Cold Pursuit

by Judith Cutler

  Stupid bugger. She offered him her sweetest smile and herself the promise of revenge. ‘I’ll let you know.’ Should she grass up Binns, not to mention Farmer himself, for failing to follow up her CCTV theory or remain professionally silent? She compromised. ‘Meanwhile, I think DI Binns may be talking to the firm installing the CCTVs, not just because of Chummie knowing where each one is but for another reason. In a separate case, I have reason to believe –’ hell, how long since she’d used that old cliché? ‘– that a new camera may deliberately have been badly fixed.’

  Fran had scarcely sat down at her desk when the phone rang.

  Farat Hafeez from West Midlands Police. How strange that although Fran would have sworn her English was accent-free, over the phone it came over pure Brummie. ‘I’m afraid I’ve nothing to report, gaffer.’ Fran smiled at the Midlands version of guv. ‘Reverend Hardy’s gone on his holidays. According to the church secretary, they’ve been booked for months.’

  ‘And I never bloody well asked about his intended movements. Shit and shit and shit! Sorry, Farat.’

  ‘Be my guest. Do you want me to put out a call for him? He’s touring in Cornwall.’

  ‘In this weather? Poor sod.’

  ‘I suppose it’s cheaper off season. Anyway, what I did do was get on to the diocesan office, which provided the name of his bank. They were efficient, too. They wouldn’t give me all the details I wanted, but they did say his debit card hadn’t been used in London at the relevant time. That doesn’t mean he couldn’t have paid cash for the flowers, of course.’

  ‘Did he make any large withdrawal that week?’

  ‘A hundred pounds from a bank here in Brum. Digbeth coach station. In the concourse, in fact.’

  ‘Travelling to?’

  ‘I tried the ticket office: nothing booked with them, but of course, he could have booked in advance using a credit card I haven’t found out about yet. And he may even have been returning from somewhere else, gaffer.’

  ‘Of course. One last thing, Farat – find out if Mrs Hardy has gone to Cornwall with him.’

  ‘Creative writing group?’ Dilly repeated after a long delay, as if she were asking permission from someone in the room before she replied. For goodness’ sake, she wasn’t about to admit to being a part-time lap-dancer. ‘Do you mean the one here or the one in Birmingham?’

  Fran suppressed a desire to fling down the phone. How could so bright a woman be so switched off? ‘Either.’

  ‘Well, here it’s just a small group of women. We meet in the house of a wonderful lady called Marion, who really keeps our noses to the grindstone. Only she wouldn’t let me say that, would she? It’s a cliché.’

  ‘I won’t tell if you won’t tell. And in Birmingham?’

  ‘That wasn’t really a group. It was more a class. Run by one of the colleges. But I can’t really remember any of the people in it. I wasn’t very – it was a difficult time. I had my mind on other things. So I never finished the course. But that’s a long time ago – it must be nearly ten years. You forget, don’t you?’

  Fran could have reminded her that some memories never died. Those of the love of your life, for instance. No doubt her relationship with Stephen had been one of the things on her mind. ‘Could you give me the teacher’s name?’

  ‘Lecturer,’ Dilly corrected her, pedantic as McDine, ‘since it was a college, not a school.’

  ‘Very well, the lecturer. And the college.’

  ‘Walker. Mary Walker. But she’s married and moved. I actually ran into her at Euston Station once – we had a cup of coffee together.’

  ‘And you don’t recall her new name? OK, it doesn’t matter,’ Fran declared briskly. ‘It’s part of the college’s legal duties to keep records. So if you can tell me the name…’

  ‘I thought I had. William Murdock. It was supposed to be an access course for university entrance, but most of us just went for interest’s sake so they closed it down. Or it may have been because Mary left. I don’t know.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Tell me, Dilly, are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Work all right?’

  ‘Yes!’ She sounded positive for the first time. ‘They’ve brought in an extra security guard. Apparently if I have to cover a story, he’ll look after me.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Fran said, as if it were news to her. ‘And where are you staying tonight, Dilly?’

