Power Games (4 page)

Kate smiled, embarrassed. ‘And how's Billy Budgie?'

‘He's fine, bless you. Mrs Hurst went and got him some of his favourite seed and he's perfectly happy. I don't know how he'll like the trip down to Cornwall.'

‘You're off to your daughter's, then?'

‘She's got a granny flat all ready for us. She's always wanted us to move down there but we've never quite got round to it. Not with the garden.'

‘Round tuits are much in evidence in Cornwall,' announced a strong female voice. ‘You can get earthenware and pottery round tuits in all the gift shops. Meg Hutchings, Sergeant.' The card she flipped to Kate announced she was an LLB and Barrister-at-Law. With a presence like that she could have been a Law Lord.

Pocketing it, Kate suppressed a smile. At last the Sargents' legal problems were in formidable hands.

 

Kate didn't stay long. It was obvious from the savoury smells that Mrs Hurst was taking her duties as hostess seriously and was producing a good meal, and under Meg Hutchings' steely gaze Kate didn't find herself equal to the very dry sherry on offer. Hutchings asked for – and got – Kate's card.

‘I shall be in touch, Sergeant. Your conduct was entirely commendable today.'

‘Far from it, Mrs Hutchings. In official eyes I was foolish to the point of a disciplinary. And then the ring—' Kate shook her head.

‘No one would have known if you'd pocketed it.'

Kate flushed. ‘I would.' No need to point out it wasn't worth stealing anyway.

 

From one powerful presence to another. Great Aunt Cassie was ensconced, not in bed, but in her armchair. After pouring her the obligatory stiff gin, Kate sat down on the day bed opposite her.

‘They're still working, these new pills,' Cassie informed her, proving it by holding out one hand only for the tumbler. ‘And you've no idea how much better they suit my insides. The diarrhoea's much better. And the doctor thinks he'll try some new tablets next time I have my water-works troubles.'

‘Perhaps you won't have any more trouble if you carry on with your daily cranberry juice,' Kate said, deciding that the general tenor of the conversation could be improved.

‘Nasty bitter stuff. And have you seen the amount of sugar they put in it to make it palatable? What's that you've got there?'

Kate laid the button on her aunt's outstretched palm. The skin was so dry. She'd better buy the old lady some rich hand-cream – always assuming she'd use it, of course. She was just as likely to give it to one of the carers. Cassie was like that. She had not only given Kate the house, she'd lent her a great deal of money to repair and decorate it. Now the London house was sold, Kate had paid her back, only to have the old woman refusing a penny in interest.

‘I think it's a button,' Kate said. ‘It's from your back garden. Alf – the workman, do you remember him? – found a hoard. So now we've got to decide what to do with them. And with the site.'

Cassie snorted and held her hand out for Kate to retrieve the button from where she'd placed it. ‘Nothing but rubbish. You get on with your garden. That's what matters. You're paying that man good money to dig the place over – let him dig it. No need to worry about this muck. Chuck it in the bin. Forget about it.'

‘Oh,' came a quiet voice from the door. ‘I don't think she could do that, do you?'

Graham!

Who came in and, taking Cassie by the other hand, kissed her cheek, something Kate rarely dared to do. And the old dear obviously loved it – well, why not? A good-looking man must be a rare enough occurrence in her world.

Straightening, Graham held out his hand for Cassie to tip the button into it and turned to Kate. He was still smiling, but a quirk of his mouth might have suggested embarrassment, too. As for Kate, she didn't know what she felt. How could a man who could be hard to the point of unforgiving at work find time to be kind to an old lady who'd perfected ungraciousness to an art form? Cassie's oft-repeated explanation was that he couldn't stand his mother-in-law and regularly slipped in for five minutes while he waited for his wife to escape Mrs Nelmes' clutches. So it was nothing unusual for him to be here. But for them both to be here, out of their usual context, disturbed Kate – and, she suspected, him too. If she couldn't forget what had passed between them, she was sure he couldn't.

Hesitating a moment, Graham sat down beside her. He held out the button on his outstretched hand, just as Cassie had done.

‘It was this that was under your woodshed?'

