by Alex Walters
Sue was wiping her eyes, looking awkward, as if she’d allowed her guard to slip more than she’d intended. ‘Is that why you’ve come home?’
For a moment, Marie was tempted to lie. Instead, she shook her head. ‘No, not really. Just a work thing. But I’d have been back, anyway. Now that I’ve seen how he is.’
Sue nodded, her face expressionless. She was a good looking woman, Marie thought, but even in other circumstances she wouldn’t have ever been Liam’s type. Liam would never have fallen for the kind of woman who would want to take care of him. Instead, he’d fallen for a woman like Marie.
‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ Sue said, finally. ‘I mean, there’s nothing you can say, is there? Not when things are like this.’ She walked over to where Liam was sitting. His upper body had gradually been slipping sideways and he was twisted awkwardly in the chair. She took his hand and eased him back upright. For a moment, his eyes remained unfocused, then he blinked and glanced up at her. ‘Thanks,’ he whispered, frowning. ‘Thanks. Sue.’
His mind wasn’t entirely gone, then, Marie thought, and then felt guilty that she was already thinking that way. But that was how it was. It was happening. It was real. The Liam she loved was already slipping away from her.
‘I was going to get Liam some soup,’ Sue said. ‘He seems to find that easier to eat. Shall I get some for you?’
‘No, I’m fine. It’s not your job to look after me. Just do the best you can for Liam.’
As Sue disappeared into the kitchen, Marie took Liam’s hand. He looked up at her and smiled. Just in that moment – in the shape of his lips, the expression in his eyes – she caught a glimpse of how he once had been. ‘Marie,’ he said. ‘You’re back.’
She smiled, struggling hard to keep her eyes from watering. ‘Yes, Liam,’ she said. ‘I’m back.’
It was only later, after she and Sue had helped Liam into bed, that she noticed the text message.
While Marie had been away, Sue had made some changes in Liam’s living arrangements. When he’d returned from hospital, it had become obvious that he would be unable to climb the stairs even with the carers’ help. Fortunately, one of the two sofas in their living room was convertible into a sofa bed – they’d used it to accommodate occasional visitors before Liam had moved his studio downstairs. Sue had dragged that into the dining room and moved Liam’s painting gear into a corner. It was hardly an elegant solution, but it at least meant the carers been able to help Liam into bed each night.
‘He needs a proper bed,’ Sue said. ‘One of those electric gizmos that go up and down, so we can get him in and out easily and make sure he’s comfortable. I’ve asked social services to look into it, though God knows how long it’ll take.’
Liam had looked comfortable enough, though, and he was asleep almost immediately. He’d been getting increasingly tired, Sue told her, frequently nodding off as he sat in the chair during the day. She’d rearranged the visit times slightly so that the carers could get him to bed as soon as he’d eaten in the evening.
Jesus, Marie thought, after they’d finished and Sue had departed for her next call, was this what it was going to be like? She still felt slightly in shock. It was difficult to come to grips with the speed with which all this had happened. When Liam had first been diagnosed, she hadn’t known what to expect and the supposed experts had hardly been able to enlighten her. It was the great unknown, the neurologist had told her. Things might remain unchanged for years, or there might be sudden declines. The general direction was downwards, but the speed was unknown.
Even so, she’d been assuming it would take years. But this was – what? Hardly two. And suddenly she was having to deal with something beyond her imaginings.
She made her way into the kitchen, deciding that this was probably an appropriate time to crack open a bottle of wine. As pulled out a bottle and fumbled in the drawer for a corkscrew, she pulled out her phone to check messages.
There were no messages, but there was a text. It was short and cryptic. An unfamiliar mobile number and the brief message: ‘Call. Use another phone.’ She stared at the message for a minute, as if she somehow expected it to yield some more detail. Then she finished opening the bottle and picked up Liam’s phone from where it had been left charging – for who knew how long – on the kitchen work-surface.
Would Liam’s phone be safe? Probably. It was just a pay-as-you-go device he’d picked up after he’d mislaid a more expensive model – the loss probably another example, she realised now, of the way his memory had been declining.
