Prey to All (18 page)

‘It could make a good intro. Yes. You might have a second career here, Trish.’

I’d rather keep my own, thanks, she thought. At least I don’t have a bank telling me what I can and can’t do. ‘And I need those medical details, Anna. Like yesterday.’

‘They’re coming. They’re coming. They won’t be long now,’ Anna said, in a rush. ‘I’m calling in almost the last of my favours. There’s the bell. Got to go. Sorry. Goodbye.’

 

Half an hour later, Trish was standing in her kitchen, stirring a complicated sauce for the steak she was planning to grill for George, and rereading everything that had been said at the trial itself about old Mr Whatlam’s medical condition. The two activities did not sit well together and she was beginning to feel sick. She wished she knew more about old age and its ills and the best way of dealing with them.

Deb’s diatribe about the hopelessness of Dr Foscutt’s treatment of her parents had definitely been sincere, but Trish couldn’t work out from the details of the examination and cross-examination propped up against the Magimix whether it had been justified or not.

There did seem to have been an inordinate number of things wrong with the old man: gout, migraine, prostate,
depression, the ulcer and the angioneurotic oedema that had been so bad during Deb’s visit, as well as an infinity of scrapes and bruises. He didn’t heal well, it seemed, and he’d been forever banging himself or breaking his wrist or his fingers.

There was the sound of heavy feet clumping up the iron staircase outside the flat. George, she thought in satisfaction. She could have let him in, but she liked hearing him unlock the door with the keys she’d given him as soon as she’d realised he cared as much as she did. Such a little thing, but it added up with a whole raft of others into a safety of familiar pleasures.

But the bell rang. So, not George, she thought, as she turned off the heat altogether and went to the door.

There was a spyhole, which she hardly ever bothered with, but tonight she did look through it. Standing in front of her was an enormously tall man in motorcycle leathers with a helmet on his head. He had a thin brown package in his hands on top of a clipboard. He was wearing black leather gloves.

Trish was sweating and her heart was walloping at her ribs, much faster than usual, but her mind was still working. Thank God. She told herself grimly to be proud of it. She looked as carefully as she could with her restricted field of vision, but she could see no gun. The messenger’s leathers looked far too tight to be concealing anything. And his bike with its capacious panniers was way down in the street. So perhaps the package was going to be a bomb. Or perhaps, she told herself, he’s a bike messenger. He rang again, then thumped his gloved fist on the heavy door.

As her vision cleared, she saw that the package was only an A4 brown envelope, not particularly thick. She put the door on the chain and opened it.

‘Yes.’

‘Maguire? Package.’

She looked at it through the narrow gap, staring at the flap.
There didn’t seem to be any wires. The envelope was addressed in neat handwriting she didn’t know. ‘Who’s it from?’ she asked, and was irritated to hear her voice high and trembling.

His voice boomed out from his all-embracing helmet, ‘Pick-up address was 14 Fratchet Mews, Holland Park.’

Cordelia Whatlam’s house. He thrust his clipboard through the gap, asking for a signature and her name in caps at the side. She scrawled her name, took the envelope and quickly banged the door shut.

She could hear his feet hitting each step of the iron staircase and checked through the kitchen window. He kicked the struts holding up his bike and roared off out of her sight. She felt all over the envelope, running her fingers up and down each part. There were no wires. A paperclip or two, and paper, but that was all.

Oh, stop being paranoid, she told herself, and ripped open the flap. Nothing blew up. All she found was a sheaf of handwritten letters with a typed note paperclipped to the top one:

Trish thought she’d had enough of them all for the day. George would soon be home and she’d promised him a good dinner. She put Cordelia’s envelope on her desk with the trial transcript, unchained the door, and went back to her pots and pans.

She was still at the hob, dealing with the last stages of the sauce, when she heard George letting himself in. His arms came round her as she stirred her pan and she leaned back, turning up her face. He did his best to kiss her.

‘If I were a contortionist or a giraffe, I’d do this better,’ he said.

Trish laughed and turned within the circle of his arms so that she could kiss him properly. She wasn’t wearing much, having already had her shower, and the thought of food suddenly seemed comparatively uninteresting.

