‘But I don’t want it. I don’t want to be sat behind a desk pushing bloody papers.’
Wilson’s face flushed. ‘You think that’s all there is to it? Let me tell you—’
‘I’m a thief-taker. I want to be up and out and not in an office.’
‘Two points. First, isn’t it bloody better to give orders than receive them? I mean you’ve got the ability, no question about it. If you’d . . . if you’d just . . . you know what I mean. You’d be equal with me.’
Macrae smiled slightly and Wilson didn’t miss it.
‘But you’ve never given it a fair shot. You’re not the most diplomatic of men, are you, George?’
‘So?’
‘I mean in relation to senior management.’
‘Christ, there you go. Senior management! We’re a bloody police force, not a paint factory.’
‘Things have changed. This isn’t the old days. The old days have gone, George. Disappeared. Vanished. You’ve got a new man at the top who—’
‘Who costs everything. We’re becoming a nine-to-five, five-days-a-week force. We should put up bloody notices.’ He sketched out in the air with his fingers, ‘To all criminals. To assist the police in their investigations please commit all crimes between Monday and Friday.’
‘George . . .’
‘It’s true, isn’t it, Les? They don’t want us to work overtime. We have to have a budget for every job. See if it’s cost effective to investigate. You know, there are thousands out there who don’t bother to phone us any longer. Car broken into? House burgled? Sorry, sir or madam, we’re just too busy. Cost effectiveness! No wonder our clean-up rate is looking slightly better. We only investigate the ones we’ve got a chance with. That’s not the way it used to be.’
‘There’s no point going down Memory Lane. Things have changed and we have to change with them. You’re like a dinosaur, George. If you don’t change you’ll become extinct.’
‘Dinosaurs had a bloody good time while they lasted.’
‘And this driver you’re always using. Twyford. You’ve got him tucked away clerking and every time you want him you pull him out. It’s no go, George. We don’t have personal drivers any more.’
‘You leave Eddie out if it! This is my patch and—’
‘George, don’t you understand, we don’t have “patches” any more, either? It’s all been centralised and—’
‘All we have is fucking sets of initials. AMIP! Send for AMIP! Jesus. It sounds like some Arab terrorist organisation. What was wrong with the Serious Crime Squad? And we never called it SCS! It’s change for the sake of change, Les, that’s all it is.’
‘Christ, I don’t know why I bother! It’s just . . .’
‘Second point?’
Wilson took a deep breath. ‘Going out as a Chief would give you a better pension, you know.’
‘I’ll get by.’
‘As long as you have us. Not quite what the song said, but you get my meaning. What the hell are you going to do outside the Met? You’ve said it yourself: you’re a thief-taker. What’re you going to do, go into security? Private practice? You think you’ll be happy? You’re a copper, George. At the sharp end. Give you a nice grisly murder and you’re as happy as a sandboy. I’ve been with you. I know.’
Macrae was becoming angry. ‘Let’s cut the lecture. You brought it up. You write what you like.’
Wilson breathed out. Shrugged. Looked down at his desk once more. Macrae began to move to the door.
There was a knock and Silver came in. ‘Foster had a flat in town,’ he said.
‘Well done, laddie. Where?’
‘Fulham. I’ve got the address. And there were keys on the body.’
‘Let’s go and look, then,’ Macrae said.
‘What about the Press?’ Wilson said. ‘They’ll be waiting.’
‘You deal with them, Les, you’re better at that sort of thing than me.’
A look of relief crossed Wilson’s face. Except for one or two reporters, Macrae’s relationship with the Press was diabolical.
‘OK, George, if that’s how you want it.’
*
Among the bales of straw and the rich farm smell of the Broadhurst Mews stables, Terry Collins slept. He dreamed of his grandfather.
In her bed in the dripping Hampshire countryside Maria Dunlap lay awake, staring at the ceiling – too excited, too afraid of what she was getting into, to sleep.
