by Janet Neel
‘I’ve got plenty,’ he said indignantly. ‘It must be five years since I ran out of cash in a restaurant. What a bossy you are.’ He looked at McLeish who was trying very hard not to laugh. ‘Does she boss you around?’
‘Not yet,’ McLeish said demurely, and on that line removed Francesca firmly from the group amid a flurry of kisses and plans for lunch from her family.
‘What a bitch,’ she exploded, as they reached the car-park. ‘Mum was looking forward to going out to a glossy restaurant with her brilliant son.’
‘Your mother is a sensible woman not to compete for him.’ He opened the car door for her as she worked her way through this thought.
‘I suppose it’s sex,’ she observed, in the tones of one reluctantly recognizing cholera or schizophrenia. ‘It’s extraordinary, you know. Perry loves both mum and me, but what he goes round with — well, none of them have as much as an O-level in needlework or knitting.’
McLeish considered her. ‘For a man, you see,’ he said cautiously, ‘it’s a question of what turns him on.’ For a moment he thought he had caused lasting offence but her face cleared, and she started to laugh.
‘Sorry. Boring for you. I must be hungry.’
Reads my mind and all, he thought with an alarmed sense of exhilaration, and drove sedately to the place Davidson had recommended. He was received with exactly the right balance of familiarity and deference, and was additionally cheered by the admiring attention that Francesca was attracting.
From a mixed beginning the evening turned to pure gold for him. Francesca had resolutely decided to forget her brother’s behaviour and her mother’s disappointment and was enjoying herself. She was extraordinarily easy to talk to; it was such a quick, impatient mind, wholly unimpressed by received theory, rather like a first-class barrister’s. They had reached the pudding by now, and Francesca was working her way through a large fruit salad. McLeish considered the last ten years of his life, his eye registering almost unconsciously the presence of a noted villain several tables away. He sighed, and decided he had to start somewhere.
‘Well, I did a year walking a beat — you’ve seen people do that, but it is where it all starts, where you learn to observe and see little things out of place, people doing odd things, wrong cars, all that. Then I moved into the CID where I had meant to go all along, and did two years in Tottenham. Then I did my Sergeant’s exams, and I was sent to Bramshill for a year. Then the Flying Squad.’ He looked at her hopefully, and she agreed that everyone had watched The Sweeney.
‘But presumably it isn’t quite as exciting as on the telly?’
McLeish thought about it, and opined that actually it was quite as exciting as portrayed, merely different, and that truth was a good deal stranger than anything that got on to the box. ‘But it isn’t policy or desk work — or rather, there is a lot of desk work, but it is entirely directed to solving today’s problem and getting another villain put away. And you’re fighting a war, which not everyone understands. No question of the people you’re dealing with being on the same side, except when it suits them and then only for a day or two.’
‘What happened to the idea of the friendly neighbourhood police force?’
‘Not my field. The uniformed branch do that. I catch villains.’
He was leaning forward, looking much too big for the table, in the attempt to communicate and Francesca looked at him squarely, trying to consider him as a policeman as well as a highly fanciable man. It was easy to imagine him rushing from a car to catch a villain in the authentic television style. For all his height he moved quickly and easily, and the huge hands were in no way clumsy.
‘What is the reward structure? I mean, what do you get good marks for in your trade?’ She saw he was momentarily puzzled. ‘I mean, in my trade, your seniors write reports on you every year, and they have to report on specific qualities, on a scale. Like, for example, “Willingness to accept responsibility” or “Numeracy”. So we all, roughly speaking, understand what you get points for, and indeed what questions you have to attempt.’
McLeish considered her with great interest. ‘It’s a bit simpler than that in my field. It’s all down to how many convictions you get. The best you can say of someone you work with is that he is a good thieftaker.’
Francesca reflected that this covered quite a lot of the qualities considered worthy of assessment by the Administrative Civil Service and said so. ‘At least you know where you’ve been at the end of the day.’
‘I’m not sure about that at all. My Mum always says that housework isn’t really satisfying because you only have to do it all again. You can feel like that when you’re catching villains — there’s always more where those came from.’
