The following morning, Friday, I was in the south-western section of the vines finishing off the pesticide respray. It was around eleven when I felt my phone buzz suddenly into life in my pocket, my heart skipping a beat as I recognised the succession of digits which followed the UK international code as Diane's home number.
"Diane! Hi. Just a sec." Gratefully unshouldering the spray tank, I slumped down into the dappled shade, propped my aching back against a vine stake. "Hard at it I'm afraid," I panted back into the receiver.
"Rare day off for me," came the chirped response.
"Good for you. So... what's it to be then? Get the Nikes out, seven times around Albert Park?"
Diane was one of those annoying types of people who, despite now being in her late-forties, and despite various lifestyle and nutritional choices which at best could be described as questionable, was simply incapable of putting on weight in any significant way. I doubt she even owned a pair of Nikes.
"Seven times around! Hah, that's for lily-livered cissies. Was thinking about going for a round dozen actually. Changed my mind at the last moment though. Decided my day off would be more constructively spent catching up on all the episodes of my favourite soap opera I've missed over the last few weeks."
"Exercise the mind rather the body."
"Precisely."
Preliminaries over, her tone then grew sombre.
"I saw the funeral on the news last night."
She went on to describe those few brief seconds of footage which I would later search out myself over the internet in preparation for the writing of this book: Sarah propped up by the two girls, seemingly carried on their shoulders as they struggle their way out of the crematorium gates and into the waiting car of a friend or relative. A sadder, more beautiful widow it's impossible to imagine.
"There's something might have come up," I informed her, proceeding to fill her in on mine and the commander's late-evening ascent of the Pozzetta headland a few nights earlier. The whole Rocco Quaranta angle. "Pricked Nuzzo's interest for a day or so. Seems to have given up now though."
"Maybe he's right Jim." Diane's voice had taken on a gently urging tone, the same someone might use to echo a doctor's advice that a friend give up smoking. "I mean, between you, you've done all that's humanly possible. Bracewell got away, simple as that. Sometimes you've no choice but to accept things. Let it go."
Like all detectives, my retirement had indeed been tinged by the frustration of unresolved mystery. The bloated corpse of a never-to-be-identified asiatic male spotted by a dogwalker along the banks of the Tees one grim, foggy morning. Jamie Holliston, the ten-year-old who went missing on his way to school; in the unlikely event he was still alive, he would be around twenty-five now. Cases that stay with you, images which will forever haunt. Not so many though perhaps, all things considered. No matter how long it might take, no matter how many wrong turns I made, I usually got to the bitter end of things. I was determined to do the same again now.
"I just think we might be close to understanding what really happened that night. That there's something we've been overlooking, that's all. A false assmption we've based our hypotheses on."
Diane knew better than to argue with me. After a sighed, resigned comment that I was worse than a dog with a bone, she proceeded to fill me in on the latest CID room gossip.
As she did so I found myself gazing up at the twin rows of grape bunches which stretched out in front of me, ever smaller, the end of the vines so distant my seated perspective made them disappear into the foliage. Healthy grapes, each bunch as heavy as a cow's udder, thick dripping jewels of a purple not far removed from black. Now having almost finished the pesticide respray, I'd been able to confirm with my own eyes what the ministry inspection team had concluded: that, somewhat miraculously, the fanleaf virus had been contained to the upper section past the outbuilding. What was more, the earlier bunch rot problem was more limited than I had feared; was of a level, in fact, which could be deemed desirable in terms of sweetness to the overall taste. Though my yield was significantly reduced, I at least felt confident that this would be an even more palatable vintage than last year's. Something, yes. At least I had this to cling to.
"How are you Jim?" Diane asked finally, this after exhausting her repertoire of libellous supposed workplace scandals. Her tone reminded me a little of Ellie: she wasn't to be fobbed off with mere platitudes. Only the truth - something approaching it at least - would be accepted.
So it was that I briefly outlined the symptoms of fanleaf virus. Described the visit of the ministerial inspection team, the short and mid-term consequences to my business. Went on to recount my call to Heather; without going into specifics, broadly brushstroked the enormity of my debt.
Diane's response was surprisingly upbeat: "Well that's great!" Then, in an attempt to qualify this: "Not the virus thing I mean. Not the financial aspect. But that you called her. Felt comfortable enough to do that."
"Needs must," I muttered.
"Yea, but even so, I think we can call it a step forwards."
"Then why does it feel so much like a step backwards?" I asked.
