The Malcontenta (2 page)

Dowling accepted the ribbing with a shy smile and took the handle of the fork while Brock speared a crumpet on to the long prongs.

‘I haven’t had a crumpet since I was little,’ Kathy said, and caught Dowling’s eye, nodding her head surreptitiously towards the bench on the other side of the room. He glanced over, and she saw the relief dawn on his face as he spotted the pattern slowly rotating again on the computer screen.

Brock was crouching, pouring the coffee into mugs and passing them round.

‘You like kd lang, do you, Brock?’ Kathy asked.

‘Of course,’ he smiled, easing himself back into his chair. ‘And how is the country suiting you, Kathy? Are they teaching you anything?’

Kathy was about to come out with the opening she had prepared, then stopped. ‘Good question. I suppose that’s it, really. No, they’re not.’

‘Because of your murder?’

She nodded. She had said very little to him on the phone, just enough to get him interested, although he had told her often enough to keep in touch with him and let him know how her spell with the County force was going. It suddenly occurred to her that he may have made some inquiries of his own after she’d rung. She hoped not - not before she’d put him in the picture.

‘But the whole point about your being down there is to broaden your experience - they know that. We’ve done these rotations with them before. There’s no point to it if you’re not learning anything. We might as well pull you back to the Met.’

‘Yes,’ Kathy said doubtfully. For her, the whole point was to get back, not just to another division in the Met, but to SO
I
, the Serious Crimes section at the Yard.

‘Have you spoken to whoever’s supposed to be supervising your assignments?’

‘He’s a DI, Ric Tanner. Yes, I have, and got nowhere. He made it plain that I’m being punished - not in so many words, but there is a … lack of confidence in my ability to perform at a higher level.’

Brock snorted. ‘Bullshit! Who’s his instructing officer?’

Kathy sighed. ‘That’s the problem. The programme comes under the Deputy Chief Constable’s office. His name is Long.’

‘Long?’

‘Bernard Long. Both he and Tanner came from the Met originally. They knew each other there. And Long became involved in the murder case - personally involved.’

Brock frowned. ‘You’d better tell me about this murder, Kathy.’

‘Brock, before I do, I want to be clear about this. I’m not making a complaint. I just want the advice of someone whose judgement I trust. But I don’t want to put you in the position where you feel you have to follow up. In fact you may very well want to be able to say later that you knew nothing about it.’

‘Ah.’ Brock gave a little smile into his coffee mug. ‘But you’ve brought Detective Constable Dowling with you, Kathy.’

Kathy coloured. ‘I brought Gordon because he’s become tainted along with me. I was in charge of the investigation, and he was my main assistant. When things turned sour he stood by me. Now he’s getting the same treatment I am. Only he won’t be transferring out in another month or so, as I will. He’s stuck. That’s why I brought him, that and the fact he may be able to add to what I say. But if you’d rather he left, of course he’ll go.’

Brock nodded non-committally, hearing the tightness in her voice. ‘All right, but I’m not joining a conspiracy, Kathy. If I feel I have to act in a certain way after what I hear, I’ll just have to do it. That could be awkward for Gordon, perhaps. What do you say, Gordon?’

The young man straightened from the fire. Two toasted crumpets lay on the plate in front of him, a third almost finished. He was twenty-five, just six years younger than Kathy, but, as he cleared his throat to speak, she realized how protective she had come to feel towards him. His slow and rather tentative physical movements seemed to have the effect of making hers quicker and more adept, and the same happened with his speech. As he hesitated, she had an almost overpowering desire to break in and answer for him. Yet when he did eventually speak, he did so with such a depth of concern in his voice that she felt ashamed of her impulse to patronize him.

‘I believe …’ he began, and for a moment it sounded as if he was about to recite the catechism, ‘I believe that Kathy was right, all the way down the line, in the way she handled the Petrou investigation. They tried to make her look incompetent, but she wasn’t. The way they treated her, they wouldn’t have done the same if she’d been a man. At least’ - he ducked his head - ‘that’s my opinion.’

He stared gloomily at the toasting fork in his hand while they waited to see if there was more. Finally Brock said, ‘Yes, I see. But you look, well, uneasy, Gordon … about being here. Are you sure you want to be involved in this?’

