by Val McDermid
Carol aimed for rueful. ‘Flash is still a bit young to be left on her own for too long.’
He mirrored her regret with a downward twist of his mouth. ‘Hoist by my own petard.’
‘Who’s Flash?’ The question came from an older man further down the table whose meaty red face and several chins made him look like one of the cheerier illustrations from Dickens.
‘Carol kindly took on one of Jess’s pups,’ George said, the genial host again. ‘One that’s scared of sheep.’
‘Scared of sheep?’ The Pickwickian questioner looked as incredulous as he sounded.
‘It happens from time to time,’ George said mildly. ‘All a ewe has to do is bleat and Flash puts her tail between her legs and runs. Carol saved the dog from redundancy.’
‘And she’s a great companion,’ Carol said. ‘But she’s not much more than a pup. And like all collies, she doesn’t like being on her own for great chunks of time. So I ought to get back.’
The man she wanted to punch snorted. ‘Your dog sounds more tyrannical than our babysitter. And that’s saying something.’
‘Not at all, Charlie,’ George said. ‘Carol’s quite right. You treat a pup reasonably and you end up with the best kind of dog.’ He smiled, his dark eyes genial. ‘I’ll get Jackie to run you home. You can pick your car up when you’re out with Flash in the morning.’
Carol frowned. So he had been paying attention to how much she’d put away. The thought angered her. What she drank was her business. Nobody could be expected to endure what she had without some sort of support system. She knew she was in control of the drink, not the other way round, in spite of what anyone else might think. Or any one person in particular.
She pushed that thought away and forced a casual tone into her voice. ‘No need. Jackie’s got enough to do in the kitchen. I’m fine to drive.’
The man on her left made a faintly derisive noise. ‘I’ll get my driver to take you,’ he said with a condescending pat to her hand.
Carol stood up, perfectly steady. ‘That’s very kind, but there’s no need. It’s only a couple of miles down the road. It’s quiet as the grave at this time of night.’ She spoke with the authority of a woman who has grown accustomed to being deferred to.
George hastily got to his feet, lips pursed. ‘I’ll see you to your car,’ he said with his invariable politeness.
‘Lovely to meet you all,’ Carol lied, smiling her way round the table with its late-night chaos of crystal and silver, china and cheeseboard. Eight people she’d never have to see again, if she was lucky. Eight people probably breathing a sigh of relief that the square peg was leaving the round hole. George opened the dining room door and stood back to let her precede him into the stone-flagged hall. The subtle lighting made the elderly rugs glow; or perhaps that was the wine, Carol thought as she walked to the broad front door.
George paused in the porch, gauging the coats hanging from the guest pegs. He extended a hand towards a long black cashmere, then stopped, casting a smile over his shoulder towards her. ‘The Barbour, yes?’
Carol felt a stab of embarrassment. She’d deliberately chosen her dog-walking jacket, stubbornly refusing to completely dress up for something she didn’t want to do. And now it felt like a deliberate insult to a man who had only ever shown her kindness and a friendly face. ‘It matches the Land Rover rather than the dress,’ she said, gesturing at the black silk jersey sheath that fitted her better than it used to. She was a different shape from the woman who had bought it; hard physical work had broadened her shoulders and reconfigured her hips and thighs.
He handed her into the waxed coat. ‘I rather like the contrast,’ he said. She couldn’t see his face but she could hear the smile in his voice. ‘Thank you for coming, Carol. I hope it wasn’t too much of an ordeal. Next time, I promise you a more relaxed evening. A quiet kitchen supper, perhaps?’
‘I’m amazed at your persistence.’ She turned to face him, her grey eyes meeting his. ‘I’d have given up on me long before this.’
‘Secret of my success, persistence. I was never the brightest or the best in my cohort but I learned that if I stuck with things, the outcome was generally acceptable. It’s how I got Diana to marry me.’ He opened the door and a shiver of chill air crept over them. ‘And speaking of persistence – are you determined to drive? It’s no problem at all to have Jackie drop you off.’
