Mean Spirit

‘Stomach’s a bit off, actually,’ Maiden had murmured.

Ashamed at the deceit, but this was not a good time to explain to Norman Plod about becoming a vegetarian.

In fact, there never was going to be a good time, was there?

‘Too much ale, eh?’ Norman looked up, lips wet with bloodied gravy. He winked. ‘I know what it’s like when the lads get together after a fine result, a grand collar.’

Maiden had been telling Norman about the neat smack circuit which Elham CID had broken after two weeks of freezing nights with a video camera on a church tower overlooking the Redbarn estate.

‘Excellent stuff. It’s just a bloody shame Mr Riggs weren’t there to see it,’ Norman said.

Meaning Superintendent Martin Riggs, now early retired.

‘Mmm,’ Maiden said, non-committally.

Norman had met Riggs just once, while visiting his son in hospital. But he’d followed the newspaper reports, read between the lines, knew Riggs was Old Force and his lad’d had the best boss he could wish for in these slack times.

‘Because’, Norman said, stoking his mouth with steak, the Brylcreem shining on his fuse-wire hair, ‘whichever way you look at it, busting them bastards — that were a direct result of the Riggs regime. Tight as a drum. Zero bloody tolerance. No little toerag shifted a bag of pills without Mr Riggs knew about it.’

‘Mmm,’ Bobby Maiden said.

How very true that was.

He’s gone. All right? He got out. You dropped him off at his bungalow half an hour ago.

But the smell of Brylcreem remained, half-manifesting the ghost of Norman Plod. Once a copper, always a copper. I’ll be seeing you, lad — Norman’s familiar finger-wagging warning to the toerags. Maiden almost snatched a glance in the driving mirror just to make sure that it wasn’t Norman’s eyes glaring back.

Norman Maiden: still very much alive, but his glowering ghost was following Bobby Maiden around. And getting closer? Bobby was thirty-eight years old; at what age did you start turning into your father?

While they were parked in front of the bungalow, Norman had asked his son, ‘They told you who’s replacing him yet? Mr Riggs? Likely one of them shiny-arsed, university fast-trackers, am I right?’

Maiden had told him how, in the light of Riggs’s sudden retirement, there’d been some reorganization in Elham Division. From now on, there wouldn’t be a Superintendent based at Elham; there’d be a Chief Inspector over the uniforms and for the first time — an experiment — an acting DCI in charge of CID.

On the way up here, he’d thought he might discuss this in greater depth with his dad. In the end he couldn’t face it.

It took him just over an hour to drive back to Elham. A diversion, due to the laying of new water pipes under the ring road, brought him into town past the General Hospital.

He found himself turning in between the two white lamps.

Just like …

… the old days.

The sprog coppers hanging round, drinking Sister Anderson’s strong coffee — these wee cops often smelling of vomit, arising from that first severed head on the hard shoulder or the fried child on the burnt-out back seat.

Casualty: where young coppers and young nurses met at moments of high stress, a great aphrodisiac. Casualty was a government-funded dating agency.

Wasn’t quite the same these days, mind, now that man-hours were rationed and the police had their own counselling service — which, of course, took a whole lot more out of the police budget than Sister Andy’s coffee cost the Health Service.

She closed the door against the warm blast of Accident and Emergency, sat down at her desk and motioned Bobby Maiden to the spare plastic-backed chair. Looked him over for signs of damage.

‘And there was me thinking it was all coming together for you, Bobby.’

‘And me thinking you were leaving to become an alternative practitioner down at St Mary’s,’ Bobby Maiden said.

He sipped at the coffee and winced. Andy smiled. Still killer stuff, eh?

‘It’ll happen,’ she said. ‘One day soon, I’ll be just a memory here. A grating Glaswegian growl in the night. A stale smell of high-tar smoke in the lavvy.’

Bobby shook his head. ‘You hate this place far too much ever to leave.’

‘Jesus God,’ Andy said. ‘This is what the psychological profiler course did for you, is it?’

He smiled ruefully. ‘What the psychological profiler course did is far worse than that.’

‘Oh?’ Andy peered into his eyes. The boy had been looking so much better lately, too, the brain-stem problem maybe causing less numbness. She could tell he still had some pain over the eye, though.

‘It put me in direct line for promotion.’

‘Oh aye?’

‘So they’ve offered me acting DCI.’

‘Acting?’

‘Eventual permanence implied.’

Andy thought about this. ‘That would be more of a desk job, right?’

Bobby nodded grimly.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘for a start, you should try and have your desk facing east and make sure you’ve no’ got a door at your back.’

‘Feng shui?’

‘Welsh style. Cindy Mars-Lewis dropped in while you were away and rearranged ma furniture. I’m a much calmer person now, is that no’ apparent?’

‘He’s been here?’

‘Just passing through. He was sorry tae miss you, Bobby.’

So they talked for a while about Cindy’s new fame on the Lottery Show. Bobby had only seen him the once. Andy said she was amazed how the guy kept getting away with it.

‘Stands up there and attacks everything the Lottery stands for. Rails at the audience for their greed. Warns them it’ll all end in tears. No’ him, of course, it’s the bird. How dare you say that, Kelvyn? Back in the case for you!’ Andy chuckled. ‘Audience loves him. I reckon even the boss guys at the BBC believe, in some weird, subliminal way, that they are two separate personalities, him and that bird.’

‘Shamanism,’ Bobby said thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if they know.’

‘Ach, it wouldnae matter a damn — he’s got the charm tae carry it off. Just like nobody ever asks about his sexuality and gets a satisfactory answer. So … does acting DCI give you a key to the executive washroom or are you still standing side by side with the guys figuring tae shaft you?’

Oh aye, Andy remembered Riggs. And all the things you couldn’t say about him, not out loud.

The one time Andy had actually met the Superintendent, he was urgently looking for Bobby. Because Riggs knew that Bobby knew. About Riggs.

And about Tony Parker, the ‘businessman’. Friend of Riggs from London, invited to Elham to ‘regularize’ a rather ‘chaotic’ drugs scene. Tony’s new system offering small dealers two simple options: either shelter under the Parker umbrella or get yourself very swiftly shopped to the police — thus providing the new chief with a terrific clean-up rate and a wonderful reputation in no time at all.

That broad, beaming face in the local paper week after week. Guest speaker at the Rotary Club. Guest of honour at the Magistrates’ Association dinner. And a copper’s copper, too, always popular with the troops. Excepting Bobby Maiden. Bobby had known Riggs from when he was with the Met. Known what he was.

Now Tony Parker was dead — natural causes — and Riggs had taken early retirement and calmly walked away before any of the shit could reach the Vent-Axia.

‘Where is he now, Bobby?’ Andy poured herself a killer coffee. ‘Tax exile on the Costa del Crime?’

‘Oh, no. Worcester. You heard of Forcefield Security?’