Burying the Past (2 page)

‘Any developments with your body?' It was Paula, whom Caffy always grandly called the
prima inter pares
of Pact Restoration. Goodness knows where she'd learned about Latin feminine nouns. And remembered how to use them.

One of Paula's many gifts was to be able to materialize apparently at will, much like a serious-faced Cheshire Cat. ‘Sorry – didn't mean to make you jump.'

Oh, no? ‘Not yet. How's Caffy?'

Paula said flatly, ‘At work. As usual. It's been hard getting any details of this Simon's death out of her. Is it true that when she told him to stop harassing her he just dashed off to his room and jumped?'

‘Pretty well.'

‘In other words I've got to wait until all the details come out officially.'

‘'Fraid so.' Details of how he'd filled the hotel room with roses; how two bottles of champagne at a hundred and fifty pounds a pop had been chilling. ‘Poor devil,' she added. ‘And poor Caffy.'

‘Why didn't Mark put his foot down? I mean, he's an assistant chief constable. Surely his word would count for something.'

‘Don't think he didn't try. But Caffy was adamant . . . and the chief constable overrode Mark.'

Paula shook her head. ‘Not good. Duty of care. But on the other hand, human rights,' she conceded tersely. ‘Hell, Fran, whatever happened to good old-fashioned common sense?'

‘Quite. But Caffy's OK?'

Paula nodded in the direction of the house; Caffy was now halfway up some of the scaffolding that had scared Mark witless. ‘And how are you? Caffy said you'd helped Simon when he was one of your underlings.'

Fran nodded. Simon had been one of the many young officers whom she'd tenderly mentored, though one who'd become decidedly unlikeable. ‘It's always tough when one of us dies,' she said, non-committally. But she had an idea that that didn't deceive Paula for a moment.

‘Especially for management,' Paula said ironically. ‘But standing in the sun talking isn't going to get your house fixed, Fran. I'd best be off.'

Fran nodded. In her way, Paula was as hard to read as Caffy. Meanwhile, she should be working too, planning the new cold case team for a start. Some people she'd worked with before might volunteer. A few more would be dragged in later, resentful at being in what they saw as a backwater. Any sign of a mutiny, though, and she'd make sure the waters were too choppy for comfort.

The trouble was, thinking didn't look like work. Just in case anyone was watching, she'd better look official. So she pulled on a pair of light gloves – vinyl, since she'd developed an irritating allergy to standard issue latex. Then she looked for something to lean on while she watched. Nothing. But she could imagine herself here in a few years' time – maybe even a few months' – becoming a tentative gardener, for the pleasure of leaning on a spade handle and looking around. She didn't want a plastic-handled spade; her father had used an old-fashioned wooden-handled one, the grain polished to a fine silky sheen by the years of use. She wished she'd claimed it when he died, but future gardening had been far from her thoughts then. As for digging, for the near future any that was considered necessary would be professionally done – and not, of course, by gardeners.

At last she found a low wall that had crumbled to just the right height, so she could sit and watch the show. It might have been an episode of
Time Team
, with the archaeologists wearing not their usual eclectic clothes, but the familiar white garb of crime scene investigators. White tape marked off segments of the ground, and a serious pair of sturdy young women marched backwards and forwards with some scientific instrument the TV
Time Team
presenters, if not the actual experts, referred to casually as geophys. They were checking for irregularities in the subsoil – or something like that. Everyone knew that these days you couldn't just go and dig where you thought there might be a body. But to wait so long before a single clod was turned almost had her jumping up and down in frustration.

She'd already spent a weekend playing a waiting game. In the past, at the merest sniff of a murder, CID and crime scene investigators would have flooded on to the site, raking in overtime hand over fist. They'd have been halfway to solving the crime by now. But in these new bean-counting days, you had to acknowledge that if a body had been
in situ
as long as this had been – always assuming it was a body, of course – it might as well wait till the much cheaper working week before the team of forensic archaeologists started to exhume it.

