Power Games (20 page)

The naan had gone cold and leathery. She picked at it with distaste, until she was saved by the doorbell.

Rod with his briefcase and a couple of carrier bags. One chinked on the hall tiles. The other emitted good and familiar smells.

‘I thought you'd be too knackered to cook,' he said, picking up the carriers and taking them through to the kitchen. ‘So I brought you some of our regional speciality.'

‘You're a King Kebab fan too!' She meant it as a sociable observation. It sounded more like the eager sharing of a lover.

‘Of course.' His smile suggested he took it as it sounded. And the smile intensified as he produced a bottle. ‘And something to wash it down with afterwards – they wouldn't go together. Only first I want you to promise me something. Not a single word about work.'

‘One single word only,' she said, reaching plates for new portions of chicken tikka in naan, and shoving the champagne in the fridge, ‘before we deal with any of this. And that's it. Promise.'

‘And what's that word?' he asked, sinking to a chair and rubbing his neck.

‘Sweeteners,' she said. ‘Oh, and perhaps one more. Backhanders.'

‘The hardest part of this relationship is trying not to talk shop with you,' Rod said, tracing a trickle of sweat between her breasts.

‘You're sure it isn't the second hardest part?' Kate asked, with a sexy giggle. ‘Going by the evidence, that is.' And then she stopped giggling. Although she knew it was inevitable, the last thing she wanted at that moment was a sober discussion.

He produced that devastating smile. Just for her. ‘And the third hardest is trying not to let my feelings for you affect my judgement about some of our colleagues. And what to do about them. And not to break confidentiality when I'm with you.'

She tensed. ‘You're saying that the relationship is a mistake?'

‘A tiny, tiny part of my head's trying to tell me that. But the rest of me just isn't listening.'

But it might, one day, mightn't it? And how would she feel then?

He brushed her cheek with a finger that smelt of her. ‘I've broken my promise, haven't I? And talking like this in bed is in the worst possible taste. Oh, please lie down again.'

She shook her head. They'd done things in quite the wrong order, hadn't they? They should have talked before they fucked. She and Robin had worked things out, not clinically, but clear-sightedly. That's why they'd been so good together. In every respect.

‘Oh, Kate, Kate. Don't you see, I want it to work, you and me? But there are issues.'

She scrubbed her face and turned to him. ‘Not the least of which is my late partner. You must have read my file.'

He nodded. ‘Is this – am I – the first since – since you lost him?'

Her turn to nod.

‘In that case we have all the more to work through. Together: I want us to deal with all this together.' He pulled her gently down, cradling her head on his shoulder. ‘Let it all go, Kate – I'm here.'

 

She woke to find the bed empty. The bastard! Not even saying goodbye. But then she could see his clothes still on the chair where he'd flung them. Part of his brain had clearly wanted to fold everything meticulously. The other part had simply wanted to leave things where they'd fallen. A compromise: his trousers should be OK, but she didn't hold out much hope for his shirt.

And there he was, wearing the unisex bathrobe last worn by Simon.

‘Tea in bed! What a luxury!'

‘But it presages my early departure. There are things I must collect from home. And I can't fake the car again.' Putting the mugs on the bedside cabinet, he perched on the side of the bed. ‘Cold shower time, Kate. Enjoy your tea. Only before you do, tell me when I can come and meet Aunt Cassie.'

‘Whenever you want,' she said. ‘She's always happy to entertain attractive young men. Trouble is,' she added more soberly, ‘there's always a chance you'll meet Graham Harvey there.'

‘Graham Harvey! Visiting your aunt!' His smile faded.

‘More particularly his mother-in-law. He consulted Cassie before he booked Mrs Nelmes in, and he still pops in from time to time.'

‘Whether you're there or not?'

‘More often when I'm not there, I'd say. He's fond of the old bat.'

‘Is she like you?'

‘Heavens, isn't that stretching the laws of heredity a bit far? I'll say this, she's a tough old bird, my great aunt. With a heart of gold.'

