Trick of the Dark (24 page)

With a sigh, she turned off the reader and returned the films to the librarian. Charlie walked back through the pedestrian precinct towards Carfax, its medieval tower a reproach to the disposable shopfronts surrounding it. She'd hit a dead end already. What she needed to see was the inquest report, but a call to the coroner's office had made it plain that wasn't going to happen without authorisation from Jess Edwards' family. Having no official standing had introduced Charlie to a level of frustration that was entirely new to her.

She walked down Cornmarket and on up the Banbury Road towards Schollie's. She'd parked her car in a nearby side street, one of the first roads where city-centre parking restrictions didn't apply. As she walked, Charlie considered her limited options. She didn't want to admit she was already defeated, but she couldn't see how to make progress on Jess Edwards' death. Maybe she should just accept that this wasn't the death where she was going to implicate Jay. And if that was the case, there was little point in hanging around in Oxford. She'd hoped to find something that would keep her here long enough to see Lisa again. But she couldn't justify sticking around with no leads to follow.

Still, it wouldn't hurt just to drive past her house, to drop in on the off chance. It was almost lunchtime, after all. Even Lisa had to stop for food sometime.

Skirting the city centre, it didn't take too long to get to Iffley village. Cruising past Lisa's, Charlie was disappointed to see another car in the drive beside Lisa's Audi. Still, they might not be staying for long. Charlie found a parking spot that provided a view of Lisa's front door and her drive and settled down to wait.

While she waited, she considered her next course of action. Kathy Lipson's death on Skye was the obvious next place to look. There was plenty about that online, but she needed to get past the headlines and talk to someone who understood what had really happened. That probably meant a trip to Skye. This was starting to get expensive. Charlie wondered whether Corinna had considered that aspect of what she had asked Charlie to do.

On the other hand, taking money from Corinna, even if it was only expenses, would place her under an obligation. If Corinna was paying for the investigation, she was entitled to its product. And Charlie didn't want to lose control of whatever she uncovered. She didn't want to find herself in a position where she was blocked from sharing information with someone else because Corinna didn't want that. However much she had once admired Corinna, it didn't mean she completely trusted her now. On balance, Charlie decided she'd fund her redemption from her own pocket. Now she just had to figure out how to get her hands on the information that would allow her to redeem herself.

However hard she tried to develop a strategy for the next phase, Charlie kept coming back to Jess Edwards. The idea that Jay might have committed the perfect murder affronted Charlie. That she could do nothing about it affronted her still more.

The ringing of her phone startled her out of her reverie. Maria, the screen read. Feeling uncomfortable at taking a call from her partner while she was staking out the house of the woman she wanted for her lover, Charlie spoke. 'Hi,' she said, sounding as flat as she felt.

'Just finished my morning list and thought I'd give you a call. How's it going?' Maria, cheerful, upbeat. The one who had always kept her going.

'Dead-end street,' Charlie said. 'The newspaper reports don't say anything I didn't know already. The inquest report's been transferred to the county archives and I can't get to it unless I'm an interested party. Like, Jess's family.'

'Poor you,' Maria said. 'What about the police?'

'I haven't even bothered trying to talk to them. Nobody's going to remember who was in charge of an accidental death seventeen years ago. There was never anything suspicious about it officially, so it would barely have made an impact on anyone in CID.'

'No, no, that's not what I meant.'

'What, then?'

'Wouldn't the police be able to access an inquest report?'

'I suppose so. But that doesn't help me. I'm not the police.'

'God, Charlie.' Maria's tone was the verbal equivalent of eye-rolling. 'You may not
be
the police, but you know plenty.'

Charlie gave a little bark of laughter. 'Most of whom want to forget they ever heard my name right now.'

'I'm not thinking of the ones you've worked with, necessarily. What about Nick? He thinks the sun shines out of your backside. You know he does. He sent you a card when you got suspended, remember?'

Charlie groaned. 'You're right. Why didn't I think of Nick? Oh yes. Could it be because he's an ambitious young cop who's not going to take chances with his career just because I've turned into Don Quixote?'

'You don't know till you ask. Call him. He's just down the road. You could take him out to dinner and ask him.'

'Just down the road,' Charlie muttered. 'He's in London.'

