Clare Mackintosh - I Let You Go

‘Oh.’ Tom meandered back to the house and pulled the front door closed with a bang. He got into the back seat. ‘How come Lucy’s in the front?’

‘It’s my turn.’

‘It isn’t.’

‘It is.’

‘Enough!’ Ray roared.

Nobody spoke, and by the time they had driven the five minutes to Lucy’s primary school, Ray’s blood pressure had subsided. He parked his Mondeo on yellow zig-zags and marched Lucy round to her classroom, kissing her on the forehead and legging it back just in time to find a woman noting down his registration number.

‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said, when he skidded to a halt by the car. She wagged her finger. ‘I would have thought you would have known better, Inspector.’

‘Sorry,’ Ray said. ‘Urgent job. You know how it is.’

He left her tapping her pencil on her notepad. Bloody PTA mafia, he thought. Too much time on their hands, that was the trouble.

‘So,’ Ray started, glancing over to the passenger seat. Tom had slid into the front as soon as Lucy had got out, but he was staring resolutely out of the window. ‘How’s school?’

‘Fine.’

Tom’s teacher said that while things hadn’t got worse, they certainly hadn’t got better. He and Mags had gone to the school and heard a report of a boy who had no friends, didn’t do more than the bare minimum in lessons, and never put himself forward.

‘Mrs Hickson said there’s a football club starting after school on Wednesdays. Do you fancy it?’

‘Not really.’

‘I used to be quite the player in my day – maybe some of it has rubbed off on you, eh?’ Even without looking at Tom, Ray knew the boy was rolling his eyes, and he winced at how much like his own father he was sounding.

Tom pushed his headphones into his ears.

Ray sighed. Puberty had turned his son into a grunting, uncommunicative teenager, and he was dreading the day the same thing happened to his daughter. You weren’t supposed to have favourites, but he had a soft spot for Lucy, who at nine would still seek him out for a cuddle and insist on a bedtime story. Even before adolescent angst had hit, Tom and Ray had locked horns. Too similar, Mags said, although Ray couldn’t see it.

‘You can drop me here,’ Tom said, unbuckling his seat belt while the car was still moving.

‘But we’re two streets away from the school.’

‘Dad, it’s fine. I’ll walk.’ He reached for the door handle and for a moment Ray thought he was going to open the door and simply hurl himself out.

‘All right, I get it!’ Ray pulled over to the side of the road, ignoring the road markings for the second time that morning. ‘You know you’re going to miss registration, don’t you?’

‘Laters.’

And with that, Tom was gone, slamming the car door and slipping between the traffic to cross the road. What on earth had happened to his kind, funny son? Was this terseness a rite of passage for a teenage boy – or something more? Ray shook his head. You’d think having kids would be a walk in the park compared to a complex crime investigation, but he’d take a suspect interview over a chat with Tom any day. And get more of a conversation, he thought wryly. Thank God Mags would be picking the kids up from school.

By the time Ray reached headquarters he had put Tom to the back of his mind. It didn’t take a genius to work out why the chief constable wanted to see him. The hit-and-run was almost six months old and the investigation had all but ground to a halt. Ray sat on a chair outside the oak-panelled office, and the chief’s PA gave him a sympathetic smile.

‘She’s just finishing up a call,’ she said. ‘It won’t be much longer.’

Chief Constable Olivia Rippon was a brilliant but terrifying woman. Rising rapidly through the ranks, she had been Avon and Somerset’s chief officer for seven years. At one stage tipped to be the next Met Commissioner, Olivia had ‘for personal reasons’ chosen to stay in her home force, where she took pleasure in reducing senior officers to gibbering wrecks at monthly performance meetings. She was one of those women who were born to wear uniform, her dark brown hair pulled into a severe bun, and solid legs hidden beneath thick black tights.

Ray rubbed his palms on his trouser legs to make sure they were perfectly dry. He had heard a rumour that the chief had once blocked a promising officer’s promotion to chief inspector because the poor man’s sweaty palms didn’t ‘inspire confidence’. Ray had no idea if it was true, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. They could get by on his inspector salary, but things were a bit tight. Mags was still on about becoming a teacher, but Ray had done the sums, and if he could manage another couple of promotions, they’d have the extra money they needed without her having to work. Ray thought about the morning’s chaos and decided Mags already did more than enough – she shouldn’t have to get a job just so they could afford a few luxuries.

‘You can go in now,’ the PA said.

Ray took a deep breath and pushed open the door. ‘Good morning, ma’am.’

There was silence as the chief made copious notes on a pad in her trademark illegible handwriting. Ray loitered by the door and pretended to admire the numerous certificates and photographs that littered the walls. The navy blue carpet was thicker and plusher than in the rest of the building, and an enormous conference table dominated one half of the room. At the far end, Olivia Rippon sat at a big curved desk. Finally, she stopped writing and looked up.

‘I want you to close the Fishponds hit-and-run case.’

It was clear he wasn’t going to be offered a seat, so Ray picked the chair closest to Olivia, and sat down regardless. She raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

‘I think that if we just had a little more time—’

‘You’ve had time,’ Olivia said. ‘Five and a half months, to be exact. It’s an embarrassment, Ray. Every time the Post prints another of your so-called updates, it simply serves as a reminder of a case the police have failed to solve. Councillor Lewis rang me last night: he wants it buried, and so do I.’

Ray felt the anger building inside him. ‘Isn’t Lewis the one who opposed the residents’ bid for the limit on the estates to be dropped to twenty miles per hour?’

There was a beat, and Olivia regarded him coolly.

‘Close it, Ray.’

They looked at each other across the smooth walnut desk without speaking. Surprisingly, it was Olivia who gave in first, sitting back in her chair and clasping her hands in front of her.

‘You are an exceptionally good detective, Ray, and your tenacity does you credit. But if you want to progress, you need to accept that policing is about politics as much as it is investigating crime.’

‘I do understand that, ma’am.’ Ray fought to keep the frustration out of his voice.

‘Good,’ Olivia said, taking the lid off her pen and reaching for the next memo in her in-tray. ‘Then we’re in agreement. The case will be closed today.’

For once Ray was glad of the traffic that held him up on his way back to CID. He was not looking forward to telling Kate, and he wondered why that should be his overriding thought. She was so new to CID still, he supposed: she wouldn’t yet have been through the frustrations of having to file an investigation in which so much energy had been invested. Stumpy would be more resigned.

As soon as he got back to the station, he called them into his office. Kate came in first, carrying a mug of coffee she put down next to his computer, where three others sat, each half-full of cold black coffee.

‘Are they from last week?’

‘Yep – the cleaner refuses to wash them up any more.’

‘I’m not surprised. You can do them yourself, you know.’ Kate sat down, just as Stumpy came in and nodded a greeting to Ray.