Trowchester Blues

by Alex Beecroft

  Egmont got up and took his crumpled suit and dandelion hair over to the window. “First of all, good job on getting that sick bastard. He thinks he’s walking free from this, but he’s not. If there ever was an open-and-shut case, this would be it.”

  “Yes, sir.” May wished he could believe it. Half of him still did. Under all the despair, part of him still believed in justice. Even in the criminal justice system. It was creaky and slow and weighted towards the criminal, but it wasn’t systemically corrupt.

  It didn’t have to be, though. “I don’t know. He seemed pretty sure. Lots of money, best lawyer, one bad judge. What’re the chances?”

  “That’s not our concern.” Egmont looked out over the scrubby miniature roses in their faded window box to the rooftops of his metropolis. “But it’s hard to coerce a whole jury, and if he tries, we’ll charge him with that too.” He took in a long breath. “That’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

  In the light from the window he had all but disappeared: only a pair of dark trousers and a belt visible against the light; everything else a haze of white against a white sky. May’s imagination tasered him with the memory of a man literally severed at the waist. He’d seen one once, as a new constable: a man who had committed suicide by jumping in front of an underground train; his lower half intact, his upper half smeared along the train tracks for three miles.

  He closed his eyes in an attempt to force the picture back into the dark, but all the graves were opening now, and his head was full of horrors he couldn’t even say he’d imagined.

  “No, sir. I assaulted a prisoner. In . . . in my defence, sir, he deserved it.”

  Egmont turned around, but it didn’t do much to make him more visible. He was just a condemning voice from the corner, disembodied, like a judgement handed down by God. “He deserves hanging, and not the long-drop kind either. But maybe you can comfort yourself with the thought of what he’s going to get when he’s banged up with the decent cons.”

  He sighed, drifting back to his desk, suddenly visible again, a man made out of paper and regrets. “But you, May. I can’t have you going round assaulting my suspects. I don’t give a shit what he deserves. I deserve not to have my station under investigation for police brutality. Do you hear me? I need you to get yourself together and be absolutely squeaky clean from now on, or I will not go to the wall for you. As it is, I’m tempted to let you face this one on your own. The man was tied hand and foot, for God’s sake. You didn’t even have the excuse of an affray.”

  May took his hands out from under his legs and tipped his face into them. How the hell had it come to this? He’d known he wanted to be a policeman from the age of five. He’d spent his school life getting between the bullies and their prey. He could no more walk away from someone else’s danger than he could leave his own arm behind, but . . .

  But he was starting to think he couldn’t do it anymore. If he had to walk into another room with another dead girl in it, he couldn’t guarantee that anyone would be able to hold him back again. He wanted it all to stop so badly, he’d started fantasising about choking the next rapist with his bare hands, and if he ever met Watkins again . . . He could almost feel the man’s neck under his fingers, the cartilage cracking under his thumbs.

  “Are you losing it, May? Is that what’s going on?”

  It wasn’t such a hard question to answer after all. “Yes, sir. I think so. I think maybe I should resign before you have to throw me out.”

  “You can’t promise me it will never happen again?”

  “No, sir. I’m fairly sure it will.”

  Egmont sighed. May could feel the pale gaze on the top of his bent head. Then the sergeant sat down and hunted in his desk before drawing out the appropriate form. “I understand your father just died?”

  That was an unexpected stab. Smith must have mentioned it. May hadn’t taken time off for the funeral, just arranged it over the phone, and hoped the old bastard had at least one mourner, but it damn sure wasn’t going to be him. “Yes, sir.”

  Another sigh and some warmth in the wintery old voice. “Well, I think I can sell this to the powers that be as an incident brought on by grief. With that and your resignation, we should be able to put it to bed in such a way that your pension is secure and your record is clean.”

  “Yes, sir.” The prospect of being dishonourably dismissed hadn’t felt real until he narrowly avoided it. Grief and horror overwhelmed him again at the reprieve. “Could I . . . Could I come back? If I get this under control—some kind of anger-management thing—could I be reinstated?”