  ‘Has the security camera been fixed at home yet? I’ve had all the locks changed, after all.’

  ‘Are you absolutely sure you want to stay there on your own?’ Fran squeaked despite herself.

  ‘I shall be all right.’

  ‘I’ll do my best to organise a regular police patrol, but rural forces are always stretched to their limits.’ She grasped the nettle. ‘Look, why don’t I ask Tom if that bedroom’s free at his house?’

  ‘No, thank you. I have Daniel’s feelings to consider, after all.’

  ‘Does he consider yours, Dilly? Has he invited you to stay with him tonight?’

  ‘There’s some school function. He won’t be back till late.’

  If only Dilly had managed to say, ‘And if he were the last man on earth I wouldn’t stay with him.’ But she hadn’t.

  Fran continued, ‘What about Tom staying in your spare room?’

  ‘Daniel…’

  As if on cue, Tom knocked and entered. Fran pointed to the handset, mouthing ‘Dilly!’

  Predictably he held out his hand, then made a praying gesture and finally shrugged when she shook her head. But she held his gaze when she told Dilly, ‘There’s only so much we can do without your cooperation, Dilly. If you want us to help you, you have to help us. Very well, I’ll get on to that college, get a list of students and call you back. Or get one of my team to. OK?’ She cut the call without waiting for a response. ‘Sit down, Tom, and tell me how you’ve so offended Daniel McDine that he won’t let his fiancée anywhere near you.’

  He blushed so furiously that anyone else might have deduced that he had debauched the young woman in her own bed. ‘We played Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit – Dilly and me and my housemates. I asked her to lock her room from the inside. I slept at the far end of the house. But she came down to breakfast in her dressing-gown, as we all did, and McDine thought we’d had an orgy. Talk about a Victorian father.’

  ‘No hanky and zero panky then?’

  ‘Zero, zilch, whatever – I can’t think of any other zeds,’ he concluded, grinning at himself. ‘Mind you, guv, given half an eyelash of encouragement I’d have been there. Despite the fact she kept on talking about Steve, the guy she left behind in Brum. You know what,’ he added, ‘I reckon he was as big a control freak as this McDine guy. They met because he told her off about leaving books open and damaging their spines. Him just a student and her the librarian. Can you imagine it?’

  She thought back to Stephen’s sad, lined face. Was there something implacable about the set of the jaw, the tightness of the lips? She’d assumed it was the pain of his self-denial that had caused all those frown lines.

  ‘What’s this about a college and a list of students, then, guv?’

  ‘It seems she’s forgotten that she was a creative writing student at one time up in Birmingham. You wouldn’t like to phone William Murdock College for me and get a class list, would you? There’s just a chance there might have been a male in the group besotted with Dilly.’

  ‘I should think they’d all have been besotted with her – I mean, ten years ago she’d have been – well!’ he rolled his eyes. ‘Sorry, guv. What about the teacher?’

  ‘Female. Mary Walker. Now with a different name and a new address.’

  ‘Also being stalked?’ he asked eagerly.

  ‘Calm down. She got married, Tom. As people do. Even lecturers.’ But not her and Mark, of course. ‘OK. Off you go.’

  He looked at her under his lashes. ‘And would you want me to phone Dilly to ask if any of the blokes made a move on her?’<
br />
  ‘Who better?’ she replied blithely. But wondered even as she spoke if she’d done the right thing.

  He was half way out of the door when he stopped. ‘Almost forgot what brought me here, guv. We’ve shut down that obscene website. We couldn’t manage to trace it back to source, but we’ve got the forensic computer scientists on to it. I asked for Amy Lu: she’s the best. And I asked for it ASAP.’

  ‘Well done. Any news of Jon Binns and the CCTVs yet?’

  ‘Only that Farmer Giles went ballistic about him slipping out of that meeting and told him he should have been doing his own team’s work, not someone else’s. Tough, especially as it only took him two minutes to ask for a list of technicians by five tonight. So we can reckon on nine tomorrow, in my experience.’

