Staying Power

by Judith Cutler

  And tomorrow she’d start organising herself a social life.

  Chapter Three

  ‘It’s Mr Rhyll, is it?’ Kate asked doubtfully. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Kate Power and this is Detective Constable Colin Roper.’

  The pharmacist, an intelligent looking man in his early fifties, stood back to let them into his inner sanctum, the dispensary. ‘Hill,’ he said, moving his lips, tongue and jaw with some emphasis. ‘Hill.’

  She rubbed at her ear. Of course: Mr Hill.

  He looked at her closely; she rubbed her ear again.

  ‘That’s where they got in.’ He jerked his head upwards at a small skylight. ‘I’ve had the glass reinforced with polycarbonate sheeting, I’ve had that grid fitted. And still they managed to get in.’

  ‘Must have been after growth-enhancing drugs,’ Colin said.

  ‘Or maybe it’s a teenage girl, size six,’ Kate said, trying to stifle a cough.

  ‘If we can sort out your crime, you couldn’t sort out Kate’s attack of plague, could you?’ Colin asked, stepping back a couple of paces. ‘I’ll swear it’s become a death rattle.’

  The pharmacist laughed and passed them mugs of coffee. He leaned back on his stool. ‘Which shall we deal with first?’

  ‘The crime,’ she said, coughing again.

  ‘Are you sure? OK, apart from that one vulnerable spot, the place is like Fort Knox: all those grids, the metal pull-down blinds and the alarm. Oh, I’ve talked to your crime prevention people. Implemented all their suggestions. That was after Chummie got in up next-door’s fire escape, into their lavatory, up into the loft and down through my ceiling.’

  ‘After the usual, I suppose?’

  Hill nodded. ‘I gave a list of what had gone to your local colleagues, the uniform people. You can have another.’ He turned to his computer and clicked on the Print icon.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Kate said, ‘that they didn’t take that.’

  For answer he slipped down from the stool and peered under the bench. Kate and Colin looked too. The computer shell was attached to the bench with half-inch bolts.

  ‘No one can say you’re not doing your best!’ she said. ‘But they could still come back for that thing’s innards – that’s what they like these days. Portable and sellable.’

  ‘Like the stuff they’ve taken,’ Colin said, scanning the list as it peeled from the printer. ‘You know, I have this fantasy I’ll come out to a job like this to find they’ve skipped all the serious drugs and just nicked a trolley load of surgical appliances.’

  Hill grinned. He was an attractive man, carrying his years well. ‘Don’t hold your breath. Especially you, Sergeant!’

  ‘Kate,’ she said.

  ‘Kate.’ He checked the list. ‘Mind you, you’d be safe enough: they’ve left the chest sprays, this time.’

  ‘Chest sprays? Why nick chest sprays?’

  ‘They cost a bomb overseas. Fifteen hundred pounds for a Ventolin. A month’s salary for a professional in some parts of Africa.’

  ‘And less than six pounds on the NHS.’

  Hill shook his head, his mouth tightening. ‘Yes, but think what six pounds means to someone round here. Particularly if there’s another couple of items on the scrip. The times I have to choose which drugs they have to have, as opposed to those they simply ought to have.’

  They shook their heads, chastened. Kate tried to smother another cough. Hill relented, gesturing grandly at his shelves. ‘Look at this lot here. Proprietary this, antibiotic that. What I’d recommend, however, for that chest of yours, is a lot of steam. Just steam. You can add a drop of menthol if you really insist, but believe me, steam’s the best remedy. A basin with a towel over your head’s cheapest, but I can sell you one of these little plastic inhaler affairs if you really want to part with your money – you put the hot water in here, put the mask over your face – and there you are.’

  Kate dug in her purse. ‘I couldn’t have some of those really evil cough pastilles that stink the place out? If I’ve got to suffer, everyone else might as well too. Two packets – my neighbour’s bad, too.’

  Hill reached through the hatch into the shop. ‘Those should fumigate a whole building,’ he said, wrapping them and taking Kate’s note.

  The shop door pinged, and they could hear the assistant murmuring to a customer.

