by J M Gregson
Geoffrey wondered if his daughter was going to ask if they were sleeping together. Would she ask how often, and demand the times and the places? It was like having their roles reversed, with her as the stern parent and him as the recalcitrant teenager.
‘It’s serious, Carol. That’s why you need to know about it.’
‘And how old is this woman?’
‘Pam. She has a name. That name is Pamela Williams, if you want the formal details. And she’s fifty-seven. She has her own family. She’ll be telling them about this today, as I’m telling you and Louise, I expect.’
‘At least she’s not a bimbo, then. At least you’re not making a complete fool of yourself in that way!’
He noticed with wry amusement that he must be getting really old, since even his children were now using out-of-date slang. He tried to lighten the exchange, sensing that both of them wanted that but did not know how to engineer it. ‘I don’t fancy young women. It’s one of the few reassuring things about getting older.’
‘But you fancied Pamela. Pam.’
He rushed in quickly to try to explain himself. ‘Initially, I wanted companionship. I expect everyone says that, to disguise the stirrings of libido, but I think it was true for me. I was lonely, Carol, deeply lonely. It seemed at first like a desperate thing to advertise for company, but—’
‘Female company.’ The interruption had come before she could prevent it, and she immediately regretted it.
‘Yes, all right, female company. I agonized for months before I put my details into DATING POINT, and then immediately regretted it. Now I’m obviously glad that I made the move.’
‘Obviously.’ Her lips set again for a moment in that thin line he hated to see. Then he could see in her features an effort which it was almost painful to watch. ‘Do you want your grandchildren to know about this?’
‘Yes, of course I do. It’s not something I’m ashamed of.’
‘No. That’s certainly obvious.’ Another bit of acid, when she had not intended it. She wanted now to apologize to him for her reception of this news, to tell him that she had been taken off guard, that she would come to terms with it, given time. But Carol had never found it easy to apologize and the words would not come to her now. ‘Do you want me to tell them?’
‘I think that would be best, don’t you?’ When she did not reply, Geoffrey made himself reach across the space between them and take her hand in his. It felt stiff and cool, even on this warm day. ‘I’ll tell them myself if I must, but you’ll do it much better, Carol. I trust you to do it tactfully, once you’ve got used to the idea yourself. You actually do tact rather well, when you want to, don’t you?’
Carol gave him a brief smile on that, wanting to respond, but not yet having the capacity to do it. ‘I’ll tell them. When I’ve digested the news myself, as you say. It’s been rather a shock, Dad. I’m sorry ... I know I’m a bitch at times.’ Geoffrey knew that it had cost her a lot to say that, and he had the sense to leave it there and get out of the house as fast as he could. When he started the car, the Jaguar engine roared raw and loud, as he put his foot too clumsily on the pedal. He realized that his hands were shaking as he watched them upon the steering wheel.
For the first time he could remember, he was glad that he lived thirty miles away from his eldest daughter and her children.
* * *
Chief Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker walked moodily across the thick carpet of his penthouse office and stared through the window at the wide Lancashire vista outside it. Normally he enjoyed the combination of industrial landscape and the beginnings of greenery where town met country. Quite often, he spent a few minutes of his day studying this view and congratulating himself. The office and the panorama it commanded was his visual evidence of how far he had progressed in the police service.
Today Tucker’s brain barely registered what his eyes took in, because he was preparing himself for a confrontation. It was a confrontation which he knew he could win. He repeated to himself the comfortable reassurance that there is no way round rank, that ultimately it must always triumph in the British police service. Without rank there is no discipline, and the system depends upon discipline. Chief Superintendent Tucker repeated these mantras to himself more than most. When you were chronically inefficient, you had to fall back on them surprisingly often.
He was nervous because his confrontation was to be with Chief Inspector Peach, and Percy Peach had a habit of circumventing the realities of rank more often than any other officer Tucker had met in his long and surprisingly successful career.
He could hear the voice of his formidable wife Barbara ringing in his ears. ‘For heavens sake, Tom, be firm with the man!’ she always said impatiently. ‘I can’t see why you put up with his nonsense!’ She couldn’t see why because she didn’t appreciate the extent to which Tucker depended on Peach for the results which had buoyed his career. Barbara didn’t realize the full extent of her husband’s ineffectiveness, which she tended to presume was confined to the home.
‘Ah, Percy! Do sit down and make yourself at home.’ Tucker waved a wide, hospitable arm towards one of the armchairs in front of his big desk, hesitated for a moment, and then took the other one himself.
Peach sat down very carefully on the edge of the seat, keeping his back bolt upright. When Tommy Bloody Tucker used your forename and offered you an easy chair, there was trouble in store.
‘A splendid opportunity has come up for you, Percy. It is an opportunity which will be available to only a very few senior officers. One for which you have been specially selected.’
‘By you, sir, no doubt.’ It was as well to know whom you were fighting: no use wasting your ammunition on the people in front of you, if the real enemy was at a further remove.
