Indian Summer (10 page)

Livya appeared at the bathroom door. ‘Supper's almost ready. It's only scrambled eggs, that lime mousse we picked up on our way from the airport, and cheese and biscuits. There's plenty of fruit if you're still hungry later.'

‘Sounds fine,' he said, rising from the bath.

She held out a towel, studying his dripping body with appreciation. ‘All that rowing you do certainly builds up muscles.' She ran a finger from his throat to his groin and let it linger in that area. ‘The rest isn't bad, either . . . and it's all mine for the next two weeks.'

He stepped out on to the bath mat. ‘For far longer than that, if you want it.'

She reached up to kiss him. ‘Let's see how things are after the two weeks.'

They had more wine with their light supper, by which time Livya was more intoxicated than Max had ever seen her. She was also amazingly sexy over the normal business of eating and drinking. That it was alcohol-fuelled he did not doubt, but he had been starved of sexual release for too long to resist what was on offer. Perhaps it was that very abstinence that turned their lovemaking into fierce grappling which brought a climax far too soon. Max was annoyed with himself but, as he lay waiting to recover his impetus, Livya demonstrated her enormous hunger with amazing energy, her hands and mouth all over him.

Max met her demands with delight tinged with a sense of not being in control. She had never dominated him like this before; never been so desperate for gratification. Had jealousy of Clare prompted this drive for possession?

Later, when Livya appeared to be sleeping, Max gently withdrew his arm from beneath her and padded to the kitchen. The men in the black and white films he collected and loved to watch always lay smoking a cigarette after sex. He drank ice cold milk. Replacing energy? He glanced at the clock. An hour before midnight. There should be word from Tom by now. He had left his mobile on the kitchen worktop after their meal, and now picked it up. The text confirmed that Starr Keane had been in the crashed car.

Tom had done as asked, with nothing added. Fair enough. Tomorrow morning he and Livya would leave the base and not return for fourteen days. By then, Tom and the team would hopefully have the case neatly tied up and presented to Colonel Trelawney for further action.

Rinsing his glass beneath the hot tap, Max returned quietly to the room which, in fact, was fitted out as a bedsitter with a table and chairs, a couple of armchairs and a computer desk along with the usual bedroom furniture. Ideal for one, or a busy couple away all day and sometimes for longer. For Max, used to living in a basic room in an Officers' Mess, it was real luxury. It flitted through his mind that he might have to leave the apartment if they decided marriage was the way forward for them. Livya's response tonight suggested that she was finally thinking along those lines.

The glow from the fire and security alarm panel on the far wall provided enough light for him to see his way to the bed. It also enabled him to see the tears on Livya's cheeks as she lay wide-eyed facing that wall. He halted as the truth hit him with a crushing awareness as painful as if he had been physically struck across the chest. What a fool he had been not to recognize her insistence on in-depth discussions of the difficulties surrounding marriage last night, for her subtle evasion of lovemaking before lunch, for the generous intake of wine before her desperate lust just now, for that was what it had been.
What a fool
! Jealousy of Clare? No, unbearable jealousy of the woman she had watched marry his father yesterday.

Had she pretended it was
Andrew
Rydal in this bed with her, fantasized throughout her wild coupling with his son? He shrugged on his bathrobe and moved to the window, gazing at the lights of speeding traffic along the distant autobahn. He had always suspected it; now he knew for certain. He tried to believe she had only realized the true nature of her feelings for her boss when she saw him pledge the rest of his life to Helene Dupres, but that small inner voice of honesty told him otherwise.

He stood for a long while facing the truth, then he said tonelessly, ‘How do you imagine you can go on working with him?' She lay silent, facing the wall. ‘Did he ever give you an indication that he returned your feelings?'

Still no reaction from her, so he turned to study her averted face and the tangle of dark hair on her pillow. ‘My days of acting as substitute for the lover you can't have are over.'

That brought a response. She sat up clutching the duvet as if it was a shield. ‘
No
, Max. I love you for the person you are.'

‘The only problem being that I'm not him.'

In the faint light her eyes looked like dark bruises in her pale face. ‘We've had some wonderful times together, but I did my best to persuade you that it could never go beyond that, you
know
I did.'

‘Oh yes, I'll accept that in your defence, but you're guilty as charged over what happened here tonight. I'll be leaving early to start work on this murder case. I'd like you to be gone by the time I get back.' Taking up the key to the central room he left her sitting in his bed.

After an uncomfortable, tormented five hours in an armchair Max walked in to his kitchen to find a note propped against the toaster. The bedroom door was open. Livya's suitcase and cabin bag had gone, although her perfume lingered. He opened the folded sheet and read her words.

Tom had had a disturbed night after an in-depth session with Cheryl Major, Starr's close friend who had gone with him and Connie to identify the crash victim. She had been very upset, crying the whole way back to the base where another of Starr's friends had been baby-sitting the Major children. Both women had mounted a case for Starr, claiming she had been forced to become the dominant partner because Flip was such a wimp.

Tom had pointed out that Keane had achieved rank and was an excellent soldier, which was hardly indicative of wimpishness. They had both sneered and maintained his refusal to leave the Army was because he knew he would be totally pathetic as a civilian. They rounded off their tirade of contempt by revealing that he had been sleeping on the sofa because Starr had wanted another baby and he could no longer get it up.

Neither of them knew where their friend had left her children. The best they could come up with was the fact that Starr had an old friend who had married a German bookseller, and now lived with him outside the base. They could offer no more on the subject, and echoed Tom's belief that whoever had the youngsters would call in once they realized Starr was long overdue to collect them.

