A Detective in Love (A Harriet Martens Thriller Book 2)

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘And what precisely did you learn?’ she had asked, her voice cold.

  Handy Andy was unfazed.

  ‘For one thing,’ he said cheerfully, ‘everyone I talked to was absolutely clear that Bubbles was never in the tennis lesbian camp. So one line of inquiry the less. But, more important, I managed to learn a good deal about friend Cacoyannis. Apparently what my little Fiona had gathered, stuck away there in Adam and Eve House, was a hundred per cent correct. Old Caco did attempt to rape Bubbles. She took it badly, and came out with it all to Mummy’s boyfriend, as he was then, Peter Renshaw. Who, to his credit, beat Cacoyannis up good and proper before sending him on his way back to California. Someone told me you could date what had happened to Bubbles by a sudden falling-off in her form. Seems she lost early in the Austrian Ladies Open at Kitzbühel to a girl far below her in the rankings.’

  ‘Very good. You’ve got Cacoyannis with a heavy grudge against Bubbles, caught out by not being able to keep his hands off. But have you got any more than that? A grudge wears away with time, you know, even one as deep as his might be.’

  ‘Ah, but I have got more. I’ve got the bugger back in this country shortly before Wimbledon this year. He was seen skulking around at Eastbourne, out of a job and making the odd quid or two selling gossip to any journalist who’d pay attention. And, from what I heard, that wasn’t many. So, look at it this way: here’s a man with a really heavy grudge, against Peter Renshaw, against Bubbles. His career as a coach wrecked by what Renshaw, if not Bubbles, told people about him. Broke. Acting like a scavenger on the fringes of the world in which he once featured pretty high in the pecking-order, coach to a real rising star. And he was here certainly in this country just before the murder. I’ve got inquiries in with the Immigration people, find out when he left. But I’m willing to bet it’ll turn out to be the day after the murder or the day after that.’

  ‘We’ll see. But if he was in this country then, I’m going to have a word with him. If I have to go to the States to have it.’

  *

  It took a good deal longer than Harriet had expected for the Cacoyannis line to begin to look as if it was going to bear fruit. No one in the Immigration Service, swamped by an outcry in Parliament about the huge sums international criminals were making bringing in refugees from Eastern Europe to work as prostitutes, appeared to have time to deal with the inquiry. Something to tell John, Harriet thought wryly. More support, as if it’s needed, for his thesis about the widespread economic effects of Eros.

  Even when at last there came confirmation that Cacoyannis had left the UK, not at all as quickly as Handy Andy had been willing to bet, on July the first, there were still long delays. In America it took the FBI, working at Harriet’s request, a considerable time before they were able to locate Bubbles’ former coach.

  Understandably enough, Harriet thought, when at last the positive report came through. Cacoyannis, it turned out, had dropped down so far from his former job as coach to rising star Bubbles Xingara as to have landed up as a barman. His only remaining link with the world of tennis was that he was working in the famous casino at the tennis club at Newport, Rhode Island. A casino, her FBI contact told her on the phone, that was not in fact a gambling place.

  ‘You know what it is?’ he said with the suppressed glee of someone about to unwind a dirty story. ‘It’s a casino in the old Italian sense. In other words, it was once a good old-fashioned whorehouse.’

  Harriet produced the bark of a laugh that was expected of her. Ubiquitous sex popping up once more.

  ‘Yes, ma’am, that’s what it was. But then, when things began to get a bit respectable, some guy who’d been thrown out of the nearby gentlemen’s club, for getting a pal to ride his horse through the bar I believe, bought the place and the land around it and opened it up as his club, complete with tennis courts. So now there’s the International Tennis Hall of Fame there. I guess, if you come over, see this Cacoyannis guy, you’ll love to spend an hour or so looking over that.’

  ‘I dare say I would. I’ll let you know what I decide, and thanks for all your help.’

  She saw herself, momentarily, wandering round that tennis museum endeavouring to forget the palm-roughened club player she had left behind. And at once she felt a wave of longing for Anselm that almost brought her to tears as she sat at her desk, her hand still on the phone she had just put down.

