A Narrow Margin of Error (17 page)

She went to her stationery cupboard, and quickly typed up her notes. She was just slipping them into the murder book folder in the small office the rest of the team used, when she realized she had left the wooden cross in the evidence bag in the bottom drawer of her desk. Knowing it would be better to remove it, just in case prying eyes found it and wondered what it meant, she quickly went back to retrieve it. She was just picking it up when her eyes fell on the three-lettered message on it.

JOY.

For a moment, her mind had played a trick on her, for she’d half-expected to see the initials R.I.P. on it instead. That was the usual three-lettered message on such a funereal thing, after all.

She shrugged, tossed it into her bag, and stepped through the office door. She’d just closed the door behind her and was walking down the corridor, when suddenly she felt her steps slowing.

Something was clanging away urgently in the back of her head.

What?

Initials.

R.I.P. Initials.

‘Oh, shit,’ Hillary said softly. How could she have failed to spot that?

She back-tracked just a few steps and walked into the main computer room. She expected it to be as empty as her own small kingdom, but here there were still several people working away at the constantly busy machines, and in one corner Sergeant Handley looked up at her surprised.

‘Didn’t you get my message?’ he asked, as she approached. ‘There were no hits of any kind for a woman named Joy,’ he said.

‘Yes I know, thanks. My fault, I should have thought of it before,’ Hillary said, smiling ingratiatingly, ‘but could you do the same checks, but this time using the initials J, O and Y. As in J for Jenny, O for Oona, and Y for, say, Young, or whatever?’

Handley made a quick note. ‘Sure. That shouldn’t take long either. As a set of initials, they don’t sound too common. Having Y for a surname isn’t anywhere near as bad as having a W or a C for instance.’

‘Great,’ Hillary said, not really caring about the semantics. ‘It’ll probably come to nothing as well, but I just need to make sure.’

‘No problem,’ Handley said vaguely. ‘But you won’t get any answers till Monday morning, mind.’

‘Monday’s fine,’ Hillary said, and, giving a wave of thanks, stepped back out into the corridor.

It wasn’t until she was in the lobby and on her way out that she heard her name being called.

She recognized the voice at once of course, and seeing the desk sergeant’s head come up, like a hound spotting a fox’s brush disappearing down a hole, made sure she put on a dazzling smile as she turned around.

Steven Crayle was just trotting up the last of the steps leading from the basement. He was dressed in a dark-blue suit, and his tall, lean, elegant frame moved with an athletic ripple that made her throat go dry.

Damn, but he was buff.

‘S…Steven,’ she said, managing to transfer the word from ‘sir’ to his forename just in time. She gave a quick movement of her eyes to her left as he approached, and knew from the way he made his smile become very warm indeed that he’d clocked the nosy desk sergeant too.

‘Glad to catch you,’ he said, somehow managing to make the statement sound suggestive.

Hillary’s eyes narrowed. ‘Always a pleasure,’ she drawled back.

Steven’s lips twitched. ‘I was just wondering if you wanted to go to the picnic tomorrow.’

Hillary looked at him blankly.

‘The police picnic, in the park?’ he said. ‘You know, they hold them all the time. You go, have a burnt burger, sip stewed tea
from a thermos, play some footie with the uniforms and pretend you’re all having a good time.’

‘Oh right, those,’ Hillary said. She’d always thought they were strictly for the desperate-to-please. She’d never been to one in her life.

‘Let me guess. You’ve never been to one,’ Steven said, and grinned as her eyes narrowed even further in warning. ‘I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t go either, except that there’s an unspoken rule that some of us have to go to at least one once a year. I thought you might like to join me, and we can be miserable together. Who knows, maybe we could go on somewhere else afterwards?’

The desk sergeant was, by now, almost hanging over his
countertop
to make sure he didn’t miss a single word.

Hillary smiled warmly. ‘I’d like that,’ she said, ‘Steven.’

She even managed to make her voice sound husky.

Honor Blackman, eat your heart out, she thought. And saw one of Steven Crayle’s dark velvet-brown eyes close in a brief wink.

