by Bill James
This effort sharpened his own brain and judgement. He saw now that possibly the most stupid part was the plan to tail Scott, and therefore, almost certainly at some stage, to tail Hazel, who’d be with him then. And, also almost certainly, she would notice him, even if Scott did not. Harpur’s way of moving and of standing still and of giving attention to what he saw would be printed on her subconscious, and similarly his height, weight, clothes, retreating hair. A father trailing his daughter! Snooping, as she’d certainly call it. God, contemptible. He was inviting catastrophe – permanent catastrophe in his relations with Hazel. Jill might not think much of him, either, when she heard about the spying. Probably, they’d fail to understand that his only aim was to protect Scott, and so protect Hazel. He would never recover his status as a fine, aboveboard single parent. This prospect terrified Harpur. He loathed the thought that he might get categorized in their recollections as a professional nose and not much more. Although his life could not allow a lot of above-boardness, he did often try to maintain it with the children. He decided to forget the tailing, just do the break-in. The objective was the same: nail Scott before someone else did. Of course, he saw a freighterload of difficulties around a break-in. Of course, he saw he could fail and saw that, if he did, someone else might nail Scott before he did, but nail him in a different way from what Harpur hoped.
Denise and Harpur washed the breakfast things and then went into the sitting room. He’d like a little escapism, a little selfishness, before he had to face up. But, at first, Denise did not allow that. ‘And she’s right, of course.’ With another ciggie going, she was on one of the new settees Harpur had bought when changing the decor and ambience, legs folded under her.
‘Who?’ Harpur said.
‘Jill.’
‘About?’
‘Romeo and Juliet.’
‘Just kids were they?’ Harpur said.
‘Absolutely. So, you’re right, too, Col.’
‘About?’
‘To worry. The feelings are real. They’re young, Hazel and Scott – school kids – but the feelings are real. From her, anyway. I don’t know him properly.’
‘Oh, yes, they’re real. They might not last. But for the moment they’re real. She’d be poleaxed, if he was. I can’t have that.’
He sensed her put the questing, undergrad brain on to this: ‘No, you can’t. No parent could. So, as I’ve said, you might do something stupid?’ she asked.
‘Yes, there’s a bit of that in it.’
‘Would it be doing something just for the sake of doing something?’
‘Yes, there’s a bit of that in it.’
‘What I thought originally was you were scared that if Hazel lost Scott she’d be so off balance that . . .’
‘She might turn to Iles in distress? Yes, there’s a bit of that in it. You should be doing Psychology, not Literature and French.’
But Denise had grown fed up with the chatter. ‘You know, Col, I look around this lovely room and feel that as a priority we should make love in it.’ She pointed her cigarette at a selection of walls.
Thank God. She could turn him away momentarily from Scott, Hazel, guns, the war. ‘Well, yes,’ he said.
‘This would have a fairly terrific significance.’
‘Will have,’ Harpur said.
‘I see this room as the most important and significant part of the house. Its fulcrum.’ She did an imitation of the words Jill used when she thought she might be going too fast for Harpur: ‘You heard of “fulcrums” at all? It’s quite a common word. Like crucial points or areas. This is the fulcrum.’
‘I think so.’
‘It used to have all those significant books belonging to your wife, didn’t it?’
‘Significant, yes.’
‘Books do tarnish a room. But nous avous changé tout çela.’
‘Sorry?’
‘French. A famous line in literature.’
‘Yes?’
‘Meaning, “We’ve changed all that.” ’
‘That’s literature?’
‘This would clinch it,’ Denise replied.
‘What?’
‘Having it off here.’
‘It will, it will. A priority, as you say.’
‘Did you ever make love in this room surrounded by books just after breakfast with her? But is that a degraded, prying, unforgivable curiosity?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which?’
‘Which what?’
‘Which is the “Yes” for? Are you saying you did make love in here surrounded with books just after breakfast with her? Or, are you saying this is a degraded, prying, unforgivable curiosity?’
