Burying the Past

by Judith Cutler

  ‘I wonder what state the place is in,’ Mark said.

  He was wavering, obviously, so she gave a verbal push. ‘Only one way to find out, my love. But I’d take the locksmith to the back door, not the front, if I were you. Less publicity. Actually,’ she added, ‘I’d take up Ms Rottweiler’s other suggestion that you find a negotiator to go with you. I’d hate her to start throwing things.’

  ‘Especially if they were mine to start with,’ he agreed with a rueful smile. ‘But I can’t act now, Fran – we’ve both got to get back to hear the chief drop his bombshell officially. And then for a week I can’t see me needing to sleep anywhere except on my office floor. Can you?’

  ‘I can, actually. And I’d say you needed somewhere quiet to sleep. But if you can’t face any more pressure, phone Ms Rottweiler and ask her to initiate Plan B. The stern final warning letter. It’d certainly be nicer if you didn’t have to get your hands soiled.’ Even if just one of Ms Rottweiler’s letters would cost a day of Mark’s not inconsiderable salary. Anything, anything, just to have a peaceful home for him to go to. Stress wasn’t kind to men of his age, and although he exercised and ate a well-nigh perfect diet, she never lost the niggle of fear for his heart that she’d experienced ever since they got together.

  ‘Plan B it is. I’ll phone her from the car park,’ he said. ‘Then, Fran – into battle. I can’t blame the chief for resigning, but I can’t help feeling a lot of the shit he might have fielded will now be the responsibility of yours truly.’

  Fran put her head on one side, Caffy-like. ‘Haven’t you mixed a metaphor or two there?’

  Paula was the sort of woman Fran would want beside her when the last trump sounded – or was it last trumpet? Caffy would know! – calm to the point of stolid, as she had been when she’d broken the bad news earlier. But when she phoned Fran an hour or so later, at precisely the time that all the senior officers were doing headless chicken impressions, she allowed a hint of exasperation to seep into her voice.

  ‘Fran, this DI of yours – is she for real?’ With Paula, you never got preliminaries, polite or otherwise.

  ‘It’s her first day at school,’ Fran said.

  ‘Ah. In that case, you’ll have to give her detention. She’s being totally unrealistic in her demands. She wants all work on the house to cease forthwith. I tried reminding her who the house belonged to, but that seemed to make her all the more determined to play by the book.’

  Fran remembered her own green days. ‘It would. Have they dug up that bean row yet?’

  ‘Nope. Talking of the bean row, now Caffy’s worrying about misplacing her copy of Yeats – some poem she wants to quote. She didn’t lend it to you, did she? No? It must be one of the plasterers. I had to tear her from that DI’s throat when she suggested all the plaster would have to come off, by the way.’

  ‘All this for what might not even be a body. OK,’ Fran said with a sigh, ‘I’ll try to get someone to drop by and have a word with poor Kim. Not sure when. I certainly don’t see me doing it. It’s chaotic here—’

  ‘I’ll bet it is, with the boss throwing in the towel. Mind you, I don’t blame him. As I’m sure you know, the press are going wild. I hope they don’t know where you live, because sure as God made little apples, they’ll sit on every senior officer’s doorstep till they can get a comment.’

  For an evil moment Fran felt like leaking the Loose address so they could drive Sammie out of the house; on the other hand, Sammie might spin some hideous tale about her father’s cruelty.

  ‘And Fran – have you found anywhere to stay yet?’

  ‘I still wonder about the house—’

  ‘No.’ Paula cut the call.

  ‘Kim: try to forget what’s convenient or not for the ACC and me,’ Fran told her, doing the work a more junior officer should have been doing. Since there’d been a nasty murder on someone’s doorstep only a few hours ago, the already depleted DCI team had more pressing matters than Fran’s to worry about. And – to be honest – she simply enjoyed being out at the rectory, after the horrors on the pensioner’s doorstep. These days she found herself getting less, not more, inured to the sight of blood and brain tissue. And the smell . . . ‘Think budgets. If you strip the house down to bricks again, it’s going to cost the service an arm and a leg. The grounds – well, you can see there’s nothing to worry about there. Uproot every last weed with my blessing, but watch the trees – some of them have preservation orders on them. Start small, and then move the enquiry outwards.’

