A Narrow Trajectory Read online

  Not that he’d ever been so stupid as to tell her that, knowing how well she and her home seemed to fit one another.

  But wasn’t that part of the problem? He stirred restlessly on the bed, turning over and sighing grimly at the early hour depicted in green lighting on his digital alarm clock. Hillary clearly had no intention of selling the boat. And she had bought only a year’s mooring rights which meant that they were going to start their new life together with Hillary having the safety net provided by having her old home moored, literally, within her sight. And just what did that say about how much confidence she had in theirs being a long-term relationship? Or was he just being oversensitive? Was he asking too much in wanting her to be as committed to their partnership as he was? Was he just being a big girl’s blouse by feeling so worried by the fact that she had refused to marry him, and opting to co-habit instead? Or was he right to be concerned?

  Steven sighed and rubbed a tired hand across his face. He knew that the ghost of her past marriage still haunted her – and who could blame her? And he’d always known she had trust issues with men. How could she not have? He had been so sure that he could cope with that.

  But what if he couldn’t?

  He muttered an angry oath to himself and turned his back on the alarm clock and determinedly closed his eyes. He was not going to mess things up by being too demanding. He was not going to crowd her, or do anything to make her uneasy. He loved her too much.

  And perhaps, there, right there, was the real thorn in his flesh.

  And yet didn’t they say that in all relationships, there was one who did the loving, and one who was loved? And if that was truly the case, then he was just going to have to accept the fact that he wanted and needed her more than she did him. And not let any stupid, macho bullshit get in the way of their happiness.

  Having sorted that out, Steven closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep.

  On board The Mollern, Hillary Greene slept soundly. She’d gone to bed early, knowing that she was going to need to keep her wits about her and keep her eyes sharp for Jake’s meeting tomorrow afternoon, and she wanted to feel refreshed and alert.

  Before that meeting, she wanted to talk to Lydia Allen’s stepfather. Although Lydia’s disappearance was almost certainly down to her working life as one of Medcalfe’s girls, that didn’t mean that she could blithely ignore any other avenues; a pretty young girl with a disgruntled stepfather causing family tension was a situation that couldn’t be overlooked.

  She had no idea that her lover was, at that moment, lying awake and tormenting himself with doubts about her commitment to their relationship. And if she had, she’d have been astonished by what he was thinking.

  The next morning she awoke early and pulled on a warm pair of dark, bottle green corduroy trousers, matching it with a cream cable-knit sweater and a dark green jacket. The colours suited her dark chestnut cap of hair perfectly, and she applied a light green eye shadow to her lids, and the merest brush of a dark plum lipstick. Then she pulled on a pair of serviceable, flat-heeled black boots with a reinforced toe-cap. Not that she was expecting trouble exactly, but she felt, psychologically, that she needed to be prepared, just in case Darren Chivnor turned rough.

  And besides all that, after that nasty interview with Sasha Yoo, she felt the need to boost her confidence and remind herself who was in charge. It wasn’t often a low-life unnerved her to the extent that the Asian woman had, and it had left her feeling wrong-footed and uneasy.

  It was still near dark as she stepped off the boat, since in early winter, morning light wasn’t always that easy to come by. She stepped onto the towpath and felt the treacherous crunch of frost underfoot. Cautiously, she tested the frozen puddles for ice. And sure enough, her foot started to slide out from underneath her, and with a sigh she reached into her bag and turned on her torch.

  As she did so, something plopped distinctly into the canal right beside her, and her torch spun quickly that way. And she was just in time for the beam of light to illuminate the sleek brown fur and leather-like tail of the large brown rat that was swimming energetically across the icy water. For a moment she watched as the rodent swam competently towards some old bull rushes and disappeared.

  She smiled.

  She had no problem with rats.

  As her dad – a countryman through and through – had often said, there was nothing wrong with a sleek, healthy, brown country rat. They were not the same creatures as the black city rats, and when he’d caught one on his allotments and shown it to an eight-year old Hillary, she had, in fact, thought the bright-eyed, whisker-twitching creature thoroughly enchanting.

