Life Sentence

by Judith Cutler

‘For God’s sake, she’s a police officer, not some pen-pushing civil servant!’

  ‘We seem to be both, these days – especially Harman, the way the Home Office changes policies every time the wind blows from a different direction. She takes the brunt.’

  ‘Except that she doesn’t. Not recently. She’s been sending substitutes to these meetings of hers. Or, worse, apologies. No, I’m not having her carry on like this. Sort it, Turner, will you? And quickly.’

  ‘I’d like to find out what’s going wrong before I jump in with both feet, sir.’

  ‘It’s an order, Turner – in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ACCs (Crime) were not permitted to scuff furiously along the corridor, slamming doors and cursing under their breath. Even as he did the grown-up, management equivalent, striding with a file at a furious angle under his arm, Mark laughed sardonically at himself under his breath. The Chief was well within his rights, and it was Mark’s duty to obey. Perhaps he was so angry because when things had been so bad for him, when Tina was dying, Fran had simply taken over what parts of his jobs she could do. No questions. She had simply done it. There were days when he’d been afraid his in-tray would buckle, but he’d get back from a scampered lunch with Tina to find Fran had emptied it. She’d written up reports, minutes, anything she could to maintain his veneer of efficiency. Not because she’d wanted anything, just because she was a decent woman.

  He’d known her from their rookie days: at one point it had looked as if her career would outstrip his. But when a quirk of fate, or perhaps some residual sexism, had seen his rising slightly more quickly, she’d shown no malice, allowed no backbiting. She’d been a good friend.

  And now he had to bollock her.

  Like hell he would.

  ‘Fran!’

  She stopped and turned, the sagging tissues of her face managing to pull themselves into a smile, which even reached her eyes when she saw who had called to her down the corridor. Invitingly holding open the door to his office was Mark Turner, a man whose seniority sat very lightly on his shoulders. His warm smile – though his eyes, which missed little, in her experience, were more searching than usual – was like balm.

  ‘How do you do it, Fran? You always turn up as bright as paint meeting after meeting, and, just when everyone’s going to sleep, you come in with just the right comment.’ He was already busy with his electric kettle. ‘Green? Lemon or jasmine?’ He’d told her he’d taken to green tea when Tina, his wife, had been diagnosed with cancer. It was supposed to act as a preventative, and, though it hadn’t worked for Tina, dead these three years, he’d kept up the habit, eschewing coffee and the sort of tea every police canteen in the country seemed to serve as next door to poison. So long as green tea came with its own quiet shot of caffeine, who was she to argue?

  Well as she knew Mark, kicking off her shoes as she collapsed on to one of his comfortable chairs didn’t seem appropriate, especially as even when he had a visitor as senior as her there was a constant stream of interruptions from officers and clerical and other support staff.

  It was restful to watch him make the tea, silhouetted against the light through the vertical blinds. He’d lost weight since Tina’s death, and had the neat belly and buttocks of a man who spent time in the gym.

  Did she find herself slumping a little less? At least she didn’t put her head down on his desk and snore. The very thought brought her out in a damned flush. Why in hell did this have to be happening to her just when she least needed it? A couple of years ago she’d have sailed through it all. A couple of years hence, retired, she should be able to cope with anything.

  Or nothing. In two years’ time, she could be a full-time carer. In fact, in only one year’s time she could be a full-time carer. Technically, having put in her thirty years’ service, she could retire as soon as she’d served her notice. This year.

  As if reading her mind, or more probably because he was the same age and must be facing the same decision, Mark asked, without preamble, ‘What are your plans for retirement?’

  Caught off guard, she said, absentmindedly taking the mug he was offering, ‘The day I’m fifty-five it has to be Devon. My parents.’ She grimaced.

  He raised an eyebrow, more senior to junior officer than she liked, as if she’d just made a crass suggestion in a meeting.

  ‘In fact,’ she continued, the decision making itself even as she spoke, an insidious idea she’d rather have swatted away before she articulated it, ‘I thought I’d pop into Personnel one day soon to talk about paperwork.’

