The Serpent Pool (6 page)

Les muttered, ‘Watch out, there’s an ACPO about.’

Hannah glanced across the cafeteria and spotted Lauren Self. The ACC was working the room like a politician, moving from table to table, and wishing everyone a happy
New Year. She didn’t need to seek votes, so she must be ticking off her list of resolutions. Their eyes met, and Lauren sashayed over to join them.

‘Hannah! And Les!’ Lauren made a show of shaking their hands. Her grip was cool and firm, her skin lightly tanned. ‘All the very best for the next twelve months. Did you both have a good break? Hope you avoided this wretched bug that’s going round. We were in the Caribbean, and we only flew back into Manchester yesterday morning. I’m still adjusting to the thirty-degree drop in temperature.’

You’d never have guessed it from the brightness of her eyes and the spring in her step. Hannah couldn’t help wondering if Lauren wasn’t quite human. If she were a visitor from a distant galaxy, it might explain her lack of empathy with traditional police work. She sought to cover it up with a ceaseless flow of jargon culled from the Ministry of Justice’s guide to doublespeak, but the robotic zeal defied any disguise. Hannah fantasised about shooting at her and watching her evaporate, or turn back into an alien life form. But Lauren was so thick-skinned that a bullet was sure to bounce off her impenetrable hide.

‘You’ll remember this is Greg Wharf’s first day with us, ma’am.’ Hannah noticed the rictus of disdain. Further proof that she saw Cold Cases as a dumping ground for people she wasn’t allowed to sack. Maybe they should be rechristened Hopeless Cases. ‘I’ve briefed him about Bethany Friend.’

A frown disrupted Lauren’s efficiently organised features.

‘You still think there is mileage in looking into her death?’

‘There’s more to be found out, I’m sure of it.’

‘Even though we don’t have DNA?’

Lauren worshipped DNA evidence. To hear her talk, you’d never believe any crime could have been solved before the discovery of that magical double helix.

‘Time has passed,’ Hannah said. ‘People who were reluctant to talk at the time of the original inquiry may have changed allegiances and be more willing to open up. I’ve briefed Maggie Eyre to trace people who gave statements to the original inquiry team. Some of them are still around, but others have moved on. Les here has his hands full with our existing caseload, but Greg and I will talk to some of the key witnesses.’

Lauren tutted. ‘You’ll recall our chat before Christmas? We need a few more outcomes if I’m to persuade the Police Authority to maintain your team’s funding at its present level. No guarantees, Hannah.’

Les Bryant feigned to choke on his Shredded Wheat. The ACC gave him a pitying glance before turning her attention back to Hannah.

‘Pressure on resources is growing all the time. Money is tight and next year’s allocations will come up for review soon. I need positive news to report. Otherwise…’

She shook her head, as if mourning a lost cause. So much for the cheery optimism of the start-of-year rallying call that her spin doctors had put out on the staff intranet.

‘Bethany’s mother is dying, she never understood what happened to her daughter and she deserves closure.’

‘We’re not a charity.’ Uh-oh. The public-funds card. ‘This is taxpayers’ money we are spending. At a time when government revenues have fallen off a cliff.’

Time for Hannah to play her ace. ‘I had a word with a freelance journalist who writes occasional features for the Sunday broadsheets. If we could get a result in the case, he’d run it as a major story.’

Lauren leant forward. Had she been a bitch, Hannah thought, she would have wagged her tail. Come to think of it…

‘Seriously?’

Not really. Hannah had bumped into the man at Stuart Wagg’s party. He was drunk and talkative and was keen to show off. Their conversation had lasted less than three minutes and she doubted he’d remember it if and when he sobered up.

‘Of course,’ Hannah murmured, ‘I appreciate that favourable publicity isn’t the be-all and end-all.’

‘Absolutely not,’ Lauren said. ‘However, I’ll be absolutely honest with you…’

Les shot Hannah a glance which said
there’s a first time for everything
…

‘Ma’am?’

