Those Who Feel Nothing

by Peter Guttridge

  Watts took the glasses. It took him a moment to focus them so his eyes swept across the strange beauty of the burned and buckled skeleton of the once great edifice; fire-bombed, it was rumoured, by jealous competitors. Then the binoculars caught sight of a slow moving boat with sails and steam puffing from an old-fashioned funnel.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Watts said. ‘But can it get across the Channel?’

  The ruddy-face man laughed. ‘It was easily capable of crossing the Atlantic in the 1920s. And did so. An old rum-runner from Prohibition days. It would stock up in Glasgow and hand over its cargo a few miles off New York, just outside American waters. Years later it did God knows what in the China Seas. It was berthed in Hong Kong until independence.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Watts said again, handing back the binoculars. ‘Is it a regular entrant?’

  ‘First time, I think,’ the ruddy-faced man said.

  Watts turned to him and held out his hand. ‘I’m Bob Watts, by the way.’

  ‘The new police commissioner,’ the ruddy-faced man said, shaking his hand. ‘Yes, I know. Ned Farage.’

  ‘Where is that beautiful boat berthed these days?’

  The man shrugged. ‘All I know is that it berthed last night in the Marina – a lot of visitors berth there the night before the Race. Owned by a man called Charles Windsor.’ He saw Watts’ expression. ‘No, not that one.’

  Watts smiled and Farage looked through the binoculars again.

  ‘That may be the owner sitting aft.’

  He passed the binoculars back to Watts. Watts focused them on a broad-shouldered elderly man sitting straight-backed in a director’s chair. He had a shock of white hair and a strong jaw. His face was also ruddy. He was dressed in some oriental-style, high-collared black jacket, his matching trousers flapping in the wind against thin legs.

  Sitting beside him, speaking intently into his ear, was a handsome man around Watts’ age. Watts assumed he was the skipper. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and his hair was crew cut. He looked fit and capable.

  ‘I assume you mean the older man?’ Watts said. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Not in the least. There’s an antique shop with his name on it in the Lanes but I don’t think he’s ever there.’

  Someone touched Watts’ arm. He turned.

  ‘Hello, Commissioner,’ Karen Hewitt said.

  The smartly dressed Asian woman was sitting on the low wall in front of the dodgems on Marina Drive, carrier bags at her feet. She scrutinized the face of every man who passed.

  ‘What’s that woman waiting for?’ Gilchrist said to Bellamy Heap as they drove slowly by. ‘There’s no bus stop there.’

  ‘She’s waiting for her son to come back, ma’am,’ Bellamy Heap said, working his way through the chicanes intended to discourage boy racers on this long, straight stretch down to Black Rock. ‘She sits there every day, morning or afternoon. Been doing it for months.’

  ‘Her son is missing?’

  ‘Nine months ago, ma’am, as I understand it.’

  ‘We’ve investigated?’

  ‘I believe so, ma’am.’

  ‘And she thinks he’s coming back here.’

  ‘She spoke to a fortune teller.’

  Gilchrist twisted her head to examine the woman more closely. The woman looked to be in agony.

  ‘The fortune teller doesn’t seem to have been a great help,’ she said, facing forward again.

  ‘I know,’ Heap said. ‘Apparently he told her that her son said he was coming back to her. That she had to wait in the places familiar to him and he’d return. However, he wouldn’t necessarily look the same.’

  Gilchrist clenched her jaw. ‘That’s appalling. Has no one tried to tell her otherwise?’

  Heap nodded. ‘A number of times.’

  Gilchrist watched the woman dwindle in the rear-view mirror. ‘So sad,’ she said, almost to herself.

  ‘She does a kind of circuit, ma’am. Couple of pubs, couple of roads.’

  Gilchrist looked out of the window. Heap went wide to pass a woman on a bicycle pulling a trolley with her baby in it.

  ‘God, I hate stupid women like that,’ Gilchrist said sourly.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Heap said, his voice neutral.

  ‘She’s more interested in her health and the environment than she is in her own child. When she’s involved in a crash and, heaven forbid, that little love of her life dies, she’s going to blame the car that crashed into her. Which may be right, except she’s equally to blame because she has taken her child out on the road in a contraption that means she can’t keep an eye on what may be happening to her baby.’

