Mr Keoshgerian snorted. “Wally Mole.”
“He’s a good lad.”
“He was at school with our Kevin. I could see he was stupid, even then.”
“Wally is not stupid,” I said. “He’s a good copper.”
Mr Keoshgerian sighed and shrugged. I was never going to convince him. On the other hand, he’d managed to make me forget all about the trenching machine.
On the way back into the village, I drove past Dronfield Farm and pulled into a lay-by a few hundred yards further down the road. I walked up the little lane to the gate and leaned on it, looking up the gravelled driveway into what had once been the farmyard. The buildings had been cleaned up, the stone sandblasted and new windows installed. It didn’t look very much like a farm any more.
While I stood there, Leonie Hallam emerged from around one of the buildings, saw me, and walked down the driveway to the gate.
“I almost didn’t recognise you out of uniform, Sergeant…” she said.
“Grant,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Can I help you?” She was wearing a green waxed jacket and jeans, and there were green Wellingtons on her feet. Her face was scrubbed and her hair was tied back. She looked a lot younger than I remembered.
“I was just passing,” I told her. “I thought I’d look in and check you hadn’t had any more trouble.”
She shook her head. “Nothing I’ve noticed. Have you caught him?”
“I’m afraid not. Not yet.”
She tilted her head to one side and looked at me. “And here was me thinking you’d come to bring me some good news.”
“You seemed a bit upset the other night,” I said.
“I’m not surprised; I’d just seen a strange bloke wandering around outside.”
“Was that all it was?”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Isn’t that enough, Sergeant?”
I decided to let it go. “We’re going to be stopping by, from time to time,” I told her. “Just to make sure you don’t have any more unwelcome visitors. And my Inspector’s arranging a visit from someone who can advise you on home security.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said. “The place was already like a fortress when we moved in.”
Courtesy, no doubt, of the rock star who had once lived here. I said, “It won’t hurt to have someone check. And it’s free.” She kept looking at me. “But it’s up to you. Free country and all that.”
“I’ll talk it over with my husband,” she said. “Anyway, it’s been nice to see you, and thank you for taking the trouble to stop by, but I have to get back to work.”
“Of course. Mustn’t keep you. If you do have any more trouble, though, call us immediately. I’d like to find this chap, if possible.”
“You think he might be dangerous?”
“Maybe not, but most of the farmers round here keep shotguns; I’d like to sort this out before someone gets hurt.” When she didn’t reply I nodded and said, “Anyway, have a good day, Mrs Hallam.”
“Yes,” she said, and she turned and walked back up the drive.
I watched her go for a few seconds, wondering what I’d done to offend her. Then I headed for my car.
Like a lot of villages on the old coach-roads, Stockford had grown up around its coaching inn. It hadn’t grown up very much, though. There were two steep streets of houses and little shops running down towards the valley bottom, a scatter of outlying farms, a Forestry Commission plantation, and a dozen or so light-industrial units. In the normal course of events, its police station would have been closed years ago and the responsibility for policing the area would have devolved to a station in one of the larger villages closer to Barnsley or Huddersfield, but some bureaucratic brainstorm had occurred at Force HQ and we not only had a police station but twelve officers and four patrol cars as well. John Weller, my Inspector, said he spent at least five minutes every day worrying that HQ would notice that we were still here and decide we were costing them too much money.
Because my house wasn’t yet fit for human habitation, I was living over the shop, in one of the bachelor flats above the police station. It was bright and airy and had all the amenities, but no matter how much air freshener I sprayed about it always smelled faintly of disinfectant, and on Saturday nights you could always hear some drunk or other shouting in the cells.
It was also difficult to get away from the Job.
I was cooking dinner when there was a knock on the front door. “It’s open!” I shouted rather than answering the door, because my hands were covered with a mixture of flour and egg.
The door opened and John looked into the flat. “You’re busy,” he said.
“Just having a bite to eat. Come on in.”
He came in and closed the door behind him. “What are you cooking?”
“Pork escalope, duchesse potatoes and mange touts.”
He shook his head. John remained indelibly imprinted with the solid meat-and-two-veg ethos that he had learned from his mother’s cooking. To him, a square meal was one that came with lashings of Oxo gravy. My menus might as well have been written in a foreign language.
I held up the meat. “You get a nice lean cut of pork, and you beat it flat with a hammer.” I held up the meat hammer in the other hand. “This tenderises the meat. Then you dip it in flour, then in beaten egg, then –”
He held up a hand. “All right, Frank.”
“It’s really easy, John,” I told him. “You can do it with chicken breasts as well. Turkey breasts. Veal. Yum yum.” I smacked my lips.
“Frank.”
“All you need is a bit of meat, a couple of eggs, some flour and some breadcrumbs and a bit of seasoning, and it’s really nice. I’ll teach you. Go home tonight and surprise Lucy.”
He looked levelly at me. I sighed and put the pork on a plate and the meat-hammer on the worktop. “I can’t believe in this day and age that you’ve never learned to cook for yourself.” I turned off the gas under the frying pan, turned to the sink and rinsed my hands under the tap.
