In the Family

by Christina James

  “Unfortunately not,” said Tim. “I don’t smoke. But in any case . . .” he gestured at the No Smoking sign on the wall. She shrugged.

  “Much better for me not to.”

  He nodded agreement.

  “Are you here for the statistics seminar?” he asked. “Because if you are, I admire your cleverness in getting out of the first day. It has been deadly dull – and that’s putting it mildly.”

  “I have come for it: but not as one of the delegates. I’m one of the speakers.”

  “Oops, sorry!” said Tim. He felt his face grow red.

  “Oh, it’s OK,” she said, with a grin. “I had nothing to do with designing it, and I’m certainly not a statistician. I think that I was brought in for a bit of light relief. I’ve got the pre-lunch slot tomorrow, as well, so no doubt no-one will bother to listen to me – they’ll all be thinking about taking a break, if not actually disappearing into the bar.”

  “Well, I shall certainly listen to you. What are you going to talk about?”

  “You should have asked that first, before you promised to listen! You can’t have looked at the schedule for tomorrow, either, though admittedly my name doesn’t appear on it; one of my colleagues was supposed to be giving the presentation, but she’s gone down with ’flu. I got a call on my way back from the airport, which is why I wasn’t here earlier, and also why I’ve brought so much luggage with me.” She glanced ruefully at the shocking pink monster.

  “You mean you’re still supposed to be on holiday today?”

  “Yes. First day back tomorrow. But being here will beat sitting at my desk checking up on hundreds of e-mails.”

  “I wouldn’t be too certain about that,” said Tim.

  “If it’s as boring as you say, I may just stay in my room and check the e-mails there, except when it’s my turn to speak.”

  “It’s not that bad,” said Tim quickly, regretting for the second time in five minutes that he had let his tongue run away with him. “You could give it a try the course delegates might amuse you. I’ve never seen such a stereotypical set of coppers.”

  “I’m used to coppers,” she said. “I work with them all the time. I wouldn’t be able to identify a stereotype, though; most of the ones I work with have individual quirks. But you’re right: I do find meeting them interesting. If the people here aren’t brain-dead from all those statistics, I’m sure they’ll be interesting to talk to. You are, after all.”

  Tim felt both put down and flattered, all in one go. He was curious, as well.

  “You still haven’t told me what you do. Do you work with coppers all of the time, or is it only part of your job? Are you a psychologist – or a psychiatrist?”

  “Nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid. I’m a police researcher. I expect you’ve met quite a few like me. We dig up the background information to serious cases and sometimes recommend expert witnesses. We aren’t always treated seriously, as a matter of fact. I think that’s partly why Commander Rawlinson asked my colleague to speak – to make you all appreciate how much we can help you if we’re allowed to. I may even throw in a few stats to prove it,” she added mischievously.

  “I can honestly say that I appreciate everyone who helps me and my team, or becomes part of my team,” said Tim. It sounded a little pompous, but it was true. He had little time for hierarchy or bogus professional pride. “But I can equally honestly say, I’ve never worked with anyone remotely like you.” He said it in a bantering way, but she could see that he was in earnest. She laughed again, almost a schoolgirl giggle.

  At that moment, the old man whom the receptionist had earlier referred to as the ‘concierge’ belatedly put in an appearance. He was a man of about sixty, whose face had apparently been set habitually in such a morose expression that its skin now fell naturally into deep sad grooves; his drooping, badly-cut greying hair and moustache gave him the look of Lewis Carroll’s walrus. Nevertheless, he managed a small smile in her direction, which was more than he had vouchsafed to Tim earlier.

  “Can I help you, Miss?” he enquired, surveying the huge suitcase. “Are you here for the conference, or just visiting?” He eyed Tim askance, as if to indicate that he knew that Tim was trying to lead the woman astray. He consulted a piece of paper that had been sellotaped to the reception desk.

  “I’m Katrin Schuster. I’m one of the speakers tomorrow, but you won’t find my name on your list. I’m standing in for a colleague, whose name should be on it: Louise Thresher.”

