‘Everyone clear? All right, we’ll move on to the happy-slapping incidents. Nice to have you with us, ma’am. Glad you’re feeling better.’
Damn it, was the woman trying to be sarcastic? To her boss’s boss, a woman who’d given her support and encouragement from day one?
‘So we know from Ms Harman’s injuries that happy-slapping has serious results, as the TVInvicta interview confirmed. The good news is that we have a number of leads, but we agreed to wait till today, when the possible offenders will be in school, to follow them up.’
Who agreed? And why? Fran would talk about that decision later, too. Before she knew it, she was asking, ‘Has anyone asked schools to confiscate mobile phones as the kids go in? If the slappers can’t communicate immediately perhaps that will tone down its charm.’
‘Websites and blogs, ma’am,’ Jill said, as if that answered everything.
A young man Fran only knew by sight drawled, ‘I had a go at one or two of those on Saturday, ma’am. I’ll drop the results on your desk, shall I?’
And thus neatly told everyone, including Fran, that Jill hadn’t been at her desk over the weekend. It was a good job for Jill that Fran didn’t have time to speak to her.
CHAPTER SIX
And what will you be wearing, Dilly, to greet me? That stern suit of yours? Or black lace, altogether more welcoming?
Normally she’d have headed back relentlessly to work by the quickest route, in this case the M20. But she was suddenly tempted on to the A20, a nice ordinary road winding through villages, altogether more homely, less minatory about missing minutes at her desk, than the motorway. At the first lay-by she phoned Mark, who had thrown himself with amazing gusto into their house-search, and brightened their weekend with breathtaking spontaneous gestures – flowers, earrings to die for, and a huge coffee-table book on garden design. Guilt? Possibly. But for a man not given to grand gestures or making easy apologies, pretty impressive.
‘I’m taking the long way back,’ she informed him, ‘and keeping my eyes open for dream cottages as I go.’
‘Do they exist? After this weekend, I’ve lost hope.’
‘That’s because you wouldn’t repeat after me, “I believe in fairies!”’
‘Sweetheart, to please you, I believe in the Sacred Heart and the Banshee and any other phenomenon, just like whoever it was in Dubliners.’
‘Fairies?’
‘Fairies. A whole Midsummer Night’s Dreamful.’ And he started to hum the Mendelssohn overture down the phone to her, cutting the call on a particularly off-key donkey-like bray.
Suddenly the sun was breaking through, and who knew what the fairies might bring.
In the event they’d brought no more than the promise of spring and a general feeling of benevolence, which lingered even as she eventually sauntered into work, thinking of a cup of green tea, to which Mark had converted her. But even dear old builder’s brew was off the menu for the time being, it seemed. An artistically arranged pile of Post-its greeted her, someone apparently having used a ruler to give exactly the same distance between the top of each one and its predecessor. Dumping her case and shrugging off her coat, she peered at the top one. Jill; Jill; Jill; Dilly Pound; Tom. And Jill. All needed her urgently, it seemed.
It was probably safe to assume that Pound was merely making a courtesy call to thank her for her appearance. But there was a number, which meant she ought to return the favour. Jill. Was she trying to pre-empt the bollocking Fran had mentally promised her and which she must know she deserved? And Tom – well, he was the one she was happiest to share a tea bag with. She was torn between a duty she’d never enjoyed, carpeting a colleague who was also a friend, and asking a junior officer for information. Hoping fate would decide, she strolled along to the incident room. There should be an air of purpose, eyes glued to screens or ears clamped to phones. There might also be knots of officers clearly discussing an issue. Or even joking – she didn’t ban joking. A bit of hilarity meant pressure was being relieved. But she didn’t like to see a lot of people standing in close knots, surreptitiously checking no one was listening in, and scurrying back to their desks when she hove into view. It smacked of the schoolroom, when the teacher had been called away and the head had suddenly appeared. There was no immediate sign of Jill in Henson’s office, either. If Tom had been anywhere in sight she’d have invited him to share his auntie’s bikkies and the latest news.
