‘Good line to be in, isn’t it? Everyone fancies having their own little Eden outside the scullery door.’
‘True, but Gail must be worth a second look.’
‘Hope Linz gets further with her than I did. Mind you, if Peter’s swopped Gail for Tina, Roz will be seriously unimpressed. She’ll blame Tina for breaking up the marriage. In her book, that’s as serious a crime as murder.’
‘She’s certainly stayed true to her own husband.’
‘Yes.’ Nick shuffled his feet on the tarmac. ‘What did you make of them, then?’
Hannah chose her words. ‘I’d say they look after each other very well.’
‘Is that it?’
‘You know them better than me.’
‘Too well to regard them as suspects.’
‘And you assume I do?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Stop fencing, Nick. If you must know, I liked them, but I thought they were holding back on me. Why, God knows, but there’s something they don’t want me to find out They’re your friends, but I’m sorry, I can’t let that influence me. If they’re keeping a secret that’s relevant to this inquiry, you can bet I’ll find it out.’
He didn’t answer. The only question in her mind was whether he knew what the Gleaves’ secret was, but if he did, he wasn’t telling. For a few moments they looked at each other before he gave a curt nod and walked away towards his car.
As she watched his retreating back, an overwhelming sense of loss flooded over her. Whatever was going on in his mind, she was afraid that things between them would never be the same again.
When Kirsty arrived home after work she found her brother asleep on the sofa. The stench of drink and uninhibited flatulence hit her as she walked into the living room. His snoring reminded her of his motorbike’s snarl. He was still wearing his muddy trainers and you could see dirt on the cotton throw covering the back of the sofa. Mum would kill him when she found out, but right now she was nowhere to be seen. She would be over at Peter’s. Unbidden, an image slid into her mind of Peter Flint’s white, stringy body stretched out on top of her mother’s fleshy curves.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Of course! When she realised, despite herself, she couldn’t contain a blast of laughter.
Mum would insist on being on top, no question.
‘You all right?’
Marc had been sitting cross-legged on the carpet, checking a pile of dusty hardbacks for the tiny flaws that would diminish their value to serious collectors and sliding them into protective see-through jackets. Now that the task was completed, he was paying attention to her again. Not for the first time lately, Hannah felt she’d prefer him to remain buried in his own affairs.
She mumbled something non-committal and kept leafing through the latest guidelines for the conduct of staff appraisals that she’d spread over the table. The yearly box-ticking ritual would need to be conducted soon and she was dreading it. Everyone had to pay lip service to the benefits of performance management, but in private everyone ridiculed the whole process. How could you guarantee a level playing field, consistency and an absence of favouritism and score-settling across the whole county? The whole exercise was a time-consuming waste of energy that everyone except the people who mattered thought would be better devoted to real police work. Yet it was becoming ever more important, with scores affecting competency payments and pension benefits for officers at the top end of their salary scale. People like Nick.
‘I said, are you all right? You’ve hardly said a word all evening.’
Guilty, m’lud. She had a raging headache and had economised with effort over their meal, heating up a cheese and salami pizza and disinterring some fruit salad from the fridge. When it was made, she hadn’t felt like eating. The encounter with Nick in the car park kept nagging at her and she’d paid little attention as Marc recounted a triumph of Internet book dealing. Within hours of his advertising it, someone in Idaho had paid a small fortune for a book by Cecil Waye that he’d found in the job lot from Ravenglass.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Things on my mind.’
‘For a change.’ Bitterness frosted his voice. ‘Work’s all you ever think about these days.’
She almost said: for God’s sake, stop whining like a caricature of a neglected housewife. Just in time, she bit back the words. For one thing, he was right.
‘I am sorry.’
She picked up the appraisal documentation and slung it into her briefcase. It could keep. She walked across the room and bent to kiss him on top of the head. He reached out for her wrists and when he pulled her down on to the floor beside him, she shrieked in mock protest whilst making no attempt to resist.
But even as he unfastened her blouse, even as he touched her nipples with his cool fingers, in the way that once had driven her to ecstasy, her thoughts began to stray. Marc wasn’t entirely right, it wasn’t just work that was bothering her. Filed away at the back of her brain was a suspicion so scary that she daren’t acknowledge it to herself, far less to Marc.
Kirsty turned up the volume of the television until her brother spluttered and stirred from his torpor. As he came round, he swore repeatedly and with uncharacteristically inventive imagery. For Kirsty, it was water off a duck’s back. Their father had been as bad.
‘And what the fuck’s that?’
On the screen, arrows were being fired at a young Chinese man wearing nothing but boxer shorts who was chained to a vast brick wall.
‘New programme.
‘You are so hilarious, move over Joan Rivers.’
‘Actually, it’s one of these endurance programmes. You know, how much can one human being be expected to cope with? Any day now they’ll start filming behind the scenes at The Heights.’
Sam snorted in derision. ‘You don’t have any idea, do you? What it’s like in the real world. Your idea of a tough day is when the latest coachload of geriatrics doesn’t stump up a single tip.’
She cringed at the smell of the beer fumes on him. ‘The real world? Getting pissed and riding motorbikes is your idea of the real world, is it?’
‘Why don’t you piss off, little waitress?’
Ripping off the scarf, she said, ‘See what you did to me?’
‘I can hardly see anything.’
‘You haven’t even said sorry.’
He uttered a long, low groan.
‘I suppose that’s as close as you’ll come to apologising.’
‘You shouldn’t have provoked me.’
‘I didn’t…oh God, what’s the use? Anyway, I’ve got news for you, if you’ll only break the habit of a lifetime and actually listen.’
‘News?’
‘The police are reopening the investigation into Dad’s murder.’
‘What?’ He sat up as though the sofa had been electrified.
‘You heard.’
‘How do you know?’
‘That would be telling. The point is, they are bound to want to interview us, aren’t they? His nearest and dearest.’
‘Oh, for Chrissake.’
‘They’ll poke around in our lives. They’ll find out about the anonymous letters.’
‘So what?’ He glanced back at the television screen. A medal was being put around the Chinese man’s neck.
‘So what if they discover that we lied about the Hardknott Pass?’
‘Who’s going to tell them?’ he demanded.
‘They have ways and means.’
He reached towards her and gripped her arm so hard she squealed. ‘Listen to me, Kirsty. You’ll keep your
