Remember, Remember

by Lisa Cutts

  Following Annie into her living room, I noticed it had been wallpapered since I was last here. It didn’t seem the right time to mention it. I stood waiting for the barrage that was to come, and I couldn’t really say I blamed her. I was angry that no one had told me that Patrick Hudson was out of prison. I was also annoyed with myself for not asking Wingsy the name of the shooting victim when we’d spoken at the hospital. I could have helped Annie avoid facing more distress in her life.

  A uniform PC sat in one of Annie’s armchairs. He was perched on the edge, stab-proof vest almost touching him under the chin, he was so far forward on the seat. He looked uncomfortable in every way. He was also vaguely familiar. I’d seen him at the station from time to time but didn’t know his name.

  ‘Hello. You must be Nina,’ he said, standing up to face me. ‘Annie’s been asking when you’d get here. I’ll leave you to it. I’ll be outside. Thanks, Annie.’ He left the room, talking into his Airwave radio, giving the control room an update that DC Foster was now on the premises.

  Annie stood at the window with her back to me, arms crossed. As she turned, the sunlight hit the side of her face with the iron burn upon it. The burn her ex-husband had inflicted on her the night he’d tried to kill her and beat the living daylights out of me. My injuries were only physical, and had been caused doing the job I’d chosen to do. Hers were caused by being married to a violent bully. There were no better words to describe someone who inflicted physical and mental injury on the person they were supposed to love. It could only be called cowardly, and these types of people were oxygen thieves.

  He was now a cowardly oxygen thief with several bullet holes in him.

  ‘Did you know about this?’ snapped Annie.

  ‘No,’ I said. This appeared to take the wind out of her sails. I heard Wingsy enter the room behind me. ‘You should have been told. I should have been told.’

  Wingsy had drawn level with me by this stage, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the movement of his head turning in my direction.

  ‘Your husband didn’t do me too many favours either,’ I said, in tones as even as I could manage.

  ‘Yeah, I always forget that you got a kicking that night as well as me,’ said Annie.

  I turned away from her to look at Wingsy, who was making minuscule head-shaking gestures at me. I think it was dawning on Wingsy that both victims of the last two violent convictions listed on Patrick Hudson’s Police National Computer printout were standing in the room with him.

  Wingsy then broke the silence. ‘One of our detective inspectors is on his way to see you, Annie. His name’s Clint Stirling and he’s going to explain a couple of things to you. The thing is, you live in the Metropolitan Police area. They were the original force who arrested your husband and put him inside. They will want to speak to you, but for now we’re here, and we’ll deal with anything you need. Patrick was in prison in our county. He was also shot in our county.’ Wingsy pointed his forefinger back and forth between me and him to demonstrate who he was talking about. I hoped I’d remember later to tell him how stupid it made him look.

  Annie was still standing close to the window. Past her, I could see that a tall man in a black suit was talking to the two uniform officers outside. I recognised DI Clint Stirling. I liked him. He was both a good man and a good officer. Everything DI Dandy wasn’t, Clint was. We’d gone on a couple of dates years ago. It had been a disaster.

  ‘That’s the DI now,’ I said to Annie, mainly to explain why she’d caught me gazing out of the window in her hour of need. ‘I’ll go and let him in.’

  I opened the door, saying, ‘Hi, Clint,’ as I did so.

  ‘Alright, Nin?’ he said, shutting the door behind him and following me back to the living room.

  I said, ‘Sir, this is Annie Hudson, an old friend of mine.’

  I heard her tut and say, ‘Let’s not go that far, Nina.’ Normally I would have responded by telling her that she was quite old, but I mumbled that I was going to make the tea and left them to it.

  Wingsy followed me out into the kitchen. ‘Cups are in that cupboard above your head, mate,’ I said, pointing to the wall unit. I filled the kettle, but as I turned to plug it back in I noticed that he hadn’t moved but was staring at me. ‘What?’ I said, mid-turn towards the fridge.

  ‘Exactly what is it with you, duchess, and people having it in for you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m a police officer, Wings. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not always that popular. Take the rough with the smooth and all that. I don’t think – ’

  ‘Stop changing the subject.’

