by Gavin Smith
“Cat got your tongue? What happens now? Constable.”
“We’ve reason to believe you’re driving under the influence of intoxicating liquor. Sergeant. Grounds being witness reports and our own observations of this car veering in an erratic fashion.” The cop sniffed histrionically. “That and you smell like you showered in vodka and slept on a barbecue.”
Harkness shrugged away his momentary crisis, really no more than fatigue and low blood sugar picking at his stitching. He scented Biddle behind this. He’d been roaming alone for too long and a pair of sheep dogs had been sent to round him up.
“Fine. Do you actually think I’m going to snot you or run? Can I at least get out of this shit-heap for a minute?”
The traffic cop shrugged and took a step backwards. Harkness uncoiled himself from the car, stretching to his full height to put himself a head above the cop.
“Now then. Where do I blow?”
“Steady,” exclaimed the cop, accepting the intoxilyzer from his partner and clipping a disposable plastic tube to its receptor. “That might be seen as a kind of bribe. But you probably know more about the promotion process than me. Sergeant.”
He studied his hands as they grasped the bars; scraped knuckles, singed hairs and nails rimed with soot and filth fitting perfectly with the vertical shafts of steel thickened by grey emulsion. Wedging his clammy forehead in bored exasperation against the cold metal, it felt like the very fabric of the cellblock was exuding cold sweat.
He imagined his life unspooling. Pounced upon in a busy road in stark daylight. Dragged, cuffed, kicking and spitting into gaol. Every scrap of falsehood in their words fuelling his raving indignation. Every plan, assumption and ounce of self-worth being sloughed away as he writhed against clutching hands and metal bands. Daylight banished by jaundiced strip-lighting.
Even his strong hands, already scarred and burned by toil, couldn’t bend or break or melt these bars. No power within his aching skull could frame a picture that didn’t include bars. Nothing he could say or do could make the cops and lawyers and hangers-on, bustling and hustling an arm’s length away, think of him as anything other than a devalued commodity to be traded away, another problem to be solved or deferred.
Perhaps he was missing something; the mental leap or lapse that allowed those who had gone before him to tolerate the bars and thrive. Cognitive dissonance, the headshrinkers called it. Some of them, anyway. The naïve ones, clever enough to grasp the concept, if not clever enough to realise that beneath all the conditioning, damage, dysfunction and inertia, not everyone is middle-class.
The prison hierarchy certainly depended on it, a rank structure based on both ruthless violence and a skewed yet clear personal morality. Gangsters, armed blaggers and knife murderers gazed down like bloodied Mayan priests from the top of the ziggurat. In the offal-spattered gutters at the base cowered the paedophiles and perverts whose appetites and compulsions made hard men wince. Clambering up the middle terraces, the burglars, drug dealers, con men, drug users, muggers, arsonists and wastrels clamoured for the right to liberty and an end to consequences.
Those vying for the heights had succeeded in one vital aspect. They had accepted their own transgressions as a necessary adjunct to a professional life. They had forged a code of morality that permitted an indignant, self-evident righteousness that no mullah or cardinal could outdo. So men who brutalised security guards with pick-axe handles and shotguns for unspectacular sums of money, or stabbed strangers for drunken gratification, or ravaged the savings and mental health of pensioners, all knew with adamantine certainty that they were superior to the broken creatures whose illicit appetites were merely sexual.
There was no hand-wringing doubt. To take a stranger’s life for inebriated honour, or to crush a skull for a few grand in pocket money, was neither forgivable nor understandable; it was in fact respectable. Giving in to misplaced sexual urges because your childhood had been warped and debased and you were emotionally adrift, desperate to re-enact, to punish and be punished, to steal innocence and taste it for a while; that was carte blanche for righteous violence against you.