  She was ready for Mark’s phone call to say he was ready to leave, but there was something very odd about his voice when he made it.

  ‘Would you be kind enough to pop round to my office a moment? Thanks.’

  It reminded her irresistibly of the way he’d prefaced any bollockings he’d had to deliver in their past. Trying to unclench her jaw and her stomach muscles, despite herself she started to review her activities to see if she’d broken any major rules. But her conscience was as clean as she’d known it, and she wondered if he simply had some lovely surprise to spring.

  So she was beaming when she put her head round his door.

  He wasn’t.

  He stood as she entered, but stayed his side of his desk. Then he leant on it, knuckles down and shoulders braced. ‘The Chief tells me you went on night patrol round Ashford. Would you care to tell me when?’

  She replied easily, ‘The night there was an assault in the town. You were busy with some papers, weren’t you?’

  ‘So who did you patrol with?’

  ‘What do you mean? I was on my own, of course. Just casing the joint, as it were.’ And now getting uneasier by the minute.

  ‘Just putting yourself at risk. And putting yourself at risk at a time when you were far from fit, and probably even more vulnerable. What the hell did you think you were doing?’

  ‘What I always do.’ Unease had mutated to anger.

  ‘Did. When you were a middle-rank officer. And you’d have had a partner. I take it you didn’t bother with body-armour or CS spray or even a radio? For God’s sake, someone in your position being so cavalier! You should be setting an example, someone of your rank.’

  ‘An example to whom? And how?’ She’d moved to furious, in one breath.

  ‘We get the media to tell all women to be on their guard, to go nowhere ill-lit, preferably to take cabs and always to stick in groups. And you swan round disregarding our own advice! Wouldn’t it have looked good if you’d been a victim – not just of the rapist but even of a set of juvenile bag-snatchers? More happy-slappers? You’d have been a laughing stock. We’d all have been a laughing stock.’

  Hell! All those years of conditioning – must accept a senior officer’s rebuke, mustn’t answer back. But her own lover speaking to her like this, her lover, her partner, the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. How dare he? How bloody dare he?

  The conditioning swamped her.

  ‘Will that be all, sir?’

  ‘For now. Thank you.’

  She’d have slammed the door off its hinges if it hadn’t been for three or four officers in the corridor outside discussing their forthcoming evening’s boozing. Boozing. When she’d be silently retrieving all her stuff from his house and knowing it was totally impossible to rebuild her life without him. She wanted to howl with the pain of it.

  But women of her rank didn’t retire to a loo and sob. What did they do? And what did she do? She’d better get back to her office, because whatever her face was supposed to be doing, it wasn’t obeying orders. And she’d better take the shortest route, away from any casually interested eyes.

  The last person she wanted contact with was the Chief, who emerged as if by magic from his office as she went past. He was obviously seeing his Sussex opposite number off the premises.

  But he hung back a second. ‘Harman, I hope Turner did a good job? You deserved every word. You know you did.’ He quickened his step and fell in with the other man.

  Did knowing that Mark was acting on orders make it better or worse? Still staggering with the shock of it all, she made it back to her office. Her secretary was just shrugging on her coat.

  ‘Urgent message on your desk, Fran!’ she said. ‘I gather you’re looking at another house tonight. Let’s hope this is the right one.’

  Fran hoped the muscles formed a smile, hoped the voice sounded as if Fran were merely thinking about something else. Yes, there was an urgent message on her desk. In a sealed envelope addressed to her in Mark’s writing, Fran, not DCS Harman.

  I had to do it because it was a direct order and what I said was right. What I couldn’t say was that had you been hurt – or worse, for God’s sake – my world would have collapsed about my ears. Can we stick to our rule about no work talk after working hours? See you in the car park in twenty minutes?

  At least she made it to the loo before she was sick.

  As she blotted her face, she stared at herself in the mirror. Should she act on her first impulse and end everything between them? Or – and this really hurt – should she admit that she had indeed been in the wrong and accept his remarkably gracious explanation? Was it just the implications for their lives at work if they broke up, all the covert glances, the open sniggering that were influencing her decision? Or was it something else?

