by Celina Grace
**
It was a long day, as first days on new cases tended to be. After hours spent at Roland Barry’s cottage, and an equally lengthy time back in the office, it was nearly ten o’clock by the time Kate called it a night. She’d been due over at Anderton’s that evening but, exhausted, she rang him as she was leaving the office.
“Hey, you.”
“Hullo. You sound knackered.”
“I am. That’s what I was calling about.”
Kate could hear the smile of recognition in Anderton’s voice. “I take it that you’re heading straight back to your place instead?”
“Yes. Sorry. You know what it’s like.” Kate caught herself and cursed inwardly. She tried very hard not to keep reminding Anderton of what he had lost, but sometimes it just slipped out. “Um, I mean—”
“Don’t worry.” Anderton sounded wry rather than annoyed. “Anyway, I’ve got some hardcore Game of Thrones to catch up on, so you’ve given me the opportunity to do just that.”
“Happy to oblige.” Kate, safe in the knowledge that he couldn’t see her, pulled a face. Sometimes she felt like the only person left in England who didn’t like that bloody TV series. She remembered that Anderton had said that morning that he wanted to talk to her about something. Briefly, she considered bringing it up and just as quickly decided not to. If it was important enough, it should be a face-to-face conversation. Plus, she was knackered.
They said goodbye and she slung her phone back in her handbag. Trotting down the steps, she saw Theo’s tall figure leaning against the handrails and pulling hard on his e-cigarette. A cloud of vapour escaped from his mouth into the cold night air.
“Theo,” said Kate, somewhat surprised. He had the unmistakeable aura of someone waiting for someone else. “Bit late for one of your hot dates, hey?”
Theo grinned. “Never too late for one of those, mate. Actually, I’m just waiting on a taxi.”
“I can run you home if you want?”
Theo shook his head. “Nah, thanks all the same. It’ll be here any minute.”
“OK. See you tomorrow, then.”
Theo blew her a smoke ring—or should that be vape ring?—in farewell, and Kate headed off to her car. It was very cold by now, and she’d come out that morning without a decent coat. Shivering, she turned the car heater up to full and drove off.
Her route home took her past the front of the police station, and she was surprised to see Theo—or someone who looked very like him—striding off down the road accompanied by another person. It was too dark to see who it was. Hadn’t he said he was waiting for a taxi? Kate pondered for a moment and then forgot about it, concentrating on her drive home.
***
The first debrief of the Barry case took place the following morning. The whole team (minus Olbeck) were assembled in the incident room, waiting for DCI Weaver to grace them with her presence.
Kate sat next to Chloe, chatting about nothing in particular. She spotted Theo across the room, yawning hugely. It was contagious. Kate stifled her own yawn, unfortunately just as Nicola Weaver came into the room and caught her.
“I do hope we’re not keeping you up, DI Redman.”
Nicola’s genius—and Kate had to admit it, begrudgingly—was to fire off the kind of bitchy remark that, taken one way, could merely be gentle teasing banter, and in the other way, a nasty, mean-spirited dig. Kate knew damn well the way that Nicola had meant it. She’d worked out a way of dealing with it, for it happened a lot; pretending that DCI Weaver had meant it lightheartedly and responding as if she had.
“No, I’m fine,” Kate said, with a light laugh, keeping the smile on her face. She felt Chloe snort quietly beside her and the smile became genuine. She and Chloe were good mates anyway, but they were further bonded by their hatred and loathing of their boss.
“Good,” Nicola said with a wintry smile. “We’re debriefing on the Roland Barry murder case, as you all no doubt know.” She cast a glance about the room. “The body has been formally identified by his sister, Mrs Winifred Cole.”
Kate made a mental note of the name. That would be someone to interview as soon as humanly possible.
Nicola was still speaking. “The post mortem is scheduled for first thing tomorrow morning. Theo, would you be our representative, please?”
“Yup.” Theo nodded. Nicola favoured him with a slightly warmer smile before turning away.
Oh, so he’s ‘Theo’ but I’m DI Redman. Kate’s mood soured. It was made worse by the sheer pettiness of the behaviour—or that Kate would seem even more petty if she complained about it.