  ‘You mean you’ve not already calculated to the last penny how much you’ll get?’ He contrived to make raising his mug an ironic gesture. It sloshed as he rapped it down with more force than necessary. ‘Come on, Fran, you can’t just slide away. You’ve got a job to do here.’

  ‘Which can terminate when I reach fifty-five.’

  ‘We all assumed – hoped! – you’d carry on working till you were sixty. Maybe you’d want to cut down a bit on the active side – certainly drop that extra work foisted on you when Field was taken ill – and concentrate more on planning and development…’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘Seems a bit like agreeing to play for a non-league club after being Arsenal’s striker.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’ve got an excellent reputation – national.’

  Head on one side, she asked, ‘What are you not telling me? Mark, has someone grassed me up for skiving the odd meeting?’

  ‘Not your meetings to skive: Field’s meetings.’ He stared at his mug with what looked like embarrassment, though it could equally have been irritation.

  ‘They have. Hell. Well, they’ll have to find someone else to cover everything when I go,’ she said defiantly. ‘And you? We started on the same day, after all.’

  ‘Keeping my options open,’ he said, finishing his tea quickly. As soon as the conversation got halfway interesting, it was over. But he seemed to change his mind. ‘Tell you what, why not have a drink one evening? Make it a meal – save us both cooking.’

  ‘Or microwaving a ready-meal,’ she agreed.

  He produced his diary. ‘Next Monday?’

  She had the presence of mind to shake her head firmly. ‘Mondays aren’t good. I’ve started to spend the weekends with my parents, you see.’

  His eyebrows shot up. ‘Every weekend?’

  ‘For the time being.’

  ‘Retiring down there’s one thing… Are they ill or what?’

  God, what happens when they’re ill? ‘Just old and frail.’

  ‘So you go—?’

  ‘Friday evening, and come back Sunday evening.’ She said it flatly, as if there wasn’t a round trip of some four hundred and fifty miles involved.

  ‘But Monday evening—’

  ‘I don’t get back from Devon till the silly hours. Sometimes I don’t even start back till Monday morning. All I want is bed when I get home on Monday evenings.’

  To her amazement the simple word raised possibilities she’d never thought of. Did they raise them in him? He didn’t laugh with embarrassment or suggest another evening. In fact, he was letting the silence grow.

  So it was left to her to break it. ‘Tuesday’s altogether better for any activity,’ she declared. The pity of it was, the thought of sharing his bed involved simply a realisation that to do so would spare her an alcohol-free evening and a drive back in the dark. Passion? Her libido had been dormant for years. Why should it wait till the menopause – could this really be the first time she’d spelt that word out to herself – to rear its interesting head?

  ‘Next Tuesday, then. No: sorry – I’ve got a meeting in London. How about the Thursday of that week?’ He wrote with a flourish in his diary, still a paper one like hers. She’d once bought an incredibly expensive palmtop and forgotten how to extract vital information after a particularly traumatic weekend in Teignmouth. She’d retrieved it eventually, of course, but then panicked that she needed back-up. At last
it had seemed simpler to abandon sophistication altogether.

  All the possibilities hanging almost visibly between them, she was relieved when a token tap at the door was followed by the entrance of the Chief Constable, in full fig. Was it her imagination, or did the Chief lift an interrogatory eyebrow in Mark’s direction? If he did, Mark gave no indication of having seen anything.

  After smiles and fine words all round, she made her exit.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Piss off. Just piss off out of it. I told you, piss off. Just piss off out of it!’

  ‘Dear me! You shouldn’t have to put up with this, Elise! Really! You’d think someone would have a word with her. I’ll have a look to see if there’s a nurse around and ask.

  ‘But you can’t hear, can you? You can’t tell whether she’s yelling obscenities or reciting poetry. But others can – I’m sure it’s upsetting for them. Excuse me one moment.

