by Jane Renshaw
The Time and the Place
Jane Renshaw
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, institutions and organizations are products of the author’s imagination or used fictionally.
Text copyright © 2020 Jane Renshaw
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author.
Cover design by The Cover Collection.
Author’s note
Scots words are occasionally used in this story. If, like Claire Castleford, you find these annoyingly obscure, you can find some definitions in the glossary at the end of the book.
AUGUST
Prologue
A smile, a step forward, a blade – pressed to Chimp’s side, just above the kidneys.
A shake of the head. ‘Not your finest hour.’
Chimp couldn’t but agree.
Not his finest hour.
Out across the pond somewhere a duck quacked, a comical sound from another world, a world in which he’d done normal things like stop and look at ducks, a world in which he’d had time, stretching out ahead of him, for all that. Chimp’s world, now, had shrunk down to this moment, to the blade pressed against his side, to the hand that had slipped into his pocket and was removing the phone on which he had been recording the conversation.
They were standing, the two of them, on the verandah of the boathouse which jutted out over the still, glassy depths of the pond. The pond in the middle of the wood. The pond in the middle of the wood in the middle of the private grounds of the House of Pitfourie, where they were unlikely, of course, to be disturbed by anyone, given that it was Friday night and the lads were all off to the Forbes Arms.
You stupid bastard.
Why hadn’t he set this meeting up in a pub, a café, a shopping centre, anywhere there were people, anywhere he’d have a realistic chance of avoiding this?
Rookie mistake.
But he wouldn’t, in fact, have made a mistake like this when he was a rookie, because Phil had drummed into him the importance of never relaxing, never forgetting, never trusting:
Never let your guard down.
It had been Phil’s mantra, and Chimp – John – had lived by it on all those operations in Manchester, Leeds, London; he’d never relaxed, he’d never forgotten, and he’d certainly never trusted any of those scumbags he’d been charged with bringing down, those monsters, those fucking psychopaths for whom the rest of humanity was prey. He’d never lost sight of who he was and who the bad guys were.
Until now.
SEPTEMBER
Experienced cook/housekeeper required
for country house in Aberdeenshire
Duties to include:
o Everyday cooking; dinner parties; some occasion cooking
o Food shopping and sourcing
o Stock-keeping (incl. maintenance of stock records and accounts)
o Management of small housekeeping team
o Care of antique furniture, china, silver etc.
o Some laundry work
o Liaison with other staff
o Oversight of tradesmen, specialist conservators etc.
40 hours/week
Accommodation provided
Some unsociable hours
To start mid-December
References required
For further details, please contact:
Hector Forbes, Pitfourie Estate Office, Kirkton of Inverglass, Ballater AB34 6TY; email: [email protected]
– An advertisement appearing in the Jobs section of the Press & Journal for several weeks in September
1
‘Could it have been an accident?’ said Claire, turning away from the concern in Phil’s face to look out of the window at the patchwork of fields and forests and hills far below. They’d passed over the border five minutes ago, according to the pilot’s commentary. How ridiculous that even this was freaking her out! It was Scotland, for God’s sake, not Outer Mongolia.
‘Anything’s possible,’ said Phil carefully, lowering his voice, although they were alone in their row of seats. ‘But I very much doubt it. How does a fit, healthy forty-seven-year-old with no drugs or alcohol in his bloodstream come to drown in a pond?’
There was a river down there, snaking its way through fields, past a little town.
How did John Innes come to drown in a pond? That was the question. He had been a much more experienced undercover officer than she was. He’d worked some really big cases, been instrumental in putting away some seriously bad people. But it seemed the target must have rumbled him. Murdered him, or had him murdered. That was the working hypothesis, and it was up to Claire to go in there and find evidence for or against it, along with anything else she could get on Hector Forbes.
‘The body had been in the water a week when it was found,’ Phil went on. ‘The post mortem was inconclusive. Cause of death was drowning – that was all they could say. The sheriff at the fatal accident inquiry had no option but to return a verdict of accidental death. There was no mention, of course, of John being an undercover police officer. That’s being kept under wraps for now.’
She swallowed panic.
This was just a trip north to meet the CID team she’d be working with. She wouldn’t be going anywhere near Hector Forbes for another two weeks, and if she didn’t pass muster with Campbell Stewart, the DCI who’d be heading up the team, she wouldn’t be going near him at all. There was no need to be panicking just yet.
She’d been trying to keep a lid on it ever since the meeting with Phil – Detective Inspector Phil Caddick, her handler – a week ago in a café in Camden, when he’d triumphantly handed her a print-out of an email from Hector Forbes to ‘Claire Colley’, her soubriquet for this operation, in which he thanked her for her application for the job of cook/housekeeper at the House of Pitfourie and for her CV, which he had ‘read with interest’, and invited her to the house ‘to see what you’d be letting yourself in for and have a bit of a chat about the job’.
Claire had had to pretend to be happy about it.
Whoopy-do, off I go on another amazing undercover adventure. Can’t get enough of those psychos.