  It was like asking, If I sort myself out, could I be Michael May again? The job was so integral to who he was.

  But Egmont shook his head. “Maybe you could reapply, start again on the beat in some little peaceful station out in the sticks, but no one’s going to want you like this, Michael. Just be glad that you got out before you fucked it up any worse.”

  “I can’t believe it.” Jenny tucked the ends of her scarf back into her green greatcoat and glanced away. Her mouth set hard and her chin crumpled a little in an effort not to cry. Out of solidarity, May looked in the opposite direction, over the lawns and trees of St. James’s Park to where the fountains were playing in the Serpentine.

  October’s wet cold had taken a brief break in favour of the kind of autumnal weather you saw on postcards. The sky was clear deep blue, the ashes and oaks of the park had turned a dozen shades of burnt umber and orange and gold. Blown leaves whispered down the paths and the water in the fountains glittered like diamonds.

  He watched London’s bundled-up passersby hurry along and saw murderers and their victims as though the day had been rolling in spilled blood.

  “I shouldn’t have insisted you went in,” Jenny was saying, her voice under control now. He looked back, and her face was smooth again, her eyes only a little brilliant, and that could pass for the effect of the wind. “I could tell something was wrong. I shouldn’t have—”

  “It was going to come out sooner or later,” he said, nudging a fallen conker with the toe of his shoe. It reminded him of childhood’s small pleasures, such as they were. At least his school days were all behind him. He’d have to go a long way before his life got that bad again.

  “But you were holding it together until then, and I—”

  The wind plucked the ends of her scarf out of her coat. A silvery thing that looked soft. She’d tied it in some kind of elaborate knot, and he hadn’t even teased her for it—that was how bad things had got.

  “You know—” he started them walking again, over towards Paddington and Khan’s Indian restaurant, where they traditionally ate when everything was shit and they needed to be reminded that something was worth carrying on for “—I’m not sure I’ve been normal for months.”

  Jenny laughed. “You’ve never been normal, May. It’s what I like about you. I ask myself every morning, ‘What kind of freak show are we going to get today?’ It keeps things interesting.”

  The wind tussled with her hair, unravelling it from its braid. It never stayed as sharp as she wished. Two hours into the day she always ended up looking like she’d rammed it into a hedge full of teasels. Then she would bitch about it and spend twenty minutes in the toilets redoing it. He once suggested shaving it all off. She actually had the kind of strong-boned face that would look good under a buzz cut. But she’d just called him a wanker and laughed.

  And now she isn’t your partner anymore. Like taking hold of an electric fence, the thought tensed all his muscles to the point of pain, but he couldn’t let it go. He stopped and put his head in his hands. After a while, she took his elbow and tugged, and they walked on with her leading him, like a plough boy with his horse.

  “But yes,” she conceded, “you haven’t been quite the life and soul of the party you normally are. I’ve missed the deadpan snarking. What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on!”

  He managed the glimmer o
f a smile at her scepticism as they skirted the fountains and the little Victorian glasshouse that looked in the long rays of the setting sun as though it were made out of light.

  “I don’t.”

  A final screen of trees and they stepped out onto Bayswater Road, glowered over by monumental hotels. Had to run full pelt over one carriageway, then stand on the white line for ten minutes waiting for the chance to get across the second. Then they disappeared into the warren of narrow streets lined with white-terraced houses just like the one belonging to Watkins.

  Queensway Tube station fell behind them in silence, then Bayswater.

  “I just stopped being able to switch it off,” he volunteered finally as they proceeded past gardens full of chained-up bikes. Chained like her. A squat little discoloured church broke up the neoclassical façades with unexpected Gothic, and he thought about pederastic priests and the people behind them in the shadows whom he could never take on and win. It was like being a child forever in a house of fear, forever powerless to make the misery stop.

