Trial by Fire (2 page)

Òh. And what does Mr Bailey do?' they persisted, beaming in benign, slightly wavering curiosity.

`He's a detective chief superintendent. In the police.' She could never keep a note of defensive pride out of her voice when describing Bailey, not for his rank, just because he was Bailey and she could never cease to honour him, in public at least, but she had watched the faces fall.

Mental head count of delinquent children, out-of-date road tax, and unpaid parking fines, end of conversation. 'Well, my husband works in the city.'

Helen's understanding of this reserve was complete. She knew it to be as natural as breathing, not indicative of malice or stupidity, simply a withdrawal capable of reversion if their other interests had been more communal. As the woman of the piece, like all the other women, it was her role to make the social effort, but chatter died on her like the end of sudden rain. She did not despise domestic bliss, but, having ploughed the furrow of thoroughly professional life for a dozen years, remained puzzled why anyone with choice settled to anything else.

There was so little to discuss: she and Geoffrey had no children, no company car and, although the details of their identical houses would be enough to fill conversational hours, she did not, as they did, love or treasure her home. It was rented for twelve months, half of them gone. She would never have bought it in a million years and would never have filled it with these fat, hard, uncomfortable, but ludicrously expensive things chosen by her young and absent landlords who were pursuing the upward path of their success on foreign territory.

Helen did not feel like a successful woman, didn't expect she ever would, wondered what it was like. Her own environment, lost for this experimental year, reflected only what she liked, rich colours, plentiful pictures, and an element of disorder. In Helen's mansion, it would take at least a year to mend a broken object; here, anything flawed would have hit the reject heap and been replaced within hours. The pale harmonies of the walls, grey carpets, cream sofa, jarred on her, also the lack of anything middle-aged, let alone old.

She sat on the offending sofa and thought that if it had been taken out of context, it would have been quite nice. The same sort of thin description would apply to Branston itself.

A village that was not quite a village, one of a series of villages, this one in particular was caught in a time warp of house prices because of the triangle of motorways and trunk roads that had somehow isolated it with a few miles of protected woodland.

But it was still not a real village, because the heart went out of it every day when three-quarters of its occupants remembered it was only an outpost and pushed themselves into taxis and trains. Well, thought Helen, cheerful at the alternative prospect, at least I don't do that. I get in my clapped-out car, drive it to the office as rarely as possible, then to magistrates' courts in Cheshunt and Epping where I prosecute the daily list of thieves, burglars, and even, occasionally, poachers, all at snail's speed to suit the magistrates, saying everything twice.

It was in that respect that the contrast was most marked — the pace of it, the deliberation behind decision, the endless repetition of facts. What would have been allowed half an hour in front of a tetchy stipendiary magistrate in Bow Street or Tower Bridge took half a day here, with somewhat dissimilar results. Here they were swifter in sending the offenders to prison, heavier on fines, and inclined to hang them for careless driving, but she had to confess that law and order prevailed after a fashion, not unjust, not innovative either.

Less bark, slower bite, more civilized.

Nor did she mind the subtle demotion that her move from central London had involved. Helen was not designed to succeed on the crude hierarchical ladder of the Crown Prosecution Service, or in any branch of the uncivil service, had never progressed far in grade, owing to an embarrassing frankness in interviews and a deliberate ignorance of whom she should please and flatter. Securing further promotion was a Machiavellian exercise demanding paroxysms of sycophancy for which she had no stomach.

Bailey's similar indifference had propelled him through the ranks of the police like a secret missile, but Helen's had kept her still and, in the old office, rewarded in a way she had preferred. She had skills beyond those of her superiors. They recognized and exploited her skills by a division of work that took advantage of them, leaving Helen with a host of difficult and dangerous cases.

Here in the outback, her sheer competence, the experience of murder, mayhem, drugs, and fraud, unnerved her employers more than slightly and they tried to bar her from the mainstream as far as possible. It was Cheshunt, Epping, and the juvenile court for Miss West.

