Funeral Music (30 page)
DCI Poole was sorry Imogen Bevan had died, for her own sake. But he was almost sorry on his own behalf because, having posted DC Heaton at the hospital to await the remote possibility that Miss Bevan might be interviewed, while he organised the setting-up of an enquiry here in the Manvers Street station, there was now no excuse for him not to go back home, even though he was now in all probability investigating a murder. And he did not want to go home. The call informing him of the suspected letter-bomb explosion had interrupted the first turning of the meat on the barbecue and given him the satisfaction of handing over to Valerie the long tongs and the butcher’s apron, with an insincere frown at having to leave. Now that Miss Bevan had died and he had officers at the scene of the explosion, there was nothing more, for the present, that he could do.
Lifting his head from his hand, he leaned back in his chair and looked round the empty Major Incident Room. Imogen Bevan would never know that hers would be the first murder dealt with here and she could hardly appreciate the honour, but it was progress. The last murder case he’d worked on, the death of the director of Bath Museums, had begun with the usual scramble to commandeer an empty room and purloin telephones, equipment and furniture from all over the building, wasting the better part of the first day. After that, he had made a case to the District Commander for a permanent room. Now he had his Major Incident Room, with telephones, computer screens and consoles on a continuous line of desks which stretched round two sides, pinboards and large-scale maps on the walls, and even a microwave and kettle. Tomorrow morning they could get straight down to it, as soon as they had the PM report.
For now, he was free to return home to Oldfield Park where all three kids would probably be lying inside with the curtains drawn, glued to the bank holiday feature film. His three carelessly beautiful, maddening children, Benji, Dan and Natalie, whom he had discovered he could not leave. Outside, Valerie would be banging around in a penumbra of charcoal smoke, picking up from the scuffed grass the dirty skewers, knives, trodden bones, half-raw, discarded ropes of meat and ketchup-soaked napkins that reduced their semi-detached garden, post-barbecue, to something more like an abandoned field hospital. She would look up at him, her furious face face smeared with sooty exertion, before barging past him with another bin-liner, pointedly saying nothing about the seventy concrete paving slabs and half-ton pile of sand that had been lying at one side of the garden for over a year, and that Andrew had still not built into Valerie’s dream patio on which they could have proper civilised barbecues that would be rather less Crimean in their aftermath.
He should go back home. But instead, he allowed his chin to sink into the cup of his other hand and he leaned forward again, staring at his desk and trying, although not very hard, not to think about Sara, because that only made him feel worse.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Morag Joss left Scotland to study singing at Guildhall; she now lives in Bath and writes full time. She is the author of
Funeral Music
,
Fearful Symmetry
, and
Fruitful Bodies
, three Sara Selkirk mysteries;
Half Broken Things
, her fourth novel, won the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger Award.
ALSO BY MORAG JOSS
Fearful Symmetry
Fruitful Bodies
Half Broken Things
Coming soon from Dell
FUNERAL MUSIC
A Dell Book
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is
a trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-42293-4
v3.0
