Cold Relations (Honey Laird Book 1) Read online

  COLD RELATIONS

  Gerald Hammond

  © Gerald Hammond 2006

  Gerald Hammond has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2006 by Allison & Busby Limited.

  This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter One

  Ask any random group to choose the most attractive woman from another group and you will find that different choices will be made by the women as against the men. The reasons are simple. Each sex will have taken into account the usual criteria of beauty, discarding those with any tendency to obesity, sagging, asymmetry or deformity. Out will have gone those with raddled skins, a serious squint or an unfriendly cast of features. The chosen ones will be smoothly rounded in face and body, with pleasant expressions. They will conform to the stereotypes of youth – round eyes, long legs, smooth skin and not too large a nose.

  But the above reads like a general specification for female beauty. The difference between the gender choices is explained by the form of the question. Beauty is almost universal, subject to local or temporal changes of fashion. Attractiveness, while incorporating the same criteria, introduces others. The women judges may have made choices based only on beauty but perhaps with a slight bias towards masculinity. Men will have sought out femininity, even feminine sexual promise – an hourglass figure, rounded hips, prominent breasts, pouting lips and perhaps slightly hooded eyes.

  Honoria Laird, without actually displeasing the women judges, could have been sure of the masculine vote. Of this she seemed quite unaware, although if her mirror had not given her the assurance she might have known it from the fact that for a few months after leaving finishing school, until her father put his foot very firmly down, she had modelled expensive lingerie for a living. She was tall for a woman and accorded well with the criteria already outlined. Her dark hair had a natural curl. Her full lips were well-modelled, her brown eyes large and bright and her expression in repose was a piquant mix of dignity and humour. She had a natural sense of style and could have dressed well on a comparative pittance, but a very generous allowance from her landowner-industrialist father was an undeniable help.

  She had been born Honoria Potterton-Phipps. As a pretty baby and while her early hair remained fair, it was inevitable that she would be called Honeypot; and as her hair grew darker and she grew from a tomboy into a beautiful woman, even after her marriage changed part of the basis for the pun, the nickname stuck. This she found puzzling. When she grumbled to Sandy, her husband, he tried to explain that she attracted men like flies to a honeypot, but she told him to pull the other one. ‘Honeypot’ was not a suitable nickname for a police officer of some seniority. She liked to be called Honey, in the American manner, and was so addressed by most of her friends. The name was apt, her hair being much the colour of dark heather honey. Her subordinates, behind her back, used either nickname but the sobriquet Honeypot was only accepted, face to face, from the chosen and favourite few.

  For no particular reason that she could remember she had at one time joined the Metropolitan Police, where her natural ability, remarkable memory and Criminology degree had soon raised her to Detective Sergeant. When she met Detective Inspector Alexander Laird on a firearms course the attraction was immediate. Sandy Laird was an officer with the Lothian and Borders Constabulary, based in Edinburgh. Honey had been born and largely raised on her father’s estate in Perthshire so that a return to Edinburgh was almost a coming home; while Lothian and Borders were delighted to poach a Detective Sergeant, trained at Hendon, from the Met.

  After a period at Newton Lauder, she was brought in to Edinburgh. It was a convenient opportunity for the couple to wed, and wed they did.

  In the police, a certain amount of joking, even horseplay, is tolerated; but a woman officer with ambition must aim to retain respect. Honey cultivated an air of dignified reserve and her occasional inclination towards frivolity was restricted to her home life and to her correspondence with her many friends.

  The beginning of this story was gradual. A convenient but randomly chosen starting point finds her sitting alone and busy at her laptop computer in the small office that she usually shared with three colleagues. A passing colleague, glancing in, might have supposed that the typing pool was busy and that she was writing reports or otherwise catching up with the paperwork that has been invented solely to plague the busy officer. But she was a quick and efficient typist and had the knack of composing lucid English at speed. Her paperwork was finished and her casework delegated and she was busy writing an email to a friend.

  She wrote:

  11 December. Edinburgh.

  Poppy darling, I know it’s an age since I last emailed you, but I hadn’t forgotten you and I promise that I would have written soon even if I hadn’t had your email last week. Truly. But life has been full and busy. Did I tell you that I’d been made up to Detective Inspector? Well it’s true, and it leaves me very short of people with whom I can let my hair down. Most of my days are spent pretending to be an infallible prig. An old school-friend living a long way away makes an ideal correspondent.

  I may say that I was perfectly happy as a DSgt in Lothian and Borders. The extra money doesn’t even make much difference – as you know, I have an extremely wealthy Dad who thinks that I’m still his little girl and also a husband who is preceding me up the promotion ladder. The downside is that I still have responsibility for the dog unit while working several cases of my own and I remain responsible to the loathsome Det Sup Blackhouse of evil memory. He started off hating my guts, but he now thinks that I’m the best thing since flavoured condoms, which is worse because he drops all the weirdest cases in my lap with an air of doing me favours.