  I dropped my voice and got closer to my friend. ‘The stuff that happened with Annie and her pig of a husband was years ago. I had a bit of personal grief going on too at the time. I left the Met and transferred. It was for reasons of necessity but I’m glad I did. I was in uniform then so I moved on. I never regretted it. I’ve never let go of Annie, though. She’s not quite as tough as she makes out.’

  Wingsy rubbed his hands over his face before turning to reach up into the cupboard for the cups. Over his shoulder he asked, ‘What kind of personal grief? Not someone else trying to kill you?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said moving to get the milk. ‘All the grief in my life’s well behind me.’

  Fortunately he couldn’t see the worried expression on my face from behind the fridge door.

  9

  We took the tea back into Annie’s living room to find her sitting on the sofa while Clint explained to her that an attempted murder investigation was under way.

  Putting the tray down in front of Annie, I deliberately rattled the cups to make her look at what I’d put before her. In the cupboard, I’d found a packet of Belgian-chocolate-covered cookies. On my visits, I brought her expensive brand goodies from time to time and she always delighted in giving me the cheapest biscuits she could get her hands on. I watched her face as she pursed her lips at the open packet.

  ‘Fucking cheek,’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Annie?’ said Clint.

  ‘Not you, Cliff,’ she said. ‘I was talking to her.’

  ‘It’s Clint actually,’ said Clint.

  ‘Whatever, love,’ said Annie, picking up her tea. ‘What I want to know is what happens to me now. And stop talking to me about fucking risk assessments. I couldn’t give a bollock. Am I going to get shot?’

  ‘Boss,’ I said, sitting next to Annie, ‘can I try to explain what’s going to happen and what we know so far?’ He nodded. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘you should have been warned that Patrick was coming out of prison. As should I.’

  I locked on to Clint’s eyes but he held my stare. It didn’t seem that I’d be getting an apology any time soon.

  ‘As far as Patrick is concerned, he’s in hospital with armed police officers guarding him twenty-four hours a day. The attempt on his life is being investigated by a team of detectives from Headquarters. Part of that investigation involves speaking to Patrick’s family members, including you as his ex-wife, and also – and I know you don’t want to hear about risk assessments – but also assessing if there is any threat to your life. What DI Stirling was saying when I came in is that, as you haven’t seen Patrick in eight years – you’ve had nothing to do with him – any risk to you is minimal.’

  I heard Clint clearing his throat. ‘Thank you, Nina. That’s correct. But we’re still going to fit a panic alarm in your home,’ he said, looking at Annie. ‘Also, the local firearms sergeant is on his way to carry out a strategy plan in the very unlikely event that we need to respond to an emergency of any kind. I’m leaving John here to take a statement from you. Nina, it may be best if you go back to the station.’

  He stood up, shook hands with Annie and made towards the door. I followed him to be sure that there was nothing else he hadn’t wanted to say in front of Annie. But all he said was, ‘Thought they’d put you on Cold Case with a fifty-year-old train crash to keep you out of trouble, Nin? I see it
didn’t work. You need to get back and see Ian Hammond, give him an update.’ He flashed me a smile and was gone through the front door.

  Back in the living room, Annie was trying to put the cookies back in the packet. Wingsy looked up at me from the armchair as I came back into the room. ‘Are you leaving or staying?’ he asked me.

  ‘The DI’s right,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t really be here while you take Annie’s statement. The night Patrick got nicked involved me too. It would be inappropriate if I stayed while you asked her questions. The chances are that at some time someone will take a statement from me too. I may even need to be ruled out as a suspect.’ At least Bill could vouch for my being at home a couple of hours after the shooting, if it came to it. That, and I wouldn’t know where to get a gun, how to load it or how to aim straight. I’d had a bottle of Chianti that night, too, so my aim would have been right off. I’d have blown his head off whether I meant to or not.

  ‘Listen, Annie, I’m gonna shoot…’ I trailed off, aware of what I had said, fluttered my hands at her, and finished, ‘Oh, you know what I mean.’

