Cold Pursuit

by Judith Cutler

  ‘Nearly as long as yours? Come on, how many times have I had to kick my heels here while you finished some document the Home Office wanted yesterday? How else do you think I’ve managed to get my paperwork up to date and my desk so tidy?’ she added.

  ‘I’m glad it served some useful purpose, anyway. But now your desk will be cluttered again, and it may be me waiting for you. Maybe we should revert to taking two cars again.’ He sounded resigned, gloomy, even, rather than critical.

  ‘Why don’t you pull over and we’ll talk this through? You’re obviously not happy,’ she continued, as he took no apparent notice. ‘Is it because we shall find ourselves in professional disagreement from time to time? Like this morning, when I could have wrung your neck for banging on about Jill’s virtues? Because we’ve managed before. I’m sure we will again.’

  For answer he dropped his hand from the wheel on to hers again, flashing the smile that took ten years off him. ‘If you’re happy, I’m happy.’

  It wasn’t quite enough. The old Fran wanted to nag and worry at it, but the new one would try to take everything he’d said at face value, hard though it sometimes was. Now wasn’t the moment for a heart to heart, anyway. One of their colleagues was giving the blues and twos to all before him as he tried to make the red sea of rush hour tail-lights part. Mark pulled neatly on to the kerb, and then dropped back onto the road.

  ‘At least neither of us has to work shifts,’ he said, nodding at the vanishing tail-lights, ‘like that poor bugger. Rush hour RTA I suppose. I always hated dealing with crashes after dark – worse than in daylight, with everything rendered ghastly by the emergency vehicles’ lights. And the blood a funny colour…’ He changed tone deliberately and audibly. ‘Now, can I pop into my house before we go on to yours?’

  ‘We can stay at yours if needs be. I’ve got plenty of clothes there.’ Not to mention her make-up, laptop and yellow Marigolds, still on his draining board after her determined and possibly vain efforts to clean his oven. During his wife’s last illness, though he had mastered the roast – to perfection, Fran was the first to declare – he’d never realised the concomitant part of roasting meat and potatoes, cleaning the oven. Since she had systematically neglected her gutters, and, indeed, much other house maintenance while she made regular dashes to Devon to help keep her aged parents in their own home, he offered reciprocal help.

  At least she no longer had to worry about her parents. Her father had died after a fall, and her mother was now in Scotland, ruling the roost in a retirement home and battling daily with her older daughter, an activity both seemed to enjoy, though neither as much as her brother-in-law, who might have set the whole thing up simply for his entertainment.

  For the first time in twenty years, she was free – to do anything she wanted.

  Except now her cottage had decided to interfere. On the outskirts of the picture postcard village of Lenham, it was absorbing effort like three-dimensional blotting paper, and she found herself rationing the time they spent there. Mark’s work life was as exhausting as hers, and he needed to relax as much as she did.

  ‘Let’s eat and then decide where we stay,’ he suggested.

  In other words, yes. It made sense. So he turned off to Loose, the village – more like a suburb of Maidstone – where he lived in an Edwardian house she always found forbidding. Loose, home to a Thomas Telford bridge, was correctly pronounced to rhyme with whose, but provided them with endless opportunities to pun. She rather thought the pretty Victorian ring she sported on her engagement finger might be a response to jocular colleagues’ suggestions she was a Loose Woman, since neither she nor Mark had ever mentioned marriage.

  If, in the kitchen, he was a roast man, she – since their thirty years of friendship had blossomed into love a couple of months ago – was a quick and speedy woman. She had graduated from supermarket-prepared stir-fries with the aid of a pile of books. Jill Dupleix, Nigel Slater, and Jamie Oliver were all her heroes now. Some lodged in her kitchen, some in his, friends supporting her when occasionally she was all too aware of the ghost of Tina, Mark’s late wife, hovering over her shoulder to offer intimidating advice. The shelves of jams, pickles and chutneys testified to her industry. Or perhaps the poor woman had just wanted to leave something behind when she’d gone. Was that how Mark saw them, as a culinary memorial? Certainly she’d never seen him eat any preserve from their ranks.

  ‘Do we need a supermarket run?’ he asked.

