‘We all know you’re putting up a smokescreen, Dr Hill,’ Penny said, glaring at him. ‘There are too many people who know what really happened that night to keep the lid on it.’
Tony gave a dry chuckle. ‘What? Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead? But that only works if there’s a secret in the first place. Carol has nothing to hide. Maybe you should be writing a story about the financial pressures that mean the police can’t afford to maintain their equipment.’ He pulled a face. ‘But that wouldn’t be very sexy, would it? Quarter page in the middle of the paper. Not like a front page accusing senior cops of corruption. Even if that’s nothing more than a fantasy.’
Penny’s lips were a tight straight line. He was right, Carol thought. He’d exposed Penny’s weakness. She had nothing but a couple of shreds of rumour she was taking a flyer on. ‘So if that’s all,’ Carol said sweetly, ‘we’ve got dinner to eat.’ She stepped back, preparing to close the door. But she’d underestimated how quick the reporter was when it came to fancy footwork.
‘So you’re living here now, Tony,’ she said. ‘That’s a happy ending, isn’t it? After all you two have been through together.’
Tony squeezed his eyes shut momentarily. ‘A working dinner, Penny. My boat’s still moored up in the Minster basin.’ He released Flash, who immediately leaned into Carol’s leg.
‘I’m sure it is. But if you’re moored up here, walking the dog… Well, my readers love a heart-warming happy ending. God knows you deserve it.’
‘Go away, Ms Burgess,’ Carol sighed. ‘You’re really starting to piss me off.’
‘Fair enough. You can’t say I didn’t give you a chance to rebut the version of events that’s gaining traction. There are four people dead whose relatives want answers to the question of why Dominic Barrowclough was driving around West Yorkshire when he should have lost his licence weeks ago. They need somebody to blame, and I don’t think you can count on West Yorkshire Police to keep covering your back.’ She gathered her coat more closely around her in preparation for leaving.
‘I have done nothing wrong,’ Carol said, her voice low and steady.
Penny scoffed. ‘That’s not what I’m hearing.’
Tony stepped forward quickly, forcing her to retreat. ‘You of all people should know how committed DCI Jordan is to justice. You know the work she’s done, the cases her teams have resolved down the years. Is making life easier for criminals really what you’re after? Because that’s all you’ll achieve if you join the fake news brigade. These are alternative facts, Penny. The truth is that Carol catches criminals and puts them away.’
Penny glared mutinously. ‘It’s a shame not everybody makes it to the glory day, isn’t it? This isn’t the first time you’ve left bodies in your wake, is it, Carol?’
Abruptly, Carol turned on her heel and disappeared inside. ‘Good job,’ Tony said sarcastically, stepping back into the doorway and closing the door firmly in Penny Burgess’s discontented face. From the far side of the barn, Carol watched him take off his jacket and hang it up in silence. The last thing she felt like was a post-mortem, but she couldn’t ignore the scene that he’d walked into.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said as he went across to the kitchen area.
Tony paused by the oven, his back to her, and said, ‘Bloody Sam Evans. Paula told me all about it. If he hadn’t wanted to make you pay for not choosing him, none of this would ever have surfaced.’
‘But it has. And Penny Burgess is like a terrier who gets a whiff of a rabbit. She’ll quarter the hillside sniffing the bloody air till she finds where the truth’s gone to ground. I’ve barely got ReMIT up and running and already I’m living on borrowed time.’
He took the casserole out of the oven and stirred it enthusiastically. The smell was amazing. ‘Nobody who sits around George Nicholas’s dinner table is going to talk to a scummy hack like Penny Burgess.’
‘He had staff working that night.’
‘Bet they couldn’t make a venison casserole like this.’
‘Where did you get the recipe?’ Carol asked, momentarily diverted. Cooking was not one of Tony’s core skills.
‘On the internet. I did exactly what it said, except you didn’t have any juniper berries.’
‘Shame you dumped the gin down the sink,’ she said wryly.
