by Bill James
Harpur had the idea she didn’t greatly enjoy this. She wouldn’t want to be regarded as a replacement mother. Of course not: she was an undergraduate at the university up the road, still less than twenty, only a few years older than Hazel. But Denise, although so young, had the mature decency and kindness to hide her objections from the kids. She obviously saw they needed consolation and felt compelled to give it. Denise could be very dutiful.
Occasionally, Harpur would try to talk to her about marriage, about actually becoming family, really cementing that completeness, making the completeness complete, the belonging secured by more than a dressing gown and stained boots. He would have loved this, and so would the girls. He’d worked out where they’d have the reception: not Ralph Ember’s club. He sensed Denise didn’t go for the marriage idea, though. He could understand. Dutifulness didn’t reach that far. Harpur was nearly twice her age. Hazel and Jill called his taste in music, clothes and hairstyles unforgivable, even for someone in the police. He thought she spent some nights in her student bed to underline that it had not become a settled, shacked-up arrangement with him. This hurt.
As to clothes, Harpur dressed as quickly as he could now in the dark. He put on what he regarded as a pretty good Marks and Spencer, double-breasted, dark-grey suit; a white shirt; tasteful blue and silver tie; and black, high-price, lace-up shoes. Some said you could spot police detectives by their expensive shoes. If you were going to trample through someone else’s noble property, as he probably must this morning, you needed to have something fine on your feet. In fact, the kind of ‘open-up-it’s-a-raid’ call he would be on soon demanded a respectable and respectful appearance generally, not just shoes. He thought Denise had probably never seen him so radiantly togged out. She might be impressed, even persuaded into a rethink about something established and permanent with him, such a bandbox. But, no, she wouldn’t be. She wasn’t one to be wowed by tailoring or lace-ups. Her mind took her elsewhere.
One of the problems was that Denise had told him she’d been listening lately in her Jonson Court room to a recorded book called Fear of Flying, which caused a small storm apparently when it came out as a volume in the 1970s. It had been issued lately on CD, and Denise thought its message very sound. She said the story’s heroine sought and recommended what she called the ‘zipless fuck’, meaning a sex session free from commitments or significance beyond itself. The heroine travelled in her quest for this. ‘As Gertrude Stein might have said, Col, a fuck is a fuck is a fuck,’ she’d told Harpur.
‘Gert always got to the nub,’ Harpur replied.
Denise did a lot of reading, or being read to, not just about categories of shag. Some works she’d discuss with Harpur, who appreciated these slices of education from her. They might help him catch up. She had a French poem where the writer moaned he had come too late into a world that was too old. Harpur sometimes felt like this, though he realized that if he had come into the world earlier he’d be even older now.
Because of Denise, he knew her accommodation building was named after a big English literary figure who had no ‘h’ in Jonson; but there was another famous Johnson who did. Only the ignorant mixed them up. Harpur didn’t think he’d ever mix them up because he wouldn’t be referring to either. Also, he’d discovered from Denise that the name of the German writer Goethe was not pronounced like the Biblical ‘goeth’, but to rhyme with frankfurter. However, Harpur found her comments on Fear of Flying troublesome. She prized the book, and would sometimes beat off Harpur’s talk of a wedding by praising this happy ziplessness. ‘It was written around two decades before I was born—’
‘Not from a zipless fuck.’
‘—and conditions for women have changed, yes, but its argument is still interesting,’ she’d said.
‘Doesn’t she mean a single zipless fuck between people who don’t know each other and will never meet again?’ Harpur had argued. ‘One-night stand. Whereas, we’ve had a lot of fucks and will probably continue to have a lot as long as my back’s OK and so on. Are they all zipless?’
‘What “and so on”?’ she replied. ‘You never mentioned an “and so on” before. This is the trouble with older men.’
‘Which other older men have you known?’
‘And they’re liable to jealousy.’
‘The children think you’re liable to jealousy.’
‘ Who of?’
‘You’ve got a point there,’ Harpur replied.
‘In any case, Erica Jong, the book’s author, didn’t invent the zipless fuck.’
