Martin Edwards - The Coffin Trail

‘Have you seen my golf clubs?’ the man called. ‘Surely you wouldn’t have moved them again after what I said before?’ His voice had a grumbling, disconsolate note that Daniel guessed was habitual. Unexpectedly, he felt a pin-prick of sympathy for Cheryl.

‘Not today,’ she said hurriedly, glancing over her shoulder to offer a tense smile of apology. ‘I’ll look for them in a minute.’

The man shuffled out of sight, muttering to himself.

‘Look,’ Daniel murmured, ‘I’m sorry if it’s a bad time…’

She compressed her lips. ‘No point in saying you’ll be back another day. It would always be a bad time.’

Daniel wouldn’t give up. ‘He investigated a case. The woman who was found on the Sacrifice Stone. I wondered…’

‘He and I never talked much about the job.’ She spoke so quickly that he felt sure she was fibbing.

‘You worked for the police.’

‘Only as a civilian, and not after we moved up here and got married. When he came home, it was better for him to forget about all the crime and squalor. I tried to make the house nice for him, help him to unwind. He worried too much about his cases, he could never let them go. I hated that, hated the way his work mattered more than…’

She bit the sentence off, as if regretting that she had said so much.

‘Did he ever…?’

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’ll have to go. Sorry if you’ve had a wasted journey. If you’re that keen to rake up the past, you’d have done better to talk to that bloody sergeant of his.’

‘Which sergeant?’

She was closing the door on him, her face a powdered mask even as she replied. ‘Hannah Scarlett. That was her name. She thought the sun shone out of your father’s backside.’

‘Hannah, Nick, there you are!’ The ACC, practising for the media scrum, flashed a maximum-wattage smile as she beckoned them over. ‘Can I introduce Les Bryant?’

Hannah had walked into the ante-room ready, willing and able to take a serious dislike to her new colleague. First impressions were not encouraging. She’d never liked the smell of tobacco and he reeked of it. His weather-beaten features were moulded in a look of dour scepticism, as though he were about to caution her that anything she might say would be taken down and might be used in evidence.

‘Pleased to meet you.’

Bryant’s flat Yorkshire vowels gave no clue to his true feelings. But then, how thrilled was he likely to be that, after years of his own command, the senior serving officer in this new team was a woman? Plenty of policemen, not all of them veterans, found it hard to cope with female superiors. Given her experience of Lauren Self, Hannah was tempted to sympathise.

‘This is a truly exciting project,’ the ACC said. She spoke with deliberation, and Hannah guessed that she was rehearsing her lines for the conference. ‘Too many families of too many murder victims have had to wait too long for justice. Now we have an opportunity to tackle the mysteries that baffled a previous generation of investigators.’

‘What if they ask about resources?’ Bryant asked. ‘Are the figures finalised?’

Nick coughed. Hannah guessed that he was trying to suppress a snigger. Trust a Yorkshireman to focus on the money. Bryant had a point, nonetheless. There was a lot of talk at the moment about Government money being redistributed from rural forces to the metropolitan areas with higher crime rates. If this unit wasn’t properly funded, her fear of being set up to fail would prove prophetic.

‘Well,’ the ACC said, colour rising into her cheeks. ‘The Head of CID’s initial budget proposals have been approved by the police authority.’

‘I was only thinking, my contract is for six months at four days a week. Not exactly a long time to see justice done.’

The ACC flushed. ‘Yes, but don’t forget that your contract has an option to extend, if both parties wish it.’

Bryant thrust his hands in his pockets. A small pony-tailed girl from the press office put her head round the door and said in a breathless tone, ‘We’ll start in two minutes, ma’am, if that’s all right.’

‘Thanks, Sally-Ann, that’s great. Are we all set?’

‘Absolutely. The BBC crew is here and the room’s full to bursting, but I thought you’d like to keep them waiting for a few moments. Make a bit of an entrance. Build the excitement.’

Hannah caught Bryant wince at that last phrase, but the ACC was too busy checking her cue cards to notice. She lifted her head and squared her shoulders, her momentary discomfiture already forgotten. ‘Marvellous, absolutely marvellous. This could kickstart our project in the best possible way. Nothing like wall-to-wall media coverage for regenerating interest in an inquiry that’s gone cold. Don’t you think so, Les?’

‘Two-edged sword,’ he said bluntly, slouching towards the door. ‘We could find ourselves knee-deep in rubbish. Time-wasters and clairvoyants. It’s all about sorting the wheat from the chaff.’

‘Of course, you’re right, but…’

The ACC hesitated. For once she was lost for words. And for once Hannah actually felt sorry for her.

‘So now the circus is over,’ Les Bryant said as they trooped into the room that Headquarters had allocated for the team briefing, ‘where do we go from here?’

‘The pub?’ Bob Swindell stayed true to form. He would be the unit’s self-appointed joker. Every team had to have one.

Hannah waited until everyone had settled down and Bob had stopped pretending to shiver. Or perhaps he wasn’t pretending. The room was light and airy and freezing. Some problem with the radiators; they always malfunctioned during a cold snap. At least the media conference had gone as well as could be hoped. The ACC was thrilled with all the photo opportunities and the fact that nobody had asked penetrating questions about budgets. She was currently giving an in-depth interview to a local journo who needed to fill a page in a slack news week.

‘All right, where do we go from here?’ Hannah asked. ‘Well, we start by having to make choices. The resources allocated to us are limited. Our aim has to be to make an impact, fast. The ACC has been told to make an interim assessment of our work after six months. Not much time, not much cash.’

‘No change there, then.’ Lindsey Waller crossed her long legs and her skirt rode higher than ever. Hannah had already noticed that eyes kept straying to admire her. No change there, either. Linz was an object of almost universal desire and also one of the sharpest young detectives in the county. When the pressure was on, her sceptical sense of humour kept everybody grounded.

‘Too right. Six serving officers plus Les here as consultant, to cover all three regions of the county, all unsolved murders and rapes in Cumbria over, say, the past thirty years. That’s enough for a start.’

Bryant rocked on his chair and said, ‘More than enough, don’t you think, ma’am? Better make it fifteen years.’

The ma’am nettled Hannah even more than the hint that she was biting off more than she could chew. A small team needed to operate with maximum cohesion, minimum formality — she had little doubt that he was taking the piss. She’d retaliate by killing him with courtesy.

‘Excellent idea, Les. Spot on. Fifteen years it is. As for you four,’ she nodded at the detective constables, ‘I’d like you to split into two teams. Linz, you’re with Bob. Maggie, I’m pairing you with Gul.’

Bob Swindell nodded with enthusiasm and Maggie Eyre seemed happy enough, but DC Gul Khan wasn’t much of an actor and his flicker of disappointment was noticeable. A renowned ladies’ man, he’d obviously fancied taking the chance to bond with Linz Waller. Maggie had the rosy cheeks and ample proportions of a true farmer’s daughter, but glamorous she wasn’t. Anyway, she’d recently fallen for a young car mechanic from Keswick. Gul’s parents ran a convenience store in Workington; he and Maggie might not be soul-mates, but they could share experiences about escaping the clutches of a family business without becoming distracted from the grunt work of cold case review.