Some by Fire (13 page)

‘You’re stressed out,’ she told me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m not very good company.’

‘How are the midge bites?’

‘Agonising.’ I smiled as I said it.

She went away for a while and returned carrying a box filled with coloured bottles, like a paintbox. She placed it on the coffee table alongside me and drew a chair up directly in front of mine. ‘Prince Charles swears by lavender oil,’ she said.

‘Right,’ I replied. ‘Right.’ If it was good enough for him it was good enough for Charlie Priest.

She lit three small porcelain burners about the room and turned the lights low. I relaxed. I had a feeling I was in for a treat. Jacquie sat facing me and took my hand. ‘First the lavender, to absorb all your stresses,’ she whispered. I watched her long fingers caress my wrists, her scarlet nails skimming my skin but not touching it. She did my fingers, one by one, and I discovered things about myself that I’d never imagined.

‘And now the aloe vera,’ she said.

I breathed deeply and closed my eyes, and wished
this could go on forever. She removed my shoes and socks and stroked my feet, fingertips and exotic oils mingling together so I couldn’t tell touch from smell, pleasure from torture, arousal from relaxation. I stopped trying.

‘This is where the problem is,’ Jacquie told me. She was massaging my neck now, harder than before, her thumbs probing muscle, searching for knots. ‘You’re tight here.’ I let my head loll up and down in agreement. It could have been the most magical evening of my life, but it wasn’t. She cured the itching and the stress; all I had now was confusion and frustration.

It was the hottest night of the year, which didn’t help. I lay on my bed with just a sheet over me and the window open. When the blackbird on the roof started singing at about three thirty I got up and read a book. I don’t mind him singing, but he will insist on tapping time with his foot, and he has no sense of rhythm. At seven I went to work.

Terence John Alderdice, Dave told me, remembered Duncan Roberts but was mystified about the girl. ‘He reckoned Duncan was a right plonker,’ Dave said. ‘He was quite friendly with him the first year. They became mates on day one and were in the same tutorial group, whatever that means, then drifted apart as they found more kindred spirits, as you do.
He said Duncan developed some repulsive habits. They were in a hall of residence, and Duncan took great pleasure in never washing his plate or coffee mug. He just used them over and over again.’

‘Sounds delightful,’ I said.

‘In the second year,’ he continued, ‘Alderdice said Duncan just gave up studying. He lost interest and moved into a squat with a bunch of other dead-beats. Alderdice didn’t see much of him again and never saw him with a girl and doesn’t remember ever seeing one with purple hair. So there. How did you go on?’

‘Similar. Waste of time. Except that the cycle is repeating itself. I saw Pretty’s girlfriend come to visit, just as I left. Black girl, early twenties, with a little daughter, ‘bout five.’

Dave said: ‘Number three lining up for the chop. What can we do about it?’

‘Not much. I’ll have a word with his probation officer, see if he’s any suggestions. She was gorgeous.’

‘The little girl?’

‘No, turnip brain, the mother. The little girl was…
little
.’

The high pressure moved around a bit, bringing breezes from the north. The nights were clear and cold and early-morning mists rolled off the hills, causing havoc on the roads. Two people were killed in a fifteen-vehicle pile-up on the M62 and a golfer was struck by lightning in Brighouse. We made ten more contacts, some by telephone. It’s all right having
carte blanche
with expenses, but driving a hundred miles for an interview takes a big chunk out of the working day. And although Nigel was running the big show there were some jobs I had to attend to myself and some I wanted to. Arresting Peter Mark Handley was one of the latter.

Handley was forty-four years old and taught physical development at Heckley High School, the local comprehensive. When I was a pupil there it was called the Grammar School and we learnt
PT. Because of financial constraints there was no games mistress as such for the girls, just a reluctant succession of uninterested teachers seconded to take a lesson when they could. The netball and hockey teams suffered, as did a group of girls who showed promise as swimmers. To prevent a further slide in the school’s fortunes Handley had volunteered to take over as their coach, too.

We’d heard via an older girl who spent a week with us on a job awareness programme that he subscribed to the touchy-feely training method. We held off while the school was in session to avoid rumours spreading, but as soon as the summer holiday came we put him under observation and started interviewing specially selected pupils. Another girl, called Grace and wise beyond her years, said he would give them group talks before a match, extolling the virtues of the East German training methods. He showed them videos of the 1936 Berlin Olympics and modern ones of powerful Teutonic maidens out-sprinting, out-throwing and out-swimming their mortal competitors. Winning was all, he exhorted. Any means of achieving victory was acceptable, and ‘Simply the Best’ became the unofficial team song.

Later, after the game, when senses were heightened and bodies pleasantly tired, he would offer a lift home to his current favourite. Let’s have a McDonald’s he’d insist. In the restaurant he’d tell her more about East
German training methods. They had relied heavily on the administration of huge amounts of the male hormone testosterone. It was a wonderdrug for female athletes, and drastically cut down on the amount of training required to achieve international status. There could be problems, of course, if the dosage wasn’t carefully controlled. He’d laugh, and suggest that some of the women shot-putters who’d taken massive doses now left the seat upright when they came out of the toilet. What it did for their sex lives he couldn’t imagine, he said, studying the girl’s reaction as he broached the subject.