  Heap glanced at her and Gilchrist became conscious her voice had sounded strident.

  ‘Still, at least the mother is physically fit,’ she said, trailing off.

  They drove on in silence for a moment.

  ‘How surreal is that?’ Heap said abruptly.

  He was gesturing to a community police car going by the other way. Painted all over it were advertisements for the latest novel by a bestselling crime writer who lived locally. He had donated the car to the police.

  ‘If I were a villain and I got put into the back of that I might take against that bloke’s writing,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Do you think most criminals can actually read?’

  ‘I hope you’re not stereotyping, Detective Sergeant.’

  ‘Just observing that Milldean exists, ma’am.’

  Gilchrist remained poker-faced. ‘Point taken.’

  Heap was chewing his lip.

  Gilchrist sighed. ‘What’s on your mind, Bellamy?’

  ‘Not for me to say.’

  ‘If you don’t say what’s on your mind, nobody else will.’

  ‘OK – it’s Bob Watts, our new police commissioner.’

  Gilchrist stiffened a little. She knew Heap was aware that she and Watts had a scandalous history. ‘What’s troubling you?’

  ‘The elections for police and crime commissioners in England and Wales had an average turnout of fifteen per cent.’

  ‘It was low,’ Gilchrist agreed.

  ‘It was abysmal.’

  ‘What point are you making, Bellamy?’

  ‘His appointment is not exactly a ringing endorsement of him.’

  ‘No different to most other elected appointments then,’ Gilchrist said. She saw that Heap had caught the sharpness in her tone.

  ‘Ma’am, you know that these commissioner appointments just open the door to cronyism and nepotism.’

  ‘Bob Watts isn’t like that. You’re saying he’s a crony or that he’s going to use nepotism or that he’s not up to the job?’

  ‘I’m saying that there is no proper job and that there are precedents. The guy who beat John Prescott appointed as his deputy the man who ran his campaign. There was no advertisement and no selection process. Both men were Tory members of the local county council. Somewhere in the Midlands an old Labour party friend of the new PCC is a deputy on sixty-five grand. Job not advertised. And she’s keeping all her old jobs so will get over ninety grand a year.’

  Gilchrist looked straight ahead. ‘Bob Watts isn’t like that.’

  Next day you fly out of Hoi An heading for Nha Trang. Your itinerary then takes you to Saigon – you can’t bring yourself to call it Ho Chi Minh City – then upriver to Chau Doc and Can Tho on the Mekong Delta. You had allowed yourself seven days for these places. From there you go upriver into Cambodia.

  Your itinerary is both a pilgrimage and a commemoration. It charts a journey into your past. That voice on the answerphone chimed into that past but it also changed the coordinates. Now you want to get into Cambodia as quickly as you can. Now it isn’t a pilgrimage, it’s a pursuit. Not commemoration but revenge.

  You have not phoned Siem Reap. You left no message on the Brighton number. You regret phoning it at all. You do not want him to have any warning that you are coming for him.

  ‘You might want to hear this, ma’am,�
�� Heap said to Gilchrist the minute she walked through the office door. After their Madeira Drive interview she’d gone to a community meeting – one of an increasing number that had become part of her schedule in the interests of community relations.

  Gilchrist put her bag down on her chair and glanced at her watch. Bob Watts would be rallying the troops shortly. She looked at her diminutive, red-faced colleague then at the young, fit-looking constable standing beside Heap’s desk.

  ‘Stanford here disturbed a copper cable thief last night in Keymer,’ Heap continued.

  Theft of copper cable from railway signalling systems was an ongoing and serious problem as it totally disrupted the train service until the missing cable could be replaced. Boring as hell, though.

  ‘Well done, Stanford. Anyone we know?’

  Stanford looked at his feet. ‘He got away, ma’am.’

  ‘That happens,’ Gilchrist said. She glanced at Heap. ‘But why am I being told this?’

