Upstairs, the shower was roaring. Presumably Marc was trying to sluice away the troubles of the day. He’d already tried one solution; a bottle of Glenfiddich stood on the breakfast bar alongside an empty glass. While munching the toastie, she channel-hopped with the TV remote. True to form, when she fancied half an hour’s escape, the screen was filled with soap opera actors shouting at each other, demanding “Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?” The alternatives included a documentary about AIDS in Africa and a close-up of a bowel operation in a hospital drama renowned for its gritty realism. She’d moved into the kitchen to wait for the espresso machine to finish gurgling, when she heard heavy footsteps bumping down the stairs.
‘Fancy a drink?’ she called. Perhaps his mood had nearly run its course. If not, she could always retreat into the bathroom herself and relax with a long soak in the tub while the aromatherapy candles gave the steamy atmosphere a tang of rosemary and juniper.
‘I’ll have a whisky. Neat.’
He was framed in the doorway and as she turned to face him, it struck her yet again what an attractive man she shared her life with. At least she hadn’t become indifferent to him, at least he still had the ability to turn her on. His features were smooth and regular, his gaze clear and penetrating, and she knew that if he touched her in a certain way, she would melt: not a matter of choice, not a decision to be made, he could still do it for her.
She gave him a conciliatory grin. ‘Bad as that, huh?’
He replied with a grunt and wandered off to the living room. When she followed with a well-filled tumbler and the bottle of Glenfiddich, he was watching the TV without the sound. The documentary had finished and been replaced by a football match. Two European teams she’d never heard of. She switched off the set and put on the CD player. Erik Satie; not her sort of music, too ethereal, but Marc was a fan. He gulped the whisky down without uttering a word. The coffee was still too hot, so she went to sit cross-legged on the rug, right at his feet. She caught the whiff of alcohol on his breath as he poured himself another generous measure.
She pushed the glass to one side with a firm shake of the head. ‘If you drink much more of that tonight, you’ll be no good to me later on.’
He still didn’t say anything as she eased off his socks and began to stroke his soles. Foot massage was something he liked, something that often formed a prelude to making up after an argument or a period when they’d been too busy to spare enough time for each other. Suddenly she realised how much she wanted this to end in their making love, to magic away the troubles of the world.
‘Want to tell me all about it?’ There was no hard skin anywhere on his feet, no callouses, no corns; he just didn’t have physical blemishes, this man. Already she was getting into a rhythm, moving her hands up and down, up and down.
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ he said hoarsely.
She could feel the tension in his body. He hadn’t closed his eyes yet in surrender to her caress, let alone made a move to unfasten her blouse or jeans.
‘Come on, talk to me,’ she whispered.
‘It won’t help.’
‘Hey, relax.’ She ran her nails lightly over the surface of his feet ‘You’re not the only one who’s had a difficult day.’
It was true enough. They were no nearer to finding their anonymous caller. Bob Swindell had reported that Dale Moffat in particular had been hostile and unco-operative when questioned, but Linz didn’t recognise the voice of either of the sisters. The likeliest candidate remained Jean Allardyce and she’d gone AWOL. Tomorrow they’d have to try again. How much did Marc care about that, or about anything other than his own preoccupations? Increasingly of late, a sceptical voice kept quizzing her: just how tough can it be, running a bookshop, for God’s sake? Opening and shutting pretty much as you please, answerable to no one but yourself?
‘Is that so?’ He lifted his legs, pulling out of her grasp. ‘Sorry, it keeps slipping my mind how much more arduous your job is than mine.’
‘I never said that.’
‘You were thinking it, though.’ With a defiant glare, he picked up the tumbler and took a mouthful of whisky. ‘Don’t deny it, Hannah. I know you too well.’
Her cheeks started burning and that made her angry, with herself and with him. She hauled herself up and said, ‘For God’s sake, what’s got into you tonight?’