  ‘Not after last night’s! There’s plenty in the fridge.’

  ‘Champagne to celebrate your decision?’

  ‘Probably some of that, too.’

  ‘I can think of another way to celebrate, too.’

  ‘So can I!’ And the jars in the kitchen paled into insignificance.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I’ve been searching for you, my darling, so very long, and now I’ve found you at last. I can’t wait to see you again.

  Jill Tanner was looking around her new base with less than enthusiasm, though Cosmo had installed her in the quite palatial surroundings of Henson’s office. ‘If this is Henson’s room, shouldn’t you have moved in here?’

  Hierarchically, Fran should have done. ‘I’m happy where I am,’ she said, offhand.

  It was one thing to admit to Jill as a friend the reason she wanted to stay put, but quite another to admit it to Jill as an officer working under her. Mark had allocated her office to her when she was at a particularly low point in her personal life. He had also organised its redecoration and had it furnished, and she liked to think of it as his first love token.

  ‘I suppose it’s very chic,’ Tanner said doubtfully, touching the blond wood desk. ‘But I hate to think how much of the budget this has consumed. And it’s a bit…sort of male, isn’t it?’

  Fran grinned. ‘I’m sure you’ll get rid of any nasty vibes Henson’s left lying around – they’ll be black and spiky, should you come across them.’

  ‘And I bin them? Or try to recycle them?’

  ‘Definitely don’t put them in the green bin, or they’ll contaminate everything. That yellow medical sharps bucket in the FME’s room should do the job. Now, you know where everything is, you’ve met the team, and you’re ready to go. And you promise to let me have any tiny tasks no one else wants – just so I keep my hand in.’

  ‘On those days when you don’t have wall-to-wall meetings?’

  It should have sounded like a joke, but didn’t. It didn’t sound like matey sarcasm, either. It sounded more like an anxious plea for professional hand-holding, as it were, as if the room blurred her confidence, even though only a moment ago she’d been joking with Fran as an equal.

  ‘I’d welcome anything to provide an excuse to keep the meetings short. Some of those Home Office guys think all we have to do is formulate impossible policies. They forget we have to implement them.’

  At least that provoked a laugh. ‘And you want to come to our briefings?’

  ‘Whenever I can. So long as no one thinks it’s to check up on you. That stint working on my own to sort out that Persistent Vegetative State victim case was an eye-opener: I’d forgotten the adrenaline rush that comes when you’re on the chase.’ She smiled reminiscently. She checked her watch. ‘Hell, is there such a thing as an adrenaline drain?’

  Jill must have seen her sneak into the back of the Major Incident Room as she was in mid-spiel but she didn’t so much as falter. ‘…So I want us to interview every single young woman who has reported an assault, however trivial it may seem. Even if it doesn’t appear to be part of our pattern, log it. I’m sure the government would be delighted if we introduced a zero tolerance policy on violence towards women.’

  ‘Does that include domestic violence?’ came a male voice from the front, the groan implicit.

  ‘Under Chief Superintendent Harman’s regime it always has, or so I understood.’ Jill strained to see. ‘Has anything changed, guv?’

  Fran stood up. ‘Not that I know of. Now, I should imagine
we’ll pick up some girl-on-girl violence. Policy is to treat that seriously, whether it’s casual bullying or happy-slapping. Hell, what’s happened to a society where kids gratuitously assault an innocent victim purely for the pleasure of showing as many people as possible what they’ve done?’ There was a murmur of agreement, not altogether to do with her rank, she hoped. ‘Now, I want to stress, everyone, that I’m part of this team, neither more nor less. My obvious role will be backstage, to expedite any equipment or back-up you need. But I’m also here as another pair of hands should you need them.’ She waved them, palms out, fingers straight, like a stiff puppet. ‘Part of the team,’ she repeated. ‘Not its leader. That’s DCI Tanner. Is that clear? Great.’ Suppressing an urge to ask what they’d found so far, sitting down firmly, she looked back at Jill. It was her call.

  Accepting it, Jill pointed to the map affixed to the whiteboard. ‘You can see these clusters are similar to those originally shown on TVInvicta’s piece.’

