Burying the Past (11 page)

‘Sorry, Cynd. I just can't stop myself interrupting. Why not just tell me what happened and I'll try to keep my mouth buttoned.' With her left thumb and forefinger, she literally pinched her lips together, hoping the bit of silliness would undo some of the harm her earlier tone had done. Meanwhile, time was ticking on, and she was supposed to be at the rectory.

Cynd stared at Janie, as if asking what the hell she'd done to agree to talk to the daft old bat again.

‘That's fine. Just tell her what happened,' Janie said.

Fran's phone rang. Her instinct was to kill it – but she checked. Fatal to her interview – her
talk
– with Cynd. Possibly. Possibly not? It was just what Cynd would have done herself.

It was Mr Pargetter. ‘Don't like the thought of taking the van down that lane of yours,' he declared.

But he'd never been meant to! ‘Go straight to the self-store,' she said. ‘I'll phone ahead to tell them to let you in.'

‘Doesn't work like that, Mrs Harman, does it? You have to be there to unlock your units. You've got the keys to the padlocks.'

‘So I have.' She'd put them on a chain round her neck so she wouldn't put them down somewhere and lose them in the chaos. ‘Have you and your lads had lunch yet?'

‘We don't do lunch, Mrs Harman. We work straight through. And we finish when we've done the job. Which we can't till we've unloaded at the self-store. Where we'll be in – say – twenty minutes.' He cut the call.

Meanwhile, Cynd was bickering with Janie. And she'd managed to brush her hand against a nettle.

Her phone rang again. ‘Mark! Thank God you've called. Any chance you could meet the removal men at the self-store? I'm in Grafty Green.' Fingers crossed he wouldn't waste time by asking why.

‘Not unless I can take my son there too,' he said flatly. ‘And you're the one with the keys.'

‘So I am. Son? Oh, shit! I did try to phone you. Love you!' She cut the call and scrambled to her feet. ‘I'm sorry. I've got to be in Maidstone. Now.' She wouldn't make it in twenty minutes, but maybe thirty.

‘Wouldn't mind a lift,' Cynd said. ‘See my cousin.'

Perhaps Janie had been praying on her behalf for just such a suggestion, so that Cynd could speak in private; a driver's eyes fixed to the road sometimes made it seem like a confessional for the passenger.

‘We have to run,' Fran said doubtfully, eyeing Cynd's flip-flops. To her chagrin, she was easily outpaced. On the other hand, she was finding Mr Pargetter's number and calling him as she ran. But she also felt she saw the appearance of writing on the nearest wall. Approaching old age, it said, in shaky letters . . . With an extra turn of speed, she told herself she'd erased it.

‘You just have to go on the game,' Cynd said. ‘Either that or burgle or thieve. I mean, you've no idea how much it costs.'

Fran had a very good idea of the street value of most illegal substances, but took advantage of an awkward bend to do no more than grunt a prompt.

‘And we look out for each other, mostly. Word goes round – watch this one, don't go with that one. But this was a new punter. Came to my place, didn't he, without a by-your-leave. I thought he was a burglar. Maybe he was. What he thought he'd get in my place, God knows. I thought I heard voices outside, like he'd come with his mates. Anyway, he rapes me, like I said. And then he gets up, calm as you like, and gets his hands on my gear. So I told him to piss off out of it. And then he said he'd have another fuck, and to shut up and lie down, and I saw red. Really red. And I saw a knife in me sink and let him have it. And that's the truth.'

Except it might not be. It sounded too pat, too rehearsed. For a grim moment Fran suspected Janie might have edited it.

‘Have you told Jill yet? Because she's still looking for someone who doesn't quite exist. And now she could start checking the CCTV footage for someone who does. What does he look like? Black, white, Asian?'

She could feel Cynd tense beside her. She'd gone too far, hadn't she? So she rewound a bit.

‘How hard did you stick him, Cynd? Really hard? Because when I saw you the first time, you really wanted to tell us you'd killed him.'

‘I must have done. I mean, it was a bloody sharp knife, and for all I'm thin, I'm strong. And he was white, miss. But he had a funny accent and smelt weird. Real yuck, his breath.'

