Beside a Narrow Stream

by Faith Martin

  Suddenly becoming aware that she was sitting in a wheelbarrow, long legs dangling incongruously over the side, she struggled to get up. Her husband thrust out a hand to help her, but his mind was obviously still on other things.

  ‘I’m still waiting to hear who you’re talking about, Mr Freeman,’ Hillary said, not about to let it go.

  ‘Huh? Oh. Well, I dunno,’ he began to look worried for the first time and under his wife’s admonishing gaze actually blushed.

  ‘Like I said, Vic never liked Wayne,’ Pauline Freeman said quickly.

  ‘And you, Mrs Freeman?’

  The other woman shrugged. ‘Well, he had a bit of a way with him. He was obviously happier with ladies than with men, I can tell you that. But then, he was a good-looking young chap, and an artist to boot. Most men tended not to like him.’ She shot her husband another frowning look, and then shook her head. ‘I’ll have to go to our Mon. She’ll be right upset. Vic, you’ll have to stay, keep the shop open. I don’t know when I’ll be back.’

  Hillary decided it was in her best interests to let her go, and a few minutes later, when silence had once more settled over the clematis and wisteria plants, the rambling roses and honeysuckles, Hillary glanced pointedly at Victor Freeman.

  The lean, gangling man sighed heavily. ‘He was a bloody gigolo, wasn’t he?’ he said helplessly. And when Hillary said nothing, added more forcefully, ‘I mean, literally. He lived off women. Conned them silly. That car of his was a “present” from some besotted divorcee who should have known better. And that cottage he was so-called “renting”. Hah!’ he snorted inelegantly. ‘I doubt the owner of that ever saw a penny. Not that he wouldn’t have paid her in a different kind of way.’

  Hillary, by now not altogether surprised by this revelation, simply nodded. ‘His mother said he was a professional artist,’ she pointed out quietly.

  Victor Freeman laughed. ‘Oh yeah? And just who do you think it is that buys those bloody awful paintings of his? Women, that’s who. All of a certain age, all either divorced or widowed or unhappily married. You won’t find a gallery owner or a true art lover buying them, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Have you seen them? He gave one to our Mon for her birthday, and it’s hanging in our front room. I tell you, looking at it gives me eyestrain. She’s better off without him.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘Your daughter tells me she came to your house last night?’

  ‘That’s right. For dinner. She arrived at about quarter to seven.’

  ‘And she left, when?’

  ‘About quarter past nine. Look, you can’t think our Mon had anything to do with this? She’s just a strip of a girl! Besides, she hasn’t got a violent bone in her body. She loves animals, even as a little kid. She hates to see anything suffer.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘And after she left, Mr Freeman? What did you do?’

  ‘Me? I went out to the greenhouse out back. We’ve got a large series of glass houses there – we’ve not got much space here as you can see, so we tend to grow a lot of our stock at home.’

  ‘Did your wife help you?’

  ‘No. There was something on telly she wanted to watch. I came in about ten-thirty and we went to bed.’

  Hillary nodded thoughtfully. So not only did Monica Freeman not have an alibi. Her father had no alibi either.

  Interesting.

  chapter four

  By the end of the day, they’d covered a lot of ground, but learned very little about the victim’s movements on the day of his death. The owners of the cottages nearest the meadow had returned home from work, to be greeted by officers on their doorsteps, notebooks at the ready, but nobody remembered seeing Wayne Sutton yesterday evening.

  One bright PC had ascertained that there was a short-cut from the village to the meadows that by-passed the lane altogether. Once the last house of the village was left behind, the footpath kept mostly to the sides of hedges before opening out into the meadow where the victim was found, so it was possible that Wayne Sutton had never even walked down the farm track past the cottages on the day of his death. Hillary wearily told the uniforms to find out, next day, who the regular dog walkers were, since they were bound to use the path, and question them instead.

  After a half an hour back at HQ talking to Danvers, outlining the case so far and receiving further instructions, she was more than ready to call it a day. As she pulled out of the HQ car park, she heard a faint church bell toll eight o’clock. Her stomach was rumbling, and when she passed a fish and chip shop, she almost whimpered at the delicious smell. Telling herself that she really did want the cold tinned salmon and cobbled-together salad that awaited her back on the boat more than a greasy fry-up, by the time she finally pulled into the car park of The Boat pub, where she habitually parked, she was almost convinced.

