For Death Comes Softly

Four

The morning after Julia returned to London I received a phone call I had been expecting but not looking forward to, from my former husband, Simon.

‘We’re ready to exchange contracts,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ve got a load of paper work for you to look at and I need your signature.’

‘Fine,’ I said, trying to sound as if selling the home in which I had shared my life with him for twelve years was really of no consequence at all.

‘I’d like to move as quickly as possible now,’ he went on very formally.

‘Fine,’ I said again.

‘So, is it all right if I come around to your place this evening?’

I started to agree to that too and stopped myself only just in time, remembering Julia’s reaction to the so-called studio flat I was renting. It was a complete tip. To be fair, it hadn’t been that bad when I moved in, and it was in a big old Victorian villa in a nice part of town, but the fact remained, whatever fancy names you gave it, it was only a bedsit, and I had not been born to live in one room. I rented on a weekly basis, at a highly inflated price, and the place had been intended merely as very temporary accommodation when I had moved in more than six months previously. I was still there and the room was now buried in clutter and junk. It also seriously needed fumigating. But you couldn’t get past the clutter to clean it, even if I had had any inclination to do so, which I didn’t.

I had yet to allow Simon near my own personal tip and I had no wish for him to see the way I was living. Whatever his emotional state, I knew that Simon would always be surrounded by order. That’s the way he was. In fact in the good old days he had been inclined to joke that he had obviously made a mistake and should have married Julia, who of course, also always lived in total order. At least I think he had been joking.

‘Uh, couldn’t we meet for a drink somewhere,’ I suggested desperately.

‘Rose,’ he replied, in the kind of voice you might use to a tiresome child. ‘We need to make the final arrangements for the sale of our home. That’s not something you do in a bar.’

‘Oh,’ I said. And I supposed he was right, really.

‘Look,’ he still sounded like someone exasperated struggling to remain patient, ‘if you don’t want me to come to you, why don’t you pop round here. It won’t take long.’

I should have said no to that as well. The ‘round here’ he referred to was the idiosyncratic 1920s bungalow on the outskirts of town which had been our home throughout our marriage, and where, by and large, and I hated admitting it to myself now, we had both been happy for so long. Well, I had anyway. Sometimes now I doubted if I had ever made Simon really happy.

I arrived just after 8 p.m., straight from work. Simon was alone. That at least was a relief. I had heard that he had a new girlfriend. I didn’t know whether she was living with him or not, but I did know that I didn’t want to meet her.

He opened the front door to me with barely a word of greeting and out of habit I walked straight into the kitchen. A pot of soup was simmering on the stove. Typical. Simon was a great cook who always liked to have something delicious and nourishing on the go.

‘That smells good,’ I said, sniffing the air, and trying, I suppose, to make small talk.

Another of my mistakes, apparently.

‘Pity you didn’t show some appreciation when you had the chance,’ he sneered.

I was exasperated, and saddened yet again.

‘Oh Simon, can’t we at least be civil,’ I heard myself plead.

‘It’s a bit late for you to start observing the niceties of life, don’t you think?’ he countered.

I felt myself flinch. Extraordinary that he could still do that to me.

‘Let’s just get the paper work sorted, shall we?’ he continued.

I nodded tiredly. Meticulous as ever he explained the mathematics to me, and showed me where to sign. I knew he would never cheat me nor anyone else for that matter. It wasn’t in his nature. Our home and our finances had been divided precisely down the middle.

‘Now are you sure you understand and are happy with everything?’ he asked. God, why was it that every man I encountered seemed determined to patronise me?

‘I don’t want there to be any comebacks,’ he went on, with just a hint of veiled menace, just in case, I supposed, I should be daft enough to misinterpret the reasons behind his concern.

‘It’s all fine, Simon,’ I told him, without a lot of interest. He had a point actually, because he knew I was barely sitting up and taking notice. I was past caring, as it happened. I had after all already concluded that dividing up two lives which had been entwined as one for so long was about the most deeply depressing exercise in the world, and dividing a home was the final step.

