S arah Gilchrist didn’t sleep much after the hot debrief. Her mind was flooded with images of the dead people in the house, whilst the analytical part of her was trying to work out what might have happened.
Once she’d seen Connolly and White from Haywards Heath leave HQ at the end of the meeting, she had phoned Jack Jones, a scene of crime officer she’d once had a fling with.
‘You’re lucky, Sarah,’ he said. ‘I’m just taking a fag break out in the garden, otherwise you wouldn’t have got me.’
‘Haven’t managed to kick it, then?’ Jones had been a sixty-a-day man. One of the reasons their relationship hadn’t lasted longer was that she couldn’t bear the cigarette smell on his breath, on his clothes, on her. Another reason was because she didn’t want any kind of commitment. But that was another story entirely.
For Jones to be smoking whilst attending a scene of crime meant he was still as hooked as ever. With the new DNA-based forensic examinations of crime scenes, inadvertent contamination was a real issue. Putting your hand on any kind of surface was enough to leave your own DNA evidence.
SoC officers took special care. Having a fag part way through an investigation required a real palaver – taking the kit off then putting new kit back on.
She could tell by the tone of Jones’s voice that he was up for a bit of flirting but she was too tense. She couldn’t be as relaxed as he was about sudden death. She told him about the man in the kitchen, the thing in his hand that went flying. He picked up on her mood, promised he’d get back to her the next day, let her know if they found anything.
‘Though if we do find something, I can’t say what,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
She knew that.
‘I just want to know you’ve found something.’
She had about four hours’ sleep then got up and prowled her flat waiting for Jones to call her. Finally, she called him.
‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ he said impatiently. ‘There was nothing there.’
She put the phone down, her brain buzzing. She paced the flat, stood by the window looking down into the street, paced the flat again. Twenty minutes later she called DC Philippa Franks, the other woman involved in the Milldean operation. Franks had been terribly upset on the night. Gilchrist had comforted her as best she could.
‘Philippa, it’s Sarah.’
There was silence on the line, although Sarah thought she could hear a man’s voice in the background. The television? Then, cautiously, Philippa said:
‘We’re not supposed to be in contact until the enquiry is over.’
Standard procedure, so that the officers under investigation couldn’t cook up a story together.
‘I know. It’s just that I’m stumbling around in the dark here. I have no idea what happened upstairs.’
‘That makes two of us.’
‘But you were there. You saw it.’
Franks’s voice was harsh.
‘I can’t talk about it.’
‘Who went up the stairs first?’
More silence. Gilchrist thought she could hear Franks’s breath. Short, almost panting. Then there was a click and the sudden buzz of a phone hung up.
She tried Harry Potter next. She hadn’t forgotten the sight of him leaning heavily against the wall at the top of the staircase in the house in Milldean. He had looked so defeated.
Potter’s wife picked up the telephone.
‘Hello?’ she said cautiously.
‘Hello, Mrs Potter. It’s Sarah – Sarah Gilchrist. I work with Harry – with DS Potter. I wonder if I could have a word?’
Mrs Potter put her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. Gilchrist could make out a muffled conversation then she heard Potter’s voice.
‘Sarah, this isn’t a good idea.’
‘I know – I’m sorry. I’m just so in the dark. Can you tell me anything?’
Potter cleared his throat.
‘I was focusing on the back room. It was empty. The shooting started when I was in there. I went along the landing but nobody was letting me through – and, anyway, the damage had been done.’
‘Were our men fired on?’
‘I have no way of knowing. I just heard shots. Finch would know.’
‘You looked shocked by it all when I came up the stairs.’
‘Weren’t you? I signed on to protect people not kill them. What happened was appalling.’
‘Do you blame our men? Do you think they were trigger happy?’
Potter was silent.
‘Harry?’
‘Not for me to say, is it?’ Potter’s voice had changed. ‘Let the investigation decide that. Look, Sarah, I’ve got to go. My wife… you know.’
Gilchrist tried Finch next. Aside from anything else she was curious about his relationship with Connolly and White from Haywards Heath. Judging by his appearance at the hot debrief, the cocky bastard had had the stuffing knocked out of him by the events in Milldean.
