Not a Very Nice Woman

by John Eider

‘That’s an ugly weapon,’ said the young Constable still coming down after the nerves of the raid. He was stood next to Grey above the motionless and handcuffed Patrick Mars, looking to the shotgun kicked four yards away across the flat roof. ‘What were they doing with that in a shop? I mean, I could just about understand a baseball bat.’

  ‘Oh, you see these weapons turn up in amnesties, things you wouldn’t believe.’

  The building had been flooded with reinforcements after the all-clear had been sounded, and the crowd able to mingle freely again by the shops and discuss what had just happened to them, ‘Did you see it? I could have been shot!’

  Paramedics were on site and ambulances waiting on the road, though they were making sure Mars got treated last.

  ‘Where’s the doctor?’ he called from the ground.

  ‘Treating the female officer you shot,’ spat back the Constable, with anger Grey wasn’t going to reprimand.

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t have women on the front-line then.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be a front-line if…’

  Grey stepped in, ‘Why don’t you try and find us both a cup of coffee?’

  ‘Okay, but if he tries to move, sir, shoot him.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will.’

  Grey was left alone standing over Mars,

  ‘He’s got a point though, there was no point hurting her, or the shopkeeper.’

  ‘You’re trying to moralise me? Don’t you think I’m a little past that?’ he asked groggily.

  ‘Fair point.’

  The man’s speaking was strained, and Grey wondered if he was really injured? After all, Derek’s screwdriver had gone in somewhere. Yet he could only see cuts and bruises, he couldn’t be any worse than his victims, and an extra paramedic would be found for him anytime now.

  ‘And that’s all your going to ask me?’

  ‘What would you have me ask you then, Patrick?’

  ‘Why I did it.’

  ‘Oh, I think we know most of it.’

  ‘You’ve been busy.’

  ‘I think you received a call from your son Peter, away in the Navy Cadets, something along the lines of, “Esther’s found some woman who was married to Granddad, who bought your painting of the bear…”’

  The man’s face collapsed as he repeated his son’s words to him,

  ‘“She’s Esther’s tutor, lives at that old people’s place in town, by the trees.” Esther’d told him everything. Of course I knew where he meant.’

  ‘Peter must have trusted you, to call you.’

  ‘No, he just knew I’d be the only one who could confirm it. He’d already abandoned me, like the rest of them. The women I expected nothing less from, but him, I always hoped he’d come around in time.’

  ‘He followed your career.’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ he brightened. ‘I was proud of that.’

  ‘Your mother. Did you know?’

  ‘No; and I didn’t plan it, if that’s what you’re getting at; by which I mean I know what I did, but only wanted to find her that night. I didn’t know what I’d do once I got there.’

  ‘It was dark, everyone was watching television.’

  ‘I watched from by the trees at first, at the windows of all the flats, knowing she was in there somewhere. The place looked deserted, only a few of the rooms were lit. I went around the back to the door and walked straight in, I couldn’t believe it was so easy.’

  ‘Perhaps they still trust people there?’ said Grey; but Mars didn’t spot the jibe, continuing,

  ‘She had her full name on her letterbox in the hall, otherwise I wouldn’t have found her. So I followed the numbers up… and…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When I got there I couldn’t move.’

  ‘In the corridor?’

  He nodded, ‘Frozen, terrified I was running on adrenalin. I know that feeling, you see, that fear. I learnt to recognise it in my training, to notice it, and acknowledge it and not pay any attention to it; but I couldn’t, I was frozen.’

  ‘Until?’

  ‘Until I heard other feet on the stairs; young feet, skipping feet, coming higher and higher up. The end of the corridor was wild, dark and full of plants, so I ran into them, pressed up against the back wall. And then I saw her.’

  ‘Stella?’

  ‘No, Esther, coming down the corridor, running towards me. I mean feet away from me.’

  ‘She went to Stella’s room?’

  ‘No, she stopped still and then ran off.’

  ‘She saw you?’

  ‘No, no. I was invisible.’

  But she sensed you, thought Grey. It came home to him then how Mars had robbed his own daughter of the chance to know, even to have an hour speaking on equal terms with, the grandmother she hadn’t before than evening known she had. Mars, his arms handcuffed behind him, lay prostrate, increasingly uncomfortably on his back on the lightly sloping roof; and Grey could understand why the young Constable had wanted violence done unto him; and why other officers, the bad ones you read about in the papers, might at this point – a doctor yet to attend, the man’s present injuries as yet unknown, with no one watching – have wanted to land a size-nine right into his midriff, again and again till his kidneys burst and his liver couldn’t cope with the injuries to his system.

