MURDER ON THE OXFORD CANAL Read online

  It showed, if she had but known it, on her face.

  As Hillary drew level, she noticed the younger woman straighten up, as if expecting some kind of reprimand. Just what was the sergeant’s problem? Hillary wondered wearily. As far as she could remember, she hadn’t done anything to step on her dainty toes.

  It didn’t help that she instantly felt awkward and ugly the moment she reached Janine. Janine, at five foot six, was a good three or four inches shorter than Hillary. And blonde. Damn her. And thin. Double damn her.

  But she had the makings of a good copper, and like any SIO, Hillary knew it was part of her job to teach as well as lead.

  Even if the trainee would obviously rather be taking orders from anyone else but her.

  Well, perhaps not from Frank Ross.

  ‘What have we got?’ she asked, trying not to sound like a growling dog that had just had its bone taken away.

  ‘Boss,’ Janine said, by way of greeting. ‘A Mrs Millaker was out walking her dog this morning. Came across the body at roughly seven thirty. She starts work at nine — in a wine shop in Summertown. Called in on her mobile and waited for us to show.’

  Hillary nodded. The usual, then. It was amazing just how often dog walkers came upon dead bodies. You’d have thought, she mused, that the general public would wise up and stay at home.

  She glanced at the woman who was standing a little way down the towpath. She looked distressed, embarrassed, curious and excited at the same time. Hillary fought the urge to tell her to buy herself a cat. Or a budgie.

  She would leave it to Janine to get a full statement from her later.

  Instead, she walked to the edge of the lock and glanced at the doc.

  Doc Steven Partridge wouldn’t see fifty again, although you’d never know it by the clothes he wore — and the hair dye.

  He played squash. And seemed to enjoy it. To Hillary, who loathed every type of sport and all physical exercise, this said it all. Nevertheless, she kind of liked the man. He had the usual pathologist’s gory humour, but he was respectful to the dead, and didn’t treat coppers too harshly either.

  ‘Doc,’ she said quietly.

  He turned his thoughtful, rather watery blue eyes her way for a moment, and smiled briefly, as if needing a few moments to recognise her. She didn’t take it personally. No doubt he’d been miles away.

  ‘Hillary. So you got this one, did you?’ he said, somewhat unnecessarily.

  She nodded, and looked down. Then she wished she hadn’t. Looking at bodies wasn’t her favourite occupation.

  To make matters worse, the lock was out. And this one seemed deep. How far down was the body? Fifteen feet? More? She’d never liked heights. She felt a little light-headed and quickly looked up.

  Swaying barley gleamed in the neighbouring field. Behind her, she noticed, was the typical English hedge — a mixture of hawthorn, blackthorn, wild damson, alder and other assorted bushes. Behind that a grazing field with seemingly nothing in it, and beyond that a railway track. She could even hear a train approaching.

  She turned more fully to watch it go by — a three-carriage, blue, green and white express. Even if a train had been going by at the fatal moment, she doubted that any of its passengers would have been able to see anything through the green thicket.

  ‘He looks a bit battered about to me.’ Steven Partridge’s voice pulled her back from her thoughts and she turned and looked down once more.

  The body was hard to make out, floating face down as it was. She could see dark hair and what had once been a white shirt bulged out in places with trapped air. The legs looked very dark. Denim? Jeans? A youngster, then? A teenager, perhaps, on holiday with his mum and dad, who’d drunk too much last night. No. They’d have been looking for him by now.

  But why was she assuming the body had gone into the water last night? It could have been in the lock only a matter of hours. Or even minutes. Could he have been one of a party of students? Oxford wasn’t far away, and canal holidays were popular with them nowadays. Somewhere, a few miles up the towpath, there could be a whole host of teenagers waking up with headaches, and wondering where old so-and-so had got to. ‘See the angle of the left leg? And the dark stains on the bottom of the shirt, where it’s tucked into the waist?’ The doc’s voice once again interrupted her musings. ‘Looks to me like he took a right bashing.’