‘Had it been patented by someone else?’ Harpur said.
‘An American woman poet, 1920s, tells a lover that, though she’s enjoying a screw with him for now – for now, only – he needn’t imagine she’ll want to talk to him tomorrow.’
‘Are you scared of conversation then?’
‘Some topics are OK.’
‘Which?’
‘Many.’
‘Which?’
‘Oh, yes, some are OK.’
And Harpur always had to leave it at that. He realized that among other factors she might be thinking of her parents in Stafford. They probably wouldn’t feel ecstatic if she announced she was going into something permanent and definitely zipped with a widower not far off forty, plus his two gabby, managing teenage daughters. This wasn’t what Mr and Mrs Prior had in mind when they coughed up all that money on fees and maintenance for a degree course and sent her off. Praise be for mobile phones: her parents needn’t know how infrequently she overnighted in Jonson Court, without an ‘h’, and without that capitalized ‘H’, Harpur.
He kissed her on the back of her neck, as farewell, all that was available for kissing, except her hair. She grunted into the pillow, and he took it as a meaningful grunt, not just piglike now, and with his name specifically on it; as affectionate and personal as could be expected at three a.m. But what a tragedy she couldn’t see him in his sterling, dawn-caller gear.
He wanted to believe, and did half believe, they’d got beyond the zipless. He thought she knew this, but didn’t like admitting it: an ego thing, an ageist thing. Damn powerful, disastrously powerful – the ageist thing. There’d be a lot of men as young as herself living in Jonson Court who kept up to attractive scratch on music, hairstyles and clothes. Being undergraduates, they’d probably know about the proper rhyme for Goethe, and wouldn’t have to waste time discussing it. Did she listen to that book CD alone? Harpur was bound to wonder whether any zipless fucks took place in her room.
At the university, she did what to Harpur seemed a strange mixture of ‘modules’, as courses were called: some literature, some languages, some engineering and engineering drawing. ‘Got to be all-round,’ she’d said. ‘What employers want. Tough days. Graduates have to tailor themselves.’ He’d suggested that having mastered these subjects she’d be able to design a new tram for steep French streets and tell the passengers in their own lingo about the poet who considered the world too old.
When he was half way down the stairs Jill, in pyjamas, came out from her bedroom. She switched on the landing light and said: ‘Dad, you’re looking rather pathetically naff in that outfit.’
‘It’s necessary.’
‘Is this for a small hours, battering-ram hit on some poor sleeping suspect, Dad?’
‘Why aren’t you asleep?’ he replied.
‘I was. I heard movement.’
‘But I was silent.’
‘I’m tuned in, even when asleep. It’s part of my . . . my, like . . . part of my very being. That’s the trouble with lace-ups: I can hear them being tied. Do people of your big rank usually go on cockcrow busts?’
‘It’s not a bust.’
‘It is nearly cockcrow, though.’
‘A special operation.’
‘To do with the Mrs Shale and Laurent murders?’
‘Special.’
‘Will Mr Iles be there?’
‘It’s part of a wide pattern of inquiries,’ Harpur said.
‘The four thirty a.m. bang on the door. I read people are supposed to be really, like, low in theirselves then.’
‘So you should go back to bed. And it’s “really low in them selves”, no need for “like”.’
She’d been speaking to Harpur from alongside her bedroom door. Now, she shifted slightly and seemed about to come part way down the stairs to where he stood. She’d want to give him a close once-over to see if she could make out a full shoulder holster shape under his coat, and possibly a flak jacket.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Sleep again now.’
‘Is it dangerous?’
‘It’s a call. We’ll have plenty of people there.’
‘Mr Iles? Is it his idea? If it’s his idea, it could be dangerous. He goes looking for risks because he’s sure he’ll win, or because he’s not sure he’ll win, but wants people to think he is sure he’ll win, so he’ll look strong and Ilesy, and because he gets so bored with ordinary police stuff, especially now he’s stopped chasing Hazel because he knows she’s got a steady boyfriendx1. He wants something to get his blood going.’
