“Aren’t any of them married?”
“Not for long. Divorce is more prevalent in that family than marriage.
The wives usually make other arrangements while their men are inside.”
He flexed his laced fingers.
“They produce a lot of babies, though, if the fact that a third generation of O’Briens has started appearing regularly in the juvenile courts is anything to go by.” He shook his head.
“Someone’s winding you up,” he said again.
“For all her sins Olive wasn’t stupid and she’d have to have been brain-dead to fall for a jerk like Gary O’Brien.”
“Are they really as bad as that?” she asked him curiously.
“Or is this police animosity?”
He smiled.
“I’m not police, remember? But they’re that bad,” he assured her.
“Every patch has families like the O’Briens.
Sometimes, if you’re really unlucky, you get an estateful of them, like the Barrow Estate, when the council decides to lump all its bad apples into one basket and then expects the wretched police to throw a cordon round it.” He gave a humourless laugh.
“It’s one of the reasons I left the Force. I got sick to death of being sent out to sweep up society’s messes. It’s not the police who create these ghettos, it’s the councils and the governments, and ultimately society itself.”
“Sounds reasonable to me,” she said.
“In that case why do you despise the O’Briens so much? They sound as if they need help and support rather than condemnation.”
He shrugged.
“I suppose it’s because they’ve already had more help and support than you or I will ever be offered. They take everything society gives them and then demand more.
There’s no quid pro quo with people like that. They put nothing in to compensate for what they’ve had out. Society owes them a living and, by God, they make sure society pays, usually in the shape of some poor old woman who has all her savings stolen.”
His lips thinned.
“If you’d arrested those worthless shits as often as I have, you’d despise them, too. I don’t deny they represent an underdass of society’s making, but I resent their unwillingness to try and rise above it.” He saw her frown.
“You look very disapproving. Have I offended your liberal sensibilities?”
“No,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.
“I was just thinking how like Mr. Hayes you sound. Remember him?
“What shall I say?” she mimicked the old man’s soft burr ‘“They should all be strung up from the nearest lamppost and shot.” She smiled when he laughed.
“My sympathies with the criminal classes are a trifle frayed at the moment,” he said after a moment.
“More accurately, my sympathies in general are frayed.”
“Classic symptoms of stress,” she said lightly, watching him.
“Under pressure we always reserve our compassion for ourselves.”
He didn’t answer.
“You said the O’Briens are inadequate,” Roz prompted.
“Perhaps they can’t rise above their situation.”
“I believed that once,” he admitted, toying with his empty wine glass, ‘when I first joined the police force, but you have to be very naY ve to go on believing it. They’re professional thieves who simply don’t subscribe to the same values as the rest of us hold. It’s not a case of can’t, but more a case of won’t. Different ball game entirely.” He smiled at her.
“And if you’re a policeman who wants to hold on to the few drops of human kindness that remain to you, you get out quick the minute you realise that. Otherwise you end up as unprincipled as the people you’re arresting.”
Curiouser and curiouser, thought Roz. So he had little sympathy left for the police either. He gave the impression of a man under siege, isolated and angry within the walls of his castle. But why should his friends in the police have abandoned him? Presumably he had had some.
“Have any of the O’Briens been charged with murder or GBH?”
“No. As I said, they’re thieves. Shoplifting, pick-pocketing, house burglaries, cars, that sort of thing. Old Ma acts as a fence whenever she can get her hands on stolen property but they’re not violent.”
“I was told they’re all Hell’s Angels.”
He gave her an amused look.
“You’ve been given some very duff information. Are you toying with the idea, perhaps, that Gary did the
