False Tongues (8 page)

Wendy: ‘She tried to hide it, even. She told me she was there to buy paracetamol for Father Brian. But I saw the box in her hand, plain as day. “Miss Scarlett.” I think it must mean that Mildred Channing was right, you know.'

Liz: ‘About the vicar and the curate, you mean?'

Wendy: ‘Absolutely. And it means that Jane knows about it. Don't you see? Jane realises that Father Brian fancies his curate, so she decides to dye her hair—red!—to make herself more attractive to him. To rekindle the spark, so to speak.'

Liz: ‘I'm not sure it's going to do that much good, to be honest.'

Wendy: ‘Jane Stanford with red hair—the mind boggles. But it just shows how desperate she must be, don't you think?'

Liz: ‘Well, like I said before, there's no smoke without fire. Poor old Jane.'

Chapter Five

Mark Lombardi was, unusually for him, at the desk in the police station which was his official ‘office.' It was no more than a cubicle in a large room full of such cubicles, the desk top furnished with a computer, a phone, and some trays for his files. He generally spent as little time there as he could decently manage, much preferring to be out actually doing his job. But he, like his friend Neville, had found that paperwork was becoming an increasingly important part of that job. It was a paradox, verging on travesty: for the police to be seen to be fulfilling their function, they had to be ever more transparent, which meant documenting everything they did. Writing things down in notebooks, transferring their notes to official forms, transcribing everything onto the central computer. Those who were conscientious about it could spend most of their time at their desks and very little time actually working.

Neville, Mark knew, was the opposite of that. He avoided paperwork like the plague, resorting to it only when there was absolutely nothing else to do—or when the pressure increased on him from above to produce something in writing about a specific case. He was always behind, always snowed under.

While Mark hated the paperwork nearly as much as Neville did, he tried to tread a middle path and to exercise some discipline so that it would neither take over his life nor burden him with guilt over ‘leaving undone those things which he ought to have done.' So he usually forced himself to go to his desk on Monday mornings, as a matter of routine, to put his head down and get things in shape for the week to come.

Today was a holiday; he wasn't on duty and needn't have come in at all.

Other years, Easter Monday had meant a family outing of some sort. This year no one had even suggested it—thank God for that. And Callie was away.

Furthermore, his flatmate was at home, lounging round their none-too-spacious flat and catching up with the Sunday papers. Theirs was a business arrangement, not a relationship; they tended to keep out of each other's way as much as possible. So Mark had decided that it may as well be business as usual. He'd get a head start on the week, he told himself smugly.

He may as well not have bothered: he was finding it impossible to concentrate.

He couldn't stop thinking about the fiasco that had taken place at the family table yesterday. It should have been such a joyous occasion; instead it was a disaster of enormous proportions. And he'd been helpless to do anything about it. Mortified, Mark re-played the scene over and over in his head, looking for a point at which he might have brought about a less horrendous outcome.

He'd let Callie down: he knew that, and yet he couldn't see how he could have done anything differently.

To make matters even worse, he and Callie had parted so abruptly that he hadn't had a chance to make amends to her.

And now she'd gone away for a few days, and he hadn't been able to reach her. She'd not rung him, and his repeated efforts to ring her had resulted only in increasing frustration on his part. Her phone was off; Mark was getting sick of the non-human voice telling him to leave a message.

Had she switched her phone off on purpose? Was she that angry with him, and not ready to talk about it?

Had he really, truly blown it with her this time?

Mark hadn't been all that happy about her plans to go away this week, feeling insecure at the thought of her stepping back into a past that hadn't included him, surrounded by people he didn't know and memories he didn't share.

He hadn't told her that, of course. He'd encouraged her to go, to revisit a place that had been important to her. Especially since she'd said, with a casualness that didn't fool him, that Adam wouldn't be there. That was the one thing that made it bearable, from Mark's point of view: no Adam.

Mark had never met Adam, even though her former fiancé lived in the next parish to Callie in London. He didn't want to meet him. Adam was married now, but that made no difference. Adam's very existence touched Mark's insecurities at the deepest level: a man who had loved Callie, who had been intimate with her, who shared memories with her that Mark would never know about. Adam had hurt her deeply, yet before that she had loved him, and the thought of that was more than Mark could bear.