  Hill turned to the hatch. ‘OK, Helen. If that’s Mrs Shaw’s scrip. I’ll do it now. That’s another thing they didn’t nick,’ he said, turning back to them. ‘HRT. Now, it’s OK if I get this roof light fixed now, is it? So I can order more supplies.’

  ‘Fixed?’ Kate repeated.

  ‘Bricked up. That should stop them.’

  ‘It’ll also make it very dark in here. And hot.’

  ‘Electric light and extractor fan. And blow the electricity bills and the environment. They won’t drive me out.’

  She’d moved towards the door, but stopped. ‘Has anyone said they want you out of here?’

  Hill shook his head. ‘Why force a ready supply of drugs and syringes to dry up? Mighty inconvenient for some, I’d have thought.’

  ‘If you have any more thoughts about it, you will contact us, won’t you? You’re the fourth pharmacy that’s been done over this week,’ Colin said. ‘That’s four too many.’

  Hill reached through the hatch for the prescription and laid it next to the computer before answering. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But this is the start of last night’s surgery rush. And in half an hour it’ll be this morning’s surgery rush. And there’s a small matter of a builder to organise. Thoughts may be hard to come by.’

  Thoughts were also hard to come by in Kate’s office, for the rest of the day. She’d still got the rest of her desk to clear – Forth Bridge painting – and her concentration was well below its peak, despite the steam inhaler.

  What had impressed Cope most, of course, had been the vile smelling pastilles.

  ‘If they’re that nasty they must be doing you good,’ he said, breathing in deeply as he stood over her desk. ‘Good job you’re not needed on obbo, though. They’d hear you coughing up your guts five hundred yards away.’

  ‘And smell her,’ Colin added. ‘What on earth’s in them?’

  Kate made a show of reading the small print. ‘Creosote, amongst other things. Ah well, I suppose if it’s good for my fence it’s good for me.’

  ‘Depends if you’re made of well-seasoned wood,’ Cope said. ‘Now, have you picked up anything on this chemist’s shop business?’

  ‘We’re waiting for precise lists from all the pharmacists,’ Kate said. ‘The guy this morning was particularly efficient: the others haven’t come through from uniform yet. Colin’s just going to chase them.’

  ‘Oh, it’ll be the usual – uppers and downers and anything they can sell on the streets.’ Cope hitched his trousers higher over his belly. ‘No need to bother with that, surely. Just chase the usual dealers. Get out on the streets and pay a few visits. We’re supposed to be cleaning up crimes, here. Being thorough’s one thing. Pratting round with academic research is quite another.’

  Kate stopped herself reacting, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Colin’s eyes opening wider.

  ‘Come to think of it, we could get Selby and young Fatima on that, couldn’t we? OK, by you two?’ Cope continued. ‘Except, if Power went, the air would be a lot sweeter. Are you sure it’s only creosote in there?’

  Kate stood. ‘What if there’s anything unusual been nicked?’

  ‘You mean, elastic stockings, something like that?’

  ‘Possibly. Or at least vitamin pills. Why on earth nick vitamin pills?’ She pointed to an item on Hill’s list.

  ‘Choosing the healthy option, of course,’ Colin put in.

  ‘But they’re cheap and on all the vitamin supplement counters. You could shop-lift them easily enough.’

  Cope looked at her sideways. ‘You got some sort of hunch, Power? Hmm? Because if you have, stick with it. That’s what m
akes a good cop.’ He turned on his heel. The words, Not your fancy qualifications hung in the air as if he’d spoken them. Perhaps he had: she was still deaf enough in her right ear to miss things. Certainly Colin had jumped in as loudly as he could with some joke about Mystic Meg, but Fatima was flushing and burrowing ostentatiously amongst the papers on her desk. Selby was smirking as he tapped away with painfully slow jabbing strokes, as if attacking the keyboard.

  What Kate would have liked to do was go after him. But what could she have said? He’d just paid her one of his rare compliments, backhanded though it was. He could, after all, have dismissed her theory as woman’s intuition.

  She coughed again.

  ‘I think it had better be me making those calls,’ Colin said. ‘You sure that pharmacist was right? You’re sure you shouldn’t be banging on your GP’s door demanding some antibiotics?’

