Elizabeth George: Careless in Red

“Who?”

“What d’you mean who? Posh Spice. Posh whoever. Mum has Hello! and OK! sent over by the lorry load, not to mention Vogue and Tatler and whatever else, and that’s her ambition. To look like all of them and to live like all of them and it’s not mine, Grandie, and it never will be, so you can send me home and nothing’ll be different. I don’t want what they want. I never have, and I never will.”

“I didn’t know you talked to them,” he repeated. “They said they’d not talked to you.”

“ What do you mean?” She flung herself round in the seat so that she faced him.

“The Mother Whatever-she-is,” he said. “The abbot lady. What d’they call her?”

Tammy hesitated then. Her tongue came out and licked her lips and then her teeth caught the lower one and she sucked on it in a childlike reaction. Selevan felt his heart twist at the sight of this. So much of who she was was still a little girl. He could see how her parents couldn’t bear the thought of watching her disappear behind convent doors. Not this sort of convent at least, where no one emerged till they emerged in a coffin. It didn’t make sense to them. It was so…so un-girl-like, wasn’t it? She was supposed to care about pointy shoes with tall heels, about lipstick and hair thin-gummy dandershoots, about short skirts, long skirts, or in-between skirts, about jackets or not, waistcoats or not, about music and boys and film stars and when in her life she should lower her knickers for a bloke. But what she was not supposed to think about at the age of seventeen was the state of the world, war and peace, hunger and disease, poverty and ignorance. And what she definitely was never supposed to think about was sackcloth and ashes or whatever it was they wore, a small cell with a bed and a prayer stand and a cross, a set of rosary beads, and getting up at dawn and then praying and praying and praying and all the time locked away from the world.

Tammy said, “Grandie…” But she didn’t seem to trust herself to finish the sentence.

He said, “Tha’s who I am, girl. The granddad who loves you.”

“You phoned…?”

“Well, that’s what the letter said, didn’t it? Phone the Mother Whosis to arrange for a visit. Girls sometimes find they can’t cope, she said. They think there’s a romance to this kind of life, and I assure you there isn’t, Mr. Penrule. But we offer retreats to individuals and to groups and if she’d like to take part in one, we’d welcome her.”

Tammy’s eyes were Nan’s eyes once again, but Nan’s eyes as they should have been when she looked on her dad, not as they’d become as she’d listened to him rage. She said, “Grandie, you’re not taking me to the airport?”

“’Course not,” he said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world for him to fly in the face of her parents’ wishes and drive his granddaughter to the Scottish border to spend a week in a Carmelite convent. “They don’t know and they aren’t going to know.”

“But if I decide to stay…If I want to stay…If I find it’s what I think it is and what I need…You’ll have to tell them. And then what?”

“You let me worry about your parents,” he said.

“But they’ll never forgive you. If I decide…If I think it’s best, they’ll never agree. They’ll never think…”

“Girl,” Selevan said to his granddaughter, “they’ll think what they think.” He reached in the side compartment of his door and brought out an A to Z for the UK. He handed it over to her. He said, “Open that up. If we’re going to be driving all the way to Scotland, I’m going to need a bloody good navigator. Think you’re up for the job?”

Her smile was blinding. It crushed his heart. “I am,” she told him.

“Then let’s carry on.”

THE REACTION TO THE day’s events that stayed with Bea Hannaford the longest was the one that led her towards looking for someone to blame. She began with Ray. He seemed the most logical source of the difficulties that had resulted in a killer’s being able to walk blithely away from a murder charge. She told herself that had Ray only sent her the MCIT blokes she’d needed from the very beginning, she would not have had to rely on the TAG team he had sent her, men whose expertise was limited to heavy lifting and not to the finer points of a homicide investigation. She also would not have had to rely on Constable McNulty as part of that team, a man whose mad release of critical information to the dead boy’s family had put the police in a position of having virtually nothing that was known only to the killer and to themselves. Sergeant Collins, at least, she could live with, as he’d never left the station long enough to cause trouble. And as for DS Havers and Thomas Lynley…Bea wanted to blame them for something as well, if only for their infuriating loyalty to each other, but she didn’t have the heart to do so. Aside from withholding information about Daidre Trahair, which hadn’t turned out to be germane to the case anyway despite her own stubborn beliefs in the matter, they’d only done as she’d requested, more or less.

What she didn’t really want to consider was how everything came down to her in the end because she was, after all, in charge of the investigation and she had maintained a pigheaded position on more than one topic, from Daidre Trahair’s culpability to her own insistence upon an incident room here in the town and not where Ray had told her it should be, which was where incident rooms generally were, which was also where more adequate personnel were stationed. And she’d held firm to that desire to work in Casvelyn and not elsewhere simply because Ray had told her she was wrong to do so.

So while it all came down to Ray in the end, it also came down to her. This sort of thing put her future on the line.

No case to present. Were there four worse words? Oh, perhaps, our marriage is over were equally bad and God knew enough coppers heard those words spoken by a spouse who couldn’t take the life of a cop’s partner any longer. But no case to present meant leaving a bereaved family in the lurch, with no one brought to justice. It meant despite the long hours, the slog, the sifting through data, the forensics reports, the interviews, the discussions, the arranging of this piece that way and that piece this way, there was nothing left to do save begin the entire process again and hope for a different result or to leave the case open and declare it cold. Only how could it be cold, really, when they knew very well who the killer was and he was going to walk away? That was hardly a cold case. A cold case still shone with a glimmer of hope should something more turn up, whereas this case shone not in the slightest. The regional force might well ask her what she needed to make things right in Casvelyn, but that was more or less in her dreams because what the regional force were far more likely to ask was how she’d cocked this up so badly.

Ray was how, she told herself. Ray had no interest in her success. He was out to get her for almost fifteen years of estrangement, no matter that he’d brought them about himself.

For want of another direction, she told the team to start sifting through the data again, to see what they could come up with to pin Jago Reeth, aka Jonathan Parsons, to the wall of murder charge. What, she asked them, did they have that could be handed to the CPS, that could light the fire beneath those Crown prosecutors and set them off? There had to be something. So they’d begin this process on the following day and in the meantime they should all go home and get a decent night’s rest because they’d not be sleeping much till they had this matter sorted. Then she followed her own prescription.