The slam of a car door disturbed her reverie. Automatically, she stood: time-wasting was one thing, but to be caught out in it was another, even – perhaps especially – by a delivery driver with more material for their house. However, it was a police car, unmarked, but one she recognized from the pound. The driver wasn't the person she was expecting, her deputy senior investigating officer, who'd phoned in to say she'd be held up by dentistry to a broken front tooth. DI Kim Thomas, new to the Kent CID team after a spell in Gloucestershire, had had an off-duty argument with a drunk trying to urinate on a war memorial. So DCS Harman had declared, unilaterally, she was at very least entitled to a couple of hours' police time having it dealt with. Nor was the driver Harry Chester, the DCI to whom Kim Thomas would answer, as soon as he was back off sick leave following gall-bladder surgery.

No, it was top brass. Topmost brass. At the wheel was Mark, who no doubt couldn't keep away from the site either; his passenger was no less than the chief constable himself. Both completed their shiny braid-and-buttons ensembles by donning protective footwear like her own – a complete waste of time, she privately considered, given the general state of the area. Perhaps they simply meant to keep their highly-polished shoes pristine.

Just in case their arrival had attracted the attention of the officers on site, she greeted the newcomers formally, even though she was going to marry one of them – yes, the word ‘marry' still felt strange, making her heart beat faster and a silly smile spread across her face – and felt subtly indebted to the other for having supported the relationship between two senior officers that might well have raised eyebrows in some circles.

The chief always indulged in verbose preliminaries, and today was no exception – he touched on the beauty of the location, the elegance of the house, the potential of the garden. But then, abandoning the verbal bonbons as if he was sated, he said, ‘I didn't want you to hear this from anyone except me, Fran. I'm retiring. My resignation's operative from today.'

‘But—' Fran stopped short. The chief was an institution. He
was
Kent Police. On the other hand, she'd imagine that that was one reason why he'd chosen to go now.

‘I can't have a senior officer topping himself on my watch, Fran, and that's the truth. Whatever the outcome of the enquiry. The hotel room he jumped from is being treated as a crime scene, of course, and we're not supposed to go anywhere near it till Devon and Cornwall Police have given it the going over of its life. But even if they find me lily-white pure, I'm not happy with what happened and my part in it. How's the poor young lady, by the way?' He dropped his voice as if a Victorian maiden had been sullied. ‘The one with the unlikely name? Caffy? What sort of name is that?' he added with sudden tetchiness, as if embarrassed that he'd been unable to refer to Simon by name.

‘It suits her,' Fran said mildly. ‘Anyway, she's at work today. There she is.' She pointed to the overall-clad figure at the top of a ladder. ‘We expected her to take a few days off, but Paula – she's the woman in charge of the team – says she's better where she is.'

‘Up there? Dear God. She can't . . . Not when a man killed himself for love of her less than forty-eight hours ago.'

‘Caffy doesn't do hand-wringing. And why should she? Her take is that Simon was clearly unbalanced. She compared him to Hamlet – brilliant but unhinged. What if she'd continued the relationship – which she says never was a relationship except in his eyes – and he'd decided to take her life instead, or even as well? But I must admit, her calmness disconcerts me,' Fran added.

‘It probably disconcerts even Paula,' Mark said, ‘but if anyone could deal with Caffy should she suddenly have some sort of crisis, it'd be Paula. Do you want a word with her?'

The chief shook his head emphatically. ‘I mustn't be seen to do anything that could be construed as interfering with a witness. I'd best be off to clear my desk.'

Mark and Fran exchanged a glance; no, neither was going to try to argue him out of his decision. They turned with him, one either side, to walk him back to the car.

He held his hand out for the keys. ‘I'm sure you can rely on Fran here for a lift back to the office, Mark. You might want to discuss what we were talking about earlier,' he added with a discreet cough.

Mark shook his head. ‘With respect, Adam, I shall stick to what I said then. It's one thing if they insist on my acting as a stopgap until they find a proper replacement for you, but as for applying for your job at my age, forget it. No, they want some young thrusting alpha male – or,
pace
Paula over there! – alpha woman, of course. And I wouldn't want to take on anything extra at the moment anyway.' He turned slightly to mouth at Fran, ‘I told him.'

