He didn’t struggle this time; he seemed to know there was no point.
When they were alone in the office, Banks turned to Burgess. “If you pull a stunt like that on my patch again,” he said, “I’ll kick your balls into the middle of next week, superintendent or no fucking superintendent.”
Burgess held his gaze, but Banks felt that he took the threat more seriously than he had Rick Trelawney’s.
After the staring match, Burgess smiled and said, “Good, I’m glad we’ve got that out of the way. Come on, I could murder a pint.”
And he put his arm around Banks’s shoulder and steered him towards the door.
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I
The rattle of the letter-box and the sound of mail slapping against the hall mat woke Banks early on Saturday morning. His mouth tasted like the bottom of a bird cage, and his tongue felt dry and furry from too many cigarettes and too much ale. He and Burgess had murdered more than one pint after Boyd’s interrogation.
It was getting to be a habit.
Banks still wasn’t used to waking up alone in the big bed. He missed Sandra’s warm body stirring beside him, and he missed the grumbles and complaints of Brian and Tracy getting ready for school or for Saturday morning shopping expeditions. But they’d all be back in a few days. With a bit of luck, the Gill case would be over by then and he would be able to spend some time with them.
Over coffee and burnt toast-why the toaster only burnt toast when he made it, Banks had no idea-he examined the mail: two bills, a letter and a new blues-anthology tape from Barney Merritt, an old friend on the Met, and, finally, just what he’d been waiting for-the package from Tony Grant.
The information, which Grant had copied in longhand from PC Gill’s files, made interesting reading. Ever since picket-control duty at the Orgreave coking plant during the miners’ strike in 1984, Gill had volunteered for overtime at just about every demonstration that had come up in Yorkshire: protests outside U.S.
missile bases, marches
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against South Africa, National Front meetings, anything that had seemed likely to turn into a free-for-all. Gill certainly wasn’t the only one, but he seemed to have been the kind of person who graduated from school bully to legalized goon. Banks wouldn’t have been surprised if he had carved notches in his truncheon.
There were complaints against him, too, generally for excessive use of force in subduing demonstrators. However, there were surprisingly few of these, and no action had been taken on them, except perhaps a slap on the wrist now and then.
The most interesting complaint came from Dennis Osmond, charging Gill with using unnecessary violence during a local demonstration in support of the Greenham Common women about two years ago. Another familiar name on the list was Elizabeth Dale, who had accused Gill of lashing out indiscriminately against her and her friends during a peaceful antinuclear march in Leeds. Banks couldn’t immediately place her, as she didn’t seem to belong to the pattern that included Paul Boyd and Dennis Osmond, but he knew the name. He made a note to check it in his files, then read carefully through the rest of the material. No other names stood out.
But the most important piece of information Banks gleaned from the files had nothing to do with Gill’s behaviour; in fact, it was so damn simple he cursed himself out loud for not seeing it sooner. He always thought of his colleagues by name, even the uniformed men. Most policemen did-especially plain-clothes detectives. But it was a different matter for others. How could a member of the public name a particular police officer in a complaint, or even in a letter of commendation? He couldn’t. That’s why the numbers were so important. Called “collar-numbers” because they originally appeared on the small standup collars of the old police uniform, the metal numbers are now fixed to the officer’s epaulettes And there was Gill’s number staring him right in the face: PC 1139.
He remembered driving back from the Black Sheep after his lunchtime chat with Mara. He had been listening to
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Billie Holiday and wondering what it was he’d said that should have meant more than it did. Now he knew. He had mentioned Gill’s name and, in his next question, the number. They had almost leaped together to complete the circuit, but not quite.
Banks put the papers away, grabbed his coat and hurried out to the car. It was a beautiful morning. The wind still blew cool, but the sun shone in a cloudless sky. After the miserable late-winter weather they’d been having recently, the smell of spring in the air-that strange mixture of wet grass and last autumn’s decay-was almost overwhelming. As the pipes on Keats’s Grecian urn appealed not to the “sensual ear” but played “spirit ditties of no tone,” so this smell didn’t so much titillate the sensual nose as it exhaled a scent of promise, a special feeling of anticipation, and a definite quickening of the life force. It made him want to slip the Deller Consort recording of Shakespeare’s songs into his Walkman and step lightly to work. But he would need the car for the visit he had to make later in the day. Still, he thought, no reason why he shouldn’t follow the musical impulse where it led him, especially on a day like this, so he made a special trip back inside and found the cassette to play in the car.
It was after nine when he got to the office. Richmond was playing with the computer, and Sergeant Hatchley was struggling over the Daily Mirror crossword.
There was no sign of Dirty Dick. He sent for coffee and went to peer out of the window. The good weather had certainly enticed people outdoors. Tourists drifted in and out of the church, and some, wearing anoraks over warm sweaters, actually sat on the worn plinth of the market cross already eating KitKats and drinking tea from Thermos flasks.
Banks spent an hour or more staring out on the busy square trying to puzzle out why PC Gill’s number had turned up in Seth Cotton’s old notebook. Had it even been Cotton’s handwriting? He examined the book again. It was hard to tell, because only the faint imprint remained. The numbers were exaggeratedly large, too, unlike the smaller scrawl of
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most of the measurements. Carefully, he rubbed a soft pencil over the page again, but he couldn’t get a better impression.
