by James Craig
The old guy looked genuinely offended. ‘Don’t be so bloody heartless. You wouldn’t call the Rozzers over a poor sick dog, would you?’
Before Carlyle could respond, Dom stuck out a thumb. ‘He is the police.’
‘Yeah?’ The man looked him, unconvinced.
‘I am the police,’ Carlyle said solemnly.
‘Haven’t you got better things to do than harass my poor Joey?’ Shifting in his seat, the man looked around, as if searching for some assistance in dealing with the two jokers making fun of his dog. But the end of lunch hour had largely emptied the park, and none of the remaining visitors showed any interest in coming to his aid.
No, not really. Carlyle watched Joey stop what he was doing and head towards a pair of Chinese tourists eating their lunch on a bench in the mini-pagoda that stood in the centre of the park. Taking up a position in their line of sight, the dog waited expectantly for a morsel of hamburger.
‘He’s begging now,’ Carlyle spluttered.
‘Leave the poor little sod alone.’ Dom stood up. ‘Everybody gets hungry after sex. It’s all the calories you burn.’ He turned to the man on the scooter. ‘I bet that must be sore.’
The man nodded. He looked genuinely upset. ‘Joey’s really been suffering.’
Carlyle rolled his eyes. He hadn’t schlepped halfway across town for a discussion regarding a dog’s sunburned privates.
Ever the humanitarian, Dom was far more sympathetic. ‘I’m sure you can get some kind of ointment for the problem,’ he told the man. ‘Ease the discomfort. He needs to leave it alone.’
So do we, Carlyle observed.
The guy looked round the square. Expensive office space rose up on all sides, broken only by the occasional gentleman’s club and luxury car dealership. ‘And where am I going to find a vet round here?’
Dom turned and raised an enquiring eyebrow to the inspector.
‘Don’t ask me,’ Carlyle huffed. ‘How would I know? Animals are not my thing. I’ve never owned so much as a goldfish in my entire life.’
Shaking his head, Dom pointed in the direction of Oxford Street. ‘Just take Joey to Superdrug. There’s one at the top of Davies Street. I’m sure that the pharmacist will be able to give you something for his . . . problem.’
With a grunt, the man put the scooter into reverse, sending it shooting across the grass. Conducting a wide U-turn, he went off in search of his four-legged friend.
‘I quite fancy one of those.’ Carlyle nodded at the scooter. ‘It looks quite nippy; handy for getting around.’ Turning towards Dom, he realized that his mate was already heading towards the park exit. ‘Hey!’ he shouted, jumping to his feet. ‘Wait for me!’
‘I’ve got to get back to the Gallery,’ Dom replied, over his shoulder. ‘Fiona will be wanting her lunch.’
Fiona? Carlyle wondered. Who’s Fiona? ‘Fair enough,’ he said, jogging after him.
What the hell was that beast doing? Discarded newspaper on one side of him, empty coffee cup on the other, Daniel Hunter tried to take up sufficient space to deter anyone else from joining him on the bench. After the best part of half an hour sitting in the park, the only thing that had caught his attention was the eccentric dog. Daniel watched with wry amusement as the uninhibited animal finished its . . . rutting on the grass and then went off in search of other diversions. No one else in the park seemed to bat an eyelid. That was the thing about London, everyone was wrapped up in their own little world. No one paid the slightest attention to what was going on around them. The city was a funny place; as a country boy, he wasn’t sure if he would ever really get used to it.
By now, lunchtime was over. The office workers had gone back to their desks and only a handful of folk remained loitering in the square. Daniel quickly pegged the old guy on the electric scooter as the dog’s owner. No one else looked like they would have the time or inclination for looking after a dog. Of course, the mutt could be a stray but he doubted it. As a rule, you didn’t see many strays roaming the streets of Mayfair.
Scooter-man finished his conversation with a couple of guys on a bench on the far side of the park and headed for the pagoda-type building where the dog was now being fed titbits by a couple of tourists. Trundling across the gravel, the man manoeuvred his scooter next to the dog. From his hand gestures, Daniel could see that he was making a half-hearted attempt to scold the dog for its shameless panhandling. Bowing its head, the animal looked suitably contrite. After a nod in the direction of the tourists, the man reached down and scooped up his pet. Placing it in the basket on the front of the scooter next to a couple of bottles of cider, he drove off, making for the exit on the west side of the park.
