For Death Comes Softly (9 page)

I accepted Mellor's offer with alacrity. At least I had just enough sense to realise I was getting a reprieve from my own madness.

In the morning I woke with a thick head and a great sense of relief that I was alone in bed.

Typically Mellor gave no hint of anything when I pulled my filthy dirty elderly Scimitar, its original silver now more of a murky grey, alongside his gleaming white VW Golf in the Lockleaze car park. I was, however, quite aware of knowing smiles and stifled giggles from some of the others in the CPT team.

I went straight to the ground-floor kitchen and made myself a strong mug of instant coffee. I also took one to Peter.

‘Think you may have saved me from myself,' I murmured, as I placed on his desk the least stained and chipped mug I had been able to find. It bore an only slightly battered image of Princess Diana.

I saw him glance with an almost imperceptible wince at my rather embarrassing offering, and in any case remembered too late that Peter only drank out of his own carefully washed plain white china mug which he kept in his bottom drawer.

My favourite sergeant grunted, and raised big brown expressionless eyes.

‘Doubt it,' he said. ‘Pathetic bastard'll boast about you anyway.'

I grinned. That I could live with. I still believed, with perhaps surprising naivety considering my job, that the truth had a way of surfacing all on its own.

I spent Christmas with my elder sister, Clem, and her family, who had moved back from London to run a small seaside hotel in our home town of Weston-super-Mare. Clem, extraordinarily enough short for Clematis, and I had both been named after flowers by our dotty mother. I reckoned I had got the best of the bargain. Rose was at least a halfway normal name. I had little doubt that mother, who suffered from bizarre delusions of misguided grandeur and whom Clem and I referred to as Hyacinth, after social-climbing Hyacinth Bucket in the TV series, could equally well have chosen to call me Bougainvillaea or Bird of Paradise. Clem and I were good friends. I was fond of her husband and two children, and I found that I enjoyed Christmas with them rather more than I had expected to. This enjoyment was assisted, of course, by the absence of our mother who would normally have required to be present at such a family gathering but had found herself a new man friend – all her friends were inclined to be new as they rarely lasted long – whose company she temporarily preferred.

Back at work in the New Year all of us in CPT and our colleagues in Social Services continued to plug away unsuccessfully with the Stephen Jeffries investigation. By the first week in February I knew that the time was approaching when decisions would have to be made one way or another. I felt fairly depressed again, a state of mind not improved by returning to the cold reality of my currently rather lonely and unfulfilling life after the warmth of the family Christmas in Clem's comfortably stylish home.

Sitting at my desk indulging in a certain amount of self-pity on a wet Monday morning, following yet another empty weekend, I realised that drastic action was called for. At lunchtime I sent a DC down to McDonald's for comfort grub – Big Mac and chips followed by Maple syrup pancakes. I told myself that allegedly abused children did not necessarily deserve a total monopoly on junk food, and simultaneously resolved to put my life in order.

The first thing was to sort out my accommodation. I knew only too well that the grubby overcrowded room to which I returned every night was enough to depress anyone. It was also quite beyond redemption. I was on my own now and I may as well get used to that and make the best of it. What I needed most of all was a proper home of my own.

Simon had told me the money from the sale of the bungalow would be through that week, and Simon rarely got things wrong. I decided to start looking straight away for an apartment to buy. One of those new luxury ones in the old docks would do just fine. Bristol was a good place to live, and it was time I started living again. For myself and only for myself.

I spent the afternoon sifting yet again through the accumulated paperwork on the Jeffries case. Basically we had nothing. Zilch. If Jeffries wasn't squeaky clean then his act was super impressive and he appeared to have left no trail at all behind him. I really did not see how the CPT could do much more now than advise that the Social Services continue to keep a watching brief on the Jeffries family, and yet a lurking uneasiness that I could not explain seemed to grow within me even as logic and lack of evidence combined increasingly to suggest that Richard Jeffries must be innocent. There was something about the man that disturbed me, and that had maybe been so, if I was honest, from the beginning. Perhaps he was too good to be true. And maybe that way of thinking said as much about me and what seventeen years of policing had done to me as it did about Jeffries or anyone else. Certainly appearing to be rather too decent a human being hardly made it possible, thankfully, to arrest a man on a child-abuse charge.