  Kim’s face remained stubborn, and it was hard for Fran to believe that this was simply the result of the anaesthetic. She’d hoped that, in the absence of DCIs, there’d be some experienced sergeant around to support the young woman, helping her develop skills and confidence, just as she always had mentored all the officers in her various teams. Caffy had referred to the late Simon as her protégé; she sometimes felt she’d peopled the senior ranks across the country with youngsters she’d nurtured – she didn’t need a shrink to know that they’d become her surrogate children. To pursue the analogy, perhaps Kim was going through the belated terrible twos, or whenever it was children started to argue with everything their parents wanted. Of course, Fran could simply remind her who was boss by giving a direct order, but that would soil their relationship from the start.

  ‘Then, if you really think the case merits it, of course you can order work on the house,’ she continued, feeling as spineless as Mark in the face of his daughter. She regrouped immediately. ‘But remember that the chief was emphatic this morning that we had to count every penny. Paula’s already told you that the house has been gutted once. Believe me, had there been anything slightly amiss, those women would have summoned us. Don’t forget it was one of them who pointed out the present problem.’

  ‘Even so, ma’am—’

  ‘Quite. By the way, did Paula tell you we should be moving in on Thursday?’ she lied.

  Fran’s possibly innocent smile must have reminded Kim of a crocodile’s: paling visibly, the young woman said swiftly, ‘Paula said something about the place having been unnaturally clean of evidence. Do you think the owner knew what was in the garden and made sure they left nothing that would be any help to anyone coming across it?’

  This time Fran’s smile was genuine. ‘If I were you, that’s exactly the line of enquiry I would be pursuing. I can start you off. We bought it from a charity I’d never heard of, which was left it in the last owner’s will, though for the life of me I can’t recall her name offhand.’ Hell, was this what they called a senior moment? ‘They could do what they liked with quite a lot of land that lay with it, but they couldn’t sell the house for ten years.’

  ‘Weird or what?’

  ‘I’m afraid we wanted the place so much we hardly registered that anything might be dodgy. In the ensuing years, the place became pretty well derelict: it’s looking good, now, in comparison. We wanted to awaken Sleeping Beauty, as it were – but we might have poked a stick into a hornet’s nest, mightn’t we?’

  Kim nodded. ‘But it’s odd you weren’t curious. What was the charity?’

  ‘Something to do with preventing the culling of badgers: I’ve got all the details back at the office, so it should be easy enough to find who left it to them – who is obviously our prime suspect. As for the charity . . . Ah, Don’t Badger Badgers, that’s what it’s called. It didn’t have much to spend its funds on, of course – until recently, I should imagine. Now it’s probably busy organizing protest meetings in the south-west, where dairy farmers have got the go-ahead to shoot them on their land.’

  Looking up from the notes she was making, Kim said, ‘I’ve always thought of badgers as Wind in the Willows characters, I’m afraid. What farmers ought to be doing is inoculating the cows, surely?’

  Warming to her at last, Fran said, ‘Since I don’t like guns in anyone’s hands, I couldn’t agree more. But I’m not a farmer, of course. Nor an archaeologist – apparently, badgers do huge damage to as y
et unexplored historic sites.’

  Kim nodded grimly at the figures in the vegetable patch. ‘We’ll just have to hope they haven’t been busy here, then.’

  Fran shook her head. ‘I can think of two damned good reasons to hope they have – my home and my budget. Don’t look so shocked, Kim! You must admit that a body that’s lain there for at least twelve years – the charity found it couldn’t shift the place when the bottom dropped out of the housing market – is probably of less interest to us than one that’s just appeared.’

  ‘That Chinese illegal that turned up by the OAP’s bungalow at two this morning?’

  ‘Exactly like that. Just one thing, Kim. On my watch we don’t call them “illegals”. It’s a term that seems to diminish, to dehumanize people. And for all I’d rather not have a skeleton in my bean row, if we do find remains, we’ll treat them with absolute decency, even reverence. Won’t we?’

  ‘Of course, ma’am.’ She was pretty well at attention again, poor girl.