  Beside her, she felt the svelte, blonde presence of her sergeant and tried to ignore her stomach’s insistence that, once back at the Big House and no longer contemplating a corpse, she should tuck into the canteen’s sausage and egg special.

  ‘Propeller damage?’ she asked, expecting no reply. Police surgeons, pathologists and medical personnel in general were notorious for not sticking their necks out. Opinions came after the post-mortem, rarely before.

  Steven Partridge sighed.

  ‘I wasn’t sure whether or not to open the lock, boss, and get some uniforms to wade in and move him. Or whether to flood the lock and bring him up. It’d be easier to get him out that way.’ Janine already knew what Hillary’s response would be but, as she so often did in the DI’s presence, she felt the need to talk, say something. Probably because, before all this guff had come out about Ronnie Greene, Hillary’s track record had been good, and Janine wanted to know how she managed it. Hillary consistently got good results, so the gossip had it. In fact, old Marcus was known to think she had a “real detective’s mind.” Whatever the hell that meant.

  ‘No, don’t flood the lock,’ Hillary said at once. ‘In fact, I suppose we’d better call out the divers. Who knows what fell out of the victim’s pockets down there?’

  ‘Boss,’ Janine said quietly, and moved a few steps away to use the phone and summon the police diving unit. Exercising this little bit of control made her feel better again.

  Hillary, long since immune to the joy of giving orders, was now staring down as morosely as the doc. No doubt there’ll be plenty of mud to sift through down there, she thought. She didn’t envy the divers their job.

  Thinking of professionals doing their job, how come the doc wasn’t down there now, in his white overalls and wellies, valiantly examining the body?

  ‘You not going down there, then?’ Hillary said, hiding her smile carefully, as Dr Partridge glanced down automatically at his Yves Saint Laurent ensemble. His expertly plucked eyebrows rose a scant millimetre or two.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ he said. ‘Look what happened to the last silly sod who went down there.’

  There was no answer to that.

  CHAPTER 2

  Superintendent Marcus Donleavy leant back in the comfortable leather swivel armchair he’d purloined from the police liaison officer. He cast a brief smile on DCI Philip Mallow, who’d just walked in.

  ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’

  ‘Sit down, Mel.’ His use of the officer’s nickname was a tacit acknowledgement of their friendly relations. ‘Just thought I’d bring you up to speed on the latest developments concerning the Ronnie Greene affair.’

  Marcus was dressed in his usual navy blue suit and trademark black tie, but his face had a drawn look that wasn’t at all usual.

  Mel, who was in the act of easing his six-foot-two frame into the rather less comfortable chair, glanced up, a grimace on his clean-shaven face.

  ‘Trouble?’

  Marcus waved his hand, palm down, in a rocking motion. ‘Yes and no. Seems they’ve definitely got their teeth into something, but so far there’s nothing that ties us in. Or Hillary.’

  While he spoke, Marcus watched Mel speculatively. Station gossip had it that Mel was rather fond of Hillary Greene, but he could detect nothing of the sort in the thoughtful blue eyes now.

  ‘Well, that’s good. Mind you, I never thought Ronnie Greene would have been the kind to share his action with anyone else . . .’ Mel’s voice trailed off.

  Marcus looked at him. Tactfully, Mel was keeping his mouth shut but Marcus knew he was almost certainly thinking the same thing as he was.
If Ronnie’s corrupt little ways had infiltrated the Kidlington HQ, there was really only one place to look. Ronnie Greene and Frank Ross had been as close as two ticks on a sick parrot.

  ‘They’ve requested an interview with Hillary this week,’ he said.

  “They” were the officers from the Discipline and Complaints Department who, over two months ago now, had been assigned by the Police Complaints Authority to investigate Ronnie Greene.

  The “Yorkie Bars,” as they were universally known, came from a North Yorkshire force, so everyone at the station was currently engaged on thinking up scathing jokes and insults about Yorkshire puddings, Leeds United, cricket and everything else Yorkshire. One university graduate had even come up with a War of the Roses pun that nobody got, but it was supposed to be very derogatory indeed towards Yorkies, so everybody laughed at it.

