I looked up at O’Bryan, found him watching me intently. I led the way to the door without speaking.
“Look,” he said as I pulled it open for him to leave, “juvenile detention would break a lad like Roger. Perhaps turn him to crime permanently. It could ruin his whole life. Just say you’ll think about it, eh?”
I found myself nodding reluctantly as I stood to one side to let O’Bryan out.
“OK,” he said, “I’ll give you a few days to –
I jumped as O’Bryan’s voice rose from softly persuasive to a full-blown roar. He leapt out of the front door and went dashing towards the pavement, the briefcase swinging against his legs as he ran.
I stuck my head round the door and saw a group of kids scrambling away from the ruin that was now O’Bryan’s Mercedes, like malicious monkeys in a safari park when the game warden with the tranquilliser darts appears.
The kids scattered with a precision that spoke of long practise, all disappearing over garden hedges and through gates in different directions. O’Bryan got as far as the pavement before it dawned on him that trying to catch any of them was an utter waste of time.
He faltered and then stopped dead, putting his case down slowly on the cracked paving next to his feet. His full attention was taken by the beautiful example of the German sports car maker’s art. Or what had been, when he’d set out that morning.
I saw him lift his hands to his chubby face in horror. As he shook his head the sunlight glinted off the lenses of his little wire-rimmed glasses, as though his eyes themselves had flashed fire.
Almost against my will, I found myself following him out, stopping just behind his shoulder as he surveyed the damage.
The Merc was wrecked. The hood was in tatters, the chrome windscreen wipers had been twisted into loops, and all four tyres had been comprehensively slashed. Something heavy and sharp had been dragged along the bodywork, leaving deep gouges right down to the bare steel from headlight to taillight.
“The little bastards,” O’Bryan whispered. “Three years I’ve spent rebuilding this car. Bought it for peanuts as a right basketcase.” He turned and favoured me with a sad, lopsided smile. “I only brought it today because the clutch has gone on my Cavalier.
I didn’t speak. There wasn’t anything I could say. I’ve never owned a car, just an elderly Suzuki RGV 250 motorbike. Still, I could understand his distress. If anything happened to the bike it would be like losing a limb.
Suddenly, O’Bryan jerked round to the back of the car, and was staring at the boot lid. The lock had been punched out of it, and the lid itself was partly ajar. He yanked it open fully, looked inside with an anger that turned his already pale features ashen.
“I don’t believe it,” he muttered.
“What?”
“They’ve taken—” he broke off, scrabbling through the debris in the boot with the air of somebody who knows he isn’t going to find what he’s searching for. Finally, he slumped, defeated.
“What is it, Mr O’Bryan?” I asked again, gently. “What’s been taken?”
“What?” He focused on me, distracted. “Oh, my case notes,” he said weakly. “Private stuff, you know, important documents.”
“Would you like me to call the police?”
“No.” He gave a sigh that was almost a snort. “I don’t suppose it would do much good, would it?”
I thought of the kids I’d seen disappearing from the scene of the crime. None of them looked in double figures, let alone old enough to prosecute. “Not if you’re going to spend all your professional time trying to get them off with a caution, no,” I agreed.
O’Bryan’s face dropped suddenly, and I felt ashamed of my unworthy dig.
We went back into the house and I fed him a cup of tea with plenty of sugar in it to help deal with the shock. He recovered enough to borrow the phone to ring his garage to come and cart the remains away. Once that was done, he called himself a taxi, and departed. A sad, harassed little figure, with the weight of the world sitting heavy on his rounded shoulders.
***
After he’d gone, I rang my mother. Quite a momentous occasion in itself, if truth be told. There was a time when I would have cheerfully chewed off my own hand rather than use it to pick up the receiver and phone home. My, how things change.
I suppose, to be fair, I was never any great shakes as a daughter, even before the disgrace of my court martial, and the endless horrors of my trial.
I lost my father’s interest very early on by dint of surviving my birth when my twin brother failed to do so. My father had fiercely wanted a son to follow him into the medical profession, but the complications that followed my arrival meant that, after me, there were no more children.
I think my mother secretly hoped that I’d turn into one of those girlie girls. It wasn’t her fault that I firmly resisted any attempts to mould me into an ideal daughter. You can take a girl to ballet lessons as much as you like, but you can’t necessarily
It was an accidental discovery on a team-building outward bound course in my late teens that led to my choice of a military career. I found I was physically tougher than I’d realised, and had the natural ability to shoot straight with a consistency that amazed the instructors.
Finally, I’d found something that earned me approval and respect. I’d gone home in triumphant defiance and dropped the news that I was joining up onto my parents with a fearful sense of excitement.
If I was expecting an emotional explosion of atomic proportions I was sadly disappointed.
Now, my mother answered the telephone herself, which saved me having to make polite, if brief, conversation with my father.
“Hi,” I said. “It’s me.”
For a moment there was a silence brought on by surprise. Although I’d made an effort since the winter before to get back on speaking terms with my parents, we were still at the stage where contact from either party brought about a profound discomfiture, just in case either of us said the wrong thing.
“Oh, Charlotte, how lovely to hear from you,” she cried, her voice jerky and bright almost to the point of manic. “How
“I’m fine,” I said.
She heard the mental step back and toned down her manner. “So, tell me all your news,” she said, still heartily. “How are you keeping? What have you been up to?”
“I’m fine,” I said again. “I’m house-sitting for a friend. Well, dog-sitting actually.” The dog in question, who’d been spark out on the rug in the middle of the living room, sat up long enough to scratch behind his ear with one hind foot, then flopped back down again.
That launched us into a conversation about her dogs, two elderly Labradors. She seemed relieved to be on neutral ground and had nearly started to relax by the time I got round to the real reason for my call.
“I need to pick your brains,” I said.
“About dogs?”
“No, not really, although I suppose that comes into it,” I replied, thinking of the part Friday had unwittingly played in last night’s events. “I need to pick your professional brains.”
There was silence again, and this time it went on for a while. My father’s lucrative job as a consultant surgeon has meant my mother never needed to work after she married, but to pass the time she’d become a local magistrate.
That had turned out not to be as much use as you’d imagine when it came to my own trial, but sordid little cases like mine didn’t crop up too regularly in the stockbroker belt of Cheshire. Burglary, however, was another thing.
“Of-of course I’ll help, Charlotte, if I can,” she said now, wary, but still amenable.
Before she could change her mind, I jumped right in and explained about the botched burglary by Roger and his mates, including the injury to Fariman, but glossing over any active part I’d played in the proceedings.
I finished by telling her about my feeling that Roger should end up in court, and O’Bryan’s opinion that a caution would better keep him on the straight and narrow. “But, he’s already had cautions before,” I said. “I don’t know what to do for the best and I was hoping for some advice.”
