The Collared Collection (14 page)

Did that make her feel any better? Not one piddling iota – nothing ever could – but it might well provide the answer to that particular conundrum. The overwhelming emotion she felt at that stage was anger. Anger with Balaclava Man – how dare he presume to wipe her out to suit his grand plan, whatever that was – and anger because he was stupid, blasé, or perhaps simply insane, and went on his killing sprees with little thought as to whom he might kill or maim in error. His career needed to be extinguished immediately. And it looked as though that might be down to her, since the police didn’t seem to have a clue.

She badly needed a pee and had to drag herself out of bed to go to the bathroom. It was very quiet downstairs and she assumed she was alone. No such luck – when she flushed and emerged, Sally Stephens was lurking on the landing, waiting for her.

Involuntarily, she jumped several inches and gasped, ‘Oh, God, it’s you! Sorry … I didn’t expect to see you again.’ In truth, she’d hoped not to.

A stiff smile dimpled Sally’s fat cheeks, ‘The boss has reconsidered your need for protection in light of yesterday’s, err, incident. Can I get you a drink – tea or coffee, Mrs Ashton?’ At least she’d dropped the ‘ma’am’.

‘It’s Callie. No thanks, I’m going to get myself a glass of water,’ she looked down at what she was wearing, or more accurately not wearing, ‘just as soon as I grab some clothes.’

Sally followed her around the house as though they were joined by a short length of elastic – Callie so wanted to sever it and ping her off into orbit. As Ginny’s kitchen wasn’t spacious enough to accommodate a table and chairs, she took her glass into the garden, where she put up the umbrella to stop the strong sun beating down on her sore head. Sally sat so claustrophobically close to her that Callie could pretty much brush the hairs on her top lip. Sally was severely annoying her just by being there; she needed to be on her own to mourn her dearest friend, come to terms with what had happened, and do something about it – but the PC wasn’t allowing her to do that.

‘Would you like to sit on my lap?’ she asked, shooting her a calculated ‘I don’t like you and I don’t want you anywhere near me’ glare.

Bull’s-eye. Sally blushed unattractively, muttered ‘Sorry …’ and shifted her chair, making a lot of scraping noises to torture Callie’s head. Still determined to strike up a conversation, Sally asked, ‘Had you and Ms Montague been friends for long?’

Callie considered a ‘Why don’t you shut the fuck up’ stare as an encore, but decided to quit while she was ahead and answered, ‘Yes, we met during Freshers’ Week at university – on our first day, actually – and we’ve been close ever since … over twenty years. She’s … she was … godmother to both my sons.’

‘No children of her own, like?’

‘No, she’s never been married.’

‘That doesn’t stop no one these days, does it?’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘Did you do Law too?’

‘No.’

‘What then?’

Pushy cow, she thought, ‘English.’

‘Oh right … nice …. I’ve thought about doing a degree in Criminology.’

Callie had a delicious mental flash of her with a giant magnifying glass and deerstalker hat, puffing on one of those old-fashioned pipes that looked like shrunken tubas. ‘Fascinating. I expect that would enhance your chances of promotion?’

‘Oh yeah, quite a lot.’

What are you waiting for? You can piss off right this minute, as far as I’m concerned.

Sally got up and walked around, loudly admiring various flowers. Callie tried to ignore her, which proved impossible in such a restricted space. The constable was perspiring heavily in her starchy white shirt, with all the heavy-looking clobber that beat constables carry about their person nowadays, and she knew it would only be good manners to offer her a glass of water too. But no … she decided she was happy to let her expire from heat exhaustion.

‘I heard Ms Montague was bonking Mike Durant – is that true?’ Sally’s grasp of social awareness hadn’t improved any, she noted, since she’d grilled her about Dee.

‘She and Mike were seeing each other, yes – is that relevant to your line of enquiry? I doubt it.’ She aimed a clutch of visual daggers at her heart, assuming she had one.

‘Oh, err … no. I was just curious. He’s a bit tasty, eh?’ She sat down again, leering like the female version of a dirty old man.

Callie had had enough and sprang to her feet. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have things to do upstairs in my room – how long will you be here?’ Any pretence at politeness was gone – she wasn’t in that frame of mind.

Sally appeared offended (direct hit, at last!) and her answer was curt. ‘Until five – DCI Bennett said he’ll be back by then.’

