High-Wired (3 page)

It seemed odd, disclosing this sort of personal information to a colleague, but as she intended to extract some personal details from the DS, it seemed only fair. It would certainly be nice to have a friend in her work colleague, as there weren’t many people comfortable about a friendship with a member of the police force – damn,
service
– whoever they were. There was always that slight discomfort there that they had to be on their best behaviour all the time. She, too, was looking forward to having a partner in her wrestle with that difficult instrument, and tonight would be the highlight of her week.

As they entered the cottage, Lauren exclaimed with pleasure, ‘This is absolutely charming. You must be very happy here.’

‘We are, for now. Now, let’s see what Hal’s left us for supper.’

Hal had left them a pot of spicy lamb stew and a pot of rice to be heated in the microwave, so it wasn’t long before they sat down to eat, with the first of the glasses of wine they would consume that evening.

When they had cleared away the plates and opened another bottle of chilled Sauvignon Blanc, Olivia got out the two copies of the duet she had found and asked Lauren if she would be able to play her part through on the upright piano which nestled against the far wall of the small dining room, never giving a thought to whether she would be capable of doing so.

‘No problem. Lead me to it,’ she replied enthusiastically, and Olivia smiled as she realised that her colleague was beginning to relax under the benign influence of the wine, and certainly could handle going through her part on the old Joanna. They stood in front of the instrument with a copy of the jig on the hanging music stand, and made a good fist of playing it through at a fair lick, Olivia taking the top part, Lauren the lower one.

‘I don’t think I can go that fast on the flute,’ admitted Lauren.

‘Me neither,’ replied her boss, with a heartfelt sigh of relief. ‘What part do you want to play on the flute?’

‘Can I take the lower part? Only I’ve noticed a couple of high Ds in the top part, and I can’t blow them yet.’

‘Well, I can just about manage that. How are you in the middle register?’

‘A bit shaky. I don’t really seem to have the confidence.’

‘Well, I’ll open another bottle of wine, and we’ll extract such Dutch courage as we can from that.’

Lauren had brought her flute in with her, opened the case and began to fit it together. ‘I’ll just get mine,’ her hostess said, and went into another room, coming out with her instrument already put together. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can’t always be bothered to put it away when I’ve finished with it.’

‘I wouldn’t dare leave mine out. That interfering, nosy au pair would no doubt have a go at playing it, and she’d probably break it, then deny all knowledge of what had happened.’

‘Here’s to making sweet music together,’ said Olivia, handing her sergeant another full glass, and they toasted each other and music in general, before both taking a goodly swallow. Music stands had appeared from nowhere, and as they settled down, the DI announced, ‘It’s in 6/8 time. I come in first, so it’s me after five, then you join in.’

They played through the piece very slowly, inaccurately, and with lots of minuscule breaks for swearing. ‘The only time I use bad language is when I’m sight-reading music,’ confessed Lauren, and Olivia knew exactly what she meant.

After a couple more attempts, trying to increase the tempo each time, they were both helpless with laughter, and Olivia refilled their glasses. ‘And now for the best bit: I set my little sound-activated tape recorder on the table, so we can listen to ourselves from a more critical position.’

‘You’ve what?’

‘You’ll find it funny. I used to do this with an old schoolfriend with piano duets, and we used to laugh until we cried when we heard what we were actually like. Keep an open mind.’

When the front door opened later to admit Hal, they were both helpless with mirth, and didn’t even notice his arrival until he spoke.

‘What’s tickling you two ladies’ funny bones?’

Lauren reacted with shock, whipping round her head to look at the large black man who filled the small doorway from the hall. ‘Who …?’ she cried, only to be cut off by her inspector.

‘Hello, Hal. This is Lauren, my DS. We were just sight-reading a flute duet, and I recorded our efforts. We’ve just listened to the tape and it was hilarious.’

‘Can I have a listen, too?’

‘Course you can,’ replied his wife, and played the recording for a second time.

Hal was suitably amused, and was finally formally introduced to Lauren. ‘Hal’s a musician,’ Olivia explained, thinking this might go part of the way to explaining why he was in a brightly coloured shirt covered in images of parrots.

‘What do you play?’ asked Lauren, still confused.

