Cause of Death (12 page)

Louise had made him get counselling. He'd gone along to please her, but Jerry could recall how resentful he had felt. There was nothing wrong with him.

He ran his hand across the now close-cropped hair. He'd grown it down to his shoulders for a while. Added a beard, which she'd sort of liked. And he'd taken up photography in a big way. Louise had been pleased, Jerry remembered, as he sorted through the equipment in the padded backpack. Even bought him one of those khaki jackets she saw the professionals wear on the television; Jerry had laughed, but he'd put it on and after a while, as practicality outweighed his sense of the absurd, he had worn it when he went tramping off over hill and dale, as Louise would have said, searching for the perfect sunrise.

Gently, he cleaned the lens he was holding and replaced the cap. Haines had encouraged the hobby and the look; it made for excellent cover and the strange thing was, Jerry knew that if he ever found a way out of this, it would be the one thing that kept him sane and quite literally focused. He had a bit of himself that no one else could touch. Haines could make use of his skill, but that was like doing the day job. The boss makes use of you for eight hours of the day, the rest is . . .

Except it was getting harder and harder to tell where one began and the other ended. Harder to know where the old Jerry had gone and when this new Jerry had emerged, or rather sprung fully formed from somewhere inside of himself that he'd barely registered.

Others had spotted it though, seen what he really was. Didcott had seen it and been ready to exploit it. And the pressure had been applied.

Six months at most he'd been told, but he knew Louise wouldn't stand for it. He'd said no. More pressure had been applied and more than a little blackmail. The rewards he'd been promised had been . . . well, at the time they'd seemed adequate. He knew better now.

Looking back, Jerry could see how much he had been manipulated. Eventually he'd agreed. Six months, he told Louise, and I'll be able to come back regularly. He'd been naive enough to believe that at the time. Or maybe he'd just been playing her a line.

No, she had said. Go and you won't be coming back at all.

And he had, and she'd kept her word. The divorce had gone through two years after he'd come to work for Haines. Louise had seen his name blackened and his career ruined by the lies that had become his cover story, and in the end she'd not known what to believe.

Well, in the end she'd believed what the rumours said: that he was corrupt, that he was a thief, that he had beaten a man to a pulp in an interview and it had taken three other officers to pull him off.

That part had been true, Jerry acknowledged. But there'd been reasons for it. Trouble was, he'd almost forgotten what they were.

‘Can't you leave your work at work?' Miriam complained mildly.

‘I thought you were still asleep.'

‘No fun staying in bed on your own.'

Mac smiled at her. ‘There's fresh coffee in the kitchen. I heard you moving.'

He watched as she crossed to the kitchen and pressed the plunger on the cafetière. Mac was a tea drinker in the morning, but Miriam needed her coffee. She wore a blue silk robe, floor length and cinched at the waist. It had been a present from Rina, genuine art deco, the embroidery at the collar and cuffs heavy and geometric. Miriam loved it and Mac enjoyed the way it clung to her curves. He caught his breath as she pushed a heavy tress of dark hair away from her face and then came over to where he sat, mug of coffee clasped between her palms.

He had never dreamt he'd end up with someone as beautiful as Miriam.

‘So, what's all this then?' she asked, settling beside him on the sofa and looking at the files and photographs laid out on the coffee table. The early light streamed in through the porthole window and fell across her hair, illuminating the red strands mixed in with the dark. Mac moved closer, kissed her cheek, inhaling deeply.

‘Maybe we should go back to bed.'

She laughed. ‘And leave half your mind back here? I don't think so.'

He knew she was right. He was up and dressed now and deep in thinking mode. ‘Background reading,' he said.

‘These are all Haines's known associates?'

‘No. Some of them are. Some of them are from other cases. I've been trying to pull together what I can about that hush-hush business a couple of months back in Wales.'
¹

‘Ah, that's a face I know. He was on the telly.'

Mac picked up the photograph. ‘DI Charlie Eddison,' he said. ‘Not his finest hour, but so far as we know there was no link to either Haines or Vashinsky.'

‘Hmm, and there's a photo of our friend Stan Holden. What do you think will happen to him now?'

