Hampstead Common case, or something else?'
'You wanted me back on the job, didn't you, guv?'
'Just don't let it get in the way. This turns out to be a serial killer and you fuck up on us, Jack, there's no way I can keep your nuts out of the vice.'
'Nice image.'
'Just don't let me down . . .'
'You got it.'
'And don't call me guv!'
Delaney closed his phone. Trouble was, he was good at that. Letting people down.
Jack Delaney and his wife had been eating dinner that Saturday night four years ago in a restaurant at the top of Pinner High Street. Just down from the church they had been married in, a Norman-style edifice that stood on top of the hill like a small, suburban castle. The restaurant served a pan-Asian menu, or Pacificrim fusion as the owner liked to call it. Whatever it was called, though, it wasn't to Jack's taste, he'd never really liked Chinese food. But it was his wife's favourite restaurant. It was their anniversary that evening and the truth was that Jack had a lot of making up to do to her. They had been arguing too much of late. Mainly about his job and the hours he worked. The risks he took. The danger on the streets, the growing proliferation of guns and knives in the hands of teenagers who, with no future ahead of them, valued others' lives as cheaply as their own were valued in turn. It was the same arguments that policemen and policewomen had with their spouses up and down the country and all around the world. But that wasn't all there was to it. Behind it all Jack knew the real reason for the growing tensions between them.
Sinead wanted to go back home. To leave England behind and return to her native Dublin, or move even further out into the country. Even as far as to the heathen, blighted, wind-blown and rain-soaked fields of Cork, whence Delaney had dragged his own sorry Irish arse. Jack had pointed out to her many times that he was ten years old when his parents had moved to England. Although he would hate to admit it to his colleagues, Jack felt that England was more of a home to him now than Ireland. His memories of it were fond enough, but mainly he remembered the lack of work, the lack of money, the struggles his parents had to put food on the table and leather on their feet. The opportunities London offered in the seventies for a man such as his father and a woman like his mother, God rest her soul, who were prepared to put in a long day's work were too good to refuse. And so the family had moved, like many before, across the waters to the mainland. His mother had died when he was eleven years old, run over in the early hours on her way to work by a hit-and-run driver whom the police never found and whose soul, Jack still hoped, was rotting in hell. And so it was his father who had pushed Jack into joining the police. A man needed a profession or a trade, Jack's dad reckoned, and as the boy had maybe the brains but not the inclination for a university degree he should look at the army, the navy or the police force. The idea of serving in Northern Ireland put any notions of joining the armed forces out of Jack's head. He couldn't see himself pointing a rifle at his Northern brothers, Catholic or Protestant, and he certainly couldn't envisage pulling the trigger. But the thought of joining the police had some appeal to him. Maybe it was the spectre of his mother's death, maybe it was just the knowledge that if he didn't join the police he'd go the way of his cousins who lived in Kilburn and made their money on the other side of the legal fence. And so he worked hard enough at school to get the right kind of grades to apply to the Met. Which he did when he was eighteen and hadn't regretted it since.
But lately Sinead had been, subtly at first, and then not so subtly, pushing him to take early retirement. Plenty of people left early, took up another profession. Something safer, something with regular hours. A job that meant she wouldn't be looking at the clock with dread, but with pleasure at the certainty of his arrival home at the given hour. The sound of a phone ringing wouldn't set her heart racing and her mouth dry every time she answered it, terrified that this call would be the one bringing the news she lived her life in fear of. And, moreover, their young girl, Siobhan, was three years old now. A walking, talking miniature human being with her