His eyes were glistening. For a few seconds she was afraid she’d gone too far and that he would dissolve into tears. ‘All right. If you really want to know, it’s to do with this inquiry your people are running. Leigh called me earlier. She and Dale have each been given the third degree by a pair of your DCs.’
She was baffled. ‘Is that all?’
‘It’s enough.’
‘Leigh’s getting it out of proportion. The team was only conducting routine follow-up interviews.’
He tossed back the remainder of the whisky. ‘Is this simply because Daniel Kind has turned up on the scene? Because his father never accepted Barrie’s guilt, you want to keep the son happy by going through the motions, is that it?’
‘This has nothing to do with Daniel Kind.’
‘You’ve not spoken to him?’
When she hesitated before replying, she saw a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes. ‘He and I have talked, yes. What about it?’
‘There’s no need for your sidekicks to go around upsetting people all these years later.’
He poured himself another finger of Glenfiddich. In some bizarre way, he seemed to regard himself as having scrambled on to the moral high ground. With no bloody justification at all. The sheer unfairness of it made her skin prickle.
‘What’s the problem?’ Her voice was rising; she couldn’t help herself. ‘I don’t get it. For God’s sake, Dale and Leigh aren’t kids who need to be seen in the presence of an appropriate adult. They’re mature women, they can cope with a few questions.’
‘Leigh told me they pretty much reduced Dale to tears. Don’t they realise she’s a lone parent? That she’s…vulnerable?’
‘Vulnerable? Don’t make me laugh, she’s about as vulnerable as Cruella de Ville.’ Hannah softened her tone as she added, ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten that you and she used to see each other. Fair enough if you still want to look out for her. But there’s nothing to fret over. Bob and Linz were only doing their job. No one’s accusing her of murdering Gabrielle Anders.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ he snapped. ‘Routine investigations are all in a day’s work for you, but the sisters aren’t used to being interrogated. Made to feel as though they are being secretive, holding stuff back, obstructing the police in the course of their inquiries.’
‘Dale and Leigh were both working at The Moon under Water at the time. It was possible that either of them might have been our anonymous caller.’
‘Ludicrous.’
‘Or they may have seen something, without even realising its significance. We have to cover all the bases.’
He took another drink of whisky. ‘This is so typical. You people do anything you want.’
‘You people?’ She reached out and seized his wrist. ‘Hey, this is me. Your partner, remember? I’m not you people.’
He drained his glass and poured again. ‘It’s true, though, isn’t it? Police work is all about trampling over lives, regardless of the consequences.’
Without a word, she took the tumbler out of his hand and put it down on the rug. ‘Marc, I can’t believe you’re saying this. It’s so over the top. Look, we’re both tired, you’ve obviously had plenty to drink already. It’s not even dark yet, but never mind. Why don’t we have an early night for once?’
‘You always have to have the last word, don’t you?’ he said bitterly. ‘I will go up, but maybe I’ll spend the night in the spare room. You can get on with your work as late as you like without any disturbance.’
His words were like needles entering her flesh. ‘Why are you doing this?’
He gave a
curt nod in the direction of her briefcase and laptop. ‘You’ll have brought work home, presumably? As always. You’re forever saying you need to catch up with the paperwork. Well, here’s your chance.’
‘I don’t need to…’
He sprang to his feet, although the decisive effect was compromised by a slight stumble which caused him to knock over the glass of whisky. As Hannah let her voice trail away, she watched an amber stain spreading out over the rug. Reaching out for the music system remote, she brought an abrupt end to Trois Gymnopedies.
He stopped at the door, seemed to waver for a moment. ‘Goodnight, then.’
She didn’t answer. Tonight there wasn’t anything more for them to say to each other.
She’d never asked Marc directly about his love life in the years before they got together. It wasn’t that she was incurious; far from it. But there were some questions – a lot of questions, actually – that it was better not to ask. You never knew how easy it would be to live with the answers.