But there was no excuse for it: she would have to spend the afternoon fulfilling her promises to her coastal colleagues this morning, and sulking and kicking the desk wouldn’t help either. Administration! Bah, humbug! Oh, for a bit of decent, honest detection. She knew in her heart that prevention was better than cure, of course. But there was a man out there who was busily committing dirty little crimes and there was nothing she could do about it.
Cosmo Dix rolled into her office just as, conscience squeaky-clean after a whole afternoon’s administrative efforts, she’d thought it might be safe to phone Mark and discuss what time they could reasonably leave. Cosmo returned her smile with a charming one of his own, sitting on her more comfortable visitor’s chair and generally looking as if he had all the time in the world. ‘I am the bearer of good news and I hear your coffee is excellent.’
‘Is it too late in the day for the real stuff, or would you prefer decaffeinated?’
‘Whichever is easier – oh, what an irritating thing to say. As bad as, “whichever you’re having”. Fran, pour me something which involves no decisions, preferably a tot of under the desk whisky. No? OK. Now, I’ve drawn up a long list of possible temporary replacements for our friend Henson. Any chance of an hour of your time to reduce it to a short list?’
‘An hour? At this time of day? Tomorrow, maybe.’ She popped a hand over her mouth, rounding her eyes like a toddler caught with its hand in the biscuit tin.
‘We could get the invitations to interview out tomorrow if you did them now. And, before you ask, you know you’re not allowed to take them home with you. Highly confidential.’
‘OK. You make whatever beverage takes your fancy and hand them over. You don’t need Mark’s input too, do you?’
‘He’ll have to ratify our selection.’
‘Fill the kettle, then. He might as well come and ratify as we go.’
Mark could hardly contain his laughter till they got to his car. ‘Perfunctory or what! Fran, I’m ashamed of you.’
‘It’s called being demob happy. It’s only a temporary appointment, for goodness’ sake! We don’t need a conclave of cardinals and white smoke.’
‘My darling, you’re being remarkably cavalier over the guidelines you yourself drew up.’
‘Who better to be cavalier than me then? No, I’m bored with all this administration already, Mark. I want to be out there doing a job, not sitting behind a desk. Hell, how do prisoners out in the community on licence force themselves to go back to prison at the end of each day? Knowing what it’s like?’
‘It’s called deferred gratification, I believe,’ he said, still laughing at her over the top of the car. ‘Plus if they don’t go back they get banged up even longer when we catch up with them.’
She slid into the car more easily than over the weekend.
‘Eat at mine, sleep at yours?’ he asked.
‘Eat at yours, stay at yours. And spend an evening in front of the computer trawling for possible houses. I just want to be up and doing!’
‘You always want to be busy-busy when something’s on your mind.’ He shot her a sideways look. ‘So what’s worrying you?’
‘Jill Tanner.’
‘Want to tell me about it?’ He cut the engine, turning to face her more fully. ‘I can tell you she’s dropped in on me a couple of times and didn’t seem to know when to go, if you see what I mean. The first time was at your behest, mind, to ask how I’d feel about your going on TV. The second – and third, come to think of it – she was on about quite trivial procedural issues.’
�
��Maybe she fancies you.’
‘She can fancy away to her heart’s content.’ He patted the back of her hand to reassure her.
‘Or maybe she’s finding this job too much for her. I don’t know why. I’ve seen her tackle far worse cases before and not turn a hair.’
‘And I thought that was how she fixed her coiffure!’
‘But clearly the troops aren’t happy – she’s made a couple of weird judgements and doesn’t seem to be throwing herself into it. I’ll have to talk to her in the morning.’
‘Poor you. I never like having to chew someone’s ears off.’
She turned her hand to squeeze his, but then realised that that wasn’t a good idea. ‘When I was in a mess, you didn’t chew my ears off. You changed things. That’s what I might have to do. But how to do it without her losing face I don’t know. OK, guv, let’s hit the road. The sooner we’re in a work-free zone the better.’
