he might be having a heart attack. It was a fear that crossed his mind often these days, ever since his doctor had told him he had high blood pressure and needed to lose weight. Every time he felt a spasm of discomfort or a touch of cramp, he thought he was having a heart attack. He would sit back in his chair and breathe slowly, and reach for the aspirin to thin his blood, before it was too late. But it had never been a proper heart attack, not yet. Usually it was just the effects of one more bit of stress piled on to him by one of his junior officers, eager to tell the Chief Superintendent about the latest disaster in F Division, careless of the damage they might be doing to his cardiovascular system.
And the news this morning was so typical. For fifty-one weeks of the year his resources were stretched, but not so stretched that they couldn’t cope. In fact, they coped so well that Constabulary HQ in Ripley used it as a reason to fend off his demands for more officers. They always pointed out that F Division saw less major crime than any of the other letters of the alphabet from A to D. Rut they also said that he was managing the division brilliantly, that he was an example to the other commanders of the way
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intelligence-led policing should work, that his intelligence and information were so good that the question of how many officers he had on duty at any one time had become academic. It was supposed to make him feel better.
And then came the one week in the year when the whole system collapsed. The one week when traffic ground to a halt in snowdrifts on every road out of town and his officers were tied up trying to move abandoned vehicles. It was the week when half his available manpower seemed to have fallen over on the ice and broken their collarbones, or sprained their backs shovelling snow from their driveways, while the other half had phoned in sick with the ‘flu. The same week when some idiot rammed a patrol car into a stone wall on Harpur Hill, and an even bigger idiot got his dog van nicked and burned out
oo o o
by two teenage burglars he was supposed to be arresting. Her Majesty’s inspector of Constabulary was asking questions about how the administration budget was being spent. And the Police Complaints Authority had received yet another allegation of racial abuse from one of those thieving gypsy bastards camped on the council golf course.
o
And now the division had not just one body, not even two bodies but maybe three, if the missing baby didn’t turn up soon. One bodv was bad, and two was unlucky. Three would be a catastrophe. In tact, three was a whole mad rush of bodies. Chief Superintendent Jepson felt he could see them toppling towards him like a set of skittles, or like mummies tumbling out of their coffins and landing at his feet, grinning up at him from their wrappings. It seemed as though there were bodies littering the landscape everywhere. They were worse than the abandoned cars; worse than the police ofncers with sprained backs laid out Hat on their settees at home, who ought to have been dead but weren’t.
Intelligence-led policing methods ought to enable him to direct a solitary officer to the right addresses with a sheaf of arrest warrants in his hand. But intelligence had grown tired of doing all the leading and had trotted off in the opposite direction, where it would no doubt get lost on the moors in the dark and fall over a cliff.
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‘So who have we got available?’ he said, opening; his eyes just enough to examine the expression on DI Hitchens’ face. The Chief was seeking enough evidence of insolence from the DI to justify losing his temper. But, as usual, Hitchens knew how to tread the line.
‘The underwater section is at full strength,’ said the DI. ‘Otherwise, we have three traffic wardens. After all, there’s not much else tor them to do — the snow is covering up all the yellow lines.’
Jcpson let out a sound more like a whimper than a sigh. ‘That isn’t funny,’ he said.
‘Well, you know yourself, Chief, that we’ve keen talking about putting the division on emergency-only response.’
‘I never thought it would seriously come to this. But a double assault, two bodies and a missing baby, on top of everything else …’
‘And there’s the ambulance, of course,’ said Hitchens.
‘What ambulance?’
‘I’m surprised the press boys haven’t been on to this one yet. It’s the sort of story they love. They’re bound to sec it as another opportunity to bash the police — I can sec the headlines now in the EJen KaJ/ey Tjmes.’
‘What ambulance?’ said Jcpson.
‘Maybe it’s a bit too early for the reporters, though. I expect we’ll be inundated with them later on. Oh, and uniformed section say a couple of photographers turned up at the scene, so I suppose we can look forward to some pictures on the front pages, too.
‘PKfiat ambuAzncc?’
‘Sorry, Chief. I mean the ambulance that ran into one of our traffic cars on Buxton Road. There wasn’t a lot of damage to the vehicles, mind you. It was just a shunt, really. A buckled boot on the Vauxhall and a cracked radiator on the ambulance.’
Jepson closed his eyes again. ‘Tell me there wasn’t a patient in the back of the ambulance.’
‘There wasn’t a patient in the back of the ambulance, Chief.’
The Chief Superintendent’s eyes popped open in amazement. ‘There wasn’t?’
ISO
‘Actually, there was. I was lying.’
‘Oh Jesus. But hold on a buckled boot? The ambulance went into the back of our vehicle? So it wasn’t our driver’s fault. That’s some consolation. He had to brake a bit suddenly, perhaps?’
‘You might say that,’ said Hitchens. ‘I suppose.’
Jepson ran a hand across his chest, feeling for movement under his shirt. He held it over the spot where he thought his heart ought to be. His fingers flickered, as if tapping out a beat. It was an irregular beat, more syncopation than rhythm. There was a taint answering flutter. He was still alive.
‘What arc you saying?’
‘Well, it’s just that the driver of the damaged milk tanker might tell a different story when it comes to court.’