  ‘We got his bag of tools, ma’am,’ Stanford said. ‘And we got his car registration. Well, most of it. Or should I say Constable Richardson did. He saw the person hurrying out of the graveyard when he came round from the back of the church and gave chase.’

  Gilchrist frowned. ‘Graveyard? Why wasn’t this copper thief on the railway line?’

  ‘He was but he got away, then we found him in the churchyard.’

  Gilchrist looked at Heap with an explain-this-to-me expression on her face.

  ‘There have been a number of instances of coffins being dug up for the brass on the handles and hasps and bolts,’ Heap said.

  ‘These are desperate times,’ Gilchrist said wearily. She looked at Stanford. ‘You haven’t told me what your colleague was doing round the back of the church, but never mind. Where were you – just out of interest?’

  Stanford glanced at Heap who, Gilchrist noticed, had adopted a straight face. Stanford worked the muscles in his jaw. ‘I was face down in the grave, ma’am.’

  Gilchrist nodded, also straight-faced. ‘Continue.’

  ‘The man got in his car and drove off with his boot still wide open.’

  Gilchrist frowned. ‘So how did Richardson see the number plate?’

  ‘Our man did a U-turn. I think he must have realized that if he went straight on to Ditchling he had very few options. We would either have caught up with him on the long stretch of lane between Keymer and Ditchling or on one of the three roads he would need to take from there. Going back towards Hassocks gave him more options.’ Stanford shrugged. ‘Constable Richardson almost caught him on the turn but perhaps it was as well that he didn’t as he would probably have been run down. Anyway, he got all but two digits of the car’s registration numbers. And the make of car, of course.’

  ‘Good for him. Were you still communing with the dead at this point?’

  Stanford worked his jaw again. ‘I was getting into our car, ma’am.’

  ‘And you gave chase but lost him.’

  ‘He had a number of immediate options. Around the bend there’s a left turn down a lane that offers an immediate right then multiple choices, or you can go on down the lane to have a further three choices. A little further round the bend there’s a right turn which then offers multiple choices, or you can ignore the right turn and go straight on back into Hassocks where, again, there are multiple choices.’

  Gilchrist’s eyes were glazing over. ‘But none that really go anywhere, surely?’ she said from her vague knowledge of the sleepy town.

  ‘Which is why we chose that option ourselves, ma’am.’

  Gilchrist nodded. ‘But he didn’t. I understand. Good work, nevertheless, the pair of you. And you’ve got a hit on the registration already?’

  ‘We’ve got a long list of possibilities, ma’am,’ Stanford said, indicating the sheaves of paper in Heap’s hand.

  Gilchrist looked at Heap, still wondering why he had brought this to her attention.

  ‘Just a thought, ma’am. But in the ten minutes or so after he was spotted on the railway track he had time to dig a grave?’

  Gilchrist looked back at the constable. ‘A different man, then, Stanford?’

  The constable looked from her to Heap. ‘Quite possibly, ma’am.’

  ‘I was wondering if it somehow was linked to all that black magic stuff of a few months ago,’ Heap said.

  ‘We’re pretty confident we got everyone involved in that,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Aren’t we?’

  ‘We are, ma’am,’ Heap said. ‘But it remains a good possibility that this grave being disturbed is not about metal theft.’

  Gilchrist nodded slowly. ‘Look through those names, Detective Sergeant. See if any of them stand out.’ She gestured to Stanford. ‘You could have something interesting here.’

  He didn’t look interested at all.

  When you land in Nha Trang you take the next flight to Saigon where you rent a car at the airport and drive six hours to Can Tho. It’s hot and humid as hell out there but you move from one air-conditioned environment to another, so by the time you check into a riverfront hotel at midnight your throat is dry, your nose is blocked and your head is thumping.

  You should do some yoga to right yourself but you collapse into bed. The air con is fierce and noisy. You can’t figure out how to turn it off so take the extra blanket from the cupboard and put a pillow over your head.

  After an early breakfast you make your way to the hotel’s short jetty. There are already five tourists on board the boat tied there: a German couple and an English couple with their sulky teenage boy. You nod at the adults as they greet you. The boy keeps his head down over his tablet. You sit at the back of the boat, your duffel bag beside you.

