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  Oddly, we ‘behaved ourselves’ after that, which was just as well as we both had the notion that children – we still thought of ourselves as sort of kids for some strange reason, even though Patrick was eighteen by then – couldn’t make babies. Naive wasn’t the word for it – my mother refused to talk about such things. It was a miracle that I didn’t get pregnant.

  We married when we were both in our early twenties. But by then my new husband was in the army, a junior officer rising through the ranks like bread dough on a hot day. There was a whole world out there for him to explore, and he did not really want to be tied down. After a very stormy relationship there was one last terrible row which ended with me throwing his classical guitar down the stairs and then him out of my cottage – bought with my writing earnings and money left to me by my father – into the rain. We got divorced.

  He served abroad, the second youngest major in the British Army, and was horribly injured in an accident – not his fault – with a hand grenade, finally having to have the lower part of his right leg amputated. Just before this, out of hospital and in agony as the pins in the repaired smashed limb were not holding, he had turned up on my doorstep to tell me that he had been offered a job with MI5. A stipulation was that he had to find a working partner, female, as socializing was involved and it was thought that lone men did not merge easily into a crowd. We had always got on famously in public, he had reminded me brightly – which was perfectly true – so did I want the job? It was well paid, and there would be lots of potential for ideas for future plots in my novels, he had wheedled.

  I had found all this utterly unbearable and not just because he had fainted at my feet from pain and weakness not five minutes after crossing the threshold. It was somehow knowing that the real reason he was right here in front of me, almost literally on his knees, was to ask me, although he was maimed, to take him back.

  I had taken him back and accepted the job offer. We rediscovered the old magic that had been between us and I soon found that I needed him just as much, if not more, than he needed me. These days he is almost as mobile as he was before his injuries thanks to a man-made construction below the knee with its tiny in-house computer, powered by lithium batteries, that reacts to his every movement. It cost roughly the same as a family car.

  ‘So you’d left the bother magnet switched on,’ Detective Chief Inspector James Carrick of Bath CID said darkly. He seems to be convinced that we go looking for trouble. We were in the Ring o’ Bells, the pub in Hinton Littlemoor, a village in Somerset where we live, having returned home from London the previous day.

  Patrick chuckled and shook his head. ‘Not this time.’

  ‘D’you really think they might have been after Greenway?’

  ‘It’s not impossible. He wasn’t interested in giving it any thought at the time but as we know all too well head mobsters are using rogue private investigators to access police files and have even had incriminating and sensitive information deleted courtesy of bent cops. Mike’s name has to be on several inquiries into enforcement operations where there’s been insider criminal activity – inquiries that have actually been very successful. The empire has struck back and the gang leaders don’t like it.’

  Carrick pulled a face. The police attitude to private investigators tends to be that of toleration as long as they stick to checking up on straying spouses and searching for lost relatives or stolen dogs.

  ‘Another pint?’ Patrick asked him.

  The Ring o’ Bells was under new management, having been closed down for a while after the previous tenants had been convicted of using the business for money-laundering purposes. The DCI, an old friend, had called in to have a drink with us on his way home from work. A fondness for real ale notwithstanding, he never thinks it a bad idea to maintain an occasional personal presence in hostelries on his patch to demonstrate to the landlords that they are on his radar.

  ‘No, thanks, I must away,’ he replied, getting to his feet.

  I did not ask the proud new father if he was dashing off to help his wife Joanna bath baby Iona Flora as I knew he would eagerly produce his phone and show us the latest photographs – ‘She’s going to have red hair, just like her mother!’ – of his daughter. And he had initially said he couldn’t stay long, hadn’t he?

  ‘Did I ever mention a man by the name of Benny Cooper to you?’ Carrick said on an afterthought as he put on his jacket.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Patrick answered.

  ‘Remind me to sometime.’

  ‘Why, is he someone I ought to know about?’