Keep her out of the office; she knows too much. Helen smiled and defeated them further by genuinely not minding. There was a purpose to this beyond career, after all: she had only wanted to stay alive and to see if she and Geoffrey Bailey could make a success of living together. Nothing was more important, nothing more absorbing than that. If some of her remained unused material, it would have to wait.

Òh, damn.' For the second time in an hour she had gone to the wrong cupboard.

Freudian slip, the product of undiscussed homesickness, making her behave as if she was in her own home. Which she wished she was, even with all the attendant arguments — your place or mine? — that had bedevilled the last year. What an unlikely pair of lovers they were, policeman and lawyer, too scared, the pair of them, too suspicious, and far too independent to begin to decide which house should be home, miserable apart, tricky together.

She had thought of abandoning it, could not contemplate that; thought of marriage, could not contemplate that, either. A marriage of true minds, all right, but pulling in opposite directions. Then Bailey was moved to this parish; this very house fell vacant for rent. They would try it for a year, borrowed premises, borrowed time, no commitments. Helen as housewife, the idea made her choke, but there was a nice novelty to it. So far so good in this isolation, though it would have been better if he liked it less. Bailey, after all, hailed from the East End; he might have the same aspirations for a better life. Helen hailed from nowhere and believed in very little.

`We may as well go home,' said Superintendent Bailey. 'If we search in the dark we may ruin the chances. The doc will be here shortly after five a.m. So shall I.'

Ì've left Smith and Peters here to peg out the area. All that.' Ànd shoot foxes,' Bailey added, smiling.

`With what, sir? It's the ghosts worry them.' The inspector grinned, comfortable with Bailey as few were, grateful for the pragmatism that was going to allow some of them to sleep instead of messing around all night, talking about it until daylight revealed anything they would miss if they moved now.

`Seal off the footpath and the carpark, will you?'

Will do, sir. Bowles will do that. Funny thing is, it was only opened again yesterday.

Been resurfaced, out of action for weeks. They've all been taking their cars elsewhere.'

`Good. More chance we'll find traces of whoever put that body in there.'

`Poor cow.'

`Yes,' said Bailey, looking at the protruding hand sealed with polythene. 'I wonder who she is.'

The inspector grinned. Was, sir.'

Bailey sighed. 'Definitely past tense. Was. Come on, let's get some sleep before we have to look at the rest of her, presuming it is a woman. See you at five. Tell them to walk carefully.

He may have left some souvenirs on the footpath.'

Eleven p.m. now and too many boots for comfort on that footpath already. Tell them not to deviate into the woods either, for God's sake, crashing about and standing on anything that might have been left by the performer of these rude and hurried burial rites. Looking at the shallow grave, flattened earth, and bent branches around it; Bailey supposed there would be traces. No careful undertaker this; no wonder the fox had found her. Tomorrow would be soon enough for discovery, when all the willing troops were deployed to their worst after brief sleep.

All except Peters, Smith, and Bowles, who would not even have their turn to sleep in the morning. Bailey tried to forget them all on the way home, tried, on his way to Helen, to forget that offending, blotched stump of a hand pointing its accusation above earth.

In the carpark, half a mile from the grave, Police Constable Bowles tapped on the window of the single van parked beneath the trees, stood back politely. Inside, beyond the condensation on the glass, he could see movement, a breast rapidly covered, an arm in guilty movement, a face pressed to the rear window, eyes wide at the sight of the buttons on his uniform. More movement, until a youth scrabbled out of the front, buttoning his shirt, furious in the face of Bowles's half-smile.

`Wha's the matter, for fuck's sake? No law agin it, is there? First I knew.'

`Just hope she's sixteen, son. But you've got to move. Got to clear this carpark, see. Sorry about it.'

`Why? Why the fuck . . . why should I?' His fists were clenched, aggression on display like a fighting ram.

`Less of that. This your car, son? Or your dad's? Or your gaffer's? Been for a drink, have we?'

Àll right, all right, all right.' Querulous fear rose in the voice. A girl's head, young but not childlike, appeared at the window. Bowles relented.

`Found a body in the woods, miss. Dead. Got to clear the area, seal it off. Hop it.'

