Scar Tissue (18 page)

I ordered soup and salmon and looked him straight in the eye, cutting across an observation about an overflowing gutter. ‘How did our photographs come out? The ones of the people being loaded into the van?’ Whether I asked him about our other photos, the ones of the bed indentations, and the rope fibre Paula had picked up, would depend on how I felt about his honesty.

‘Very well,’ he said, effortlessly polite in the face of my rudeness. ‘You must have used a good camera.’

Hmm. ‘I borrowed someone’s. What do you make of them? Your team, I mean – I’m sure you’re too busy to take a day-to-day interest even in major crime.’ He wasn’t to know it but I was quoting one of my most messed-up clients, one with as much braid and stuff on his uniform as Moffatt – again, incidentally, in very smart casual.

‘Not too busy to keep an eye on things. And, as you can see, to report back.’

Victim liaison was hardly the job of someone of his rank.
I wished desperately that Jan were sitting beside me – legal adviser or friend, it didn’t matter.

‘Unfortunately the bread van had been stolen – to order, no doubt. The shelves were found in an industrial estate in Canterbury. Someone reported having their removal van stolen in Southampton. Nothing’s been found yet, of either van.’

‘So someone’s got a big place to hide them till they can be repainted – or enough open space to torch them without some helpful person calling the fire brigade.’

‘Not every citizen is as helpful as you, Lucy. Anyway, our scene of crime officers have looked closely at the area you pinpointed and yes, they’ve got the impression of a shoe we believe comes from Eastern Europe. Nothing conclusive yet. The trouble is, in an operation like this, where we suspect one of our own may be involved, we want to do things as unobtrusively as possible. Which means what must seem intolerable delays to others involved.’

‘That explosion couldn’t have been unobtrusive,’ I said, smiling at the waiter who’d brought the wine. He looked tired enough to drop.

Moffatt didn’t reply until we were on our own again. ‘We wanted to convince… people… that the intended victim was unlikely to survive.’

‘And did she?’

He looked at me oddly. ‘She’s deeply unconscious.’

‘How long can she be kept alive?’

‘As long as it takes to find her killer. They’ve taken away the caravan for full forensic examination.’

I nodded, as if it were news to me. All those lovely books
destroyed! Before I could ask the next question, we were summoned to our table. I drained my glass and followed Moffatt.

He hadn’t ordered any wine. Terribly apologetic, he told me he’d stick to water since he was driving home, but pressed me to have half a bottle. We compromised on another glass.

I felt as if I was in the ascendant. ‘What about the photographs of the interior of Crabton Manor? We passed them and a fibre of blue rope to Taz. He said he’d deal with them.’

He reached in his jacket for and flipped open a little notepad. ‘I’ve no idea. I’ll get on to it first thing. How are you getting on with Sid?’

‘How does he say he’s getting on with us?’

Moffatt laughed. ‘He finds Paula a bit tough.’

‘He shouldn’t try to mess her around. She’s one of the best people I’ve ever come across. Honest. Decent.’

‘But doesn’t suffer fools gladly.’

‘Do you?’

He looked completely nonplussed. ‘No. But that’s different.’

‘Not in my book. Oh, the organisations you run are different in size and organisation, but you both take decisions that affect other people. Hers are more important, in some ways. If you make a mistake, you can cover it with press statements and internal enquiries. If Paula makes a mistake in her figure work, we don’t eat breakfast. If she makes a mistake where she sites a ladder, one of us might die. People tug their forelocks at you because of your uniform. They see our work clothes and try to fiddle us out of meal breaks and
deposits and make us wait sometimes for years for money for materials she’s bought on their behalf. That’s why Paula takes no prisoners. She also took me on without a single word of criticism about my past – something some of your colleagues have found hard to do.’

He flushed a deep crimson, avoiding my eyes. My vibes had been right. Deep, deep inside, so deep he probably didn’t have to acknowledge it, he’d harboured designs on me. Once a tart always a tart, that was what some little voice inside was telling him. He might think he was being gentlemanly, avuncular, even. But his hormones urged him differently.

