I laughed. ‘You have to be kidding, don’t you? You’re one of the most… the most desirable… yes, that’s a more dignified word than shaggable… women that I’ve ever met.’
She grinned, wickedly. ‘Is that so?’
‘Absolutely,’ I murmured. ‘As a matter of fact…’
Some time later, I fell asleep.
Fourteen
Normally I will roll into wakefulness like waves on to a beach, steadily, in small advances, until my tide has risen and I’ve emerged from the last episode of whatever dream I’ve been having, from wherever I’d been during the night.
But not that morning. My sleep-bound adventure wasn’t drawn from my imagination: it was a full colour replay of the previous evening, beginning with the struggle to escape from Martin’s MX5 in the car park outside the cruddy hotel in South Shields, then taking me, step by step, back along the way, until I was standing once again in Winston Church’s kitchen, staring at his ravaged body on the table.
When his intestines started to move like snakes, that’s when I came to, in a hurry. Only I didn’t, not completely. I sat up, eyes wide open but taking nothing in. I was awake, but my consciousness remained in that bloodbath in Morpeth. I recall shouting something. Whatever it was, it made Mia reach up and take hold of my left arm. But I didn’t know it was Mia, did I? So I wrenched it free, violently, then slammed it across her chest and twisted round, forcing her down on to the bed and pinning her to it as my right hand gripped her throat.
‘No,’ she screamed. ‘Bob, no! It’s me, it’s Mia, it’s all right.’
That was enough… thanks, God, for that one… to bring me back. If it hadn’t been, I might have crushed her windpipe. I saw the fear in her eyes, and took my weight off her, then gathered her into me. ‘I’m sorry, love,’ I whispered. ‘Bad dream.’
She wriggled in my grasp, trying to free herself. I let her go and she pulled away from me, staring at me as if she’d woken up with the Blagdon Amateur Rapist. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, again. ‘I thought I was. ..’ I smiled, weakly, hoping to reassure her. ‘Call it a Stephen King moment, eh?’
‘Call it nothing!’ she shouted. ‘You scared me. I thought you were going to kill me. Is this normally what happens after you have a bad day at the office?’
‘No,’ I retorted, unreasonably irked, ‘but I don’t usually sleep with anyone, so maybe I wouldn’t know. Calm down. I had a nightmare, okay?’
She put her fingers to her throat; I could see the red marks that mine had left. ‘No,’ she moaned, on the verge of tears, ‘it’s not okay! This is not how I wanted it to be. I don’t need violence in my life! I’ve had enough of it. Men!’ The ferocity of her sudden scream took me by surprise. ‘You’re all the fucking same! All bastards. Go, will you, just get dressed and go.’
‘Mia…’
‘Fuck off!’
It’s impossible to be dignified when someone’s glaring at you as you’re trying to get the other foot into your briefs, so I gathered up my clothes, and my overnight bag, and took them through to the bathroom. I ran the Philishave over my chin a few times, then showered quickly, and dressed, same suit and shoes but a change of everything else. I was almost ready when my phone sounded.
It was Alex. I hadn’t even looked at the time until then, but the readout told me that it was two minutes past eight. ‘Morning, Pops,’ she said, and a huge warm feeling of relief surged through me. She was my foundation, the real keystone of my entire existence. I’d lost sight of that truth for just a little while; focusing on it put everything back in balance.
‘Where are you?’ she asked.
I didn’t want to tell her, but I couldn’t lie. ‘In the bathroom,’ I replied.
‘Possibly too much information, Pops. Whose bathroom?’
She was my daughter so it stood to reason that she’d be a persistent interrogator. ‘I had to go to Newcastle last night,’ I told her, irrelevantly.
‘Ah, so you stayed over?’
‘Well, no…’
She wasn’t giving up. ‘You’re at Alison’s, then?’
‘No… Alex, don’t ask, okay?’
‘You’re at Mia’s!’ she exclaimed. She sounded triumphant; she’d got me and she knew it.
‘I give up,’ I said. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘Pops, be careful.’ Her sudden concern astonished me.