  Algae like giant cabbages and strange, foliage-like growths dip and bob on the surface of the water in the wake of the boat as you head up the Mekong Delta for Phnom Penh. You have seen similar pollution on the Nile but the Mekong is, if anything, worse: pesticides, mercury and other pollutants are at such toxic levels here that the famed freshwater dolphins of the river are almost extinct.

  You watch the slow water flow, occasionally glancing at the dopily smiling German couple leaning into each other. The sullen English boy is still focusing on his tablet, his parents gazing blankly out of the windows.

  Within an hour you reach the customs post on the shore at the Vietnam/Cambodia border. There is time for coffee in a small café overlooking the brown waters whilst the military fiddle with your passports. You step out into a small garden. Something in the trees is chirruping. The humidity feels like a wet sponge bathing your body.

  There is a barracks across a dirt yard. It looks big enough to house six, maybe eight men. The last time you passed through, there had been twelve men at this post, mostly sleeping in hammocks strung between the trees. You and your colleagues had narrowly voted not to kill them all.

  Bob Watts blethered on to the assembled coppers for a while, Chief Constable Karen Hewitt standing stiffly beside him with a fixed grin on her face. He knew from conversations with Sarah Gilchrist months ago that Hewitt’s fixed grin was as much to do with cosmetic surgery as it was with her gritted teeth at the fact his role challenged her autonomy. He could still vaguely smell the alcohol on her from the champagne breakfast.

  He saw Gilchrist half-sitting on a desk near the back of the room. That likeable, fresh-faced policeman, Bellamy Heap, was standing beside her although he was scarcely taller than her seated. Gilchrist had told Watts the duo had been dubbed Little and Large by their ever predictable colleagues at the nick.

  His meeting with Karen Hewitt had gone … OK. Once he’d insisted he was not going to fire her – something the PCC had the power to do – she’d relaxed. A little. He’d assured her that he wanted to work with her, not against her. She had, quite rightly, pointed out that she’d been doing fine without any assistance in the couple of years since she’d taken over from him. However, she would be happy to work with him again.

  ‘I have a few ideas,’ he s
aid.

  ‘I’ll be glad to hear them,’ she said. ‘As long as they’re not operationally based, which is outside your remit – as you will know.’

  Watts smiled pleasantly. ‘I’m aware of that, Chief Constable.’

  ‘I have a lot of technology types knocking on my door offering us the latest policing kit,’ Hewitt said. ‘Maybe that’s an area you could be of real use – identifying the next generation of policing aids.’

  ‘Happy to,’ he said. He’d always quite liked the boy’s toys aspect of police work. ‘But what are your main operational issues at the moment?’

  ‘The usual. Drugs, of course. You know there’s talk of opening a “shooting gallery” down here for our drug addicts to shoot up legally in controlled conditions?’

  ‘Makes sense.’

  She shot him a sharp look. ‘Does it? All of Britain’s drug addicts heading our way for a year-round holiday?’

  Watts thought it wise to move on. ‘What else?’

  ‘Teen gangs; dangerous dogs.’ She grimaced – or tried to. ‘Oh, and copper cable theft is still a pain in the bum. There was travel chaos for commuters last week because some clever dick nicked fifty metres of signalling cabling around Littlehampton. Trains cancelled and delayed and diverted. I’m sending out regular night patrols to try to catch them.’

  ‘The railways have got their own police,’ Watts said.

  ‘I know that,’ Hewitt said sharply. She looked down and moderated her tone. ‘The rail chiefs are demanding a crackdown on copper thieves both to prevent them and to catch them. As are the commuting public. It’s not our primary responsibility but we need to be seen to be responding, obviously. But then that means taking police from somewhere else.’

  She sighed.

  ‘Peacehaven has turned out to be the seagull shooting capital of the south coast. I don’t know if it’s to do with what happened here a few months ago, when all the fish fell from the sky, but they are attacking humans and then people shoot them and then the birds attack some more because they’re defending their chicks. BB guns are the weapons of choice. We’ve had sixty cases reported.’

  Watts laughed. ‘And that’s a police matter?’ he said.