‘Denise will do you black pudding,’ he replied.
‘Oh, Dad, life isn’t just about breakfasts, you know.’
He recognized there were times when he disappointed her. She thought he trivialized and dodged, whereas she tried for a more cosmic approach to things, a bit like the ACC.
She gave up the plan to get nearer now and shifted towards her bedroom. He didn’t say anything else in case it started her bloody well quizzing and misty psychologizing again. He glanced back up as he went from the house, and she’d disappeared, her door closed. He drove out to the rendezvous point not far from Ralph Ember’s house and spread, Low Pastures.
Jill’s theory about sleep patterns might not apply to Ralph. His club, The Monty, in Shield Terrace, closed at two a.m., and Harpur knew Ember generally went there just before, to make sure everything was properly locked up and to put the takings in the safe or drive them to the bank’s twenty-four-hour drop-off. By the time he reached home again it would be close to three a.m., so he might only have been in bed an hour and a bit when the police party arrived.
Iles rang the bell himself. The house was dark. Ember opened up almost immediately. He had his day clothes on, shoes and all.
‘Ralph, here’s a treat!’ Iles said.
‘I heard you’d be showing here at around this time today,’ Ember said.
‘Heard from where?’ Harpur said.
‘What’s it about, Mr Iles?’ Ember replied.
‘Harpur has a warrant. He’s first class at that kind of rudimentary admin thing. And he dresses up for it, in his funny little way. I’ve got pals accompanying me here, Ralph, who’ll go through your property with total, unremitting delicacy, making their necessary and thorough searches, yes, but not at all in disruptive style. And utter decorousness will be maintained when it comes to your sleeping family, all female, in, obviously, their respective beds.
‘You may have heard the police phrase, to “spin a crook’s drum”, meaning brutally and hunnishly to ransack a suspect’s living quarters seeking evidence. This would hardly be the method adopted in a visit to the distinguished gentilhommière Low Pastures, would it, Ralph? We’re glad the plaque on your gates is being kept in good nick. “Mens cuiusque is est quisque.” Good old Cicero! He loved a bit of wordplay. “Get your hook into a man’s mind and you can land the man himself.” Makes things sound so damn easy, doesn’t it? But I wonder. How’s your mind these days and nights, Ralph?’
‘What’s all this about, Mr Iles?’
‘That’s the point I’m making,’ Iles said.
‘Well, yes, but what’s it about?’ Ralph replied.
‘What’s it about? An entirely fair question,’ Iles said. ‘Obviously, it’s not a mere social call – not so early, and with all these people.’
‘So what’s it about?’ Ember said.
Iles could obviously have answered, but didn’t. The idea for the raid hadn’t come from him. Jill was wrong on that, too. A week ago the Chief himself had called Iles, Harpur, Francis Garland and a couple of trained property-search detectives to a meeting in his suite. The Chief put on a series of first-class, almost triumphant, smiles, and looked resolved and positive. ‘The Shale-Ember situation – I see it as an opportunity,’ he said. ‘A considerable exploitable plus. This should be our constant aim, to transform what might be regarded as a setback – in this case, the double murder – into an asset. We’ve watched one half of the substances trade take an enormous hammering with the fall of Mansel Shale. We sympathize with him, to some extent, of course we do, even though he has chosen the type of career where that kind of thing – the Jaguar ambush kind of thing – can happen. But we also view his removal as an opening, a brilliant invitation. Now we must smash the other half of the crooked confederation, and smash it while a degree of shock and chaos affects the scene. If we are decisive, quick and thoroughly crash-ball in method, we could come out of this with a uniquely drugs-free city.’
Had the Chief ever heard Iles slag off the campaign for a drugs-free world? Was this a deliberate send-up of the ACC? Would the Chief risk that? Maybe. Iles had been able to control, and finally destroy, a previous Chief Constable, Mark Lane, through cheek, contempt, taunts and a faster brain. He used to call Lane’s wife ‘the power behind the clone’. So far, though, Iles hadn’t even got close to squashing Sir Matthew Upton, Lane’s replacement.