  ‘Sure. I really don’t feel too bad – I feel a damn sight better than I did last week anyway, and I was quite happy legging round the sights of Florence. Though there weren’t all that many people looking at the pictures in the Uffizi with a bag of clean tissues in one hand and a bag of wet tissues in the other.’ She grinned and returned to the piles on her desk.

  Out of the corner of one eye she could see Colin busy on the phone: he was tapping his pencil in clear exasperation. At the other side of the room, she could see Fatima still checking through a pile of files like hers. Except Fatima wasn’t being slow and methodical; she was looking increasingly frantic. Kate could see there was something wrong well before the younger woman grabbed her waste-bin and started to burrow through it, peeling open balls she’d screwed up, then scrapping them again. It wasn’t long before she repeated the whole process.

  It was time for a coffee anyway. Kate grabbed her mug, and sauntered past Fatima’s desk. It was a pity she couldn’t offer her a drink. As it was, she settled for a matey lean on the desk. When Selby abandoned a particularly frenzied attack on the keyboard to tip back in his chair and watch, she leaned even closer, mouthing, ‘What have you lost?’

  Fatima flushed. ‘Is it that obvious?’

  Kate nodded. ‘Even Selby’s noticed, I’d say. What is it?’

  The flush deepened. ‘I feel really bad about this: it was a message for you. A phone message. I took it just before you came back in this lunchtime and wrote it down. Then I got involved with something and I can’t find it anywhere. I suppose I didn’t leave it on your desk?’ she added, without much conviction.

  ‘What was it written on?’

  ‘The usual phone pad paper.’

  ‘In that case, I don’t think so. But I’ll check.’ She made the coffee anyway, and returned to her desk. It was a good thing she never balled paper before slinging it – it certainly made the sifting process a whole lot quicker. But no more successful. ‘What’s the joke, Selby?’

  He was shaking with ill-suppressed laughter.

  ‘You’ve no idea how funny you two look. Like a pair of squirrels looking for nuts.’

  She raised an ironic eyebrow – she’d never credited him with a taste for the imaginative image. And then looked at him hard. ‘If you’ve had anything to do with this, you’d better look after your own nuts,’ she said. ‘All this football coaching means I’ve learned to kick balls quite hard. And very accurately.’

  The trouble was, it wasn’t the first time notes had gone missing. In an office as full of paper as theirs it was difficult to make specific accusations, but she had a good idea that they hadn’t walked without some human help. Or sub-human, come to think of it. Meanwhile, Selby looked as righteously indignant as he could.

  ‘What was the message, anyway?’ she asked at last.

  ‘It was personal, the caller said.’

  ‘Good job it’s gone missing, then,’ Selby observed. ‘You know how the gaffer likes people sorting out their love life in working hours.’

  She bit her tongue: it was too public a place to remind him that his working hours hadn’t exactly been filled with unadulterated toil – she’d caught him playing endless games of computer patience before she went off sick, and had promised him trouble if she caught him at it again. ‘Love life, was it?’ she asked Fatima. ‘News to me if I’ve got one of those.’

  Fatima looked troubled. ‘Well, it was a young man. He didn’t – wouldn’t – give a name. Just gave me a number, asked if I’d make sure you phoned him. And now—’ she spread her hands despairingly.

  ‘So what was on the note?’

  ‘Your name. Please phone – this guy’s number. My name.’

  ‘I’ll put an SOS up on the white-board – ask people to check their files to make sure it’s not got caught up with them. And I’ll have a quick whiz round the waste-bins.’ She bent down by Selby’s desk. ‘No, don’t put yourself out, Selby: I’ll do it myself.’

  But she hadn’t got the bastard: his bin was as clean as anyone’s.

  At last, accepting the inevitable, she shrugged. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if it’s important he’ll no doubt phone again.’

  Kate had taken Fatima to one of the quieter of what were almost official police watering holes. It wouldn’t do either of them any harm to show they weren’t averse to joining their colleagues. She suspected she’d already got a bit of a reputation for being stand-offish which wasn’t a bonus for anyone and which could do Fatima, the rookie in the squad, real harm.

  She bought mineral water for two and settled at the table.

