Ash & Bone (12 page)

'You and Joanne,' Framlingham said once they'd settled. 'I was sorry to hear things didn't work out.'

Elder shrugged.

'Still see much of her?'

'Not a lot.'

'And the girl — Katherine, is it? — Frank, that was a terrible business. Nothing worse.' He broke off a piece of bread and wiped it round his plate. 'Coping, is she?'

'I'm not sure.'

'And you?'

Elder said nothing.

Framlingham leaned forward. 'All this kowtowing to civilised values and decency is all very well, but, cases like that, left to me, the bastard would've been given a taste of his own medicine and then sent for the long drop off some nice corded rope.'

The waiter, a sprig of holly pinned to his red waistcoat, had reappeared, smiling, at the table.

Oil ran down between Framlingham's fingers. 'Calves' liver's good, Frank. Sage and butter, nice and simple.'

Elder nodded, looked quickly down the menu and plumped for lamb cutlets with rosemary, saute potatoes and spinach.

'You'll have some wine, Frank? Red or white?'

'Red?'

Framlingham ordered a bottle of Da Luca Primitivo and some mineral water and for ten or so minutes they allowed themselves to gossip about half-remembered colleagues. Framlingham's liver leaked blood, pink across the plate.

'What I have to wonder, Frank, this current business, Maddy Birch, why it matters so much? To you, I mean.'

'I've told you, we worked together.'

'Come on, Frank, it's got to be more than that.'

Elder shook his head. 'I knew her, liked her. That was all.'

Framlingham poured more wine. 'More than fifteen years ago. Around the time Katherine was born, a little after? You were tupping her, Frank, no great disgrace. Times like that, it happens. Feeling a little trapped, I shouldn't wonder. You looked around and there she was. Young, available I dare say.'

'It wasn't like that.'

Framlingham laughed. 'For Christ's sake, Frank, spare us the holier-than-thou. We've all been there. If we're lucky seen it slip between the sheets and out of sight, no one any the wiser.'

Elder bit into a piece of lamb. Well done was what he'd asked for and well done was what he'd got.

'Admit it, Frank. You had her. Once, twice, half a hundred times. That doesn't matter.'

'No.'

Framlingham read the seriousness in his face.

'It's worse then. You didn't have her, Frank. Just wanted to. Fancied her and most likely she fancied you. But somehow you let her get stuck inside your head. She was the one you pictured when you were screwing your wife or jerking off in the shower.'

Elder reached for the bottle and refilled his glass. 'She's dead and I want to know why. I want whoever was responsible to be caught. Is that so wrong?'

'No, it's not wrong. Not at all. It's more than that, though, Frank. More than wanting.'

'What do you mean?'

Framlingham smiled. 'Come on, Frank, you've not come all this way for a fair-to-middling lunch and a few questions asked and maybe answered. You might not want to sign back on full-time, but you'd not mind a bite at this. Am I right?'

'I suppose so.'

'Is that a yes?'

'All right. Yes.'

Framlingham steepled his fingers. 'This investigation, Homicide gave it everything. Overtime, technical support staff, everything. Maddy Birch, she was one of ours, after all. Then, when there was no early breakthrough, things were scaled down. You know the way it goes. Normally, by now, some of my lot would be moving in, putting the whole thing under review. Starting from scratch if needs be.'

'And that's not happening?'

Framlingham set down his glass. 'We're having to tread careful, Frank, this one, with Shields in charge.'

'I don't understand.'

'Come on, Frank. A woman officer and black. If we're seen elbowing her aside…'

'That's ridiculous.'

'Politics, Frank, that's what it is. Perception. That's what matters. I doubt she'd play the race card herself, Shields, but there's others who would.' He sighed. 'It's a quagmire, Frank. A bloody mess. On the one hand we're instigating anti-racist policies left, right and centre, practically dragging ethnic minorities off the streets and begging them into uniform, and at the same time, we'll spend half a million pounds to prove some member of the Black Police Association has been fiddling his expenses. It beggars bloody belief.'

Reaching out, he poured the last of the wine.

'We'll get there, Frank. Just a little more patience, that's all.'