  The concierge ran his forefinger down the list with painful slowness. How difficult could it be? Tim thought impatiently. There were only about thirty people on the course, lecturers included.

  “Ah, yes. Ms Thresher. Room 307. Could you just fill in this sheet – for security purposes? You only need to give us your name and address. We don’t use most of the boxes on this form.”

  Katrin smiled and nodded, writing her name and address on the form with a considerable flourish before she handed it back to him. He took it from her and scrutinised it, then turned back to his list and carefully crossed out ‘Louise Thresher’ many times, so that the words were entirely illegible, before printing her name above the black block of ink that he had created.

  “Can I carry your case up for you, Miss?”

  “I’ll do that!” said Tim, with alacrity. The concierge looked at him with venomous watery eyes, as if he had made an improper suggestion.

  “Are you quite happy with that, Miss?” As Tim joked much later, he might just as well have said, “We don’t want no shenanigans going on here.”

  She nodded, obviously trying not to laugh. Tim heard the roar of voices in the bar get suddenly louder and guessed that dinner was about to be served. He vowed to get Katrin Schuster out of the reception area before his new colleagues clapped eyes on her. He fervently hoped that, by the time she had sorted out her belongings, she would have missed dinner and given him the excuse to take her somewhere else. He seized the case again and loped up the two flights of stairs as fast as he could without actually running. Katrin followed more slowly. The concierge watched, irradiating disapproval.

  “Wow,” said Tim, when she had unlocked the door and he had hefted the case over the threshold. “You’ve got a suite. How did you manage that?”

  She shrugged.

  “Speaker’s privilege, I guess.” She wandered around the room a little. “Do come in – since I don’t have to invite you into my bedroom in order to offer hospitality, I’m sure we would be behaving with perfect decorum. Sitting-rooms are only for sitting in, after all. Ah, that’s what I was looking for,” she added, moving over to a huge ornate sideboard which stood against the interior wall and swooping on a decanter which had been set on it. “Complimentary sherry. I was told that this would be here. There’s some complimentary fruit somewhere, too.” She lifted the bottle. “Would you like some?”

  “Sherry’s not really my kind of . . . oh, what the hell, it’s better than going down to the bar, and no point in looking a gift horse, etc. Yes, please.”

  She poured sherry into two of the tulip glasses that had been arranged on a tray with the decanter, and handed one of them to him. He took a gingerly sip of the pale yellow liquid. Fortunately, it was a dry sherry, so at least drinkable.

  “Sit down for a minute, if you’ve got time,” she added. She grinned. Tim realised that he was behaving with adolescent gaucheness. He had not felt so tongue-tied since he was fourteen. His earlier attempt at sang-froid had evaporated. He nodded and sat obediently. She sat down beside him, not too close, but in a companionable way. She chattered on about her holiday and her plans once she got back to work, while he listened and responded. By the time they were on their second glass of sherry, his uneasiness had vanished and he was mimicking Superintendant Thornton to a very appreciative listener. She kept on giggling until they were both laughing uncontrollably.

  “Goodne
ss!” she said suddenly, looking at her watch. “Dinner’s started. We’ll either have to go in late or miss it – and I’m starving.”

  Within five minutes of having first spoken to her, Tim had had no intention of escorting her to the police delegates’ dinner at Bagden Hall. He did not even pretend that he was annoyed at having missed it.

  “Did you see any restaurants when you were riding here in the taxi?” he asked.

  “I think that there was a gastropub in the last village before you reach here from the station,” she said. “A place called Frensham, or something like it.”

  “Fancy going to suss it out?” he said. “My treat.” He stood up and offered her his arm. “Or, to put it another way, ‘I’d be delighted if you’d do me the honour of accepting my invitation to dinner, Miss Schuster’.”

  She giggled again.

  “Give me a couple of minutes,” she said, kicking off the stilettos. “I’ve been travelling since the crack of dawn today. I just need to freshen up a bit.”

