Stealth by Margaret Duffy

knowing him, probably, his call came to nothing. The Trents had all gone away, destination unknown, the au pair, conspicuously nervous, having been ordered either to tell no one or genuinely in the dark as to where they had gone, or even when they were returning.
    Another point mentioned after my departure was the Met’s ‘advice’ that morning on the inadvisability of SOCA getting involved with any independent enquiries into the policeman under investigation who was being watched, as they were already working, with Complaints, in connection with it.
    â€˜Greenway doesn’t want me to get tangled up in that,’ Patrick commented after he had related all this to me when he had come back from his abortive mission. ‘His words.’
    â€˜You don’t tend to tangle readily,’ I murmured.
    He smiled thinly. ‘But I can remember getting really annoyed when people, cops usually, crashed into my scenarios when we were with D12.’
    â€˜So?’ I prompted, having to laugh at the understatement.
    â€˜So?’
    â€˜Where do we go from here?’
    â€˜Mike still wants me to talk to Trent when he finally comes back from wherever he is. Meanwhile, he’s going to get some kind of timber expert to write a formal report that the tree house was sabotaged, something that’ll stand up in court. Sorry about Alan, by the way.’
    â€˜He helped me a lot when I had a writing crisis after a certain man came back into my life.’
    â€˜Was it that bad?’
    I gave him a straight look. ‘Yes – turbulent, for a while.’ Not to mention having the living daylights scared out of me during the MI5 training sessions.
    â€˜No regrets though?’
    â€˜No, not at all.’
    â€˜Not even now? Now I’m a bit . . .’
    â€˜Tangled?’
    â€˜If you like.’
    â€˜Do you remember what you said when you proposed to me for the second time?’
    â€˜Be fair: blokes don’t tend to remember things like that.’
    â€˜You said, “One day, if I’m alive and in honest employment, will you consider me for general tidying up and emptying your wastepaper basket?” And I replied, “Yes, I’ll have you to grace my heart and my hearth even if you’re broken and old and just out of prison”. What I said still applies.’
    We were in one corner of the open-plan office we work in when at HQ but he nevertheless leaned over and gently kissed me.
    As far as the Miss Smythe case was concerned there followed a few days of almost complete inertia while we waited for forensic reports. They finally arrived when I had taken the opportunity to return home for a short while. The one concerning the murder victim’s house contained nothing positive, Patrick told me when he rang one evening, the only item of possible interest being very small amounts of fairly fresh grass cuttings that had been found on the hall carpet which could have come in on the killer’s shoes. These had minute traces of oil on them – used motor oil. From the appearance of Miss Smythe’s lawn – her gardener had to mow around the fallen tree house – it was clear that it had not been cut in the few days before the crime was committed and we already knew that the gardener had been away visiting his daughter. There were no patches of liquid motor oil in the garden, not even where the car had been parked before it was sold, and the conclusion had been that both grass and oil had come in from outside. There were no signs of spillages in the lane to the rear of the property either.
    â€˜If he’d walked very far those oily traces, not to mention the bits of grass, would have come off,’ Patrick told me Greenway had commented on giving him the report to read. ‘So he either drove and parked nearby or lived nearby.’
    â€˜I’d put a lot of money on him having climbed over the wall from next door,’ Patrick had said to him,