'Where do I get a crocus at this time of year?'
'You get the bulbs so I can plant them. But when you bring them you come to listen to me — you don't come with a lecture in your mouth, or an idea in your head of converting me and making me a productive member of society. I am who I am and you must not try to make me believe in redemption. Understand?'
'I understand. No redemption.'
'Good. The Remembrance is not so popular now, not like it used to be. Out of fashion and not easy to find. But…' He straightened and put his hand on Caffery's chest, holding it there as his hand rose and fell with Caffery's breathing. As if he was testing his heart. 'But you'll find them. You'll find my crocuses. I know you will.'
16
Car-jacking had arrived in the West Country. In 2006 the young professional owners of a Scenic MPV, driven in for the day from Wellington to see a show, had their car stolen as they parked near the Bristol Hippodrome. The car-jacker was wearing a red full-face ski mask and R amp;B jeans, and he'd waited until the wife was out and the husband was pulling on the parking brake before he struck.
He dragged the driver out on to the pavement, breaking his wrist, jumped into the car and drove off at thirty miles an hour, causing ten thousand pounds' worth of damage to other vehicles in the car park. He took the road up towards Clifton, and no one knew how far he'd have got if it hadn't been that in stealing the car he'd also stolen a passenger. The couple's six-year-old daughter was in the back seat. When he realized this he dumped the car double quick, leaving it on the pavement in Whiteladies Road with the motor still running, the child unharmed. He disappeared into the grey afternoon, never to be seen again.
Flea'd paid a passing interest to the case because she sometimes used the car park. She asked a friend in Intelligence for the details and when she went over what had happened one thing stuck in her mind: the child was sitting in a booster seat. Flea spent the next few days wandering parking lots, looking through the window of any Renault Scenic, looking especially for booster seats, until she was convinced of one thing: whichever angle the guy had come from he would have seen the child before he'd stolen the car. And when she looked at the witness statements she found the child reported that the first thing the offender had said was: 'Shut the fucking crying.' It didn't sound like someone who was surprised to find she was in the car: 'Shut the fucking crying…'
What if, Flea wondered, they'd got it wrong? The police thought the car-jacker'd dumped the car when he realized the child was there. But how about if you turned it round? What if it wasn't the child's presence that had made him dump the car? What if the child — and the thought made her cold — what if the child being there had made him steal it in the first place?
She became obsessed with the idea that he'd targeted the car for the little girl, and had got frightened into abandoning the kidnap. She started fishing, asking questions, offering theories. She made friends with a proactive intelligence officer in the vehicle-crime unit at Trinity Road and dropped by, asking what they thought. Then one day she got a call from her inspector. The first time she'd ever had to stand in his office, instead of sitting comfortably. He was to the point. 'I'm going to say this once and then we'll pretend I never said it. Marley, wind your neck in.'
And so she'd learned caution. Even though the little girl crying in the back seat of the MPV haunted her, Flea would never again get involved in something that wasn't her business. She made a self-pact: next time she found herself playing detective she was going straight to her inspector, putting her name down for the trainee programme and getting started on the CID 'aide' course. But that, of course, would mean an end to the diving. And because she was never going to give up the diving she went on doing her job, pulling out the bodies, searching for the knives and guns that had created the corpses, standing in the front line whenever the force needed muscle. But one thing she never did was think about the cases. No curiosity, no theorizing. It was a rule she had.
Which was why that night, driving along the little country lanes that skirted the northern outskirts of Bath, the lighted abbey and the church spires glimmering against the dark hills, Flea deliberately wasn't having any ideas about how a pair of severed hands had come to be buried under the entrance to the Moat restaurant. Instead she was thinking about Tig, about whether he was the only one who understood how she felt about her parents. Whether he understood the guilt and whether he still carried a dark hole inside him for what he'd done to that old lady. She was still thinking about him when she got home, and she might not have given the hands another thought for the rest of the night if it hadn't been for the accidental discovery she made inside her father's study.
It was late, the cottage in darkness, only the little lantern hanging over the door to guide her as she pulled the Ford Focus off the road on to the gravel driveway. The wisteria that twined round the lamp was dislodging the stones above the front door and, without the money to hire a stonemason, a couple of months ago she'd had to climb up a ladder herself with a plasterer's float full of mortar. She'd mixed it too hard, and now, only two months on, the soft Bath stone was cracking in a long, depressing line over the lintel.
She let herself in, picked up the mail, and sorted it as she headed to the kitchen. On the top was a copy of the local property paper, a scaremongering headline in red: House Prices Drop in Second Quarter. Stuck on the front page was a pink Postit with one sentence scrawled on it: 'But we would always honour our original offer, of course. Best wishes, Katherine Oscar.'
Centuries ago, the Marleys' garden hadn't belonged to the cottage but to the neighbouring Charlcombe Hall. And now Katherine and Giles Oscar, the new owners of Charlcombe, wanted to reinstate the garden, wanted a clean sweep down to the valley from the back of their overbuilt, over-decorated house. Sometimes Flea thought selling her section of the land was the smart thing to do, release a bit of equity. After the accident Thom hadn't wanted to stay there, 'with the ghosts', so they'd agreed she'd keep the house and give him a loan against her share of the life-insurance money that would come after the statutory seven years. The Oscars' money would make life easier.
But no. She crumpled the paper and shoved it into the belly of the Aga. She wasn't going to budge, no matter how hard it got to maintain her parents' house. It was the closest she could get to her childhood — and maybe that made her soft, but she needed it. She'd been born here, grown up knowing every inch of the ageing lawns that dropped in terraces out of sight, past ponds and a lake, ending somewhere vague among the fields. She'd grown up with the distant views of Bath, hazy mist settling in the valley in the autumn mornings so only the church spires were visible like sunken trees in a lake.
She waited for the newspaper to catch, then kicked off her shoes and went down to Dad's study. In the electric light all the belongings looked a little frozen, as if she'd forced them to sit in unnatural positions. Kaiser's boxes stood in a row under the table, untouched. She went to the shelves and ran her fingers along the book spines until she found the bound thesis her father had done at Cambridge. She pulled it out and opened it, looking inside the cover. It was typical of Dad to write in books — he didn't revere them, he used them. The only good book, he said, was one that had been added to by the reader and the inside cover of the dissertation was covered with scribblings- tiny notes to himself. She stood under the light and studied the list, looking for anything, anything, that could be a list of digits for the safe.