Finch’s phone rang and rang and then voicemail clicked in, inviting her to leave a message. She declined the offer. The moment she put her own phone down, it rang. She jumped. It was an officer from the Hampshire police service asking her to come in for an interview later that morning.
Bill Munro from the Hampshire force came to see me on Wednesday lunchtime.
‘Sorry to be talking to you in these circumstances, Bob.’
Bill and I had served together for three years. We were of an age, though I’d risen higher. He was a stolid, methodical copper. Not much flair but then, except in novels, policing isn’t about flair. It’s about methodology and luck, in about equal measure.
He was one of the few happily married policemen I knew. I put his girth – he was a couple of stone overweight – down to love of his domestic life. And love, more specifically, of his wife Alice’s cooking.
Molly and I had been round to dinner once, years earlier, and Alice had produced a four-course blow-out that must have been from some fifties French cookbook – heavy on cream, butter and virtually every other fat-forming food.
I was pleased to see Bill, despite the circumstances. My high regard for him was the reason I had chosen to bring in the Hampshire force rather than any of the others in our family.
‘I have to say, Bob, this is a bloody mess.’
‘Five people killed – I can see why you would think that.’
‘Five? Oh, you mean your officer, too. Yes, it’s especially bad when one of ours go down – though I’m not sure what I think about suicide. But you’re in deep shit for more than that. This riot. And I have to say you’re utterly exposed. The procedures you have in place here for armed response operations – or rather the procedures you don’t have in place – frankly, the whole thing is a disgrace.’
‘I was about to address it.’
‘About to? Given current international circumstances, it should have had absolute priority.’
I was terse. ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
And I did know. Even so, I resented him saying it. My conceit, I suppose. When I was brought in, the Southern Force was in decline after years of liberal posturing and neglect. I’d put off doing something because I had vested interests to contend with and I was drowning in other procedures.
‘There is so little audit stuff in place that anyone can go in to the armoury and take whatever the hell they want. They can use it to shoot at anything or anyone they damned well please, then drop it back without the force being any the wiser.
‘And this particular operation is a total botch. Your officers are doing no one any favours by remaining silent. Nobody knows where the tip came from. The policeman who received it is unavailable. Your gold commander is watching his back and your silver commander – who should never have been in operational charge – has killed himself.’
‘The procedures in place are standard around the country.’
‘I well know that,’ Bill snapped. ‘It’s the way those procedures are carried out that matters.’
I nodded, looked down at my desk.
‘Is everybody covering up?’
‘Except for Gilchrist. But she’s got a fixation on the man shot in the kitchen. She claims he had something in his hand but it wasn’t entered into evidence. She claims someone took it.’
‘Another officer?’
‘That’s the implication.’
I looked up at him.
‘Who is the man in the kitchen?’
‘Still unidentified.’
‘Who shot him?’
‘None of your snipers are admitting to firing the fatal shot. We’re running tests on the rifles in the armoury to see which one has been fired. But we won’t know who checked it out because there’s no signing in and out of weapons. Any forensic evidence we get will be contaminated as everybody seemed to be handling everyone else’s weapons.’
He shook his head then leant back.
‘You’re being pretty squarely blamed for the rioting too. What are you going to do?’
‘Find out what went wrong.’
Munro shook his head again. Put his hand on his paunch.
‘I can’t let you near it, Bob. You’re part of the investigation now – and you’ve shot yourself in the foot by that damned stupid announcement.’
I sat up straighter.
‘Supporting my team, you mean?’
‘Anticipating the results of my enquiry. I can understand why you were tempted to do it. But I wish you’d resisted the temptation. Especially as, on the evidence I’ve been able to gather, you may well end up with egg on your face.’
‘I assume they didn’t just go in guns blazing – they fired because they thought they were about to be fired upon.’
He shifted in his seat.
‘Don’t be so sure. At least one of the killings looks horribly like an execution. The man on the toilet…’ He shifted in his seat again. ‘How’s Molly handling all this?’
‘Not well. She’s not good under pressure.’
He eased himself up in his chair.
‘Give her my best.’ He looked down at me. ‘So will you resign?’
