Still Waters (13 page)

‘I could have shifted the whole corpse, no sweat. So why did just a few fingers…? Have they got the rest out yet?’ She could hear the effort in the question – he was desperate to return to normality, wasn’t he? But maybe he’d never be able to return to diving again. At least, not until he’d had a huge amount of therapy.

‘Yes. In some sort of plastic cradle-cum-stretcher thing – I’m sure you know the right term, Roo. They anchored her to it and then shoved the lot in a big polybag the fire service provided.’

He was silent.

Fran wanted to say all sorts of comforting rubbish, but waited, still holding his hands.

‘What did I think I was doing?’ He gulped convulsively. ‘I emptied my mask in the rezzer, for goodness’ sake. After I threw up.’

‘That’s it. Nice deep breaths through your mouth…What were you doing? Not choking to death, thank God. It’ll all be sorted out. The water people will deal with everything.’ She very much hoped so, as one intimately involved with the quality of the water round here.

‘Everything. Christ, no! Oh, God!’ He covered his face, but
then pulled his hands away again. ‘Fran, will it ever go away?’

More tears coursed down his face. She heard them splatter on the tin foil.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly, passing him tissues. ‘Yes, I promise you it will.’ Better to make a lying promise than to upset him with the truth. She put her arms round him and held him tighter.

She left Roo in A&E at William Harvey, Ashford, calling round herself to the section in Maidstone nick where Kanga was currently on light duties. Half of her had wanted to snap with some exasperation that a police station was no place for a woman in Kanga’s condition, but she told herself off for being old-fashioned about pregnancy, for having views derived from male cops of the old school who made even period pains the butt of their doubtful humour. The other half wanted to smile at the sight of a young woman waddling determinedly round the office, more like a penguin than like a marsupial.

She briefed the duty FME, but made sure he was only hanging round in the wings, as it were. Then she ejected the resident sergeant from his little office and commandeered it for her own use, summoning a bemused Kanga, whom she seated comfortably. Since she was still flourishing her clipboard, she hoped to give the impression that the interview was routine, and not set off panic where none was necessary. After all, there was no earthly reason why Kanga should associate her with any problem with Roo.

But then she had to break it to this cheery young woman that certainly for weeks, probably for months and possibly even for years, she was going to have to mother not just her
newborn baby but also the strapping man she’d waved goodbye to that morning. At least she could promise her that every expert going in post-traumatic stress would be consulted, that every aspect of best practice care would be extended to him. But while he might soon be ready to return to some sort of role in the police service, he might never rid his nightmares of that particular sight.

‘Roo is perfectly fine, Kanga, I promise you.

Kanga’s eyes widened in fear. ‘But—?’

‘But there was an incident in a dive he was doing about an hour ago.’

‘Incident?’

How stupid of her to have used the word everyone knew was synonymous with a disaster! She said quickly, ‘He found a body – somewhat decayed. Not a nice thing to find when all you can think about is your new baby and your wife’s health. He was a bit upset, so I packed him off to A&E. Just for a check-up – you know me!’

Kanga didn’t look convinced by this confession of bossiness.

Fran came round the desk, squatted beside her and took her hand. ‘I promise you he’s not injured in any way. He’s just had an unpleasant experience. In the old days we’d have sent him down to the pub and told him to drink himself silly and think no more about it. It’s not like that these days.’

‘So—?’

‘He’s still in A&E, Kanga,’ Fran said, ‘but I doubt if they’ll want to keep him in. Now, I’m going to get one of your mates to run you home to pick up some warm things for him and I’ll clear some compassionate leave for both of you – both, you understand? Not just him. No arguments. You’ve got your
blood pressure to think about, he tells me, and it wouldn’t do it any good at all if you’re toiling away here worrying about him being on his own at home.’

The tightening about Kanga’s mouth and eyes suggested she knew all the implications without being told. But her question was quite at odds with her grip on Fran’s hand. ‘Will he be well enough to paint the nursery, do you think?’ She managed a smile meant to be cheerfully ironic but slipping painfully into distress.

Fran stroked the girl’s hair back. ‘I should imagine there’s no finer therapy. But he’ll have to be debriefed, I’m afraid. We’ll need to know exactly where he found the corpse and anything else he noticed. It’ll all be done under the supervision of the shrinks, I promise.’ Was the young woman convinced? Fran released her hand the better to heave herself to her feet, using the desk to assist her.

‘I was in the middle of—’

‘Go, Kanga! I told you, I’ll sort everything here.’

