Those Who Feel Nothing (3 page)

‘Stanford here disturbed a copper cable thief last night in Keymer,' Heap continued.

Theft of copper cable from railway signalling systems was an ongoing and serious problem as it totally disrupted the train service until the missing cable could be replaced. Boring as hell, though.

‘Well done, Stanford. Anyone we know?'

Stanford looked at his feet. ‘He got away, ma'am.'

‘That happens,' Gilchrist said. She glanced at Heap. ‘But why am I being told this?'

‘We got his bag of tools, ma'am,' Stanford said. ‘And we got his car registration. Well, most of it. Or should I say Constable Richardson did. He saw the person hurrying out of the graveyard when he came round from the back of the church and gave chase.'

Gilchrist frowned. ‘Graveyard? Why wasn't this copper thief on the railway line?'

‘He was but he got away, then we found him in the churchyard.'

Gilchrist looked at Heap with an explain-this-to-me expression on her face.

‘There have been a number of instances of coffins being dug up for the brass on the handles and hasps and bolts,' Heap said.

‘These are desperate times,' Gilchrist said wearily. She looked at Stanford. ‘You haven't told me what your colleague was doing round the back of the church, but never mind. Where were you – just out of interest?'

Stanford glanced at Heap who, Gilchrist noticed, had adopted a straight face. Stanford worked the muscles in his jaw. ‘I was face down in the grave, ma'am.'

Gilchrist nodded, also straight-faced. ‘Continue.'

‘The man got in his car and drove off with his boot still wide open.'

Gilchrist frowned. ‘So how did Richardson see the number plate?'

‘Our man did a U-turn. I think he must have realized that if he went straight on to Ditchling he had very few options. We would either have caught up with him on the long stretch of lane between Keymer and Ditchling or on one of the three roads he would need to take from there. Going back towards Hassocks gave him more options.' Stanford shrugged. ‘Constable Richardson almost caught him on the turn but perhaps it was as well that he didn't as he would probably have been run down. Anyway, he got all but two digits of the car's registration numbers. And the make of car, of course.'

‘Good for him. Were you still communing with the dead at this point?'

Stanford worked his jaw again. ‘I was getting into our car, ma'am.'

‘And you gave chase but lost him.'

‘He had a number of immediate options. Around the bend there's a left turn down a lane that offers an immediate right then multiple choices, or you can go on down the lane to have a further three choices. A little further round the bend there's a right turn which then offers multiple choices, or you can ignore the right turn and go straight on back into Hassocks where, again, there are multiple choices.'

Gilchrist's eyes were glazing over. ‘But none that really go anywhere, surely?' she said from her vague knowledge of the sleepy town.

‘Which is why we chose that option ourselves, ma'am.'

Gilchrist nodded. ‘But he didn't. I understand. Good work, nevertheless, the pair of you. And you've got a hit on the registration already?'

‘We've got a long list of possibilities, ma'am,' Stanford said, indicating the sheaves of paper in Heap's hand.

Gilchrist looked at Heap, still wondering why he had brought this to her attention.

‘Just a thought, ma'am. But in the ten minutes or so after he was spotted on the railway track he had time to dig a grave?'

Gilchrist looked back at the constable. ‘A different man, then, Stanford?'

The constable looked from her to Heap. ‘Quite possibly, ma'am.'

‘I was wondering if it somehow was linked to all that black magic stuff of a few months ago,' Heap said.

‘We're pretty confident we got everyone involved in that,' Gilchrist said. ‘Aren't we?'

‘We are, ma'am,' Heap said. ‘But it remains a good possibility that this grave being disturbed is not about metal theft.'

Gilchrist nodded slowly. ‘Look through those names, Detective Sergeant. See if any of them stand out.' She gestured to Stanford. ‘You could have something interesting here.'

He didn't look interested at all.

When you land in Nha Trang you take the next flight to Saigon where you rent a car at the airport and drive six hours to Can Tho. It's hot and humid as hell out there but you move from one air-conditioned environment to another, so by the time you check into a riverfront hotel at midnight your throat is dry, your nose is blocked and your head is thumping.

You should do some yoga to right yourself but you collapse into bed. The air con is fierce and noisy. You can't figure out how to turn it off so take the extra blanket from the cupboard and put a pillow over your head.

After an early breakfast you make your way to the hotel's short jetty. There are already five tourists on board the boat tied there: a German couple and an English couple with their sulky teenage boy. You nod at the adults as they greet you. The boy keeps his head down over his tablet. You sit at the back of the boat, your duffel bag beside you.