  ‘It’s a wonder you hold down a job, girl,’ she said, getting up to give me a hug.

  ‘Give me a call when Wingsy’s done if you want me to come back over,’ I said, knowing full well she wouldn’t.

  Annie followed me out to the front door. As she stretched across to unlatch the door, she pressed her face up close to my ear and said, ‘You shag that Clyde bloke?’

  ‘It’s Clint, Annie. And no, I didn’t.’

  10

  Two missed calls from Bill prompted me to call him back on my way to the car.

  ‘Hello, darling. You OK?’ he said.

  ‘Hi, honey,’ I said, glad to hear his voice. ‘In case you haven’t guessed, I’m running a bit late. I’m nipping to work and I’ll call you when I’m leaving.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’m making Moroccan chicken. Nina?’

  The pause was me wondering what Moroccan chicken was when it was at home. ‘Oh, great, I love Moroccan chicken.’

  ‘You’ve had it before, then?’

  Now I was in trouble. I wasn’t used to coming home to someone who cared. This was going to be harder work than I’d first thought.

  ‘Yeah, in Morocco.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d been to Morocco.’

  Stone the crows. I was going to have to stop lying.

  ‘Got to go, darling, got another call coming through,’ I lied, before hanging up.

  My drive back to Riverstone gave me time to think about what I wanted to say to DI Hammond. If he gave me the chance to work on the shooting of Patrick Hudson I would jump at it, but I knew he would never do that. He was going to tell me that someone would talk to me in the morning about my earlier dealings with Hudson, they would want it in writing to eliminate me from their enquiries into where I was when he was being shot, and I was to go back to my train crash from 1964. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in the deaths of so many people, but after fifty years I wasn’t so sure I’d get to the bottom of it. And a recent shooting had more urgency to it: I could feel myself being swept up in the drama.

  I made a quick stop at the Cold Case office and said a brief hello to Jemma Russell and Micky Gowens, another two DCs who had just returned from Crown Court after a further day with the 2002 rapist Barry Oakes. Micky was an incredibly ugly man who always seemed to have really beautiful girlfriends. I’d never got the bottom of it, and suspected that he used escorts. It might have been his charm, but I thought it was more likely to be his Mastercard.

  Having left them laughing about Oakes’s evidence and how obnoxious the jury clearly thought he was, I went off to find my dapper DI. He was in his office drinking tea, a box of Earl Grey in front of him.

  I rapped on the open door. ‘Hi, boss. You wanted to speak to me?’

  ‘Hello, Nina. How are you getting on in Cold Case?’

  ‘Very well, thanks. They’re a good bunch. I’ve been to see Joe Bring in prison. I can tell you about that, but I think you wanted to speak to me about Annie Hudson and her ex?’

  He flicked the teabag into the bin and pointed across his desk at me with his spoon. He then pointed it at the vacant chair in front of him. Clearly, asking me to take a seat was too difficult.

  I obliged.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, wiping the drip from the end of the spoon on a tissue, ‘I know that you were in the Met at the time and suffered some injuries; that’s why it’s better that you don’t get involved in the investigation into the attempted murder of Patrick Hudson. HQ are sending a team tomorrow to take it over. The chances are they’ll take it back to Headquarters with them and run it from their own Incident Room. No need for you to get involved or attend their briefings.’

  I got the message loud and clear. I got up to go. ‘While I think of it, sir, I’ve not yet taken a statement from Joe Bring but, in summary, he says his father was put up to it by a bloke called Leonard Rumbly. Bring senior had some gambling debts and in order to cancel them Rumbly got him to delay the train, which resulted in it being derailed. Rumbly and his family are now the local heroin suppliers. I’ll put in a report to Intel before I go off.’

  I got the impression that Hammond wasn’t really listening to me. It was the rummaging through the desk drawers and the lack of eye contact that aroused my suspicion. I went back to the office to finish typing my notes and Google Moroccan chicken.

