And once again, Kate, his wonderful, beautiful wife, had surprised him with her generosity. And through no fault of her own, made him feel like an absolute bastard.
Maybe that’s my lot in life, he’d reasoned.
Henry was brought bang into the present as the phone went, interrupting his recall. It was Karl Donaldson.
‘ Karl, how you doin’?
‘ OK, buddy,’ Donaldson said, but Henry picked up a bum note in the American’s voice. ‘I need to see you pretty urgently, Henry.’
‘ About what?’
‘ Not over the phone. Face to face. I’m gonna travel up, bring Karen along too. Settin’ off shortly. Looking at four-five hours maybe with traffic and weather. Can you accommodate us?’
‘ Sure, sounds important. Nothing over the phone?’
‘ No clues, bud.’
‘ I’ll see you at home then.’
The phone went dead. Henry hung up, mystified and slightly worried. He had no time to ruminate, however. The phone warbled again.
‘ DS Christie — get up into my office now.’
Rather like Siobhan’s open-handed slap last night, Henry was caught unawares by what happened next.
He meandered down the corridor towards Morton’s office. When he was a few feet away from the door, it opened dramatically and Siobhan burst out, virtually into his arms. Tears were streaked down her face and she was heaving with loud, gut-wrenching sobs. She looked up at Henry and reacted instantly as though she had walked into the monster from hell.
‘ Get off me, get off me!’ she screamed, making a great show of disentangling herself from him. She was not entangled by any stretch of the imagination. She drew back, slapping the air like she was trying to free herself from Spiderman’s web. ‘Leave me alone. You’ve done enough damage.’
‘ Siobhan!’ Henry was wrong-footed completely. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘ You bastard! Don’t come near me again.’
With that she ducked to one side, swept past him and scurried off down the corridor towards the ladies toilets. Henry watched her retreating back with shock. He turned. Tony Morton was standing in the doorway of his temporary office.
‘ What was all that about?’ Henry asked, nonplussed.
Morton said nothing for a moment, but surveyed Henry with a calculating look which made him shiver.
‘ Come in and sit down.’
Morton stayed by the door. Henry slid by him into the office. He sat down, intertwining his fingers on his lap in a gesture of submission.
Morton closed the door softly and walked to his seat behind the desk, putting a large space between him and the Detective Sergeant and peering down at him from a greater height. Henry could not help but be awed by the old-fashioned power psychology. It always worked on him.
What the hell was going on?
Morton did not speak for a few moments, but allowed Henry to savour the atmosphere.
Then he dropped the bomb.
‘ DC Robson claims that you have sexually harassed her and this has culminated in a serious sexual assault. Namely rape.’
Three items appeared on Karl Donaldson’s desk just as he was in the process of packing his briefcase.
The first was from Madeira and had come by DHL. It was the sample of human tissue taken from under Sam Dawber’s fingernails. It was in an airtight container, with Santana’s signature across the seal as well as the doctor’s who had performed the post mortem.
The next item was a statement from an FBI scientist which contained the DNA profile resulting from the sample taken from under Sam’s nails at the second autopsy. There was a computer print-out attached which meant nothing to Donaldson. It went on to say that the FBI DNA database had been searched, but no match had been made.
He assumed that if he got the police here to DNA test the sample from Madeira, the result would match up with the one from the States.
He slid both items into his desk drawer and locked it.
They would have to wait.
He wanted to get on the road to see Henry, ASAP.
However, the next item caught and held his attention.
It was the photograph of Wayne and Tiger Mayfair taken on their arrival at Madrid Airport a couple of days before. Donaldson had already received a brief written report about the arrival from a field agent out there. They were good quality photographs and Donaldson was pleased by the high resolution. But it was the report which accompanied it that made him sit up. Again, from the same field agent, a guy named Moody, who had been doing a bit of digging. It briefly said that, under assumed names, the Mayfairs had now left Spain en route by air to Paris. The agent had also discovered that they had flown into Madrid from Lisbon.
And into Lisbon from Madeira.
Donaldson looked at the photograph again. Something odd about Tiger Mayfair.
He rooted around his stationery drawer and found a magnifying glass which he held over Tiger’s head.
Yes, there was no mistaking it.
Donaldson laid the photo down and breathed deeply.
Scratch-marks down his left cheek.
Henry stumbled out of Morton’s office with a face of granite and all-pervading waves of cold fear gripping his intestines.
Allegations of sexual harassment, followed by indecent assault and then, possibly, rape, were dreadful to be levelled at anyone. Especially when they were untrue.
And that is what Siobhan had alleged against him.
She had said that from the first moment they’d met, he had constantly made lewd comments to her, sexual jokes and innuendo and he had leered at her virtually all the time. ‘Active mental groping’ was the term used.
She had gone on to tell Morton she had become physically sick as a result of his behaviour, but she felt powerless to do anything about it. After all, he was a Sergeant, she was only a Constable. But above all he was a man.
To Morton she said that Henry had forced her to kiss him at the NWOCS office in King Street when they had been there alone, collecting equipment. He had rubbed his body up against hers but she’d managed to struggle free and tell him not to touch her again. That night, she claimed, she’d gone to bed and cried herself to sleep, petrified at the thought of doing observations with him the following morning in Lancaster.
Things got worse after the shooting incident when, in the casualty department of all places, he had enticed her into the cubicle where he was receiving treatment and exposed himself to her.
It all culminated at King Street, again when they were alone. This time, she alleged, Henry forced her to undress and tried to rape her. He failed to penetrate her and ejaculate because he could not maintain an erection.
She had been terrified. Put through an horrendous ordeal by a man with power.
And now she wanted some action taken against him.
As the story was revealed to Henry, he simply sat there open-mouthed, unable to believe what was being said. It was all nonsense, of course. Both had been willing participants in the engagement until Henry’s head had cleared and he realised how foolish he was being — which was at the point where his very erect penis had brushed up against the lips of WDS Robson’s vagina.
Henry ran quickly through the legal definition of rape in his mind. Only the slightest degree of penetration needed to be proved, neither did the emission of seed have to take place. The other main thread to the offence was