She turned from the window to face Phil. After what had happened with the Bristows, her next gig – and, all things considered, she was lucky there was a next gig – was always going to be traumatic, but going in after another undercover officer who’d been murdered by the target... Surely she was entitled to be a bit apprehensive about that? And it was part of Phil’s job to hold her hand, metaphorically, although right at this moment she felt like a scared little girl who really would like him to take her hand and tell her it was all going to be fine.
But Phil was staring off.
He was hiding it well, but Claire knew him. He was a friend as well as her handler. Pretty much her only friend, let’s face it. She knew he was completely and utterly devastated by John Innes’s death. And he blamed himself. Of course he did.
She had to do this for him. For him and John Innes both. She had to pull herself together and get through today, get through the meet-and-brief with the Inverurie CID team and persuade DCI Campbell Stewart that she was the woman for the job and should attend that interview with Hector Forbes. Even the most daunting of prospects became less daunting when you broke it down into manageable chunks. That was the theory, anyway. One of Phil’s many theories on how to cope with being an undercover police officer, along with make the fear your friend and never let your guard down. Like all the best handlers, he’d been a UC himself.
‘Can you tell me
about him?’ she asked quietly. ‘About John?’
She’d never even heard of the man until a few weeks ago – that was how it worked with a handler and their stable of undercover officers. There was complete compartmentalisation, and Phil never talked about his other UCs. So until Phil had briefed her about this job, she’d had no idea that John Innes existed, this wonderful man who, it seemed, had been just as close to Phil and his family as Claire was. Who’d also sat in Phil and Jennifer’s kitchen, probably, scoffing Jennifer’s roasts and apple pies and bantering with their daughter Laura.
‘He was Scottish,’ said Phil. ‘One of the reasons he was recruited for this gig. From Glasgow. A place called Linthouse. His old man was a welder in the shipyards.’
‘A tough nut?’
‘A very tough nut, when he wanted to be. Absolutely convincing as an ex-con. But he was a great guy. Into the environment and all that. Did a lot of fund-raising for a charity involved in saving the Tasmanian devil – he used to say he identified with the cranky wee buggers.’ Phil grinned, shaking his head, and then sobered. ‘John was a brilliant UC. His last but one job was infiltrating an organised crime group working out of Birmingham. He got himself involved in the import/export side of their operation; specifically, importing crack, amphetamine and XTC from Rotterdam. Three weeks after his deployment, we did a bust as they were mooring at a fishing village near Hull – netted one-point-three tonnes of crack. Four members of that OCG are currently serving ten years apiece.’
‘Wow, three weeks? That was quick work.’
Phil nodded, grimly. ‘So when Campbell Stewart put out feelers for a UC to go in and get something on this Forbes character, John was the obvious choice. He went in on his usual ticket: ex-con looking for a dishonest day’s work. Called himself Chimp.’ He smiled. ‘He always chose these ridiculous nicknames for himself. For the Birmingham job it was Madman.’
‘What was his “in”? He didn’t answer an advert, did he?’
‘No. He rented a house in the area and started drinking in the local pub, got to know some of the Pitfourie Estate workers, picked up a bit of casual work on the estate – digging ditches, mending drains, delivering logs to pensioners. He was eventually taken on full-time, given free accommodation...’ A shake of the head. ‘Oh, I was chuffed. He was in there. Only a matter of time, I thought, before Forbes involved him in the shady side of the business and we had the evidence Campbell’s been after for the last ten years.’
‘But he didn’t find anything?’
‘He didn’t report anything.’
Claire, who’d turned back to the window, looked round at him sharply.
Phil folded his hands, almost protectively, over his comfortable little belly. ‘He said he was getting nowhere.’
‘You thought he’d gone native?’
A long silence. Then:
‘I don’t know. He was certainly making himself right at home. Off with the lads bivouacking in the hills... Recruited by Forbes to the local mountain rescue team... Last time I saw him he was full of this rescue in which Forbes, to hear John tell it, saved the life of a kid stuck up a rock face practically single-handed. Tried to tell me he thought we were barking up the wrong tree. That Forbes was a model citizen.’
‘There’s no chance that could be the case?’
‘Not according to Campbell.’ Phil and DCI Campbell Stewart went way back, which was no doubt the main reason Phil had managed to wangle her this gig. Phil was from Wolverhampton and had lived in London now for over twenty years, but he had started his CID career in Aberdeen, where Campbell Stewart had been his DS.
Phil sighed, and suddenly exclaimed: ‘I bloody knew we should have got John out of there. That the operation was compromised, big time. But I didn’t, because that would have meant admitting to my old boss that I’d made a massive fucking mistake in not reading the signs before things got out of hand. It wasn’t like we hadn’t been warned. Campbell had told John, he’d spelt it out: “You’ll want to like him. Hell, sometimes I like the bastard myself.”’
