by J M Gregson
Lucy liked the old Lancashire form of address, and her mother knew it. There wasn’t much that these two women did not understand in each other. She said, ‘You shouldn’t be running about after me, Mum. It’s me who should be bringing you cups of tea in bed.’
‘If you can’t be spoiled at home, where can you be spoiled?’ said Agnes Blake. She considered sitting down on the edge of her daughter’s bed for an intimate little chat, then decided against it. You had to be careful how you approached young people nowadays, even when this one was your only and highly cherished child.
Lucy eased herself up and sat with her back against the headboard. She sipped her tea and said, ‘Thanks, anyway, Mum. I’m glad I was able to stay.’ She meant it; she enjoyed coming home to the old cottage at the base of Longridge Fell, even though she was very happy in her neat little purpose-built flat in Brunton. ‘You’re very snug in here, now that you’ve got the central heating.’
‘Aye. You were right about that.’ It was Lucy who had persuaded her to put a central-heating boiler and radiators into the cottage: Agnes had been the last one in the row to accept the improvement. She still kept coal for a fire in the bunker behind the cottage, but she lit it only on special occasions nowadays.
Most such occasions involved visits from Percy Peach, feared Detective Chief Inspector in the Brunton CID and recently retired star batsman in the Lancashire League. Agnes Blake was an unwavering cricket fan, and that had helped to cement her relationship with Denis Charles Scott Peach, the man named after the laughing cavalier of English cricket in the nineteen forties and fifties. Lucy had been full of trepidation when she had taken home a bald, divorced man who was ten years older than her, but her mother and Peach had hit it off immediately, and so thoroughly that she sometimes felt quite resentful about their relationship.
Lucy and Percy were engaged now, to her mother’s undisguised delight. They couldn’t broadcast it at the police station, since couples with a close relationship were not allowed to work together: it was only someone as out of touch as Chief Superintendent Tommy Bloody Tucker who would not have realized that Percy and his favourite detective sergeant were an item. Lucy enjoyed her work, and enjoyed working with the local legend Percy Peach even more. For these reasons, she favoured a long engagement.
Her mother had other ideas. She was nearly seventy, and it was time she had grandchildren. Surely her Lucy could see the logic of that? She watched her daughter attacking the breakfast cereals, set a rack of toast in front of her and said, ‘It was good to have you here for your day off, love. It’s a shame you have to rush back into danger this morning.’
‘No more danger than crossing the road, Mum. Think how worried you’d be if I’d ever made it as an air hostess, flying all over the world.’ She harked back to when she had been thirteen and had wanted like every other girl in her class to become a stewardess with British Airways. Mums liked you to hark back. It was a useful diversionary tactic; very often, they took up your memories and threw in their own recollections of the days when their children had been young and foolish.
The tactic didn’t work this time. Her mother banged the teapot on the table and said, ‘Have you fixed a date for the wedding yet?’
Lucy suddenly found the back of the cornflakes packet of surpassing interest. ‘I told you, Mum. We’re far too busy to think about that at the moment.’
‘And is that what Percy thinks, our Lucy?’
‘Yes. We haven’t even discussed a date yet. I’m sure he’s no more anxious to rush into anything than I am.’
‘They’ll be asking me at work, you know.’ Agnes still worked for a few hours each week at the small local supermarket, despite her advancing years.
‘You shouldn’t be discussing our business with your friends at work. I told you we didn’t want it broadcast.’ Even as she spoke, Lucy realized how unfair that was. The doings of Detective Sergeant Lucy Blake filled her mother’s life, and she loved to tell her friends and neighbours of the latest developments. You surely couldn’t begrudge that to a widow who lived on her own. But Lucy Blake was on the back foot and she knew it. She said grudgingly, ‘Perhaps we’ll get round to thinking about it, when the summer comes.’
‘The SUMMER!’ Agnes sounded as if her daughter had uttered the foulest of obscenities over her breakfast table.
