Up in Flames

by Evans, Geraldine

  Casey nodded, aware that with the super in this mood, it was pointless to try to reason with him, he let much of the predictable politically correct platitudes wash over him. But as he took in the first mixed metaphor and briefly wondered whether the superintendent expected him to be shod in kid gloves during any conversation about the deaths with one of the ethnic community, other, more pressing questions occurred to him. They would earn him no brownie points, but he voiced them anyway. ‘And what if, during the course of this investigation, it becomes clear that a member of the ethnic community – even a member of the victims’ own family – killed them?’ The tiniest tinge of irony coloured Casey’s voice as he added, ‘I presume charging them will be permitted?’

  Superintendent Brown-Smith shot him a venomous look. Casey swallowed a sigh, aware he had spoken the unspeakable. It was clear the prospect of meting out justice in such an eventuality appalled the superintendent. Determinedly on the way up the career ladder these murders really were the case from hell for the superintendent. As the super’s wall clock — a much-cherished family heirloom — loudly ticked away the seconds, Casey became convinced that should such an unwelcome conclusion become unavoidable, he was about to be urged to stage a discreet cover-up.

  But even Superintendent Brown-Smith in full pursuit of the politically correct and expedient wouldn’t be that foolhardy. Although he got himself under control, his voice was harsh from the realisation that here was his own annus horribilis. ‘Obviously, if you reach such a point that no other conclusion is possible I shall require you to confer with me first, before you make any arrests. I want no precipitate action. In fact, I shall want you to give me a full briefing at the end of each day. Less than one hundred per cent certainty of guilt in this case is not an option.’

  Casey couldn’t help but wonder if the superintendent would apply the same demanding criteria should white arsonists turn out to be the culprits. A tic started up at the corner of the superintendent’s left eye as he added. ‘Jobs could be on the line here, Casey.’

  Casey’s stomach essayed a tortured spasmodic accompaniment to Superintendent Brown-Smith’s tic, as if in acknowledgement that he was probably being lined up to be the fall guy if—- when — such a scapegoat should be required.

  ‘Obviously, you’ll need a team high on diplomacy and understanding of racial sensitivities — you have been on a recent racial awareness course, haven’t you Casey?’

  ‘Last month, sir.’

  ‘Mmm.’ The superintendent frowned. ‘You usually work with Sergeant Catt, do you not?’

  Casey nodded. He suspected he could guess what was coming. Thomas Catt had been on two racial awareness courses. Casey had reason to suspect that had only been because ThomCatt had not shown a sufficient grasp of the importance of ethnic sensitivities the first time round, something which the superintendent seemed only too aware of as he went on.

  ‘I think, in the circumstances, owing to the various delicate aspects inherent in this investigation, I would prefer that Sergeant Catt worked on something else. Catt can be a little tactless, can he not?’

  Casey, already required to conduct the investigation with both — gloved — hands tied behind his back, dug his heels in at this. He was damned if he was going to be deprived of his right hand man along with everything else. Thomas Catt might be a sad loss to the corps diplomatique and his PC sensitivities might still be a bit suspect, but he was a first rate policeman. Besides, Casey was used to him. The last thing he needed was to have one of the super’s pet blue-eyed fast-track boys foisted on him, dogging his heels and reporting his every utterance back. This case was going to be difficult enough. It would be intolerable with a spy in the camp and no confidant with whom he could speak freely.

  For the moment, Casey didn’t interrupt as the superintendent expanded on the PC theme, further vilifying Gwyn Owen the local editor for good measure. At least it would get rid of some of his temper and might make him more reasonable.

  According to Superintendent Brown-Smith, Thomas Catt not only possessed a woeful lack of political correctness he was too independent-minded, too much his own person — a lamentable thing to be in the modern police service. In many ways, so was Casey, only he had taken care to keep his feelings to himself.