If I’d realised how much going back to the bungalow, for the first time since we had finally parted irrevocably eight months earlier, would affect me, I might have been more insistent that we met elsewhere. I couldn’t help remembering the last night we had spent there together. We had made wonderful passionate love and I had kidded myself that we would be able to start again, to rebuild our lives together. But the next morning we had achieved a quarrel which, even by our standards, had reached an exceptional level of devastation.

As I climbed into my car and took one last lingering look at our little house on the hill I was silently weeping.

My next bit of near madness may have been triggered by that fraught meeting with Simon, I suppose, or perhaps I was being kind to myself. One way or another my personal life remained a disaster area. I sometimes thought I was on self-destruct.

A week or so before Christmas I was in the Lockleaze local, the Vintage Inn, sending a young DC rousingly on the way to his wedding the next day, an occasion of obligatory jollity which did nothing for my depression, when I came close to excelling myself in the stupidity department.

I was drinking that special brand of white wine in which English pubs specialise. It’s the sort that only becomes remotely palatable after you have swallowed far too much of it. A requisite of the culture also inevitably demands that the stuff should be served lukewarm, and preferably from a bottle first opened at least a couple of weeks earlier. By closing time the remains of my brain had deserted me and the DC’s best man, a sergeant with the Met whom earlier in the evening I had dismissed as too clever by half, suddenly became devastatingly attractive. In any case, what else did I have to do that night, I found myself wondering morosely.

The one thing I had managed to avoid in my life, so far at least, was allowing what I did or didn’t do privately to become public knowledge around the nicks of the Avon and Somerset. Of course all who had the remotest interest knew about Simon and my divorce, but, as far as I was aware, and with the possible exception of Peter Mellor, nobody had a clue about what kind of sex life I now had. They certainly, I hoped, had no idea that occasional one-night stands, often embarked upon with disreputable alacrity, were about the sum of it. I had at least avoided playing around with coppers. Somehow on this night, in a state of mind doubtless not unconnected with all that cheap white wine, I was past caring.

‘Why don’t I take you away from all this,’ murmured the Met sergeant unoriginally as he nuzzled an undefined but suddenly inexplicably erotic area just behind my left ear.

In addition his trousers had started to take on a life of their own.

I didn’t mess about. ‘Let’s go,’ I said, pretending not to notice the collective nudging and winking which followed us to the door. And that was where my Met friend began to blow it.

‘I’ve never shagged a DCI before,’ he remarked conversationally, breathing beer at me.

We were outside on the pavement by then, swaying gently, in the cold night air. And as the cool freshness of it hit me, just a hint of sanity returned. What was I, some kind of novelty act?

At that moment, with familiarly miraculous timing, Peter Mellor appeared from nowhere. I couldn’t even remember if he’d been in the pub all evening — another of my lapses — but he seemed, as usual come to think of it, to be completely sober. Peter Mellor didn’t like getting drunk. He was the kind of man who always ensured that he remained in control.

‘Going your way boss, if you want a lift,’ he said to me casually, then switched his gaze coldly to the Met sergeant who removed his arm from my shoulder and leaned unsteadily against the pub wall.

I accepted Mellor’s offer with alacrity. At least I had just enough sense to realise I was getting a reprieve from my own madness.

In the morning I woke with a thick head and a great sense of relief that I was alone in bed.

Typically Mellor gave no hint of anything when I pulled my filthy dirty elderly Scimitar, its original silver now more of a murky grey, alongside his gleaming white VW Golf in the Lockleaze car park. I was, however, quite aware of knowing smiles and stifled giggles from some of the others in the CPT team.

I went straight to the ground-floor kitchen and made myself a strong mug of instant coffee. I also took one to Peter.

‘Think you may have saved me from myself,’ I murmured, as I placed on his desk the least stained and chipped mug I had been able to find. It bore an only slightly battered image of Princess Diana.

I saw him glance with an almost imperceptible wince at my rather embarrassing offering, and in any case remembered too late that Peter only drank out of his own carefully washed plain white china mug which he kept in his bottom drawer.

My favourite sergeant grunted, and raised big brown expressionless eyes.

‘Doubt it,’ he said. ‘Pathetic bastard’ll boast about you anyway.’