  Now she walked towards the pub car park without turning a hair and fished inside her bag for her keys.

  Hillary had long since learned that the human was a far more obnoxious creature than anything that had fur and a tail.

  According to her research notes, Danny Thompson, Lydia Allen’s stepfather, worked at a recycling plant in east Oxford, and it was to this industrial site that she drove after first checking in briefly at HQ.

  Steven had looked a little hollow-eyed, she’d thought, and Jake was clearly keyed up about the meeting that afternoon, so she’d left them to it, reassuring everyone concerned that she’d be back in plenty of time to oversee the meeting at the Central Library later that day.

  The first thing she noticed about Danny Thompson’s place of work was the proliferation of seagulls and crows. They seemed to be everywhere. The next thing was the distinctive odour, closely followed by the noise of the machinery that sorted and crushed the things that society discarded every day. She had no doubts that recycling was the way to go, and she kept reminding herself of this as she made her way to a two-storey, concrete-grey office block that was almost exactly the same colour as the sky.

  The last day of November was threatening rain that might just be cold enough to turn to snow, but at the moment the clouds were simply lying overhead in a menacing, gun metal grey blanket.

  Inside, however, the offices were mercifully warm and oddly cheerful, sporting prime colours on the corridor walls, which were littered with photographs of smiling men and women sporting fluorescent orange coats and yellow hard hats.

  A cheerful, large woman in the first small outer office gave her directions to Danny’s office further back, looking curious, but not offensively so, when Hillary produced her ID card.

  Danny Thompson turned out to be a tall man with a muscular body that was just starting to turn to fat. He must be in his early fifties, Hillary guessed, but still had a head of thick blond hair and pale grey eyes. A good-looking specimen, his jaw was impressively square, and he looked puzzled by her ID, but invited her to sit and at once offered her a mug of coffee which she accepted.

  Hillary very rarely turned down coffee.

  As she sat, she did some swift mental calculations. When Lydia had been in her mid-teens, this man must have just turned forty or so. Just a few years into his new marriage, would he have found a young teenage girl tempting? Or was she doing him a disservice? The trouble was, Hillary tended to think of people as guilty until they were proven innocent. It was something she always remembered to keep in mind, but never particularly worried about.

  Now she smiled at Danny Thompson and crossed her legs elegantly. He noticed, but still seemed more puzzled than anything.

  Briefly she explained who she was, and what she did for the CRT, and concluded amiably, ‘We’re currently taking another look at your stepdaughter’s case, sir.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Diana did mention it. That you had been round to the house, I mean. She was right upset about it. Anything that reminds her of Lydia brings her down. Well, obviously.’

  He had a slightly nasal voice, with something of an accent. Not quite Birmingham, but from that way somewhere.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Thompson, it wasn’t my intention to cause your wife any distress,’ Hillary said. And meant it.

  He shook his head, and waved a hand vaguely in the a
ir. He was sitting behind a slightly untidy desk, and had on a slightly untidy suit. He reminded Hillary vaguely of her old chemistry teacher. ‘Lydia going missing was the worst thing that happened to us,’ he carried on. ‘And until she’s found, Di won’t be able to get on with her life. Not proper, like.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where she might have gone, Mr Thompson?’ she asked quietly.

  Danny’s pale grey eyes widened. ‘Me? No. No idea. I thought at first that maybe she’d finally got some boy to take her on – that maybe they’d gone off on a jaunt together. Then, later, when time went on and she still didn’t get in touch with Di, I thought … well … that something bad had happened to her. It wasn’t like her to let her mum worry by not getting in touch.’

  ‘You think she’s dead?’ Hillary asked bluntly, but not harshly.

  Danny winced. ‘Yes, I suppose I do. I don’t say so, because of Di, like. I mean, a mother’s got to have hope, doesn’t she? Until … well, until a body’s found or something. You’ve got to believe that she might come walking through the door, someday, don’t you?’

  ‘She was in a dangerous profession,’ Hillary said, watching him closely.