T
he first Saturday in May dawned brightly, with a red flush in the sky that Hillary saw in all its glory, thanks to the noisy birds in the willow tree. She got out of bed, had her usual
blink-and
-you’d-miss-it shower and tried to remember if red skies in the morning were supposed to give shepherds a smile or a frown.

Since it felt way too early in the day for dredging up childhood nursery rhymes from memory, and given that she was about to embark on an English picnic in spring, she simply dressed for rain.

She was no mug.

The park where the police picnics were held wasn’t far from where her boat was moored, and did in fact overlook the Oxford canal. She contemplated giving the
Mollern
a short run and arriving in style, but decided it was hardly worth the effort.

She decided to walk instead, and set out with an hour to spare. The chiff-chaffs heckled her as she passed, and she mumbled a dire warning at them about the likelihood of their getting her toasted breadcrumb leftovers from now on. They didn’t look all that worried, it had to be said, but anyone overhearing her would have understood at once that it didn’t look promising for the feathered contingent.

As she walked through the streets, she couldn’t remember whether Kidlington was still officially the biggest village in Britain or whether it had lost its crown to some other pretender.
Or even if anything had come of the campaign set in motion a while ago to officially recognize it as a town. Considering that she’d lived there more or less throughout her working life, her ignorance should have made her ashamed, but it didn’t.

When she entered the park, it was immediately clear where the second of the four annual Thames Valley Police Picnics had set up camp, since there was already an impromptu rugby match taking place, with the hooligans from Traffic doing something dire to the prima donnas from the Fraud Squad.

Hillary winced as someone hit the grassy turf with a
bone-breaking
thud and a breathless squawk.

Wooden tables, the kind with fixed wooden benches attached to them, were already filling up with the wives and – to a lesser extent – the husbands of serving officers, and their assorted kids. On the benches were the makings of hot dogs and burgers, and a variety of home-made cakes.

Every year, she vaguely remembered someone telling her, a member of the top brass was elected to scorch the meat, but even so, she was rather surprised to see the silver-haired figure of Commander Marcus Donleavy in the act of lighting a barbecue.

For the first time ever she realized that she was seeing him out of his own ‘uniform’ of grey suit and impeccable tie, for he was wearing instead a pristine-looking pair of denim jeans with a razor-sharp crease. And only the commander, Hillary thought, hiding a grin, would be able to get jeans with a crease. He’d teamed this sartorial phenomenon with a mint-green
short-sleeved
shirt and was wearing some sort of lightweight canvas shoes of the same colour.

She detoured past the screaming kids (and the screaming members of the Fraud Squad out on the playing field) and headed over to the barbecue area.

As she did so, she noticed Steven’s car pull into the parking area. Like him, it was dark, racy and sexy as hell, whilst somehow remaining sober and respectable.

She was still smiling over that particular thought when Marcus Donleavy saw her approaching and waved her over with a smile.

She herself was, for once, wearing a summery dress instead of her usual more austere skirt-and-jacket combo. Reaching just below her knees, it was an attractive empire-line affair with a powder-blue, white and lemon floral pattern. Over it she wore a lightweight white mackintosh. Knee-high white leather boots completed the outfit. Marcus Donleavy watched her approach with a speculative glance.

Could the rumours that had been reaching his ears about Hillary Greene and Steven Crayle actually be true? He wouldn’t have predicted it, but nothing, nowadays, ever surprised him.

‘Hello, did you know you’re a dead ringer for one of my
detectives
?’ Marcus said, the moment she was within earshot. ‘If I didn’t know better I could have sworn that DI Hillary Greene was gracing us with her presence. But, since I know for a fact that she’s never deigned to attend one of these plebeian affairs before—’

‘Morning, sir,’ Hillary said shortly, cutting across his sarcasm.

‘It speaks.’

Hillary wondered how much licence her new status as a civilian gave her when it came to insubordination. After all, Marcus was no longer, strictly speaking, her superior officer. And after working so hard to get her back into harness, he wasn’t likely to fire her easily. So perhaps today was the day when her long-held dream of giving Donleavy a hard time could come true.

