StillWaters:Book4oftheSophieGreenMysteries (11 page)

First I got the number of the Cornish police department. Then I asked for the pathology department. After that I started ringing every number they could give me, looking for Dr. Lucy Denver. The closest I got was that she was off sick, and then I started panicking. What if the killer had got her, too?

I begged for a home number, but was curtly told that wouldn’t be possible. So I called Directory Enquiries again and asked for a Dr. Lucy Denver in Port Gaverne. There couldn’t be many.

The magic number was granted to me, and I wrote it down and underlined it in my notebook. Then I called her up, waited for hours for someone to answer the phone, and almost hung up when a sleepy voice croaked, “Hello?”

“Dr. Denver?”

“Mmm?”

“Sophie Green. We met yesterday, in Cornwall—in Port Trevan. I was the drowned girl. We talked about Molly Stanton?”

“Oh. Yeah. Yes. I remember.”

“I’m sorry, is this a bad time?” I asked politely, hoping she wasn’t going to say “Yes, bugger off.”

“No, I have food poisoning. I think. I’m all right if I stay close to the bathroom. Excuse me if I suddenly drop the phone and run away.”

“I will,” I said, hoping germs weren’t transferable through airwaves. “Erm, I was wondering if there was anything else you could tell me about Molly? Miss Otis? Why did you call her that?”

A hoarse laugh. “Her boyfriend identified her. He said they’d had an argument…”

“But she didn’t shoot him down?”

“No, he looked all right to me.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“Gavin somebody… I’m sorry, I don’t recall… They’ll know at the Department.”

“Yes, well, they didn’t like me at the Department,” I said tersely. “Telling someone you’re a government agent doesn’t always guarantee they’ll believe you.” That was true even when I still had my job.

“Oh. Well, I believe you. Listen, Sophie, I'm afraid there’s really not a lot I can do for you at the moment, but I can call the office and get them to fax the case notes over to you, if that’s any help?”

I was about to tell her that would be a
marvellous
help, until I remembered that I didn’t have a fax machine and I was damned if I was going into the office to use theirs. Besides, it could all have been cleared out by now.

“Could you e-mail it?” I asked, and gave her my address. Dr. Lucy assured me she’d do what she could, I wished her a speedy recovery, and sat back to eat my muffins, satisfied, at least for now.

And then I realised I had nothing else to do all day. No airport shift to go to. No case notes to read. No boyfriend to see. No world to save.

Norma Jean padded into the room and looked at me mournfully. I supposed I could take her for another walk. Once around the field was hardly aerobic exercise.

But just as I was heaving myself to my feet, the muffins having padded out any gaps left by my three-day fast, my phone rang. Luke? Dr. Lucy?

Angel.

Angel is one of my best friends. Probably I’m closer to her than my other friends, because she knows all about SO17. Her parents were very famous celebrities in the sixties and seventies, but also secret government agents, and friends of Karen’s. SO17 helped Angel out in the summer when she had a stalker problem. Actually, mostly it was me who helped, by shooting the bugger dead. Well, he tried to kill me. I take that sort of thing very personally.

Anyway. She is engaged to the only other person of my acquaintance who knows about SO17’s existence, an adorable CIA agent called Harvey, who has been on secondment to SO17 for a while.

Wonder if he knew about his new job allocation? Probably that was why she was ringing. Angel and Harvey, and Harvey’s twin brother, Xander, who is also an absolute sweetheart, had gone to the boys’ parents’ house in Ohio for Christmas. They were going to come to Cornwall with us, but Angel wanted to meet her new family, and I guess the thought of spending a week listening to me and Luke bitch at each other was hardly as appealing.

I answered the phone, realising belatedly that it was her mobile number.

“Hey, honey! I didn’t know you had triband.”

“What?” Angel sniffed. “What’s that?”

“It’s…er, it’s what makes our phones work in the States. How’s Ohio?”

“I’d imagine it’s fine,” Angel said. “I’m at home. Are you still in Cornwall?”

“No, I…er, we came back early. I’m at my parents’ house.”

“Oh.” Angel sniffed again. “Can I come over?”

I frowned. “Why are you home? Is everything okay?”

“No,” Angel said, her voice rising to a tearful squeak. “It’s not.”

