Cold Pursuit

by Judith Cutler

  Fran’s task was the more traumatic. A child of twelve had had her first contact with semen when a handful of the stuff had been wiped across her mouth and nose. She was still shuddering, still retching. Fran took her by the hands, and then responded as she wanted, by taking her in her arms and letting her cry.

  ‘I’ll get the bastard,’ she said, making a personal promise.

  On the grounds that they were in the city anyway, they headed off to a Vietnamese restaurant. Halfway through their main courses, Mark let slip that it was his late wife’s favourite.

  Had someone sucked all the nam pla from her curry? But she mustn’t get twitchy. She’d known and liked Tina, after all, and done all she could at work to take on Mark’s workload so he could spend time either at home or latterly at the hospice. Mark’s house wasn’t a shrine, any more than hers was to her fiancé, Ian, who’d died of a brain haemorrhage. But she’d never have told Mark about Ian’s favourite eateries. Tact or timidity? Was she afraid of upsetting him or irritating him?

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ he prompted her.

  ‘Long day.’

  ‘I know. But you were perky enough until we came here. I thought you liked Vietnamese.’ He sounded pained.

  ‘I do. I love it. And this is a brilliant restaurant. I once won a free meal here, in some church raffle.’

  He eyed her. ‘So you brought Ian.’

  So it was all right for him, but not for her? At least he’d had long loving years with Tina, whereas she and Ian weren’t even living together when one of her colleagues had brought the news of his death. She swallowed, trying very hard. ‘We both cart our ghosts round with us, don’t we? Ian only came here on sufferance, him being a fierce Indian curry man. He never found the same pleasure in other cuisines, no matter how spicy. But it was Tina’s favourite place.’ Her face was so taut it was hard to make the smile genuine.

  ‘Heavens, we can’t wipe out our histories! Even assuming we want to!’ He pushed away his bowl.

  ‘Of course we can’t. But we need to establish a mutual history, not exclusive ones.’

  He stared. ‘You’re not jealous of the dead!’

  ‘No. Yes. I probably am. Not jealous, but aware that there are great chunks of your life where I was just someone from work, just as you were simply the boss for me. Aren’t you aware of missing out on my life?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ At least he pulled his bowl back and started to eat again.

  She took a deep breath. ‘I just wish you’d known my body when I was young and slim and didn’t have saggy breasts and hair that needed help from a bottle of colour.’

  ‘I love you just as you are.’ For a declaration of love it sounded remarkably edgy.

  ‘And I you.’ But in a cubbyhole of her heart, one that must clearly remain firmly locked, she admitted that he might have been even sexier in his footballing and cricketing days, when he carried if possible less spare flesh than he did now. Only she’d never realised it, had she, and must just count herself extraordinarily lucky now. Many another man would have simply disciplined her for failing to do her job properly – she was sure that was what the Chief had told him to do. Instead he had found an imaginative way round her problems, and at some point had fallen in love with her. And she with him, quite painfully.

  Was there some rulebook for the mature lovers attempting to blend quite different lives? If not, there ought to be – and the first copy would leap into her hands. Teenage love was supposed to be the worst, wasn’t it, all acne and hormones. But no one could tell her that middle-aged hormones weren’t just as vicious, either when they were absent or when they came surging in almost uninvited, crowding an already overfull life and landing you with two houses neither of which you both liked, both demanding attention with the insistence of an incontinent geriatric.

  ‘In fact,’ she said, dabbing her lips and smiling, ‘I’m not sure I want to bother with a dessert. What about you?’ At least bed – or the living room floor – was one place they could always resolve their problems.

  ‘Does watching the late news count as work?’ she asked later over a Glenfiddich. ‘Come on, yes or no?’

  ‘Well,’ he considered, pulling her feet on to his lap, and massaging away the day’s cares, ‘it all depends. Yes and no, I’d say. Depending on whether you want to watch it or ought to watch it.’

  ‘If I don’t it’s work?’

  ‘You might want to pick up the football results in which case it’s not work.’