Elder sat back in his chair.

Glancing at the bill the waiter had quietly left, Framlingham took out one of his credit cards and dropped it down. 'Go home, Frank, relax. It's nearly Christmas. I'll be in touch.'

Karen Shields began her day at five thirty-five with a sore throat, a thick head and a brace of Paracetamol. Just what she needed, going down with some bug the morning she had to explain to her superior why it was that after almost four weeks, not only had no arrests been made, the only serious suspect they'd had had come up pure as the driven snow. She could already see the look on her boss's face as he offered her a Kleenex for her cold and shuffled her aside.

Not only was Maddy's ex-husband Terry no longer a viable suspect, but any link with the Hackney murder now seemed more tenuous than before. A second attack, not fatal, but similar, had been carried out on a woman jogging in parkland no more than two miles away from the first incident, and two men had been arrested for both crimes and were being questioned. No links with Maddy's death had yet come to light.

In the kitchen Karen made coffee in a stove-top pot and slipped bread into the toaster. Everyone who'd been close to Maddy Birch in any way in recent years, from a cousin who lived in Esher to the roofer she'd haphazardly dated over a four-month period, had been interviewed, in some cases twice, and, where necessary, alibis had been checked.

'One thing you'd have to say about her,' Karen's sergeant, Mike Ramsden, had observed. 'She had a taste for blokes who worked with their hands.'

'Liked a bit of rough,' Lee Furness had said, the look on Karen's face, remembering how Maddy had been found, stopping him like a slap.

It nagged at her regardless: the possibility that the killer had been someone with whom Maddy had been involved, someone of whose identity they were still unaware.

She had gone back to Maddy's friend Vanessa, probing for some forgotten reference, some forgotten chance remark; she'd talked to other officers with whom Maddy had shared the occasional confidence and come up blank. Every square inch of where Maddy had lived had been pored over, every name jotted down, every number traced.

Nothing. No one.

Karen spread butter on her toast.

Could there have been someone nevertheless?

Someone who, as Maddy had feared, had taken to following her, watching her, slipping, unseen, into the security of her home.

More information, that was what Karen wanted, and she couldn't see where it might come from. If there had been a laptop, or even an email address, they might have found hits on some site or other that would lay open some secret predilection. Cross-dressing, water sports, rubber — it wasn't beyond the edge of possibility that Furness had been right, Maddy had liked an element of pain, loss of control, a bit of rough…

Outside it was still dark, the cars moving evenly along Essex Road behind dipped headlights. Another half-hour or so before the traffic would start to snarl up, north towards Canonbury, south to the Angel.

The roofer, Kennet, when they brought him in, had been politeness itself, due deference in his manner and calluses on his hands. In all the time he'd been seeing Maddy, he doubted if they'd met more than once or twice a week. 'You know how it is,' he'd said, smiling at Karen open-faced. 'Shift work. Overtime.'

Could she imagine him…? She'd been doing the job long enough to be able to imagine anyone doing anything.

She'd allowed the coffee to bubble for too long and in consequence it tasted slightly burned. Opening the fridge she took out some jam for her second piece of toast. Maybe she should be having porridge these mornings? Shredded Wheat? Start snarfing down vitamins and those seeds she kept reading about. Linseed? Sesame?

If Maddy had been right and she was being stalked, Karen realised it need not have been anyone she knew, but could easily have been someone she had come into contact with accidentally and who had become somehow infatuated. Shit, it could have been anyone. Possible suspects on the Sex Offenders Register were still being checked, but with nothing from Forensics to help narrow the field, chances were slim. The same with information from National Records, the Holmes2 computer. Karen certainly wasn't holding her breath.

Six o'clock and she switched on the radio for the news. Another American soldier ambushed in Iraq, a few more Palestinian children killed. With only six more shopping days to Christmas, retailers were cautiously optimistic of a record year. Karen had bought presents for her immediate family in Jamaica, parcelled them up but not actually taken them to the post. They would arrive late, again. Her first few Christmas cards lay on the shelf beside the stereo, as yet unopened. Last year she had managed to sign and send her own just before New Year.