  Mel sighed. ‘Well, no point trying to put ’em off, I suppose. Sooner they’re out of her hair, the better. It beats me what they expect to find. She left him more than, what, a good six months ago?’

  Marcus echoed his sigh. ‘Unfortunately, it’s looking as if our Ronnie had his hand in the till for a good few years. So it’s well within their purview to take a good long look at the wife, don’t you think?’

  The fairness of his words, however, were belied by the hard glint in his eye. Like everyone else in the station, from the humblest PC to the highest brass, Marcus didn’t like cops investigating cops. Full stop.

  Mel snorted. ‘Yeah, right. I just hope somebody’s put them right on Ronnie Greene’s wandering hands and eyes. And made it clear that theirs wasn’t exactly a match made in heaven. If Ronnie was raking in the dosh, Hillary’s the last woman he’d have spent it on. Or trusted to hide it for him, for that matter. In fact, knowing her, she’d have been quite likely to donate the whole lot to the Sally Army, just to see the look on his face when he found out.’

  Marcus grinned. Mel was certainly quick to defend Hillary, but was there anything more to it? No, Marcus couldn’t see them as a pair. Mel, for all his laidback reputation, was an ambitious sod, and although Hillary was too, there was a difference. A vast difference.

  Mel wanted to be chief constable one day. He was political. He knew how to cultivate friends in the right places and play the game. But Hillary . . . Marcus had always thought Hillary simply hated bad guys. And girls. Just liked doing the job. Enjoyed seeing crooks take the fall. To Mel, that was almost a means to an end, but with Hillary, he’d always felt, there was something far more personal about it. It was as if she enjoyed being a copper in a way very few of them did. He’d never known her to complain about public bias, for instance. Some cops got fed up with the “pig” jokes, friends’ carefulness with their drinking whenever a cop was invited to a party, the endless innuendoes about racism, elitism, or whatever “ism” was currently in vogue. But Hillary never seemed to care. If a member of the public barracked her at a crime scene, for instance, if anything it made her smile. And, for all his “mellow” reputation, that wasn’t something Marcus could ever see the chief inspector doing.

  Mel was too wise about himself not to have at least some idea that they were oil and water. And since masochism wasn’t one of his faults, who did Mel have his eye on? One thing Marcus was sure of, Mel’s two previous divorces hadn’t been enough of a case of “once bitten, twice shy” to keep him away from the ladies.

  ‘So, you want me to tell Hillary to keep herself available?’ Mel offered now, looking a little surprised when Marcus shook his head.

  ‘No, I’ll do it. Besides, I wanted to tell you — I’ve assigned her to a case.’

  Mel looked even more surprised, as well he might. To all intents and purposes, Hillary had been practically desk-bound since her husband’s death and the allegations of corruption that had quickly followed. He must be wondering why Marcus was giving her an assignment now.

  But a second later, he nodded. ‘Of course, if Hillary is working an ongoing case, she’ll have less time to give to the D&C people.’ Marcus nodded back. ‘Why make it easy on the buggers?’

  ‘So, what’s the case?’ Mel asked.

  ‘Suspicious death.’

  Mel frowned.

  Marcus knew exactly what he was thinking. A suspicious death could turn into a murder enquiry, and that might lead to ramifications in certain quarters. True, Hillary herself wasn’t under investigation. Yet. But how long would it be before her bank statements were subpoenaed and her neighbours questioned? Had Mrs Greene been going out a lot lately? New fur coat? New car? Where did she go on holiday last year? The year before?

  Of course they’d find nothing, because there was nothing to find, but to have someone under that kind of pressure heading up a murder case . . .

  ‘Relax,’ he said, and Mel shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘It’s a body in a lock. It’s bound to be some boozed-up boatie who took a tumble. It has death by misadventure written all over it. Or suicide, maybe. Just serious enough to give her some good excuses to be out in the field whenever the Yorkie Bars came a-calling.’

  Mel nodded. ‘OK. I’ll keep an eye on things.’

  Marcus added thoughtfully, ‘When I rang her this morning, she didn’t seem all that up. Still, no one expects her to be chipper, with her life in the crapper. Hey, didn’t know I was poetical, did you?’