  A quietly respectful tap at the door.

  She lifted up her head, drew the back of each hand rapidly across her eyes.

  ‘Come.’

  And it was Anselm himself.

  ‘Just a quick word, ma’am, if I may. It’s about that roofer fellow from over in Birchester. Seems he —’

  ‘Shut the door.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, ma’am.’

  He took a pace inside, turned and quietly closed the door behind him.

  To find his arms pinioned, Harriet’s hot breath warm in his right ear.

  ‘Now,’ she said.

  ‘Now? Ma’am, what — what, Harriet?’

  ‘Now. Now, you fool. Christ, don’t you want to? You’re not always so slow off the mark.’

  ‘But — But ––’

  ‘Now, I said. You’re always making sheep’s eyes at me when I say Wait. Well, now ... Now, now, now, I’m not saying Wait. I’m saying it’s now.’

  All thoughts of the need to have told John about the situation had flown from her mind. Aphrodite’s hair was twined fast around them. Eros had descended at his chosen moment.

  Without stopping for Anselm’s consent or even a sign that he was ready, she plunged her eager fingers down to the flies of his ever-ordinary grey trousers, seized the tab of the zip, ripped it to the bottom, tore open the little hooked catch above, yanked down trousers and shorts.

  *

  Plainly she had not heard the quick rap at the door, if there had been one. But what in the next instant she became aware of was that the door had been pushed wide open, almost banging into Anselm, his trousers down to his knees, and that Handy Andy, Detective Inspector Anderson, was standing there, a slow smile beginning to spread across his clean-cut tanned face.

  ‘Get out.’

  She must have spoken with such force, the force she was accustomed to use to suppress any street yobbo who tried it on with her, that Handy Andy at once took a step back, crestfallen.

  She pushed Anselm aside, sent him stumbling, hog-tied by his trousers, and slammed the door closed.

  For a moment or two she stood there, breathing heavily while Anselm contrived to right himself and haul up his heavy trousers.

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ she said to him at last. ‘Christ, I don’t know what that clever sod’s going to make of this. And it was all my fault, all my fault. You know what my husband believes? He has a theory that sex lies at the root of almost every happening, good or bad, in the world. The overhanging cloud, he calls it. Well, God knows, this has just proved how right he is.’

  ‘Look,’ Anselm said, carefully zipping up, still pale from shock. ‘Look, if ... Well, if it’d help at all, I’d gladly put in my resignation.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, listen. If I had any doubts about loving you before, about whether I should love you, whether it was somehow wrong to love you, then they’ve gone now. Every single one of them.’

  ‘No, you listen. That bugger’s going to go round the whole place, round the whole of Greater Birchester Police as like as not, telling everybody what he saw. Making out it was worse than it was, if I know anything. And I’m not going to let that happen to you. Be made a fool of in front of everyone who’d built you up as the Hard Detective, the one who set the example of how a police officer should be. No, it’s the only way to deal with it, saying it was my fault. He won’t be able to deny it. He hardly had time to see what was what, only that I was there with my pants half-way down my legs. If I say I was —’

  He came to a halt. A blush rose up on to his cheeks that, at the height of the crisis a few minutes earlier, had act
ually gone pale almost as paper.

  ‘Oh, Anselm. Anselm, darling. I know what you were going to say. You were going to tell people you initiated the whole business. That you were — oh, God, how is it they put it? — attempting my virtue.’

  She laughed. She could not help it.

  ‘Oh, Anselm, my dear. Oh, Christ, you’re so sweet, and so good. Damn, damn, damn it, I don’t deserve you.’

  She gulped down something. A tear? A choking in her throat?

  ‘But you weren’t attempting my virtue, were you? The boot was altogether on the other foot. And I’m certainly not going to allow you to make a martyr of yourself. Damn it all, you’re a good copper. A place like Levenham, like the whole of Leven Vale, needs someone like you. Someone with persistence, determination, someone who’s not going to let crime go undetected if there’s anything he can do about it. So, no. Whatever we do about what happened when you came in just now, it’s not going to be dealt with by you resigning. Or, for the matter of that, by me resigning. I know my worth. And, this is something I wouldn’t say to anyone else, I’m a bloody good police officer. I’m the famous media-created Hard Detective, and I’m damn well going to stay that way.’

