‘Oh yes, boss, fine.’
Grace frowned. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’
‘Well — strictly entre nous — I’m just going through a little difficulty with my other half.’
‘You and a lot of other police officers — it’s a very big club, Jon.’
‘Yes, ha ha. I think we will work it out. Things sort of haven’t been right since we got back from holiday.’ Exton glanced around anxiously. ‘Yes, yes, it’ll be all right. I’ll — I’m going to get back — er — with Guy, if that’s all right?’
‘See you in a bit — and I mean it, Jon. Anytime you’d like to talk. OK?’
‘Appreciate it. I’m getting it sorted, it’ll be fine.’
Grace looked around. Pewe was still talking to Bruno. Sandy’s parents weren’t here. Good. He hadn’t been sure what he might say to them if he saw them. He didn’t trust himself not to have a blazing row with them and this was not the time or place. But he couldn’t help wondering, if they had known Sandy was alive — and presumably her whereabouts since she disappeared over a decade ago — then who else had?
A ridiculous thought came into his head. Pewe? Could he have known?
He dismissed it.
Then he heard a Scottish accent. ‘Roy, remember us — cousins of Sandy — we were at your wedding! Bill and Helen Ross, from Aberdeen!’
He turned and saw an elderly but spritely couple.
‘Yes, of course, how very nice to see you again,’ he said, politely, shaking hands with them. He had pretty much a photographic memory for faces but could not really remember them.
‘Such sad circumstances,’ Helen said, ‘our hearts go out to you.’
He chatted for some minutes with them, aware that the wake was rapidly thinning out. When he next looked around, Pewe had vanished. Cleo said she and Bruno would cadge a lift with Roy’s sister, and if he was up for it later, take him for a little drive — he was keen to collect some Pokémon — and it would give her the chance to chat with him.
Grace had been sad in the church, and at the grave, he thought, as he drove away from the pub and headed to the Police HQ. But now he didn’t feel sad any more. He felt angry and puzzled. Anger at Sandy’s parents, puzzled by Cassian Pewe’s behaviour, and wondering.
Were Sandy’s parents the only people who had known the truth all this time? Yet Sandy had never been fond of them or close to them. Was it really likely she had been in touch with them, in regular contact, sharing her secret? To spare them the agony of not knowing?
Or had Sandy sent them a suicide note too, that he was not aware of, telling them everything as well? And they were just winding him up, out of spite? But why would they do that?
To score a pathetic little victory?
God, he had thought that in burying Sandy today, he would at last have closure; but instead she had sprung on him not only a son he never knew he had, but also another mystery.
Right now, as he approached the barrier at Malling House, he parked those thoughts, and switched his mind back to the myriad complexities of Operation Bantam. And something that was worrying him about it.
A definite shadow.
As he entered his office that shadow darkened. There was a message awaiting him that instantly made him deeply worried.
79
Thursday 28 April
Grace stared at the yellow Post-it note stuck, prominently, on his desk. It was written in his secretary’s handwriting.
Any request to see a Professional Standards officer was a concern. It might mean a complaint had been made by a member of the public, or by another officer; there were intractable procedures the PS department followed, in some cases requiring an officer’s suspension during the enquiry and, fortunately rarely, in some cases his or her dismissal.
That feeling of being back at school and summoned to the headmaster’s study, the one he had every time he visited the Chief Constable or one of the ACCs, was with him now. If it was about Corin Belling’s death, why was it so urgent?
If Professional Standards just wanted some information from him, on some minor matter, it would have been someone more junior contacting him, not Superintendent Paula Darke. He picked up the phone, wanting to get it over with as quickly as possible. But to his frustration he heard her clear, authoritative voice with its faint North London inflexion, requesting the caller to leave a message.
Shit.
That summons on the little yellow sticky square of paper had totally thrown his concentration. He looked at the separate piles on his desk, and knew, after a whole morning out of the office, there would be a good fifty or more new emails in his inbox awaiting him. He sat and started going through them, quickly, to see if any might hold a clue as to what Darke was going to speak to him about. But moments later his phone rang and he heard the Superintendent’s voice.
‘Roy, thanks for calling me. I know you’ve been at your former wife’s funeral this morning, but I’ve got a delicate matter to discuss with you — do you have a moment this afternoon?’
He checked the time on his computer. It was half past two. ‘I’ve got a meeting at 3 p.m., but I could come straight over now, Paula,’ he said.
‘I think we might need a bit longer than that.’ Her tone was neutral, amicable but giving nothing away. ‘What about after that?’
Whatever this was, he wanted to find out quickly and not sit in suspense. And he didn’t like that it was not going to be a quick meeting — that sounded ominous. ‘It’s OK, I can put the meeting back and come over now, if you are free?’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
For all its power and authority, Professional Standards was, like so much of Sussex Police, squeezed into far too small a space for the number of people in the department. Paula Darke’s office was tiny; her tidy desk against the wall, with a view through a large window of a steep grass bank. The only personal object on the desk was a picture of a grinning hunk of a man with a shaven head. Her husband, recently qualified as a detective after years in the Met as a PC. Most of one wall was taken up with a large-scale map of Sussex, sectored up into divisions.
As she swivelled round in her chair to face him, Grace was sitting so close their knees almost touched. The Superintendent had deservedly risen through the ranks, with a reputation for being hardworking, tough but fair. In her early forties, with a strong physique, she was an attractive woman, with classic features framed by short, brown, wavy hair, and dressed, unusually, in uniform — a white shirt with epaulettes bearing her silver crown, a black tie, trousers and shoes.
‘Thanks for coming to see me, Roy — I’ve just returned from a discipline hearing,’ she said and smiled. As always, she exuded energy, as if bursting to deal with a challenge. ‘Nice suit, by the way!’
‘Thank you, what’s the fascination with my suit? That’s the third compliment I’ve had today! It’s a few years old — I bought it in New Orleans.’
‘It’s very slimming on you,’ she said and added quickly, ‘Not that you are exactly overweight! Lucky you, New Orleans is on my bucket list.’ Then her expression became serious and her voice more sombre. ‘It’s a very delicate matter, I’m afraid, Roy.’
Grace felt his heart sinking. ‘What does it involve?’ His own voice sounded strange to him, several octaves higher than normal.
‘It’s about one of your team. DS Exton.’
‘DS Exton?’
Instantly the cloud over him lifted. He hoped the relief didn’t show in his face. Exton. He had a feeling he knew what she was going to say about him, but he was wrong.
‘I think you know, Roy, that at Professional Standards we’ve been running random checks on all force computers. And now, with phones becoming more like computers, we’ve started to include those — something not many officers know. I’ve been tipped off anonymously that DS Exton has recently been accessing escort service sites on his job phone.’ She looked at him quizzically for a reaction.