No Questions Asked (6 page)

     ‘Sit yourself down then and I’ll serve up’.

     ‘Thanks’ said Adrian as he placed a hand over his tie before sitting down. ‘I could get used to this’.

     They hadn’t been eating long before Adrian’s thirteen year old daughter Jessica came downstairs. His son Tom and his younger daughter had both stayed over with friends last night. Only Jessica had been in the house and she’d gone to bed by the time Adrian and Kate had come back from the pub.

     Jessica took one look at the kitchen and said ‘Oh I’m sorry I didn’t realise our kitchen had been rented out to a stranger’.

     ‘Jessica, don’t be rude’ said Adrian. ‘You know Kate’.

     ‘Hi Jessica’ Kate tried as warmly as she could. She saw Jessica every day at school but this was different. She wasn’t her teacher here.

     ‘I know her as Miss Branning’ said Jessica.

     ‘Shall I make you something to eat, Jessica?’ Kate ventured.

     ‘Excuse me but just who do you think you are? This is our kitchen and you’ve got no place in it’

     ‘Jessica, that’s enough’ Adrian warned. ‘Kate is my guest and you’ll show her due courtesy’.

     ‘No way will I ever show her any respect’.

     ‘I beg your pardon?’

     Jessica pointed her finger at Kate who was frozen to the spot. ‘If you’re intent on a relationship with my father then I tell you now that I will never support it because as a human being as well as a teacher you totally suck. I’m glad we’ve had this chance for a little talk away from school where I’ve got the power and you have none’.   

     ‘Jessica, apologise now!’ Adrian demanded.

     ‘I will not!’ Jessica snarled as she swept out of the kitchen and out the front door. ‘I hope my father breaks your heart because that’s what you deserve’.

     ‘Jessica!’

     ‘Its okay, Adrian’ said Kate who was close to tears but managing to hold it back. Jessica’s outburst had certainly brought her right back down to earth with an almighty great big thump. It hadn’t been entirely unexpected however. Last year Jessica had gone to Kate to say that she was being bullied. Kate hadn’t believed her and told her that she must be making it up because Kate knew the girls Jessica was accusing and had asserted that they wouldn’t be like that. Then a week or so later Kate caught the girls inflicting their torment on Jessica and she had to reprimand them and apologise to Jessica. But Jessica wouldn’t accept her apology. There’d been bad blood between them ever since.    

     ‘It’s not okay, Kate’ said Adrian who was mortified at his daughter’s behaviour. ‘I won’t have you spoken to like that’.

     ‘I’m a teacher, remember?’ said Kate. She didn’t want to tell Adrian about the bullying incident with Jessica just yet. She wanted to wait until their relationship was more solid before she dropped that little one. ‘I’m used to stroppy teenagers who think I suck’.

     ‘But you’re my girlfriend and this is my bloody house’.

     ‘It’s a family home’ said Kate who then held Adrian’s hand. ‘I did perhaps get a bit carried away acting like I knew my way around your kitchen. I went too far too soon. I was insensitive and Jessica reacted. It’s understandable when you look at it from her point of view’.

     ‘The perils of seeing someone who comes with baggage’

     ‘I’d be a bit worried if you didn’t come with baggage at your age’.

     You don’t know the half of it, thought Adrian. ‘My other two won’t be like that’.

     ‘Well at least that’s good to know’ said Kate. ‘And am I the first woman she’s seen here since Penny died?’

     ‘Yes’ said Adrian. ‘You are’.

     ‘Well that’s another reason why I can understand her reaction. It must be hard for her, Adrian’.

     ‘You are lovely to be so understanding’.

     ‘I just wanted to please you but she’s not at the right place to be able to understand that yet’ said Kate as she linked her fingers with Adrian’s over the table. ‘But its early days and I’ve got thick enough skin. I won’t give up that easily on the best man to have come my way in a very long time’.   