‘Everybody and his dog wants or expects me to.’
He gave a small smile.
‘That’ll be a “no”, then.’
‘I came here to make a difference. I haven’t had a chance to do that yet. And it would be cowardly of me to resign. I want to be here to see this through.’
‘It’s not going to be pretty.’
‘Bill, I know I’m part of the investigation. But if you could keep me informed-’
He put up his hand, then got to his feet. He nodded and left the room without another word. But at least he hadn’t said ‘No’.
Sarah Gilchrist couldn’t recall a worse time in her life. The fucking insulting interrogation she’d endured from the two Hampshire policemen had been bad enough. Were they trained to act in a way guaranteed not to get information from people they questioned?
She’d told them about the evidence going missing. They didn’t seem interested. They thought, in fact, that she was using it as a plausible reason for discharging her firearm.
‘But I didn’t discharge it,’ she said. ‘The man in the kitchen was shot by a police sniper stationed outside the house.’
They didn’t respond. She decided there and then she’d rather stick needles in her eyeballs than give these assholes any help.
She kept mostly indoors for the next few days. From her flat near Seven Dials she emerged only to go to the gym, then get the papers and food from the local deli.
In her flat she would wait for the phone to ring, trying to figure out what was going on, trying to figure out what to do.
She knew something bad had happened. Not just that people had been killed, although that was bad enough. She couldn’t find out who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Was it the police or the people in the house? Had the police raided the wrong house? Nobody was saying.
Then there was the bastard with the missing teeth – Connolly. And the dead man on the kitchen floor.
At the end of that terrible evening, as they were all cooped up in the armed response vehicle, she’d got nowhere when – out of curiosity and because she was involved – she’d tried to find out exactly what had happened upstairs. And, more to the point, who had shot whom. She couldn’t decide if they were stonewalling or simply being patronizing. Either way, it pissed her off.
Now, three days later, she’d still been unable to get hold of Finch. She’d been told about Foster’s suicide. And, courtesy of the radio and TV, she’d heard about the riot. God, what a fuck-up.
The missing evidence was difficult for her. Automatically, she felt loyalty to her fellow officers. In such a situation, ranks closed. And if ranks closed, did she want to be the one on the outside of them?
Staying home was driving her nuts. She liked her own company well enough but she also liked to keep active. The gym helped. It was a women’s-only place up near the station. She tried to choose times when she was unlikely to run into people she knew. She hit the machines for an hour, used the sauna and the Turkish; tried to sweat the emotion out.
Occasionally she got hit on but she was used to that in Brighton. She didn’t mind, she just wasn’t that way inclined.
She jogged there and back. There was easy – it was all downhill. Coming back up was something else again. She took another shower when she got back to her flat.
She prepared her food, taking more time than she ever had. Marinating meat overnight, chopping the vegetables finer and finer, cleaning the skillet and pans. Again and again. Cooking slowly, adding herbs, really getting the timings right.
Then throwing the result in the bin. Instead, scarfing lumps of cheese, olives from the jar, rice cakes from the packet, spoonfuls of yoghurt from the pot.
On Thursday, the fourth day of her suspension, she became front page news.
On Thursday my home life ended. I’d been hoping things were quietening down. I didn’t see the papers until I got into work. As I walked through the ground floor office, I wondered why people avoided looking at me.
Then I saw the newspapers my secretary had left folded on my desk. The headlines.
The tabloids had gone for the jugular. ‘Top Cop’s Sex Romp With Massacre Shooter,’ said one headline. The story that followed suggested that perhaps the reason I was so eager to defend the probity of my officers at the Milldean murder was because I’d had a one-night stand at a conference with one of the female officers. Sarah Gilchrist.
I groaned. She’d sold her story to the papers.
My first thought was to phone her. Except that I didn’t know her number. Human Resources would have it, but I could hardly phone up and ask for it. Or ask Rachael, my secretary, to do so. I tried directory enquiries on my mobile. Nothing. Some detective I was.
Perhaps it was just as well. I was furious with her. Furious at myself, too. And sick of the thought of Molly hearing of my infidelity in such a humiliating, public way.
