by Faith Martin
Janine put the plates in the sink, wondering if she should wash up or leave them. Mel had arrived with a Thai take-out, introducing her to culinary delights she already knew about but pretended not to. Her last boyfriend but one had been a backpacker, and had introduced her not only to Thai but to Creole cooking as well.
Still, if Mel liked to play the big sophisticate, why not let him?
They’d drunk the wine, called each other by their first names right from the start, discussed the latest in the case, listened to some Norah Jones, and now looked ready to get down to the nitty gritty.
Hence the wash-up-now-or-later conundrum.
When she went back into the “lounge,” Mel was leaning back in the armchair with his eyes closed. Her room was the biggest bedroom in the house she rented with her mates, but in exchange for having it, she had to use it as a living area too, leaving the real lounge downstairs free for one or the other of her mates to entertain in.
She didn’t normally mind, but now she was acutely aware of her underwear lurking in the chest of drawers to the right, along with her sanitary towels. He opened his eyes suddenly and looked at her.
Then there was the bed. It wasn’t a double bed, but a three-quarters effort.
‘Do you want to?’ Mel said simply, not even looking the bed’s way.
Janine thought of her back, which still hurt. And of those nudge-nudge, wink-wink jokes that were bound to start the moment people realised they were an item. Did she really need the hassle?
‘Why not?’
* * *
For a man who was checking out shop doorways late on a chilly night, Tommy was oddly happy. Probably because, on the other side of the deserted road, Hillary was doing the same.
Hillary knew it was madness, a DI doing scut work like this, late at night. Most people under the rank of sergeant thought all DIs belonged behind a desk doing paperwork.
So be it. She’d simply rather be here than back at the boat.
Sad, sad, sad.
It was Tommy who found him.
He wasn’t old, but he wasn’t young either. He was, however, very drunk. Perhaps that was why he actually answered when Tommy asked him where he usually slept. If he’d been sober, no doubt he’d have lied about it.
‘Guv,’ Tommy called softly, bending down to get a better look at his prize, ignoring the smell of cheap booze, urine, and — curiously — strong soap. ‘This here chap usually kips out Woodeaton way,’ he said casually as Hillary joined him.
The area they were in was not quite into the suburb of Botley, but it had plenty of carpet warehouses, car plants and dark alleys where a chap could rest away from the hustle and bustle of the city.
It wasn’t a place Hillary would choose to be alone in at night.
‘Nice and warm,’ slurred the tramp in confirmation. He was wearing a dirty, padded parka. ‘Mission up yonder.’ This unasked-for information probably accounted for the smell of soap. ‘Full,’ the tramp said, nodding wisely, in that one word explaining why he was on the doorstep. But the real question was, of course, why was he here and not back at Woodeaton?
With a sigh, Hillary nodded to Tommy to bring him in. Once he’d slept it off, had a good meal and sobered up, he might be worth his weight in gold.
He threw up as Tommy hauled him to his feet, a thin, greenish, chemical spume that made Hillary gag.
Then again, maybe not.
* * *
When Hillary got in the following morning, she was furious to find that Mel was already interviewing the tramp. His name, according to the blackboard outside the interview room, was Michael Ryan. No relation, hopefully, to the man in Hungerford who’d gone crazy and killed so many people in that shocking rampage all those years ago.
Knowing that she couldn’t just burst in on the interview, even though it had been her and Tommy who’d done the dirty work, Hillary stomped up to the office in a foul mood, only to find Janine already in and looking good.
Not that she wasn’t pleased to see her looking better, but there was something about her that raised all of Hillary’s instinctive hackles. I’m just in a really shitty mood, she thought to herself, slinging her bag down on her desk and smothering a yawn.
‘The Yorkie Bars were in looking for you, boss,’ Janine said.
Hillary swore long and graphically, making not just her sergeant’s, but several other heads turn to her in surprise. Although she could curse with the best of them, Hillary didn’t have a reputation as a spectacular sewer-mouth.
Well, sod that. Batting her eyelashes at the infatuated Paul Danvers wasn’t going to improve the quality of her day at all. She grabbed her bag again. ‘When Mel comes up, tell him I’m interviewing Dave Pitman’s mother. Oh, and tell Tommy hard luck. He’ll know what I mean.’
