Free A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series) by Alex Howard Page B

itself. Enver stroked his thick, dark drooping moustache, Joseph Huss scratched his grey one. He knew that Melinda, his daughter, and Enver had been seeing each other and there’d been a break-up. Shame, he’d thought. He’d liked the quiet policeman. He had pushed the matter away. He had every faith in his daughter’s abilities; boyfriends were not his field of expertise. Joseph Huss was not given to dwelling on his daughter’s love life. That was nothing to do with him. Well, anyway, here Enver was again. Not dressed for the occasion either.
    ‘She’s in the workshop,’ he said, pointing across the farmyard.
    ‘What’s she doing?’ asked Enver. It didn’t really matter, of course, but he felt he should say something. Are the cows well? would have sounded inane. He never knew what to say to Joseph Huss.
    ‘Fixing the clutch on the Freelander,’ said her father. Enver nodded. He knew nothing about cars. He knew a clutch changed gears when depressed, or something like that. He knew a Freelander was a kind of Land Rover. There were another two parked in the yard, a Defender and its precursor, a 1964 Series Two, looking like a prim old lady on its narrow wheels. They were both army olive-green drab. Joseph Huss said thoughtfully, ‘They’re pigs to work on, Freelanders.’ Enver made a non-committal noise, nodded again and squelched his way across the mud covering the cobbles of the yard.
    More mud. More mud on his shoes.
    Joseph Huss watched him go, a wry smile on his face. His daughter had painted her nails that morning over breakfast. I thought you were fixing the clutch. I am, she’d said. He had shrugged, baffled; now all was explained.
    Enver walked into the workshop through the open door and looked around him. He shivered. The Husses, like most country people, were outdoor types. Doors and windows tended to be left open; draughts predominated. He was always cold when he visited Huss at her home. The air in the workshop was chilly and heavy with the smell of engine oil. A black SUV was in front of him, like a dead animal, rearing up at a thirty degree angle, held in the air by two trolley jacks, one on each side. The bonnet was open; there was no sign of Huss.
    He walked to the rear of the car. His shoulders brushed a board devoted to spanners, arranged in order of size. Silhouettes had been drawn round every one of them so they wouldn’t be misplaced when they were returned after use. There were three metal toolboxes on the floor, one containing a huge array of sockets, and various other tools neatly attached to the wall. His gaze travelled over a workbench with a vice that you could fit a man’s head in, a generator and then, rounding the rear of the car, he saw DI Melinda Huss, crouched so far inside the near-side rear arch she was practically invisible. Most of her seemed to be under the car apart from her backside encased in a boilersuit, although hers was a faded green as opposed to her father’s blue one, that jutted out from beneath the curve of the car.
    Enver coughed discreetly. He didn’t want to startle her, not with all that metal hanging over her. He had somehow managed to crush their relationship; he didn’t want to add her body under a ton or so of Land Rover to that unfortunate score.
    ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said from inside the car. Her voice sounded unfriendly. For the thousandth time, Enver wondered what he’d done to upset her. They’d seen each other socially maybe a dozen or so times, things had even progressed as far as passionate kissing, which was fast work by Enver’s standards – he was a shy man by nature and had body-image problems. He would occasionally look back to photos of himself in his prime as a boxer – had he so wanted he could have found some of his fights on YouTube – and compared himself unfavourably to what he had become in just a few short years. He hated seeing himself naked these days, and when he showered he’d avert his gaze from his flabby