  Like Casey, Thomas Catt believed in justice, equal justice, for all. Their mutual, increasingly unfashionable and uncompromising honesty had bonded them into a solid team. With his children’s home background, Catt had a tendency to suspect everyone and trust no one, least of all the PC thought police. Like Casey, he wondered what was the point of trying to force others to a particular view. People had to come to realisation, to understanding, in their own time. The PC lobby didn’t seem to grasp that views openly expressed could be argued with, reasoned with and ultimately, made for a far healthier society. Telling Johnny — or Mohammed — he was barbaric, or racist or a woman-hater, didn’t make him less so; all it was likely to do was add a simmering resentment to the brew.

  Casey was not surprised to discover that Catt found it hard to trust even him. He wasn’t great at trusting others himself. He probably even shared some of Catt’s maverick qualities, though he believed he concealed then rather better. Casey’s youth had taught him many things, not least the necessity of developing his own survival techniques. Much like ThomCatt when he left the children’s home at the tender age of sixteen, he had been forced to learn self-sufficiency, self-reliance and responsibility. He had often found these hard-won qualities useful in dealing with Superintendent Brown-Smith.

  Their early experiences no doubt made both him and Catt less willing to swallow whole and unquestioned the politically correct cant that had flooded the police service in recent years. And now, as he sensed the super running out of both steam and the energy required to produce it, he firmly set out his requirements. ‘If I’m to continue to lead this case’—- he stressed the if , as if he was going to be allowed to give it up — ‘I insist on working with Catt. We work well together.’ Before the superintendent could voice a refusal, Casey added, ‘I’ll make sure he keeps in the background when I’m interviewing any of the Asian community. I’ll get him to take a vow of silence if necessary.’ Casey didn’t give Brown-Smith the opportunity to express his scepticism at this, but added what he believed the superintendent was waiting to hear. ‘I’ll also take full responsibility for him.’

  Brown-Smith sat back, gave Casey a narrow-eyed stare before he nodded. ‘Very well. Catt’s yours. You can also have WPC Singh for the duration of the case. You’ll need her language skills.’ The unspoken message that Casey had just put his head on a platter hung in the air between them. And as Superintendent Brown-Smith resumed his politically correct exhortations, Casey had ample time for reflection. Disillusionment with the job amongst the lower ranks had steadily increased in recent years and Casey was no exception. He had started seriously to count his savings and to wonder if he would be able to live on them while he found a less stressful job. Unfortunately, whether his arithmetic was off or his figures didn’t compute, his parents’ successive inroads into his savings meant he still had fifteen years remaining on the mortgage he had hoped to pay off early.

  Casey’s thoughts turned to the still-monologuing Brown-Smith — he’d heard it all before so the occasional nod was all that was required — and he reflected on how much Brown-Smith’s office mirrored the man. Like Brown-Smith himself, the office contained pairings of ordinary things joined together to make them look more important. Brown-Smith had pictures of himself in gown and mortarboard accepting his degree closely abutting pictures of him and his wife at a Palace garden party in happy juxtaposition with the Queen. This picture-pairing, directly behind the desk so you couldn’t fail to see it, had an entire wall to itself.

  The wall to Casey’s right held several, lesser pictures, of Brown-Smith handing out rosettes at his eldest daughter’s pony club gymkhana, alongside one of the him shaking the hand of a beaming Asian mayor.

  On the occasio
ns he had occupied the super’s visitor’s chair, Casey had found ample time during the monologues to ponder on why not one of the Graduation pictures featured a mother or father when it was known that Brown-Smith had parents and hadn’t sprung to life under the gooseberry bush in the garden of some liberal C of E vicar as Thomas Catt would have it. Strangely, the super’s parents weren’t in evidence in any of the other pictures either.

  Was it possible that, like himself, the superintendent suffered from unsuitable parents syndrome? It would certainly put another slant on the reason for his late adoption of the double-barrels, an adoption revealed by a close study of the framed graduation certificate with its single-barrel name. Maybe Brownjob — as Catt irreverently called their superior — had good reason to keep his parents decently buried.

  And although he didn’t encourage ThomCatt to ridicule their superior, with his own parents weighing heavily on his mind it occurred to Casey that he might just have found the answer to the Brown-Smith enigma. If the super’s name-change was not merely for show but done for wholly sensible reasons, they might have more in common than he had previously believed. The thought almost made him warm to the man.

