Authors: Hilary Bonner
‘Your wish …’ began Kelly, then let his voice trail away as he saw the look in Karen’s eye.
Janet Farnsby, whose serious, rather humourless nature was somehow emphasised by the way she kept her straight, light brown hair tied back from her face and the round granny spectacles she affected, stood up and looked doubtfully around her. Torquay CID
didn’t run to providing a computer for every CID officer. Instead, they shared the bank of machines where DC Farnsby had been sitting. Karen knew what the young woman was thinking. Was she really supposed to work with John Kelly, of all people, in the middle of the incident room?
‘You can use my office, I’m off to Middlemoor,’ Karen announced, once more leading the way. Once inside her little glass cubicle, Karen busied herself picking up and sorting out the various papers she needed for her meeting with the chief constable at headquarters. There was just one item on the agenda: CID budget. Karen’s favourite topic. No doubt, further economies were about to be demanded. Not only would her officers be sharing computers, Karen reckoned they’d be sharing notebooks and pencils if Harry Tomlinson had his way. She gritted her teeth and made herself concentrate on ensuring she had everything she needed for her unwelcome meeting.
Janet Farnsby, who had recently completed a course on building E-fits, the modern computerised alternative to identikit, had settled in front of Karen’s screen with Kelly by her side and was already typing in data and calling up various images for him to study.
Karen, still wearing the white cape, with an untidy bundle of papers tucked under one arm, the big denim Voyage bag under the other, watched them from the doorway for a few seconds.
Kelly glanced up at her and looked for a moment as if he might be about to say something clever. Karen didn’t give him the chance.
‘Right, I’m off,’ she announced briskly. ‘Good luck.’
As she crossed the incident room once more, heading for the stairs, she very nearly bumped into Chris Tompkins.
‘Sorry, boss,’ muttered the veteran detective in his familiarly flat tones.
Karen couldn’t look at him. She really couldn’t. But if she’d happened to have had a rose handy, she would definitely have at least attempted to put it between his teeth.
Once settled in her car for the forty-five-minute or so drive to the Devon and Cornwall force’s HQ at Middlemoor, on the outskirts of Exeter, Karen immediately called the chief constable’s office, ostensibly to confirm her appointment for later that afternoon.
The chief constable’s secretary, Joan Lockharte, was her usual snooty self. Karen could just picture her, prim little face framed by an irritatingly geometric yellow haircut, sitting perfectly straight before her invariably immaculately tidy desk. Karen disliked the bloody woman almost as much as she did her boss, but she made herself remain courteous because she wanted something. She wanted information. She was far from ready to share any concerns she might have about Alan Connelly’s death with Harry Tomlinson, but she was quite prepared to use his contacts.
‘Oh, by the way, you know the commanding officer of the Devonshire Fusiliers, at Hangridge. He was at the CC’s Oldway Mansions commendations bash last year,’ she began. The chief constable traditionally threw an annual reception at Torbay Council’s imposing offices at which he presented members of
the local community with various awards for bravery and outstanding service, and Karen vaguely recalled the Fusiliers being commended for the part they played in searching for and rescuing a missing Dartmoor rambler.
Joan Lockharte muttered something that sounded vaguely affirmative. Or it may just have been a sniff. Karen wasn’t sure.
‘Could you remind me of his name?’ she continued determinedly.
‘Colonel Gerrard Parker-Brown.’ The chief constable’s secretary rattled off the name without hesitation. She was at least efficient, Karen had to give her that. And her memory was faultless. Karen knew that well enough. She had often had cause to wish that it wasn’t quite so good.
Her next call was to Hangridge. She had decided to make her initial inquiries informal – which was in any case all she could reasonably do under the circumstances – hence her desire to know the name of the Fusiliers’ commanding officer before contacting the barracks. She wanted to trade on her one and only social contact with Parker-Brown. That was, after all, how dealings between potentially immovable forces like the police and the army were more often than not conducted. Karen, as a relatively young woman with certain idiosyncrasies regarding her work, who had not only managed to survive but usually to triumph in a man’s world, was not particularly good at these kind of tactics. It did not suit her either to prevaricate or to dissemble. But she reckoned that, in this case, her best chance of getting any real co-operation out of the army was to give it a go.
