High-Wired (2 page)

Olivia Hardy was on the short side, and somewhat tubby. Her hair was cut short for convenience’s sake, and she wore only mascara and lipstick as her warpaint to work. Her rotundity had increased since she had quit smoking, of which she was well aware, and she was always intending to do something about it ‘next week’, whenever that would be. Maybe. Her everyday attire was casual –
very
casual since her size had increased.

‘My suit’s going to reek when I get home,’ replied Groves, not really listening. ‘I’ll have to drop it into the dry cleaner’s tomorrow.’

Lauren Groves was always finicky about her appearance. She was a complete physical contrast to Hardy. Very tall – nearly six feet – naturally slim, and brought up never to be sloppily dressed, even in her own home. It really was just the way she’d been brought up, with a nanny first, then life at boarding school.

The police station they had just left was situated about half a mile from the promenade, in the medium-sized coastal town of Littleton-on-Sea. The station had been built in the 1970s to serve an ever-growing population, and had been constantly added to in an ad hoc manner by the use of Portakabins and other ‘temporary’ structures.

At first glance the town itself gave a good impression, the road opposite the neat green by the sea lined with Georgian houses, once grand residences for the new middle classes and their live-in staff. Now, though, most were divided up into minuscule flats and bedsits, the facades faded and peeling.

At night, however, the dark underbelly of the place began to show. Situated on the south coast, it was a regular landing base for what the locals referred to as ‘wetbacks’: illegal immigrants swimming ashore from dodgy vessels that wouldn’t chance bringing them in any closer. It was also a favourite landing place for consignments of drugs, and the town had more than its fair share of users and pushers.

The number of homeless people had also risen considerably in the last few years – many of them runaways, who often fell into stealing to feed their drug habits. Drugs had become a convenient way to blur the edges of a bleak and loveless existence. Shoplifting from supermarkets and off-licences had also risen, as had begging on the street and sleeping in shop doorways. All in all, these nomads were a pitiful and unwelcome tribe, despised by locals and shopkeepers alike, and a thorn in the side as well as the conscience of the local police.

The town also had a surrounding agricultural ring of nurseries, now steadily being bought up and built over, where casual labour was a necessity in season and these, along with the extensive building work that was rapidly expanding the place, needed workers, not all of them legal.

There was, too, a large stock of Victorian houses, mostly terraced, many seedy and rundown, where any amount of domestic and child abuse went on, rarely reported and even more rarely prosecuted. When examined closely, it was not a place anyone would choose to take an old-fashioned English seaside holiday – but then those who did visit knew nothing of these drawbacks. All they saw were the beach, the sand dunes, the amusement arcades, and the old winding streets of the town, with its easy access to the Downs and more countryside than they could shake a stick at.

DI Hardy had worked in the Littleton-on-Sea police station for longer than she cared to remember, since when it had had a minimal staff and very little to do. Now it was much expanded, with a greatly increased workforce, times had changed unrecognisably. The many departments now crammed into the building were largely insular and did not mix easily, and DI Hardy knew only a fraction of them.

She was forty-eight years old, married with two children who were hardly children anymore, and lived outside the sprawling mass that the town was becoming, in a rambling old cottage to which she was looking forward to returning on this grizzly Friday evening.

Her new DS was younger at only forty, and was also married with two children, but her life was very different, and there were no similarities at all between their domestic arrangements. Groves lived in a huge barn conversion buried in the countryside, quite a secret unless you knew where to find it, with an au pair-cum-nanny, her husband working away in the Middle East for most of the time, as he had a job in the petro-chemical industry.

Many of those working in the station considered her a rich bitch who was just passing time and slumming it, but Hardy knew better. She could see Groves was a dedicated officer who did the job to give her life purpose and direction, and counteract the smothering atmosphere of her domestic circumstances.

Both her children were away most of the time at boarding school and, although she was comfortably off, that and her husband’s habitual absence made her feel like a bird in a golden cage, with nothing to do all day except sing for release. Her job provided the necessary stuffing to fill the empty hours that filled what passed for her life.