The call was answered almost immediately, but there was silence at the end of the line.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Who is this?’
‘Marie? Jesus, thanks for calling. I need a friendly voice.’ Jack Brennan. ‘I’m in the shit, Marie. Deep, deep in the shit. Not sure how I’m going to extricate myself.’
‘Salter told me you’d been suspended. I should have called,’ she said. ‘But I thought it might make things worse.’ That was at least half true. She’d contemplated calling Brennan on leaving Salter’s office, but had concluded it wouldn’t help either of them if she appeared to be confirming Salter’s suspicions about their relationship. Or had it just been cowardice? Either way, the idea had melted from her mind as soon as she’d been faced with the reality of Liam’s condition.
‘You were better not to,’ Brennan said. ‘Turns out they’ve had me under surveillance for a while. I’ve not managed to spot anyone yet, but I suspect I still am. And I think there’s an intercept device on my landline and mobile. I’m using a pay-and-go thing I borrowed off a mate. Hope you’re not using your own.’
‘No, I’m using – someone else’s. Should be safe enough.’ She couldn’t bring herself to mention Liam’s name to Brennan. Not because she wanted to conceal anything, but because she couldn’t face whatever questions might follow. ‘Look, Jack, it can’t be all that bad. Okay, there’ll be an enquiry. But you’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘Not sure it’s that simple. I’ve got history. There are plenty of people out there gunning for me. All they need is ammunition. And Salter will make sure they get it.’
‘But he’s got nothing,’ Marie said. ‘And he’s taking a big risk if he makes all this too public. He’s not going to want to put himself in the spotlight.’
‘He’s smart, Marie. And I’ve not been as smart as I thought I was. Shit . . .’
‘What’s the story, Jack?’ She was beginning to realise that there was more to this than Brennan had been letting on.
‘I’ve underestimated Salter,’ Brennan said. ‘I can’t believe I’ve been so dumb. I mean, when he took me on, I was suspicious. Salter’s got himself a reputation out there.’
‘As bent, you mean?’ It was a long while since she’d had contact with the wider policing world. Once or twice, her old friends in the Force had told her obliquely to watch herself in dealing with Salter. But she’d never needed reminding of that.
‘Not exactly,’ Brennan said. ‘Or not necessarily, anyway. People have mixed feelings about him. Some people think he’s a hero for exposing Keith Welsby. Some people think he’s a bastard for the same reason.’
‘People have mixed feelings about you, too, Jack,’ she reminded him.
‘Yeah, but with me people think it was personal,’ Brennan said. ‘Nobody thinks that about Salter. Whatever they think about the Welsby case, they’re all in agreement that Salter’s a ruthless, cold-hearted shit.’
‘Not bad judges of character, then.’
‘Well, you should know. Everyone thinks that Salter has one priority in life and that’s Hugh fucking Salter. He’ll do whatever it takes to protect his own backside and screw everyone else over.’
‘Sounds right. So what made you agree to work for him?’ It was the same question that might be asked of her, she thought.
‘I didn’t have many options,’ Brennan said. ‘They couldn’t pension me off, and no one knew what else to do with me. I’d
probably have ended up being shunted into some admin role or even back into uniform. When Salter’s offer turned up, it was a lifeline – not just for me but for everyone trying to decide what to do with me.’
That was interesting, Marie thought. Salter had told her that he’d been asked to take Brennan. Brennan was saying that Salter had come actively looking for him. ‘But?’ She could sense a qualification in Salter’s tone.
‘So I didn’t have a lot of choice. And I was suspicious of what Salter was up to. Why come looking for me, for Christ’s sake?’ He paused. ‘But I wasn’t entirely sorry the offer had been made. I’d been following the Welsby case quite closely.’
‘Because it paralleled your own?’
‘I suppose. Like I said to you, the ironies weren’t lost on me. Salter had blown the whistle on a corrupt cop, just like I’d done. Salter was a hero. I was a pariah. So, yes, I followed the story in the newspapers. Did a bit of asking around. Mostly just idle curiosity.’