‘I’m fine, George. Really.’ She stepped on to the frosted gravel and crunched her way across, grateful for the closeness of his arm when her unfamiliar high heels unsteadied her a couple of yards from the vehicle. ‘God, it’s been so long since I wore these shoes,’ she said with a forced laugh.
‘One of the many reasons I’m grateful for being a bloke.’ George took a step backwards as she opened the Land Rover door and swung herself up into the high seat. ‘Do be careful. Maybe see you on the hill tomorrow?’
‘Probably. Thanks again for a lovely dinner.’ She slammed the heavy door closed and gunned the noisy diesel into life. There was a faint blur of frost on the windscreen but a couple of swipes of the wipers took care of it. With the fan on full to keep the windscreen clear, Carol eased the gearstick out of neutral and set off down the drive. George’s mention of his late wife – killed in an accident involving a drunk driver – felt like a reproach for her decision to get behind the wheel after a few glasses of wine. But she felt absolutely fine, in complete control of her reactions and responses. Besides, it was less than three miles. And she was desperate to escape.
God, what a night. If they hadn’t been such a bunch of tossers, she’d have been ashamed of being such a crap guest. As it was, she was dismayed at how poorly she’d repaid George’s generosity. She’d lost the knack of being with people. Once upon a time, she’d been close enough to one man to tease him constantly about his lack of his social graces. Now she’d turned into him.
She swung out of the drive on to the narrow ribbon of road that stretched between George Nicholas’s manor house and the stone barn she’d spent the past months stripping to its bare bones and rebuilding according to her own distinct vision. She’d peeled away everything that might provoke memories, but its history haunted her nevertheless.
The headlights bleached the hedgerows of colour and she felt relief as she recognised the markers that told her she was closing in on home. The crooked stump of the dead oak; the stile and the fingerpost for the footpath; the dirty yellow plastic grit bin, there to make up for the fact that the council were never going to grit a road so insignificant it didn’t even have a white line up the middle.
Then, all at once, a different kind of marker. The kind that’s never good news. In her rear-view mirror, a disco wash of blue lights.
3
Chief Constable James Blake was not a naturally patient man. Over the years, as he’d clawed his way to the top job, he’d forced himself to cultivate the appearance of patience. He’d imagined that once he was running the show, he could push the pace to match his desire. To his chagrin it hadn’t worked out that way during his first command in the West Country. Trying to provoke a sense of urgency among his officers had been, as he often told his wife, like pushing clotted cream uphill. He’d put it down to the general sense that everything ran slower down there. So Blake determined to bite the bullet and take the first chance he had at a job somewhere they knew how to get out of second gear.
Bradfield Metropolitan Police, he reckoned, would have to be up to speed to cope with policing a modern urban environment. It would be absolutely his sort of place. An edgy Northern city with a decent slice of serious and organised crime, perfect for him to make a lasting impression. One that would guarantee a fistful of executive directorships when he came to hang up the uniform. He’d convinced the interview panel, persuaded his family they’d love big-city life, and sailed into Bradfield, certain that he’d have things running with speed and efficiency in no time at all.
It didn’t help that he’d arrived simultaneously with government
funding cuts. In his eyes that was no excuse for the dogged stubbornness he encountered at every level as he battled to run the force more effectively and efficiently. It never occurred to him that the reason most of his officers had so little respect for him was his lack of experience at the sharp end of the kind of policing that Bradfield demanded. Instead Blake blamed it on their urban Northern prejudices – he must be a clueless bumpkin because he’d come from the West Country. He was disappointed and, he had to admit at times, discouraged. Which was why he had come to this meeting filled with anticipation. A working dinner with a junior Home Office minister, a pair of his civil servants and a special advisor. That wasn’t something to be taken lightly, even if the special advisor was the retired chief constable who had preceded him at Bradfield. Blake didn’t reckon much to John Brandon – if he’d done his job properly, Blake’s task would have been a lot more straightforward.
