But For The Grace Read online

  They all seemed to be waiting for an answer, a verdict even. She knelt on the floor by the chair and put away her things. Then she picked up the glass and held it out towards the constable. He took it and placed it on the bedside table.

  “I’m going to call for a non-emergency ambulance to take her to Kings Lake General. I cannot be sure of the cause of death. I will contact the coroner’s office - I assume that there is always an actual person available at weekends rather than an answering service?”

  She looked the question towards the policeman but he only shrugged it away. In Manchester, where she had trained, she knew the answer; out here, in the east, things were sometimes done quite differently.

  “So there will be a post-mortem? I’d better tell the family. I’m afraid I gave the impression that…”

  The manager looked disappointed as her voice trailed away.

  “I’ll do that as well. It’s up to you. If they call back, you can tell them or refer them to me. You have my mobile number.”

  One by one, they filed out of the room. The light remained on this time. If he had been left the keys, Kipras Kazlauskas would have gone back in and switched it off, but Ms Miller took them away with her. She asked him to sit outside the door again, just in case any of the residents tried to get into the room. She told him that it wouldn’t be long this time.

  By leaving his door ajar a few inches, turning off his lights and sitting on the end of his bed, Ralph Greenwood could watch the comings and goings. He knew all the signs, of course, after three years in the place, and he spent a few minutes trying to tot up how many had gone out feet first in that time. It was a good few. They liked to hush it up. The place would go into a sort of lock-down while the officials busied themselves in and around the room in question. All this was, presumably, to avoid upsetting the remaining residents – those who had been missed by the scythe this time. Ralph thought that doing completely the opposite might be better; let them all come in and see the body, hold a coffee morning in the room with the corpse still present – it might stop some of their moaning. They might start appreciating how lucky they were to be still alive.

  A uniformed copper was a bonus, though. He didn’t see one of those every time, even though he knew that the police always turned up. Normally they stayed downstairs, a nice cup of tea in the manager’s office, a nice break from fighting crime on the streets of Kings Lake. Where he was from, he’d seen crime up close and personal; this lot had no idea.

  He would miss Joan, though. When they wheeled her by on the trolley a bit later on, he felt that quite strongly. She was a woman of some principle. Even though the past few months had weakened her, she stood up for herself, right to the end. When they tried to move her downstairs into the real nutters’ ward, just because there was a vacancy and there was always more demand for upstairs beds, she had dug her heels in. They had all rallied around her, and somehow the family had got to hear of it, too, via an anonymous call – Ralph couldn’t imagine how that had happened. When the management backed off, they held a party in the day room and even some of the carers knew what it was all about and joined in. That was quite an afternoon. You had to keep fighting or your independence and your dignity were gone in a moment and forever. Ralph had made some of them understand that.

  It was all over by midnight, and he got up, pushed his door shut and then wedged the piece of cardboard into the safety handle so that it could only be turned from the outside with difficulty. His laptop was still on, the green light blinking away in the darkness. He flicked the mouse back and forth, bringing the screen to life. He was glad that he didn’t need much sleep these days. Let the others do that – he would watch the world for them from here, and be their conscience and their guide.

  Chapter Two

  Douglas Waters stood at the window of the snooker room and looked down the drive towards the Dereham road. Headlamps illuminated the trees for a moment but then passed on into the night. Behind him, only the light above the table was switched on, leaving a rectangle of shadow around the edges of the room; the game that he had been playing by himself a few minutes earlier lay unfinished on the table, the balls scattered like irresolute atoms, bearing no apparent relationship to each other now that all movement had ceased.

  He glanced down at the watch, a present – another new and expensive watch to go with the others that were accumulating slowly in his bedside drawer. He ought to move them, put them somewhere safer, an easy target if a burglar ever managed to make it past the security system – heaven knows what they all added up to now… Still ten minutes to go, which meant that he would be here in less than that because he was never late. It was a winding country road, though, and not the easiest place to find. Those lights a couple of minutes ago might have been someone driving past, missing the turning, going right on into the village before they realized their mistake. That would add at least another ten minutes to anyone’s journey. He looked down at the watch again and found that another minute had passed.

  The door behind him opened, letting more light into the room.

  “Here you are. Are we boring you that much?”

  He looked over his shoulder as his wife crossed the room towards him, smiling to show that she didn’t mean it.

  “I’m sorry. Is Marcia much offended?”

  “No. There’s something interesting on the financial news, I think she’s taking notes. She never stops, does she?”

  His gaze returned to the window as he answered.

  “No, that’s why I employ her. Career woman to the end.”

  Jane Waters stood beside her husband and took his arm. For a moment she too stared down the drive through the ash trees towards the road.

  “So that’s what you really like, is it? The career woman – smart, driven, efficient. I’m not sure what it says about me.”

