‘Poor Mr Old! He was such a nice man, too.'
Alex shook her head sadly. 'I've known him for years. Long ago, when I was a kid, Dad would take me into the office sometimes, when Roy Old was his boss. He always made a fuss of me, and he always gave me things to do. Tidying up the paper clips, making tea and coffee, clearing up the dirty cups; things like that. He used to call me his wee policewoman.' She smiled at the memory. Ahh; she sighed. 'It's such a shame.'
`Lightning strikes, love,' said Andy Martin, and knew, even before the shadow of a recent horror crossed her face, that he had said the wrong thing. 'Oh dammit,' he moaned. 'I'm sorry!'
She took him in her arms, touched by the anxiety in his vivid green eyes. 'It's all right, I'm used to your subtlety and tact by now.' She gathered a handful of his curly blond hair and tugged it, gently.
Oh!' she said, as a sudden recollection stirred. `Pops wants you in his office at eighty-thirty tomorrow morning. He said something about bacon rolls.'
`Hah! Last time Bob and I discussed bacon rolls, he told me what to do with them… pretty graphically, too!'
‘Take him black pudding instead, then.'
He smiled, but only for a moment. `How is Bob? You said that Sarah's in a state, but how about him? I'd have hated to be at that placee today. Is he okay?'
A candid look of concern crossed Alex's face as she looked at her fiance. 'You know my Dad. He's such a rugged old sod, and well, we both know first-hand just how tough he can be. But tonight… I was worried for him. He was doing his best to shore up Sarah, and yet…
‘I've always thought of him as carved out of rock, but this evening for the first time in my life, I thought I could see the cracks.'
TWENTY-FIVE
They had called it a field, but in reality it was a mud-flat. The glue-like muck was ankle-deep. With each step it sucked at his heavy black shoes, and caught the hem of his blue uniform trousers.
Not long before, on television, he had seen a report on the aftermath of a hurricane. It had struck a Caribbean town on market day, cutting a swathe through the stalls and tents of the traders, smashing them to matchwood, tearing them to shreds, overturning vehicles, unwinding bolts of colourful fabric and tangling them together like a great patchwork quilt.
The picture came back to him as he looked around the muddy acres in which he stood. It was strewn with suitcases and rucksacks, all burst open, their contents spread around.
Here and there his attention was caught by a sombrero, or a big black fan, bought for wall-mounting, but now broken on the ground, or a stuffed toy donkey with big, sad eyes, looking frighteningly realistic as if it were wondering what had happened to its owner.
When he saw the first victim, he thought at first that it was some more odd detritus from the baggage hold. He stared at it, and another picture came into his mind. The day before, driving to work, he had approached a road-kill lying in the kerbside. In spite of himself, he had looked at the bloody bundle of fur, trying in vain to determine what form of animal life it had been. Looking at the shapeless tangle on the ground, he felt the same sensation, hoping irrationally that the thing, with white bones protruding at odd angles from its blackened flesh, might be some large creature caught on the ground by the flaming aircraft, or another, outsize, stuffed memento, but knowing too that it was neither.
And then he saw the doll, lying in the mud, disjointed and unclothed. He saw it, he bent down towards the mud, and he picked it up…
Skinner sat bolt upright in bed. Cold sweat lashed his face. He thought, although he could not be certain, that he might have screamed. If he had, then the sound had not awakened Sarah; she lay beside him, tossing restlessly in her sleep. He wondered what dark dreams she was having.
He was breathing slightly heavily, and his chest was damp with sweat. He swung his legs out of bed and stood up in an effort to compose himself. Suddenly a snuffling cry sounded from the loudspeaker of the baby-minder. It was only Jazz, staging one of his occasional nocturnal interventions, but suddenly Bob was back in the depths of his nightmare. He sat back down on the bed, hard, and wondered if he had indeed screamed, and roused his son.
As he sat there, Sarah stirred and woke. Jazz cried again, approaching full volume this time.
`This is a first,' she murmured, seeing him. 'You normally sleep through that, or pretend to, till I've got up to see to him'
He turned to look at her. Her earlier emotional exhaustion seemed to have been slept away; she appeared calm and settled.
He forced a smile. 'Build up for thyself treasures in Heaven',' he said. 'He probably wants changing. I'll see to it.'
`Good boy. Don't be long.'
`You go back to sleep. I'm awake for keeps, I think. It's five-thirty, and I've got an early start this morning.'
When the alarm woke Sarah at 7.20, Bob and Jazz were lying by her side, forehead to forehead, the father lost in thought, holding the sleeping child in his arms as if to shield him from anything the world could throw at him. She looked at them, and wondered.
TWENTY-SIX
‘The Yanks worry me just a bit, Andy. They'll want a finger in this pie, and no mistake.
That new girl from the Embassy, she's okay, once she stops talking and starts listening, but they'll want a heavy hitter on this one. The Gower woman was impressed by the fact that Massey was her Ambassador's brother- in-law: I'm more struck by the fact that he was the best pal of the man in the White House.
I'm also struck by the fact that there's a Presidential election in three weeks, and that the incumbent will want to show a firm hand to the voters. It's a pound to a pinch of pigshit that he'll have sent over a top gun before this day is out, to show us Brits how to do it.'
Andy Martin picked up the last of the bacon rolls, which was still piping hot after having been revived in the Command Suite microwave. 'So how can I help you, boss?'
`You're helping just by being here, my friend,' Skinner said sincerely. Martin looked at him, and saw the dark marks of exhaustion under his eyes, and worry lines where none had been before. He sensed a tension in the man that he had never seen in all the years of their acquaintanceship, professional and personal.
`More practically, I would like you to handle the organisation of Roy Old's funeral. With Lottie's permission, I'd like to give him the full official send-off, like we did for the young lads who were killed in the last couple of years. Roy died on duty, just like them, hurrying to get back for a meeting. We'll call in on her later on today after the briefing, to pay our respects and talk things over.
Another thing you can do, if it proves necessary, is keep the American out of my hair.
Merle Gower has a part to play, but I won't have any spare wheels in the Command structure. So if they do send in a Shitehawk from Washington, I want you to nursemaid him. I've got you a new boy for your personal staff. He can drive him around.'
' I w a n t M cl l h e n n e y' s a i d t h e n e w H e a d of C ID emphatically.
`Fair enough, you can have him, but you're having this lad too. It's young Pye from Haddington.'
Martin's eyebrows rose. 'Young Sammy. Sure, I'll take him any time.'
I thought you would. Right, here's the third thing you can do to help me. You can run CID like clockwork. You've got carte blanche to review the present structure and operating practice and make any changes you think fit. Your brief is to raise detection rates to a uniform level across the whole Force area, and then to keep the graph moving upwards.
