questions that won’t wait until Monday?”
Nobody had one, so I thanked them for coming in and telephoned Gilbert.
“So Silkstone’s story holds water,” he concluded, when I finished.
“It looks like it,” I admitted.
“Good. Let’s have it sewn up, then. And young Walker won’t be causing us any more trouble, I hear.”
“Unless his mother sues us for not arresting him.”
“Bah! Bloody likely, too. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Meanwhile, I’m off for an hour’s fishing. Fancy coming, Charlie? Do you good.”
“No thanks, Gilbert. Sticking a hook through a small creature’s nose is not my idea of entertainment.”
“You wouldn’t catch anything!” Gilbert retorted. “What makes you think you’d catch anything?”
“I meant the maggots,” I replied. “Maggots have feelings, too.”
I would have fallen hopelessly, crazily, desperately in love with Sophie as soon as I saw her, except that I already was. She was wearing a blue silk dress and her hair was piled up in a sophisticated style that I’d never seen her wear before. “You look sensational,” I said, pecking her on the cheek. “Cambridge won’t know what’s hit them.”
“She’s gonna be a spy,” her younger brother, Daniel, informed me. “That’s where they train them all.”
“Well that’s better than being a traitor,” she retorted, referring to Danny’s ambition to play football for Manchester United and not Halifax Town.
We went in my car. I’d have to drive home afterwards, so this meant that Dave could have a few drinks. His wife, Shirley, said: “Hey, this is all right, being chauffeured about by the boss.”
“Let’s get one thing clear,” I told her as we set off. “Tonight I am taking my favourite goddaughter out for a meal. You three are just hangers-on.”
“I’m your only goddaughter, Uncle Charles,” Sophie reminded me, and her brother jumped straight in with: “You don’t think you’d be his favourite if there was another, do you?”
“It’s going to be one of those evenings,” Shirley remarked.
I’d made a bit of an effort with my appearance, for once, and was glad I had. Blue jacket with a black check, black trousers, blue shirt and contrasting tie. Dark clothes suit me and add to that air of mystery. I’d even put some aftershave on.
“You look handsome tonight,” Shirley had told me when I arrived. “Dave said you might bring a friend.”
“He speak with forked tongue,” I’d replied.
“Annette Brown. He reckons she has the hots for you. She’s a lovely girl.”
“Tomorrow, he die.” I explained that she wasn’t my type; I didn’t want to be involved with another officer and as far as I knew she was already in a perfectly happy relationship.
“So you asked her.”
“I didn’t say that!”
Four of us had fillet steak and Dave had the speciality mixed grill, which includes a steak and just about every other bovine organ known to science. Two bottles of a Banrock Shiraz helped it down quite nicely. We talked about Jamie Walker and the Silkstone case, without being too explicit, and I had my favourite apple pie for pudding. I asked Sophie why she’d chosen Cambridge and not Oxford, and she said: “Everybody goes to Oxford.”
We had more coffee back at their house and sat talking until midnight, when the kids went to bed. Dave fell asleep on the settee, snoring with his mouth wide open, which I took as a good time to leave. It was a warm evening, and Shirley walked out to the car with me.
“Thanks for inviting me, Shirley,” I said. “It was considerate of you.”
“You’re part of the family, Charlie,” she replied. “You were married to Dave before I was.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite like that, but I appreciate it.”
At the gate I said: “He was quiet tonight. Not his usual self.”
“No,” she replied, “he wasn’t, was he?”
“Has the Jamie Walker business upset him?”
“A little, perhaps. Daniel was that age not too long ago, but I think it’s mainly because of Sophie.”
“Sophie?”
“Mmm. Going to university, leaving the nest and all that. If it’s not Cambridge it will be somewhere else. She’s just finished with her first boyfriend, but there’ll be more. Danny was always my son, but Sophie is Dave’s daughter, and he’s losing her. It hurts. You worry about them, Charlie. The temptations, the pressures, the mistakes they’ll make. You want to live their lives for them, but you can’t. You have to step back and let them do it their way, and sometimes it’s painful.”
“It’s called love,” I told her.
“Yes, it is.”
We kissed cheeks and said goodnight.
At home I cleaned my teeth and hung up my clothes. I poured a glass of the plonk that was open, to catch up with the others, put Vaughan Williams on the CD and went to bed with the curtains open, so I could watch the clouds drifting past the window, like the backdrop of a silent movie. There was a new moon, and it and Thomas Tallis gave magic to the night. The wine and my thoughts probably helped.
But there’s a dark side to the moon, and clouds are fickle. New faces came to me, pushing aside the ones I cherished. Young Jamie Walker was dead, and I didn’t care. His death had lifted a weight off me, eased the tourniquet that tightened around my spleen whenever I’d heard his name. Monday morning someone would come out with a Jamie Walker joke — “What does Jamie Walker have on his cornflakes?” — and I’d laugh with the rest of them. I didn’t hate him for being a thief. I didn’t hate him for the grief and misery he caused people who were as poorly off as he was. I didn’t give a shit about our crime figures. I hated him for making me not care about his death. For doing that to me, I could never forgive him.
Sunday I gave the microwave a wash and brush-up. The fine spell was holding and the weather forecasters were predicting a good summer because the swallows were flying high and the grasshoppers were wearing Ray- Bans. I went to the garden centre to buy some new blades for the hover mower and had to park in the next field. Forget banks, knock-off a garden centre.
In the evening I watched a video about the space race that Daniel had loaned me. Apparently the USA bagged Mars first, so Russia decided to concentrate on Venus. They didn’t know until they sent the first probe there that the atmosphere was comprised largely of sulphuric acid. As my mother used to say; “There’s always someone worse off than yourself.” Danny is envious that his dad’s generation witnessed the moon landings, as they happened. To him it’s just another event in history, like World War II or the Battle of Hastings. I’m eternally grateful to the Americans for taking a television camera on the trip. OK, they did it for self- publicity, because they needed public approval for all that expenditure, but it was a brave thing to do. It could have all gone dreadfully wrong.
I have a photograph of Daniel and Sophie, standing alongside my old E-type. It was taken at Heckley Gala a couple of summers ago, after we’d taken part in the grand cavalcade, and published in the Heckley Gazette. I knew roughly where it was and soon found it. Sophie was all legs, posing elegantly with one hand on the car door, and Danny was wearing his trade-mark grin. The photo was in black and white, ten by eight, and slightly over-exposed. I turned it over and looked at the Gazette’s rubber stamp mark on the back. The copyright was theirs and a serial number was written in ink in the appropriate box. The date space was empty. I propped it against the clock and wondered about framing it.
Margaret Silkstone had consenting sex with Peter Latham on her marital bed. He wore a condom initially but removed it later. A disagreement arose between them and he strangled her. That was about as much as we could be sure of.
“Maybe she objected to him removing the condom,” Gilbert suggested.
“Or to his, er, sexual proclivities,” the CPS lawyer said, adding, “putting it another way, she didn’t want it up her bum.”
“Why does other people’s love-making always sound so bloody sordid?” I asked.
“Because you’re not getting any,” Gilbert stated.
“Putting it another way! I like that,” the lawyer chuckled. He was young and bulky, in a charcoal suit that bulged and gaped like the wrapping of a badly made, slightly leaky, parcel. Prendergast would eat him for breakfast,
