A Narrow Return

by Faith Martin

  And that would be a problem. When the bosses talked about the CRT he wanted it to be his name that came first. He was, after all, still a serving officer and relatively young. Hillary Greene, for all her assets, was now a retired civilian consultant.

  And he would have to make sure that nobody, including herself, ever forgot that.

  ‘This is fine,’ she said, breaking him out of his reverie, and making his lips twist in a grimace.

  ‘It’s barely adequate,’ he contradicted her flatly, ‘but it’s the best I could do,’ he added, totally truthfully. Space down here was problematic at the best of times, and not even he could magic a decent office for her, Donleavy’s pet or not.

  She nodded, her expression utterly unreadable. And it popped into his head that he wouldn’t like to play poker with this woman.

  The overhead lighting was making her hair gleam a deeper red than usual, and as she moved behind her desk and sat down, she gave the printer underneath it an accidental kick, which brought his eyes down to her legs.

  And very shapely they were too.

  He quickly dragged his eyes back up. He had enough trouble with the Tyrell girl mooning over him. The last thing he needed was to attract any spurious sexual-harassment charges his way. Not that Hillary Greene was the sort who’d do that. Everything he knew about her told him that if he started making overtures in that direction, he’d be more likely to get a knee in his groin rather than a formal complaint lodged against him.

  Not that that was ever going to be an issue, of course. He knew all about that poor sod Paul Danvers – the whole station house did. Her former boss, DCI Danvers had fancied her for years, and had never got anywhere, much to everyone’s amusement. And Steven Crayle had no intention of becoming another butt of station house jokes.

  ‘I’ll just go and get you your first file,’ he said, abruptly turning around and vanishing.

  Hillary sat in her chair, her face thoughtful. Then she glanced around and grimaced. Well, one thing was for sure, she wasn’t going to be spending much time in here. In fact, if she had been at all claustrophobic she’d already be climbing the walls. Then again, if she had been at all claustrophobic she wouldn’t be living on a narrowboat.

  She stashed her handbag in the large empty bottom drawer of her desk and turned on her computer. She’d need a password. She turned if off again, sighed, then looked up as Crayle reappeared.

  ‘I thought you might like this now. You’re not supposed to take it out of the building of course, but …’ he shrugged and gave a brief smile. Hillary got it at once. She could take it out, but don’t get caught.

  ‘Right, guv,’ she said. She used his title without giving it a conscious thought but for some reason the simple acknowledgement of his status made him blink and take a quick breath.

  ‘Er, right. I’ll let you get on with it then. I take it you’ll be starting straight away?’

  Hillary smiled grimly. ‘Looks like it, doesn’t it,’ she said dryly. So much for being cautious.

  Crayle nodded and returned to his own office. There he poured himself a mug of coffee and sat down, drinking thoughtfully.

  So that was the legendary Hillary Greene.

  From her personnel file, he knew she was going to be fifty in just a few weeks’ time, but she looked much younger. For some reason he just hadn’t expected her to be so attractive. For days now he’d speculated about her, seeing her as a potential threat, rival, or even a possible liability. After all, she’d stood at the side of her old friend, Mel Mallow when he’d been shot dead, and on her last case, a former colleague had also died. But for all that, she didn’t have the reputation of being a Jonah; but you never knew.

  He shrugged off all this speculation about just another consultant on his team, and brought his mind firmly back to work. And with that, he smiled wolfishly.

  Well, Donleavy had told him to give her only murder cases and who was he to disoblige a superior officer? In fact, it had given him great satisfaction to go through his back files and pick out the hardest, coldest, meanest ones that he could find.

  Now he could just sit back and see what the station legend was really made of. And it would certainly be interesting to see how Donleavy’s blue-eyed girl tackled the impossible!

  Back in her stationery cupboard, Hillary Greene stared down at the slightly grimy folder on her desk. The case file was thick, as she supposed most of the cold cases would be, since the investigation had already been done and dusted. No doubt this was just the basic brief. There were bound to be boxes and boxes of other stuff relating to the murder victim stored away somewhere. All of which would have to be gone through carefully.