As he watched the unlikely duo traverse the zebra crossing leading to Hill Street, Daniel caught sight of Mel coming the other way.
‘At last!’ He gave her a wave but, head bowed, marching forward, she had yet to notice him. Her determined strides underlined that she was the best part of fifteen minutes late. Tutting like an old woman, Daniel let his hand drop back by his side.
Timekeeping was not one of his wife’s strengths. It drove him mad. Whereas he would always be five minutes early for any rendezvous, Mel was never knowingly on time. Daniel simply couldn’t comprehend her mindset. How hard was it to be on time for things? All it required was a bit of thought and some forward planning.
When they had been courting, Melanie Ward had never been less than twenty minutes late for a date. Once, she had made him wait an hour and twenty-five minutes outside the local picture house. When she finally turned up, Mel smiled sweetly and claimed that he had got the time wrong. Daniel had been furious – he had never done that in his life. They were supposed to be going to see Avatar. To this day, he had never seen the film and never would. Mere mention of the title made him bristle with frustration.
Ten years and two kids later, she was still always late. He had never been able to shake the idea that she did it on purpose, just to wind him up. It was something that caused more than a few arguments between them.
Now, however, was not the time for a row. Daniel was only going to be home for a short time. Tonight would be the first time he had slept in his own bed for almost a week. And the last too, for God knows how long.
Walking through the gates, Mel finally looked up. Spotting him, she upped her pace, an embarrassed grin on her face. As she came closer, he could see fatigue etched into her face. Her skin was deathly pale and the rings under her eyes were so dark it looked like her mascara had smudged. Bloody hell, Daniel thought, you need a break. His wife looked completely knackered. That was not so surprising. To all intents and purposes, she had been playing the role of single parent for the last two years, with minimal support from friends and family.
Not for the first time, Daniel felt ashamed. He knew that he hadn’t pulled his weight at home for a long time now. Mel deserved better. So did the kids. So did he, for that matter. What was the point of having a family if you never saw them?
Pushing the jumble of unhappy thoughts to the back of his mind, he got to his feet and stepped towards her, holding out his arms. ‘Hey.’
‘Hey, yourself,’ Mel smiled, stepping into his embrace.
Pulling her towards him, Dan closed his eyes, breathing in her perfume, as she kissed him gently on the lips.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, once they slid apart.
‘Are you?’ Daniel tried to sound nonchalant as they sat back down. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’
She gave him a gentle punch on the arm. ‘Liar.’
‘It wasn’t that much.’ By your standards, at least.
‘There was a security alert on Oxford Street.’
‘Anything serious?’
‘I doubt it,’ Mel said. ‘At any rate, I haven’t heard a bang. It’s probably just some traffic problem or other. Whatever it was, it was a right pain. I had to go all the way round by Regent Street. Otherwise, I would have been on time.’
‘Mm.’
‘Well, j
ust about.’
‘Don’t worry. My train was late, anyway,’ he fibbed again. ‘I’ve only just got here myself. How long have we got? What time is pick-up?’
Mel checked the time on her phone. ‘Don’t worry, we’ve still got half an hour.’
‘Fine. Want to get a coffee?’
‘Nah. I’m okay.’ She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘It’s nice just to be able to sit down for a moment, without having to rush about.’
‘Yeah.’ He gave her a squeeze back.
‘The kids will be thrilled to see you when they come out of school.’
‘You didn’t tell them?’
‘I wanted it to be a surprise.’ Now it was Mel’s turn to fib. The truth was that she didn’t want to get the kids’ hopes up; it wouldn’t be the first time their father had let them down at the last minute. It wasn’t that he was an unreliable man, far from it. It was just that his job was ultra-demanding and the Army made no allowances for family life. ‘You should have worn your uniform. You know they get a kick out of seeing you in it. I’m sure it would have gone down well with Mr Fry too.’
