The late lord thorpe, p.1
The Late Lord Thorpe, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Peter Grainger
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for. [delete “has been applied for” when CIP data is added below]
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ISBNs: 9781454968733 (ebook)
E3-20260107-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
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
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
DC Smith/Kings Lake Investigation series
A Sneak Peek of Some Sort of Justice
Chapter One
Smith had asked how long it would take for her broken ribs to mend, according to the doctors. She said she’d been told about six weeks, as long as she was careful. Smith didn’t go as far as shaking his head but there was a dubious sort of look on his face, and so she had to ask.
He said, ‘It must be getting on for thirty years ago, not long after I joined Lake Central. There was a bit of a hoo-ha one Saturday night and I ended up with that injury. I don’t think they used to give us six weeks off in those days… But anyway, the point is I still get a twinge there. If I sleep on it wrongly, first thing in the morning I can still tell exactly where it cracked. I’m not sure they ever heal completely.’
Serena Butler stared back at him, and then Smith realised Jo had on her face an expression identical to the one on the face of his former detective constable – an expression which seemed to be saying, really? You have to say that right now?
He said, ‘Nobody’s mentioned that? Perhaps mostly they do mend. My case is probably quite exceptional.’
Jo looked at Serena and said, ‘No surprises there, then’ and both women shared a smile, and some sort of private joke, by the look of it. Smith decided to move the conversation along, and asked their visitor how much longer she would have to stay at home and rest.
She said, ‘Only one more week, thank God. They’ve said I can go into the office before the six weeks is up. Denise has said she’ll arrange a special chair for me. I don’t know if that involves some sort of a wind-up. I wouldn’t be surprised if it does.’
She looked as if she was longing to be back there as the target of some good-natured banter and clowning around. He remembered it, of course, the laughter and the dark humour which comes from sharing with like-minded people the sometimes awful work one has to do – he remembered it and sometimes he missed it still. After all, the word nostalgia only means the pain of longing for home.
Layla had taken up her usual position when they had a guest, lying close to Serena’s feet – this dog was particularly fond of female visitors, and Smith had decided he was probably the only man in her life. When Jo stood up, so did Layla’s ears, as if she knew what was coming next.
Jo said, ‘Well, I’ll take her for a walk along the bank and leave you two alone.’
There were protests from Serena but to no avail – hadn’t she already told them she was supposed to be resting? And anyway, didn’t they all know the real reason for her visit? That she needed to talk to her old detective sergeant about what had happened to her just a couple of weeks ago? Jo understood that was a conversation which could only take place between the two of them.
Smith had had some of the story from Waters but he let her begin at the beginning, and he listened without interrupting – telling and retelling the story is a part of the healing process just as much as resting those broken ribs. He watched her face and read the changing expressions, read, if you like, between the lines on the face of the woman who had been the last detective to join the last of the many teams he had managed in his time on the Norfolk force. Getting on for thirty years… He’d already said that today. He’d begun when they still thought of themselves as a force rather than a service. Just a word, some might say, and after all, what’s in a name?
He’d made the coffee in a French press for a change. When Serena had finished speaking, he leaned forward and poured more into her cup, and then into his own. He said, ‘Let me know if it’s too strong. It’s better to add hot water rather than more milk. Not a lot of people know that.’
She was watching him and waiting, and he remembered again how difficult she was when she first arrived in Lake Central. She’d been angry at the way she had been treated by senior officers, well aware they would have preferred her to resign instead of taking the transfer to another county. After a couple of days, he’d told her to take a car from the pool and drive around on her own, just looking at the town which would become her new patch if she was able to get over herself – he hadn’t said those exact words but his meaning had been plain enough. She had taken him at his word and didn’t come back into the office that day. Alison Reeve had come to him in the afternoon and asked whether they had broken the record for the shortest service ever given in Norfolk. But the next morning Serena Butler was at a desk when he arrived, and she never missed a shift until the day Smith retired. On the night he was stabbed, she had been there, the first to arrive along with Murray and Waters, and when someone has helped to save your life, you’re rather inclined to trust them with it henceforth.
He said, ‘What’s the latest on the girl? Angel?’
‘She’s still in hospital and still poorly but she’s conscious and talking. She’s in a private ward under some sort of protection.’