The constable would have been looking forward to reaping the rewards of his efforts last night, Hillary knew, and would also be gutted to find Mel in there well before him.
After all, Michael Ryan hadn’t spewed up all down Mel’s label-bearing shirt and shiny new Oxfords.
* * *
Mrs Pitman was one of those women who looked much older than you knew they must be. Pitman had been thirty-two when he died, but even if his mother had had him later in life, she still shouldn’t have looked like a near octogenarian. Hillary could see the pinkness of her scalp showing through her sparse white hair as she led her into a painfully clean sitting room. She was wearing a flowered apron and comfortable slippers.
Hillary sat where the obviously nervous woman indicated, and from the pale, near translucent tone of her skin, wondered if she ever ventured out of the house at all.
‘It’s about your son, Mrs Pitman,’ she said (as if it could be about anything else), and turned down an offer of tea. Usually she always said yes, because hospitality broke the barriers, but Muriel Pitman didn’t look as if she had enough energy left to even fill the kettle.
She remembered back to the report of the constable who’d first interviewed her, and his comment that he thought she must have lived in mortal fear of her son. She found herself agreeing with him. Pitman was an only child. Probably her husband, either long gone or long dead, had been the bullying kind as well, teaching The Pits that a woman’s place was to be battered, beaten and kept indoors.
‘You found out who did it yet?’ she asked, but Hillary could see no real interest in the watery brown eyes. There was no emotion in her voice either, neither anger nor curiosity. Perhaps, when it finally sank in that her son was gone, that she was free and clear, she might take off the apron, put on some shoes and go outside and find herself a life.
It was hopeless, of course. Hillary asked all the usual questions, but there was no way The Pits would have told this poor old soul about what he really did for a living, let alone who he did it for.
On the shelf were a few token photographs, one of a man who looked like a mean Wurzel Gummidge character, taken on what was obviously the local allotment, and who could only be Mr Pitman senior, and one of the The Pits himself, posing by a chrome monster of a bike. In the background lurked what appeared to be old barn buildings, sheds, and something tin and ugly, the kind of thing you came upon unexpectedly when driving through the countryside. It was usually annexed to a nice period farmhouse. Or a manure heap.
She knew the locals were still trying to find Pitman’s lock-up, and even though she asked, Hillary knew that his mother would have no idea where her son kept his pride and joy. And what did it matter whether they found his bloody motorbike or not anyway? Was it going to explain how it was him, and not Jake Gascoigne, who’d gone off the back of that boat in Dashwood Lock?
She left a short while later, her day irretrievably ruined. First of all Mel nabs her hard-won wit, then the Yorkie Bars are on the prowl again, and now this. She closed the door respectfully behind her, imagining Muriel Pitman’s shoulders slumping in relief as she shuffled back to the kitchen, probably the warmest room in the house.
She hoped she had a cat. The tho
ught of Muriel Pitman living in that insanely clean house with not even a cat for company made her want to just get into her car and howl.
Shit, she hated days like this, days when everything conspired to depress her. She noticed the neighbour too late. No doubt he’d been coiled, waiting to strike as soon as she left the house. He’d probably seen her car arrive and knew what it meant. No doubt Dave Pitman was now the local celebrity, and would be for some time to come.
The man was in his mid-fifties, round, balding, and avid-eyed. ‘Found out who killed him, then, have you? Ask me, the poor soul’s better off without him. Used to come here, Sundays like, for his dinner. Never paid her nothing, I can tell you. Sometimes he’d use her garden as his mechanic’s workshop. Remember once, she’d just put out marigolds. Lots of ’em, French ones, and them gold ones, lovely it looked. And up he comes, with that dirty scrambling bike of his, and just dismantles it on her lawn. Oil and bits of metal everywhere. But she never said nothing. Daren’t.’ He nodded sagely. ‘He’d have given her some of this, see, if she had.’ He held up his hand, palm inward.
Hillary nodded, letting him ramble on, only half listening to the usual tirade against a no-good thug and what his poor saint of a mother had to put up with.
