A Narrow Victory Read online

  CONTENTS

  Chapters

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  By the same author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  Hillary Greene rolled over in bed, looked out of the porthole window onto the canal bank beyond and blinked lazily in the mid-August sun. A glance at her watch told her that it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, so she allowed herself the luxury of a stretch for a few moments before climbing out of the narrow bed.

  Yawning, she stood up and walked a bare step to her wardrobe, where she ran a critical eye over the tiny space and the mostly sombre work-orientated suits that hung there. Surely on a summer’s day, when you were going back to work after a fortnight’s holiday, you could be forgiven for donning a colourful summer dress?

  Or maybe not.

  Her lips pulled into a small smile as she contemplated her boss’s reaction if she walked into Thames Valley Police Headquarters dressed like someone from an M&S advert.

  Detective Superintendent Steven Crayle would probably be delighted.

  Then again, she had just spent the first week of her holiday with him, on board the Mollern, her narrowboat home, cruising around the Gloucestershire canal system. The weather had been good, and they’d managed to avoid most of the usual tourist spots, in between testing out the limits of the small confines of her bed.

  Yes, Steven might be happy to see her arrive for work dressed in something more feminine, but professionalism – even in a now retired and still very much ex detective inspector – was too ingrained in her for her to give in to temptation. Instead she reached for a pale beige skirt and jacket combo, and made do with a multi-coloured blouse in gemstone colours to mark the lovely summer’s day outside.

  Habit had her in and out of her minuscule shower in three minutes flat, and after a sparse breakfast of brown bread toast and three cups of coffee, she stepped off the boat with a definite spring in her step.

  Slinging her large black leather bag over her shoulder, she walked along the towpath to where Puff the Tragic Wagon was parked in his usual spot in the neighbouring pub’s car park. As she unlocked the car door, she thought she could just distinguish the first hint of autumn’s approach. There was that slight coolness in the early morning air, and the housemartins skimming the canal had that frantic look about them that told her they were desperate to see their second brood fledged.

  Her mind went back briefly to that moment some time ago when she’d been standing in almost this very spot, and had been dragged off into the bushes by a man holding a knife to her throat, but she refused to let the image linger.

  That was all sorted, and didn’t need any re-hashing.

  With a mental shrug, she opened up the car and got in. Puff, a somewhat ancient Volkswagen Golf, started after his usual nominal grumble, and from the tiny hamlet of Thrupp the commute into Kidlington on the outskirts of Oxford took her barely five minutes.

  As she was idling at one of the many sets of traffic lights that Kidlington had to offer its happy motorists, her mind was still on her final week’s holiday.

  Because Steven had only been due one week’s leave, she’d spent last week abroad on her own, in a pleasant little mountainous spot in northern Spain’s Basque region, where the tourists were few and the frogs were many. (The amphibians, that is, not the French.) Her nights had been serenaded by so much chirruping, croaking, and singing by the nocturnal males that by the time she’d become used to the racket and could get a full night’s sleep, it had been time to come home.

  The next time she was going to bloody Benidorm and be done with it.

  But she had managed to enjoy herself, in spite of being that butt of all jokes, a single, middle-aged English woman abroad. No Spanish waiters had dared to pinch her backside, she thought with a brief grin – none of them would have dared!

  For all that she had a curvaceous hour-glass figure, and her long cap of bell-shaped hair was still a rich and glorious chestnut colour, there was something about her that warned off many contemplative males. Perhaps the copper in her came through, in spite of the fact that she no longer actually held a warrant card. But although she now worked in a civilian capacity as a consultant to the Crime Review Team, where she helped work cold cases, somehow she was always going to be DI Hillary Greene.

  Or perhaps the fact that she and Steven Crayle were now such a firm item, thus making her officially no longer available, sent off some kind of invisible signal that, alone and abroad or not, warned others that she was no desperate female seeking sun, fun and sangria.

  Most likely, she thought with an inner snort, it was just the usual, habitual piss-off look that was generally to be found in her sherry-coloured eyes that did it. It was a look that many a villain had seen in their time, and most of them had known instinctively not to test it.

  Now as she turned into the car park fronting Thames Valley HQ, Hillary sighed as the familiar building greeted her. Monday morning and back-to-work ennui battled against a more upbeat sense of anticipation. Who knew what cold case would be coming her way next? Or just how pleased would Steven be to have her back?

  As she parked and turned off the ignition, Hillary Greene allowed herself to contemplate those two questions. The first was by far the easiest to deal with. Work had always been her mainstay. It gave her life purpose and definition and her career had always been the driving force of her adulthood. So whatever case was on her desk, it would get her best efforts.

  The second question was far more worrisome. The cruise with Steven, in the intimate confines of the Mollern, had been wonderful, and had gone far better than she’d ever allowed herself to hope. She’d hesitated long and hard before asking him to go out on the boat with her for such a long period of time. A narrowboat, by its very nature, is a very intimate space, and she’d half-expected them to find it too much. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find niggling arguments arising, or for them to have to acknowledge that so much time spent together had been a mistake.

  After all, they’d only been together as a couple for a matter of six months or so.

