Through a Narrow Door (13 page)

‘What? Oh, no, she said she’d go back to school this
afternoon
.’ Francis Soames slowly leaned back in his chair, visibly growing calmer now. ‘She wants to get back to normal, catch up on the schoolwork she’s missed and be with her friends. You know how teenage girls are. She’s sleeping over at her friend’s house tonight. Mary-Beth’s. Perhaps it’s just as well. I need some time alone to come to grips with this.’

Hillary nodded. ‘Probably the best thing for you both. Well, we’ll leave it ’til tomorrow then,’ she said, getting to her feet. Francis Soames nodded, but didn’t rise himself, and
she doubted he even heard the door closing behind her. The secretary glanced up at her curiously as she walked by her desk, but didn’t speak.

Hillary stood in the parking lot for a moment, thinking. Francis Soames was an emotional man, clearly still upset at losing his wife and maybe on the verge of a breakdown himself. It wasn’t hard to imagine him, in a moment of unthinking crisis, reaching out for the nearest weapon and striking the boy who’d stolen his daughter’s innocence. The trouble was, Hillary didn’t think he knew anything about it. And why would Billy agree to meet Francis Soames at the allotment shed? As far as she’d been able to make out, Billy had been afraid of his girlfriend’s father.

No, she just didn’t see it, somehow.

Hillary glanced at her watch. Nearly ten minutes past four. She could go back to Tommy and the others, but there was little point now. She supposed she should head back to headquarters and update her new boss on the latest
developments
.

Or she could tackle Lester Miller again.

This time she called Mr Miller senior first, and he was waiting for her as she pulled up outside his mock Tudor
residence
, leaning against a silver/blue Daimler Sovereign with his arms folded across his chest, and one foot tapping
impatiently
away on the tarmac. The epitome of a busy man with better things to do than talk to the likes of herself.

Hillary smiled at him widely as she got out of her car. Her cream-coloured jacket was creased and probably smelly from the heat, her matching slacks green-smeared and covered with grass seeds from her trip through the paddock. She hoped her shoes were dirty enough to leave marks on his carpet.

‘Mr Miller, hello again. I take it Lester’s home from school?’

‘He is. And I do hope this is the last time you’ll need to see him, Detective Inspector Greene.’

Hillary grinned. ‘So do I, Mr Miller. So do I. Shall we go in?’

Lester was sitting in the same leather chair as before, but this time his feet were bare and he was drinking from a can of lager. His father noticed, but said nothing, and Hillary wondered if he’d get a bollocking after she left, or if Gareth Miller was the sort of man who’d approve of his teenage son showing what he was made of in front of the hoi polloi.

‘Hello again Lester,’ Hillary said brightly, taking a seat on the sofa opposite without waiting to be asked. She pulled out her notebook, smiled at the ginger-haired boy, waited until he’d taken a significant swig of Fosters, then said brightly, ‘So why didn’t you tell me about your mate Billy’s blackmail scams?’

Lester didn’t spout the lager from his nostrils, or choke, or do anything so entertaining, but he did swallow hard and have to clear his throat. From a lounging position against the unlit fireplace, Gareth Miller suddenly shot upright. ‘What?’

‘Please, Mr Miller, don’t interrupt,’ Hillary said flatly. ‘If you insist on making things difficult, we can always carry on this conversation at the station. With solicitors and all that that entails.’ The look she shot him made him slowly lean back against the mantelpiece, but his eyes narrowed on his son.

Lester Miller shrugged, then laughed. It wasn’t a very convincing laugh. ‘Nothing to tell.’

‘That won’t do,’ Hillary said, slowly shaking her head from side to side. ‘We found his hidden stash, Lester. Don’t tell me that you weren’t in on it. A bright lad like yourself.’

‘Don’t say a word, Lester,’ Gareth Miller growled, and to Hillary snapped, ‘Look, I’m not having this. Are you accusing my boy of something? Because if so, I want to know what.’

Hillary sighed. ‘Mr Miller, let me make things clear. I’m not interested in making trouble for you or your boy. But I need to know the facts. Why don’t we just let Lester speak, hmm?’