Tough.

The arrival of the soup allowed him to regain his cool.

‘As for how we see Sid,’ I continued, as if I hadn’t noticed, ‘we’re not at all sure. Helen and Meg don’t know he’s not a genuine decorator. He’s asked no questions, shown no signs of being – what’s the word? – proactive, that’s it – at all. He’s not a good workman. Van der Poele knows he’s not a good workman. That’s why Paula had to give him a verbal warning this afternoon.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I shouldn’t imagine it was the first thing he’d put in his report. Tell me, is he there to protect us or to spy on van der Poele? And if he’s spying, what’s he looking for?’

Cornered, he said, ‘Well, things like the presence of your friend Clive Granville near Fullers.’

Yes, he side-tracked me. ‘Does he live down here? Or is he just visiting? And is there any evidence he believes the story of my death? OK, my coma. He may be hanging out for one of my kidneys for a transplant!’

Moffatt threw his head back and laughed. ‘A man for his pound of flesh, eh? Sorry, I didn’t mean –’

‘I know. You were quoting Shakespeare.’ I didn’t admit how difficult I found his plays, though I’d tried hard to read the famous ones. Perhaps you needed to see them on the stage. I’d seen a modern dress
Merchant of Venice
on TV and it had bored the socks off me. ‘Anyway, what’s the latest on him?’

‘He’s an elusive man. There’s no doubt he’s down here – he’s used his credit card a couple of times in Tenterden – but we haven’t run him to earth yet. And until we do, I’m very much afraid you have to stay as Lucy.’

There was something about the way his crow’s feet crinkled that made me grasp my tufty mane and say, ‘I can’t wait to get this cut off.’

‘Off! You mean –!’

‘Shorn. The perm and the dye have made such a mess of it it’ll have to go, most of it.’ Mistake. Huge mistake.

Moffatt leaned across and stroked it. ‘We must make sure we temper the wind to the shorn lamb.’ And then his hand strayed to my cheek.

If there’s one thing I should highlight in my CV it’s skills in freezing off amorous males. By the time he’d finished his salmon (that old dodge of ordering the same as your dinner partner!) he was practically calling for his scarf and gloves. I wasn’t rude or unpleasant, don’t for a moment think that. After all, I should have known better than to get matey with a middle-aged man who’d given me even such a tiny vibe. But I picked at the food (not difficult when you’ve already had one supper), and allowed myself an occasional yawn.
Very soon these became quite genuine. It had been another long day and my books were calling me to bed.

If he’d offered me hard evidence about anything, of course, I’d have been bright and alert. But still a little more cool and remote than I had been.

One way to cool him down might be to talk about Taz, which I proceeded to as if I were a member of his fan club.

‘But he never made it clear exactly what job he’s doing in the Met,’ I concluded earnestly.

‘Rookie constables on probation do a lot of work but not much they can boast about.’

I had a nasty suspicion he used the verb boast deliberately – a touch of the old stag scoring points off an absent young one.

‘But he had access to you.’

‘He has – access – to a senior Met officer, who was sufficiently interested in what Taz passed on to him from you to contact me. Wheels are turning, Lucy, I promise you.’

‘I shan’t mind if they’re like the mills of God and that grinding exceeding small compensates for their grinding so slowly.’

That’s another way to put a self-assured man off you:
outquote
him. Preferably from a hymn I’d last sung when I was about ten. It didn’t take long to establish that we both had work to do the following morning and that neither could take coffee at this time of night.

So I had a solitary bed. Apart from the company of various Irish reprobates who reminded me vaguely of my dad.

As luck would have it, it was a brilliantly sunny morning, the sort that makes you leap out of bed and throw open the windows. It was only as I did my twentieth length (it really was quite a small pool, so I wasn’t being entirely honest when I boasted of yesterday’s twelve lengths) that I realised I should be cursing the sun and praying for the safe return of the rain. It’d be painting the exterior of Crabton Manor for us, not exploring the interior of Fuller’s.