Although they appeared outwardly so different, she and Hardy had got on rather well from the first, both giving their jobs high priority, but sharing a mutual interest in music. They both had lively minds that sometimes drove them to distraction, and they had discovered that each of them was attempting to learn how to play the flute.

Today Groves had brought her instrument into work, as her husband and children were away, and she planned to go back to the DI’s house that evening for a bite to eat and an attempt at the lively jig duet that Hardy had come across. She had nothing to go home to apart from the au pair, Gerda, and she didn’t really get on with the woman.

Hardy was also looking forward to this, as her husband was out on a gig tonight with his band, and she knew he would not be home until the early hours. She hoped with all her heart that this accident didn’t tie them up for too long. OK, so people had died, but that was hardly her fault, and she had been looking forward keenly to having a tootle on her flute.

It was November, and thus already dark when they arrived at the site of the collision. In one car was a lone man, the one who was, even now, being cut free by the fire service. An ambulance crew stood by, awaiting his release. In the other car had been two mothers with their young daughters in the back seat. Without the restraint of seatbelts, the girls hadn’t stayed there very long and, on her final fatal journey, one of them must have severed a major artery, thought Hardy, as the scene was liberally painted with a coating of blood. As Groves masked a retch with her hankie, Hardy had the irreverent thought that it was difficult to tell whether this scene represented an accident in an abattoir or a modern installation art exhibit.

The deceased women had probably given in to pester power, and presumably had not insisted that their two daughters wore their seatbelts. The head-on collision had catapulted the girls forward, across the front seats, breaking their mothers’ necks. They were dead, as was one of the little girls, but the other had been through the windscreen and had landed sprawled on the bonnet of the other car. She had already been conveyed to the ICU of a hospital in the larger nearby town, and the meat wagon was on its way to remove the three less fortunate travellers to the mortuary.

‘God, the pity of it!’ whispered Groves, her face a mask of horror.

‘Should’ve got the little bugger to buckle up, then. There are no excuses in a situation like this,’ said Hardy. She had long since hardened her heart to the consequences of such simple human errors.

‘How can you be so cold?’ asked Groves, staring at the DI as if she had suggested breeding children for food.

‘How many adverts have there been on the telly about this sort of thing? Why don’t people learn? This was an accident waiting to happen and, this time, it did. End of story.’

‘I wish I could think like that.’

‘If you don’t learn to, you’ll not last much longer in the force.’

‘It’s not a force now, it’s a service,’ said Groves to her senior officer, momentarily distracted.

‘Bollocks!’ Hardy replied. ‘How can a service hunt down crooks, arrest them, and put them away? There’s more
force
than
service
in that, when you look at it from our point of view.’

‘I don’t think our thoughts count anymore. It’s what we are to the public.’

‘More’s the pity. When I was little, kids were scared stiff of policemen. Now, they jeer at us – cock a snook at us as if we were a joke. We’ve had our powers so reduced that we might as well be a branch of the Mothers’ Union, for all we can do about most of the little sods in this town.’

‘True,’ Groves mused, then pointed as a vehicle approached with lights flashing. ‘Here comes Traffic. We’re here out of necessity, but do you think we can just hand over to them now?’

‘Watch me and weep.’ Hardy approached the newly arrived car and leaned through an open window to explain the situation, withdrew her head and turned towards Groves. Her thumbs went up in the air as she wandered back over. ‘All sorted. They’ll make the necessary arrangements to get the road cleared, and the sergeant will go to the women’s houses and break the news.

‘They’ve already radioed through to the Drugs Squad, and asked them to attend, so I think we can leave the rest to them. Let’s get back to mine and see what the old man’s left us for supper.’

‘Your husband cooks?’

‘You bet he does. Cleans, too. He may be in a band and need to practise, but he’s retired, and he’s got to do something else to keep himself busy or he’d go mad – either that or I would. There are two of us grown-ups living there, and he’s the one with the free time to wield the vacuum cleaner and the polishing cloth. I did it all when the kids were little and we were both working – now it’s his turn. Fair’s fair.’