  The work story was actually the main one after the break. ‘Parents all over Kent are threatening to keep their daughters at home after the latest attack on a teenage girl in Whitstable. This attack, worse than the others which have shocked parents and terrified young girls throughout the county and led to threats to boycott schools, is number twenty-three overall, and the seventh this month.’ The reporter was Dilly Pound, the woman who had been so pressing at Wednesday’s press conference. She reminded Fran of a schoolteacher, in her calm delivery – somewhat at odds with the emotive language of the report. A familiar computer graphic obligingly showed each cluster of offences.

  ‘Is that true?’ Mark asked, dropping her foot abruptly. ‘Is there really a school boycott?’

  ‘I’d certainly want to know if there was – and not via TV!’

  Suddenly Jill Tanner’s face was on the screen, her hair blown into a frenzied halo.

  ‘That can’t be Tanner!’ Mark dropped Fran’s feet. ‘She looks more like a bag lady than the senior officer in charge of a sensitive case,’ he added, strongly disapproving.

  ‘Blame the lighting,’ Fran agreed. ‘We’ve got a perfectly good room for interviews like this, so why have they dragged her outside? Why go for that ghoulish shadowing? And why let the wind blow away all her carefully prepared words? Who could ever trust a spokesperson like that? What with that and their allegations, I think I may get on the phone to TVInvicta tomorrow and have a word. I don’t like it when the media try to undercut an investigation. Not when we do all in our power to feed them stories and cooperate with them.’

  ‘I suppose we can’t blame the TV people if she doesn’t comb her hair.’

  ‘Just watch me.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘You protected me when I needed it; I must do the best I can for her. Mustn’t I?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  It won’t be long now, I promise. And then I shall never leave you. Wherever you go, I shall go too.

  It was possible for someone of Fran’s rank to summon the TVInvicta News editor to her office, but since she had a morning dental appointment in Canterbury she decided to pay him the apparent courtesy of visiting him in his office in the new Whitefriars complex.

  If Jill Tanner had found Henson’s office overly masculine and unwelcoming, goodness knew what she’d have made of this. The view might have been to die for – at night the floodlit tower of the Cathedral would dominate it – but there seemed a distinct whiff of MFI about the executive furniture, and the room itself was rather smaller than her own. But there was nothing to relieve the white walls or the laminate floor, and she suspected the blinds had never been used in anger. Someone was making a statement, even if he didn’t quite know what it was.

  ‘Clearly you’re here over something more than an unpaid speeding fine,’ Huw Venn stood to greet her, possibly wondering whether to emerge from behind his desk to shake her hand but deciding better of it.

  ‘Do you have any outstanding?’ Fran inquired, eyes wide open. ‘I’m afraid I don’t do American Express.’

  ‘So what brings such a senior officer in the flesh?’ In his pink and white baby-face, his eyes, dark as his carefully tousled hair, narrowed perceptibly. He might have been in his late thirties, or well-preserved forties.

  Uninvited, she sat. Perhaps he was grateful – their difference in height was less obvious, and not every male ego liked being seven or eight inches shorter than his interlocutor. ‘The excellent research your people have been doing on the sex assault cases.’<
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  ‘Doing your job for you, eh?’ He sat too, spreading his pudgy hands over an incipient paunch, as if he were a provincial Citizen Kane.

  ‘Absolutely.’ She kept her face straight. ‘That sort of coverage really reaches the public consciousness in a way we couldn’t hope to do.’

  He was too bright to smirk. ‘But?’ he demanded.

  ‘But that sort of power carries responsibilities, Mr Venn. All that stuff last night about people keeping their teenagers at home, not letting their children go to school – tell me, do you know something we don’t, or are you making a story where there isn’t one?’

  ‘We only report the story as it comes to us, Chief Superintendent. If we hear mothers crying because their daughters have been raped—’

  ‘My God, it’s come to that, has it?’ she asked seriously. ‘Where’s the victim been taken?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he said pettishly.