‘The steel drums. I’m originally from Barbados. I used to be a teacher, but I took early retirement and now I just do what I love best, which is playing in steel bands all over this part of the coast.’

Lauren was thunderstruck. She’d never imagined such an interesting and exotic husband for her outwardly conventional boss: no suited businessman for the inspector but this gaudy peacock of a man. Lauren realised she had led a sheltered life, and had grown up in a protective Middle England bubble which had shaped her expectations of others.

‘If you want to come upstairs, I’ll show you my kit, after I’ve lugged it back up there. Give me about half an hour, and I’ll have a glass of that wine, too, honey. Entertaining’s a thirsty business.’

His wife poured him a generous glassful, which he downed like it were water, then went to open yet another bottle. ‘You didn’t think you’d get an early night, did you?’ she asked her new friend. ‘Once he’s shown you his kit and let you have a go, he’ll want us to play the duet again so that he can busk a piano accompaniment to it.’

‘I had no idea you were so interested in music.’

‘What good would spreading that abroad do in our job? Someone would only find a way to ridicule my interest, and they’ve got enough to work with, with my rotund figure and my …
casual
dress sense – not to mention my name.’

‘You don’t sound very bitter about it,’ said Lauren, bemused by the DI’s relaxed attitude.

‘While they’re having a go at me, they’re leaving somebody else alone. I’ve got the skin of an elephant as well as the figure to go along with it. What they don’t know is that I also have the memory of one, and I’ll get my own back at some unspecified time in the future. I’m just biding my time for now.’

A loud holler from upstairs interrupted their discussion, and Olivia led Lauren upstairs to play with her husband’s second-favourite toys.

After half an hour of drum demonstrations, and a quasi-lecture about how the instrument had evolved and attempts at playing the drums herself, Hal finally bellowed, ‘Where’s that bottle of wine? And is there any of that stew left? Me stomach thinks me throat’s cut. Chop chop, woman. You’re starving your husband to death, not to mention giving him a bad case of lack of booze.’

The three of them went back downstairs, glasses were filled, and Hal served himself a plateful of the remains of the supper, eating it standing up without bothering to reheat it. As he ate, he began to tell Lauren about his parents, and why they’d left the cottage.

‘They were both dentists, working on the NHS and privately. They bought this place when they were first working here and it was in a bad state of repair. Gradually they renovated it, and when it was finally finished, the opportunity arose for them to retire.

‘They moved back to Barbados. That was years ago – I’m an only child – and they seem to be quite happily settled there. I can’t really see them coming back, but we’re keeping the home fires burning in case they have a sudden urge to move back to the grey and rainy climes of Britain.’

‘Fat chance of that happening,’ his wife commented, heading towards the kitchen with a corkscrew in her hand, her gait a little unsteady.

As she returned with yet another bottle of wine, Lauren asked a little tentatively, ‘I don’t see any signs of your children. I understood you had two.’

Olivia sighed deeply as she filled their glasses again. ‘We do. Hibbie decided to leave school, much to our disappointment as we wanted her to go on to university. She’s now doing a course at college, an admin qualification, and has a job a little further along the coast. Benjamin has just started at college. We just didn’t go into their rooms when we were upstairs and, to be honest, they’re hardly ever at home these days. They’re sixteen and eighteen, by the way, Ben’s the elder.’

‘What’s Hibbie short for?’ asked the sergeant, not being able to unravel the source of the diminutive in her slightly befuddled state.

‘Hibiscus Flower. Don’t look at me. It’s was his mother’s idea, not mine.’

Hal smiled at this comment, and his booming laugh filled the room. ‘If we hadn’t named our daughter after her suggestion there would have been hell to pay, and we didn’t want to name her after her grandmother. My mother’s given name is Morning Glory, known to everyone just as Glory.’

‘Oh.’ Lauren couldn’t think of any other comment to make. ‘Mine are Jade and Sholto – eight and ten – kids, that is. I do miss them when they’re away at school. This is Jade’s first term, so the house is very empty without her.’

‘Do they have to go away to school?’ asked Hal, who found the practice of sending small children away to boarding schools barbaric.