‘Are you very hungry?’ she murmured. He stroked her left eyebrow, then her nose, and at last her lips, with one large finger. He tasted salty.

‘No,’ he said slowly, pulling out the sound. He kissed her again and slid his hands up under her T-shirt. ‘I don’t know that I am.’

Trish only just remembered to turn off the heat under the sauce.

‘I think the boss is losing it, Sarge.’

Caroline Lyalt looked up from her list of Malcolm Chaze’s past girlfriends – a lot longer than it should have been in her opinion – and considered DC Owler. He was wearing tight black jeans and a round-necked black T-shirt under a loose grey linen jacket. His pretty face under the short hair looked worried rather than gleeful, so she decided not to ignore the comment.

‘Why?’

‘He savaged Chaze’s widow yesterday on no evidence except that she wasn’t as distraught as he thought she should be, and he’s had me and three others ransacking her papers and cross-examining her husband’s secretary about her ever since. He has no reason to suspect her. It’s a waste of time and money.’

‘You know as well as I do, Steve, that most murders are domestic.’ God, you can sound sententious, she told herself.

‘Not when they’re contract killings, like this one. We should be looking in his past for—’

‘She’s a sophisticated woman with a lot of money and she’s in a ruthless business. It’s a legitimate line of inquiry, Steve.’

‘Maybe, but not to this extent. I think the boss is—’

‘Losing it. You said.’ Caroline thought of the way Femur had changed as Jess fed and petted him in their big kitchen. ‘But he’s not. And if you’re looking for the moment to jump
ship and hitch a better ride, don’t. You owe that man.’

‘Christ, Sarge, I know that. But he’s crashing the budgets for nothing. Just because he hates women, I mean, women who …’

Caroline looked at him and knew what he was thinking and why he was scowling. If he’d been less sure of himself, he’d have been blushing. Well, she wasn’t going to help him. If he wanted to go on working at AMIP he had to get used to the fact that she was gay.

‘He rescued you from a minor, thoroughly dirty local nick,’ she said coldly, ‘where you’d have eked out your days on burglary and mugging, and he got you into AMIP. You ought to remember where your loyalties lie.’

‘Why d’you dislike me so much?’ he asked suddenly, hooking a chair towards him with one foot and sitting down with his arms crossed along the back.

‘I don’t.’ She smiled at him, carefully keeping her gaze fixed on his hairline so she didn’t have to meet his eyes. ‘But I don’t trust you.’

In the days when she was still a constable and had to pretend not to notice that the boss’s favourite sergeant didn’t like her – or the way the boss would sometimes consult her and not the sergeant – she used to tell herself that when it was her turn to feel someone treading on her tail she’d behave better. She hoped she was, but there was no way she was shutting her eyes to disloyalty like this.

‘Sarge …’

‘I can see you watching him these days, waiting for the moment when he’s not useful to you any more.’

Owler didn’t comment. He moved, though, as if he was uncomfortable.

‘I know you don’t want to be tied to a has-been,’ Caroline went on. ‘No one does, and you’re an ambitious little thing. I’ve always known that.’

His alluring face twisted again. He’d registered the insult all right. Good. She’d meant him to.

She thought of what she’d recognised in the kitchen last night: that Femur was lonely and deeply troubled about something in a way she’d never seen before. But she wasn’t going to ask questions. When he was ready to talk, he’d talk. Until then she’d support him as well as she could. One or two of her fans in the Job had taken her out for a drink recently and warned her to move on, not to let herself get tainted by that case and her association with Femur. But she owed him. He’d given her a leg up in the Force and he’d given her a kind of stability, too. In the days when life with Jess had been hard, he’d always been there, unobtrusively, noticing when she was pissed off or miserable and sorting her out.

If he really was cracking up, she’d shield him until the case was done, then take him back for another of Jess’s suppers and show him that it was time to go before he buggered up what was left of his reputation. Jess would help. He’d come to like her, too, and he was easier with the pair of them than any other straight man of his generation she’d come across so far.

Caroline saw Owler looking at her in gratification and realised she must be smiling. Dream on, sunshine, she said in her head. Aloud, she asked him what he’d found among Laura Chaze’s papers.

‘Fuck all, Sarge. Like I knew we would.’

‘Did you get anything from the secretary?’

