For Death Comes Softly (5 page)

The bombshell came the next day.

‘Rose, I'd like you to meet Natasha Felks,' said Robin, cool as you like. ‘She's over for the weekend.'

I had just noticed the
Puffin
moored in Home Bay, but, having been for a walk on my own that morning, all the way to the new north lighthouse, I had not even seen the ship come in let alone watched the passengers disembark. When I returned Robin was sitting in the drawing room quaffing his favourite dry sherry with this tall slender elegant thing straight off the cover of
Tatler
, who stood up, strode over to me, as I hovered uncertainly in the doorway, and held out a limp hand.

‘Call me Tash,' she said in an accent that was pure Roedean. ‘Everybody else does.'

‘Delighted,' I replied. But I wasn't, of course. I'm prejudiced against tall slender elegant things.

I suppose my face bore an enquiring look.

‘Oh sorry,' said Robin. ‘I should have said, Tash is my fiancée.'

He was as casual as if remarking that he'd forgotten to put the milk bottles out. Except they don't have milkmen too often on Abri island.

I knew I had no right to feel the way I did, but I could have slapped his face, I really could.

‘Delighted,' I said again, like some broken down old robot, and made myself stretch my face into some sort of smile.

The
Puffin
was to stay moored in Home Bay overnight and return to the mainland in the morning. I left with her.

Nothing of a remotely intimate nature had ever passed between the owner of Abri Island and me. There had been no words of endearment, no kiss, no touch, barely even the meeting of fingertips. But does your imagination ever run completely away with you when you meet someone you fancy rotten?

Ever since my husband, Simon, and I split I had been rather more out of control than usual in that direction. OK, so it's reasonable enough that the shock of nearly dying might make you extra vulnerable. Typically, though, I had gone right over the top.

In the five days since I had been pulled to safety by Robin Davey off the side of the Pencil I had, in the dark recesses of my poor pathetic mind, already shagged him senseless, married him, and born him at least four children.

Reality had struck hard in the form of Natasha Felks. The bloody girl was a charmer as well, a real softy, an absolute sweetheart. Damn her eyes. And a looker. And she oozed sex appeal. It really was all too much. I certainly had no desire to stay any longer on Abri and watch the two of them together, although I endeavoured mightily not to give the slightest hint that the arrival of Ms Felks had in any way precipitated my departure.

Robin insisted on walking with me down to Home Bay, although in many ways I would have preferred him not to. I tried not to think about what a fool I had nearly made of myself.

As we stood on the beach watching Jason hoist my bag into the landing craft, Robin leaned close and kissed me on both cheeks, grasping me lightly by the shoulders. Our first kiss, but not of the kind I had had in mind. I deliberately did not respond in any way, but if he had noticed any change in my reactions to him since the introduction of Natasha Felks onto the scene he gave no sign.

‘Rose, it has been such a great pleasure to get to know you, and I do so hope we will meet again in more pleasant circumstances.'

To the last he was as attentive as he had been from the beginning. There was no doubt that I remained disturbed by him, even though I had made myself start to question his motives, and, understandably perhaps under the circumstance, his almost exaggerated Jane Austen-style courtesy was beginning to irritate me. But I did my best to behave normally, or what I hoped he would accept to be that.

‘Thank you for looking after me,' I said, every bit as formal as he was being. Then I added sternly: ‘Just make sure Jason Tucker never gets to take anyone out in that boat alone ever again. That's all.'

He nodded gravely. ‘No chance of that.'

I decided to play policeman, more of a defence mechanism than anything else.

‘Robin, if I ever heard that that boy had been allowed to put any other visitor to this island in even the slightest risk I would report it at once, you do understand that, don't you?'

‘I would expect no less,' he said, as he helped me into the landing craft where Frank Tucker sat waiting at the tiller trying to look as if he had not been listening to every word we had said.

