Authors: Faith Martin
Narrow is the Way
Faith Martin
Detective Inspector Hillary Greene slammed on the brakes of her ancient Volkswagen Golf, and snarled an insult at the BMW driver who’d cut her up. Although flagging the prat down, showing her ID card and scaring the hell out of him might make her feel a lot better, it would also make her late for work. Besides, if she indulged in this bit of petty vengeance every time some idiot in a bigger car tried it on, she’d never get from point A to B.
Even though she had barely a mile to travel from her canal barge, moored permanently in the small village of Thrupp, to her desk at Kidlington’s Police HQ, the traffic approaching Oxford was notoriously bad, and this little infringement of her personal space was nothing compared to some days. So she contented herself by giving the BMW driver (was the cheeky sod on his mobile phone as
well
?) a one-fingered salute, which he pretended not to notice, and sighed heavily.
Alongside the road, the hawthorn hedges were turning a vibrant orange. Dry yellow leaves swirled around the kerb, doing a dance in the wake of passing cars and brightly coloured berries and lowering grey skies were the order of the day. Keats would have loved it. Hillary Greene just hoped that the autumnal fogs would keep off for a while yet, because then driving in to work would become an absolute nightmare.
The number of times she’d nearly been rear-ended in a November pea-souper didn’t bear thinking about.
She turned on the radio, relaxing to a sixties golden oldie –
somebody bewailing the fact that trains and boats and planes had taken their loved one away.
Hillary snorted. They should be so lucky.
Travelling down Kidlington’s main road, past the set of traffic lights that led off to the local airport, she glanced across at the turning to her old house. Or to Ronnie’s old house to be more accurate, her late and extremely unlamented husband, now nearly two years dead. Now if only some nice train, boat or plane had taken
him
away, say ten or even twelve years ago, she’d cheerfully have paid the fare.
Arriving safely at the HQ, she had her usual trouble finding a parking space, and wondered idly whose backside it was that you had to creep around nowadays in order to get your own slot.
She finally parked under a sumac tree that was going out in a blaze of glory, and glanced up at an uncertain sky. Well, not all that uncertain really. It was bound to rain in Britain in the autumn. Or summer for that matter. She only hoped the seals on Puff the Tragic Wagon held out. The last thing she needed was to finish work tonight and find herself the proud owner of a soggy car.
She scooped up that morning’s unopened mail from the passenger seat and swung out a pair of surprisingly good legs, for a middle-aged gal like herself. She mentally crossed her fingers that her tights would stay unladdered. For some reason, she seemed to spend a fortune on replacing bloody nylons.
‘Morning, guv,’ she heard someone say, just as she pushed in through to the main lobby door. Turning, she found the hulking presence of DC Tommy Lynch looming up behind her and grinning widely.
‘Tommy. We catching the same shift?’
‘Looks like it.’
They walked up together into the main office, where Hillary shared a corner with DS Janine Tyler, Tommy, and DS Frank Ross.
Her team.
‘You’re due in court this afternoon, right, guv?’ Tommy asked, noticing that his DI was wearing one of her more tailored outfits, a crafty concoction of navy and white which seemed to hide her curvaceous figure better than her usual, less mannish outfits.
Tommy hated suits like this one.
‘Yeah, the Gordon case,’ she admitted glumly, and Tommy grimaced in sympathy.
Randolph (Randy) Gordon was a two-time loser who specialized in forged passports, credit cards, sick notes, hell, even gun licences for all they knew. This time, Hillary had caught him bang to rights with a stack of falsified papers destined for illegal immigrants, but his barrister had come up with a glitch in the arresting officer’s procedure, and now it looked as if Gordon was going to walk.
‘Tough luck, guv,’ Tommy commiserated quietly.
Hillary sighed an acknowledgement, but was already shrugging out of her coat and slinging it across the back of her chair. Across the way, the door to DCI ‘Mel’ Philip Mallow’s office remained firmly closed, and she wondered if her immediate superior, and friend for the last twenty-odd years or so, was even in yet. If he wasn’t, it served the silly sod right.