  That’s enough about me. Now to the matter of your email. You told me once, in fact rather more than once, that your first husband and the father of your twins was a louse and a rat, which is pretty much how I remembered him from the few occasions on which I’d met him. Judging from your present anxious enquiries, I now suspect that you still have fond feelings for him. Well, I can understand you divorcing him, but should you really have married again so precipitately? He had only had it away with Julia Foster, and we remember what round heels she always had. Talk about burning your bridges!

  Anyway, as requested I tracked your ex down today and I must say that he no longer shows any signs of being the arrogant bastard that I remember from your wedding and one or two other occasions. If that’s what a head-wound does for you, we’ll have to arrange for most men to be shot. (Not Sandy, of course, he’s a pussycat, although he acts very tough when it seems to be called for.) The head-wound seems to have had much of what I understand to be the effect of a pre-frontal lobotomy. You couldn’t give me an address or even a phone number, you only managed to tell me that he had returned to the vicinity of his native Edinburgh, and there are several Andrew Grays registered with Social Services, so pinning him down took a little time.

  I can now report that the post-Iraq Andrew Gray seems we
ll and happy within his limits. He is living a monastic life, from all reports, just outside Edinburgh in the small house his aunt left him. She also left him a little money, so with that and his disability pension he seems to be getting by. He is not the sharpest stake in the fence, but then you will probably say that he never was. But does intelligence bring happiness? The reverse, I rather suppose. You have to be daft to be happy in this life. The difference in his case is that he now seems very placid and rather slow. There are signs of discontent with the life of idleness but I don’t honestly think that he’s fit for employment. According to his record he can flare up suddenly. He was fined quite heavily for a punchup outside a pub and only his history and decorations saved him from the jug. The other man seems to have started it by assuming that slow means soft, but the courts look askance at ex-SAS officers who engage in fisticuffs with members of the public, especially if the member ends up with a broken jaw.

  He recognised me immediately, addressing me as Honeypot in front of a social worker and a constable who happened to be in the car with me at the time. (I have still not shaken off that sobriquet entirely although it is several years since I ceased to be Honoria Potterton-Phipps. Sandy says that it’s only to be expected but he won’t explain why.) Andrew immediately asked me to help him to regain his shotgun certificate, but with that conviction on his record I don’t see a chance; and I wouldn’t be happy to have somebody with a hair-trigger temper walking around armed. Frankly, I’m not too happy that he’s driving, because I can well imagine an incident of road rage.

  He fishes a bit, but that doesn’t keep him occupied. He has been helping a local keeper and goes beating quite often, but he doesn’t really feel part of the scene that he used to know and love. When I probed a bit to find out what he really missed, it turned out not to be knocking down the pheasants. He said quite solemnly that when you’ve shot people in the line of duty, pheasants seem a bit tame. I suppose there’s a certain amount of rather wacky logic in that. It was the dog-work and the company of men who were preoccupied with dogs and wildlife that he used to find congenial. (Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think that he misses your dogs more than he misses you.) He would have found it difficult to keep a dog while he was still in the army.

  I suggested that he now had the perfect opportunity to keep a dog. At the time, I was only thinking of providing him with some company and something to nurture. He jumped at the idea and wanted to rush down to the dogs’ home to adopt a stray; but, however desirable it is to get unwanted dogs rehomed, he wouldn’t know what he was getting in a rescue dog or whose mistakes he was inheriting. (This goes double for dogs that have failed the guide dogs course, which was his first thought – they must be dim or unruly and, in addition, they have been taught to walk in front instead of at heel.) I pointed out that he would be much better starting with a pedigree pup of one of the gundog breeds. Then he could go beating and picking-up and not feel left out of it at all, and training a pup would take up much more of his time than accepting an adult dog that had been taught or mistaught by somebody else. And why would the dog be available for rehoming? Bad luck in the family or an evil disposition?

  Here let me point out, Poppy darling, that Andrew Gray is your ex- and not mine. I know you can’t come rushing back from Monaco every time your former husband gets his head in a sling. I’ll do what I can, within reason, but Andrew is still a handsome devil, the scar seems to add to rather than detract from his rather piratical good looks, and what Sandy will say if I see too much of him I just do not know. I’ll go this far. If you care to make a donation towards the cost of a suitable puppy, I’ll match it and see that he doesn’t get ripped off.

  If you have an excuse to revisit Scotland, come and stay again. Your last visit was marred by the sudden murder case requiring every available body, but life isn’t always like that. Often but not always. And we did have some fun before the storm broke, didn’t we?

  All the best, Yours, Honeypot.

  Chapter Two

  DCI Sandy Laird looked fondly at his wife and thought how lucky he had been. Not only a character who was splendid to live with – funny, sympathetic and wickedly good in the marital bed – but lovely enough to make all his colleagues jealous. What more could a man wish for? Sometimes he wished that she had not come from a family to which money was of little account; at others, he knew perfectly well that she sometimes, secretly as she thought, eased their path with a little greasing with her father’s money. She was never extravagant. He pretended ignorance and thanked his lucky stars that he did not have to grudge her anything that she really wanted.