I phoned her. There was no answer. I left a message on the answerphone. I wondered whether I should go home but there was so much work to do.
Winston Hart, my Police Authority chair, phoned at eleven.
‘I think your position has become, if possible, even more untenable,’ he said crisply. ‘I must also inform you that I have received a letter from the Home Secretary stating that he has lost faith in you and asking us to press for your resignation.’
Typical of the Home Secretary, the most right-wing one we’d had since World War Two, and one with an eye on the Today programme. He was too quick to give the sound bite and regularly had to back down.
‘It will blow over,’ I said. ‘I’m not quitting.’
‘It seems to me that you don’t care about your force – you’re making it into a laughing stock. You just care about yourself.’
I hung up on him.
I left for home at lunchtime. Molly was sitting in a chair by the French windows, looking out at the green and velvety Downs. She didn’t stir when I came in.
‘I came to see if you were all right. After the newspaper report today…’
She stood up and walked towards me. I looked at her, obviously for a beat too long. She swung at me.
‘You bastard!’
She whacked me just below my left eye, came in with her other fist and whacked my right ear. I held her off. She was shaking with rage.
‘I want you out of this house.’ She was bellowing. ‘Today. You did this to us? You did this to us?’
I took a room at The Ship on the seafront in Brighton. I was worried the manager would recognize me as I’d been to lots of functions here, but he wasn’t around and the blank-faced receptionists had no clue who I was.
That evening I stayed in my room, sipping a whisky from the minibar and gazing blankly out to sea and across at the Palace Pier in its blaze of white light. I refused to think of it as Brighton Pier, although that’s what its sign proclaimed. That honour rested with the ruined West Pier. From time to time I phoned my son and daughter but I couldn’t reach either of them. I went back to the minibar.
The next morning my mobile phone rang just after nine.
‘Bob, it’s William.’ William Simpson, my erstwhile friend. ‘Can’t tell you how sorry I am about what’s happening in the press.’
‘And?’
‘You’ll be resigning now, I assume.’
‘Like hell.’
‘Bob.’
‘William.’
‘You must resign. They’ve only just started.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The press. They’ll move in on your family. Your wife, your kids.’
‘There’s nothing there. How dare they?’
‘The press dare, believe me. Then they’ll root – really root – for anything. Anything. If you’ve something in your background, they’ll find it. Your family, your parents-’
I must have clicked my tongue.
‘Bob – I’m telling you as a friend. This could get very, very much worse.’
This time he hung up.
I was summoned to an emergency meeting of the Police Authority. Winston Hart was at his pontificating worst. He kept lifting his chin to ease his neck from the too-tight collar of his shirt and touching his moustache as if checking it was still there.
‘We’ve had a letter from the Home Office stating that the Home Secretary no longer has faith in you. We’ve had another letter from the Police Federation stating that they are unhappy with your conduct. I don’t, to be honest, understand why you haven’t already resigned.’
I forced a smile. ‘I feel I can best meet my responsibilities by staying in post until I can find out what has happened.’
‘Had you not, by your public declaration, already prejudged the investigation, that might have been possible. However, your position is now clearly untenable.’
Hart had a mobile phone on the desk in front of him. It rang. He picked it up without apology and looked at the number on the screen. He put the phone to his ear then wordlessly passed it across to me.
It was Simpson. There was no preamble.
‘They’re authorized to give you a generous settlement. It won’t be leaked to the press. You can walk away with it. But you have to resign before you leave that room. If not, the Home Secretary’s letter will be leaked and worse will follow. Take your life back, Bob, I beg you.’
I handed the phone back to Hart. He started to smirk but stopped when he saw my face. He seemed to rear back in his chair as if he thought I was about to launch myself over the table at him.
I was tempted. I did want to hit him but I never would. Well, not never, just not now.
I was seething.
I didn’t want to go, was stunned by the speed with which the media had turned against me. My every instinct was to stay and fight. But what concerned me was the thought of reporters dragging my immediate family into it. What family doesn’t have its skeletons hidden in the closet? My mother was dead, but I couldn’t put Molly, the children and my father through that.
I stared at Hart but I think he could see in my eyes that he had the upper hand. I dropped my gaze.