‘If the “Yes” is for the second question, the first collapses,’ Harpur said. The smart-arse waggishness could divert him for a while. Thanks, Denise. He’d keep it going, if he could.
‘Don’t dodge. Was the “Yes” for the second question?’ she said.
‘I bought these big settees in case you got to feel like this one day just after breakfast during the school term, when the children had left,’ Harpur replied. ‘They’re part of the changes you mentioned in French.’
‘Got to feel like what?’ she said.
‘Wanting a terrifically significant bonk in this previously book-bland room.’
‘You thought I might get to feel like that, did you?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Usually I have to nip away pretty soon after breakfast for a lecture or seminar.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘But there’ve been some emergency cancellations of teaching this week because of staff illness.’
‘Yes.’
‘When you bought the settees – what was it, months ago, a year ago? – anyway, when you bought them you guessed, did you, that there’d be some emergency cancellations of teaching today?’
‘I felt you had certain plans for this room, it being what’s known as a fulcrum,’ Harpur said. ‘You heard of that word at all?’
She ran a hand over the upholstery. ‘Col, I feel honoured by the purchase of these settees.’ It was as though she knew he needed to stay playful, silly, for as long as it could be made to last.
‘It’s true that not many girl undergraduates have settees bought with them naked specifically in mind, or men undergraduates, either, I shouldn’t think.’
‘Did you have me naked specifically in mind?’
‘Oh, look, Denise, it would be crude, juvenile, to have you in mind naked all the time, but I do now and then. There’s more to you than flesh. Oh dear, yes. After all, you know Romeo and Juliet and sayings in French.’
‘Me specifically naked? Only me?’
‘True,’ Harpur replied.
‘I don’t mind you having me in mind like that as long as it’s me specifically you have in mind.’
‘What do you think – should I close the curtains?’
‘This settee has a high back so we’d be concealed from the street and neighbours. And there’s no newspaper boy to come up gawping close to the window and then putting a tale around about the Detective Chief Superintendent at it a.m., because you’ve already been for the papers.’
‘Agreed,’ Harpur said.
‘Did you also have that in mind when you bought the settees?’
‘What?’
‘The high back.’
‘I think there would be something base and furtive about closing the curtains,’ Harpur replied. ‘It would dim the . . . well, the significance.’
‘Yes, I felt that. We’re very much en rapport you know, Col, despite the age difference and so on.’
‘Which “and so on”?’
‘I’d say I’ve never felt so en rapport with any other man,’ she replied.
‘Well, don’t keep searching for someone to match it,’ he said. Her words solaced him. All of this after-breakfast situation solaced him, for now. He prized this rapport. He’d never experienced such a closeness with her, and, despite his previous intention to keep
her in the dark, he now decided this would be disgracefully sly. It would mean he treated her as a helpful digression and that only. He must not endanger the brilliant, instinctive harmony.
And, so, afterwards, as they got their clothes on again behind the settee’s high back, he told her his plans to do a search of Scott’s parents’ house. ‘I knew it would be something like that,’ she said.
‘What do you think?’ Suddenly, he felt he needed her fresh, dauntless, trained analytical mind after all.
‘No choice,’ she said.
Yes, she had it right straight off. But he’d like more clarity, more explanation from her. ‘Well, there is a choice,’ he said. ‘I could do it or not do it.’
‘No choice you being you,’ she said.
Yes, she had it right again. That would do. They could go back to knockabout. ‘Me being me,’ he said. ‘But what if I wasn’t?’
“Well, I wouldn’t have made love to you on this new settee in your own sitting room right after breakfast if you weren’t you, would I?’
‘You can always beat me on logic. It’s your university tuition.’
‘There’ll be a lot of police around his parents’ house,’ she replied.
‘This is a plus.’
‘Is it?’
‘I’m police.’
‘Ah, true,’ she said.