‘Good – you’ll see yourself out, won’t you?’ Not really a question, more an instruction.

Callie went to her room via the bathroom, where she rooted around for painkillers. The hammering in her head had become unbearable – exacerbated thanks to Sally and the heat – and she needed relief, if she were to achieve anything useful. With luck, the tablets would cure the nagging ache in her sore arm too, where Michelle Bennett had stabbed her with the hypodermic and left a big bruise.

Lying on her bed, she held back on shedding more tears for Ginny. Instead, she grabbed paper and pen and wrote copious notes, trying to be constructive, analysing any link between the muddled events since Dee’s murder.

OK. Dee was targeted and murdered. Why? David said she was squeaky clean, not a stain on her character … but there must have been something, perhaps something in her way distant past. Callie made the assumption – in the absence of any other decent hypothesis – that was the case; someone, somehow and for whatever reason, had finally caught up with her. Wow – she must have committed a heinous act, if not a crime, which was very hard to imagine from what she knew about the woman.

Then Callie stumbled onto the scene – after she’d found the body, she was stupid enough to bend down while Balaclava Man was hiding under the bed, and he wrongly assumed that she a) saw him and b) could identify him. So, she got the unsuccessful (not premeditated?) brick to the head treatment, followed by her house being burned to the ground. Well, as good as. In between those two attacks, Giles got himself hit over the head in his garden, though he didn’t die immediately from his wound, and it was in fact a heart attack that saw him off. Sloppy. And again, why? Was he also guilty of something dreadful, or was he culpable merely by association? If he’d been the prime target, Balaclava Man would have made sure he was at home on his first visit … no, Dee must have been the intended victim initially. Perhaps Giles had come back to the house on the morning he died and disturbed BM searching for something … they struggled, Giles ripped off the mask and tried to escape, but was too slow. Maybe … Damn, this was complicated, she thought. And David had told her the lab boys found no trace of DNA inside the balaclava that Giles had presumably yanked from BM’s head. How so? Not even a minute trace?

She had to agree that David was right about the fried cat affair – just conceivably, it may have had nothing whatsoever to do with their man. Except that it guaranteed she and Ginny would be forced to use Callie’s car, at least for a while; though she couldn’t work out the significance of that either. And finally – unless she’d overlooked anything – the day before, Ginny had been killed by mistake. BM had definitely meant for the ‘accident’ to end in Callie’s death, hadn’t he? It was sheer fluke that it didn’t. He’d been very careless again, not done his homework.

Frustratingly, no matter how many times she re-read through what she’d written and retraced the arrows she’d drawn from one incident to the next, no link jumped out at her and, frankly, very little made sense.

Before too long, the hieroglyphics started to swim in front of her eyes and she gave up on struggling to keep her lids open.

Chapter Twenty-four

When the hinges on the bedroom door squeaked and woke her, it didn’t immediately occur to her to be afraid; you are one very slow learner, she admonished herself. As she lifted her not-too-sore head, she realised she’d been dribbling in her sleep – her cheek was wet and slimy. Gross – she wondered what she’d be like when she was old and senile. She pinched up an area of duvet cover and wiped the gloop from her face.

‘How are you?’ David asked, moving to lie beside her, avoiding the wet patch.

‘I’m holding up.’ Which was true. Her determination to get to the bottom of the Balaclava Man mystery had armed her with emotional blinkers – she wouldn’t collapse in a heap of despair, at least not while she had purpose to spur her on. Plus it was likely some of Dr Bennett’s chill-out stuff was still coursing through her veins, keeping her sane and on track, if slightly numbed. ‘How was your day?’

‘Full of asking questions, taking statements – but we’ve made some headway.’

She gasped. ‘Tell me.’

He shook his head, ‘Not yet – there’s homemade chicken and vegetable soup and French bread waiting downstairs for you. Why don’t you freshen up and we’ll eat in the garden? You’d better put on a sweater, though; it’s turned a lot cooler while you’ve been in the land of nod.’

‘You’ve made me soup?’ She couldn’t even remember her mother making her soup.

Grinning, he admitted, ‘Sorry, I bought it – but it’s very good, all organic ingredients and the label on the plastic pot swears it’s homemade.’

‘You don’t have to sell it to me, I’d have settled for a can of Heinz – I’m quite hungry, now I come to think about it.’ Her stomach grumbled loudly to back up her claim.

