Splinter the Silence (2 page)

After that, it had been easy. Back to hers after the staff had gone home. Into the garage. Wrist cuffed to the armrest to make it look like she was determined not to change her mind. Hose from the exhaust into the car. The book on the seat beside her, a reminder to himself of the roots of what he was doing. He could have changed his mind at any time, could have pardoned her. But what would have been the use of that? Even if she’d changed her ways, it wouldn’t change anything. He took one last look and closed the garage door.

In the morning, they found her.

2

C
arol Jordan swirled the last half-inch of port around her glass and thought almost wistfully of murder. To the casual observer, she hoped it looked as if she was fiddling with the stem of her glass. In fact, her grip was so tight she feared it might snap in her fingers. The man on her left, who didn’t
look
like someone you’d want to punch, leaned forward to make his point more forcefully.

‘It’s absolutely not hard to find high net worth individuals if you target your efforts carefully,’ he said.

And once again, like clockwork, she wanted to punch his narrow complacent face, to feel that sharp nose crunch against her fist, to see the look of utter shock widen his little piggy eyes.

Instead, she knocked back the last of her drink and pushed her empty glass towards her generous host, who casually poured another liberal slug of Dow’s 2007. The man on her left had already pronounced it ‘probably the best port Dow has ever produced’, as he’d washed down another chunk of Stilton. She didn’t know enough about port to argue but she’d desperately wanted to.

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Carol muttered again, trying not to sound ungraciously mutinous. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been at a dinner party of this formality but she hadn’t forgotten the obligations imposed by accepting an invitation to break bread. They’d been drilled into her at her mother’s table. Smile, nod, agree, stay away from politics and never ever start a row.

Fortunately for the rest of the company, years of serving as a senior police officer had reinforced her mother’s injunctions against politics at the dinner table. When your budget and the very existence of your team was dependent on the largesse of politicians, you soon learned not to express an opinion that might come back to bite you in the neck with all the philanthropy of a vampire. Over the years, Carol had carefully cultivated the art of not holding controversial views lest she let something slip at the wrong moment. She left that to the junior members of her team, who more than made up for her reticence.

Not that there had been many occasions like this during her career as the boss of an elite murder squad. The demands of the job had consumed her, eating up far more than the forty hours a week she was contracted to provide. Carol hoarded the leftover time for things she wanted to do. Like sleep. Not spend endless hours at somebody else’s table listening to obnoxious rich bastards holding forth about the iniquities of whoever they thought stood between them and their next million.

But now she had nothing but leftover time. The career she’d defined herself by was over. At moments like this, she had to remind herself that had been her own choice. She could have been Detective Chief Inspector Jordan yet. But she had chosen to be plain Carol Jordan; just another incomer to a rural Yorkshire valley that had been remorselessly invaded by people who had no relationship to the landscape that surrounded them except that they liked it better than the suburbia they’d left behind.

Her host, George Nicholas, was an exception. His family had built the big Georgian manor at the head of the valley and lived in it continuously for a shade over two hundred years. His was the sort of background of comfortable privilege Carol was inclined to despise. On their first meeting, she’d taken one look at his scrubbed pink skin, his patrician profile and an outfit that could have come straight from a catalogue featuring country gentlemen’s apparel and determined to distrust and dislike him. But she’d eventually been disarmed by the unflappable charm that met her hostility head on and chose to ignore it. That and the bloody dogs.

Later, she’d discovered the reason he believed he’d be the last of his line to inhabit the manor. He’d been widowed three years before when his wife had died in a road accident. He wore his grief lightly but for someone as well schooled in trauma as Carol, it was a clear and present pain.

Carol cleared her throat and pushed back from the table. ‘I had better be going, George,’ she said. Not a slur or a hesitation to betray the amount she’d had to drink.

The laughter lines round his eyes disappeared along with the smile the woman next to him had provoked with an ironic aside Carol had only half-heard. ‘Must you?’ He sounded disappointed. She couldn’t blame him. He’d been trying for weeks to persuade her to come over for a meal. And here she was, bailing out at the first opportunity. ‘We’ve not even had coffee yet.’

Carol aimed for rueful. ‘Flash is still a bit young to be left on her own for too long.’