‘I’ll resign.’
The press discovered I was staying at The Ship. They besieged me. I was wondering where to go next when family friends phoned to invite me to house-sit their farmhouse near Lewes whilst they went off to Spain for a month. I was touched by their thoughtfulness and accepted with alacrity.
I spirited myself out of The Ship and disappeared from view. Except that after two days I resumed my habit of early morning swims at the sports club I used in Falmer, on the Brighton University campus. Nobody else I knew was a member and I always kept to myself, so I had no worry about being tracked down there.
However, I reckoned without Sarah Gilchrist. At the start of the next week she doorstepped me in the club car park.
I was halfway from the club entrance to my car when I heard her call out. She was standing beside her dark blue Volkswagen Polo. She was in jeans and a fleece. Her hair was down. I have to say, she looked beautiful. However, my immediate response was anger.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘There’s no press,’ she said, twisting her mouth into a grimace, giving a little shrug. She’d guessed what I was thinking: that this was some kind of photo set-up.
I looked round at the other parked cars. She started to walk towards me. Usually she had a rangy, easy lope. Today she moved stiffly, awkwardly.
‘I hope they paid you well. Have you any idea what you’ve done to my wife?’
She stopped ten yards or so away from me.
‘What I’ve done? She’s not my bloody wife.’
I shook my head, exasperated with her, with me, with the whole mess.
‘I shouldn’t be talking to you. The investigation.’
I was aware of movement to my left. I glanced over at a woman walking up from the club, her wet blonde hair plastered to her skull, her gym bag over her shoulder.
‘It wasn’t me.’
‘They quoted you,’ I said.
‘Hardly. You know I don’t talk like that.’
‘I don’t know you at all.’
Gilchrist walked over to me and looked down.
‘Sir, I’m truly sorry it got in the newspapers – but it wasn’t me.’
I took a deep breath. I realized my fists were clenched. I flexed my hands.
‘You can call me by my name,’ I said quietly. ‘In the circumstances.’
She nodded.
‘How did you know I’d be here?’
She shrugged.
‘I didn’t really. I just took a chance.’
‘You must have told somebody,’ I said.
I was watching the woman unlock her car and sling her bag in the back seat. She was a swimmer too. We often shared a lane but never acknowledged each other, in the water or out of it.
Gilchrist cleared her throat, perhaps to draw my attention back.
‘Somebody I thought I could trust,’ she said.
I could smell her musky perfume.
‘On the force?’
She sighed.
‘Doesn’t matter. He betrayed me.’
She had kind eyes. I’d always felt they would be a problem when she had to deal with hard cases. They’d see her eyes and think they saw weakness. I didn’t know her well enough to know if she was weak. Hell, I’d only spent one drunken night with her.
‘They made up your quote?’
She sighed again.
‘That first time. Then they phoned me, said they’d got the story, said they’d do a real number on us unless I spoke to them. I panicked.’
The woman was in her car, moving out of her space.
I put my arms around Gilchrist.
‘It’s OK.’
She was stiff inside my embrace. I released her.
‘It’s not OK,’ she said, pulling back. ‘It’s fucking awful. You’re screwed and, frankly, I’m screwed.’ She looked fiercely at me. ‘Again.’
My turn to step back.
‘Are they giving you a hard time in the office?’
Police officers are essentially tribal.
‘I’m suspended, remember? The shootings…’
‘What the hell happened in there, Sarah?’
She dropped her eyes.
‘Sarah, I really need to find out.’
‘Why bother?’ Her voice was harsh.
‘So many reasons.’ I gripped her arms. I felt her muscles bunch. ‘Please.’
She shrugged me off.
‘What about this thing you thought you saw in the dead man’s hand in the kitchen.’
She looked furious.
‘I thought I saw? I imagined it, you mean?’
Her head was thrust aggressively towards me.
‘You tell me.’
‘No.’
‘What was it – a gun?’
She shook her head, stepped back. I heard the metal door of the gym clang closed.
‘Leave it. You need to focus on what’s happening to you and not worry about the rest of this.’
‘What’s happening to me has already happened.’
She smiled faintly as she turned away and started walking back to her car, lithe again.
