A Narrow Return (17 page)

‘What about the other one?’ Sam asked. ‘Lucy.’

‘Don’t remember her,’ Phil said casually.

Vivienne sighed. ‘So Peter wasn’t about to be expelled or anything?’

‘Good grief no. He was positively well-behaved compared to some. Bright enough too. He had his own little coterie of friends, who were nothing special, but then again, he didn’t get caught up with the bad element either. I’d have said his school life was strictly average.’

‘Did you ever meet his mother, Mr Cleeves? Sorry, what’s your first name?’ Vivienne asked.

‘Phil. And I’m not sure. If she attended the PTA meetings, I might have met her. In fact, I must have, but I can’t say as she sticks in my memory.’

And she would have done, Sam thought, if Anne McRae had come here on the warpath. He had a feeling that their murder victim had a way of making her presence felt. ‘Well, thank you, sir,’ Sam said, realizing that they weren’t going to get any further here. Perhaps Mrs Usherwood would have found something in the school records for them.

Vivienne got reluctantly to her feet. ‘Well, if you think of anything, Mr Cleeves, please give me a call,’ she said, scribbling her name and private number onto the back of a standard Kidlington HQ card and handing it over.

Phil smiled at her and took it.

‘I certainly will,’ he glanced at the card, ‘Miss Tyrell.’

Outside, a long queue of curious 15-year-olds watched them leave, one or two of the male ones calling out softly explicit comments to Vivienne, which she pretended to ignore.

‘What a hunk,’ she said, once they were out of earshot of the munchkins.

‘Yeah, I could see you fancied him,’ Sam said flatly. ‘Come on, let’s see what the gorgon lady has for us.’

But, alas, Mrs Usherwood had nothing for them. There was no mention in any of the school documents concerning Peter McRae. If he had been in any trouble, it had not become official.

That evening, Hillary Greene returned home, and found a large, pink envelope lying on the roof of her boat. It had no stamp or frank marks, and had obviously been hand-delivered.

She picked it up and took it into the Mollern, hoping that it might be a card or a note from the landlord or his son, congratulating her on re-acquiring her car.

Of course it wasn’t.

It was a Valentine’s card, albeit a very late one with a big silk-padded pink heart on the front.

Inside was the usual gooey, standard Hallmark piece of poetry, and a few printed words:

‘For my true soulmate. I think of you always.’

It was, of course, not signed.

Hillary sighed, and put the card in her bag. She stood still, and looked around.

And then she began to search, carefully.

Nothing was missing. But by the time half an hour had gone by, she knew that someone had been on her boat.

She swore roundly and with feeling.

She grabbed a can of furniture polish and set it beside the sink, then poured some pine disinfectant into some hot water and set about cleaning her boat from top to bottom. One of the advantages of living in a small space was that it didn’t require much cleaning, and after about only an hour, with the sheets changed, and every surface gleaming, she felt a little less violated.

But it was not exactly how she’d expected to spend her Friday evening.

Phil Cleeves wasn’t having much of a good time either. Once he’d driven home from school, he spent the next hour tracking down someone he badly needed to speak to.

Then he had to have a stiff gin and tonic before he could pluck up the courage to ring the telephone number he’d finally uncovered.

To make the call, he drove into town and used a pub call box. He didn’t want to use the public phone boxes in town, just in case a call could be traced through a telephone card, which was all that they accepted. And there was sure as hell no way that he was going to use his own landline or even a pay-as-you-go mobile.

‘Hello?’

He hadn’t heard the voice in years, but he recognized it at once and his heart began to beat again. It was the second time that day it had had so much exercise, but this time it had nothing to do with fear or apprehension.

‘Hello. It’s me. Phil.’

There was a moment of complete surprised silence, and then, ‘Phil? Cleeves?’

‘Yes. Look, I’m sorry to call you out of the blue like this, but I had to talk to you. I had a visit from the police today.’

For the next ten minutes he spoke, awkwardly at first, but then with growing confidence. Finally, after listening to what the other caller had to say, he sighed in a mixture of relief and exasperation.

‘No, I know her murder doesn’t have anything to do with us,’ Phil said somewhat impatiently. ‘But don’t you see? With the case being re-opened and all, they might just bumble around and step on our toes. They’ve already been to the school. Who knows what they might do next. I just don’t want to get involved, that’s all.’

