by Alex Walters
'I’m really sorry, Tim,' she said, after a pause. 'I don’t know what to say. If you think Greg’s shafted you—well, what reason would he have to do that?'
'You really don’t know him, do you?'
'What do you mean?'
'Everyone admires Greg Perry. Good manager. Decent chap. Builds a good team under him. Attracts a lot of loyalty from his staff.' He smiled at her, meaningfully. 'That sound familiar?'
'It sounds like my impression of him, more or less. And?'
'And he’s a ruthless bastard. If you get in his way, he’ll destroy you.'
'That’s not been my experience,' she said. 'Almost the opposite.'
Hulse nodded slowly, as if considering this point-of-view. 'Yes, you had your problems, didn’t you? And he was supportive. Put in a very good word for you with me.'
'Doesn’t sound very ruthless,' she said. 'Given I hadn’t made life easy for him.'
'Doesn’t, does it? Generous of him to recommend you for a move to a place that he proceeds to shaft only a few weeks later.'
'But—'
'It’s not my place to influence what you think of him. All I know is what I think of him. We go a long way back. We joined at the same time on the graduate scheme. Fairly parallel careers, though he’s generally been a step or two ahead of me. I spent a couple of years working for him when he was Dep in a Young Offenders'. That was a long time ago, but it was when I first realised what he was like. I’m not going to dish any dirt, but I caught him doing one or two things he shouldn’t have. I wasn’t intending to shop him, as it happens. That's not my style. But he knew I knew. Next thing, it was my career going down the toilet. Inappropriate material discovered on my work laptop.'
She stared at him. 'And you didn’t put it there?'
'Well, Christ, no. Nothing to do with me.'
'You’re saying—'
'Draw your own conclusions. The fact was that he’d had access to the machine a couple of weeks before. He’d borrowed it a couple of times while his was supposedly out of action. I couldn’t think of anyone else who’d been in a position to do it. But there was nothing I could do. I’d no evidence he’d even borrowed the laptop, let alone that he was responsible. It was perfectly pitched. The stuff wasn’t extreme enough for them to dismiss me, but serious enough that they had to do something. A formal warning in the end. Just enough to slow down my career when it was about to take off. And enough to destroy any credibility I might have had in blowing the whistle on Greg Perry, if I'd been so inclined. The man who’s now our Regional Director.' He stopped, as if he'd run out of things to say, and gestured towards her glass. 'Let me get you another. Same again?'
'No, bugger it,' she said. 'I’ll risk a white wine. I feel like I need a drink.'
She watched as he disappeared back into the pub. It was beginning to grow dark and the lights had come on around the pub, with a row of spotlights casting a spectral glare over the garden where she was sitting. Kate was struck by a sudden feeling that, by staying out here, by continuing this conversation with Hulse, she was taking a risk, though she couldn’t fathom what kind of risk that might be.
He was back quicker than she expected. As he ambled out of the pub doorway, she found herself unexpectedly relieved to see him. Even in the few minutes he'd been away, her anxiety had been growing. Every movement in the shadows had felt oddly threatening. A sudden sweep of light from a pair of headlights across the far side of the car-park had almost sent her scurrying inside.
'Thought you might have buggered off,' Hulse said. He placed the two drinks on the table and slid the glass of wine in her direction. 'I went for the Sauvignon Blanc,' he said, 'on the basis that they’d just opened the bottle. The Chardonnay looked like it’d been sitting there a while.'
'Wise move. Though anything winey and alcoholic’s fine by me.'
'I’m your man then.'
She laughed, wondering how much he was really joking. 'You weren't long in there. I thought you'd get waylaid. People wanting to know why you'd gone missing at your own party.'
'I kept out of the back,' he said. 'Guess who's just arrived?'
'Who?'
'Your friend and his, Greg Perry.'
'I didn't see him go past.'
'Must have gone in the other way. From the main car park. I just saw him heading into the back. Not that I invited the bastard.'
She remembered the sweep of headlights and how unreasonably startled she'd been by the sudden glare. 'You really think this is personal?'