“DS Wapping, DS Cheetam, could you begin to sift through all the CCTV, the witness statements—make a head start on what will no doubt be a long job?”
“Right you are,” Chloe said, in a tone just the right side of sarcastic. Nicola favoured her with a cold look, indicating she wasn’t fooled. Then she turned away, dismissing them.
“I’ll be in my office if anyone needs me. Please make an appointment through Pauline first.”
They all held their collective breath as Nicola shut the office door quietly behind her. Then, almost to a man, they exhaled.
“She’s such a cow,” sighed Chloe, beginning to walk back to her desk.
“You’ll have no argument from me on that.” Kate followed her friend. “But, given that that’s a given, what are we going to do about it?”
“Well, I for one intend to moan loudly and pointlessly for some time,” Chloe said, grinning and flinging herself down in her chair.
“Good plan.” Kate brought her computer screen to life and groaned aloud at the long list of unread emails. Coffee, I need coffee. She got up to make them all one and then sat down, mentally squaring her shoulders at the amount of work she had to do.
Chapter Four
Winifred Cole, the late Roland Barry’s sister, lived in the small village of Starford, some ten miles outside of Abbeyford. Kate was driving and had detoured to pick Chloe up from her little fisherman’s cottage in Salterton.
“God, I love this time of year,” Kate said as they sped along the bypass. “Autumn is my favourite season.”
Chloe gave her an incredulous look. “You’re joking, right? It’s getting colder, it’s damp, winter’s coming…”
“Yes but—new boots. Log fires. Blackberries. Halloween!”
“Oh, God, you don’t celebrate that, do you?”
“I love Halloween. I might even have a little party this year.” Kate gave her friend a mischievous glance. “Dressing up and everything. You’ll come, right?”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “If I have to. Will there be any unattached males invited?”
“Erm—” Kate did a quick mental tally as to all the unattached males she knew who might be able to cope with Chloe. It was a fairly short list. “Um…a few.”
“Well, I might consider it.” Chloe looked gloomily out of the window. “It’s been ages since I’ve had a date. Let alone a shag.”
Kate laughed. “What about Theo?”
Chloe and Theo had dated very briefly on her arrival at Abbeyford. Kate wasn’t particularly surprised it hadn’t gone anywhere. Both Chloe and Theo were a bit too alpha to really be compatible.
Chloe rolled her eyes. “I’ve learnt my lesson about dipping my pen in the office ink, as it were.” She gave Kate a mischievous look of her own. “I know it worked out for you, but we can’t all be that lucky.” She reached for the heater control on the dashboard and turned it up a little. “Besides, I think Theo might have someone else on the go.”
Kate snorted. “Someone else? How about several someone elses?”
“I don’t know,” said Chloe. “I think he’s had enough of playing the field. When we had our brief—erm, liaison, I got the impression he wanted to settle down a bit. Have a proper relationship. Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be with me.”
Kate raised her eyebrows, considering. She was so used to thinking of Theo as the classic playboy—a girl in every
port, despite the fact that he wasn’t a sailor—that it was difficult to think that he might want something more meaningful. “I suppose you could be right,” she said, thinking aloud. “I mean, things have changed a bit, haven’t they? Rav’s married, Mark’s married—and now with children. Me and Anderton are together. Poor Theo hasn’t got anyone to play with anymore, has he?” She grinned at Chloe. “Except you.”
“Ha! Not likely. I wish him well though, the cocky little bugger.” Chloe glanced at the sat nav. “We’re almost there, anyway.”
***
Winifred Cole’s house was a non-descript semi-detached, built in the 1960s, with a red-tiled roof and small, neat front garden. The street was narrow, and Kate had to wait impatiently several times for cars to give way for her to carry on to where the house was located. Eventually, she found a parking space several doors down and swung the car in to the curb.
Winifred Cole was a small, spare woman, rather anxious in demeanour, and with carefully curled white hair. She was hesitant to talk at first, but once the officers had been supplied with tea and biscuits, and installed on the mushroom-coloured sofa, she seemed to relax a little.