He listened and sighed. ‘I know I’m not involved now. But things have a way of becoming … well, dangerous. For both of us. I think it would be a good idea if we got our stories straight. Just in case we need to make a statement at any time. Yes. Right. OK. Fine, I’ll do that. In the meantime, I think it’s best if we don’t get in touch again. Yes! I know
I
called
you
. I’m just saying, this should be the only time we have any contact.’

He glanced around at the noisy bar, suddenly feeling old and vulnerable.

He felt, in fact, like shit.

‘Yes. OK. I…. Look, I’m sorry, right?’ He listened to the voice on the other end of the line, feeling equal measures of nostalgia and regret. ‘What for? Just … for everything. That’s all. OK, bye. Yes. Bye.’

He hung up and moved stiffly to the bar. There he ordered himself two more gin and tonics.

Tonight, for the first time in quite a while, he felt like getting extremely drunk.

The weekend passed uneventfully. On the Saturday, Hillary gave Puff a thorough clean, inside and out, and got a load of shopping in. She also retrieved her push bike and secured it onto the roof rack on top of her narrowboat.

She had Sunday lunch at the pub, and spent a few hours putting the final finishing touches to her novel.

During her ‘retirement’ she’d written a police procedural whodunnit. It wasn’t even based loosely on any of her cases, being purely fictional, although the DI heroine might have had a passing resemblance to herself.

Apart from being a blue-eyed, svelte blonde, with a neurosurgeon husband and adorable twins, that is.

It had been fun, and dotting the last few ‘I’s’ and crossing the final ‘T’, she finally made up her mind to send it to a publisher.

It would probably come back with a nice little bog-standard rejection slip, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

On Monday morning, she stopped off at the post office to mail her manuscript off to a large, popular publishing outfit that specialized in crime, and then drove on into work.

As she spied the HQ building looming up, she heaved a heavy sigh. Her first task of the day was not going to be pleasant.

She parked and walked down into the basement, going straight to Steven Crayle’s office.

In her bag, she took out the card, then tapped on the door.

If she’d been in one of those television programmes she so despised, the last thing she’d do is tell her boss that she was being stalked. For some reason that totally escaped her – TV heroines were always doing daft things like that. They either wanted to prove they were as tough as the men, or that they didn’t need anyone to sort out their problems for them. As a consequence, they usually ended up at the end of the episode in a nail-biting position whereby their male colleagues had to rescue them from the mad hatchet man. Or whatever.

In real life, of course, it had to play out differently.

‘Come in.’

She opened the door and walked in.

It was still early, but she could see at once that the superintendent had already been in and working for several hours. His suit jacket was slung over the back of his chair, his tie was loosened, and he had his shirt sleeves rolled up. Paperwork was in the process of passing from his IN tray to his OUT tray.

She remembered the routine well.

His dark hair flopped in two wings over his forehead, making her fingers itch to push them back. She told her fingers to forget about it.

‘Si … Steven,’ she said blandly, when he glanced up at her.

She put the card on his desk and he stared at it for a moment. What the hell? A Valentines card?

He stared at it, then at her, then at it again. Finally he smiled. ‘Well, I’m flattered, Hillary, and all that but—’

‘Sir,’ Hillary said flatly, in no mood for fun and games. ‘I think I’ve picked up a stalker.’

Crayle’s smile instantly vanished.

‘A few days ago someone stole a comb from my locker,’ she stated flatly. ‘Then they left a vase of roses on my desk here. Then Friday night, I found that on top of my narrowboat,’ she nodded down at the offending card. ‘And someone had been inside. Nothing was missing, but things were slightly out of place.’

Using a pen, Crayle pulled the padded heart towards him. ‘I’ll get Handley to run it for prints. But if it’s someone on the job, it’ll be unlikely he was stupid enough to leave prints.’ He paused for a moment, and then looked at her.

‘You do think it’s someone on the job, right?’

Hillary sighed and shrugged. ‘How many civilians have access to the locker rooms down here?’

Crayle nodded. ‘Not many. Cleaning staff?’