Clumsy as ever I stumbled on the wheeled jetty and to my annoyance fell back quite heavily into Robin's arms. He steadied me at once, and I found myself just briefly cradled against his chest looking up into those deep blue eyes.

‘I'm just sorry we met like this, I'm going to miss you,' he murmured.

Surely he could not possibly be quite so warm and affectionate if he had not felt something of what I had felt. The man was so confusing. One half of me was angry with him, while at the same time I had to fight to stop the other half of me melting all over again. Apart from anything else there was the small matter of a fiancée to consider. Was it, I wondered, really possible that his attentions to me had been a quite cynical act merely in order to ensure that I took no action for negligence against him and Abri? Or had he merely shown the kind of courteous concern he would for anyone who had found themselves in my situation, and had it been just my imagination that had begun to make more of it?

All I knew at that moment was – in spite of my assurances to young Jason and his father – that if I thought I would ever have the time or the energy, I rather liked the idea of taking bloody Robin Davey to court and suing the pants off him over the danger I had been put in on his blessed island.

However I didn't, of course. I just went back to work, like you do.

Three

‘Rose, my office, now, and bring Mellor,' he instructed.

Detective Chief Superintendent Titmuss, my immediate boss and I, had never seen eye to eye. In my opinion he was a self-seeking pompous political animal full of prejudices and misconceptions with no right whatsoever to be in a senior position in the modern police force. I was well aware that he privately regarded me as a mild embarrassment half the time while using me publicly as a manifestation of his liberal approach to life. If there is anything worse than being kept under because you are a woman, it could well be to be the Avon and Somerset Constabulary's only female senior detective.

Titmuss was head of the force's Child Protection Team and it was my misfortune that he had been appointed shortly after I had joined the team six months previously as number two to his predecessor, Superintendent Steve Livings, an old friend and one of the nicest and best coppers in the business. I had known that Steve was on the verge of retirement, but he had in fact been pressing for me to head the CPT. The powers-that-be rejected his recommendation on the grounds that the job called for the rank of Superintendent and they didn't reckon I was ready for that yet. I had always been ambitious and I was disappointed although I had been quite aware that their decision might go that way. But what neither Steve nor I had expected was that Titmuss might get the job. On paper – although in no other way, that was for sure – he was over-qualified, and to both of us he seemed the worst possible choice. Apart from anything else CPT work calls for exceptional sensitivity and anyone less sensitive than Chief Superintendent Titmuss was hard to imagine. But Chief Superintendent is a dinosaur rank nowadays and police forces never seem to know what to do with them anymore.

I had no illusions that Titmuss wanted me to be his number two anymore than I did, but my immediate attempts to find an escape route revealed that I had no chance for the foreseeable future. I was the most senior woman detective in the force – in fact the Avon and Somerset's only woman DCI – and was considered to be the ideal appointment. Child Protection is one of the very few areas of policing officially allowed to positively discriminate between the sexes – unofficial negative discrimination is something else of course. Having a male CPT chief more or less obliged the force to have a female number two. And it was just unfortunate that Titmuss and I had at best an uncomfortable relationship, and at worst no relationship at all.

Titmuss had two ways of dealing with me. He either patronised me like hell or became impossibly officious, like some dinosaur authoritarian colonial general. That morning he was in officious mode, which, to be honest, I marginally preferred. But only marginally.

It was my first day back on the job since my so-called holiday on Abri Island, from which I was still painfully recovering. I was physically well enough but I couldn't sleep properly at night. Both Robin Davey and the horror of being trapped on the Pencil continually invaded my dreams. I had been shaken in more ways than one, although I had no intention of sharing my near-death experience – let alone anything else – with anyone at the nick, and especially not Chief Superintendent Titmuss. Certainly I had been hoping for an hour or so to myself, to sort through my mail and messages, catch up on anything I may have missed, and down a couple of mugs of tea, before having to do my performing monkey act for the bloody man. It was not to be.