He looked at her sideways. ‘You may think you're tough, Kate, but I'd say you're more vulnerable than you care to admit. God!' He kissed her, gently then very hard. ‘Kate – you have this weird effect on me. I want to protect you from the harsh winds that blow.'

She reeled. No one had ever said anything like that to her. She looked away. And managed a cracked laugh. ‘So long as you protect all the other Lodge Committee members too.'

Biting his lip, he looked her straight in the eye. Whatever he meant to say he cancelled. This time his smile was his professional one, and it became grimmer. ‘It was a job I delegated to – to someone. Perhaps it would be advisable to check that measures have in fact been put in train.'

 

She cobbled together some breakfast while he was showering. A trip to Sainsbury's was called for if he proposed to stay more often. Milk; eggs; bread. Even loo rolls.

‘I thought,' she said, scraping the very last from the Marmite jar, ‘that I'd stay and talk to Stephen Abbott for a few minutes. See if softly-softly will extract from him what was nicked from his filing cabinet.'

‘Good idea. Of course. I'll let Mark and Nigel know.' He started to make a note.

‘No, you won't. Not unless you and I have started to practise telepathy.'

 

Kate didn't broach the subject while she and Stephen were drinking tea in the warmth of the kitchen. She thought she'd wait till he was off his guard, hunkered over the bricks at the bottom of her garden. Alf hadn't arrived yet. There was no point, as he said, in busting a gut if he couldn't get on with the path. And he'd got other jobs he could get on with.

‘I'm just off,' she said. She might well have been, with her jacket buttoned firmly over her working clothes. Bright though the sun was, it was still pretty feeble – only seven-thirty, in its own terms, which were nothing to do, after all, with British Summer Time. ‘You'll help yourself to tea and everything, won't you?'

‘And I'll remember to take my boots off when I go in.'

‘Thanks. You're still feeling … bad?'

‘This,' he said, waving a tiny trowel, ‘is very therapeutic. Better than writing reports, any day. I've been wondering if any of your neighbours have similar sites. Where you have one workshop, you tend to get a cluster.'

‘Enough to make quite a landmark? Did you ever find out about Worksop Road? If it is a corruption of Workshop Road?'

He stood. ‘It's on my list.'

‘If this road is worth investigating, think how much the neighbouring one would – Goldsmith Road.'

‘If you know how many precautions jewellers take not to lose one iota of gold dust, you wouldn't expect much,' he said.

‘I don't know about losing gold. I do know I found a packet of diamonds under my study floor,' she said. ‘Oh, my Aunt Cassie had put them there for a rainy day—'

‘Downpour, more like!'

‘Quite. Anyway, they'll pay for another year in that home of hers. You live in an old place. Anything interesting under your floor boards?'

‘I wish.' His sigh gave her the opening she'd been edging towards.

‘What they took – was it insured?'

‘Not intrinsic value, really. Photos, mainly. And some letters.'

‘Anyone special?'

‘A woman.'

Well, that was one theory blown out of the water. Possibly. He squatted again: had she lost him?

‘Must have been someone pretty special – you were very upset about it.'

‘A woman. Just a woman. Oh, the sister of a friend of mine. I – got too fond of her.'

She waited.

‘You know how intense things get when you're young. You lose a sense of proportion. I thought she cared for me as much as I cared for her.' He broke off to ease up a dandelion root. ‘Turned out she didn't. But I couldn't quite – well, maybe the burglar did me a good turn, getting rid of that stuff.'

‘What was she like?'

He put the root on what would become the path – then thought better of it and slung it over the fence into the entry. ‘Beautiful. No, I mean it. Beautiful. She was. Extraordinary. Why I should ever have expected her to want to stay with me—' He shrugged. ‘And very clever. Intelligent. Whatever. Got a double first a month after she'd dumped me.'

‘You were both at Durham?'

‘No. I suppose that was one problem. I was a year older than she was, so I went off to Durham a year before she went to Cambridge. And I remained absolutely faithful to her, all the time. We wrote – just a note, sometimes – every day. And when I'd got my degree, and started work on a project in Lincoln, we still wrote. Until the Easter of her last year. And then that was it. Full-stop.'

