‘Mmm,’ he murmured. ‘Are you telling me you haven’t a clue where to start, Bob?’
‘Hell no,’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m going to start with the “why”. If I can establish a motive, other than the sheer value of the vessel, then the rest might well fall into place.’
I let him go back to his party. Rachel and I crossed paths a few times when I was with Alison, but we’d never really got to know each other until that lunch in Eden’s office. From the early times, though, my impression had always been that what she wanted, she got.
My chat with Eden had focused my attention on my lack of expertise in the task I’d undertaken. I wasn’t kidding when I told him that I’d never encountered the theft of a boat.
As it happens, there’s a guy I know from my Spanish trips who was in marine insurance until he retired. He’s called Bob too. On impulse, I gave him a call.
He was surprised but when I explained what I was after, he got right down to business. From what he told me, it seemed that the insurer had followed standard practice by sending in its own assessor. But, significantly he added that in all his career, he had never come across the theft of such a high-value yacht.
We chatted for a little longer about this and that, and promised to meet up next time our paths crossed in our Spanish town. By the time we had finished, so had my quiet music playlist. I was about to cue up some more when the door opened a little wider. My daughter stood there, her hair ruffled and her eyes bleary from interrupted sleep.
‘What’s up, love?’ I asked.
‘I had a funny dream,’ she mumbled. ‘About King John. Where’s Mummy?’ she asked.
‘Mummy’s had to go to work, sweetheart,’ I told her. I picked her up and carried her upstairs, back to her room.
‘Can I have another story?’ she asked, drowsily, as she slid back into bed.
I reached for Now We Are Six. ‘Okay. Let’s find one we haven’t had before.’
We may have finished the collection, but I can’t be sure; when I woke still sprawled across her bed at two in the morning, from a dream about a burned-out car that wasn’t at all funny, the book was still open on Seonaid’s pink duvet. She was deep in the sleep of the innocent, but I knew that mine was done for the night.
Twenty-Seven
‘Did your Cheeky have much to say when you got home?’ Sammy Pye asked his colleague.
‘“What’s that fucking smell?”’ Haddock replied, ‘and that’s word for word. She went on to ask where the fire had been. It shows you how much of a barrier those paper suits really are. How about Ruth?’
‘She said something similar when I crawled in beside her at two o’clock. We should have had a shower after the autopsies, I suppose.’
‘I don’t think Professor Grace was for sharing.’
‘Maybe not.’ The DCI looked sideways. ‘You didn’t have to come, you know. One police witness would have been enough.’
‘Yes I did. You’d already done one yesterday. It’s you that could have skipped it.’
‘Did you sleep much?’
‘You are fucking joking, gaffer, aren’t you?’
‘I suppose,’ Pye conceded. ‘Me neither; maybe a couple of hours. I had coffee for breakfast; I didn’t fancy anything else.’
The DS stared at him. ‘No? I was starving. I’d a roll and black pudding.’
‘Ohhh! Stop it, you bastard.’
‘It’s okay, I’m joking. My nostrils still feel like they need to be steam cleaned. Maybe we can grab something a bit later, after we’ve seen this householder.’
They had retraced their route from the previous evening, past the Flotterstone Inn and past the clearing where the burned-out Aygo still stood, and where crime scene officers continued to work in the cold, crisp winter morning air.
Two hundred yards further along the narrow roadway, Pye slowed, coming almost to a halt as they approached a stone-pillared gate that marked the entrance to a driveway, leading to an impressive white villa. He turned in, parking well short of a double garage that was set to the right of the dwelling.
The crunch of tyres on gravel had announced their arrival. As they walked up to the front door, it opened and a woman stepped into view. She was tall, wearing tan trousers that could have been moleskin, and a check shirt, hanging loose. Her hair was golden brown, with a sheen that Pye reckoned had cost well into three figures at one of the city’s top hairdressers.
‘You’ll be the police, I suppose,’ she exclaimed as they approached. ‘I’m Nancy Walker. You’ve missed my husband, I’m afraid. He had to leave for the office.’
Pye was not impressed. ‘Even though he’s a witness in our investigation, and you were told we were coming to see you first thing this morning?’
‘Even so. Roland is a senior civil servant, gentlemen, very senior; he has a meeting with the Secretary of State at ten, and I think you’ll find that the Secretary of State outranks you.’
The DCI’s eyes narrowed, as he and Haddock held up their warrant cards. ‘I think you’ll find that in this context, he doesn’t, ma’am.’
‘Be that as it may,’ Mrs Walker drawled, as she inspected the credentials, closely, ‘he’s gone and the world is still turning, officer. Life goes on.’
‘Not for Dean Francey and Anna Hojnowski, it doesn’t,’ Haddock snapped, his customary calm disturbed.
‘And who would they be?’
‘They would be, or rather they were, the two people inside the car that your husband reported burning last night.’
For the first time, Nancy Walker’s self-assurance was ruffled. ‘It was a car?’ she exclaimed. ‘I saw flames from the kitchen, a short distance away; Roland went to investigate, then he called the fire brigade, but he didn’t go close enough to see what it was. We heard no more, indeed we thought no more of it, until one of you chaps called us to say we could expect a visit. People died, you say?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Pye confirmed.
‘That is unfortunate,’ the woman said. She hugged herself and gave a small shiver. ‘I suppose you’d better come in; you might not freeze out here in your overcoats, but I shall, pretty soon.’
She stood aside to allow them to enter a spacious wood-panelled hall. ‘Come along with me,’ she instructed, ‘and I’ll show you the view I had.’
They followed her along a corridor that led to the back of the house, into a kitchen that was flooded with light by the low winter sun. It was a mix of traditional and modern, with an Aga cooker and a farmhouse table, surrounded by fitted units and black granite work surfaces.
The sink was below the window. ‘Take a look,’ Mrs Walker said, gesticulating. ‘I was rinsing the salad when I saw the flames.’
The detectives stood beside her; from their viewpoint they saw a thick green stand of leylandii, capped at a height of around twenty feet.
‘It’s for privacy; we can’t see through and nobody can see in, but last night the light of a fire was visible even above that. I called to Roland . . . he was pouring the Prosecco at the time. He came rushing through, swore like a trooper when he saw it and rushed off again.’
‘Didn’t it strike you as weird?’ Haddock asked. ‘I mean, a fire out here in the middle of winter.’
‘This is the countryside, young man,’ Nancy Walker replied stiffly. ‘People do the silliest things here. They think they can park and have barbecues anywhere, any time, and they are all careless with their fires.’
‘In February?’
‘That is unusual, I admit. You’re telling me that two people managed to set their car on fire, with themselves inside it? Too preoccupied, I imagine, to notice anything until it was too late.’
‘Not quite,’ Pye said. ‘Before you saw the light of the fire, did you hear any noises?’
‘What kind of noise?’ She sniffed. ‘People having sex?’
‘No, I wouldn’t expect you to hear that from a couple of hundred yards away.’ A bizarre image of Nancy and Roland Walker leapt into his mind, and then to his relief it went away again. ‘Sounds that might have been gunshots.’