Whatever they had in mind for him, nobody was in any hurry to get to the point. They’d been shut away in their private dining room for almost two hours, making their way through amuse-bouche, starter, sorbet, main course and dessert. The food had been abundant; luxurious, even. The wine, rather more sparing though no less good. The conversation had ranged widely around policing and politics, laced with entertaining anecdotes and a couple of mildly diverting indiscretions, but Blake remained no wiser as to why they were all there. His impatience ate away at him, as aggravating as indigestion.
Finally, the waiters delivered a lavish cheeseboard, fruit bowl and biscuit basket then retired, leaving the five men alone with no further interruption scheduled. It was, apparently, time to get down to business.
Christopher Carver, the junior minister, leaned forward and helped himself to an oozing wedge of Époisses. Judging by the beginnings of a paunch straining his shirt buttons, it wasn’t the first time he’d indulged his appetite at the taxpayers’ expense. He glanced up at Blake and gave a mischievous smile. ‘You’re probably wondering what all this is in aid of, James.’
As the evening had worn on, Blake had become convinced he was about to be catapulted into the professional stratosphere. A dinner on this scale, guests at this level; it wasn’t simply a pat on the back because he’d worked wonders within his budget at BMP. ‘It had crossed my mind, Minister.’
‘You’ll recall that we talked earlier about the principle of sharing the back office load among several forces,’ Carver said. His face was flushed from over-indulgence, but his eyes were clear and focused on Blake.
Blake nodded. ‘It makes sense. It’s harder to manage with units as big as BMP, but we’ve had some success with merging crime scene management.’
‘Some of us think there are more radical steps that we can take. Not only in terms of cost effectiveness, but also in terms of improving police response to major crime. John, would you like to explain our thinking to James here?’
Unlike Blake, John Brandon’s career had all been at the sharp end. Nobody ever questioned his pronouncements when it came to operational strategies, which Blake thought was taking respect a little too far. Nobody was perfect, after all. But he smiled and gave Brandon a deferential nod as he sipped from his water glass then cleared his throat. The older he got, the more Brandon resembled a bloodhound, Blake thought. Long face, pendulous jowls, folds of flesh under his eyes.
‘Murder,’ Brandon said, his Northern accent dragging out the syllables. ‘In spite of all those cop shows on the telly, we don’t get that much of it outside the big cities. And what we do get is mostly domestic. Figuring them out wouldn’t tax your average manicurist, never mind detectives. But every now and again, something comes along that isn’t your run-of-the-mill homicide. You get a dismembered torso in the woods. Or an abducted child turns up strangled on a bit of waste ground. Or some lass doesn’t make it home from a night’s clubbing and a dog walker finds her mutilated corpse by the canal. Difficult, complex cases. Because they exist and because it’s our job to solve them, every force identifies its best investigators and designates them a major incident team. Agreed?’
‘Of course. You have to have specialist officers who are trained to deal with those difficult, complex cases. We have a duty to the public. But we also have to make maximum use of our personnel. We can’t simply have them sitting around waiting for the next murder,’ Blake said, trying not to sound defensive. ‘Plus a reorganisation like Bradfield’s means that, when we need it, we can pull together a very specific team to meet the needs of particular incidents.’
Brandon gave a weary smile. ‘Nobody’s criticising you for disbanding your MIT, James. We might not agree with the decision, but we understand the motivation.’
The minister pushed his floppy silver fringe back from his forehead and said, ‘In fact, James, it was the boldness of your decision to scatter your specialists throughout the CID as a whole that made us reconsider our general policy in this area. If a force like BMP felt it was possible to manage without a standing MIT, what might make sense for other forces?’ He waved a pudgy hand towards Brandon. ‘So I asked John to think outside the box. Tell James what you came up with.’
Brandon began breaking an oatcake into crumbs with one hand. ‘The drawback with pulling together an ad hoc team for major incidents is that it can damage the ongoing investigations those detectives were already knee-deep in. Not to mention the fact that you’ve got no idea what the personal dynamics of that rag, tag and bobtail bunch are going to be. Because that’s what it is. Rag, tag and bobtail. It’s not a team. Not like the cohesive unit you get when people work together over a period of time. When they’ve shed the dead weight or the awkward bastard or the sexist pig who pisses off the women on the squad. That’s a team and that’s policing at its most effective.’
