The Cipher Garden (12 page)

The kitchen windows were open. Kirsty had developed a habit of skirting along the front of the building and past the windows on her way in to the restaurant. Sometimes she heard Oliver and Bel having a private conversation, nothing to do with problems at the wholesalers’ or the best place to buy strawberries this summer. It was fascinating to listen to people talk when they didn’t know you were there. All the more so when one was the man you yearned for. She might have been a forensic scientist, peering through a microscope for hints of disharmony. Oliver always seemed crazy about her, it had to be a sham. He was trapped like a fly on sticky paper. The relationship with Bel was going nowhere, had nowhere to go.

She trembled at the sound of his voice. A week ago, Veselka had caught her eavesdropping on him in the dining room and given her a mocking smirk, as if to say:
You haven’t a hope
. Jealous bitch, just because no matter how high she hitched her little black skirt, Oliver paid no attention.

Kirsty hesitated. Just my luck if Veselka comes out from round the side of the building right now, she thought. But she had to chance it. The opportunity to eavesdrop was irresistible.

‘A chief inspector?’ Oliver sounded awestruck.

‘A woman, too. Roz was saying, you know you’re getting older when even the chief inspectors are young and
attractive. She said this one was friendly enough, but single-minded. Not easy to fob off.’

‘Why would Roz want to fob her off?’

‘Darling, who wants to be reminded of a murder?’

Kirsty flinched. The casual intimacy of that
darling
was like being soaked with a wet sponge.

‘Besides, it was a thousand times worse for Roz. It was a low point in her life, what with Chris going missing as well. You can’t expect her to enjoy being questioned again by the police after all this time. Just because she found the body.’

The body
. Kirsty’s head swam. Her knees felt as though they were about to buckle. They were discussing her father. She clutched at the window sill, desperate not to lose her balance.

‘Why would they send out someone so senior?’

‘She’s in charge of investigating cold cases, sweetie. Roz said she recognised her from an interview on regional television a while back. They look into old crimes.’

‘Why Warren’s murder in particular?’

‘Look at it from their point of view. No one arrested or charged, let alone brought to trial. It was a failure, a black mark. Can you remember people being grief-stricken when he died? The police probably took it worse than anyone else.’

I always knew you were heartless
. This wasn’t just about Bel’s insensitivity. First the letters, now a detective asking questions. What was happening in Old Sawrey, why was the past coming back to haunt everyone?

‘They must have received some new information.’

‘Forensic stuff, maybe, it’s all the rage these days.’

‘I can’t believe that. Not after all this time. Remember, he was found out in the open air after a downpour. What
sort of forensic evidence would be left?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Roz tried to worm the details out of the Chief Inspector. But she was keeping her cards close to her chest.’

‘So what did she want to find out?’

‘Anything and everything. She even gave Chris the third degree when he turned up.’

‘But he wasn’t even around when Warren was killed.’

‘Exactly what Roz said!’

‘Sounds as though they don’t have any idea.’

‘We’ll be able to judge for ourselves soon, darling. Roz says the police are going to talk to everyone who knew Warren.’

‘Christ. Does Kirsty know?’

‘It might explain why she was looking so awful at lunchtime. I thought she was sickening for something.’

‘I’m sure she’s fine, it’s only…’

As Kirsty craned her neck to listen, Veselka appeared from round the side of the restaurant. Her round face was split by a grin of triumph. Making her look, Kirsty thought, like some kind of manic ventriloquist’s doll. With a gap between her front teeth as wide as the Kirkstone Pass. No wonder Oliver never gave her a second glance.

‘Everything OK, Kirsty?’ Her English was good, although the accent was hard work and she’d developed an irritating habit of making every sentence, however mundane, sound like a question. ‘You don’t look so happy?’

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘That’s good?’ Veselka giggled and blew a smoke ring into the soft summer air. ‘I was worried about you today? Wondering if you might have – what would you say, boyfriend trouble?’

‘So you didn’t know that Peter Flint and his partner’s widow were in a relationship?’

Nick Lowther shook his head. ‘News to me.’