Claire took a deep breath. She felt like she was coming down with something, queasy and shaky and spaced out, but she knew it was just the effects of her old friend cortisol, the stress hormone, which had been coursing round her body ever since she’d forced herself out of bed at quarter past four this morning. She wasn’t going to be sick. She wasn’t going to be sick. Don’t think about it.
Inverurie. That was the town they were heading for, where the meet-and-brief was to take place. She’d never even heard of it, a one-horse town in the middle of nowhere. There was something unsettling about that alone, the unfamiliarity of the place, the feeling that she would be adrift in unknown waters in more ways than one.
The target. Think about the target.
‘Tim Nice-But-Dim,’ she said, a little desperately.
How much of a challenge was it going to be to persuade this upper class twit to employ her? How difficult was it going to be to embed herself in his household? If he really had murdered John Innes, it wasn’t going to take longer than about five minutes to gather the necessary evidence.
That was what she’d been telling herself. But as she thought back over his email, she hoped that she might not be too far off the mark. He had sounded like a bit of a twit. ‘We’ll ask you to prepare a dish of your choice,’ he’d written, ‘from the admittedly random selection of ingredients to be found in the larder.’ Of course, there would be a larder. ‘Yes, I’ve been watching too much Masterchef!!’ he’d added in a laboured attempt at humour.
Even if he really did watch Masterchef, she didn’t imagine he was exactly a gourmet. These types were brought up on nursery goo and boarding school stodge, after all, weren’t they? Grey mince and gloopy rice pudding?
So what if she couldn’t boil an egg? He was unlikely to care if it was raw or so rubbery you could play squash with it. If this meet-and-brief went okay and DCI Stewart felt confident enough in her abilities to send her in after John, she would have time to perfect a signature dish before the interview. And if she managed to get through that, she would have another couple of months to practice a wider repertoire. The start date for the job of ‘experienced cook/housekeeper’ was the middle of December.
‘He definitely isn’t nice and I don’t think he’s particularly dim!’ Phil rapped out.
‘I know.’ Oh God – bile was rising in her throat. Her stomach was roiling.
Phil was frowning at her. ‘Claire? Are you –’
She swallowed; attempted a smile. ‘I know. Never... let your guard down.’ She put a hand over her mouth and then she was up out of her seat, the sick bag over her face, and Phil and a stewardess were hustling her down the aisle to the toilet as if she were a child who couldn’t cope with the turbulence.
◆◆◆
Claire followed Detective Chief Inspector Campbell Stewart into a stark little room at Inverurie Police Station. It was intimidatingly brightly lit, with no pictures on the walls, no coffee cups or plates of biscuits on the table, nothing in the least welcoming or reassuring or friendly. But that was okay. That was fine. The version of Detective Constable Claire Castleford who was walking into this room didn’t need to be welcomed or reassured or befriended.
She could do this job standing on her head.
Head up, shoulders back. She was a cocky London cop looking down her nose at the local yokels. This version of DC Castleford hadn’t thrown up on the flight because the whole thing scared the hell out of her. She hadn’t made an idiot of herself on the platform at Aberdeen railway station by bursting into tears. She certainly hadn’t wailed at Phil, when he’d awkwardly put his arm around her and told her, in the nicest possible way, to pull herself together: ‘I can’t do this!’
As they sat down at the table, Phil was all hail-fellow-well-met, guffawing at something the DCI was saying, but he was touching his tie, running his hand down it in the way he did when he was nervous. The other person attending the meet-and-brief was a woman a li
ttle younger than the two men, maybe mid-forties. Detective Sergeant Melissa Gardiner: unsmiling, short sandy hair, dressed like a bank manager.
She could do this.
Claire sat down on one of the hard chairs and leant back, crossing her legs under the table. It was all about sussing out what people were expecting of you and taking on that form. Shape-shifting. Usually it involved mirroring, copying body language and speech patterns, picking up tiny clues to attitudes and prejudices and adopting them as your own. In these meetings with the CID teams she’d be working with, she was generally able to use mirroring to give the impression that she was a cop just like them, someone who matched the classic undercover profile, a steady sort who could be relied on to remain calm and collected in any given situation, rather than run crying from the room to throw up in the nearest toilet.
But sometimes, as now, the shape-shifting called for more than that.
These were provincial cops. According to Phil, DCI Campbell Stewart had only worked with one UC before John Innes, and that had been on routine drugs busts more than ten years ago. So he’d have got his ideas of what a UC should be from film and TV. He’d be expecting DC Claire Castleford to be a bit of a maverick, a bit of an awkward cuss, rather than someone just like him.
Mirroring wasn’t going to cut it.
‘Oh yes,’ said DCI Stewart in response to something Phil had just said. ‘He’s a pillar of the community. Does a lot of good work for charity. In fact, to listen to the locals, you’d think there’d be no need for electric light in Pitfourie because the sun shines out of his arse.’ He slapped the file copies down on the table and pushed one in Claire’s direction.
The sun had, in fact, come out, and was throwing golden light through the row of windows facing her, as if in an effort to make the little box of a meeting room more appealing, but it just made Claire want out of here even more desperately. Out into the air.