Titmuss had been right about one thing at any rate, this was definitely a messy case. There was really nothing conclusive either way. I knew I had to put a particularly detailed report together though, because of the sensitivity of the suspect, and the quicker I got it over with the better.

I left Lockleaze shortly after eight, and on the way home stopped to buy an evening paper specifically for the property supplement. As I climbed back into my car I glanced at the front page. I never got to the supplement.

‘Woman killed in island mystery,' screamed the splash headline. ‘Millionaire fiancé distraught.'

Natasha Felks was dead. Her body had been fished out of the water off Abri Island, by the crew of the Clovelly lifeboat, in circumstances which shook me rigid. It seemed that Tash had gone to the Pencil to look for dolphins – and that the young boatman who had taken her there had failed to pick her up. Natasha, stranded, as I could imagine so well, clinging to the rock face, hanging on literally for her life, had at some stage been unable to maintain her hold. She had fallen into the sea and drowned.

Five

How on earth had history been allowed to repeat itself? Technically I had no right at all to interfere in the Abri Island case. Abri came under the jurisdiction of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. Whatever may or may not have happened there was none of my darned business. But I have never been very good at minding my own business.

I called a mate at Barnstaple nick for a general gossip and worked my way round to asking about the death on Abri, which I had correctly guessed would come under Barnstaple's jurisdiction, explaining vaguely that I was just mildly curious because I'd recently spent a holiday on the island.

I learned that Natasha's death was being officially treated as suspicious and that the Senior Investigating Officer was a man whom thankfully I knew a little and liked a great deal – Superintendent Todd Mallett, a good, thorough, old-fashioned copper who came from North Devon and had recently returned there after having been stationed in Exeter for some years.

I battled with my conscience for the rest of that day, but ultimately, and somewhat against my better judgement, I could not stop myself calling Mallett himself.

‘Yes, of course I remember you, Rose,' he remarked cheerily. ‘That cattle rustling case, the last time we met, wasn't it? What can I do for you anyway?'

He was as friendly as I remembered. But straight to the point. After all he was investigating a suspicious death. He had no time to waste.

I repeated what was now becoming my standard explanation.

‘I went to Abri Island on holiday in November and got a sort of fascination for the place,' I began, and I didn't think I sounded particularly convincing. ‘I suppose I am just intrigued, by what has happened, I'd love to talk to you about it . . .'

‘What, mere curiosity?' he interrupted jovially. ‘Nothing more than that, DCI Piper? Have you no work of your own to be doing?'

I resolutely refused to let myself think about Stephen Jeffries and a family torn apart waiting for me to complete an investigation which appeared to be getting nowhere.

‘Well, I may be able to help,' I said as coolly as I could. ‘Perhaps we could meet . . .'

‘Ten tomorrow, here at Barnstaple – as you've obviously got time on your hands,' he said.

Nothing could be further from the truth. However, the next morning I called in with some vague story about a possible tie-up with cases in Devon and Cornwall.

‘I need to go to North Devon, Barnstaple nick . . . hold the fort, Peter,' I instructed.

It took me almost exactly two hours to drive from Bristol to Barnstaple Police Station, a neat modern box-like building joined on to the Civic Centre. I had plenty of time to think during the journey. All kinds of weird ideas were whistling through my head and I wasn't sure how much I should tell Todd Mallett nor how much I wanted to tell him. I did know, as I had always done, that I should have reported the incident on Abri at the time. It was a bit late now. I wasn't going to come out of this looking good. Maybe I shouldn't even be going to see Superintendent Mallett at all.