Which didn’t take long, Kanga’s sergeant knowing when simple obedience was best. As for Human Resources, they generally found themselves ready to concede defeat when Fran stuck her oar in. But she must remember to tell Cosmo – she didn’t want to get his back up.

Surprising herself at her consideration she sank back behind the desk with a sigh. God, she was tired. And hungry, in whichever order.

‘Are you all right, ma’am?’ Someone was looming over her.

A hard blink and a stare confirmed it was the FME, a man of about her own age, disappointed, perhaps, that his skills had not been called upon to minister to Kanga.

‘I’m fine. Had a busy day, that’s all.’

‘And quite a long one. You know it’s nearly five?’

‘What?’ she squeaked. ‘No, lunchtime, surely.’ Not that she wanted to eat.

He shook his head emphatically.

‘Well, I’ll go to the bottom of our stairs, as one of my old sergeants used to say. I’d better head back to HQ, hadn’t I?’

‘Want a coffee before you go?’

‘Caffeine at this time of day? I’d never sleep, doc.’

‘Nor would I,’ he conceded, withdrawing with a smile.

Would poor Roo? With or without caffeine?

‘As crime scenes go, the reservoir and its environs are pretty corrupt, but that won’t stop the entire site being cordoned off for the forensic scientists to have a nose round and then the old fingertip search going ahead,’ Fran told Mark over a quick bite in the canteen. ‘We’ve already got Janine Roper’s DNA on record, of course, so if the body is hers the lab should be able to ID her pretty soon. I’ve managed to get the PM set up for tomorrow morning.’

‘Will you want to be involved with that? Didn’t you see enough—?’ Not unreasonably he sounded disbelieving.

‘You bet I want to be there.’ She firmly suppressed the images that still floated like the detached skin before her inner eye. ‘I shall go straight to the hospital. Apart from anything else, Ashford’s a reasonable distance from HQ. If Gates is back I don’t want him impeding me.’

From the quality of Mark’s silence, she guessed immediately there was something wrong.

‘I found a memo addressed to the chief on my desk this morning, copied to me anonymously,’ he said at last. ‘Look,
perhaps we should talk about this in my office.’

‘Don’t worry – I shan’t have a tantrum and I need to get back to the incident room in ten minutes. Let me guess: Gates has formally requested my return to Uniform? Knowing my opinion? The bastard. When I’m in the middle of a full-scale murder inquiry. Though I suppose if he sent the memo to the chief yesterday he wouldn’t know that, would he? What will you do?’

He met her eye. ‘There’s only one thing for it – you’ll have to tackle the chief himself. I don’t think I can, since I wasn’t supposed to get the memo.’

‘But surely at the very least you should have been consulted? Crime’s not his purview! Only professional standards, corporate communications, and organisation and development. Not to mention,’ she added, relishing the polysyllabics, ‘change management, strategic planning, delivering best value and service improvement, service inspection and performance analysis. Crime’s still
your
bailiwick.’

He raised a warning finger as her voice rose. ‘But he outranks me.’

‘This is a classic case of empire-building at someone else’s expense! Is he hoping to piss you off so much you retire too?’

‘I’m not sure he wants to be rid of you. Or me, to do him justice. The thing is, you’re popular and you’re bright and hard-working, so he may want to keep you on his bloody committees.’

‘I shall have to do something really bad, then, won’t I? Like forget to turn up. Or fall asleep and snore.’ She didn’t joke any more. ‘OK, the moment the chief gets back I shall be knocking on his door. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual, as far
as I’m concerned. After all, neither of us has heard the news officially. Not from Gates’ mouth. Only from that memo. I wonder who leaked it…’

‘One of your fans, sweetheart, trusting me to do the decent thing. Actually, perhaps it’s no bad thing that Gates is off sick – if he’d been in the building I’d have shoved his damned note down his ungrateful little throat.’

‘It’s not his ingratitude that worries me,’ Fran protested, ‘but his incompetence and lousy priorities. I wonder what’s the matter with him.’

‘You mean in general or specifically?’ He shook his head, falling silent, as if trying to find a neutral topic. At last he said, ‘I wonder how long it’ll take them to flush out the reservoir.’

‘Long enough. But how they’ll ever get it clean enough, after all that’s gone into it—’ To her horror she found herself shuddering. Maybe she’d shudder every time she thought of it.

He leant forward and clasped her hands.

‘No, don’t be kind or I shall cry. Lord, look at the time – I must be off. Don’t wait for me. I can pick up a pound car and come home when I’ve done all I can here.’ Disengaging her hands, she pushed away from the table.

He shook his head firmly. ‘I’ve got plenty of reading here to catch up on. Just give me a bell when you’re ready.’

