Authors: Judith Cutler
‘The switchboard would filter them.’
‘But you’ve had no one breathing heavily down the line and then cutting the call?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Fran managed not to swear. ‘Let’s make sure. Ask the switchboard not to put calls through directly to you. The caller can leave their details and you’ll call back.’
‘It’s not how it works.’
‘All right – so long as you promise me that if you do get an anonymous call you’ll tell me and I’ll think of some security excuse so everyone’s calls are filtered. Your mobile provider can do the same if you ask them. Trust me, Dilly, if we can get to the bottom of this we will.’
‘I do trust you. As soon as I saw you at the press conference I knew I could trust you.’
A tiny but insistent alarm bell rang. ‘You realise that I won’t be dealing personally with the case, don’t you? I’m just an administrator these days. I’m sorry.’ She broke off, ready to snarl at the idiot walking in with no more than a perfunctory knock. But the idiot was the Chief Constable.
‘I might have known he would have got in on the act,’ Fran laughed, as she backed neatly into Mark’s drive. ‘He can’t resist a luvvie, can he? He was all over the poor woman like a rash.’
He retrieved his coat and case. ‘We’ll suspend our ban on talking shop, just for tonight, won’t we? Just so that you can fill me in?’
‘Just this once. Go and run us a bath. I’ll bring up some wine and I’ll tell you all about it.’
‘So he wants you to drop everything and investigate this sad woman’s only bit of excitement?’ Mark sat up in disbelief.
She blew some foam at him.
‘Not everything. And not immediately. Not until we’ve got in place a proper acting DCS. He’s already told Cosmo that the interviews must be this week, which won’t please the Superintendents’ Association.’
‘It’s certainly very short notice. And he’d want whoever it is in post when?’
‘Middle of next week.’
‘Bloody hell. What’s this bird got over him?’
‘You saw her on Friday. An air of vulnerability. She’s brought out his protective instincts. And she is very pretty.’
‘Much too bland for my tastes,’ he assured her, blowing foam back. ‘I like a woman with some spirit! Hey! No! I surrender…’
Come back, come back, to our screens, so I may look on you again. I want to see your beautiful feet, your knees, your thighs.
‘London postmarks,’ Fran said, flipping a week’s worth of still sealed envelopes addressed to Dilly on to the desk of Mike Dalton, her tame forensic scientist. ‘That’s a big help, isn’t it? You might as well have these too, just in case.’
He eyed the sheaf, but donned gloves and picked up that morning’s delivery, which had been intercepted by the Royal Mail and diverted to Maidstone, as Fran had requested anything addressed to Dilly at work should be. Until an anonymous note arrived at Dilly’s home address, she’d reluctantly acceded to Dilly’s pleas that her ordinary mail should continue as usual.
Mike popped it into an evidence bag. ‘Quite a lot of people in London. Commuters. Not just Kent. Sussex is in TVInvicta’s catchment area too. And you said this woman went national?
Northerners come to London too.’ Mike dropped the fact as if it were a leaden weight.
‘And so do Brummies. And that’s our only, very tiny, lead so far.’
‘Come on, Fran, what am I supposed to be looking for? It’s a big place!’
‘What do they make in the Midlands these days? Not cars any more.’
‘Chocolate. They still make chocolate. Yes, someone working for Cadbury’s would be nice and obvious.’
‘Wouldn’t it just? Just give it your bog standard going over, Mike – bearing in mind it was the Chief himself who dropped this on to me.’
‘I thought you were retiring? Funny, you spend forty years longing to do all the things you didn’t have time to do when you were crawling up the promotion ladder and when you know you’re going to have hours and hours to do just what you want it’s dead scary and you can’t think of anything you really want to do. They’re so short of experienced forensic scientists…’
‘I thought the universities were snowed under by applicants!’
‘You missed an essential adjective, Fran. Experienced. They want me to carry on working part-time. On the face of it that sounds brilliant. But I don’t know I could do the job if I didn’t put my heart and soul into it.’ He touched the evidence bag. ‘OK, then. If I can’t get anything from this, do you want me to pass it on to Guy the Graphologist, let
him see if he can find any word patterns?’
‘That’ll come expensive. Just hunt for chocolate. Yes, and anything else the Black Country makes these days,’ she joked.
He lifted a minatory finger. ‘For a start, Cadbury’s is in Birmingham, not the Black Country. For seconds, half the Black Country industrial output has disappeared. Have you looked at the figures for our manufacturing base?’
Fran couldn’t say she had, but knowing Mike they were serious. He had the sort of flesh free face that would have made him the perfect extra in a Dickens TV adaptation and had once famously said he didn’t do joy. But he brought to his job an imagination that some of his colleagues declared was unscientific – his response being that all the great scientists had made leaps of the imagination that ordinary mortals couldn’t even guess at.
He’d picked up and was reading a random page from Fran’s sheaf. ‘Quite poetic, isn’t he? Biblical even. Are any of the others?’