     Joe Alexander was taking an upbeat attitude to joining a new team even though the thought of it was making his heart sink to the depths of Hell. He’d got on well with his former boss, DCI Sara Hoyland, but since he was almost killed in the line of duty last year his centre of gravity had shifted. Those bastards last year had almost succeeded in sending him into the next world and he was frustrated that he hadn’t experienced enough of this one to be willing to move on yet.

     ‘Do you know much about this new boss, Adrian?’ Joe asked as they made their way down the corridor to the Serious Crimes Unit.

     ‘He likes to get things done his own way but then we’re used to that with Miss Hoyland, big man’ said Adrian who was still thinking of how he was going to smooth things over with his daughter Jessica. The look in her eyes had been so hateful. It wasn’t going to be easy. ‘But you know that they’re all like that at that level. Are you worried about fitting in or something?’

     ‘I couldn’t care less about fitting in, Adrian’ Joe retorted, a little sharply. ‘Sorry. I’m not particularly in the right frame of mind for making friends and influencing people this morning’.

     Adrian saw there was a small empty office coming up on the left and he pushed Joe into it when they got level. He closed the door.

     ‘What the fuck?’ Joe demanded.

     ‘Now look, Joe, I’m your mate and I’m worried about you. What happened last year happened and you’ve got to leave it there. Yes, you shouldn’t have been placed in that position, yes it was a total fuck up from beginning to end that could’ve got you killed but it didn’t. You’re here and you’ve got to get on with it. And that means showing your worth to this new shout as the bloody brilliant police officer that you are and dropping this attitude you’ve got that there’s somehow unfinished business going on. Do you get me?’

     ‘Yes’ said Joe through clenched teeth. ‘But you weren’t the one who almost died’.

     ‘No’ said Adrian. ‘But my wife died the year before. Remember? Penny was murdered because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time so don’t talk to me about demons and how they’re hard to slay every flaming day because I know, mate’.

     ‘Alright, alright, I’m sorry, mate. I’m just finding it all a bit of a struggle at the moment’.

     ‘Have you been back for counselling?’

     ‘What do you think?’

     ‘Well you need to get some form of help, Joe. Otherwise God knows where you’ll end up’.

     ‘Alright, that’s as far as I’ll let you go’ said Joe. ‘By the way, what’s put the smile on your face this morning?’

     Adrian winked. ‘Need I spell it out? Miss Kate Branning the sexy geography teacher?’

     ‘She gave in to your hidden charms eventually then?’

     ‘What can I say, mate? The old dog has still got it’.

     ‘Yes well this old dog would like to get a lick of the bone but he never does’ said Joe who’d slipped back into his old routine of work, telly, pub, parents, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, everything the thirty something slightly overweight single heterosexual man does when there’s that big gap in his life and time is running through him like a car speeding towards a brick wall. His previous girlfriend had ripped his heart out when she’d left after admitting that she’d used him to get away from her ex husband and had never had any intention of staying with him for long. He was fed up of being single but women were so like a closed book to him. All he wanted was to share his life with someone who didn’t end up shitting on him from a great height and accusing him of being ‘too nice’.

     ‘You’ll find someone desperate enough eventually, mate’ Adrian chided. ‘Give up the pies for a day or two and take yourself down the gym and you’ll attract a better class of woman’.

     ‘Now I know you’re taking the piss’ said Joe. ‘Come on you big stud. Let’s go and be the new boys’.

     ‘That’s more like it, Joe. That’s more like it’.