‘Only confirmation of the marital rows. She was hacked off by his affairs. He thought she ought to put up with them, like his mates’ wives did. And she was well pissed off by his campaign to get Deborah Gibbert out of prison.’

Caroline felt like sighing. Trish Maguire’s dark intense face floated into her mind, saying, ‘I told you so.’

‘Tell me more,’ she said.

Owler repeated everything Malcolm Chaze’s secretary had said about the last row her boss had had with his wife. Caroline didn’t think there was much there.

‘Anything else?’

‘Only that Mrs C got even more vicious after the girl she’d never seen before came to the house a few weeks back.’

‘Girl? What girl? And why didn’t you tell me that before?’

‘I was coming to it. Give me time.’ He was all injured innocence, the little rat.

It crossed Caroline’s mind that he might be stacking up some private stores of information to feed to one of the other incident rooms, hoping to show up her and the boss. Well, if that was his nasty little plan, he’d find himself neck deep in shit before she’d let it happen.

‘What’s her name?’

‘The secretary said she thought Kate, but she couldn’t hear much. She didn’t open the door, see; she was working in the little study by the front door – they call it the boot room – inputting some document into his laptop because the scanner was on the blink. She heard the bell ring. Laura Chaze yelled out, “I’m busy, Malcolm, answer that.” “Must I?” he yelled back.’

‘All this verbatim reporting, Constable, I’m impressed. But are you sure it’s accurate?’

He pulled out his notebook and flipped it open with one hand, like a Georgette Heyer hero with his snuff-box. Yeah, yeah, she thought, clever clogs.

Jess had introduced her to the books and she liked them because they made her laugh; touched her sometimes, too. But now she kept her face stern. She wasn’t going to give Owler any more encouragement.

‘It’s an accurate record of what I was told, Sarge. I can’t be sure it’s what my informant heard, but it’s what she told me.’

‘Good point.’ He wasn’t stupid. He might even turn into a
useful officer one day, when he’d been a bit bruised by life and learned what hurts and why and what it’s worth taking on the chin.

‘Then she heard his steps, the door opening, his voice all cold saying, “Yes?”, then a breathless quite young girl’s voice, saying, “I’m Kate.” Then there was a long pause till he said, “You’d better come in.” They went into the drawing room, past the office, and Sally – the secretary – said she caught a glimpse of a tall, thin, dark-haired girl. Lots of hair, drawn back in a slide at the back of her head: old-fashioned, she said. About five minutes later, Chaze breezed in and told her she’d done enough and ought to go home, since it was a Saturday. She never saw the girl again.’

Caroline was glad he’d seen fit to give her the full story, but she was angry all the same that he’d kept it so long. ‘And what construction did you put on all that?’ He just shrugged. ‘You didn’t have a shot at working out who she could be?’ Caroline did give him a smile this time, wanting to soften him up. ‘That’s unlike you, Steve.’

‘A constituent? A relation? I didn’t think it was that important. She’s hardly going to have been a major drug-dealer – or even a runner for one. They don’t come girl-shaped with well-spoken voices and old-fashioned hair. At least, not in my experience they don’t.’

‘Probably not.’ Caroline went on smiling blandly at him, pushing the irritation down well below anything Owler would be able to see. ‘Well done. I’m not sure how much further it’ll take us, but you’ve done good. Thanks. Now, more important, how are Incident Room One doing with the gun dealers?’

‘I don’t know yet. I’ve—’

‘They’ve been sending through reports every day. Haven’t you bothered to read them?’

‘Not yet. The boss made me—’

‘Well, get on with it, then. That’s hard information we need out there. Right up your street.’

‘But the shooters and the snouts don’t come under our brief,’ he said, betraying his resentment. So maybe it wasn’t just Femur’s dwindling reputation that was whittling away at his loyalty, but envy of the other team’s more interesting work. If so, he wasn’t alone in that.

‘No, but the more we know, the more we can use as a lever when we do find a suspect. Which we might well do. Get on with it. Check the facts, find the gaps, make a few lists. Man’s work, Steve. Like trainspotting.’

The look in his narrow dark eyes was poisonous, but at the door he turned back and gave her a bit of smile back. ‘You’re right, Sarge. Sorry.’

