Burying the Past

by Judith Cutler

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  ‘With your schedule? We’ll argue about that later.’

  ‘No, we won’t. I’ll pick you up at six fifteen, which should get us into Ashford with time to spare. Should. OK?’

  Raising work-worn hands in surrender, Janie smiled. ‘OK. I can see how you got to be a chief superintendent.’

  ‘Being a steamroller doesn’t always work – not when it came to finding our temporary accommodation. But this is about you, Janie, not me.’

  She rocked her head in reluctant acquiescence. ‘Would you believe it, good is actually coming out of this? My wee sister and I have hardly done more than send Christmas cards for twenty years, but now she’s coming down to nurse me, having had the same problem herself. The good news is they think it’s not spread.’ Fran didn’t like the word think, but she held her tongue. ‘So I shall be able to officiate at your wedding.’

  Fran gaped. ‘How did you know about that? Because I was going to tell you today, since it’s another thing we could hardly discuss in front of Cynd.’

  ‘Your old boss phoned.’

  ‘Shit and double shit! I know he’s an old dear, but just now he’s an interfering old bastard.’

  ‘He seemed a polite old gentleman to me. Full of Dickensian charm.’

  ‘That says it all – he’s only in his sixties! And he had no right—’

  ‘Loving people gives you a lot of rights, and even if love’s too strong a word in this instance, he’s very fond of you and Mark. Anyway, he phoned to ask if I’d be able to officiate in the Cathedral. In your dreams, sonny, I told him. I mean, I would be able, if given permission – but you two probably wouldn’t be eligible anyway. Sorry. But I take his point about St Jude’s. You want something a bit more photogenic, Fran, for your big day.’

  However much this might have been music to her ears, she protested, truthfully, ‘But we want you to take the service, to marry us. Because – because we love you, Janie, and as you’ve just said . . .’

  Janie blushed. ‘We’ll find a way round it, never fear.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Now, I’ve got to push you out: I want to check on young Cynd, who’s taken the news of the op far worse than I have – would you believe, I found her on her knees howling outside my bedroom door last night? Plus one of the lasses in the mothers’ group is likely to be evicted, and I need to go and talk to her social worker. Fran,’ she added, putting her hand on Fran’s, ‘I know you’re not so sure about the power of prayer as I am, but I’d welcome your getting into God’s ear for a bit: I trust the NHS, but a bit of extra insurance never came amiss.’

  Personally, Fran would have liked to give God a good kicking for letting cancer exist, let alone descending on such a good woman.

  ‘Now, a bit of a hug, and off you go,’ Janie continued.

  ‘I’ll see you at six fifteen,’ she managed, ready to howl, like Cynd, with rage and horror and fear. But she didn’t. Not until she was safely in her car.

  ‘I’m sorry to be in such a rush,’ Mark said, arriving at the station cafe, despite having an official driver this time, five minutes late. He plonked his mobile on the tiny table Dave was already perched at.

  ‘You always were in a rush,’ Dave responded unsmilingly, putting his mobile down cheek by jowl with his father’s – same make, same model, same everything.

  Mark blinked: hadn’t Dave had something altogether sexier? ‘New toy?’ he ventured, touching it.

  ‘Poor coverage over here,’ Dave said dismissively, before continuing what sounded like a prepared tirade. ‘You never had a moment for us. I can’t recall a single birthday party, Sammie’s or mine, which you didn’t arrive late for or leave early.’

  He didn’t argue – hadn’t he beaten himself up for the same thing?

  ‘Mom was a saint to put up with you. In fact, I’m even beginning to feel a little sorry for this Fran of yours.’

  ‘When we retire—’ Mark began bracingly.

  ‘If you retire. If you live long enough. Anyway. Sammie. I’m going to see her. I’ve not been before because I wanted to see how the land lay.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I can’t see how you got yourselves in this financial mess, to be honest. And it disgusts me that you have. And that you need to sell our home to sort yourselves out. You’ve behaved like crazy kids.’