The sergeant who answered the phone put her
straight through to the colonel, whose double-barrelled name, while so traditionally appropriate for a senior army officer, did not fit at all with her brief memory of him. Certainly she was not surprised when he so promptly came on the line. He hadn’t seemed the type who would hide behind minions under any circumstances.
‘Parker-Brown.’ He spoke crisply, not quite with the aristocratic intonation of previous generations of army officer, but Karen suspected that upper-crust vowels had probably been deliberately toned down.
She quickly introduced herself, at the same time reminding the colonel that they had met once at the CC’s party at Oldway Mansions.
‘Yes, yes, I remember,’ he responded at once, in such a way, however, that Karen was quite sure he didn’t remember at all. ‘How nice to hear from you, Detective Superintendent.’
His approach threw Karen a bit. She had expected the CO of the Devonshire Fusiliers to be rather more on his guard with a senior policewoman, albeit one who was playing the social card. She found herself pausing while she worked out exactly how to word what she wanted to say next. The colonel, still sounding helpful and friendly, filled the silence.
‘So what can I do for you, Miss Meadows?’
Karen decided to get straight to the point.
‘Look, I wondered if I might come up and see you. As soon as possible. Tomorrow morning, perhaps? It concerns one of your young soldiers, Alan Connelly, the lad killed on the road over the moors last night, near Buckfast. Certain matters have come to my attention that I’d very much like to talk through with you …’
‘Ah, yes, Connelly. Tragic, quite tragic. He was only seventeen, you know. I’ll help in any way I can, naturally. But his death is hardly a police matter, is it, Miss Meadows?’
‘Any sudden violent death is a police matter, Colonel, at least in the initial stages. And that is the case even with serving military personnel when death occurs in a public place.’
Karen was determined to make that clear from the beginning.
‘Yes, yes, of course. I do understand. Would you like to come up here for coffee tomorrow? Midmorning? Would about eleven suit you?’
Karen agreed at once, reflecting on how civilised the modern army was, or at least how civilised it liked to be perceived as.
She ended the call and forced herself to concentrate for the last half-hour or so of her journey on the unwelcome meeting ahead. Karen reckoned that she was a good copper. She’d had her ups and downs, but, in reality, she knew darned well that she was a good copper. Paperwork, however, was her
bête noir
. She hated it. She loathed it. And managing a budget was the worst sort of paperwork in her opinion, and the most unsatisfactory aspect of her job. However, the chief constable was a paperwork sort of policeman. If you considered him to be any kind of policeman, that is. Which Karen actually didn’t.
It was one of those days when Karen was extremely pleased eventually to get home. Her meeting with the chief constable had gone much as she had expected. It had been a bit like a visit to an accountant, really. Only an accountant who was not so much on your
side as that of the tax authorities. As usual when finances were under discussion, Karen had found herself forced to duck and dive quite spectacularly. It had been one of her trickiest sessions with Harry Tomlinson, and by the time it was finally over Karen had felt uncharacteristically drained of energy.
As soon as she entered her apartment in West Beach Heights, an old Victorian block to the west of Torquay seafront, she headed straight to the small kitchen at the back to make herself a large gin and tonic. Plymouth gin poured over lots of ice and a slice of lime, in a decent tall glass filled to the brim with Schweppes tonic – her favourite tipple, and the kind of G and T that was still hard to find in British bars of any kind, and virtually non-existent in pubs.
As she took a long, deep drink she became aware of a small furry creature rubbing itself against her legs. Sophie, the handsome brown and white cat with which Karen shared her home, was inclined to scratch, claw and deliver impatient love bites if she did not receive enough attention. So Karen, wondering why she was quite so fond of such a self-centred pet, dutifully bent down to tickle Sophie’s ears, as she knew was required. Then she carried the remains of her drink into the sitting room. It was a rather lovely room, decorated in pale creams and white, and furnished with the various antique pieces Karen so much liked to collect. Two huge windows along one wall, stretching almost from floor to ceiling, gave sweeping views of the bay. Karen was by nature congenitally untidy, but she more or less kept her untidiness to the bedroom, making a real effort to keep the living room in at least reasonable order. She slumped gratefully onto the sofa, deliberately
omitting to switch on the lights so that she could savour the view outside. Almost at once, Sophie took a flying leap onto her lap and demanded attention again.