  Honey usually felt just as fortunate, but surely a husband ought to have just a trace of jealousy. ‘You really don’t mind me driving around with a good-looking and unattached male?’ she asked. Could it be that he didn’t care? Or that he felt guilty about something and was making up for it?

  Sandy became aware that he was treading on dangerous ground. They were entering territory wherein almost any answer was likely to be wrong. He gave her a hug and then nibbled her earlobe. ‘I trust you absolutely,’ he said. ‘And, of course, you’ll drive him mad with lust but I know you’re capable of dealing with any would-be lover.’

  ‘He’s ex-SAS.’

  ‘He’s spent months in hospital since those days and from what I hear he’s very well behaved.’

  She turned her head to put the earlobe beyond his reach. ‘The sheriff didn’t think so. Why don’t you go with him?’

  He sighed and spoke with exaggerated patience. ‘Darling, you know I’m right in the thick of it. The McLure case is taking up rather more than all my time. And these are your friends, not mine. And also, you know more about dogs than I do. If you feel the need for a chaperone, get one of your friends to go with you.’

  ‘They’d think that I was trying to set them up on a date.’

  ‘That might be a sound idea in itself. What he needs is a companion-nanny-mistress. What about June?’

  The two were cramped together in one overstuffed armchair. As he spoke, he felt Honey’s body stiffen. June was their resident maid, daughter of Honey’s father’s housekeeper, a treasure and an absolute necessity while both were working and liable to be called to duty suddenly at any time. Sandy was unnecessarily touchy about being seen to accept subsidy from Honey’s father, who was an industrial tycoon as well as a major landowner. He never acknowledged that his wife was underwriting part of June’s wages out of her allowance from her father.

  ‘You’re not thinking that we might put her forward for the post?’ Honey enquired.

  ‘Lord, no! Life would be impossible without her. Imagine one of us away and the other coming home late to a cold and empty house. Let him find his own nursemaid. I was only suggesting her as your escort for the afternoon.’

  ‘Keeping house for us is what she’s for. I suppose I’ll have to face him without backup,’ she said. ‘Remind me to take that can of Mace® with me. Well, at least a dog should help him to meet people. I thought a Labrador. You can’t really go wrong with a Lab. Treat them well and they train themselves and they’ll love you for ever after whether you deserve it or not. You can’t beat a Lab.’

  They were stretched out in the chair – which must have been built for somebody of enormous girth – in their sitting room, each relaxed after a good meal but tired after a hard day. She stretched out a long and well turned-leg and gave Pippa, her personal Labrador, a push. The dog responded with an affectionate fart.

  ‘Sometimes they make you want to beat them. Nothing can eat or fart like a Labrador. They leave all other breeds at the farting gate. You think he’s capable of looking after a dog properly?’ Sandy asked.

  ‘I’m sure of it. He’s not an idiot. He’s a bit slow and very gentle and I think he’s just looking for something to lavish all his bottled-up love on. I phoned that chap in Fife, the Lab breeder, and he has a bitch puppy available. If that doesn’t work out, we’ll try again after Christmas when the unwanted presen
ts are being returned. As soon as Andrew gets a puppy of his own he’ll forget all about me.’

  ‘All right. Carry your mobile phone switched on and I’ll do the same.’

  Two days later, Honey emailed to her friend Poppy:

  Poppy – before I forget, let me wish you a very Happy Christmas and a thoroughly happy New Year. Now to matters of more importance.

  Your money order arrived safely. I said earlier that you must still have a tendresse for your ex and to judge from the size of your money order you must still be his slave. But I said that I’d match your contribution and I’m not one to renege. I wasn’t sure whether it would be best to try before Christmas while pups were still available or later when unwelcome presents had been returned. I decided to start now. To my surprise Sandy was not in the least perturbed at the idea of my driving all over the place in the company of a personable ex-officer with a history of brain damage and loss of temper. I did ask Sandy whether he’d rather undertake the chore. But he said that I know more about dogs than he does and anyway he’s in the thick of a big fraud case just now.

  According to Dad’s ’keepers the most suitable breeder, or the one with the most suitable line of Labs, was in north-east Fife, not too far away. Even if it hadn’t looked like snow, I wasn’t going to travel in Andrew’s little sports car and come back with a wet puppy being sick in my lap. Dad, you may recall, still passes his Range Rovers on to me as soon as he gets tired of the colour or the ashtrays are full or something. We went in the latest handmedown. Rather than have Andrew’s rusty little toy lowering the tone outside our house all day, I picked him up from his door. I brought Pippa along because she’s a motherly bitch who would reassure any pup on the journey.

  We had directions to a Joe Little, who breeds (and trains and competes with) the most perfect Labradors. Only when we were there did Andrew mention that what he really wanted was a springer spaniel. I didn’t slap him – he might have hit me back and he’s SAS trained. I did try to point out that springers, being self-willed and cussed little bastards, were a challenge for the beginner, that they collected mud and burrs like nobody’s business and that after being out of doors for ten seconds in a slight drizzle you could wring them out like a sponge, but it went through and out of the other ear without touching the sides.