Power Games (10 page)

 

So here she was, sitting opposite Patrick Duncan in a Chinese restaurant. It turned out he hadn't eaten either, so they might as well kill two birds with one stone, he said.

Neither of them had ever alluded to an embarrassing incident before Christmas, when Kate had declined to play his sexual games. And now sex was off the menu, they had no difficulty sharing a table and some conversation.

‘So have you changed your mind about the p.m.?' Patrick asked, through a mouthful of spare-rib.

She shook her head. ‘It's not my case, and there's someone at Kings Heath nick who fancies I've trampled on too many toes already.'

‘Nigel Crowther, is it? He's a bright guy – lives with a linguistics teacher at one of the universities. Male,' he added, his voice neutral.

‘Do you know him well?'

He shook his head. ‘Not socially. I just know he's sharp – quick on the uptake and asks the right questions. Rather like you, really.'

‘Thank you kindly, sir. He and I don't seem to see eye to eye about this stiff. He's going for death by natural causes, I – well, I won't tell you it's intuition – we all know how wrong that can be. Even mine!' she said, grinning and toasting him with her saki glass to show she'd got over his being right in another case. ‘It's just a funny combination of circumstances. And I'll tell you what, it's an even funnier coincidence that helped us ID her …' Her explanation was brief: she didn't want her soup to go cold.

‘It's not unknown for apparently healthy people to drop down stone dead,' he reflected.

‘You will check every possibility – sorry, I know you will.'

‘You know if I find any suggestion of foul play I have to stop and get the Home Office pathologist in?'

‘Of course. But you will take every available swab, get the blood checked for absolutely – shit, I'm not being very tactful. You can see why I can't be there tomorrow.'

He dipped his hands in the finger bowl, drying them carefully before he said, ‘Just between ourselves, yes. At least now we know who she is we'll be able to check her medical records to see just how fit she was. Not that people axiomatically go to their GP if they suspect something's wrong. I had this guy the other week who'd dropped dead with heart failure in his local Tesco. He was so riddled with cancer he shouldn't have been able to stand, let alone push a trolley. And he'd not been to his GP for months, except to complain about a fungus infection under his thumbnail which he could have cured with a proprietary preparation.'

‘Perhaps he'd meant to tell the doctor about all his real symptoms and chickened out at the last moment.'

Patrick nodded soberly. ‘Perhaps. None of us likes to think about our last end, as Joyce called it. Now, how's that knee of yours coming on? I can't wait to get you on the squash court …'

 

Was it simple kindness that made Kate phone Stephen Abbott before she went to bed? She hoped it was, but she had to admit she might have been sniffing for information.

Stephen seemed genuinely glad to hear her, however. ‘I mean, Rosemary was old enough to have been my mother – just – but she was a friend. Well, we were fighting on the same side to start with, but she was so – I mean, she could have bought and sold me and not noticed the small change, but she never shoved her money down my throat. She lives— Oh, God! How many times am I going to say that before I get it into my thick skull she's dead?'

‘It's OK, Stephen. It's normal not to be able to take it in. And seeing her … as you did … I should think the brain tried to block it out. Have you got something to help you sleep tonight?'

‘Apart from a bottle of whisky?'

‘That might not be your best friend, you know.' No, she mustn't preach. And there was no need to point out how much harm drink had tried to do to her.

‘I know. Alcohol's a stimulant. It might knock me out but it'll probably wake me up. No, I've actually got some homoeopathic stuff. Kate, you will let me know if there's anything—'

She waited a few seconds before prompting. ‘Anything?'

‘I don't know. There was no reason for Rosemary to die.'

There was something in his voice that worried her. ‘If you think of anything – anything at all – you will tell us, won't you?' Every instinct told her there must be something. He'd gone from open to cagey in about three seconds.

‘You sound a damned sight more interested than that inspector. He didn't want to know. He just wrote down the number of the house and got the older bloke to take me home. He and I were at the same university. Crowther, I mean. Never met, of course.'

‘Which one?'

‘Durham. Will he be investigating Rosemary's death?'

‘Unless the powers that be decide to send in a specialist team.'

‘You're CID – will you be involved?'

‘I'm afraid not.' Yes, she would have liked to be, but at least she could sound positive about her colleagues. ‘Look, Stephen, every CID team is full of highly-trained men and women …'

 

On Wednesday morning she'd be late in: that had been agreed. She was going to talk to Simon again. They drifted to a Christian coffee shop a couple of hundred yards up the road. She could make sure that he had a good breakfast, at least. And the bacon sandwich smelt so good she joined him.

‘Well,' Simon grinned, after his first slurp of coffee, ‘seems I might have something for you. And it didn't cost you much either.' He started to push a tenner across the table to her.

She gestured it away.

He looked at her quizzically, but shrugged. ‘Well, if it's who the guy I talked to thinks it is, she was a real old loner. Wouldn't talk to any men at all. Would spit at them if they came near. Not at all keen on women, come to think of it. She came from up Wigan way, originally. She's got – she had – all sorts of pretty horrible nicknames, but this geezer reckons she was really called Sally Bowles.' He caught her eye. ‘Hang on, the bastard's been having me on, hasn't he? Isn't she in a film?'

‘Mmm. The Liza Minelli character. But the other stuff – do you reckon that could be genuine?'

‘Don't see why not. He wasn't quite so pissed then. Trouble is, Kate, he was so happy to be drinking something decent at someone else's expense, he ended up just wanting to please me. I guess when he ran out of hard info he just said stuff he thought I might want to hear. Do you want me to have another crack?'

She pushed another tenner across the table. ‘Does the Pope wear a frock?'

 

Back at the office, Kate pounced on the phone, first ring.

Patrick. ‘Heart failure. As far as I can see, it was her first attack. Nothing to show she was anything but an extremely healthy woman. So why the sudden death?'

