Martin Edwards - The Coffin Trail

Hannah leaned forward. ‘I still think he’s a murderer.’

The ACC pursed her lips, adopting the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger expression that she’d perfected. ‘Well, anyway. No one’s ever going to prove it now. We need to look forward. And that’s why I wanted to share this new project with you.’

‘It’s a backwater. We both know that.’

‘Not at all.’ The ACC winced at such blasphemy. ‘The Cumbria Constabulary Cold Case Review Team will be a flagship unit, a sign of our commitment to making sure that no serious crime in the county goes unsolved.’

‘And the murder of Sudhakar Rao?’

‘Already detected,’ the ACC said, folding her arms to preclude argument. ‘Golac had a fair trial and was properly convicted. He’s served nine years and he’ll be dead before the year’s out. Most people would say that justice has been served.’

‘Not if they’d listened to Golac describing how Patel hired him, the conversations that they had, all the…’

‘I really think you should leave it, Hannah. The team will have enough on its plate to keep it occupied from the word go, I’m quite sure.’

Digging her teeth into her tongue, Hannah muttered, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Now, let me give you an outline of what we have in mind. Tonight you can see what your husband says. I’ve absolutely no doubt that once you’ve thought it over and had a chat with Marc, you’ll be excited by the whole idea. This is a once in a lifetime chance for any ambitious police officer, Hannah. Trust me.’

‘She might just be telling you the truth,’ Marc said as they lounged on their living room sofa, after washing down a microwaved Bird’s Eye dinner with a bottle of supermarket Chardonnay whose high alcohol content compensated for any lack of subtlety. ‘It could be a great opportunity.’

Lauren Self had remembered Marc’s name correctly, that was one of her skills, but she had made one small mistake. Marc wasn’t Hannah’s husband. Marriage was, she’d understood from day one, a commitment too deep for him. He maintained that if a relationship was strong enough, who needed a piece of paper to document it? If the bond wasn’t strong enough without the official seal of approval, then there wasn’t much hope for it anyway.

‘The ACC’s a politician, and who trusts politicians?’

‘You always swore you wouldn’t let the job turn you into a cynic.’

‘Right now I feel more like I’m in a maze, and I’ve turned into a dead end. Word’s got out already. Albie Kelsen couldn’t wipe that smug smile off his face when he asked if the rumours were true, that I was stepping back from front-line detective work. God, I could have slapped him.’

Marc cast a glance at the television screen. An elderly contestant on a quiz show was agonising over the answer to a question that might win him a villa in the South of France. In the studio audience, his wife covered her face with a knobbly, age-spotted hand.

‘You worry too much.’

He spoke absently and she didn’t know whether he was offering a considered analysis of her reaction to the new job, or merely chanting a mantra that had become over-familiar. He reckoned that she cared too much about the job. She’d worked so hard to earn her stripes. It had paid off; she’d reached the rank of Chief Inspector at an absurdly young age, thanks to the accelerated promotion scheme. Not so long ago, gossips reckoned she was marked down for stardom. But then Ivan Golac had failed to show up in court to give the testimony that would have convicted Sandeep Patel.

‘Reviewing cold cases is a job for old men. Lauren is even going to dig some superannuated detective superintendent out of retirement to contribute his wisdom. And harp on about how much better police work was in the good old days.’

‘So you’ll be reporting to him?’

She shifted on the sofa. They’d bought it a couple of years ago from a Scandinavian store that offered designer living on a budget. It was blue and elegant and looked wonderful in the catalogue. It was also astonishingly uncomfortable. ‘No, retired officers don’t have full police powers. Nominally, I’ll be in charge.’

‘What’s the problem, then?’ he murmured. ‘Sounds fascinating to me. Go for it. It could be just the change you need.’

Could it? Hannah had feared that she’d been lucky in her career. What if her luck had run out? Was the collapse of the Patel trial her fault? Of course, witnesses fail to turn up every day of the week. Talk to any officer who has worked in Merseyside or the Met, they’ll say it’s an occupational hazard. In any city, intimidation of people due to give evidence is a way of life.

But this was a high-profile murder and she’d been sure that Golac would see it through. Of course, she should have sat on the fence with the ACC. If the investigation had been allowed to die quietly once further enquiries drew a blank, no one would have complained. No one mourned Sudhakar Rao. His widow had remarried and his two daughters had been so young at the time of his death that they could barely remember him. Would it really have mattered if Sandeep Patel had been allowed to escape prosecution? Hannah thought it would. Even after ten years in the police, she still wasn’t cynical enough to abandon all belief in doing the right thing simply because it was the right thing. But, clearly naive. Her efforts had come to nothing and Patel had been allowed to put two fingers up to justice.

‘Even if this new team isn’t just a rest home for detectives who have screwed up,’ she said, ‘it isn’t…’

‘Oh, don’t you know anything, for God’s sake? It’s Gerard Manley Hopkins! Any fool should know that.’

Hannah blinked and then realised that Marc was shouting at the hapless quiz show contestant. The man on the small screen had developed a nervous tic. The questionmaster’s trademark sarcasm wasn’t helping.

‘Tennyson?’ the man enquired, with a mixture of hope and panic.

‘Doh!’ Marc flicked the remote so that the crushed features of the ignoramus vanished. ‘Imagine Tennyson writing The Windhover . I mean…’

‘Sorry, was I distracting you?’

‘All right. Don’t start.’ Marc put his hands up in mock surrender. ‘You’ve had a bad day, a miserable experience, and it’s a shame. Just don’t take it out on me, okay?’

‘I wasn’t…’

‘Look,’ he said, stretching a bony arm around her, ‘I was listening to you, honest. Just remember, you’re not the only one who has bad days. The bank manager was telling me this afternoon to carry less stock. The accounts aren’t looking too clever at the moment. All the same, I try not to bring these things home, right? Trouble is, you let that woman get to you. Has it crossed your mind she could be right?’

‘There’s a first time for everything,’ Hannah said bitchily. ‘I just have this sneaking feeling that I’m being set up to fail. Or not to succeed, which is just as bad.’

‘Listen, cold cases are sexy at the moment.’ His hand strayed to her breast. ‘Journalists love them. Maybe she thinks she’s doing you a kindness.’

‘Moving me out of the firing line? Perhaps. But she’s also taking away my best chance of redeeming myself after Sandeep Patel. Outcomes, that’s the name of the game. The police authority loves to see them. Budgets are fixed, reputations won and lost, all because of outcomes. Any progress I’ve made so far has been because I’ve delivered the right outcomes. And then came the Patel trial, and a shedload of negative publicity.’

He began to nibble at her ear. ‘You’ll get over it.’

‘Sure,’ she said, wriggling away, ‘but if I’m shuffled into reviewing cold cases, it won’t only be Kelsen who sees it as a sort of demotion. And far worse, I won’t be able to do much to claw back my credibility. Let’s face it, there’s often a very good reason why cases go cold. It’s because they’re bloody difficult to solve.’