Grief Encounters (2 page)

Edward laughed. ‘We could always get in the back,’ he suggested, rather daringly.

‘Like young lovers,’ she giggled. ‘What a good idea.’

‘Slide your seat forward, first,’ he told her, ‘to make more room.’

‘How do I do that?’

‘There’s a button down the side.’

Teri felt for it and the seat moved forward, generating another giggle and a squeal of pleasure. The interior light came on as they opened the doors, and faded again as they made themselves comfortable in the back, laughing like teenagers as they sank into the deep seats. Teri put her arms around him and pressed her face against his chest. After a few seconds she said: ‘Take your jacket off, Edward. It’s like snogging with a tailor’s dummy.’

Edward, eager to please, gladly pulled the garment off and moved closer to her.

‘So,’ Teri began, ‘how much holiday do you have?’

‘It’s not a holiday,’ he replied. ‘It’s a recess. It’s a time to concentrate on work in one’s constituency. And we still have to keep in touch. And if anything drastic happens we can always be called back and parliament reconvened.’

‘How drastic?’

‘Oh, a war,’ he replied airily. ‘Or a big tsunami wiping out the east coast. Something like that.’

‘It sounds like a holiday to me. When do you have to go back?’

‘You mean when do we reconvene?’

‘Do I? So when?’

‘The tenth of October.’

‘Tenth of October!’ she gasped. ‘That’s three months away. Who’s running the country until then?’

‘Oh, it’s in safe hands.’

‘Is it? So…does this mean I’ll be able to see more of you, Edward? Will I be in safe hands?’ She took hold of his tie to loosen it, and undid the top two buttons of his shirt.

‘I hope so, Teri,’ he told her, his voice so gruff it was barely audible as he fought against his own personal tsunami, sweeping up his legs and engulfing his loins. ‘I really do hope so.’

He was nibbling her neck, thinking of Henry Kissinger, when the camera flashed for the first time. Kissinger said that power was an aphrodisiac, to explain his success with women. Edward couldn’t think of any other reason for this beautiful girl to be with an old fogey like him. The flash cut through the thought like a scalpel. He didn’t know what it was. The interior of the car was there for a fraction of a second, brightly illuminated, Teri’s face white as marble, her eyes closed. Then all was even blacker than before. He half turned, blinking, puzzled but not alarmed by what he thought was a natural phenomenon. Summer lightning, perhaps. The second flash told him it was a camera, pressed against the window of the car. He twisted in his seat to confront the photographer when the camera flashed for the third time. Teri had covered her face with her hands and pulled her legs up in a protective gesture, which had the side effect of exposing her stocking tops and thighs. Edward was turning away from her, his jaw hanging loose and his clothing disarrayed.

That was the shot they used.

Detective Chief Superintendent (Crime) Colin Swainby was the ugliest policeman in the East Pennine force. I loved drawing him. The challenge was to capture the look without making him appear like a cartoon character. I’d got the shape of his face about right and was hinting at the details, smoothing out the carbuncles and assorted warts, when I realised he was addressing me. We were in the large conference room at the force HQ, at his monthly superintendents’ meeting, facing each other down the length of the table. Along each side were the heads of the various specialities, plus the chief honchos from the divisions. I was standing in for Gilbert Wood, my boss at Heckley. I lifted the pencil from the pad I was drawing on and tried to look fascinated.

‘Have you any comments on that, Charlie?’ the super was asking.

‘Nothing specific, Mr Swainby,’ I replied, ‘but I’d like to have a one-to-one with Peter sometime, when he can find a window for me. We need to keep abreast of developments with HOLMES in order to maximise its benefits.’ I glowed inside with satisfaction:
one-to-one
and
find a window
in the same sentence was pretty good going, not to mention
maximise
. Peter was the DI in charge of our murder-hunt computer system, and had just delivered a tedious update on its latest tricks. The DCI from drug squad sitting round the corner from me shook his head and hid his mouth behind his hand, trying not to giggle.

‘That’s a good idea,’ Swainby said. ‘I’ll leave you to organise something between yourselves.’

