Caroline picked up the pace, wanting to get back to the relative warmth of her car, desperate to return to the office and fill up on black coffee. The peaks and troughs of energy and fatigue were proving difficult to get used to, but there was no way she was going to let on to anyone that she was anything other than absolutely fine.
It’d taken a while for her to work her way around it, but she’d grown adept at managing her symptoms and masking the severity of her exhaustion from just about everyone around her. She knew it probably wasn’t healthy, but then again neither was lying around in bed all day. The sheer boredom had left her on the verge of going mad, and she was in no doubt it’d be far healthier in the long run to get back on her feet.
‘As much as I’d love the Market Overton Mafia to exist,’ she said, ‘I’m inclined to agree it’s probably not going to be our primary line of inquiry. Would certainly make the job one hell of a lot more interesting, though. I can just see you sliding over car bonnets and gunning down speedboats full of drug-runners on Rutland Water.’
‘Never say never,’ Dexter replied, beaming.
‘You agree there’s definitely something up with the Tanners, though?’
Dexter shrugged. ‘I dunno. Maybe they’re just a bit weird. You get people like that, where something seems off but they haven’t actually done anything wrong. That’s half the fun of the job.’
‘Fun? Frustration, more like.’
‘Yeah, but we can’t just go around nicking people because they seem like wrong’uns. That’s why we deal with evidence and facts rather than old-school coppers’ instincts.’
Caroline grunted. ‘Yeah, alright. I don’t need the lecture. I’m not suggesting we ignore evidence and facts. I just… There’s definitely something not right there. And I don’t want to lose track of that, then find out later we’ve missed something really obvious.’
Dexter smiled as they reached the car. ‘Okay. I promise you I won’t forget you think Amie Tanner’s a wrong’un. How about that?’
Caroline returned a wry smile. ‘Hmmm. Deal.’
20
The black coffee almost scalded her throat, but she didn’t care. Warmth was warmth, and right now she would take anything she could get.
She’d lost quite a bit of weight over the past weeks and months — more than she could account for through simply lying in bed for much of it — and it’d shocked her to see how much the treatment had taken out of her. It was cold — abnormally cold — but Caroline was in no doubt that she was feeling it more than she would have done in any other year.
She’d joked with her colleagues about London being perpetually five degrees warmer than the rest of the country, but it’d only been a partial joke. Snow and frost had been rarities, and where they occurred they tended to be gone before breakfast. The cold had been damp, dreary and miserable. Here, it seemed to bite. It was a bitter, inescapable cold. A thin, sharp chill that managed to creep its way into every crevice of your clothing. Unrelenting.
She supposed it was the openness of the area. London was built up, buildings crammed together, central heating seeping out of walls every few feet; sunlight bouncing off glass towers and warming up the streets; cars and trucks sitting in traffic jams, their warm exhaust fumes defrosting the tarmac. There was none of that here. This was pure.
The cold was one thing. She could deal with that. But, try as she might, the one thing she couldn’t quite get used to was the quiet. Even in the middle of Oakham or Uppingham — as busy as the county got — it was nothing compared to what she was used to. Things were still. Calm. And now she was more convinced than ever that everything was somehow interlinked. Causational, even. It was as if the calm, still air had frozen far harsher than the boisterous, moving air of London ever could.
It was almost ironic, the family moving to Rutland to escape the noise and enjoy the great outdoors, only to spend weeks and months on end in the house — or, in Caroline’s case, in bed — the second the weather turned.
She told herself she’d suggest to Mark that they start walking or cycling again, provided she could summon up the energy. There was a certain attraction in bare trees and frost-glazed fields that couldn’t be matched by even the most sumptuous of summers. Besides which, she needed the exercise. She was sure a large part of her lethargy and fatigue was due to having done very little for weeks on end. For now, though, there were more pressing matters to attend to.
‘Okay,’ she said, as she perched on the edge of a desk. ‘Welcome to today’s afternoon briefing on Operation Cruickshank.’ It always felt a little daft in her mind to speak so formally to just three other officers, but years of Met training and habits were hard to shake off. ‘First things first. You’ll be aware by now that the suspect we had in custody, Monique Dupont, has been released without charge. She’s got a solid alibi for the night of the murder, which has been backed up with CCTV evidence.
‘Dexter and I have been out and about this morning speaking to people who knew Martin Forbes. We went back to the offices of Allure Design to speak to their IT manager, Tom Mackintosh, primarily to obtain potential digital evidence, but also to speak to him as a work colleague of Martin’s. The most interesting part was the revelation that Martin Forbes had been trying it on with Amie Tanner. Tom said it was something that was never actually spoken about, but which a few people had cottoned on to. We spoke to Amie Tanner again, and she said Martin had tried coming on to her a
