Rope Enough (The Romney and Marsh Files Book 1) (7 page)

What had started out as an exciting dream had, at times, been more of a millstone than anything else, especially in the winter when everything seemed perpetually damp, cold and miserable.

Builders’ rates being what they were, he had opted to employ his not inconsiderable talent and his spare time to renovate the place. It had been dragging on for nearly two years and he still had a long way to go before he could envisage an end to it.

In the short time that he’d known Julie Carpenter, he hadn’t yet invited her to see what a monstrous task he’d saddled himself with. He doubted that she would be as impressed as she would be if it were finished. And anyway, crossing such boundaries, he knew from previous bitter experience, brought perils and suggestions of commitment that he was not prepared to engage in, yet. He was quite happy at this stage in their relationship to divide his time between evenings out and her cosy, clean, femininely ordered and fragranced home.

By eight o’clock he was bowling along the back lanes, showered, changed, hungry and excited at the prospect of later undressing Julie’s firmly curved body and making love with her again as they had on the last two occasions they’d met before the previous night. Rodrigo seeped out of the speakers and everything was good in the world. Except that it wasn’t.

With a guilty feeling, he thought back to his interview that morning with Claire Stamp. What would she be doing now? Where was the rapist – the man who had succumbed to, what had Marsh called it, the barely suppressed animal desire inside him? Fleetingly, Romney wondered whether that was what he was feeling towards Julie Carpenter: a simple, basic, primitive urge to possess her, to dominate her. But it wasn’t the same, of course. Similarities might exist on a plane of thought, but normal men didn’t go around acting on such impulses by taking women against their will. It was called civilisation. Normal civilised men knew that they had to work for it like most things in life. Play the game. Pay your money and take your chance.

*

Detective Inspector Romney next thought of Claire Stamp at about midnight. His evening with Julie had gone as well as he could have hoped. She was beautiful, intelligent, attentive, alluring and he realised that he was feeling fairly smitten with her. The food was excellent, the restaurant service exemplary, the prices outrageous, but the general ambiance of the gastro-pub that he had heard so much about from colleagues lived up to the high recommendations.

When she invited him in for a coffee as he was dropping her off, he felt an anticipation and exhilaration that had been lamentably infrequent sensations of latter years.

She pulled him against her inside the doorway in the darkness and probed his mouth with her hot, wet tongue and then, unashamedly, led him up the stairs to her bedroom.

It was as he was fumbling with the contraceptive wrapping – unable to get a purchase on its oily surface – that he thought of Claire Stamp. Or rather, it was as he put the corner of the square plastic envelope into his mouth and ripped off the top with his teeth that DI Romney thought of her. And then it wasn’t so much Claire Stamp that he thought of as the man who had raped her. Romney wondered if he, too, in his fit of primitive longings to possess the woman spread before him, had found himself unable to gain entry to the little plastic packet and resorted to tearing off the top with his teeth. And whether he, too, would have found the top of the packet stuck inside his mouth, being coated with his saliva and his unique DNA before he carelessly spat it out oblivious of where it might end up and what it might later reveal.

It was a measure of the power of the urges that Romney was experiencing and giving full vent to that he didn’t interrupt himself, make his apologies, enquire after a pen and paper and write down his epiphany so that he might be guaranteed of reminding himself in the morning to ask forensics to run saliva tests on the little strip of plastic recovered from the crime scene. Instead, he trusted the scrap of priceless intelligence to his less than wonderful memory and for a few intense minutes lost himself.

***

4

The new day began well enough for Romney. With brief but sincere endearments exchanged with the barely awake naked warmth of Julie Carpenter, he had retrieved his scattered clothes from her bedroom floor, taking a pleasure in their dispersal as testimony to the climax of the previous night. Dressing quickly, he let himself out to stand a moment on the doorstep and drink in the crisp perfect winter’s morning. As if on cue, the new day’s sun, unfettered by cloud, peeped over the battlements of Dover castle, the monument to times past that dominated the town from its raised position and from every approach. It was, he decided, good to be alive.

*

Despite returning home for a shower and change of clothes, he arrived at the station in good time. He parked his car and, after checking his watch, opted to visit the small patisserie around the corner and treat himself to a good pastry and proper coffee. 

He entered the station through the public entrance clutching his purchases some ten minutes later. The uniformed sergeant on the front desk greeted him.

‘Morning, Dennis. Quiet night?’

The sergeant’s smile split his fat face. ‘Haven’t you heard, gov?’

A sense of ominous foreboding hatched inside Romney. ‘Heard what?’

‘Fracas in the town last night. All hands on deck. We had to summon uniform from Folkestone and Deal.’

‘What? Where? Why?’ The mono-syllabic questions chased each other out of his open mouth.

‘Mob of local thuggery turned up at The Castle. Started taking the place apart and whoever they could get their hands on.’

‘The Castle?’ said Romney. ‘Is that still run by Kosovans?’ His good mood was evaporating like a shallow puddle on a summer’s day.

‘Yes, gov. It would appear to be a racially motivated attack. But no one seems to know what sparked it.’

I do, thought Romney, guiltily.

He dumped his pastry, coat and bag in his office before going down to the holding cells to investigate. The duty sergeant looked tired and harassed.

Romney said, ‘Busy night I hear.’

‘Like the good old days, gov, when the squaddies came in to paint the town red before their postings.’

‘Mind if I have a look at the visitors’ book.’

The register was turned through one-hundred and eighty degrees without further comment and the man went back to the pile of paperwork beside him.

