Moffatt leaned across and stroked it. ‘We must make sure we temper the wind to the shorn lamb.’ And then his hand strayed to my cheek.
If there’s one thing I should highlight in my CV it’s skills in freezing off amorous males. By the time he’d finished his salmon (that old dodge of ordering the same as your dinner partner!) he was practically calling for his scarf and gloves. I wasn’t rude or unpleasant, don’t for a moment think that. After all, I should have known better than to get matey with a middle-aged man who’d given me even such a tiny vibe. But I picked at the food (not difficult when you’ve already had one supper), and allowed myself an occasional yawn. Very soon these became quite genuine. It had been another long day and my books were calling me to bed.
If he’d offered me hard evidence about anything, of course, I’d have been bright and alert. But still a little more cool and remote than I had been.
One way to cool him down might be to talk about Taz, which I proceeded to as if I were a member of his fan club.
‘But he never made it clear exactly what job he’s doing in the Met,’ I concluded earnestly.
‘Rookie constables on probation do a lot of work but not much they can boast about.’
I had a nasty suspicion he used the verb boast deliberately – a touch of the old stag scoring points off an absent young one.
‘But he had access to you.’
‘He has – access – to a senior Met officer, who was sufficiently interested in what Taz passed on to him from you to contact me. Wheels are turning, Lucy, I promise you.’
‘I shan’t mind if they’re like the mills of God and that grinding exceeding small compensates for their grinding so slowly.’
That’s another way to put a self-assured man off you: outquote him. Preferably from a hymn I’d last sung when I was about ten. It didn’t take long to establish that we both had work to do the following morning and that neither could take coffee at this time of night.
So I had a solitary bed. Apart from the company of various Irish reprobates who reminded me vaguely of my dad.
Chapter Nineteen
As luck would have it, it was a brilliantly sunny morning, the sort that makes you leap out of bed and throw open the windows. It was only as I did my twentieth length (it really was quite a small pool, so I wasn’t being entirely honest when I boasted of yesterday’s twelve lengths) that I realised I should be cursing the sun and praying for the safe return of the rain. It’d be painting the exterior of Crabton Manor for us, not exploring the interior of Fuller’s.
Sid was moaning how the storm had kept him awake last night. ‘What about you?’ he asked eventually.
‘Slept the sleep of the just, Sid. Plus I was tired,’ I conceded. I’d mention dinner with Moffatt if he asked, but by now I’d definitely decided to volunteer as little as possible about one policeman’s activities to another. If anyone asked pointblank, that was another matter.
As if he’d been reading my mind, Sid slowed and asked, ‘What did you and Paula get up to last night?’
‘I told you – we needed to do a bit of forward planning. She’s brilliant at working things out, but sometimes even she needs to have someone agree that she’s right.’
‘And she was right? Better than a calculator?’
My God, the bugger hadn’t planted some sort of bug, had he? Some nasty listening device that transmitted everything we’d said? Paula had said she didn’t trust him. I answered his question with one of my own. ‘What are your plans for today? Are you going to try and case Crabton Manor?’
‘Anything rather than spend the day like yesterday. Jesus, I bloody ache every sodding where. Why should my leg muscles ache? It’s as bad as bloody toothache.’
‘Ladders. Not just climbing but balancing on them. That’s why we were happy to knock off when we did yesterday. And it’s a good job we did. That rain wouldn’t have done fresh paint any good at all.’
‘Hmph.’
I added more kindly, ‘Have a word with Paula. She’ll find you a patch where you can keep both feet on the ground.’
‘More likely to send me up to paint the sodding chimney, that one.’
‘She has to maintain the front that you’re a professional painter, Sid, and don’t you forget it. If van der Poele thinks you’re a poor workman, or simply skiving, he’ll dock the money the rest of us should be getting. He’d just tear up the contract – you know he would. He’s what my dad would have called a nasty piece of knitting.’
‘Did your dad know about your being a whore?’