  ‘What’s your background, Mr Venn?’ She continued calmly, ‘You see, I’ve never met a TV journalist who invented stories to raise his profile. The red tops, yes. But I can’t see how spreading needless alarm throughout Kent is going to do anyone any good. It certainly won’t help us stop these crimes, and may make our job of finding the perpetrator more difficult.’

  Damn it, he pounced. ‘You think it’s just one man, do you?’

  ‘Whatever I may think is currently immaterial. What my colleagues and I need is evidence we can – and will – work on. I’m not a woman for theories, Mr Venn. I like facts.’

  He produced a sudden impish smile, not wholly attractive. ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Gradgrind!’

  Touché! She would have loved to ask if his Hardyesque name was genuine, but preferred to seize the moment. ‘I’m afraid the majority of your viewers wouldn’t recognise your allusion – even if it went national. But only TVInvicta carried last night’s story: the national network wouldn’t touch it. Why do you think that was, Mr Venn?’ she asked, her voice still eminently reasonable.

  He shrugged. ‘They had another story! It’s not every day you get a cabinet minister caught with his trousers down. They spent a lot of time on that.’

  ‘So they did. It’s a good job really – we wouldn’t want the good burghers of Bridgewater, Bolton and Birmingham getting the impression that we’ve got Jack the Ripper cavorting round Kent, would we? To be serious, Mr Venn, what you did last night was dangerous. You created a whole fabric of non-information and made one of our most capable officers look a fool because she could say nothing new or useful. Come on, if you were a concerned parent would you believe that a distressed scarecrow, badly lit and with a poor mike, could trace your child’s assailant?’

  ‘I’m not responsible for some woman’s bad hair day.’

  ‘Of course not. But when Detective Chief Inspector Tanner offered your colleagues the use of a perfectly good room, they insisted on the outside location. And lit her so that she looked like a Hallowe’en pumpkin and fastened her mike the far side of a wind farm. I presume,’ she prompted him, ‘that that was an editorial decision, not just some artistic whim on the part of a cub reporter?’

  ‘I rely absolutely on the discretion of the reporter,’ he said.

  ‘Just as I rely absolutely on the ability of my DCI. How nice our views of our junior colleagues coincide. Now, Mr Venn, we’re clear about this, aren’t we? We’ve always done all we can to provide TVInvicta with good local stories, and you’ve supported us in return. It would be nice to return to this – symbiotic – relationship, wouldn’t it?’ Not waiting for a reply, which could hardly be in the negative, she stood. ‘It’s a magnificent view, isn’t it?’

  He stood too, magnanimous in defeat. ‘I like the way they’re developing the city, I must say.’

  She patted back the conversational ball. ‘But it’s a pity that we’ve got no concert hall or proper theatre and that plans for a new library were axed.’

  ‘Imagine the City Fathers putting themselves up as contenders for European City of Culture indeed!’ he snorted. ‘Pathetic, wasn’t it, to think they could lift that sort of honour!’

  ‘I suppose you couldn’t do a bit of campaigning to improve facilities for music – I love the Cathedral, but not as a concert venue, and now we’ve got a link with the Philharmonia…’

  All sweetness and light to end the discussion, then. And he ushered her down the stairs in person.

  On impulse, she didn’t go straight back to the car but to Castle Street to one of her favourite shoe shops. Succumbing to one temptation, in the form of evening shoes that positively caressed the feet, she found herself ready for another, a proper breath of fresh air. It wouldn’t take much longer to walk back via the Dane John Mound, or at least in the grounds in which it stood. As a Roman burial ground, it wasn’t of any particular interest, as far as she knew, since it had been remodelled to suit eighteenth-century sensibilities. Now the area hosted occasional food and other fairs, and, even on a winter’s day, provided pleasant walking away from the crowds of shoppers. Today only a couple of pairs of pensioners were taking the air, trying pointedly to ignore the jeers and catcalls of a group of schoolkids.