We nodded our agreement and I resumed my sketching. The next presentation was from the female DCI who was the Force Child Abuse Coordinator, and now I dropped my pencil and listened. You see some ghastly things in this job, but we learn to deal with them. I treat it, when I can, as a pantomime, where we are all bit players with a few lines before we exit stage left. Most of the time it’s not funny, but you can usually find something there to brighten your day. It might be a humorous comment from a villain, or a spark of humanity from someone who has been robbed of what little he or she had. Sometimes, you find it in unexpected places, but never in child abuse cases. We sat quietly and listened, each inwardly seething, me wondering how much worse it was for the officers who had small children.

The DCI finished what she had to say and we sat in silence for a while, absorbing her words. The super thanked her, then said: ‘Item twelve. This is an extra item on the agenda I gave you at the start of the meeting. It’s a personal statement that I wish to make.’

We’d all seen it: ‘Item 12, Personal statement by Mr Swainby’, and assumed that the old codger was finally retiring. Nobody minded. Apart from being our ugliest officer, Swainby was also the most unpopular. There’d be a collection, but it wouldn’t be a record-breaker. His nickname was Bulldog, more because of his aggressive instincts than his looks, but a psychologist might have suggested that it was because of his unfortunate appearance that he was always so belligerent and hostile when dealing with junior officers.

Strange thing was, I always got on well with him. He might be a nasty bastard, but he’d done several years with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and earned himself the Queen’s Police Medal. If you worked your butt off and kept your nose clean, he’d tolerate you. I shot somebody not long ago. An hour later I was sitting in an interview room, waiting for the sky to come crashing down, when he hustled in through the door. He leant over me, gripping the edges of the table, his face inches from mine, and said: ‘Just keep your mouth shut until someone’s had a talk to you. Understand?’

I nodded, and he was gone.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. I closed my pad and sat back to listen. He looked pale and grave, like I’d never seen him before. ‘I won’t keep you long, but this is important to me. On Monday I suspect I will be asked by the chief constable to hand in my resignation.’ Chairs squeaked around the table as we realised this wasn’t the usual retirement speech. ‘He wants to see me at nine o’clock, which is always a bad sign.’ He tried to smile, make light of what he was saying, but it didn’t work. ‘First of all,’ he went on, ‘I’d like to take this final opportunity to thank every one of you for the loyal service and hard work you have all given. You are as fine a body of officers as I have ever worked with. So what’s it all about? I’m not going to go into details, but certain allegations have been made against me. Allegations which I totally refute. But mud sticks, as we all know, and my position in the force would be untenable if I tried to defend myself, and, if the truth is known, I don’t have sufficient fight left in me to take on a long litigation. I will be asked to go quietly, which is what I will do. I admit to being foolish, but no more than that. I have done nothing illegal or anything I am ashamed of. You will hear rumours, of course. Accusations have been made against me, but I assure you that they are all totally unfounded. When you hear the rumours, I’ll be grateful if you would tell your informant that I totally refute every one of them. That is all I ask of you.’

The poor bloke was close to tears. With one last effort he looked at us all and said: ‘I wish you all the best of luck with your careers. Thank you,’ and gathered up his papers and left.

We all sat dumbfounded until someone said: ‘What was all that about?’ but none of us knew.

‘So is the meeting over?’ I asked, standing up. I had half a mind to chase after Mr Swainby, see what I could do for him.

‘We haven’t discussed any other business,’ one of the sticklers for protocol reminded us. Stickling for protocol can take you a long way in the police force. Sometimes I feel as if I’m submerged by sticklers.

‘Is there any other business?’ I asked. I certainly didn’t have any.

The detective chief inspector in charge of administration and policy decided that this was one of those situations that fell into his field of expertise. He half rose to his feet and rapped his knuckles on the table. ‘Do we have any other business?’ he repeated.

‘Um, well, I have something,’ my opposite number from Halifax said, and I sat down again.

‘Right,’ the detective chief inspector (administration and policy) said. ‘Let’s resume the meeting with any other business.’