‘I could be conducting inquiries. I will be conducting inquiries. A daytime call on someone who might have witnessed the action or part of it. However, there’ll be nobody in. A plastic-card-on-the-front-door entry.’
‘Alarms?’
‘I hope none. And, in any case, sometimes the plastic doesn’t set them off because it’s acting almost like a legitimate key. Burglary is less than a science but does have some scientific aspects.’
‘This will be a really fatherly thing, Col.’
‘That’s important.’
‘I’d say crucial to you. Why openly in daylight?’
‘I told you. It would have seemed inglorious and stealthy to make love behind the curtains.’
‘No, I meant why do you have to break in up there during daylight?’ she replied.
Naturally, he’d known that’s what she meant, but he’d wanted a break from the listing of problems. ‘The only time the house is liable to be empty. Mr, at work. Mrs, shopping or having her hair done. The children in school. I’ll watch for a chance. A lot of waiting around.’
‘Listen, if you’re caught and they demote you to inspector I’ll stick by you, Col. Women do that kind of thing. All the women stick by Phineas Finn when he’s wrongly accused of murder in Anthony Trollope – though, mind you, he is handsome.’
‘They’d demote me to constable.’
‘Oh.’
‘Possibly charge me.’
‘Oh.’
He couldn’t work out whether her shock was part of the jokey playacting or part of the occasional intrusions of the actual and the bloody sombre. ‘Maybe I should be in the street to cell-phone warn if someone comes back early,’ Denise said.
‘Cell-phones are insecure, especially on a crime site. Plus, you’d be noticed up there. They’ll notice everyone. And there’s all the seminars and lectures you might miss.’
‘Down to constable?’ she said.
‘It’s possible.’
‘I’d find that a challenge.’
Jokey? ‘So would I,’ he said.
‘In uniform?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Hazel and Jill would hate that.’
‘They would,’ he said. ‘And there’d be no point telling them it was all on account of trying to look after Scott and Hazel.’
‘Kids can be cruel and narrow-minded.’
‘It’s all –’
‘Oh, God, you’re sure Scott’s going to get killed, aren’t you, Col?’ For a bad, ungovernable moment, the badinage was dead. She looked as Hazel had looked – very close to weeping.
‘Perhaps my mind’s gone dodgy,’ he said.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I hope so,’ Harpur replied.
‘Iles wouldn’t let them take away your rank, would he?’
‘Iles isn’t the power he was. Besides, he likes a jape.’
‘That would be a jape?’
‘An Iles-type jape.’
‘If you went to jail I’d be outside waiting on your release day,’ she said, and smiled, to show things were back to whimsy.
‘Good.’
Denise said: ‘There’s a Somerset Maugham story about a man sent to jail just after getting married and he wanks so often, thinking about his pretty wife, that when he comes out he’s exhausted all his feelings for her.’
Jokey? Very darkly jokey? ‘Sometimes I think you read too much,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d like a sitting room with book shelves all round.’
In the Grants’ sitting room Harpur stood for a few minutes, well back from the windows, and did a quick survey. He felt that old excitement and that old annexed entitlement: the excitement and wholly unfounded entitlement of the invader. Mrs Grant would probably argue him out of that if she suddenly turned up. Perhaps this room, also, had fulcrum status, but it could not keep Harpur’s attention for long. It was hardly the place where Scott would hide a gun, if Scott had a gun, and if Scott ran with traffickers and had been part of the Chilton Park intergang Come Dancing. The room conveyed to Harpur a family flavour, a high-flyer family. Most of the furniture looked as if it came from the Leather Paradise store, not too much shine on the surface, but a gentle glow saying wearability, as well as chic comfort. Harpur had looked at settees there when rescheming at home and greatly liked several, but found them too dear. At Leather Paradise they were called sofas, not settees.