It was half six and they’d bumped into each other in the car park behind the police station. Hannah fiddled with her keys, wondering how much to tell him, and then rebuked herself for having any reservations about candour. They’d known each other a long time and she trusted him as much as any man. Even Marc.

‘Who’s to say that they weren’t having it off at the time Warren was killed?’

‘They must have taken enormous care to cover their tracks, then. If Warren Howe had caught them in flagrante, it’d have been Peter Flint’s corpse that Roz stumbled over in her back garden.’

‘He was the jealous type?’

‘We never found any evidence of Tina giving him cause. She was the one who always had to turn a blind eye. Her line was that there’s more to a marriage than sexual fidelity.’

Les Bryant, reversing out towards the exit, pipped his horn and she mouthed
goodnight
. ‘Perhaps she was thinking about her own behaviour, as well as his.’

‘Warren always came back to her, that was what she cared about. Or so she said.’

‘He might not have been bothered if she was playing away. Sauce for the goose and all that.’

Nick made a sceptical noise. ‘Warren wouldn’t fret about inconsistency or double standards. And Peter shagging his missus wouldn’t have appealed to his sense of irony. No, he wouldn’t have rested until he’d taken revenge.’

‘Suppose Tina decided to kill him before he found out?’

He considered her. ‘You think she’s guilty?’

‘Not on the strength of an anonymous tip-off. But Roz Gleave gave me the impression she didn’t have much time for Tina.’

‘They were never close. Whereas she became friendly with Gail.’

‘Linz is due to see Gail tomorrow. She lives near Coniston these days. Peter had to buy her a cottage as part of the divorce settlement.’

‘I interviewed her myself.’

‘Yes, I saw the statement. Did I read between the lines correctly? You didn’t take a shine to her.’

‘She’s an ice maiden. Very different from Tina Howe. She might have lacked a cast-iron alibi for the murder, but there was nothing to link her to the scene. And there was the question of motive. It was in her interest for her husband’s business to flourish and Warren was an integral part of that business.’

‘It seems to be flourishing now.’

‘Good line to be in, isn’t it? Everyone fancies having their own little Eden outside the scullery door.’

‘True, but Gail must be worth a second look.’

‘Hope Linz gets further with her than I did. Mind you, if Peter’s swopped Gail for Tina, Roz will be seriously unimpressed. She’ll blame Tina for breaking up the marriage. In her book, that’s as serious a crime as murder.’

‘She’s certainly stayed true to her own husband.’

‘Yes.’ Nick shuffled his feet on the tarmac. ‘What did you make of them, then?’

Hannah chose her words. ‘I’d say they look after each other very well.’

‘Is that it?’

‘You know them better than me.’

‘Too well to regard them as suspects.’

‘And you assume I do?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Stop fencing, Nick. If you must know, I liked them, but I thought they were holding back on me. Why, God knows, but there’s something they don’t want me to find out They’re your friends, but I’m sorry, I can’t let that influence me. If they’re keeping a secret that’s relevant to this inquiry, you can bet I’ll find it out.’

He didn’t answer. The only question in her mind was whether he knew what the Gleaves’ secret was, but if he did, he wasn’t telling. For a few moments they looked at each other before he gave a curt nod and walked away towards his car.

As she watched his retreating back, an overwhelming sense of loss flooded over her. Whatever was going on in his mind, she was afraid that things between them would never be the same again.

When Kirsty arrived home after work she found her brother asleep on the sofa. The stench of drink and uninhibited flatulence hit her as she walked into the living room. His snoring reminded her of his motorbike’s snarl. He was still wearing his muddy trainers and you could see dirt on the cotton throw covering the back of the sofa. Mum would kill him when she found out, but right now she was nowhere to be seen. She would be over at Peter’s. Unbidden, an image slid into her mind of Peter Flint’s white, stringy body stretched out on top of her mother’s fleshy curves.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Of course! When she realised, despite herself, she couldn’t contain a blast of laughter.

Mum would insist on being on top, no question.

‘You all right?’

