by Faith Martin
Hillary sighed. ‘Back to base. We need to get the admin underway. Set up a case file number, get the murder book started, and work out some way of relaying our data to Geoff. What we want him to know, that is.’
‘DI Rhumer going to be a problem, guv?’ Jimmy asked sagely.
Hillary sighed again. ‘Not sure yet. Let’s hope not.’
Vivienne Tyrell left Kidlington’s Thames Valley Police HQ that lunchtime with a spring in her step. She was twenty, pretty rather than beautiful, with long dark curly hair and pansy-velvet brown eyes. She’d been working in the CRT for nearly eight months now, still unsure whether the police force was for her and if she should apply to join properly when the opportunity arose. She was, however, still a little bit infatuated with Steven Crayle. But even there, she was beginning to see the writing on the wall as far as the handsome, sexy superintendent was concerned. He’d always played hard to get, and now she was being forced to admit that he hadn’t been playing, so much as meaning it. He was never going to ask her out. And ever since Hillary Greene had joined their team, things had gone from bad to worse.
She simply couldn’t see what a gorgeous guy like Steven saw in her. She was older than he was for a start, and here Vivienne gave a mental snort. Who’d have thought the super was into cougars?
As she walked into the local pub, she began to smile in anticipation though. At least it wasn’t all bad news on the romantic front now that things were looking up. Tom might be just a humble PC, but at least he was young and fit. In both senses of the word! He must work out every day to get the pecs he had!
OK, having the hots for a forty-year-old had been fun while it lasted, but Tom was closer to her own age. And she loved his green eyes.
She glanced around the crowded bar and saw him stand up and lift an arm to attract her attention. He’d managed to snag a window seat, and through the open windows, a hanging basket of flowers provided some floral colour for the dark interior.
She approached at an easy hip-swinging stride, knowing that many male eyes had turned to look at her. She hoped Tom noticed it too. It wouldn’t hurt to remind him that she was hot, and that he was always going to have competition.
‘Hiyah,’ she said cheerily, slinging her bag onto the bench seat and sliding in beside him. She was pleased to notice that he that already had her favourite drink – a cinzano and lemonade – waiting for her on the table. ‘Boy, am I glad to get out of that place. I feel like a mole, working down in the basement like that. I tell you, as soon as I can get out of there and into somewhere better, I’ll be off.’
Tom Warrington smiled stiffly. And the moment you are, he thought silently, you cease to be of any use to me, you silly cow.
‘Have a drink, and tell me all about it,’ he said instead, forcing a sympathetic smile to his face and nudging her glass closer. ‘I asked for ice, just how you like it.’
He watched her sip the silly drink, wondering what it was that Hillary drank. It would be something classy and simple, he knew. Perhaps a good wine? Or something more straightforward and no-nonsense perhaps, just like herself. A G and T?
‘We’ve got this new guy in, but I don’t know why,’ Vivienne said, taking a sip and giving a sigh. ‘Him and Hillary and Steven were closeted together nearly all morning. But nobody’s telling us nothing.’
Tom forced himself to relax in his seat. ‘Oh? Who is he, then, this new bloke?’
Vivienne shrugged. ‘DI Rhumer. Geoff, I think I heard his first name was. Funny thing is, I got the feeling that he’s on the job. I mean currently, like, not a retired old fart like Jimmy.’
Tom felt his heartbeat quicken. Yeah, that made sense. The CRT only dealt with cold cases. But they would need to call in someone else to work on an on-going crime. Even so, he felt a shaft of anger lance through him. It should be just between Hillary and himself; that’s how she would have wanted it too, not to have some stranger brought in to spoil their fun. It couldn’t have been her idea to bring in an outsider.
He knew who was to blame – that bastard Steven Crayle. The superintendent wanted Hillary for himself – that was obvious. And because he was her boss, he could insist on them bringing in someone else to ruin it all.
But they wouldn’t let him. Hillary was more than a match for this DI Rhumer and Crayle put together, of that he had no doubt.