  She locked the car and headed for the towpath, glancing at the other boats as she walked towards her own, noting which of the ‘regulars’ had moved on, and which visiting, mostly tourist craft, had moored in their spot.

  She had to smile at Oodunnit, a boat that had painted inside each of the two ‘O’s a worried-looking eye, and wondered if the owner was a mystery writer. As she neared the Mollern her own narrowboat, she sighed to see that Willowsands was still absent. Nancy Walker, who owned her, had been Hillary’s nearest neighbour since she’d had to move on to the Mollern after the break-up of her marriage to Ronnie Greene. Last winter, however, Nancy had chugged her way up to Stratford-upon-Avon, and Hillary still missed her raucous, humorous, blithe presence. A swinging divorcee, who loved younger men – and many of them – she had decided to trawl for fresh pickings from the many actors and wannabes who flocked to Shakespeare Country. Hillary hoped she’d come back soon.

  As she approached her predominantly grey-and-white boat with black-and-gold trim (the colours of the heron, after whom her boat had been named) she saw that she had a visitor. Stretched out on a patch of sun-dried grass beside the boat, was the figure of a man. He lay with his forearm across his eyes, his shirt undone almost to his navel as he sunbathed in the setting sun.

  ‘Put it away before you get arrested,’ Hillary advised cheerfully. ‘It’s still too white and pasty-looking to be out on public display anyway.’

  DI Mike Regis, from Vice, slowly lowered his arm and opened one eye. ‘I’ll have you know that,’ and he patted his flat belly proudly, ‘is now the colour of clotted cream. Tomorrow it’ll be the colour of ripe wheat, and by the end of the week I’ll be so bronzed I’d make a Hollywood leading man jealous.’

  Hillary laughed. ‘Sure you won’t just look like a lobster?’

  Mike Regis rose lithely to his feet. Although her own age, he moved with the subtle fitness of a much younger man. True, his dark hair was thinning, but he had spectacular green eyes, and a killer smile. He reached forward and kissed her gently on the lips.

  ‘Been waiting long?’ she asked, worried that they’d arranged to meet, and she’d forgotten.

  ‘Nope. I got off late, didn’t fancy home, or the pub, and took the off chance you’d be here. You weren’t, but it was such a lovely evening, I thought what the hell?’

  They’d been seeing each other for over six months now, but it was rare for him to come to the boat. Hillary had a sneaking suspicion he wasn’t overly fond of it. And, to be fair, she could remember that, at first, she hadn’t exactly been enamoured of the narrowboat either. But the Mollern had been much better than staying at her marital home, which had resembled a battlefield, and over the years, she’d come to love the boat. So much so, that she’d finally took the plunge and bought it off her uncle, who’d originally owned it. And after the death of her husband before their divorce could be finalized, she’d made the decision to sell the house and keep the boat.

  Now she stepped on to it and felt the slight movement beneath her with a sense of coming home. ‘Mind your head,’ she called automatically over her shoulder, as she negotiated the few steep steps down into the narrow corridor that ran the length of her hom
e. She walked on through to the front, where a single armchair, a narrow bookshelf, a small portable telly, and a gas fire, comprised her ‘parlour’. She pulled out and opened a folding chair, and slung her bag under it. Then she took one step to one side so he could get past her, and walked back a few steps to the open-plan galley.

  ‘It’s salmon salad. OK?’

  Regis nodded, sitting down gingerly in the chair, and feeling like a rabbit in a hutch. Outside the window, set higher above him than he was used to, he saw a pair of legs walk past, closely followed by a black button of a nose, belonging to a curious dog. It sniffed the window, cocked its leg, and moved on.

  ‘I bought some bread and wine,’ he added, realizing he’d left it outside on the side of the grass. ‘I forgot to bring it in.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get it,’ Hillary said quickly.

