Ash & Bone

'You and Joanne,' Framlingham said once they'd settled. 'I was sorry to hear things didn't work out.'

Elder shrugged.

'Still see much of her?'

'Not a lot.'

'And the girl – Katherine, is it? – Frank, that was a terrible business. Nothing worse.' He broke off a piece of bread and wiped it round his plate. 'Coping, is she?'

'I'm not sure.'

'And you?'

Elder said nothing.

Framlingham leaned forward. 'All this kowtowing to civilised values and decency is all very well, but, cases like that, left to me, the bastard would've been given a taste of his own medicine and then sent for the long drop off some nice corded rope.'

The waiter, a sprig of holly pinned to his red waistcoat, had reappeared, smiling, at the table.

Oil ran down between Framlingham's fingers. 'Calves' liver's good, Frank. Sage and butter, nice and simple.'

Elder nodded, looked quickly down the menu and plumped for lamb cutlets with rosemary, saute potatoes and spinach.

'You'll have some wine, Frank? Red or white?'

'Red?'

Framlingham ordered a bottle of Da Luca Primitivo and some mineral water and for ten or so minutes they allowed themselves to gossip about half-remembered colleagues. Framlingham's liver leaked blood, pink across the plate.

'What I have to wonder, Frank, this current business, Maddy Birch, why it matters so much? To you, I mean.'

'I've told you, we worked together.'

'Come on, Frank, it's got to be more than that.'

Elder shook his head. 'I knew her, liked her. That was all.'

Framlingham poured more wine. 'More than fifteen years ago. Around the time Katherine was born, a little after? You were tupping her, Frank, no great disgrace. Times like that, it happens. Feeling a little trapped, I shouldn't wonder. You looked around and there she was. Young, available I dare say.'

'It wasn't like that.'

Framlingham laughed. 'For Christ's sake, Frank, spare us the holier-than-thou. We've all been there. If we're lucky seen it slip between the sheets and out of sight, no one any the wiser.'

Elder bit into a piece of lamb. Well done was what he'd asked for and well done was what he'd got.

'Admit it, Frank. You had her. Once, twice, half a hundred times. That doesn't matter.'

'No.'

Framlingham read the seriousness in his face.

'It's worse then. You didn't have her, Frank. Just wanted to. Fancied her and most likely she fancied you. But somehow you let her get stuck inside your head. She was the one you pictured when you were screwing your wife or jerking off in the shower.'

Elder reached for the bottle and refilled his glass. 'She's dead and I want to know why. I want whoever was responsible to be caught. Is that so wrong?'

'No, it's not wrong. Not at all. It's more than that, though, Frank. More than wanting.'

'What do you mean?'

Framlingham smiled. 'Come on, Frank, you've not come all this way for a fair-to-middling lunch and a few questions asked and maybe answered. You might not want to sign back on full-time, but you'd not mind a bite at this. Am I right?'

'I suppose so.'

'Is that a yes?'

'All right. Yes.'

Framlingham steepled his fingers. 'This investigation, Homicide gave it everything. Overtime, technical support staff, everything. Maddy Birch, she was one of ours, after all. Then, when there was no early breakthrough, things were scaled down. You know the way it goes. Normally, by now, some of my lot would be moving in, putting the whole thing under review. Starting from scratch if needs be.'

'And that's not happening?'

Framlingham set down his glass. 'We're having to tread careful, Frank, this one, with Shields in charge.'

'I don't understand.'

'Come on, Frank. A woman officer and black. If we're seen elbowing her aside…'

'That's ridiculous.'

'Politics, Frank, that's what it is. Perception. That's what matters. I doubt she'd play the race card herself, Shields, but there's others who would.' He sighed. 'It's a quagmire, Frank. A bloody mess. On the one hand we're instigating anti-racist policies left, right and centre, practically dragging ethnic minorities off the streets and begging them into uniform, and at the same time, we'll spend half a million pounds to prove some member of the Black Police Association has been fiddling his expenses. It beggars bloody belief.'

Reaching out, he poured the last of the wine.

'We'll get there, Frank. Just a little more patience, that's all.'

Elder sat back in his chair.

Glancing at the bill the waiter had quietly left, Framlingham took out one of his credit cards and dropped it down. 'Go home, Frank, relax. It's nearly Christmas. I'll be in touch.'

15

Karen Shields began her day at five thirty-five with a sore throat, a thick head and a brace of Paracetamol. Just what she needed, going down with some bug the morning she had to explain to her superior why it was that after almost four weeks, not only had no arrests been made, the only serious suspect they'd had had come up pure as the driven snow. She could already see the look on her boss's face as he offered her a Kleenex for her cold and shuffled her aside.

Not only was Maddy's ex-husband Terry no longer a viable suspect, but any link with the Hackney murder now seemed more tenuous than before. A second attack, not fatal, but similar, had been carried out on a woman jogging in parkland no more than two miles away from the first incident, and two men had been arrested for both crimes and were being questioned. No links with Maddy's death had yet come to light.

In the kitchen Karen made coffee in a stove-top pot and slipped bread into the toaster. Everyone who'd been close to Maddy Birch in any way in recent years, from a cousin who lived in Esher to the roofer she'd haphazardly dated over a four-month period, had been interviewed, in some cases twice, and, where necessary, alibis had been checked.

'One thing you'd have to say about her,' Karen's sergeant, Mike Ramsden, had observed. 'She had a taste for blokes who worked with their hands.'

'Liked a bit of rough,' Lee Furness had said, the look on Karen's face, remembering how Maddy had been found, stopping him like a slap.

It nagged at her regardless: the possibility that the killer had been someone with whom Maddy had been involved, someone of whose identity they were still unaware.

She had gone back to Maddy's friend Vanessa, probing for some forgotten reference, some forgotten chance remark; she'd talked to other officers with whom Maddy had shared the occasional confidence and come up blank. Every square inch of where Maddy had lived had been pored over, every name jotted down, every number traced.

Nothing. No one.

Karen spread butter on her toast.

Could there have been someone nevertheless?

Someone who, as Maddy had feared, had taken to following her, watching her, slipping, unseen, into the security of her home.

More information, that was what Karen wanted, and she couldn't see where it might come from. If there had been a laptop, or even an email address, they might have found hits on some site or other that would lay open some secret predilection. Cross-dressing, water sports, rubber – it wasn't beyond the edge of possibility that Furness had been right, Maddy had liked an element of pain, loss of control, a bit of rough…

Outside it was still dark, the cars moving evenly along Essex Road behind dipped headlights. Another half-hour or so before the traffic would start to snarl up, north towards Canonbury, south to the Angel.

The roofer, Kennet, when they brought him in, had been politeness itself, due deference in his manner and calluses on his hands. In all the time he'd been seeing Maddy, he doubted if they'd met more than once or twice a week. 'You know how it is,' he'd said, smiling at Karen open-faced. 'Shift work. Overtime.'