  Superintendent Brown-Smith’s PC monologue finally came to an end. Casey dragged his gaze from the contemplation of the glassy, dust-free, picture gallery just as the super uttered his name and was at last allowed to escape.

  The first day of the investigation had been long and tiring. And when Casey finally arrived home, feeling bushed and frustrated by too many questions with as yet no answers and the pressures already beginning to build, he saw, as he approached his front door, that the day’s frustrations had scarcely begun.

  For, squatting on his doorstep, surrounded by assorted baggage, were his parents.

  Chapter Seven

  Casey wondered uneasily whether merely thinking about his parents had somehow spirited them here. His parents, unreconstructed old hippies who still refused to leave the 60s behind despite both being well into middle age, lived on a ramshackle communal smallholding where they had a subsistence, ‘Good Life’ existence. Every so often the community suffered a financial crisis and the inhabitants moved out to stay with various hippie friends. Inevitably, as they had aged, their collection of hippie friends and acquaintances with spare rooms had decreased and Casey had been called upon to pick up the slack. He had bailed his parents out financially a number of times. It saved him from having them as permanent lodgers.

  ‘Why didn’t you ring?’ and warn me, he added silently to himself, as he opened the front door to let them in.

  ‘No bread, man,’ his father laconically explained, being too idle to waste words.

  He didn’t need to add that Casey had, in any case, forbidden them to try making reverse charge calls to the station. All he needed was for it to get out that DCI Casey had a pair of degenerate, drug-taking old hippies for parents...

  ‘Hey, my uptight man, don’t you have a hug for your mama?’

  Casey turned. His mother still looked the same; still wore her kinky, now greying hair long and mostly plaited, which only increased its kinkiness. Today she wore an ankle-length Indian cheesecloth skirt instead of the sari or salwar kameez she mostly favoured since her Indian trips. Under the skirt peeked a pair of vermillion embroidered jootis.

  Casey smiled sheepishly. ‘Hi mum. It’s good to see you.’ The swift hug pressed her numerous beads painfully against his shirt-clad chest and he winced.

  His mother held him away from her and gazed at him, a suspicious twinkle in the green eyes that Casey had inherited. For all his mother’s hippie ideology, she was, unlike his father, sharp enough to appreciate that her son found his parents an embarrassment. His father, on the other hand, even if he were aware of his son’s feelings, would probably just shake his head, light another weed and say, ‘Don’t get heavy, man. Loosen up.’

  Casey’s father preferred the world and its problems, including those of his son, to waft past him on a drug-scented breeze. Casey put aside his anxieties, shook his father’s hand and clapped him on the shoulder. A mistake, as an odd smell drifted in Casey’s direction. He knew his father wasn’t much into washing and had got out of the habit of bathing or taking showers since the last time their water supply had been cut off. Anyway, he always insisted he preferred the purity of rainwater. Only he didn’t make much use of their stored rainwater either because ‘heating it up’s such a drag, man.’

  Casey wrinkled his nose and sniffed, but even this smell was rather ripe for it to emanate from his father’s body. It took no more than a second to trace the smell to his father’s shaggy Afghan coat. This 60s relic, obviously a recent second-hand purchase, was none-the-less worn with pride, in spite of stinking as if the dead animal it came from still inhabited the skin.

  His mother gave him a slow wink from kohl-encircled eyes. ‘Don’t worry, Willow Tree, honey, we won’t be cramping your style for long.’

  Casey brightened. It was not that he wasn’t glad to see them both, not really. They were his parents, after all. It was just that — for a policeman and a senior policeman at that — they were the wrong sort of parents. Much as he suspected Superintendent Brown-Smith’s were. And for ageing hippies, whose youth had resounded to chants against the ‘pigs’ he was the wrong sort of son.

  He ushered them inside, with a suggestion that they make themselves at home. But not too at home, he silently prayed, as he began to heave their luggage into his hallway.

  Cardboard boxes.