About to go to bed, Tom had then taken a call from George Maddox which added a further slant to the case and prevented sleep for more than an hour. Starr's family had been informed of her death, and of Keane's. Her mother had lost control and said a number of wild things: Starr had called saying she had something important to do before coming home for good;
she was leaving the bastard and suing for divorce; she was going to take him for every penny he earned and get a court order to prevent him from seeing the kids. That would punish him for what he'd done.
Now her poor girl would be unable to get her revenge on him.

Gloria Walpole stated that she was coming immediately to Germany with her two sons to collect Prince and Melody. She had been deaf to warnings that the children would be put into foster care by the British Forces Welfare Services until their future was decided in court. The woman had then let fly invective, stating that if anyone tried to keep her grandchildren from her they would be very sorry. When it had been pointed out to her that there was another pair who might be eager to claim their grandchildren, Gloria had demonstrated surprising shrewdness. Flip had died first, therefore the kids had belonged solely to Starr when she was killed. That surely gave
her
full rights to them. The Keanes were nowhere in the picture.

Tom had lain awake knowing they could not prevent the woman and her two truckie sons arriving to further complicate the case, and he wished the hours away until whoever Starr had left her little ones with contacted the base. As a policeman he was concerned for their safety; as a father he felt pity for the young orphans.

Weekday breakfasts during term time were noisy and busy. Tom always descended first to the kitchen leaving, as he had once said to Max, four females of varying sizes and in varying states of undress to wander back and forth to the bathroom moaning, groaning and generally being feminine.

As usual, Nora sensed his mood, but there was no opportunity for discussion between them and Tom was keen to reach his office. There was a lot to cover today, and the returning members of the Royal Cumberland Rifles could well be heading off to the UK or to a European destination before they could be interviewed.

Driving to Section Headquarters, Tom reminded himself that the problem of Starr and her children must not obscure the fact that they had a murder investigation on their hands. He needed to read through the reports submitted so far, familiarize himself with the salient points.

Only when he started on this did it come home to him with a jolt that no more than thirty-six hours had passed since George had woken him to report the discovery of Keane's body. 26 Section had been bloody busy during that short time!

He had set noon today for a meeting to collate his team's reports, before deciding on further action this afternoon. Connie was set to bring in Ryan Moore for more intense questioning about his friend Keane's private life, although Tom did not support Max's belief in some kind of criminal link to the killing.

Heather was tasked to seek out and interview four of those officers who had acted as jousting knights: he planned to tackle the remaining four, among whom was Lieutenant Sears who had insisted on keeping the tank full overnight. A knight in armour riding around after dark would have been up to mischief of some kind. The team needed to know the identity of that knight, and the nature of his mischief.

Hearing someone enter the building and approach along the corridor, Tom glanced up to see Max enter the office. Swallowing the comment he meant to make, after seeing the expression on the other's face, Tom got to his feet in silence instead.

‘The two-week tour has been cancelled, by mutual consent, so I'll defer my leave for a while and get stuck into this murder case.'

Knowing enough about his friend not to probe a relationship which had clearly come to an end, Tom said, ‘Glad to have you aboard. Let's have coffee while I fill you in on what's come in overnight.'

Now Max was officially in command Tom privately admitted that it was good to have his sharp brain working alongside his own. He knew he could have sorted the tangled facts and produced a satisfactory resolution, as he had done on several occasions during his career, but working in harness with Max was more energizing because he frequently pursued what the team referred to as WGs. Once or twice these had borne fruit. More often they had proved to be no more than wild geese.

After updating him, Tom was surprised by Max's dismissal of his own earlier theory that Keane had been involved in criminal activity and had paid the price of duplicity. Munching a chocolate digestive he instead gave his opinion based on what he knew so far.

‘Sex is behind this, Tom. Stands out a mile . . . if you'll pardon the gross exaggeration. Keane liked his bits on the side and the itinerant army life gave him plenty of opportunities for unfaithfulness. No way would he sacrifice that for a settled civilian job, living in a small semi with a weighty mortgage and the wife's eagle eye recording his every coming and going.'

‘To say nothing of her aggressive family on his doorstep.'

‘Precisely. Looking at that scenario in reverse, it would be Starr's ideal solution to a wandering husband. She wanted more children, and it's easy to guess her aspirations. A house they could call their own and do what they liked with; a man whose regular working hours he'd be unable to change without a solid alibi. There'd be no furtive shagging on the way home, no overnight sessions with the boss's secretary. He'd be well and truly shackled to a domineering wife and a clutch of noisy kids. Poor bastard! No wonder he refused to leave a profession that provided a gratifying escape from his personal life.'

Taken aback by the ferocity with which this had been said, Tom was forced to protest. ‘She apparently kept the house very clean, and the kids were well looked after. We've known situations where the wife was a slag, the house had to be gone over by the sanitary guys, and the kids were filthy and neglected. Keane had it good, by comparison.'

‘I wonder if any of his friends tried to point that out to him.'

‘Connie's bringing in Corporal Moore, Keane's main buddy. Simpson reckoned he knows more than he gave out to him yesterday. I've called a meeting at noon. She'll have more to report on that.'

Max got to his feet, holding his empty mug. ‘Then there's this business of pots of herbal remedies in the Keanes' bathroom. The woman I saw at the hospital would have been quite a decent looker. Outsize, but attractive. She was either a nutter about her image, or those potions, ointment – whatever – were his, not hers.'

Tom grinned as he followed Max to the bench where they made more coffee. This sounded like a wild gosling. ‘I've never seen Starr, but Keane's body was firm and muscular; nothing to suggest he'd need a shelf full of enhancers. They were hers, all right. You know what women are like. They'll buy anything that claims to turn them into a replica of Cheryl Cole.'