He mirrored her regret with a downward twist of his mouth. ‘Hoist by my own petard.’

‘Who’s Flash?’ The question came from an older man further down the table whose meaty red face and several chins made him look like one of the cheerier illustrations from Dickens.

‘Carol kindly took on one of Jess’s pups,’ George said, the genial host again. ‘One that’s scared of sheep.’

‘Scared of sheep?’ The Pickwickian questioner looked as incredulous as he sounded.

‘It happens from time to time,’ George said mildly. ‘All a ewe has to do is bleat and Flash puts her tail between her legs and runs. Carol saved the dog from redundancy.’

‘And she’s a great companion,’ Carol said. ‘But she’s not much more than a pup. And like all collies, she doesn’t like being on her own for great chunks of time. So I ought to get back.’

The man she wanted to punch snorted. ‘Your dog sounds more tyrannical than our babysitter. And that’s saying something.’

‘Not at all, Charlie,’ George said. ‘Carol’s quite right. You treat a pup reasonably and you end up with the best kind of dog.’ He smiled, his dark eyes genial. ‘I’ll get Jackie to run you home. You can pick your car up when you’re out with Flash in the morning.’

Carol frowned. So he had been paying attention to how much she’d put away. The thought angered her. What she drank was her business. Nobody could be expected to endure what she had without some sort of support system. She knew she was in control of the drink, not the other way round, in spite of what anyone else might think. Or any one person in particular.

She pushed that thought away and forced a casual tone into her voice. ‘No need. Jackie’s got enough to do in the kitchen. I’m fine to drive.’

The man on her left made a faintly derisive noise. ‘I’ll get my driver to take you,’ he said with a condescending pat to her hand.

Carol stood up, perfectly steady. ‘That’s very kind, but there’s no need. It’s only a couple of miles down the road. It’s quiet as the grave at this time of night.’ She spoke with the authority of a woman who has grown accustomed to being deferred to.

George hastily got to his feet, lips pursed. ‘I’ll see you to your car,’ he said with his invariable politeness.

‘Lovely to meet you all,’ Carol lied, smiling her way round the table with its late-night chaos of crystal and silver, china and cheeseboard. Eight people she’d never have to see again, if she was lucky. Eight people probably breathing a sigh of relief that the square peg was leaving the round hole. George opened the dining room door and stood back to let her precede him into the stone-flagged hall. The subtle lighting made the elderly rugs glow; or perhaps that was the wine, Carol thought as she walked to the broad front door.

George paused in the porch, gauging the coats hanging from the guest pegs. He extended a hand towards a long black cashmere, then stopped, casting a smile over his shoulder towards her. ‘The Barbour, yes?’

Carol felt a stab of embarrassment. She’d deliberately chosen her dog-walking jacket, stubbornly refusing to completely dress up for something she didn’t want to do. And now it felt like a deliberate insult to a man who had only ever shown her kindness and a friendly face. ‘It matches the Land Rover rather than the dress,’ she said, gesturing at the black silk jersey sheath that fitted her better than it used to. She was a different shape from the woman who had bought it; hard physical work had broadened her shoulders and reconfigured her hips and thighs.

He handed her into the waxed coat. ‘I rather like the contrast,’ he said. She couldn’t see his face but she could hear the smile in his voice. ‘Thank you for coming, Carol. I hope it wasn’t too much of an ordeal. Next time, I promise you a more relaxed evening. A quiet kitchen supper, perhaps?’

‘I’m amazed at your persistence.’ She turned to face him, her grey eyes meeting his. ‘I’d have given up on me long before this.’

‘Secret of my success, persistence. I was never the brightest or the best in my cohort but I learned that if I stuck with things, the outcome was generally acceptable. It’s how I got Diana to marry me.’ He opened the door and a shiver of chill air crept over them. ‘And speaking of persistence – are you determined to drive? It’s no problem at all to have Jackie drop you off.’

‘I’m fine, George. Really.’ She stepped on to the frosted gravel and crunched her way across, grateful for the closeness of his arm when her unfamiliar high heels unsteadied her a couple of yards from the vehicle. ‘God, it’s been so long since I wore these shoes,’ she said with a forced laugh.