And if that wasn’t enough, he stood up too, and in full view of all their colleagues gave her a kiss and a hug. There could be no doubt, then, to whose mast he was nailing his colours.

According to plan, Friday morning saw Fran heading straight to Ashford and the William Harvey Hospital, to watch the post-mortem of what the media had promptly dubbed the Lady in the Lake and to discuss the findings with the new
pathologist, about whom she knew nothing except the name, Dr Harris.

Dr Millward, Harris’s predecessor, and Fran had been more or less contemporaries. Millward had had his own special way of involving the police presence at post-mortems, which consisted of getting the poor sap who was greenest to hold a vital instrument – worse, a vital organ – for him while he probed. His commentaries were equally idiosyncratic, full of outrageous blasphemy and a total denigration of the corpse’s previous lifestyle. Whether the bile within had matched the bile he so constantly vented, or for some other reason, Millward had suddenly succumbed to cancer, from diagnosis to death in two short weeks. Fran rather thought he’d known exactly what he was suffering from and had deliberately avoided seeking assistance – not a cure, since he’d know all too well that there was none available.

Fran tapped at the half-open door of his replacement’s office. She found a young woman attractive enough to star in that TV series about pathologists, wearing her wellies as if they were Jimmy Choos and her overalls as if they were – Fran had forgotten who was supposed to be the latest designer for the young and size eight.

Harris’s smile included a couple of dimples and immaculate teeth. Fran prepared to hate her.

‘Detective Chief Superintendent Harman? Come in. I’m Iona.’

‘Fran.’ They shook hands.

‘Such a pain of a first name,’ the younger woman said with a rueful smile.

Fran was taken aback, but smiled encouragingly.

‘People always want to add something to it, instead of my
surname. I own a bicycle; I own a car; I own a scalpel. Sometimes I think of abbreviating it to Ion, with a short O.’

‘Which gives just as many opportunities for merry quips, I should think,’ Fran said, starting, after all, to warm to her, ‘beginning with filings. I shortened mine to Fran because so many people expected a male Francis to turn up and were disappointed when it was a female Frances.’

Issues of nomenclature out of the way, Fran and Iona turned to greet the new arrival, DCI Dan Coveney, who had just arrived, puffing slightly from the stairs.

‘Sorry. It’s been one of those mornings. First some prat had blocked me in, then the traffic was snarled up and then there were no parking slots left. Would anyone care for a mint? I know you always laugh,’ he told Dr Harris, who had rather ostentatiously refused one, ‘but I can’t watch a PM without my peppermint!’ He gave a nervous laugh.

Fran believed him, accepting one herself while they donned their protective finery.

At last Iona revealed their corpse, in all its pathetic glory. Normally Dan would have made all the notes the police considered necessary; today Fran augmented his with her own, jotting as Iona and her technician recorded each relevant observation.

‘Do you have any ID on her yet?’ Iona asked.

Dan jumped in. ‘We’re routinely checking the MisPer records,’ he said. ‘And running a DNA check. But the guv’nor here thinks she recognises the lady.’

‘
Lady!
’ Iona repeated scathingly. She seemed to think there was no need to explain why the word had offended her.

Fran, who rarely used it herself, said as if there had been no interruption, ‘There’s a chance she might be one Janine Roper,
whose husband is currently in Maidstone jail for her murder. Would two to three years ago fit your time frame?’

‘Possibly. It depends on water and air temperature and so on.’

‘I’m sorry – I could have nipped into HQ first for a photo to show you.’ But she might have met the dreaded Gates.

Iona waved aside the apology; clearly such old-fashioned things were irrelevant in her hi-tech world.

‘I’m hoping for an ID from her hubby,’ Dan put in.

Even Fran winced.

Iona stared. ‘Fucking hell! You want him to look at her? Like this?’

‘It might just provoke him into confessing,’ Fran said, ‘horrible though it would be. In any case, we’ve not been able to run to earth any relatives at all, despite all my team’s efforts last night. He’ll be cuffed and brought here and cuffed and taken away.’ And God knew what effect it would have on the poor grey little man.

‘But if he didn’t do it, think of the psychological trauma! Worse than being in jail for a crime he didn’t commit!’

Fran nodded. Such an opinion from someone used to dealing in death must merit consideration.

‘But shocking him into a confession would be nice,’ Dan urged.

Somehow his enthusiasm made Fran’s diminish. ‘I’m going to have to do it, I’m afraid.’

‘You’ll do it yourself?’