‘I’m dying to meet him,’ said Groves, as if this represented a rare treat for her, ‘but I don’t even know his name.’

‘Everybody calls him Hal, but his full name’s Hallelujah Martin Luther King Hardy. How’s that for a handle?’

‘Good gracious! Whatever was his mother thinking of?’

‘If you stay on for a bit tonight, you might meet him and work that one out for yourself. Are you going to stay over?’

‘I hadn’t planned on it.’

‘Well, I suggest you think about it. We’ve just witnessed a very nasty accident, and I propose to open at least one bottle of wine with supper, and the same again when we have a go at this duet. Are you on duty tomorrow?’

‘No. I’ve just got some paperwork to catch up with.’

‘I’m not due in till the evening, so I suggest you phone your au pair and tell her you won’t be back. We’ll nip back now and get our cars, and I expect I’ll be able to hunt you out something to wear in bed, even though it’ll be far too big for you.’

‘Do we have to go back to the station? I won’t need my car until I’m going in later in the day: it’s not as if I have anything much to go home to.’

‘Come on. I heard you had a fabulous barn conversion.’

‘With nobody in it but the au pair, and I don’t really like her if I’m being honest. We’ve got nothing in common, and if I do want to talk about something, she pleads a lack of understanding of English. She can speak it well enough when she chooses, though. Without the children’s presence, I don’t much want to spend any time there.’

‘Would you like me to drop you off when I go in late tomorrow afternoon?’

‘Thank you very much,’ replied Groves gratefully. She’d worked in a station further along the coast before she was transferred to Littleton-on-Sea and moved house, and she didn’t have many friends locally. She and Hardy had worked their first case together very politely and formally, but the recent realisation that both of them were enthusiastic novice flautists had sparked off a warmth in their relationship, and made them sisters in arms against the mysteries of those shiny metal tubes with all the little holes.

‘And I think you could call me Olivia when we’re not in the office, especially if we’re going to be socialising together over supper.’

‘Thanks … Olivia. Then you’d better call me Lauren. I am looking forward to this duet.’

‘Me too. Hey, do you know what I heard that little rat Redwood doing the other day when he thought we couldn’t hear?’

‘No. I never heard anything derogatory.’

‘I heard him whistling the theme tune from the Laurel and Hardy films under his breath.’

‘Why?’

‘Have you ever thought about what we look like side by side? And if you examine our names, you’re Lauren – not quite Laurel – and I’m Hardy. Ha ha, very funny. The next time Traffic’s short of a body, he can go along and help out, and I hope it’s on a freezing cold day with driving rain and sleet.’

‘Blasted cheek of the man!’

Olivia Hardy turned the car in the direction of her home and mused on the surprising things that could turn a professional partnership into a friendship. In their case, it looked like the flute might prove to be the catalyst, and she felt it would be nice to have a decent relationship with her working partner. Her previous one had been nearing retirement and taciturn to the point of almost complete silence. She had never got to know him, having found their working life together very barren and lonely.

It had not been possible to form any sort of friendship with other officers at the station because of a lack of compatible senior ranks. Often abrupt, she knew she could appear aloof at times, not willing to settle for the shallow matiness that her male colleagues seemed to accept – more a cult of the penis than a recognition of ability, she felt. A DS, though, would be considered suitable as a friend as well as colleague, especially as they were both women.

After about ten minutes, she pulled off the main road on to a small side road and, after four hundred yards, turned right on to a narrow driveway. ‘This is it,’ she said, braking at the front of a long, low thatched property with leaded lights.

‘Oh, how pretty!’ exclaimed Lauren, climbing out of the car to have a closer look. ‘It looks like you even have roses round the door in the summer. How long have you lived here?’

‘Almost all our married lives. Hal’s parents didn’t want to sell it, but they did want to retire from the NHS and go back home. We live here for now, and if they come back, they’ll live here again. If they don’t, well, it’s here when they drop off their perches. We’ll sort something out if and when the situation arises.’