For just a few seconds I ignored his order, which had been shouted through the open door of my office at the Portishead HQ of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary. I sat quite still at my desk, mug suspended halfway to my lips, woefully watching Titmuss's retreating back. As he approached his own office – never being one to miss an opportunity to display his superiority he wouldn't have dreamt of talking to me in mine – he swung abruptly on his heels and seeing that I had not moved bellowed impatiently: ‘Rose!'

Resigned to my fate I hoisted myself upright, and as I did so spilt tea down my extremely expensive new cream jacket, purchased the previous day in a bid to cheer myself up.

‘At the double,' murmured a laconic voice in my ear.

I grinned in spite of myself. Thank God for Detective Sergeant Peter Mellor – a handsome young black man in a job which doesn't take kindly to anyone who is different. So at least he knew what that felt like. Mellor paid lip service to no one, me included. He could be cold as steel and he was an unforgiving pedantic bastard, but he was so clever it hurt, absolutely straight down the middle, and he was brilliant in the CPT, because children, even those who had good reason to fear men, instinctively trusted him. He and I had worked together regularly before both moving into Child Protection and I wouldn't have been without him for the world – although I was sometimes not sure he always felt quite the same way about me.

When I'd first started working with Mellor I'd found him disconcertingly humourless. He'd learned. Nowadays he had developed a droll, nicely irreverent sense of humour. His timing was good too.

Peter Mellor was usually based at Lockleaze, the former district police station which serves as the Bristol area headquarters for the CPT, but had come over to Portishead, my base as Deputy Chief, in order to brief me on anything he felt I should know about which had happened while I had been on leave. He was exceptionally able at keeping his ear to the ground, and I trusted his judgement more than that of any other cop I knew. A briefing from Mellor was always invaluable. However it appeared that on this occasion I was going to have to face the boss without that luxury.

We obediently followed Titmuss into his lair, with me rubbing my stained jacket in desultory fashion with the back of one hand.

‘Attention!' whispered Mellor at the door.

Titmuss, who vaguely resembled a younger Captain Mainwaring without the charm, was wearing a dark pin-striped double-breasted suit so stiffly formal it was something of a miracle that he could move in it. I knew I could safely bet a month's salary that he was going out to lunch. Or to a lunch, I should say. He was very hot on the kind of occasions any normal copper would volunteer to police an England soccer international with Germany in order to avoid. Chamber of commerce lunches, Rotary lunches, civic investitures. And you could always tell when he was going to one because of both the expression and the suit that he wore – each clearly inclined towards self-importance.

Titmuss slapped a file on the desk in front of him and peered through his round gold-framed spectacles. Even his eyebrows bristled when he was in this sort of mood.

‘We've had a complaint,' he began. I felt my back involuntarily stiffen. What had Mellor and I done now, I wondered fleetingly.

‘. . . of an exceptionally delicate nature even within the realms of the CPT,' he went on. ‘One that will have to be treated with extreme discretion.'

So it was just another child abuse incident. Terrible to think like that, or to be relieved at such a matter, but it was not normal for our cases to be filtered down from Titmuss. As well as being Titmuss's deputy, I also had direct control of the Bristol and South Gloucestershire division at Lockleaze. The social services and the medical authorities, sources of most of our workload, would normally report straight to me or one of my officers – six sergeants and twenty-four constables – rather than to the big boss whose job was the overall administration of the team.

‘Just the thing for you, Rose,' continued Titmuss, reverting briefly to patronising mode.

His inference was plain enough. The importance of CPT work is pretty obvious, but only months previously I had been heading the Avon and Somerset's biggest murder investigation in years, the serial killing of male prostitutes and, I know it's awful, but a major murder investigation is inclined to be the ambitious detective's dream job. Some of us find a big murder hard to follow, and Titmuss, rather curiously as he was the CPT chief, liked to rub it in by implying that I had in some way been demoted to an area much more suitable for a woman.