‘One of the many reasons I’m grateful for being a bloke.’ George took a step backwards as she opened the Land Rover door and swung herself up into the high seat. ‘Do be careful. Maybe see you on the hill tomorrow?’

‘Probably. Thanks again for a lovely dinner.’ She slammed the heavy door closed and gunned the noisy diesel into life. There was a faint blur of frost on the windscreen but a couple of swipes of the wipers took care of it. With the fan on full to keep the windscreen clear, Carol eased the gearstick out of neutral and set off down the drive. George’s mention of his late wife – killed in an accident involving a drunk driver – felt like a reproach for her decision to get behind the wheel after a few glasses of wine. But she felt absolutely fine, in complete control of her reactions and responses. Besides, it was less than three miles. And she was desperate to escape.

God, what a night. If they hadn’t been such a bunch of tossers, she’d have been ashamed of being such a crap guest. As it was, she was dismayed at how poorly she’d repaid George’s generosity. She’d lost the knack of being with people. Once upon a time, she’d been close enough to one man to tease him constantly about his lack of his social graces. Now she’d turned into him.

She swung out of the drive on to the narrow ribbon of road that stretched between George Nicholas’s manor house and the stone barn she’d spent the past months stripping to its bare bones and rebuilding according to her own distinct vision. She’d peeled away everything that might provoke memories, but its history haunted her nevertheless.

The headlights bleached the hedgerows of colour and she felt relief as she recognised the markers that told her she was closing in on home. The crooked stump of the dead oak; the stile and the fingerpost for the footpath; the dirty yellow plastic grit bin, there to make up for the fact that the council were never going to grit a road so insignificant it didn’t even have a white line up the middle.

Then, all at once, a different kind of marker. The kind that’s never good news. In her rear-view mirror, a disco wash of blue lights.

3

C
hief Constable James Blake was not a naturally patient man. Over the years, as he’d clawed his way to the top job, he’d forced himself to cultivate the appearance of patience. He’d imagined that once he was running the show, he could push the pace to match his desire. To his chagrin it hadn’t worked out that way during his first command in the West Country. Trying to provoke a sense of urgency among his officers had been, as he often told his wife, like pushing clotted cream uphill. He’d put it down to the general sense that everything ran slower down there. So Blake determined to bite the bullet and take the first chance he had at a job somewhere they knew how to get out of second gear.

Bradfield Metropolitan Police, he reckoned, would have to be up to speed to cope with policing a modern urban environment. It would be absolutely his sort of place. An edgy Northern city with a decent slice of serious and organised crime, perfect for him to make a lasting impression. One that would guarantee a fistful of executive directorships when he came to hang up the uniform. He’d convinced the interview panel, persuaded his family they’d love big-city life, and sailed into Bradfield, certain that he’d have things running with speed and efficiency in no time at all.

It didn’t help that he’d arrived simultaneously with government funding cuts. In his eyes that was no excuse for the dogged stubbornness he encountered at every level as he battled to run the force more effectively and efficiently. It never occurred to him that the reason most of his officers had so little respect for him was his lack of experience at the sharp end of the kind of policing that Bradfield demanded. Instead Blake blamed it on their urban Northern prejudices – he must be a clueless bumpkin because he’d come from the West Country. He was disappointed and, he had to admit at times, discouraged. Which was why he had come to this meeting filled with anticipation. A working dinner with a junior Home Office minister, a pair of his civil servants and a special advisor. That wasn’t something to be taken lightly, even if the special advisor was the retired chief constable who had preceded him at Bradfield. Blake didn’t reckon much to John Brandon – if he’d done his job properly, Blake’s task would have been a lot more straightforward.

Whatever they had in mind for him, nobody was in any hurry to get to the point. They’d been shut away in their private dining room for almost two hours, making their way through amuse-bouche, starter, sorbet, main course and dessert. The food had been abundant; luxurious, even. The wine, rather more sparing though no less good. The conversation had ranged widely around policing and politics, laced with entertaining anecdotes and a couple of mildly diverting indiscretions, but Blake remained no wiser as to why they were all there. His impatience ate away at him, as aggravating as indigestion.