The Long Call (Two Rivers #1) - Ann Cleeves Page 0,13

artist. She gave nothing of herself away.

* * *

The police station in Barnstaple was concrete, ugly, built next to the civic centre that was already empty and earmarked for demolition. It looked out on the green space of Castle Hill. There was no castle now, and the hill, round as an upturned cup, was all that was left of the earthworks that had supported it. It was grassed over and covered with trees and bushes. Barnstaple stood inland from Ilfracombe. Once it had been a small market town, and the centre still felt like that, with its pannier market and busy high street, but the town had spread, sprawled. It had council estates and retail parks on the outskirts. Tourists coming for the first time might be disappointed by the initial impression it gave. It could have been any other English town. Apart from the river. The river, tidal still at this point, changing with the moon and the weather, made the place wilder, hardly a town at all. In good weather, Jen ate her lunchtime sandwiches on the green and sometimes walked to the top of the hill. Even from there you could smell the salt of the estuary and there was the special light you only find close to the sea. She’d always loved the sea.

She knew she was lucky to be here. There were colleagues who would have given their right arm for a posting to Devon; she’d jumped to the top of the queue because she’d been daft enough to marry a bastard who’d knocked her around. She was grateful for the transfer and she loved the place, but sometimes she missed the buzz and challenge of city policing. And it felt like an escape, a cop-out. Why should she be the one who’d had to move? And why had the CPS cocked up the prosecution of her smooth-talking, brown-nosing accountant husband? He was still there, living it large in her patch, telling the world that she was a psycho, that the police had moved her to Devon because she couldn’t cope with the stress of real policing. She’d been in Barnstaple for five years, but it still rankled.

On her way up the stairs she phoned Ella. Jen knew Ben would have headphones on and he wouldn’t hear his phone. ‘All okay?’

‘Yeah.’ Ella was a swot. She’d be lost in an equation. Or a chemical compound. Jen could tell she was distracted.

‘I should be home by ten. Get yourselves to bed if you’re tired, though.’ Matthew Venn despised meetings that dragged on. He said there was nothing that couldn’t be decided and achieved in an hour.

‘Cool.’ And the line went dead.

The room was full; there were volunteers who’d stayed on after their shift. Murder wasn’t common in North Devon and Jen sensed affront as well as excitement. She wondered if the team would be so keen on justice when they knew that the victim was an incomer from upcountry and not one of their own. Ross had bounded up the stairs ahead of her. He’d bagged the desk with the fastest computer and was obviously checking out the name they’d been given by Gaby Henry in Ilfracombe, digging the dirt on Simon Walden. Jen heard the whir of the printer. Ross would want to present any information he could find about the victim to the team. He’d probably take the credit for the ID too. Sometimes, Jen thought, she found him tricky to work with because he reminded her of her former husband. Competitive. Controlling.

Matthew called the room to order, but before he could speak, the DCI appeared. Joe Oldham was a big, lumbering man, but none of them had heard him coming. He had the ability to walk silently; Jen had looked up from her desk on several occasions to find him there, looking down at her, listening to her chatting to a colleague. Now she took care that he was nowhere around before she passed on any gossip that she wouldn’t want him to hear. He’d moved to Devon as a constable but he was still a proud Yorkshireman, a sports fanatic, chair of the local rugby club. As different from Matthew as it was possible to be.

Oldham nodded to the group. ‘I won’t keep you. I know you’ve work to do.’ He was wearing a sports jacket that had seen much better days and his shirt wasn’t quite tucked into his belt. That was his image: the rugged old-fashioned copper who’d have nothing