  She walked back over to her desk, exhausted. Slumped down. Sat in silence.

  Then she lifted up her head.

  ‘No, I see what can be done now. First of all, you are going on leave. You’ve been working seven days a week ever since you were called to see Bubbles Xingara’s body, there beside the little trickling Leven, and you bloody well ought to have some time off. So, two weeks’ leave, starting today. That’s an order. And I’ll tell you what I’ll do myself. Just before you came in, I’d had a call from the FBI. They’ve found this fellow Cacoyannis for us. He’s working as a barman in Newport, Rhode Island. Well, someone should question him, and I’m damn well going to do it myself.’

  She gave Anselm a smile, or a show of one.

  And with any luck, with both of us off the scene, and Anderson enjoying himself being in charge of things here, there won’t be too much fall-out.’

  ‘But — But, well, are you sure?’

  She smiled again, more easily now.

  ‘No, not sure. Certainly not perfectly sure. But more or less sure, perhaps. Come here and kiss me.’

  He took a step towards her, stopped, looked over at the door.

  She laughed.

  ‘Okay, here’s the key. Now, come on. But a kiss and no more, all right?’

  It was a kiss and no more. But Harriet made sure it was a lingering one.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Too early, Harriet had realized, for the much-praised glories of New England in the Fall. But there was pleasure here in Newport all the same. The hoped-for but always doubted pleasure of the loosening of Aphrodite’s entwining hair. Two days away from quiet Levenham and amid the glare and hustle of America at its busy and bustling best, she found she was able almost all the time not to think of Anselm, and that she was thinking of John only to compare his accounts of his business trips to the States against her own first-time impressions.

  Whether or not this was her true state, she did not dare investigate. Enough that, for the time being at least, it seemed she was free of those long pale-golden tresses. If this was an illusion, well, it was one worth cherishing for the peace of mind it gave, if for nothing else.

  Only once or twice her mind went back to Levenham and that outwardly comical scene when the thunderbolt from ever-hovering Eros had smashed through some narrow gap in her defences and Handy Andy had burst in on herself and trouserless Anselm. But when the, in fact, not-so-comical sight came back to her she quickly told herself that this time-out, away from it all, was the last opportunity life was giving her to escape.

  If it was an opportunity.

  And now, accompanied by unabashedly handsome, life-glowing FBI Agent Fernandez — ‘Ma’am, call me Chuck’ — who was making no impact at all on her sexually, she was walking along Newport’s Bellevue Avenue, as bright and hustle-bustling as she had expected America to be.

  ‘Okay, here we are,’ Chuck Fernandez said, pointing to a canopy stretching out over the sidewalk on the other side of the street. ‘According to my information one Michael Cacoyannis should be on duty in the Horseshoe Piazza bar inside there right now.’

  Harriet felt a slight tightening of her muscles.

  Was she at last about to confront the man who had gone creeping across the fields towards Adam and Eve House in its calmly rural setting that June morning, nearly three months ago, carrying with him a long, 800-gram javelin. But where had an American ex-tennis coach got hold of such a weapon? And how had he hit on the notion that something as silent would be his best way of putting an end to Bubbles Xingara’s life and getting away with it?

  Chuck Fernandez cheerfully pushed open the Casino’s heavy entrance doors.

  Harriet felt as if she had stepped from up-to-the-minute Bellevue Avenue, all sleek shiny cars smoothly manoeuvring past each other and shops with names like Fotomat, into the world of a hundred years before. A long, ornately built piazza looked on to a tennis court of the smoothest, lushest grass that might have been tended and cared for over the years by the gardeners of an English cathedral close.

  ‘The Hall of Fame court,’ Agent Fernandez murmured in church-interior tones.

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet said.

