I took a deep breath and reached for the door handle. I’m not a nervous guy as a rule, but I could feel a fluttering inside. It reminded me of an oral exam I once faced as a student. My degree hung on it, and I knew that I would walk out of that room as a success or as a failure.
Earlier, I’d had a call from Sauce Haddock, apologising for dropping me in it. I admit that the day before I’d been thinking about ripping his head off with my bare hands, but when I’d cooled down, I knew that if our roles had been reversed, I’d have handled the situation in exactly the same way he did. I told him as much. He thanked me and wished me luck with my interview, from which I guessed that it must have been public knowledge.
‘You’ll come out okay, Griff,’ he said. ‘I did.’
I was grateful for his support, but I lacked his confidence. I was going in to see the deputy chief as a serving detective constable, one who’d expected, just forty-eight hours earlier, to be promoted to fill a vacancy for detective sergeant. Whatever Sauce thought, there was a chance I would come out with my card marked for dismissal. If that happened, it would have huge consequences.
Having ‘Sacked from the police force’ on your CV is not the best reference on the job market. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to stay in Britain. I’m a Commonwealth citizen with a Welsh grandmother, but I haven’t lived here for five years, so I don’t have permanent resident status. Being chucked out of the country was my biggest fear: I’d left South Africa for a whole raft of reasons, but chief among them was my need to make enough money to support my kids from my failed marriage. If I was forced to go back there, we’d all be in trouble.
I knew the woman who was holding my life in her hands, but not all that well. She has a rock-solid CID background, but she’d been moving back into uniform and heading for the command suite when I secured my international transfer and arrived in Edinburgh. I knew her husband much better, Stevie Steele, God rest him. He was my DI in Leith, before Sammy Pye. We’d got on, and I carried the small lingering hope that his widow might bear that in mind.
I knew why I was seeing her and not the chief; that didn’t need to be spelled out. My sister Spring and I moved to Scotland at the same time and bought a flat together in Stockbridge, right on the Water of Leith and right next door to Alex Skinner, his daughter. She and I became friends, and both of us being young, free, single and liberated, there were evenings when the five-yard journey home from her place seemed too long for me to contemplate. We were discreet about it, but inevitably there was a degree of office gossip, at Alex’s end, not mine: I don’t believe there’s anyone in the force stupid enough to accuse me of trying to sleep my way to the top, not to my face.
Our closeness was over by the time Alex moved house; she never spelled it out but I learned later that she’d taken the hump with me because I didn’t tell her that I’d been married. Since neither she nor I was looking in that direction, I didn’t think it was relevant, but I made a mental note not to be so secretive in the future.
Mistake, Griffin, I thought as I turned the door handle and stepped into the deputy chief constable’s office.
She didn’t stand up to greet me, and she wasn’t smiling either. She was too busy frowning at an open folder on her desk, at some documents whose crest I recognised, even upside down. It was my career file, going right back to the beginning in South Africa. She finished the page she was on, and then looked up.
‘Good afternoon, DC Montell,’ she said. I tried to read her eyes as she looked at me, but they weren’t telling me anything. She was in uniform, but she wasn’t wearing her jacket, a small informality that might have been a good sign. . or might have meant, on the other hand, that she didn’t want to get blood on it. For a second I wondered if I should have worn mine, then was happy that I hadn’t, in case she’d taken it as an indication that I’d settle for being booted out of CID, as a better option than the sack.
She pointed to the corner of the big wood-panelled room, towards a low L-shaped leather seating arrangement, set on two sides of a coffee table. She rose to her feet. ‘When the chief had this room,’ she explained, ‘he held most of his meetings over there. I like to do the same.’
I looked at her as she led the way. DCC Steele is at the low end of medium height for a modern woman, five feet six tops, and her standout feature is probably her reddish hair, which she wears fairly short and has done, they say, since she went back into uniform. She has a figure that my sister, who works in Harvey Nichols ladies, would find easy to clothe. If she’d a mind to, Spring could make her look voluptuous, but that’s no way to think of a deputy chief constable, especially when she holds your career in her neatly manicured right hand. Neat: if there’s a single word to describe her, that’s it.
She steered me towards the seat facing the window. ‘Would you like coffee?’ she asked.
I hadn’t expected that. ‘No thank you, ma’am,’ I replied. ‘I’ve had my quota for today, I reckon.’
‘Then I’ll follow your example,’ she said, favouring me with her first small smile. ‘The chief’s an addict, and it’s bloody near compulsory in his office. Some of the stuff he brews can make you hyperventilate.’
She sat, and I followed, perching on the edge of the squab, not wanting to appear at ease, which I wasn’t in any case. She looked at me, then smiled again. ‘Relax, man,’ she exclaimed. ‘Whatever happens here, it’s not going to be fatal. I’m probably more nervous than you are. I’ve never been in this situation before.’
I took her at her word and settled myself into the well-worn leather; the tension was still there, but I did my best to hide it.
Then she was serious again. ‘Do you think you have any leverage in this room?’ she asked. ‘Your sister Spring is in a gay relationship with one of our senior officers. You have a past friendship with Alex Skinner and those of us who know her well, know also that she isn’t famous for celibacy. D’you reckon any of that’s going to get you off the hook?’