  A correspondent from Tunbridge Wells could now quite legitimately sign himself ‘Disgusted’ – a couple of girls from a quite exclusive seminary had been goosed in the Great Hall Arcade, and another young woman complained of similar treatment in Royal Victoria Arcade. All three assaults had taken place in broad daylight within about three hours of each other the previous Saturday. The MacArthur Glen Outlet, a shopping mall near Ashford, reported a man hanging round near one set of ladies loos, but the CCTV had failed to pick him up. In Canterbury things were rather more serious, with flashing involved. The same in Dover and Folkestone. The series – if series it was – had sprung up quite suddenly, as if someone had flicked a switch.

  A hand went up. It was Tom Arkwright’s. Fran had worked closely with him before, and had him down as a bright and enthusiastic lad who was more sensitive than would be comfortable for him if he wanted to stay in the force. ‘Guv, is there anything to link all these other than the TV news? They don’t seem to have any connection at all – not from what I can see, like,’ he added, as if he’d gone too far.

  ‘One peculiarity in the MO for one thing – at least in the flashing incidents,’ Jill responded. ‘It seems that when he’s finished wanking, Chummie likes to wipe what his willy’s produced on to the victim’s clothes. And seminal fluid has been found on the clothing of the girls who complain of being groped.’

  It wouldn’t have been Fran’s choice or words, but she couldn’t deny that Jill had everyone’s interest.

  ‘And one child – thirteen – had it wiped on her face.’

  ‘God, that’s sick! They didn’t mention it on the news, though,’ Tom reflected. ‘I suppose they wouldn’t, not before the watershed, like, would they?’

  ‘You never know with the media,’ someone observed darkly. ‘I suppose it’s the same DNA, guv?’

  ‘It is. But we have no other record of it on file. The guy’s a first offender.’

  ‘Then the attacks really are getting more overtly sexual?’ Tom again, surprising Fran with his change of tone and vocabulary. Well, that was what graduate entrants were supposed to do.

  ‘Not as far as we know, that face stuff apart. But kinky is as kinky does, and I don’t want him to get the chance of being any weirder. Nor – and I stress this absolutely – do we want this information to go beyond the team. Imagine what the media would make of it, especially the red tops. OK, to work, everyone. Get those computers sparking with information.’

  But a hand went up. ‘Any chance of anyone acting as bait? You know, a young PC?’

  Jill’s face didn’t so much as crack. ‘Chummie prefers thirteen-year-olds, DS Swann. Anything else?’

  ‘This is what you get when you’re media-driven, not crime-driven,’ Fran said, jabbing a canteen lunch cherry tomato with unnecessary violence. It responded by bursting all over her shirt. She tipped her bottle of water on to a tissue and scrubbed furiously.

  ‘For which that poor innocent tomato has just provided a perfect image,’ Mark suggested. ‘You poke away at something long and hard enough and you get a big mess. I think you’ve got rid of the stain now, but you’ve got tissue-fluff everywhere.’

  She had. She picked off individual shreds. ‘Loves me, loves me not…’ When she concluded on ‘loves me not’, in a rare public declaration, he replaced a speck. ‘Loves me!’ she beamed.

  He gave a furtive left-right check.

  In response, she put a finger to her lips, shrugging extravagantly. Didn’t everyone know, for goodness’ sake? But it was his whim to pretend their relationship was covered by the Official Secrets Act. In any case, did it still qualify as simply a relationship after all this time? Surely it would be more properly described as a partnership? But she still couldn’t refer to him as her partner without producing a mental image of herself and a spotty youth in a patrol car.

  She retrieved the conversation. ‘So you think we should press on the search for the phantom fingerer?’

  ‘It’s like the man says, you’ve started so you’ll have to finish.’

  ‘At least until the media simmer down,’ she agreed, pragmatically. ‘Or Henson returns and squashes everything.’ Their eyes met, and dropped to the tomato. The canteen rang with their laughter. ‘I did think,’ she added seriously, ‘of suggesting a profiler.’

  ‘But you know what the Chief thinks of them. And truly, it’s still pretty low level.’

