Up in Flames (10 page)

             
The wall to Casey’s right held several, lesser pictures, of Brown-Smith handing out rosettes at his eldest daughter’s pony club gymkhana, alongside one of the him shaking the hand of a beaming Asian mayor.

             
On the occasions he had occupied the super’s visitor’s chair, Casey had found ample time during the monologues to ponder on why not one of the Graduation pictures featured a mother or father when it was known that Brown-Smith had parents and hadn’t sprung to life under the gooseberry bush in the garden of some liberal C of E vicar as Thomas Catt would have it. Strangely, the super’s parents weren’t in evidence in any of the other pictures either.

             
Was it possible that, like himself, the superintendent suffered from unsuitable parents syndrome? It would certainly put another slant on the reason for his late adoption of the double-barrels, an adoption revealed by a close study of the framed graduation certificate with its single-barrel name. Maybe Brownjob — as Catt irreverently called their superior — had good reason to keep his parents decently buried.

             
And although he didn’t encourage ThomCatt to ridicule their superior, with his own parents weighing heavily on his mind it occurred to Casey that he might just have found the answer to the Brown-Smith enigma. If the super’s name-change was not merely for show but done for wholly sensible reasons, they might have more in common than he had previously believed. The thought almost made him warm to the man.

             
Superintendent Brown-Smith’s PC monologue finally came to an end. Casey dragged his gaze from the contemplation of the glassy, dust-free, picture gallery just as the super uttered his name and was at last allowed to escape.

The first day of the investigation had been long and tiring. And when Casey finally arrived home, feeling bushed and frustrated by too many questions with as yet no answers and the pressures already beginning to build, he saw, as he approached his front door, that the day’s frustrations had scarcely begun.

             
For, squatting on his doorstep, surrounded by assorted baggage, were his parents.

Casey wondered uneasily whether merely thinking about his parents had somehow spirited them here. His parents, unreconstructed old hippies who still refused to leave the 60s behind despite both being well into middle age, lived on a ramshackle communal smallh
olding where they had a subsistence, ‘Good Life’ existence. Every so often the community suffered a financial crisis and the inhabitants moved out to stay with various hippie friends. Inevitably, as they had aged, their collection of hippie friends and acquaintances with spare rooms had decreased and Casey had been called upon to pick up the slack. He had bailed his parents out financially a number of times. It saved him from having them as permanent lodgers.

             
‘Why didn’t you ring?’ and warn me, he added silently to himself, as he opened the front door to let them in.

             
‘No bread, man,’ his father laconically explained, being too idle to waste words.

             
He didn’t need to add that Casey had, in any case, forbidden them to try making reverse charge calls to the station. All he needed was for it to get out that DCI Casey had a pair of degenerate, drug-taking old hippies for parents...

             
‘Hey, my uptight man, don’t you have a hug for your mama?’

             
Casey turned. His mother still looked the same; still wore her kinky, now greying hair long and mostly plaited, which only increased its kinkiness. Today she wore an ankle-length Indian cheesecloth skirt instead of the sari or salwar kameez she mostly favoured since her Indian trips. Under the skirt peeked a pair of vermillion embroidered jootis.

             
Casey smiled sheepishly. ‘Hi mum. It’s good to see you.’ The swift hug pressed her numerous beads painfully against his shirt-clad chest and he winced.

             
His mother held him away from her and gazed at him, a suspicious twinkle in the green eyes that Casey had inherited. For all his mother’s hippie ideology, she was, unlike his father, sharp enough to appreciate that her son found his parents an embarrassment. His father, on the other hand, even if he were aware of his son’s feelings, would probably just shake his head, light another weed and say, ‘Don’t get heavy, man. Loosen up.’

             
Casey’s father preferred the world and its problems, including those of his son, to waft past him on a drug-scented breeze. Casey put aside his anxieties, shook his father’s hand and clapped him on the shoulder. A mistake, as an odd smell drifted in Casey’s direction. He knew his father wasn’t much into washing and had got out of the habit of bathing or taking showers since the last time their water supply had been cut off. Anyway, he always insisted he preferred the purity of rainwater. Only he didn’t make much use of their stored rainwater either because ‘heating it up’s such a drag, man.’

             
Casey wrinkled his nose and sniffed, but even this smell was rather ripe for it to emanate from his father’s body. It took no more than a second to trace the smell to his father’s shaggy Afghan coat. This 60s relic, obviously a recent second-hand purchase, was none-the-less worn with pride, in spite of stinking as if the dead animal it came from still inhabited the skin.

             
His mother gave him a slow wink from kohl-encircled eyes. ‘Don’t worry, Willow Tree, honey, we won’t be cramping your style for long.’

             
Casey brightened. It was not that he wasn’t glad to see them both, not really. They were his parents, after all. It was just that — for a policeman and a senior policeman at that — they were the
wrong
sort of parents. Much as he suspected Superintendent Brown-Smith’s were. And for ageing hippies, whose youth had resounded to chants against the ‘pigs’ he was the wrong sort of son.

             
He ushered them inside, with a suggestion that they make themselves at home. But not
too
at home, he silently prayed, as he began to heave their luggage into his hallway.

             
Cardboard boxes.