'He screwed me over once before. I don’t see why he wouldn’t do it again.'
'But if what you told me was true—'
'It was true, right enough. I’ll never be able to prove it, but I know what happened.'
'OK, but then he had a reason to shaft you. Why would he do it here? Why now?'
'I’ve no idea how that bastard’s mind works. Maybe he's just been waiting for the opportunity. You’d have to ask him.'
'You don’t think you’re being paranoid?'
'No, I don’t. I’ve not been allowed to see it, but I’m told he’s written a confidential report on this place that paints us blacker than black. He’s said I’m not up to the job. A lack of leadership, was the phrase.'
She hesitated momentarily then said: 'You don’t think there might be any substance in what he’s saying? Shit, that sounded wrong. I know you’re a good manager, Tim. I suppose what I mean is, isn’t it possible that Greg’s just got it wrong? Or—I don’t know—that’s he’s just trying to make an impression in his new role by showing how tough he is?'
'You mean, am I just deluding myself?'
'That’s not what I meant—'
'It’s a fair question. Nobody wants to be on the end of something like this. We all try to paint ourselves in the best light. But I think I’m being realistic. I’m not perfect. The prison’s not a hundred percent yet. But I think I—we have made all the progress that could reasonably have been asked of us, given the state the place was in when I took over. I know that whoever comes in won’t make any significant changes but will get all the plaudits when the Inspection goes well.'
'Isn’t there any way you can appeal?'
'Against what? The official line is I’m being given a—what’s their phrase?—a "lateral opportunity for development and operational purposes". Some bullshit like that. I haven’t seen the report he prepared. I’m not even officially supposed to know it exists. I only found out because an old mate at HQ tipped me off. It’s full of total bollocks, apparently. Even implies I’ve been fiddling the performance stats.'
'But why would he do it?'
'You still haven’t got it, have you? He’s a vicious, ruthless bastard. Part of it will be what you said. He wants to make an impression. He’ll pretend he’s taking a hands-on role in sorting out the mess I’ve supposedly left behind. He’ll probably be the one who takes the credit when the Inspectorate gives us the thumbs up, along with whoever he appoints here. But that won’t be the main reason. The main reason is that he wants to destroy me.'
It all sounded too melodramatic to Kate. She was beginning to buy some of what Hulse was saying, but she still couldn’t see Perry as a pantomime villain. 'Why would he want to do that?'
'Like I say, who knows how his mind works. Maybe because he thinks I’m still a threat. Maybe because I’m the only person who really knows what he was up to at that YOI. He pulled the rug from under me then. But he might still think I’ve got something over him.'
'After all these years?'
'I don’t know. It's the first time he’s had any real authority over me. Maybe it’s the first time he’s had the chance to do it.' He paused. 'But it feels to me like there’s something more. Some reason he’s done this now.'
'Such as?' She took a first small sip of the wine. Hulse's pint was already half gone.
'That’s why I wanted to talk to you. You know him better than I do—or at least you know what he’s like now.'
'I hardly know him at all,'
she said. 'That’s what I’m realising. He gives nothing away. All you ever get's what’s on the surface.'
'Your partner did,' Hulse said, quietly. 'He knew him very well.'
She looked up, baffled. 'Ryan knew him?'
'Ryan?' Hulse looked equally baffled for a moment. 'Oh, Christ. Of course. Jesus, that was stupid of me. Look, I’m sorry—'
She took a much larger mouthful of the wine. 'What are you talking about, Tim?'
'I’d forgotten. I saw a reference in your file, but I wasn’t thinking.' He shook his head. 'About your husband. God, I’m sorry.'
'It's in the past. I wouldn’t say I’m over it, exactly, but—well, you know.' It was always like this when she talked about Ryan. She was the one who ended up giving reassurance to others. She’d grown sick of that in the months after it had happened, having to be mindful of others' feelings while she was struggling to make it through the day.
'I didn’t mean your husband,' Hulse said, finally. 'I meant—'
She suddenly understood. 'Graeme,' she said. 'You meant Graeme. Of course. It’s always fucking Graeme.'
