A Dog's Life (The Romney and Marsh Files Book 4) (6 page)

Marsh nodded and said, ‘Perfectly, ma’am,’ although she didn’t want to believe what she felt sure had just been suggested to and asked of her.

The intercom buzzed. An appointment had arrived.

‘That’ll be all for now, Joy. We’ll talk more later.’

‘Ma’am.’ Marsh stood and hurried out. She walked confidently through the outer office and down the flight of stairs to the CID corridor. She went back to the toilets, locked herself in one of the cubicles, sat down and put her head in her hands.

Boudicca wanted a snitch and she’d been chosen. Because she was a woman. The carrot had been dangled and there was little doubt about whose head the new station chief wanted on a spike over the front gate. Shit. Shit. Shit.

*

When
Joy came back from the early lunch she’d decided to take, Grimes was sitting in with Romney. They were talking earnestly with the door shut. It was an unusual sight. She wondered whether they were talking about her. Were they in there drawing lines? Forming plans? She shook her head. Stupid paranoid cow.

Her sister hadn’t answered her mobile on any of the three times she’d rung it. Stupid childish cow. Tracy wouldn’t be able to comprehend her position, her dilemma, even if Marsh drew her pictures. Other than her kids, she’d never gone in for duty and even that most grave of responsibilities she’d largely shirked.

Joy experienced a fresh wave of guilt and sorrow. Poor old mum. How bad was it? She’d drive up after work. Take the flak.

*

Tom Romney wasn’t going to alter his plans for the afternoon just because Boudicca was tearing around on her chariot putting the wind up everyone. He put his time in at work. The public got their money’s worth out of him. Besides, he’d paid up front for it. Rescheduling, he had been given to understand, would be both inconvenient and potentially harmful. He believed the first and doubted the second for a scare tactic. They must have their illusions.

Four sessions behind him, another two to go. After that they’d agreed they’d talk again about the best way forward for him. If indeed there should be a clear path. As a private patient, he didn’t have the luxury of the NHS to supplement his indulgence and he was beginning to wonder whether the money would have been better spent on paving slabs.

‘Hello again, Tom. Come in. Welcome. Chair or couch this week?’ Doctor Puchta managed a barely suppressed smirk.

‘When have I ever consented to the couch?’

‘Just asking, Tom. Just asking.’

Romney hung his coat on the rack and took the seat he’d taken on his four previous visits to the psychiatrist. In his reasoning, to take the couch would be to make his attendance more real, more serious, more clinical. Sitting in the chair chatting for half an hour felt none of those things.

Doctor Puchta came around from behind her desk to sit almost opposite him. She had neither pen and pad nor electronic device poised for any kind of recording. That was the way they had agreed to proceed. That was the way Romney wanted it – unofficial and casual. Nothing on record.

Although Romney had not wanted to spend time exploring his preference for this condition of their ‘sessions’ – a term with implications that he chose to shy away from – Dr Puchta sensed strongly that it was something to do with his state of denial regarding what they were exploring.

Despite his initiation of the programme of introspection and his insistence that he would like to spend some time trying to get to know himself better, Romney had proved, at times, to be an extremely sceptical ‘client’, almost to the point of being uncooperative. But slowly Dr Puchta had encouraged him out of his mental shell and Romney would have to admit that just occasionally the experience of trying to understand his feelings and perspectives better had not been unpleasant, possibly even therapeutic, if, sadly, not yet useful.

Romney had first met Doctor Puchta during his investigation into the murder of Edy Vitriol, a local man with a big, noisy skeleton rattling around his wardrobe. It transpired that the doctor had been treating Vitriol, courtesy of the NHS, long enough to have bought a small terraced house in a fashionable part of the town with her fees if she had so wished. However, with homes in both River and the south of France, she had not.

Romney had struck up a comfortable and fortuitous rapport with the lady head-doctor. And so it was with an odd sense of the predetermined that when Romney had felt the overwhelming need to seek out the professional help of someone specialising in mental health, Doctor Puchta’s card had been confronting him from the top drawer of his work desk.

Romney’s visits were not something he shared with another living soul. That was going to the grave with him. For a start, his ego wouldn’t have permitted it. Secondly, he couldn’t have risked the ridicule, but more importantly, he believed that Kent police would take a rather dim view of the head of Dover CID being treated, to all intents and purposes, as a psychiatric outpatient. 

His idea to consult with a qualified professional to see if he could benefit from a programme of analysis had arisen after a particularly dramatic, horrific and gory near-death experience that had left him deeply troubled, emotionally scarred and regularly disturbed by night terrors. With Grimes now staying with him, he could only hope that the shouting he experienced in his dreams wasn’t something he was actually doing out loud in his sleep. He couldn’t imagine the big man being able to keep such a rich vein of gossip to himself.

Off duty and on a promise, he had been wining and dining a forensic scientist in a local Greek restaurant when three men had entered the place to collect an instalment on their protection racket. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Romney had felt obliged to intervene. A violent conflict of opinion followed that had disastrous consequences for all three men, the owner of the restaurant and his family, and ultimately Romney’s chances of getting the alluring and increasingly provocative Diane Hodge into bed. (To Romney’s chagrin she had moved on to pastures greener and newer in London before giving him the chance to try again.)

The three men had been standing within feet of Romney when parts of them were suddenly, explosively and unceremoniously dispatched to soil the walls, fixtures and fittings of the restaurant’s kitchen, courtesy of the incensed owner’s remarkable handling of a pump-action shotgun. In the ensuing seconds of utter confusion and temporary ringing deafness brought on by the discharges of the weapon in the confined space, Romney had succumbed to his brain’s worst, if unrealised, fears that he’d been fatally wounded. A plastic catering container of plum tomatoes had exploded, covering him in what he assumed was his life-blood, body tissue and vital organs. As he had lain on the floor clutching at the pulped remains of his ‘entrails’, drifting into unconsciousness – the result of a crack to the back of the head received as his legs gave out from under him and his skull collided with the worktop – a bloodied severed ear had come to rest six inches from his face.