  She’d know when she saw him. But it would be best to speak before they reached the car park. Surely it would. After all, as he’d said, they had their ban on shoptalk to consider.

  Did that mean she’d made a de facto decision?

  Hadn’t she once said that they must continue to treat each other exactly as they’d treat other colleagues in a similar situation?

  And she’d been in the wrong. No doubt about that. She’d have said much the same to Tom.

  She headed back to his office to apologise. She got as far as, ‘I’m sorry.’

  He didn’t speak, but switched off the lights and locked the door.

  Baying and snarling, the two Dobermans hurled themselves against what appeared to be a terribly frail wire barrier between the kitchen and their scullery.

  The cottage must have been five miles from its nearest neighbour, and six from anything like a main road.

  ‘The rush hour would be two tractors, not one,’ she murmured into Mark’s ear.

  The vendor – a pallid woman whose too-tight jumper showed the outlines of an inadequate bra – was working up huge enthusiasm for a klargester, a means of disposing of human waste neither had ever heard of. At the end of three minutes, both knew that they didn’t wish to push the acquaintance further.

  The dogs certainly didn’t.

  From time to time, the woman asked them to be quiet, in the hopeless tones some mothers use when addressing vile toddlers. The dogs took as little notice.

  Would Mr and Mrs Harman like some sherry? It was time to declare themselves teetotallers on the way to an AA meeting and scoot. Even as they turned the car in the lane outside, the dogs hurled themselves at the gates. Another off the list, then.

  ‘I think we’ve taken a wrong turn,’ he said at last, the grass growing in the middle of the lane brushing the car’s suspension.

  ‘Best find a gate to turn in,’ she said absently, wrestling with an OS map and an inadequate torch – the oracle seemed to have thrown up its hands in horror.

  ‘What about this one?’ Cutting the ignition and releasing his seatbelt, he murmured, ‘Look at those stars.’

  ‘Careful how you get out – cowpats!’

  ‘Who said anything about getting out? Fran Harman, come here!’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘Do you reckon Tom will have worked his charm and persuaded Dilly back into his care?’ Mark asked, as he drove
them into work the following day. Neither had referred again to the bruising encounter of the previous day or to the sexual passion it had engendered. They’d been neither more nor less loving or tetchy with early morning irritation than usual. But he thought she was still wary; God knew he was. He’d meant to read her a reasonable lecture, but the thought of the danger to which she’d so blithely exposed herself without even talking about it afterwards had made him explode. Just as he’d have exploded to any other colleague doing something so stupid.

  Possibly.

  ‘Technically, it depends whether he had any news to report about the Birmingham writing course,’ she said.

  ‘If I’d been him I’d have phoned her, even with nil returns!’

  ‘Are all men really attracted to pretty faces rather than personality?’ she asked, almost wistfully.

  He was glad the traffic had congealed into a solid jam: it meant he could look at her properly. This tone was getting familiar – nothing to do with yesterday evening. It dated from their Birmingham trip. What had happened in Birmingham to shake her self-confidence like this? Surely it wasn’t the simple fact that there had been no clothes in one shop that had been to her taste? Was she really so frightened of growing old? She was hardly middle-aged, and certainly didn’t look even that. Why, in any other profession than the police, there’d be no question of her retiring till she was sixty. The government were already talking about raising the national retirement age to sixty-seven, for goodness’ sake. Only talking, he hoped. It was all very well for people behind desks, but how could labourers or even front-line police officers for whom fitness was vital continue to such an age? And what a national outcry there’d be when the first 67-year-old officer died of a heart attack chasing a young yob. But would it be age discrimination to move older people on to permanent light duties?

  Meanwhile, he must find something to lift Fran’s spirits, to prove to her that she was still attractive and desirable – though he’d have thought their sex life should have been demonstration enough of that. Or was she afraid that his long abstinence after Tina’s death was the reason he wanted her, not her body? And her mind, of course. Fran, all of Fran.