  She disappeared back into the tiny lobby that led to her sitting-room. He heard her lugging the big suitcase into the bedroom, and decided that it would be indelicate to offer to help. He remained seated on her yellow sofa, idly flicking through an advertising brochure for Bagden Hall, until she returned. She’d been more than a couple of minutes, but still pretty swift, he thought, admiringly. Now she was wearing skinny jeans and a white polo sweater, and carrying the fur jacket. Her jeans were tucked into knee-high boots. Tim smiled approval. He decided not to risk complimenting her verbally.

  “Next step,” he said, “is for us each to sneak out of here without being observed. “I’ll go first, then you won’t have to stand around in the cold. You follow in a few minutes. My car’s a BMW that’s seen better days. It’s dark blue. I’ll bring it round from the car park and wait just the other side of the main entrance, at the top of the sweep.”

  Ten minutes later they were driving into Frensham. They found the pub immediately. It was called The Queen’s Head and it stood right next to the road. Its sign, painted in primary colours, depicted a female head in a Tudor headdress – perhaps intended to represent that of one of Henry VIII’s wives– lying severed on the ground, the neck ruff and the jewelled band holding the headdress still, improbably, in place. A square placard tacked underneath it proclaimed ‘Gourmet meals served daily. Local specialities. 12.30 – 2.00 and 6.30 – 8.30. Tim glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes after eight o’clock. It looked as if they would be lucky.

  They laughed about their first dinner together many times afterwards. Inside, The Queen’s Head turned out to be a ‘spit and sawdust’ establishment with wall-to-wall football blaring from an outsize TV, which was being watched by half a dozen or so locals standing at the bar. No-one appeared to be eating. However, the landlord – a balding man with a huge gut – assured them that he was still serving food, and brought grubby menus. There was steak and chips, curry and chips or steak and kidney pie and chips.

  “Gourmet in every case,” said Tim, smiling ruefully. “Do you want to risk it?”

  “Why not?” Katrin had smiled back. “The worst that can happen is that we both have to bunk off tomorrow because we’ve gone down with food poisoning. I’ll try the pie – it’s less likely to have been made on the premises than the other things.” Tim afterwards said that he had loved her from this moment on, for her wonderfully enterprising attitude. Most of the girls that he knew would have thrown a tantrum at this point.

  Two pies duly arrived, each accompanied by pale greasy chips and bright green frozen peas. The vegetables proved to be inedible, but the pies were passable, especially when washed down with the real ale which was The Queen’s Head’s only redeeming feature. Katrin was probably right about their provenance. Despite the questionable food, the evening passed like a dream. They talked about each other, their jobs, their interests, their families. Tim felt as if he had never known anyone so well or cared for anyone so much.

  Outside in the car park, they paused and kissed. And kissed some more. When finally they reached Bagden Hall again – just before its ridiculous curfew of 11 p.m., after which all the doors were locked – it took all his powers of self-restraint not to follow her up the broad staircase to her suite of rooms once more, instead of turning past reception to his own room at the end of the ground floor corridor. Afterwards, she had said that she was disappointed that he had been so circumspect. However, it had enabled her to manage a reasonable night’s sleep and then get up early to do some work.

  The next day, she delivered an engaging talk, having spent most of the morning in her room preparing it. The old lags all vied with each other to sit with her at lunch, so that it was mid-afternoon by the time Tim got the chance to speak to her again. The seminar was almost over by then and people were preparing to depart. He gave her a lift to the station, where they exchanged telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. He was convinced that they would meet again, and soon, but nevertheless he was overcome with an overpowering sense of sadness – of the transience of all truly pleasurable things – as he drove home.

  “Learn anything useful from that seminar?” asked Superintendant Thornton.

  “Yes, sir,” said Tim. “I found out what a big help police researchers can be.”

  “Funny you should say that, because I’ve been thinking of advertising for one. Perhaps you could help me draft the jd.”

