly. He nodded to the bicycle. “Going a bit overboard on this, aren’t you? I thought it was down as a possible theft at most, and I’ve got the budget to think about, eh?”

  His attempt at light-hearted banter was too forced to quite come off but Grace appreciated him making the effort to pass for human, at least.

  “I assumed you’d been given the update. The ten-year-old child this belongs to”—she indicated the bike while carefully sticking to present tense—“hasn’t been seen since last night. We’re looking at a possible hit-and-run incident, or maybe an abduction.”

  Blenkinship fell silent. He moved up close alongside her. If he was trying not to loom, he failed in the attempt. As she watched his eyes skim over her notes and equipment, she swallowed down a minor bubble of resentment.

  That he had never liked Grace—nor made any secret of the fact—was one thing. She was sanguine enough to recognise that not everyone she worked with would do so. But he’d never respected her abilities, either, and she found this far more difficult to stomach.

  When Blenkinship had been one of her colleagues rather than her superior, he’d satisfied himself with the odd sly dig whenever the opportunity arose. But Grace had always known she could rely on his predecessor, Richard Sibson, to back her up when necessary.

  Sibson had been her mentor as well as her boss. He was the one who had persuaded her to turn a good eye for photographic detail into a forensic one instead. Coming comparatively late to the job merely meant she’d time to experience life, he told her, to develop both a practical attitude and some common sense beforehand.

  She still missed him fiercely.

  To Blenkinship’s mind, who’d come into scenes-of-crime the old-fashioned way, she was an upstart interloper and would no doubt remain so.

  “I wa
s expecting your report on this before close of play yesterday,” he said with more than a hint of censure in his tone.

  “I was called from the crime scene to the parents’ home to collect elimination samples. Then, with the storm forecast, I felt it was more important to prioritise securing the evidence and having it transported.”

  He was silent for a moment. Looking for the holes, she thought. His huff of breath revealed he hadn’t found any and was not pleased by it.

  “All right, Grace. See to it that I’ve got a copy today, though. If something has happened to this lad, it’s important to prioritise the paperwork, not just the glamorous stuff, eh?”

  “Of course,” she said blandly. “I’ll see to it.”

  “So, what have you got so far?”

  “Hair, prints, and saliva from the home. Plus blood and prints from the scene, as well as some transfer from—presumably—the vehicle that hit the bicycle.”

  “Now, now. You should know enough by now never to presume anything. That transfer could have got there because the bike was left lying about somewhere. You know how careless kids are.”

  No, I don’t. But then, Christopher, neither do you…

  “Of course,” she said again.

  “What kind of transfer are we looking at?”

  He was crowding her again, not just physically but professionally as well. Grace took a calming breath to quell her annoyance and re-centre her equilibrium.

  “Obviously, I have taken a sample for the lab, so I’d hate to guess as to its exact nature,” she said with precision, “but if you asked me to offer an opinion, I’d say it may well turn out to be the kind of black plastic residue from the coating on a modern car bumper or protective side moulding.”