  But it simply hadn’t happened. In fact, rather the opposite. Their week together had only drawn them closer. They’d spent lazy days cruising, before tying up in some out-of-the-way spot and sunbathing. They’d spent hours just talking about anything and everything, before cooking something simple but delicious al fresco and then sleeping rolled up together, ridiculously closely, in her narrow bed.

  They’d learned so much more about each other, and seemed to like whatever they’d learned.

  And for some reason, she found it almost worrying.

  Perhaps because her life, up until Steven Crayle had come into it, had been largely predictable and, if not exactly uneventful, then at least manageable.

  When she’d retired from the police force just before her fiftieth birthday, she’d cast off in her boat and chugged out to explore the canal system, and never thought to see her old haunts again. But after a year, she’d been back. And her canny boss, Commander Marcus Donleavy, who’d predicted just such an event, had had a place all lined up ready and waiting for her.

  It was not possible for her to get her old position back, of course, even if she’d wanted it. But in an offshoot of the Crime Review Team (or CRT as it was known), one very good-looking Superintendent Steven Crayle worked with a small team dedicated to cases that needed tried-and-trusted methods, and an SIO with experience in murder cases.

  Old crimes, by their very nature, were notoriously hard to close, and Hillary, of cour
se, had gone for the bait like a trout rising to the fly. Just as Donleavy had so smugly predicted. And so, a year after thinking that she’d left the police service for good, and that her days catching villains were totally behind her, Hillary found herself once again back in the thick of it, this time working as a civilian consultant in a new team.

  And her first day on the job, she’d been introduced to her new boss.

  Hillary’s first thought was that the man was a walking cliché – tall, dark and handsome, he was also a good six years her junior. Long divorced, with children that he hardly ever saw, he had not been at all happy to have her more or less forced on him by Donleavy.

  Which was, Hillary had had to admit, not altogether surprising, since no one could deny that she came with baggage. A lot of it. And both good and bad.

  The bad began with her late and extremely unlamented husband, Inspector Ronnie Greene. As bent and corrupt as a three pound note, she’d been on the verge of divorcing him when he’d died in a road traffic accident. And whilst subsequent investigations into his activities had proved that he’d run a very lucrative animal parts smuggling operation, it had also cleared her of all involvement.

  Fortunately for Hillary, Marcus Donleavy knew a good detective when he saw one, and her success rate for collars, especially when it came to murder investigations, had been second to none. Her relationships with some of her immediate superiors, however, had always been strictly chequered.

  The time she’d spent working with her best friend and longest-serving boss, Phillip ‘Mellow’ Mallow, had been very successful. They’d become very tight-knit, and she had even taken a bullet for him, and won a bravery award because of it. Between them they had put away half the local big-time villains.

  And then, just a few years ago, he’d been shot dead in front of her eyes, in this very car park.

  One of Philip’s predecessors had openly fancied her and pursued her, until finally admitting defeat and heading back north to lick his wounds. Yet another boss had stolen her husband’s ill-gotten gains and scarpered with them overseas, whilst one had very unwisely tried to ruin both herself and her ex-sergeant, Mel’s widow, and get them thrown off the force. Him she had promptly out-manoeuvred and sent packing off to Hull, where he’d been forced to await his own retirement in chilly solitude.

  All of which had been station-house gossip for years, and none of which could have helped to endear her to one Superintendent Steven Crayle. He’d simply listened to Commander Marcus Donleavy extolling her solve rates, and nodded obediently when he’d pointed out her experience with murder investigations. He smiled through gritted teeth and agreed readily when admitting that the rank-and-file rated her, not least because rumour had it that she’d gone above and beyond the call of duty in protecting her ex-sergeant, Janine Mallow, when she’d killed the man who’d murdered her husband.

  The moment she’d arrived, he had handed her the coldest, most dead-end unsolved murder case he could find, and then had been forced to watch her as she solved it. And all the while, as he had finally been forced to admit, fighting the urge to keep his eyes (not to mention his hands) off her.

  Hillary was still smiling at the memory of how very good he was with those said hands as she walked into the main lobby of the building and instantly fell foul of the desk sergeant.

  ‘Bloody hell, the wanderer returns. Where’s the suntan then?’ he jeered amiably.

  Desk sergeants, as Hillary had very quickly learned as a raw recruit and a still-wet-behind-the-ears WPC, were a breed apart. They knew every last drop of station-house gossip, had seen it all and done it all, and took flack from nobody. In the instances where they had first contact with the public, they had an almost supernatural ability (or the good ones did) to sift the wheat from the chaff. And they had no respect for authority at all. And the latter was probably one of the main reasons why Hillary had always liked them and got on with them so well.

  By way of reply to this first wave of witty banter, she gave a pretty standard two-figured reply and, without breaking stride, headed for the stairs that led down into the bowels of the building.

  With the sound of the desk sergeant’s pithy riposte about Steven’s mating habits still ringing in her ears (which would, incidentally, have been legally answerable in a slander case), she headed down to the labyrinthine underworld where the CRT hung its hat.