‘And lots more. And' – she dug in her pocket – ‘some bone ones, too. Too many to be ignored, really.'

‘I don't know what you're making such a fuss about,' Cassie put in, holding out her glass. ‘And more to the point, why you want to pull that shed down.'

Kate got up to refill the glass. She gestured with a spare glass to Graham, who blinked with amusement as she sliced lemon and clinked ice, and shook his head. She fixed herself a very small one, too. It was strange to sit down beside Graham again. Goodness knew how many meetings they'd sat side by side; but this was more shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, than she was used to. And he was still holding the buttons.

She knew how well-shaped his hands were, and that the left was weighed down with a particularly heavy wedding ring. But she'd never had to touch one before. He could simply have scooped the buttons up and passed them to her, couldn't he? But they lay over whatever destinies the lines on his palm were supposed to promise, waiting for her to gather them.

‘The wood was beginning to go rotten,' Kate said, reaching for the buttons as gently and unobtrusively as she could. She turned to flick a smile at him.

For a crazy moment she thought he was closing his fist around both the buttons and her fingers. If he was, he thought better of it.

‘You could have repaired it,' Cassie grumbled. ‘Where will you keep your garden tools? Your lawn-mower?'

‘In the coal-shed!' She didn't think it wise to tell her at this point that she wouldn't need a lawn-mower as she wasn't going to have a lawn. ‘Alf's going to clean it out and put a proper floor in. And then replace the corrugated iron roof with a polycarbonate one – you know, strong transparent plastic. So it'll almost be a potting shed. And the outside lavatory – I'll put some shelves in to overwinter any plants I manage to grow.'

‘And I thought you'd got green fingers,' Graham put in.

She spread her hand for him to inspect them. ‘I'm afraid that they look pretty ordinary pink ones to me.' Why on earth had she done that? And risked glancing sideways up at him, to find his eyes fixed on her face? It was so dangerous.

‘She kills house plants, I can tell you that. When she was a little girl and she used to stay with me – I'd give her cuttings to take back home and they'd always die. Wouldn't they?'

‘That might have been something to do with that cat – the one that used to pee on them.'

‘Our cat does that,' Graham said. ‘Wretched creature – I can't think why my wife keeps it.' His face closed. And suddenly he was on his feet and halfway to the door. ‘See you soon, Aunt Cassie. Kate.' He nodded formally and was gone.

‘Well, you know your own mind best. But where'll you keep your coal?' Cassie demanded, without pausing to do more than nod goodbye.

Probably he wouldn't have noticed, any more than he'd noticed Kate's wave.

Kate rallied. ‘Come on, when did you last have a coal fire? You don't need it with central heating.'

‘I always had some standing by. Just in case. Power cuts and three-day weeks. You need a stand-by. Now, you were saying you'd started to play tennis. Don't you go getting a new racquet, spending your money where you don't need to. There's a perfectly good one in the loft.'

Not quite the ultra-light graphite one Kate had treated herself to.

‘Behind the chimney, I think it is. Me and my Arthur used to like a good game. Always took our racquets on holiday. I had this lovely dress—'

‘What was it like?'

‘Oh, quite daring it was for those days …'

 

Well, she reflected in bed later, she'd escaped a cross-questioning for that evening. Tales of Cassie's tennis and her clothes had kept them going till Kate could decently go home. But she had a nasty suspicion her great aunt had missed not one blink of the interplay between her and Graham. That tension. Then he'd mentioned his wife, and the very thought of her had driven him to his incontinent escape.

Oh God! Cassie's bladder, Graham's cat – and at last the word she'd been trying to avoid all evening! But for all her chuckles, she couldn't keep at bay the memory of those half-touches, and the intensity of Graham's gaze.

Kate had thrown up twice already. Her stomach was warning her it could do it again, any moment now. She must get the smell out of her nose. Mints might help. One in her mouth, one in a tissue pressed to her nose. But nothing could disguise the smell. Nothing could disguise the fact: this charred mess had been a human being.

‘Smoke inhalation would get him first, of course,' Kevin Masters, one of the fire officers, was saying. ‘So it wouldn't be like one of your martyrs, burnt at the stake. Though I believe they strangled them first, didn't they?'