The girl shrieked, short and shrill, an eerie little sound, then curled back in the passenger seat, pulling the boy in beside her. The engine spluttered, van spitting away full of the boy's fury, leaving profound silence. Extending the yellow tape across the entrance to the road, Bowles missed the company and wondered how they had failed to see the police car parked in the far corner. Shame on you, boy, you could have done better than that.

The purr of Bailey's diesel engine at the door was a welcome sound. By the time he had collected his case, gazed at the sky, gathered his wits, wondered if Helen was still awake, and opened the door, she had padded into the kitchen, found the Scotch, run the bath, and filled the kettle. This was not the first body he had found in their six months' sojourn in this not so peaceful place, nor was it the first late evening to give Helen the opportunity to practise domestic solicitude, which Bailey neither demanded nor expected, but which secretly delighted him to the marrow of his strong and slender bones.

Bailey welcomed these attentions like a child. It felt like having the wife he had seen described in fiction, a true comforter never encountered in his life until now, and not even a wife in name. Bailey regretted that, and respected it. It was Helen's decision, not his. Sleep, even after thirteen hours of duty, was less important than news and the long embrace of dear familiarity. One day they would discuss his reservations about the place, this frightful house she seemed to like, but not now. There is nothing, he thought, more delightful than a woman who is happy to see you.

There is nothing, Helen thought, more becoming than the wrinkles on Bailey's face.

`Very macabre,' he told her, sitting up in bed with Scotch and coffee, Helen curled beside him, as welcoming as the night had been chill, both of them indulging in a frequent if decadent night-time ritual. 'Macabre with the usual comic overtones. It always makes me laugh when the divisional surgeon turns out. You know, he who precedes the pathologist and gives us licence to continue.'

Helen knew.

`Dr Flick, busy little man, looks at this hand, this suggestion of body, far from fresh.

"I think she's dead at the moment," he says. "I'll do a certificate." Very pompous and Irish. I don't know why we needed a doctor to tell us that. "I'll pronounce it lifeless, I think," says Flick, just as he would if faced with a pile of bones. Pretty clever diagnosis, I thought. Has a swig of this out of his back pocket' — Bailey raised his own glass to illustrate — 'then scuttles away as fast as his legs will carry him.'

`Back to the living. Or the pub. Can't blame him.'

`No,' said Bailey, turning to her. 'I don't blame him. The living have more to say. I'd rather be with you than keeping vigil in a wood.'

She smiled at him, forgetting her preoccupations, seeing him anew as she did almost every day. 'Well, if that's the case, I'm glad you've no other choices.'

`Who said I haven't?'

Ì did.'

Later in the warmth, his arms surrounding her. Geoffrey murmured sleepily into Helen's ear, 'You didn't have to run a bath for me, you know. I don't have to touch the bodies.

Not these days.'

She stirred. He could feel her frowning. 'But you do. They touch you, and you touch them.

You always do.'

`Yes,' he said, remembering the spasm of anger as his own fingers had touched that pathetic and pleading mutilation of a hand, felt the ice-cold mottled forearm in the dark. He had wished her goodbye, disliking the prospect of tomorrow's disinterment, wishing they could simply leave her alone.

`You always do,' Helen repeated.

`You're right,' he sighed. 'I always do.'

Detective Constable Amanda Scott arrived early by fifteen minutes, always in advance of the boss, careful in this and all things to preserve the good opinion she had tried so hard to deserve. She stepped out of her neat car, unaware of its highly polished gleam, but pleasantly conscious of the shine on her leather pumps and the curve of her waxed and tanned calves as she stood away from the door with her precise movements.

She checked her hair in the side mirror, reproving herself for her own vanity while locking the car with automatic care. Miss Scott was dressed as she was always dressed in sensible but feminine clothes. White long-sleeved blouse with buttons, pleated cotton skirt in navy blue, matching the handbag and shoes, offset by tiny pearl earrings. Nothing flashy about Miss Scott — not a Mrs or a Ms — clad in good chain store clothes with an eye to economy and perfect presentation rather than the luxury of flair. She had liked the less nerve-racking days of uniform duty, still reflected in her conservative clothes, but she liked this better and knew herself to be modestly, only sometimes raucously, admired.