The code certainly had self-preservation at its core. Everyone needs somebody to feel superior to. The higher your place in the pecking order, the greater your chances of enduring untouched, unscarred, sane and alive. So where does murdering a screw’s wife and kids by arson fit? The intended victim was a screw, but every child-killer in the seventh circle of D Wing had an excuse. It was always a fit-up. Once the gavel fell on the pleading and calculating and over-educated noises off, you’re still a child-killer with a place in the gutter awaiting you. How far down the ziggurat would Firth’s head bounce?
Would Firth survive it? What if Harkness had taken that road? Would he have had to embrace the rules of his new society, cognitive dissonance just so much radio static that sooner or later has to be tuned out? But for a few different steps, were Firth and he so very different?
Damn him to his private hell of concrete, steel and fear, thought Harkness. He’s obsessing me and we’re not even through the bloody gate yet. Was it normal for daydreaming to be this vivid? He was sure he used to think about sex and his shopping list when his mind idled. When did he become an urban shaman? He glanced at his watch, twice, initially failing to read the time. His first fever dream had marked twenty-four hours without sleep. He was now approaching thirty-six hours. He raised his head, punched the gate with the heel of his hand, hating waiting.
“Sarge!” he shouted to either of the two men behind the elevated custody desk. Neither one acknowledged him, both wholly consumed in delivering pro forma homilies to teenage shoplifters in a bid to recycle cells.
“Take a break, Rob. Relax. Take stock. Think of this as a lull before the storm rather than a complete fucking waste of time.”
Biddle leaned against the other side of the access bay, the double-gated holding area separating Beaumont Fee’s cell block from the outside world. Judging by the tang of ingrained sweat and pipe tobacco, it seemed that Biddle had worn the same thick tweed jacket all day, despite the lack of any kind of air conditioning in the enquiry office.
“Just let me ask you this. Again. Did you really tell traffic to put me through the mill just because I didn’t return your calls?”
“I was concerned. I asked them to keep an eye out.”
“And they had to come from Boston to do that?”
“We’re a big county with few specialist resources.”
“I thought you were old school. I know traffic would love to bag a pissed up detective, but I’m surprised you’d want to help ‘em.”
“Come on, Rob. What about our clean slate?”
“Come to think of it, you know perfectly well I wouldn’t drink on the job, but you’d still find it sweet to have me harassed and shown up on company time.”
“Rob, don’t you think it would be more productive if we used this opportunity to think about interview strategy.”
Biddle glanced towards the glazed holding cell occupying one wall of the access bay. Firth lay on the concrete bench projecting from the wall, one thickly plastered leg outstretched, chest sucking in rapid, hoarse breaths, one arm draped across his face, crutches propped against the door. Harkness realised he’d been loath to look at Firth in case his flesh and blood reality somehow jarred with the certainties he’d painstakingly stitched together.
“Are you joking?”
“He is our prisoner now, Rob. It’s time we got our heads together.”
“Haven’t you got an enquiry room to manage?”
“You mean why can’t you have Slowey instead of me?”
“That too. He knows what he’s doing and hasn’t tried to have me arrested yet.”
“I’ve sent him home for a rest. Me being a caring supervisor. You’ve got to learn to take better care of your staff.”
“Why don’t you email me to that effect?” Harkness paced another circuit of the access bay. He’d found a new sympathy for the head-lol
ling, fur-chewing mania of caged predators in zoos.
“More to the point, why the bloody hell is Firth here now?”
“Expediting the enquiry,” said Biddle, looking fondly at the stupefied Firth.
“Pissing away an advantage.”
“You say potato.”
“Come on. Just think,” whispered Harkness. “There are evidential holes to be filled. Looked to me like he had a decent injury. Leaving him in County Hospital overnight could have given us another day before the custody clock started ticking. And I could have slept. And had a square meal.”
“Boss wanted to crack on. Town sergeant’s not happy with losing staff to babysit him. Besides….”
“Besides what?”
“Seems your friend here was champing at the bit to see you. Once his leg was plastered up and he’d sobered up enough to shout and hold a pen, he discharged himself. County were glad to see the back of him.”
“Marvellous. Why’s that then?”