‘And its most expensive,’ said the younger of the civil servants, his face screwed up in distaste.
‘So I had to figure out how to square the circle,’ Brandon continued, unperturbed. ‘And I thought, if forces can share back room ops, why not share front of house as well? Why not create an MIT that operates like a flying squad? The ghostbusters of complex homicide, if you like. One team that stands outside any particular force and goes where it’s needed, when it’s needed.’
Blake realised his mouth had fallen open during the silence that followed Brandon’s words. They were all staring at him, waiting for his response. His brain was racing to process the implications. They were going to ask him to mastermind this radical proposal. It sounded like madness. It sounded like the kind of thing you wouldn’t want to touch with a bargepole. But on the other hand, if it worked… The sky would be the limit for the man who changed the face of British policing and made it happen. He clutched at something sensible to say. ‘What if more than one complex homicide happens within a few days of each other?’ It wasn’t a stupid question, he told himself.
‘They don’t.’ The younger civil servant pulled out his smartphone and fiddled with it, then turned the screen so Blake could see it in all its meaninglessness. ‘We analysed the figures for the past five years. On only one occasion has there been sufficient proximity to give us grounds for concern.’
‘And John has looked closely at that conjunction of events,’ the minister chipped in.
‘That’s right. And it seemed to me there were no insurmountable issues,’ Brandon said. ‘There are ways to extend resources in a digital world that didn’t exist even a couple of years ago.’
‘And so,’ said Carver, ‘we’re going ahead with a pilot.’ He attacked the cheeseboard again, this time slicing off a chunk of Ossau-Iraty and spearing two dates with the point of the cheese knife.
Blake felt the warmth of satisfaction rising through his body. One in the eye for everyone who’d ever said he lacked vision. ‘That sounds like a tremendous challenge,’ he said heartily.
Carver’s smile was as sharp as the knife. ‘Indeed. And that’s why it’s so important that we have the right person at the helm. That’s why we asked you here tonight, to help us come to
the right decision.’
Blake was so taken up with delight at the way he saw the evening going that he didn’t quite absorb the nuances of what the minister had said. ‘Absolutely,’ he gushed. ‘I’m ready to take on whatever you demand of me.’
Carver’s eyebrows rose, to Blake’s confusion. Why was he looking surprised? ‘I’m glad to hear it. We’re very clear about the person we have in mind for this role. But John was most insistent we shouldn’t rely on his word alone when it came to appointing the new regional MIT chief. And so we turned to you as the last person to have worked directly with our first-choice officer.’
Blake heard a faint ringing in his ears, like a brass bell struck a long way off. What the hell was Carver talking about? Who could he be thinking of? There was nobody in his Bradfield command who was up to a job like this, he’d have put money on it. ‘I’m sorry? I’m not sure what you mean,’ he stammered, his composure wobbling.
Brandon put his forearms on the table and leaned towards Blake, a smile bracketing his mouth with wrinkles. ‘He means Carol Jordan. The minister wants to know what you think of Carol Jordan.’
4
Tony Hill opened his mouth in consternation. But the weird popping and crackling continued. The other three people round the table grinned, enjoying his discomfiture. The youngest, fourteen-year-old Torin McAndrew, started guffawing so hard tears formed in his eyes. Detective Sergeant Paula McIntyre poked him in the ribs with her fingers. ‘Show our guest some respect,’ she mock-scolded.
Her partner, Dr Elinor Blessing, took pity on Tony. ‘It’s popping candy,’ she said. ‘I sprinkled it on the chocolate topping before it set.’
Tony closed his mouth and frowned. ‘And people like that… that weirdness in their mouths?’
‘Most people do,’ Elinor said.
‘But Tony’s not most people,’ Torin said, still cackling.