  Within the hour I was back at Bill’s, my feet up on the sofa and a glass of Merlot on the table next to me. It hadn’t escaped my notice that Bill had pushed an unengraved glass into my hand as I walked through the door. I pretended not to mind. I was going to have to get used to letting him have some small victories. Apparently it was one of the things that made a relationship work. It smacked more of giving in, to me.

  ‘Dinner will be ten minutes,’ he said, topping up my wine glass and kissing me. ‘Oh, and here’s your work phone. I heard it bleep from the stairs.’

  I took the phone from him as he went back into the kitchen with the diminishing bottle of red, muttering something about mangetouts. I unlocked the phone and read the text message from Ian Hammond. It read, Briefing tomorrow 9am re Patrick Hudson. You’re needed. Speak to Clint Stirling if you have any problems with this.

  I couldn’t fathom what would cause Hammond or Clint to have such a sudden change of heart. They’d been determined to keep me away from Patrick Hudson’s shooting investigation, and now they’d told me to be at a briefing. As I pondered whether I’d been sent the message in error as part of a group text, my phone started to ring. It was Wingsy.

  ‘Hi, mate,’ I said. ‘How was Annie when you left her?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s OK, duchess. But you certainly know how to throw the cat among the pigeons, don’t you?’

  ‘Does this have something to do with being invited to the briefing in the morning?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, it does. It was your report about seeing Joe Bring in prison and the Intel report you put in. We’ve done some checking on who Patrick Hudson was inside with. Before he got released from Mill End prison, he’d been sharing a cell with none other than Niall Rumbly.’

  ‘Bloody hell. The grandson of the man who was behind the 1964 Chilhampton Express crash?’

  Things had just got a whole lot more interesting, and I was being invited to join in.

  11

  At eight am on the dot, I walked into the Cold Case office and said my hellos to Jemma and Micky, who were about to head off to Crown Court. Today was the day for the jury to be sent out to consider their verdict for Barry Oakes. By the sound of it, he was going to prison.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jemma put her suit jacket on and heard her say to Micky, ‘Wait a minute, Mick, I want to say hello to Mark if he’s here yet. He was coming over from Headquarters.’

  I looked up at her. She caught me staring. ‘Mark?’ I asked, partly because I’d worked with Mark Russell on a previous operation and partly because the p
enny had dropped that Jemma’s surname was also Russell.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, one arm in her jacket, the other flapping around behind her. ‘Mark’s my husband. We got married last year.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said, ‘I was a bit slow on that one. I don’t think I’ve said anything negative about my time on Major Crime. I’d love to go back there one day.’

  Jemma smiled as she buttoned up her jacket. ‘I wouldn’t have passed it on if you had, Nin.’

  Micky’s oversized, acne-scarred face appeared from behind his computer screen. He gave an unattractive chortle and said, ‘My silence would need to be bought, though.’

  ‘Micky,’ said Jemma, ‘Nina lives with Bill Harrison. Why would she look twice at a rubber-faced bastard like you?’

  ‘I’m naturally charming,’ said Micky.

  ‘Yeah, but she’s right, Mick,’ I said.

  As he gathered his own jacket and rucksack, Micky winked at me with his good eye and said, ‘I love it when they play hard to get.’

  I’d missed these kinds of conversations. They made the grief and stress tolerable.

  As Jemma and Micky headed past me to the door, Micky said, ‘See, I made her laugh. That’s what women look for in a man – a good sense of humour.’

  From the corridor, I heard Jemma say, ‘Have you been reading my Cosmo again? “That’s what women look for in a man”? Trust me on this: no matter how funny you are, if a woman can’t stand you touching her, winning Stand-Up Comedian of the Year won’t get her into bed.’

  I spent the time I had left before the briefing looking through the various databases I had access to, for information I could gather on Patrick Hudson and the Rumbly family. Apart from Hudson’s PNC record, which hadn’t changed since he’d been locked up for an attempted murder and assault on police – and I knew more than most about those offences – our force’s databases held little on him. There wasn’t much to say about a man who had been serving a lengthy custodial sentence, except his release date. I found that on the Prison Intelligence Database. At the very least, Annie should have been warned. I’d be asking on her behalf.