Lucy pushed her plate aside, snatched up her mug of tea, and said, ‘I really must be off, Mum. I have to be in the station by half-past eight. Find out everything that’s been going on on my day off, you see.’ She disappeared up the narrow stairs and shut the bathroom door.
Her mother was neither diverted nor mollified. ‘I’ll have to speak to Percy!’ she called up the stairs. ‘I expect I’ll get more sense out of him. I usually do.’
DS Lucy Blake drove away from the village with that threat still ringing in her ears. An alliance between the formidable Percy Peach and her mother had already been more than she could cope with on several occasions. She told herself that she must be firm, that the considerations of her career must come first.
Before the day was out, she was having harsh words with DCI Peach, over an entirely different matter.
At noon on this bright spring day, Jack Clark felt unnaturally exposed.
He had become a creature of the night since he had gone undercover, and he had grown used to having the cloak of darkness over most of his activities. Now not only were the days getting longer, but he had been summoned for the first time to meet his supplier in broad daylight.
He looked anxiously behind him as he approached the apparently deserted warehouse, first over one shoulder and then over the other. The street was empty. It was cold still, despite the sun; he was glad of the thick vest he wore beneath his ragged and filthy outer garments. He moved towards the high wooden doors in the rapid, shuffling gait which had now become part of his persona. He remembered hearing some actor say that getting the walk was the first part of any character you assumed. Jack Clark could scarcely now remember that he had walked in any other way.
He stood and looked at the high wooden doors, at the spot where heavy lorries had once moved in and out of the loading bays under huge bales of cotton. Then he raised his eyes from the cobbled yard to the windowless brick walls, which stretched like high cliffs above him towards the clear blue of the March sky. The place looked entirely deserted, but he knew that there was life inside it.
Sure enough, a small wooden door to the right of the padlocked ones opened at that moment. No one beckoned to him, but he forced his unwilling legs towards the dark oblong of the doorway and slipped into the icy interior of the building. There were skylights in the roof, but that seemed impossibly far above him. After the brightness of the day outside, the overwhelming sensations here were of cold, dampness and dark.
He caught a movement, twenty yards away to his right, and a voice he could not identify said simply, ‘This way.’
He did not look at the man; menials were not important people. He took the way that was indicated to him, moved through an open door, heard the unwelcome sound of it being shut firmly behind him. He was firmly trapped, if that was what these people were about.
There was a single lamp on the table in what must years ago have been a busy office. It was the sort of lamp students use for study, with a flexible stand which allowed you to direct maximum light to the book were reading or the notes you were making. It was directed towards him, turned slightly upwards, so that it shone full into his unshaven face as he stood before the table. The voice from the man who sat in the gloom on the other side of the table said, ‘We’ve been watching you, Clark.’
Jack’s heart lurched. Was he about to be exposed? Was this man about to tell him how pathetically inadequate his attempts at deception had been, before he felt the barrel of a gun at his temple as his last sensation upon this earth? He sensed that it was better to say nothing than to offer any proof of his assumed identity. He stood very still, nodding his head as if he took the man’s statement as appro
val. He could see his white breath wreathing away from the harsh and brilliant light into the darkness; he wondered if the man could see the unevenness of his breathing from the patterns of this vapour.
‘You’ve done well. So far.’ He caught the contempt in the last two words, understood in that moment that contempt was habitual to this man, a means of asserting his position against those below him in the chain. Jack could see a little of him now, in the vestigial light which fell away from the lamp to the other side of the table. The man was sitting, enjoying the feeling of relaxed power his pose gave him against the frightened man on the other side of the table. He wore a dark anorak, which at this moment seemed too big for him. The only visible part of him was his face, and that was heavily shaded by the hood of his anorak.
Nevertheless, Jack recognized him. He had seen him only once before, but he would remember his name, given time. He did not trouble himself with that name now. He had long since trained himself to give absolute concentration to his own behaviour in situations like this, where any false move could be fatal. He measured the impact of each monosyllable before he said, ‘I’m glad you think so. That I’ve done well, I mean.’