‘The headmaster? I thought he had retired last summer.’
‘No, not till the end of this year. You know how impressed he was that you were a Redcap.’
‘Yeah. It certainly helped get us through the interview.’ It was a conversation they’d had many times before. Bagging not one but two places at any Central London school required ruthlessly exploiting any connection or asset you had. When Daniel had walked into Dr Alfred Fry’s office in his Royal Military Police uniform, the old fella’s face had lit up. Even before they had shaken hands, Daniel had known the kids would get in.
‘I’m sure he’ll be at the gates. It would have been nice if you’d had it on.’
Irritated, Daniel tugged at the collar of his North Face jacket with his free hand. With the fleece lining, it was a bit too warm for the time of year but he would wear it on all but the hottest days; it was his off-duty uniform. ‘I don’t like wearing the uniform when I don’t have to,’ he mumbled. ‘Too conspicuous.’ Britain had long since stopped being a country where members of the military were shown proper respect. He was fed up with being accosted by wankers who felt they had the right to walk right up to you to give you a piece of their mind about everything from the ‘so-called War on Terror’ to the ‘dictatorship of the military-industrial complex’.
Mel nodded. She had heard it all before. ‘I understand.’ She gave his hand another squeeze. ‘The kids’ll just be happy to see you. That’s the main thing.’
‘Yeah.’
For a while, they sat in silence, each simply enjoying the pleasure of the other’s presence.
TWO
Groaning inwardly, Hunter watched as the dosser came towards them, an expectant grin on his face. He was a tall guy, in his thirties perhaps, with a thick beard and eyes that lacked focus. In one hand was a bottle of cheap Australian red wine. It was as close to empty as made no difference.
Jimmy Gallagher eyed the couple sitting on the bench and smiled to himself. Jimmy knew every type of person that turned up in the square. He could calibrate the likelihood of each one putting their hand in their pocket down to a fraction of a percentage point. The bloke wouldn’t want to know; the woman, however, was a racing certainty.
Seeing the scowl on the bloke’s face, Jimmy addressed his remarks to his good lady wife. ‘Spare a few pence for a cuppa, love?’ The accent was more West Country than West End.
Before Mel could stick a hand in her pocket, Daniel waved him away angrily. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he muttered with a robotic insincerity, meaning, Bugger off.
Sensing the woman’s hesitancy, Jimmy stood his ground. Every second of compound embarrassment was money in the bank.
‘Here you go.’ Mel fished a few coins out of her pocket and handed them over. She didn’t know precisely how much it was but it certainly wouldn’t come close to covering the cost of a latte in the Starbucks across the road.
‘Thank you.’ Jimmy gave Daniel a small smirk of triumph before shuffling off in search of his next target. ‘Have a nice day.’
‘What did you do that for?’ Daniel asked as he watched the dosser line up his next target. ‘He’ll just use the money to stay pissed.’
‘Poor bloke.’
‘Poor bloke, my arse.’
‘Daniel Hunter,’ she admonished him. ‘How do you know he’s not an ex-serviceman?’
‘Pfff.’
‘You’re the one always pointing out how ex-soldiers are more likely to end up homeless than normal people.’
Normal people. ‘Okay, okay.’ He watched the dosser get short shrift from a guy in a suit with a copy of the Financial Times under his arm. Presumably used to such rebuffs, the tramp wandered off without any protest. ‘You’re right.’
Satisfied with the admission of defeat, Mel graciously moved the conversation on. ‘How was Hereford?’
‘Hereford,’ he sighed, ‘was fairly routine.’
‘Must have been nice to have a simple one, for a change.’
‘You can say that again. Three SAS guys went out for a night on the tiles and put a couple of the locals in hospital. No one disputed what happened. I handed the report over to the Camp Commandant all signed, sealed and delivered. Job done.’
‘So what happens to the SAS guys?’
‘They’ll get three months in MCTC, something like that.’ The Military Corrective Training Centre in Colchester was England’s only military prison. It was built to house 500 service personnel convicted of various offences; the current population was 782, and rising. Daniel had spent a decent part of the journey back to London trying to work out how many of the buggers in there he’d put inside personally. His best guess was eighty-four, give or take. ‘Then it will be back to active service.’