Her face froze, more rictus than smile. She knew what was coming – could feel it in her water. This precious tiny wedding was going to grow of its own accord, wasn't it? Though how Mark could tell Caffy she'd been dropped as best woman she didn't know.

The chief produced his kindest, most avuncular smile, odd in a man not more than eight years her senior. ‘My dear, I am so glad that you are about to enter the married state. And nothing, believe me, would give me more pleasure than to give you away, since I understand your father is no longer with us. On the other hand,' he added quickly, ‘I can't imagine that you need to be in any sense “given”. So would you do me the honour of letting me accompany you down the aisle? I understand that Mark is already equipped with a best man.'

‘A best woman,' Mark corrected him. ‘Look: she goes up and down those damned ladders like an old-fashioned monkey-on-a-stick toy.' He looked away quickly. Clearly, his trip to the roof hadn't cured his vertigo, which even seemed to afflict him second-hand, when someone else was scaling heights – or, in this case, descending from them briskly.

‘Will you be having a big wedding? A police guard of honour is always a fine sight. It would look well in the Cathedral Close. Imagine that.'

He must mean Canterbury Cathedral! ‘I think we might rattle round a bit in a building as grand as that,' she said, trying to sound diplomatic. Infinitely better than poor ugly St Jude's, of course. On the other hand, a pretty country church . . . ‘But I would like to be escorted, wherever we end up. Thank you.'

‘Good. That's settled then,' he said, suddenly gruff. He swallowed, and continued: ‘Do you have any other family, Fran? I know Mark's having trouble with his daughter . . .'

That certainly wasn't an issue Mark would want aired just now, so she gabbled, ‘I've a married sister in Scotland. She keeps an eye on my mother, whose ambition is to take over and run the care home she's in. But I should imagine she'll be physically too frail to come down, and I don't know that my sister would want to leave her in case she causes an insurrection.' Not that she'd want her sister anywhere near her, for all she was fond of her clergyman brother-in-law.

The chief laughed.

‘I'll say this again, Adam,' she said, keen to change the subject, ‘I really shouldn't be involved with this investigation. I've told you: there may be real clashes between me as an investigator and me as the householder. And Mark's not exactly disinterested, either.'

He looked at her under his eyebrows. ‘I'd trust you with my life, my dear – and if you imagine my eventual replacement will have time to concern himself with anything involved with day-to-day crime fighting you must be living not here but in cloud cuckoo land. You've got some good DCIs – trust them if you're in any doubt, though they must be up to their ears carrying Harry's caseload as well as their own. And didn't I hear that one of them is on maternity leave? Otherwise, do what you do best, with the rider that you must save money while you're doing it. Think cuts, Fran, think cuts.' He might have said more, but, looking anxiously at Caffy, who was fast approaching, he let himself into the car and, with a general wave, set off more quickly than was wise given the state of the track.

Caffy, arms akimbo, stared. ‘Was it something I said?'

Mark shook his head repressively. ‘Police business.' But his face softened. ‘Maybe he didn't want to meet the person who'd got the job he really wanted. Best whatever.'

‘He's going to give me away instead,' Fran said quickly. ‘Which will suit him much better than organizing Mark's stag do.'

Caffy looked enigmatic, something she did remarkably well. ‘It's all in hand – what a good thing you didn't let him usurp me, Mark.' Her eyes followed the retreating car. ‘He didn't want to meet me because of Simon's suicide – something to do with protocol, right?' Clearly, she wasn't going to give them a chance to offer more condolences. ‘No problem. Oh, there is, isn't there? Don't tell me he's decided it's all his fault and he's got to pretend he's an ancient Roman and fall on his sword. Simon was mad, that's all there is to it. If you want to make it sound romantic, mad with love. OK, a weird, possessive and entirely unrequited love. So it's not the old guy's fault, any more than it was yours. Hey, don't you two go resigning! Not till you've paid us!'

‘Quite,' Mark said. ‘We can't have Pact going bankrupt.'