Burying the Past (7 page)

‘In my book it's the rats that jump first. Losing one chief, one deputy chief and one ACC at a stroke—'

‘Exactly. Not to mention a pretty sound chief super. Not good for morale. And there is something else: I can't see you moving out until you've sorted out our skeleton.'

‘Quite. Plus the cable theft, which I'm also inclined to take personally. Oh, and I've got a rape and a stabbing now, too,' she said, leaning forward to share the details.

‘Thanks to you giving permission to question your solicitor, we have a name for the previous owner,' Kim told Fran the following day. As in the classic TV movies, they met in the women's loo, but by chance, not design.

Fran had just emerged from yet another bruising budget meeting, which had managed to last till almost noon. She had almost forgotten about the real world as opposed to the world of figures. She was washing her hands, as if, like Pilate, to absolve herself of responsibility for bad decisions. And this was before the new round of spending cuts the government had just threatened. ‘I'm only sorry I didn't have time to wait for an answer myself. Anyway, name?'

‘Marion Lovage.'

‘Lovage? How very herbal,' Fran observed. ‘For real, Kim?'

‘According to the land registry,' Kim said huffily. ‘And we have other information too. She was a headmistress.
Dr
Lovage. She ran a junior school in a village not far from yours – what will be yours, I mean, when you move into the rectory.'

‘Someone with a doctorate running a tiny school? Weird.'

Kim didn't seem to think so. ‘She did very well there, too, according to the present head. Got it out of special measures, whatever they are. She did so well that some government minister came to congratulate her. It made not just the local but the national news: they've still got the fading photos up in the head's office.'

‘Good for her. What happened next?' If Fran was hoping that Dr Lovage had suddenly left the neighbourhood, leaving everyone in the lurch, she was to be disappointed.

‘She worked there till she retired – a couple of years later. Then she told the staff she was going to take the holiday of a lifetime, and shut the rectory up and left it. Well, it's so off the beaten track that vandals might not notice. Or squatters . . . But she told the school secretary she'd put some of her best pieces of furniture in store. Just that. Not where. I've got someone on to it. It'd be nice to see if she reclaimed them before she died.'

‘It would indeed. And you have a year of death?'

‘It fits in with what you said about the house not being sold till ten years after her death and the market going flat – March, thirteen years ago.'

‘Excellent. Where?'

‘Hammersmith. Sheltered accommodation. She bought her apartment outright, lived there a couple of weeks, talking to the warden every day, and then just died. Phut. Heart, according to her death certificate. She had a minimalist funeral, ashes scattered on Dartmoor. Near those sodding badgers, maybe.'

‘Is her solicitor still alive?'

Kim blinked.

‘I just thought that putting a ten-year moratorium on the legatee selling something as lucrative as a house might be a bit unusual – he or she might have tried to talk to her about it. Sometimes solicitors are just as nosy as the rest of us – might have wanted reasons.'

Kim retired to a cubicle. Fran blasted her hands with the drier until Kim emerged again, to use the basin next to Fran's.

‘You've got the team working well, by the sound of it, Kim, not always easy for someone from another force. Is anyone trying to be too clever by half? You're sure there isn't? Good. Remember, if anyone plays you up, come down on them like a ton of bricks.'

‘Thanks. But you won't like what I've got to say next too much, Fran.' She wrinkled her nose and rubbed one leg against the other, like a schoolgirl. ‘I'm afraid there was no trace of any ID on the skeleton, and, more to the point, no trace of a murder weapon. So it looks like we're going to have to give your garden a bit of a going over.'

‘As I said, the garden's not a problem. In fact, we'd be grateful to have it dug for us,' she said, laughing.

‘But you still don't want us to touch the house itself, even though from what that Paula woman says, you can't move in for a bit anyway?'