  The bread turned out to be still warm, crusty and brown, the wine a rich Chablis. Just as well, since the tinned salmon was minuscule and the lettuce a little wilted. The bag of fresh tomatoes she thought she had in the fridge turned out to be only three in number, and just wrinkling. A small tin of new potatoes, warmed up, and a wedge of cheese – strong enough to walk out the fridge on its own and pop the cork of the wine without benefit of an opener – would just have to do. She spread it all out on to two mismatched plates, grabbed some cutlery and took it through.

  ‘I’ll have mine on my lap,’ she said. ‘But there’s a small side-table you can use for yours – that’s it, flush to the wall. It pulls out,’ she watched him fiddle with the latch that kept it pinned to the wall, then wince as it hit the top of his knee with a bang. He scrunched down in the chair a little, and she eased his plate on to the small square of wood. ‘No salt, I’m afraid, I haven’t been shopping this week.’ She tended to buy only small, strictly needful items of grocery, since she didn’t have the storage space on the boat that most home-owners were used to.

  ‘This is fine,’ Regis lied gamely, and prodded a piece of rather soggy fish experimentally. Hillary went back for the wine and poured out two large glasses.

  ‘So how’s Vice?’

  ‘Busy,’ Regis grunted. ‘With the summer comes the grockles, and you know what comes with them.’

  Hillary grinned. ‘Grockles’ was Regis’s favourite word for tourists, and she did, indeed, know what came with them. More prostitutes, more drug dealers, more illegal gambling. All the things that were Vice’s bread and butter.

  ‘And you?’ He looked up over his plate, his eyes softening on her as she sprawled tiredly in her chair. Her hair was mussed and clung to her cheeks, making him want to push it gently away. Her big, doe-like brown eyes that had always made his heart beat just a bit faster, looked strained and yet eager.

  ‘Got a new murder case today,’ she said simply, and he nodded knowingly.

  ‘Ah.’ That explained it. ‘You’re getting quite a rep for them.’

  Hillary shrugged. It was her Chief Super, Marcus Donleavy, she suspected, who’d been responsible for her being in charge of so many murder inquiries. And Mel Mallow, of course, her oldest friend, who, as Danvers’s immediate superior, was in charge of who was assigned to what.

  ‘So, what’s it all about?’ Regis asked, staring suspiciously at a tomato. He prodded it and it rolled obligingly across the plate.

  ‘Young guy, bit of a Casanova. Found dead in a meadow with a red paper heart weighted on his chest.’

  ‘Blimey.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. A bit over the top. Already his girlfriend and her father might be in the frame, and I’ve got the feeling that before long, we’re only going to add to their number.’ Briefly she outlined her day. ‘So I expect we’ll be up to our eyeball in female suspects once we know the extent of his list of clients.’

  Regis smiled. ‘Bit of a change from your last case then. As I recall, you were struggling to find even one person with a motive.’

  Hillary sighed and sipped her wine. She bit half-heartedly into a lettuce leaf, thinking of cod and chips. The bread though was nice, especially lathered with naughty butter. Arare indulgence, but she’d bought a half-pound on impulse and was now glad that she had.

  Outside, the evening light slowly died and the stars came out. She cleared and washed the dinner things, putting them away neatly before opening all the windows to let in a cool, evening breeze.

  ‘Are you staying?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Do you want me to?’ he asked, almost diffidently.

  She frowned. ‘Of course. Why? Don’t you want to stay?’

  ‘Don’t talk daft, woman,’ he growled, and let her lead him to the bedroom, a tiny cabin with a single bed that could pull out to make an almost three-quarter bed. He watched her undress with lazy-lidded eyes, and when she was finished, took a step back into the corridor to do the same. To attempt to strip in the tiny space would have had him scraping his elbows and bumping his knees and toes – and who knew what other protruding bits – into the walls or furniture.

  Hillary giggled as he got naked into bed beside her, then gave a muffled yelp of laughter as she turned to face him and he nearly fell out the other side. ‘Come here,’ she said helpfully, pulling him on top of her.