'That's what I mean. It's just down the road. Or you could catch a train. It's better than coming home with your tail between your legs,' Maria said. 'What have you got to lose? If he says no, you're no worse off than you are now.'

She was right, and Charlie knew it. 'All right,' she sighed. 'I'll give him a call. How was your morning?' she added, suddenly remembering that Maria also had a professional life.

Maria chuckled. 'Nothing I need to share with you. But I have to go now and scrub up for my first afternoon appointment. I've got to hammer two titanium screws into a footballer's jaw. I think he must have spent his entire adolescence sucking sweets, the state of his teeth. I love you. Talk to me later, OK?'

'Will do.' Charlie ended the call just in time to notice Lisa's front door opening. She recognised the man who emerged carrying a laptop bag. Tom, the colleague who had been there when she'd arrived on Saturday. Lisa followed him on to the doorstep. She was wearing what looked like a Westernised version of the shalwar kameez - oversized collarless shirt and baggy pants gathered at the ankle, both in vivid turquoise. Her feet were bare, but she seemed not to notice the cold. Tom turned to Lisa and put his free arm round her shoulder. Lisa put her hands on his chest and leaned into him.

The kiss went far beyond what Charlie expected between a boss and her subordinate. True, it fell short of what she and Lisa had shared on the other side of the door, but it didn't look like something that had taken either of them by surprise. This looked like habit; it looked like a fragment of something more.

Charlie fought a sudden wave of nausea. The last thing she wanted right now was to be caught throwing up on the grass verge in plain sight of Lisa's house. The misery she felt was bad enough without adding a dose of humiliation. A small voice at the back of her head kept saying, 'You've had a lucky escape.' The trouble was, Charlie still didn't quite believe it.

This was not over.

14

D
etective Sergeant Nick Nicolaides swapped the National guitar for his Martin D16 and checked the tuning. This was the first day off that hadn't been hijacked by the job for over two weeks and he was determined to lay down the backing guitar tracks for the new tune that had been teasing at the corner of his mind for days. He knew his colleagues were wary of him because he wasn't interested in football or fishing or boxing or pumping iron or any of the other pursuits that marked you out as a real man. It was OK to like music, provided that didn't go beyond having the right sounds in your car or on your MP3 player. But wanting to spend your spare time making music on your own or with a bunch of civilians - that was definitely on the weird side.

What they didn't know was that the music was what kept Nick sane, what locked him into a sense of himself. The music was the only remnant of the life he'd had before the life he had now. It was his bridge across a distance most of his colleagues would not believe.

It was a miracle that he had made it through his teens without a substantial police record. Someone less smart, less quick on their feet, less able to cover their tracks would have ended their adolescence in custody rather than in university.

But that was a secret history. And he planned to keep it that way. Nick had been fast-tracked ever since he'd joined the police. To begin with it had been because of his first class degree in psychology, but his aptitude had been demonstrated both at the National Police Academy and at the sharp end. He was a young man who was going places. And he never forgot that the reason it had all become possible was Dr Charlie Flint.

Nick had scraped into the psychology course at Manchester, his exam results the bottom of the barrel for a course in such high demand. The main reason for choosing to go to university at all had been to extend the range of his drug dealing and to postpone having to consider any kind of career that would interfere with making music, taking drugs and shagging girls who didn't have the brains to snag him. Within a few weeks, in spite of himself, he'd found he was actually interested in some aspects of the course he'd signed up for. The main reason for that had been Dr Charlie Flint.

She was the only member of the department he came across who was a psychiatrist rather than a psychologist. What she did was underpinned by medical training; almost as interesting as what she had to say was the fact that she could prescribe legal drugs. And she was young enough in the job that he reckoned she wouldn't know how to stand up to him. Halfway through the first term he'd gone to her with an offer he'd thought she couldn't refuse. She would write prescriptions for him for stuff he could sell on. In exchange, he would pay her. More importantly, he would not make her life a misery. When she'd asked him what he meant, he'd said, 'I'm not a man who's short on imagination. Trust me, you don't want to go there.'

'Try me,' she'd said, leaning back in her office chair, hands locked behind her head, the picture of insouciance.

