A Private Investigation

by Peter Grainger

  He said, ‘What about you? Murder squad?’

  ‘That’s not what it will be called.’

  ‘OK. But it looks as if you already know something about it.’

  She got up from her desk, walked around to his and made a show of peering down at the laptop as if they were discussing the work. Then she said quietly, ‘I’ve got an informal chat lined up for this Thursday, not in working hours.’

  ‘Well done. Who with?’

  ‘It’s very informal, I’m not saying anything to anyone else.’

  ‘Right.’

  So now he wasn’t going to pursue it, which was annoying, over-respecting her request for secrecy.

  She said, ‘It’s with DCI Freeman.’

  ‘Cara Freeman? From Regional Serious Crimes?’

  Serena nodded.

  Waters said, ‘That’s good, then, she’s seen you before, when they made the cocaine arrests and we found Tina Fellowes. You’re aware she spent a long time trying to get DC into RSCU?’

  ‘I know that’s one of the reasons she said she’d speak to me.’

  He nodded this time before he said, ‘Yes, probably sees you as the next best thing which is a sort of compliment.’

  Still leaning over his laptop, she tried to pinch and twist his nipple through his shirt. He pushed backwards, sending his swivel chair scooting across the floor, and then both realised that Detective Inspector Terek was back at his desk and watching them. Serena straightened her face and said, ‘Yeah, well, got to do something. Not going to be the same, is it? It’s already changed a lot.’

  She was looking across at Smith’s empty desk, as a sign of things to come.

  ‘Where is he?’

  Waters said, ‘HR, I think. I had no idea retiring involved so many meetings and consultations.’ And then, ‘I heard that the new squad, which is not a murder squad but which will involve specialist investigations into people unlawfully killed, is going to be a dispersed unit. A couple of full-time people and the rest staying in post but released as required. So you’d still be here.’

  Terek was still watching, and getting on her nerves.

  ‘That’s the plan, or so I hear. It would be a start. At least I’d get out of here sometimes. If it was really slow, I could always commit a couple myself, just to get things moving.’

  Waters looked up at her, never doubting that under the right circumstances… Then he said, ‘I’m sure DC has a list of suitable candidates.’

  ‘DC is a man of many lists.’

  Terek had stood up and would be on his way over soon.

  Waters said, ‘Anyway, good luck on Thursday. Don’t forget to remind them that you do a very good bored housewife impersonation. DC still has nightmares about your visit to the Velvet Club.’

  She edged closer to him, one hip nearer than it needed to be, and gave him the full sultry stare, as she said, ‘Bored housewife? You’ve no idea, young man…’

  Waters blinked and nearly blushed – she could still get to him that way, if no other. He gets more like Smith every day. She waited another second or two, until Terek made his move; by the time he arrived she was back at the mobile phone database, fully focused on her work.

  As she did so, Smith pulled into the carpark and found his usual space empty, as it ought to be – it didn’t have a little signpost like Superintendent Allen’s, three bays closer to the station’s rear entrance, but it didn’t seem to need one.

  That was his last trip to Norwich, then. He had signed the final papers. And the numbers had surprised him because the tax-free lump sum had been significantly higher than he had predicted, thanks to the fact that when he stepped down he had done a deal that preserved the force’s contributions at the level of Detective Chief Inspector. That had been Sheila’s idea – she knew that teachers could do that sometimes. Now he could afford a small fleet of dinghies and still have plenty of change.

  He sat in the car, thought and patted the steering wheel – it looked as if the old girl was going to see him through to the end after all. There had been many of little faith, many siren voices telling him for years to get a new one. But she had stuck by him, and he by her. Loyalty is an under-rated quality these days.

  But for heaven’s sake, Smith, you’re talking about a car! He got out, not bothering to lock it, but deciding nevertheless that when this was finally over, he would need to make a decision about the Peugeot’s retirement as well. And this would finally be over in fourteen working days and – a glance at the Date 15200 – six hours. Canteen? It was almost lunchtime but he wasn’t particularly hungry.

  Once inside, instead of going up the stairs to the offices, he went left along the ground floor, round to the front entrance where Charlie Hills should be on duty; there were just twenty-nine opportunities remaining for the two of them to indulge in mutual commiserations. How many packets of biscuits could he steal in that time? Would Charlie get some nice ones in – custard creams or bourbons – to make it especially memorable?

  When Smith arrived, he found Charlie in the foyer, on the wrong side of the counter, looking confused. He said, ‘Hello? Lost your key?’

  As getting back to the correct side only involved lifting the flap, this wasn’t very likely.

  Charlie mumbled a greeting and continued to stare back into the space that he had occupied for longer than anyone in the building could remember; Smith joined him, hands in pockets and a look of vague expectation on his face. Several seconds passed slowly before Charlie said, ‘I just can’t see it…’

  Smith looked again, and said, ‘Anything in particular you can’t see?’

  Nothing from Charlie.

  ‘I’m hoping the answer to that is yes, because if it isn’t, this is a pretty serious medical emergency, Charlie.’

