Stick or Twist

by Diane Janes

  ‘I’m being cautious. Do you want to end up in the back of a van, trussed hand and foot, with a gag in your mouth?’

  ‘Lightning doesn’t strike twice,’ she snapped back at him. ‘And please don’t remind me. I’ve had to relive that episode too many times. You have no idea what it’s like, or what I went through that night.’ She was holding his gaze again, staring him out.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’m still going to do some more digging. For both our sakes.’ It was his turn now to adopt a pleading note.

  ‘For goodness sake, Rob, please don’t interfere. I know what I’m doing.’

  SIX

  Detective Constable Peter Betts was lying full length on the king-size bed, his eyes closed, trying to ward off the truth as portrayed by his digital clock. He didn’t want to get up for work, because just at that moment, he didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything. What he needed was time to think. He couldn’t think properly at work, because work represented other kinds of thinking, which usually required all his concentration. Just now he needed to think about the email he had picked up the previous evening. An unexpected message which he had yet to answer. He had been thinking about the message when he had fallen asleep the night before (ever since first starting shift work, he had never lost the ability to drop off the moment his head touched the pillow) and it had been the first thing to enter his head when he had woken up that morning.

  The very fact that he had to think about his reply at all was what worried him most. He had always wanted to be a policeman. When the other little kids had been into Postman Pat and Thomas the Tank Engine, he had eschewed the idea of a future career in the Post Office or on the railways, and attended his local playgroup proudly sporting a plastic policeman’s helmet, acquired on a day trip to London. As he was gradually allowed access to more and more grown-up television programmes, he had fallen in love with the idea all over again. Unlike the other kids, his heroes had never been the fast-talking, sharp-shooting Bruce Willis types. No, Bettsy, as he had been known even then, had preferred to identify with the crusty old Brits like Frost and Morse, who though they occasionally gave chase, or had to physically restrain a suspect, usually arrived at a solution by brain power in the end.

  Getting accepted for the police had been his dream. By the time he was old enough to apply, he had long known that the police forces of television drama were well divorced from the police forces of reality, but even so, nothing had ever dimmed that original ambition. Peter Betts had always wanted to be a detective. And now he was one.

  In his teenage years, when everyone else was doing weed and making music, he had – albeit very briefly – considered a change of direction. He’d smoked the occasional spliff and become a more than half decent guitarist, whose vocal skills were well above average. He had been in a band at school – well who hadn’t? And later on, local bands had sometimes sought his services, and yes, it was true, once or twice he had wavered. Why not become a musician? He had no aspirations to write his own music, but that didn’t matter, because his skill and passion lay in covering old standards, and plenty of people had told him that there was work for young, lively, talented musicians with a wide traditional repertoire and no ties.

  The police force had always won, but he had retained his connections with a few musical mates, and continued to fill in for people at the occasional gig, and this in turn had led him the closest he had come so far to having any ties. He had originally been introduced to Ginny when the guitarist in Shuffle ’n’ Deal fell ill and a replacement was needed at short notice. He had been on eight till four at the time, which made him available for their Saturday-night gig, for which he’d been recommended by a friend of a friend. Ginny was the band’s vocalist, and had viewed his arrival as stand-in at a last-minute rehearsal with undisguised alarm. ‘A copper?’ she had exclaimed on learning that he wasn’t even a proper, full-time, professional musician. ‘You’re having me on? Please tell me that you’re not serious?’

  Later on that evening, their perfect harmonizing during ‘Bye Bye Love’ had excited him – albeit in a different way – nearly as much as had sleeping with her in the early hours of the next morning. Ginny had been the least serious, yet most serious, relationship he had ever had. They had enjoyed going to bed together, yet suffered no illusions about being in love.

  At the same time, Ginny had been the first and only person who had ever seriously dented his assurance in his own destiny. She wasn’t the sort of person to be impressed by job security or a good pension. She didn’t factor in the particular reward which comes of undertaking a socially important job, and doing it responsibly and well. What she did understand was the unique joy of creating great music. Security, social responsibility, steady salary – none of it came close. ‘We’re great together,’ she had said – and he had known from the get-go that she was right. He had continued to fill in at the band’s gigs, work rotations permitting, until their regular guitarist had made a full recovery. (Shingles, Ginny had explained. Extremely nasty.) There had even been some vague talk of him ousting Jared, the unfortunate shingles-sufferer, and even vaguer suggestions of himself and Ginny breaking away, to form their own band. ‘I’ve got the contacts,’ she had said. ‘We wouldn’t be short of work.’

  The police force had won out. In spite of the tensions, the pressures, the cutbacks, the nonsense government directives, he loved his job, he told her, at which she had shaken her head in disbelief. It was the same night that they had received a standing ovation – come off stage on a complete high, Ginny’s eyes shining, Baz, the drummer, laughing like he was drunk. That sort of applause was a buzz like no other. It had only been a corporate bash, not exactly the Royal Albert Hall and small beer to a great many bands, but when Ginny’s eyes met his across the four feet of stage which separated them, he knew that she was asking him what the police force had to offer, which could ever possibly compete with that feeling?