I grinned. That I could live with. I still believed, with perhaps surprising naivety considering my job, that the truth had a way of surfacing all on its own.

I spent Christmas with my elder sister, Clem, and her family, who had moved back from London to run a small seaside hotel in our home town of Weston-super-Mare. Clem, extraordinarily enough short for Clematis, and I had both been named after flowers by our dotty mother. I reckoned I had got the best of the bargain. Rose was at least a halfway normal name. I had little doubt that mother, who suffered from bizarre delusions of misguided grandeur and whom Clem and I referred to as Hyacinth, after social-climbing Hyacinth Bucket in the TV series, could equally well have chosen to call me Bougainvillaea or Bird of Paradise. Clem and I were good friends. I was fond of her husband and two children, and I found that I enjoyed Christmas with them rather more than I had expected to. This enjoyment was assisted, of course, by the absence of our mother who would normally have required to be present at such a family gathering but had found herself a new man friend — all her friends were inclined to be new as they rarely lasted long — whose company she temporarily preferred.

Back at work in the New Year all of us in CPT and our colleagues in Social Services continued to plug away unsuccessfully with the Stephen Jeffries investigation. By the first week in February I knew that the time was approaching when decisions would have to be made one way or another. I felt fairly depressed again, a state of mind not improved by returning to the cold reality of my currently rather lonely and unfulfilling life after the warmth of the family Christmas in Clem’s comfortably stylish home.

Sitting at my desk indulging in a certain amount of self-pity on a wet Monday morning, following yet another empty weekend, I realised that drastic action was called for. At lunchtime I sent a DC down to McDonald’s for comfort grub — Big Mac and chips followed by Maple syrup pancakes. I told myself that allegedly abused children did not necessarily deserve a total monopoly on junk food, and simultaneously resolved to put my life in order.

The first thing was to sort out my accommodation. I knew only too well that the grubby overcrowded room to which I returned every night was enough to depress anyone. It was also quite beyond redemption. I was on my own now and I may as well get used to that and make the best of it. What I needed most of all was a proper home of my own.

Simon had told me the money from the sale of the bungalow would be through that week, and Simon rarely got things wrong. I decided to start looking straight away for an apartment to buy. One of those new luxury ones in the old docks would do just fine. Bristol was a good place to live, and it was time I started living again. For myself and only for myself.

I spent the afternoon sifting yet again through the accumulated paperwork on the Jeffries case. Basically we had nothing. Zilch. If Jeffries wasn’t squeaky clean then his act was super impressive and he appeared to have left no trail at all behind him. I really did not see how the CPT could do much more now than advise that the Social Services continue to keep a watching brief on the Jeffries family, and yet a lurking uneasiness that I could not explain seemed to grow within me even as logic and lack of evidence combined increasingly to suggest that Richard Jeffries must be innocent. There was something about the man that disturbed me, and that had maybe been so, if I was honest, from the beginning. Perhaps he was too good to be true. And maybe that way of thinking said as much about me and what seventeen years of policing had done to me as it did about Jeffries or anyone else. Certainly appearing to be rather too decent a human being hardly made it possible, thankfully, to arrest a man on a child-abuse charge.

Titmuss had been right about one thing at any rate, this was definitely a messy case. There was really nothing conclusive either way. I knew I had to put a particularly detailed report together though, because of the sensitivity of the suspect, and the quicker I got it over with the better.

I left Lockleaze shortly after eight, and on the way home stopped to buy an evening paper specifically for the property supplement. As I climbed back into my car I glanced at the front page. I never got to the supplement.

‘Woman killed in island mystery,’ screamed the splash headline. ‘Millionaire fiancé distraught.’

Natasha Felks was dead. Her body had been fished out of the water off Abri Island, by the crew of the Clovelly lifeboat, in circumstances which shook me rigid. It seemed that Tash had gone to the Pencil to look for dolphins — and that the young boatman who had taken her there had failed to pick her up. Natasha, stranded, as I could imagine so well, clinging to the rock face, hanging on literally for her life, had at some stage been unable to maintain her hold. She had fallen into the sea and drowned.