Andy shook her head. ‘They on the level?’
‘Far as I know, absolutely reputable.’ Bobby sighed. ‘Riggs is executive director. Nothing like a distinguished retired senior police officer to bestow that aura of tough respectability.’
‘Is there no bloody justice, Bobby? That scumbag tried tae have you killed. What about the guys close to him? Beattie?’
‘Still in there. And a few others. You can tell who they are. They’re the ones keep a formal space between you and them. They call you “sir” instead of “boss”.’
No doubt blaming Bobby for having to live off their pay packets again. So now he was going to have to organize guys who saw him as having profited from Riggs’s downfall while their own personal finances had taken a tumble. Who needed that?
‘Can you no’ apply for a transfer?’
Shook his head. ‘Not so soon after being virtually offered promotion. Obviously, I’d like to get out altogether, but what would I do?’ Still shaking his head, the old injury affected by the hard fluorescent light. ‘Sorry, Andy, I didn’t intend to burden you with this. I was just … passing. Just had supper with the old man. Who thinks Riggs was God.’
‘You never told him the truth?’
‘Like he’d believe me?’
‘These other guys know you’ve been offered the job? Beattie?’
‘I don’t know.’
Sister Andy sighed. It was a terrible indictment of how isolated Bobby was in this scrappy, bent little Midlands town. In his personal life too. Mother dead in a road accident when he was a kiddie. Some years divorced now from Lizzie Turner, the avaricious wee nurse he’d met as a sprog cop, on this very ward. And then there was Em, who was funny and smart and would have been so very right for him, had she not become the penultimate victim of the psycho-killer calling himself the Green Man. That whole episode, coming so soon after the personal death experience, throwing Bobby clean off his axis.
It was flattering to think he came back here because of Andy, as some kind of tough mother-figure. More likely he kept returning because this was where his heart stopped and was restarted. Where he’d died and where his second life began.
‘So, how long before you officially start as DCI?’
‘Acting.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘About three weeks,’ Bobby said. He had some leave owing. Was thinking he might go away for a few days.
‘On your own?’
He shrugged. Said he could do some painting. Find a lonely shore. Solway Firth or somewhere. Get really cold and wet and miserable.
Andy had one of Bobby’s paintings in her house. Sea and sky merging in shades of flat grey. The work of a guy who was always looking for the vanishing point. Most people, they had a near-death experience, they became born-again Christians or just wandered around in the warm glow of knowing there was
‘Just a thought,’ she said. ‘Would you no’ like to go spend a few days at Marcus Bacton’s place?’
Andy’s office door opened, Nurse Kirsty Brady’s big face in the gap. ‘Mr Trilling …?’ Brady made a face. The wee nurses were all a little scared of Mr Trilling.
‘Aye, I’m coming,’ Andy said. ‘Hey, give it a thought, Bobby. I believe, ah … I gather the wee American girl’s back.’
‘Grayle?’
‘Trying to put
Bobby Maiden rolled his eyes. ‘Then she’s got enough problems.’
Because he never thought he’d stay long in Elham, he was still living in the same apartment in this grimy Victorian heap in Old Church Street. One day they’d extend the bypass and the Victorian block would vanish.
The flat wasn’t much more than a studio now. He liked it smelling of paints. He liked having the work in progress, a triptych of big canvases, covering a whole wall. Another life in progress.
The sequence was coming together from drawings he’d done, photos he’d taken, the last time he was down at St Mary’s — the three canvases joining up to show the line of the Black Mountains at dawn under mist. The point being that, viewed from St Mary’s, the Black Mountains were featureless, a long bank. But the whole of Wales lay behind them.
He remembered what it was like going up there with Cindy Mars-Lewis. Cindy with his Celtic shaman’s drum and his shaman’s cloak of feathers — ridiculous and yet unexpectedly dramatic, a big bird against the skyline. Cindy starting to chant, and it was like he’d thrown his voice into the mountains.
A weird bloke in a bird suit stirring up primeval forces. Now also the man with the big-money balls. Bizarre.
Maiden unlocked the communal front door, entering the hallway. Keeping the keys in hand as he strolled across to the door of his ground-floor flat. And found he didn’t need any keys for this one.
OK, he wasn’t expecting it — was anybody, ever? — but it was no big, devastating shock to find the door of his flat splintered again, all around the lock.
The first time this happened to you, even as a copper, you felt sick, invaded. You were never going to settle until you’d seen the bastards in court. The second time, it was a profound inconvenience but it didn’t keep you awake.
This was the fourth time. Maiden felt weary. There was nothing worth stealing in there, except the portable TV and the CD-player. Three hundred quid the lot.
Still, he went carefully. One time, they’d still been inside. A steel toecap had messed up his left eye.
He kicked open the door and stepped back into the hallway.
Nothing. Maiden was sure he could somehow tell these days if a place was empty, that he could sense a presence. He walked in and switched on the lights. Stood in the doorway and looked around.
Nothing. Everything as it was. The CD-player on its shelf, the TV on its stand over by the bricked-up fireplace.
He went back to look at the door. Unsubtle. A crowbar job. There would have been some noise involved, unavoidable, but it didn’t look as though they’d cared. Five flats in the building, but two of them empty. Students in the others, out most nights.
But why? What was the point? They hadn’t even turned the place over. He went back in, kicking something which skittered across the boards and finished up on the rug.
Stanley knife with the blade out. He didn’t touch it.
He looked across at the wall with the three canvases hanging on it.
Stood gazing at the joined-up picture for nearly a minute.
They must have spent quite some time on it, because the lettering was quite regular, spread over all three canvases, each letter about three inches high, carved out of the misty flank of the Black Mountains.
It looked like the Hollywood sign.
It said
CONGRATULATIONS SIR
X