  ‘There. A waste of time that was. The charge nurse says she’s not in her right mind, as if that were the great medical diagnosis of the century. Dementia. Nothing they can do about it except wait for her to die. I suggested more morphine, since she seems to be in so much pain, but he says the pain’s largely psychosomatic, and any more would kill her – which would be a mercy but which would cause all sort of legal difficulties. Nurses have been charged with manslaughter for less, he said.

  ‘What’s that? No, every time you clutch my hand I think you mean something, don’t I? But if I remove my hand – thus – you clutch thin air with equal passion.

  ‘Passion! If you want passion, you should see the effect DH Lawrence is having on my first year students. If you ask me, he’s positively dangerous. My sister tells me that for years she felt she was a freak because she didn’t feel as Lawrence insisted women felt. Honestly! Ha, ha! Oh, dear: it seems wrong, doesn’t it, to laugh aloud, just as if I were safe in the SCR, when you’re as silent as the grave and she – there she goes again, that poor woman with Alzheimer’s. Pray God I’ll go before I get like that.

  ‘Can you feel this, Elise? If you can, give me one squeeze for no, two for yes.

  ‘Yes! Yes, you squeezed then, quite hard. Again, Elise – one for no, two for yes!

  ‘No: I imagined it, didn’t I? Let’s try once more. One for no, two for yes.

  ‘Not a sausage. Nothing.

  ‘Look at the time: it’s time for my remedial class. Oh, yes! I’m doing remedial English with students taking an honours degree in English! There’s not one of them that comes on the course without an A at A level, but ask them to spell, to frame a sentence, to structure a paragraph… As for sustaining an argument throughout a three thousand word dissertation, they can no more do that than – than you can take up your bed and walk.

  ‘I must go. I’m sorry, my dear. But I really must run.’

  Chapter Four

  ‘I hoped you’d speak to me before you went to Personnel,’ Mark said quietly, but tapping his desk with palpable irritation. ‘I thought we’d agreed – Oh, do sit down.’

  Fran felt her jaw set. She tried to relax it. Friend he might be, dinner date for this week, indeed, but while still on duty as they were now, the hierarchy still operated. She ought to have warned him that she meant to put in her resignation. The fact she hadn’t was interesting in itself. Even she realised that.

  ‘Fran, you are at perfect liberty to take your pension the moment you reach the appropriate date and run off to retire in any place in the world. We both know that.’ He sat opposite her, forearms on his desk, leaning forward as if he were dressing down a raw recruit. ‘But I’m not convinced that you should, especially if your destination is Teignmouth. No. Put it another way. I’m absolutely convinced you shouldn’t “retire” down to Devon.’ The quotation marks floated between them and disappeared. ‘Down in Devon you’ll become what you’re absolutely not qualified to be – a geriatric nurse. And for a pretty short time.’

  ‘We don’t know that. They may go on for years.’ Her head went back like a defiant teenager’s. After another shattering weekend she couldn’t lay her hand on her heart and swear she hoped they would.

  ‘I don’t know which would be the worse scenario,’ he said reflectively. ‘Do you? To retire down there, selling that lovely cottage of yours, I presume, to be their unsung drudge for ten years, by which time you’d be too old and too worn out to think of doing anything except dwindling into old age yourself. Or to retire down there and find them both dead within a year and you with twenty or thirty years on your hands wondering what the hell to do with yourself. Those are the options, Fran.’

  ‘I’m sure I could find all sorts of things to do down there,’ she countered.

  ‘I’m sure you could.’ His smile was dangerously affable. ‘You could join the Ladies’ Luncheon Club, be a red-hot committee member for every organisation going, arrange church flowers and have your garden win prizes.’

  Even to her own ears her laugh was rueful.

  ‘Exactly. Now, it’s clear to me you can’t carry on as you are. Your job demands a hundred and ten per cent of your time and energy, and the most you can offer is about fifty. No,’ he overrode her, ‘please don’t try to tell me otherwise. I’m saying that as your senior officer. As a friend I’m telling you you’re burning out before my eyes. I want to transfer you from your present positions in both Policy and Crime – God knows why Personnel thought you should continue to fulfil both roles, when it was supposed to be a very short term measure, and why, despite my official request, they’ve changed nothing in a whole week. I suppose,’ he conceded with a grin that made him look absurdly boyish, ‘it was because until recently you were one of a handful of officers who could take on both and succeed brilliantly.’