  ‘I’ve seen the plans, DC.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  Smith was about say, oh, what, the plans for the alien invasion? And then he remembered that this was about something worse – the redesigning of police station entrances across the county of Norfolk.

  Smith said, ‘So, you have seen the future, and it doesn’t work. There’s a surprise.’

  ‘And we’ve got a date. The 6th of February.’

  For a moment Smith had a selfish thought – he wondered what he would be doing on that fateful day. Before he could say something in compensation, Charlie Hills went on, ‘Instead of an officer behind that counter, the public will be met by a bullet-proof screen and some instructions about how to speak clearly into a microphone. And we’ll be watching them on closed circuit TV from the other side.’

  One could make a joke of it, say let’s have a practice, Charlie – you go back and pretend you can’t see me, or I’ll hide behind this pillar and pretend I’ve got some of the usual queries. But it wasn’t funny. This was a metaphor for what had happened to policing in their working lives. In the relentlessly expanding universe of improved procedures, new management practices and ever-evolving mission statements, the ordinary officer found himself further and further away from the centre where the people had been – the people who needed help and support or just a friendly face.

  Charlie said, ‘You know, my Mrs is telling me to go early, DC. She says, what’s a couple of years of your pension if you’re going to be miserable? If you think it’s just plain wrong?’

  He was likely to be asking for Smith’s opinion on that. Thinking back about the past few years, the years in which he had stayed on when he could have retired, Smith knew what he would find; he was the only officer to have done so. Everyone else was going on their due date or before it, even the very best of them, men and women that the service could ill afford to lose. And many of the spaces left behind were being filled by out-sourcing contracts, civilianised services and support officers.

  Smith said, ‘Well, Charlie, if you’re asking for the benefit of my experience, such as it is, it’s this. The women are often right, and even when they’re not it usually isn’t worth arguing. Now, are we having a mug of tea or n
ot?’

  Four o’clock in the afternoon. Smith had never watched the clock in his working life but now, suddenly, time seemed to be an ever-present concern in the back of his mind. One more hour and this day too would be over, leaving fourteen more.

  He distracted himself by looking up and around the office, watching them all at work. Well, all two of his team that were here. Murray had taken a half-day to go and view a house with Maggie; now that they had become three, the apartment would no longer do – young William David needed a new room of his own and a garden to play in next summer. Richard Ford had never quite made it into team Smith; as a result, Wilson’s team was now six strong. That made sense, of course, with Smith leaving soon but it suggested that the reorganisation that Terek had wanted from day one would not involve Smith’s team simply continuing under a new detective sergeant. When he retired, his team would cease to exist by the look of it, and that was a pity.

  Waters would be alright – Smith trusted that DCI Alison Reeve would keep her word and oversee his first steps on the promotion ladder. Smith didn’t know Cara Freeman nearly as well but the phone call he had made to her last week about Serena Butler and the new murder squad ought to produce something in Serena’s favour – at the very least she would begin to get her face known and her ambition noted in a new police force after her problems in Lincolnshire.

  John Murray? There was a new centre of gravity in his life now, and promotion had never been of any interest to him; it would not matter who they put in charge of him, he would go on doing what he does, which is the job, quietly, systematically and well. Maggie might want to come back in a few years’ time, when William goes off to school, and the force would be fools if they did not find something for her, but by then Smith would be long gone and half-forgotten. There was nothing he could do for her now.

  So, not with a bang but a whimper, that’s how it was to end. Office-bound work preparing files for cases that would not be in the courts until the spring, and he would be able to read about them in the newspapers. Wilson was getting his people out and into the town after reports that Lake would be targeted by organised shoplifting gangs during the Christmas bonanza – that could produce lots of arrests and charges in double-quick time, delighting Detective Superintendent Allen. And Smith could concentrate on ways to avoid the surprise party that was being arranged in his honour on the afternoon of Friday the 23rd of the month. This is the way the world ends, Smith. Bernard Reuben Sokoloff was your last case, just as you guessed he might be.

  Enjoy the quiet life, start getting used to it. After all, if anything interesting was to walk through the door here tomorrow morning, you probably wouldn’t have time to get it sorted anyway. You wouldn’t want to leave with a job half-done.

  Chapter Three

  The Dockmills estate to the north of the centre of old Kings Lake is nothing special – it has hundreds of counterparts in scores of British cities. The accommodation is all either privately rented or social through the many associations that sprang up after the demise of local council housing departments. Almost universally there are three bedrooms to a property, as if this had somehow been ordained as the optimum living and sleeping space for modern humans, but the number of ways in which individual families and other nameless groupings of people have evolved to inhabit those three bedrooms is effectively infinite.

  Some of the houses are in terraces of eight or a dozen, while in the posh south-west corner, a planner with dreams of greater things created an enclave of semi-detached homes, perhaps as a gesture of reconciliation to the estate of private houses two hundred yards away over the disused railway line that inevitably soon became an unofficial and unadopted footpath down into the city centre. It was here, up against the old railway line, and a decade later, that another group of councillors agreed to make another gesture and construct a small adventure playground for the offspring of the Dockmills, somewhere for them to use up some of that energy which otherwise tends to find its release in ways that produce caseloads for environmental health officers and long lists of repairs for local authority sub-contractors.