Chapter Nine
Dawn, a grey, sleety dawn with a wind puckering the surface of the Thames, was more than half an hour old, when Leo Silver let himself into his house in Pimlico. It was one of a thousand similar terraced houses that lay between the Buckingham Palace Road and the river. Most had two pillars and a portico, most had been refurbished over the past few years and were now expensive properties. At this time in the morning, except for an occasional car, Pimlico was devoid of movement.
Silver’s was a four-storeyed house which had been converted into flats in the sixties. He and Zoe Bertram occupied the top two floors, which had been turned into a maisonette.
It sounded grand, Silver thought, as he mounted the inner staircase, until you realised that the house was narrow and that the apartment consisted of only three rooms. The top floor had been knocked into an open-plan area which contained living-room, dining-room, and kitchenette. On the floor below there were two bedrooms and a bathroom.
He came to the door of his flat. He was bone-weary, so tired that he leaned against the wall for a moment before pulling from his pocket a ring with several keys on it. He began unlocking the first of the three deadlocks on the heavily reinforced door. It sounded, he always thought, like Bluebeard unlocking the room in which the bodies of his wives hung.
He had never said that to Zoe, not even as a joke. Not joking about anything that might frighten her was part of the price they had to pay for what had happened.
He entered the apartment, relocked the door, and put up a solid security chain. Their bedroom door was closed and he opened it gently. She lay on her back, with her arms above her head and her mouth slightly open. The room was shadowy but he could see a note pinned to his pillow. He took off his shoes and tiptoed silently across the room.
She looked like a child, her face innocent and unlined. He leaned over her, smelling the talc from her bath the previous night, and carefully lifted the note. It said: ‘What have you done with Dr Millmoss?’
He smiled. She had introduced him to James Thurber. She was something of an expert on his cartoons and short pieces, and Leo had become so infected and infatuated that he had not only read everything possible that Thurber had written, but also several biographies of the great man. He took out his pen and wrote, ‘He’s with the owl in the attic,’ and placed the note softly on her chest.
He decided to make some breakfast, see her off to work, and then go to bed. He went up into the open-plan floor above and put on the kettle, standing in the window as he did so and staring out at the cold, wet street. His view took in the houses opposite and ended with the tall chimneys of the old Battersea Power Station. Not much of a view but better than some.
The feature about the apartment which had caused them to borrow more than they could afford was that it had a flat roof and a skylight that led up to it. In the spring they would start to make a roof garden. Ruth said that Sidney had said that they would have to strengthen the roof first. What the hell would Sidney know about such things? He was like Leo’s father. He couldn’t change a light bulb.
Silver had brought with him a pile of morning papers and now glanced at their front pages. They were all calling the death a mugging.
He made himself coffee and sank into one of the old easy chairs which they had bought at a junk market and had had re-covered. On the coffee table in front of him was one of Zoe’s work folders. She was a copy writer at Runcorn, Friar and De Groote and often brought work home.
On top of the folder was another note to him. ‘We need a jingle for a new line in
canned beans. Get to it – but no farts, please.’
He thought for a moment and wrote, quoting Remarque, ‘Every little bean must be heard as well as seen.’
He sipped at his coffee and felt the warmth go down into the pit of his stomach and spread out from there. He knew if he went round the house there would be other notes. It was her way, he thought, of occupying her time when he was working late, keeping herself amused, banishing thoughts. Underneath the surface, under the layers of humour and sophistication, of sudden aggression and equally sudden contrition, underneath all that, he knew she was still raw.
How long had it been? He worked backwards. Last September. Six months.
There had been a time in the weeks after it had happened that they spoke about it every day. For Zoe it had been a compulsion. It was as though by talking she could exorcise the ghosts of memory. But for some months now it had not been mentioned.
For a while he had thought she might be over it but he had done his reading and he knew that sometimes the trauma was so great that some women never got over it.