Anyone could be strong in that situation, propelled by fear or in self-defence. Possibly Marion Lovage had been, with a wheelbarrow to assist her. But ribs – and a precise placing of the knife . . . She had a strong feeling that Cynd and the guy who was supposed to have raped her were not the only ones in the flat. Thank God for DNA and the clever things Scene of Crime officers could do with chemicals and light and photography. Maybe one day she'd send herself on a course to find out what was going on, instead of funding everyone else. No, it was too late now. In the meantime, she really did not want Cynd to know about her storage solution – quite illogical, but she'd always done her best to ensure her colleagues' privacy and didn't see why she shouldn't have the same rights.

‘Whereabouts in Maidstone do you want me to drop you?'

‘Like, anywhere.' It seemed she wanted privacy too, for herself and possibly for her dealer. She lapsed into silence and didn't seem inclined to go over her narrative again.

So all she'd got out of this, Fran reflected sourly, was a nasty hurried lunch, an itchy wrist, zero information and a horrible conviction that she'd compromised her rule never to be caught on CCTV with a suspect or a victim. Funnily enough, Cynd seemed to have the same opinion of the cameras and slouched down in the seat, her face sunk deep on to her chest and mostly obscured by her hands, well covered by the sleeves of her top. Neither managed a smile at the invisible eyes.

Relieved that the drive was over, Fran pulled into a convenient bus lay-by and, once Cynd had sloped off, called Jill with the latest information.

I
n the event, it didn't seem too silly an idea to take Dave along with him to the self-store. It got them both away from Headquarters and the far from remote possibility that there would be yet another three-line whip meeting, just as tedious and pointless as the last. As for him and Dave, they could scarcely do more than chat lightly about Dave's wife and children, after all, while Mark was driving. And he had, of course, been somewhat duplicitous to imply to Fran that she was the only one with keys to their units: he'd made sure he'd kept the duplicates. In his head he turned over the two words,
duplicitous
and
duplicates.
The syllables gave him the sort of pleasure he imagined young Caffy must get from the words she insisted she was still discovering. What would the tightly respectable Dave make of her? He hoped the experience would be beneficial: if anyone could penetrate the shiny carapace of his first born, Caffy could.

Dave had been notably tactful about recounting his meeting with Fran, but the very set of his lips suggested that something had offended him. Or perhaps that was the way his face fell these days – it had something of Sammie's smug defiance about it. If only he could ask him about Sammie, but he didn't trust himself to be tactful.

He found Fran surrounded by cardboard boxes – literally surrounded, as if they'd closed like a brown tide around her. Pargetter and his crew were ferrying the furniture into the first of the storage modules they'd hired; the second was to accommodate the cardboard boxes, all of which were supposed to have the contents written on the top and on all four sides so it should be possible to extract the right one with the minimum of fuss, before they were stacked in a giant Rubik's cube. Their system seemed to have gone wrong, however – it was quite clear that Fran was searching quite frantically for something.

‘It isn't in the car, is it?' he called, by way of greeting.

She slung him her keys. ‘Check. I could have slung the Crown Jewels in there and never noticed.' She paused long enough to give Dave a brilliant smile. ‘Hi again – I still can't offer you a seat, I'm afraid.' She pointed at Pargetter, carrying two kitchen chairs, stacked seat to seat. ‘You're looking for a box marked KITCHEN.' Her voice cracked ominously.

He dug in the car; nothing doing. But he knew his Fran, and he emerged to shout, ‘What about the carrier bag with the kettle? Would that do?'

‘Uh, uh. And we need the bathroom box too – loo rolls and towels. And the scales,' she added mock-threateningly.

He'd have given anything for Dave to shrug off his jacket, roll up his sleeves and start rooting alongside Fran. Anything. But he stood coolly aside, watching them as if they were ideal jet-lag entertainment.

Bent over a row of boxes, he asked, over his shoulder, as if it made it a casual, not a significant, question, ‘Where are you staying, Dave? With Sammie?'

‘The Hilton.'

He hoped Fran had picked up the flatness of the three syllables. She was good on nuances.

