A Shred of Evidence

by Jill McGown

  “I haven’t got a missus,” Lloyd said. “Not any more.”

  Lloyd wasn’t at all sure that the short bald bloke should be divorced, but even he drew the line at inventing a wife.

  “I’ve had two. Still got the second. Shows you what a glutton for punishment I am, doesn’t it?” A dig from his elbow accompanied this remark, causing Lloyd’s fork to ship its cargo on its way to his mouth.

  “Look round. They’re not half bad. See her?” He pointed to a young woman at a far table. “She’s a DI from up north—a right little goer, by all accounts.” He laughed. “I’m all for women getting into the higher ranks if they’re lookers,” he said.

  “I don’t think that wins points for political correctness,” said Lloyd, in some danger of stepping out of character. The short bald bloke might not mind having his evening meal thus interrupted, but he did, and he wanted this moron to go away. He would probably be Chief Constable somewhere in about five minutes, he thought sourly.

  “Eh?”

  Lloyd smiled. “Nothing,” he said. What was the point in getting into an argument at this stage, he asked himself.

  “Aren’t there any that take your fancy?”

  Some of them were, as his friend had so poetically put it, not half bad, and this had not gone unnoticed by Lloyd. But he could survive without dragging one of them off to his room, even supposing that any of them found him not half bad. That was what intrigued him about his companion; the certainty with which he was looking forward to the gratification of his carnal desires.

  “They’re off the leash, too,” said his fellow diner, proving Lloyd’s point about the policeman’s nose being as important as the wine expert’s was to him. Knowing what your interviewee was thinking went a long way towards getting a result. “Get a few gins down them, and you’re away.”

  Lloyd’s one and only attempt to seduce a female police officer had finally borne fruit over ten years and two broken marriages later, but that was another story, and not one that he was about to discuss with this Romeo or anyone else.

  He asked himself, all the same, what would have happened if he had met Judy at one of these things rather than at work. It had been the idea of getting into a relationship with a married man that had scared Judy off, that had made her marry Michael, and all the rest. She might well have entertained the idea of a one-night stand.

  He wondered, a little uncomfortably, if she ever had. He knew there had only been two serious relationships—Michael and him—but he didn’t really know about anything else.

  And if they had met at one of these things, would they have ended up together? If you called living in two flats being together, that was. Perhaps the sort of instant gratification apparently on offer to his companion would have been enough, and they would have gone their separate ways.

  But he doubted it. He and Judy had something special, and even she, unromantic and down to earth as she was, knew it. And now he came to think of it … He took out his glasses and checked the date on the newspaper that he had rather been hoping to read. Damn. It was tomorrow. Not that Judy would know that, of course, but he would much rather be celebrating with her than bedding any of his fellow students, that was for certain. No point in sending a card or anything. She wouldn’t know what it was all about.

  “No,” he said, pushing away the remains of his meal and getting up. “There’s no one takes my fancy. They’re all yours.”

  “What’s he still doing here?” asked Julie.

  They were standing in the late-evening sun, a group of them, at the bus stop just beyond the gates, having been to the drama group. The school was just on the edge of the town centre; until five o’clock there was a little shuttle bus service that came along every ten minutes, but after that the buses slowed down, and, for reasons best known to the now privately owned bus company, acquired another deck, though they had fewer passengers.

  Natalie turned to look in the direction of Julie’s gaze.

  “Mr. Murray?” said Kim. “He said he marks books and things at school before he goes home. I think he always stays late.”

  “He taught at some posh boys’ school before, didn’t he?” asked Julie.

  “Yeah. He’s nice, though, isn’t he?” said Claire, dreamily. “I’m going to ask him if he’d like to join the drama group.”

  “Didn’t work with Colin Cochrane, did it, Hannah?” teased Julie.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Hannah, instantly on the defensive.

  “You only joined the drama club because Colin Cochrane was in it! She was hoping she’d get a love scene,” Julie went on, addressing Kim, who smiled. “But no such luck.”