Kate gave her the standard words of condolence, hoping that she at least sounded sincere. She was sincere, actually; no matter how long you’d been in the job, it was never nice to see people floored by grief. Not that this exactly appeared the case here. Mrs Cole didn’t seem particularly happy but she didn’t seem particularly upset, either. Kate decided to find out why.
“Were you close to your brother, Mrs Cole?” she asked.
Mrs Cole sniffed. “Not particularly, I don’t think. I mean, he was family.” She didn’t elaborate on that. Instead she asked whether they would like another biscuit.
“Not just now, thanks, Mrs Cole,” said Kate, not wanting her witness to disappear off into the kitchen again. “So, you wouldn’t say you were close? Would he confide in you, would you say?”
“Well—” Mrs Cole seemed at a loss. “Well, perhaps, if it were something really worrying him.”
“Did he seemed worried about anything when you last saw him?” That would have been on the day of his death, but Kate didn’t want to remind Mrs Cole of that, in case it interfered with her memories.
“No, dear. No, I don’t think so. We had lunch, you know, where we always do—in the café in John Lewis.”
“What did you talk about, Mrs Cole?” asked Chloe. Kate noticed she had a biscuit crumb stuck to her lower lip, but she couldn’t exactly tell her in front of a witness.
Mrs Cole looked unhappy, or if not exactly unhappy then a bit lost. “Well, I can’t really remember, dear. Um…Roland was planning a holiday, I remember that much. We talked a bit about that.”
“Where was he going to go?” As Chloe spoke, Kate saw the biscuit crumb fall from her lip, to her relief.
“He liked Asia. He’d been to a lot of places in East Asia. Vietnam and Thailand and, um, what’s the other one he mentioned? Laos. That was where he was planning to go this year.”
“So, he was well travelled, then, Mrs Cole?” Kate decided she’d better speak up for a change.
“Yes, Roland loved to travel. He couldn’t afford to go more than once a year or so, especially now he was on his pension, but he did enjoy it.”
Kate remembered the picture of the Lake District. “Who would he travel with? He wasn’t married, was he?”
Mrs Cole shook her head. “No, he never got married. He had girlfriends, of course—he wasn’t a homosexual, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Kate and Chloe managed not to exchange glances. “He was engaged to someone once, Lucinda Somebody. Oh, what was her surname? I can’t remember, off hand. But that didn’t last, and the wedding never took place.” Mrs Cole clasped her hands together and for once, became eloquent. “I really don’t know who could have done this awful thing to Roland, I truly don’t.” Behind her glasses, her eyes were bewildered and shone with unshed tears. “It must be some madman, some serial killer. It can’t be anyone who knew him. Everyone liked him. He… I—I just can’t understand it.”
“I’m really so very sorry,” Chloe said in her warmest, most sympathetic tone, and DS Wapping could be extremely warm and sympathetic when she wanted to be. Mrs Cole wiped her eyes with a crumpled tissue, sniffing.
They carried on the interview after a discreet pause, asking gently about Roland’s finances, his friends, his last place of work, his neighbours. Nothing was particularly illuminating. Roland Barry’s nearest neighbour was half a mile down the lane, his friends mostly ex-colleagues who lived in places all over the UK. Kate scribbled down the names that she could interview, but it was a sparse list. Barry had apparently last worked five years before, at a sixth-form college in Bath, but since his retirement, he had occasionally privately tutored children and teenagers. Kate remembered seeing some folders in the filing cabinet at Barry’s house and made a mental note to go through each and every bit of paperwork contained within that cabinet with a fine-tooth comb.
