‘So you see, darling, it’s just not feasible. It would mean getting off one flight and literally straight onto another.’
Flyte stared down at the grey carpet in the corridor outside the incident room, the phone pressed to her ear so tightly it hurt. Sylvia had called to tell her daughter that the date of Poppy’s naming ceremony was ‘inconvenient’ – falling the day after she and her husband returned to Cyprus from a cruise around the Aegean. Poppy’s grandma wouldn’t be present for her single moment of official recognition.
‘Don’t be cross with me, darling. I’ve been suffering with my knees and Ralph thinks I really need this holiday.’ Flyte didn’t trust herself to say anything. ‘But you must come over this Christmas, or in the New Year sometime? The climate is so delightful here in the winter.’
Of course Flyte could move the date she’d agreed with the local vicar for the ceremony, but she knew it wasn’t really about a schedule clash. It was about her mother’s inability to deal with any emotional situation. The constant refrain she’d heard from an early age: ‘Don’t make a fuss’ . . . ‘Least said, soonest mended’ . . . the sodding importance of the stiff upper lip. It was the suppression of feelings elevated to a fetish. As a little girl, when she’d needed a comforting cuddle, like the time she trod on a wasp, it had always been Pops to whom she’d turned.
‘Phyllida, are you still there?’
‘I’ve got to go, Mother, I’m at work.’ She hung up without saying goodbye.
Rather than head back into the incident room, she flew down the stairs, two at a time, borne aloft on a burning fury.
Don’t think. Don’t think. Her old mantra, the way she’d coped for two years – pressing all thoughts of Poppy, of her loss, out of her mind, until it was a shiny empty place.
Reaching the high street, she headed for the Pret to get a skinny soya mocha coffee, her go-to treat when she needed soothing.
A familiar voice interrupted her thoughts.
‘DS Flyte!’
Turning, she saw Luke, the local reporter. Marvellous. She didn’t slow her pace, but he put on a spurt and caught up with her.
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you since I heard. So our floater was murdered – and frozen for years! And a policeman.’ Luke sounded like a man who’d acquired a supermodel girlfriend and won the lottery all in one day.
‘Our’ floater?!
‘Former policeman,’ she snapped. ‘And it’s not actually a murder until we have evidence, a motive, little details like that.’
She saw that he was wearing his beige trench coat and another of those thin ties. For crying out loud.
Pulling out a folded copy of the paper from the previous day, he flourished the front-page splash, which read: CANAL MAN: BODY OF EX-COP FROZEN ‘FOR YEARS’. And underneath the headline: ‘By our crime correspondent Luke Lawless’.
‘The news editor at the Mail called me today,’ he said modestly. ‘A case like this, it gets local reporters noticed.’
‘Congratulations,’ she said.
‘You knew there was something funny about it from the start, didn’t you?’ he said, ignoring her sarcasm. Despite her long stride, he was sticking to her like Velcro. ‘That’s why you didn’t want to let it go.’
‘Look, Luke, was there something? I’ve got to be somewhere.’ No way was he getting anything out of her, not after dropping her in it with the press office.
‘Could you just . . . ?’ He was breathing fast from the exertion. Relenting, she paused. He pulled out his Moleskine notebook and tapped it meaningfully. ‘Listen, I doorstepped Sean Kavanagh’s ex, Bethany Locke,’ he said, scanning her face for a reaction.
Fishcakes.
‘It’s really not helpful having members of the press interview witnesses,’ she said coldly. ‘But there’s no law against it’ – her tone making it clear that were it up to her, there would be.
Luke did a near-comic conspiratorial look over his shoulder. ‘I think she knows more than she’s saying about what happened to Sean.’
‘Really. What did she say, exactly?’
‘It wasn’t what she said, just a feeling she wasn’t being totally upfront.’ Luke nodded slowly, pocketing the notebook.
‘Right.’ Imagining Bethany’s response to a pesky reporter turning up asking intrusive questions about her dead ex.
‘The press release said that he didn’t go to Canada as his contacts believed, so obviously somebody faked the Facebook posts he supposedly did from there.’
‘What Facebook posts?’ She stared at him; those details hadn’t been released.
She remembered that the press release had named Sean’s last nick as Finsbury Park – one of the areas that Luke mentioned covering for his newspaper group. Had he tracked down one of Sean’s old colleagues there? Perhaps even paid for information? All highly illegal of course, but given the eye-popping stories that were emerging about cops, no longer that surprising.
As if to confirm her hunch, Luke said, ‘I’ve got my contacts.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You have to ask, who is the person most likely to know Sean’s log-in details and be in a position to lay a false trail in Canada after he was already dead?’
She remembered thinking the same thing in the briefing.
Luke wasn’t giving up. ‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd that Bethany, whose modelling career sounds pretty short-lived, was able to go ahead and buy a pricey flat in the Barbican even after she and Sean split up?’
When Flyte had mentioned the same concern to Dean Willets that morning before he’d gone to interview Bethany, he’d been dismissive. He didn’t buy her as a suspect as she’d had ‘nowhere to store the body’ and ‘wouldn’t have been strong enough to manhandle a body in and out of the boot of a vehicle’.
‘Do you see what I’m saying?’ Luke persisted.
‘Look, you’ll have to go through the press office like everyone else. We’re not issuing individual briefings. And this time, keep my name out of it.’ And with that, she struck out for the coffee shop leaving him standing on the pavement looking like Columbo’s younger brother.