Burying the Past Read online

  Table of Contents

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Judith Cutler

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Judith Cutler

  The Lina Townend Series

  DRAWING THE LINE

  SILVER GUILT *

  RING OF GUILT *

  GUILTY PLEASURES *

  GUILT TRIP *

  The Josie Welford Series

  THE FOOD DETECTIVE

  THE CHINESE TAKEOUT

  The Fran Harman Series

  LIFE SENTENCE

  COLD PURSUIT

  STILL WATERS

  BURYING THE PAST *

  * available from Severn House

  BURYING THE PAST

  Judith Cutler

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2012 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  This eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2012 by Judith Cutler.

  The right of Judith Cutler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Cutler, Judith.

  Burying the past.

  1. Harman, Fran (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  823.9'2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-320-4 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8209-7 (cased)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For my dear husband Keith, who brought the sun into my

  life and makes it shine brighter every day

  PROLOGUE

  Holding Fran’s hand, Mark presses back towards their new house. They’re right up beyond the eaves, on the scaffolding platform installed by the roofers. Despite the guard rails – the builders are as safety conscious as one could wish – his legs want to fold till he’s foetal. But he forces them straight. He focuses on the horizon and tells himself it’s been worth the effort to get here. Maybe it has. Here he’s monarch of all he surveys. Co-monarch with Fran, of course; she’s returning the pressure on his hand, not, he’s sure, with terror like his, but with love.

  Caffy, one of the all-female firm, Pact Restoration (for ‘Paula And Caffy’s Team’, he thinks), is the other side, short, slight, but defying all efforts to think her small and vulnerable. She grins with triumph, as if it was worth giving up a Saturday-morning lie-in just to get him up here.

  Forget the word ‘up’. And ‘lie-in’ for Caffy – does she ever rest?

  Held in the palm of the Kentish countryside, the rectory garden’s like a relief map, with ghostly flower-beds at one end, what look like the foundations of an ornamental fountain, and then a kitchen garden. It will take years to complete their project, but in the short term a motor-mower backed up with a strimmer should work wonders. ‘What a wonderful place for our wedding reception,’ he thinks.

  He’s said it out loud. There’s a huge silence.

  ‘You’re so good together I thought you’d been man and wife for years.’ Caffy is an expert at filling silences.

  ‘With or without the benefit of the clergy, we’ll be together for many more years,’ Fran says, falsely jolly and pointedly ignoring what he said.

  ‘I can’t back out.’ His smile feels stiff. ‘Not now we’ve got a witness. Fran, are you OK with this?’ It might be a decision about staffing. Where the hell is loving eloquence when he needs it?

  She clutches his hand and nods. She’s been ghost-pale; now she blushes, rosily, as if she’s a coy girl, not, like him, well over fifty. It’s hardly surprising, considering how often and how hard he’s snubbed her marriage hints in the past. She’s worn that sort-of-engagement ring for ages, just to silence any police colleagues who might have baulked, even in these liberal days, at any unofficial relationship. Would he have backed out even now but for Caffy’s presence? No. Surely not.

  Again Caffy fills the silence. ‘Me – a witness? At the wedding?’ she says, with a worrying edge of joy to her disbelief.

  He curses himself for using the word. All he meant was that he’d proposed in front of someone else. He ought to correct the mistake, but Caffy’s still speaking.

  ‘No, you don’t mean that. You’ll want an old friend. Family.’

  He makes a desperate grasp at common sense. ‘I guess we’ll be married quietly at St Jude’s in Canterbury. We know the vicar there. So we may not need witnesses in the register-office sense. But nothing would give me greater pleasure than for you to be my best woman.’ All this formal conversation on a roof. He wonders if he’s stepped into the world of Lewis Carroll.

  The women envelope him in a triple hug. Fran is shaking, as if with cold. Whatever their thoughts, they all stare at the garden. Yes, he was right: it will make a grand setting for their wedding reception. He must just think about that.

  He and Fran manage a wry sideways smile. She looks as if someone’s just switched a light on inside her – but also as if she’s afraid they’re about to switch it off again.

  Caffy speaks again. ‘Sorry to bring you down to earth, as it were. This new job of yours, Fran, that Simon Gates was talking about. It’s looking at dead cases, right? Just how dead does the case have to be? Or rather, the body?’

  How can she mention his name so casually? Simon, a protégé of Fran’s and now Kent’s Deputy Chief Constable, heaven help them all, has been stalking the girl, not to put too fine a point on it.