Just like that. Not an eyelid must I bat, even at the deliberately offensive term. He mustn’t see my efforts to breathe normally. But I had to say something. ‘You like to call a spade a spade, I see. As a matter of fact he didn’t. He buggered off when I was about six or seven. But forget about my dad. I usually do. Can’t think why I should have mentioned him then. Let’s talk about van der Poele instead. Taz passed on what Paula and I thought was possibly evidence that someone was killed here. I can show you the room – from the outside. We’d love someone to take us seriously.’ I didn’t tell him that Paula had kept a duplicate set of photos in case the first got mysteriously lost. She’d have teased a few spare fibres from the rope too, knowing her.
‘We are taking you seriously – you know that. Not everyone gets to eat dinner with an assistant chief constable, do they?’
‘Not everyone needs to,’ I said. ‘Look! A heron, just taking off over there!’ An ungainly grey shape organised itself into slow, efficient flight over the placid, gentle fields, dotted with sheep so round and white they looked like toys. As a city woman, the sight of lamb chops on the hoof still amazed me. Mind you, I ate far fewer of them, for one reason or another.
Sid wasn’t impressed by any of it. He drove as far as Dymchurch in grumpy silence.
‘You can’t even see the sea along this road. This huge sea wall, whatever it is, fair gives me the creeps. Fancy living in one of them little houses and looking at that all day.’
‘The upside is that all they have to do is cross the road and climb up those steps and there’s the beach.’ My mouth was working but my brain was trying to work out if that was how my poor immigrants had come into the country – simply been dropped the far side of a huge wall and being made to leg it before it got light. But surely there’d be coastguards to stop that sort of activity? Unless someone had squared the coastguards.
‘And a force ten gale to blow you straight back home. And look over there – that ruddy great gun emplacement! Martello towers, they’re historical. But that –’ He shuddered. Perhaps world wars weren’t yet sanitised enough to be history. And yet one of my best ever days down here had been at Dover Castle, exploring the war rooms tunnelled deep into the famous white cliff. Sid pointed again. ‘And the bleeding army practising killing folk all the way along here with their nice tidy firing ranges.’ Anti-military? A policeman? That struck a very bum note. ‘No, you don’t kid me into taking a holiday down here. Spain, that’s where I’m retiring, soon as I can.’
He sounded so disillusioned I glanced at him. ‘It sounds as if it can’t be soon enough for you.’
‘Nor can it. The police isn’t what it used to be. All paperwork and looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re being PC. PCPC. PC Politically Correct. Geddit?’
On that positive note he fell silent. I was too preoccupied on my own account to disturb him. Or to laugh.
‘Bugged? You mean, bugged?’ Paula was so angry she almost squeaked. It wasn’t because I’d broken our rule and followed her behind the van when she’d obviously been about to have a wee.
‘I don’t know.’ I touched my finger to my lips. ‘Maybe they trust us as little as we trust them. Tell you what, just check your bag when you come out. And I’ll check mine.’
‘Do you know what to look for?’
I shrugged. ‘All I know was that Sid spent a long time faffing round here doing sweet F. A. all yesterday.’
‘But I�
�d taken my bag with me. So it’s more likely to be in yours.’
‘I’ll check. But do you know something? I think I’ll do it in front of him. Look, we’ll have to talk away from the van later – he’ll be thinking we’re having a lesbian moment and trying to sneak a look.’
I emerged first to find Sid, arms akimbo, staring at the ground floor. It was clear that that was where he wanted to paint. When Paula emerged from behind the Transit, he toddled over, heaving a stepladder out and planting it firmly in his new territory. Paula raised an eyebrow, but didn’t argue, not until she came down from aloft a few minutes later to find him half kneeling on one of the ladder’s steps.
‘Sid, that’s the way to damage joints.’
‘I’m three-quarters crippled the way you got me shinning up and down ladders,’ he whined.
‘You must be very out of practice. I suppose,’ she added, very clearly, ‘that’ll teach me to take someone his last boss let go. Very well, paint down here until your muscles feel a bit better. But for goodness’ sake stand tall and keep those knees relaxed but straight.’
‘Sounds like you’re giving orders at some sodding antenatal class.’
By now white with anger, she snapped, ‘I wouldn’t know. But I do know that as your employer I’m responsible for the health and safety of all my workers. I’m warning you, Sid, fit in or drop out.’