  Fran sighed. She’d picked up rumours that youngsters – and a few old lags – were inclined to find her intimidating. But she rarely meant to be. Oh, when she put her mind to it, she could draw tears, male as well as female. Now all she’d meant to do was remind the newcomer of the CID ethos – OK, her ethos – but it was clear she’d overdone it. Perhaps it was a generational thing. Perhaps it really was time to retire. But not quite yet. Not if it meant letting Kim plough on unrestrained.

  ‘Look,’ Fran said, ‘they seem to be having some sort of chinwag. Shall we go and put our three penn’orth in? Or rather, Kim – your three penn’orth: you’re the one in charge here, in case I’d forgotten,’ she added with a grin.

  Kim managed to respond with a hint of a smile, while not quite dropping a curtsy. Roll on the return of that nice malleable DCI, Harry Chester; with luck, having your gall bladder fished out didn’t require much time off.

  Fran’s phone rang; expecting gossip from HQ, she was surprised to see the caller was Janie Falkirk, the vicar at St Jude’s, Canterbury, whom Mark had mentioned upon their scaffolding the other day. Janie was a tough, laconic Glaswegian, currently based at one of the ugliest churches Fran had ever seen.

  ‘Fran – sorry to disturb you, but I’ve got a problem. Serious. But it needs a wee bit of sensitivity. Any chance?’

  With all the problems at HQ, and just when things were kicking off here! But she ought to give Kim a freer rein, ought to let her find her feet. And in all the time she’d known her, Janie had never asked for a favour. ‘How urgent?’

  ‘About as urgent as it can be.’

  THREE

  In its way, not to mention in its day, the Edwardian vicarage next to St Jude’s, a viciously Fifties concrete bunker on the east side of Canterbury, must have been as grand as their rectory. It sat within its own grounds next to the church; together they made a decent and potentially highly profitable site should the church ever be declared redundant. Fran could imagine some rapacious developer sidling up to the Church Commissioners and rubbing his hands in glee as he saw the tiny congregation dwindle further. As for Mark, a fervent admirer of the Reverend Janie Falkirk’s sermons, he always thought she was wasted where she was and nursed the hope of hearing her in a grand cathedral pulpit.

  Janie, on the other hand, greeting Fran with a smile that couldn’t disguise the fact that her face was lined with anxiety, always said she was where God had planted her, and no doubt He’d transplant her when He was ready. ‘My study,’ was all she said, heading Fran off from the kitchen, where she was usually entertained.

  She didn’t respond to Fran’s raised eyebrows till the study door was firmly closed. Fran didn’t need to be told to sit; she moved a heap of papers from a chair the room might have been built round and prepared to make herself uncomfortable.

  ‘There’s a lass in the kitchen thinks she’s killed someone.’

  Janie could still surprise her. ‘Thinks?’

  ‘Man broke in to her flat and raped her in her bed. She had a knife to hand – this is the bit I don’t like, Fran – and stuck him between the ribs. He left, with the knife in place. She came here.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Trust issues with you people, of course.’

  ‘So she’s not been medically examined? Of course not. But she must be – you must make her see that. If she has knifed someone, there’s got to be a damned good excuse. If she’s killed someone, a watertight reason would be better.’

  ‘Hand herself in?’

  ‘No! Report the rape! She’s the victim, assuming she’s telling the truth. The Sexual Crimes Unit people are the ones who should be dealing with this.’

  ‘I don’t know them. I know you. If I tell her I’d trust you with my life, maybe she’ll do as you say. Maybe.’

  ‘You want to talk to her alone first?’

  ‘You can edit my sermon while I’m away.’ She patted an elderly computer.

  But it was Fran’s mobile that took all her attention. After twenty long minutes spent handling a torrent of calls and texts, dealing equally with the chief’s departure, the Chinese murder and the cable thefts, Fran was finally summoned to the kitchen. This was Janie’s sanctuary, the beating heart of the vicarage – it was, as Janie always said dourly and almost certainly truthfully, the only room in the house she could afford to heat, which was why her sermons were getting shorter. At one end of a much-scrubbed table hunched a young woman the height and build of Caffy; the main difference was that this girl had victim written all over her, with drug-user as part of the palimpsest.