  Again he winced, but said nothing.

  ‘Did you have any specific boy in mind?’ she changed the subject slightly.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You said you thought that your stepdaughter might have found herself a boyfriend to look after her?’

  ‘Oh. No. Well, that student she was so hooked on, maybe. But I wouldn’t call him a boyfriend exactly. He was clearly … paying her.’ It obviously caused him discomfort to have to put into words what Lydia had done for a living, and she imagined that it would have made him angry as well. Clearly Daniel Thompson had been raised in a respectable, working-class environment where prostitutes had probably never been mentioned. Well, not in front of his mum or sisters. So just how much had it hurt his vanity and sense of self-worth to have a working girl for a stepdaughter? And just how fragile was his ego?

  Hillary nodded, her face showing none of her thoughts, and casually asked, ‘Which student was this? The one she’d formed a relationship with?’

  ‘She didn’t tell me his name,’ Danny said, then half-grunted, half-laughed. ‘Well, she wouldn’t, would she?’

  ‘Why not, sir?’

  ‘Because he was clearly embarrassed to be seen with her by a member of her family. Even Lydia could tell that. It didn’t fit in with her fantasy that they were a … a normal, loving couple.’

  Hillary frowned. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m a little confused. Perhaps you could explain a bit more? Did she bring him home with her?’

  ‘Hell, no! He wouldn’t want that, would he?’ Danny said with disgust. But whether for Lydia or her erstwhile beau, Hillary couldn’t be sure.

  ‘So where exactly did you see Lydia with this student?’ she probed relentlessly.

  ‘At a pub in town.’ Danny sighed. ‘It was like this, see. It was the work’s annual do, we all get together for a slap-up meal at one of those swanky pubs on the river, you know? Di didn’t come that year because she was down with some sort of bug, so I went on my own. That’s when I saw Lydia. She was hanging around at the bar with a bunch of student-types. Rowers, rugby blues, I dunno. That hale and hearty, hoity-toity crowd who think that life owes them a living. You know the type?’

  Hillary smiled. She did. ‘Yes, sir. And one of them…?’

  ‘A good-looking foreign lad,’ Danny said. ‘Dark, but not a … a … ’ he paused, clearly not sure of the word he should be using. ‘Oh hell, I dunno.’ He gave up the effort to be politically correct with another half-grunt, half-laugh. ‘Anyway, she was hardly in any hurry to introduce us, was she? When she noticed me with the others …’ At this point he broke off and waved a vague hand at the premises around him. ‘We were milling around in this area outside the door to the restaurant.’ Danny shrugged. ‘She didn’t look best pleased about it, I can tell you.’

  ‘Your wife did mention that you and she didn’t get on,’ Hillary probed delicately.

  ‘Nah. She was a real daddy’s girl, and she thought I had taken his place. The truth is, Trevor Allen was a right bastard. Liked his drink and liked knocking Di around. She was well rid of him. And from what Di tells me, he couldn’t have given a toss about his kid. Never read her a bedtime story, took her out to the park, nothing like that.’ He paused, then sighed. ‘Me and Di only got together, like, long after he was gone. But Lydia still saw me as the big bad wolf who ruined her parents’ marriage, and there was no talking sense to the girl. I tried, but …’ He shrugged.

  Hillary nodded. This was pretty much the same story as the one Diana had given her. So it was probably true, unless both of them were lying to her – which was hardly beyond the realms of possibility.

  ‘Did you make contact or did Lydia?’ she asked next.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘At the pub. When you bumped into each other.’

  ‘Oh. I did, I suppose. I said hello. Not much else. I was at the bar getting a pint – I could hardly ignore her, could I? Even though she was dressed in a skirt that barely covered her, and this low-cut top. It was clear what she and the couple of other girls with her were up to. And some of the lads looked real smug, like. They could tell that I knew what was what. Anyway, let’s just leave it that it was pretty embarrassing. We both wished we hadn’t seen the other. But like I said, I had to say hello, right?’