‘What do you mean?’ I almost stammered. ‘You’re not giving me.. . big-people advice, are you?’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. I meant be careful with Mia. Don’t get serious or anything. She’s not right for you.’
I felt just a little huffed. ‘What do you mean? I thought you liked her.’ I wasn’t sure whether I was defending my taste in women or the woman herself.
‘I do. She’s a friendly person, and she’s good on the radio, and she went out of her way to be nice to me which meant for sure that she fancies you, but she’s different, so different from you. You don’t belong together.’
‘And what about Alison?’ I challenged.
‘I like Alison more than I like Mia, and she would be right for you, maybe, but that’s not going to happen. If it was you wouldn’t be in Mia’s bathroom at this time in the morning.’
I was comforted. She didn’t know everything, I thought, until I realised that, actually, what she didn’t get was the truth about her old man, that he was as weak as most other blokes when it came to women, as easily led by his dick.
‘Don’t you worry yourself,’ I declared. ‘Neither of those things is going to happen. No kitchen-sharing, I promise. Now bugger off to school. What are you doing today anyway? A post-grad in adulthood?’
‘Double maths, Spanish and English this morning, as it happens. See you tonight?’
‘See you tonight,’ I confirmed. ‘And you’re cooking, since you’re so bloody grown up all of a sudden… and so territorial when it comes to the kitchen.’
I slipped on my jacket and ventured out of the bathroom. I’d hoped, maybe even assumed, that Mia would be waiting outside, contrite, with tea and toast, and maybe even a full Scottish on the hob if I was lucky. But she wasn’t. The bedroom door was still closed. ‘Fuck her,’ I whispered, angry and more than a little humiliated, as I walked out, closing the door firmly so that she’d know I’d gone, but just short of slamming it like a petulant kid.
I was first into the office, but only just. Andy Martin arrived just as I was starting on my copy of that morning’s Saltire newspaper. It was my barometer; I took its journalism and its editorial line seriously, which I didn’t do always with the other blacktops. There was nothing in it about either of the murder inquiries. That pleased me in one way and worried me in another. It meant that there was no immediate public pressure on me for a result in either case, but worried me because I’d expected a harder time from them, on the Weir-McCann investigation at least. My reading was that the paper was sitting on the story, not wanting it to run out of steam, in case.. . in case there was more, in case there was a third murder. At that moment, that was my biggest fear. Two down. How many more to go?
I looked up and saw Martin standing outside my door, as if he was considering whether or not he should knock. I waved him in.
‘Hi, Andy,’ I greeted him. ‘I thought I told you not to be too sharp getting in this morning.’
‘I couldn’t sleep, boss. I didn’t see any point in hanging about the flat.’
‘Lucky you. I wish I hadn’t slept.’ I’d never been more sincere.
‘Bad dreams?’
I nodded. ‘The worst. You had breakfast?’
‘Coffee, that’s all.’
I stood. ‘Come on then, let’s go to the canteen. When I’m feeling fucked I always refuel.’
The staff catering was just as good as that in the senior officers’ dining room, and every bit as traditional. Cops need feeding properly. I filled a plate with fried egg, sausage, bacon and black pudding, then topped it off with a fried potato scone, just for luck, to be washed down with a hu
ge mug of tea. Martin had the same, only more so. ‘It’s a training night at Raeburn Place,’ he explained.
‘Are you still serious about rugby?’ I asked.
‘The day I stop being serious about it, I’ll have played my last game. I may have dropped out of the top flight, but I’m still as committed as ever. I owe that to the other fourteen guys in the team.’
‘Think that way in CID and you’ll be fine,’ I told him.
We ripped through our breakfasts like a chainsaw through a tree, then turned our attention to the well-stewed tea. I looked at the DC over the top of my mug. I’d known him for less than a week, and we were hardly equals in rank, but I was starting to think of him as a friend. ‘Have you got a bidey-in?’
He blinked at my question. ‘A what?’
His surprise made me chuckle, and realise how far from my roots I’d travelled. ‘Sorry, I forgot that’s more of an east coast term. Have you got a live-in girlfriend?’
He shook his head. ‘No, not just now. I did have, but that went tits up about nine months ago.’
‘Whose fault?’