  But instead he only asked,

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I stepped out, back into the light. Her door was already open, and when I went in there she was, at the end of the table, like she was waiting for me,

  ‘”Patrick. Well, what a day it is for surprises.”’

  ‘You recognised each other?’

  ‘Yes. She was just the same, the same eyes, face, only her hair had gone grey. “I think you have a daughter,” she said. “She’s bright. You must be very proud of her.”’

  ‘The daughter you hadn’t seen for, how long?’

  His face screwed itself up in unfacable pain, he turning it sideward, one way and then the other as if someone held a knife to it, before gasping for air like a landed fish. The sobs came quickly now, Grey imagining the inner-horror as he summarised,

  ‘The mother you thought abandoned you, who you thought didn’t love you, yet who was so glad to see you; the daughter you’d already cast away, had given up on; all the love you had missed out on, all you would miss out on. You snapped?’

  He nodded,

  ‘She got up, came forward to greet me, and I…’

  As if on cue the bright-coated medics burst onto the roof. In the end Grey hadn’t meant to hurt Mars, but he had more than ever by making him remember.

  ‘His breathing’s weak,’ said the lead medic, they unbuttoning his suit blazer. ‘His chest’s bleeding. Didn’t you check him?’

  ‘Hard when he’s pointing a shotgun at you.’

  ‘We need these cuffs off.’

  ‘No.’

  The medic didn’t argue, instead shouting back down the ripped corridor, ‘We need a stretcher here. Stab wound, internal wounding.’

  The big man didn’t seem diminished for his injuries, Grey still not imagining he could be badly hurt. For the medics’ presence he still had to ask Mars,

  ‘And Charlie Prove?’

  ‘Ah, him. Is that his name?’

  ‘You didn’t even know him?’

  ‘Oh, I knew him. I wouldn’t forget him. I had to go back you see, to the Cedars the next night: to relive it, to understand what had happened, what I’d done. I hid in the trees, watched the windows, watched them all go to bed; and then the alarm went up, lights were on, people moving around.’

  ‘One of the residents was taken ill.’

  ‘Well, what could I do? I slunk back, stayed hid, and then… and then there he was, dashing away down the road. I could see his pyjama legs beneath the coat. It was like he’d been gifted to me, feted to meet.

  ‘I went after him… and he only led us right to these wretched buildings my mother was always out at meetings campaigning about when she should have bee
n home with me and dad, when I begged her to stay.

  ‘I don’t even know if he knew I was there. But then he stopped at the yard, turned around and… I’d bought the stick with me as a cover, for the Cedars, so I could rest on it while passing, looking like I needed it, like I was tired. I found I was gripping the stick so hard, and there was suddenly so much to ask him, to find out, but he just smiled at me like… like he wasn’t all there, and I knew there’d be no point, that I’d get nothing from him. And that tension, everything he did to my family, all the stuff from when I was a kid, it all came out and I had my stick in my hand and I just swung it. He tried to turn away and it came around at him to hit him on the back of the head. It… just kept going, the stick, went into his head, through his head, left a ridge in his skull.’

  The medic, who had been diligent in his work, now cast his patient a look of horror before silently resuming his treatment.

  Grey’s voice was white and dry as fired clay, ‘”From when I was a kid”?’

  ‘We went once to pick her up, after “one of her blasted meetings”, as dad would say, and she was getting into his car. She came over smiling when she saw us, bold as brass, saying how lovely it was we’d come to collect her, looking back to her fancy man, saying, “I won’t need that lift after all, my boys have come to pick me up.” I remember seeing him, and how my father looked at him; and I knew that night when my parents argued that it was him who dad was talking about.’

  ‘The night your mother left?’

  ‘I sat on the stairs listening – I used to when they argued. They didn’t know I was there. Dad called her “a whore and a harlot”, said she was out every night, and now he knew where. That she ought to be spending time with us. She was crying, trying to talk about the Council and her meetings, but he knew it was lies.’

  ‘How could you know? You were Seven.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Years later dad told me about it, but he hadn’t known I’d heard.’

  ‘Where’s that stretcher?’ called the medic. ‘You’ll have to ask him this later, it’s tiring him out,’ he said without conviction. But Mars went on regardless to his health,

  ‘And that’s what all came out when I struck him; and before I knew it he was down. What for, you ask? For loving my mother, for being loved by her, for having all those years with her living there so close to me, the son she’d walked out on. I hated him for splitting up my parents, for robbing me of my childhood, for leaving me with a father who could never trust a woman again.’

  Grey was agog at this inversion,

  ‘Patrick, your mother and Charlie, they were at Council meetings. They were on sides utterly opposed.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘You’re forgetting how it went that night. Your father kicked her out onto the street.’