  He clamped his arm to his side, squeezing her hand.

  “It says you are my salvation.”

  There was a mutual silence; they both knew that he meant every word of that. Eventually, still without taking her eyes off the dark, wintry night in front of them, she spoke again.

  “I suppose this brings it all back in a way, him coming here tonight.”

  “We never fell out, never argued. In fact, it was him that told me to go, if that’s what I needed to do. I don’t know why we never stayed in touch.”

  “You needed the complete end to it, a complete separation from everything.”

  He smiled.

  “Ten years is a long time, a hell of a break, though! Ten years!”

  “And now it just seems like yesterday?”

  “Today, tonight, has brought things back, things that I’d not thought about in a long time. We’ve all changed, haven’t we? If we’ve all changed that much, this evening might be embarrassing.”

  “You said that from what Chris has told you, he hasn’t altered much at all.”

  “True. I just thought I’d warn you, even though you are the perfect hostess. It might all be over by nine o’clock.”

  “What’s the time now?”

  “Five to seven. That actually makes him late because he was always early – if that makes sense.”

  “Do you like the watch?”

  “I love it.”

  She poked him in the ribs.

  “Come back to the lounge, talk to Marcia while I go into the kitchen. He’ll be here soon.”

  “And you’re still OK with what I’m planning to say to him? Assuming that everything is still OK, that he hasn’t… Or I haven’t… You know what I mean.”

  She turned him away from the window and looked up at him.

  “Dougie, it’s just dinner with an old friend. Relax. Play it by ear, that’s what you always say. See how it goes. He’s just someone that you used to know, someone that you used to work with. Isn’t he?”

  Waters glanced out of the window and then looked back at her. In the sideways light from the table, she looked different, younger.

  “I hope so.�
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  Smith reversed carefully into the field entrance, hoping that he had left the front wheels with enough purchase on solid ground to pull out again. He opened the new phone and tapped on maps – he’d had this phone for some months now but it would still be ‘new’, he supposed, until he had to think about replacing it some years into the future, though he somehow doubted that this new one would last as long as the old one – too much to go wrong in it. But just as Chris Waters had said, the pin thing was sort of pinging away, showing him his location. He enlarged the image by reverse pinching the screen, as he had been instructed, and now he could see the narrow road that he was on, and enlarging it again showed the turning that he had missed. And there was Dougie’s house, large enough and important enough to appear on this satellite image. Remarkable.

  It even had its own drive, he discovered three minutes later, winding through the trees that hid it from the road. Dougie must have installed a good security system, living out here in the wilds. Smith smiled to himself as he pulled into the parking space to the left of the double-fronted house, all lit up by spotlights. Four cars already there but room for several more, as if this was one of those discreet country places where you could hold small conferences for influential people. For a moment, he panicked; had he misunderstood what Dougie had said on the phone? Was this a major dinner party with local dignitaries? Surely not…

  He debated for a moment and then took the bottle of wine with him to the front door. It was a good one, the off-licence manager who owed him a favour had promised him that, but he still felt like a teenager going to a party with some cheap plonk, just to get through the door. The door which opened before he had a chance to push the brass button below the little engraved plate that said ‘Ash House’.

  “DC.”

  “Dougie.”

  They shook hands in the open doorway, the brightly lit hallway stretching in one direction and the black, chilly night in the other, but in reality both were for a moment back in the lounge bar of The Blue Boar. That was not their last meeting – there had been the leaving do and the speeches, the crowded late-night celebration afterwards in some other pub – but it was in The Blue Boar that they had been open about what the Andretti case had done to them both. It was there that their ways had parted a decade ago – and now, somehow, they had caught sight of each other once more.

  “DC, my wife, Jane. You’ve met before, a long time ago. And this is Marcia, my accountant, as well as our friend! Ladies, DC Smith.”

  Dougie was good at this, a proper businessman now, arranging introductions and drinks simultaneously, and everyone was smiling. Both women shook his outstretched hand, Jane a little demurely and Marcia not all so, but strongly, looking him directly in the eye as she said, inevitably, “DC?”

  “I know not everyone’s into initials. I don’t know how it all started though – some terrible joke in a police station, I expect. David, DC, it’s all the same to me. Whatever you prefer.”

  “I’m going with David.”

  “Blimey –we’ve only known each other thirty seconds!”

  She wasn’t too stuck up to laugh aloud at that, and he thought that the evening would be OK after all. It had been a while though, and it felt a little odd. When Chris Waters had said to him a week ago, ‘You ought to get out more’ before springing the surprise invitation, he had been closer to the truth than he realized.

  “It’s a Moroccan dish, a tagine with lamb and apricots.”

  Smith took another forkful from his plate and chewed it, savouring the combination of sweet dried fruit and spicy meat.