Hillary nodded. ‘The padlocks on both the locker and the Mollern were picked. Ex-cons?’

‘You’ve put a fair few behind bars, but none of them would be employed to work here. I know the recruiting regime can be a bit lax, though.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I’d better go through the files.’

Hillary nodded. ‘My ex-sergeant, Janine, she had a stalker once,’ she mused. ‘Turns out it was a PC right here in the station.’

‘You think history’s repeating itself? What was his name?’

Hillary gave it to him.

‘I’ll check him out. But it’s unlikely to be the same man.’

Hillary knew that too. It was unlikely, after the scare she’d put into him, that he would be looking at her as his ‘true soulmate’.

‘OK, I’ll requisition a camera. We’ll hide it and keep it fixed on your locker, that way if Romeo tries the same trick twice, we’ll get a visual on him,’ Crayle said. ‘Want me to set one up in your office?’

‘Hell no,’ she said quickly. The thought of knowing that Steven Crayle could be watching her at any time of the day without her knowing about it would send her blood pressure sky-rocketing.

‘OK. We’ll find him. But I don’t have to tell you that it might take a while. If he’s done this sort of thing before, he’ll be careful. And in the meantime, you know the drill.’

Hillary smiled crookedly. ‘Be alert. Don’t go out alone at night. Have a digital camera with me at all times, and take discreet pictures of anyone I see hanging around. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.’

Crayle grinned. ‘OK, granny, here endeth the lesson on egg-sucking.’

Hillary nodded with a wry smile, and walked to the door. Crayle watched her go, and then stared down morosely at the Valentine’s card.

So the flowers hadn’t been from a lover. He felt glad about that. On the other hand, a stalker was bad news. There were stalkers, and there were stalkers. Some could be fairly harmless, some could be pests, and some real head-cases who could turn out to be murderously dangerous.

And the thought that someone, and probably a cop at that, had Hillary in their mentally-deficient sights filled him with a mixture of anger and dread.

As Hillary had done less than forty-eight hours ago, he swore roundly and with feeling.

This was just what they needed.

‘Jimmy, I want you to get cracking with the warrant,’ Hillary said, a few minutes later. ‘Then I want you to take Sam and Vivienne to collect the DNA samples from both of the Burgesses. It’ll be good practice for them. It’s time they had some practical experience of chain of evidence.’

‘Right, guv,’ Jimmy said. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going back to Jenny McRae,’ Hillary said. But although Jimmy looked a question at her, she didn’t elaborate. The truth was, she was stuck at a dead end, and when there was nothing else to do, a second interview with a witness was better than twiddling your thumbs.

But she didn’t want to tell her team that. Just because she was disheartened, didn’t mean she fancied company in her misery.

‘Oh, you’re back,’ Jenny McRae said flatly, when she answered the knock at the door and found the redheaded police woman on her doorstep. She didn’t sound particularly welcoming.

Hillary didn’t take it personally.

From the back of the tiny flat, Hillary was sure she could hear children’s voices.

‘Kids in school, Jenny?’ she asked, as the younger woman, who, at gone ten in the morning was still dressed in pyjamas and a dirty housecoat, led her into the kitchenette.

‘Yeah, course,’ Jenny lied. ‘Cup of coffee?’ she then asked, so loudly that she was almost shouting.

The sound of childish bickering abruptly ceased.

Hillary declined. She watched Jenny make herself some toast, and wandered over to a grimy window.

‘I’ve talked to Lucy,’ she said. ‘I got the feeling that she knew about your mother’s lovers,’ she said, deliberately bluntly.

Jenny, in the act of putting jam onto some toast, froze momentarily, and then shrugged.

‘Lucy likes to give the impression that she knows everything.’

Hillary smiled. ‘Sisters, huh?’

Jenny shrugged.

‘Do you see much of your Aunt Debbie?’

Again Jenny shrugged. ‘Not much.’

‘But she helps you out from time to time?’

‘Maybe.’

‘What about Peter?’

Jenny snorted. ‘He wouldn’t give me the drippings from his nose. He said he’d get me into rehab once, as if he was doing me this great big sodding favour. I told him, I didn’t want rehab. I just wanted some cash for a score. I haven’t seen him since.’