  She’s pointing at the far corner of the vegetable patch, where the weeds and grass grow with far more energy than anywhere else in the plot – anywhere in the garden for that matter. A strip, two or three feet by six or seven. A few canes, weathered grey, sugges
t it was a runner bean row.

  Narrowing her eyes, Fran says, ‘It’s meant to be cases we have on file but have never solved. I suppose it could be any sort of body. But I wouldn’t want one on my own patch. Literally,’ she adds with an amused glance at Caffy, who responds with the broadest of smiles, a lick of her index finger and a mark in the air.

  ‘The omens aren’t good, are they? Nothing like a decaying body to raise the nitrogen levels so spectacularly.’ He squeezes Fran’s hand: together they can deal with whatever problems come with this new situation – both new situations.

  Caffy says, ‘All may yet be well.’

  Pretty much an autodidact, she’s read more than the average professor of English, so no doubt she’s quoting something he ought to have read years ago. But he doesn’t know what. So he just says, ‘I’d say we need to get our colleagues and their clever thermal imaging equipment in here.’

  Which means that somehow or other he has to get down again, doesn’t it? If only he can make his legs work without thinking about the space below.

  ‘One rung at a time,’ Caffy says.

  At last on terra firma, Mark feels more assertive. ‘Now, Caffy, your plans for this evening – this “date” that Simon’s talked you into. I really am not happy.’

  ‘Are you talking as a top cop or as the bloke I’m best womaning for?’

  ‘Both. I want you to stay at home with a box of chocs and your feet up and let Simon and his dinner go hang.’

  Caffy looks straight at him. ‘In the circumstances, not a good choice of verb.’ Her face softens. ‘To use that horrible cliché, I hear what you’re saying. But I’ve given him my word, and that’s it: although he may not always know a hawk from a handsaw, he’s still a human being.’

  ‘And a good cop,’ Fran admits, biting her lip. ‘But he’s been stalking you. It’s an offence.’

  He nods, glad that Fran’s called a spade a spade.

  ‘Yes. But I’m not going to press charges. I just want to spell it out to him that any romance is in his head. No more no less. OK? OK. Unless someone in a white coat gets him sectioned, dinner goes ahead.’ Suddenly, she flips into something like hostess mode. ‘Now, would you like to see how the work inside’s going? We’ve done our best to make some of it habitable for you even if it’s not much more than a glorified bedsit.’

  ‘So long as we can just camp there – we’ve got to move out of the cottage on Thursday, whatever happens.’

  Caffy shakes her head doubtfully. ‘We still need Sparky Smith to come along and do all the wiring . . . It’ll be a damned close run thing,’ she concludes.

  ONE

  Detective Chief Superintendent Harman needn’t have been supervising the operation at all – indeed, she was virtually paid to stay away from such interesting events. These days her life revolved around endless acrimonious meetings as she desperately defended the tattered Kent CID budget. This was the only reason, she told herself, not necessarily truthfully, for not retiring tomorrow – after all, she was doing her pension no good at all by staying on beyond her thirty years’ service.

  In fact, she really shouldn’t have been here, enjoying the fresh air, fascinated by the clinical approach of the team in front of her. She’d already officially declared an interest in the rectory crime scene and could take no part in any of the decisions regarding the investigations. Possibly. Certainly not officially. Just the odd word of advice, perhaps. As she’d told Caffy, now at work with the rest of the Pact team on the lovely old house behind her, she hadn’t officially started her new role reviewing cold cases, so given a possible corpse, she might as well continue her old role running CID and, in Caffy’s words, generally solving murders. Not that Caffy was half as naive as she claimed to be, not with all that reading under her belt. A former drugs user, she had once been trapped in a relationship with her pimp, which only his violent death at someone else’s hands had ended. And now she had another death to deal with – that of Deputy Chief Constable Simon Gates.

  ‘Any developments with your body?’ It was Paula, whom Caffy always grandly called the prima inter pares of Pact Restoration. Goodness knows where she’d learned about Latin feminine nouns. And remembered how to use them.

  One of Paula’s many gifts was to be able to materialize apparently at will, much like a serious-faced Cheshire Cat. ‘Sorry – didn’t mean to make you jump.’

  Oh, no? ‘Not yet. How’s Caffy?’

  Paula said flatly, ‘At work. As usual. It’s been hard getting any details of this Simon’s death out of her. Is it true that when she told him to stop harassing her he just dashed off to his room and jumped?’

  ‘Pretty well.’

  ‘In other words I’ve got to wait until all the details come out officially.’

  ‘’Fraid so.’ Details of how he’d filled the hotel room with roses; how two bottles of champagne at a hundred and fifty pounds a pop had been chilling. ‘Poor devil,’ she added. ‘And poor Caffy.’