‘It’s OK, Dad, I think I know what she’s talking about, and it’s no big deal, yeah? Billy took photos see, of people. There was this woman who used to sunbathe in the nude, right, and it drove her husband spare. He was always telling her off about it. Well, Billy took pictures, see, and said he was going to see if she’d pay him off, otherwise he would show them to her husband. I don’t suppose he went through with it though. Billy just did it as a joke.’

Yeah, right, Hillary thought sourly.

‘It doesn’t sound funny to me,’ Gareth Miller growled.

‘Me either,’ Hillary put in tartly. ‘Tell me, Lester, how did Billy know about this woman sunbathing nude?’ she asked curiously.

‘Huh? Oh, somebody at school told him. This kid in the third form was bragging about it. She lives just down from him, apparently, and he was telling everyone how, when he goes home from school, he gets his old man’s bird-watching binoculars and does some real bird-watching. Get it? Anyway, when Billy heard him he decided to follow the kid home and see if it was all just bullshit, or on the up-and-up. And when it turned out to be true, he goes over there on the next sunny day and – wham. Pictures.’

Hillary sighed heavily. ‘I’ll need this boy’s name. The woman’s neighbour, I mean,’ she clarified, and wrote it down when Lester told her. At least that was one victim they’d be able to trace with ease. ‘And what about the other pictures, Lester?’

Lester Miller shrugged one bony shoulder and took a sip of lager. ‘Don’t know about them,’ he lied.

‘You don’t, huh?’ Hillary said sceptically and saw the boy’s father frown. ‘But isn’t that where Billy got all his money from, Lester? You know, to buy the mountain bike, and the fancy zoom lenses for his camera. The gold jewellery for his girlfriend?’

Lester shrugged, but his eyes refused to meet hers. He looked less cocky now and more angry. And suddenly, Hillary twigged.

‘He was holding out on you, wasn’t he, Lester?’ Hillary said softly and with mock sympathy. ‘What was it? At first he kept you in touch with what he was doing. The nude sunbather, the man waving his willy about.’ Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Gareth Miller jerk against the wall, and carried on quickly before he could break her momentum. ‘And it was fun, wasn’t it? Watching Billy con or bully or threaten all these men and women, these so called adults and grown-ups, out of their hard-earned cash. But things changed, right? He began to keep secrets. Not tell you stuff. Maybe even deliberately kept you out of the loop. Is that how it was?’

Lester Miller stared down at his lager can. ‘He thought he was so clever. He used to take me along, when he confronted them, like, letting them know that he wasn’t the only one who knew. And in case they got stroppy, like, I was to call the cops straight away. But the last few months or so … I could tell he’d got on to something good. Really good. But he wouldn’t tell me what. He kept denying it, but I knew.’

Hillary leaned forward on the chair, unable to mask her sudden tension. ‘You think he arranged to meet someone that afternoon, don’t you? The day he was killed. You think one of his victims turned ugly, don’t you, Lester? And you know what? So do I. So if you have any idea, any idea at all who it was, you have to tell me.’

‘Lester, tell her,’ Gareth Miller urged. ‘Have some sense for once in your life.’

‘But I don’t know, do I?’ Lester Miller suddenly shouted, leaping to his feet and throwing the can of lager to the floor in a fit of childish temper. His eyes, though, were full of genuine tears. ‘You think I don’t know that if I’d been there, like before, I could have stopped it happening? If only he’d told me, I’d have gone with him and he’d be alive today. If I knew who killed him, I’d tell you. But I don’t.
I don’t.’

By now the lad was sobbing, and his father, nonplussed, went across and patted him awkwardly on the back. But the boy pushed him away and angrily wiped the tears from his
face with the back of his hand. Mucus from his running nose hung in strings from his hand and he wiped them vaguely on the side of his jeans.

Hillary got up slowly. ‘All right, Lester,’ she said softly. ‘All right.’ She nodded across his carrot-coloured head to his father, and let herself silently out of the house.

She felt tired all of a sudden. Perhaps she’d head back to HQ after all, have a drink in the canteen, catch up on some of her other cases while she waited to hear from Tommy. Do something normal, something that didn’t have human misery and sin stamped all over it.

It was nearly six when Tommy came back from the pigsty. Frank had driven off on the dot of five, of course, leaving him and two uniforms to bag up the proceeds.