‘By me, indeed, Percy. As you know, I always have your best interests at heart. It will need the chief constable’s approval, no doubt, but I think you can be confident that my word carries considerable weight in that quarter.’
‘Yes, sir. The chief constable is a man whose judgement I have learned to respect over the years. I have a good idea of just how much weight he will give to your pronouncements.’
Tucker looked at him keenly, but Peach’s face had that glassy inscrutability which usually accompanied those insolences which his chief could not quite pin down. ‘You’d better have a look at this, Percy. It’s a confidential document, I need hardly say.’
Confidential, my arse, thought Percy sourly, as he glanced at the heading and skimmed the details beneath it. This matter had been an item of much gossip in the police canteen over the last three days. A group of very senior police officers were to spend a weekend in a prison in Nottingham. The idea was to allow pillars of the police service to appreciate exactly the conditions to which they were consigning their criminal opponents. As well as increasing understanding between criminals and those who had to operate the law against them, this temporary incarceration would improve relations between the police and the officers of the prison service, with whom they had so often to liaise. This exercise would be good for public relations all round, the document concluded.
Good, my arse, was Percy’s succinct conclusion. It has to be said that that was often his conclusion where public relations were concerned. Whilst his brain worked furiously, he said, ‘This promises to be an interesting experiment, sir.’
‘Indeed it is. Peach.’ Tucker leant forward and touched the side of his nose. ‘It is also an opportunity for you to further your career, Percy. To do a bit of fraternizing with the right people.’
‘My career is fine, sir. I don’t wish to rise beyond my present rank and move away from the crime-face. I’m not very good at fraternizing, sir, not being one of the brotherhood of Masons like you.’
Tucker bristled, as he usually did when Peach mentioned the Freemasonry which was one of his favourite targets. Then he controlled himself: he needed this odious man’s cooperation. ‘We all need to fraternize, Percy. When it’s with peop
le of a higher rank, it can be very useful.’
‘I’m happy arresting villains and seeing them put away, sir. I haven’t got your overview.’
He managed to invest the word with a heavy irony, but irony wasn’t Tucker’s strong suit. The chief superintendent was too concerned to get himself off this particular hook: the chief constable had actually suggested that Tucker himself should spend a couple of nights in a prison cell. He stood up, returned to the chair on the other side of his massive desk, and said determinedly, ‘I’ve been asked to make a decision on this. Peach, and my decision is that you should go.’ Percy noted the return to his surname and to the normal dispositions of the sides in this contest with some relief. He pretended to study the detail of the sheet about the weekend which Tucker had given him and said with an air of surprise, ‘There’ll be some big police guns at this. Some very big guns indeed. Are you sure that you can afford not to be there, sir?’
‘Important people, you say?’ With the prospect of creeping to the bigwigs, Tucker was immediately thrown into doubt, as Percy had anticipated that he would be.
‘It’s one of your strengths, that, sir. Everyone says so.’
‘Peach, if you’re trying to suggest that I would—’
‘Fraternizing, sir. It’s often said that you’re the most fitting fraternizer in the force.’ In his enthusiasm for alliteration, Percy had almost used another epithet entirely.
Tucker stared at him malevolently. But he was torn. There would be a lot of important people showing the police flag on this prison exercise. A chance for him to butter up those people. A chance to make it clear that he was a conscientious senior officer, supporting the latest initiatives. ‘I suppose it’s important for Brunton to be represented at Nottingham by a reliable senior officer.’
Percy read the runes of his chief’s too-revealing face and knew that he had won. He said daringly, ‘Of course, I appreciate you thinking of me for this, sir. But I’m not the consummate diplomat that you are. I’d be afraid of saying the wrong things to important people. Afraid of damaging the reputation of the CID section and thus of you, sir.’
‘You’d be a loose cannon, Peach!’ Tucker nodded firmly and jutted his chin in decision. ‘You’re entirely the wrong man to send off on what could be an important public-relations exercise for us. I don’t know how I could ever have been persuaded to consider you for this privilege.’
‘No, sir. I’m glad it’s been sorted out to your satisfaction. I’ll tell the boys and girls down in CID all about your selfless devotion to duty.’
Percy went downstairs with the smile of a man who had managed a difficult situation adroitly. Arsehole-creepers were always easily distracted.
Alone in his office, Tucker too smiled, lifted by the prospect of a weekend of saying the right things to important people. Then his face clouded: how was he going to explain to his Brünnhilde of a wife that he was going to be away for a whole weekend?
Five
Geoffrey Aspin liked this time of the day, when all the office staff at the factory had gone home and he had the place to himself. It was the time when he savoured his control of the place. When everything was quiet, he liked to roam at will and remind himself of what he had achieved. Walking round the little works on his own had become first a small pleasure and then a habit in the lonely, sometimes desperate, days after Jill’s death.
He liked to wander round the various machines which did the printing, revelling in having the latest technology, marvelling at how compact, efficient and clean these machines were compared with the heavy printing presses on which he had begun work as a teenager in the printing room of the now defunct Brunton Times. The three men he now employed could do the work of twenty when he had started in the trade nearly forty years ago.