Dowling raised his eyes to face Brock. ‘Oh, yes, sir. If Kathy thinks you should know about it, then I agree and I want to be part of it. I was in her team, I trust her judgement.’

Chastened by his loyalty and anxiety, Kathy lowered her eyes and said nothing, waiting for Brock’s decision.

He stared at Dowling for a moment, scratching his beard, then nodded. ‘So do I lad,’ he said. ‘So do I.’

They followed his example and took a crumpet each, letting the butter melt before they spooned honey over it.

‘Last October, you said,’ Brock prompted, and she nodded, mouth full. ‘Mmm, the end of October. There’d been quite a lot of rain, remember?’

Kathy had hung back as the others filed out at the end of the early Monday morning briefing. Detective Inspector Tanner threw the last file behind him on to the table he was half straddling, and made some comment to one of the sergeants as he passed. They both laughed, and the other man replied, saying something about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Kathy waited for them to finish, their easy banter making her feel even more uncomfortable.

‘You watch the match on Saturday, Sergeant Kolla?’ Tanner asked suddenly, looking back over his shoulder. The other sergeant smirked and looked at his feet.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, sir, I didn’t.’

‘No … well. You want me?’

‘I’d like a word, if you’ve got a minute, sir.’

She was very careful with her words, with the tone of her voice, with the expression on her face as she answered him. He had never been overtly rude to her, always listened to what she had to say, always given a reasoned response. Yet from the very first time they had met, she had felt his hostility. At that stage she had had no opportunity to give offence, yet it was palpably there from that moment, and had continued, unprovoked and unacknowledged, ever since. It was a chilling undercurrent to the formality with which he treated her and lack of interest in what she had to say. There was something rather frightening about it - the unreasonableness, the pointlessness of it and, worst of all, the way in which it had gradually inspired in her an equally unjustified aversion. She resented being forced to protect herself by allowing this feeling to grow, of antagonism towards someone she hardly knew, of being drawn towards a confrontation that lacked any reason. He was an admirable officer in many ways - he worked longer hours than anyone else at Division and, like Kathy herself, he had driven himself up the ranks without the benefit of a higher education. He had made no attempt to modify his broad Tyneside accent, which he sometimes seemed to exaggerate as a point of pride. He was tough, experienced and proficient. And he made Kathy’s skin crawl whenever she found herself in the same room with him.

The other sergeant left, closing the door behind him, and Tanner turned to face her. ‘Speak.’

‘I wondered if you would consider a change in my duties, sir.’

He stared at her for a while, his face expressionless, then lowered his eyes and picked at a thumb-nail. ‘Why would I do that?’

She took in a deep breath, steadying her voice. ‘Since I’ve been here, for the past six months, I’ve been working with Sergeant Elliot in Family and Juvenile Crime. I wondered whether I could have some time in other areas. Maybe with Sergeant McGregor in Serious Crime.’

‘Don’t you get on with Penny Elliot?’ He brought his eyes back up to hers as he completed the sentence, looking for her reaction.

‘We get on fine. It’s not that. I’ve learned quite a bit from working with her. She’s very good at it. But it’s not really the kind of detective work that I’m interested in.’

‘That you’re interested in,’ he repeated. ‘Wouldn’t you call domestic violence and child abuse serious crime?’

‘Of course. But I’d hoped to get some experience in organized crime - some murder investigations perhaps - while I’m here.’

‘Murder investigations,’ he again repeated her words, managing, without any particular emphasis in his voice, to make them sound vaguely absurd and self-indulgent.

Kathy flushed. When she spoke again, her voice was harder. ‘Under the terms of my transfer to County…’

‘I’m quite familiar with the terms of your transfer, Sergeant,’ he broke in, without raising his voice, ‘according to which you go wherever, in my best judgement, I think you should.’

He paused, giving her more of the cold eye. ‘What’s so special about murder investigations? You think they’re glamorous?’

She was about to tell him that she had already led one murder investigation while she’d been with ED Division at the Met, then remembered he knew that.

‘You don’t have some kind of unhealthy obsession with death, do you?’ he went on. ‘Some kind of fetish?’ He gave her an unpleasant little smirk.

There was a knock on the door. Without turning, Tanner barked ‘In’, and the sergeant he’d been speaking to earlier put his head round. He handed Tanner a note. ‘I’ll take it if you like, Ric.’ He was pulling a coat on over his jacket.