  Chapter Five

  It was a glowering February morning and dawn had just broken, although it was well after 8 a.m. It was three days after the discovery of the skeleton, and Tim Yates, sanguine as he normally was, was beginning to get annoyed that he had still received no results from either the pathologist or the National DNA Database. Katrin had already left for work, and he himself – characteristically, for time-keeping was not his strong point – was in danger of being late for his first team briefing on the case. He reflected angrily that there wasn’t much point in a team briefing unless they could identify the victim – although he knew that he was being unreasonable, especially with regard to the database, as the probable date of death made it unlikely that they would find a match. The only clues that they had to go on were some shreds of fabric, which a forensic analyst had already dated ‘with reasonable accuracy’ as having been manufactured in the early 1970s, the ring, and the plastic Red Indian. Juliet Armstrong was investigating the likely provenance of this and she had given him to understand that she had made progress. Otherwise, nothing.

  He decided to call Juliet on his cellphone. He knew that she would already be at the police station, setting things up for the meeting. Juliet was nothing if not efficient and, although her painstaking attention to bureaucratic detail sometimes irritated him, he would be the first to acknowledge the value of this in a team whose other members all shunned ‘the paperwork’.

  “Juliet? It’s me. Have we heard anything back from the pathologist or the DNA database yet?”

  “Good morning, sir. No – you asked me that question yesterday afternoon. I chased them both then and they said that they would pull the stops out. I’m hoping we might get something today.”

  “I’m on my way in now. If we don’t have anything by the time I get there, I shall call them myself and give them a rocket. I should like to know what they think we mean when we say something is urgent.”

  “As you wish, sir. I suppose they can be forgiven for thinking that work on what we believe to be an old crime is not quite on a par with some of their other jobs. The skeleton has probably been by the side of the dual carriageway for thirty-odd years, after all.”

  “That’s not the point, it’s . . . forget it. I’m on my way.”

  Tim’s bad mood had not abated when he reached HQ. When he entered the incident room, he found the investigation team – such as it was, for it consisted of only three officers besides himself – assembled. As he knew she would have done, Juliet Armstrong had
written what information they had collected so far on the glass screen and stuck several photographs of the remains of the skeleton from different angles at the top of it. Tim immediately felt brighter. He poured himself coffee from the insulated jug and took one of the seats at the circular table.

  “Good morning, everyone,” he said. “Thank you, Juliet, for getting everything ready. You’re an inspiration, as usual.”

  Juliet blushed. She was rather a dumpy woman in her early thirties, with poor skin. She wore heavy, black-framed spectacles and seemed to be unable to control her thick black corkscrew curls. He saw Andy Carstairs, Juliet’s counterpart and exact contemporary, smother a grin, and realised that he might have pushed his praise too far. The last thing that he wanted to do was to humiliate her. He moved swiftly into the briefing.

  “Let’s begin by summarising what we already have. At approximately four-thirty p.m. last Monday afternoon – just as it was getting dark – a skeleton was found by workmen on the reservation of the southbound carriageway of the A1. It appears to have been there a long time. All that was found with it were some fragments of blue cloth, some metal circlets and hooks and eyes, probably part of a woman’s bra, a silver ring of the type that I believe is known as a ‘friendship ring’ – they are inexpensive and available from shops and boutiques all over the country – and a terracotta-coloured plastic Red Indian. Forensic tests show that the skeleton is that of a young woman, and that she probably died about thirty years ago. Cause of death so far indeterminate. Her exact age cannot be determined, either, but she was probably about twenty-five when she died, and certainly no older than thirty. Andy has been looking up the names of women reported missing in this age group during the period, and come up with five. Andy, tell us what you know.” Tim did not add that he had had a conversation with Andy Carstairs on the previous day, which had prompted him to commission a separate piece of research of his own.

  Andy Carstairs rose and moved to the glass screen. He indicated a list of names that he had already written there in blue marker pen. Two photographs were stuck alongside them.