‘The heat of the tennis, the shock of the cold water?' Kate asked. ‘When I've showered there the water was extremely cold. Breathtakingly cold. Mind you, it may warm up later in the day.'

‘Even if it was still cold, why should it kill her? I know she was in her mid-fifties, but that doesn't mean she was a weak old dear in her dotage. Her doctor's notes make that clear: she went along for a sort of ten-thousand-mile service but there was never anything wrong. BP fine; smear fine; breast scan fine. She seems to have taken her HRT and got on with life. It's just possible, I suppose, that the cold water killed her. Or it may be simple coincidence.'

‘Do you think there may be something in all those swabs and blood samples you've taken?' Kate asked.

‘I hope so. I sincerely hope so. I hate having to ascribe the cause of death to an act of God.'

 

‘You look very grim, Kate,' Graham Harvey said as she walked slowly along the corridor to the office. ‘Fancy a cup of tea and a shoulder to cry on?'

The day she took Graham up on the second half of the offer he'd no doubt drop dead of a heart attack too – brought on in his case by an excess of guilt. Still, the tea sounded good enough. And she was so wound up she might even be better off with one of his herbal brews than with the caffeine-fix she craved.

‘Thanks.' She slung her bag on the floor, but was too restless to sit down. Instead she headed for the window. His geranium cuttings would give her something to do – she could prod the soil to see if they were too dry, as usual, and tease round to check the new shoots. Anything to keep her hands occupied.

‘There you are: peach and passion-fruit,' he said, putting the mug on the windowsill.

‘Thanks.' She jiggled the tea bag until she deemed – as usual too early – that the brew was strong enough. ‘I've been talking to Patrick Duncan.'

‘You didn't go to the p.m.?'

‘Didn't want anyone to think I was muscling in.' Turning so she could rest against the windowsill, she explained what had happened the night before.

‘You don't want to put up the backs of the local people,' he said sharply.

So much for the shoulder to cry on.

‘Of course I don't. But Crowther's been so slow moving – he—'

‘Kate: get it into your head that however good a cop you are, you can't pick up everyone's case-load. OK? You've got enough on your plate with those fires, I'd have thought, on top of all the other stuff in your in-tray. And we're all going to have to pick up more admin with Neville going.'

‘You especially,' she observed.

He grinned ruefully. ‘But I wasn't talking about me. Any officer can do only so much work. OK, you might not like the pace Crowther's working at, but you can't read inside his head. He might be making an enormous amount of progress, but just doesn't see why he should have to explain himself to a junior officer from another OCU. I wouldn't, if I were in his shoes. And I can't help noticing there's often something of an edge between you and officers from other squads – you and Lizzie over in Fraud never hit it off, did you? And she's a very good woman. Very good indeed.'

The peach and passion-fruit was a very thin brew indeed. Kate put the mug back on the sill, still half-full. Or half-empty, depending on how you looked at it.

 

Kate only ate that lunchtime because Colin dropped a sandwich on her lap. Maybe Graham was right. Maybe there was only so much any one officer could do. A quick meeting had established that they still hadn't got a positive ID on the warehouse fire victim despite everyone's leg work. She passed on Simon's suggestion, to some derision.

Closing yet another file, she slapped the side of her head. She'd asked Fatima to chase up something, hadn't she? But Fatima was on some blasted course today. Knowing Fatima, however, she'd have cleared her desk before she went. Which meant there was probably a neat note somewhere in the chaos that had accumulated on Kate's desk since yesterday if only she could burrow through and find it.

Which explained the frantic work and the fact she'd forgotten to eat.

If something was important, Fatima always used an envelope. A sealed envelope. So it might be in the post-pile. No? What about – longest of shots – e-mail?

And there it was. Amidst a stream of other messages. What time was the message sent? And from where? Fatima, bless her, had gone to the trouble of sending it from the course venue.

Yes, it was indeed a strange time to be starting a fire. Clearly a conversation with the hospital authorities was called for. She e-mailed Fatima back: check where the ambulance collected him from. And, just to make life more interesting, she would phone Kevin Masters, the fire fighter – it would be nice, wouldn't it, to confirm there'd been no outbreaks of warehouse arson since the one she'd been called to last Wednesday morning?

It would have been nice if he hadn't changed shifts and wouldn't be available till seven that evening, by which time she ought to be in the pub saying farewell to Neville. Well, if an e-mail had worked for Fatima, perhaps it would work for her. And fingers crossed that Masters remembered to check all his virtual in-tray when he checked his real one.

The noise in the pub wasn't deafening yet. It was still possible to have a conversation without shouting, and without the older officers having to cup hands round their ears and lean intimately forward.

Not that Graham was that old, Kate would have thought. And Rod Neville, who still hadn't arrived, certainly wasn't. But a couple of guys who'd been involved with firearms in the pre-ear-protector days already had strained expressions on their faces, and peered closely at the lips of those they were talking to.

The talk was all of movement, of change. Fine officers retiring, others being transferred. Lizzie Siddal was loudly lamenting that with all the cuts she'd soon reach her original ambition – being Head of the Fraud Squad – without the promotions she'd always expected would go with the job: an ordinary DI, doing detective superintendent work!

No one had noticed that Rod Neville had slipped in. Kate wouldn't ever have associated him with shyness, but he hung back by the door, as if uncertain which group to break into. At last he caught her eye and smiled, starting to push over towards her. Although she tried to make room in the group around Lizzie, he swiftly detached her. In a second, Graham, who'd been on the edge of another group, managed to join the pair of them. Yes, poor Graham liked a bit of status, didn't he?

‘How's this tennis court death going, Kate?' Neville asked, with less preamble than if he'd been in his office, where he always observed courtesies, no matter how pressing the business in hand.