  ‘They’ll try on all sorts of things,’ she said without preamble, ‘to test you. They did with me. It’s never fun. I was too pig-headed to ask for help, but if something as important as a phone message has disappeared, sticking it out on your own isn’t a course I’d recommend.’

  Fatima sucked the lemon slice. ‘DCI Harvey’s already had a word with me. He told me – well, it was as good as an order – to tell you if there was excessive horseplay.’

  Kate smiled. It was the word she’d used herself in the autumn, but Harvey had repeated it with an ironic turn – no doubt that was how he’d used it to Fatima. ‘Good. And I hope you will.’

  ‘I want to be accepted, Kate. I don’t want a reputation as a grass.’

  ‘Don’t think of it as grassing: think of it as whistle-blowing. Of course it’s not easy to distinguish between the two. Why do you think I kept quiet? Come on, Fatima, there’s legitimate fun – they sent me all over the building, hunting for non-existent files, my first day. And there’s bullying. You’ll know if you’re being bullied. And there’s the sort of stupid thing that may have happened today which is detrimental to our work. OK, could be detrimental, if it was an official, not a private message that got lost.’ She stopped. She sounded horribly like a schoolteacher. ‘Fancy some crisps?’

  Fatima shook her head. ‘I shall be eating with my family later.’

  You could almost see the word Sergeant being suppressed. Swallow the rebuff or accept it? She compromised. ‘You know I’m speaking just as a woman? Because I wouldn’t want anyone to go through what I went through? Right?’

  Fatima’s nod was courteous but not enthusiastic.

  Kate tried a different tack. ‘You’re from Bradford, aren’t you? Do you know any people in Birmingham?’ Foolish – the woman kept referring to her family. ‘You know, in the police?’

  ‘I’m living with some cousins at the moment and my mother’s come down to stay for a bit. I’ve not had much time for socialising.’

  Poor woman. Free but not free.

  ‘Are you looking for your own place?’

  ‘Oh, yes! I mean – it’s lovely being with people you know – but after being away at Uni and living on my own …’

  ‘They still think you’re fourteen and ask you if you’ve cleaned your teeth!’

  ‘So if you know anywhere—’

  ‘House share of flat? Not that I do at the moment – I hardly know anyone either. I’d only been in the squad a few weeks when I had to go on sick leave – I hurt my knee when someone drov
e a van at me.’

  ‘Didn’t people visit you?’

  ‘Some did. Even Cope. But I think I might not have been the most friendly of women – my partner had died and I think I put barriers up I didn’t even know about. Not a good thing. So I’m very grateful to you for coming tonight – I need to get out more, mix more, myself. Another drink?’

  ‘My shout.’ There was a certain note in Fatima’s voice which said that she was grown up and used to pushing her way to bars, despite her height and religion.

  Kate nodded, accepting the rebuke. ‘D’you know, I think I’ll go wild and have a tomato juice.’

  Chapter Four

  The face drew Kate’s eyes. No matter how often she’d told herself never to look at the face, always to fix the scene in her memory first, she couldn’t keep her eyes off the face. The bulging eyes were reproaching her.

  No. The location. Always check out the location; details that looked trivial but might not be: burn those into the brain so that even the foulest, most repulsive damage to a fellow human couldn’t eradicate them. Don’t look at that face again. She looked at a canal: tatty, still awaiting the restoration they’d done further out of the city. No one had prettified the ugly backs of buildings, the myriad drainpipes in a mixture of peeling paints. Many leaking. Tufts of buddleia and willow-herb, not quite dead. The towpath here was cindered, not paved in red and blue bricks: European funding had obviously run out downstream. And now to the bridge over the canal: a high parapet and metal spikes designed to stop anyone doing what this poor bugger had done. Or had had done to him. He swung – the thin blue rope could have been nylon tow-rope. Backwards and forwards, quite gently.

  Don’t look at his face.

  There’d been nothing gentle about his death. He’d not broken his neck, but strangled slowly, painfully. There were for some reason what looked like bloodstains on his sweater. She had to look more closely. Yes, there were deep slashes across it. Something very sharp – a Stanley knife? The arms, too. At least, the left one. The right wasn’t so bad.