  It felt odd to be coming onto a case where the victim had been dead for twenty years.

  Nevertheless, it beat idling away her days, desperately trying to find something to do.

  With a happy sigh, she opened the file and began to read.

  Mrs Anne McRae, née Carter, born on 2 February 1956, had been found dead in her home in the village of Chesterton on 6 June 1991, by her 13-year-old daughter Lucy.

  Hillary took a deep breath, trying not to imagine the kind of trauma that moment must have been for a young girl. Or how it must have blighted her life ever since.

  The victim was married, with three children, the eldest at the time being a boy named Peter, aged fifteen, the youngest, a girl of eleven, named Jennifer. All three children had been at school on the day of the murder. The victim’s husband, Melvin McRae drove a coach for a holiday firm, and had been returning from a continental tour on the day of his wife’s death. His alibi had been closely checked, of course.

  He’d spent the previous week in the Netherlands with his forty-or-so passengers, and had just returned to the UK that very day. He had been at the coach station, returning his vehicle at the time the pathologist had estimated as time of death.

  Questioning of all forty passengers confirmed that he’d been with them all that day, and had dropped the last five people off at the final drop-off point in Oxford at 2.45 p.m. The office and garage staff confirmed that he’d arrived in their depot at Weston-on-the-Green at 3.05 p.m.. This wouldn’t have given him time to go home to Chesterton and kill his wife, even if he had found somewhere inconspicuous to park a large grey and white touring coach. Even his mileage and been checked and confirmed – there had been no little detours.

  Melvin McRae had still been at the garage, going through his time sheets and paperwork when a uniform had come to inform him of his wife’s death and to escort him back home. The bobby who’d picked him up, a 50-year-old veteran whom Hillary remembered from her youth as having a wise head on his shoulders and not being someone easily fooled by good acting or superb lying, had been in no doubt that his shock and grief had been genuine.

  ‘Exit the husband,’ Hillary mused out loud, then clamped her mouth shut. Hard. At least in her solitary splendour in her stationery cupboard nobody had heard her talking to herself.

  She sighed, and returned to the file.

  Anne McRae, according to the path report, had died some time between two and five o’clock in the afternoon. She’d last been seen in the back garden by a neighbour around lunch time. She lived in a small cul-de-sac of council houses, which were probably mostly privately owned by now, and had been there since her marriage, so the whole family was well known. Cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, but there were no surprises there. The murder weapon, a wooden rolling pin, had been found beside the body, bearing traces of her blood, hair and brain tissue.

  Hillary studied the scene-of-crime photos and grimaced. Unfortunately, the surface of the rolling pin wasn’t much use for fingerprints, as most were smudged, and the only partial prints they could identify belonged, not surprisingly, to the family members.

  DI Andrew Squires was SIO, and from what Hillary could tell over the course of a solid three hours’ reading, had done a good and thorough job on the McRae case.

  Which was a relief. The last thing she’
d wanted to find was a shoddy job.

  But Squires had very quickly discovered everything there was to know about the victim, and as far as she could see, had covered every lead doggedly.

  Married at just eighteen, Anne had her three children in quick succession, but had retained her youthful looks and figure with regular keep-fit sessions at a local sports hall. From the photographs of her, she had been an attractive blonde woman, five feet four inches tall, with green eyes and a large smile. She seemed to be both popular and well-liked by her neighbours, had a healthy number of friends and outside interests, and volunteered a few hours a week at a charity shop in the nearby market town of Bicester.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, given that her husband’s job meant that he was away for weeks at a time, Squires had been keenly interested to find out if the lady had indulged in adultery and quickly discovered that indeed she had.

  With her own sister’s husband no less.

  Hillary gave a silent whistle, guessing at once where this was going to go.

  And sure enough, Anne’s elder sister Debbie, married to one Shane Gregg, quickly became Squires’s prime suspect. It didn’t take him long to discover that Debbie, elder, plainer, and less popular than her sister, had always resented her younger sibling. She had no alibi for the time of her sister’s murder, and, living in Bicester, had easy access. She was resentful and bitter on interview, and subsequently left her husband within weeks of her sister’s murder. But the lack of both physical evidence, and witnesses thwarted Squires.