I told her to get right over, I had cookie dough in the fridge and there would surely be some alcohol around somewhere. Angel half-laughed, half-cried that it was ten in the morning, and I told her that meant it was five a.m. in Ohio, and it was perfectly acceptable to drink at five a.m. In fact, if one wasn’t sleeping or having sex, it was the only thing to do at five a.m.

Angel told me bleakly that she wasn’t likely to be doing much of the first two for quite a while.

She arrived fifteen minutes later, looking wrecked. But Angel, like Luke, is one of those annoyingly beautiful people who actually seems to look better when miserable, or hung over, or ill. Me, I look big and blotchy and puffy, like rotten crabmeat or something, when I cry. Angel had adorably dishevelled blonde curls, a pink nose and spiky wet lashes. I think she actually looked prettier than usual for crying.

“What happened?” I asked, feeding her cookie dough straight from the tub. We were sitting on the wooden floor in my parents’ kitchen, with a bottle of shock vodka, fresh from the freezer, at the ready by my feet.

Angel took a shaky breath.

“His family is really nice,” she started, her voice all wobbly. “His mum bakes apple pies and stuff, and his dad showed me all these baby pictures of the boys. They were really cute,” she wailed, and I reached for the ultra absorbent kitchen roll so she could dab her eyes.

“You’re upset because Harvey and Xander used to be cute? Angel, honey, they’re still cute. Very cute.”

She nodded. “I know they are. You know they kept getting up in the morning and putting on the same clothes? I swear they did it on purpose to try and trick me.”

Good grief. Don’t tell me she’d flown all the way home because of twin tricks?

“You didn’t get them mixed up, did you?”

“No! Even without that little scar Xander looks nothing like Harvey. He’s just not as cute.”

While this was all very sweet, it wasn’t exactly helpful.

“Angel,” I said gently, spooning out some cookie dough for her. “Why did you come home?”

Her pretty face crumpled and I shoved some cookie dough in before her mouth closed. She chewed and swallowed, like a good little girl (honestly, if I hadn’t had firsthand reports from Harvey, I’d think she was a mama doll), and then sniffed decisively.

“Yesterday,” she said, her voice trembling like an opera singer’s. “I went in to ask Lynnie—that’s Harvey’s mum—for a recipe—she does the best bran muffins in the world—but I thought I heard her talking to Harvey, so I hung back. And she asked if Rachel was coming up to visit, because wasn’t this a family thing and shouldn’t I be meeting family? So I went in—and it wasn’t Harvey, it was Xander—and I said, ‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’ And Xander said—” her voice was rising alarmingly, “‘We don’t.’ So I said, ‘Who’s Rachel, then?’”

By now she was squeaking so much I feared Norma Jean’s ears would be hurt.

“And Xander said, ‘Harvey’s daughter, didn’t you know?’”

I stared at her, appalled. Firstly at Xander for being so tactless—I knew him, and he was an absolute sweetheart. He must have been smoking his special cigarettes to let something like that slip out.

And then it hit me. Harvey, Angel’s perfect fiancé, who’d bought an antique diamond ring and got down on one knee at sunset on her birthday; Harvey, who was so perfect to look at he looked computer-generated; Harvey, who’d saved my arse a good few times—
Harvey
had a child?

“God, Angel,” I stammered. “That’s—Jesus, I mean… He has a
daughter
?”

She nodded, her face soaked with tears. “Her name is Rachel and she’s eight years old and her mother died in a plane crash and he sees her like twice a year and he never
told
me! He has a daughter and he never told me…”

I put my arms around her. “Oh, sweetheart. Did you talk to him about it?”

“Of course I did. I thought it was Xander messing around. But he said it was true and he’d been waiting to tell me. And I was like, oh,
after
we’re married? I can’t believe he never told me!”

“Well, he was probably waiting for the right moment,” I said feebly.

“Like, some time before he proposed?” Angel shuddered. “I broke it off.”

I stared at her. “Seriously?”

She nodded. “I can’t be with someone who doesn’t tell me things like that. I mean, it’s not a little lie. It’s not like when he can’t tell me about some case he’s working on. This is his life—our life, together!” She swiped at her eyes with the kitchen roll. “He only sees her twice a year! She lives in the same state as his parents and he sees them all the time!”