Smith said, ‘Any permanent damage?’ and Serena said she didn’t know for certain but it looked as if the girl had been lucky for once in her young life.
He went on, ‘The protection is good. They might have her down as a possible witness. If she gives evidence, she could get a new start somewhere.’
Serena didn’t look convinced, and he asked her why.
‘Give evidence against who, DC? They’re clever bastards. She’ll know her handler, and maybe one more along the line. Small fry, not worth investing in her for them. She’ll end up back where she started.’
Smith said, ‘She’s fourteen, you said. Still very much a minor. That’s in her favour, believe it or not. Some other agency might get involved…’
He felt the weakness of his attempt to reassure her, and he knew Serena was right to doubt what he’d suggested; if this was a war they were fighting, the civilian casualty rate was climbing, not falling. In towns and cities across the land, it felt as if the backstreets had become battlefields.
‘But obviously,’ he continued, ‘that someone cannot be you. I know I’m only saying what others have already told you. Even so, it bears repetition. You have to keep clear of it all now.’
Serena looked away from him and said nothing. Chris Waters had told him they thought the main reason Serena had stayed undercover as long as she did was because of the teenaged girl – that she wanted to hurt them for what they were doing to children like that. Knowing her as he did, Smith found this easy to believe but it seemed she was still struggling with the outcome.
When she looked back at him, he said, ‘So, how are those new people doing at Central? I know they’re not really new at all now – I mean the ones I’ve never met. You mentioned Denise. Although I’ve a feeling I did come across her once on a training day…’
Serena said, ‘Oh, we get on like a house on fire.’
‘And so sometimes there are a few sparks?’
A lucky guess? No – he was lucky too often for that. Someone must have said something, probably her detective sergeant – she knew the two of them stayed in touch. And then, of course, there was John Murray. Smith had been gone for a couple of years now but he was most certainly not forgotten, and his intelligence gathering seemed as good as it ever was.
She said, ‘We have our moments, but Denise is a pro. Not much gets past her out on the streets. Clive is funny but there’s more to him than meets the eye. He’s a Level 1 driver and an AFO.’
Smith said, ‘Firearms officer? Not much call for that in Lake, not in my time.’
‘I don’t think he’s drawn a weapon since he arrived but I expect Freeman thinks it’s useful to have him around. And there’s Fordy, who you do know – he’s pretty much full-time with the squad now.’
‘What about your DI?’
She had relaxed again, talking about the people she worked with every day – the people she was desperate to re-join. Smith knew there had been boyfriends since she arrived at Lake Central, and by all accounts Mike Dunn had been serious about her, but she was still single. There was something missing – something unfulfilled – and he felt a little guilty that he had never discovered what it might be.
She said, ‘Greene’s a legend! He never gets into a flap, he never seems to miss a beat. He’s so organised it’s scary. Clive reckons he’s a prototype robot run by AI.’
Smith sat back, a little disconcerted. She asked him what was the matter.
Smith said, ‘AI? Are you sure? I can’t see what that has to do with anyone’s organisational skills.’
‘Er, yeah. Chris says policing will be unrecognisable in five years’ time because of AI.’
He shook his head, and she asked him why he found the idea so strange.
‘Are you sure you mean AI? Because the last time I heard anything about it, it was farmers doing unthinkable things with long rubber gloves at the rear ends of cows. I dread to think what’s going on at the College of Policing these days if…’
She remembered the dead straight face that could catch you out every time, and she began to laugh, even though she knew that’s exactly what he’d intended, and why. He stood up then and said he was going to make some fresh coffee. She watched him go into the kitchen, and then eased herself back into the armchair. Laughing had hurt her a little but it had been worth it. She closed her eyes for a moment and listened to the silence of the late autumn morning which surrounded the cottage on the edge of the saltmarshes.
When he was seated opposite her once more, Smith said, ‘Would you go undercover again?’
She must have asked herself the same question a dozen times by now. The pause before she answered suggested she had yet to come to a firm conclusion.
‘Probably. But I’d ask more questions the next time, before I said yes.’
Smith said, ‘Good. Experience is an exacting sort of teacher, isn’t it?’