  ‘What you see round it is the canopy of the Hall of Fame restaurant, a place of fine dignity, together with the Casino administration and the Hall of Fame itself.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Harriet stood in respectful silence for a count of fifty. Then she turned to Chuck Fernandez.

  ‘And the bar?’ she said.

  ‘Through here, ma’am, and I doubt if at this hour there’ll be many drinkers there, if any.’

  The bar was as long and as glinting and as bottle-backed as Harriet had expected, and, as Agent Fernandez had forecast, it was empty of drinkers. Only behind it there stood, forearms resting on the polished surface, the man who must be Michael Cacoyannis. Big-built, dark hair cut short, shiny with some oily preparation, close-shaved cheeks almost black, pudgy misshapen nose, a heavy-lipped, sensuous mouth, eyes mistily brown under thick tangled eyebrows.

  Harriet marched over to him, aware of Chuck Fernandez dropping a pace or two back.

  ‘Michael Cacoyannis?’

  An immediate look of wary suspicion, a gathering-up of his whole thick frame.

  My English accent, Harriet thought. So has he reason to be wary of someone from England demanding his name? Is there something he did in England not so long ago that makes him suspicious of anyone from there?

  ‘I asked: are you Michael Cacoyannis?’

  ‘What’s that to you, lady?’

  ‘This.’

  She thrust her warrant card under that pudgy nose.

  ‘Detective Superintendent Martens, making inquiries concerning the death of Bubbles Xingara.’

  Now the wary look was altogether evident on the dark face.

  ‘Look, this is America. You ain’t got no business here.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I have. I’m making an authorized inquiry.’

  ‘Anyhow, Bubbles Xingara ain’t anything to do with me.’

  ‘Nonsense. You were her coach for three years. Until you were dismissed for attempting sexual intercourse with her.’

  ‘Attempting sex — hey, that’s a damn lie.’

  ‘No, it’s the plain truth. You attempted to rape Bubbles Xingara. She told Peter Renshaw. And he punished you in his own way and saw that you were dismissed.’

  ‘That yellow-belly. He couldn’t punish a damn fly.’

  ‘Nevertheless he gave you enough of a beating to make you leave the country pretty damn quickly.’

  ‘If I was kicked out as Bubbles’ coach, then what the hell was I going to do in lousy Limeyland?’

  ‘So why did you go back there?’

  ‘Who says I did?’

  ‘The Immigration Service officer w
ho examined your passport when you arrived, just before the tournament at Eastbourne. And his colleague who inspected it when you left confirms that you did so within a few days of Bubbles Xingara’s death.’

  ‘You accusing me, or what?’

  ‘I am asking you some questions. Depending on the answers you give, I shall ask Agent Fernandez of the FBI here to detain you to await extradition. Or not.’

  ‘The hell you will.’

  ‘One more reply of that sort and you’ll be on your way to a cell. Now, where did you get hold of the javelin?’

  A look of incomprehension on the dark close-shaved face in front of her.

  But genuine incomprehension? Or, if he had in his mind at this moment a picture of himself creeping with that silent weapon towards Adam and Eve House, the quick necessary attempt to pretend he had not understood?

  ‘What the heck are you saying, you — Javelin? What’s a javelin?’

  Surely he must know. Like many liars, going too far?

  ‘Don’t tell me someone into sports like you doesn’t know what a javelin is.’

  Then a slowly appearing look of recognition. Genuine, or put on?

  ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah, one of them spear things they have in athletics. Never had any use for that sort of fancy sport, me. But I know what you mean. A javelin, yeah.’

  ‘So, where did you get hold of the javelin you used?’

  ‘Hey, yes. I remember. What I read about little Bubbles when she was killed. Didn’t they say it was a stabbing with some sort of spiked mystery weapon?’

  ‘And you are saying now that you were not the man who used that javelin?’

  ‘I was not.’

  ‘Very well, so where were you on June the twentieth?’

  That’s weeks and weeks ago. How the heck should I know where I was then.’

  ‘I take it that means you deny being on that day at about the hour of six a.m. in the vicinity of Adam and Eve House, home of Bubbles Xingara?’

  And at last the implacable questioning began to show results.