A person who wasn’t used to it would have found it impossible to work in that room. Not a single other body in it was in a state of silence and rest. Two dozen Met officers were in constant motion, most of them also talking, joshing, making off-colour jokes, often while simultaneously keying data into computers, or flicking through files, or dialling phone numbers, or eating muffins, or lobbing crumpled paper into the bin, or carrying piles of forms from one end of the office to the other. It was mayhem. Mill liked that about it.
He found himself asking the first thing he always asked about any piece of work: why me? It wasn’t an idle question. Mill was not, demographically or psychologically, a typical policeman. He was a Classics graduate from Oxford, both the town and the university, the son of two teachers, who had joined the police as an experiment on himself, for reasons which he often speculated about – observing himself as from a distance – but still didn’t understand. He wanted to scratch an itch to do with authority, his need for it, his desire to have it, his liking of hierarchy and order. It was that thing the centurion says to Jesus: ‘For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers, and I say unto one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.’ Yes. That felt right to him. Five years out of university, on the graduate fast track up through the ranks, he was very aware of the ways in which his colleagues thought he might be a wanker; not that he was a wanker all the time, but that, through the cocktail of class and education, he had the kind of perspectives and opportunities which meant that he might at any moment say or do something wanky. As if being in the police was for him a lifestyle choice, rather than a fundamental expression of who he was. He resented that they saw him like that, while admitting, deep down, that it was also fair enough. So he learned to be careful.
Mill wanted to make a difference, whatever that meant – it was a phrase he thought about a lot. He was a Christian – had never stopped being one, had been one since childhood – and wanted to lead a good life. But you had to think about what that meant. To make a difference presumably meant either to do something that other people couldn’t or wouldn’t do, or to do their jobs in a way which was better than the way they did it. So it was a marginal difference. It was the difference between the kind of policeman he was and the kind someone else would have been. If he was, say, 15 per cent better than the other person who would have been Detective Inspector at his station, then that was the difference he was making, that 15 per cent. That was his marginal utility. Was it enough? There were days when he felt it was and days when he felt it wasn’t. His girlfriend Janie thought he was mad to have wanted to go into the police, and was only now, four years in, beginning to accept the idea that it might in some bizarre way suit him.
That didn’t mean he didn’t think about giving it up and doing something else. He did, almost every day. The thought was a safety valve; the idea that he could quit whenever he liked was one of the things which kept him in the job. The exit was always in his line of sight. The idea of it helped him to stay put and to cope with the rough parts of his job and his day.
One of those rough parts, in the form of Constable Dawks, was heading towards his desk at that precise moment. Dawks was a decade older than Mill and would never be anything other than a constable. Mill had spent two years on the beat and then been promoted to inspector as part of the accelerated-promotion scheme, invented in the eighties as a way of attracting more graduates into the force. It worked, but not without attracting resentment at the gilded generation who slid effortlessly into jobs which ordinary coppers would never have a chance of getting. Added to this was the fact that Mill – as a slightly built, well-groomed 26-year-old non-smoking teetotaller can sometimes do – looked roughly half his age. As a detective there were times when that was an asset. In the station house, not so much. One of the reasons that was true was because of men like Dawks, a physically imposing, not very bright 35-year-old whose attitudes were less about law and much more about enforcement. Dawks was a natural bully, who over the nine months they had known each other had made a number of attempts at picking on Mill, like a shark circling potential prey; Mill had fended him off, but it was clear that Dawks would return for another go whenever he felt like it. The idea was to look for a weak spot, something he could find that Mill minded, and that he could then exploit to turning the Inspector into a figure of ridicule. Once that was done it was hard to undo. People liked Mill well enough but he was sufficiently different to make a good target, once the beachhead had been established.
Today, though, there was a reprieve. Just as Dawks was about five feet from his desk and opening his mouth to say something, he was called to the other end of the room by one of the custody sergeants. The constable stopped and turned away, not without giving a last look at Mill. So that was unfinished business. Back to work. Mill picked up the folder and began flicking through it again and returned again to the question, Why me? Mill’s boss, Superintendent Wilson, was a dark-haired, trim, smooth-mannered woman in her middle forties, another product of the accelerated-promotion scheme. She was the most talented natural politician he had ever seen, especially when it came to sniffing out trouble in advance, spotting pitfalls, and knowing what things would look bad if they went wrong. It made her a cautious police officer but not necessarily a bad one. Her use of Mill, he noticed, implied that he was cut from a similar mould. She often sicked him onto problems with a political angle, real or potential. That was half a compliment, because it implied that she trusted him, and half an insult, because it implied that he resembled her.
In this case, her brief has been explicit. ‘Find out what’s happening, then make it go away.’
So the first question was, what was happening? The material on his desk had been accumulated by aggrieved householders in a local street called Pepys Road. They had been subjected to what they called ‘a campaign of sustained harassment’. They had written a classic middle-class complaint letter, carefully phrased to press the maximum number of official buttons. According to them, the campaign had begun with postcards of their own front doors, then with videos of their street, and there was also an anonymous blog with photos of the houses, shot at a variety of hours and over a period of time. All of this material, without exception, bore the slogan or motto or injunction or threat ‘We Want What You Have’.
Mill took his desktop PC out of sleep and navigated to the web page. He spent about half an hour browsing through it and another twenty minutes looking at the material which had come through the letter boxes. The postmarks were from all around London and the handwriting was the same on all of the addresses: block capitals in black ink. There was no other writing, indeed no other words of any kind except the same five, over and over again. As he did this, Mill began to get an answer to his question and to realise why the task had landed on his desk. There was something disturbing about the material. It was hard to know what it was after and it was hard not to feel there was something creepy about it. Somebody was taking too much interest in this street, in these houses and in the people who lived in them. It felt wrong. That wasn’t the same thing as saying that a crime had been committed, though. Perhaps whoever was doing this had thought about that – about not breaking the law. On his notepad, Mill jotted down:
harassment
trespass?
privacy angle?
antisocial behaviour
Then he put a selection of the postcards and DVDs in an evidence envelope and did the paperwork to have them checked for fingerprints. He wasn’t too optimistic about that, but it had to be done. As for the main issue, which was what this whole thing was, Mill’s conclusion for the moment was that he didn’t have a clue.
33
Mary, Mary, quite contrary… Mary loathed that poem but all her life there were times when she found it hard to get out of her head. Her father had recited it to her, often, and always with amusement. For him, so very contrary himself, up to and far beyond the point of total unreasonableness, contrariness was a positive quality. But Mary didn’t think of contrariness as a positive quality, and didn’t think it was one she had; though the lines did sometimes run through her mind, often when there was something she was subliminally cross at. Mary, Mary, quite contrary…
She put the pot of tea, which had now steeped for four minutes, onto the tray, then picked up the tray, then put it down again. Better just to take up a mug; the fewer things there were for her mother to drop or spill the better. And at the same time Mary was trying to defend against the slippage in her mother’s condition by pretending it wasn’t happening, and by setting small rigged tests for her to pass: look, she can still cope with a cup and saucer;