‘A few columns of positive coverage in the media wouldn’t harm. The chair of the Police Authority is up for re-election in May. He’d welcome a few supportive headlines.’

‘Reviving the inquiry might be money well spent, then?’ Hannah kept her face straight.

‘I think so.’ Lauren was judicious. Weighing the pros and cons with care and objectivity before coming down on the side of self-interest. ‘We need to reach out to the wider community in a very public manner. Good media relations are integral to what we do.’

‘Of course.’

‘That’s settled, then. Keep me informed, Hannah. And bear in mind that solving a cold case doesn’t equate to admitting the force got anything wrong in the past.’

‘I printed off the attachment to my email.’ DC Maggie Eyre thrust a couple of sheets of paper into Hannah’s hand. ‘The witness details you asked for.’

‘Thanks.’ Hannah waved Maggie into a chair as her gaze travelled down the list. ‘You’ve been busy.’

‘Six years is a long time. So far I’ve traced half the people who were interviewed after Bethany’s body was discovered. Most of them still live in the area.’

‘And the people we haven’t found?’

‘Include two of her closest friends from her school days, Phyllida Lathwell and Jean Pipe. They’ve probably married and changed their names. The main evidence they contributed concerned Bethany’s crush on a teacher, the woman who died. There was a fellow student, Gillian Langeveldt, who came from South Africa, and presumably went back there. A couple of work colleagues, with the depressingly common surnames of Smith and Brown. Plus some of the people who came forward, saying they’d seen her on or around the day she died.’

Hannah considered the names. ‘Graeme Redfern?’

‘Worked for an undertaker’s in Ambleside. Reckoned he saw Bethany having sex in a shop doorway the night before Valentine’s Day. Turns out that Redfern was sacked twelve months after Bethany died, and his old boss thinks he may have gone back home to Leeds. Not a nice man, Mr Redfern. He took a ring from a corpse’s finger and tried to sell it on the Internet.’

Hannah remembered now. Ben had mentioned Redfern to her. He’d dismissed the man as a sad fantasist. People like that always cropped up on the edges of a police investigation. There were other names on Maggie’s list. A pizza delivery man, Mickey Cumbes, whose criminal record included a prison sentence for indecent assault of a teenage girl, swore he’d seen Bethany kissing another woman outside the Salutation Hotel on the morning of Valentine’s Day. A dropped-out student who claimed to have seen Bethany being manhandled into an unmarked white transit van by a burly bloke who looked like an off-duty soldier. Once again, Ben didn’t believe a word of it. Roland Seeton was a long-haired layabout with two convictions for possession of illegal drugs, who probably nurtured some sort of grudge against the army. Any investigation attracted time-wasters, and tracking them down years after the event was a pain. But they had to give it a go. One lucky break was all they needed.

‘Good, you’ve noted Nathan Clare’s phone number. I want to talk to him as soon as I can. And to call on Bethany’s mum.’

‘I spoke to the care home.’ Maggie’s face wrinkled with dismay. ‘She had flu over Christmas and they said she’s fading fast.’

Hannah sprang to her feet. ‘Better get a move on, then. For Mrs Friend’s sake.’

Sleet slanted down outside the converted mill that was home to Amos Books. From his office on the first floor, Marc gazed out at the swollen beck as it rushed over the weir. The wooden decking beneath the window had disappeared under the water. On a fine day, customers of the cafeteria downstairs sat out and admired the scenery whilst they tucked into cappuccino and cake, but no book buyers had ventured out there for months. Half two in the afternoon, and the sky was the colour of Coniston slate. He switched on the radio to check the forecast, and was greeted by an avalanche warning for Helvellyn.

‘Snow and ice are unstable at all levels of the mountain.’ The Park Authority spokeswoman raised her voice to make herself heard above the storm. ‘Together with the gales, they make any ascent dangerous. High winds are moving the snow around, so it isn’t bonding. Surfaces underfoot are treacherous – all the time, edges are breaking away. With the sudden deterioration in the weather, there is added danger from a cornice of snow.