Serena nodded, and he continued, ‘Different people do it for different reasons, I think. I liked the intellectual challenge. I know that sounds a bit pompous – what I mean is, I enjoyed figuring it out, how to make the character I’d become as convincing as possible. To make them perfect. I used to go into that side of it pretty deeply, like one of those method actors. Is that still a thing in the thespian world? It used to be all the rage. Anyway, I prepared a lot, read and memorised everything I was given. But the other side of it is, you have to be able to think on your feet, to handle the unexpected and make literally split-second decisions, which is a different skill altogether. It’s not for everyone.’
She was listening intently, and when Smith paused she nodded but made no reply.
‘From what you’ve told me, you did a good job. No one can expect to bring down an entire enterprise – what you did will have seriously disrupted it, and that’s probably the best we can hope for, here in the real world.’
He sensed this was what she had come for – his judgement. He felt the responsibility, felt the weight of it.
‘And by the sound of it, you were unlucky. Events beyond your control aroused someone’s suspicions. The same thing happened to me, in the end. I had to make a run for it.’
That as a soldier he had been undercover in Belfast, infiltrating a cell of the Provisional IRA, was not a secret among the detectives he had worked with in Kings Lake Central, but it was only John Murray who knew the whole truth – that on the night he had ‘made a run for it’ Smith had, in self-defence, shot and killed the younger brother of one of the leaders of that terrorist organisation, a man who had later become an important figure in the politics of Northern Ireland.
Serena said, ‘I made a mistake. I let the girl get too close to me. We both paid the price.’
He sensed her pain, sensed that for her this was the crux of the matter – her guilt at what had happened to the teenager used by the gang. Smith picked up his coffee cup and drank a little more. He looked at the clock on the wall and thought Jo would be back soon.
‘How other people feel about us is one of those beyond-our-control things. She just fell for your natural charm. We all have at some point or other, before we realised the truth.’
He was wearing his philosophically rueful expression and she half put up her hand with the appropriate one-fingered gesture, as if they were still back in the offices they had shared in Central. His eyebrows went up in mock surprise and then he asked her what the girl, Angel, had been like.
‘Just a kid. She’d been a victim all her life – you know the sort – but somehow she’d survived. She was bright enough. If she’d had support at school, she’d have done all right. Maybe she could have done well enough to climb out of the pit… You should have seen her in the sea. It was bloody cold but she was straight in, and she could swim. To see someone like that being so used… Yeah,’ she said to him with a defiant look, ‘it got to me.’
‘And by the sound of it,’ he said, ‘you got to her. Maybe you’re right, maybe you were careless. But with someone so young, it’s not easy to be cruel, is it?’
Her eyes were brimming a little, and Smith had to conceal his surprise – that she had strong emotions he had never doubted but they were rarely so close to the surface. And then he saw a change in her face when she looked up at him, as if he was gazing at someone he had never met before. She said in an odd, quiet voice, ‘She’s fourteen. I’ve never told anyone else at Central this DC, but…’
She stopped when the latch lifted at the back door, and two seconds later Layla bounded back into the room. Serena reached down and made a fuss of her. Smith waited but when she looked back at him he caught only a glimpse of the other person – the one who had been about to share a great secret – before she slipped away. In response to a question from the kitchen, Serena said yes, she would stay for lunch if it wasn’t too much trouble.
He watched and waited but Serena made no attempt to return to their previous conversation. The three of them ate lunch at the oak table in the kitchen – homemade tomato soup using the last of the crop grown in the small greenhouse, with wholemeal bread and two or three cheeses from the local shop. Smith made yet more fresh coffee.
Serena asked him what it was like to work for Diver and Diver Associates – she said she knew they were friends of her detective sergeant but she’d never met them in person. He told her it was a demanding, high-pressure environment with many deadlines to meet but she was watching Jo, and she knew most of his tricks by now.
Jo said, ‘He gets to pick and choose his cases. Jason Diver has given up thinking he might do a forty-hour week. There are weeks when he doesn’t do forty minutes. But to be fair, he has made a serious effort with a couple of things since he joined them.’
Smith said, ‘Damned with faint praise. I sometimes think that’s the story of my life.’
Serena said, ‘You found that missing businessman. How did that end up?’
‘Well, it hasn’t yet – ended up, I mean. Gerald Fitch will be a wealthy man when it does. He’ll sell the lot and make a new home on the east coast – I’ve no doubt about that. I imagine his daughter and granddaughter will go with him.’