  Again, how could he argue? But he scrabbled on to safer ground. ‘If you haven’t seen Sammie yet, you may not know the provision I’ve offered to make for her until she and Lloyd have sorted themselves out. For all they’re not living together, he’s still got a job, and they’re his children. Whatever the state of their marriage, he can’t shirk that responsibility. Meanwhile, I’ll make sure she has a roof over her head, clothes on her back and food in her and the kids’ bellies. When the house is sold, I can make you a gift to the same value.’

  ‘So we don’t have to wait till you’re dead?’ He snorted. ‘Why didn’t you say this before? Only just thought of it?’

  Why indeed? Because he’d had other matters to worry about?

  ‘You always did try to bribe us.’

  ‘This is nothing to do with bribery: it’s to do with fairness. Fairness to you, to her and to Fran. And – somewhere along the line – to myself. And speaking of lines, that’s my train. I’m sorry, Dave, but when you’re meeting the Home Secretary you can’t be late.’ And he had a terrible feeling that the Home Secretary would be less hostile, less implacable, than his only son.

  The young man’s name badge might have said Fred, but Fran was sure that it should probably say Frydyryk, or whatever was the nearest equivalent to the Polish first name. He greeted her as if she was at least a duchess even before she flicked out her ID, at which his eyebrows shot up. Then he found her a chair, which he insisted on dusting before he presented it with a flourish. Together they pored over the relevant records – and this branch’s were as meticulous as those in Maidstone.

  As he ran his finger down the fifth or sixth page, Fred remarked idly, ‘Lovage is a curious name, isn’t it, for a person, not a herb? A very useful herb, too, with very high levels of quercetin.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Something that is a natural antioxidant – it inhibits free radicals.’

  Despite herself, she trotted out a joke she’d used before, her only excuse being that the young man probably hadn’t heard it. ‘I thought the Home Secretary had locked them all up.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have expected a police officer to make such a remark,’ he said, not quite straight-faced.

  ‘I wouldn’t have expected a self-store security man to know about quercetin,’ she countered, eyes a-twinkle.

  ‘Then we are both surprised – I to find a police officer with a sense of irony, and you to find a man halfway through Med School doing a job like this. Money, Detective Chief Superintendent, money. Ah! Here is our useful herb. Dr Marion Lovage. Unit One-Seven-One B.’

  She was ready to leap to her feet and punch the air. But she confined herself to an exultant: ‘Really?’

  ‘And the strangest thing is that she hasn’t been back since, according to our records. Not in fourteen years and more.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘See for yourself. I’m surprised my bosses have never checked – space is short, apart from anything else.’ He looked at her shrewdly. ‘Much as the police would like me to, I can’t just unlock the unit for you.’

  ‘I’ll organize a search warrant. Thank you for your help.’

  ‘You’re welcome. But ma’am, may I ask when you plan to open the unit? Because if it’s so important, I would dearly love to be the one on hand to supervise you.’

  She grinned. ‘Give me your mobile number. Oh, and your boss’s, come to think of it.’

  ‘Of course. I’m sure the Home Secretary worries about such procedures as much as about free radicals,’ he declared.

  Heavens, why couldn’t Mark’s son have been as charming and witty as this young man? Maybe she could con
jure some sort of reward for him for Crimestoppers or some other crime-fighting charity.

  ‘Meanwhile, can I have her passport number? And that of her driving licence?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘We seem to have a lacuna in her details. See – all we have is the word “Pending” in both columns. A real lapse in security there, Chief Superintendent. Possibly because she paid so very much cash up front. Enough for – say – five years. I can only apologize.’

  ‘Come now, it’s hardly your fault. You weren’t even in infants’ school then. But I’d like to meet the person who nodded her through, as it were.’

  He stood to one side, pointing at a totally illegible signature, clumsy as if a child was practising a grown-up autograph. There was a small run of them, but it soon stopped. Then the usual signatures returned. ‘Perhaps someone new to the firm. Or temporary. I’ll ask my boss to check staff records for you. And ask about this.’ He pointed. ‘Another cash payment, only two months later. Very strange.’ He picked up the card she gave him. ‘And I will ask my boss to do everything urgently, ma’am. Any case meriting a detective chief superintendent asking the questions must be serious indeed.’