  Everyone laughed, except Natalie. She was tired of Hannah and her one-sided romance with Colin Cochrane.

  “There he is,” said Kim as Colin Cochrane emerged from the gym.

  Natalie turned her head and watched as his tracksuited figure strode round to the car park.

  “Why does he have to wear a tracksuit all the time?” demanded Julie. “In case no one recognizes him?”

  “He’s training most nights,” said Hannah, protective, as she always was about him. And she always called him Colin when she spoke about him; that irritated Natalie, but it made the others laugh.

  “Is that what he calls it?” said Julie, her voice acid.

  “What do you mean?” asked Hannah.

  “The woman who works with my mum knows his wife,” said Julie.

  “So do we,” Natalie pointed out.

  “No, I mean really knows her. She’s a friend of hers. And she says that Erica Cochrane reckons he’s seeing someone else. Someone from school.”

  “Some friend she is,” said Kim. “Telling people Mrs. Cochrane’s business.”

  “Who’s he seeing? Mrs. Kane?” asked someone.

  “No. A pupil, she says.” Julie grinned. “So you’ve missed your chance, Hannah,” she said. “Sorry.”

  Hannah bridled. “How do you know it isn’t me?” she demanded.

  “Because even he’s not that daft,” said Julie.

  Everyone laughed; Hannah didn’t like that, but the remark hadn’t been personal, as Julie was quick to point out once she saw Hannah’s face.

  “I just meant that it’ll be one of the sixth-formers,” she said. “He’s not going to go with someone our age, is he?” she said. “He could go to prison if he got caught.”

  Kim drew in her breath sharply and looked at Natalie, then went pink and stared at the ground.

  Natalie could only hope that she kept her mouth shut and that the others hadn’t noticed. She had had to confide in someone just after it had started, and Kim was her best friend. Hannah had noticed, perhaps, but no one else had.

  Julie obligingly changed the subject to her evidently numerous boyfriends, and one sticky moment had passed, but there would be plenty more, Natalie was sure.

  The bus came then, a double-decker with about a dozen people on it, drawing to a noisy stop, its engine rattling, its brakes sighing; they all got on except Hannah.

  “Aren’t you coming?” asked Kim, half on, half off the step.

  “No,” said Hannah, looking at Natalie, not Kim. “I’ll walk.”

  “You get on if you’re coming, girl,” said the driver testily to Kim, revving the engine as the bus shuddered. “Or you’ll be walking too.”

  Judy Hill sat upstairs in the bus, from force of habit. She hardly ever smoked anyway, and the buses had all been smoke-free zones for years, but her feet, on the odd occasion that she found herself on a rare double-decker, still took her upstairs, and along the length of the aisle to the very back.

  So, that was where she now sat, unobserved by the girls who had come on at the bus stop outside the sprawling Oakland School.

  “Did you see her face?” one of them said as they came upstairs. “When I said he wouldn’t be daft enough to go with her? I thought she was going to hit me!”

  The others laughed, obviously at someone else’s expense. You would
probably have deserved to have been hit, Judy thought.

  There were only four girls, though they somehow contrived to seem like double that number as they spread themselves around the upper deck, lazily insolent, carefully unconcerned by the faintly disapproving looks being cast in their direction by the handful of other passengers. They took up four double seats in the empty bus so that they could stretch out long legs, almost lying back in a literal evocation of their would-be state of mind.

  One sat up in order to inscribe graffiti on the back of the seat in front with black felt pen; BABY OTTER AND PINK CHAMPAIGNE WAS HERE, she wrote.

  “I spell champagne wrong,” she said.

  Judy wondered how Lloyd would deal with that one. Someone who knew she couldn’t spell a word, but spelt it that way anyway. As an officer of the law, she supposed she ought to be worrying less about their spelling and more about their behaviour, but she didn’t advise them against writing on the seats.