‘And the alternative?’ the Chief had said. ‘There are two possibilities. One – the most likely, in my view – is that Ember expands his business to colonize what used to be Shale’s operation. This must have been a temptation and aim even before the shooting. Ember’s formidably strong now, but he would be stronger still. No doubt he already sells to prominent media people, Chamber of Commerce people, Round Table, educational and political people, who can put in a word for him when there are problems. Don’t tell me that university vice-chancellor lady I’ve met at functions now and then got so intermittently bold without sniffing something quality maintained and free from over-mix. Ralph’s list of such powerful mates might double. He’d become virtually unassailable. We couldn’t move against him without endangering the whole social fabric.
‘The GB social fabric is already flimsy. Consider the fan club that’s emerged for the killer Raoul Moat. He’s their hero. People are not necessarily on our side. I hope everyone understands the significance of Moat and his admirers. Consider also the middle-class anarchists with their stated objective to shaft the police in the student fees riot in London.
‘The second potential development is that new, suddenly aspirational, minor local pushers, or firms of any size at all from outside our ground, will spot the gap left by Shale and aim to fill it. There’s been plenty of publicity about the situation here. It will sound like an invitation to villains everywhere. Nature abhors a vacuum. We could very soon have a territorial war on our hands, perhaps involving Ember, perhaps featuring other gangs, based here or not.’
A second echo: maybe in the Chief’s hearing Iles had spoken one day about his emphatic agreement with Nature in the vacuums matter. Was Upton calculatedly echoing some of Iles’s themes, ridiculing him, toying with him? Did the Chief really have that kind of arrant fearlessness and lunacy?
‘The logic of this, it seems to me, is that we should as a first-stage operation achieve the removal of Ember,’ Upton had said. ‘Alone, Ralphy and his outfit are comparatively easy meat.’ He smiled, and his voice became the gentle voice of gorgeous reasonableness. ‘Now, I hope I’m not an as it were serf to logic and the cerebral. I know there are other considerations, other impulses. Some of these at their proper time may be wholly valid. We are not all mind and deduction. Gut-feelings about a situation do often count, and we all have some of those, and are the better for it. But logic, when it is insistent and indisputable, must surely be allowed ultimately to guide, to predominate. Current developments present us with a splendid chanc
e to dispose of the Ember interests as first phase of a comprehensive purging. In that first phase, he and his dealership will be obliterated.’ Now, the Chief had become terse and commanding. ‘I want you to arrange an immediate, full-out strike against him, Desmond, Colin.’
‘In what form, sir?’ Iles said.
‘This would be a completely justified move,’ Upton said. ‘I regard Ember as, first, a leading suspect as organizer of the Naomi and Laurent Shale murders, and second, a flagrantly major drugs purveyor, with that grog-shop, The Monty, and his ponderous letters to the Press on environmental topics, a cover. It is a cover we shall no longer be fooled by.’
‘I was intrigued by a phrase you used, sir,’ Iles replied. ‘I took a note.’
‘Which?’
Iles made as though to read from a pad. ‘About Nature abhorring a vacuum.’
‘Something of a cliché, I fear, Desmond. Not at all original.’
‘Nonetheless, sir, it is your cliché. You have corralled it, enlisted it under your, as it were, ensign. There are many clichés out there, clamouring for an inclusion in serious discourse, a whole bucketful of trite folk wisdom, but this is the one – Nature, vacuums – this is the one you selected, you as a Chief. I would suggest this gives it special status, extraordinary impact.’
‘In a sense, yes,’ Upton said.
‘Why that particular cliché was chosen is, perhaps, something all of us in this room can learn from,’ Iles said.
So, Upton hadn’t got the phrase from Iles, had he? Or were these two at some subtle, injurious game, both pretending this was the first time Nature and a vacuum had cropped up between them? Why would they do that? Harpur couldn’t have said. But, then, he very often failed to work out Iles’s motives and tactics. And perhaps Upton, too, knew how to disguise his.