The whole station knew that the twice-divorced DCI Mellow Mallow and her sergeant, Janine Tyler, were all but shacked up together. And rumour also had it that it was this naughty relationship that had helped to scupper Mel’s chances for a superintendency when their current boss, Marcus Donleavy, had been promoted.
Way back in January, Marcus was supposed to have been booted upstairs, but due to some snafu or other, it was only now happening. And Hillary wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t wondered if her own chances of steeping into Mel’s shoes, as a new detective chief inspector, might just have been in the offing.
But there’d been serious obstacles to that happening back then. Ronnie, the bastard, had died in a car crash, and with his death had come serious allegations of corruption. Corruption,
moreover, that had been subsequently investigated and corroborated. Worse still, the internal investigation team had had her firmly in their sights too, for a while. But, long since separated from Ronnie, Hillary had had nothing to do with his animal parts smuggling operation, as the investigation had finally proved. It had hardly been auspicious for her promotion chances though, had she not also solved a particularly nasty murder case going on at the same time.
Now, of course, she’d long since put all thoughts of a promotion behind her. Mel wasn’t getting booted up, so there was no opening for a DCI slot.
Hillary gave a mental shrug and put all thoughts of Mel to one side. No doubt he knew as well as everyone else what a mess he’d made of things, and she knew that her friend was nothing if not ambitious. So why was he still, after nearly a year, sticking to his relationship with the unsuitable Janine Tyler?
And speak of the devil, Hillary thought wryly, smiling inwardly as she watched DS Tyler swing through the door. In truth, there was no real mystery as regards Mel Mallow’s ongoing relationship with his junior officer. Janine was almost the archetypal blonde bombshell. She was young, not yet twenty-seven, and had long, pale-blonde hair, the almost
obligatory
blue eyes, and a slim, athletic build that was the envy of many.
Hillary had not been best pleased when she’d first learned of their affair. Janine, as a humble sergeant, was supposed to answer directly to Hillary, who answered to Mel, who answered to Donleavy, and so on, up the food chain. The thing was, Janine tended to think that having the DCI’s ear (as well as every other part of him) circumnavigated Hillary’s part in the link. An error that had caused some friction between the two women in the past. Now, though, things seemed a bit more settled, although Hillary was well aware that Janine would have preferred to work with another DI.
But that was life for you. Give it half a chance, and it would bite you in the arse.
‘Janine,’ Hillary greeted pleasantly, as her pretty blonde sergeant settled herself down at her desk. ‘Making any headway with the warehouse fire?’
‘Arson, boss, clear as day,’ Janine said, and for a while, they went over her previous day’s interview with the fire marshal, the witnesses, and the warehouse owner.
Tommy, busy typing up his notes on his own cases, paused momentarily when Frank Ross, reeking of cigarettes and booze, shuffled by. The poisoned cherub, as he was universally known behind his back – and sometimes to his face – was looking even more hung over than usual. He slumped down at his desk and began to initial pages on a report, which even Tommy could see he was barely making a pretence of reading. The sooner Ross took early retirement the better. It was a sentiment unanimously held at Kidlington nick, from the desk sergeant up to the chief constable. Only Frank Ross never seemed in the mood to oblige.
Hillary, going through her own paperwork with rather more diligence, finally took a break after an hour or so to open and read her mail.
There were the usual suspects of bills, flyers and promises of a change of lifestyle courtesy of mail-order catalogue
subscriptions
, and these were quickly binned or set aside. But Hillary felt her heart jump as she recognized the familiar logo on the last envelope. It was from her solicitor, Graham Vaughan, an old crony from years back. She sighed and opened it, and read the short, neat letter with a sinking heart.
Over six months ago, just when she’d thought the house was going to be freed up after probate, and the internal
investigation
team had finally cleared her name, she’d had a letter from the Endangered Species Animal Army (or ESAA for short) informing her that they were suing her for possession of the house.
Their argument was simple. Ronnie Greene had made his money via the illegal trade in endangered species. Ergo, they considered that they had a moral and legal right to seize his assets to help fund their own fight on behalf of endangered
animals. It had sounded all well and good, but Ronnie had very carefully hidden his ill-gotten gains, and not even the police team that had uncovered so many of his scams had been able to find it. That had left ESAA with only one real asset to go for: Ronnie’s house.