'Well, for a start there's sexual harassment,' Nick had said. 'A woman of your age, it's not pretty to be accused of throwing yourself at a young student.' She laughed out loud. He was affronted. 'Don't think I won't do it.'

'Be my guest,' Charlie said. 'But before you do, let me say just one thing. Your choice of attack suggests to me that you need this course far more than you know.'

'What do you mean?' People usually caved in to whatever Nick demanded. He was a mixture of good looks and danger, a walking carrot-and-stick.

'You can't work it out? Well, you'll just have to go ahead and make a complete arse of yourself.' Charlie sat up straight, hands flat on the desk. 'And I expect you'll be doing it from the inside of a police cell. What you don't know about me, Nick, is that I work with the police. I have friends who will take great pleasure in dogging your every step and nicking you for everything from dropping litter upwards. And I will grass you up. Make no mistake about that. I had an idea you were trying to extend your little empire of fucked-upness to my students but I wasn't sure. Now I am. And I will not have it.'

'You're threatening me?' He was amused, but outraged too. Who the fuck did this chubby cow think she was? More to the point, how the fuck did she not get who he was, what he was?

Charlie shrugged. 'It's not a threat. It's a wake-up call. You are a very bright young man. The essay you gave me last week was clearly dashed off at the last minute. Probably fuelled by cocaine. You clearly hadn't done most of the reading. But it was still one of the best pieces of work I've ever seen from a student in his first term. The way I see it, you've got two options.' She held her hands apart as though she were literally weighing up his options. 'You can carry on the way you are. Build a criminal empire. Never sleep at night for fear of betrayal and jail, or worse. Or you can actually harness your potential. Do some work. Demonstrate how good you really are. Sleep at night.'

In some respects, it had been a pretty trite Damascene moment. What Charlie couldn't have known was how much pressure Nick had been under. From his family, from the dealers further up the chain, from the cops cracking down on dealing to kids too young to be out clubbing. So far, he'd kept his nose clean. But he understood what she was saying. That wouldn't continue. Eventually, he'd be fingered and there wouldn't be two options. 'And be like you?' was the only counter he could manage then. He knew even as he said it how weak it was.

'I will help you,' Charlie said. And she had. In three years, he'd turned his life around. By the time he did his final exams, he wasn't even using any more. He was studying and making music. There wasn't time for anything else.

He'd also worked out why Charlie had been so amused that he'd threatened her with an accusation of sexual harassment. Now, he blushed to think of the fuckwit he'd been back then.

So when the phone screen flashed her name in the middle of his first run-through of the new piece, he stopped finger-picking and grabbed the phone. 'Charlie,' he said.

'Hi, Nick. Is this a good time? Can you talk?'

'Day off,' he said. 'I was beginning to wonder what that felt like.'

'I'm sorry. I'll call you tomorrow if that's better?'

'No, Charlie. I'm always happy to talk to you. How are you coping? How's tricks?'

'Well, it's a bit complicated.'

'It's not Maria, is it? She's OK, right?'

'Yes, she's fine. It's just that . . . Well, I'm in the thick of something and I could use a bit of help. But I don't want to get into it on the phone. Can I buy you dinner?'

Nick checked the time. It was barely two o'clock. 'I can't do dinner,' he said. 'One of my mates has a studio booked, I promised I'd do some backing tracks for him. Are you in London now?'

'No. I'm in Oxford.'

'Look, I'm only ten minutes' walk from Paddington. Are you busy this afternoon? Can you jump on a train? You could be here by four. I don't have to go out till six. Would that work for you?'

Charlie thought the new flats in Paddington Basin covered both extremes. You either got a great view across London rooftops or you got an unrivalled view of the Westway on stilts and its endless stream of traffic. As she waited for the lift, she made a bet with herself. A couple of minutes later, she congratulated herself on getting it right. Nick had not settled for a flash address at the expense of a lousy view. The vista from the wall of glass that occupied one side of his living room was breathtaking. The room itself was devoted to music. Guitars hung along one wall, a keyboard sat on a long desk beside a bank of computer peripherals, an array of mics and music stands occupied one corner. A squidgy leather sofa faced the view, the only concession to standard living-room furniture. 'It's very you,' Charlie said, looking around.