  ‘Why didn’t Mark put his foot down? I mean, he’s an assistant chief constable. Surely his word would count for something.’

  ‘Don’t think he didn’t try. But Caffy was adamant . . . and the chief constable overrode Mark.’

  Paula shook her head. ‘Not good. Duty of care. But on the other hand, human rights,’ she conceded tersely. ‘Hell, Fran, whatever happened to good old-fashioned common sense?’

  ‘Quite. But Caffy’s OK?’

  Paula nodded in the direction of the house; Caffy was now halfway up some of the scaffolding that had scared Mark witless. ‘And how are you? Caffy said you’d helped Simon when he was one of your underlings.’

  Fran nodded. Simon had been one of the many young officers whom she’d tenderly mentored, though one who’d become decidedly unlikeable. ‘It’s always tough when one of us dies,’ she said, non-committally. But she had an idea that that didn’t deceive Paula for a moment.

  ‘Especially for management,’ Paula said ironically. ‘But standing in the sun talking isn’t going to get your house fixed, Fran. I’d best be off.’

  Fran nodded. In her way, Paula was as hard to read as Caffy. Meanwhile, she should be working too, planning the new cold case team for a start. Some people she’d worked with before might volunteer. A few more would be dragged in later, resentful at being in what they saw as a backwater. Any sign of a mutiny, though, and she’d make sure the waters were too choppy for comfort.

  The trouble was, thinking didn’t look like work. Just in case anyone was watching, she’d better look official. So she pulled on a pair of light gloves – vinyl, since she’d developed an irritating allergy to standard issue latex. Then she looked for something to lean on while she watched. Nothing. But she could imagine herself here in a few years’ time – maybe even a few months’ – becoming a tentative gardener, for the pleasure of leaning on a spade handle and looking around. She didn’t want a plastic-handled spade; her father had used an old-fashioned wooden-handled one, the grain polished to a fine silky sheen by the years of use. She wished she’d claimed it when he died, but future gardening had been far from her thoughts then. As for digging, for the near future any that was considered necessary would be professionally done – and not, of course, by gardeners.

  At last she found a low wall that had crumbled to just the right height, so she could sit and watch the show. It might have been an episode of Time Team, with the archaeologists wearing not their usual eclectic clothes, but the familiar white garb of crime scene investigators. White tape marked off segments of the ground, and a serious pair of sturdy young women marched backwards and forwards with some scientific instrument the TV Time Team presenters, if not the actual experts, referred to casually as geophys. They were checking for irregularities in the subsoil – or something like that. Everyone knew that these days you couldn’t just go and dig where you thought there might be a body. But to wait so long before a single clod was turned almost had her jumping up and down in frustration.

  She’d already spe
nt a weekend playing a waiting game. In the past, at the merest sniff of a murder, CID and crime scene investigators would have flooded on to the site, raking in overtime hand over fist. They’d have been halfway to solving the crime by now. But in these new bean-counting days, you had to acknowledge that if a body had been in situ as long as this had been – always assuming it was a body, of course – it might as well wait till the much cheaper working week before the team of forensic archaeologists started to exhume it.

  The slam of a car door disturbed her reverie. Automatically, she stood: time-wasting was one thing, but to be caught out in it was another, even – perhaps especially – by a delivery driver with more material for their house. However, it was a police car, unmarked, but one she recognized from the pound. The driver wasn’t the person she was expecting, her deputy senior investigating officer, who’d phoned in to say she’d be held up by dentistry to a broken front tooth. DI Kim Thomas, new to the Kent CID team after a spell in Gloucestershire, had had an off-duty argument with a drunk trying to urinate on a war memorial. So DCS Harman had declared, unilaterally, she was at very least entitled to a couple of hours’ police time having it dealt with. Nor was the driver Harry Chester, the DCI to whom Kim Thomas would answer, as soon as he was back off sick leave following gall-bladder surgery.

  No, it was top brass. Topmost brass. At the wheel was Mark, who no doubt couldn’t keep away from the site either; his passenger was no less than the chief constable himself. Both completed their shiny braid-and-buttons ensembles by donning protective footwear like her own – a complete waste of time, she privately considered, given the general state of the area. Perhaps they simply meant to keep their highly-polished shoes pristine.

  Just in case their arrival had attracted the attention of the officers on site, she greeted the newcomers formally, even though she was going to marry one of them – yes, the word ‘marry’ still felt strange, making her heart beat faster and a silly smile spread across her face – and felt subtly indebted to the other for having supported the relationship between two senior officers that might well have raised eyebrows in some circles.