‘As fast as you tidy one lot away, somebody gets a lot more out?’
‘That sort of thing.’ He smiled at her peacefully, thinking what a bright, talented creature she was, and it occurred to him to ask her what she had read at Cambridge.
‘Law.’
‘I expect you were good at it.’ She did not comment and the implications suddenly occurred to him. ‘Did you get a First?’
‘No, no, a 2:1, but it didn’t take any work,’ she said, briskly spooning up the last of the juice, making a thorough job of it. He sat, dismayed, thinking about his own lame Second from Reading, for which he had sweated.
‘It was a swindle. I have a photographic memory, so it was money for old rope.’
‘Do you really?’ McLeish was distracted from the horrendous implications of being involved with a girl who seemed to be more able than he was, by simple interest. ‘Can you reproduce the pudding menu here, for instance?’
‘No, because I didn’t really look at it, and I have to do that. I mean, I have to focus. But if I do, for about forty-eight hours I can call up the relevant page, and read it. Absolutely invaluable for exams. Both Part 1 and Part 2 Law were feats of memory if you understood the subject.’
‘I read Engineering and slogged for a Second.’
‘Wrong subject for you, surely? I would have placed you in something more philosophical or more imaginative — history, I suppose.’ Francesca spoke completely without coquetry, offering this view as a matter of professional judgement, and he sat, stunned, with new vistas opening before him.
‘We didn’t have anyone who thought like that at Reading,’ he said when he got his breath back.
‘Did you not? Cambridge was stuffed with people who thought like that, but I don’t believe anyone would have bothered to tell me if I had not asked. I had a Classics scholarship — another subject where a photographic memory helps — but I didn’t want to go on, so I asked what else I could do. The Principal suggested Law. With what result you see.’
McLeish found himself wondering at the close of this admirable history how the independent Francesca had ever come to seek advice. Or brought herself to accept it, having sought it. The answer occurred to him. ‘The Principal was a woman?’
‘Well, yes, at Newnham.’ She looked suspiciously at him, and he smiled innocently back. She might be academically as smart as paint but there was an awful lot she didn’t know. He glanced up at the clock and was frankly staggered to see that it was 11.30, and that they had been there for nearly three hours. Francesca followed his gaze.
‘I’ve got an 8.30 meeting,’ she said, in amused horror. ‘I’ll never make it.’
‘I’ll get you home quickly,’ he promised and did just that, depositing her at the door ten minutes later. She thanked him gravely for dinner and he thanked her, equally seriously, for taking him to hear Perry sing. He escorted her punctiliously to her door, and hesitated, trying to decide whether a social kiss on the cheek would be correct. She settled the question by reaching up and kissing him lightly, steadying herself with a hand on his shoulder. It affected them both like an electric shock, and as she stood back he saw that the blue eyes looked enormous, and the amusement had gone from her face.
‘Will you come out at the weekend?’ he asked, bre
athing out carefully.
‘I’m here for the weekend, but I’ve got a dinner on Monday,’ she said, and he noticed the slight reservation surrounding Monday. Another bloke, he thought, his senses sharpened.
‘Saturday?’
‘That would be lovely.’ But another bloke she isn’t quite sure about, or who isn’t available, he thought.
‘Let yourself in, Francesca. I want to see you over the doorstep in this district.’ She laughed at him, but did as she was asked, stopping to give him a tiny wave before she closed the door.
10
McLeish was at his desk by 8.30 the next morning, still feeling a warm glow from the night before. He beamed at Davidson who walked in at 9.30 looking tired, but observing him carefully. Davidson grinned back.
‘Had a good time did you? When are you seeing her again?’
‘At the weekend — dunno after that. She’s got a date on Monday.’ He shook himself out of his preoccupation. ‘Let’s have another look at the Fireman file. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it is an ordinary mugging.’
Davidson sniffed. ‘There are unkind coppers who might suggest you feel that because it involves a company where the lassie you have your eye on is also involved. There’s nae sign of anything out of the way.’