  ‘You talking about private investigators brought him to mind. He used to work for The Bath Times as a crime reporter and also wrote a gossip column: In The Know, it was called. I got him for being an accessory to GBH and, with the Vice Squad, for peddling child pornography some years ago. He’s out of prison now, set himself up as a private eye and been seen locally with a mobster known to the Met. He’s been linked to a case in London where police files were tampered with. No pointers to Benny as yet, though – more’s the pity,’ Carrick finished by grimly saying.

  ‘Do you have a name for this character known to the Met?’

  ‘As usual, he has more than one identity but because of pressure of work I’ve had to postpone investigating further.’

  ‘Can you give us a few minutes Monday morning first thing to give us what you do know?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘I thought you were back off to London.’

  ‘This sounds like being work-related. We can travel up later.’

  ‘Fine. Eight thirty?’

  ‘I know about Cooper,’ I said a little later. We had stayed to have a meal in the pub’s restaurant. ‘Joanna told me a while back. She was the victim in the GBH case.’

  Patrick looked up from the menu. ‘Really?’

  ‘Cooper’d had his knife into James for a while as he knew he was on his case and somehow, some time previously, had got hold of the story of how he and Joanna, who was James’s sergeant at the time, had an affair while his wife was still alive – she died from a rare form of bone cancer, if you remember. The super, now retired, hated women in the job and she was forced to resign by being moved to a dead-end posting.’

  ‘I can’t imagine that happening now.’

  ‘No, nor can I.’

  ‘Sorry, go on.’

  ‘Cooper was knocking around with a man whose name I think she said was Paul Mallory – they had some kind of porn outfit together – and started shadowing James when he went out in the evening, trying to spot him drinking heavily or picking up a prostitute – anything that he could use to try to blacken his character. Apparently he already sneered anonymously at Bath CID through his newspaper column. Eventually, because James was closing in on the pair of them, he persuaded Mallory to rough up Joanna to muddy the waters of a murder investigation involving another woman with red hair, to act as a distraction. Only he almost strangled her and when James found her he had to give her the kiss of life.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Patrick whispered. ‘I’m not surprised he’s got him in his sights now he’s out of jail and seemingly back in business. He’ll be wanting, very badly, to nail the creep to the wall by his ears.’

  The fact that men who have laid a hand on me during our time working together have ended up either in prison or extremely dead, mostly the latter, is never far from my thoughts.

  We bought the old rectory in Hinton Littlemoor when it became apparent that the church authorities were about to put it on the market and move Patrick’s parents John and Elspeth – John is the incumbent of St Michael’s Church – to a small bungalow on a cheap and ugly new development at the lower end of the village, the site of one-time railway sidings. After a lot of building work had taken place at the rectory – including an old stable, harness room and garage turned into living accommodation which serves as an annexe for Elspeth and John, and an extension to the first floor above it – we moved in.

  We have three children of our
own, Justin, Victoria and baby Mark, and two adopted, Matthew and Katherine, known as Katie, Patrick’s late brother Laurence’s children. Their mother is under seemingly permanent treatment for alcoholism and/or drug abuse and wants nothing further to do with them. Our three youngest are looked after mainly by the nanny, Carrie, and we could not manage without further help from the children’s grandparents. My dear father died at a tragically early age of a ghastly creeping illness, my mother is another basket case and again, has no interest in her family, so the children have just the one set of grandparents.

  ‘Can I count you in for the choir on Sunday?’ John asked his son, putting his head out of the annexe’s front door as we entered the back way, through the conservatory. ‘We’re very thin.’

  ‘Counter tenor or bass?’ Patrick said with a grin.

  ‘Whatever you like as long as you sing.’ John’s fuse as far as Patrick’s sense of humour goes is sometimes very short.

  ‘I’m a thin alto,’ I offered, but inwardly quaking as I had never done anything like this before.

  ‘Delighted, my dear! Thank you. Elspeth’ll find a robe that fits you.’