‘“Mostly”?’
‘Well, I was intrigued. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t exactly burning with indignation at Salter’s treatment. I could see there were differences. I knew he’d risked his life in dealing with Welsby and Kerridge–’
‘He risked my life, more to the point,’ Marie interjected. ‘Though, in fairness, he probably saved it as well. So why the interest in Salter?’
‘At first, as I say, just curiosity. Fellow feeling, maybe. Someone who’d been through what I’d been through but come out in a better place. But the more I asked, the more interesting the story became.’
‘Go on.’
‘Salter polarises opinion. Everyone agrees he’s a total bastard. Some people think he’s an honest total bastard, and others think he’s a corrupt one. But the more I talked to people, the more the name of Pete Boyle cropped up. It surprised me at first. It didn’t fit with the way we saw things in Manchester. Even after he got out of prison, we thought Boyle was a lame duck. He was shooting his mouth off about getting back in control, taking over Kerridge’s territory, but we couldn’t see it happening.’
‘Why not? Boyle had been Kerridge’s number two. Till they fell out, anyway.’
‘And they fell out because Kerridge was looking for a scapegoat to take the heat off him. He shafted Boyle because he and Welsby knew that if the authorities got the scalp of one local bigwig, they’d probably lose interest in chasing up any more. For a while, anyway.’
‘That wasn’t how we saw it,’ Marie protested. ‘Everyone was talking about Boyle as the first step to prising open Kerridge’s organisation.’
‘I’m sure they were. I’m sure that’s how Welsby positioned it. But you know how these things are. What the Chief Constable’s looking for is a good news story he can sell to the local media, How we snared local crime lord. The thing about Boyle was that, in truth, he wasn’t much more than Kerridge’s muscle. A tough guy, but not much up top. Kerridge kept him as part of his inner circle, even designated him as his deputy, because he knew that Boyle wasn’t much of a threat. I suspect that Kerridge kept him well away from the serious stuff, and Boyle hadn’t the brains to realise it. If Boyle had gone down, he’d have shot his mouth off all over the place, but he probably wouldn’t have taken anyone down with him, except a few other small-fry. Kerridge would’ve made sure of that.’
Marie took a few moments to digest this. She’d assumed that Boyle had a higher status than Brennan was suggesting, but then they’d all been indoctrinated in Keith Welsby’s skewed view of the world. ‘So why would Salter have thrown his lot in with Boyle – if that’s what he’s done. Salter’s a lot of things, but he’s not dumb.’
‘They don’t come much smarter. That’s what intrigued me. I thought it might be interesting to find out more about Salter and Boyle.’
‘So this is a great personal crusade, is it?’ she asked. ‘What were you hoping? That you could expose Salter and resurrect your own reputation?’
‘Hardly. I may not have Salter’s intellect, but I’m not stupid enough to think that I’d be thanked for exposing yet another popular hero. No, like I say, mainly curiosity.’ He allowed himself a small laugh. ‘When I was a kid, I was the one who went poking about under stones, just to see what might crawl out.’
‘And what crawls out has a tendency to bite you. So that was why you were pumping me about Boyle when we first met?’
‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘I’d got the impression from everyone I’d spoken to that you were seen as pretty straight–’
‘Well, gee, thanks,’ she said. ‘I should treat that as a compliment.’
‘It’s intended to be one,’ he said. ‘You’ve a good reputation out there. And you were much more straight with me than I expected.’
‘That just shows how dumb I am,’ she said. ‘Pity you weren’t as straight with me.’
‘I haven’t kept any great secrets back from you. And – to be honest – I wasn’t sure how far I could trust even you. You were very open with me when we met. But that might have been another of Salter’s games. You acting indiscreet to get me to shoot my mouth off.’
Marie recalled that she’d had similar fears about Brennan. Jesus, this was how it was dealing with Salter. He generated an air of mistrust wherever he went. Everyone was so busy suspecting everyone else that Salter could sail serenely through the middle of it. ‘So what have you been holding back?’