  They fascinated her, these languid, self-confident creatures as they talked and laughed and wrote on the seats; she didn’t want to inhibit them.

  The girl behind leant over the seat and took the pen to cross out the intrusive I. She, presumably, was Pink Champagne; at any rate, she could spell it. She sat back again, flicking her long blond hair over her shoulder.

  Baby Otter, cute, short, sandy hair, added (KIM AND NAT) to the inscription.

  “He really thinks I’m pregnant,” said one of the others, to laughter.

  “Aren’t you going to put him out of his misery?”

  “I’ve told him I’m not, but he doesn’t believe me.”

  Judy shook her head slightly, recalling her own schooldays, and the desperate crushes she had developed on the older boys. Men, it seemed to her, from her twelve-year-old perspective. One such had dropped a coin as he was putting change in his pocket; she had dived to retrieve it for him, and he had told her to keep it. She probably still had it, somewhere. It had meant everything to her for at least six weeks.

  But these girls were older than that, and, Judy knew only too well, a great deal better versed in such matters than she had been at their age. Quite possibly than she was now, come that. She watched and listened as these nearly-adults did their best to shock the other passengers.

  She could be the mother of one of these fascinating creatures, she realized, with a jolt. She didn’t think she’d mind; she could believe having given birth to one of them, even if they did exhibit slightly anti-social tendencies and an alarming readiness both to indulge in and subsequently discuss matters sexual. She had never given any thought to motherhood, never wanted the responsibility; now, sitting upstairs on a bus, she felt faint stirrings of regret.

  It wasn’t too late yet, she told herself, partly in fun. Mostly in fun. It was impossible: she was too old to be a first-time mother, it would disrupt her career, change her life for ever … Of course it was in fun. Lloyd would be all for it, naturally, if she were ever to suggest such a thing. But she wasn’t serious. It would pass. Besides which, it was babies that were supposed to make women in their late thirties broody, not tall, leggy teenagers who would probably all be pregnant before they were twenty.

  Linda wasn’t that much older than these girls—two, three years, perhaps. The thought of her sticky relationship with Lloyd’s daughter checked Judy’s brief moment of regret.

  One by one the girls alighted from the achingly slow bus as it did a tour of Stansfield. Those left after each departure became visibly more conventional, less noticeable, taking up less room than before. And then there was just one. Blond, slim, sexy Pink Champagne—Nat, presumably. Self-assured, still, but now she was sitting up, her feet on the floor, quiet and well-behaved, indistinguishable from the other passengers.

  The girl rose as the bus approached the last stop in Stansfield before it took to the dual carriageway, and pressed the bell. She made her way to the stair, then turned and said cheerio to the young man at the very front whose presence she had not once acknowledged. A sudden, broad, and quite unexpected smile transformed her expression from sophisticated ennui to friendly openness as she ran down, no longer the languorous sophisticate of the upper deck, but the girl who went home to her mum and dad, the girl they worried about and expected to come home.

  And she did come home, thought Judy, as the girl set off in a half-run. She did.

  Perhaps she was missing something after all.

  “Erica? Colin. Look—the car won’t start, so I won’t be home.”

  Erica frowned a little at the phone. There had been nothing wrong with the car this morning, and besides, it was only a ten-minute walk home from school.

  “I’ll get something to eat in the town,” he said. “And I’ll be back at ten as arranged. All right?”

  “All right,” she said.

  All right. She saw him for only about an hour on Tuesdays between the drama club and his training, and now he was avoiding even that. He wasn’t even training for anything, as far as she could see. Nothing specific, anyway; he had practically retired from athletics.

  Erica made a meal for one, as she so often did, eating it on a tray in front of the television.

  Colin would be back as Big Ben struck for the ten o’clock news; it was an obsessive trait that would make deception childishly simple, and the fact that he was obsessive was one of the reasons that she was contemplating deception at all. Marrying Colin may have been a dreadful mistake.

