Janine looked across to see the big lass in pink flouncing off, Butchers mopping at his face with a handkerchief. Didn’t look like a match made in heaven. Her thoughts lit on Clive and Claire then Clive and Felicity, the way their marriage had soured and died, then on Pete. No, she admonished herself, I’m here for a good time and a good time is damn well what I’m going to have.
Day Four – Thursday May 1st
Chapter 17
Janine woke with a crushing headache, roiling guts and an uncomfortable sense of unease. She was too old, her liver too tired to cope with nights like that.
Charlotte was burbling in her cot. It was six am. Janine left her to burble and went to shower. Her mortification grew as snatches from the evening came back to haunt her, her ill-fated attempts to tease Richard and Millie that had quickly unravelled. And Louise! Oh, Lord. Louise warning Janine and Janine playing dumb. And then to crown it all she had confided in Louise, blurted out her doubts. ‘Kids, promotion, a case like this. Usually, usually,’ Janine had found it hard to pronounce the word right, ‘I can hack it, wing and a prayer, yeah? Having it all, they call it having it all. Well… it’s too bloody much, sometimes…’
‘Do you need time off? It can be arranged.’
‘Nah! Just having a moan, Louise, honestly, I can cope. I will cope. I want to get the bastard. Bastards. Plural.’
Shit! Had she offered to resign? Janine tested the notion but could not recall actually saying that.
Did she tell Louise about Pete and Tina and the baby? God, please, no. There were some parts of her life she’d rather keep private. Louise was OK but she didn’t have kids, didn’t have that extra load, day in and day out. Janine didn’t know if that had been a conscious choice or whether it had just never happened or even whether it was something Louise had longed for that never came to pass. They weren’t close enough for that sort of conversation.
Janine’s toes curled and she felt heat on the nape of her neck as she imagined what she might have shared, blithely overstepping the boundaries under the influence.
There’d been some bother with Butchers too, not that she needed to feel any responsibility for Butchers’ behaviour. She had enough on her own plate. Butchers and the fiancée had left the party early on and never returned. Maybe he’d gone after her to make up.
Janine wasn’t sure she was right for him. Butchers had been married once before, had a child as well, but that had all gone wrong and he didn’t see the child. It hadn’t looked like there was much love lost last night. Kim seemed to treat him as a joke. Not a good way to start a marriage – no respect. Butchers could be an idiot but he wasn’t a stupid man. Nor was he malicious. He played the clown at times, his size and demeanour made him an easy target for people’s jokes but he was a diligent detective.
She thought of her own marriage. Did she still respect Pete? Not really. Certainly not the way he was dealing with the whole baby situation. She rinsed the shampoo from her hair wincing as the movement of her head backwards made the pounding behind her eyes even more violent.
She wouldn’t have been so peevish with Millie if she and Richard hadn’t been so condescending, as if suddenly instead of being Richard’s old mate, pals and colleagues, Janine had turned into some embarrassing maiden aunt or alcoholic neighbour to be tolerated and evaded as quickly as possible, passed on to someone else to deal with.
As she turned off the shower, Charlotte cried for attention, a noise that pierced Janine’s skull and made her grit her teeth. She needed coffee and painkillers. Janine put on a bathrobe and went to pick her daughter up and wondered how soon she could rouse the nanny.
She wasn’t the only one suffering judging by the state of the rest of them. Apart from Detective Superintendent Hogg, of course, fresh as a daisy and looking critically at Janine as Janine got herself some water. Janine smiled hello, determined to keep up a front of normality even while her mind was scrabbling around wondering what else she might have said or done in her drunken stupor. Lesson one – do not get pissed in front of the boss.
Janine realized that she had left her laptop in the hall. Pete had stayed the night, bunking in the spare room, not something he did regularly but it meant he hadn’t had to stay up late waiting for Janine to get home and as it was his day off today he could take Eleanor and Tom to school, which they always liked. She rang and got his voicemail and left a message asking him to drop her laptop off at the station once he’d done the school run.
Lisa and Butchers hadn’t arrived as she began the briefing on the murder. Not like either of them. Butchers had never been late in all the years she’d worked with him, and Lisa keen and energetic, wouldn’t dare be late, too eager to make the grade.
‘News has come through from Interpol,’ she told the team, ‘Dutch police have completed the comparison on the DNA profiles of missing Tomas Rink and our unknown victim. No match.’ Janine knew it had been a long shot, though she’d held out a sliver of hope because if the child had come in from another country, it would account for why no-one here had reported him missing.
‘Those we know with easy access to the crime scene are the Palfreys, the Staffords and the builders McEvoy and Breeley. We now have detailed statements from them and we also have house-to-house for the whole of Kendal Avenue plus testimony from Royal Mail staff, window cleaners, meter readers, Avon lady, the works. That little lot needs correlating and mapping out.’ The run of bad weather hadn’t done them any favours. Fewer people had been out and about, and when they were they didn’t linger. They were concerned with keeping dry, getting from A to B as quickly as possible. The heavy rain made it harder to see too, especially if you were driving. They’d got absolutely nowhere finding a primary crime scene. And without the identity of the child they had no idea where to look. ‘Someone put that child there. They weren’t observed, so when did they get the chance?’
‘Paedos, boss.’ Shap began.
‘Sex offenders,’ she corrected him.
‘Them and all,’ he grinned. ‘Known individuals on the sex offenders register in the neighbourhood have been visited and interviewed. No-one’s done a bunk or raised any alarm bells with their probation workers, apart from this one perv who admitted breaching his licence by being within a hundred yards of a school.’
‘He admitted it?’ Richard asked. ‘Perhaps he owned up to that hoping to hide what he’d really been doing.’
Had this been the bearded weirdo by the gate?
‘His story checked out,’ Shap said. ‘He’d travelled across town to Altrincham and spent the days indulging his fetid little fantasies outside a high school there. On the Saturday in question he did the same, loitering near the playing fields. His record’s for raping twelve and thirteen-year-old girls.’
‘A different profile from our victim,’ Janine said. She was distracted by Lisa’s arrival. ‘Late night, Lisa?’
‘I’ve been out with Sergeant Butchers, boss. He’s brought in Luke Stafford and Phoebe Wray.’
What on earth! ‘Has he now?’ She felt a surge of irritation. She couldn’t blame Lisa, Butchers was her senior in rank so if he said jump, Lisa or any other DC would have to, unquestioningly.
‘Continue building a timeline for the crime scene and identify periods when the place was apparently deserted,’ Janine told the team, ‘there may have been opportunities for the killer to leave the body. Anyone need further guidance on tasks in hand see Sergeant Shap,’ she wound up briskly. She set off to see just what the hell Butchers was playing at.