  “You know? We get one guy and there’s always another. There’s always someone who’ll protect the criminals and the rich, and there’s an unending supply of victims, and nothing we can do to dismantle the whole . . . the whole fucking structure that props it up.”

  She flinched, and he wished he hadn’t said anything. This whole talking-about-your-feelings lark was fine when your feelings were fit to be seen, but it just spread the shit around when they weren’t.

  “We,” Jenny said. “We are the structure that stands against all of that, Michael. You, me, the unit, the CID, all the button mob on the beat. We’re here to stop it. And we did, today. We stopped him.”

  “Too late for Stacey, though.” May’s turn to hide his face so she wouldn’t see him fight off tears. He fixed his gaze on black-painted railings rather than see wheelie bins just like the ones under which he’d lain wondering if he was going to be shot. He wouldn’t have to imagine the light flooding in from the sash windows they passed, that were the same ubiquitous pattern as the ones in the house where he’d found that little corpse. “I can’t look at these streets and not think of going down into every basement, finding it flooded with blood. The whole fucking city’s just floating on blood.”

  Jenny took his elbow again, but she was quiet until they turned onto Westbourne Grove. The shopping centre’s cupola was lit up magenta pink against London’s orange night sky. Golden palm trees outside Khan’s gleamed with familiar welcome.

  “Maybe this is a good thing, then,” she said gently. “I don’t want you to go, but it sounds like you really need to get away.”

  Inside, Tahir showed them to their usual table, but maybe he recognised when a man was so bowed with shame he could barely stand up, because he forwent his usual banter in favour of turning up with two whiskeys and a basket of bread, then leaving them so May could pull himself together in peace.

  What kind of a man was he, that he could believe in this so much and still find himself unable to do it? Maybe his father had been right all along; he was useless and just too stupid to realise it until now. He was a mummy’s boy, a cringing little crybaby who would never amount to anything. Well, that had turned out to be true, hadn’t it? And perhaps he could live with that part, if only the anger would go away, the terrible werewolf anger that was his father’s true legacy. Could he be turning into the bastard? This explosion of fury, could it be some kind of late-onset psychosis that would eat him out from within, leave him bitter and cruel, delighted by his loved ones’ fear? He’d rather slit his wrists right now than let that happen.

  He sipped the drink, the burn and buzz setting a thin film of gold between him and the darkness. The bread seemed to solidify him, and he remembered he had not eaten today, too rushed for breakfast, too broken for lunch.

  Sighing, he looked up into Smith’s smile as she nodded Tahir back over and ordered for him. There was a finality in her gaze he didn’t want to think about. “So what are you going to do now?”

  May got the pieces of himself together enough to smile up at Tahir. Another person he was going to miss, another regret. They could have got closer if he’d taken the time.

  “Is it a funeral?” Tahir asked and put his hand down tentatively on May’s shoulder. He was a beautiful guy, with his black curling hair and his strong brows and eyes dark as polished obsidian. He’d made a couple of passes at May since his divorce, which May had rebuffed because the force was old-fashioned about queers and he was married to his work.

  Wrong choices everywhere. He reached up and covered Tahir’s long hand with his own squarer paw. Too beautiful a boy for a forty-year-old failure like him anyway. The guy deserved better. “Kind of,” he said, distracted and regretful at the way Tahir’s fingers tightened on the sore muscles. “Funeral for my career. I’m leaving the force, leaving London.” He indicated a spare seat. “You want to sit down?”

  “You wait until now to ask me?” Tahir took his hand back. There was a brief moment of indecision, and then May could practically see him make the decision to disengage. He was very gentle about it, though. “But I mustn’t.” He nodded at the rest of the room, where the tables had begun to fill up. “My father will have my guts if I sit and chat during the dinner rush.”

  He patted May’s shoulder again, maybe consolingly, certainly in farewell. “We should have seized the day sooner. But I hope it goes well, your new life.”

