Heck eyed her curiously. ‘You’ve come all the way from London just to tell me that?’
‘No, I’ve come to buy you lunch.’
‘Come again?’
She took the car keys from her jacket pocket. ‘To congratulate you. You’ve put in a lot of hours on this job, and it’s paid off.’
‘No disrespect, ma’am, but I always put in a lot of hours.’
‘Heck … I’m offering you lunch, not a knighthood. Plus I want a little chat. So get in your car and follow me. I’ve already reserved us a table, but they’re not going to hold it indefinitely.’
‘Matt Grinton was on the phone last night,’ Gemma said over her Caesar salad. ‘Whatever today’s outcome was going to be, you still got his vote. He praised, and I quote, “your work ethic, your attention to detail, your willingness to think outside the box, your all-round professionalism and, above all, the trust you place in your instincts”.’
Heck paused over his chicken pie and chips. Around them, the lunchtime clientele in the country inn murmured as they ate and drank. Summer sunshine poured through the tall glazed panels of the conservatory annexe in which they were seated. He took a sip of Diet Coke. ‘My instinct that Alan Devlin was lying to us was a fifty-fifty gamble. It could easily have gone the other way.’
‘But it didn’t. And that’s the trick. If Hood had left Nottingham, Christ knows where he’d have washed up. We’d have had another spate of old lady murders in some other part of the country, which would have meant starting the whole thing from scratch.’
‘We’ll have to start another one from scratch again at some point, ma’am. There always seems to be someone out there with an irresistible urge to kill and kill.’
Gemma watched him eat. She’d suspected all the way through that Heck had willingly taken the Nottingham assignment because of events involving his deceased brother many, many years ago. Tom Heckenburg had been wrongly convicted of robbing and brutalising a number of OAPs while Heck was still a schoolboy. Though Tom was later exonerated, this only came after he’d committed suicide in prison. Not only had the nightmare experience driven Heck to join the police – ‘clearly the bastards needed someone to show them how the job should be done,’ as he’d once told her while drunk, a policy he’d followed to the letter ever since – but it had given him a particular bee in his bonnet about hoodlums who targeted the elderly and frail. Not that he ever lost control while investigating these kinds of crimes. Oh, Heck was a wild card; he was fully capable of ‘going off on one’ as they said in his native Lancashire, but in Gemma’s opinion this gave him an edge that many of her other detectives lacked. He was also meticulous and thorough, but more important than any of that, he got results.
‘The bigger picture,’ she said, ‘is that things have recently gone SCU’s way. This last one’s a bit of a cherry on the cake. At least two television companies, one of them American, have enquired about putting us on film in a warts and all documentary. Joe Wullerton’s said no.’
‘Good,’ Heck replied.
‘For the time being.’
‘Ah …’
‘No one’s sharpening their knives for us at present, Heck, but we never know when funds will get tight again. Under those circs, a bit of positive free publicity would do us no harm.’
‘And what if there are too many warts?’
‘There wouldn’t be. I’d keep your antics well away from the cameras.’
He half smiled as he finished off his meal.
‘I say that because I don’t want to give the impression that you’re some kind of man of the moment,’ she added.
‘Perish the thought, ma’am.’
‘Hell of a job on the Lady Killer, but that’s the total of it … work is work. There’s no reward coming; except this lunch.’ Fleetingly, she looked embarrassed. ‘My little thank-you. Just so you don’t feel completely under-appreciated.’
He pushed his empty dish and cutlery aside. ‘Sooner have a bit of nice grub than an empty promotion, ma’am.’
‘Most coppers wouldn’t consider any kind of promotion “empty”,’ she said. ‘You’re saying you still wouldn’t accept one even if it was available?’
He shrugged. ‘You know I wouldn’t know what to do with an office of my own. And that I’d get bored sitting behind a desk all day, even a posh one. That said, the pay rise wouldn’t go amiss.’
‘We’re all frozen in time on that score, Heck – which you know perfectly well.’
‘In which case the free lunch will have to suffice.’
‘It was the least I could do,’ she said. ‘Especially as I need a favour.’
He feigned shock. ‘Ulterior motives, ma’am?’
‘Just something I’d like your opinion on.’
‘As I’m not laughing all the way to the bank this afternoon, I suppose I’ll just have to sit here and listen.’
‘It’s an accident investigation.’
Heck raised an eyebrow. ‘Not usually our department.’
‘I’m not totally sure about that.’ Gemma dabbed her lips with a napkin. ‘But essentially you’re right. In this first instance, we’re just giving it the once-over. You know my mother’s a member of a golf club down in Surrey?’
Heck’s smile turned crooked. ‘So we’re actually doing a favour for your mum?’
Gemma reddened slightly. ‘It’s not just that. There may be something in this for us. If there is, you’ll be the man to find it … won’t you? That’s Mum’s opinion, I should add.’
Heck smiled all the more. Gemma’s mother, Mel Piper, was a strikingly attractive and very personable lady in her late fifties; an older version of her daughter, minus the adversarial edge. She’d taken it hard when Heck and Gemma had split up while still in their mid-twenties. ‘She asked for me specifically?’ he said.
‘You know she likes you a lot. I can’t think why.’
‘Okay, go on: this golf club?’
‘It’s just outside Reigate. Pretty exclusive, to be honest. Mum’s only a member through her role as chair of the local WI. It seems that one of the other members, some bloke called Harold Lansing, wealthy local businessman, has died in a road accident right outside his own house.’
‘Did your mum know him well?’ Heck asked.
‘Reasonably well, but not to the point where she’s grieving. The puzzle is the manner of his death. Some spoiled brat in a Porsche – kid called Dean Torbert, nineteen but with half a dozen traffic violations to his name already – ran into Lansing while he was pulling out onto the main road. Before you ask, Torbert was killed too. It was a nasty smash, very high speed. The first weird thing is that Lansing, or so my mother says, was a careful driver. He’d even fitted a safety mirror onto the tree trunk opposite his drive entrance so that he could check it was clear before pulling out. Apparently it gave good vantage in both directions. Well over a hundred yards.’
‘Perhaps it was suicide?’
‘If so, he didn’t leave a note. Plus no one who knew him felt he had any personal issues of that magnitude.’
‘What have Surrey Traffic said?’
‘Fatal RTA. No witnesses,