‘No.’ Tanner read the note, the sergeant waiting motionless with one arm in the coat. ‘No, Bill. I want you to stay with the cars.’

‘Shall I give it to Arnie?’

‘No. Sergeant Kolla here is very interested in unnatural deaths. This should appeal to her.’

The sergeant glanced at him, then at Kathy, shrugged and left. Tanner handed her the note. It read:
0855 hrs, 19 October. Request for CID assistance. Suicide hanging at Stanhope House Clinic, Edenham. Patrol car at scene. Police Surgeon notified.

‘Looks like the angels were listening to you, Sergeant.’ Tanner’s smile was very tight. ‘The angels of death, perhaps. It’s all yours. Your very own investigation. Take that sleepy bugger Dowling with you.’

He turned, swept up his files and walked out of the room. She had spoken to Penny Elliot about Tanner. Penny didn’t particularly like him, thought him fairly unsympathetic on a personal level, but couldn’t fault him in his dealings with her. Although he wasn’t much interested in the areas of domestic crime that she was concerned with, he had made sure that she had received a fair - and in recent years a growing -share of resources. She had experienced none of the animosity Kathy felt.

‘So it’s not common-or-garden sexism; it must just be
me;
Kathy had said, and Penny Elliot had smiled.

‘Well, he does like to control things. Maybe he doesn’t like the fact that you really belong to the Metropolitan Police and are only here for a year.’

Maybe. Kathy stared gloomily out at a wood of dark pines that flashed past the car window. Dowling was skirting the edge of Ashdown Forest on the way to Stanhope House. Making a report on a suicide wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind when she’d finally worked herself up to approach Tanner. She wondered why the uniformed branch couldn’t have dealt with it themselves. ‘What is this place we’re going to, anyway? Any idea?’

She hadn’t worked with Dowling before and asked the question as much to make conversation as anything, as he’d been very quiet since they got in the car. He chewed his lip for a moment, concentrating on a bend.

‘Er … some kind of health farm, I believe, Sarge.’

‘Call me Kathy. You’re Gordon, aren’t you?’

‘Er … yeah, that’s right, Sarge.’

Sleepy Dowling,
Kathy said to herself.
Thanks a lot, Inspector Tanner.

There were puddles by the road from the recent rain, and the woods looked sodden. Through Edenham, a small market town whose streets were still almost deserted this Monday morning; lights on in the two glass-fronted supermarkets which had pushed their way in among the old brick and halftimbered houses of the high street; the largest building in the street a pub, formerly a coaching inn, the Hart Revived, whose painted sign of a deer drinking from a pool was suspended over the pavement. Beyond the town, more belts of dark conifers; then high hedges closed in on either side. Sporadic patches of mist crossed the road and Dowling slowed, peering forward through the windscreen.

‘Somewhere around here …’ he muttered. Then, with satisfaction, ‘There!’

A signpost marked
STANHOPE
indicated a narrow lane branching to the right. More hedges, then a cattle grid, beyond which the hedges stopped abruptly, opening up a rolling landscape of sheep-cropped grass dotted with small copses of oak and beech. They came to a river, maybe ten yards wide, which they followed until a bridge appeared, a single high arch of weathered grey stone decorated with elaborately carved balusters and urns.

‘Wow,’ Kathy said, and then repeated herself a moment later as Dowling carefully steered the car up to the crown of the arch, and a panorama of Stanhope House, half shrouded in a bank of silver mist, presented itself before them. A pale-grey cube made of the same stone as the bridge, in the same classical style and embellished with a tall pedimented portico, the Palladian villa’s original simplicity and symmetry had been ruined by a later wing grafted on to the left side, like the single ungainly claw of a hermit crab thrust out of a perfect shell.

On the far side of the bridge the metalled road curved away to the right, and a gravel road branched off it towards the house. Beside the junction stood a dark-green sign with white lettering, S
TANHOPE
N
ATUROPATHIC
C
LINIC
, beneath a symbol based on the design of the front portico of the house. The winding gravel road took them around the edge of the meadow which lay in front of the house, and soon revealed a red-brick stable block among the trees further to the left. Perhaps thirty cars - Jaguars, BMWs and Mercedes accounting for more than half - stood in the area between the stables and the house.