Sid was moaning how the storm had kept him awake last night. ‘What about you?’ he asked eventually.

‘Slept the sleep of the just, Sid. Plus I was tired,’ I conceded. I’d mention dinner with Moffatt if he asked, but by now I’d definitely decided to volunteer as little as possible about one policeman’s activities to another. If anyone asked pointblank, that was another matter.

As if he’d been reading my mind, Sid slowed and asked, ‘What did you and Paula get up to last night?’

‘I told you – we needed to do a bit of forward planning. She’s brilliant at working things out, but sometimes even she needs to have someone agree that she’s right.’

‘And she was right? Better than a calculator?’

My God, the bugger hadn’t planted some sort of bug, had he? Some nasty listening device that transmitted everything we’d said? Paula had said she didn’t trust him. I answered his question with one of my own. ‘What are your plans for today? Are you going to try and case Crabton Manor?’

‘Anything rather than spend the day like yesterday. Jesus, I
bloody ache every sodding where. Why should my leg muscles ache? It’s as bad as bloody toothache.’

‘Ladders. Not just climbing but balancing on them. That’s why we were happy to knock off when we did yesterday. And it’s a good job we did. That rain wouldn’t have done fresh paint any good at all.’

‘Hmph.’

I added more kindly, ‘Have a word with Paula. She’ll find you a patch where you can keep both feet on the ground.’

‘More likely to send me up to paint the sodding chimney, that one.’

‘She has to maintain the front that you’re a professional painter, Sid, and don’t you forget it. If van der Poele thinks you’re a poor workman, or simply skiving, he’ll dock the money the rest of us should be getting. He’d just tear up the contract – you know he would. He’s what my dad would have called a nasty piece of knitting.’

‘Did your dad know about your being a whore?’

Just like that. Not an eyelid must I bat, even at the deliberately offensive term. He mustn’t see my efforts to breathe normally. But I had to say something. ‘You like to call a spade a spade, I see. As a matter of fact he didn’t. He buggered off when I was about six or seven. But forget about my dad. I usually do. Can’t think why I should have mentioned him then. Let’s talk about van der Poele instead. Taz passed on what Paula and I thought was possibly evidence that someone was killed here. I can show you the room – from the outside. We’d love someone to take us seriously.’ I didn’t tell him that Paula had kept a duplicate set of photos in case the first got mysteriously lost. She’d
have teased a few spare fibres from the rope too, knowing her.

‘We are taking you seriously – you know that. Not everyone gets to eat dinner with an assistant chief constable, do they?’

‘Not everyone needs to,’ I said. ‘Look! A heron, just taking off over there!’ An ungainly grey shape organised itself into slow, efficient flight over the placid, gentle fields, dotted with sheep so round and white they looked like toys. As a city woman, the sight of lamb chops on the hoof still amazed me. Mind you, I ate far fewer of them, for one reason or another.

Sid wasn’t impressed by any of it. He drove as far as Dymchurch in grumpy silence.

‘You can’t even see the sea along this road. This huge sea wall, whatever it is, fair gives me the creeps. Fancy living in one of them little houses and looking at that all day.’

‘The upside is that all they have to do is cross the road and climb up those steps and there’s the beach.’ My mouth was working but my brain was trying to work out if that was how my poor immigrants had come into the country – simply been dropped the far side of a huge wall and being made to leg it before it got light. But surely there’d be coastguards to stop that sort of activity? Unless someone had squared the coastguards.

‘And a force ten gale to blow you straight back home. And look over there – that ruddy great gun emplacement! Martello towers, they’re historical. But that –’ He shuddered. Perhaps world wars weren’t yet sanitised enough to be history. And yet one of my best ever days down here had been at Dover Castle,
exploring the war rooms tunnelled deep into the famous white cliff. Sid pointed again. ‘And the bleeding army practising killing folk all the way along here with their nice tidy firing ranges.’ Anti-military? A policeman? That struck a very bum note. ‘No, you don’t kid me into taking a holiday down here. Spain, that’s where I’m retiring, soon as I can.’