  It was nearly four in the morning when Regis finally admitted defeat and slipped out of the bed. No matter how much he tried, he simply couldn’t sleep with so little room. It wasn’t so much the crowded bed – when you had such lovely curves as Hillary’s pressed against you, who cared? But he could lift his hand and touch the ceiling, or move his arm parallel, anywhere in a 360-degree radius, and touch walls. He felt as if the air was thickening, pressing him down, making it hard to breath. He dressed quietly, with the full moon shining through the round port-hole in the bedroom and illuminating her sleeping face.

  He sighed softly, wishing she’d move in with him. He was renting a fairly spacious flat out Botley way, but if that didn’t suit her, he was more than willing to move. But so far, all his gentle, tiny hints, had fallen on to stony ground. Dressed, he bent and kissed her forehead, and let himself off the boat.

  The moment she felt his weight rock the boat slightly as he leapt on to the towpath, Hillary opened her eyes and sighed. She’d thought he would never go. He was so restless, it had been impossible to sleep. But she could hardly shove him from her bed, could she?

  She sighed, waited five minutes, until she was sure he’d be gone, then turned on the light. She knew it would be no good trying to get off just yet. Instead, she went into the galley and made herself a cup of coffee, and then, reaching for her mail, extracted a literary magazine she subscribed to, and took it back to bed.

  The magazine was one she used to read as an undergraduate at Oxford, and it was filled with local gossip as well as articles. As she opened it out to the middle-spread, always her favourite part, she instantly noticed the headline: ‘Jane Austen find in obscure Oxfordshire village?’

  She gave a small grunt of disbelieving pleasure, and began to read, slightly disappointed to find that the article wasn’t about a long-lost Austen manuscript, or even the outline or notes for one, but of a ‘possible’ portrait of the famous author instead. Apparently, there was only one authentic portrait of the novelist in existence, painted rather indifferently by her sister Cassandra, and currently hung at the National Portrait Gallery. However rumours were flying that another painting of her might have been discovered not far from the city of Oxford. Experts and sceptics gave conflicting statements, and the reporter promised more revelations to come.

  She put the magazine down, wondering just what she was going to do about Mike Regis. She sighed, finished her drink, and turned off the light.

  Without a restless partner taking up all the room, she was quickly asleep.

  *

  Keith Barrington woke up the next morning with a vague feeling of dread. It took him several moments to realize why.

  The autopsy.

  Before he’d left the office the previous day, Hillary had asked him to attend
. It was only the second one he’d ever had to do, and although he’d had to dash to the loo to be sick at his first go-round, at least he hadn’t fainted.

  He knew that it was protocol in a murder case that someone from the investigating team be present, but he wished she’d asked the new girl to do it. He swung his legs out of bed and rubbed his face tiredly.

  He wasn’t quite sure what to make of Gemma Fordham. Born and raised in London, he’d spent all his working life in the city, until an unfortunate incident with his sergeant had forced him to relocate. He’d been lucky to keep his job, he knew, and saw his move to Thames Valley as his last chance to turn things around.

  And he’d been lucky in his new boss. Hillary Greene was fair, straight-forward, intelligent, and one hell of an investigative copper. He’d learned more from her in the last six months than he’d have learned in six years at his old nick. And Gemma Fordham was said to be something of a high flier too. She certainly came across as one tough woman, with her gravelly voice, kung-fu persona and no-nonsense wardrobe. Already he sensed that half the men at the nick either fancied her rotten or were dead scared of her. And probably both. He felt neither, but then he had a certain immunity.

  He felt a sleepy body stir on the other side of the bed, and then a warm hand slipped up his back, resting between his shoulderblades. ‘Come on, Kee, it’s still way too early. Come back to bed.’

  Keith smiled. ‘Some of us don’t have rich daddies to keep us in luxury. Some of us have to work for a living.’

  ‘How bloody boring! Come on, come back to bed. If you have to live in this shit-hole, the bed’s the only place habitable.’

  Ignoring the invitation, Keith got to his feet. ‘You’ve already made me late once, and don’t think my boss didn’t notice. Besides, I have an appointment with a dead body. Gotta go see that it’s sliced and diced properly.’

  ‘Ugh, don’t. Who’d do your awful job? I don’t know why I put up with you. And as for leaving London – I still think you’re out of your tiny mind. If you come back, you know I can always line you up with something. A job with a bit of class.’