Romney ran his finger down the list of names, his lips working silently. Simon Avery’s leapt off the page at him, as he feared it would. He counted six names of British origin and ten of an eastern European flavour.

‘I see what you mean,’ he said.

‘That’s not counting those in the hospital,’ said the sergeant.

‘Who came off worse?’

‘Score draw if you ask me, gov,’ said the seasoned officer. He had an air of a man who’d seen it all before and refused to be moved by any of it.

‘Any serious injuries?’

‘One of the local lads sustained a nasty knife wound. Nothing life threatening. Apart from that a few broken bones and a concussion or two.’

The DI nodded. ‘Mind if I take a peek?’

‘Most of them are sleeping it off, gov, but feel free.’

There were six holding cells: three on either side of the corridor. Once upon a time there had been more, but the need was no longer regularly there and storage space for reports in triplicate was always in demand.

Romney flipped the peep hole on each taking in the forms of men in various reposes. Some slept, others were mumbling, some paced and in the last but one he saw Avery. He was sitting on the hard plastic moulded surface intended for sleeping – although ironically the discomfort afforded by the unforgiving hardness rarely encouraged that – his back to the wall, staring straight at the little aperture as though he had been waiting patiently for someone to come and spy on him. Romney saw that his jacket was torn and bloodied. He felt slightly better, but not as cheerful as if Avery had lost his front teeth. He was also happy that none of the associated paperwork was going to be his problem.

As soon as he was told of the incident, Romney had suspected that this was some sort of idiotic reprisal for what had been done to Avery’s girlfriend, Claire Stamp. Or, more accurately, if he were quite honest with himself – although the thought made him suddenly hot – what he had suggested to Avery to rile him. If he’d stopped to think about it, he might have expected it. Romney chided himself for his lack of foresight, for not considering the consequences of his foolery; for not having predicted the possibility of such an outcome and forewarning his uniformed colleagues of the chances of a lively night.

At the best of times the tension between the few but significant competing factions of local criminal fraternities in the town was like a tinder-box. Almost a year before there had been a similar incident provoked by the vicious assault on a Kosovan by some of the locals. On that occasion the Kosovans had gathered a sizeable force intent on vengeance and had – with a fervour that brought to mind news-film of the ethnic cleansing of their homelands that had served as an excuse for most of them to seek asylum in the UK – gone about destroying a snooker hall and hospitalising several of those unfortunate enough to have been looking for a quiet night on the baize.  As it turned out, the Kosovans hit the wrong venue. They should have been at the pool hall around the corner.

Romney guessed that Stamp would have revealed to Avery the possibility that her attacker was eastern European and Avery would have put two and two together and made his usual five.

Romney doubted that the accuracy of Avery’s assumptions would have been uppermost in his mind. He knew Avery well enough, through experience and reputation, to be one who quickly resorted to physical violence when things weren’t going his way. The locals he was able to influence and command needed little reason, or excuse, to go and fight another battle in the interracial and intercultural turf war.

There existed in the town a clear and hostile undercurrent of resentment that a wide consensus of local opinion harboured for the immigrant population that had been foisted on them as a community, like a mini-invasion. In a town that had seen better days economically, for local residents who were struggling with the expense of life and lack of work, it was widely viewed as adding insult to injury as they had watched a steady stream of eastern European refugees trickle into their town assisted by aid packages that included free accommodation, free transport passes and food vouchers. Unlike the bureaucrats who made such decisions from their leafy shires – distant and unaffected by such policies – many of those who had to live with the reality of the situation on a daily basis found such arrangements difficult to stomach.

Despite the political incorrectness of the sentiment, Romney, with personal and professional experiences of the influx of displaced humanity, didn’t blame the locals for their views. Many of the ethnic population who had settled had sought only to create little enclaves of their former communities and on the whole showed a distinct lack of respect and gratitude towards the culture and the community that had to suffer them. Dover would have to brace itself for further violence, thought Romney, in the inevitable tit for tat.

As the duty sergeant had said: it was like the old days when Dover had been a proper garrison town supporting a much larger soldiering population than they currently did.  Nights of inter-subculture violence had been a regular feature of a policeman’s life and local news reporting. Were those days returning, Romney wondered, only the combatants changed?

Wherever he was and whatever his circumstances, man, it seemed to Romney, would eventually resort to the tribal animal that he basically was, and once these tribes were established the violence would not be long in coming.

*

Romney returned to his department. Marsh was waiting for him with an expression on her face that made Romney forget what had already ruined his day.

‘What’s up, Sergeant? You look like someone pinched your new toy.’

‘They have, sir.’

‘Explain.’

‘Someone broke into my car last night and took my digital voice recorder.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ said Romney, not particularly sounding it. ‘But you should know better than most not to leave valuables in your vehicle.’

‘It had Claire Stamp’s testimony on it, sir.’ The DI stared at her, disappointment settling on his stern features. ‘I hadn’t written it up,’ she added. ‘I was going to do it at home.’

Romney shook his head once and sighed heavily. ‘Make it top of your list to get another statement pretty bloody sharpish and file a bloody crime report.’ He turned his back on her, went into his office and shut the door.

Romney rang through to the forensic laboratory and asked to speak to one of the technicians involved with the rape case. The voice of the female SOCO that Romney recognised from the petrol station crime scene came to the phone.

‘Morning, this is DI Romney. Who am I talking to?’

‘Diane Hodge. How can I help you Inspector?’