“Yes, but Ohio is a big place.”

“And she’s his
daughter
. God, Sophie, my parents were busy but they still spent all the time they could with me. They had two jobs each, two really big jobs, but I still saw them every day. And he—he…”

We got through the whole tub of cookie dough and made a pilgrimage to the Co-op for more junk food. The way I was feeling I needed a lot of sugar. And that vodka wasn’t looking too bad, either.

Perhaps it was time to break my pledge.

By the time I waved Angel off in her Mini, it was getting dark again, and I was slightly tipsy. Only slightly, mind. Enough to think it would be a good idea to take Norma Jean out for a walk in the darkness. I pulled on my old trainers and all my cold weather armour of thick socks and gloves and stuff, and set off down the road. I didn’t have a clear idea of where I was going, but I thought it would probably be a good idea to keep away from the fields. Stick to well lit roads.

Trouble was, my parents’ house was about a mile from any well-lit road. I snagged a torch and set off, feeling oddly like I had a week ago on that Saturday…

God, that long ago? I’d spent so much time in bed. So much time moping around, doing nothing.

I decided to be decisive. When I’d got over the shock of Karen telling me I was going to lose my job, I’d told my parents I might be a little bit behind with my rent. You see, my little flat used to belong to my grandmother, and when she died my mother inherited it. I think she was planning on renting it out for a lot more than I gave her, but I’d just quit university and started at the airport, and it was decided that it would be better for all concerned if I moved into the flat and paid about half the going rent. I am her only daughter, after all, and I think she was just so relieved that one of us was growing up and moving away (Chalker is two years older than me and still lives with them), that she hadn’t the heart to charge me full whack.

So I’d told them there were staff cutbacks at Ace, and my name was on the list. They could manage for a while, couldn’t they, if I didn’t pay my rent until I’d got another job?

My parents exchanged worried glances. The thing was, they explained, they’d just booked this holiday of a lifetime to Australia. Chalker had only paid for about half of his share; he owed them a lot of money. And without my rent, they were going to be in some trouble with the bank…

That’s my parents’ problem. If it had been me I’d have told Chalker to either pay up or not go. But they let him. Too soft.

Who am I kidding? I’d probably have paid the lot if I could.

So the upshot was I was shamed into reapplying for the job I’d quit four months before. The job I’d just told them I’d lost. I could always say Ace had changed their minds.

Be positive, I told myself now, tripping along in the freezing darkness. Okay, so the hours suck, and the passengers are frequently hideous, and every new security rule they dream up makes my life so much more difficult I want to do physical harm to someone—but it’s a job. And it won’t be for long. Just think of the money.

I marched back to my flat to pick up my mail and found a huge stack wedged behind the door. Bills, junk, a postcard from Port Douglas, and a formal looking letter.

From Ace Airlines.

Telling me that although I had been a valued employee for the two and a half years I’d been with them, they were not in a position to take on any more staff. Global airline cutbacks. Et cetera. Thank you very much for your interest. A photocopied signature.

God.

I found my emergency chocolate supply and ate it all in one go. I was jobless. And that meant I would soon be homeless. If I couldn’t pay my rent my mother would have to find someone who could. I’d have to go back to living with my parents. Regressing to childhood. This could not be happening!

It was too hot in my flat, so I stumbled outside, and found myself locking up and walking back up the road to my parents’ house. My house. I’d have to live there now.

Norma Jean was dawdling, bored by her road walk, but I hardly noticed. I went past Luke’s house and saw no lights there. Not that he’d be any comfort. Lousy, hung over bastard.

It was cold, really cold, and the air was so clean I felt it scouring my lungs with every breath I took. Since the drowning episode I’d been taking the deepest breaths I could. I didn’t remember being in the water, but my lungs had felt sort of… I don’t know. Scummy. Lined. Not clean.

I was just around the corner from Luke’s house when I heard running footsteps behind me, then someone yelling my name.

Luke.

I kept on walking, looking right ahead. He caught up with me, and I said, “Are you following me?”

“Saw you go past.”

“What do you want?”

“Can we talk?”

“Well, both of us seem fully conversant with the language.”

“Ha ha. What are you doing out alone around here?”

“‘Around here’? Luke, it’s a village street in Essex, not a ’hood in the Bronx.”