Tony replaced the casserole. ‘Half an hour, I think. George Nicholas’s staff won’t rat out a friend of the house. And even if they did, their evidence is meaningless. They weren’t in the room all evening. Even Penny Burgess wouldn’t take a chance on something so fragile. Or if she did, her editor would kick it into the long grass. They don’t want to make an enemy of the cops unless they’re on rock-solid ground.’
Carol moved away from him, trying not to show the fear and anger churning inside. ‘How dare she come here? This is my home.’ In spite of herself there was a catch in her voice.
‘Should have set the dog on her,’ Tony said.
Carol laughed. Shaky and spluttering, but a laugh nevertheless. ‘Death by a thousand licks.’ She turned to face him, eyes sparkling with unshed tears. ‘Do you want to talk about Kathryn McCormick?’
He shrugged and began to pace. The dog eyed him uneasily, her eyes following him. ‘I’ve nothing to say. There’s nothing to get hold of so far. The only interesting thing is that the killer picked her up at a wedding. But we’ve no way of knowing whether he went there to pick up Kathryn specifically or just to acquire any random victim. We can’t even say whether he went to the wedding to find a victim or whether he seized a passing opportunity. So there’s really no point in talking about it till we know more.’
‘What about the body dump?’
Tony stopped by the window that looked up the black moorside. ‘He chose it carefully. No cameras. A quiet road, so not much risk of witnesses. But that’s a description that fits a lot of places in the Dales. Why that one?’
‘OK. Why that one?’
He threw himself down on a sofa. ‘I have no bloody idea. I can’t profile a single instance, you know that. I need more. So as far as I’m concerned, this would be a good time to teach you how to play FIFA 17.’
‘I hate football.’
He grinned. ‘Trust me. This isn’t football, it’s fun.’
21
T
he drive from Telford to Cardiff had been a nightmare. An accident on the M5 had brought traffic to a standstill for almost two hours and by the time Kevin had crossed the Severn and entered Wales, all he was fit for was a pint, a pizza and bed. But he still managed to be on Niall Sullivan’s doorstep at half past seven next morning in the teeth of a fine drizzle that was doubling the weight of his leather jacket.
He took a moment to assess where Sullivan was living before he hit the bell. It was on the edge of what were called executive developments when they were jacked up in the eighties but this one hadn’t worn well. The brickwork looked dirty and pockmarked. Several of the houses betrayed their shoddiness with watermarks and stains on the stucco of the upper storey. Sullivan’s home, a two-storey detached house, looked in decent repair, though. A bit tired and dated, but cared for. In the drive, a new BMW 4-series convertible and a Mini. Looked like Niall had replaced Kathryn, Kevin thought. Which bumped him down the suspect list.
But still, the hoops had to be jumped through. Kevin pressed the bell, letting a long peal ring through the house. Through the door he could hear the sound of feet clattering down stairs and the door opened on a frowning bear of a man with a thatch of damp auburn hair. He was dressed in suit trousers, a navy shirt with the top button undone and a pair of Chelsea boots, which explained the noisy descent of the open-plan staircase Kevin could see over his shoulder. ‘Yeah?’ he demanded. ‘What?’
‘Niall Sullivan?’ Kevin produced his ID and held it up. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Kevin Matthews from the Regional Major Incident Team based in Bradfield.’ He couldn’t help it, but it still gave him a buzz to use the rank he’d been stripped of years before.
Carol had dangled its restoration in front of him as a bribe to get him to come out of retirement and he’d leaped at the chance, not merely to up his pension but to redeem himself in his own eyes. He was as proud of it now as when he’d first won the promotion.
Sullivan tightened his mouth in an expression of distaste. ‘This is about Kathryn, right?’
‘You’ve heard about —’
‘This is 2017, not 1917,’ Sullivan interrupted. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of messages I got yesterday. As soon as you lot turned up at her office, the word spread faster than Ed Sheeran’s downloads. Look, I’m sorry she’s dead, of course I am. We were together a long time. But I don’t know what you’re doing here. I moved down more than three years ago and I’ve only seen Kathryn twice since then.’