  The vast bulk of the department was desk-bound and computer-based, of course, but she had very little to do with that. They dealt with the majority of cold cases that were solved due to the advancement of DNA profiling and the improvement in forensic science. These colleagues of hers brought villains to book for past crimes by comparing old samples of DNA taken from unsolved cases, and matching them with more recent crimes. Rapists who’d long thought they’d got away with it suddenly had their collars felt when the CRT computer programmers ran their names through the database and matched their DNA to, in some cases, decades-old crimes.

  But Steven Crayle ran a unique (not to say very small and totally under-funded) department that was dedicated to reopening cases where only good old-fashioned detective work would do.

  Which was where Hillary came in, and why Donleavy had been so insistent that Steven include her. So far, she’d been working here less than a year, and had already successfully removed three unsolved murder cases from the files, as well as put away a very dangerous individual who had stalked a number of women and almost killed one of their own.

  His big mistake had been in trying to add Hillary Greene to his list of victims.

  Now, as she pushed open the door to her tiny office (it had literally once been a stationery cupboard), Hillary didn’t even reach up to touch the now almost invisible scar on her neck. Nowadays, she very rarely had nightmares about feeling the cold slice of the knife blade on her skin, nor did she any longer have flashbacks to the attack in the pub car park.

  With a sigh, she flung her bag under her desk, booted up her computer and checked her emails. Time to get on with the daily grind. Nothing much stood out, but after two weeks away she spent a couple of hours dealing with the inevitable admin, before, at just gone ten, taking a break and heading for the slightly bigger office where her team worked.

  Not that they could really be called her team, Hillary mused, as she walked down the gloomy corridor towards the sound of voices.

  It was hardly like her glory days, when as a fully active and accredited DI, she had a whole bunch of people at her command – specialists, subordinates, and not to mention a whole range of old-pal networks that helped her to get the job done.

  When she’d first arrived at CRT, this change had been something of a culture shock for her. As Donleavy had explained, the current economic situation meant that police forces everywhere were downsizing, and new recruits were few and far between. And since cold cases were inevitably low down on the totem pole, it was hardly surprising that Steven’s small unit-within-a-unit would be the least well funded of all.

  Consequently, Steven Crayle had been the sole working, official police presence. After him there came Hillary Greene and another ex-copper, Jimmy Jessop, a grey-haired former sergeant who had quickly become her right-hand man. Apart from them, there had been two youngsters who were gaining ‘work experience’ and who might, at some unspecified point in the future, join up and become regular coppers.

  Of these, Sam Pickles was a student at Brookes University studying for his BA, and the other, Vivienne Tyrell, had been a precocious little madam, job-hopping and seeking her place in life while simultaneously (and unsuccessfully) trying to seduce her boss, the gorgeous Steven Crayle.

  But after the events of their last case, when Vivienne’s life had, for several long hours, hung in the balance, she had not surprisingly taken the decision to leave the team, and had headed instead for the bright lights of London and a career in the media.

  Which suited all of them much better.

  Now, as she paused in the doorway and looked around, she expected
to see two new faces, and did so. Donleavy had told her before her break that he would be interviewing for two new placements.

  Jimmy saw her first and grinned across at her. ‘Morning, guv. Had a nice holiday?’ The small room was, as usual, crammed with two shared desks, telephones, laptops and assorted, ill-matched chairs. A lone spider plant battled for survival under an ultraviolet-light-producing lamp. It looked like it was losing.

  As he spoke, Sam Pickles looked up from his computer and nodded hello at her. Sandy haired and freckle faced, he was shaping up nicely, Hillary thought, with some satisfaction. He’d worked well with her on the previous cases, and since uni was out for the summer, she knew he’d been working (unpaid and on a strictly voluntary basis) full time, helping out the computer-based team whilst Hillary had been away. She’d considered it time well worth spent toughening him up a little and showing him the ropes and she was quietly confident that, once he’d graduated, he would apply to join up and have no trouble being fast-tracked up the ranks.

  ‘Lovely, thanks,’ Hillary said, ‘apart from the noisy bloody frogs.’ Her eyes went thoughtfully to the two newcomers, who no doubt instantly had her pegged as a raving Francophobe.

  Donleavy had personally chosen them both, and she had just been going over their files to familiarize herself with their circumstances. What she’d read had certainly been interesting, and she’d instantly been able to tell why the commander had chosen them.

  ‘Guv, this is Zoe Turnbull and Jake Barnes,’ Jimmy introduced them briefly. ‘Zoe, Jake, this is Detective Inspector Hillary Greene – listen to what she says and do it.’

  ‘Hardly the Battle of Agincourt speech, Jimmy,’ Hillary said with a grin. ‘And it’s ex DI, actually. Welcome to the team.’

  Zoe Turnbull, Hillary knew from her personnel file, was twenty-four years old but looked more like a teenager. This might have had something to do with her style of clothing, hair and make-up, which distinctly leaned towards the goth. Her short somewhat spiky hair was jet black and had scarlet-coloured tips, and was the perfect foil for a rather gamin-shaped face. Her eyes had the inevitable black gunk liberally applied, and her lipstick was a matching scarlet. She was wearing black denim jeans that fit her lean frame well, and some sort of faded black T-shirt with a logo that was now indecipherable.