In the car, near the end of her street, he’d park while talking about the game to hold her attention. His arm would reach across the back of the seat and his fingers caress her hair. There were other methods, he’d say. She was special. She could make it, right to the top. The coach-and-athlete relationship was like no other. The other way, his way, was the loving way. There were no tests for it, and anyway, it wasn’t against the rules. His way of administering the male hormone brought only happiness and contentment, plus improved performance. And there were no unwelcome side effects. He didn’t mention pregnancy.

Grace told him to go play with himself and slammed the car door so hard the mirror fell off. He never spoke to her again but she thought the
next girl he approached fell for it. Two others gave us the same story but different names of girls they thought had had affairs with him. Three refusals, three successes, not a bad scoreline. A female DC had a quiet word with the girls we’d been told about and two of them admitted it. The other one told her to mind her own business.

Trouble was, they were over sixteen. A schoolteacher is
in loco parentis,
and is not expected to seduce his charges, but it ain’t illegal. We could get him sacked, but that looked like all we could do. Then one of the girls mentioned the magazines he’d shown her and that was all we needed.

The good news was that his wife had left him about a month earlier. Whether it was related we didn’t know, but she’d packed two suitcases and decamped to her mother’s in Wombwell, near Barnsley. We have to tread delicately in cases like this, but with her out of the way we had a free hand to go round and put the shits up him. Thursday morning, nine a.m., me, Maggie Madison, Sparky and Annette Brown swung into the street of mock-Georgian
link-detached
dwellings and knocked on his door. The neighbour’s sprinkler was drenching the shared lawn and a sunbed was deployed, all ready for duty. The forecast said thunder and a few big cumulus clouds were sailing overhead, but it looked unlikely.

Mrs Handley opened the door, which wasn’t in
the script. I stumbled through the introductions and suggested she let us in. Her husband was in the back garden, tinkering with a lawnmower.

‘Peter Mark Handley?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Why?’ He placed a screwdriver back in its toolbox and rose to his feet. He didn’t look like a PT instructor. He didn’t look much like anything right then, except a man whose past has caught up with him. Mrs Handley looked at us in disbelief and didn’t even ask if we’d like a cup of tea.

‘We have a warrant to search your house,’ I said, holding the printed side towards him.

There was a green plastic picnic table nearby, with four matching chairs around it. He reached out like a blind man, feeling for a chair. When he located one he fumbled with it and lowered himself down. ‘Search the house?’ he repeated.

‘Yes.’ I turned to his wife. ‘Would you like to accompany my officers while they conduct the search?’ I said.

She ignored my question. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘We’re acting on information suggesting that your husband may be in possession of pornographic material.’ I nodded to the other three to get on with it and invited her to accompany them again.

‘What’s all this about, Peter?’ she asked.

‘I…I don’t know, love.’

‘I’m not leaving you alone with my husband,’ she said. ‘I want to know what this is about.’ We sat down. Pornography is a vague definition. The tabloids and most women’s magazines overstep the boundaries that our parents would have laid down. I’d wanted to have a chat with him, perhaps suggest he quietly hand in his resignation and take up welding or
tyre-fitting
. Something that wouldn’t surround him with nubile young ladies. I couldn’t have done his job. I wouldn’t have fallen to temptation, like him, but I’d have slowly gone blind and mad.

‘We didn’t expect you to be here, Mrs Handley,’ I said.

‘I came back last night.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘Is that relevant?’

‘I don’t know. Is it?’

‘You tell me. My mother suffers from Alzheimer’s, with other complications. The doctor wanted to put her in a nursing home. One for geriatrics. She has four daughters, so we decided we could look after her ourselves, staying with her for a few weeks at a time. I’ve just done my first stint. At a guess I’ll have one more to do. I can’t see her lasting much longer than that.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said. It wasn’t much to offer, but I meant it.

‘Boss.’ I looked round and saw Maggie standing in
the doorway. I walked over to her and she whispered: ‘Upstairs.’

‘Go sit with them,’ I told her, and went inside.

The loft ladder was down, with Dave leaning on a rung and Annette standing nearby. ‘Up there,’ she said. It was his den. His private world, his space, his fantasy land that nobody else was allowed to enter. I couldn’t stand upright, even in the middle, but there was room for a cheap desk and chair, with a TV and VCR.

Mr Handley liked pictures of young girls. Without their clothes on. He liked to see them posing. He liked to see them struggling. But most of all he liked to see them suffering. At a guess he downloaded stuff from the Internet and dealt in imported magazines. I looked at just enough to satisfy myself it was illegal and went outside, to the real world, where the sun still shone. President Truman was right: sunshine is the best disinfectant.

His head was in his hands. Normally I would have invited Annette to launch her career with his arrest, but I didn’t. ‘Peter Mark Handley,’ I began, ‘I am arresting you for the possession of material of an obscene nature. You need not say anything…’

I was aware of Mrs Handley rising to her feet as I droned the caution. ‘Oh no,’ she sobbed. ‘Oh no.’