The room had no fitted carpet but an oak board floor, varnished to a grand gold tint, and a couple of bright rugs with Picasso-style designs on in mostly red, cream, blue and yellow. Harpur thought they more or less got away with it as to taste, but realized he might be short of that. A boy brought up in this kind of setting should be aware of style. But he might decide that style required money. An oak floor would be an expensive extra and conceivably the rugs also cost. Had Scott decided to look for income early? Hazel visited the house now and then and, as far as Harpur could recall, never mentioned the rugs, so possibly she found them a hoot and didn’t want Harpur to regard her friend’s parents as gross, awkward, jumped-up. But, examining this room, Harpur, in fact, considered these were people ready to work industriously at image, and made quite a job of it. They earned their postcode, and what this postcode previously represented, before folk like Tommy the Strong, Adrian Cologne, the Albs and Bobby Sprale did some colonizing. Hazel could be hard on bad taste. Of course, Scott, in the dogmatic way of youngsters, might detest this property – not just the rugs and oak floor and sofas, but the entire sweet nest for nestlings and their elders, and so he acquired a handgun, and the kind of life that kind of gun was part of.
Harpur thought the pictures hanging here good. The art took its theme from the rugs: surreal and diagrammatic prints in narrow, silver, metal-look frames, on temperate striped wallpaper. The prints – more Picasso? You wouldn’t meet sailing boats or tame rural scenes nor that very popular singing butler here. It seemed to Harpur that Scott’s parents might be regarded as avant garde, for Morton Cross. Harpur had not decided yet on art for the sitting room at Arthur Street, following removal of the book shelves. He had put up a couple of framed certificates won by the girls at judo. Plenty of blank wall remained. Although he, personally, quite liked the singing butler, Harpur couldn’t be sure what his daughters and/or Denise would make of that. Denise’s view was very important now they had given the sitting room extra significance on the settee. Although the singing butler had definition and panache, Harpur would not bet it was the kind of definition and panache Denise might like, even though she spoke of the splendid rapport between her and him.
Scott had a younger brother but Harpur easily found the right
bedroom. Two framed photographs of Hazel stood on the pine dressing table. In both she smiled cheerily. They looked like back garden shots, perhaps here, definitely not Arthur Street. It seemed to be summer. Hazel wore jeans and a white blouse in one and denim shorts and string vest in the other. The rest of the photographs in the room were publicity pictures of local ice hockey stars. Three vivid posters for recent games had been Blu-Tacked to the walls. Gingerly, Harpur started his search. This could not be a customary police rummage. If possible, he must quit the room and the house without leaving evidence he’d been here – unless, that is, he found a gun, in which case the sign of his intrusion must obviously be its absence. Only Scott would know about that, when he came looking, checking, ready to adore, and he wouldn’t mention the loss.
Harpur didn’t find a gun, and nothing else that would tie Scott to drugs, using or dealing. He came across no big cash store nor any clothes or footwear or jewellery or technology above the norm for a boy living in Chilton Park, Morton Cross, and whose parents laid out enough for an oak board floor in a five-bedroom, triple-garage property, with a sturdy little front garden wall to give separation from the street, and top hotel quality stair carpet in russet. This was either a boy clever at establishing a standard teenage profile, or a boy with a standard teenage profile. Harpur discovered no condoms either, and wondered whether he should be pleased or anxious.
Chapter Five
Mansel Shale hung about in a car not far from Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur’s house in Arthur Street waiting for Harpur’s older daughter to come out. He would tail her. He thought it shouldn’t be difficult. Although she most probably had heard of Mansel – or Manse – Shale through kid gossip at school, or on the streets, or in clubs . . . yes, heard of him as undoubtedly one of the city’s main commercial figures over quite a period, she would not know what he looked like, and he intended to keep well back. Of course he didn’t know what she looked like, either, except she was under consent age, which would not bother Iles, being an Assistant Chief. Shale never minded when people shortened his name to Manse. It was a bit familiar, but to object would be raw pomp, and not like him. However Ember could go very unpleasant if people called him Ralphy, instead of Ralph or Ember, saying it made him sound like someone’s retarded cousin.