'I’m sorry,' he repeated. 'Yeah, Graeme Ellis. That guy.'
'How’d you know about Graeme?' She’d been confused by the apparent reference to Ryan, but at least Ryan had been in the Service. It was likely that Hulse would have come across him.
He frowned. 'It was on your file.'
'Really?' She was beginning to feel as if the world was shifting slightly but continually under her feet. 'I mean, we were hardly together. Only a couple of months. I hardly told anyone about it. Especially at work.'
'Look, I probably shouldn’t really say this. But there was stuff on the file about—well, about why you were off sick.'
'There was bound to be some stuff,' she said. 'There were reports from my GP to human resources. That kind of thing.'
'Not just that. There was a file note about accusations you made. Against Graeme Ellis. There was an implication that—well, that your judgement had been impaired at that point. That it might have implications for your professional work.'
'But that was nothing to do with—' she began, then stopped. 'Who wrote that note?'
'Guess who. Your loyal boss. I only saw the note after you'd started down here and the full personal file was sent over.'
She frowned, trying to make sense of all this. 'You said Graeme knew Greg. But why did Graeme’s name mean anything to you in the first place?'
Hulse seemed as puzzled as she was by the way the conversation was unfolding. 'Well, I knew him. Graeme. We both did, me and Perry. From his days in the Service.'
This time it really did feel as if the ground had been pulled from under her. 'Graeme? In the Service?'
'You didn’t know? Jeez. He was an officer at the YOI I was talking about. Worked for Greg.'
'I didn’t know. He never said. He never bloody mentioned it. He knew where I worked, and he never bloody mentioned it.' She took another mouthful of wine. 'Why the hell would he never have bloody mentioned it?'
'He and Greg Perry were thick as thieves in those days,' Hulse said. 'Ellis left the Service unexpectedly after a couple of years. While we were still at the YOI. There were rumours he left under a cloud, but I never heard anything definite. When I saw his name in the file, I assumed you must have met him through Perry.'
'No, not at all.' She was trying to remember exactly how she had met Graeme. He’d slid into her life with such smoothness she’d barely recognised he was doing it. One day, he wasn’t on the scene. The next, they were apparently an item. That was how it had felt. 'I met him in the pub,' she said. 'One Friday after work. I’d gone there for a quick after-work drink with a few members of the Psych team. From what I remember, Graeme was in there with one or two business types— colleagues of his, he reckoned. He started chatting to me at the bar. Made a bit of a bee-line for me in a way—well, that I found flattering, I suppose. I was just beginning to get over what had happened with Ryan. Not ready for a serious relationship or anything like that, but ready to start living again. Graeme’s very good at getting you to talk without giving away too much himself. In the end, he persuaded me to give him my phone number.' She shrugged. 'I thought he was probably married. Wasn’t really intending to take it any further. But he can be very persuasive.'
'That was always his reputation.'
She was trying to envisage the scene in the pub. There’d been nothing obviously suspicious about it. Just a smooth-talking older man chatting up a woman at the bar. But if Graeme really did know Greg, the whole thing couldn’t have been coincidental.
'The question is,' Hulse said, as if voicing her thoughts, 'did Ellis know who you were when he approached you? Had he been tipped off?'
'By Greg, you mean? But why would he?'
'I don’t know. But he wouldn’t do it without a reason. And that reason would have been more than just a bit of matchmaking. Even assuming that Ellis was that way inclined.'
'What do you mean?'
'I just meant—well, let's just say that, in the days when I knew Ellis, I wouldn’t have assumed his primary interest was in the adult female.' He held up his hands before she could respond. 'Not based on any real evidence. Just my impression. And the word on the grapevine.'
She could feel her mental landscape tilting again. 'This file note. Did it mention the nature of my accusations?'