     Jeff went to see Gary Mitchell at his butcher’s shop on the Bury new road just before the M60 Manchester orbital motorway crossed over it. After the cavernous branch of a nationwide supermarket chain had opened on what used to be waste ground across the road Gary had seen a worrying drop in trade and takings aside from the ultra loyal customers who’d been with him since the Pope was an altar boy. But he’d responded by diversifying and now he was one of the few butchers in the area who went beyond the standard supply of beef, pork, lamb, and chicken. He had an arrangement with a Lancashire farmer who held shooting parties on his land. Now Gary had a regular stock of game including guinea fowl, pheasant, pigeon, and quail. He also offered rabbit and duck and imported foie gras from France. And with all the other improvements he’d made to his offer to customers his trade was now buoyant again. He still had his regular crowd who wouldn’t even think of venturing past pork chops or taking his advice and not cremating their joint of beef on a Sunday, but he’d also drawn in a slightly more adventurous crowd most of whom had travelled and been happily exposed to the idea of trying different types of meat. Gary’s view was that if you ate meat then it was stupid to be squeamish about what kind of meat you ate. But then he’d found that was the British all over. A cow was there to be eaten. A chicken was considered a mainstay of any British food cupboard. But a lovely little bunny rabbit was a member of the family and it was cruel to eat it. That was why Gary had never gone in for pets of any kind.

     They walked the couple of hundred meters to a small local park set between two rows of terraced houses. Two early middle aged men sat there amongst the swings and roundabouts looked decidedly dodgy but that fact didn’t concern them.

     ‘Do you think Bradley was your son, Gary?’ Jeff asked.

     Gary replied with an almost wistful look in his eye. ‘I could sometimes see in the way he walked, the way he moved his head, the way he smiled, the way he talked.  I could see my own mannerisms in him. But then other times I didn’t think he even looked like me’.

     ‘But what’s your gut instinct?’

     ‘I believe Lucy when she says he was mine, yes’ said Gary. ‘It’s almost too much, Jeff, you know. Debbie and I have been trying for so long and she’s become so frustrated. Then I find that my own kid was right across the road and now the poor little sod’s been murdered and being his father I should’ve been there to protect him. But I didn’t know, Jeff. She honestly didn’t tell me’.

     ‘And you didn’t ask?’

     ‘I didn’t want to know’ Gary admitted. ‘I was like any married man having a fling with another woman. I was high on the pleasure, the passion and the excitement of it all. I didn’t want anything else to come between any of that and the moments me and Lucy shared’.

     ‘Even if it was your own flesh and blood, Gary?’

     ‘Alright, alright, I was a bastard, I admit it. I put it to the back of my mind and tried not to think about it when I was fucking his mother. There, that’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it? You wanted to hear me admit to being a shit of the highest order’.

     ‘Actually that’s not what I want, Gary’ said Jeff. ‘I want to find Bradley’s killer and however you or anybody else comes out of it is of no consequence to me, although I do think that Lucy is shouldering more than her fair share of the grief’.

     ‘Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t care that she’s in absolute pieces over there and that the press are having a field day portraying her as a single mother scrounger on benefits who was a lap dancer and having sex with a married man at the time her son was being murdered? Do you not think that the thought of all that kills me too? I know that Lucy isn’t the woman she’s being made out to be. I know she was a good mother because I’ve witnessed it and so have you. You know she was a good mother’.

     ‘She was one of the best of the single mum’s I’ve ever come across’.

     ‘There you are then’.

     ‘But what I think or what you think doesn’t matter at all when the gutter press have got the bit between their teeth, Gary. Did you know that Lucy had once been lovers with Bernie Connelly?’

     ‘Yes, I knew’.

     ‘And that she was once on the game for him?’

     ‘Yes, I knew that too’.

     ‘And neither of those things bothered you?’

     ‘I like to deal with the here and now, Jeff, as you know’ said Gary. ‘And look, ‘I’ve been plastered across the press too as you know’ said Gary. ‘They’ve been after me here and at home. I’ve not been able to get away. What do you think that’s doing to Debbie?’

     ‘What do you think it’s doing to Lucy?’

     Gary put his head in his hands and then brought his face back up again. ‘I don’t know what to do, Jeff’.

     ‘Well for a start we need to take DNA samples from you and match them up with Bradley’s DNA. That’ll prove once and for all whether or not you were his father. In the meantime, Gary, can you think of anyone who might’ve held the kind of grudge against you that would lead them to doing something like this?’

     ‘But nobody else would’ve known that I was Bradley’s father’