‘So far.’ The man enjoyed repeating his caveat. ‘You’ve shifted what we’ve given to you, without using too much of it yourself. Junkies are no good to us, you know.’
‘No, I know that.’ Jack was tuning in to the rhythm of this. His part was to be craven, to pander to the prejudices of this man who thought he was so much cleverer than he actually was. Jack knew that this was why he had volunteered for this crazy assignment: to put animals like this behind bars. That unexpected thought gave him a lift, but also made him cautious. If he gave any hint of excitement now, he would be sounding the wrong note.
The voice from the gloom below him said, ‘We’ve decided you’re capable of a bigger round. That you’re capable of shifting more.’
‘Good.’ He didn’t trust himself with any more words: he was afraid of overplaying his Uriah Heep mode.
The man studied him for ten, fifteen, twenty seconds, which seemed to Jack to stretch into minutes, enjoying keeping the abject figure standing in the glare of the lamp while he sat in comfortable dimness on the other side of the table. ‘If you do well in what we give you, you’ll make money. The sky’s the limit, Jack Clark. If you shift what you’re given and please the big men, you might even be able to afford to shave and get out of that shithouse!’ He leant back on his chair and allowed himself a little snort of amusement at his own humour. Then, as Jack began his mutter of thanks, he snarled, ‘You’ll be at the meeting tomorrow night. Someone will take you there. Now fuck off!’
Jack Clark scurried like a frightened mongrel from the room, from that baleful presence, from the warehouse, out into the blessed and dazzling open air. That was the conduct he knew was expected of him.
As he set off back towards the squat, he muttered to himself, ‘I’ll have you, Banham. Your days are numbered, mate.’
It seemed to him a good omen that the man’s name had come back to him.
‘Good day out in the country?’ Percy Peach was at his most innocent.
Lucy Blake was still wondering how to play this. ‘Not bad. I like my colleagues, but it’s good to be somewhere with not a policeman in sight, occasionally.’
‘Indeed. Even when your Chief Inspector thinks that the sun shines out of your dear little arse. Well, your substantial and beautifully rounded arse, to be strictly accurate, as all CID officers should train themselves to be.’ Percy peered round his desk in an attempt to memorize the details of that particular section of his sergeant’s anatomy, but as she was sitting firmly upon it, it was distressingly invisible.
‘And what’s been going on here in my absence?’ Give the man the opportunity to confess whenever possible, she thought. That was one of Percy’s own maxims.
If he detected any menace in her tone, he gave no sign of it. ‘And how’s my favourite mother-in-law?’ Percy gave her his widest and most innocent beam.
‘She’s not your mother-in-law yet. And perhaps never likely to be, at this rate.’
‘At what rate?’ Percy contrived a look which combined bewilderment with hurt, an expression rarely if ever witnessed by the criminal fraternity of Brunton.
Lucy Blake realized that she would have to tackle this head-on. ‘There’s a big job on tomorrow.’
Peach nodded, allowing a slight frown to trouble his noble brow. ‘Confidential, that’s supposed to be.’ But he knew the prospect of a major criminal snatch would have drifted through the section as rapidly as wind-blown smoke; that didn’t mean anyone would have dared to breathe a word of it outside the station.
‘Come off it, Percy. You know this is a big one.’
‘Apparently it is, yes. But it hasn’t been confirmed yet. And it’s no use pressing me for details. I know not the time nor the place, my pretty flame-haired temptress.’
‘It’s not flame, it’s chestnut. And you’re trying to divert me with your compliments. You don’t usually get this daft at work.’
‘You’re right.’ Percy affected to look apprehensively at the door of his office, as if he feared hidden listeners. ‘You’re my Delilah, you are, threatening to undermine my position of trust.’
‘You’ve already lost your hair. And I don’t see you bringing the temple of Chief Superintendent Tucker crashing about our ears.’