‘Only if they were bribed to,' Kate said. If showing off his general knowledge helped him deal with the death, why should she discourage him? It certainly made a change from the ghoulish humour that was her squad's usual defence mechanism. In any case, Rowley and the SOCO and the rest of the team were all busy, and a bit of bridge-building between services never came amiss. Especially when you had a bit of a conscience about a budgie. ‘And wasn't there,' she continued, trying to smile, ‘some guy who held his right hand into the flames, because it had signed papers which betrayed his cause?'

Masters, a spare man in his early forties, scratched his chin. ‘Would that be Sir Thomas More? Or Saint Thomas More, depending on your persuasion.'

She shook her head doubtfully. ‘Or maybe it was Cranmer? He had quite a lot to recant, after all. I rather think More had a nice swift death – off with his head. This poor bugger here didn't, though,' she said. ‘What did he do? Get so drunk swigging meths he spilt some, and then – when he lit a fag – whoosh?'

‘Could have. But I wouldn't like to pass an opinion till the FIT people have had a thorough look.'

‘FIT as in our MIT – Major Incident Team?'

‘FIT as in Fire Investigation Team. They do the same sort of job as your SOCOs – searching for needles in haystacks to make sense of everything. It'll be very interesting to see how the two teams work together,' he added darkly.

‘But where will they start?' Kate looked helplessly at what was left of the warehouse. ‘I mean, this was once a three-dimensional structure – now you've got all the walls, all the ceilings, turned into one soggy mess. Who's to know whether that girder there was part of the wall or part of the roof?'

Masters laughed. ‘Training. Experience. Instinct. The same sort of things you people bring to a murder case.' He looked sideways at her. ‘Which you may have here, of course.'

‘If the poor sod didn't set fire to himself.'

‘Or herself. Would you take bets on whether it was male or female?'

She forced herself to look again at the charred flesh, the teeth bared in a manic final grimace. She swung away, holding back bile.

A stir of activity distracted her.

‘Ah! That'll be the experts. The big, tall chap with glasses – he's the Forensic Science Agency fire expert. The short one with hairy legs – that's the other expert.'

Kate opened her eyes in a cynical stare. A dog?

‘No, I reckon the canine expert's as important as the human one. In his own way. He's trained to sniff petrol, you see. To pick up the fumes.'

‘Like other dogs sniff cannabis or dead bodies?'

‘That's right. So if he has a good nose round and comes up with the smell of petrol, it'll blow our theory of the drunk meths-swilling tramp out of the water, won't it? Anyway, let's see what Star comes up with.'

Star, a black Labrador, stood patiently to be fitted with little leather boots.

‘You see,' Masters said, ‘they're to protect his feet from broken glass. Off he goes.'

Dog and handler started, appropriately enough, she supposed, where the corpse had been found. But Star gave no reaction. As he ranged over the rubble, however, he started to get a lot more interested. Then excited. Finally very excited, in a doggy sort of way. And certainly his handler looked pleased.

‘Petrol?' Kate asked.

Masters nodded. ‘Looks like it. Now, didn't those other fires start with someone pouring petrol through skylights? Well, believe it or not, Kate, that is almost exactly where a skylight would have been.'

Sue Rowley came towards her with SOCO and the taller of the experts. ‘Come on,' she said, ‘let's get out of here. All the smells,' she continued, stumbling over a twisted girder, ‘of a fire like this. Wood; paint; chemicals. And now – a human.'

Masters nodded. ‘It drives me crazy, people saying how they enjoy their garden bonfire. I tell you, some days I can't face a barbecue. There. That's better, isn't it?'

Kate returned his smile, sniffing. ‘Lovely fresh rush-hour air! You're right. Even the smell of all those buses is sweet.' She found she was shivering.

So was Sue Rowley. ‘What puzzles me is how some people manage to turn their stomachs off – I mean, those forensic teams in Yugoslavia, as was, and pathologists, going in real close—' Shaking her head, she closed her eyes. ‘A day like this, I can't wait to have a shower and get into some clean clothes.'

Kate nodded. That was exactly what she had in mind.