Biblical! But, not wanting to give him any pointers that might be quite spurious, she said flatly, ‘Not as far as I know. What she hadn’t opened I left sealed. I thought my loss might be your gain.’
‘Well, at last I’ve got you trained,’ he observed with what in anyone else might have been a smile.
Strolling back to her office – these days she consciously tried to resist the fashion of clutching a file and striding, grim-faced, as if late for an
appointment with her doom – Fran popped her head into the Incident Room, its walls now papered with notices, photos, diagrams and maps. With the arrival of the new acting Chief Superintendent, Jill had been moved, not altogether tactfully, as Fran had already told Cosmo, to a goldfish bowl at the far end of the room, leaving Henson’s office to Joe Farmer. The newcomer was a youthful forty-minus and shy-looking but no doubt fearsomely competent. Another white male middle-class face, of course: she kicked herself for having been so slipshod in helping select the short list. Positive discrimination wasn’t an option, but keeping an eye open and encouraging certainly was. At the interviews Fran had really wanted a Sikh – minus a turban, it had to be said – but the majority supported Farmer, and she had to acquiesce. His CV glowed in the dark; she just hoped his spiral up through the ranks hadn’t been at the expense of getting proper experience.
She flapped a casual hand; with a fleeting, possibly respectful smile, he responded in kind. Jill, on the other hand, did a fair imitation of a rabbit caught in her headlights. At last she overcame her paralysis to lurch from behind her desk, bumping her thigh hard on the corner as she did so.
Fran winced for her. The two women laughed, and Fran settled on a singularly uncomfortable visitor’s chair, Jill retreating to her own side of the desk.
‘I want to pick your brain,’ Fran said. ‘Girls’ talk
sort of thing.’ She didn’t particularly want to discuss the Dilly Pound case with anyone, but hoped it would get Jill to open up a little. ‘The Chief’s got a pet stalking case.’
‘That’s not a job for you, Fran, and so you should have told him!’
‘Funnily enough, it probably is, you know – at the moment it’s manageable enough for one person and goodness knows you’ve got enough with all these assaults to keep twice as many people busy. How are things going, by the way?’
Jill gave an embarrassed smile. ‘I took your advice. I’ve got a team of bright young things who might talk the lingo dealing with the
happy-slappers
, and the rest of us are doing everything we can to trace the sex offender. Whoever it is – they are! – there’s no record on the sex offenders’ register. And as you know, there’s no DNA match. The bugger’s now heavily into sexual assaults. I’m afraid any day now we’ll have our first rape. Quite,’ she acknowledged Fran’s grim expression. ‘He’s like the damned Scarlet Pimpernel. We seek him here, we seek him there – we seek him bloody everywhere.’
‘Still no decent description to go on?’
‘Half the girls were so traumatised they didn’t – maybe couldn’t – recall any details. The others just said he was “ordinary” – and no two e-fits match! Some said he wore specs. Others were equally convinced that he didn’t. So we’re checking couriers, taxi-drivers, train drivers: if it’s
male and it moves we’re on to it.’
‘And you’re managing it all without frightening the horses. Well done. CCTV installers?’ she added, as she stood up. She could have sworn she’d suggested them before, but – no, she couldn’t swear to it. Just to thinking about it? Senior moments…
‘Shit! I knew there was something… I wrote it down and put the note somewhere. I’ll get on to it.’ As Jill looked frantically for another piece of paper, the phone rang. She took the call, but promised to phone back. As she replaced the handset she said, ‘Guv? You wanted to talk to me about Pound?’
‘So I did!’ At least wrinkling her nose in irritation hardly hurt any more. ‘She really doesn’t want to give me the name of the only suspect. He’s a family man, very respectable.’
‘Just the sort of man you’d expect to be stalking,’ Jill said cheerfully but not entirely accurately. ‘Did they have a red hot affair or something?’
‘Pretty lukewarm from what I can gather. Which is what worries me. It’s too pat. But I’d like to eliminate him from the enquiry.’
‘Not like you to use cop-talk, guv.’
‘No, indeed. I think my subconscious has just given me my answer, don’t you? Thanks for the natter, Jill. It really cleared my brain. Look, don’t beat yourself up over these cases. If you need more resources, more personnel, you know I’ll always… be your advocate,’ she finished tamely. With the advent of Joe Farmer, she’d relinquished control of
the purse strings. They exchanged rueful grins of acknowledgement. ‘And my door’s always open too, remember. Any time I need to make a decision, please drop in!’
‘You don’t suppose I’m going to march up the vicarage path and demand to speak to Steve in front of his wife and kids, do you? Or stand up while he’s giving Communion and denounce him as a sinner? For goodness’ sake, Dilly, do you think I came down in the last shower?’ Fran kept her voice low: she wanted them to seem like just another couple of women drinking coffee in a popular Canterbury teashop. Aunt and niece, maybe.