‘You didn’t keep in touch?’
He scoffed. ‘Hardly. Once she realised I was serious about moving without her, things got pretty frosty between us.’
A woman’s bare legs appeared on the stairs behind him. ‘What’s occurring, Niall?’ Kevin could hear the Welsh accent even in those few words.
Sullivan glanced over his shoulder. ‘It’s nothing, just get in the shower.’
The rest of her appeared wrapped in a dressing gown that stopped in the middle of her tanned thighs. She had a tousled mane of blonde hair and a pert face bare of make-up. ‘Who’s this, then?’
Kevin introduced himself again as she descended.
‘I’m Pippa,’ she said. ‘Niall, invite the nice man in. It’s bloody draughty with that door wide open. Come on, Inspector, I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
‘Pippa?’ Sullivan protested but he’d already lost and he knew it. He sighed and stepped back, pointing down the hall to where Pippa had disappeared into the kitchen. ‘Let’s keep this quick and to the point,’ he muttered at Kevin’s back as he followed him. ‘I’ve got a busy day ahead of me.’
Like Pippa herself, the kitchen had all the right stuff in the right places but it lacked any sense of cosiness. It resembled the set-dressing of a show house. One that Kevin definitely wouldn’t have bought. His Stella would have roared with contemptuous laughter at it.
Pippa made the tea, managing to invest that simple job with a look-at-me performance. Kevin leaned against the counter and smiled at Sullivan. ‘So when did you last see Kathryn?’
Sullivan studied the ceiling. ‘Let me see… It must have been October. We were both at the same wedding. Gayle Thomas. She used to work for me. She got to be pals with Kathryn.’
That chimed with what the McCormicks had told Kevin. So far, Sullivan appeared to be telling the truth. ‘How did the meeting go? At the wedding?’
Sullivan shook his head in frustration. ‘It wasn’t a meeting. We didn’t speak. I saw her across the room. That’s all. She didn’t even catch my eye. I don’t suppose she wanted to talk to me any more than I did her. Look, we were over. Done. There was nothing left between us.’ He was, Kevin thought, protesting a bit too much. Was that for Pippa’s benefit, or was Sullivan hiding something?
‘She was no match for you,’ Pippa stated firmly as she handed Kevin a mug of tea with too much milk. Baby tea, he thought.
‘We do have to explore every avenue,’ Kevin said.
‘Are you saying she hadn’t had a boyfriend since Niall left? I mean, if there were other men in her life, you wouldn’t be here, would you?’ Pippa’s smile was malicious.
‘I can’t discuss the investigation with you, sorry. I do however need to ask, sir, where you were on Sunday evening.’
‘He was with me,’ Pippa said. ‘We went for a curry down the Brewery Quarter with four of the team from work.’ She squeezed Sullivan’s arm as she handed him his tea. ‘Then we went clubbing. So he wasn’t setting fire to his ex in Yorkshire, was he?’
It sounded very much as if she was right. ‘I’ll need their names and contact details,’ he said, knowing as he spoke it would be a waste of time. But then, so much of what they did in a murder investigation was a waste of time.
Sullivan nodded. ‘Give me your phone number, I’ll ping them over to you.’ As Kevin fished in his pocket for a card, the man continued. ‘I had no hard feelings towards Kathryn. I didn’t hate her. I just got bored. She didn’t have any —’ He waggled his hands, searching for the word. ‘Get up and go. She wanted everything to carry on the way it was. Me, I wanted more.’ His smile was rueful. ‘I’m not a bad man, Inspector. We weren’t right for each other, me and Kathryn, that’s the top and bottom of it. No way did she deserve this. She was a decent person.’
‘No enemies? Nobody bothering her at work or among the neighbours?’
Sullivan shook his head. ‘She wasn’t the sort to make enemies. She didn’t really rouse strong feelings, Kathryn. When I was working up to leaving, I couldn’t even remember how we ended up together in the first place.’ He patted Pippa’s backside and his face lit up. ‘Not like with you.’
