“Then let’s carry on.”
THE REACTION TO THE day’s events that stayed with Bea Hannaford the longest was the one that led her towards looking for someone to blame. She began with Ray. He seemed the most logical source of the difficulties that had resulted in a killer’s being able to walk blithely away from a murder charge. She told herself that had Ray only sent her the MCIT blokes she’d needed from the very beginning, she would not have had to rely on the TAG team he had sent her, men whose expertise was limited to heavy lifting and not to the finer points of a homicide investigation. She also would not have had to rely on Constable McNulty as part of that team, a man whose mad release of critical information to the dead boy’s family had put the police in a position of having virtually nothing that was known only to the killer and to themselves. Sergeant Collins, at least, she could live with, as he’d never left the station long enough to cause trouble. And as for DS Havers and Thomas Lynley…Bea wanted to blame them for something as well, if only for their infuriating loyalty to each other, but she didn’t have the heart to do so. Aside from withholding information about Daidre Trahair, which hadn’t turned out to be germane to the case anyway despite her own stubborn beliefs in the matter, they’d only done as she’d requested, more or less.
What she didn’t really want to consider was how everything came down to her in the end because she was, after all, in charge of the investigation and she had maintained a pigheaded position on more than one topic, from Daidre Trahair’s culpability to her own insistence upon an incident room here in the town and not where Ray had told her it should be, which was where incident rooms generally were, which was also where more adequate personnel were stationed. And she’d held firm to that desire to work in Casvelyn and not elsewhere simply because Ray had told her she was wrong to do so.
So while it all came down to Ray in the end, it also came down to her. This sort of thing put her future on the line.
No case to present. Were there four worse words? Oh, perhaps, our marriage is over were equally bad and God knew enough coppers heard those words spoken by a spouse who couldn’t take the life of a cop’s partner any longer. But no case to present meant leaving a bereaved family in the lurch, with no one brought to justice. It meant despite the long hours, the slog, the sifting through data, the forensics reports, the interviews, the discussions, the arranging of this piece that way and that piece this way, there was nothing left to do save begin the entire process again and hope for a different result or to leave the case open and declare it cold. Only how could it be cold, really, when they knew very well who the killer was and he was going to walk away? That was hardly a cold case. A cold case still shone with a glimmer of hope should something more turn up, whereas this case shone not in the slightest. The regional force might well ask her what she needed to make things right in Casvelyn, but that was more or less in her dreams because what the regional force were far more likely to ask was how she’d cocked this up so badly.
Ray was how, she told herself. Ray had no interest in her success. He was out to get her for almost fifteen years of estrangement, no matter that he’d brought them about himself.