We women exchanged scared rabbit looks. Paula had never had to speak to one of us like that, and certainly not in public, and we didn’t know how to react. Should we rally round in support of the miscreant or be teacher’s pets for the day? I knew that there was another, more serious problem. If Sid was one of Moffatt’s men, how could Paula sack him? There must, apart from anything else, be a limit to the number of undercover officers capable of wielding a professional paintbrush.
Paula made a slight sideways movement of her head, drawing Sid to one side. I suppose she should probably have done that earlier so that his bollocking was in private. Funny, it was unlike Paula to make that sort of mistake. Along with the others, though, I decided that discretion was the greater part of valour, and applied today’s paint as if I were wearing blinkers.
Perhaps that was the problem with Meg. She was so busy not looking that when she went back to the van to top up her paint can, she succeeded in spilling several litres of the stuff. The more she tried to stop it, the worse it flowed. God knows what she thought she was doing, standing there screaming and watching this stream of creamy-white flow everywhere. The rest of us were down there with her, ready to defend her against Paula if necessary. But Paula was coolest of all, simply grabbing the big tin and steadying it. Fortunately most of the paint had fallen in the deep tin tray she always insisted the paint tins stand on.
Taking Meg gently by the arm, she led her away. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you had a migraine?’ she asked quietly.
Helen and I didn’t need to be told what to do. We tidied up without speaking. Technically we shouldn’t really use this paint again, in case it had got bits of dust and so forth in it. But the only place to tip it was the tin, so that was what we did.
‘She’s lost the vision in one eye,’ Paula reported. ‘She’s done this before. She’s taken two of her tablets, but I still think I should take her home. I’d better buy some more paint too. Can’t have van der Poele complaining we’re using mucky stuff. But I don’t suppose Mr Green’ll argue if I offer him a freebie tin.’
Mr Green was the old boy whose bungalow we’d be doing between big jobs. Cost price.
On impulse I gave Paula a hug, which clearly amazed her almost as much as it amazed me. ‘We’ll be OK here.’
We were. Helen was a bit scared, but once she’d heard from Meg’s own lips that she’d be all right after a bit of a lie down, she buckled down as she always did. Sid might have been a Trappist monk for all we heard from him. But I couldn’t help seeing that he still used the step-ladder as a kneeler, and wished I’d got the authority to repeat Paula’s warning.
By the time Paula got back Sid had given up his stepladder and was kneeling on the ground so he could paint the underside of a windowsill. He might have been praying it glossy. She raised her eyes heavenwards, but simply said, ‘There’s a fresh can of paint in the van.’
‘How’s Meg?’
‘She was well into what she called her Technicolor zigzags by the time I got her home. She says she’ll be all right. Funny, you’d have expected a migraine before a storm, not after it.’
Towards the end of the afternoon, the wind changed direction; it became noticeably cooler, and Paula started looking to the west. ‘The last thing we need now with the end almost in sight is an Atlantic front,’ she said. ‘I know they’re talking about a hosepipe ban, but I could manage without washing the car if I could finish here in time.’
She hadn’t mentioned penalty clauses, but it sounded as if the miserable bastard had insisted on one. With the English weather, for goodness’ sake! And now we were one and a half down, one being Meg, and the half being Sid, now painting more slowly than ever. Paula couldn’t fail to notice. Nor could anyone miss the pain he was obviously in. Perhaps he should have had Brownie points for carrying on. Paula didn’t seem inclined to award any.
‘Bursitis,’ she said crisply. ‘You’ve gone and given yourself bursitis. Better get off to your GP while you can still drive. Anti-inflammatories and hot and cold compresses.’
‘What are you on about?’
‘Your knees.’
‘Bursitis,’ he said, almost as if he was proud to have an ‘itis’.
‘Yes,’ she said scathingly. ‘Housemaid’s knee.’
And it was precisely the diagnosis the A and E doctor gave, at the end of a four-hour wait at the William Harvey. There’d been a pile-up on the M20 and personally I’d have been ashamed to take up the time of people who’d been under so much pressure. But it seemed Sid had never got round to registering with a GP, so even if I’d driven him back to his base in what he vaguely called Sarf London he’d still have had a wait in an A and E there. Maybe, he said, almost proudly, an even longer one, what with the gun and knife crime in the neighbourhood.