And so they would have been had it not been for the news, which carried reports of two more sexual assaults, this time right in the middle of Jill’s own manor, Ashford. TVInvicta News’s tone nicely balanced restraint and triumphalism. Mark didn’t argue when she picked up her car keys; he might have done had she known she was going to walk round Ashford’s streets herself.
It was a long time since she’d been on night patrol, and then of course she’d been with a colleague and the full issue of equipment. Now she was a lone woman, middle-aged and not at her fleetest. She was being bloody stupid, but she had to get the feel of what was going on. She checked for CCTV cameras, peered into corners, disturbing not masturbators or potential rapists but a prostitute and her client and a kid sleeping rough. The first two got an earful, backed by her ID – at least she’d had the sense to bring that. The latter got the Sally Army’s address. Suddenly she realised she had to walk down that nasty little alleyway linking the high street via the public car park to the police station car park, and she strongly wished she hadn’t. Not a flasher. A group of kids. All with mobile phones. For two pins she’d have turned tail and gone the long way round. That was what violence did to you, wasn’t it? Even the fear of violence? She’d been reduced to being Ms Average.
Well, she’d better reclaim the streets for Ms Average. Head held high, she plunged out of the light into the darkness.
The kids swore a lot, but not necessarily, she supposed, at her. If she assumed it was, she’d be lost.
‘Ashford’s was a much more serious attack,’ Jill admitted to a feverish incident room the next morning. ‘Contact was made – enough to constitute indecent assault. But we have no DNA, because this time the scrote wore surgical gloves. And a condom.’
Tom asked, ‘Does this mean it’s the same scrote that got wiser or that it’s a different one? After all, previous attacks have involved him smearing semen on his victims.’
‘A fact that has never been revealed to the public,’ Jill emphasised.
‘Has anyone thought of the effect all this must be having on the ordinary woman in the street?’ Fran asked. No one knew of her little adventure, and she’d prefer to keep it that way. All the Ashford team knew was that their governor had joined them in a cuppa and asked about their kids.
‘Since when did the ordinary woman last feel able to walk round towns at night?’ Jill countered. ‘There’s the perennial problem of streetlights and CCTV and nimbyism: I had a bloke complain yesterday that some streetlights I pressed to have installed in a village that’s been in darkness till now are messing up his stargazing! Karate lessons for all girls? Curfew for all men? Come on, guv, you’re the one in charge of policy decisions!’ She got the laugh she’d set up.
Jill was doing quite well this morning, Fran thought, but that didn’t mean she could let her off the hook. Any more than TVInvicta were letting Fran off the hook. There was another Post-it waiting on her desk when she arrived shortly after seven-thirty. Mark had grumbled at the earliness of the hour, but since he had to spend the day at the Home Office and needed an early train she had felt able to ignore his protests, especially as she’d dropped him off at the station and promised to collect him that evening.
She made a point of merely falling into step with Jill as she terminated the briefing. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t available yesterday when you needed me,’ she began, turning towards her office, not Jill’s, ‘but I had a meeting down in Folkestone that took for ever.’ She closed the door behind them before she continued, ‘That’s the problem when the boss isn’t on the premises.’
‘Tell me about it. It seems I no sooner leave for a school visit than there’s another crisis in the Incident Room.’
‘You’re doing all those yourself? My goodness, Jill, that’s spreading yourself a bit thin! I thought we’d agreed to bring Crime Prevention in on those, by the way.’
‘This wasn’t to warn about gropers and flashers! This was to talk about happy-slapping!’ Jill flared. ‘Part of the ongoing investigation into the sort of incident that left you looking like this!’
‘Tea or coffee? Do sit down. And try one of those biscuits – they’re home made,’ she said proudly. ‘This weekend I tried my hand at baking for the first time for years.’ She had – when it became quite clear that the perfect house wasn’t going to drop immediately on to their laps. But for the time being she didn’t need Mark to ask her to keep their decision under wraps. ‘I was inspired by Tom Arkwright’s auntie who, I have to admit, does a far better job than I.’