She met his level, grey-eyed gaze, and thought again.

She was definitely no mug.

‘So what does bring you here, Hillary?’ he asked, genuinely curious.

Hillary shrugged. ‘I was invited.’

When she said no more he typically got right down to business. Social occasion or not, he never turned off. It was something Hillary understood, because she was the same.

‘So, how’s the latest case going?’ the commander asked briskly.
‘I take it Steven’s got you on something else, now that you’ve closed your first cold case? And by the way, congratulations on that. We’re all well impressed.’

‘Thank you, sir. And yes, I’m currently working on the Thompson case.’

‘A murder file, is it?’ Marcus asked sharply, and nodded,
satisfied
, when Hillary agreed that it was. She gave him a quick but comprehensive précis, and by the time she was finished, she could sense someone coming up behind her.

Her hormones – ever helpful little things that they were – instantly let her know who it was. She could feel him behind her, his superior height casting just a faint shadow over her, which made her shiver slightly.

‘Sir,’ Steven said, nodding at Donleavy. ‘Did I hear Hillary filling you in on the Thompson case?’

‘You did.’ Marcus began to neatly load the barbecue with rows and rows of sausages. They instantly began to spit and sizzle and all three of them took a few cautious steps backwards.

‘Hillary, you look lovely,’ Steven said, conscious of the
contingent
of nosy wives over by a bench who were eyeing them speculatively. Every one of them knew who the commander was, of course, since all of them had an eye to their husband’s chances of promotion and knew who you had to schmooze up to at affairs such as this one. And most of them knew Hillary either by sight or reputation.

‘Thank you,’ Hillary said, glancing across at him.

Like Marcus, he was also dressed casually in jeans, this time of a more washed and natural appearance, and he’d teamed them with a plain white shirt, unbuttoned at the top. She could just see the beginnings of a few dark, curly chest hairs in the V-shaped length under his throat, and swallowed hard.

Donleavy, in the act of turning over the first of the blackening sausages, shot them a quick, sharp, gimlet glance.

‘Did you bring any wine?’ Steven asked, before holding up a bottle of Chablis for her inspection.

‘Very nice. I brought chocolate,’ she said. Actually, she should have said she’d
meant
to bring chocolate, but had forgotten to.

‘Well, that’s the two staples of any picnic sorted, then,’ Steven laughed. He nodded at Marcus. ‘Sir,’ he said, then held out his hand.

Hillary, without so much as blinking, reached out and took it. It felt surprisingly right and natural to do so and, as they walked away to a quiet, unclaimed bench, it felt surprisingly good when they swung their hands together in motion with their walking, like two schoolkids off on their first adventure.

Marcus Donleavy watched them go, and then suddenly
realized
his sausages were burning. Even over the acrid smoke, he could hear the gossip beginning to heat up all around him too.

So the stories about Steven and Hillary were true. Marcus had to admit that not only had he not seen it coming, he was not at all sure how he felt about it. When he’d caught the first faint whiffs on the rumour mill of a dalliance between them, his first instinct had been to give it very little credence. But now they might just as well have taken out an advert and put it in the paper.

Already he could see a sergeant from Juvie, who was the unpaid photographer for the police newsletter, taking snapshots of the pair as they sat and drank wine, their heads bent close together.

Marcus sighed and hoped it wouldn’t end in disaster. Now that he’d finally got Hillary safely back in the fold and working for the CRT the last thing he wanted was for her to get distracted.

Perhaps he should give some thought to promoting Crayle away from the basement and to a chief superintendency
somewhere
else?

Over at the bench, Hillary leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table. It brought her head closer to his.

‘Have you got anything new from him?’ Steven asked quietly, aware of the watching eyes and the listening ears all around them.

Hillary understood what he was asking at once and hesitated. She should really tell him about the cross now, but decided to wait until Handley got back to her on Monday morning. That way she’d have something worthwhile to report. Besides, although she didn’t really give voice to the thought, she was feeling more and more reluctant to let anything spoil her day.

She was enjoying herself, sipping wine and having his
undivided
attention. And it suddenly felt as if it had been a very long time indeed since she had enjoyed herself.