  Seated in the choir stalls for the first time on that Sunday morning with a full view of the congregation, I noticed a man I had not seen before. When Joanna had told me about Benny Cooper she had quoted a woman who lived in the same square as Paul Mallory who had described him as being ‘sort of smarmy with dark hair and shades’.

  So who was this man sitting almost at the back of the church who looked sort of smarmy with dark hair and shades? After the service I asked John if he knew him.

  ‘Oh, that’s Jeff Bates. He and his girlfriend have recently moved into the one-time forge. He’s a landscape painter but the poor chap’s been having treatment for some kind of eye trouble. Everyone’s hoping it won’t affect his career.’

  It appeared that the odious Cooper was preying on my mind.

  TWO

  There had been a suspected murder overnight and Manvers Street police station was in organized turmoil. Carrick, with his assistant Lynn Outhwaite hurrying just behind him, was descending the stairs from the top floor. As we approached a third person caught up with them, the new Detective Inspector, David Campbell, whom we had not previously met. After quite a long time without one a new DI had finally been appointed to Bath CID and it was his second week in the job. He had come from HQ in Portishead and everyone had assumed that another Scot would meld very nicely with the boss. Everyone, that is, except Derek Woods, the custody sergeant who, having read the history books, had warned darkly against making such presumptions. For the MacDonalds still hated the Campbells after the massacre of Glencoe, didn’t they? Perhaps others did, too.

  We had already gathered that Carrick, who had undertaken to mentor Campbell for a couple of weeks to show him, in his words, ‘how Bath ticked’, was not particularly impressed. Apparently this was nothing to do with anyone being put to the sword but merely an apparent lingering prejudice on Campbell’s part that everything in England was vastly inferior to the land of his birth. I thought there was every chance that James had merely disliked the man at first sight.

  The DCI was annoyed now and I had an idea that our mission was already in ruins. We waited until they arrived on the ground floor where, upon seeing us, he came to a halt, causing Campbell to almost cannon into him and Lynn. Carrick gave him a look and the other man apologized.

  ‘Sorry, I have a possible murder case on my hands right now,’ he said. ‘A woman’s body was found near Oldfield Park railway station three quarters of an hour ago.’

  ‘We’ve just been told,’ Patrick replied.

  Carrick’s normal good manners surfaced and he introduced Campbell to us, just giving our names. The DI smiled thinly and gave us a little nod. He was older than Carrick, stocky, possibly in his early fifties, with hard, pale blue eyes and coarse grey hair cut brutally short.

  We stood aside and they went off in the direction of the side entrance to the car park.

  As they departed I heard Campbell ask, ‘Who are they?’

  ‘SOCA,’ Carrick answered tersely.

  ‘Right,’ Patrick drawled as we strolled slowly in the same direction. ‘Tell me, oh, oracle mine, what is the chemistry going on there?’

  I said, ‘Your guess is as good as mine but it could be something to do with the fact that although he’s been desperate to be given someone permanent to spread the workload, James has been king of all he surveyed for quite a while now. Campbell’s older, probably been in the force far longer but from what we hear has probably never really acclimatized to being down south. James is irritated, that’s all. He’ll get over it. He was probably looking forward to our chat this morning.’

  ‘You have to get on with your staff, though, don’t you?’ Patrick remarked disapprovingly.

  I paused in my stride for a moment. ‘You can talk! I can distinctly remember you and one of yours fighting like tomcats on a village green after he’d taken a swing at you because he found you utterly insufferable.’

  Patrick smiled reflectively. ‘You fell off a horse on to him too. That didn’t exactly help.’

  ‘And shortly afterwards, still presumably all shades of black and blue, he left MI5 to live with an American divorcee who had four children.’

  The pair of us hooted immoderately with laughter, causing the trio ahead of us to turn round and stare.