We think it may collapse at any time.’

Someone coughed behind him.

Marc swung round. He hadn’t heard the door open. He didn’t like people invading his private space or taking him by surprise. For years he’d been accustomed to a warning creak whenever someone came in, even if they didn’t knock. It had been a mistake to oil those hinges.

In the doorway wasn’t some nosey customer in search of a Wainwright first edition, but a woman in a thick fisherman’s jersey and jeans, with shoulder-length fair hair tied into a ponytail. Steam rose from the mug of coffee in her hand. He wasn’t sure how long she had stood there. Why would she wait and watch him, without a word? His skin prickled. Her silent scrutiny was curiously exciting, as if she could see right through him.

‘Our fell-top assessor says he has rarely seen conditions as bad as this in the Lake District,’ shouted the woman on the radio. ‘The wind chill factor is severe. We urge people, however experienced they might be as mountaineers, not to venture out until the situation improves.’

Marc shook his head. ‘What kind of fool would climb a mountain in this weather?’

A dreamy look came into Cassie Weston’s eyes. Her lips parted, revealing front teeth that slightly overlapped. Somehow the imperfection made her all the more attractive.

‘Someone who likes living dangerously?’

‘Living dangerously is one thing. Killing yourself is quite another.’

‘I brought you a hot drink.’

‘You’re very good to me.’ Her expression was unreadable. ‘You were miles away.’

He waved at the chaotic mess of paperwork on his desk. ‘You caught me out.’

‘It’s not as if you were doing something wicked.’

Most people would have said
something wrong
. But Cassie wasn’t most people.

‘I should be checking the unpaid invoices. Cash flow is king, and all that.’

She handed him the mug. ‘What were you thinking of?’

He might have asked her much the same question. Cassie had worked for him since the autumn, but he still couldn’t make her out. One minute distant, the next, almost intimate, as if she were on the verge of confiding a secret. Whenever he tried to find out more about her, she pulled up the drawbridge, but this elusive contrariness was part of her appeal. What made her tick, what turned her on? Once upon a time, he’d wondered the same about Hannah. Cassie was a fresh challenge, a conundrum he yearned to solve.

More than once, when the shop was shut and the staff had gone home, he’d pulled her file from the cabinet and pored over her CV like a detective in search of clues. But he found so few. She came from Carlisle, and after a year spent studying for a degree in English literature, she’d given up on university in favour of the real world. Over the years she’d drifted from job to job. Typing here, waiting on tables there. Her job application mentioned that she wrote short stories in her spare time, but the one occasion he’d asked about them, she’d shaken her head in embarrassment and changed the subject.

‘I’m a book man,’ he said. ‘Living dangerously isn’t for me.’

‘You never know till you try.’

‘A place like this can’t be too exciting for a young woman like you.’

‘That isn’t what I meant,’ she said softly. ‘I enjoy it here. I find it fascinating…to learn from you.’

He’d tried to explain how much he loved it here, surrounded by thousands of second-hand books. Each had a story to tell, and not just in words written on the page. Every volume on every shelf had a past life. Sometimes all was revealed by an inscription in a flowing hand – ‘To Daisy, Merry Christmas, 25 December 1937’, ‘Given to Hubert Withers for one year of unbroken attendance at Cark Sunday School’ – sometimes the books came with no provenance and you had to play detective to find out how a rare book printed in Gibraltar when Victoria was on the throne finished up in a junk shop at Gateshead one hundred and twenty years later.

He relished teaching her how to buy and sell rare books, couldn’t help feeling flattered by the way she hung on his words as he described the tricks of the trade. How to spot books that weren’t what they seemed, like alleged signed firsts of
The Man with the Golden Gun
and
Octopussy
– neither of which was published until Ian Fleming was dead and buried. Book values flipped up and down like the stock market.