  As Debbie had, of course, visited her sister’s house on numerous occasions – Christmas and so on – any traces of her in the house hardly proved conclusive one way or another. And although Squires pressed her hard there was no confession. Worse still, although house-to-house went on for weeks afterwards and wide publicity was given in the local press asking for any witnesses to come forward, nobody was ever found who could place Debbie Gregg at her sister’s house on the afternoon that she was killed.

  Not that Squires concentrated on her to the exclusion of everyone else, Hillary noted with approval. It was very easy for a investigator to become obsessed with a fixed idea, or – the gravest of all sins – start trying to force evidence to fit around his pet theory. But Squires hadn’t succumbed to the lure of either of these.

  The lover, the victim’s brother-in-law Shane Gregg was gone over with a fine-tooth comb as well. But he’d been at work in his office in Summertown all day. The manager of a car sales showroom, he’d had witnesses in the form of his secretary, and several forecourt salesmen who confirmed that he hadn’t left the premises all day. He even ate in his office, since he’d been keen to sell a fleet of cars to a Japanese computer outfit that was relocating to Oxford and wanted some top-of-the-range vehicles for its executive staff and didn’t want to miss their arrival.

  So, exit the lover.

  Squires had even made sure that all of the victim’s children had been in school all day – they all had – and as far as possible, ruled out any of the neighbours. Nobody seemed to have – or would admit to having – any kind of a grudge against the victim.

  Nothing was stolen from the house. A single strand of unidentified hair was found on the victim’s body, the DNA of which couldn’t be matched to anyone in Anne’s life.

  According to the husband, the victim’s behaviour hadn’t changed at all; she was outgoing and busy and happy right up to the end. There’d been no threatening letters or phone call, no sign of a stalker, or a disgruntled ex-boyfriend in the wings.

  As far as Squires could ascertain, Shane Gregg had been the victim’s only extra-marital affair, and Debbie Gregg had sworn up and down that she didn’t know about it.

  From his case notes, it was clear that DI Squires didn’t believe that, although he was inclined to believe that the husband, Melvin McRae, had had absolutely no idea about his wife’s affair.

  Here Hillary broke off and sighed. That was the trouble with reading something years old. She wanted to see the husband for herself and assess his reactions with her own two eyes. But of course, all of this had happened two decades ago. The man would have had twenty years to grow calluses over his emotional wounds and become inured to his loss.

  She was used to being on the spot and in the moment, but now she felt distanced and wrong-footed. She was seeing this only from Squire’s perspective, and although she hadn’t, as yet, any reason to doubt him or his conclusions, it wasn’t the same as making her own observations and deductions.

  She couldn’t wait to get out there and start doing stuff herself.

  She stretched her arms and arched her back, hearing her bones click. She wasn’t used to sitting still for so long, and, needing to stretch her legs, got up and walked across the corridor and poked her head into the other room.

  ‘What do you do for lunch around here?’ she asked vaguely, and Sam Pickles held up a tupperware lunch box, from which he extracted a sandwich.

  ‘We nearly always bring our own,’ he said, unnecessarily.

  ‘I was just thinking of going up to the canteen, guv,’ Jimmy Jessop said diffidently.

  Hillary silently blessed him and wondered if he used the term ‘guv’ simply out of habit, or if he had sensed her unease earlier.

  ‘Has it improved any in the last eighteen months?’ she asked with a grin.

  ‘Doubt it, guv,’ Jimmy said with grin of his own. ‘There’s always the Black Bull.’

  ‘Done. Sam, Vivienne?’

  ‘Not me, guv, I’ve already eaten,’ Sam Pickles said at once, picking up on Jimmy’s wording without seeming to notice. ‘Besides, I’ve got seven more folders to get through and get back to Sergeant Handley before I can clock off.’

  ‘I’m not here this afternoon,’ Vivienne said quickly.