‘Money, Kim, money,' Fran said. ‘Twenty per cent cuts. If you don't cut some expenditure, you cut either front-line staff or the back-room people we all depend on. Last year I had to watch them sacrifice a whole team; this year there'll be more. If we get extravagant on this investigation, there'll be less to spend on the next. What if we have to skimp on the investigation of a current murder just so we can say we've crossed all the T's and dotted all the I's on this? In fact, rather than dig up the whole patch, I'd get a metal detector run over it. Maybe find a keen amateur detectorist – the heritage officer might be able to recommend an honest one. No nighthawks, thanks very much. But I'd bet any possible murder weapon disappeared years ago, wouldn't you?'

‘If the garden's like the house, yes, I suppose so.' Kim shook the excess water off her hands, but didn't attempt to dry them.

Fran held the door open for her, and they walked into corridor. ‘This Dr Lovage. She sounds a very capable woman – very thorough, very meticulous in her planning.'

Kim came to an abrupt halt. ‘You're still thinking of her as the killer, ma'am? But she's tiny. You can see in those school photos. Five foot four at the most. Slightly built.' This from a woman who was probably a mere size eight for all she was nearly as tall as Fran herself.

‘Might have been whippy. And nothing like needs must for finding a way to do something. Tell you what, Kim, when I've got a moment, which may not be for a few days with the house move coming up, I'm going to try a nice informal chat in the village pub with the locals. After all, there'll be a lot of folk interested in this new couple daft enough to try moving into a building site. I'll report to your team as soon as I know anything – meanwhile, let me know when you've organized the post-mortem.' She couldn't imagine it throwing up anything more than they already knew, but she could hardly skip it, not with such an inexperienced officer as Kim at the helm of the investigation. Only bones, at least. No guts or gore to spoil her day. ‘I might not be able to get to all your briefings, but I'd like to be kept in the loop, and not just for personal reasons, either. Nor,' she added with a grin, ‘merely to see how much of my budget you plan to spend. I hope that nice Dr Valentine won't cost the earth.'

‘He's my sister's partner. I'm pulling in a favour.'

‘Uh, uh. Favour or not, we pay him.' Remembering the red column on her much-loathed spreadsheet, she added, with a smile that in her youth would have been called impish, ‘But ask him for a family discount. You're doing well, Kim, especially as your DCI is conspicuous by his absence at the moment.' She added with a grin, ‘It'd be nice if you'd got it all done and dusted before he came back from his sick leave. Good for your CV.' Fran waved Kim on her way as she headed back to her office.

Meanwhile, how was Jill's investigation getting on? If she knew Jill, she'd be too busy to think about breaking off to eat; Fran would make that decision for her. She'd even make it sound official; instead of popping her head round Jill's door, she got Alice to make a formal phone call asking Jill to present herself.

So Jill looked both puzzled and apprehensive when she arrived five minutes later.

Fran grinned. ‘Eaten yet? About to? Gotcha! Canteen, or sarnies here?'

‘Canteen. I don't suppose we'll have it much longer. Cuts . . .'

Fran didn't contradict her. She held open the office door and they headed for the canteen.

‘I'd have thought you'd be eating with Mark,' Jill said, at last, looking for a quiet corner.

‘We used to. When we were “courting”.' With no hand free, she inserted the quotation marks with her voice only. ‘But now we're living together, there's less need. Though we still stick to our no-shop rule once we shut our front door. Goodness, I'm so hungry. We're moving out on Thursday, and breakfasts tend to be a matter of polishing off whatever happens to be left in the fridge or the cupboard. We take another lot of stuff to the self-store tonight, if only Mark remembers.'

‘And you're still moving into the rectory? Despite the body?'

‘Skeleton. Actually, that describes the house as much as the corpse. It's stripped down to the bones. We would have moved in despite that, except someone stole our electric cable.'

‘Part of that huge sweep over the weekend? Shit.'

‘Quite.' She tucked into her salad. Perhaps it would be more filling than it looked.

‘You can't move back into Mark's place?' Jill split her baked potato to help it cool. ‘Or is his daughter still acting up?'

‘If by acting up you mean squatting, yes. But that's between you and me.' She suppressed a shudder: Sammie should have had the solicitor's letter by now giving formal notice to quit. ‘Now, how's your waif? Cynd?'