Jill looked, but didn’t quite dare say, ‘Lucky you to have time even to try.’ She took a biscuit anyway.
‘This case getting on top of you? No, no – let me finish, please. How many cases would you say we’ve got here?’
‘Two, possibly three.’ She sounded as if she were on solid ground at last. ‘The happy-slapping is a dangerous fad. We’ll identify the perpetrators and charge them, but then what? Criminalise them by asking for a custodial sentence? Tag them? What about a few hours’ community service?’ she demanded ironically. ‘And the problem is, they’re decent kids at heart. Just kids.’
Fran pricked her ears, but said nothing, nodding sagely as if there were indeed nothing to be said. ‘What about the sex crimes?’
‘We’ve got a highly mobile perpetrator of minor ones. Masturbation Man keeps popping up all over the place. But he’s never behaved in a truly physically threatening way like he did last night – which is why I wondered if it was really him, or some other bastard jumping on the bandwagon.’
‘Nothing on CCTV?’
‘It’s as if he knows the locations of all the cameras and waits till he’s out of range. We’ve been able to identify the young women who became his victims, but never him.’
‘OK, let’s storm our poor old brains. He fitted the cameras? Or operates them? Or he’s a transvestite?’ At last her teetering walk from the kettle to her desk with two mugs of coffee made Jill laugh. She even made a note on a scrap of paper she stuck into her pocket. ‘You know what I’d want to do in your case?’
‘Concentrate on the sex crimes, just in case they escalate. Get all the local heads in at once and talk mobile phones and happy-slapping. Leave investigating your assault to Canterbury. That’s what you’d do.’
‘Well, why not do just that? We’ll get brickbats whatever we do, especially from TVInvicta and the red tops. But the real sex attacker’s got to be the main brunt of the investigation, surely. Even if – especially if – it’s a different suspect.’
‘These biscuits are very good,’ Jill said, with a distinct sigh. ‘God knows when I last did anything in the kitchen. It was all right when the kids were small – I could get them to help. Now all I get is “whatever” and they’re not hungry. But they’re good kids really.’
Who was she telling, Fran or herself?
‘Brian OK with them?’
‘He’s got a shed.’ The sentence seemed to say far more than the four words justified.
Fran rested her bum on the desk. ‘And you’re trying to juggle everything
.’
‘You did! You were always buzzing around like a blue-arsed fly. Ask any of the older ones.’
‘In that case I was a very bad boss.’ She shook her head at the recollection. ‘And I didn’t have a family.’
‘You had your parents.’
‘Who were safely down in Devon, manageable most of the time. Until they became very old,’ she conceded.
‘And all those responsibilities!’
‘At which point I nearly lost it. Everything. That’s what happens when you take on too much. Blokes like Henson have heart attacks. Women, I gather, tend to have breakdowns. Neither’s a good option. But while people know about heart attacks and treat them with some sort of macho respect—’
‘“There but for the grace of God”—’
‘Exactly! People don’t seem so sympathetic to nervous illness.’
‘Despite your efforts – all that debriefing, that business about avoiding post-traumatic stress.’
Fran wrinkled her nose. ‘That’s almost become macho, hasn’t it? But no one appreciates that someone subject to sheer every day intolerable grind can be just as ill as the next bloke.’ She made a point of slipping off the desk. ‘There! I’m off my high horse. So that’s what you’ll do, then – pull all the stops out on the sex crimes case? Cases?’
‘If it’s OK by you.’
Fran spread her arms in exasperation. ‘Since when did you have to ask permission? You’re in charge. All I’m in charge of is making sure you’ve got enough paperclips. You wouldn’t have asked Henson for his permission.’
‘Because he wouldn’t have put me in charge. He’d have had some young snappy-suited bloke, all degree and iPod.’
Fran choked on her biscuit. ‘So he would. But I put you in charge because you’ve got the brains and the experience. Go on, Jill – you can do it.’
The phone rang. It was the secretary Fran shared with other senior officers. An urgent outside call, she said.
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