‘Rose, it has been such a great pleasure to get to know you, and I do so hope we will meet again in more pleasant circumstances.’
To the last he was as attentive as he had been from the beginning. There was no doubt that I remained disturbed by him, even though I had made myself start to question his motives, and, understandably perhaps under the circumstance, his almost exaggerated Jane Austen-style courtesy was beginning to irritate me. But I did my best to behave normally, or what I hoped he would accept to be that.
‘Thank you for looking after me,’ I said, every bit as formal as he was being. Then I added sternly: ‘Just make sure Jason Tucker never gets to take anyone out in that boat alone ever again. That’s all.’
He nodded gravely. ‘No chance of that.’
I decided to play policeman, more of a defence mechanism than anything else.
‘Robin, if I ever heard that that boy had been allowed to put any other visitor to this island in even the slightest risk I would report it at once, you do understand that, don’t you?’
‘I would expect no less,’ he said, as he helped me into the landing craft where Frank Tucker sat waiting at the tiller trying to look as if he had not been listening to every word we had said.
Clumsy as ever I stumbled on the wheeled jetty and to my annoyance fell back quite heavily into Robin’s arms. He steadied me at once, and I found myself just briefly cradled against his chest looking up into those deep blue eyes.
‘I’m just sorry we met like this, I’m going to miss you,’ he murmured.
Surely he could not possibly be quite so warm and affectionate if he had not felt something of what I had felt. The man was so confusing. One half of me was angry with him, while at the same time I had to fight to stop the other half of me melting all over again. Apart from anything else there was the small matter of a fiancée to consider. Was it, I wondered, really possible that his attentions to me had been a quite cynical act merely in order to ensure that I took no action for negligence against him and Abri? Or had he merely shown the kind of courteous concern he would for anyone who had found themselves in my situation, and had it been just my imagination that had begun to make more of it?
All I knew at that moment was — in spite of my assurances to young Jason and his father — that if I thought I would ever have the time or the energy, I rather liked the idea of taking bloody Robin Davey to court and suing the pants off him over the danger I had been put in on his blessed island.
However I didn’t, of course. I just went back to work, like you do.
Three
‘Rose, my office, now, and bring Mellor,’ he instructed.
Detective Chief Superintendent Titmuss, my immediate boss and I, had never seen eye to eye. In my opinion he was a self-seeking pompous political animal full of prejudices and misconceptions with no right whatsoever to be in a senior position in the modern police force. I was well aware that he privately regarded me as a mild embarrassment half the time while using me publicly as a manifestation of his liberal approach to life. If there is anything worse than being kept under because you are a woman, it could well be to be the Avon and Somerset Constabulary’s only female senior detective.
Titmuss was head of the force’s Child Protection Team and it was my misfortune that he had been appointed shortly after I had joined the team six months previously as number two to his predecessor, Superintendent Steve Livings, an old friend and one of the nicest and best coppers in the business. I had known that Steve was on the verge of retirement, but he had in fact been pressing for me to head the CPT. The powers-that-be rejected his recommendation on the grounds that the job called for the rank of Superintendent and they didn’t reckon I was ready for that yet. I had always been ambitious and I was disappointed although I had been quite aware that their decision might go that way. But what neither Steve nor I had expected was that Titmuss might get the job. On paper — although in no other way, that was for sure — he was over-qualified, and to both of us he seemed the worst possible choice. Apart from anything else CPT work calls for exceptional sensitivity and anyone less sensitive than Chief Superintendent Titmuss was hard to imagine. But Chief Superintendent is a dinosaur rank nowadays and police forces never seem to know what to do with them anymore.
I had no illusions that Titmuss wanted me to be his number two anymore than I did, but my immediate attempts to find an escape route revealed that I had no chance for the foreseeable future. I was the most senior woman detective in the force — in fact the Avon and Somerset’s only woman DCI — and was considered to be the ideal appointment. Child Protection is one of the very few areas of policing officially allowed to positively discriminate between the sexes — unofficial negative discrimination is something else of course. Having a male CPT chief more or less obliged the force to have a female number two. And it was just unfortunate that Titmuss and I had at best an uncomfortable relationship, and at worst no relationship at all.
Titmuss had two ways of dealing with me. He either patronised me like hell or became impossibly officious, like some dinosaur authoritarian colonial general. That morning he was in officious mode, which, to be honest, I marginally preferred. But only marginally.
It was my first day back on the job since my so-called holiday on Abri Island, from which I was still painfully recovering. I was physically well enough but I couldn’t sleep properly at night. Both Robin Davey and the horror of being trapped on the Pencil continually invaded my dreams. I had been shaken in more ways than one, although I had no intention of sharing my near-death experience — let alone anything else — with anyone at the nick, and especially not Chief Superintendent Titmuss. Certainly I had been hoping for an hour or so to myself, to sort through my mail and messages, catch up on anything I may have missed, and down a couple of mugs of tea, before having to do my performing monkey act for the bloody man. It was not to be.
For just a few seconds I ignored his order, which had been shouted through the open door of my office at the Portishead HQ of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary. I sat quite still at my desk, mug suspended halfway to my lips, woefully watching Titmuss’s retreating back. As he approached his own office — never being one to miss an opportunity to display his superiority he wouldn’t have dreamt of talking to me in mine — he swung abruptly on his heels and seeing that I had not moved bellowed impatiently: ‘Rose!’
Resigned to my fate I hoisted myself upright, and as I did so spilt tea down my extremely expensive new cream jacket, purchased the previous day in a bid to cheer myself up.
‘At the double,’ murmured a laconic voice in my ear.
I grinned in spite of myself. Thank God for Detective Sergeant Peter Mellor — a handsome young black man in a job which doesn’t take kindly to anyone who is different. So at least he knew what that felt like. Mellor paid lip service to no one, me included. He could be cold as steel and he was an unforgiving pedantic bastard, but he was so clever it hurt, absolutely straight down the middle, and he was brilliant in the CPT, because children, even those who had good reason to fear men, instinctively trusted him. He and I had worked together regularly before both moving into Child Protection and I wouldn’t have been without him for the world — although I was sometimes not sure he always felt quite the same way about me.
When I’d first started working with Mellor I’d found him disconcertingly humourless. He’d learned. Nowadays he had developed a droll, nicely irreverent sense of humour. His timing was good too.