The three of them took him back while I waited for her to lock up. We rode to the station in the patrol car
we’d had standing by and I seated her in reception and told her about the allegations against her husband. It wasn’t enough to stop her looking at me with hatred in her eyes, as if it were all my doing. Maggie would interview her, stalling for long enough for the porn squad to lift the stuff we’d found. I trudged upstairs to my office to read the mail and wondered if it was all worthwhile.

The ten ex-chemistry students we’d contacted told us very little, so we pressed on. After another couple of blips I decided to concentrate on the female members of the course, on the doubtful grounds that they’d be more likely to remember a male colleague and, being the more sentimental gender, might possibly have retained any photographs. Also, there were only sixteen of them. Also, if they went to university in 1975 they’d be in their early forties now, which is a dangerous age. I didn’t mention that last reason to Sparky.

Four of them remembered Duncan, and confirmed the dropping-out bit. One supplied us with a
first-year
class photograph and a lady working for the EE C in Belgium said she had some pictures taken at a party. Duncan was there and he might have been with a girl, but not one with purple hair. She wasn’t sure if she still had the pictures but would be going home in about six weeks. The others were all doing
quite well for themselves: one had just resumed a career as an industrial journalist after rearing three kids, and we had accountants, an advertising executive, a megabyte of computer boffins and, would you believe, several chemists among the rest. All of which was about as much use to us as dog poo on the doorstep.

‘How,’ I said to Sparky, ‘do you fancy going to university?’

‘I’d a feeling this was coming,’ was his glum reply.

‘We’re getting nowhere, and we need to know who the girl with purple hair was. So far, all we’ve established is that Duncan dropped out. She was probably the reason but almost certainly wasn’t on the chemistry course. She’s the key to his problems and ours. I’ll have a word with Roper-Jones, the registrar, and maybe you could have a day or two over there, going through the records of all the other students. For Christ’s sake, surely someone can remember a girl with purple hair!’

‘How many is “all the other students”?’

‘There’s twenty-two thousand there at present, but it would be a lot fewer in ‘75.’

‘That’s a relief.’

‘Are you OK for tomorrow?’

‘University, here I come. Wait till I tell Sophie that I’ve got there before her.’

Sophie is Dave’s daughter and my goddaughter. She’ll be starting university soon, when she decides where to go. Her results were brilliant and she’s spoilt for choice.

‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you take her with you?’

‘You mean…to help?’

‘I don’t see why not, there’s nothing confidential about the records. I’ll mention it to Roper-Jones; he didn’t strike me as being a job’s-worth. If he doesn’t agree she could always explore the campus or do some shopping.’

‘Great. She’d like that. Do you mind if I tell her it was my idea?’

‘Why?’ I demanded, suspicious.

‘I’m in her bad books. Not enough time to give her driving lessons.’

‘Well, pay for them.’

‘At twenty quid a throw? I should cocoa!’

When he’d gone I rang Jacquie and arranged to see her that night. I felt ready for another steak, possibly followed by a session of aromatherapy. She was telling me that too much could be dangerous for my health and I was clarifying whether she meant steak or pongy massage when my other phone rang. I said a hasty goodbye and picked it up.

‘Pop up, please, Charlie, if you don’t mind,’ Superintendent Wood said.

He had Gareth Adey, my uniformed counterpart, with him, and they both had problems. Gilbert was catching hell from the Chamber of Commerce over the number of street traders who were selling fake jeans and T-shirts, and Gareth had double-booked three teenagers who were coming in to be cautioned. I agreed to do the youths and Gareth promised a blitz on the street traders at the weekend.

The first of the cautions was a young man with low aspirations; he’d been caught shoplifting at Everything a Pound. ‘It says here that you are a thief,’ I told him, waving his case notes. He was standing in front of Adey’s desk in the downstairs office, his mother on a chair to one side. He nodded his agreement.

‘Do you know what I normally do?’ I asked him. He didn’t. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. I chase murderers, and here I am wasting time because you stole a cheap musical box from a two-bit shop.’ He didn’t look impressed. ‘Yesterday,’ I continued, ‘we had a meeting about you. Four strangers, round a table, discussing what to do with you. How do you think that makes your mother feel, eh?’ He didn’t know. ‘Don’t think you’ve got away with it,’ I told him. ‘The reason you are not going before a court, and possibly to a young offenders’ institute, is because we decided it wasn’t best for you. We decided to give you another chance because we don’t want you to waste your life. What do you want to do when you leave school?’ He shrugged
his shoulders. ‘Pardon?’ I said.

‘Speak to the inspector,’ his mother told him.

‘Get a job,’ he mumbled.

‘And what chance do you think you’d have with a criminal record?’

‘Dunno.’

‘If you had six people apply for a job and one had a record, who would you choose?’

‘One of the others.’

‘Right.’

I told him that shoplifting cost every man, woman and child in the country about a hundred pounds a year and ranted on until I reached the point where I was boring him. He signed to accept the caution and I kicked him out. His mother apologised and swore he wouldn’t be back. Funny thing is, most of them don’t come back.