‘She'd been going to stay with a friend – we'd not finished with her flat, such as it is. Teenage squalor and poverty – not a good combination. And I wasn't impressed by the friend's place either. Think Rob in his drug-taking days. Squared.'

She must be better if she could speak of him as casually as that. Possibly casually. But Fran knew better than to make any comment about it. She limited herself to saying, ‘Cynd's not your responsibility, Jill.'

‘I know, but all the same . . . She'd never worshipped at St Jude's, apparently – just got to hear of Janie via some
Big Issue
-selling friends whom Janie provides with soup and sandwiches.'

‘Why aren't I surprised by that? What a good woman she is.'

‘Quite. Anyway, I had a word and Janie had a word, and now Cynd's actually moved into the vicarage, thank goodness.'

‘Or God.'

Jill ignored her. Pointedly. ‘I gather she trails Janie like a duckling after its mother.'

‘Well done you. Any news of Cynd's assailant – or victim, depending on which way you look at him?'

‘None.'

‘In that case, are you thinking what I'm thinking?' Fran laid her cutlery down, as if that would make her think more clearly. ‘That she gave a false description? For whatever reason?'

‘Like—?'

‘Like she was so scared of the real assailant she wanted to put us off the track? Would that wash? But then there's the problem of the stabbing – why confess to killing the wrong person?'

‘Doesn't make sense.' As if was the end of the speculation, Jill started eating.

‘No, it doesn't. But what if someone else stabbed the victim? If Cynd doesn't have a police record, and was clearly a victim, then she might get away with it. Shit, Jill, I don't want to harass a girl we should be cosseting, but we need a few answers.'

It seemed as if Jill wasn't enjoying her potato – she pushed her plate away. ‘Won't do it. You drew up the code of practice yourself, Fran. Don't even think of asking me to go against it.'

‘I wouldn't dream of it. Eat while I think. Go on. My salad won't go cold like your spud.' She pressed her temples. ‘I reckon I could stretch the budget to speeding up the DNA tests on the bedlinen at least. And on her vaginal swabs. And we pray there's a match on the database. How about that? It'd probably mean a proportionate reduction in your overtime, though.'

‘Maybe we wouldn't need so much.' Jill smiled hopefully. ‘Thanks, Fran. Now, before we hit the shops, what sort of wedding outfit did you think of?'

‘I was wondering – hell, is that the time? Another bloody meeting!' She grabbed her apple and ran.

‘R
etirement would mean more time for sunsets like this,' Mark observed, slowing to admire the view from the hills guarding what he thought of as their valley. The rectory, still bristling with scaffolding, was centre stage. To its right was the village from which it had somehow become separated years ago – or perhaps some moneyed rector of Great Hogben had decided he didn't want his parishioners inconveniently close to his glebe land. The sun just caught the weathervane on top of the stocky church tower.

‘It'd mean more time to worship at our parish church,' Fran observed, ‘where I'd bet the congregation's better heeled than at poor St Jude's.'

‘The patron saint of lost causes,' Mark murmured. ‘Speaking of which, Ms Harman, soon to be Mrs Turner – no, you'd stay as a Harman, wouldn't you? – shall we make ourselves even later home by dropping down to see what they've been up to?'

‘Paula and Co or Kim and Co?'

‘Both, I suppose. And then catch a snack in our new local?' He didn't manage to stifle a terrific yawn.

‘It's tempting, but we've still got stuff in the freezer we ought to eat. More of my unlabelled meals. You can choose some at random while I deal with the utility room.'

‘What about the self-store? We said we'd take a preliminary load?'

‘Tell you what, we're paying the removal people enough. Let them deal with everything, not just the furniture. If you could just scout around on the Internet for a hotel . . . A week, I suppose, to allow time for Mr Smith to get his cable and install it. And we must make damned sure we label the stuff we need,' Fran said.

‘OK. I'll get busy labelling while you microwave our feast.'

‘Excellent. If we're good, we can treat ourselves and take a look in tomorrow morning. Both of us. That'll scare Kim. I've held you up as a monster of official miserliness, by the way. So don't worry if she hexes you and backs swiftly into the excavations.'