‘Give her my best.’ He looked down at me. ‘So will you resign?’
‘Everybody and his dog wants or expects me to.’
He gave a small smile.
‘That’ll be a “no”, then.’
‘I came here to make a difference. I haven’t had a chance to do that yet. And it would be cowardly of me to resign. I want to be here to see this through.’
‘It’s not going to be pretty.’
‘Bill, I know I’m part of the investigation. But if you could keep me informed-’
He put up his hand, then got to his feet. He nodded and left the room without another word. But at least he hadn’t said ‘No’.
Sarah Gilchrist couldn’t recall a worse time in her life. The fucking insulting interrogation she’d endured from the two Hampshire policemen had been bad enough. Were they trained to act in a way guaranteed not to get information from people they questioned?
She’d told them about the evidence going missing. They didn’t seem interested. They thought, in fact, that she was using it as a plausible reason for discharging her firearm.
‘But I didn’t discharge it,’ she said. ‘The man in the kitchen was shot by a police sniper stationed outside the house.’
They didn’t respond. She decided there and then she’d rather stick needles in her eyeballs than give these assholes any help.
She kept mostly indoors for the next few days. From her flat near Seven Dials she emerged only to go to the gym, then get the papers and food from the local deli.
In her flat she would wait for the phone to ring, trying to figure out what was going on, trying to figure out what to do.
She knew something bad had happened. Not just that people had been killed, although that was bad enough. She couldn’t find out who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Was it the police or the people in the house? Had the police raided the wrong house? Nobody was saying.
Then there was the bastard with the missing teeth – Connolly. And the dead man on the kitchen floor.
At the end of that terrible evening, as they were all cooped up in the armed response vehicle, she’d got nowhere when – out of curiosity and because she was involved – she’d tried to find out exactly what had happened upstairs. And, more to the point, who had shot whom. She couldn’t decide if they were stonewalling or simply being patronizing. Either way, it pissed her off.
Now, three days later, she’d still been unable to get hold of Finch. She’d been told about Foster’s suicide. And, courtesy of the radio and TV, she’d heard about the riot. God, what a fuck-up.
The missing evidence was difficult for her. Automatically, she felt loyalty to her fellow officers. In such a situation, ranks closed. And if ranks closed, did she want to be the one on the outside of them?
Staying home was driving her nuts. She liked her own company well enough but she also liked to keep active. The gym helped. It was a women’s-only place up near the station. She tried to choose times when she was unlikely to run into people she knew. She hit the machines for an hour, used the sauna and the Turkish; tried to sweat the emotion out.
Occasionally she got hit on but she was used to that in Brighton. She didn’t mind, she just wasn’t that way inclined.
She jogged there and back. There was easy – it was all downhill. Coming back up was something else again. She took another shower when she got back to her flat.
She prepared her food, taking more time than she ever had. Marinating meat overnight, chopping the vegetables finer and finer, cleaning the skillet and pans. Again and again. Cooking slowly, adding herbs, really getting the timings right.
Then throwing the result in the bin. Instead, scarfing lumps of cheese, olives from the jar, rice cakes from the packet, spoonfuls of yoghurt from the pot.
On Thursday, the fourth day of her suspension, she became front page news.
On Thursday my home life ended. I’d been hoping things were quietening down. I didn’t see the papers until I got into work. As I walked through the ground floor office, I wondered why people avoided looking at me.
Then I saw the newspapers my secretary had left folded on my desk. The headlines.
The tabloids had gone for the jugular. ‘Top Cop’s Sex Romp With Massacre Shooter,’ said one headline. The story that followed suggested that perhaps the reason I was so eager to defend the probity of my officers at the Milldean murder was because I’d had a one-night stand at a conference with one of the female officers. Sarah Gilchrist.
I groaned. She’d sold her story to the papers.
My first thought was to phone her. Except that I didn’t know her number. Human Resources would have it, but I could hardly phone up and ask for it. Or ask Rachael, my secretary, to do so. I tried directory enquiries on my mobile. Nothing. Some detective I was.
Perhaps it was just as well. I was furious with her. Furious at myself, too. And sick of the thought of Molly hearing of my infidelity in such a humiliating, public way.
I phoned her. There was no answer. I left a message on the answerphone. I wondered whether I should go home but there was so much work to do.
Winston Hart, my Police Authority chair, phoned at eleven.
‘I think your position has become, if possible, even more untenable,’ he said crisply. ‘I must also inform you that I have received a letter from the Home Secretary stating that he has lost faith in you and asking us to press for your resignation.’
Typical of the Home Secretary, the most right-wing one we’d had since World War Two, and one with an eye on the Today programme. He was too quick to give the sound bite and regularly had to back down.
‘It will blow over,’ I said. ‘I’m not quitting.’
‘It seems to me that you don’t care about your force – you’re making it into a laughing stock. You just care about yourself.’
I hung up on him.
I left for home at lunchtime. Molly was sitting in a chair by the French windows, looking out at the green and velvety Downs. She didn’t stir when I came in.
‘I came to see if you were all right. After the newspaper report today…’
She stood up and walked towards me. I looked at her, obviously for a beat too long. She swung at me.
‘You bastard!’
She whacked me just below my left eye, came in with her other fist and whacked my right ear. I held her off. She was shaking with rage.
‘I want you out of this house.’ She was bellowing. ‘Today. You did this to us? You did this to us?’
I took a room at The Ship on the seafront in Brighton. I was worried the manager would recognize me as I’d been to lots of functions here, but he wasn’t around and the blank-faced receptionists had no clue who I was.
That evening I stayed in my room, sipping a whisky from the minibar and gazing blankly out to sea and across at the Palace Pier in its blaze of white light. I refused to think of it as Brighton Pier, although that’s what its sign proclaimed. That honour rested with the ruined West Pier. From time to time I phoned my son and daughter but I couldn’t reach either of them. I went back to the minibar.
The next morning my mobile phone rang just after nine.
‘Bob, it’s William.’ William Simpson, my erstwhile friend. ‘Can’t tell you how sorry I am about what’s happening in the press.’
‘And?’
‘You’ll be resigning now, I assume.’
‘Like hell.’
‘Bob.’
‘William.’
‘You must resign. They’ve only just started.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The press. They’ll move in on your family. Your wife, your kids.’