‘No more text messages or flowers,’ she temporized, not exactly lying but skirting the truth just a tad. ‘So, now that we’ve officially become an item,’ she said, looking around with a wry smile, ‘how do you fancy having a day out on the boat? It’s a nice day, we can have a gentle cruise a couple of miles north – as far as the boatyard at Lower Heyford, anyway. It’s a pretty stretch of canal up that way. We could buy some strawberries.’

And finally stop pussy-footing around, she added silently.

When she looked up at him, it was obvious he’d picked up on her unspoken addendum, because his brown eyes were going a slightly darker colour.

The impact of them gave her a very pleasant kick in the stomach.

‘Hell, yes,’ he said simply.

When they got up and walked away together, neither of them noticed or cared that they were being avidly watched.

When Sam went in to work on Monday morning, he found both Jimmy and Hillary Greene in ahead of him. It irked him slightly, since, at just gone 8.30, he’d assumed he’d be first in, and the warm glow of having achieved the moral high ground was denied him.

Jimmy was sitting behind his side of the desk, and Hillary was half-sitting, half-leaning on the other side of the desk, her bag still slung over her shoulder, so obviously she hadn’t been there long enough to have gone through to her own tiny office. It made him feel a bit better.

He smiled, however, when Jimmy glanced at his watch, and grinned up at him. ‘Eager, ain’t you?’ the old ex-sergeant said approvingly.

Sam shrugged modestly.

‘Right then, Sam, since you’re so on the ball, have you got anything to report?’ Hillary asked, catching Jimmy’s amused eye. She knew as well as he did how it never hurt to encourage the tyros.

Sam quickly booted up his computer in search of something to give her. Jimmy thought he looked a bit like a red setter eager to give his mistress a chewy toy to play with.

‘Jimmy and me interviewed the Freeling brothers, guv,’ Sam began.

‘I’ve already been briefed by Jimmy on that,’ Hillary said with a grin. ‘From what I’ve heard, you should both be claiming danger money.’

Jimmy croaked out a gruff laugh. ‘Either that, or claim
compensation
for stress.’

‘Right. Well, I’ve done that background check on Mrs Landau that you asked for,’ Sam said, a bit disappointed not to be the one to relate the perils of the bike shop.

‘The landlady?’ Jimmy said, sounding interested. ‘You
interested
in her, guv?’

‘Not particularly. I just felt, when we interviewed her, that some youngster had given her a hard time. Sam thought it was probably her daughter who was the culprit. Apparently she had a kid then went off the rails, leaving her mother to raise the grandson on her own. Did you manage to find out anything more, Sam?’

Sam nodded, and quickly re-read his notes from the computer file out loud.

‘Melinda Stephanie Landau, only daughter of Wanda Landau. She started getting in trouble when she was in her mid-teens,’ Sam read rapidly, ‘and then convictions for shop-lifting, affray and prostitution. She had a baby boy when she was nineteen, but
the father’s name is not listed. Social services were on her case right from the start, guv – although the baby wasn’t born already addicted.’

Hillary let out a long slow breath. ‘Small mercies,’ she muttered darkly.

‘Right. Melinda had the baby taken away from her when it was four months old, she went into rehab, got the child back, but was arrested a few months after that for possession. Wanda Landau started petitioning the court for custody of her grandson from that time on. Although technically the baby remained in ‘the home of the mother’ it was the house in Kebler Road, so Mrs Landau was the one who was actually looking after the baby anyway.’

Sam paused for breath, and read silently for a few minutes, then nodded. ‘I had a hard time getting any files from social
services
, but I did manage to track down one of the social workers who was willing to chat a bit, off the record, like. Seems the grandmother was the primary care-giver more or less from day one, and since Melinda lived with her mother, the courts were more inclined to leave the baby
in situ
than might otherwise have been the case. Then, when the kid was three and a half, Melinda just took off. From the reports at the time, it seems likely that she left with one Malcolm William Purdy, a known drug dealer, who had to scarper PDQ over some sort of turf war with a rival dealer.’