Karen grumbled at her in good-humoured fashion. She was actually grateful for Sophie’s company. It wasn’t that she was short of friends, or certainly acquaintances, eager to spend time with her. But she rarely seemed to have time in her head to arrange anything, even if she did have the inclination. And since her affair with the man she had believed to be the love of her life had ended the previous year, she seemed to have no interest whatsoever in starting a new relationship with anyone. Or certainly not with anyone she had so far met.
She sighed, and trying not to disturb Sophie – who now appeared to be asleep, after digging her claws into Karen’s legs for at least a minute while making herself a suitable bed in her mistress’s lap – she reached for the telephone on the little table next to the sofa. She pushed the appropriate buttons to check for messages.
The first was from her elderly neighbour Ethel, whose spirited attitude to life and apparently perpetual good humour put Karen to shame, she sometimes felt.
‘I’ve taken in a parcel for you, dear. Pop round any time. I’ve got a nice bottle of port that fell off the back of a lorry. Only I shouldn’t be telling you that, should I? Still, if you arrest me and put me inside, at least I won’t have to spend Christmas with that blessed sister of mine.’
Karen grinned and waited for the next message.
‘Darling, where are you? It’s Alison. Didn’t you get
my message at the weekend? George and I would really love you to come to dinner on Saturday. Our new neighbours will be there, and Sally Sturgis and her husband are down from London. Sally Court that was, do you remember her? She’s dying to see you again …’
Karen pulled a face. She and Alison Barker had once, a million years ago, been good friends, when they were at police training college together. Since then their paths had diverged dramatically. While Karen had concentrated on her career, and had only once even come close to marriage, Alison had quickly abandoned the police force to become a wife and mother of four. The two women had absolutely nothing in common any more, in Karen’s opinion, but, none the less, Alison had been wooing Karen constantly since she and her husband had moved to Torquay from the Midlands several months earlier. Twice now Karen had accepted invitations from Alison, primarily, if perversely, in an attempt to make her phone calls go away, and each time she had regretted it. On the second occasion, Sunday lunch a few weeks previously, Karen had been obliged to spend her entire visit cooing over Alison’s first grandchild. Apart from anything else, that had made her feel dreadfully old, as she knew she was almost exactly the same age as Alison. And now Alison wanted her to meet another police cadet from their ancient past. Someone else she would no doubt have absolutely nothing in common with. She could barely even remember Sally Court.
Resolutely, she pressed delete. Just hearing Alison’s voice had somehow made her even wearier than she had been before, and she knew that she
would have to be at her desk by seven, at the latest, in the morning if she wanted to keep her appointment at Hangridge. First, she had to sort out a load more paperwork to send off to Harry Tomlinson, in a desperate effort to back up some of the claims of financial diligence which she had made that afternoon.
Carefully, she lifted a purring Sophie off her lap and laid her on the sofa by her side. The cat stretched sensuously, but otherwise didn’t stir. Lascivious little beast, thought Karen, as she wandered into the kitchen to pour herself another drink. She was vaguely hungry, but not sure that she had the energy to make herself something to eat. Missing supper would, in any case, do her no harm, she reflected. She had consumed that rather large lunch in the Lansdowne, after all.
All she really wanted to do now was to fall into bed and watch TV for the rest of the evening.
Ethel would have to wait until tomorrow. And Alison Barker could wait for ever.
In the morning, Karen succeeded in making her early start as planned. And by around ten she was able to throw a bundle of papers at a somewhat bemused DC Farnsby, along with instructions to send them to the chief constable’s office. Then she set off for Hangridge. In spite of his apparently relaxed manner, Gerrard Parker-Brown was still a soldier, and a high-ranking one at that. Karen doubted he would have much truck with unpunctuality.