‘Just like that?'

‘Just like that.'

‘What happened to her?'

‘She's already a senior civil servant. Going to fly very high. Home Office, I think. Your boss,' he said, managing a grin at last.

She nodded. ‘So all Burglar Bill got was her love letters and some snapshots.'

‘Oh, no. Snapshots they weren't. Studio portraits. I'm a very good photographer – though I says it as shouldn't,' he added, dropping into a Birmingham accent. ‘I use photography a lot in my work,' he said, in his normal voice.

‘Studio portraits? We're not talking what amateur photographers will call “glamour”, are we?'

‘Silly tarts wearing nothing but a basque and a pout? Do me a favour! Oh, there was some nude stuff. But, as the amateur photographers would say, “all very tasteful”.'

‘But she might not have wanted them lying around.'

‘They were in a locked drawer,' he snapped.

Get his trust back. ‘Where did you meet her?' she asked.

‘The county youth orchestra. We were both viola players. Now, I know there are pages and pages of viola player jokes on the Internet, but we're not all sad old gits. At least, she isn't!'

‘So you'd be very young – still at school?'

‘That's right. Both swots, of course, but with lust and loyalty. We'd study together, until I went up north. And half of her letters are about work she'd be doing – ideas for essays and so on. But she was good fun, Kate. We laughed a lot. Of course, her parents were loaded compared with mine, but they quite liked me. Didn't discourage me, at any rate.'

‘Were you at the same school?'

‘No, I was at the local comp. She – I told you she was a high-flyer – she was at a girls' public school.'

‘Oh – now, what are they called here in Brum? One of the King Edwards' schools?'

‘No. Neither of us is a Brummie – can't you tell? The accent? We were both from Lichfield.'

Lichfield! ‘The Swan of Lichfield'! And the Seward Foundation and all its land!

Not letting her voice change, keeping the tightest control over her face, Kate asked, ‘Now, would that be an Anna Seward Academy, out there?'

‘That's right. Know someone there, do you?'

‘Someone was telling me about the foundation, just the other day. They were saying it was surprising there weren't Seward Academies in Brum.'

‘Suppose it is, really. Still, like you said, there are other good girls' schools. Now,' he said, pointing swiftly, ‘how about that for a bright little button?'

 

It seemed Stephen, slender though he was, was a man for second breakfasts. If all his work was done in weather like this she could hardly blame him, even if making him toast did finish off the bread.

‘My colleagues need to know all about the problems with protecting the Lodge,' she said, passing him the butter. ‘All.'

‘They didn't seem very interested. Or in the fact that the committee papers had been nicked. In fact, that sleek bastard Crowther thought that part of the burglary was just a bit of vandalism, that all they really wanted were sellable things: the video and TV, and the computer.'

She looked at him steadily. ‘Are you sure?'

He shifted. ‘OK. Probably he didn't. What he really wanted to find out was what I've just told you. And I suppose you'll have to go and tell him, won't you? He is your boss, after all,' he added wearily.

‘What I'm more interested in now,' she said, ‘is the Lodge. The Lodge documents that were stolen.'

‘No need to worry about them. There'll be copies of everything in Rosemary's files,' he said. Her silence must have told him what he didn't want to know. ‘Oh, God, don't say they've taken all her stuff?'

‘Enough,' she said mildly.

‘When? No, don't tell me. The night she was lying dead in the shower. Fucking hell, how callous can you be! They kill her, they nick her keys, they break into her house and take her stuff. Jesus Christ. God save me from big business.'

‘From what?'

‘Stands to reason. We were trying to protect the Lodge from being “redeveloped”—'

‘Not simply protect it from general dilapidation?'

He shook his head. ‘So it doesn't take much detective work, does it? It's got to be one of the firms that wanted to develop it.'

She nodded. At least someone was now taking it seriously.

‘Then there was the Tax Office—'

‘Tax!'

‘Yes. She'd been on PAYE all her life, of course. But she reckoned someone at the Tax Office kept on querying her returns. And she'd have been punctilious about something like that. I suppose I should have told that woman on Saturday, shouldn't I?'