He smiled across at the silly, fatuous girl beside him, and forced himself to lean closer and put an arm around her shoulder. In deference to the warm May weather, he was wearing only a short-sleeved T-shirt under his police jacket, and he was pleased with the way his muscles showed as he flexed his arm.
He saw Vivienne notice, and saw the way her dark brown eyes registered admiration. Silly little twit.
The skin on his arm tingled, though, when he remembered it draped around Hillary Greene’s neck. Over and over again, he was reliving that moment when he’d stepped up behind her and held her hard against him.
He heard again her quick intake of breath.
The way she quickly realized she couldn’t physically fight him and had become quiet and clever.
The way she’d tried to play him.
The fun they’d had. The touch of his knife against her skin. She’d barely flinched as he’d drawn a fine, oh so fine, line of blood in her skin. Anyone else would have panicked, or started begging, or behaving in any number of disgusting ways.
But not his Hillary. She was class, through and through.
Tom Warrington felt a delicious warm wave wash over him as he remembered how magnificent she’d been, as he’d always known she would be, after all that time watching her and adoring her from afar.
Wanting her. Playing the delicious, torturous, waiting game.
The first move had been his. Now it was her turn.
‘So what’s the queen bee been doing?’ he asked, forcing himself to use Vivienne’s nasty nickname for her. Vivienne, who was nothing more than a wannabe, and who didn’t even have the sense to realize that she was being given the opportunity to learn at the feet of a master. Sometimes, Tom found it hard to keep from snapping her stupid, vapid little neck for her.
‘Oh, she and Jimmy went off this morning to interview some people over a missing girl. Oh yeah, that’s what we’re working on now apparently – not even a proper murder. But some missing girls. I mean, who cares?’ Vivienne said, taking a large gulp of her drink. ‘They’ve probably all run off to be with a bloke, right? I mean, that’s what usually happens, yeah?’
Tom absently twirled a lock of her hair around his finger. ‘What’s the name of the couple?’
Vivienne shrugged, and snuggled up closer. And to Tom’s fury said smugly, ‘Oh, I can’t remember. It’s not important, is it? When are you and me going to get together seriously, then?’
Tom fought back the urge to slap her. But really, she was right in a way – it didn’t matter. Whichever set of witnesses Hillary had talked to, it meant the same thing: she’d made her move. She’d begun trying to track him down. She was on his scent.
The thought made him shudder with delight.
Beside him, Vivienne giggled, believing it to be a reaction to her flirting. Tom Warrington smiled with forced patience and reached for the menu. She was his eyes and ears in Hillary’s camp, he reminded himself, so he needed to keep her sweet. ‘What do you fancy to eat then?’ he asked.
Back at HQ, Hillary reached for the Vickary folder.
Margaret – known to all her friends as Meg – Jane Vickary. According to her file she was thirty-two years old at the time she was reported missing. Photographs of her showed her to be a rather glamorous woman with long, tawny hair that looked so casually untidy it had to have been carefully cut and arranged to look like that by a top flight hairstylist, and large grey-green eyes. In nearly every snapshot and photo they’d been able to accumulate of her in the last few days, she seemed to be always fully made-up with highlighter, blusher, mascara and eyeshadow. It was hard to see past the mask to the woman beneath. Did she sec
retly fear that she wasn’t as beautiful as she needed to be?
She’d been married but then divorced from one Brian Vickary. No children. Had the divorce undermined her self-confidence?
Hillary sighed, knowing from experience that it was pointless to speculate before getting the facts. But so far, the first of their missing girls had a bad family situation behind her. Now she needed to find out if the second of their missing women also had a difficult situation behind her, courtesy of a bad marriage and a messy, damaging divorce.
Perhaps her stalker liked damaged, vulnerable women? Or was she just trying to force a pattern where there was none? After all, nobody could think of her as vulnerable, could they? A veteran, battle-hardened middle-aged ex DI with the hide and disposition of a grumpy rhino?
She picked up the folder and walked on through to the communal office. ‘Jimmy?’ she said, ignoring the quick, hopeful look that Sam Pickles gave her. He was a good lad and coming on well, and would be an asset to the police force once he’d graduated and been properly recruited and trained, but right now he was out of his league and needed to be kept on the sidelines.