‘It’s the only way to get them a decent start in life these days,’ replied Lauren, then began to bluster. ‘Not that I mean … not with yours … I’m sure they had a perfectly good …’ She finally stuttered to a stop.

‘That’s OK, Lauren,’ declared Olivia, ‘I wouldn’t exactly say that ours have turned out as model young citizens. Sometimes I wish we’d had the money to send them somewhere decent, even if they were only day pupils.’

Hal growled deep in the back of his throat in disapproval – he had been a state school teacher before he retired – before grabbing the neck of the bottle for a little top-up. A swig soon restored his goodwill, and he asked Lauren what she did when she wasn’t working.

‘I don’t do all that much, to be quite honest, what with Kenneth working away so much.’

‘You must do something,’ he persisted. ‘Lord, I’m still hungry.’

As he went in search of the cake tin, Lauren shrugged and explained that her only interests were music and needlework, and she was lonely a lot of the time.

‘Well, if we’re off duty together, you’ve got a musical partner now.’

‘That’s true. I don’t suppose you play recorder, do you?’

‘Of course I do. I have a whole family of different sizes put away in a cupboard. Do you want to do that next time?

‘Next time?’

‘Of course. We’re a musical partnership now. If you want to be, that is,’ said Olivia, slightly unsure of herself in making this assumption.

‘I’d love to do that. We’ll have to compare rosters.’ Lauren was definitely getting bleary-eyed now, and put her head back, allowing her eyes to close.

When Hal came back with a huge wedge of cake in one hand, his jaws working away on this second supper, Olivia pointed at her and said, ‘I think you ought to help her up to her room. We had a call out to a filthy accident just before we went off duty, but I think she’s relaxed enough now not to have nightmares.’

Hal gathered the tall, unresisting figure, which was just beginning to emit small, polite snores, up into his arms and headed for the staircase. ‘I’ll be back in a minute, and you can tell me about that accident. I know that if you don’t get it off your chest you’ll have nightmares yourself.’

CHAPTER TWO

The next morning didn’t start until 10.30 for any of them, when there were three pairs of bleary eyes at the breakfast table, and three jaded palates trying to enjoy the home-made marmalade spread liberally on their toast.

‘Do you think you could drop me home for a change of clothes before we go into the station?’ asked Lauren, anxiously hoping that she wasn’t being a nuisance – but she had after all slept in what she was wearing, with just a duvet put over her comatose body.

‘No problem,’ replied Olivia. ‘It’ll give me a chance to have a quick peek at where you live.’

‘Of course. I’ll give you the guided tour, and just hope we don’t run into Gerda – she’s the au pair I don’t particularly get on with. Maybe she’ll be out shopping, or whatever it is she does most of the time now there are no children to look after.’

‘Great! I love looking at other people’s houses, although some of the ones we visit in our job aren’t exactly of the ideal home variety, are they?’

After several cups of coffee and a couple of painkillers, Olivia declared herself safe to drive, and they bade goodbye to Hal for a short while. Before they drove off in the pool car, they could hear the sounds of the Caribbean coming from the room upstairs where his set of steel drums lived in the winter. Apparently, in the summer, he relocated them to an old barn at the back of the property, so that his practice wasn’t too much of a disturbance in the house.

Home Farm Barn was a couple of miles to the west and further inland, proving to be a substantial building that had been renovated beyond recognition and now represented a very up-market dwelling. There was a huge double-height entrance lobby with sofas and a central table with a large vase of flowers on its highly polished centre.

Every room was on a grand scale, and a single staircase right in the middle of the vestibule split halfway up, and led in opposite directions to the bedrooms. ‘Bloody hell! You didn’t let on it was this grand, and so off the beaten track,’ exclaimed Olivia in disbelief.

‘Kenneth has a very high salary,’ was the only explanation she got, and this was said apologetically.

In Lauren’s bedroom, Olivia, having no regard for other people’s privacy, flung back all the wardrobe doors in what appeared to be a dressing room. ‘Bloody hell,’ she carolled, again. ‘You’ve got enough suits in here to start your own company!’ A whole row of navy, grey, and black suits and pale blouses hung neatly on parade. Another set of doors revealed some very expensive day wear, and yet another, a row of what looked like ball gowns. ‘Very fancy,’ she commented drily.