"Believe me Jim, in a few months, a couple of years at most, you'll look back at this as a starting point in your and Heather's reconciliation." Then, rethinking: "Reconciliation, no - that's not the word." As she searched for the right one I reminded myself that if anyone knew what they were talking about it was Diane, that she'd experienced exactly what I was going through not once but twice. Despite her barbed-wire sense of humour, I knew she'd maintained close, constructive relationships with Kev and Johnny's respective fathers, had retained a certain residual warmth in their regard.
"A starting point in your and Heather's repacification," she self-corrected.
But it struck me this wasn't the right word either. Heather had already repacified herself to me. Forgiven, moved on. I was the one stubbornly digging my heels in.
Dwelling and brooding.
Curdling my insides with wine and rancour.
*
Marston would get back to me on Sunday morning, just as I was passing a razor over jaw in preparation for my lunch appointment at Commander Nuzzo's home.
"On my way back up the A1," he announced. "Spent the night in a B&B. Throw in food and beer, I reckon that's over a hundred quids' worth of expenses you owe me Jim. Sure as hell my editor's not going to be stumping up any cash."
I'd swung back from the bungalow's closet-sized bathroom into its bathroom-sized kitchen/living room, had pulled up a chair at the ricekety old table, my face still half-lathered in shaving foam.
"Thanks," I offered, my gratitude genuine. After all, the guy had sacrificed his Saturday night for me. More than Nuzzo perhaps, it seemed that Marston was my only true ally in still wishing to get to the bottom of the Bracewell case.
"So, I got down there early in the evening. You know, a quick tour of a few pubs." Yes, I'd suspected this might be his strategy. "Lovely place, Stamford. Some cracking boozers." I didn't doubt it; something of a mini Oxford, didn't they say? "Didn't get anything I didn't already know from the tabloids though. You know, that her father's rolling in it and all that. Partner in a construction company, Wollaton and Pearce. Not just residential but offices too, factories, shopping centres, train station redevelopments, everything you can think of. Pratically, half of anything that's been built over the last twenty years in the whole of the East Midlands has got Wollaton and Pearce's pawprint behind it."
Reflecting on this - on the multi-millionaire background Olivia came from - I swished down the remaining mouthful of lukewarm coffee from my breakfast mug there on the table beneath me.
"As you can imagine, it wasn't the local comprehensive school Olivia went to but some posh private school. Some place over towards Oakham, I was told."
There was a pause in his words, the slam of the car horn loud and sudden enough to cause me to wince, snatch the phone involuntarily away from my ear.
"Bloody lorry drivers!" Marstin cursed. Then, settling himself again: "So, it still not having gone nine I decide to have a little drive over there, this place out towards Oakham where she went to school. Picture-postcard little village - you know, all thatched roofs and Mercedes parked in the drives." A diiferent world from Middlesbrough and its surrounds, I thought, pinching together the last remaining crumbs of croissant from the breakfast plate. "And the pub, Lord God, I swear half of the clientele have got wine glasses in their hands rather than beer!" Perhaps remembering that I was in fact a producer of the former type of alcoholic beverage, he carried on without further comment on the preferences of his fellow bar leaners the previous evening. "Anyway, I get talking to this young woman about Olivia's age, and turns out she went to this same private school, the year above." My right hand paused its crumb pinching. This was interesting, yes. "There was a bit of scandal it seems. At 18, her final year at school, Olivia goes and gets herself pregnant. The thing is, she claimed the father was Doug Pearce."
"Her father's business partner," I gasped.
"Imagine, the guy was in his forties, had kids of his own."
I'd noted Marston's choice of the verb 'claimed'. "And did people believe her?"
"Some did it seems, yes. Pearce's wife, for one. Divorced him not long afterwards."
"But not Olivia's father," I mused out loud.
"Exactly. Or at least didn't believe it was Pearce who'd set things into motion. Threw her out of the house, cut all links with her. She ended up having an abortion needless to say. Moved to Nottingham, bit of modelling, escorting, that sort of thing. A dissolute sort of lifestyle I suppose you could say. You know - drugs, casual sex. Then she met Lee Bracewell and the rest, as they say, is history."
Despite her lies and subterfuge, it was impossible in that moment not to feel sorry for her. A victim, a naive young girl dealt a terrible hand. Yet in the context of the case it was difficult to see how this particular piece slotted into place. Seemed to be of a different puzzle entirely.
Maybe Diane had been right, I reflected as Marston ended his call. Sometimes there is no other choice than to accept defeat. Just let things go.
Case resolution is like an old acquaintance you haven't seen for years however. No matter where you might find yourself, no matter what the state of your soul, it can be there hidden just out of sight around the next corner. Something to be stumbled into, chanced upon.
As I finished getting ready for my lunch appointment at commander Nuzzo's that Sunday morning, there was no way I could have guessed how close we were in fact to the end.