  TWELVE

  One day maybe she’d stop worrying when Mark was late. But not yet. And because she was so tired, Fran wasn’t at her most logical. Some of her weariness was relaxing after a job well done: she’d set up everything for what she mentally called the Grand Opening of the storage unit. It was easier to hide hopes behind the irony that had appealed to young Frydyryk. A written explanation pinned to a packing case was not on the cards, she was sure of that – a woman wouldn’t go to so much trouble to erase everything from her home only to blurt it out later. She didn’t see Dr Lovage summoning a priestly ear to receive her deathbed confession, either. But there must be something . . .

  Why on earth hadn’t she set an earlier deadline for Kim to come up with Lovage’s biog? She didn’t want to wait till Monday. But she’d said from the outset that the budget was limited, and more speed meant more officers working, and possibly unnecessary overtime, too.

  Maybe it was warm enough to take a G and T outside and enjoy the view, such as it currently was. But there was a nip in the air, and the only chairs, white plastic ones some of the workers had left out, were so thick with building dust it’d take five minutes to clean one. And a G and T wasn’t a good option anyway, not with the prospect of going to collect Mark from the station when he eventually arrived. Why hadn’t he at least phoned to say which train he was on? She felt the usual clang of fear in her gut when anything might go amiss with him.

  At last her phone rang. ‘Mark! Thank God. Where have you been?’

  ‘It’s David Turner here,’ came a stranger’s voice. Dave, of course, distancing himself from her deliberately.

  ‘But you’re on Mark’s phone?’ Image chased image – Mark ill, all the important phone numbers and highly sensitive contact details in someone else’s hands. You needed a password to get into the memory, but for all she knew of him Dave might be the sort of geek to get round that sort of thing in the twinkling of digitally adept fingers.

  ‘He left it at the station when he met with me. He must have mistaken it for mine.’

  How had he made such an error? ‘Could you give me the number of the mobile Mark’s got? I need to know what time he’ll be back so I can prepare his supper.’ She had a vision of herself in a frilly apron wielding a wooden spoon, just like the mother in one of the old Ladybird Janet and John books. In fact, all she’d be doing was exercising her index finger pressing microwave buttons to heat one of the selection of ready meals she’d picked up from Sainsbury’s on her way home.

  He rattled through it too quickly for her to pick up a single digit – something to do with the Transatlantic blurring of his T’s into D’s, maybe.

  ‘Maybe you’d be kind enough to hold on,’ she said with a creaking formality. ‘I don’t have a pencil and paper handy.’ Eventually, with several embarrassing requests for him to repeat a digit, she had the number. She was ready to cut the call – but, of course, he’d contacted her in the first place and might have wished to say something. ‘Thank you. Now, how can I help you?’ Wrong words, wrong tone – perhaps it was tiredness that had summoned her standard office enquiry.

  There was a long enough pause to suggest that he was taken aback. ‘I guess I just thought it might be profitable for us to talk.’

  ‘What a nice idea,’ she said with cheery duplicity, as if she’d not picked up any subtext at all. ‘I don’t think either of us is working tomorrow. Why don’t we shout you lunch at Leeds Castle or somewhere equally picturesque?’

  ‘I was thinking more of just you. My father being so busy,’ he added with something horribly like contempt.

  She strapped a smile on her face in the hope it might reach her voice. ‘The trouble is, Dave, that your father and I see so little of each other that we try to make sure we share everything we can at weekends. And I’m sure he’d be mortified if he thought you and I were off on a jolly without him.’ She waited. Nothing. So she breezed on: ‘How are your family managing without you? How’s Phoebe’s tooth?’

  She forced the conversation along family lines as long as she dared, feeling like poor Miss Bates exhausting that irritating girl Emma’s patience. At last, she declared untruthfully that she had a call waiting and hoped audibly it might be Mark managing at last to recall her mobile number without any electronic assistance. Pause for girlish giggle and a silent reflection that she wouldn’t, in similar circumstances, have a clue what Mark’s might be.

