by Oliver Tidy
Despite the time of night, there were others milling in and out and around the entrance. The officers found a private corner that offered shelter from the continuing light rainfall.
Romney rubbed vigorously at his face for a moment and breathed deeply in and out. Marsh caught a whiff of alcohol, garlic and stale cigarette smoke. She expected a drink and the interruption of his evening to make the DI irritable. She didn’t expect him to stay that way. She knew he couldn’t be prepared for what she was about to tell him. She waited while he shook out a cigarette and lit it. As a smoker, he’d need it. His lighter flared illuminating and exaggerating his grim expression.
‘First things first,’ he said, filling the air with smoke. ‘What medical state are they in?’
‘DS Wilkie is stable. He took quite a beating, but most of his injuries seem superficial. He’s lost a couple of teeth. They were about to take him for x-rays when I left. They want to check him internally.’
‘And the victim?’
Marsh’s power of speech deserted her momentarily as she rummaged for words to express the news. In the end she decided on the plain truth. ‘She had a heart attack at the scene. She died in the ambulance.’
‘She? Died? Oh, Jesus-fucking-Christ. What has he done?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Marsh, ‘it gets worse.’ Romney waited, not believing that it could. ‘She was old. Possibly in her seventies.’ It could and it had. The DI was stunned into silence. Marsh ploughed on. ‘It looks like she could be The Parking Medal Man. A hammer was recovered from the scene. Wilkie’s car is there. It’s blocking the pavement. It’s been damaged. It looks to me like he set a trap and then waded in expecting violent resistance, only it was just some mad old insomniac woman with a thing for bad parking.’
Romney pulled on his cigarette absently. He was somewhere else. Marsh shut up and wondered whether it was the future or the past. She also worried whether Wilkie had the connivance of the DI in his harebrained scheme.
‘What were you doing there?’ said Romney, breaking the silence. ‘Tell me you weren’t involved.’
In an instant the tables had turned. The question prompted Marsh to realise that her own position in this would come under legitimate scrutiny. It hadn’t occurred to her that the coincidence of her presence in the immediate area might take some believing. ‘I was in the next street looking for Dorothy Mann’s house.’
‘Who’s Dorothy Mann?’
‘Duncan Smart’s ex-wife. I had an idea that the business dealing between Emerson and Smart might have just been the innocent removal of furniture from Smart’s house. The dates coincide roughly with the divorce of the pair. I think she just had her stuff moved out and put into storage. I was going to ask her.’
‘Late for that wasn’t it?’
‘I was nothing to do with Wilkie’s idiocy,’ she blurted. ‘Yes, it was late. I was restless at home. When I thought about it, it seemed like a good idea. It took me a while to find her address. In the end I don’t think I would have called on her. I heard the fracas and investigated. Like a good police officer.’
‘People,’ he said, holding her gaze steadily, ‘sceptical senior police officers are going to ask you harder questions than that. They’re going to ask us all difficult questions. Make sure what you tell them is the truth and that you can verify everything. Make sure you have nothing to hide because they’ll find it. They’re trained to and they always do.’
Romney’s thinking had sprinted ahead of her own. He was lapping her. If he was trying to frighten her it was working. The reputations of staff and procedure of an IPCC investigation were well known and feared by every police force in the country. They had to be. Until that moment, she hadn’t thought of the repercussions of Wilkie’s actions. The whole department would come under the microscope. They would all be tainted with what he had done. Wilkie would be thrown to them. For the rest, individually, and collectively as a station, it would be damage control, tarnished reputations, notes on files and disciplinary and operational recommendations. None of them would escape being spattered. All that mattered now was how close to the steaming turd of a mess one was standing when it hit the fan.
Romney stubbed his cigarette out. ‘I’d better get in there before the super arrives. Think on what I’ve told you.’
‘Sir, I said it got worse. I haven’t finished. I know you won’t want any surprises.’ Romney’s expression tightened in preparation for something he couldn’t even begin to imagine could be worse than what he had already heard.
*
The following few hours were made up of long excruciating periods of hanging around interspersed with brief, but energetic, exchanges of information and emotion.
Superintendent Falkner duly arrived looking as grave and disturbed as Romney could ever remember seeing him. He had a right to. His station was about to become the centre of national attention for all the wrong reasons. He was briefed, incredulous, exasperated, furious and finally subdued.
A local press reporter must have had a friend in the force and in the know to arrive at the hospital with a photographer as soon as he did. National press would not be far behind. The police couldn’t go around killing grannies in the street and not expect the media to rightly stir up a storm of excrement that would galvanise public opinion.
DS Wilkie’s injuries turned out to be largely superficial, however, the concussion that he suffered ensured he would remain oblivious, for the present at least, to his situation. More than one of his colleagues would experience the guilty thought in the coming days that it would have been more convenient for the Kent County Constabulary if he had fallen victim to some virile form of MRSA in the hospital, did everyone a favour and expired.