The problem was that Robin Davey had been preying on my mind again, in more ways than one, ever since I had heard the news. I just could not believe that Natasha would have gone off with Jason in a boat and allow him to abandon her on the Pencil. She knew all about what had happened to me. Neither could I believe that Jason had still been allowed access to the boat. At best it was all so totally irresponsible. And the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary seemed, at the moment, to be thinking the worst.

Beyond these two facts I tried not to let my train of thought progress any further until I had talked to Todd Mallett. I told myself that I have always had far more imagination than is desirable in a police officer.

At least Todd Mallett was a refreshing change after Titmuss the Terrible. One of the few genuine non-chauvinists in the job, I reckoned.

We talked in his office over surprisingly good coffee. Not like police station issue at all. Todd was a big man with a ruddy complexion, big feet and hands. He looked a bit like a rather dated kiddies' picture-book illustration of a beat copper. All he needed was the funny hat.

He tipped his chair back, balancing himself rather precariously with the toe of one foot against his desk, and seemed to study me very carefully.

At first he let me take the lead.

‘I know the set-up out there,' I said. ‘I can imagine it very clearly.'

He raised his bushy eyebrows quizzically, but passed no comment. I was suddenly quite certain that he knew more about me and my association with Abri Island than he was letting on. And I suspected that I had no alternative but to come clean.

‘Look, I had a narrow escape from the Pencil myself when I was on Abri,' I said.

He still did not speak.

‘What makes me think you may know that already,' I remarked, sounding cool enough to rather surprise myself. I can box clever too. In spite of appearances which might occasionally indicate the contrary, I hadn't got to be a DCI at thirty-three through being a complete idiot.

Todd smiled slightly. ‘I was about to call you when you called me yesterday,' he admitted.

‘Who told you?' I asked.

‘Not me, one of my sergeants got that information,' he replied.

I waited. He knew exactly what I wanted to know. Todd shrugged. ‘Robin Davey,' he said eventually.

I suppose I half expected that answer. It had to have been the owner of Abri Island, really.

Todd continued. ‘Davey volunteered the information the very first time we interviewed him following Natasha Felks' death. Told us there had been a previous incident. Even supplied your name. Here see for yourself.'

A manila folder sat in the centre of Todd Mallett's desk. He opened it to reveal a stack of computer print-outs and passed me several sheets. They were the transcript of a formal taped interview with Robin Davey, which the cover sheet, complete with the date and time, told me had been conducted at Barnstaple Police Station by Detective Sergeant Colin Pitt.

I scanned them quickly.

‘Young Jason took another woman out to the Pencil two or three months ago,' Davey had said. ‘One of yours. DCI Piper. Would be funny wouldn't it, if it wasn't so tragic.'

The man managed to come through as highly personable even in a police report. There followed a more or less accurate account of the way I had been abandoned on the Pencil and then rescued by Davey and a couple of the islanders just in time to save my life.

I looked up. Todd Mallett remained tipped backwards in his chair at a dangerous angle while continuing to study me laconically.

‘And Natasha? How could it have happened again?' I asked.

‘That's what I'm trying to find out,' remarked Todd levelly. ‘And I'm not making a lot of progress at the moment.'

‘Well, what explanation did Davey give?'

Todd shrugged again. ‘He simply said he'd had no idea why Tash had gone off in the boat, except that it had been an unseasonably calm and beautiful day and she may have thought she knew Jason well enough to sense any danger – to guess if he were likely to have a fit. The boy had been banned from taking out the boat on his own or with a passenger after they nearly lost you. And Davey said as far as he knew it was the first time he had broken the rule.'

I didn't like the sound of any of it. And my own feeling of guilt was worsening. I couldn't quite get over the notion that if I had played things by the book Natasha Felks might still be alive.

‘They noticed on Abri that I was missing in time to save my life and I was just a paying guest,' I said. ‘How could Davey not miss his own fiancée for so long?'