“I haven’t had a chance to say well done for arresting the Hinchcliffes,” he said, short-circuiting the conversation about his culinary shortcomings.
“Wally was there too,” I pointed out, drying my hands on a towel.
“You were driving the car.”
“Wally wanted to.”
He smiled. “If he had done I’d have been visiting you in hospital.”
“Doesn’t matter. He was there.” I went through into the living room, sat down on the sofa and started to roll myself a cigarette.
“I’ve read your report,” he said, following me and flopping into one of the threadbare armchairs.
“And?”
“Oh, brilliant, as usual. Every full stop and comma in the right place. Semi-colons. Ah.” He looked at the ceiling and smiled nostalgically. “I thought I’d never see another semi-colon again after I left college.” He caught me looking cynically at him. “No, I mean it. Some of these lads can hardly put two words together on a page. Your reports are a joy to read. Can I tell you a secret?”
“You can give it a try.”
He sat forward on the chair and clasped his hands together between his knees. “Sometimes,” he said seriously, “I take your reports home and read them before I go to bed, just so I can go to sleep knowing the force isn’t entirely in the hands of illiterates.”
I smiled at him. “Fuck off, John.”
He shrugged and sat back. He was only five or six years older than me, and he was starting to get fat. He was still wearing his uniform trousers and shirt, but he’d removed his clip-on tie and undone the top button of his shirt and his thinning brown hair was a little tousled.
“And in all those pages of gorgeous prose, I detected a definite reluctance on your part to take any credit for what you did the other night,” he told me.
“Oh, John,” I said.
“We’ve been trying to put the Hinchcliffes away ever since they were ol
d enough to go in the newsagents’ and steal copies of The Dandy,” said John. “We know they’ve been involved in at least forty percent of all the crimes committed in this area over the last eight years, and we’ve never been able to charge them for any of them.”
I rubbed my eyes.
“This goes no further than you and me, right?”
I nodded.
“Some of the lads were talking about going up to Hinchcliffe Farm with baseball bats and sorting out the problem.”
I stared at him.
John nodded. “Well, it never came to that, did it.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was trying to reassess my relationship with my fellow officers. It hadn’t realised I was working with people who had vigilante tendencies.
“You’ll take credit for this collar, Frank,” John told me. “And that’s an order.”
“You can’t give me an order; you’re not wearing your tie.” I licked the sticky-strip on my Rizla and rolled my cigarette shut. Then I started to search through the pile of newspapers and magazines on the coffee-table for a bit of card to use as a filter.
“I can’t understand you,” he said. “The most significant arrest in this area since...” He thought about it “...well, ever, and you don’t want to take credit for it.”
I scowled and tore a strip off the cover of a copy of New Scientist. “As I understand it, we don’t do this job for brownie points.”
“There’s brownie points and brownie points. You understand what I mean?”
“No, John. I don’t.” I rolled up the strip of paper and inserted it in the end of my cigarette. Then I put the cigarette in my mouth and lit it. A shower of burning tobacco sifted down onto my lap. I was the world’s most inept roll-your-own smoker, but I knew that if I bought ready-mades I could quite happily notch up three packets a day. By rolling my own I at least managed to limit the amount of tobacco I smoked; a high percentage of it just fell out. I patted my jeans to put out the tiny little cinders.
John said. “Ursula’s made a formal complaint against you.”
“Well, that’s hardly new.”
“She says you wilfully endangered the twins because you have a personal grudge against them.”
I stared at him.
“Oh, it’ll never fly, of course,” he said. “The car was nicked, we’ve got your dashcam footage, and even the twins won’t be able to deny they were there. Ursula’s saying you panicked them into driving like that, though.”
“It’s a novel idea,” I said, “considering they were already doing seventy-five when Wally and I first sighted them.”
“Like I say, we’ve got your footage of the pursuit. It won’t stand up, but you should be aware that the IOPC will be in touch about it.”
I sighed. The Independent Office for Police Conduct were exactly what I needed in my life right now.
“There’ll be someone over from Sheffield to interview you in a day or so,” he told me. “Just stay calm and tell them the truth and everything will be fine.” He watched my face for a few moments. “You’ve dealt with the IOPC before.”
“Once.”
“They’re all right, really,” he said. “Just doing their job. They hate being lied to, though. So keep it on the straight and narrow. Your report’s fine; stick to that.”
“We didn’t really follow procedure out there,” I reminded him. “After the twins rolled the car.”
He scowled. He’d seen some of the photos of the little carnival which had gone on at the crash site, and he knew as well as I did that we were one social media posting away from a public relations catastrophe. It was only a matter of time. “Let’s deal with one disaster at once, Frank,” he said. “You’re on administrative leave until the IOPC have had a chance to interview you. I would tell you not to contact any of the officers involved with the incident, but you live in the police station so just try to stay out of everyone’s way. Do not try to contact Ursula Hinchcliffe.” As if I would ever do that under any circumstances.