‘Nobody’s, really. We didn’t fall out or anything. She wanted it to go further than I did, that’s all, so we split. I still see her from time to time; we’re still good friends.’
‘Is she in the job?’ I asked.
‘Hell no. She works in PR. I would not fancy having a policewoman as a girlfriend.’
‘No?’
‘What else would you talk about over the dinner table, other than the job?’
‘Your kids, eventually. By the way,’ I added, ‘you’re not supposed to use that word any more.’
He was puzzled. ‘Which word?’
‘Policewoman. There are no more WPCs; we’re all police officers now, everybody. It’s no longer politically correct.’
He grinned. ‘Did I catch an inference there, sir, that you don’t have much time for politicians?’
‘I’ll say it out loud if you like. I can’t fucking stand the breed. There is something completely fucking phoney about them. They’ll be back soon promising us the world in exchange for our votes, and as soon as they have them they’ll fuck off for another four or five years and forget about us, until it’s time to be nice to us all again.’
‘Don’t you like any of them?’ he asked.
‘I admired the last Prime Minister… “admire” being different from “like”. Balls like grapefruits. But the present bloke? I don’t believe he really exists. I’m sure he’s made of fucking latex, like his puppet. As for the new guy, he’s all fucking bouffant and razzamatazz. He went to bloody Fettes, for Christ’s sake, that fucking Gormenghast of a school across the road. “Boys Only” when he was there and now he’s fixing the rules to get more women into Parliament, just because they’re women. That should be a fucking gender-free zone, man. Every MP should be there on the basis of ability; no elector’s choice should be restricted to people who sit down to pee. It’s un-fucking-democratic, Andy, and it’s the mark of the man.’
I realised that I had raised my voice, and was drawing glances from other tables; I stopped. ‘Christ,’ I continued, a little embarrassed and a lot more quietly, ‘listen to me. You’d think I was a misogynist, yet I’m anything but. We need more women in the police force, we need them in the higher ranks and yes, we need them in politics too, but only as long as they get there the right way and not through some artificial process. Our service has been male-dominated from the start. Its thinking is far too narrow, and if I ever got to command rank, I would do everything I could to change that, but that would not include putting “Women applicants only” signs over promotion boards.’
‘You lost your wife, didn’t you?’ he said.
Taken aback, I stared at him. ‘Yes, I did. A while back.’
‘Is that how you and she talked over the dinner table?’
A smile, so broad that I felt my cheeks bunch, spread across my face. ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Exactly like that. We used to go at it hammer and tongs, especially when Myra’d had a couple of drinks and her tongue was really loosened… not that she ever held back much.’
He nodded. ‘That’s the kind of relationship I want,’ he declared. ‘Full frontal, nothing left unsaid. That’s why… your word… bideyins don’t work for me. I want a relationship that challenges me every minute of the day. Clearly you’ve had one, and you’ll never settle for anything else again.’
But I did, for a while. And so did Andy. We’ve got there in the end, both of us, but if we’d recorded that conversation and played the tape to ourselves every day, maybe we wouldn’t have made the mistakes that we did along the way. But, if we hadn’t, then four lovely kids wouldn’t have been born, so… what the hell?
That morning, though, our discussion showed me something very clearly. It told me why, as much as we liked each other, Alison had been right to set limits to our relationship, to draw a boundary line over which neither of us would step. We didn’t fire each other up in that way, and we both knew it.
As for Mia, she was history to me, even then. There was something about her reaction that I knew I wasn’t going to get over. Sure, I had scared her; there was no doubt about that. But she’d known where I’d been the night before, and she’d even known that it connected to her, and yet there had been no shred of sympathy in her, or any attempt to understand why I had reacted in that extreme but completely involuntary way. I didn’t want to reach out to her again, not after the way she’d behaved, and if she’d phoned me at that moment, I wouldn’t have taken her call.
Martin said something to me, but I hadn’t been listening. ‘Sorry, Andy, what?
‘I asked if we were going to see Manson again this morning, boss.’