Come and spend Christmas Day with us,
said her brother in West Bromwich, her baby sister in Stockwell.
The children would love to see you,
wrote her other sister from Southend.

She didn't know if she could take so much turkey, so much screaming, so much apparent happiness. Pouring the last of the coffee, she picked up her cup and went back into the bedroom to finish getting dressed.

Mindful of the season, and remembering Katherine sitting open to the elements on a city-centre bench, Elder bought her a double-weight wool scarf, long enough to wind round her neck more than once and then tuck snugly down. When she had first visited him in Cornwall, almost two years before, he had pointed out Eagle's Nest, the house where the artist Patrick Heron had lived and which dominated the landscape where Elder had then been staying; now he bought her a slim book with reproductions of the paintings Heron had made of the shrubs and flowers in his granite-bordered garden. He added a box of dark Belgian chocolates and, at the last minute, a pair of blue Polartec gloves, parcelled them up and sent them, along with a card, to Nottingham, first class.

Several days later, uncertain, he bought a card for Joanne, simple, nothing fancy, quickly wrote 'Happy Christmas, Love Frank', sealed it and slipped it into an already crowded postbox.

That was it.

He had cousins somewhere and when he had lived in London and later in Nottingham they had exchanged greetings at Christmas and, sporadically, on birthdays, but since his move west, they had lost touch.

Instead of a turkey, he ordered a prime leg of lamb from the butcher's on Fore Street and, having grown up in the days when most shops had still closed for several days over the holiday, stocked up with vegetables and milk and bread. For some minutes he lingered over a small Christmas pudding before settling for a pack of mince pies and a carton of double cream.

The last weekend before Christmas itself, he drove up-country and watched Plymouth Argyle outmanoeuvre and outplay Notts County by three goals to nil, his first live match in years and watched in a mixture of blinding sunshine and driving rain, County willing and eager but lacking purpose or plan, the phrase 'headless chickens' coming easily to mind.

On Christmas Day, he put the lamb in a slow oven and set out for a walk that would take him almost to the opposite coast, certainly well within sight of St Michael's Mount, before turning back. Forecasts of heavy rain and high winds regardless, he was rewarded with clear skies and no more than a single shower. A long, slow bath and a glass of whiskey on his return and lamb that fell away from the bone at a glance.

Joanne's card, as spare and functional as his own, stood on the kitchen shelf between a large jar of Branston pickle and a bottle of HP sauce. Though he'd willed himself, without success, not to listen for the post van on the lane, persuaded himself, as best he could, there was no likelihood that she would send him anything, the absence of an envelope bearing Katherine's writing, a card with her name, cast a pall, longer and deeper, over each and every day.

* * *

For Elder, as for Karen Shields, the new year started early, a grey Monday at the nub end of December, the north London headquarters of Homicide West.

Elder was in the room when Karen arrived, together with a tall man wearing a Barbour jacket and twill trousers, whom she recognised as Robert Framlingham, head of the Murder Review Unit.

'Karen,' Framlingham said, extending his hand. 'Good to meet you at last.'

So that was the way it was going to be. She was surprised it had taken this long.

Introduced, she shook hands with Elder; his grip was dry and strong and no more lingering than her own.

'The Maddy Birch case,' Framlingham said. 'I've asked Frank here to take a look, see if he can't lend a hand.'

Elder was dressed in a dark suit that had seen somewhat better days, pale blue shirt and inoffensive tie, shoes that, though recently shined, were as creased as the lines around his eyes. Karen wondered how he had got the scar on his face.

'You're shunting me aside,' Karen said.

'Not at all,' Framlingham replied. 'That's not the way we work at all.'

'Oh?'

'No. Frank will sit down with you and your team, review the progress in the investigation so far…'

'Mark my card.'

'Not in any way. What Frank will do, in full consultation with you, is try to point up areas which will open up the inquiry to new ground.'

'But it's still my investigation?'

'You are the lead officer, yes.'

'In charge.'

'Absolutely.'

Bullshit, Karen thought. Bullshit.

'Frank here knew Maddy Birch,' Framlingham said. 'Worked with her in Lincoln.'