His own romantic history was much simpler: it scarcely existed. Before Callie, he'd gone out with a few girls, but there'd never been anything serious. His family had seen to that. Mamma's insistence that he marry a nice Italian girl had affected him powerfully, always there at the back of his mind when he met an interesting woman at work or socially. The Italian girls who had been paraded before him on a regular basis had failed to click with him—possibly because they were as brainwashed and screwed up as he was, when it came to relationships.

And then he'd met Callie. Intelligent, attractive, empathetic, caring. Committed to her vocation. Vulnerable, as well, in a way that touched his heart at a deep level. They'd met entirely by chance, unless you believed in a Higher Power who arranged these things somehow, and Mark wasn't sure that he didn't. From the first he'd been attracted to her in a way that he'd never before experienced, strongly enough to overcome the insistent voice of Mamma in his head, telling him that she wasn't suitable. It wasn't just that she wasn't Italian; that would have been bad enough, but it was far worse than that. She was outside of their faith, to the extent of being an ordained minister in the Church of England. Not just English, but Anglican.

Yet she was the woman for him. His certainty had grown as he'd got to know her better. Of all the women he'd ever met, she was the one. He loved her. It was as simple—and as complicated—as that. Twist of fate, cosmic joke—whatever. When he realised that he couldn't imagine a future without her, Mark knew he would have to leave his comfort zone and fight for their future together.

It hadn't been easy, but he'd done it. Was he to get this far, only to fall at the last hurdle? Sabotaged, once again and fatally, by
la famiglia
?

Mark stared, unseeing, at a sheet of paper on his desk. It may as well have been written in Swahili.

And then his mobile rang, with the special ring-tone assigned to Callie. He lunged for it. Be cool, he told himself. Concerned, not accusing.

He managed pretty well with the preliminaries, though in his overwhelming relief he knew he was running on a bit more than he should have about how many messages he'd left for her. And then he asked her, belatedly, about her trip.

‘It was the trip from hell,' she said.

All sorts of horrible images flashed into his mind, along with a panicky guilt that he'd been worrying about himself and their relationship rather than taking seriously the possibility that something dreadful had befallen her. ‘Oh, no! What happened?'

There was a sigh on the other end of the phone. ‘Tube trains not running. Missed train. Obstruction on the line. And my phone dead as a dodo. Some day I'll tell you all about it, in excruciating detail. At the moment I don't even want to think about it.'

‘You're okay, though?' he demanded anxiously.

‘Oh, yes. I'm fine. Apart from lack of sleep, anyway. And missing you, of course,' Callie added, a smile in her voice.

Mark smiled in return. ‘Likewise,
Cara Mia
.'

There was a tiny pause on the other end of the phone. ‘And Adam's here,' Callie said. ‘He changed his mind at the last minute, apparently. I've managed to avoid him so far.'

His heart plummeted. Adam—there! It was bad enough, missing her, without having to deal with the torment of knowing that she was spending the week with Adam instead of with him.

The phone on his desk emitted its harsh double ring-tone. Mark jumped and stared at it: this phone never rang, or at least if it did he was seldom here to answer it. As far as he was concerned it was little more than desk furniture, there to balance the computer on the other side.

‘Just a second,
Cara Mia
,' he said into his mobile. ‘My other phone is ringing.' He checked the caller display before picking it up. Neville Stewart.

‘You're a hard man to track down,' Neville said without preliminary. ‘Your mobile's engaged, and your flatmate says you're not at home.'

Mark sighed, knowing this was no social call. ‘Well, you've found me now.'

***

Easter Monday was not, generally, a very active day in the world of journalism. Most of Lilith Noone's colleagues were, she supposed, at home with their families, making themselves ill by overindulging in chocolate Easter eggs. Tomorrow they would stagger back to work, jaded and bloated.

Lilith, however, had no family. And she didn't particularly care for chocolate.

Besides, she had some ground to make up at the
Daily Globe
. A recent high-profile assignment had left her with a bit of egg on her face, and she knew that her boss, Rob Gardiner-Smith, was keeping an eye on her performance. She needed to prove to him that she was up there with the big boys, capable of producing the goods.