‘I wish we could offer you a bed,' he said truthfully. ‘But we're staying in someone's motor-caravan. And our new house is – well, both a building site and a crime scene. Take your pick. Neither conducive to comfort.' He was talking too much – he could tell from Fran's quick glance. ‘But we'd love to shout you dinner – at your hotel if you like.' Except he felt as if he'd moved mountains, and Fran looked as if she had.

‘Perhaps that would be better than the Three Tuns,' Fran said. Why the Three Tuns? He was horrified at how slowly he realized she must have suggested supper earlier. ‘We could meet you there,' Fran continued. ‘We really need half an hour to settle ourselves in – hang up clothes and so on.'

Dave tossed his head back as if he might have taken offence.

‘We've been up since before five, Dave,' he said soothingly, ‘and I'm sure you could do with a nap after your flight.'

‘We have to pick up my car, remember – it's still in your car park.'

Shit. So it was. And if he knew Fran she'd have wanted their arrival at the rectory, even if it was to camp in a motor-caravan, to be something special. Whether he could carry her over the threshold . . . but he'd try, and she'd pretend. It would be important to her. Funnily enough, he didn't want a third party around, either – and somehow he could trust Paula and Caffy to be tactfully out of sight.

He inched over to Fran. ‘I'll sort out Dave's car and see you back here. OK? Then we can go in convoy.' It was only a peck on the lips, but it would have to do.

For some reason – was there a connection? – Dave seemed to have decided to grasp a couple of nettles, though Mark wasn't at all sure that an edgy drive in Maidstone's early rush hour was the moment to voice intimate and controversial matters. He knew he differed from Fran, who said she liked the impersonality of non-eye contact conversations. She seemed to pick up tonal nuances; as he got older, he relied far more on visual ones. Maybe Fran was right, and he should get his hearing checked. The ear drops she'd been assiduously applying each bed time – Caffy would have remembered, as he always did, the dumb show in
Hamlet
– hadn't been noticeably successful.

‘So now you're planning to marry this woman?'

‘Fran and I have always intended to marry,' he said, fairly sure that this was the line Fran would already have taken. ‘It was just a matter of when and where.'

‘So what's this Chief of Police got to do with it?'

‘Old Adam? Nothing. A joke between the three of us. The catalyst, if you want one, was a sudden realization of mortality as I stood at the top of our scaffolding.' It wasn't wholly true, but he thought the more prosaic truth might not work. ‘Fran's always been a good friend: come on, surely you remember the times she babysat you. No? You always were a sound sleeper, Dave. And when your mother was ill, she took a huge amount of work off my shoulders so I could spend time with her. Precious time.'

‘In other words, the woman always had her eye on you.'

Mark almost ran into the car in front. He took a deep breath. ‘Don't make her out to be some predatory female, Dave. I've an idea my suggestion we have a date took her totally by surprise. Since then . . . Look, after your mother, I couldn't have imagined anyone I'd want to share my life with. Now I can't imagine spending it without Fran.' Did he sound angry? Why not? He felt it. He'd almost have preferred a nudge-nudge, wink-wink approach from his son, though he wouldn't have liked that either.

The quality of the silence told him to say nothing more yet, but to wait for the reaction.

‘She's a gold-digger.'

‘On the contrary, she's brought more in cash to the relationship than I could.' Why on earth was he offering such spurious information? Why hadn't he made a simple flat denial?

‘Cash. With your salary?' Perhaps he reflected on how his birthright had been spent, on his education and Sammie's.

‘I wasn't going to raise the matter, Dave, but since you have, I can tell you that we wouldn't be able to afford our new marital home had she not sold that cottage of hers and stripped out her savings. So Fran is literally penniless at the moment. And until I can sell the Loose house, I can't help out.' Again, he stifled any further words, though they would have come tumbling out had he let them. But Dave said nothing, so he added what he should have said earlier: ‘And were Fran a beggar maid to my King Cophetua, she'd never be a gold-digger.' He liked that sentence. Caffy would too.

‘So you're saying this is all Sammie's fault?'

‘Saying what? What's Sammie's fault?' Perhaps he'd seriously misheard, because Dave's question seemed to have come from nowhere.

‘This rushed marriage of yours. And if you had your house back, it'd be OK.'