“Some other fuckwit snotted a probationer while trying to damage our fuckwit. There he is.” Biddle indicated the electronic custody screen. “Number nine.”
Harkness squinted at the wide, elevated screen, with its neat delineations of names, offences, review times, officer-in-case collar numbers and warning notes. Toiling away beneath it, trading numbers and jargon and form sheets, the custody sergeants resembled down-at-heel bookmakers at a race meet where every hateful nag would fail to finish.
‘Braxton K’ had been housed in number nine. ‘Police assault etc’ suggested a long stay and both a doctor and appropriate adult had been requested. The volume crime unit had been tasked with interviewing this body, charging him with the most easily proved and least labour intensive offence and quickly sluicing him away.
Braxton. He rolled the name around his head, looking for a connection. He should know. He’d read it or heard it in the last eighteen hours. Slowey would know. He swallowed a burst of anxiety, knowing he might well waste his first murder interview as a DS if he didn’t eat something more substantial than a Mars bar and close his eyes for twenty minutes.
Drifting in the haze of his own fatigue, he suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable. The smoke receded and he found Firth’s eyes on him, blank, alert and indifferent. For seconds, they studied each other. Harkness involuntarily scowled and bunched his shoulders, returning the gaze and ready for the testosterone-fuelled battle of wills that usually flowed from direct eye contact. Firth turned away, revealing nothing, unruffled and uncurious.
“So. Nigel.” Harkness leaned on the holding cell’s door-frame. “How are we?”
Firth didn’t deviate from his study of the ceiling, eyes flickering from side to side, lips counting silently.
“Rob,” hissed Biddle. “None of your cowboy tactics now. He’s not in for littering so for fuck’s sake no Mickey Mouse bloody amateur interviewing off tape.”
“But I’m bored, Biddle. I’m going to save us some time.”
“I’ll give you a game of ‘I spy’ if you like.”
“Ok. Let’s start with ‘u’. Give up? It stands for do whatever else you want, but don’t you fucking try to undermine me in front of a punter.”
Biddle bridled, flushing and straightening his jacket.
“It’s your funeral, Rob.”
Firth’s face bore the memory of a smile when Harkness turned back to him. Harkness was unnerved. Firth had never before managed such a convincing show of impassivity, although that might be pharmaceutical in origin. Worse, having more in common with the suspect than he did with his co-pilot was not the best basis for a good, attacking interview.
“Nigel, I’m going to assume that you don’t want to talk to me in this setting. Could be you’re blaming me for that little road accident and you’d rather I just went away and fucked myself and my mother. Besides, you don’t want to accidentally give anything away about the fire you started. And those dead children.
“Yep, if I were in your prison trainers, I’d keep my mouth shut too.” If Firth reacted, Harkness couldn’t tell. “Remind me not to play poker with you, Nigel. But here’s the deal. You can have a solicitor. Your know that. But you’re a bright lad who’s been through the system. I’m offering you a chance to explain your actions, scrub off all that dirt, get yourself off the hook. If I’m wrong, I need to know.”
Firth inclined his head slightly, studying the CCTV camera over Harkness’s shoulder. Harkness knew the system didn’t record sound and shrugged inwardly.
“But if you freeze me out, glue your mouth shut and hide behind some lawyer who’s only interested in prolonging all our pain and milking the system, I’ll have to believe you’ve got something to hide and do what I need to do to prove it.
“So, here’s the deal. If you skip the lawyer, we’ll get straight into interview. If your story adds up, we’ll get you processed out ASAP. Otherwise, well, it’s a bank holiday, the cells are heaving; you could be here for a long time waiting for someone to come along and advise you on the bleeding obvious. I think our number’s about to come up at the meat counter, so what’s it going to be?”
“Snelling,” said Firth, eyes never leaving the ceiling. “Rory Snelling.”
“Next!”
The magnetic contacts on the barred gate clicked as a custody sergeant beckoned to them.
“Whoop whoop. Nee-naw, nee-naw.”
“You’ve reached the voicemail of Rory Snelling. I’m currently engaged with another client. If your call is urgent, please…..”