I said, “This is very annoying, John.”
“I know. But it’s just routine. Tell them what happened, tell them the truth, and it’ll all be over in a few days.”
I stubbed out my cigarette. “Okay.”
He got up and went to the door. “Oh, I got a call from Leonie Hallam.”
“Has she made a complaint as well?”
“She was wondering what you were doing out there this afternoon.”
“I’d been up to the house, it was on the way back,” I told him. I shrugged. “I just thought I’d look in.”
He watched me for a few moments. “What did you talk about?”
“I asked her if she’d seen anything else out of the ordinary since I was last there, told her we were going to run extra patrols past the farm, mentioned sending someone to check their locks and alarms. She seemed a bit annoyed with me being there, so I left. I didn’t go onto the property; we talked at the gate.”
“Hm.” John put his hand on the door handle. “You said in your report that you thought there might be a domestic situation there.”
“It was just a feeling; I got the impression she and her husband had been rowing. They’d both been drinking – she was still drinking while I was there – but I didn’t see any signs of a fight.”
“Okay.” He turned the handle. “Let me have a think about that. But do me a favour and don’t go out there again without letting me know.”
“Sure,” I said. “Not a problem.”
“And don’t worry about the IOPC. Everything will be fine.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m sure it will.”
Four
A couple of days later, I was called down to the interview room, and found a couple already sitting there. She was middle-aged and untidy; he was younger and smartly-suited. There were official-looking folders on the table in front of them.
“Sergeant Grant,” the woman said, standing as I walked in. “Rhona Sachs.” She put out her hand and I shook it. “This is my colleague, Colin Richmond,” she added, indicating the younger man, who hadn’t bothered to stand and didn’t offer to shake my hand. “May I call you Frank?” she asked, sitting again.
“By all means,” I said, sitting down opposite them.
“I understand you’ve waived your right to be accompanied by a Police Federation rep,” she told me, putting a voice recorder on the table and switching it on.
I put my phone down beside the recorder and turned on the voice memo app. “Let’s not bother the Fed until we have to,” I said.
She nodded. “So,” she said. “We’re here because a complaint has been brought against you by a Mrs Ursula Hinchcliffe. Do you know Mrs Hinchcliffe?”
“Only by reputation. We’ve never met.” I watched Richmond note this down on a clean sheet of paper.
“Right.” Sachs smiled at me and clasped her hands on the table. “Well, this is all perfectly routine and we’ll try to make it as painless for everybody as possible.”
“Painless is good,” I said.
She smiled again. “Indeed. So, to start with, why don’t you tell us what happened on the evening of the seventeenth? In your own words.”
I took them through what had happened, from receiving the call to be on the lookout for a stolen Lexus, to spotting the car being driven at high speed, setting off in pursuit, the Lexus crashing. I was more vague about the aftermath, with everyone taking photographs. Sachs asked questions when she thought a point needed clarifying. Richmond remained silent, taking notes.
When I’d completed my account, Sachs said, “Mrs Hinchcliffe alleges that the officers at this station were engaged in a vendetta against her sons. Would you say that’s a fair comment on the situation?”
“I wouldn’t say it was a vendetta,” I said.
She sat back and watched me. “What would you say it was then, Frank?”
“The twins are responsible for quite a high proportion of the crime around here,” I told her. “We’ve been kee
n to arrest them for some time.”
She nodded. “Keen. By any means necessary?”
“No, of course not. The longer they’re put away the longer things will be quiet round here; nobody would want to jeopardise that.”
Sachs looked at me a moment longer, then she opened one of the folders and consulted some notes. “And then you were despatched to… Dronfield Farm,” she said, reading. “A reported intruder. Shouldn’t you have come straight back here and written up your report about the accident?”
“It was a busy night. Dronfield Farm was on the way back here. Control thought I could kill two birds with one stone, stop off and deal with the prowler report and then carry on back to the station.”
“And that’s what happened?”
“Yes. I took statements from the householders, Sergeant Beck checked the property. There was no sign of an intruder.”
“How long were you at Dronfield Farm?”
“About thirty minutes.”
“That doesn’t seem very long,” she said. “To take two statements and do a check of the property.”
“The householder who reported the prowler had been drinking. I got the impression that she and her husband had been having a row. I made a judgement not to expend time and resources on it unnecessarily. And, as you said, I should have been back here making my report.”
“Cary Grant,” said Richmond. They were the first words he had spoken since I arrived in the room. I looked at him. He’d stopped taking notes and was watching me. “Mrs Hallam said the intruder was Cary Grant.”
“Those were her words, yes.”
“Not ‘he looked like Cary Grant’.”
“As I said, she’d been drinking. Was still drinking.”
Richmond made a note. Sachs said, “Why would she say that?”
“It happens more often than you’d think. People are familiar with the faces of famous people; sometimes they just subconsciously associate them with people they’ve seen. We had a distraction burglar about eighteen months ago, two of the victims said he looked like George Clooney.”
“Did he?” asked Richmond.
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