Janine had also been and gone, citing a hot date for not hanging around. Something about the way she’d said it had caused alarm bells to go off in Hillary’s head, but she’d been too tired to pursue it. Besides, Janine put in so much unpaid overtime, there was no way she was going to comment about her getting away on time for once.

Tommy wasn’t surprised to find only Hillary at her desk, but as he went by the DCI’s cubbyhole, the door opened and Danvers came out.

‘Guv,’ Tommy said in passing, but didn’t stop, since he had an arm full of evidence that looked ready to totter over and spill across the floor. He made it to Hillary’s desk just in time and dumped the lot in the middle of the table, catching some of it before it spilled over. It was only then that he was aware that Danvers had followed him across the room.

‘This the lot?’ Danvers asked. ‘Hillary’s informed me of your find out at Aston Lea. Good going.’

‘Yeah. Er, right, thanks guv. No, it’s not the lot. I’ve logged most of it into Evidence downstairs. But I thought the guv should see these. They’re a bit odd. We can’t figure out, me and the lads, what they’re doing in with all the rest,’ Tommy said. ‘We found more naked women shots, by the way; some
of older women too, who the hell knows why they posed for him. And some other shots of a couple making out in the back of a Volvo, plus two men in a Gents out at Woodstock park. We reckon Billy took them through an open window. One face is clear, the other,’ Tommy coughed, ‘isn’t.’

Hillary nodded. More blackmail victims.

‘But like I said, guv, these don’t seem to fit the pattern.’

Intrigued, both Hillary and Paul Danvers took a beige folder each and opened them out.

In Hillary’s pile, the now familiar style of Billy Davies’s camera lens showed photograph after photograph of the same man and woman. The man was of medium height and build, rather effeminate-looking, with carefully styled brown hair and a perfect complexion. Sometimes he was wearing a suit, sometimes something casual. In one or two he had on sunglasses. In all of them he had the look of a man who had regular face massages at a club where they also manicured his nails and clipped his nose and ear hair. Hillary guessed he’d have cabinets full of those products for men that ranged from fancy shower gels to moisturizing shaving lotion. The woman with him had a similar, pampered look. She was about his height, with long dark hair and big eyes bristling with mascara. Like her partner, she was always expensively dressed, be it a plain white tennis dress that must have cost more than a month’s worth of Hillary’s salary, or plain, extremely tailored trouser suits designed to look like a man’s outfit from Brooks Brothers.

They were pictured getting in and out of cars, always together, always going to, or coming from, different, respectable-looking and well-maintained houses. There was nothing in them that could possibly be material for a
blackmailer
.

She frowned at Paul Danvers, who was looking equally puzzled at his own folder, and, catching his eye, wordlessly swapped with him.

His couple were a little older, a little plumper, but the photographs were the same. In fact, all five folders were
filled with men and women going to and coming from houses. Nothing more, or less.

‘What the hell?’ Danvers said.

‘Exactly guv,’ Tommy said. ‘We can’t figure it out. The nude sunbather, or the bloke peeing up a wall, OK. I can see how it could be embarrassing for them, and why they might pay out the odd fifty quid just to save them the hassle of explaining them away. And maybe the gays in the bog might want to avoid the hassle of being outed. But these? What’s the big deal?’

Hillary sighed. ‘I don’t know, but we’re going to have to track them all down. No sign of any names I suppose?’

‘No guv. No little black book, nothing.’

‘Well, we need to find them and interview them. Tommy, you and Frank get on to it first thing tomorrow morning.’

‘Guv,’ Tommy said. ‘Do you mind if I get off now? Only Jean’s picking up the bridesmaids’ dresses and she needs a ride out to Marsh Gibbon.’

Hillary nodded and Danvers watched him go, smiling. ‘The wedding’s next month, right?’ he confirmed.

Hillary nodded.

‘You’re going to miss him. He’s a good officer. Fancy coming for a drink?’

Hillary sighed, but nodded. It was easier than thinking of an excuse not to go.

She only hoped he didn’t choose a pub where anybody knew them. The last thing she wanted was for the gossip mill in this place to start linking them together.