McLeish was riffling through papers, hunting. ‘His watch was taken, and his briefcase and his wallet, and none of them have turned up. The ordinary mugger would have ditched the empty wallet and the case, and pawned the watch. You couldn’t sell it, it was initialled, rolled gold, and came for forty years’ service with the one firm. We tried the pawnshops, I take it? Nothing? Doesn’t that seem odd to you?’
Davidson thought. ‘Not really. Even a stupid pawnshop owner might well remember that watch and who popped it. I reckon the chappie threw it into the river along with the empty wallet and the case. Or he just put it in a bin.’ Both men silently contemplated the unlikelihood of a gold watch’s surviving the attentions of London’s derelicts, or London’s dustmen come to that.
McLeish tried again. ‘Look, an ordinary thief doesn’t kill a bloke except accidentally, and there was nothing accidental about this. This villain killed his man, taking some pains about it. Now either he is out of his head with drugs, in which case he’ll turn a gold watch into cash quite quickly, or he is someone who knows that victim and meant to kill him, for some reason we haven’t fathomed, in which case he will be afraid to get rid of the watch for fear the disposal points to him. And the watch hasn’t turned up.’
‘Guv’nor, he threw it in the river. All right, I know, you’ve got a feeling, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, I have. From the moment I saw the body.’
Davidson nodded resignedly. He had worked with McLeish for three years and knew that beneath that rugger-player exterior he was a highly imaginative and sensitive policeman, qualities which normally he suppressed rigidly since he was clear that most police work was best achieved by careful attention to detail and to routine; and he knew, as all policeman do, that most murders are committed by the obvious suspect. Typically there was absolutely no mystery about either the identity of the murderer or his motivation.
‘Humour me, Bruce. Who could want to murder Fireman? He’s a widower, three children, two grandchildren, all of them grief-stricken according to the Yorkshire end.’
‘Ah. He had a wee girlfriend whom he was refusing to marry, and her brother topped him?’ offered Davidson obligingly.
‘He lived next door to his mother, aged eighty-eight, and went in every day,’ McLeish reported gloomily, finding the relevant paragraph. ‘Played bowls, churchgoer, sidesman indeed. No other hobbies.’
‘Not much space for a wee girlfriend in that,’ Davidson agreed. ‘But you never know. Will the Yorkshire force do much more for you?’
‘Very much within limits. They are sure it was a mugger — London being entirely populated with them, as all in Yorkshire know — and in any case they have their hands full. They have the Moors Rapist on the loose still, and it is coming up to the full moon.’
‘Who inherits Fireman’s cash?’
‘His children, equally. There is only really a house, and £5,000 in savings. £50,000 all in, perhaps. Yorkshire report both sons in good jobs and the daughter well married.’
Davidson fell silent, feeling that he had done his bit for creative thinking, and not liking to reiterate his own strongly held view that the wretched Fireman had met a thief crazed by drink or drugs with consequences as certain as running into a three-ton truck.
‘I’ll maybe go up there.’ McLeish sounded dogged. ‘I may get a better feel for the case than I can here. I ought to go to the funeral — that’s Wednesday.’
‘They rang from Yorkshire?’ Davidson had been asked to establish the day of the funeral but had not had time that day.
‘No, no. Francesca — Miss Wilson — mentioned it in passing. She and her colleagues had wanted to visit the factory on the Wednesday, but had had to change to Monday to avoid the funeral.’ McLeish kept his head down, but Davidson could see he had turned pink. He was beginning to worry that McLeish, having plainly fallen like a ton of bricks for the girl, was letting his judgement be dangerously distorted. But attending the victim’s funeral was a step conventional enough to go unnoticed, and McLeish’s lasting belief in routine meant that he was at the same time working his way through all the registered addicts and other customers with a record of violence in the district, at the same time as he was engaging in flights of speculation. They worked steadily through the rest of the caseload, fighting the losing battle to keep up with the paper which is the key to all good police work. Davidson, working separately, arrived at the Byers case, and lifted his head.