“Yes, Rory, it’s urgent. It was urgent an hour ago and it’s still urgent now. Ring me. It’s Sharon. But you knew that.” Sharon Jennings cleared the call. “Fuck it!”
“Epithets unwarranted!” said Jeremy in his lisping sing-song. “May warrant your detention!”
“You’re right, JJ. Pretend I never said it.”
“I’m good at pretending. Lying commensurate with good manners. Manners maketh the man. Man made the car to take us over the road.”
“I’m sure you’re right, JJ.” Once more oblivious to her, Jeremy was busily rearranging his toy car collection. Each treasured, die-cast miniature was precisely aligned and spaced on Sharon’s dining table. Not only were the cars aligned with the grain of the wood, but they appeared to be sub-categorised into makes, models and functions.
“What are you doing now, JJ?”
“Truth self-evident to law-abiding motorists,” he said, ignoring her and concentrating on a series of intricate three-point turns so that half a dozen toy hatchbacks could make way for a fire engine, police car and ambulance.
“Is that how it looked last night, JJ?”
“No no no no no. Toys easier to move. Mother said to be clear in my head and get all my ducks in a row for the policeman so as to tell what should be told.”
“You’re a good lad, JJ.”
“Yes I am SJ.”
Her phone trembled into life, barely managing the first two seconds of ‘Daddy Cool’ before she answered it.
“Rory?”
“Erm, yes.”
“You don’t seem sure.”
“Thanks, yep, just print the whole thing.”
She felt herself sliding to the margins. She swallowed a rebuke, not quite finding the words and knowing she wasn’t entitled to bitterness. They were professionals who’d slept together, nothing more. This call was strictly business. One colleague to another. So why did she keep having this debate with herself?
“Sorry, Shaz, not quite free to talk. What do you need?”
“It won’t wait. Can you get yourself free to talk?”
“Do you know where I am?”
“At the police station, printing off Nigel Firth’s custody record?”
“Wait.”
She was scuffed and buffeted, coming to a rest in a softened space where muffled voices could just be heard over the clinking of change on keys. Paul Simon was a prophet: Rory had finally slipped her into his pocket with his car keys. A door slammed and was locked
and an extractor fan buzzed. She was abruptly dragged out of the pocket.
“Shaz. Hi. Sorry. So: Firth. Shoot.”
“You sound like a text message. Are you billing by the word now?”
Rory held his breath. She knew this mannerism. He’d be taking the second or two he needed to fine-tune his response. Were she an office junior, he’d have lambasted her for wasting his time. Were she his girlfriend, he’d have ignored her call, keeping her at the requisite distance from his work. As a fellow professional, an apprentice and a walking reminder of delirious transgression, she was getting harder for him to peg.
“Keeping my powder dry,” he said warmly. “Could be a long night. The sooner I crack on with it, the better. Look, I know Firth’s one of yours. This may change things for your case, but there’s nothing you can do about any of this right now. You should just enjoy what’s left of your day off.”
“The police came to see me. An hour or two ago. About the arson murders.”
“You should have called.”
“I’m calling.”
“At the time.”
“I’m a big girl, Rory.”
“Of course. I’m not doubting your acumen. Who was it and how badly did you maul him?”
“One DS Harkness. New to me. And I was a pussycat.” She winced. She’d been more like a hissing wildcat, betraying her fears when she should have played the sphinx.
“I know him. Bad tempered. Aggressive. Bit of a blusher. Thinks he’s got a poker face, but very readable. Does look like he’s been hit with a poker though. An oaf but persistent. What did he ask? What did you say? Wait, I’m going to jot it all down.”
“I thought time was of the essence. Won’t they miss you? They’ll think you’ve got dysentery.”
“Right, go.”
Sharon summarised her encounter with Harkness. She included the connections he’d made between Firth’s paperwork, the firm, Murphy and, incidentally, her family. She made great play of upbraiding Harkness for his sins against confidentiality. She was drowned out by the toilet flushing.