Pricing had little to do with literary merit, let alone critical acclaim, when the books were new.
Winnie the Pooh
wasn’t worth quite as much this year, while a set of early whodunnits by Miles Burton in pristine jackets would set the rich collectors aquiver with desire.

‘I’d hate to bore you,’ he said.

‘You don’t bore me at all.’ She considered him. ‘But has anyone ever dared to suggest you care more about books than people?’

From someone else, the question would be offensive. He wondered if she was referring to Hannah. He leant against the desk and smelt the coffee. Pungent Arabic, spiced with cardamom. Still too hot to drink.

‘Depends on which people.’

She pointed at the clutter of documents, paper clips and ring binders. ‘But you hate being a businessman.’

‘Running the shop and having to worry about cash flow and stuff is the price I pay for being my own boss.’ She was trying to find out about him, she must be interested. ‘There are plenty of other things I dread more.’

A light shone in her eyes. ‘Such as?’

‘The taxman, for a start,’ he said lightly.

She frowned, as if the answer disappointed her. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.’

As she moved away, he felt a stab of disappointment.

‘Any time,’ he said.

When he took the empty mug downstairs to the cafeteria, Cassie was behind the counter, talking to a customer on the phone. Some long and complicated inquiry about a search for a book whose title and author the caller couldn’t remember. A frustratingly common form of amnesia. She didn’t spare Marc a glance as he walked past.

A coal fire burnt in an inglenook on the ground floor, in between the bookshop and the café. The wind whistled in the chimney and from cracks in the window seals, but the crackling blaze kept the winter at bay. Marc warmed his hands before helping himself to a fat slab of chocolate gateau. As a penance, he sacrificed a couple of minutes to an exchange of pleasantries with Mrs Beveridge, who had
taken over the running of the café from Leigh Moffat. A slice of the legacy from Aunt Imelda had enabled Marc to take a lease on premises in Sedbergh, now designated as a book town. For the moment, the store was little more than a handful of shelves annexed to Leigh’s café. He missed her, and wondered if she missed him as much.

Mrs Beveridge was efficient but voluble and he was already bored with her jokes about the suitability of her surname for someone who spent her working life serving tea, coffee and soft drinks. She was large and jolly and smelt of banana cake. Every now and then, she told him that he ought to make an honest woman of Hannah. Once, in frustration, he’d trotted out the old joke about what you feed a woman to put her off sex. When he said the answer was wedding cake, she’d uttered such a groan of dismay that the floorboards rattled. You couldn’t beat marriage for companionship, she maintained, although he gathered her recipe for connubial bliss involved keeping her husband well and truly under her thumb. Mr Beveridge was a retired chauffeur (‘and he still drives me to distraction!’) who spent every daylight hour on an allotment in Kendal, no doubt to keep a safe distance from his wife’s relentless chatter.

The kitchen staff had left early to get home before the weather worsened, and there wasn’t a customer in the shop. The mill was one of half a dozen buildings grouped around a yard; the others housed an assortment of craft shops, and visitors often drifted from one store to another. But not today.

He fled from Mrs Beveridge’s clutches to the detective fiction shelves, and blew dust off a set of squat reprints lacking dust jackets. Hack work produced by long-forgotten
practitioners with names like Bellairs, Morland and Straker. Titles as hard to shift as aged relatives who have long outstayed their welcome. It was increasingly difficult to sell anything that wasn’t out of the ordinary. He blamed the Internet, as most booksellers blamed the Internet for whatever went wrong with their business. An Agatha Christie reprint from the Sixties, a Ruth Rendell from the Eighties? No, thanks. You could get them online for a handful of pennies.

Rarities. He must keep finding them, if his business was to survive. He didn’t need Hannah to remind him that he couldn’t live off the legacy for ever. He had a few scouts, people with the know-how to search out scarce books, who were ready to sell at a hefty discount in order to make a quick profit. Charity shops and car boot sales were a waste of time, but he haunted book fairs, although the good buys were to be had from fellow dealers early on the first morning, long before the doors opened to admit Joe Public. Even the punters were savvier than ten years ago. Internet comparison sites and online auctions made everyone an expert.