  He had rebelled, by conforming. After an early acceptance of their opt out and irresponsible lifestyle, he had, in his late teens, rejected it. He had been a source of parental disappointment ever since. As for his parents, they still felt the stigma of having a policeman for a son. It had been the pigs who had harassed them at Woodstock and the Isle of Wight and countless other festivals in their youth. For Casey, it created a guilt-trip. And while his brain knew that the guilt he felt in being a disappointment — even a shameful disappointment when his parents had to confess to their equally old, hippie friends that their only son was a pig — was ridiculous. But he felt guilty nonetheless.

  Baskets.

  Was that how Chandra had felt? he wondered. Her life, too, had made differing demands. Her family and her in-laws required her to conform to their traditional beliefs, while her experiences of growing up a young girl in England raised entirely different expectations. Like him, she must have been continually pushed and pulled in two opposing directions. For Chandra, death had brought the push/pull to an end. And if he wasn’t the son his parents would have wanted, Chandra, too, hadn’t turned out to be the daughter her parents -—or her in-laws — had wanted. She had too many opinions by all accounts, was too ‘spirited’ and westernised and had only agreed to her arranged marriage when she was at a low ebb, having done badly in her exams. The idea that she was not particularly bright brought home to her - deliberately? — by her parents.

  Assorted rucksacks.

  Her marriage, he suspected, had been unhappy. Her mother-in-law critical. He found it difficult to believe that in her situation she would have welcomed an early pregnancy. Casey wondered whether the pregnancy had been an unhappy accident. Certainly, it must have made her feel even more trapped. And then her husband had died. How had that made her feel? Guilty and responsible as her in-laws had told her she was? Or gloriously, unexpectedly free from the ties of a marriage she had never actually wanted? But her release from the bonds of marriage, rather than freeing her, had only brought even more pressure.

  Was that why her brother had put forward the possibility that Chandra might have killed herself and her baby? Or did the suggestion spring from a desire to turn their suspicions from other possibilities?

  God -they’d even brought their record collection. They must have crept out before the bailiffs arrived and cadged a lift from another of the departing commune. Casey just hoped they didn’t stink the place out with dope like last time.

  When he had fin
ally heaved all his parents’ possessions into the hall and shut the door, Willow Tree Casey went in search of his mother. He found her in his kitchen poking about in his store cupboard.

  ‘Hon. What kind of junk have you got in your larder?’ his mother asked in her pseudo Californian accent as she surveyed the ranks of tinned everything. ‘It’s all kinda unhealthy.’

  Casey restrained the impulse to point out the irony of his druggie mother commenting on the unhealthy junk he chose to put in his body. Instead, quietly, and without fuss, he found some brown macrobiotic rice that Rachel, his musician girlfriend who was fortunately away on tour, had bought last time she was home, set it to boil while he grated cheese and carrot, sliced raw mushrooms and prepared a green salad.

  With Rachel away so much with the orchestra, he had got in the habit of looking after himself. Anyway, he had been used to doing so from childhood. And several evenings a week he stopped at the small supermarket on the corner of his street. Luckily, given the arrival of his unexpected visitors, he had shopped the previous evening.

  After getting his parents settled, and the meal prepared and eaten, Casey slumped tiredly in an armchair before he asked, ‘So what happened this time? Did your crops fail again?’

  As Casey had good reason to believe that the only crops they grew on their Fenland smallholding with any enthusiasm or success, was cannabis, he thought this unlikely. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to come the heavy-handed son and ask outright if the bailiffs had turned up again demanding payment of debts.

  However, his father wasn’t so reticent. As he sat on the floor, sorting through their ancient record collection, with the wall light gleaming off the expanding bald spot visible beneath his otherwise long, luxuriant and still black hair, he slowly drawled, ‘The crops are fine. Likely to be a good harvest. No, what happened was—’ And he launched into a long, rambling explanation which Casey lost track of and interest in before it was half told. The drugs his father had taken over the years hadn’t improved his ability to string a coherent sentence together, much less several. Anyway, he had got the gist of it. He had been right. The bailiffs had paid another visit. He wondered how much it would cost him this time to set things right and winced on discovering the answer.