He sounded so disillusioned I glanced at him. ‘It sounds as if it can’t be soon enough for you.’

‘Nor can it. The police isn’t what it used to be. All paperwork and looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re being PC. PCPC. PC Politically Correct. Geddit?’

On that positive note he fell silent. I was too preoccupied on my own account to disturb him. Or to laugh.

‘Bugged? You mean, bugged?’ Paula was so angry she almost squeaked. It wasn’t because I’d broken our rule and followed her behind the van when she’d obviously been about to have a wee.

‘I don’t know.’ I touched my finger to my lips. ‘Maybe they trust us as little as we trust them. Tell you what, just check your bag when you come out. And I’ll check mine.’

‘Do you know what to look for?’

I shrugged. ‘All I know was that Sid spent a long time faffing round here doing sweet F. A. all yesterday.’

‘But I’d taken my bag with me. So it’s more likely to be in yours.’

‘I’ll check. But do you know something? I think I’ll do it in front of him. Look, we’ll have to talk away from the van later – he’ll be thinking we’re having a lesbian moment and trying to sneak a look.’

I emerged first to find Sid, arms akimbo, staring at the ground floor. It was clear that that was where he wanted to paint. When Paula emerged from behind the Transit, he toddled over, heaving a stepladder out and planting it firmly in his new territory. Paula raised an eyebrow, but didn’t argue, not until she came down from aloft a few minutes later to find him half kneeling on one of the ladder’s steps.

‘Sid, that’s the way to damage joints.’

‘I’m three-quarters crippled the way you got me shinning up and down ladders,’ he whined.

‘You must be very out of practice. I suppose,’ she added, very clearly, ‘that’ll teach me to take someone his last boss let go. Very well, paint down here until your muscles feel a bit better. But for goodness’ sake stand tall and keep those knees relaxed but straight.’

‘Sounds like you’re giving orders at some sodding antenatal class.’

By now white with anger, she snapped, ‘I wouldn’t know. But I do know that as your employer I’m responsible for the health and safety of all my workers. I’m warning you, Sid, fit in or drop out.’

We women exchanged scared rabbit looks. Paula had never had to speak to one of us like that, and certainly not in public, and we didn’t know how to react. Should we rally round in support of the miscreant or be teacher’s pets for the day? I knew that there was another, more serious problem. If Sid was one of Moffatt’s men, how could Paula sack him? There must, apart from anything else, be a limit to the number of undercover officers capable of wielding a professional paintbrush.

Paula made a slight sideways movement of her head, drawing Sid to one side. I suppose she should probably have done that earlier so that his bollocking was in private. Funny, it was unlike Paula to make that sort of mistake. Along with the others, though, I decided that discretion was the greater part of valour, and applied today’s paint as if I were wearing blinkers.

Perhaps that was the problem with Meg. She was so busy not looking that when she went back to the van to top up her paint can, she succeeded in spilling several litres of the stuff. The more she tried to stop it, the worse it flowed. God knows what she thought she was doing, standing there screaming and watching this stream of creamy-white flow everywhere. The rest of us were down there with her, ready to defend her against Paula if necessary. But Paula was coolest of all, simply grabbing the big tin and steadying it. Fortunately most of the paint had fallen in the deep tin tray she always insisted the paint tins stand on.

Taking Meg gently by the arm, she led her away. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you had a migraine?’ she asked quietly.

Helen and I didn’t need to be told what to do. We tidied up without speaking. Technically we shouldn’t really use this paint again, in case it had got bits of dust and so forth in it. But the only place to tip it was the tin, so that was what we did.

‘She’s lost the vision in one eye,’ Paula reported. ‘She’s done this before. She’s taken two of her tablets, but I still think I should take her home. I’d better buy some more paint too. Can’t have van der Poele complaining we’re using mucky stuff. But I don’t suppose Mr Green’ll argue if I offer him a freebie tin.’