‘I want you to keep on researching the three missing persons’ backgrounds, Sam. The more information we have, and the more diverse it is, the easier it’ll make our job in finding out what happened to them.’
‘Right, guv,’ Sam said, but looked enviously at Jimmy who was following Hillary out of the room. Although he’d worked with the police long enough to know that research and paperwork were the bread-and-butter of crime solving, like Hillary, he preferred to be out and about actually talking to people and getting a feel for a case.
Outside, Hillary followed Jimmy to his car and slipped into the passenger side, where she carried on reading the folder, relaying bits of information to Jimmy as he drove.
‘According to this, Meg was a legal secretary at Kane, Boltham and Kane.’
Jimmy whistled. ‘Top notch solicitors, those. Only cater to the well-heeled. If you’re an Oxford don caught doing something naughty, they’re the people you’d run to screaming “fit up”.’
Hillary nodded, also being familiar with the firm.
‘Want to stop off at their place first, guv?’ he asked, as he indicated to go around the Woodstock roundabout on one of the city’s northern-most main thoroughfares. ‘We’ll be going through Summertown any minute.’
Hillary thought about it for a moment, and then shook her head. ‘Maybe later, when we know more about her. For the moment, I want to interview her flatmate, the woman who reported her missing in the first place.’
Georgia Biggs was still living at the same residence in a converted Victorian pile in Botley, but they were unlucky. Nobody answered the doorbell. However, a nosy neighbour was able to point them to the dental practice in town where she worked as a hygienist.
Finding the usual trouble parking in the fabled city of dreaming spires, they had to hoof it a quarter of a mile to the practice. And the moment Hillary pushed open the door to a narrow hallway with an even narrower flight of stairs leading upwards, they could hear the nerve-grating high whine of a drill. When she pushed open the door at the top of the stairs, the smell of disinfectant, peculiar to dental surgeries everywhere, set her teeth automatically aching. Beside her she heard Jimmy mutter something dire about hating these places.
Hillary grinned. ‘Never mind, Jimmy. At least you’re not here to get your root canals a good seeing too.’
The old man muttered something even less repeatable, but Hillary was already smiling at the receptionist and reaching for her ID.
‘We were hoping to speak to a Miss Biggs. Strictly routine, nothing to worry about,’ she said automatically.
The woman, fifty-something with a fine coiffeur and deep crows’ feet around her eyes, smiled uncertainly. ‘Georgie? She’s got a patient in with her at the moment, but she should be out soon. Would you like to take a seat and wait?’
Further in the room, a guppy confronted her, swimming bug-eyed and fan-tailed in a large fish tank. Watching him, and several of his piscine friends, was a wide-mouthed boy of about five, who began to wail piteously when a door opened and he was beckoned inside by a patient-looking man in his sixties.
‘Poor little bugger,’ Jimmy said, then reaching for a magazine on dog-breeding, added heartlessly, ‘rather him than me though.’
Hillary was still grinning about that when a door opposite opened, and a plump blonde woman wearing the prerequisite white coat ushered out a man and walked him to the reception desk. She then gave a classic double-take towards them as the receptionist whispered something to her, and then approached them warily. She had the slightly puzzled, worried but intimidated look a lot of members of the public wore on their faces when confronted by the police. Well, the innocent ones, anyway.
‘Police?’ Georgia Biggs asked tentatively. She had a round, pleasant but just a touch plain face, with somewhat protruding blue eyes.
‘Yes. We’re here about your flatmate, Meg Vickary, Miss Biggs,’ Hillary said at once, hoping to allay at least some of her anxiety.
‘Oh Meg.’ Then she went pale. ‘You’ve found her. She’s dead, isn’t she? That man did something to her.’
Hillary felt Jimmy snap to attention beside her, like a pointer suddenly spotting a pheasant in the undergrowth.
Hillary smiled gently. ‘No, we haven’t found a body, Miss Biggs. I work for the CRT, and we’re currently reinvestigating Meg’s disappearance. We just have a few follow-up questions for you. Perhaps we could talk in your office?’
‘Oh yes, of course. Sorry, it’s a bit small.’