David kissed her on the lips – just fleetingly – leaving her wanting more, much more. ‘Last one downstairs does the washing up.’

‘Mm … this is very good – is there any left?’ She licked her lips and broke off another large chunk of bread, making a pig of herself.

David laughed, ‘Plenty, but don’t gobble – you haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours and you’ll give yourself chronic indigestion.’

‘Yes, Mum – now, tell me what happened today.’

‘A lot, but the first thing we must discuss is your protection.’

A facetious remark about condoms hovered on her lips, but she evicted it on the grounds of good taste. ‘O-K …’ She hoped bumptious bloody Sally Stephens hadn’t been assigned to her on a permanent basis. She’d surrender to Balaclava Man tomorrow.

‘My superintendent has a big problem balancing his budget.’

She spluttered, spraying crumbs. ‘Don’t we all?’

‘This is serious, Callie – as a rule, someone in your position would be spirited away to a safe house.’ He saw her look of horror and laid a reassuring hand on her arm. ‘Don’t panic, that’s not going to happen. We don’t have the manpower for a twenty-four hour babysitting rotation, for a start.’

‘Charming.’

‘You wouldn’t be able to go to work if you were hidden away, as that rather defeats the object. I’m assuming you do want to continue working?’

‘Oh, most definitely – Ginny gave me the job, it’s her law practice and … oh I don’t know; I just feel I’d be letting her down if I didn’t carry on. I was planning to go back tomorrow.’

It seemed she’d given the right answer. ‘Good girl! I need a pair of eyes and ears inside that office.’

‘Why?’

‘Just so that I know what’s going on – somebody working there may be involved, in some way.’

‘I’ve thought about that myself, though I really can’t imagine who – or why.’ A prickly memory rattled its cage, ‘Just a minute – this is a bit of a turnaround on your part, isn’t it? What happened to not being at liberty to discuss any aspects of a police investigation with me, because I’m such a lowly civilian? Now you want my help! Bloody nerve.’

He had the decency to look shame-faced. ‘Sorry about that – I was a bit pompous, wasn’t I?’

‘Does the Pope wear a frock?’

‘Anyway, let me finish what I was saying.’

‘Sorry – I’m paying attention now.’ Her bowl refilled, she slurped more soup noisily from her spoon as he spoke.

‘OK, we – that’s the squad – think it best if you move in with me, for the time being – given our special circumstances.’

‘Hmm, is that what they’re calling it nowadays?’

‘If I can’t be at home with you, I’ll get Mike, or someone else to cover. And, of course, I’ll drive you to and from work.’

‘How is Mike?’

‘Devastated, as you’d expect, but angry too – he’s not going to leave any stone unturned until we nail whoever did this to Ginny. He feels he’s been robbed of a relationship that was going places. It was him who formally identified the body, poor sod – not a nice thing to have to do in any circumstances, but after an accident like that …’

She shivered, not wanting to go there even in her darkest imagination.

‘Now stop changing the subject – are you coming to stay with me?’

She made an immense effort to keep up her cheery front. ‘Throw in flashing blue lights on the way to work and I’ll get my coat.’

‘Calm down, you can finish your soup – and have thirds.’

She laid down her spoon and shook her head to admit defeat. ‘That was really yummy – thanks, David, you’ll make someone a wonderful Jewish mother some day.’

‘Funny. Do you fancy ice cream for dessert? There’s some in the freezer.’

‘Not for me, thanks – I’m stuffed.’ She rubbed her pot belly. ‘You go ahead, though.’

‘No, I’m good; I have to watch my figure, you know.’

‘Hmmm … So, did you speak to everyone in chambers?’

‘Not quite, Ronan Murphy was off sick; George Caldicott is away prosecuting in Birmingham and he has Tinker Taylor tagging along. Is that really the lad’s name?’

‘So he says – you’d hardly make it up, would you?’

‘I guess not … oh, and Susan Williams is on annual leave, gone to Paris – other than that, I’ve got statements from everyone who works there. Unfortunately, nothing significant has come to light so far – but guess what?’

‘Go on …’

‘When he heard what had happened, Bernard came back to see what he could do to help. Nice old boy, isn’t he?’

‘Oh, that’s so sweet – he was planning to have a couple of weeks off before starting his new job … he and Ginny were very fond of each other, they go back years.’