The two women who came in to clean could get around the floor of the small works in an hour. They were finishing now, talking cheerfully to each other as they stowed away their tools. Through the window of his office, he watched them getting into a car, and thought how much the conditions for that sort of work had improved since his mother had cleaned for the gentry of the town half a century ago when he was a boy. The minimum wage which some people had predicted would be such a disaster had helped to transform life for women like these.
It was good to remember your roots. It made you appreciate what you had done and where you stood now. And to acknowledge the luck which had after all never been far away, even in the darkest hours of the last three years. Tonight, though, Geoffrey Aspin was waiting here alone for reasons which were not merely philosophical. Two minutes after the cleaners’ car had left, another small vehicle nosed its way into the deserted car park. The driver looked swiftly round him, as if checking that he was unobserved and not vulnerable to attack. He stood upright and glanced at the evening sky for a moment as he locked his car, yet still he carried a furtive air about him as he turned and hurried into the factory.
It was a bright evening in early spring. This visitor looked as if he would have preferred the cloak of darkness for his movements. It was still quite warm, but he wore a faded blue anorak and a shabby maroon baseball cap. Even on this evening, which seemed a herald of the summer, this man looked like a creature of the night who was reluctantly forced to operate by day.
He was brisk and efficient, not only in his movements but in the delivery of his report. He refused the armchair in Geoffrey Aspin’s office and chose instead to sit upright on a chair he brought forward from the edge of the room. He made brief references to a notebook he produced from the pocket of his raincoat, but Geoffrey thought that he could have delivered his report without the benefit of these reminders, if that had been necessary.
Geoffrey was sitting at his desk. He made brief notes of times, dates and actions on the pad in front of him as the man spoke. His visitor noted this and said, ‘I can submit a written report if you like. I have all the details under lock and key at home, but I think we agreed that I would not report to you in writing at this stage.’
Geoffrey smiled, trying to lighten the atmosphere of this bizarre exchange. ‘We did indeed. I’m merely making a few reminders for the sake of my own failing memory. I can memorize them and eat the sheet of paper, if you think that’s necessary for security.’
The thin figure in front of him gave a wan smile. Humour wasn’t part of his brief. ‘What you do with any information which I bring to you is of course up to you, Mr Aspin. For both our sakes, I trust that you will be very careful that it is kept away from any prying eyes.’ He looked swiftly round the office and at the closed door which led to the clerical area which was so busy by day. Every one of these absent, anonymous people was a threat, his bearing said.
‘Be assured, I shall be very careful. You don’t build up a successful business by leaving confidential information lying about.’ Geoffrey smiled wryly at his attempt to reassure this man whose services he was paying handsomely to hire. ‘I can’t say that what you have brought me is welcome, but it confirms my suspicions.’
‘It’s mostly circumstantial. But it’s beginning to add up. I’m sure I shall have more concrete evidence for you in due course.’ The man in the raincoat tried to deliver that statement with an air of regret. His was a strange occupation: your most efficient work was often greeted with dismay by those who paid you.
Geoffrey Aspin understood the reasons for the man’s low-key delivery. ‘You’re confirming what I suspected. I’m not saying that I welcome it, but I need real evidence before I can proceed any further. I’m grateful for your efforts.’
‘You’re paying me well enough for them. Gratitude isn’t necessary,’ said the man gruffly. He didn’t want emotions like gratitude, any more than he wanted anger or exultation. These things were better kept impersonal.
Geoffrey nodded. He reached into the top drawer of his desk, produced a chequebook, wrote and signed, then passed the cheque across without another word and with only the smallest of smiles.
The man looked at the amount, saw th
at it was for three thousand pounds, raised his eyebrows a little even as he pocketed it. ‘There may be some change from this. It’s entirely up to you to end our arrangement. When you think you have enough, let me know and I’ll cease to operate immediately.’ Recommendations in this game usually came by word of mouth. It was important for clients to know that you operated honestly, that you provided just as much information as they wanted and didn’t rip them off.
‘I understand that. I’ll let you know when I think I have enough.’
Geoffrey Aspin watched the man drive out of the car park and sat down at his desk. After a moment, he buried his head in his hands. He felt like weeping, but his eyes remained obstinately dry. Knowledge is power: his father had repeated that to him many times, long, long ago.
This knowledge would give him power, of a kind. It would also bring him much pain.
* * *
On the outskirts of Clitheroe, ten miles away from where Geoffrey Aspin was meeting his mysterious employee, his daughters and their husbands were comparing notes on the unexpected crisis which their father’s affair with Pamela Williams had presented to them.
‘It may still come to nothing,’ said Steve Hawksworth, Louise’s husband. His voice carried no conviction. He was an accountant with a small firm in Brunton, a man who was better with figures than with people, a man who seemed destined to be an employee working for others rather than a man in control. When he did take independent action, it was often on impulse, and sometimes mistaken. That in itself had affected his self-confidence over the years.