‘I somehow don’t think that’s the end of it,’ she called back. ‘Sir.’
A couple of days later I went to see my father, Victor Tempest. His real name was Donald Watts but he’d used his nom de plume for years. I thought I should tell him first-hand what had happened.
He lived in a cramped-fronted house across the road from the Thames in west London. On the big Georgian house to his right, a blue plaque commemorated Gustav Holt’s stay there when he was in London at the turn of the twentieth century. Another plaque on the house to his left commemorated dancer Nanette de Valois’s time living there. My dad probably hoped there would be a plaque for him when he passed on.
You could almost miss his house as it was set back from the road. The narrow courtyard at the front was dominated by a huge, low-hanging tree that all but hid the doorway. The flagstones were littered with empty fast-food packages, crisp packets and a crushed beer can. He kept his downstairs front room shuttered. The windows were grimy.
He kept it like this deliberately. Deters burglars, he used to say.
Inside was a different story. From the first floor there was a lovely view over the Thames and across the graceful iron bridge. His walled garden at the back was secluded and tranquil.
My dad had made a good living as a thriller writer and although his books were not so much in demand these days he still got feted when people remembered he was alive.
He’d bought this house with his first big lump of money after he’d divorced my mother. I never lived here, nor even stayed over. My father never remarried. He was a womanizer until late into life. Even now, probably, if he could get away with it.
He was expecting me but there was no answer when I rang the bell. I stepped back into the street and looked towards the pub a few hundred yards away on the riverbank. He’d probably be there.
I waited for a break in the traffic then hurried across the road. I walked under the bridge, on to the towpath and headed for the pub. I inhaled the sour smell of the river. I liked it almost as much as the briny tang of the sea in Brighton.
Ye Olde White Hart had a long balcony overlooking the river and, below them, long tables with benches attached set in concrete right at the river’s edge on the towpath. When the river was high, the towpath flooded and the concrete was the only way to ensure the tables didn’t float away. I’d always thought it would be a pleasantly surreal experience to drift down the river sipping your drink at your table.
My father was inside the pub. It was big, Victorian with a high ceiling and a circular bar in the middle. A boat was suspended from the ceiling – this was a popular venue for watching the boat race.
He was in conversation with a young barmaid who was standing by his table. He was leering at her and when she moved off he turned his head to watch her backside. Ninety-five and still a lecherous bastard.
He had a live-in nurse/factotum/cook. He’d had a series of them. He usually made a pass, so they either laughed it off and stayed on, or took offence and left. At the moment it was a Polish girl, Anna, who coped with him very well. She’d been with him a couple of years.
‘Did you forget I was coming?’ I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. He tilted his head back.
‘I knew you’d find me. Smart copper like you.’
In his youth, my dad had been a robust, broad-shouldered man. With age he was shrunken but his shoulders were still broad and he held himself erect. His neck had shrunk, though, so his shirts always looked too big and his jackets hung oddly, almost up around his ears.
My father had always been charming. Turned it on and off. Could charm anyone. Especially women.
He was remarkable. He’d run his last marathon on his ninetieth birthday. But I wasn’t sure what he did to fill his days, except ogle women in pubs, I suppose.
We weren’t close. Indeed, we’d had a lot of problems over the years, mostly because of the way he’d treated my mum. I was pretty sure I had half-brothers and sisters somewhere and that they would come out of the woodwork when he died.
I got him another beer and sat down with a glass of wine. He watched me for a moment.
‘You’ve come a cropper, I gather.’
‘I wanted to let you know the full story – didn’t want you getting the wrong idea.’
‘There’s no such thing as a full story. As I understand it, you shot your mouth off about how innocent your officers were after you’d got your leg over one of them. You being in Brighton, I suppose we should be grateful it was a gal, not a bloke.’
‘Finished?’
‘Pride’s taken a bit of a bashing, then?’
‘It’s not over yet.’
‘Looks like game, set and match to the other side from where I’m sitting.’ He took a drink of his beer and I saw his eyes follow another woman across the room.
‘Is yon government bloke going to help? Billy Simpson? Or has he put the boot in, too?’
Good question, I thought, but didn’t say. My father looked at me.