Why was I involved? Sid claimed he was in too much pain to drive, and Paula wasn’t going to put Helen at risk by not taking her home. So I’d got the short straw and the keys to Sid’s utility truck. I didn’t ask who owned it, so I never knew whether to blame its lack of maintenance on Sid or on the Met or even on Kent County Constabulary. OK, I was sulking. And why not? The William Harvey’s a nice bright modern hospital, but sitting waiting for someone who wouldn’t have needed so much as an aspirin if he’d carried out orders was niggling me. Not least because as time ticked inexorably by, it became clear that Paula and I would miss out on further explorations of Fullers that evening. I hadn’t got a book and I was bored.
So bored I at last remembered to do what I’d been planning to do all day. I accidentally on purpose tipped over my bag. And – guess what – inside I found something apart from balled up tissues and old till receipts. A ballpoint I didn’t recognise. I was just about to hold it up for Sid’s inspection when a sodding nurse didn’t take it into her head at that precise moment to call him in.
Frustrated, I had to vent my spleen. Especially when I unscrewed the ballpoint to find something inside – not, I was sure, a refill – small enough to sit on my fingertip. Who better to avenge myself on than the hidden listener? I retreated to the outside porch, where there was a congregation of mobile phone users, and, with my lips right close up to it, whistled as loudly as I could all the tunes I could remember before reassembling the ballpoint.
That’d teach someone. The question was, who.
Chapter Twenty
It would have served Sid right if I’d obeyed my next impulse, which was to follow him and shove his equipment where the nurse might have shoved a thermometer. The alternative was to return to the waiting room and confront him when he came out. Or I could have handed the ballpoint complete with its little
cargo to the receptionist, telling her I’d found it on the floor somewhere, and then driven off in the ute., leaving Sid high and dry. That would have been very satisfying, but might have meant him taking up an emergency bed someone else might need. The thought I might be nicking official property had somehow escaped me, and when I remembered I found I didn’t care all that much.
Meanwhile, of course, without the ute. I was as high and dry as Sid.
No. Think positive. The William Harvey wasn’t all that far from my flat in Kennington. I could walk it. I still had the key, and could bunk down there. Without sheets and towels not to mention food and drink. There had been times, not so long ago, when I could have managed without any of those, and thought shelter a real luxury. But that was then. Then I perked up. There’d be tea-bags and dried milk and some of the books I hadn’t been able to take with me. And a radio. Now all that was luxury indeed. Leaving the ute. keys but not the pen with the woman on reception, I strode off.
Ashford isn’t, to be honest, your actual metropolis. It’s a huge dormitory sprawl and very little else. Once it was a nice little country town. If you don’t believe me, check out the Chinese restaurant in the middle of the town, where they’ve got an eighteenth century engraving blown up to occupy a whole wall. Better than flock wallpaper and machine-embroidered silk pictures, anyway. I wonder if that was the Chinese restaurant where a triad kept someone kidnapped in the basement for a week. Like we said in that conversation a million years ago, Kent has its fair share of undesirable residents. Anyway, the once thriving market depicted in the old print is a now very pale imitation of its former self, and various stalls had disappeared even in the short time I’d been there. There’s a big out-of-town entertainment area, so the centre, quiet during the day, is like a morgue in the evening. Were it not for some architect – with more sensitivity for looks than the comfort of women pedestrians in strappy sandals – putting down great swathes of granite setts, the place’d be silent as a graveyard at night. As it was, it sometimes sounded as if supernatural fingers were taking a typing lesson. I was padding almost silently in my paint-covered trainers, of course, grateful that if some man emerged who’d had a couple too many in the County Hotel or wherever I could easily outrun him. Not the young woman ahead of me, though. It was clear she’d registered the middle-aged bloke lurching sideways towards her like a giant crab but she didn’t know quite what to do. The matter was partially solved when he collapsed at her feet, grabbing at her knees not because he was attacking her but because there was nothing else handy.
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