In the early hours of the morning a detective chief inspector from area – a woman who Romney had never seen before and who behaved as though she had something hot and uncomfortable stuck up her backside – arrived and assumed control with an impassive looking veteran of an inspector. All those not in need of medical treatment were ordered home and unsurprisingly told to be prepared to make themselves available at the station early the following morning. They were also cautioned against speaking to each other about what had happened. Even Falkner, with his greater age, experience and rank, seemed intimidated by them.
Romney accepted the offer of a ride home from Marsh only to be upgraded from economy to business class – one that he couldn’t refuse – from Falkner, thereby immediately flouting the instructions of the visitors to keep away from each other. Romney wasn’t surprised Falkner would want to speak privately to him before the following morning’s inquisition.
‘You know what they’ll do to us, Tom, don’t you, if they find that we are culpable in some way for what he did?’
‘Will they want to?’
‘No. I doubt it. We’re all on the same side in the end. But they’ve got their job to do. It’s all about accountability. The more that it looks like he was acting completely alone, lost the plot, the greater the distance that can be put between us.’
‘When you say us?’
‘I mean Wilkie and everyone else. That’s how you have to see it now, Tom. That’s the way it is.’
‘But he is one of ours – one of us.’
‘More precisely, Tom, he’s one of yours. You are his immediate senior officer. He is operating in your office on your team. Make no mistake they will be looking to you for explanations. If I were you, I would stop considering him one of us – he relinquished that right when he started on this course of action, tore up the rule book and began behaving like some amateurish vigilante – and start thinking very carefully about what you can do to distance yourself from what went on tonight.’
‘So he’s guilty until proven innocent.’
‘Wake up, Tom. Wilkie is finished as a serving police officer. He may well go to prison for this. An old woman died as a result of his over-zealous actions.’
‘It was a heart attack. She could have had one at any time.’
‘She was engaged in criminal activity, damaging property. She had been a plague on the town.’
‘OK, let’s assume that this has all been her work, that she is responsible for damage to dozens of vehicles. So what? She put a few dents in a few cars. She is going to be portrayed as a little old lady who took a stand against one of the great evils of our modern society. Wilkie has just martyred her. I shudder to think where this will end if it’s not explained away believably. Someone has to be held accountable. Someone will have to pay. Heads will roll and I have no intention of mine ending up in the basket.’
‘What are you saying, exactly, sir?’
‘Did you know what he was up to?’
‘No.’
‘Did he discuss any of it with you?’
‘No.’
‘Would you have sanctioned something like this?’
‘No.’
‘Then why should you, I, anyone, have to pay a price for it? Answer me that.’
Romney couldn’t, but what the super was asking and suggesting still discomforted him, especially as he struggled to remember the details of the conversation he’d had with Wilkie about a possible way forward. ‘But what can we do?’ he said.
‘A deal with the devil. Wilkie was acting alone and secretly. He was under a lot of strain. He was foolish and unorthodox. He’s a new father isn’t he?’
‘Fairly.’
‘So he’s tired, under pressure at home. How long has he been on the case?’
‘Since the beginning. He’s been in charge of it.’
‘That’s good. So, again, he’s probably been feeling the pressure with the publicity and attention, especially with the crusade that the local rag has embarked on over it. Perhaps it was all getting too much for him. The pressure clouded his thinking. How long has he been engaged on staking out Dover? If he’s doing it at night on top of a day’s work and with a screaming baby at home, it’s no wonder a screw came loose.’
It all sounded so reasonable and logical, thought Romney. If only they were discussing the motivation and behaviour of the central protagonist in some psychological thriller that they’d just seen at the cinema and not a colleague who they had worked closely with for several years – a man who had a wife and a baby, a career and aspirations. A real person. One of them.
‘Let me put it to you another way,’ said Falkner. ‘From what you understand of tonight’s debacle would you say he has acted in a rational, balanced, professional way?’
‘No, of course he hasn’t.’
‘Right. Of course he hasn’t. You said it, Tom. The man needs help, especially if those other claims turn out to be true.’
Romney understood then. They were going to tee him up for a plea of mental breakdown, diminished responsibility, as a result of home and work pressures. Because of his secretiveness, his colleagues – all fine upstanding and conscientious officers – had no idea of the decline of his state of mental health. He’d become unhinged. He’d be helped not hanged. Pensioned off in some shabby deal. Falkner was right about one thing, it would be a deal with the devil and they’d all be selling their souls if they signed up for it.
Falkner dropped him at the entrance to his driveway and told him to sleep on things. Romney listened to him drive away through the country lanes and waited for the stillness to return and envelope him. The rain had stopped, leaving the air smelling fresh and fragrant. The sky was clear, once again, and the stars temporarily distracted him as they awed him as they always did when he took the trouble to look up. He let himself into his home. The emptiness hurried to gather him in its cool comforting embrace.
Julie Carpenter had left a phone message and a text on his mobile, neither of which he’d been able to reply to. It was too late when he arrived home to do anything about them.
As he undressed a key fell out of his trouser pocket and rattled around on the laminate flooring. He picked it up, stared at it briefly and then tossed it into the change bowl on the chest of drawers.