  ‘Incidentally, there’s something wrong with his phone.’ Dave sounded puzzled or aggrieved. ‘I couldn’t access the memory – it’s a good job I’d kept that business card of yours.’

  ‘It is indeed. Look, I’ll tell Mark you called – or perhaps you could call him yourself? – but just for now I must go.’ What the hell was going on? Why should Dave want to speak to her without Mark? More important, why had she failed to ask him why?

  Meanwhile, there was something more urgent to deal with. There were people at HQ on duty round the clock just in case one of their colleagues lost or was robbed of his mobile or his computer. She speed-dialled the number. A few moments’ conversation established that Dave would find his father’s phone suddenly and inexplicably unusable, not just the memory. Which brought her to another imponderable – how much of this should she tell Mark when he eventually got home? Correction, to the Winnebago.

  Arms wrapped around each other, as if they were drunken kids, they staggered, almost dropping, to the car she’d insisted on driving over. An official police vehicle would have been available, and calling for one would have made a lot more sense, but it wouldn’t have made his heart leap like the sight of Fran, waving as the train drew in.

  ‘Just talk at me,’ she said, starting the car. ‘Or I shall fall asleep, and then where will we be?’

  ‘I can tell you I still don’t know how I picked up the wrong phone,’ he said obligingly. ‘First sign of senility or what?’

  ‘Not if someone had one just like yours.’

  ‘I thought he had a quite different one. But when we put our phones down . . . It’s like marking territory, isn’t it?’ he reflected whimsically. ‘Then there were definitely two identical ones on the table. Weird.’ When she said nothing, perhaps because she was making an awkward right turn, or perhaps not, he asked, ‘What did he say when he called?’

  If she hoped he wouldn’t notice her hesitation, plus a bit of a swallow, she was wrong.

  ‘Forgotten already?’ he asked drily. ‘Or would you rather talk about it later, over a drink? But don’t think we won’t.’

  ‘I think the rule about not talking shop at home applies in the Winnebago, doesn’t it?’

  ‘So do you want to talk now? Something’s really bothering you. Perhaps if you switched your lights on?’ he prompted.

  ‘I don’t know if my head’s up to doing two things at once.’

/>   ‘It was up to going into theft-of-phone mode earlier. As it happens, I think you were right, both as a cop and as a stepmother elect. I called in the loss myself as soon as I realized I had the wrong one, and they said you’d already alerted them. Well done.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure . . . If you’ve got dementia, I’ve got paranoia. I don’t think he wanted the chief’s home number or the car pool. I think he wanted my number, to talk to me without your being present. Just a feeling.’

  He could tell she was lying; what had Dave said? ‘Talk about what?’

  ‘No idea. Truly, no idea. Maybe what you’d like for your next birthday.’

  He pointed skywards. ‘Look, there’s a pig up there doing loop the loops. Or not. Come on, Fran, we’ve always been honest with each other.’ Unless it’s really suited us to lie, he added silently, touching her hand and the ring he’d never meant to be an engagement token.

  ‘I’ve told you: I’ve not got a clue. And the birthday present idea’s as good as any. No? Whoops – wasn’t that our turning?’

  He waited while she manoeuvred the car. ‘Why don’t you call him and agree to meet?’

  ‘I’ve told him our weekends are sacrosanct. Oh, Mark, you haven’t got to work tomorrow, not really?’ Her question dwindled into something between a wail and a sob. Not Fran!

  ‘I can work in the caravan on my laptop. Only for an hour. And maybe another hour on Sunday. Tomorrow we’ll nip into Maidstone to get me a new cheapo phone to tide me over till Dave returns the other one. Then we’ll see if the village cricket club is playing at home, and we’ll eat in the pub in the evening. And go to church on Sunday.’

  ‘St Jude’s.’ She explained about Janie. ‘And we’ll leave our phones at the end of the Winnebago that doesn’t get a signal?’ She sounded like a little girl begging permission to hang up her stocking for Santa.

  ‘Indeed we will. And we’ll only check for calls every six hours.’

  ‘Probably five, knowing us.’