Requiem Mass by Elizabeth Corley Page B

attended his wedding; Bob had been best man and Fenwick was a close enough friend to warrant an invitation. Which meant that this radiant – possibly unfaithful – mother had been the young bride on that occasion. He couldn’t remember her name, nor anything about the day except that he had managed to seduce one of the bridesmaids later on, thanks more to champagne than to any skills of his.
    The coincidence of encountering some of Bob’s close family put his own domestic worries out of his mind. He deliberately set the Fearnside file to one side to return to last, as a small incentive to keep him going. The next complaint related to police handling of a domestic incident. A six-foot-three father of four, Mr Baxter, was complaining that the police had used unnecessary physical force when attending a domestic incident at his home. Apparently, a five-foot-eight, female constable had physically restrained the man, bruising his arm and wrist in the process. The man had been off sick for over a week and, being self-employed, he was threatening to sue for loss of earnings. The amount he was claiming made him significantly better paid than the Assistant Chief Constable!
    The account from the constable’s notebook provided some clarification. Apparently the aggrieved gentleman had been in the process of delivering a ‘lesson’ to his live-in companion. During the incident the constable had had to wrest an old-fashionedmarble rolling pin from his hand. She had, in her own words, ‘employed the minimum of force and restraint necessary to prevent potential injury to the other person present, myself and the dog.’ The dog?
    The incident was less than a week old and Fenwick was puzzled as to why it was being taken so seriously. Then he noticed the ACC’s note to him, clipped to the file: AJF, Baxter is one of Councillor Ward’s regular private-hire drivers. AHB. It might just as well have been a large, red ‘Handle with care!’ notice. Ward was one of a large minority of militant left members of the local council and had decided to justify his minority position by taking the police to task, with monotonous regularity, on any and all points of issue.
    Fenwick realised that he would need to spend hours investigating and making sure the paperwork was perfect before reporting back. It would be a waste of his time, the constable’s and inevitably the ACC’s.
    It was with a compensating pleasure that he saw a recent note had been added to the file from an RSPCA investigator, called in by the enterprising constable. Concerned about the condition of the dog in the kitchen, she had asked the RSPCA to make a visit. Baxter’s female partner might in the eyes of the law have sufficient self-determination to drop charges of assault and put herself at his mercy for another time. Fortunately for the dog, as a dumb animal, the law allowed others to intervene on its behalf. Baxter was to be prosecuted for neglect and ill-treatment of the animal.
    Councillor Ward was unlikely, after all, to protest too strongly on his driver’s behalf. There were a lot of animal lovers in Sussex!
    It was after eleven when Fenwick finally found himself looking again into the too blue eyes of Deborah Fearnside. He spent time over Derek Fearnside’s letter. It was depressingly familiar. Even in a relatively rural area such as this, missing persons cases were quite common. Usually they were troubled teenagers, depressed wives or disturbed husbands who simply could not cope any more. And usually the person turned upwithin a few days, if they were to turn up at all, apologetic, tired, sometimes in need of medical care, but grateful for the affection they found waiting for them at home. Occasionally, they were never seen again, except in ageing photographs in missing persons specials in the press or on TV.
    Mr Fearnside could not understand why there was no police investigation into his wife’s disappearance, now nearly four weeks old. A standard letter had been