***
Later that afternoon, driving home, Kate made the impulsive decision to go and call on Olbeck. It seemed like longer than a week since she had seen him; she’d purposely stayed away, wanting to give him and Jeff the space and time they needed with their new young children. But now, driving through the part of town in which he lived, she felt a pull towards her friend’s house. She debated sending him a text and then decided against it. On a second thought, she pulled into a petrol station and bought wine and flowers (for Olbeck and Jeff) and chocolate lollipops for the children. Was that bad? Perhaps she should have bought something healthier—satsumas, or bananas or something…
Fretting a little, she drove on towards Olbeck’s house. He probably won’t even be in, thought Kate. How old were the children again? She knew they were a sibling pair; a boy and a girl. Feeling more nervous than the situation perhaps warranted, Kate parked the car in the driveway and made her way to the front door, clutching her gifts to her chest in the absence of a plastic bag.
She was half expecting to hear childish shrieks and thuds and see toys flying out of the window and other markers of domestic chaos. Ridiculous, really, because when Olbeck opened the door, all was calm within.
“Kate!” He swept her into a hug and the lollipops fell to the floor. The flowers got crushed. Luckily, Kate retained a firm grip on the wine bottle. “Oh, sorry.”
“Thought I’d pop in, see if you’re surviving,” said Kate. She and Olbeck retrieved the sweets. “I bought these for—for the children. Do say if they’re not allowed to have chocolate yet.”
Olbeck grinned. “Well, Poppy’s only eight months so probably best not—”
Kate was crestfallen. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be daft. I’ll eat it. Harry can have one.”
They moved back through to the rear of the house where the kitchen and dining room had been thrown together into one big, sunny space. Jeff, who was a keen cook, had overseen the installation of a very swish kitchen, and the remaining space had become a calm, bright, relaxing room, with minimal ornaments, a large corner sofa in a dusky blue shade and a fluffy white rug.
Now, the room looked as if a toyshop and a baby equipment factory had exploded within it. The clean lines of the wide wooden floorboards were lost beneath a sea of toys, baby bouncers, rattles, dummies, packs of nappies, stray white muslin cloths, a half-sucked rice cake, crayons, teddy bears and baby wipe packets. The hitherto hospital-quality cleanliness and sterility of the kitchen was but a distant dream, wiped away by half-empty baby bottles, jars of baby food and a large round object puffing steam that Kate couldn’t quite work out the function of, before a long-ago memory told her it was a bottle steriliser.
Jeff, looking harassed but happy, sat in the middle of the chaos with a baby on his lap; curls of fair hair covering her round head, one cheek bright pink. She was wailing loudly. Over in the corner sat a boy of about two or three, thin and wary looking, with rather long brown hair. He had his knees tight t
o his chest and had his thumb in his mouth.
“Kate,” said Jeff, or rather shouted it above the noise. “What a lovely surprise! Come and meet the kids!”
“Hello,” Kate said to the wailing baby, or rather mouthed it as she couldn’t hear herself think.
“Sorry about this, Poppy’s teething,” shouted Jeff. “I’ll just pop upstairs and see if I can find some gel for her gums.”
“Okay,” mouthed Kate, smiling desperately.
Poppy’s wails floated behind her as Jeff took her out of the room. Kate tried not to relax too obviously.
She smiled at the little boy—Harry, wasn’t it? “Hello, Harry. I’m Kate.”
Harry looked at her unblinkingly.
“He gets a bit anxious when Poppy cries,” said Olbeck. “Or when there’s a lot of noise.” He addressed the boy. “It’s okay, Harry. Nothing to worry about. Do you want me to get you Tato?” Harry nodded in a movement so tiny Kate could barely see it. “Okay, sweetheart. You just wait there and Kate and I will go and find him.”
In the hallway, Olbeck gave Kate a smile that she could tell was meant to reassure. “Sorry about that, it’s just he gets frightened if I leave him with strangers. Not that you’re a stranger but, you know—”
“I am to him,” said Kate. She squeezed her friend’s arm. “I get it, it’s okay. I’m sorry—I should have given you warning I was coming around—”
“Don’t be silly. It’s lovely to see you.” Olbeck had gone into the front living room and was hunting around. “I have to find Tato. He’s Harry’s favourite cuddly toy.”
“What’s he look like?” Kate asked, joining him in the search.
“Like a big potato, of course.”
“A cuddly potato? Interesting.” Kate spied something likely wedged down between the sofa and the armchair. “Is this the fellow?”