‘I don't know,' Mac admitted. ‘If anyone can sort him out it's Rina. She'll have her work cut out, though. I can't see that he possesses a very saleable skill set.'

He pointed to another image. ‘Santos, aka Ivram Kayne and a half-dozen other aliases. Worked for a private security firm in Iraq after the first Gulf War. We think that's where he fell in with Haines. Jerry Mason. Ex-copper, thrown off the force for corruption and assault. He'd reached DI before that and was tipped for big things. Then there's Tomas James, been with Haines, we think, for about as long as Santos, though we've got even less information about his early career than we have for Santos.'

‘And has all this research helped you?'

Mac laughed. ‘Not so far. I just wanted a refresher, I suppose.' He pushed everything into a pile and set it aside.

‘Any thing on the bones yet?'

Mac shook his head. ‘We've got so little to go on,' he said. ‘Poor young Andy's got stuck with the legwork. If he gets a break we can see about getting a team together. Right now Kendall tells me they've got nothing to spare.'

‘It's still a murder, though,' Miriam argued.

‘Well, that's the assumption. Frankly, we don't even know that.'

‘So, what? Someone had a few spare bones knocking about and thought the archaeologists might like them?'

‘Could be,' Mac nodded seriously. ‘Truthfully, we don't have a clue. I mean we really don't have a clue. We have to see what Andy can turn up.'

‘Poor Andy,' Miriam sympathized. Then, cheekily, ‘I'll bet
he's
not working today.'

Ted Eebry had lunch with his daughter Stacey, son-in-law Sam and their little toddler. Ted's first grandchild, Tammy, had been a revelation to him. He had loved his own girls so much it had never occurred to him that he could feel more for any human being. But he did. Tammy was his miracle.

He played with her while Stacey got the lunch ready and Sam interfered and helped and eventually gave up all pretence of knowing what he was supposed to do and joined Ted in the living room. Sam cooked several times during the week, Stacey working three evenings in the local supermarket, but Sunday lunch was her domain and had to be done her way.

Sam flopped down into the old recliner. He'd owned it since his bachelor days and brought it with him when he and Stacey moved in together. He watched his father-in-law and little girl as they played with her tea cups and drank pretend tea, a game Tammy never seemed to tire of. He smiled. Ted was a nice old boy, Sam thought, then reminded himself that he really wasn't that old, just a bit set in his ways.

‘Those boxes of stuff any good for your friend?' Sam asked.

‘What? Oh yes, they were. I've got some money for you in my jacket pocket.'

‘Looked like a box of old junk to me, but Stacey reckoned they'd got a value.' He laughed. ‘I suppose everything has a buyer if you look long enough.'

‘Rina was pleased. She knew a lot of the people on the bills. She was an actress, you know.' Ted struggled to his feet and fetched his jacket, fumbling in his pockets for the cash Rina had given him.

Sam looked surprised at the amount. ‘What's that? Fifty? For that load of old junk?'

Ted shrugged. ‘Rina liked it,' he said. ‘Reckon she'll have a lot of fun going through it and remembering old friends. We were selling her a dose of nostalgia, I suppose.'

Sam laughed. ‘Well you'd better give that to the boss. I told her whatever the stuff fetched could go into the holiday fund.' He sounded faintly regretful now the boxes of junk had fetched more than he had anticipated. He bent down to scoop his little girl into his arms. ‘You got a cup of tea for Daddy?'

Tammy giggled and Ted watched, a heavy weight wrapped around his heart.

Andy had managed to get back to his mother's home for a few hours, immersing himself once more in the sibling-heavy squabbling, noise and laughter that characterized her house.

Andy, oldest of the brood, had moved out almost as soon as he'd started police training, and though his bedsit wasn't anything to shout about, he was loving the independence –
and
the quiet
and
getting off the Jubilee Estate where he'd grown up and where being a police officer wasn't the typical career choice. He missed his family though; his mother had raised all five of them alone when their father had died. The Big C, as his Aunt Bec still called it, taking his dad only six months after the diagnosis, though Andy realized now he'd been ill for a lot longer than that but just hadn't wanted to confront the fact. Andy, then eleven, had done all he could to help the rest of them through it, taking over the cooking when his mum had to get a job with more hours. Susie, the youngest, had only been two.

