Burying the Past

Table of Contents

A Selection of Recent Titles by Judith Cutler

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Epilogue

DRAWING THE LINE

SILVER GUILT *

RING OF GUILT *

GUILTY PLEASURES *

GUILT TRIP *

THE FOOD DETECTIVE

THE CHINESE TAKEOUT

LIFE SENTENCE

COLD PURSUIT

STILL WATERS

BURYING THE PAST *

* available from Severn House

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

First published in Great Britain and the USA 2012 by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

This eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2012 by Judith Cutler.

The right of Judith Cutler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Cutler, Judith.

Burying the past.

1. Harman, Fran (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

2. Detective and mystery stories.

I. Title

823.9'2-dc23

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-320-4 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8209-7 (cased)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

For my dear husband Keith, who brought the sun into my
life and makes it shine brighter every day

H
olding Fran's hand, Mark presses back towards their new house. They're right up beyond the eaves, on the scaffolding platform installed by the roofers. Despite the guard rails – the builders are as safety conscious as one could wish – his legs want to fold till he's foetal. But he forces them straight. He focuses on the horizon and tells himself it's been worth the effort to get here. Maybe it has. Here he's monarch of all he surveys. Co-monarch with Fran, of course; she's returning the pressure on his hand, not, he's sure, with terror like his, but with love.

Caffy, one of the all-female firm, Pact Restoration (for ‘Paula And Caffy's Team', he thinks), is the other side, short, slight, but defying all efforts to think her small and vulnerable. She grins with triumph, as if it was worth giving up a Saturday-morning lie-in just to get him up here.

Forget the word ‘up'. And ‘lie-in' for Caffy – does she ever rest?

Held in the palm of the Kentish countryside, the rectory garden's like a relief map, with ghostly flower-beds at one end, what look like the foundations of an ornamental fountain, and then a kitchen garden. It will take years to complete their project, but in the short term a motor-mower backed up with a strimmer should work wonders. ‘What a wonderful place for our wedding reception,' he thinks.

He's said it out loud. There's a huge silence.

‘You're so good together I thought you'd been man and wife for years.' Caffy is an expert at filling silences.

‘With or without the benefit of the clergy, we'll be together for many more years,' Fran says, falsely jolly and pointedly ignoring what he said.

‘I can't back out.' His smile feels stiff. ‘Not now we've got a witness. Fran, are you OK with this?' It might be a decision about staffing. Where the hell is loving eloquence when he needs it?

She clutches his hand and nods. She's been ghost-pale; now she blushes, rosily, as if she's a coy girl, not, like him, well over fifty. It's hardly surprising, considering how often and how hard he's snubbed her marriage hints in the past. She's worn that sort-of-engagement ring for ages, just to silence any police colleagues who might have baulked, even in these liberal days, at any unofficial relationship. Would he have backed out even now but for Caffy's presence? No. Surely not.

Again Caffy fills the silence. ‘Me – a witness? At the wedding?' she says, with a worrying edge of joy to her disbelief.

He curses himself for using the word. All he meant was that he'd proposed in front of someone else. He ought to correct the mistake, but Caffy's still speaking.

‘No, you don't mean that. You'll want an old friend. Family.'

He makes a desperate grasp at common sense. ‘I guess we'll be married quietly at St Jude's in Canterbury. We know the vicar there. So we may not need witnesses in the register-office sense. But nothing would give me greater pleasure than for you to be my best woman.' All this formal conversation on a roof. He wonders if he's stepped into the world of Lewis Carroll.

The women envelope him in a triple hug. Fran is shaking, as if with cold. Whatever their thoughts, they all stare at the garden. Yes, he was right: it will make a grand setting for their wedding reception. He must just think about that.

He and Fran manage a wry sideways smile. She looks as if someone's just switched a light on inside her – but also as if she's afraid they're about to switch it off again.