  ‘Until it gets higher. And by then, if we’re not careful, he’ll have twigged we’ve got our eyes open and use a condom, which he’ll carefully remove from the scene.’

  Though a budget meeting kept her occupied all afternoon, the implications putting a huge question mark over the expense of a profiler before she’d even mooted the idea, she made a point of dropping in on Jill before she left.

  ‘I’ve just fielded my sixth phone call from a head teacher wanting one of us to talk to their girls,’ she wailed. ‘Sixth different head, I mean. How not to get groped. And I can see the point—’

  ‘You need someone to intercept your calls,’ Fran said, making a note to contact the switchboard and talk to Cosmo about finding a temporary secretary for her. ‘And you really don’t have to do all the talks yourself. How about Crime Prevention?’

  ‘They want positive female role models. Top brass.’

  Fran interrupted the hopeful glance with a basilisk stare. ‘And they all want the same thing?’ She frowned. ‘Are they some sort of educational mafia?’

  ‘They must have had some meeting or other – all posh girls’ schools.’

  ‘And you said?’

  Jill stuck out a lip, like a child caught in a fib. ‘See what I can do. Made no promises. But they’ll be back, I know they will.’ She stared at the handset with something like terror.

  ‘How about a female Crime Prevention team now and something like a tour of selected parts of the place when everything’s sorted? Nothing like a trip around HQ with all the sexy lads in uniform to help recruitment. Photo opportunities too.’

  Jill looked mulish. ‘For a load of posh girls who won’t ever have to work? Bugger that for a game of soldiers!’ So the class war wasn’t dead. ‘Are we going to turn out to every bog-standard comp?’ Bitter quotation marks inserted themselves almost visibly. ‘Every bog-standard secondary modern, this county being what it is? They’ll probably ask for crime prevention for just the grammar school kids, not the others, if I know them!’

  What could one say to a tirade like that? Nothing. But suddenly Fran’s brain fired in a quite different direction. ‘Is there, as a matter of interest, any breakdown of the educational background of the girls who’ve been groped? It might just be worth checking, Jill.’

  ‘Terminal neglect,’ Fran wailed, as Mark knelt with a pair of inadequate pliers trying to fix a loose toilet seat – loose as in not safely secured, and in Lenham. ‘What this place needs is a team of maintenance men devoting themselves to it for clear two weeks. And another couple of minions for the garden, full-time, in perpetuity.’

  ‘Fir
st find your maintenance men,’ he groaned. ‘That’s the best I can do, I’m afraid.’ He scrabbled to his feet. ‘How about that for your post-retirement career? A job in plumbing?’

  ‘First find your course. Last I heard, postgraduate scientists were queuing round the block for a college place. And I don’t so much need a plumber as a whole new bathroom and kitchen. Avocado: who’d imagine that it was the colour to die for once? Brand new when I bought the place – that’s why I’ve put up with it so long.’

  ‘That, and never being in the place to see it. How many years were you constantly careering down to Devon to your parents? On top of the sort of hours you always worked? Well, then. But there’s no reason not to change it now. You could move into my place full-time, for as long as it takes. In fact,’ he continued, perching beside her on the edge of the bath, ‘I was— Drat!’ He fished for his phone.

  Simultaneously she fished for hers. The message was the same. Another flashing incident, this time in Whitstable.

  ‘Gets around, doesn’t he?’ Mark observed. ‘No reason for either of us to dash to the seaside, is there? Not in the dark, at this time of night? Come on, Fran – this is a CID job, true, but you’ve got to let others do the legwork. You know that.’

  ‘So I do. And you. All we’ve got to do is pity the poor buggers out there and toast them with a single malt.’

  ‘All the same…’

  The police station in Whitstable was a part-time office, only open in shop-hours, and not even all of them. The policy always made Fran fume, as did the closure of local A and E units – in the interests, management inevitably asserted, of helping the public. As if a closed door with an inadequate answerphone link to the nearest nick was any substitute for a live bobby. So they headed to Canterbury, simply to assure, in Fran’s case, the parents that a senior woman officer was taking the child’s allegations seriously, and in Mark’s to appear to be showing a decent interest in the drones.