Janine reached up and accepted the glass of red wine being offered to her. She smiled, and curled her legs up further under her on the big white sofa. Whoever would have thought she’d be back sitting in her favourite place in all the world?

In front of her, the empty grate was filled with a dry flower arrangement that was becoming a little dusty now, but it was still considered by the woman who came in to clean for Mel twice a week to be the last word in interior design. Oddly enough, Janine found that even the desiccated purple petals and dyed-orange grass stems looked good to her now – like long-lost friends, that you meet after a time, and find have improved with age.

‘So, how’s the case going?’ Mel asked smoothly.

‘Nowhere,’ Janine shrugged and took a sip of the Bordeaux. ‘Or maybe we’ll have it solved tomorrow.’ As she drank, she filled him in on the latest developments. Although, as a superintendent now, Mel had a wider field of responsibility and wasn’t, in any case, in overall charge of the Davies murder inquiry, he listened closely and nodded when she’d finished.

‘Hillary thinks the murderer is a blackmail victim, and it’s only a matter of time before pinning him or her down?’

‘It makes sense,’ Janine agreed. ‘It would explain why he was at the shed – because he’d arranged to meet someone there to put the bite on them – and why someone would
want to kill a fifteen-year-old boy that doesn’t involve a
sex-gone
-wrong scenario. And we know there’d been nothing of that sort from the autopsy report.’

Mel sighed. ‘Let’s not talk about it now. We get enough of the squalid side of life at work. Try some of the brie.’ He pointed to the platter resting on the little coffee table in front of them, which contained crackers, biscuits, an assortment of cheese and a bunch of grapes. Janine looked at it and laughed.

‘The old seduction kit, huh? Have you forgotten that you offered me the same thing the very first night you brought me back here?’ Here being Mel’s place in ‘The Moors’ area of Kidlington, which comprised most of the old village, before Kidlington morphed into an anonymous town. It was one of the most elite areas going, and Mel had been awarded the big, detached house during his divorce from his second (and stinking rich) wife. In return, wife number two had left for London with Mel’s son. But father and son, as Janine knew well, seemed to stay in touch and keep close and, as far as she could tell, Mel had never questioned the arrangement. Like most men, he seemed to believe that children belonged with their mothers.

‘Of course I didn’t forget,’ Mel said now, rubbing the side of his face with his palm. ‘I
wanted
to remind you. It used to be good, didn’t it? Between us, I mean?’ he added softly.

‘I thought so,’ Janine said flatly, taking a sip of the wine, ‘until you dumped me to get your promotion.’ Oddly enough, the words weren’t angry, or even resentful, and Mel smiled grimly.

‘If the promotion had been going your way, you’d have done the same thing, and you know it.’ His words weren’t accusatory either, simply a statement of fact. ‘Let’s face it, Jan, we’re both as ambitious as hell. Or at least, I thought
I
was. Lately, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s all been worth it.’

Janine slowly put her wine glass down on the table in front of her, her heartbeat picking up a notch, and casually selected a grape. ‘That sounded curiously plaintive. Don’t
tell me the air is too thin, up there with big boys?’ she mocked.

‘You’re a sarky cow.’

‘Job not all it’s cracked up to be?’

‘The job’s fine. And you know damned well what I’m trying to say. I miss you. I miss us, being together, like this.’

‘Forget it, Mel,’ Janine said flatly. ‘The brie could be imported from France for all I care, I’m not getting into bed with you again. Is that what dinner the other night was all about? And now this quaint little trip down memory lane?’

Mel sighed heavily and turned to face her on the couch. He was wearing jeans that were almost white after so many washes, and clung to his thighs in a way he knew Janine really liked. He was also wearing one of his Ralph Lauren silk white shirts. His hair was freshly cut and he’d shaved before going out to meet her, and had splashed on the cologne she’d given him for his birthday, just weeks before they split.

Slowly he reached out with one finger and pulled a strand of her long blonde hair from the side of her face. Janine watched him, smiling slightly, her eyes the eyes of a cat wondering whether to play with the mouse or simply kill it. It made his stomach clench in that old, familiar way.

‘It was always good between us,’ Mel said blandly.

