Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

‘All those lies festering all these years.’

‘They came out eventually, Kate. I guess the evil was lanced eventually.’

We stopped at the top of the ward by the nurses’ station and looked back at Helen Middleton.

Kate gripped my hand harder. ‘Secrets can destroy people,’ she said.

‘As easily as a shotgun,’ I agreed.

It was some months later.

It was technically spring but someone had forgotten to tell the weather gods. There was a thick hoar frost on the ground and tiny frozen particles in the air.

I was dressed in a traditional suit but I had refused to wear grey. I wanted to wear green as part of my cultural heritage but the proposal was met with as hostile a reaction as Hitler’s invasion of Poland had been in 1939. We had struck a balance and we had opted for black. 1930s style to match Kate’s wedding dress.

The landlord of The Lobster smiled genially at me as I came in and sat at my usual corner stool.

He put a large glass of whiskey in front of me. ‘I’ve not been idle,’ he said. ‘The function room’s all ready. Bunting, buffet — and chilled Bolly good to go.’

‘Cheers,’ I said, raising the glass.

‘Get it down you,’ he said. ‘Last drink for the condemned man. On the house!’

I took a small sip. ‘Get me a pint to go with it, would you?’ I asked. The days when I could knock back multiple half-tumblers of whiskey were a long way behind me. And I had a wedding to go to, after all.

The door opened and she walked in. Killer legs, a cream-coloured skirt and matching jacket. Bright red lipstick, hair that was straight off the cover of Vogue magazine. High-heeled, cream-coloured shoes. Eyes that a man could probably dive into.

‘Hello, Susan,’ I said.

‘That’s “superintendent” to you, Delaney,’ she said as she sat elegantly on the stool next to mine. But she said it with a smile this time.

‘Champagne, landlord,’ she said.

‘We’ve got some cava somewhere,’ he said apologetically.

‘Get a bottle of Bollinger from the reception room,’ I said.

‘Excellent.’ He beamed once more and hurried away.

Susan Dean was certainly looking better than the last time I had seen her. Severe head trauma had put her into a coma. Or to put it more prosaically, Solly had hit her savagely on the back of her head with something very hard. He had thought he had killed her and very nearly did. Kate had arrived on the Bump a little while after me. It’s hard to run fast uphill wearing wellingtons, after all. She had detected a faint pulse. An air ambulance was called in and Susan was flown to the A amp;E at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. Her skull hadn’t been fractured. Luckily she had come out of the coma and was as good as new. Apart from the nights when she woke up screaming, that was. Screaming at the memory of what had happened, and the imagining of what would have happened had I not pulled her out of the bonfire.

Strangely enough, my own recurring nightmare had not returned since the incident. Perhaps not so strangely, Superintendent Susan Dean’s attitude toward me had brightened enormously.

She had finished her first glass of champagne and was sipping on a second when she fixed me with a look. I could see that she had been flirting around the issue of something or other, getting ready to articulate it. Something was on her mind and she was about to let me know what it was.

‘I want to offer you a job, Jack,’ she said.

I looked at her, a little surprised. ‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘A consultant on some case? Has something happened that I don’t know about?’

The body of the missing dentist had never been recovered although Solly Green’s body had washed up on the shore a few days after his death. Spat back by the vengeful god who found the man too unpalatable even for him.

‘A proper job.’

‘Go on?’

‘Your little holiday is coming to an end soon.’

I knew that right enough. I had had Diane Campbell on the phone plaguing me practically every day asking for my decision. And in truth I didn’t know what that decision was going to be. Recent events had given me a taste — more a hunger, really — for proper police work again, but I knew how much it meant to Kate and Siobhan to stay up here. Kate’s cousin’s prospective buyer had fallen through and Kate was pushing me to make a decision.

‘I know you are thinking of going back to London,’ Susan Dean continued. ‘But I want you to stay here. The murders here shook up more than our little town, Jack. Norwich and Yarmouth have been in consultation with us and the county, and we agree that we need some form of CID presence locally.’

‘I see.’

‘Local knowledge. You can’t import that. You know that.’

‘I’m not a local.’

‘Yes, you are. Especially now. You’ll never be a Shannock, Jack. But a large percentage of the people here aren’t either. The town is growing. The tourist season is lasting longer and longer. We have the Viking festival, the Crab and Lobster Festivals, the Forties Weekend, the Raft Race, the Christmas events, the Carnival, other things planned. More and more people are coming into the town and we as a police force have to acknowledge that and address it.’

‘So where do I come in?’

‘Like I say, regional funding has authorised the establishment of a CID unit here. A small unit — nothing like the size of White City or Paddington Green, obviously. But a unit here so that if there is a major incident we don’t have to draft in teams from Wymondham ten miles south of Norwich or from Great Yarmouth! We will already have eyes and ears on the ground here. Trained ears. Experienced eyes. But not private.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘And I want you to head up the unit, Jack. You can select your own team. Be part of the whole process from the ground up. What do you say?’

What could I say?

So I said it best, as the song suggests, for the moment at least, by saying nothing at all.

I was standing at the front pew on the right-hand side of the aisle of All Saints Church in Beeston Regis.

I flicked away the small flecks of snow that had settled on my shoulder as I had made my way from my car to the church. The car was a Volvo, almost new, traded in for my old Saab, and had been driven by my best man.

Sergeant Harry Coker was standing beside me, looking uncomfortable in a suit that matched my own. I had considered asking my cousin to be best man but had decided against it. We had opted for a small ceremony and so no members of either Kate’s or my family were there. The church was filled with people, though. Most of them friends of Kate, who had taken to small-town and village life like a mallard making a nest.

I looked behind me. Susan Dean was sitting in one pew, smiling at me but giving me the look. She wanted an answer. Sitting next to her was Diane Chambers with her partner, a PC who worked in the records office at White City, and Sally Cartwright, my old DC. Holding baby Jade and looking as youthful and fresh-faced and innocent as ever. I hoped she would always be that way but I knew how much the city of London and our job took its toll. You had to grow a hard carapace and sooner rather than later.

Amy Leigh was in the pew behind me. She gave me a thumbs-up and winked. Then the music started.

Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.

Kate had chosen it, of course. Along with the flowers, the hymns, the wedding-breakfast menu. She had asked for my input. Demanded it. But when push came to shove she was far too much of a control freak to allow me to make any decisions that she hadn’t already suggested.

I didn’t mind. Seeing her happy, seeing that happiness reflected in my daughter Siobhan’s eyes and in the happy smiles of our baby brought a warmth to my body that no drug could replicate.