Fran wasn’t sure of the drift of the young woman’s question. ‘Yes. With a younger colleague who seems to have a rapport with Roper,’ she added, lying through her teeth. If either of them had had a rapport with Roper, she thought it
was herself. ‘You see, you can get rusty, after being deskbound. And every month psychologists come up with new techniques, new ideas for the best location for interviews, that sort of thing. Even the colour of the walls, would you believe. Amazing. And I wouldn’t want to let anyone down because I’m out of date.’

It was clear none of this pleased Dan, who had no doubt registered that he was being pre-empted. So he made a little bid for power on his own account. ‘Doctorarris,’ he said, exposing another problem with her name the young woman was no doubt also aware of, ‘you’re probably more au fait with fashion than I am. Could you give a fair approximation of the date of her clothes?’

‘I’m into Oxfam chic.’ It was an unnecessarily firm put-down.

What was the history here? She’d never found anything actively to dislike in Coveney, and had a very favourable impression of the young woman, but there was certainly a problem. It had better not interfere with their work together.

Fran said, ‘I’d have thought the shoes might be helpful, Dan. Manufacturers change styles regularly, don’t they? Especially fashion shoes like those.’ Would she or Iona ever have sported such an extreme pair? Heels four inches high? Ankle-straps? And in lipstick red? And why had her killer not removed them?

They were stowed in an evidence bag.

‘Clothes by Dorothy Perkins and Next,’ Iona said. ‘But – my goodness! – lingerie by Agent Provocateur. A set! What a mismatch, eh, Fran?’

Fran nodded.

‘As a matter of fact, my mother always used to make my
sisters put on their good undies when they went out in case they were run over. It didn’t matter about the top clothes because they’d be ruined anyway,’ Coveney said.

‘But these aren’t just good, they’re very expensive and very sexy,’ Iona said.

‘What about you, Dan?’ Fran asked idly, but registering Iona’s point. What did such underwear say about a classroom assistant whose hobby was reading? Or not reading, if Roper was to be believed.

‘In point of fact, Mum always confiscated my clothes at the end of every day, guv, or I’d have worn them till I became a public health risk.’

It was always like this at a PM. The coppers nattered rubbish, anything to distract themselves while the professionals got on with the business of cutting and sawing and taking intimate swabs. Nonetheless, at the end of the session, it would be amazing how much information had found its way into police notebooks.

Afterwards, in her office, when they were all back in civvies, Iona offered tea and a packet of chocolate digestives.

‘I don’t mind if I do,’ Coveney said, taking two.

Fran limited herself to one, but noted that Iona took none; even someone as young and lithe as she wouldn’t stay that way if she celebrated the completion of each examination with calories. And why celebrate anyway, if corpses were your job?

‘I know you’ll give a most detailed report full of the appropriate jargon,’ Fran said, ‘and I’m sure you and Dan will know exactly what it means.’ And no doubt the wordier it was the more Coveney would enjoy it. ‘But for ages I’ve been trapped behind the biggest mound of paperwork in the
Western world, and could do with a nice everywoman version.’

‘It’s been on the tip of my tongue to ask you what brought you here, guv,’ Dan put in. ‘Someone your level. I expected you to take an overview of the case, not to hobnob with corpses.’

‘Since I was there when they found her, I thought I’d take a personal interest. It sure as hell beats a seminar on the delivery of best value and service improvement,’ she added conspiratorially.

‘It comes to something when you’d rather watch a stinking corpse getting cut about than go to a meeting,’ Dan grunted. ‘Mind you, I think you might be right, the number they lumber us with. And what gets me is it’s all change Tuesday, change again Wednesday.’

Fran threw her head back and laughed. ‘Believe it or not, that’s a very useful contribution to the project I’m working on for the new DCC. Mind if I quote you? It’s all right, Dan, not by name! Now,’ she added with a brisk smile, ‘since I’m out of touch with all this hands-on stuff, can I just check I’ve got everything right?’

Iona nodded, glancing with much more interest at her watch. Another punter in the lab? Or a lunch date? Fran suspected the latter. Well, she would just have to hang on three minutes: after all, if you were as young and lovely as Iona, it was more than likely that your lover would be patient.

Fran read through her jottings. ‘About thirty-five. No children. Good health. Height, five-five. Weight, about a hundred and thirty pounds. Throttled. And then, judging from the verdigris marks on her skin and the deep indentations in her flesh, trussed with electric wire and slung up above the waterline.’

‘Nicely refrigerated up there on that concrete beam, but not frozen,’ Dan put in.

‘So eventually the wire corroded and she plopped down into the reservoir and started polluting it. Now, Iona, if your report contains anything really viciously technical, you’ll put a little footnote for me – OK?’