‘I am. I’m waiting for a call back from Asif Malik.’
‘Well, go that route, then.’
‘Look, I was doing the right thing—’
The arms started swinging from side to side again and once more I forced myself to button it. ‘You’re a good copper, John,’ he said, talking to me like I was an office junior rather than one rank and only a handful of years below him, ‘and we’re all pleased with your progress here, but don’t start to get ahead of yourself. You’ll end up causing problems both for yourself and for CID. Understand?’
I sighed, knowing that he was right and that it was a mistake to go to see Vamen, but longing for the moment when I was a DI again and didn’t have to report to him. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said reluctantly.
‘In future I don’t want you going to see Neil Vamen or any of his associates without speaking to me about it first. OK? I don’t want to sound like I’m not supporting you, but I think it’s the best way.’
I nodded, but didn’t bother responding. The conversation over, I stalked back to my desk and began the torturous task of bringing everything up to date. Only once did Capper interrupt me, to ask if we were still trying to get hold of Fowler. I said that we were but that we were still having no luck.
‘He’s the one we’ve got to concentrate on,’ he said, nodding his head as if he was agreeing with himself – another of his annoying habits, most likely brought about by the fact that no-one else did. I didn’t bother to comment.
* * *
At exactly five o’clock, Capper left for the day, telling me helpfully that I shouldn’t work too hard. ‘You need to unwind sometimes,’ he said with another irritating smile. ‘That way it won’t all get on top of you.’
I didn’t bother telling him that it was a little too late for that. Instead, I put my head down and felt glad for the opportunity of some space and quiet.
Paperwork can be a therapeutic process. It’s repetitive and it’s mundane, but when there’s plenty of it to do, the person doing it can sometimes lift himself spiritually from the pile in front of him and reach an almost Zen-like state where the hand simply writes automatically and the brain sails away to calmer, happier waters where there are no interruptions and no will-sapping and pointless confrontations.
I’d reached that point and was probably wearing a serene smile as idiotic as Capper’s when the door to the incident room opened and WDC Boyd walked in. Now, I liked Boyd. She was my kind of woman: attractive, amusing, but definitely no push-over. We got on well, too. I think that if it hadn’t been for the fact that we worked together, I would have definitely fancied her, and might even have tried my luck – not that I tended to have a great deal of it where love was concerned. She appeared to be a bit worn out and hot, but her short black hair, cut into a cute bob, looked like it had come straight out of a cheesy shampoo ad, and her grey trousersuit was spotless. For a woman who’d been out tramping the dirty, sweating streets of London, she carried herself remarkably well.
It was ten past six. She smiled, looking genuinely pleased to see me. ‘Hello, John, you still around?’
‘I could ask the same question,’ I said, looking up. ‘Did you manage to get hold of John Harris?’
‘Ah, the elusive Mr Harris, former stud of the Arcadia. I found him all right,’ she said, sighing theatrically. ‘Eventually.’
‘And?’
She wandered over and sat on her desk a few yards away from mine. ‘And, I don’t think he’s our man.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s been in hospital for the past ten days. He was working the door at a place in Clapham on their garage night and he got caught in the crossfire of somebody else’s argument.’
‘That’s south London for you.’
‘Too right. It’s bandit country down there,’ she added, winking at me. ‘Anyway, he got shot in the stomach. Apparently the bullet passed straight through him and hit one of the glass collectors inside. That was three days before Matthews was murdered. What a waste of a day. It took me more than four hours to find that out when I could have been sat out in the park sunbathing.’
I almost said that that would be a sight I wouldn’t have minded seeing, but settled instead for a clichéd, ‘That’s the way it goes sometimes, Tina.’
She took off her jacket and turned on her PC. ‘How was your day anyway?’
I grunted. ‘I think I can safely say it was probably even worse than yours.’ I gave her a detailed rundown of all the disasters that had befallen Berrin and me since we’d arrived for work that morning. She laughed when she heard about his slow dance with McBride’s corpse but her look had turned to sympathy by the time I’d finished.
‘Blimey, John, you don’t mess about, do you? Marching in and interrogating Neil Vamen?’
I sighed and shook my head. ‘It was a stupid move. You know, I was thinking this morning how naive Berrin was in the way he dealt with people, but I was far more naive than him over this. I really thought I could rattle Vamen, but in the end I’ve achieved absolutely nothing, except maybe to alert him to the fact that I might know something about what’s going on. And he’s already made a pre-emptive strike to get me off his back.’
‘You did your best,’ she said, giving me a supportive smile. ‘Which is a lot more than a few of the people round here.’
‘Well, it didn’t