Recently he had read of a new school of psychiatric thinking which had emerged in Israel from work with Holocaust survivors. Its thesis was that if you could bury traumatic memories deeply enough you lived a happier, less psychologically disturbed existence. This stood Freud on his head. He wondered if that was what Zoe was doing now – burying it.
He sat there, in the grey light of early morning, sipping at his coffee and gradually the pattern of events shaped itself in his thoughts.
It had been such a lovely day. One of those golden mid-September days. It was his nephew Stanley’s sixth birthday and Leo had promised to take him for a pizza in Hampstead. Ruth had taken the day off and Leo, Ruth and Stanley had decided to walk on Hampstead Heath through the Vale of Health up to the Whitestone Pond and then back to the Pizza Express.
Each held one of Stanley’s hands as they walked down the deserted road that led to the Vale of Health. It is a strange place, an enclosed village within the Heath itself, cut off by trees and undergrowth from the surrounding houses, as though a dozen brownstones from upper Manhattan had been uprooted and plonked down in the wilder part of Central Park.
It is an expensive part of London. Very quiet. Few cars come and go. It lives its own secluded and élite existence, and on this midweek day in September there was hardly a soul about.
‘Why is it called health?’ Stanley said. He was a plump child and had excruciatingly bad eating habits. He liked almost nothing except junk food but Leo had a soft spot for him.
They came abreast of the first of the red-brick houses.
‘Because it’s healthy,’ Ruth said.
She was wearing her hair short, had on heavy spectacles, a long dress and old-fashioned open-toed sandals.
‘Once upon a time,’ Silver began and Stanley swung his head towards his uncle, eyes shining. ‘Once upon a time there was a terrible sickness in London called the plague and people were dying in their thousands and—’
‘We don’t talk about misery,’ Ruth hissed at him, shaking her head sharply.
‘Why not? It’s part of life.’
‘Maybe your life. Maybe that’s all you see. I should have thought . . .’
‘And all the people died . . .’ Stanley said. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, those that lived here didn’t,’ Silver said. ‘That’s why it’s called the Vale of Health.’
‘Why didn’t they?’
‘I don’t know why you had to bring it up,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s his birthday. We don’t want to talk about that.’
‘You’re right, it’s too nice a day.’
‘Why didn’t the people die?’ Stanley said, yanking at his arm.
‘You see?’ Ruth said.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Silver said. ‘On your seventh birthday.’
‘No.’ He yanked at Silver’s arm again. ‘Now.’
‘Sssh . . .’ Silver said. ‘What’s that?’
They stopped in the narrow little road, listening. Silence. Then a strange noise. It sounded as though someone was gargling. Abruptly it was cut off. Then there was a kind of long drawn-out moan.
The sounds were coming from behind one of the houses on their left. A small lane wound round the back.
‘What the hell . . .?’ Silver said.
‘You’re not on duty,’ Ruth said.
‘What is it, Uncle Leo?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Leo!’
But he had dropped Stanley’s hand. ‘Take him over there,’ he said, pointing to a pub about fifty yards away.
‘Leo, for God’s sake, whatever it is you—’
He went quickly down the lane. He wasn’t frightened yet. In his mind was some kind of animal situation. A dog tied up. Cruelty of a sort. He could feel the adrenalin streaking through his muscles. He felt light. He had nothing on him, no gun. He saw, on the ground just inside the fence, the handle of a spade from which the head had broken off. It was heavy and solid and he picked it up. If it was a dog it might be aggressive.
The sounds were louder now and seemed to be coming from a small shed at the end of the overgrown garden.
Even now six months later he could not manage a complete picture. The scene flashed on his inner eye fractured into psychedelic images as though by a strobe light . . . Her body, half naked, on an old potting table . . . a track-suit top . . . trainers on her feet . . . the black V of her pubic hair and the thin red line above it . . . the pearls of blood oozing into tiny rivulets . . . her face suffused . . . rags stuffed into her mouth . . . the man holding a knife in one hand, his penis in the other . . .