‘They always take them back, don’t they?’
‘Not always.’
‘No, but most of the time.’
‘Why wouldn’t you? A lot of time, effort and money goes into recruiting and training these guys in the first place. If you throw them back on to the streets, all that goes to waste.’ He looked up, trying to pick out the tramp, but the man had disappeared from the park. ‘Plus, they’ll probably cause more trouble out here than if they stay in uniform.’
‘But they broke the law.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘There’s no suppose so, Dan, it’s black and white.’
‘Is it?’ He made a face. ‘They were provoked. The civilian “victims” were the ones who kicked everything off.’
‘But still—’
‘It’s always the ones who retaliate who get the blame. The blokes who started it all, they’re sorted. They’ll get their compo from the government, along with a formal letter of apology, plus their fifteen minutes of fame in the local paper.’
‘So, job done.’
‘Yes. Apart from the three off to the MCTC, everybody’s happy. And even they didn’t seem that bothered, to be honest.’
‘You’re just doing what you’re supposed to.’ Mel was used to her husband’s somewhat cynical tone. As far as she could see, it helped to keep him sane in a job which revolved around cleaning up other people’s mess.
‘Everybody’s happy,’ Daniel repeated. ‘The whole thing’s more a PR exercise than anything else.’
Mel edged closer on the bench, slipping her arm through his. ‘So what’s next?’
‘I was thinking we’ll pick up the kids and maybe take them to the Giraffe up the road, grab a burger and a Coke. What do you reckon?’
‘Okay.’
Registering the uncertain tone, he turned to face her. ‘You don’t seem too sure.’
‘Giraffe’s fine. But you know that’s not what I meant. What’s your next investigation going to be? How long will you be home for this time?’
The killer question.
Daniel stared up at the grey sky. ‘That depends on what comes up. I need to check in with
the CO later on.’ He could not face telling her that he was already booked on a Hercules leaving Mildenhall for Kandahar the day after tomorrow.
If only the RAF did ‘air miles’. In the last eight months, Hunter had handled three investigations in Afghanistan. This time around, an Afghan civilian had been shot in the neck while praying in a field. His death had caused protests that had left another three locals dead and a further sixteen injured. Two Welsh Guards accused of the initial killing languished in the brig at Camp Leatherneck. Each was blaming the other for firing the fatal shot.
The fact that Daniel was being flown in showed that the powers-that-be recognized that this would be a difficult investigation and also a political nightmare. For sure, the case was far more serious than some handbags outside the Queen Victoria in Lugwardine. And far more complicated too. The preliminary enquiries into the Leatherneck killing had seemingly managed to uncover no weapon and no usable forensics evidence. How could that be possible? Daniel felt a spasm of frustration. The investigator inside him knew that he should be there already. Every hour that passed made it less likely that he would ever get to the truth of the matter.
But sitting here, next to his wife, waiting for his kids to get out of school . . . did he really want to go? There was a limit to the amount of other people’s shit that any man could deal with. After twelve years in the RMP, Daniel fancied that he was getting very close to that limit.
‘You’re a captain now,’ Mel said. ‘That should make a difference.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Perhaps you’ll get a choice of assignments.’
Yeah right. ‘I dunno about that, love.’
‘Surely, this time?’
‘You know as well as I do, we’ve been saying that for the last year or so. But the RMP ain’t big on choice, whatever rank you wear on your shoulder. They tell you where to go and you say, “Yessir”. Simple as.’
She gave him a sad smile. ‘Chain of command.’
‘That’s right. It’s the Army. You have to respect the chain of command. Anyway, there’s bugger all below me at the moment. A lot of blokes are saying now is the time to get out. There are cuts everywhere. The politicians won’t stop trimming budgets, so the brass are trying to convince themselves that we’re running out of people to fight.’ The irritation in his voice was clear, but did he really care? ‘Three of the guys in my team have gone in the last six months and another two are angling for redundancy. At this rate, I shall be the only one left.’