‘Like father like son, eh? Billy’s father were always watching out for himself. Anything I can do to help?’
This was typical of my dad. He’d always given me a rough ride but once he’d had his say and given me grief he’d be there if he could. Well, sometimes.
‘Not really. Got to stick it out, I guess.’
‘What are you going to do to make a living? Write your memoirs?’
He smiled as he said it. It was a thin smile. My father had a mean face. I’d often wondered about that. Does physiognomy reflect character? In the nineteenth century, police forces throughout Europe had built a whole system on that assumption. And some people did look cruel or sour. It was usually to do with the set of the mouth. My dad had a tight mouth drawn down. Eyes protuberant, unblinking. And he was cruel. When I was growing up, praise had been grudging. He’d always been demanding, always lorded it over the household. He was a bully, sharp with his words, contemptuous of what he saw as weakness.
I think he was missing an empathy gene. He could feign kindness. He was regarded as a charming fellow. But underneath he’d always been cold, hard.
‘A bit young for a memoir. Consultancy. Lecturing – I don’t really know.’
‘Crusading? Not that the word has the right connotations in these days of warring religions. Son, I have no idea where you have got this crusading thing from.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘My point is – there’s nothing good about any of us. We’re all in the gutter-’
I started to finish the quote but he interrupted.
‘I know the bollocks you’re going to say. Oscar Wilde – the man who invented sound bites. Some of us like to think we’re looking up at the stars, but whilst we’re doing so someone is nicking our wallet, someone else is shitting on our shoes and that other bloke is fucking us up the arse.’
He leant forward to take a sup of his beer, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He caught my look.
‘What – you’re shocked to hear your dad talk like this? Bit late for finickiness, isn’t it, after what you’ve done? You’ve spent your life taking the moral high-ground about me and your mother but now you see how it can happen. You know what I thought when I read about your leg-over? Thank bloody Christ he’s actually got blood in his veins – because I often wondered.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with fidelity and having a moral code.’
‘Fidelity is for my old hi-fi system and don’t get me going on morality.’
His eyes were burning fiercely, his jaw jutting at me.
‘Dad, you’ve always been ice – there’s no give in you.’
‘Your mother was fire. Fire and ice is a good combination, don’t you think? Anyway, I’m a writer. We’re all less than human.’
‘You’re not exactly James Joyce,’ I said in exasperation. ‘You write thrillers.’
My father looked at me for a moment then continued:
‘Graham Greene said every writer should have a sliver of ice in his heart.’
‘You quote that approvingly. How does that work with family?’
He shrugged.
‘You seemed to have survived OK. Aside from your daft antics, and I don’t see how I can be held responsible for that.’
‘Did you know Graham Greene?’
‘I met him a couple of times.’
‘At some authors’ do?’
‘The second time.’
‘Is there an anecdote?’
‘I don’t do anecdotes.’
This was true. He was notoriously close-mouthed.
‘What was he like?’
‘The first time he was arrogant; the second time better.’
‘When was the first time?’
‘1934. Then in the sixties at a Foyles literary lunch.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Visit you to get your blood circulating.’
He barked a laugh.
‘Aye. It’s not exactly aerobic but it’s better than nothing.’
As the sky started to lighten, the two hooded men left the car. When they opened its doors, no interior light came on. The taller of the two men unlocked the boot and swung the lid open.
The other man looked along the deserted road then up at the dark house, perched on the edge of the cliff some quarter of a mile away. He nodded.
The two men lifted a long, bulky bundle from the boot. The bundle squirmed. Hoisting it between them, the two men walked up the steep grassy sward to the cliff edge.
The taller man looked along the line of the cliff, the brilliant white chalk pale in the dim light. He looked down to the sea some four hundred feet below. The tide was full. He could hear the slap of the waves against the rocks, the undertow sucking at the beach.
The bundle squirmed more vigorously.
The taller man gestured to his partner. Together they swung the bundle back and forth. Once, twice, three times. On the fourth swing they released the bundle. It rose in an arc up and beyond the cliff edge. For a moment it hung in the air, silhouetted against the brightening sky. Then plummeted to the sea below.