'Not really. You mean—'
'I thought—I still think—that he had an unnatural interest in my son, let’s put it that way. Like you, I didn’t have any hard evidence. I never really caught him doing anything—inappropriate. Nothing he couldn't talk his way out of, anyway. But there was something about the way he behaved, the way he talked. It began to give me the creeps, to be honest. At first, I persuaded myself I was imagining it. He behaved like the perfect gentleman to me. I could easily have convinced myself I’d found the ideal partner.' She laughed, with just an edge of bitterness. 'That’s certainly what my mother thought. But I became more and more uneasy.' She was suddenly conscious that it was fully dark now, and that it was growing cold. 'I know I’d lost it by the end. I was getting hysterical. I can see that now. And Graeme was probably only a part of that. I was feeling stressed at work, and I probably hadn't come to terms Ryan's death as well as I thought I had. But Graeme was one of the triggers. Even after I'd ended it with him, my suspicions kept growing and I felt as if I was losing my mind. Then he turned up one day when I was at work and talked my mother into handing over Jack, pretending he was meeting me.'
'Jesus. What happened?'
'I got home and completely lost it. I called the police. They caught up with Graeme easily enough. I think he'd just intended to use it as a way of trying to lever himself back into our lives, and hadn't expected me to respond so dramatically, so he actually phoned me an hour or so later to let me know where they were. He got a shock when a couple of uniformed officers turned up instead.'
'Serve the bastard right,' Hulse said with feeling. 'Assume he talked his way out of it.'
'He claimed it was all just a misunderstanding. That he'd told my mother where he was taking Jack but she must have not heard, or some such bollocks. That he'd thought it was all agreed with me. Breakdown in communications. All that. Had the police eating out of his hand in the end. Meanwhile, I was a complete wreck. But that just helped convince the police that I was hysterical and that Graeme must be the wronged party.'
'That sounds like the Graeme Ellis I knew,' Hulse said. 'Looking back, though, do you think your suspicions of Ellis were wrong? About him and your son, I mean.'
She surprised herself by responding with no hesitation: 'No, I was right. I’d lost perspective on how to deal with it by the end. But I was right about Graeme.'
'I wouldn’t take any convincing,' Hulse said. 'That was always my impression. But he was a manipulative bastard. He and Perry were birds of a feather.'
She gazed back at him, still trying to take all this in. She could see there was something more troub
ling him. 'Go on. What else?'
'I’m as baffled by all this as you are,' he said. 'I was just struck by another thought. It was when you mentioned your late husband—'
'Ryan?'
'Look, say if you don't want to talk about this. But I saw on your file you were a widow. That your husband had died in service. Some sort of accident.'
'Yeah. Stupid bloody accident. He wasn’t even on duty. He’d been out to the pub after work.' She gestured round with her hand. 'Funnily enough, yet another leaving do. Some officer in his team who was transferring. Felt obliged to go—you know, show willing.'
'No wonder this sort of thing isn’t your idea of a good time.'
'He hadn’t stayed late. Hadn't had a drink.' She took a breath, trying to control her emotions. It was a long while since she'd had reason to tell this story. 'He rode a motorbike in those days. It wasn't long after we'd married. I was working over in South Yorkshire, so he was commuting back over there until I could get a transfer sorted.' She laughed bitterly. 'My new posting was confirmed about two weeks after I no longer needed it. The story was that Ryan lost control up in the Derbyshire hills. Skidded off the road. Nobody could ever quite explain how it might have happened, but sometimes things just do.'
'God, I’m sorry.'
'I got worried when he didn’t get back. Got even more worried when I phoned one of his colleagues and found out what time he’d left the pub. Called the police who didn’t take it seriously till later that night—kept insisting he must have gone on somewhere else. Even suggested that he might have gone on somewhere he didn’t want me to know about. Then in the morning some farmer found the crashed bike and Ryan's body. He’d been dead for hours by the time the police got there.'
'And the police assumed it was an accident?'
'That was the official line. There was no real reason to think any different. There were some oddities. It was a dry clear night, Ryan was an experienced biker, and they reckoned the angle of the skid was a bit strange if he'd just lost control. But, well, like I say, these things can happen.' She hesitated. 'There was one officer who didn't seem quite willing to let it lie. He got their collision analysts to double-check the site. There was some evidence there might have been another vehicle involved, but it wasn't definitive enough for them to pursue it. So the verdict was accidental death.'