  Hillary nodded and went back to her cupboard to get her bag. This part-time thing that her fellow team members took for granted was going to take some getting used to, she mused. And she tried to remember that she wasn’t living in the good old days any more. She didn’t have hot and cold running constables to order about and see to her every whim now.

  ‘You got a car, Jimmy?’ she asked, meeting the older man back in the corridor.

  ‘Yes, guv, but it’s nothing much.’

  Hillary laughed. ‘It’s got to be better than my transport. I’ve only got a push bike at the moment.’ Seeing his surprise, she smiled. ‘I live on a narrowboat. Moored up in Thrupp. Getting a car is going to have to be a top priority, I can see. You don’t know anyone with a reliable second-hand banger for sale do you?’

  ‘Not off hand, guv, but I’ll keep my eyes open,’ he said obligingly.

  Hillary thanked him as they set off for the car park, where it turned out that Jimmy Jessop owned a dark green five-year-old neat hatchback, which he drove with casual but impressive skill.

  ‘Something about the way you walk and talk reminds me of the military, Jimmy,’ she said as they headed out onto the main road.

  ‘Yes, guv. I joined the army when I was twenty, and then got turfed out when I was thirty-five. They like their grunts young and fit. I joined the police force straight away. Left when I was sixty.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘Married?’

  ‘Was, guv. The wife died a few years ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Jimmy Jessop shrugged. ‘That’s life, I suppose. Anyway, after retiring with all these plans – me and the missus were going to go on a cruise, get an allotment, you know, all that sort of thing.’ He sighed and touched his brakes as a prat in a Mazda cut him up at the traffic lights. ‘I suddenly found myself on my own in a nice little flat out by the canal, with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs all day long. Turns out I can’t grow a cabbage to save my life, so I gave up the allotment, and when I saw CRT advertising for us old codgers, I jumped at the chance.’

  ‘Regret it?’

  ‘Not so far, guv,’ Jimmy said cautiously and Hillary grinned. As she’d suspected, he was a man after her own heart.r />
  In the pub, Hillary began to pump him gently for information about Pickles and Tyrell and – even more delicately – about Crayle.

  ‘Sam’s going to be all right, guv, I reckon,’ Jimmy said, over his ploughman’s lunch. ‘Bright lad, a bit green still, but he’s got enough stuffing in him to make a go of it. The little madam’s another matter. She’s one of these butterfly types, must have had a dozen jobs since leaving school and can’t stick at any of them.’

  Hillary grinned. ‘Not a Vivienne fan then, hmm? I thought those big brown eyes of hers would melt butter at fifty paces.’

  Jimmy Jessop grinned and bit into a lump of cheddar. ‘I dare say they could at that. But she’s been wasting her time trying to melt the super and not having much luck, which has come as a bit of a nasty shock for her. Still, better that than her trying it on with Sam. She’d have that lanky loon in a puddle at her feet before you could spit.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘What’s Crayle like to work for?’ she asked neutrally, and trying not to feel too pleased at the fact that Steven Crayle, unlike most men, seemed able to resist temptation when it was flaunted under his nose.

  Jimmy Jessop leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his half a shandy. ‘Clever, I reckon. And ambitious, of course, that goes without saying. But he knows what he’s doing. In spite of his looks, he’s been a decent enough thief-taker in his time. Divorced now for a few years, with a couple of kids, nearly fully grown. He’s straight with you, I’ll say that for him, but I wouldn’t want to get on his bad side. All in all, I’ve worked for worse.’

  Hillary snorted. ‘Tell me about it.’

  Jimmy Jessop said nothing. He knew that she and a certain superintendent had crossed swords in the past, with the Super in question now licking his wounds up in Hull, and his career prospects in tatters.

  He looked at her over his drink and thought that here was another one that he wouldn’t want to cross either. Not that she wasn’t a totally different kettle of fish from Crayle. Steven Crayle would make a great muckety-muck one day, but give him a copper like Hillary Greene any day. He was still looking forward to working with her, and the more he got to know her, the more relaxed he felt.