DCI Isaac Cook Box Set 1

she could see no resemblance.
Her father had shown her great love, made her feel special; her mother had ridiculed her, kept her out of the limelight, and had belittled her too often. How often had she seen her mother telling her friends that her daughter’s looks came from Robert’s side of the family? How many times, when there was a function to attend or an event where the cameras would be clicking, had she been denied the chance to participate? She remembered her brother Sam attending, but then her mother had always said, ‘He’s much older than you. You’re too young to attend such events. People get drunk, make fools of themselves. At your impressionable age, I want to protect you from such influences until you’re older.’
Fiona remembered well enough. As the years rolled by through her childhood and formative teenage years, the non-attendance continued, although the reasons given varied.
Her father ensured that her mother’s rejection was countered by his love and generosity. As a child, she looked for a mother’s love. As a teenager experiencing her first period and then her first playground crush on a boy, rejected with scathing insults, she looked for a mother’s support, a shoulder to cry on. As an adult, she no longer needed her mother, only her hatred for her.
Her father she adored. She knew full well her mother’s promiscuous behaviour caused him great concern, although he never admitted it, at least to her. He always said that was the way she was, and they should accept her for her flaws. She could see the hurt in her father’s eyes, and the look on his face when he thought no one was looking.
Her temper had been an inconvenience as a child, just a tantrum, but as an adult it had become an embarrassment, even to her. A failure to obtain an acting part, an inattentive shop assistant, a hairdresser who had failed to achieve a satisfactory result ‒ not difficult given the substandard material that he had to work with ‒ and she would see red, and blow off steam in an uncontrolled manner.
There had been a production at a theatre in the centre of London, and she had managed to obtain a decent part. Mainly because it required a name to pull in the paying public, and the daughter of Marjorie Frobisher was better than no name, but only just. Secondly, and less important, was that the part of an embittered unattractive woman matched Fiona Avers. The casting agent saw that little makeup would be required.
There had been a lesser reason, although to Fiona it had been significant. The director of the play, one of the Russian classics, had a perversion for unattractive women, which he made clear the first night of rehearsals, in his office at the back of the theatre. Everyone had gone home; she had stayed for some additional coaching at his insistence and encouragement. He had plied her with alcohol, vodka mainly, which had little effect, as she had a substantial capacity for drink, having regularly drunk too much since her teens. There, sitting close in his office, the touching, the compliments, and it was not long before they were both naked on the floor. The carpet was old and dirty, although both were beyond caring and it was her that was underneath, her breasts feeling the heaviness of his body and the scratching of his chest hair. It was soon over. Once he had expended his lust, she had quickly been hustled out of the office.
The next day he was cool, maybe from guilt, perhaps to show a neutral approach to the cast in his praise and criticism of them all. At least, she wanted to believe that, until she saw him approaching Mary O’Donnell, the lead actress, and his request for her to stay back for some extra coaching. Fiona knew that yet again a man had used her for his base needs and had left her high and dry, emotionally and sexually.
The weeks passed by, she kept her emotions in check, until he had criticised her once too often, and the cow Mary O’Donnell had offered some choice comment about Fiona’s acting, and that she was an easy lay. It was clear that the director had told Mary about his night-time encounter with her and the office floor.
Unrestrained, Fiona slapped the woman hard across the face with such force that she fell back and banged her head against a box in the corner of the stage. They took her off to hospital and evicted Fiona from the theatre.
Since then the parts had been few, and she saw her career was at an end. She blamed her mother for her life, but the few times they had met in the last few years her mother had been unapologetic. ‘It was my career, darling. I had to do what was right, what was necessary to look after the family, and you always had the best.’
Fiona knew she had had the best that money could buy, but not what she longed for, the love of a mother for a daughter. She hated her mother, the one emotion that was not subject to scathing comments from talentless actresses, critical seducing directors, and playground arbiters on her lack of good looks. That one emotion, hatred for a person that she should love, could only hate, remained constant.

Chapter 6
With Isaac out looking for Marjorie Frobisher, Farhan had taken on the responsibility of finding out why she was so important. So far, he had only come up with blanks, but he and Isaac had decided it was integral to the case to know, although they had been told to focus on finding her.
Their boss, Detective Superintendent Goddard, should have known better than to ask a detective to look in one place, avoid another. A good detective looks everywhere, no matter how insignificant and supposedly irrelevant. A jigsaw