  ‘I’m loath to lose either,’ she snapped.

  ‘You don’t have an option. Let me make that clear.’ As if to sooth her ego, he added, ‘And, I repeat, you should never have been asked to try in the first place, in my opinion. No one should. No, you’ll leave both with almost immediate effect and take on a project answering directly to me.’

  She nodded. She had to listen, after all, when he spoke in his official voice, however angry and resentful she might be. Angry, resentful and tired.

  ‘It’s a case we’ve had on file for some time,’ he continued, with a smile aimed to placate, even charm her. ‘Almost a dead file. But not quite dead. And it’s suddenly become urgent.’

  Through the haze of fatigue she heard words that intrigued her. She straightened. To her intense irritation, Mark stopped, and got up to switch on his kettle.

  ‘Unless you’d rather have a blast of coffee?’ His hand moved from his tea caddy to hover over his percolator. ‘No? Green? Excellent.’ While he waited for the kettle to boil, he reached across to an ivy geranium on his windowsill and removed a dead leaf, dropping it in the waste bin. To her amazement he bent to retrieve it, putting it in another bin. ‘I mustn’t mess up the recycling, must I? Here – is that strong enough? Good.’ Sitting at his desk again, he burrowed in his desk, producing a tin of expensive organic biscuits.

  Was this what being a widower had done to him, reduced him to this sort of old-maidish domesticity? Or was the term not ‘reduce’ but ‘elevate’?

  She smiled and took a biscuit. It was very good. Ah, the rush of sugar!

  He patted a thick file. ‘You can see a lot of effort’s already been put into this. But not enough – you’ll see that we’re no nearer to solving it than on the day it happened.’

  ‘Who was the victim?’

  ‘A middle-aged woman. Found in the undergrowth just off a lay-by on the B2067, northbound. Nearly two years ago.’

  ‘Two years? Well, it’s the old twenty-four hour syndrome, I suppose. If you don’t start getting results straight away, it may take months to get them.’

  ‘Quite. And often matters are allowed to drift, and it’s just another unsolved crime and you hope you can pin it on some con already doing time for something else.’

 
; ‘So what’s different about this one?’

  He laughed. ‘Is it the tea, the biscuit – here, have another – or the challenge? You already look a different woman.’ He took a sip of his tea. He might use mugs but they were bone china, as good as she used at home. ‘What’s different about this one is that the charge may soon change from assault and aggravated rape to murder.’

  ‘May change?’

  ‘The victim – we only know her first name, which is Elise – is in what they call a persistent vegetative state. PVS. The medics have been treating her all this time, and now they want to pull the plug on her.’

  Her voice was sharp. ‘Is that for medical or budgetary reasons?’

  He raised a placatory hand. ‘Simply humanity, from what I gather. The courts are involved. Elise will be allocated a lawyer whose job it is to fight for her life, such as it is, while the hospital authorities will argue that withdrawing food will permit Elise to die naturally – which technically, apart from the fact her heart’s still beating, she’s already done. Did at the time of the assault.’

  A little silence fell.

  Fran broke it. ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because I want to assure the court that we’ve done all we possibly can. By putting you in charge, with your reputation, not to mention your rank, I’m demonstrating that. Of all the officers at my disposal, you’re the best for the job. But because the case is pretty nearly cold, some of the urgency has gone out of it. After all, to put it brutally, Elise isn’t going anywhere, and the courts take forever in these cases anyway. So if you need to dash down to Devon at short notice, you needn’t feel so guilty. You won’t be inconveniencing two teams – and let’s face it, no matter how well you cover, currently your work has to be delegated to people who aren’t paid to do it. It might look good on their CVs if it’s official, but if it’s a favour for you, it wouldn’t get on their CV.’

  ‘I take your point. You’ve been very patient so far,’ she added, wishing she could fire up and deny the implicit accusation.