The doorbell jangled, and he looked over his shoulder in surprise.

A woman wearing a hooded raincoat stepped into the shop. She dropped a zipped shopping bag onto the floor, pushed back the sleet-spattered hood, and gave him an Arctic smile.

‘If you buy me a coffee, I promise not to throw it all over you.’

Marc exhaled.

‘Afternoon, Wanda.’

When Mrs Beveridge brought their drinks and a plate of scones, she hung around, trying to engage Wanda Saffell in conversation. But Wanda didn’t do small talk, and eventually, the cafeteria manager admitted defeat and retired to the kitchen.

Wanda watched her retreating back. ‘You must miss Leigh.’

Marc frowned, but said nothing. Wanda was so bloody provocative. His fling with Leigh was long in the past, long before they’d worked together. He didn’t like people getting the wrong idea about their relationship. It was purely professional.

‘Thought you might like to see my latest production.’ She unzipped the bag and produced a thin red slip case. ‘Of course, I’m hoping that you would be prepared to stock it.’

She slid a little book out of the slip case. It was bound in papyrus and stitched with raffia.

‘
Voilà
!’

Marc had seldom seen Wanda Saffell show pleasure – her natural expression was chilly disapproval. She must be proud of what she had done. Picking up the book between forefinger and thumb, he considered the title page.

‘
Pulses of Light
?’

‘You don’t recognise the quotation?’

He shook his head.

‘Thomas De Quincey, talking about Dorothy Wordsworth. He was talking about her energy, the way she illuminated the scene. He had the hots for her, all right. Poor woman, not pretty, but full of pent-up passion. After William married, she lost her mind. Anyway, in these verses, the poet imagines himself as De Quincey, setting about the seduction of Dorothy.’

‘And does he succeed?’

She smiled. ‘You bet. It’s a pure lust thing. No hearts and flowers. Not a daffodil in sight. Read the poems, and you’ll find an explanation for Dorothy’s mental breakdown that has nothing to do with her brother. It’s very dark and disturbing. No prizes for guessing why he couldn’t find a London publisher. But I adore his work.’

Marc stared at the author’s name.

‘Nathan Clare?’

‘I wondered if you’d put a few copies on the counter.’

‘Well…’

‘Sale or return, of course, I expect nothing else. Trade terms. I have a poster, too, if you wouldn’t mind?’

Marc flicked through the pages. The poems were interspersed with woodcuts. The images fell just short of pornographic. Splayed limbs, convoluted couplings. He read a stanza of ‘Taking You Beyond’.

‘Strong stuff.’

‘Like I said. But Nathan has a fierce talent.’

He touched the binding. ‘Never mind what’s inside the book. You’ve created something beautiful.’

‘Would you judge a book by its cover?’

‘A lot of people do precisely that.’

‘I wanted to create a binding that was…counterintuitive.’

Marc opened the book again and stared at a picture of a reinvented Dorothy, pleasuring her devilish lover with ferocious energy.

‘I’ll take half a dozen.’

‘You’re a star.’ Wanda hesitated. ‘As a matter of fact, I owe you an apology. I almost crashed into your car on New Year’s Eve.’

‘High risk,’ he murmured. ‘Hannah was driving.’

‘The detective chief inspector.’ Wanda sipped her drink. ‘I should have been more careful, but I wasn’t in the best frame of mind.’

‘So, I gathered.’

‘God knows why I showed up. Stuart Wagg said he didn’t like to think of my being alone at the turn of the year. Told me I couldn’t hide away for ever. I should never have listened. He only wanted me there as a prize exhibit. The widow of his dead rival.’

‘Rival?’

‘In book collecting.’ She considered him. ‘What did you think I meant?’

‘Of course.’

‘He and George competed for years, you must have made a pretty penny out of them both.’