Pound shook her head. She was letting her hair grow, and one strand was the perfect length for her to chew, like a troubled teenager. ‘He may not be there any more!’
‘You mean he may have another curacy? Or have been promoted?’
‘May have been. Though his wife—’
‘Yes?’
‘She worked full-time, as I recall.’ She blushed so deeply it must have hurt. ‘It would have been difficult for them to move unless she could get another job. A senior teacher. Earned about five times what he was getting. And, of course, she was never going to be there to help about the parish.’
Well no, not with a couple of kids to worry about on top of the hours teachers were supposed to work these days.
‘Would you remember their address? And the name of his church? Holy Trinity? Let me write it down. Right, now we’re getting somewhere.’
The younger woman’s jaw jutted. ‘I really do not want some plod kicking down his front door. I want to withdraw the charges.’
‘You haven’t made any yet. As for a plod, the investigator will be a woman in her fifties, one you trusted enough to ask to help you in the first place.’
Dilly looked up, eyes round. ‘You’ll do it yourself?’
‘Something as delicate as this we don’t send in police cadets with no GCSEs, Dilly. One thing you can do, however: tell me where I would find information on Church of England clergy. I want to make sure he’s still in the Black Country before I try my luck with the M25.’
‘Something called Crockford’s Directory. There should be one in the public library.’
Fran took a deep breath, regarding her steadily. ‘You’re telling me you’ve never been tempted to look him up? To see what he’s doing?’
Dilly’s voice was firm. ‘Tempted, Chief Superintendent? I’ve been tempted every moment of every day. But I’ve never, ever fallen.’
The interview with Dilly completed rather more quickly than Fran had dared to hope, she had time to kill before her next meeting with Joe Farmer. The obvious port of call was the city library. Externally it was a magnificent Victorian Gothic affair; inside
it was cramped and dingy. A shiny new one in the Whitefriars development should have replaced it. However, the Powers-that-Be had claimed they couldn’t afford to improve the lot of readers, so the historical premises remained. Whether Fran was pleased or otherwise she couldn’t say. If Birmingham’s Central Library was an example of what librarians thought their clients preferred, she was glad to stay old and cosy. At least she knew where everything was, even if there wasn’t much of it. The volume of Crockford’s was only a couple of years old. By that time the Reverend Stephen Hardy was no longer a curate. He was now priest in charge at St Philip’s, Moat Road, Warley. So he was still in the Black Country. And his address? Another road in Warley, she’d no idea how far from the church. A quick call to one of her Midlands colleagues would confirm he hadn’t moved to a new parish recently.
She dawdled back to the Castle Street car park past another batch of estate agents’ windows and collected more handfuls of particulars and thus over-ran the time on her ticket. But she was there before the parking attendant, and hightailed it out before she could be humbled.
Should she take to the lanes again? Why not? She could keep an eye peeled for estate agents’ signs. She might fancy a home in Pluckley, especially as there was a station on the outskirts, but Smarden never. The very name suggested a down-turned mouth. Boughton Malherbe, now – would that give humans hay fever or cows
bellyache? Further south was Cuckold’s Corner: it would take a man with a fine sense of humour to want to put that on application forms or letter headings. Boldshaves, on the other hand – would Mark like that? What about Hunger Hatch? One day maybe she’d take a course in local history and find the origin of some of these place names.
Meanwhile, she drove gently on, keeping parallel, she hoped, with the motorway. What would it be like to live in that gatehouse over there, guardian to what seemed to be some great estate? To her astonishment, a discreet for sale sign jostled the garden gate. She was certain she’d never seen the place during her Internet searches.
She pulled over – plenty of hard-standing opposite the front gate, but none within.
In the thin February sun, the place seemed perfection itself, pretty curtains flapping through the open diamond paned windows in the roof. Exactly what she and Mark had at the top of their wish list: an old cottage, on a road but not a main one, with no close neighbours to disturb them.
In a rosy mist of dreams, she stared on, repainting, replacing – who on earth had planted Leylandii quite so close? – and, wearing an apron because she’d been cooking Mark scones for his tea, standing on the front door step to welcome him home.
Someone was trying to get into the car!
Adrenaline a-pump, she nearly cried out. But the face at the driver’s door was canine, if no more
attractive for that. At last someone pulled the baying brute away.
She switched the ignition back on and opened the window.
‘Are you interested in the house?’ a woman at the far end of the dog’s lead shouted. She wore a folded headscarf, just like the queen. ‘Sit, Toby. Sit!’
‘Yes, I suppose I might be.’
‘Want to look round?’
‘But I don’t have an appointment.’
‘That doesn’t matter. You can come in now if you want.’ There was such desperation in the woman’s voice and face that Fran almost agreed.
Eyeing the dog, she got out slowly. She was greeted by a roar. Not the dog, or any other resentful pet. Traffic. The M20.
She was torn. They couldn’t possibly live with such a constant din. Clutching at straws, she turned to the woman. ‘Is there always so much noise?’