That’s when everything froze in Silver’s mind. It was like a photograph in a pornographic magazine; a picture carefully staged for the SM trade.
Silver only had an impression of the man, a thin face with long hair, jeans and an anorak. About thirty.
As the man opened his mouth and said, ‘Noooooo . . .’ Silver hit him with the handle of the spade. He felt and heard the crunch of the wood as it met his cheekbone and stove it in. Then he hit him again . . . and again . . . He was lucky he hadn’t killed him.
*
He got up restlessly and went to the window again staring out but seeing nothing. Thinking about it shredded his nerves, yet he found he could not bury it. Just when he thought it had gone, here it was popping up to ambush him.
They had gone over it so many times at first because her counsellor had said it would be of benefit to her. The first time had been in the hospital when he had gone to see her. He had taken her flowers. She’d looked tiny in the bed. Her black hair was spread on the pillow, her damaged hands, where she had grabbed for the knife, heavily bandaged.
‘I brought you these,’ he had said, looking round for somewhere to put them.
‘Thank you,’ she said, not meaning the flowers. ‘Thank you . . .’ Then she began to cry.
Crying had also been part of her therapy. He’d come to see her several times in hospital and she had cried each time.
After she’d left hospital she went to stay with her father in Surrey. Silver went down to visit her and took her to dinner in Guildford. She began to talk about it then, rapidly and compulsively, and before she had even started her food she had begun to cry.
After a few weeks the crying stopped. She still went on talking about it though: the lovely day, the decision to jog on Hampstead Heath. The man working in the garden as she had run past. Asking her for the time. Grabbing her as she paused to look at her watch.
Then the ‘if onlys’. If only she hadn’t gone jogging, if only the day had been cold and wet, if only she had taken a different route, if only . . .
That had taken a week or so. It coincided with a growing dependence on him. She would phone him from Surrey and ask his advice about the simplest things: she was changing her bank, which did he recommend? Which did he use? She was going to buy her father a present, what would he suggest? The calls rained down on him.<
br />
Then one day they stopped. He didn’t hear from her for a week or more. He began to miss her. He phoned her and got her father. She’d gone back to work. She was sharing a flat with three other young women in Wandsworth.
Silver thought about her for two days. He couldn’t get her out of his mind. Wherever he went he saw her: small, dark, high cheekbones, wide-set brown eyes. He always thought she looked Spanish and should be wearing one of those figure-hugging dancer’s dresses. And he wasn’t far wrong because her mother was half Spanish.
He’d phoned her. She sounded brisk, in control. ‘I’ve made a fool of myself,’ she said.
‘How’s that?’
‘The way I’ve been harassing you, making your life a misery.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Yes it is. But I want you to know how grateful I am. And I want you to know that I’m over it, thank God.’
‘When can I see you?’ he said.
‘Leo, I don’t think that’s a good idea. When I say I’m over it I mean I’m halfway over it. I’ve got a new job, new flat, new environment. I think it might be a mistake.’
‘You mean seeing me might . . .’
‘Just start things up again in my mind.’
‘Yes. I understand. But I miss you. Miss, hell. I think I’m in love with you. No, not think. I’m sure.’
She said something then which he only half heard, but the word ‘miss’ was quite clear. Then the phone went dead.
Two days later, about six o’clock on a December evening shortly before Christmas, the duty officer at Cannon Row called him away from his desk saying there was someone to see him in the waiting room. She was sitting on an old wooden bench warmed mostly by criminal bottoms. She was wearing a black suit with a red blouse and a double strand of black beads at her throat. For a moment she took his breath away.
‘I was passing,’ she said.
‘Passing?’
‘On my way home. I always go the long way round. It makes life so much more interesting.’
Dirty Weekend (Macrae and Silver Book 1) Page 6