It was this ear that regularly plagued his nights. In his dreams the ear grew legs, sprouted pert breasts and danced for him; in a baffling display of physiology, it mouthed words at him, although he could never hear anything it said; it increased in size, inflating until it threatened to smother him. This was usually when Romney woke sweating and panting, gasping for air, like a drowning man, and possibly shouting.

After two weeks of the oft-recurring nightmare, DI Romney went in search of answers and help the only place he thought he could do so in the strictest of professional confidences. Friday afternoons had been determined for the sessions because Doctor Puchta’s secretary knocked off for the weekend Friday lunchtime. Romney would not even risk being identified as a regular visitor.

The recurrence of the ear in disturbing dreams was, Doctor Puchta assured him, a common symbol of some deep-rooted listening-associated anxiety. In dream culture, the ear was long recognised as indicating issues of the dreamer to do with responsiveness and receptiveness.  Often, it carried negative associations. It suggested an over-reliance of the individual in question on their own judgment and intuition and their acknowledgement of their insecurity for it. The talking ear that cannot be heard implies a deep subconscious need on the part of the sufferer for guidance and instruction, she had told him. She could offer no interpretation for the ear that grew legs and breasts and danced for his amusement.

Something long and deeply buried in his subconscious, she had theorised. Something that must be chiselled away at and exposed if Romney were to have a chance of understanding and then successfully putting the whole business behind him and moving on. She said that rarely were such emotionally-disturbing issues simply revealed and dealt with. If he wanted her help, he would have to sign up for a six-session programme and after that they would consult as to whether there was the need for more.

From understanding comes enlightenment and ultimately peace, she had said. And he had believed her, such was his desperation for answers. A month on and he was beginning to have his doubts that there was anything to be found. He was feeling better about it all and he felt that this had more to do with the passage of time than anything he’d learned about himself in her consulting room.

She had tried to regress him, failed to hypnotise him and been unable to unearth any dark boyhood secrets or perverted fantasies. For Romney, it had not all been comfortable participation, but it had at times been cathartic to just talk to someone – something he realised he rarely had the opportunity to do. An enema for his mind. Other than that, he was beginning to think that the whole exercise was a waste of time and money, despite the good Doctor insisting that they must persevere at least for the initial six-week consultation programme she had devised for him. But she would say that at the prices she was charging. Maybe she was saving for a pool.

‘How are you feeling this week, Tom?’

‘Fine. Really.’ And then he couldn’t help himself: ‘Or I was until this morning.’

‘Why? What happened this morning?’

*

‘Why does this always have to happen on Friday afternoons?’ said Grimes. ‘I told the kids we’d go bowling tonight in Ashford, Pizza Hut and then Cineworld.’ He shook his head, tutted and waited with the phone to his ear. ‘You can come along if you like, Sarge. The kids actually liked you.’

‘Thanks. I liked them too, but I’ve got something on tonight.’ A fresh ripple of dismay washed through Marsh at the thought of her evening. ‘No luck?’

‘His phone’s off. Where does he go, do you think?’ Grimes looked unusually agitated.

‘I’ve no idea.’ Marsh suspected that Romney had a regular Friday afternoon assignation with a member of the opposite sex, but she would never share something like that with Grimes. ‘We can go and deal with it and you can tell him all about it over your cocoa before bedtime. Come on.’

CID had been notified by uniform of a suspicious death. A neighbour had smelt burning and raised the alarm. The fire crew had smashed the door down and called fo
r an ambulance. The ambulance team had taken one look at the deceased and called the police. The young uniformed constable had taken one look at the victim and thrown up on the carpet. Everyone had been moved out of the way and they were all waiting for the detectives, forensics and the pathologist.

Grimes had taken the call while he was making his way through the apology-muffin that Marsh had left on his desk. Say it with cakes. He was glad he’d been sitting down. He knew one of the occupants of the address given. Not four hours previously he’d tipped a pint of lager into his lap.

*

When they arrived, Marsh and Grimes were concerned to see Superintendent Vine standing on the pavement speaking with two male uniformed officers. She was as tall and imposing as both of them and they were wearing stab vests. As Vine noticed them pull up behind one of the two patrol vehicles in attendance, she checked her watch.

‘Bollocks,’ said Grimes.

‘My sentiments exactly,’ said Marsh.

They’d tried Romney four more times on their short drive to the address of the suspicious death on Folkestone Road. No answer.

A good crowd of Dover’s unfortunates and undesirables had gathered. But only because they hadn’t had far to walk. They were nearly all men – the out of work, the out of luck, the out of ideas. Nothing better to do than hang around their rooms or the street corners all day waiting for something to happen. There was a good number of the town’s increasing variety of ethnic minorities represented, which told another story of Dover’s emerging demographics.

As the detectives approached, Superintendent Vine turned to face them. She was frowning. It looked like part of an exaggerated act. ‘Where is DI Romney?’

As the senior detective present, Marsh said, ‘He’s not answering his phone, ma’am. Could just be in a reception black spot.’

Vine look unconvinced. Grimes thought Romney might prefer black hole when he got wind of this.

‘Doesn’t he say where he is going when he leaves the station?’

‘Normally, yes, ma’am. We’ll keep trying him.’

Vine stored that away for later.

The building at the centre of all the activity and attention formed part of an architecturally-impressive row of Victorian townhouses and was spread over four floors. Once upon a time these properties, this street, had been affluent and convenient. A short walk from the town centre and with close access to Dover train station. Very middle class.