  Mel smiled obligingly. ‘I don’t think she likes living on the boat.’

  ‘No?’ Marcus was genuinely surprised. ‘I thought it would have been most people’s idea of a dream come true. Life on the open road. Well, open canal. All that wildlife, kingfishers and stuff. A small space to keep clean, no housework to speak of.’

  Mel shrugged. ‘I suppose it all depends on the circumstances, doesn’t it? I mean, it wasn’t as if she’d always wanted to live on the canal. It’s just that when she left Ronnie, and the bastard kicked up rough about not selling the house till the divorce was final, or letting her live in it either, she had nowhere else to go until her solicitor could flex some of his own muscle. And she’d have been mad to shackle herself to another mortgage before she’d offloaded Ronnie for good. You know what a tricky bastard he was. She had to stay local, and you know as well as I do, living so close to Oxford, what rents are like round here on anything even halfway decent.’

  Marcus nodded. Luckily, he and his wife had bought their modest (but now very desirable) detached house in “The Moors” nearly twenty-five years ago, before things got so crazy.

  ‘Right. Think the government’s latest plan to help us, and the nurses and firemen, to buy locally will be any use?’

  For a while their talk turned to more general topics.

  It wasn’t until Mel was making moves to go that their conversation got back to the internal inquiry that was causing so much aggro.

  ‘If Ronnie has been pulling in the dosh for so long, he must have collected quite a wad,’ Marcus said, automatically lowering his voice even though the door was firmly shut and only Julie, his secretary, was sitting outside. ‘I know he was a bit brash, but he could be surprisingly sophisticated in certain ways.’

  ‘But not with women.’

  Marcus nodded, remembering the string of affairs, always with blondes, usually recruited from the restaurants, pubs and hairdressers of nearby Oxford.

  ‘So, with a bit of luck they’ll never be able to pin him down,’ said Mel. ‘No wads of cash packed around the central heating lagging on the boiler. No gold coins in a safety deposit box. No stocks and shares and a portfolio with a city stockbroker that would have kept a professional footballer’s wife happy.’

  ‘Let’s hope not,’ Marcus said with feeling. ‘At any rate, the bugger’s safely dead. That was one huge favour he did us.’

  Mel laughed and nodded, then rose, stretching as he did so. ‘Who’d have thought there’d be so much money in tiger pricks?’

  * * *

  The sun was definitely shining as if it meant it. Hillary glanced once more at her watch. It was now gone half past ten, and there w
asn’t a cloud in the sky. Behind her some dog roses, the first of the season, were beginning to uncurl their pale pink petals, and a squadron of ducks and one brave moorhen, no doubt attracted by human activity, were clustered around her feet, looking for a bread handout.

  If it wasn’t for the presence of a black, rubber-suited diver below, and the insistent presence of the bobbing corpse, it would be a perfect kind of day. The sort of day Evelyn Waugh would have set on the Isis, with Oxford’s dreaming spires shimmering around his characters, rather than the more prosaic Oxford canal in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘Ready, guv?’ the diver called up to her, and she nodded, wondering why there wasn’t a second one. Didn’t divers always work in pairs, for safety? Probably cutbacks were the reason, she thought, with a non-accountable person’s smug indifference to the cost of things. Or perhaps, with the water being barely four foot deep, the other diver had managed to skive off.

  ‘Right, let’s get the gate fully open,’ she said to the uniforms who’d since gathered. ‘Give the man some room.’

  Then she wondered if she meant the diver or the body.

  Detective Constable Tommy Lynch moved forward and pushed the lock’s arm without waiting for help. Not that he needed it. At six foot three, he was powerfully built, though Hillary had heard his particular sport was running rather than boxing or weightlifting. She nodded in silent thanks as she went past, and a little knot of professionally interested people gathered at the lock’s edge to watch the proceedings.

  Doc Partridge walked down to the end in anticipation of the body’s arrival, and began to lay out a plastic sheet on the grass. From his voluminous bag he pulled out a white coverall that literally covered all, slipping over his shoes and finishing in a hood at the top of his head.