  The Railway Playpark opened with a half-page spread in the local free paper, and the wife of the mayor had her picture taken at the top of the slide, but over the years it was used less and less by the young mothers and their toddlers, even during term time when the older ones were sometimes in school. After a walk around, you might decide to take your youngsters elsewhere too, what with the litter and the dog-fouling and the evidence of play of sorts surely never intended by those well-meaning if somewhat naïve district councillors.

  Hundreds of counterparts in scores of cities? It might be more. And these are places on the edge of things in so many ways. It might be only two hundred yards across the old tracks but that’s another world, a different universe. Attitudes and values alter somewhere in the space between. On the Dockmills, other laws apply.

  On that Monday evening, the girl got off the roundabout she had been idly pushing around with her feet. As it slowed and then stopped, the roundabout gave a final, drawn out squeal of protest.

  Gemma wasn’t coming. The girl wasn’t annoyed or even that surprised – people let you down, you get used to it. Neither of the two texts she had sent had been read, or maybe Gemma had turned off show read receipts. Back at home, her mum wouldn’t return for a couple of hours at least, but there wasn’t much to eat. The girl had left a message on the table saying she’d gone to Jaimee’s but even if her mum came home early, it wasn’t likely she’d ring Jaimee’s to check, so she had plenty of time.

  She walked to the edge of the play-park, went down the scuffed-earth bank and turned left along the railway footpath, heading for town; no need for the torch on her phone, this had been her territory since she learned to walk. There might be someone to talk to outside the shops along The Crescent. Sometimes boys from the Towers came across that way. At least she could get something to eat with the tenner mum had given her before Roy arrived and took her out again. Roy was getting his feet under the table, Nan said, and that meant Roy would be moving in soon.

  There’s one place along the old railway path where the bushes grow right down to the edge and you have to push your way through. Thorn bushes they are, they can scratch your face. She slowed down and protected her face with one arm, anxious not to have scratches on it like a kid. If someone was waiting for you along this path, this is where they’d do it, come up from behind but she isn’t scared. She knows who all the weirdos and perverts are on the Dockmills and they aren’t the sort to hang around here. Also, she knows how to hurt a boy if you have to, how to make him back off.

  Not scared coming through here alone, not bothered about being on her own. Makes you harder and you’ve got to be hard in this life. Ahead of her she could see the lights of The Crescent, and she felt the first drops of rain. The shops looked inviting, brightly lit, the promise of a little warmth. Get a drink in the kebab shop. The usual bloke was old, at least forty, and his eyes went all over you, but he’d let her hang around inside until the rain stopped, if it wasn’t too busy.

  Mehmet Sadik watched as the girl sat herself down in the customers’ waiting area – one orange plastic table and three orange plastic chairs. She was a customer because she had bought a paper cup containing hot chocolate from the vending machine, but the table and chairs were intended for people who had paid for proper things – the donner kebabs, the chicken shish, the mixed meat pieces with curry sauce which was his own invention designed to have a multicultural appeal in this cosmopolitan enclave of Kings Lake. Not intended for kids who bought one drink…

  Mehmet considered the promotional potential. At least with her sitting there in the window, the place did not look empty – maybe it would encourage others inside. If so, and they bought food, he would tell her to go, take the firm, commercial decision. All too often the early weekday evenings were useless; he had thought about not opening until Wednesdays. Now the burger van had made things worse, parking across the stree
t. Right across from him, sneaking in on the end of the bay for the bus stop. Mehmet had gone out the first night this happened and spoken to him, told him to clear off, but the man was young and not afraid – he had offered to come out of his van and settle it on the pavement, and Mehmet had retreated.

  He thought about calling the council, to see if the burger man had any sort of licence but that might mean officials coming to his own takeaway establishment, and he didn’t want the environmental health here again. So, life is hard, you try to offer a service and make a small living but always it is a struggle, a fight for survival.

  Mehmet made a point of not watching the girl all the time – she had caught him looking already. What is a man supposed to do now? Nobody knows anymore. In the village he had left as a boy, back at home, such a girl might be married already. She was not a child. But here, in this country? Like he said, nobody knows anymore.

  But she is too young to be out after dark, just hanging around on her own – that cannot be right, he knows that much. The girl was staring out of the rain-streaked window most of the time, taking an occasional look at her phone, as if someone might send her a message. A taxi driver Mehmet recognised came in and bought two wraps from the ready-made counter, and he too had a long look at the girl as Mehmet assembled the order. On the way out, the driver asked the girl if she was waiting for a cab, and she might have been because the rank was only thirty yards away from the shop, but really he just wanted to say something to her. The girl pouted and smiled, saying no thanks, and the driver left, honour satisfied.

  Ten minutes passed, and there was no sign of another customer. Mehmet came out from the counter and went to the table. It was awkward, her sitting there for so long. He said, ‘You know this is not a youth club, right?’

  ‘Yeah, think I worked that out.’