  Cheek their elders, would they? She strode closer. They were mostly girls but a couple of lads were larking around on one of the benches. She’d rather not know what was so amusing them. But that was what she should, as a cop, be doing: she should be keeping an eye on kids of just that age – the younger teens. They might not all be happy-slappers but she for one treated the bye-laws with respect and expected others to as well – so if they were carving their initials or daubing the seats with magic markers, they’d hear a few words. Evidence? Better get some of that too before she waded in. She slowed to a halt some fifty yards short of them. If they took any notice all they’d see was a lady of a certain age making a phone call. What they might not notice was that she was using a pretty up-to-date, and certainly desirable, bit of mobile technology and also photographing their activities. There’d be a dozen or so, maybe fifteen.

  She could always delete the results later.

  They’d clocked her. Delete, hell! Despite their youth, they exuded menace. She sent the images to Mark’s phone, and switched on her police radio, calling in urgently. There was no time for any more. Like starlings, they wheeled and swooped. In seconds she was surrounded, and she couldn’t imagine it was to admire the carrier with her new shoes. The very situation when you want both hands free and she’d got this encumbrance! Plus a damned handbag.

  She left the radio open. The switchboard would be able to locate her and pick up what was going on.

  Which was, for the moment, just a confrontation. Perhaps her height fazed them. Or the fact she looked more like a headmistress than they’d expected, and some residual respect still operated.

  Meanwhile, they must not see fear in her face. Or shock, if they hit her. That was the idea, wasn’t it? And what should she do if she were attacked? Grab the would-be assailant? Good publicity that would be. She could see the headlines now: Top Cop floors City Tot. Maybe better than City Tot floors Top Cop!

  Unhurriedly, she flashed her ID and gave her name and rank. No clever lawyer could say she hadn’t warned any potential assailant.

  A couple of the younger girls slouched away. The rest closed ranks.

  She waited, face carefully blank, with just a hint of inquiry, perhaps. Then she saw the craft knife. ‘Drop that knife please. Come on. Drop the knife.’ She held the child’s gaze, though it meant reducing the others to no more than movements at the edge of her vision.

  Transferring her bag to share her left hand with the carrier, casually, she hoped, as if she were waiting for change at the checkout, she pointed. ‘Drop the knife. Drop it there.’

  The girl swung her arm not down, but up, in a slicing movement.

  Instinct took over. She grabbed the girl’s wrist, and twisted it hard. The knife fell. Armlocking the girl, she stamped on the sets of fingers reaching for it. So far so good. But ther
e were still a dozen kids to deal with. If they simply closed in and kicked her she’d be powerless.

  ‘Back up urgently required!’ she told her radio. Didn’t raise her voice. Tried to sound efficient – menacing, even.

  And, propelled by hands in the small of her back and a vicious kick to her shin, she fell flat. The girl in the armlock screamed as Fran’s weight came down on her, forcing her to the ground, too.

  Would they stab her? Even a blade as short as that could kill.

  And then came the blessed sound of a siren – two, three sirens. But someone grabbed her hair, jerked her head back, and slammed it forward.

  The call came through while Mark was between meetings, or he might not have picked it up. She was right to describe the bunch of kids as threatening: he could see that from the images she sent. The very way they stood spelt danger, superior, impregnable smiles on their vicious little faces. Weasels. The sort that took over Toad Hall.

  Why did the brain always throw up such irrelevancies when every cell, every synapse, should be dedicated to solving a problem?

  At least his fingers were working. Canterbury. That meant his old mate Colin, who could be guaranteed to mobilise their colleagues the moment his shout went up. Favours! Hell, you didn’t need favours when the safety of a Chief Super was at stake.

  Safety. Mark found he couldn’t frame the word life. She was less than two hundred yards from Canterbury nick, for God’s sake, two hundred yards – two hundred yards that included a busy dual carriageway ring road and a twenty-five foot defensive town wall that had been impregnable for Christ knew how long. Sorry, God. Please, let her be all right, my lovely Fran.

  He took the stairs to the control room two, three at a time.

  ‘Canterbury are on to it, guv. Sir,’ the woman monitoring the incident corrected herself.

  ‘Guv’ll do. Can you put me through to their ops room?’