Written in Blood(21)

‘Victim’s male,’ said Troy. ‘Found in his bed—’

‘Thank you. I can read.’

Suit yourself. Troy waited, impatient but concealing it, while Barnaby cleared his desk. This involved two memos and several quite lengthy phone calls delegating work in hand.

The chief inspector had not troubled to remove his coat and this, plus the warmth of the building, made him feel quite snug, but once outside the harsh air snatched all the heat from his body. His lungs cringed as the wind whistled down his windpipe and his lips were so dry and cold they stuck together.

Inside the car Troy drew on his black peccary driving gloves (sliced off at the knuckles and buckled at the wrist), turned the heater full on and negotiated his way into Causton High Street. He was an extremely skilled driver but inclined to be overproud of that skill and to perform on occasion in a very flamboyant manner. At work he never took unnecessary risks, but Barnaby sometimes wondered about his sergeant’s off-duty motoring. However at the moment he was easing the car along the A4007 in a manner that was, for him, positively decorous. The bad-tempered scowl, so marked half an hour ago, had died down into mere sullenness.

‘What’s the matter with you this morning?’

‘I’m all right, sir.’

The matter was Troy’s cousin Colin. His mother’s sister’s boy. Colin had been a thorn in Troy’s flesh for years. Sailing through exams that Troy had had to sweat blood even to scrape a pass in. Silver-tongued, sarcastic, Colin was always laughing at things his cousin held most dear. He seemed to regard Troy’s whole lifestyle as some sort of comedic entertainment, referring to the sergeant more than once as a clockwork Rambo. Last night he had turned up at his Aunty Betty’s when Troy was also present and for the same reason - to deliver a birthday gift. Winking at his cousin, Colin had taken off his filthy battered sheepskin jacket to flash the message on his T-shirt: ‘When The Going Gets Tough The Smart Bugger Off ’. He had just left university and, to Troy’s deep satisfaction, had so far been unable to find a job.

‘They make me laugh,’ said Troy, with bitter lack of humour. Barnaby sensibly received this out-of-the-blue remark in silence.

‘People who don’t reckon the police,’ continued his sergeant, signalling and easing on to a slip road. ‘Catch them being mugged or burgled or losing their bloody car. They start yelling for us then fast enough.’ His grip on the steering wheel tightened till the seams on his gloves looked fit to burst.

Barnaby only half listened. The inclination to tease out the reason for Troy’s present petulance had proved fleeting. It could be anything, for Gavin was a walking mass of insecurities. He also had an overwhelming need to be admired which, given the public’s current perception of the Force, was in no danger at all of being satisfied.

The chief inspector was also distracted by a keen gnawing in his stomach, which seemed similarly proportioned now to the inside of Jonah’s whale - his breakfast slice of toast and solitary boiled egg bounced and fell from wall to hungry wall like a solitary sock in a tumble dryer.

‘Over there, chief.’

Troy was crunching around a village green on a surface newly scattered with rough sand. Barnaby could see a Panda, the SOCO van and George Bullard’s blue Viva parked in the driveway of an attractive double-fronted cottage with prettily fretworked shutters. Troy pulled up a few feet away.

It was very quiet. There was some moody quacking from the ducks slithering about on their frozen pond and a fair amount of bird song, though what the hell they could find to sing about on a day like this Troy could not even begin to comprehend. He took in the immaculate oval of expensive, beautifully maintained houses. In their gardens trees and shrubs glittered with frost in the hard, bright winter light. Only the prominent display of burglar alarms detracted from a Christmas-calendar image of perfection. As they approached Plover’s Rest the footsteps of the two men rang out on the rock-hard road with the clarity of horses’ hooves.

At the gate a constable was telling a small gathering of people, who were staring at the house in a hopeful and fascinated way, that there was nothing to see and would they please move along. Stretching his arms wide he moved towards them and, broom-like, swept them away a few feet. He had done this more than once and more than once they had drifted back. Soon the barriers would go up and the containment problem would be solved. There was something officially dissuasive about the holey orange plastic. Once it was pegged in, observers, no matter how half-hearted their previous willingness to toe an invisible line, rarely pushed or climbed beyond it.