‘Granted,’ Janine shot back tartly. ‘But not good enough for you to give the brass the two-fingered salute and keep me with you.’

‘Come on, how would you like it if some chancer waltzed in and snaffled your promotion right out from under you? Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.’

‘What’s the matter,’ Janine jeered. ‘Did the man from the Met put your nose out of joint? So this is all Detective Superintendent Jerome Raleigh’s fault is it? And now he’s not around anymore, you want things back the way they were? Only with you getting to keep the big new job, and still have the little woman back in your bed giving you your jollies. Well, I don’t think so,’ Janine swivelled her legs
around and put them on the floor, preparatory to getting up and leaving. ‘You don’t get to do that to me again, Mel. How stupid do you think I am?’

Mel didn’t move from his position on the sofa. In fact, he didn’t react to her angry words at all. It was almost as if he hadn’t heard them. ‘No, I don’t want things to go back to how we were; the same problems would still exist. Donleavy and all that crowd will start looking down their noses at us again, and all the old rumours will start up, and the
sniggering
. I don’t fancy that any more than you do.’

Curious now, Janine slowly leaned back against the sofa again. ‘So what
are
you saying?’

‘You like this place, don’t you, Jan?’ Mel asked, waving a hand around the living room. It was a large, high-ceilinged room, with original pelmets and mouldings, and a large set of French doors that opened out on to a beautiful garden complete with pond and weeping willows.

Janine, thinking of the cramped semi she shared with her two housemates, laughed grimly. ‘What’s not to like? What’s your point, Mel?’

‘You were always angling to move in here permanently. You gave out enough hints that you wanted to do the whole settle down, maybe start a family, thing. Did I misread the signs?’

Janine laughed again, but her heart had once more picked up a quicker beat. ‘And much good it did me. You made sure I never quite got my second foot through the door, didn’t you?’

‘The time wasn’t right,’ Mel said, shaking his head. ‘But now I think it is. Or could be, if you wanted.’

Janine licked her lips and slowly reached for her wine glass again, giving herself time to think. She watched him narrowly for a moment, then tossed back the contents in a single gulp. ‘Let’s get this straight. You’re asking me to move in with you?’ Janine demanded, twiddling the empty wine glass and then swearing graphically as Mel began to shake his head.

‘No, that’ll just put us back where we were before,’ he pointed out. Then he reached out and took one of her hands in his, and began to rub the tops of her fingers with his thumb. ‘I want you to marry me, Jan.’

Hillary Greene woke up when a sound like nothing else on earth shattered the early morning silence. It sounded a bit like a car exhaust backfiring after a baked spud had been rammed up it, or like some kind of machinery that had been choked with a century’s worth of grime giving its last
death-call
. When it sounded again, Hillary groaned and turned over in her bed and yelled out the open, round, port-hole window,
‘Shut up for Pete’s sake.’

The heron that had landed in the field opposite, no doubt to digest its early morning breakfast of stickleback and to proclaim to one and all that this was his territory whilst he was at it, took off in alarm and flapped nosily away. Although the name of her boat, the Mollern, was the Old English country word for heron (in the same way that a badger was a brock, or a fox was a Reynard), Hillary didn’t particularly appreciate her boat’s namesake waking her up at 4.30 in the morning.

Her uncle had once told her that herons were often referred to as ‘Old Croak’ in old English literature, and it hadn’t taken her long to realize why. They had a call that could raise the hackles on a dead dog.

She heard the same ghastly sound again, this time coming from only a hundred or so yards down the canal where the heron had re-landed, and gave up. Sitting up, she threw back the covers on the bed and put her feet to the floor, yawning widely.

It was Saturday morning, but it was not one of her days off. She took a quick shower and made herself some porridge for breakfast. Most mornings, she didn’t have time for more than a snatched cup of coffee and a crust of toast, but since she was up at such a freakish hour, she supposed she might as well make the effort.

The sky had just lost the last of its pink-tinged sunrise as she pulled into the parking lot at HQ, and she’d finally managed to stop yawning by the time she pushed open the swing door and walked through the foyer.

‘Bloody hell, don’t tell me the Martians have invaded and all leave’s been cancelled,’ the desk sergeant said as she walked by, doing a slapstick double-take of the clock, which showed it to be ten minutes past five in the morning.