Percy contemplated that happy vision for a moment, his face suffused with a dreamy bliss. Then he shook his head and his shoulders in turn, as if to dismiss this Utopia from his mind. ‘If it comes off, we should have a couple of the major drug barons in our cells by tomorrow night. I can’t tell you any more than that, because as of this minute I don’t know any more myself, Detective Sergeant Blake.’
‘You’ve been getting your team ready for this operation.’
‘I’ve had an unofficial word with one or two of the boys, yes. They need to be aware that they might not be home for their evening meal tomorrow. I’m always the soul of consideration in these things, as you know.’
‘Several of the boys, in fact. And there’s one female detective sergeant who so far hasn’t heard a word about this. I’m giving you the opportunity to remedy that omission, DCI Peach.’
Percy had known from the start that this was why she was in his office, though he had enjoyed exercising his rarely used diversionary skills in the elaborate verbal minuet which had delayed it. He said stiffly, ‘I have to deploy my resources as I see fit. Chief Superintendent Tucker has directed me to do so.’
‘And you always give the utmost attention to Tommy Bloody Tucker’s directives.’
‘Occasionally even the greatest idiots must be right. It’s called the George Bush Law of Averages.’
Lucy decided that only directness would serve her now. ‘I want to be on that team tomorrow night.’
Percy Peach decided, on the other hand, that this was a moment for an uncharacteristic retreat into officialese. ‘It’s possible that when I know more I shall be able to reconsider the matter.’
‘You don’t intend to use me tomorrow night, do you?’
Percy sighed. ‘No, I don’t. Lucy, this is one of those occasions when I want hard, reliable men around me.’
‘But not hard, reliable women.’
Percy eyed her delicious curves, but decided that this was not a moment to comment upon her lack of hardness. ‘We’ve already got the Armed Response Unit on standby. There’ll likely be bullets flying about, tomorrow night.’
Lucy Blake’s lips set into the thin, determined line he hadn’t seen since the early days of their relationship. ‘You’re taking Gordon Pickering and Clyde Northcott and Brendan Murphy in there. Three DCs: all three of them together haven’t got the experience that I have.’
‘Three men who can handle themselves when the fists are flying. Each of them stronger than you, even when you’re fired up.’
‘Like now, you mean? You’re refusing to take me on an important as
signment, just because I’m a woman.’
‘And there are places where I’d take you and not them. Places I do take you, all the time. All right, I’m saying this isn’t the place for a woman. I’m paid to use my judgement, amongst other things.’
‘You’re saying that a woman wouldn’t be reliable like the men, in times of danger.’
‘She might. But the men wouldn’t be reliable if I had a woman like you around. They’d be watching out for you, when I want them to watch their own backs. Not to mention mine.’
She recognized a certain logic in this, though she wasn’t going to admit it to Percy. Men were sentimental creatures, at the best of times. Despite their normal tendencies for lust and irresponsibility, they were prone to outbursts of chivalry at the most inopportune moments. Lucy Blake was driven to an irritated, ‘This isn’t equality, you know.’
‘I have to go in there with the best team I can muster. I have to back my own judgement about the selection of that team. I’m considering my own safety, as well as that of everyone else involved in this.’
‘And of course it wouldn’t be the fact that you have a personal relationship with me that makes you want to make sure that I’m not in any danger.’
‘Of course it wouldn’t. You wouldn’t be going in there tomorrow even if you were the ugliest and most objectionable female I can think of. Even if you were Barbara Tucker, for instance.’ He threw in Tucker’s Brünnhilde-like wife in an attempt to lower the tension. ‘In fact especially not if it was Barbara Tucker. She’d present far too big a target.’
Lucy felt the corners of her mouth trying to crinkle. She knew now that she wasn’t going to win this one. She repeated desperately, ‘This isn’t equality, and you know it.’
‘You can always appeal to higher authority, if you don’t approve of my decision.’
‘To Tommy Bloody Tucker? He thinks women are only good for making tea and cleaning offices. He wouldn’t put a woman within a mile of this action.’
‘I told you, the George Bush Law of Averages. Even our much derided leader has to be right sometimes.’