In the back of her mind, though, something tickled. Eventually she realised what it was. ‘He had a scrambling bike, then?’ She thought back to the photo. That gleaming chrome monster was no scrambler, that was for sure. So he must have had more than one bike. She thought back to the picture on the mantelpiece. Farm outhouses. Was it possible that he didn’t have a lock-up at all? Not a garage as such, because a collection of bikes wouldn’t fit, but some disused barns or something might just be the ticket. Farmers, nowadays, had to scrape a living as best they could. No doubt Dave Pitman would have paid good money to keep his babies safe in a nice waterproof barn somewhere.
‘Oh, aye. Used to do a bit of illegal scrambling out by Woodstock way. Farmers were all up in arms about it, but they couldn’t catch him at it, see. I reckon the Duke of Marlborough will be as glad to see the bugger dead as anyone. I wouldn’t have put it past him to go haring across the fields out near Blenheim. He’d have considered that a right laugh. And a dare. You know, to cock a snook at the Duke.’
Hillary did know.
She thanked the man, who was still reminiscing about big bad Dave Pitman when she’d got in the car and firmly shut the door on him.
Immediately, she called up the Big House and got hold of Tommy.
‘Hey, Tommy. Fancy coming out to Woodstock? Meet me at the Duke’s Head and we’ll have a bite to eat. There’s something I need you to help me with. Oh, and don’t tell Mel, eh?’
CHAPTER 15
Paul Danvers pushed open the door to the open-plan office and saw at once that DI Hillary Greene wasn’t at her desk. Surprise, surprise. A lesser man might have suspected that people were deliberately avoiding him.
By his side, Curtis Smith smiled obliquely. ‘Well, look who’s not here. Again.’
Paul shrugged. For some reason it made him angry that his sergeant should be thinking the same thing as him, and so he was careful to keep his voice even. ‘I daresay she’s busy. She has got a case on. And an important one at that.’
‘Yeah? And whose fault is that?’ Curtis asked aggressively.
Paul glanced across at Mel Mallow’s cubicle. The door was firmly shut.
Curtis, spying Frank Ross staring at them openly, nudged Paul’s arm. ‘You ask me, if we want to run DI Greene to earth, we’d be better off asking the poison cherub over there.’
Paul sighed. ‘You seem hot to confront her all at once.’
‘We’ve got new evidence.’
Paul snorted. ‘Remember who you’re talking to, OK? Our new evidence isn’t worth the paper it was written on.’
Curtis smiled softly. ‘So? DI Greene won’t know that.’ So saying, he began to amble over towards DS Ross, who put on a sneer especially for them.
‘DS Ross! Just the man we were looking for.’ Curtis was glad to see the sergeant go slightly pale at this rather ominous beginning.
‘We were wondering if you could tell us where DI Greene is,’ Paul put in flatly. For some reason he was in no mood to play bait-the-poor-sucker.
Frank Ross fought a brief war between the dictum that said you never but never talked to filth like this and the delicious sensation that came over him whenever he managed to shaft Hillary Greene.
Delicious sensation won.
Now there was a surprise.
* * *
Tommy was happy. He’d arrived at the pub, half-expecting the call to have been one of those mirages (albeit an auditory version) that some poor sap got when crawling through the desert, only to find that Hillary actually and truly was waiting for him. At a table in a big bay window, to be precise. They ordered chicken, leek and ham pie, with a side salad, and talked about the case.
Tommy would have preferred to talk about anything else. Literature, music, telly — hell, even childhood memories or their favourite colours.
Yes, he was that desperate.
But the case it was. And if Hillary wanted to find The Pits’s lock-up, barn, bikes, what the hell ever, he would search through hell and high water for them. Well, at least through the environs of Woodstock.
The meal passed all too quickly, and soon they were driving past an outlying village, the name of which escaped him.
‘I’ll drop you off here. I’ll search the next village on, then come back for you. We’ll keep it up, on a clockwise sweep around the town.’ Hillary paused, and added wryly, ‘You never know your luck.’