There was nothing more for him here, Kevin thought, his heart sinking at the prospect of the long drive north. ‘Thanks for the tea,’ he said.
As they walked back down the hall, Niall said, ‘I hope you catch the bastard who did this. I totally don’t understand how it could have happened. Truly, Kathryn wasn’t the sort of woman to provoke a reaction on that scale from anybody. We were out one night in town, and we ran into somebody she’d sacked a few months before. And this lad she’d given the bullet to, he couldn’t have been nicer to her. When she told me afterwards that she’d been the one to give him the elbow, I couldn’t believe it. I’m not saying she’d win a popularity contest. She didn’t have charisma. But she was genuinely inoffensive.’ He shook his head. ‘Whatever happened to kick this off, I’d lay money that it wasn’t anything Kathryn did.’
They shook hands on the doorstep. ‘We’ll do our best,’ Kevin said. He walked back to his car, pondering what Niall had said. What if Kathryn’s death truly was nothing to do with her? What did that mean for the investigation?
That, he reckoned, was one for Tony Hill.
22
K
evin wasn’t the only member of the ReMIT squad making an early start. But what drove Paula out of the house before Torin had even descended for breakfast was nothing to do with Kathryn McCormick’s murder. Procrastination had never been one of her faults, but if it had been, living with a teenager would have given her pause. If you put things off, before you knew it, you’d missed the bus and it was too late to achieve the pay-off you hoped for. Nothing stayed in the same place for long with adolescents; even when it looked like all Torin was doing was vegging out, things were constantly changing in his world.
So after the conversation she’d had with Elinor the previous morning, she’d emailed Torin’s form teacher and asked for a meeting. Paula still hadn’t quite got her head round the way communication between teachers and parents had changed. When she’d been a kid growing up in Manchester, the only time the two groups ever met was parents’ evening, when the teachers basically laid down the law and parents nodded obligingly. Because obviously the teachers knew best. Otherwise they wouldn’t be teachers, would they? Parents were only ever summoned to the school when their child had committed some heinous offence and the notion of a parent taking the side of their child against the monolithic phalanx of the educational establishment was laughable.
But these days, parents and guardians were expected to take an active role in their children’s education. It was all a bit novel for Paula. But at least it meant that when a problem did emerge, she wouldn’t have to start from scratch with a total stranger. Still, she’d taken care with her appearance that morning, keen to make a good impression. She’d even dried her hair properly and rubbed styling paste in to give some shape to her dirty-blonde bob. Linen suit fresh out of the dry cleaner’s bag and a scoop-necked navy top underneath. Silver earrings like fingerprints and a thin silver chain finished the job. She wasn’t going to put the fear of death into any bad guys looking like this, for sure.
Lorna Meikle had been Torin’s form teacher when his mother had been murdered. She’d been supportive and concerned, taking his change of circumstances in her stride but never for granted. Elinor and Paula had warmed to her when she’d worked with them to develop a strategy for helping him recover the ground he’d lost in his grief at Bev’s death. There had been no problems since and they hadn’t seen her for a while except for the last parents’ evening, where the focus had been Torin’s potential choice of A Level subjects. But when Paula had messaged her, she’d responded immediately and agreed to meet before school began.
The traffic was heavy, but Paula knew all the back doubles and she cut through the narrow alleys between streets like a teenage joyrider trying to evade capture. She made it to the school with ten minutes to spare. Lorna Meikle was pulling up in her car as Paula locked up and they walked to the building together, making small talk till they turned into Torin’s form room.
Lorna was a matronly woman in her late forties. She’d taken a career break to have her own three kids and she had the air of someone who took in her stride whatever the world might throw at her. But there was a steely edge there, and Paula had seen from the first that the kids respected her. Sometimes that respect was grudging; there were plenty of pupils who could never be described as students, kids with no realistic aspirations or ambitions, who saw school as a battle they had to survive then escape. But still, as Torin said, ‘Nobody messes with Mrs M.’