He'd called her into his office and had actually questioned her vocation as a journalist. That hurt: Lilith had never wanted to do anything else. Growing up as the daughter of the proprietor of a weekly provincial paper, she'd set her sights on the national journalistic scene from an early age. She'd worked hard, starting at the bottom, putting in her time, earning the respect of her colleagues and putting fear into the hearts of not a few people.

Now here she was keeping a low profile, writing features and other rubbish just to stay out of Rob Gardiner-Smith's sights for a while. It wasn't good.

And Lilith had something to prove to herself, as well. She'd been offered a job—a very good job—with
HotStuff
, the top celebrity gossip magazine, and had turned it down. It wasn't that she had scruples about gossip-mongering, and wasn't above engaging in it herself in pursuit of a larger goal, but she wanted to feel that what she did had some value in the greater scheme of things. She was a real journalist, she'd told herself as she turned her face against
HotStuff
. Now she needed to to something to demonstrate that she'd made the right decision—to herself and to her boss. She was tired of hiding from him; it was time to beard the lion in his den.

So on that morning when other employees of the
Globe
were having a lie-in, Lilith got up at the usual time, dressed in clothes which said ‘professional journalist,' and did a careful job on her makeup.

She had to get past Rob Gardiner-Smith's secretary, who consulted with him by phone before waving Lilith into his office, so he was expecting her, looking rather bemused as he sat behind his desk.

‘Lilith,' he said with an ironic smile. ‘I haven't seen you for a while.'

‘No.' She forced herself to look him in the eye. ‘But I was wondering whether you had anything for me. I'm keen to get my teeth into something…challenging.'

‘Are you, indeed?'

‘Yes.' Lilith held his gaze, unflinching.

‘Well, well, well.' He put his elbows on the desk and tented his fingers, regarding them thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Perhaps there is something, then.'

‘Yes?'

He seemed to hesitate for just a second, then nodded decisively and met her eyes again. ‘I've had a tip-off from a reliable source. Never mind who.' His smile was without mirth. ‘Another teenage stabbing. An unidentified fatality, I understand. In the Paddington area. No one else should have it yet. Just check it out for me, see what you can find. And the quicker the better, obviously,' he added.

‘Obviously.' Lilith was already on her way to the door.
You won't be sorry
, she wanted to say, but decided she had better produce the goods first.

***

Neville hadn't needed to look at the photo—not really. Once he'd seen Dr Frost's curly hair and tall frame, he'd been in no doubt that they were at the right house. But there were procedures which must be followed.

The next order of business—now that he'd seen the photo and satisfied himself that Sebastian Frost was the boy in the mortuary, now that he'd broken the news to the parents, now that he'd tracked down Mark Lombardi to step in as Family Liaison Officer—was to arrange for a formal identification of the body. One of the parents would have to do it.

Neville asked himself which of the two was stronger. They were both doctors, he'd discovered, which meant that they'd seen their share of blood, mangled flesh, probably even dead bodies. They wouldn't be squeamish and faint, have the vapours and need to be carried out like some people he'd dealt with in the past. He observed the two of them and decided that he would put his money on Mrs Frost. She was in shock, yes—deathly pale and quiet—but there was a steeliness at her core that was palpable even in these circumstances. Dr Richard Frost was less sure of himself, more at a loss.

He would leave it up to them—let them decide between them which one of them to put through the ordeal. Not quite yet, though. He needed to wait for Mark Lombardi to arrive, and in the meantime there were questions he needed to ask the Frosts. It would be difficult, undoubtedly, but he did have an investigation to conduct.

And it was time for that coffee, to fortify him. ‘Would you like Sergeant Cowley to make some coffee, or some tea?' he suggested.

Mrs Frost shook her head and headed for the door. ‘No, I'll do it.'

Her husband offered them a wan smile. ‘No one touches Miranda's precious coffee machine,' he said. ‘Not even me. It's one of those monsters like you see in restaurants. I won't say it cost as much as the house, but it certainly cost several times more than the plasma television. And it makes the best coffee you've ever tasted.'

Out of the corner of his eye, Neville registered Cowley's incredulous expression.