Bricks and Mortality: Campbell & Carter 3 (38 page)

After a moment he asked quietly, ‘Do you hate me?’

‘No, I don’t hate you.’ Kit sounded tired. ‘I thought I did once, because I was so furious. But I don’t. I don’t want us to be enemies, or go on fighting. If that’s burying the hatchet, then consider it buried. But to be friends again as we were … Much as I want that, how can we get there?’ She raised a sorrowful face to his.

‘I’m glad at least you don’t hate me. I’ve never wanted us to be enemies, Kit, God knows, quite the reverse. Can we call a truce, start again from there?’ Gervase raised his eyebrows in question and, a couple of seconds later, his whisky tumbler.

‘We can start from there,’ said Kit after a moment, and joined in raising her tumbler in salutation to whatever future lay ahead.

Of all places to eat, thought Carter, those located in motorway service stations, though no doubt offering an excellent opportunity to rest and refresh oneself, remained probably the least inviting to the eye. The arrangement for returning Millie to her mother was that he would bring his daughter here, a convenient halfway point between their places of residence, and Sophie would collect her in a ceremonial handover. He and Millie had arrived early and Mille had demanded a burger. So now Carter sat gazing over a sea of plastic table tops, with a cup of tea in front of him, while Millie ate her burger and chips. From time to time she offered him a chip. But then, she’d also offered MacTavish a chip. MacTavish was propped against a menu card and gazed at the scene in his usual critical fashion. You and I, MacTavish, Carter mentally addressed the bear, are probably in agreement for the first and only time. Make the most of it.

He ought to be making the most of the last fifteen or twenty minutes he was able, if lucky, to spend with Millie until her next visit. But as usual he was stuck for something to say to her. It wasn’t that there was nothing he wanted to say, but he couldn’t find the way. At a nearby table sat a family of five, all of whom looked as if they had eaten nothing but burger and chips for their entire lives, and who were managing to tuck into yet more, while conducting a lively discussion at the same time. It was more of an argument than a discussion, perhaps, but they were communicating.

‘I hope you haven’t been bored, Millie,’ he said now, avoiding MacTavish’s beady gaze. ‘I’m sorry I had to go to work and leave you with Auntie Monica. But you like her, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Millie. She stopped eating to suck at the straw sticking out of her milkshake. ‘Did the old woman really kill that man?’

‘You’ve been watching it all on local television news, I suppose?’

Millie nodded enthusiastically. ‘I thought that man, Gervase, had done it. But then the old woman tried to kill him as well. Are you sure that man Gervase didn’t kill anyone?’

‘I’m sure, Millie.’

Gervase left someone in a wheelchair for life, thought Carter. His actions as a young man probably set Muriel on the path to murder. But he hadn’t killed anyone. He’d messed up lives, including his own. Perhaps the best you could say was that he hadn’t killed outright.

Muriel might have taken the path to murder anyway. One couldn’t overlook the sudden demise of the tyrannical Major Pickering, found floating in the river with his fishing rod beside him. Not difficult to creep up behind him and give him a good shove. But that was the secret of a successful murder: no one ever suspects it. Or not until thirty years later when there’s no evidence and speculation is all it can remain. Perhaps it planted a seed of confidence in Muriel’s mind. You can do it and get away with it. If she did, of course, push her old dad into the river. He must put that idea out of his head. No evidence, Superintendent Carter! he told himself sternly. No hard evidence, no investigation. Only in books do detectives have the time and funds to chase down hunches.

‘There’s Mummy’s car!’ announced Millie, pointing past him towards the plate-glass window.

Carter turned round and saw a blue Mazda easing its way into a parking slot.

‘Eat up,’ he said. ‘We’d better go out and meet her.’

‘I’ve finished,’ said Millie. She scrambled to her feet, collected MacTavish and her pink tote bag and trotted beside him out into the car park.

Carter was carrying her suitcase. He saw Sophie getting out of her car and at the same time felt Millie’s small hand slip into his free one. He looked down at her and they exchanged smiles.

‘Hello, darling,’ exclaimed Sophie, swooping on Millie and hugging her. ‘Hi, Ian, everything OK?’ They exchanged chaste pecks on cheeks.

‘Everything’s fine,’ he told his ex-wife.

‘Daddy’s been investigating a murder!’ Millie announced gleefully.

‘Oh, really?’ That twitch of Sophie’s right eyebrow that Carter remembered so well.

‘Always something happening in the world of crime!’ he said cheerfully.

‘So I discovered.’ Sophie’s voice was icy now.

‘But Millie had great fun with Aunt Monica, didn’t you?’ he asked his daughter.

‘Oh yes. I thought I knew who the murderer was. He was staying at a hotel near Auntie Monica’s cottage. But it wasn’t him, after all, it was an old woman. She tried to kill the man I thought was the murderer. He looked like a murderer.’ Millie paused and added regretfully, ‘I met him; but I didn’t meet the real one.’

‘Let’s be thankful for small mercies,’ Sophie said.

‘She learned all about it on the local television news,’ Carter explained. ‘I didn’t talk about it with her.’

‘I’m sure. Well, we must be off. Thank you for taking care of her at such short notice.’

‘Any time. She is my daughter.’ He heard his voice harden and added hurriedly, ‘My good wishes to Rodney. Was New York fun?’

‘Oh, yes, thanks. It was well worth it. Rodney had lots of meetings. Come along, Millie.’

Carter kissed his child goodbye and watched her led to her mother’s car. As she was scrambling into the back seat, he heard her voice clearly floating towards him.

‘And Daddy’s got a girlfriend. Her name is Jess.’

Sophie straightened up and turned to look at him.

He waved a hand from side to side signalling, he hoped, that this wasn’t so. All he got was another twitch of that right eyebrow.

‘And she’s a police inspector …’ were the last words he heard from Millie as the car door was closed smartly on her.

It was Tom at the door of her flat again.

‘Now what?’ asked Jess unkindly. ‘You can come in provided you’re not going to ask me to solve all the problems of your love life.’

‘Haven’t got one any more,’ said Tom simply, taking her words as an invitation to enter. ‘Madison has dumped me. Well, she’s made up her mind to take the research post in Australia and until she leaves, she’s going to be far too busy to make time for me.’

‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ Jess said contritely. ‘I shouldn’t have been so unkind to you. I’m really sorry, too, that things didn’t work out between you and Madison.’

‘I’ve got over it,’ said Tom. ‘It’s been a learning curve. I am not indispensable in Madison’s life, or in any other female’s, but I do hope I still have you as a friend.’ He looked at her hopefully.

‘Of course you do.’

‘Good,’ said Tom, ‘then let’s go out for a curry.’