             
He had rebelled, by conforming. After an early acceptance of their opt out and irresponsible lifestyle, he had, in his late teens, rejected it. He had been a source of parental disappointment ever since. As for his parents, they still felt the stigma of having a policeman for a son. It had been the pigs who had harassed them at Woodstock and the Isle of Wight and countless other festivals in their youth. For Casey, it created a guilt-trip. And while his brain knew that the guilt he felt in being a disappointment — even a shameful disappointment when his parents had to confess to their equally old, hippie friends that their only son was a pig — was ridiculous. But he felt guilty nonetheless.

             
Baskets.

             
Was that how Chandra had felt? he wondered. Her life, too, had made differing demands. Her family and her in-laws  required her to conform to their traditional beliefs, while her experiences of growing up a young girl in England raised entirely different expectations. Like him, she must have been continually pushed and pulled in two opposing directions. For Chandra, death had brought the push/pull to an end. And if he wasn’t the son his parents would have wanted, Chandra, too, hadn’t turned out to be the daughter her parents -—or her in-laws — had wanted. She had too many opinions by all accounts, was too ‘spirited’ and westernised and had only agreed to her arranged marriage when she was  at a low ebb, having done badly in her exams. The idea that she was not particularly bright brought home to her - deliberately? — by her parents.

             
Assorted rucksacks
.

             
Her marriage, he suspected, had been unhappy. Her mother-in-law critical. He found it difficult to believe that in her situation she would have welcomed an early pregnancy. Casey wondered whether the pregnancy had been an unhappy accident. Certainly, it must have made her feel even more trapped. And then her husband had died. How had that made her feel? Guilty and responsible as her in-laws had told her she was? Or gloriously, unexpectedly free from the ties of a marriage she had never actually wanted? But her release from the bonds of marriage, rather than freeing her, had only brought even more pressure.

             
Was that why her brother had put forward the possibility that Chandra might have killed herself and her baby? Or did the suggestion spring from a desire to turn their suspicions from other possibilities?

             
God -they’d even brought their record collection. They must have crept out before the bailiffs arrived and cadged a lift from another of the departing commune. Casey just hoped they didn’t stink the place out with dope like last time.

             
When he had finally heaved all his parents’ possessions into the hall and shut the door, Willow Tree Casey went in search of his mother. He found her in his kitchen poking about in his store cupboard.

             
‘Hon. What kind of junk have you got in your larder?’ his mother asked in her pseudo Californian accent as she surveyed the ranks of tinned everything. ‘It’s all kinda unhealthy.’

             
Casey restrained the impulse to point out the irony of his druggie mother commenting on the unhealthy junk he chose to put in his body. Instead, quietly, and without fuss, he found some brown macrobiotic rice that Rachel, his musician girlfriend who was fortunately away on tour, had bought last time she was home, set it to boil while he grated cheese and carrot, sliced raw mushrooms and prepared a green salad.

             
With Rachel away so much with the orchestra, he had got in the habit of looking after himself. Anyway, he had been used to doing so from childhood. And several evenings a week he stopped at the small supermarket on the corner of his street. Luckily, given the arrival of his unexpected visitors, he had shopped the previous evening.

             
After getting his parents settled, and the meal prepared and eaten, Casey slumped tiredly in an armchair before he asked, ‘So what happened this time? Did your crops fail again?’

             
As Casey had good reason to believe that the only crops they grew on their Fenland smallholding with any enthusiasm or success, was cannabis, he thought this unlikely. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to come the heavy-handed son and ask outright if the bailiffs had turned up again demanding payment of debts.

             
However, his father wasn’t so reticent. As he sat on the floor, sorting through their ancient record collection, with the wall light gleaming off the expanding bald spot visible beneath his otherwise long, luxuriant and still black hair, he slowly drawled, ‘The crops are fine. Likely to be a good harvest. No, what happened was—’ And he launched into a long, rambling explanation which Casey lost track of and interest in before it was half told. The drugs his father had taken over the years hadn’t improved his ability to string a coherent sentence together, much less several. Anyway, he had got the gist of it. He had been right. The bailiffs had paid another visit. He wondered how much it would cost him this time to set things right and winced on discovering the answer.

             
Casey’s mobile phone rang just then. It was Rachel.

             
‘Hi, Will. I heard about the murder case and wasn’t sure whether you’d be home yet. Can you talk or are you about to see BB?’

             
BB was Brian BrownJob aka as Superintendent Brown-Smith. Casey, with Joan Baez singing loudly in one ear and his father’s tuneless voice accompanying her in the other, was debating his answer when she asked, ‘What’s all that noise? Don’t tell me you’re throwing a party?’

             
‘No,’ he replied. It only seemed like it. He stood up and went into the hall, shutting the door behind him. ‘It’s just the radio.’

             
‘Good. Don’t want you learning to enjoy yourself in my absence. Can’t chat long. Mr Baton Man’s ordered an extra rehearsal. So how’s it going? Trust you to draw the short straw. I suppose BrownJob’s being bloody?’

             
‘Heading that way. It’s good to hear a sane, friendly voice. I miss you.’

             
‘Me, too. Listen, I’ll have to go.’ A furious, hectoring voice was clearly audible down the phone line. Casey guessed it was Mr Baton Man himself. ‘I just rang to let you know the tour’s being extended. Seems the Brighton and Southampton venues want us after all.’

             
Casey didn’t know whether to be pleased or sorry. He missed Rachel like hell, but it meant he had more time to get his parents out of his hair.

             
‘You needn’t sound so disappointed,’ she said when he made no comment.

             
‘Sorry, sweetheart. Of course I am. It’s just that I’m not likely to be home much myself. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.’