He'd not said that he was coming to Sunday dinner, but he knew that didn't matter. They'd be glad to see him and his mum and Aunt Bec – a fixture on a Sunday since the last of her own brood had left home – would be eager for any gossip he might feel able to impart. Andy was always careful about what he told them, but boy were they good at wheedling. Frank Baker always reckoned Andy's mum and aunt should have advertised their services as interrogators.

Lunch over, Andy helped his mum with the washing up, the only way he could guarantee getting her alone for a bit. Or almost alone. Aunt Bec installed herself at the kitchen table with a fresh pot of tea and lit a cigarette.

‘So,' Aunt Bec wanted to know, ‘why aren't you on that murder investigation? The one out near the pub at Teston.'

‘Because the CID at Exeter got that one. I'm looking after the bones at the dig site.'

Bec didn't look impressed, but his mother was interested. ‘Any news on that, is there?'

‘No,' Andy admitted. ‘I'm trawling missing persons, but it's a job and a half. You'd never reckon so many folk just drop off the planet.'

‘'Ow far you goin' back?' Bec asked, and Andy knew he'd hooked her. He celebrated silently and played it cagey; best to be a bit conspiratorial with Bec and his mum.

‘Oh, we've narrowed it down far as we can, but . . .'

‘There was that woman end of Newell Street. Ran off and left her kids. Hilda someone. Must be thirty years ago now.'

‘Too far back,' Andy said.

‘And old Mrs Took. Though I always reckoned her son just put her in a home.'

‘Too old,' Andy said. ‘If she was old enough to be put in a home.'

‘You think it's a young woman then?' his mother asked.

‘Youngish. I mean, best guess is between twenty-five and fifty. There's not enough bones for anyone to be really sure.'

Bec snorted. ‘Bit of a spread you got there, ain't it? I thought these 'ere CSI could tell to the year what age a corpse was.'

‘It's not a corpse,' his mother defended. ‘It's just bones. It's not the complete skeleton, then?' she asked, picking up the implication from what Andy had said.

Andy shook his head. ‘Just a sort of random selection.' His mother and aunt exchanged a look. ‘This is confidential stuff, you know,' he reminded them, and comforted himself with the thought that anyone who actually read the local papers would have been able to figure that out for themselves anyway, so it was
almost
public domain, though as neither his mother nor Aunt Bec read anything more exacting than the odd female magazine, he had to admit they'd never have found out themselves.

‘So.' His mother dried her hands and took a seat opposite her sister. ‘What are you looking for? What sort of missing woman?'

Andy wiped and stacked another plate. ‘That's the thing,' he said. ‘The bones were clean and dry and we reckon they'd been stored somewhere else. Best guess is the woman died not more than twenty years ago, but it could be as recently as five. And it was somewhere they hadn't been disturbed by wild animals or anything. No teeth marks on them or 'owt like that. And –' he took a deep breath – ‘boss reckons they were local and whoever dumped them was local and knew the place well enough to get there at night without falling in a ditch or getting caught on the cameras up at the site.'

These had, in fact, been Andy's own conclusions, but he knew his mother would take Mac's view much more seriously.

Bec snorted again. ‘We all know where the cameras are,' she said. ‘Up on that damned great pole.'

This was true, Andy thought. They'd been set high and made deliberately obvious in the hope this might persuade the kids on the Jubilee Estate that it wasn't worth their bother to thieve from the site.

‘So. A local girl, then.'

Andy noticed that his mother had automatically gone for the younger age estimate and diminished it still further. It was funny, he reflected, how the young and the very old garnered more sympathy when they were dead or lost. The middle-aged seemed to make less of a ripple in the public consciousness.

She and Bec exchanged another meaningful glance.

Andy waited.

‘You'll need your notebook then,' Bec told him. ‘And a pen. There's paper and pen on the side near the telephone if you've forgotten yours.' The thought of Andy without the tools of his trade made her laugh.