  Hillary nodded thoughtfully. Just how embarrassed had Danny Thompson been, by that impromptu meeting? And just how angry had he felt with the handsome, young students who looked so smug?

  ‘Your wife told me that Lydia had a plan to snare herself a rich student,’ Hillary said casually.

  Danny did the same snort-laugh thing again. His eyes, she noticed, roamed the office restlessly, rather than settle on any one thing. ‘That just goes to show, doesn’t it, how naïve she was? As if some foreign lad with plenty of money was ever going to think of her as anything other than disposable rubbish.’ He looked out of the window at all the crows and seagulls and his own kingdom of rubbish.

  Hillary nodded. ‘It must have been hard. Seeing your daughter in a situation like that.’

  ‘Stepdaughter,’ Danny Thompson corrected at once. ‘I’ve got a boy and girl by my first wife, and my Celia is a nurse. Works up at the Churchill. In radiology.’

  There was definite pride in his voice now.

  ‘Nurses are angels in my opinion,’ Hillary said gently. ‘And they don’t get paid anything near what they should do.’

  Danny nodded. ‘Too damned right.’

  ‘So Lydia must have been a disappointment to you?’

  Danny shrugged. ‘I tried. Di tried. But she just went her own way. Couldn’t be told anything. You know how it is?’

  ‘Yes,’ Hillary said heavily. ‘This student that she seemed to be so fond of, you sure you didn’t get his name?’

  ‘Quite sure. Only it was clear, like, that they knew each other real well. I mean, that they’d been … together quite a number of times. The other girls with her seemed to divide their time and attention throughout the whole group, but Lydia and this one lad stuck together. Like he owned her or something.’

  Hillary nodded, and listened to her alarm bells ringing loud and clear. For one thing was for certain – Danny Thompson must have studied the young people very closely that night, and over some period of time, to notice the dynamics of the situation. And he obviously hadn’t liked the thought of Lydia being bought and owned by the ‘good-looking, dark-skinned foreigner’.

  ‘Do you have any idea what college this lad went to, Mr Thompson?’

  ‘What? No, why should I?’

  ‘Well, I know you said she didn’t introduce you to him, but was he wearing something that gave you some hint as to where he studying? Or what subject? Often students, especially athletic types, wear T-shirts with their college crest or names on them – some kind of sporting affiliation.’

 
‘Oh. Yeah. Right… .’ He paused, clearly thought about it for a moment, and then began to nod. ‘Yeah, you’re right. They do. But I don’t think he was wearing a college sweatshirt or anything. But I heard them talking about some big cricket match. And the lad she was with had done well… . Hold on. Yeah, one of the others was joshing him like, saying how his college never won any silverware so there was no need for him to be so cocky. Hell … what college did he say…?’

  Hillary waited patiently, but without much hope, but for once, her pessimism was unwarranted. There was nothing wrong with Danny Thompson’s memory. Or at least, not when it came to remembering details about his stepdaughter.

  ‘St Bede’s. That was it,’ Danny said, snapping his fingers in triumph. ‘He was from St Bede’s College.’

  Hillary made a note of it, thanked him, and went on to ask a few more questions, but he wasn’t able to add much more. He’d never seen Lydia again after that occasion and had no idea what might have happened to her.

  But on the drive back to HQ, Hillary couldn’t help but wonder just how much Danny Thompson had resented his stepdaughter’s way of life. It had been clear that he had some serious issues with it.

  But just how serious had they been?

  Jake was in the canteen with Rollo Sale, but felt too keyed up to eat. However, very much aware of the new boss’s eyes on him, he was being careful to act cool, and so forked a small morsel of quiche Lorraine into his mouth, and forced himself to swallow it.

  Rollo ate his own chicken salad sandwich with not much more enthusiasm. In his straightforward career, he hadn’t been the senior investigating officer on many cases where an undercover man under his command had to meet, in a public place, a known and dangerous criminal and he was feeling nervous. Distinctly so, since so many things could go wrong. All of which meant that he’d spent much of last night tossing and turning and thinking about all of them – much to his wife’s annoyance and concern.