Marc had been sitting cross-legged on the carpet, checking a pile of dusty hardbacks for the tiny flaws that would diminish their value to serious collectors and sliding them into protective see-through jackets. Now that the task was completed, he was paying attention to her again. Not for the first time lately, Hannah felt she’d prefer him to remain buried in his own affairs.

She mumbled something non-committal and kept leafing through the latest guidelines for the conduct of staff appraisals that she’d spread over the table. The yearly box-ticking ritual would need to be conducted soon and she was dreading it. Everyone had to pay lip service to the benefits of performance management, but in private everyone ridiculed the whole process. How could you guarantee a level playing field, consistency and an absence of favouritism and score-settling across the whole county? The whole exercise was a time-consuming waste of energy that everyone except the people who mattered thought would be better devoted to real police work. Yet it was becoming ever more important, with scores affecting competency payments and pension benefits for officers at the top end of their salary scale. People like Nick.

‘I said, are you all right? You’ve hardly said a word all evening.’

Guilty, m’lud. She had a raging headache and had economised with effort over their meal, heating up a cheese and salami pizza and disinterring some fruit salad from the fridge. When it was made, she hadn’t felt like eating. The encounter with Nick in the car park kept nagging at her and she’d paid little attention as Marc recounted a triumph of Internet book dealing. Within hours of his advertising it, someone in Idaho had paid a
small fortune for a book by Cecil Waye that he’d found in the job lot from Ravenglass.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Things on my mind.’

‘For a change.’ Bitterness frosted his voice. ‘Work’s all you ever think about these days.’

She almost said: for God’s sake, stop whining like a caricature of a neglected housewife. Just in time, she bit back the words. For one thing, he was right.

‘I am sorry.’

She picked up the appraisal documentation and slung it into her briefcase. It could keep. She walked across the room and bent to kiss him on top of the head. He reached out for her wrists and when he pulled her down on to the floor beside him, she shrieked in mock protest whilst making no attempt to resist.

But even as he unfastened her blouse, even as he touched her nipples with his cool fingers, in the way that once had driven her to ecstasy, her thoughts began to stray. Marc wasn’t entirely right, it wasn’t just work that was bothering her. Filed away at the back of her brain was a suspicion so scary that she daren’t acknowledge it to herself, far less to Marc.

Kirsty turned up the volume of the television until her brother spluttered and stirred from his torpor. As he came round, he swore repeatedly and with uncharacteristically inventive imagery. For Kirsty, it was water off a duck’s back. Their father had been as bad.

‘And what the fuck’s that?’

On the screen, arrows were being fired at a young Chinese man wearing nothing but boxer shorts who was chained to a vast brick wall.

‘New programme.
Brothers from Hell
.’

‘You are so hilarious, move over Joan Rivers.’

‘Actually, it’s one of these endurance programmes. You know, how much can one human being be expected to cope with? Any day now they’ll start filming behind the scenes at The Heights.’

Sam snorted in derision. ‘You don’t have any idea, do you? What it’s like in the real world. Your idea of a tough day is when the latest coachload of geriatrics doesn’t stump up a single tip.’

She cringed at the smell of the beer fumes on him. ‘The real world? Getting pissed and riding motorbikes is your idea of the real world, is it?’

‘Why don’t you piss off, little waitress?’

Ripping off the scarf, she said, ‘See what you did to me?’

‘I can hardly see anything.’

‘You haven’t even said sorry.’

He uttered a long, low groan.

‘I suppose that’s as close as you’ll come to
apologising
.’

‘You shouldn’t have provoked me.’

‘I didn’t…oh God, what’s the use? Anyway, I’ve got news for you, if you’ll only break the habit of a lifetime and actually listen.’

‘News?’

‘The police are reopening the investigation into Dad’s murder.’

‘What?’ He sat up as though the sofa had been electrified.

‘You heard.’

‘How do you know?’

‘That would be telling. The point is, they are bound to want to interview us, aren’t they? His nearest and dearest.’

‘Oh, for Chrissake.’

‘They’ll poke around in our lives. They’ll find out about the anonymous letters.’

‘So what?’ He glanced back at the television screen. A medal was being put around the Chinese man’s neck.