‘Anything else on Byers?’
‘I managed a word with Peregrine — Mr Wilson — at the concert last night, and with Mrs Byers. No worry, all funny phone calls stopped.’
Davidson nodded. No further trouble to be expected either, he thought; it shouldn’t take that family of well-informed villains long to grasp that the whole Wilson family was under the personal protection of a Detective Inspector at one of the toughest stations in London. Secure in this conviction, he marked the file to go into the central system, so that he could clear a space in his crammed filing cabinets. He listened with half an ear as McLeish made the phone calls necessary to get himself to Yorkshire for the funeral and to chat with the local force, and with rather more attention as McLeish cleared Saturday night — the young Miss Wilson being available, he remembered — and volunteered himself to work late on Monday — Miss Wilson being at a dinner.
‘I need the whole weekend off though, guv’nor,’ he reminded McLeish when he paused for breath. ‘My lassie is here for Saturday and Sunday.’
‘That’s fine — I had remembered. When had you planned to join us again?’
‘Monday, if that’s all right? You know where I am.’
In the event it was not until just before midnight on Monday that they met again, McLeish having been distracted in the interim by a robbery with violence that had left an Indian sub-postmaster in hospital with two bullets in his spine, and Davidson by a rape case. Davidson and he ate in a McDonald’s hastily, Davidson treating his exhausted superior with some care.
‘No connection with the Fireman case?’ he asked cautiously. ‘Just round the corner, wasn’t it?’
‘No, I mean, yes it was just round the corner but no connection. This one was a professional, wore a mask and used a shooter. Same as the Notting Hill Gate job last month. Poor bloody sub-postmaster, taking his duties seriously, wouldn’t show him how to open the safe so he shot him in front of his wife and made her open it. Real villain, no frenzy there; just the sort I want tucked away for a good long stretch.’
Davidson offered to drive back to the station, and McLeish had just closed his eyes thankfully in the passenger seat when the radio summoned them urgently. Davidson snatched the receiver in an attempt to prevent McLeish being woken, and all but
drove the car off the road at the message.
‘Mrs Byers hurt? What happened? No, nae bother, we’re on our way.’
Cursing, he flung the car round the next corner, oversteering, so that McLeish as he struggled awake again was thrown hard against his seat belt.
‘What happened? No need to take the lamp post with you.’
‘Sorry. Attack on Mrs Byers outside young Wilson’s house.’
‘Never!’ McLeish sounded appalled. ‘It’s an insult.’
‘Yes,’ Davidson agreed, and glanced at his superior who was sitting bolt upright, bristling, the dark hair standing up. Not a sight you would wish to meet on a dark night. ‘The ambulance is behind us, by the way.’
McLeish turned slightly in his seat, shading his eyes against the headlights, and Davidson swung the car out of the way, pulling out immediately to follow the ambulance. The small convoy reached Perry Wilson’s house three minutes later, blue lights flashing, reflecting off the walls as curious faces appeared at every window.
Davidson slid the car’s nearside wheels on to the pavement, clear of the ambulance so as not to restrict its exit, and he and McLeish piled out to join three ambulancemen bent over a huddled figure lying almost underneath the open door of the brown Rolls. Long dark hair lay like a fan across the pavement and McLeish drew breath sharply as he saw that she lay in a pool of blood, with more blood pouring from the side of her head just underneath the hairline.
‘No sign of spinal damage. We’re moving her.’ The senior ambulanceman spoke without deference.
‘Yes, carry on.’ McLeish had a notebook out, and was drawing swiftly, marking the position of the body and the car, while Davidson drew a chalk line around the recumbent Sheena, both of them so concentrated that they only belatedly noticed Peregrine weeping with distress as he clung to Sheena’s outstretched hand. Davidson efficiently shifted him to get some space for the ambulancemen, who had clapped a pad to Sheena’s head and were manoeuvring her on to a stretcher. The whole process took astonishingly little time, and Perry, galvanized, had only just time to scramble into the ambulance with her.