‘I am,’ I replied. ‘You’re not. Nothing personal, but I may have to lean on him, and it would be more comfortable if it was just the two of us.’ His eyes narrowed a little. I smiled. ‘Hell, Andy, I’m not going to thump him. There needs to be some straight talking, that’s all, and for that it has to be just him and me. Sometimes you have to play by their rules to make any progress.’ I finished my lukewarm tea. ‘Come on. We have to bring the troops up to speed.’
By the time we got back to the office, the rest of the squad, such as it was, had arrived. I knew it wasn’t enough for the continuing job I’d been given, a mixture of ongoing intelligence work, active investigations and pure fire-fighting, of the kind we were involved in at that time, and staffing was an issue I’d have to address. Fred was due for a promotion to DCI, and a move. I’d meant what I’d said to Martin about broadening our thinking. Maybe Alison and I could work together after all. Then there was young PC Rose, the officer I’d met in St Leonards. She’d impressed me, for no reason that would have been clear to anyone else. I’ve always prided myself on being able to spot potential in an instant, by the way someone speaks, looks and acts at first encounter.
But that had to wait; for that time I had what I had. I sat on a corner of Fred’s desk and gathered them around me, him, Jeff Adam and McGuire, with Martin standing alongside me. ‘Okay guys,’ I began. ‘Andy and I had a very active evening down in Newcastle. We’ve got some bad news for you and then we’ve got some worse news.’
I gave them a detailed rundown of the scene that we had encountered at the Seagull Hotel, and of the bleak prospects of identifying the killer of Milburn and Shackleton from trace evidence left behind him. Then I told them of our call on Winston Church, and of what we had found there.
‘The man didn’t mess about,’ I said. ‘It may be that he signed his name in forensics in the old guy’s kitchen, but he was efficient and thorough in the hotel and I don’t expect anything else from him there.’
Leggat and Adam sat silent, frowning; it was young McGuire who spoke. ‘Surely there was a big difference in the nature of the attacks, boss? One lethal wound each in the hotel, but the guy Church seems to have been killed in a frenzy.’
‘Point taken, Mario,’ I told him. ‘But the difference can
be explained. From what we saw, neither Shackleton… who died first. .. nor Milburn had any clue they were in danger until it was too late. Shackleton even opened the door for him. At Church’s house, it was nothing like that. He broke in, the old man heard him, paused his porno movie and went to investigate. The intruder had neither the time for subtlety, nor the need; he just attacked. Church tried to defend himself,’ I held up my right hand to demonstrate, then mimicked the attack, ‘but had two fingers severed and his face bisected. Then he was…’ I paused, back in the middle of my nightmare, ‘… he was just ripped open, and died of shock, or blood loss, or whatever the autopsy tells us.’
Leggat winced. ‘So the investigation’s stalled?’
‘As of this moment, it is. We have to hope now that the victims have left something behind that links them to the guy who paid them to do the job. Fred, I didn’t raise any of this last night, because the situation was developing, and because I didn’t want anyone thinking I was telling them how to do their job, but now I’d like you to get on to DI Ciaran McFaul in Newcastle and ask him if he can get us access to the phone records of the three dead men, and also to the call logs of their mobile phones. I’m assuming that they had them; it seems to be de rigueur these days for hoodlums to use pay-as-you-go mobiles, in the belief that they’re untraceable.’
I didn’t say anything to them about my potential dropped clanger with Tony Manson. It wasn’t for sharing at that time. ‘Do that,’ I continued, ‘and ask him to send us copies of the post-mortem reports for our case files.’
‘Do they belong there, boss?’ Adam asked.
‘Of course they do,’ I retorted, just a wee bit sharply. Poor Jeff didn’t have a lot of luck around me. ‘Whatever the Tyneside boys may think, this is our inquiry. We started off looking for the people who killed Marlon Watson, and we found Milburn and Shackleton, and through them Church. As of yesterday we were looking to thumbscrew out of them the identity of the man who set them on him. He was our ultimate target. Now the three Geordies have been silenced. Who else did it? He did. The hired hands have been taken out of the game, but the employer remains, the man we’ve always been after. So you see, Jeff, nothing has changed. It’s a continuous investigation, so Northumbria CID and ourselves are looking for the same man.’
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