  ‘She ran off to be with him.’

  The man resumed crying, and Grey knew there was no point arguing.

  The stretchermen came, they covering Mars’s mouth, they telling him to be calm, to relax, not to strain anything; yet he whispered to Grey as they lifted him to lead him off,

  ‘When we’d walk this way when I was growing up, my dad used to say, “You know, your mother would’ve hated these flats, she did all she could to stop them.” He sounded sad when he said it. She’d hurt him, you see.’

  The day had seemed too bright to be wading through such murky waters, these matters better suited to the veil and shadow of the Confessional. Grey had listened to Mars with no desire to be the sharer of his secrets, his confessor by necessity maybe, but never a confidant. They didn’t need his words, they already had their case: the women’s statements, forensics from the house, and lack of alibi would do for Patrick Mars. Grey left the rooftop calmed by this.

  Cori was standing by her car at the site of the earlier crowd scene, the shops now back to usual busyness, though the conversations of the shoppers given an urgent edge.

  ‘How’s my little soldier?’ she joked as Grey met her welcome presence.

  ‘Tired. I guess Rose wants to see us?’

  ‘Oh, hospital first, I think. Try not to bleed on the upholstery.’

  He felt for his collar, remembering, and realised that for all the medics around him upstairs the cut on his neck hadn’t even been asked to be looked at.

  ‘You learnt a lot today,’ he said in the Infirmary waiting area, he proud of her achievements.

  ‘A shame it all came in the wrong order though, before we had a chance to bring him in.’

  He shoved the letter from Derek Waldron, crumpled now from his adventures, into her hand.

  ‘He’s not too bad apparently, though he worried the doctors for a while,’ she said after reading. ‘It looks like Derek did get his “lucky blow” in before Mars got his.’

  The doctor concurred when Grey got to see her,

  ‘It’s not good for someone Mr Waldron’s age to get beaten about like that; and as for Patrick Mars, he’d been bleeding internally for two or three hours before we got him. I’ve seen men die from smaller cuts.’

  So Waldron was bad but far from fatal; and as for Mars, well, Grey knew he was unfinishable. He had the same faith in Mars’s immortality as we each have in our own. Mars would have many healthy years of life ahead of him, to be wasted in whatever institution the state chose in which to dispose of him.

  ‘Why don’t you get off home?’ had asked Grey while waiting to be seen.

  ‘Are you joking? Once we’ve gotten you patched up then I’ve three days of my notebook to write up.’

  ‘They’ll wait until morning.’

  ‘No they won’t, because something else will be along tomorrow; as you well know.’ She bumped shoulders with him in a friendly gesture, just as his name was called from across the room,

  ‘Right then, you’re up. You want me to wait?’

  ‘No, I’ll see you back at the station.’

  She gave his hand a squeeze. ‘My hero,’ she said and pecked him on the cheek. ‘Then I’ll go and see Natasha.’

  At that moment though through the doors came the male Constable, who Grey had speculated before might have been seeing their now-injured colleague. Giving the senior officers a nod as he dashed to her bedside, as the uniformed figure passed through the room the waiting people whispered, their own complaints distracted from, ‘They’re the police who took down that gunman.’

  The sense of pride and slight embarrassment at being the centre of attention would continue a while yet, as the regional news carried footage of the six of them in carbon-fibre vests rushing into the Hills shopping building. That he had done little other than hold cover behind a doorframe as the one-and-only shot at them was fired was neither here or there.

  Back at the station, Rose echoed Grey’s own instruction to Cori, but backed his with authority. Ordered not to show his face again till morning, Grey couldn’t quite cope with home yet, even with it being not far off a normal worker’s knock-off time. Despite being put on strong painkillers that forbade drinking, and it being too early for him to start anyway, he needed company, faces, voices, and so walked the short walk to the Young Prince Hal Tavern.

  ‘Pint Grey?’ asked Bill Blunt at the bar.

  Grey showed and rattled the plastic pillbox, Bill pouring him a pint of lemonade. His barmaid Janice, wiping a glass distractedly nearby, smiled at him before returning her gaze to the news rolling silently across the flatscreen television hoisted up above the door.

  ‘Lord, we’ve made the BBC,’ said Grey. ‘It must have been a slow day.’ That the TV was even on in the Prince Hal at any time other than a national sporting event was itself a turn up, Bill not a lover of technology in pubs.

  ‘Steak and eggs for The Holdup Hero?’ he offered. Grey gave him an equally sarcastic smile as he nodded and fell into a cushioned chair.

  Chapter 28 – Loose Ends and The Cedars Again

  Friday