Romney was both physically and mentally exhausted, however, the pressing nature and seriousness of events and the suggestions of his senior officer suggested he wouldn’t sleep well. But with the following day and all its horrible promises only a handful of hours away he had to try. As he lay in his bed staring up at the ceiling, the carousel of decisions, loyalties, possibilities and doubts turned slowly in his mind. His week of sun, sea, sex and sangria, or whatever they drank in Corfu, suddenly seemed an even more remote possibility. He tried to block it all out, clear his mind and let sleep find him, but instead found the void filled by one particular disturbing and baffling, small aspect of the incident that had seen one of his officers fatally attack a woman old enough to be his grandmother. Remembering the last couple of days, he could at least own to beginning to comprehend Wilkie’s desperation, his frustration, his anxieties, his anger, his tiredness and how they may have combined to cloud his judgement. Perhaps Falkner, while searching for ways and means to preserve his own position, reputation and pension had inadvertently hit upon the truth – maybe Wilkie had suffered some kind of mental breakdown. But what Romney couldn’t even begin to grasp was why, when Wilkie had attacked the old woman, his penis was out of his trousers? What had been going through his mind? What had he been intending to do to her?
*
Wilkie was standing at the far end of the car park when Romney drove in the following day. There were a high number of cars crammed into the small space. They were parked so closely together that Romney wondered how on Earth the drivers had managed to get out of them. A bright, early sun hung low in the sky directly behind Wilkie making it difficult for Romney to make him out clearly. But he could see he held something in his hand. As Romney parked and got out he saw Wilkie strike the bonnet of one of the vehicles – it looked like Falkner’s Jag. The crash echoed around the enclosed area. It hurt Romney’s ears.
Romney got out of his own vehicle and began walking towards the Detective Sergeant. He noticed that all the cars’ bonnets he passed had been beaten and disfigured. Wilkie struck again. He seemed not to have noticed the DI. Romney called to him, but Wilkie ignored him and went on battering metalwork. Where was everyone?
As Romney got closer he saw with fascinated horror that Wilkie was beating the cars with his enlarged penis. Wilkie looked up and stared Romney down with his legendary piercing blue eyes. As Romney came on, he saw a pair of stockinged legs sticking out from behind one of the vehicles. There was blood on the floor – a deep crimson puddle. The head was covered. Romney bent down to pull the hood away and was rewarded with a view of Falkner’s pulped face. He retched and reeled backwards.
Wilkie was advancing towards him waving his monstrous member threateningly. Romney got to his feet too slowly and tried to run away. His legs were heavy. The surface was shifting. He couldn’t get a purchase, some momentum. His shoes were too big. They were slipping. Wilkie’s shadow cast a darkness over him.
Romney tensed himself for the blow, but it didn’t come. He looked desperately around to see Julie Carpenter on her knees in front of Wilkie the whole of his giant cock in her mouth. The brightly painted fingertips of her slender hands dug into the soft white flesh of Wilkie’s buttocks as Wilkie, with a fistful of her hair, slid himself in and out of her gaping orifice. Wilkie looked down at Romney and winked.
A car alarm began its intrusive protest. Romney rolled over automatically, punched the top of his clock and opened his eyes. Wilkie, his huge phallus, Carpenter, Falkner and the car-park full of smashed cars had gone. It was an ominous start to the day.
*
Romney was late to the station for the first time in over a year. At least then he’d had a decent excuse. Unwilling to suffer Grimes, his Puccini, his car stinking of fish and his inevitable questions, he’d ordered a taxi. It didn’t show. It was in an accident. They didn�
�t tell him and they didn’t send a replacement. Romney was forced to call another company and wait. He had smoked three cigarettes before it arrived.
The station atmosphere was buzzing with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. CID was subdued and busy. Several pairs of eyes followed Romney’s progress across the department floor space as he strode, eyes forward, chin up to his office.
His phone started ringing before he’d shut the door. Superintendent Falkner was expecting him at his earliest convenience. He dumped his bag.
Marsh caught him on his way back out. ‘Have you got a minute, sir?’
‘No. What is it?’
‘I need to speak with you privately about something. Very privately.’
Romney creased his eyebrows at her. ‘I’m going to see the super. I’ll know more about what’s what in a few minutes. Have they arrived yet?’ Marsh shook her head. ‘That’s something, I suppose. Walk with me. Did you get in touch with Smart’s ex-wife about the storage?’
‘She’s still not answering her phone. Not to me anyway. She works in the shoe shop in the high street. I thought I’d ring her when it’s open.’
‘Whatever she says, we still have a search warrant to execute.’ Marsh wasn’t going to be arguing with him today. ‘Let me see the lie of the land, then we’ll talk. Right?’
*
Falkner was sitting stern faced behind his large empty desk when Romney was shown in. He was immaculately turned out.
‘Where have you been, Tom?’
‘Car trouble, sir. Taxi didn’t show.’
‘Still? Haven’t you got breakdown cover?’
‘Maintenance said they’d take a look for me, but they’ve been busy. What time should we expect our guests?’
Falkner barked out a short cynical laugh. ‘You don’t think they’d tell me that do you? I’m only the senior officer around here. You thought anymore about our conversation last night?’