Unlike her previous boyfriends, he seldom talked about himself. Except at their most intimate moments, when he gave himself to her without reservation, there remained something unknowable about him, something other-worldly and remote. In those heart-stopping weeks after she’d first slept with him, she’d vowed that she would suppress her natural inquisitiveness and concentrate on the here and now. All that mattered was that she never lost him.
Of course, she couldn’t resist playing the detective game. As time passed, she became assiduous in picking up crumbs that he dropped. Marc was no monk in his earlier days, that was for sure. He’d lost his virginity to an older woman whom he’d met while working in a hotel during his gap year. Maybe from her he’d learned the patience and technique that made him as different from her previous lovers as Mozart from Meatloaf. He’d taken lovers at university, but out of term time he kept going back to a Brackdale girl he’d first courted as a diffident, acned schoolboy. Dale Moffat.
Hannah sat in the living room, rifling her memory for the bits and pieces of information he’d let slip about Dale. After consigning the Erik Satie CD to the bottom of a box of their least-played music, she’d put on Diana Krall and gone in search of comfort food. In a corner of a kitchen cupboard she’d discovered a forgotten box of Belgian chocolates. The legend boasted that the contents represented an exquisite combination of refined taste and time-honoured tradition: how could she resist? She’d worry about her weight in the morning. In the absence of sex, chocolate wasn’t such a bad substitute.
As for sex, every community had at least one Dale. Pretty, vivacious, narcissistic; smart enough not to cheapen herself by spreading her favours too thickly but not quite smart enough to do a Tash Dumelow and hit the jackpot. When Marc was sixteen, she’d dumped him for the star centre forward of the school football team. By the time he came back as a student on his first vacation, the acne was long gone and the soccer player wasn’t scoring any more. Hannah gathered that Marc and Dale liked each other’s company and liked going to bed together even more, but it was never a grand passion. Long before Marc took his degree, Dale caught the eye of a married man and, in time-honoured tradition, finished up pregnant. She’d kept the baby but not the boyfriend.
When the child was a little older, she and Marc had resumed their affair on a sporadic basis. As far as Hannah could figure out, it was a fallback position in more senses than one. If Marc was ever without a girlfriend for the night and Dale wasn’t otherwise engaged, they usually finished up in bed together. In the unlikely event that matrimony had ever been on the cards, Hannah had no doubt that the presence of Dale’s boy Oliver was enough to deter Marc. For a lifelong commitment-phobe, taking on a stepson in addition to a wife was too much to ask. Perhaps that was why he insisted on surrounding himself with books. The dusty tomes never threw up or got toothache, they never made demands.
‘She does know about you and Dale?’ she’d asked when Marc said that he’d invited Leigh Moffat to run the café at Amos Books.
‘Of course, those two don’t have secrets.’ The question seemed to amaze him. ‘But it’s not an issue.’
She’d thought about joking that it would be different if the boot was on the other foot, and she was proposing to set up with the brother of an ex, but she let it go. It would never occur to him that she might suffer a pang of jealousy. In a way, she felt flattered that he regarded himself as incapable of betraying her. Only in the darkest moments of self-doubt did she wonder if she was fooling herself. Or if he was fooling himself.
Leigh was less blatantly alluring than her sister, but to Hannah’s mind more attractive. Like Dale, she’d never married; Hannah didn’t have a clue why not. There had been relationships with men, Hannah gathered, but nothing that lasted, and she seemed content to spend a lot of time with Dale and Oliver, upon whom she doted. Apparently she’d been on her own for years, making a modest career in catering while Dale drifted from job to job. Both were intelligent women, but neither seemed to possess any burning ambition. Hannah couldn’t relate to such a lack of drive. To her, it was an article of faith: any woman with talent owes it to herself, and to her gender, to make the most of her potential. From childhood, she’d been determined to make her own way and never to be beholden to a man.
Leigh wasn’t the type to worry without good cause. Whenever Hannah met her, she radiated a calm assurance that verged on the intimidating. Impossible to imagine that in her entire life, she’d ever allowed a soufflé to sink or stepped outside her front door without the benefit of a discreet touch of blusher and eye-shadow. If neither she nor Dale was the anonymous caller, why so much angst over what they remembered of the day when Gabrielle Anders had been murdered?
