minutes looking over their notes from yesterday. They had spent the previous afternoon interviewing a pro at the Belvedere Golf Club whose memory might as well have been wiped clean by aliens. In fact, the aliens seemed to have been quite busy in the amnesia business around here.
Ronnie was usually based in Bradford and Reggie in Leeds, and although they had only been working together for a couple of weeks, out of Reggie’s station in Leeds, they had already discovered how harmonious they were. Reggie could imagine them being friends outside of work, but had kept that thought to herself as she didn’t want to appear too eager.
They had been brought in as part of a small outside task force that went by the name Operation Villette. Actually they pretty much were Operation Villette. Gilmerton was bouncing on and off other investigations as well. He was pleasant enough and at first Reggie had liked the way he made light of things, and then after a while he had begun to seem more lightweight than light.
Reggie and Ronnie had been recruited to interview potential witnesses and contacts. Some new accusations had recently come to light and the accuser herself lived on their patch. Their job was to talk to people who had been mentioned by other people who in turn had been mentioned by other people, a bit like a game of Chinese whispers. It was an ever-expanding jigsaw, one with a lot of missing pieces as it dialled all the way back to the Seventies and many of the people mentioned were dead. Unfortunately. The new accusations involved Establishment figures – big cheeses, ‘head yins’ in Reggie’s native patois – and yet the investigation couldn’t be more low-profile. Perhaps for good reason. Or perhaps not.
Gilmerton was on the edge of retirement, demob happy, and was pretty much leaving them to ‘get on with things’ on their own. He wasn’t expecting much in the way of results, he said (‘We’re just dotting some “i”s and crossing some “t”s’), which made Ronnie and Reggie more determined than ever to solve the puzzle.
‘We’ll find all the pieces,’ Reggie said. ‘They’ll be under a carpet or down the back of a sofa. But we’ll finish it.’
‘Perhaps they’ve been swept under the carpet on purpose,’ Ronnie said.
Ronnie liked to be organized almost as much as Reggie did, and that was saying something. They were both newly promoted, fast-tracking ‘all the way to the top’, Ronnie said. Two years in uniform and then a training period in CID. Keen as mustard. Reggie planned to apply for a job with the National Crime Agency. Ronnie wanted to join the Met.
Reggie was Scottish, but did not have the exile’s longing for her homeland. Some of the worst years of her life had been spent in Edinburgh, where she came from. And anyway, her family were all dead now, so there was no one to go back to. At eighteen, she’d flown south and landed in Derby, where she did a degree in Law and Criminology. Before she went there she couldn’t have found Derby on the map. She hadn’t really minded where she went as long as it wasn’t where she came from.
Ronnie had studied for a Master’s in Forensic Science from the University of Kent. Her name was Veronika, spelled Weronika. Her parents were Polish and her mother called her Vera, which she hated. She was second generation. Her parents talked a lot about going back, but Ronnie wasn’t interested. Yet one more thing she had in common with Reggie.
They were the same height – short. (‘Petite,’ Ronnie amended.) Reggie wore her hair bobbed to her ears and Ronnie wore hers in a bun held tidily in place by a scrunchy. The older female detectives were, on the whole, a sartorial mess – jeans or ill-fitting skirts, washed-out shirts and unfashionable jackets on bodies softened by too many takeaways and packets of crisps. Reggie and Ronnie were spick and span. Today Ronnie was wearing a white shirt and a pair of navy-blue trousers. Despite the warm weather, Reggie was wearing a black suit in ‘summer-weight wool’ (no such thing, she had discovered – wool was wool).
When she was younger, Reggie had hoped that one day she would have a life that involved a black suit. Her mentor and employer at that time, Joanna Hunter, had gone to work every day as a GP in a black suit. Reggie had worked as Dr Hunter’s nanny and they still