‘I started snooping around right from the start. That was why I wanted to meet you, to see if I could identify some leads, some way of digging whatever dirt there was on Salter.’
‘I wasn’t much help in that regard.’
‘Salter covers his tracks very well. Part of this was about covering my own backside. I didn’t know why Salter had invited me on to his team. He gave me a lot of guff about being a good detective, putting the past behind me, all that crap. But I never really bought it. I thought he was setting me up to fail. There I was, reputation already half in tatters, trying to build an evidential case against Boyle. Half the evidence in the files was as thin as cheap bog paper. Much of the other half looked dodgy. Some of it potentially con-cocted stuff that would dissolve under the scrutiny of a half-decent defence council. I thought the idea was that I’d do my best to pull this stuff together, submit it to the CPS, and they’d laugh in my face. Salter would shift the blame on to me, and the case against Boyle would be quietly dropped. If that’s what he wanted, I was the perfect fall guy.’
‘Salter told me you’d been sifting through the evidence. Discarding stuff.’
‘That was just me trying to do my job properly. Weed out the crap and see what we had left. Which wasn’t much. But while I was doing that, I was trying to find out whatever I could about Salter. Trying to get some purchase on him. I was digging into the Agency’s computer files, pulling up anything there was.’ There was a pause. ‘That’s where it gets tricky. I went further than I should have. Persuaded someone in HQ to help me, and I got hold of a couple of passwords. Got access to some more confidential files–’
‘Jesus, Jack. Not a smart thing to do, no matter how good your intentions. Apart from anything else, the way I understand, you leave your fingerprints all over the system whenever you look at anything.’
‘I was hoping to leave someone else’s fingerprints,’ Brennan said. ‘But I’m no expert. Anyway, Salter sussed that I was dabbling in areas I shouldn’t have been.’
‘Have you been told that? I mean, is it part of the case against you?’
‘It’s worse than that,’ he said. ‘After a while, Salter must have worked out what I was doing and when. From what’s been said to me, it looks as if he must have entered the system shortly after I did each time, used the same access route and made changes to the files I’d looked at. Deleting and amending stuff. Important stuff about Boyle.’
‘But that’s crazy. The systems are designed to be secure. And our forensic IT people must be able to tell what was changed and when. They can probably show that the changes were ma
de from a different workstation from the one you used. It wouldn’t achieve anything.’
‘It’s about throwing suspicion in my direction. Salter would know there was no point in making those sorts of changes, but I wouldn’t necessarily. I’m new to the Agency. I’ve not worked with the IT experts. That’s obvious from the fact that I was stupid enough to access the material in the first place. I didn’t use my own workstation, but I had to use one in the Manchester office. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to make the link. And I don’t know how or where Salter made whatever changes he made. Maybe he did it while he was up here. In any case, they think they’ve got enough of a case to bring a misconduct hearing. And they’ve said it might go further than that.’
‘Shit. But, even so, most of that’s circumstantial. They can’t prove it was you that made the changes.’
‘They don’t need to. Not for the misconduct hearing, anyway. They just need to satisfy themselves that I’m guilty on the balance of probabilities. This would be construed as gross misconduct. Which means that dismissal’s the most likely outcome, even if they decide not to take it further.’
‘But, Jesus, why would he go this far?’
‘Because he’s a ruthless bastard, Marie. He can feel me sniffing too closely to whatever relationship he’s got with Boyle. So he ratchets his plan up a notch. Not just position me as the scapegoat who carries the can when the case fails, but actually paint me as a bent cop out to screw the case against Boyle. The case against Boyle won’t just be dropped, it’ll be buried so deep that it’ll take another decade to uncover it. And any suspicion that might have fallen on to Salter’s nearly deflected on to me. Like I say, deep, deep in the shit.’
‘I don’t know what to say, Jack. If there’s anything I can do . . .’
‘I think you’re better off keeping your distance. I bet Salter’s already warned you off, hasn’t he?’