  “It’s absolutely delicious, just like that starter – lovely.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But it’s time to own up now. You’ve got a couple of chefs in that kitchen, beavering away. You’re only in there a couple of minutes each time and then food like this appears.”

  Jane Waters pulled a serious face.

  “I would never lie to you, DC. Dougie has told me how pointless that would be.”

  “So you’re not prepared to own up? I could get a warrant with no trouble and turn the place over.”

  Dougie was smiling as he reached over with the bottle of red, the one that Smith had brought.

  “DC, don’t hide your own light under a bushel – this is a great Shiraz, and the perfect accompaniment to a tagine.”

  Smith accepted a little more in his glass before holding up his hand.

  “Driving, Dougie. Can you imagine uniform’s delight if they pulled me over? I don’t know much about wine, but I know a man who does, thank goodness. As for your wife, I’m going to take her word for it, as long as she’s prepared to sign a sworn statement. That’ll do. I don’t know how I’d explain to Christopher why I’d taken his mother in for questioning.”

  Jane was laughing, and she glanced across at Marcia as she said, “Well, if you do take me in, I’d want the handcuffs and everything!”

  Now the laughter ran all around the table.

  “So, do you take them with you wherever you go, DC? The handcuffs, I mean.”

  “As it happens…”

  He made a gesture of reaching into his pocket and the laughter grew louder. It wasn’t the first flirtatious remark that Marcia had made to him since they had sat down to eat – all very tasteful, just a twinkle of naughtiness, and he imagined that she was playing her part, a lady brought in to entertain a male guest at an intimate dinner party. But it was fun – he hadn’t enjoyed company this much for a while.

  And so it was no surprise when they had finished their first cup of coffee that Jane ordered the two of them back into the lounge while she and Dougie cleared the table. The armchairs were luxurious – deep, soft and supportive – and Smith thought again about just how well Dougie must have done to afford all this. The lady sitting opposite him, of course, would know to the penny just how well Argus Investigations was doing. Strange, isn’t it, how life turns about; ten years ago he was Dougie’s senior officer, advising him about how to deal with a professional and personal crisis, and now here he was having dinner with Dougie’s accountant.

  The thought must have left a trace of itself on his face.

  “What are you smiling about?”

  “Oh, just old times. When you haven’t seen someone for a while, things come back with a bit of a rush, I suppose.”

  “Ten years, Jane tells me. And then you bumped into Chris, and here we are.”

  Smith remembered her being introduced as a friend – she was clearly on good terms with the family, referring to Chris by his first name quite naturally.

  “Yes. It’s a winding old road, especially when you’ve got plenty of it to look back on.”

  Marcia was a good ten years younger than him, perhaps fifteen – he might as well make that clear from the start – not that he saw this as the start of anything but it was as well to be prepared.

  “And you’ve never thought of getting out of the force yourself? Using all that experience, building something up for yourself? Being your own boss?”

  “Yes, about once a week for the last twenty years. But then a case comes up, months go by sometimes, you get involved. It has its compensations. And I doubt if I’m any sort of businessman, to be honest.”

  “Neither was Dougie when he started.”

  “Fair point.”

  Clearing the table seemed to be taking some time. He listened and could hear no other sound in the house – perhaps Jane and Dougie were doing the same. Marcia eased off her shoes, tucked her legs under herself and then began to talk quite informally about how the company had developed since its beginning eight years ago. She knew staff numbers, annual surpluses, and projections into the future for profits and new premises. Argus was approaching the critical point at which it could become a major player in the rapidly expanding business of surveillance and information security. These were exciting times – and Smith could see that she meant it, that she was passionate about the project. He found it almost disconcerting – an
d then he remembered how Sheila would say to him, when a case was taking him over, ‘You’ve got that look on your face!’ Marcia had that look on her face.

  But Smith realized too that she was briefing him – this time together in the lounge had been planned before he came through the front door of Ash House. It wasn’t too difficult to see where things were heading.

  “And he thinks very highly of you…”

  Smith had to catch up a little, her last words having taken him unawares.

  “Well, thanks for that. The feeling’s mutual, and I’m sorry that we’ve been out of touch for so long.”

  “Who knows what-’

  She stopped when the door opened and Jane entered with fresh coffee, followed by Dougie, carrying a tea towel as if he needed to convince them that he really had been busy in the kitchen. They sat, and the four of them chatted about families and old friends. It was Dougie who said that they were sorry to hear about Sheila, and Marcia asked a couple of questions about her, sensible, sensitive questions, because she wanted to know and because she wanted to show that she was not afraid to ask them. Then it was on to children and grandchildren, and some photographs, and Smith glanced at the fine antique clock on the mantelpiece and wondered how long it would be.

  At half past nine exactly, as if that too had been prearranged, Dougie said, “Do you fancy a game of snooker, DC?”