The DI from Halifax produced a pile of ten by eight photographs from his briefcase and passed half of them to the people sitting at each side of him. ‘I’d like you to look at these,’ he said. ‘This lady’s body was found in parkland just outside town last week. No doubt you’ve heard all about it. Unfortunately we’re having difficulty identifying her. I just want to bring it to the attention of the other divisions to see if their field intelligence people might recognise her. It’s a long shot: she was clean of drugs so she might not be known to us.’

The pictures reached me. I took the top one off the pile and passed them on. The woman was at the wrong end of middle aged, at a guess, with
waist-length
hair in a ponytail, but apart from that there was little that could be used for identification purposes. Her face was a swollen mass of bruises, completely closing her eyes; her nose was flat and her lips swollen and split like barbecued sausages. ‘How did she die?’ I asked, without taking my eyes off her photograph.

‘She was beaten to death,’ I heard him say.

Another pile of photographs arrived. This one showed her back view, covered in bruises again. Someone had really gone to town on her. ‘The mark on her left buttock is a rather distinctive tattoo,’ the DI told us. ‘The final photo shows it in more detail.’

I waited for the next pile to arrive and took one. It was a close-up of her bum, and the tattoo was clearly visible. It said:

‘Property of the Pope,’ somebody read out.

‘Yes,’ the DI said, ‘but I don’t think we should take it too literally.’

My head was spinning. I stared at the picture and in an instant was in another, more carefree world. A long-forgotten smell stung my nostrils and my ears were filled with music. I was sitting on the bare floor, back against the wall with a bottle of Newcastle Brown in my hand, and Joan Baez was singing about the colour of her true love’s hair.

‘I know her,’ I said. ‘I know her.’ I looked up and saw eighteen mouths hanging open, eighteen pairs of eyes boring into me like gimlets.

‘Um, she’s called Magdalena,’ I told them. ‘I know her. She’s Magdalena.’

They almost collided in the doorway in their rush to meet their visitors, he yanking the door open before the chimes had died away.

‘Hello! Hello!’ they all gushed as the new couple crossed the threshold.

‘Have you seen this?’ the female visitor shrieked, waving that night’s newspaper at them. ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’

Her jacket was taken from her, the men shook hands, the women air-kissed each other and the two men then kissed the opposite partners, this time with more passion.

‘We saw it on
Look North
just now,’ the woman of the house stated, her face bright with excitement. ‘Didn’t you do well?’

‘Teach the bastards a lesson, eh?’ her husband said. ‘That puts you in the lead, Teri. Well in the lead.’

‘I didn’t know it was a competition,’ she replied.

‘It isn’t. But maybe we should make it one. Give the game an edge. What do you think, Richard?’

‘Um, no, I think not,’ he replied. ‘We might get careless. Leave things as they are and nobody can touch us. We aren’t breaking the law. Well, not that anyone can prove.’

‘You could be right.’ He turned to the woman again and slipped his hand around her waist. ‘But you did well, Teri. You did brilliant.’

The hosts for the evening were Tristan and Fiona Foyle. Tristan was old money, left a fortune by a father who despaired of his only son, but not sufficiently to disinherit him. He had been expelled by two of the best schools in the country and then amassed a further fortune of his own by cashing in early in the IT boom. In the early Eighties he developed a programme for investing in the stock market, based on following the big-name company chairmen rather than the individual companies themselves. He invested as only a teenager with a rich dad can, made lots of money for himself and other people, and sold the business for twenty-two million just before the boom ended and the markets nosedived.

Fiona was a model that he met in Bahrain, where she had gone to work on her tan. She liked what she saw there and stayed on to work behind the counter in the beauty salon of one of the new hotels, where oil millionaires came to buy presents for their wives and mistresses. She was very discreet. If she accepted an invitation to dinner she always wore the same perfume that her host had bought for his wife, earlier in the day. Tristan did not know this, of course. He met her by chance, he thought, as he came ashore from the hired yacht he was sharing with some male friends. She was a genuine ash blonde, with a figure like molten honey, and she played him like he played the marlin and yellowfin tuna he and his friends were trying to catch.