  ‘Just tell me what happened,’ Fran said, accepting a mug of tea, which both she and Janie knew she’d never drink because it was so strong and stewed.

  ‘He came in and raped me. I was asleep, miss, and he raped me. No condom, nothing. Does that mean I’ll get pregnant?’

  Janie said, ‘We’ll make damned sure you don’t, lass.’

  ‘Aids! I could get Aids!’

  ‘If he’s carrying it, it’s always a possibility – so we need to address that quickly too,’ Janie said. ‘As I was telling you a wee while back, Fran here’s not just a policewoman, she’s a top policewoman, the sort that makes things happen. Now, one of the things she’s done – this is right, isn’t it, Fran? – is set up a team of women, police officers and medics, who specialize in sexual assault. They’ll take your clothes and bedclothes and make sure they get any evidence.’

  The girl said, with a mixture of worldliness and terror, ‘They’ll want more than that, won’t they?’

  ‘They’ll want a full statement – and because you’ll be talking to women, you needn’t be embarrassed,’ Fran said.

  ‘I don’t mean – you know what I mean.’

  ‘Of course I do. They’ll ask a woman doctor to examine your insides and take swabs. It won’t be a bundle of laughs, but having a smear test isn’t anything you look forward to, is it? But it’s as necessary as that. And a good deal more urgent. What’s your name?’ Fran smiled. ‘Janie’s so good at keeping secrets she hasn’t even told me that, you see. No? Let’s not worry about that yet then. May I phone one of my colleagues? The one who’s an expert? Jill. She’s a really decent woman. She’s got kids of her own – her daughter’s a bit younger than you, I’d say. So nothing’ll shock her. And she’ll drive you straight to the place where you’ll have your swabs, and then you can have a nice shower and put on some clean clothes. People often say they feel dirty all over when they’ve been raped.’ She smiled again.

  ‘But going to court—’

  ‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. We don’t want you getting pregnant, and we don’t want you getting Aids or any other STD. May I phone Jill? I’ll make the call here if you like so you can hear everything I say.’

  ‘But what about killing the bloke?’

  Janie put a warning hand on the girl’s wrist.

  ‘But I might of! I stuck him in the ribs, miss. And he ran off.’

  ‘With the knife stil
l stuck in?’ Fran kept her voice calm.

  The girl nodded.

  Fran held up her hand. ‘We’re going to have to talk about this, but not now. Let’s deal with the crime committed on you first. And then we’ll look into the problem of your assailant – the guy who attacked you. I don’t suppose – did you know him?’

  ‘In the dark? Wearing one of them woollen hood things? Not a hoodie, it covers your face too.’

  ‘Balaclava,’ Janie put in.

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Was there much blood?’ Janie asked.

  ‘Not a lot. Not what you’d call a lot, anyway.’

  Fran held up her hands. ‘I’d much rather we didn’t talk about this now. I’d much rather concentrate on you. Is that OK? Can I make the call?’

  The girl grabbed Janie’s hand convulsively.

  ‘Yes, it’s fine for Janie to stay with you – if it’s OK by you, Janie?’

  Fran had hardly cut the call to DCI Jill Tanner when another call came in. ‘I’m sorry – I have to take this.’ She stepped out into the hall, cool to freezing even on a pleasant day like today. ‘Kim?’

  ‘I thought you’d like to know, ma’am, that the archaeologists are about to excavate the bean patch. Just that, for now.’

  ‘I’ll be over as soon as I can.’

  ‘Don’t worry – if their progress so far is anything to go by, they’ll still be here at midnight.’

  Perhaps she might just warm to Kim after all.

  With Jill Tanner now officially in charge of the girl, who still hadn’t given her name, Fran could indulge herself again before an urgent meeting about metal theft. Indeed, every visit to the rectory, scaffolders and now archaeologists notwithstanding, was an indulgence, come to think of it. Perhaps retirement wouldn’t be so bad, not with that house to care for, that garden to tend – not to mention that view to feast her eyes on when she and Mark, with their end of the day glass of wine, sat on the terrace she planned to revive. Just the two of them. Man and wife. Bliss.