  Shuffle ’n’ Deal had been offered a contract to work on a cruise ship soon afterwards. Six months gigging around the Caribbean, playing sets each evening and during the daytime too, when the ship was at sea, with time off for sightseeing and soaking up the sun on their days in port. He had found it hard to say goodbye to Ginny – not so much to the Ginny who had sometimes shared his bed, and whose untidiness and ill-informed views had begun to grate, but rather to Ginny the performer, with whom singing and playing had never been sweeter. Subsequently he had often found himself wondering what she and the band were doing, particularly when he was wading through mounds of paper work, or hanging about in court, waiting for an assault on his credibility from some smart-ass barrister. Ginny had cheerfully informed him that she wasn’t good at keeping in touch, but they had maintained a desultory contact by email, and it was vaguely understood that they would at the very least meet up for a drink when she got home. Ginny’s typing and spelling were so execrable that some of her messages lent themselves to multiple interpretations and occasionally verged on the incomprehensible, but in spite of this there had been no difficulty whatsoever about understanding her most recent communication.

  Pleaz think abut this. We v been ofered anoter 6 mnth contract same ship starting Janurary. Jared still mising Annie and not intrested. We alked and we want you. No need to anser rigtaway.

  Luv Ginny xx

  A year ago, he wouldn’t even have hesitated before sending a politely worded refusal. He had always been absolutely confident about where his future lay, so the very fact that he now had to think about it was worrying. He loved his job, didn’t he? He was good at it. It represented ambitions fulfilled, while continuing to offer goals which he had yet to achieve. Was it merely because he could hear the English summer rain hitting the window panes that the thought of spending six months belting out ‘Johnny Be Good’ by night and slumming on golden sandy beaches by day, sounded so seductive? In a moment of weakness, he had checked the ship’s itinerary online and discovered that the contract coincided with a round-the-world cruise: New
York, San Francisco, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan … He had never been further than a package to Rhodes.

  You couldn’t just drop out of CID for six months or a year, then drop back in again. Leaving was a big step.

  It gave him a jolt to recognize that he was actually thinking about it. He’d never done anything wild. There had been no gap year, no sowing wild oats, or going off travelling. If he wasn’t careful, he would be approaching fifty, and a sad old copper like DI Ling.

  That was unfair. Lingo was not sad. He was a good bloke. Peter liked and respected him. But did he want to be him? Did he want to spend the best years of his life chasing after fuckwits who stole cars, robbed the local Cash’n’Carry, or got too drunk to find their way home and ended up decking somebody? How many more perverts, fantasists, morons and murderers would it take for him to become so dislocated from ordinary life, that he suspected everyone of being secretly up to something? How many more tons of useless new regulations? How many more pointless evaluations, awareness days and other hoop-jumping exercises?

  In the shower he found himself humming ‘Johnny Be Good’. He stopped immediately, as if caught in some unspeakable act. He reminded himself that he was doing what he wanted to do – and it was worthwhile. Ridding the streets of the baddies, making society a safer place, getting justice for people who’d been wronged – that was what he was ultimately about. Last year he had been part of Operation Nimble, which had ended with a trio of hardened, violent, career criminals being handed sentences which would keep them out of everyone’s hair for the next decade. Ling and his team had been justifiably jubilant. No other job could ever offer that level of camaraderie, or satisfaction. Or of frustration. At first he had taken them hard, those acquittals after months of painstaking work. Graham Ling had taken him aside the first time it happened. ‘No use raging against the system,’ he had said. ‘Always remember that there’s no such thing as a safe conviction, unless the defendant has been given the best possible defence. It wasn’t our day today, kid, and that’s sometimes the way it is.’

  The face of Jude Thackeray rose up in his mind, unbidden. The team talk a couple of days before had taken them precisely nowhere, but Lingo had decided that someone should take a more detailed look, assigning Peter himself, and Hannah McMahon to the task, giving them a week to look through the information and talk everything through again, just in case there was something sitting in the files that had been missed. He had known Lingo employ the technique once before, half-jokingly referring to it as a ‘warm case review’.

  Peter understood the way that Lingo felt about the Thackeray case, because it was a feeling that he shared. It represented one of the team’s biggest frustrations: literally thousands of man hours spent on an investigation which had come up with basically nothing. No arrest, no credible suspects, even. If he stayed in the force, how many Jude Thackerays was he going to let down in the next twenty-five years?

  The Thackeray woman’s face – pale, bruised and distraught, the way he had first seen it – gave way to Ginny’s face, leaning in towards the mic, as if she was about to kiss it, her lips parting in readiness to sing.

  SEVEN

  ‘You have reached your destination.’

  ‘Thanks Pam.’ Mark only addressed his Sat Nav aloud when there was no one else in the car to hear him. Quite apart from anything else, he didn’t want to have to explain why he called her Pam, after a primary school teacher that he had never quite forgiven, or the way it amused him to imagine prim-voiced Mrs Dangerfield, trapped somewhere in the dark confines beneath the bonnet of his car, eternally condemned to issue directions, while remaining uncharacteristically cool and patient, when he defied her with the occasional wrong turn.