She nodded. So maybe the boss was on to something after all when he claimed that Steve Owler was a good, honest, intelligent copper in the making. And maybe she was a jealous cow, too, not wanting to lose her status as Femur’s most cherished body on the team.

When Owler had gone, Caroline checked the time and put in a call to Trish Maguire’s chambers. Her clerk said she was in a con but that he’d get her to call the incident room as soon as she was free.

Caroline spent the intervening twenty minutes tooth-combing the lists of all known girlfriends and mistresses of Malcolm Chaze, from his schooldays until his death, for criminal records. She grinned privately. Jess always got cross when she used the expression, banging on about how it was a fine-toothed comb you were supposed to use to pick nits, and that no one combs their teeth, but Caroline used it like most of her colleagues. You had to talk in the language of your world, even if it wasn’t right. Otherwise you were just being a snotty cow and getting up people’s noses.

Several of Chaze’s old squeezes had motoring offences
recorded against them; a few, minor convictions for possession of soft drugs; one, with possession with intent to supply. But there was no one with any real drug habit that Caroline could find, at least not one who had come to the attention of the police. Her next set of checks would be against suicides and accidental deaths. That was going to take a lot longer.

She was still on the B suicides when Trish Maguire phoned back.

‘What a surprise, Sergeant Lyalt,’ she said, in her deep, classy voice, which always made Caroline think of Jess. That was probably why she’d liked Maguire from the start, and why she trusted her. She’d better watch that: an officer like her couldn’t go round trusting a brief. And just because Maguire sounded like Jess, that didn’t make her the same kind of person at all.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘You knew Malcolm Chaze quite well,’ Caroline said. ‘Can you put a surname to a young, probably teenage, girl with long dark hair, who was visiting him a short while before the killing? He called her Kate.’

‘Why have you come to me? You must be talking to his wife and staff. They could tell you straight away.’

Such suspicion, Caroline thought, as she said aloud, ‘The widow’s had enough to take right now, and the last time I talked to the secretary she howled so much I couldn’t get anything out of her. Do you know who this Kate is?’

‘May I ask how you’ve come across her?’

‘So you do know. Great.’

‘I have an idea, but that’s all it is. How does she fit in to your inquiries?’

‘She probably doesn’t, but we’ve heard that relations between the Chazes deteriorated after her visit. We have to find out why. If you won’t help, you won’t. We’ll go crashing
about in our size tens and hope we don’t hurt too many innocent people.’

There was silence down the phone. Caroline waited to be told that Maguire wasn’t susceptible to that sort of blackmail. But eventually she said, ‘The person who springs to mind is Deborah Gibbert’s eldest child, Kate. She fits the description.’

Facts and inferences clicked into place in Caroline’s brain. She could almost hear the satisfying clunk.

‘And Chaze and Deborah Gibbert were once lovers. And you overheard Mrs Chaze saying she could put up with girlfriends but drew the line at “steps”, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could she have been talking about stepchildren?’

‘It’s possible.’ Trish didn’t sound too happy about it. ‘Is that all, Sergeant Lyalt? I’m pretty busy here.’

There was a sound of shuffling papers, as though Maguire was determined to prove her desk was covered with work.

‘That’s all for the moment. Thanks. I’ll be in touch.’

Caroline put down the phone and looked up to see Femur standing in front of her desk.

‘I need a drink, Cally.’

‘OK.’ Without a protest, she locked away her lists in the drawer of the borrowed desk. ‘There’s a nice little pub just round the corner. Shall we go?’

‘How do you know Pimlico so well, Sergeant?’

He was smiling again in almost the old way; his eyes were still hurt, but the rest of him was looking better.

‘Jess has friends who live here. We sometimes go with them to this pub and drink The Macallan.’

‘Sounds good to me. I want … I need … Can I talk to you about Sue?’

Caroline got up from the desk and put her hand on his shoulder. Odd how you could feel like the mother of a man
old enough to be your dad. ‘Let’s wait till we’ve a Scotch in our hands, Guv. That’ll make it easier for us both.’

She put out the lights, sent him off ahead and had a quick word with the officers who were still at work. She delivered the orders as though transmitting them from Femur, then said she’d be back in an hour. They showed no signs of resenting – or suspecting – the orders.