The room they were ushered into was small, with the obligatory and ominous black vinyl dentist’s chair taking up most of the space. Both she and Jimmy gave it a wide berth, and in the end it was Georgia Biggs who parked her plump rear end on it, whilst Jimmy and Hillary stood leaning against the walls.
‘When you said “that man did something to her”, who did you mean, Miss Biggs?’ Hillary asked, getting straight to the point.
‘Oh, Marcus of course.’
‘Marcus?’
‘Marcus Kane. Her boss.’
Hillary nodded slowly, as if she knew all about it, and glanced across at Jimmy, who was rapidly taking notes in his own idiosyncratic shorthand.
‘Why would you think that, Miss Biggs?’ she said, beginning the mining process for information gently.
‘Oh, please, call me Georgie. Everyone does.’
‘Did Meg not get on well with her boss? Is that it?’ Hillary pressed.
Georgie laughed harshly. ‘Rather the opposite, Inspector,’ she said, and Hillary didn’t bother to correct her about her title. Since retiring from the force, strictly speaking, she was no longer entitled to it. But she’d grown so used to hearing it over the years that she quite liked to hear it aired now and then. And it sure as hell beat being referred to as Mrs Greene. She’d been in the process of divorcing her corrupt husband when he’d died in a RTA. She was still pondering whether or not to revert to her maiden name, but somehow couldn’t seem to drum up the energy to tackle the paperwork involved.
‘Meg and Marcus were something of an item,’ Georgie Biggs said, with a certain snap to her voice.
‘You didn’t approve.’
‘He was married. With kids.’
‘Ah,’ Hillary said. ‘That old story.’
Georgie sighed. ‘He kept telling her he was going to leave the wife and kids when the time was right, stringing her along. But guess what?’
Hillary nodded. ‘The time was never right.’
‘You got it,’ Georgie agreed. ‘The kids were too young, their wedding anniversary was too close, or it was Christmas in a few months’ time. You name it, he came up with it. I kept telling her to get out from under, but….’ She shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know what she saw in him. I thought he was creepy.’
Jimmy glanced up at the word. Hillary wasn’t surprised. It was a word bound to twang any copper’s
radar.
‘You met him?’
Georgie flushed. ‘No.’
She sounded puzzled for a moment, as if for the first time realizing the inconsistency of it, then shook her head. ‘It’s hard to explain. It’s just something I picked up from the things that Meg used to say. But then, any married man having an affair with his secretary has got to be a scuzz-bucket, right?’
Hillary nodded. But had to wonder, what did that make the secretary?
‘When she went missing, you reported her as missing straightaway?’ Hillary carried on smoothly.
‘Yeah, I did. If Meg was going to spend the night away she always told me, see? And after the second night, I knew something was up. I didn’t like the way she just vanished without packing a case or saying anything. Especially when the flowers stopped coming.’
Hillary felt her spine grow cold.
‘Flowers?’ she repeated. Against the opposite wall, she saw Jimmy stiffen too.
‘Yeah. She’d been getting these bouquets of flowers and cards and stuff. I thought at first they were from him – Marcus, but she said they weren’t. She said she’d got a secret admirer. She thought it was funny. To be honest, I did wonder if she’d been sending them to herself, you know, to try and make Marcus jealous.’
Hillary smiled, but it felt tight on her face.
‘Did she get any threatening phone calls?’
‘No. But she got some text messages. She showed me a couple. I told her she ought to go to the police, but she just shrugged it off. She said it was probably just some poor loser who knew her from around, you know? Someone with a crush on her. Like the guy who sold her the newspaper in the supermarket, or the mail courier who biked stuff to the office, someone like that. She didn’t take it seriously.’
Georgie Biggs shifted on her dentist’s chair. ‘You have to understand, Meg was one of these women who could have been a model. The sort you see on telly, selling shampoo, waving their fabulous hair about. Well, OK, maybe not quite that gorgeous, or young, but pretty damned close, you know? In a league of her own around here, at any rate. She was used to attracting male attention. It’s why I can’t understand why she’d waste her time on a loser like Marcus.’