  May watched him leave with the sense that everything was being cut away. A new life, eh? But he didn’t want to have to let go of the old.

  “So.” Jenny applied herself to tearing her naan into orderly rectangles, eating first the curved pieces around the edges that disrupted its neat lines. For the first time that day, there was something resembling her normal liveliness in her eyes. “You didn’t shut him down this time. That’s interesting.”

  May relaxed minutely. If she was teasing him, then one thing at least was still all right. “Just leave it.”

  “I’m having new thoughts about why your wife left you.” She shuffled to one side to let Tahir put down rice, balti, and a bottle of Tiger beer.

  “Yeah, bringing that up is guaranteed to raise my mood.” May smiled back, because oddly enough it was true. The shit in his life was hard enough without having to go home to arguments and recriminations and guilt. At least he was alone now, where he could drink himself into a stupor and pass out on the couch with no one there to tell him how pathetic he was.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, and partitioned her food into two careful camps, curry on one side of the plate, rice the other, a perfect straight line where they touched. “You know, I always thought she was a terrible bitch. But it can’t have been much fun being some dour copper’s full-time beard.”

  He wasn’t sure how they’d got to this of all subjects. He’d been so careful on the job, never a one-night stand, never a lingering glance, just “unhappily married straight guy” leading to “divorced and bitter.” It wasn’t even that he expected her to be biphobic, just that the days when it wasn’t safe for people to know he was bi were not exactly long ago. “You knew?”

  She waved a naan soldier at him in triumph. “Not until right then. You walked straight into that one.” She had relaxed enough to slump against the back of her seat, cross her legs, and rest her cowboy-booted foot against the pillar of the table. He recognised the pose. Tea-break time. Watercooler moment. Shooting the shit.

  “Seriously. I can see why you haven’t told anyone before, but—like Tahir says—you have a new life now. You could find someone, settle down. You know? Actually have a chance to be happy. It could be great. Anyone in mind?”

  “Are you joking? In my state? What if they got on my wick and I punched them? I’m not . . . really not fit to be with myself at the moment, let alone someone else.”

  “You wouldn’t do that.” She nudged the balti pan over to his side of the table so that he could eat the quarter of it that she didn’t have spac
e for. “I know you. You’re a lamb in wolf’s clothing—”

  “But I don’t trust myself.”

  “No.” Her smile turned bitter again. “No, and I guess you don’t want to have to deal with someone else until you at least know where you stand with yourself. Fine, then. No boyfriend just yet. But what are you going to do?”

  He’d been trying to avoid this realisation from the moment he’d cleared out his desk, but hey, that was cowardly too. He should face the facts as they were. Not facing them would not make them go away.

  “My dad left me the house.” A little clench of anxiety, a pain in his chest like a stomach ulcer. “From all accounts it’s a tip.” Brown patterned wallpaper. Brown curtains with great cream-coloured roses on them like moonlight seen through the slats of a trap. “But it’s a waterfront property. There’s a boatyard next door and a narrowboat docked at the end of the garden. I’m going to go there . . .”

  Ramming his head back between the bars.

  He’s not actually there anymore. And even if he was, it’s been a long time since he could hurt you.

  “And I’m going to do it up, see if I can sell it for a profit, buy something else with the money, do the same again. You know? I like making stuff with my hands.”

  “You’re good at it too,” she agreed. “Those bookshelves you put in for me? They. Are. Awesome. All my friends think they’re some kind of bespoke designer ware, with that curve. And yes. It’ll do you good to repair things, make ugly stuff beautiful. Come to terms with the past. All that jazz.”

  He had the sneaking suspicion that at some point she had stopped talking about shelves and segued seamlessly into suggesting that he could make some peace with his memories, with the old bastard and the place where he grew up. That seemed needlessly optimistic, but he was not going to tell her so now that they’d both crawled their way out of the morass of despair and grief. It was a fake hope, but a fake hope was better than none.