Her
house, dammit.
So far, Graham had been doing everything to stall them and keep the process from getting to court. His letter today informed her that ESAA, in the form of the Chairman of the Oxford branch, had finally agreed to a face-to-face meeting with Hillary and Graham the day after tomorrow to see if they couldn’t come to terms.
That promised to be a real barrel of laughs.
Hillary shoved the letter, along with the bills, back into her bag, and looked up as Mel Mallow finally made it in. He looked, as ever, as if he’d just stepped out of the portals of a male modelling agency.
Janine, she noticed, watched him with a proprietorial air that made Hillary wonder uneasily if wedding bells might not be in the air. If so, Janine was almost certain to be moved to another division, which meant Hillary would have to break in another sergeant: a not totally unpleasant thought.
In his office, Mel unloosened his grey silk tie and undid his gold and onyx cufflinks. He settled down with a cup of his own-brew coffee, made from the coffee machine he kept permanently in his office, and went over his immediate plans, now that the new super was due to arrive today.
No two ways about it, when he’d first learned that Marcus was being booted upstairs and was being replaced by some high-flyer from the Met, he’d been as sick as a dog. Even more so when Donleavy, never one to pull his punches, had come straight out and told him that part of the reason he’d been overlooked for the promotion, had been down to the situation with Janine Tyler.
Of course, Mel knew that his previous two divorces had never sat well with the top brass. Even though practically
everyone else over the age of thirty was divorced nowadays, the fact that he’d got two such divorces behind him was considered to be particularly careless on his part. But it was hardly his fault.
He’d made the classic mistake of marrying too young to begin with, a problem that had been quickly and more or less painlessly resolved by a mutual, and largely amicable divorce, less than two years later. And it wasn’t as if he’d done anything stupid after that. He hadn’t rushed into another marriage, nor made the same mistakes twice. In fact, his second marriage, to a very wealthy widow, had had the brass purring. Mel and his new wife had quickly produced a son, and for over ten, good, solid years, everything had been hunky-dory. It had been his wife who’d become restless, who’d said that she couldn’t take to life in a back-water place like Kidlington, and who’d yearned to get back to London and her gallery-owning, Sloane-ranger friends. What had he been supposed to do? Contest the divorce? Hardly. As it was, he’d come out of it very nicely indeed. For once, it had been the male partner who’d come up trumps in the financial quagmire that was a modern divorce court. He now had a detached, des res. in The Moors area of Kidlington, and no alimony payments to make, since his first wife had also since remarried.
It was not as if he was a Casanova, for Pete’s sake. OK, so Janine was younger than him by twelve years or so – and was blonde and beautiful and a mere sergeant. His worst sin, he knew, had been in poaching in his own back yard. But he wasn’t a monk. He was damned if he was going to give her up.
Yet he wanted to rise high, if only to show his second wife a thing or two, and for the boy’s sake, too, of course. It did a lad good to have a father to be proud of. And yes, he could admit it to himself, he’d always rather fancied himself as top brass. He might look and dress the part of a sucessful
middle-class
executive-type now, but lurking in the back of his mind were memories of his extremely humble beginnings. To make matters worse, Janine was constantly hinting at wanting to move into his house, and the fact that he was always pushing
back to avoid just such an event happening, was surely a clue that something was not right in the house of Mellow Mallow.
Time to get to work. He sighed and picked up the dossier detailing the possible murder of one Jean Radcliffe. A
middle-aged
, single woman, who might (or might not) have been bumped off by her married, harried and much poorer sister, who was the sole recipient of her sister’s quarter-of-million life insurance policy. As a trained nurse, she would know several fairly clever ways of getting away with murder. An unusually unclear pathology report wasn’t helping matters. The CPS was dithering.
But he simply couldn’t concentrate.
He glanced at the clock and wondered when Superintendent Jerome Raleigh would get here. Jerome Raleigh. Mel gave a mental snort. Now what the hell kind of a name was
that
anyway? Detective Superintendent Jerome Raleigh. He sounded more like a character out of one of those ridiculous romantic novels. Rome Raleigh, the tall, dark and handsome dashing police superintendent.