Caffy speaks again. ‘Sorry to bring you down to earth, as it were. This new job of yours, Fran, that Simon Gates was talking about. It's looking at dead cases, right? Just how dead does the case have to be? Or rather, the body?'

How can she mention his name so casually? Simon, a protégé of Fran's and now Kent's Deputy Chief Constable, heaven help them all, has been stalking the girl, not to put too fine a point on it.

She's pointing at the far corner of the vegetable patch, where the weeds and grass grow with far more energy than anywhere else in the plot – anywhere in the garden for that matter. A strip, two or three feet by six or seven. A few canes, weathered grey, suggest it was a runner bean row.

Narrowing her eyes, Fran says, ‘It's meant to be cases we have on file but have never solved. I suppose it could be any sort of body. But I wouldn't want one on my own patch. Literally,' she adds with an amused glance at Caffy, who responds with the broadest of smiles, a lick of her index finger and a mark in the air.

‘The omens aren't good, are they? Nothing like a decaying body to raise the nitrogen levels so spectacularly.' He squeezes Fran's hand: together they can deal with whatever problems come with this new situation – both new situations.

Caffy says, ‘All may yet be well.'

Pretty much an autodidact, she's read more than the average professor of English, so no doubt she's quoting something he ought to have read years ago. But he doesn't know what. So he just says, ‘I'd say we need to get our colleagues and their clever thermal imaging equipment in here.'

Which means that somehow or other he has to get down again, doesn't it? If only he can make his legs work without thinking about the space below.

‘One rung at a time,' Caffy says.

At last on terra firma, Mark feels more assertive. ‘Now, Caffy, your plans for this evening – this “date” that Simon's talked you into. I really am not happy.'

‘Are you talking as a top cop or as the bloke I'm best womaning for?'

‘Both. I want you to stay at home with a box of chocs and your feet up and let Simon and his dinner go hang.'

Caffy looks straight at him. ‘In the circumstances, not a good choice of verb.' Her face softens. ‘To use that horrible cliché, I hear what you're saying. But I've given him my word, and that's it: although he may not always know a hawk from a handsaw, he's still a human being.'

‘And a good cop,' Fran admits, biting her lip. ‘But he's been stalking you. It's an offence.'

He nods, glad that Fran's called a spade a spade.

‘Yes. But I'm not going to press charges. I just want to spell it out to him that any romance is in his head. No more no less. OK? OK. Unless someone in a white coat gets him sectioned, dinner goes ahead.' Suddenly, she flips into something like hostess mode. ‘Now, would you like to see how the work inside's going? We've done our best to make some of it habitable for you even if it's not much more than a glorified bedsit.'

‘So long as we can just camp there – we've got to move out of the cottage on Thursday, whatever happens.'

Caffy shakes her head doubtfully. ‘We still need Sparky Smith to come along and do all the wiring . . . It'll be a damned close run thing,' she concludes.

D
etective Chief Superintendent Harman needn't have been supervising the operation at all – indeed, she was virtually paid to stay away from such interesting events. These days her life revolved around endless acrimonious meetings as she desperately defended the tattered Kent CID budget. This was the only reason, she told herself, not necessarily truthfully, for not retiring tomorrow – after all, she was doing her pension no good at all by staying on beyond her thirty years' service.

In fact, she really shouldn't have been here, enjoying the fresh air, fascinated by the clinical approach of the team in front of her. She'd already officially declared an interest in the rectory crime scene and could take no part in any of the decisions regarding the investigations. Possibly. Certainly not officially. Just the odd word of advice, perhaps. As she'd told Caffy, now at work with the rest of the Pact team on the lovely old house behind her, she hadn't officially started her new role reviewing cold cases, so given a possible corpse, she might as well continue her old role running CID and, in Caffy's words, generally solving murders. Not that Caffy was half as naive as she claimed to be, not with all that reading under her belt. A former drugs user, she had once been trapped in a relationship with her pimp, which only his violent death at someone else's hands had ended. And now she had another death to deal with – that of Deputy Chief Constable Simon Gates.