Unless, Hannah supposed, they remembered something about Marc that they didn’t want anyone to know.
The choice was simple. She could imitate Marc and take refuge in booze to stop worrying herself sick. Or she could do something. No contest. She found herself reaching into her case for the personal organiser, and then for the phone.
She was halfway through dialling Daniel Kind’s mobile number when she asked herself what she was doing. Already it was mid-evening; soon it would be dark. He would be busy with his work or doing whatever he did in the company of his partner, the journalist. They weren’t even friends. It was – well, Lauren Self’s phrase would be quite inappropriate. What would he think if she called him out of the blue, without an excuse?
As his phone rang, she cut off the call. Perhaps he was out. Besides, she wasn’t sure what to say if he answered. The impulse to dial his number was inexplicable: why not Nick, or even Les Bryant? It wasn’t as if she fancied him. That morning, she’d taken care not to look straight into his dark eyes, so reminiscent of his father’s. The trouble was, all he had to do was to check who had called in order to discover that she’d called for a couple of seconds, only to think better of it. Embarrassing.
Given the option, it’s always better to do something than nothing.
How many times had she heard Ben Kind say that? As a piece of philosophy, even he’d admitted its limitations, but right now it was apposite. What did she have to lose?
She dialled the mobile number again.
Chapter Seventeen
‘This is Hannah Scarlett.’ A long pause. ‘Have I called at a bad time?’
‘No, no,’ Daniel said hastily. ‘It’s fine, absolutely fine.’
‘I felt guilty about rushing off this morning, after I’d dragged you over to Kendal.’
‘No need.’
‘I really didn’t give you much of an insight into Ben as I knew him. I’m sorry if you thought it was a wasted journey.’
‘Of course not.’ He didn’t want her to hang up without agreeing to talk to him again. ‘If sometime you could spare…’
‘Tell you what. I’m not far away at the moment. Are you busy this evening?’
‘No.’ He groaned inwardly: why keep saying no? ‘I’m just taking a walk in Tarn Fold, that’s all.’
‘Do you know The Slow and Easy?’
‘On the road into Whitmell?’
‘That’s it. If you’d like to drive over, I can meet you in the lounge bar for a chat. Not for more than half an hour, mind. I mustn’t get back home too late.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sorry,’ she said abruptly. ‘You’re breaking up. I’ll see you there in twenty minutes.’
The Slow and Easy was an old coaching inn by the side of the road connecting Brackdale with the neighbouring valley. A blackboard outside bore the legend: I wandered lonely as a cloud and then I thought – sod it, I fancy a pint. The lounge boasted slate tiles and an inglenook with a smoky fire and there wasn’t a jukebox or pinball machine in sight. According to a magnificently bearded old man leaning on the bar, the carved oak bar had been made from a four-poster bed. Hannah wanted a tonic water and he opted for half a pint of Jennings’ Sneck Lifter as a treat to celebrate her unexpected call. On the way here he’d speculated what lay behind it. He wasn’t naïve enough to believe that a senior police officer would indulge in spur of the moment socialising with someone she’d only met once. Presumably her sudden enthusiasm for an early second meeting was linked to the interviews that Leigh Moffat had complained about. He was glad to see her, whatever the ulterior motive.
‘It was good of you to phone,’ he said, handing her the glass. ‘So – you were working late?’
‘I’m off duty now,’ she said carefully. ‘As you may have deduced from the change of outfit.’
In sweatshirt and jeans, she looked even slimmer than when they’d met in the morning. Smaller, too. Almost fragile. He pulled his eyes away from her and took a draught of beer.
‘Since we spoke this morning, I’ve heard I’m not the only one making waves. Your detectives have been quizzing Leigh Moffat and her sister.’
The Coffin Trail Page 21