* * *
A couple of minutes after they drove out of the pub car park, the Yorkie Bars pulled in.
The barman was no help, but the member of staff who’d served their pies and pints recalled them discussing tactics for searching barn outhouses in the immediate area. Paul was ready to give up there and then, for a mixture of reasons. One was sheer laziness. The thought of driving through cowshit-covered lanes in search of one car made him depressed to the marrow of his bones. He longed to be back in Leeds, his home town, where villains stayed close to cafes, pubs and decently paved streets with buildings on either side. The chances of finding Hillary out in the sticks were remote, and painstaking tasks always made him shudder. He was beginning to feel like one of those characters in the American films of the thirties and forties, where brutal prison guards with bloodhounds tracked some poor hapless bastard through the swamps.
But Curtis had other ideas. For some reason, he was determined to confront her, and Paul was willing to bet that he wouldn’t have minded slipping the cuffs on Humphrey Bogart or George Raft in a Mississippi swamp, given half a chance. Curtis would even buy the bloodhound a chump steak for its pains.
* * *
Hillary couldn’t believe her luck. The first farm she’d tried, and she’d struck gold. Now what were the chances of that? As if to make up for the really crappy start to her day, she was suddenly being given a pat on the head and a “there-there.”
The farmer’s wife didn’t look like a farmer’s wife in that she wasn’t rounded, rosy-cheeked and cheerful. She was blonde, nearly as pretty as Janine, wore pricey jeans and looked like she was on her way out, probably to do some shopping in Harvey Nichols or to buy expensive wallpaper for the dining room.
The farmhouse was huge and square, and under this lady’s auspices had no doubt been decorated to within an inch of its life, but it was surrounded by the usual accompaniment of barns, sheds and outhouses, and that’s all that mattered to Hillary.
Particularly when one of them had been rented by David Pitman.
‘Yeah, Mr Pitman rented the old pig house from us. That one, over there.’ A red-painted nail pointed out a large, rectangular building with a corrugated iron roof and stone walls that looked at least a foot thick.
‘Mind if I take a look?’ Hillary said. ‘You may have heard that Mr Pitman met with a fatal accident.’
>
‘Really?’ Big blue eyes widened innocently. ‘I didn’t know that.’
Hillary smiled. Yeah. Right. Then again, she looked the type who probably only ever read Home and Country.
Or Horse and Hound.
‘So, I’m sure, under the circumstances, you’ll have no objection to me looking around?’
‘Oh no. He only kept his bikes in there anyway. Oh, you might like the key to the padlock.’
Before she could reply, the jolly farmer’s wife popped back into the house, leaving Hillary speculating furiously. Why would The Pits, a bike fanatic, leave a spare key here? Perhaps the farmer had insisted. Or perhaps they’d had a spare key cut, on the sly? Or maybe The Pits had been only too pleased to give her a second key. No. Surely not. Surely they hadn’t been doing the horizontal tango together? Not someone that pug-ugly with the wannabe Sloane Ranger?
‘Here it is,’ the farmer’s wife said, dangling a key helpfully. Hillary took it with a grudging thanks and set off briskly across the courtyard.
In the olden days, she thought wistfully, there’d have been free-range hens clucking contentedly around a trough, scrounging for corn and grass seeds. A sheepdog would lie panting a welcome in the shade. Perhaps the odd goose or two would honk at her in passing.
But this was the new millennium, and the only thing that indicated the forecourt belonged to a farm was a tractor, pulled to bits and awaiting reassembly, parked up against a far wall.
That, and oil and drying cowshit everywhere.
* * *
Paul Danvers spotted the car first and pulled over to the side.
‘See, told you it wouldn’t be so bad,’ Curtis had the cheek to say. In truth, he’d never thought they’d find her either, but it beat sitting around back at the Big House, trying to prise out facts about Ronnie Greene that no one wanted to set free. Paul climbed out and looked around. A vague odour of manure hung in the air, helped by overnight rain that the sun was quickly steam-drying.
The corn was green, and in the hedge, a corn bunting sang jubilantly from the highest branch. The country lane was empty of traffic, and it was hard to imagine that a city existed anywhere.