Mr Green was the old boy whose bungalow we’d be doing between big jobs. Cost price.

On impulse I gave Paula a hug, which clearly amazed her almost as much as it amazed me. ‘We’ll be OK here.’

We were. Helen was a bit scared, but once she’d heard from Meg’s own lips that she’d be all right after a bit of a lie down, she buckled down as she always did. Sid might have been a Trappist monk for all we heard from him. But I couldn’t help seeing that he still used the step-ladder as a kneeler, and wished I’d got the authority to repeat Paula’s warning.

By the time Paula got back Sid had given up his stepladder and was kneeling on the ground so he could paint the underside of a windowsill. He might have been praying it glossy. She raised her eyes heavenwards, but simply said, ‘There’s a fresh can of paint in the van.’

‘How’s Meg?’

‘She was well into what she called her Technicolor zigzags by the time I got her home. She says she’ll be all right. Funny, you’d have expected a migraine before a storm, not after it.’

Towards the end of the afternoon, the wind changed direction; it became noticeably cooler, and Paula started looking to the west. ‘The last thing we need now with the end almost in sight is an Atlantic front,’ she said. ‘I know they’re talking about a hosepipe ban, but I could manage without washing the car if I could finish here in time.’

She hadn’t mentioned penalty clauses, but it sounded as if the miserable bastard had insisted on one. With the English weather, for goodness’ sake! And now we were one and a half
down, one being Meg, and the half being Sid, now painting more slowly than ever. Paula couldn’t fail to notice. Nor could anyone miss the pain he was obviously in. Perhaps he should have had Brownie points for carrying on. Paula didn’t seem inclined to award any.

‘Bursitis,’ she said crisply. ‘You’ve gone and given yourself bursitis. Better get off to your GP while you can still drive. Anti-inflammatories and hot and cold compresses.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘Your knees.’

‘Bursitis,’ he said, almost as if he was proud to have an ‘itis’.

‘Yes,’ she said scathingly. ‘Housemaid’s knee.’

And it was precisely the diagnosis the A and E doctor gave, at the end of a four-hour wait at the William Harvey. There’d been a pile-up on the M20 and personally I’d have been ashamed to take up the time of people who’d been under so much pressure. But it seemed Sid had never got round to registering with a GP, so even if I’d driven him back to his base in what he vaguely called Sarf London he’d still have had a wait in an A and E there. Maybe, he said, almost proudly, an even longer one, what with the gun and knife crime in the neighbourhood.

Why was I involved? Sid claimed he was in too much pain to drive, and Paula wasn’t going to put Helen at risk by not taking her home. So I’d got the short straw and the keys to Sid’s utility truck. I didn’t ask who owned it, so I never knew whether to blame its lack of maintenance on Sid or on the Met or even on Kent County Constabulary. OK, I was
sulking. And why not? The William Harvey’s a nice bright modern hospital, but sitting waiting for someone who wouldn’t have needed so much as an aspirin if he’d carried out orders was niggling me. Not least because as time ticked inexorably by, it became clear that Paula and I would miss out on further explorations of Fullers that evening. I hadn’t got a book and I was bored.

So bored I at last remembered to do what I’d been planning to do all day. I accidentally on purpose tipped over my bag. And – guess what – inside I found something apart from balled up tissues and old till receipts. A ballpoint I didn’t recognise. I was just about to hold it up for Sid’s inspection when a sodding nurse didn’t take it into her head at that precise moment to call him in.

Frustrated, I had to vent my spleen. Especially when I unscrewed the ballpoint to find something inside – not, I was sure, a refill – small enough to sit on my fingertip. Who better to avenge myself on than the hidden listener? I retreated to the outside porch, where there was a congregation of mobile phone users, and, with my lips right close up to it, whistled as loudly as I could all the tunes I could remember before reassembling the ballpoint.

That’d teach someone. The question was, who.