I shook my head. ‘No, ma’am. Nor would I want it to. If you’re working up to ask me to resign quietly because of it, I will, for my sister’s sake, and for her partner’s. As for Alex, she’s a big girl, she can look after herself and she wouldn’t expect me to do anything so noble on her behalf.’
The DCC laughed again. ‘Christ, you do know her well.’ She paused. ‘Do you know what carte blanche is?’
Was she patronising me? ‘French has reached Cape Town,’ I replied. ‘It means. . open season?’ I suggested.
‘That’s as good a translation as any,’ she agreed. ‘Well, that’s been declared on you, for that’s what Mr Skinner says I’ve got.’
The brought me up short; privately I’d been hoping that the boss would weigh in discreetly on my side. I helped Alex out of a scrape a while back, and I knew that I had his personal gratitude; but not professional, it seemed.
‘What have you got to say to me?’ she asked.
‘Sorry,’ I said, immediately.
‘That’s a start, but to whom?’
I didn’t have to think hard. ‘To the force, to the chief, and to the guys who were involved in the Bass investigation. I screwed it up for them.’
‘What’s your relationship with Alice Cowan, away from the office?’
I’d been asking myself that one for more than twenty-four hours. ‘We’re close. . or we were until yesterday,’ I added.
‘Would you say that you were a couple?’
‘Informally. We’ve never discussed the long term but we’ve been in a relationship for a few months now.’
‘Which you did not disclose to your line managers.’ That wasn’t a question.
‘No, we didn’t,’ I conceded. ‘We didn’t think we were at the stage where we had to. It has no bearing on our. .’ I didn’t complete the sentence as I realised how wrong that was.
‘Indeed.’ The DCC frowned. ‘Did you know how Alice came to be posted to Leith?’ She paused. ‘Just in case you’re thinking about protecting her, I’d better tell you that she’s resigned from the force.’
That was news to me; I hadn’t spoken to her since the previous morning, after my DI had called me into his office and ripped me to shreds. Sammy Pye’s a nice, friendly guy, which means that being taken apart by him hurts even more. Alice hadn’t appeared for work; she’d been ordered to stay at home. As soon as Sammy had thrown me out I called her on my mobile, from the toilet, yelled at her, thanked her for what she’d done to my promotion prospects and told her that was the last way she’d ever be fucking me. I felt bad about it a few hours later, but I reckoned that the bridge was burned right down to the water level. I probably would have protected her, or tried to, but her quitting had made that pointless.
And so I answered, ‘Officially, no, because as you know, the reason was never made public within the force, but she told me.’
‘Did you know where she’d been before?’
‘Yes, Special Branch.’
‘You know where I’m going with this, Griff, don’t you?’
She used my Christian name, I thought. A good sign.
‘Of course. You’re going to ask me why it didn’t occur to me that she might be a security risk. I can’t answer that properly; all I can say is that I trusted her.’
‘And she let you down.’
The interview was taking a turn I hadn’t expected. I’d assumed that it would have taken her about two minutes to bust me down to village cop in Breich, or to have me sign my goodbye letter. Instead she appeared to be offering me a way out; shop Alice and let them rubber-stamp the official inquiry.
‘No, ma’am,’ I contradicted her, regardless of it. ‘I wouldn’t put it that way. I let her down by being indiscreet, and putting her in a position that’s led to her blowing her career.’
She smiled again. ‘That’s noble of you. But there’s still a question left, the key one as far as I’m concerned. Did you know of her family connection with this man Welsh?’
‘Absolutely not. I knew that Inspector Varley was her uncle, but that’s all. I’ve never met any of her family, and I didn’t know of the Freddy Welsh connection until DI Pye told me. I’d never even heard the man’s name until I was pulled into the Lafayette’s thing.’
‘So you didn’t know that she had a personal connection with him?’
What the hell did she mean by that? My face must have answered her question and asked one of my own.
‘I’ve got to be blunt here,’ she said, gently. ‘Alice was interviewed this morning at Leith, by DCS McGuire and another senior officer. She admitted to them that she had a brief sexual encounter. . a quickie, if you like. . with Welsh at a family celebration about six years ago. Did you know about that?’
And if I had, then I was done for; out on my ear, and that would be at best.
I took a long breath, blew it out and looked her in the eye. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘She told me. .’ I began, then stopped, considering how best to put it. When I saw how, I continued.
‘At the beginning of our sexual relationship, I told Alice all about me, about my marriage, about my family, and about the extent of my relationship with Alex Skinner. I’ve come to believe that it’s best to be frank about these things.’ I didn’t tell her how. ‘Alice told me that she didn’t have a past anything like that. She said that she’d had very few relationships, that she wasn’t promiscuous, and that the worst thing she’d ever done, and I quote, “was banging a married guy at an in-law’s wedding a few years ago, after too many tequila sunrises, and feeling guilty as hell next morning”. She added that she’d hardly been able to speak to the man since. It sounds as if that was Freddy Welsh, but she didn’t put a name to him, not then and not since. In fact we’ve never discussed it again.’
‘Sure?’
‘Certain.’ I held her gaze. ‘Look, ma’am, Alice is not routinely untrustworthy. Yes, she told me she’d been booted out of SB for tipping off her uncle about something, but when she did she was cracking a joke at my expense. Usually she’s tight-lipped about the time she spent in the Branch. You have to be. .’