  Patrick had offered her a lift home; anyone overhearing the conversation would have thought nothing of it, but she had known what was on his mind. And there had been an instant, the merest fraction of a second, when she had almost accepted. Colin safely out of the way for two hours at the drama group … It would have been easy to say yes.

  The dog shifted his position at her feet, with a little throaty growl of contentment, and Erica felt a pang of envy. Patrick might have made her feel like that, if she had said yes. But she hadn’t.

  The film started at eight, but it failed to catch her attention and she switched it off just as the door bell rang.

  Hannah cursed the dark blue sweatshirt as she had cursed it all day. It was far too thick to wear in this weather.

  She had gone to the burger bar, and stayed there reading until just before nine; now she waited on the darkening Green for Colin to arrive. She hoped the temperature would drop a little when it got dark, which it was just beginning to do. It had been so hot all day, and even the breeze that was getting up, whispering in the wood that bounded two sides of the long, wide rectangle of grass, was warm, like the ones you got abroad.

  Across from the adventure playground, where she sat waiting, across the areas marked out for rugby and football, was Beech Street, with scarcely any traffic in the evening, its commercial buildings all dark. To her left was the much busier Ash Road, along which she could hear but not see the traffic as it rumbled past. A hedge of trees separated the Green from the road, and from the service road which branched off it, down to the council depot, which was hidden in a dip, on a level with the houses that lined Ash Road.

  It gave the illusion of countryside, of loneliness. But she wouldn’t be lonely when Colin came. They had laughed at her, laughed at the very idea of her and Colin. She’d show them.

  She got up to wander through the columns of tyres and wooden climbing frames. She didn’t know when Colin would appear; she just knew that he would, because he always came home this way, and on Tuesday nights, hidden by the structures of the adventure playground, she always waited for him.

  But tonight was going to be different; she had made that clear to him in her letter.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ten past nine. Lloyd sipped an indifferent whisky and looked round the bar, where huddles of people sat actually discussing the stuff they had been listening to all day. They used jargon as though it were holy scripture, and spoke about modems and windows as though they were the deity.

  Judy had, not unnaturally, asked why he had been so keen to g
o on the Leadership Development Program. His answer had been that he had a few years to go before he would have put in his thirty years, and early retirement on a reduced pension did not appeal.

  That, he had told her, was the likely outcome of the changes about to be forced on the police, unless he got a rank that kept him clear of it, and to do that he had to be up to date with current command thinking.

  In truth, there was a possibility of his being kept on at his current salary with the rank of inspector, and a desire to continue to outrank Judy might have quite a lot to do with his late-flowering ambition, but he tried not to think about that. His male chauvinist tendencies bothered him a little.

  Neither of those reasons, needless to say, were the ones he had given Them. He had been scheduled to attend a Junior Command Course, to which this was the successor, after his promotion to Chief Inspector, but had been prevented from doing so by, of all things, appendicitis. He had never reapplied, and now, some years later, it should have been too late. But They had understood his belated desire to reach, if not for the sky, then at least for a hand-hold on the rooftiles.

  So many senior police officers had been on accelerated promotion that, in Lloyd’s official opinion, the opinion of the short bald bloke, there was a danger of a lack of empathy with the officers under their command, most of whom had achieved whatever rank they had by putting in years of service.

  And if, he had said earnestly, in his man-of-the-people Welsh accent, as opposed to his expensively educated Welsh accent, his sinister Welsh accent, or his literary Welsh accent—the one that got Judy going—if a them and us situation was to be avoided, it seemed to him essential that a balance of old and new be maintained at the top.

  Every round of interviews had seen him expand on his theme, which he found even more boring than they did; they had let him go on the course simply to shut him up, he was sure.

  He had mistakenly thought that no one else had discovered this pub, its being a considerable distance away from Bramshill and not exactly the most welcoming place on earth, but it hadn’t remained undiscovered. The serious mob had found it. The ones who didn’t want to let their hair down, who had probably never let their hair down in their lives, had found it.