  Of course, he hadn’t actually reached his destination, because he knew that in this rural part of East Anglia the postcode would cover a long stretch of road, and the property he had come to see might be anywhere for several hundred yards in either direction, or even off down an adjacent lane. He slowed the car a fraction more, scanning the name plates which stood at the end of each drive. Some places were visible from the road and could be ruled out immediately, because he knew from the old press photographs pretty much what Jude’s house looked like from the road. The photos had already given him an idea of the property’s potential worth, but he wanted to confirm it for himself. It would give him more confidence about what he had to do, particularly after the conversation with Chaz two days ago.

  ‘I only need another couple of months.’ As he uttered the words, he had recognized something of the tone which he had been wont to use for Mrs Dangerfield. ‘It wasn’t me, Miss, honest.’ Wheedling and weak. It was sickening to find himself still pleading with people at his age and after all the hard work he had put in, all the successes which had led to the money, which had in turn led to playing for higher and higher stakes.

  People naturally assumed that his father had backed him when he set up in the property game, but after financing Mark’s education, his father had been unwilling to offer anything at all unless it was repaid by hours of long, hard graft, learning the ropes in the family business, en-route to a directorship alongside his elder brothers. To his father’s undisguised annoyance, Mark had never considered the substantial perks and salary this would eventually bring sufficiently attractive to outweigh the disadvantages of working alongside his father and brothers for the rest of his life, so he had turned his back on three generations in engineering and instead used his name, connections and wits to build up, then sell on, a property holding company, and it had all been going brilliantly until a spell of bad luck and misjudged investments had all but wiped him out.

  If his father or mother had still been alive, he could have gone cap in hand, but she had succumbed to cancer while he had still been in his teens, and with the old man gone as well, he hadn’t fancied his chances with Monty and Michael. They had always presented a united front against him, those fitter, smarter, bigger brothers, tormenting him throughout childhood, sneering at his initial schemes for independence, and then resenting his successful escape south. Quite apart from anything else, he could never bring himself to give them the satisfaction of knowing that the house of cards had fallen about his ears.

  It had almost come to that, as the unpaid bills had mounted up and the creditors began to circle, but then a friend had introduced him to Chaz, and it had been like an answer to a prayer. Chaz understood perfectly how a chap could get into trouble temporarily and need a little bit of help in the form of a large cash advance. The arrangement would be discreet, without need of references, or paperwork. ‘A gentleman’s agreement’ had been the words used.

  Chaz did not advance any cash himself, but he had what he described as ‘various useful contacts’, which included an unnamed friend, who needed someone plausible to turn up at various race meetings and place a few big bets on races where the outcome was a sure thing. In exchange for this service, Chaz’s friend would advance a substantial sum to Mark, a proportion of which was a ‘drink’ for services rendered, and the remainder of it would be easily repayable thanks to the fact that Chaz’s friend had no problem with Mark’s taking advantage of the situation, by separately wagering some money of his own on the various tips which he received. Chaz had said that was the whole idea – he should look on it as his commission. After his own run of bad luck, Mark liked the idea of recouping his losses with a few certainties and he knew that he made an ideal front man, having already acquired a bit of a reputation as a high-stakes gambler. Serendipity. Or it would have been, if during the course of his third visit to a race meeting, armed with a large wad of cash belonging to Chaz’s mysterious contact, he had not somehow misunderstood the instructions and backed the wrong horse, taking a big hit for himself, as well as for Chaz’s unknown friend.

  Mark had never seen this ‘friend’, and up until that moment had vaguely imagined him to be urbane and gentlemanly, as was Chaz himself, but after the mistake at Towcester, the mental image had
begun to waver, with Chaz’s friend gradually transforming into a big bloke, surrounded by heavies, straight out of Get Carter, or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, who could inflict lasting – maybe even permanent – damage upon his person. When he had attempted to explain the Towcester mess-up to Chaz, Chaz had made it perfectly clear that his friend was unlikely to take the news of the loss well.

  Mark had replayed the business of the mixed-up numbers again and again in his mind, and he still didn’t understand how he had come to transpose them or to confuse the race time, or whatever the hell it was that he had done. Another commission had been forthcoming, but he was now extremely limited in the amount that he could personally raise to lay out, and factoring the stake money he had lost at Towcester into the picture meant that it was going to take much longer to clear the overall debt. What had looked like a lifeline, now appeared nothing more than another deadweight, dragging him further and further into the mire. Mark knew that the sooner he could draw a line under the relationship with Chaz and his friend, the better it would be. In his worst moments he had even begun to wonder whether he had made a mistake at all – whether it was possible that he had been deliberately fed the wrong information, in order to render him even more indebted than he already was. But no – that made no sense – you would have to be paranoid to think a thing like that.

  He was so preoccupied by his recollections of the business with Chaz, that he almost drove right past the thick conifer hedge which screened Laurel Cottage from the road. There was only a modest sign to identify the house: an ankle-level wooden plaque on a post stuck in the grass verge, and easily missed. As he applied his foot to the brake, the thought occurred to him that either the place had been christened years before the planting of the leylandii, or else someone did not know their arboriculture very well.