‘Come on. His place was full of stuff.’
‘Was it? I don’t know… sometimes he did seem out of it. I thought he was on medication.’
‘He was dealing, Sharon. That’s what we’re told.’
‘I didn’t know that, honest. How could he have done, in his chair?’
‘Wiff was his legs, ran his errands.’
‘Oh.’ She looked genuinely shocked. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘But you had a pretty good idea he was taking something.’
She nodded.
‘Then surely Harry must have realised too, eh?’
‘Yes, maybe. I saw Harry getting stuck into him once, and I thought it might have been about that. Speedy was really doped up at the time.’
‘Well, we don’t have anything to say we’re wrong at the moment, Sharon. But if you think of anything, give me a ring, will you?’ Kathy wrote her mobile number on the back of a card and handed it to her. They shook hands and said goodbye.
Leon was already there when Kathy got home. He was sitting at the table by the window with a mug of tea, absorbed in a road atlas. Rain was beating against the dark window, making the distant streetlights glimmer liquidly.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Tea’s fresh. Come and sit down.’ He fetched her a mug.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Looking for places to spend a lull in. There’s Lulham in Herefordshire, and Lullington in Derbyshire, and another one in Somerset. Or how about Lulsgate Bottom? Sounds good, eh? My money’s on Dorset; we can get four lulls in one hit, all within walking distance: East Lulworth, Lulworth Castle, West Lulworth and Lulworth Cove. That’s an irresistible concentration of lulls. What do you reckon?’
Kathy smiled. For a brief moment, before he lifted his head, he reminded her of an earnest schoolboy doing his homework assignment. Then he looked up at her with his intense dark eyes and her stomach tightened. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t go. Brock wants us to work tomorrow.’ She put her arm round his shoulder. ‘And it’s going to be a total waste of time. But I have to go.’
‘Oh. Too bad. Another time.’
She suppressed an impulse to say, no, we’ll go, there won’t be another time, not like this. But instead she nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Next week,’ he said. ‘I thought of going up to Liverpool for a day or two. We could go together.’
‘Liverpool?’
‘Yes. I want to have a look around.’
‘Why?’ She felt a small chill inside her.
‘I’m thinking of applying to go there.’
‘A transfer? Why?’
‘No, no. I’m thinking of doing a masters. Investigative psychology. I’d ask for leave for twelve months.’
Kathy sat down facing him across the table and stared at him, saying nothing.
‘I’m stuck, Kathy,’ he went on patiently. ‘To move up I need some more qualifications. The Liverpool M. Sc. is exactly what I need. I’ll show you the brochures.’ He made as if to get up, but then, seeing the look on Kathy’s face, didn’t move. ‘What?’
‘That’s where Alex Nicholson teaches, isn’t it? Did she tell you about it?’
‘Yes, that’s right, while we were having dinner the other night. I was explaining the problem I have, and-’
‘What problem? You never told me you had a problem, Leon.’
He leant forward, mildly exasperated. ‘But you know how it is. I can’t go beyond sergeant as laboratory liaison.’
‘We didn’t discuss this. You’ve only been here a few days, and you’ve already decided to move on.’
‘It’s not like that!’ he protested. ‘Look, Kathy, you should be thinking about this for yourself, too.’
‘What?’
‘You haven’t got a degree.’
She flushed. ‘I know that.’
‘Well, you should get one! Hasn’t Brock ever told you?’
‘No!’
‘Well, he bloody well ought to have done. He’s a negligent supervisor.’ He sat back and folded his arms in a pose that Kathy found quite astonishingly, insufferably smug. The anger flared inside her.
‘Fuck you, Leon,’ she said. ‘He’s ten times the copper you’ll ever be.’
‘But he’s near his used-by date, Kathy,’ he replied coolly. ‘Things are different now, you know that. Look’-he held up his hands in truce-‘this is stupid. I’m not going to fight about this. You know I’m right. I just didn’t… find the right way to put it.’
‘Damn right,’ she muttered fiercely. ‘And I haven’t got time to get a degree. If I was going to get one I should have done it years ago. It’s too late now. I can’t stop what I’m doing just to get a paper qualification.’
‘Wrong,’ he said, more gently. ‘You must make time. Do it part-time. I’ll help you.’
‘Oh sure. From Liverpool.’
‘That’s just for a year, for God’s sake. And it’s only a couple of hours away.’
She relented eventually, and they made it up and prepared a meal together and generally agreed to be sensible and adult. It would have been all right if she hadn’t known as soon as she saw Alex Nicholson that she was going to be trouble, and if they hadn’t both initially told themselves, as a kind of insurance, that this was never going to work out anyway.
14
T he following morning Kathy put on what she hoped would pass for shop assistant’s clothes: a white blouse and navy cardigan and skirt. She pulled and clipped back her hair to try to avoid cursory identification by Harry Jackson’s staff, and drove to Silvermeadow where she duly reported for duty at Cuddles, the soft-toy shop. The manager gave her a quick introduction to handling cash and credit-card transactions, then had her memorise the shop’s mission statement (‘We aim to bring joy to young and old through the medium of soft cuddly toys’), before placing her at a checkpoint in the middle of the shop, with a clear view of the large badger in the open shopfront facing the mall.
At ten a.m., when the centre opened its doors, she had a call on her mobile from Brock to say that the two vans were in position at the site entrances, ready for the day. She was armed with an extendable baton and a pair of handcuffs in the pocket of her skirt.
By lunchtime she felt she had pretty well exhausted whatever interest was to be derived from selling soft toys, and was glad of a break. She sat in a small staff room at the back of the shop, keeping an eye on the customers through the half-open door while she ate a sandwich, before returning reluctantly for the afternoon shift. Shortly afterwards she was in the middle of an electronic funds transfer transaction for a heavily built, extensively tattooed truck driver clutching a five-foot orange giraffe, when she caught a fleeting glimpse of a man standing at the edge of the swirling mall crowd, staring at the badger. She looked hard, trying to make him out, and immediately he turned away and disappeared into the mass of people.
While the truck driver and the rest of the queue looked on in surprise, Kathy abandoned her till and hurried towards the front of the shop. She was almost at the mall when she was stopped by a penetrating female voice. ‘Sergeant! Sergeant Kolla! What on earth are you doing, serving in here? Is this a part-time job?’
Harriet Rutter emerged from behind a column, blocking Kathy’s way, and she had to weave past her to get out into the mall. She could see no sign of anyone looking like North’s pictures. She turned back, told Mrs Rutter to keep this to herself, and rejoined her queue.
At six, tired and exasperated at the waste of the day, Kathy phoned Brock to say she was leaving. He thanked her, apologised, and mentioned that an Armacorp security truck had driven down into the service road