‘If I’d had any damned sense, I’d have gone back to bed,’ Hillary snarled back by way of cheery greeting, and headed for the stairs without breaking stride. She had to suffer similar comments from the nightshift as she crossed the big, open-plan main office, but by the time they’d begun to filter out, and the day shift had come in, Hillary had cleared her in-tray (which was miraculous in and of itself) and had
reread
every scrap of paper generated by the Davies case.

Tommy was first in, and after checking her notebook for the ‘to do’ reminders, gave him the name of the school boy who’d been so keen to watch the naked lady sunbathing. ‘Find out her name from him and then interview her. Find out if she had an alibi for the afternoon of the murder. Oh, and since the hubby is apparently less than pleased with his wife’s tan-lines being so seamless, find out where he was too. If Billy Davies had approached him, he might not have been in the mood to take it lying down. You never know just what the outraged jealous types can do in a fit of temper.’

‘Right, guv. I’ll make a start on identifying the odd couples in the pictures as well, yeah?’

Hillary nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s top priority. And get that lazy git Frank to … hold on.’ She picked up her ringing phone, listened for a moment, frowned in puzzlement, and said, ‘OK Mel, I’ll be right up.’

Tommy gave her a questioning look and she shrugged. It was unusual for a DI to be called to a super’s desk, because it implied he was by-passing the chain of command. In this case, Danvers.

She felt her mouth go dry as she got up, wondering if
someone had seen her and Danvers in the pub last night, and told Mel about it. But surely word wouldn’t have travelled that quick? Besides, ‘The Duck and Drake’ in a small village out near Weston-on-the-Green hadn’t exactly been a hot bed of CID activity. Unless one of the two octogenarian darts players had been undercover narks, or the busy barmaid somebody’s snout.

‘The moment you find out the identity of one of our couples let me know,’ Hillary said to Tommy. ‘I want to be interviewing at least one of them by the end of the working day.’

‘Guv.’

Hillary walked up the stairs to Mel’s office, and went straight through, as his civilian assistant (posh word for part time secretary) wasn’t in on a Saturday morning. At his office she tapped on the door and went in without waiting for a summons. She noted at once that he was alone, which came as something of a relief. If DCS Marcus Donleavy had been there as well, she’d wonder what kind of shit she’d landed in.

As it was, Mel was smiling that particular smile he favoured when he knew she wasn’t going to like something, and she felt her stomach give a distinct dip. She began to wish she’d given the porridge a miss.

‘I don’t have time for messing about, Mel,’ she started, without preamble. ‘You’ve got that little-boy-caught-
with-his-
fingers-in-the-biscuit-tin look, so what the hell have you done, and why is it any of my business?’

‘And good morning to you, what a lovely day it is and why don’t you take a seat. Coffee? It’s that new Brazilian blend I told you about.’ She watched him pour her a mug and felt her stomach do a further nose-dive into her shoes as he came up with a Nash’s bakery box. Inside were two, plump, chocolate éclairs.

Hillary took a long, fortifying breath. ‘OK, not a word until I’ve finished it. If it’s this bad, I need the chocolate fix to fortify me.’

Mel smiled thinly but let her eat and drink, whilst doodling on the report of next month’s projected crime figures. When she’d licked the last of her fingers free of cream, Mel leaned back in his chair.

‘I know Tommy’s leaving next week, so you’ll be getting a new DC, which means this probably isn’t the best time to spring this. But how would you feel about losing Janine as well?’

Hillary stared at him flatly. ‘She got a promotion already? Hell, that was quick work, even for Janine. You know she’s not ready for the responsibilities of being an inspector, don’t you?’

Mel shook his head. ‘No, it’s not that. But she won’t be able to stay at Kidlington after we get married.’

Hillary stared at him for another second or two, then said shakily, ‘You should have made that a whole boxful of éclairs, Mel. What the hell are you using for brains? No, scrap that.’ She held up a hand. ‘I know what you’re using instead of the old grey matter. Mel, you’re not serious are you?’

Her old friend grinned at her and reached for his mug. He looked young and carefree, and Hillary wanted to stretch her foot under the table and kick him on the shins.