  ‘No real leads,’ Michael Greenway announced without further preamble. ‘Not as far as any connection with yours truly, that is. The Met’s convinced it was a gangland shooting, mistaken identity or whatever. The bike was found, burnt out, on waste ground and three boys, playing truant, presumably, were spotted and questioned. One of them said he saw a couple of youths running away from the area on the day the crime was committed – one thin, the other on the overweight side. They were carrying their crash helmets but he didn’t recognize them. He may well have done, of course, but was too afraid to say so. There are local suspects and I understand they’ll be questioned – if they can be run to earth. People like that, the odd job boys, tend to disappear as though they never existed. I suggest we let the Met get on with it and tackle more pressing matters.’

  ‘How is the woman who was injured?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll find out for you,’ the commander said with perhaps the merest hint of exaggerated patience. He hit keys on his computer, swore under his breath as a chunky forefinger landed on a wrong one and then remedied the mistake.

  OK, so I was a bit annoyed with the way men sometimes airbrush things like that from their mindset.

  ‘Three stitches in a cheek wound and kept in hospital overnight as she was suffering from shock and has a heart condition,’ Greenway reported. He flashed me a big cheesy grin, as though he knew his irritation had surfaced. ‘Now then …’

  ‘One thing,’ Patrick said.

  ‘What?’ Greenway grated.

  ‘I have a name for you. Benny Cooper. He used to be a crime reporter for a Bath newspaper and had his knife into DCI James Carrick, rubbishing the CID anonymously in a column he wrote and snooping on his private life. This was mostly because Carrick knew he had a porn business and was pulling out all the stops to close it down.’

  ‘Is it relevant to this?’

  ‘It might be insofar as you’ve been involved with CID cases in Bath.’

  ‘There’s something I really think we ought to get on with. Right now. You have one minute.’

  The commander had picked the wrong man to get flustered and almost certainly knew it. Patrick made himself more comfortable in his chair and said, ‘Carrick mentioned him to us in connection with police officers, especially those in charge of cases, being targeted by serious criminals, whether directly by personal attacks on their characters or through the use of dodgy private investigators who bribe dodgy cops in order to get evidence removed from case files or details of witnesses for the intimidation thereof. Cooper went to prison some years ago for being an accessory to a
serious assault on Carrick’s wife Joanna – this was before they were married. She almost died. The aim was to muddy the waters of an ongoing murder investigation at the time, to make Bath CID – and James – look bad. The man who attacked her, Paul Mallory, an oppo of Cooper’s, also went to prison, obviously with a longer sentence. Carrick told us that Cooper’s out now, and so is Mallory – I checked and read up about the case. Moreover, Cooper has set himself up as a private eye and been seen hobnobbing locally with a mobster involved in a case in London where police files were tampered with.’

  Greenway knows James Carrick quite well and respects his judgement. He frowned for a few moments and then said, ‘I agree that it’s interesting. Do we know who this mobster is and whether his name’s cropped up in relation to any of the same cases that I have?’

  ‘Not yet. As is the norm these days, he has false identities,’ Patrick replied. ‘We had to postpone a meeting with Carrick about it and I haven’t been able to delve into it as I was told to remain on leave.’

  A very small smile twitched at Greenway’s lips, a sort of silent touché. They both really enjoy these exchanges. Then he said, ‘Make a note of it. Until we’re asked for help or a good connection’s made I think we ought to let Avon and Somerset do any work needed. Now then …’

  I had gone along to this back-to-work briefing partly out of courtesy, to show my face, and also to learn of any important updates. My role only involves working part time, otherwise I would not be able to write a word, and anyway, most of what Patrick does on a day-to-day basis is just that – routine, involving liaising with and issuing orders to people ‘on the ground’ who are mostly carrying out surveillance operations or working undercover. For this is he eminently suited, having worked in army special operations, and feedback from those under him shows an appreciation of his knowledge of exactly what is involved.

  The real reason for my return to London for a couple of days was to meet an old friend – she lives very handily in Kensington – go shopping and generally have time off. That was today; tomorrow I was hoping to undertake a little more writing research in the Soho area, hopefully in the dry this time. So I excused myself from the briefing and left the building. As soon as I switched my mobile phone back on there was a text message asking me to contact Julia, my friend, immediately.