‘The fact is though, Mr Dunn, that no crime has been reported, no allegations made against you. The only witnesses to anything amiss occurring at the Aubrey house were the couple themselves and whoever may have hurled a piece of their rockery through the window at them while they ate their breakfast; and if none of them will come forward… well, what kind of case do we have?
‘Nor is it any more than speculation how any alleged attacker got all the way out to their house and back twice over; for it would be quite a hike from town. Even if I had the time to go through traffic camera footage, and two nights running found a vehicle matching yours heading out in that direction… and mere hours after personally witnessing its driver intoxicated…’
‘Okay, okay, I get it,’ Dunn squirmed.
‘Though you see what I’m saying here?’ concluded Grey. ‘Count yourself lucky. Don’t ever try me again.’
Grey could have said more: of how cowardly an act it had been, lying in wait for someone like that, catching them off guard while eating… and a manual man against an office worker to boot, when they had always physical advantage… but he knew to say all this would have been unproductive.
Larry Dunn was no fool, he knew that for Alex Aubrey to make a compliant would require him coming back to town… and that might not be happening anytime soon. Dunn had understood the words, and understood he was free, but something rooted him to his seat,
‘So what about Thomas then?’ he at last responded. ‘Have you found him?’
‘We’re working on it. You know, you’re still almost the last person to see him.’
‘At the busstops?’
‘Yes, although at least we know now where he was going, and that he got there; which at least confirms what you told us.’ Grey patted the statement Dunn had given his colleagues during his stay.
‘Oh, your theory that I hadn’t waylaid him?’ offered Dunn with a snort.
‘Something extraordinary happened to Thomas that night. You wouldn’t believe the questions we have to ask of people sometimes.’
At liberty to leave, Dunn instead took the opportunity to talk, Grey finding he was quite happy to listen. The man began,
‘You know, when I saw Thomas in town, he looked rattled, fit to burst — you know the way really straight- laced guys are when they get pushed? You or me, finding out what Thomas did, would shout the place down, get on the phone, put our fist through something. But those kind of guys… their lives are too ordered, they follow the rules, they want someone to protect them — the boss, the law, I don’t know. They don’t ever cut loose, it’s like they’re powerless.’
‘Impotent.’
‘Yeah,’ he chuckled, ‘if you like. Aubrey screwed him over though, left him there to sort that mess out. He knew the well was dry.’ At this Dunn leaned in to whisper, ‘That was half the reason I did it. Not just for myself, but the way he’d screwed all of us.’ He pushed his chair back to leave, ‘I hope the lad’s okay, Inspector.’
‘Yes, so do I,’ Grey found himself replying, as with an unexpected hand on the detective’s shoulder, Larry Dunn passed him as he left the room and walked the short way to freedom.
‘Now go and protest if you must,’ called Grey after Dunn, ‘but trust one who knows — the money is not there, no matter what pressure you put them under.’
‘Are you telling me we didn’t get paid, Inspector?’ he called back with irony.
‘But then you knew that already,’ whispered Grey to himself. ‘Thomas Long had told your mate, you were the first ones to know.’
‘So we’re not charging him with anything?’ asked the Constable upon Grey’s own eventual rising to exit the room. He happened to have been one of the three who had pinned Dunn to the factory floor during yesterday’s scuffling bid for freedom.
‘No son, he did for Aubrey all right, but he will never bring charges.’
‘Other things on his mind?’
‘I shouldn’t wonder, the trouble this is all going to cause people. They wanted you for the picket?’
‘Yes, sir. If you don’t need me any more?’
‘Is this your first crowd scene?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You remember your training?
‘Every bit of it, sir.’
‘Just remember then — be spat at, be swore at, don’t ever raise your truncheon.’
Grey released the lad to his first proper large-scale operation, while recalling his own: Too young for the miner’s strike, a trainee during the Poll Tax disputes, he had first formed a line as a very young Constable, at, of all places, a music festival; one of the first paying, legal dance music events of the early Nineties, the Acid House raves of recent years having petered out in a low miasma of law changes, drug busts and general bad vibes.
It was being held quite legally, in a disused airfield some miles away, employing local labourers, a scaffold stage and — crucially — a rented concert public address system; which, as it neared the headline set of the evening, suffered a massive and irreparable power cut — in fact a man was burnt when the generator and the van it was in exploded. And so the organisers, who were probably the same who had been running the old illegal raves until quite recently, paused only to call in the police before disappearing into the surrounding countryside; and leaving it for the force to tend to thirty thousand colourfully dressed people, who were now being asked, and by the very officers they still viewed with suspicion from those earlier lawless days, to leave in an orderly fashion the field they had but a short while ago paid a not insignificant sum to enter. It had taken eighteen hours.
Chapter 27 — Canteen Confrontational
‘No rest for the wicked,’ murmured Grey to himself, as jogging back upstairs, he headed to the canteen to find Isobel eating greedily, Cori sat beside her with a notepad, taking notes of her words between mouthfuls. The room was empty but for a couple of officers talking at another table. Again he saw, like when he watched her sleeping in the hospital, how at moments like these Isobel had a girlish simplicity about her; she now displaying the pleasure a hungry child takes in their food. Yet the moment he sat down she looked up; and without missing a beat asked him between mouthfuls,
‘So what do you need me to do now? What’s the necessary procedures?’ Other questions followed as casually as you like, her knife and fork working at the food automatically.
She looked straight at the Inspector as he answered to say how there was no necessary procedures as such, she not having committed any crime, at least none they were investigating; but how he was glad of having her statement as a witness in the Long case, no matter how little light she could shed.
‘It really is very little, I’m afraid. I haven’t a clue who called us from the hotel,’ she offered, before changing the subject quickly, ‘So, what will happen with my things in the flat? And there’s also our… I mean, not all our money was…’
‘I’d think even your personal accounts would be seized,’ advised Grey, ‘at least until after the court case. You might also need to be interviewed by Nottingham police.’
These last reports seemed to sadden her, noted Grey, she perhaps having earmarked some part of their joint assets as an aid in launching into whatever she did next in life. Perhaps they were part-legitimate, he mused, earned by herself somehow? But he doubted it. He also noticed a certain fear about her, sparked by even the most oblique reference to Stephen Carman and the life they shared. This was betrayed by her big eyes, so expressive that not even her iron control could stop them hiding everything authentic she was feeling. God, he must have given her a rough time, he thought.
Isobel, eating less hurriedly now, no longer like an animal worried of where its next meal may come from, sat rocking her feet beneath the chair; while each officer passing through the almost deserted dining room, like their colleagues in the carpark before them, gazed on her with a mixture of amazement at seeing her in the flesh, joined with a look of near-parental love — she was their missing girl, and they were all her family.
Grey didn’t want to rush her — she was after all still a patient in their care, her horrid night not too far behind her. But time was pressing, and there were things that needed saying,