Algae like giant cabbages and strange, foliage-like growths dip and bob on the surface of the water in the wake of the boat as you head up the Mekong Delta for Phnom Penh. You have seen similar pollution on the Nile but the Mekong is, if anything, worse: pesticides, mercury and other pollutants are at such toxic levels here that the famed freshwater dolphins of the river are almost extinct.

You watch the slow water flow, occasionally glancing at the dopily smiling German couple leaning into each other. The sullen English boy is still focusing on his tablet, his parents gazing blankly out of the windows.

Within an hour you reach the customs post on the shore at the Vietnam/Cambodia border. There is time for coffee in a small café overlooking the brown waters whilst the military fiddle with your passports. You step out into a small garden. Something in the trees is chirruping. The humidity feels like a wet sponge bathing your body.

There is a barracks across a dirt yard. It looks big enough to house six, maybe eight men. The last time you passed through, there had been twelve men at this post, mostly sleeping in hammocks strung between the trees. You and your colleagues had narrowly voted not to kill them all.

Bob Watts blethered on to the assembled coppers for a while, Chief Constable Karen Hewitt standing stiffly beside him with a fixed grin on her face. He knew from conversations with Sarah Gilchrist months ago that Hewitt's fixed grin was as much to do with cosmetic surgery as it was with her gritted teeth at the fact his role challenged her autonomy. He could still vaguely smell the alcohol on her from the champagne breakfast.

He saw Gilchrist half-sitting on a desk near the back of the room. That likeable, fresh-faced policeman, Bellamy Heap, was standing beside her although he was scarcely taller than her seated. Gilchrist had told Watts the duo had been dubbed Little and Large by their ever predictable colleagues at the nick.

His meeting with Karen Hewitt had gone … OK. Once he'd insisted he was not going to fire her – something the PCC had the power to do – she'd relaxed. A little. He'd assured her that he wanted to work with her, not against her. She had, quite rightly, pointed out that she'd been doing fine without any assistance in the couple of years since she'd taken over from him. However, she would be happy to work with him again.

‘I have a few ideas,' he said.

‘I'll be glad to hear them,' she said. ‘As long as they're not operationally based, which is outside your remit – as you will know.'

Watts smiled pleasantly. ‘I'm aware of that, Chief Constable.'

‘I have a lot of technology types knocking on my door offering us the latest policing kit,' Hewitt said. ‘Maybe that's an area you could be of real use – identifying the next generation of policing aids.'

‘Happy to,' he said. He'd always quite liked the boy's toys aspect of police work. ‘But what are your main operational issues at the moment?'

‘The usual. Drugs, of course. You know there's talk of opening a “shooting gallery” down here for our drug addicts to shoot up legally in controlled conditions?'

‘Makes sense.'

She shot him a sharp look. ‘Does it? All of Britain's drug addicts heading our way for a year-round holiday?'

Watts thought it wise to move on. ‘What else?'

‘Teen gangs; dangerous dogs.' She grimaced – or tried to. ‘Oh, and copper cable theft is still a pain in the bum. There was travel chaos for commuters last week because some clever dick nicked fifty metres of signalling cabling around Littlehampton. Trains cancelled and delayed and diverted. I'm sending out regular night patrols to try to catch them.'

‘The railways have got their own police,' Watts said.

‘I know that,' Hewitt said sharply. She looked down and moderated her tone. ‘The rail chiefs are demanding a crackdown on copper thieves both to prevent them and to catch them. As are the commuting public. It's not our primary responsibility but we need to be seen to be responding, obviously. But then that means taking police from somewhere else.'

She sighed.

‘Peacehaven has turned out to be the seagull shooting capital of the south coast. I don't know if it's to do with what happened here a few months ago, when all the fish fell from the sky, but they are attacking humans and then people shoot them and then the birds attack some more because they're defending their chicks. BB guns are the weapons of choice. We've had sixty cases reported.'

Watts laughed. ‘And that's a police matter?' he said.

‘Of course,' Hewitt said, almost indignant. ‘People found guilty of shooting a bird can get a six-month prison sentence and a twenty-thousand-pound fine. And you think with a Green MP for the town we can afford to ignore that?'

Watts put his hands up in a placatory gesture. ‘You're right, of course.'

‘Experts say the birds have become “abnormally aggressive” in Peacehaven. It's like that film
The Birds
down there. People and pets have been attacked. One woman told the
Argus
she wears a hard hat when she hangs out her washing.'

Hewitt joined in with Watts' laughter this time. Then she raised her hand.

‘But, in consequence, there are more crimes against gulls in Peacehaven than the rest of the towns along the south coast put together.'

‘Jesus,' Watts said, still grinning.

‘I know, but we do have to deal with it.'

‘Noted,' he said, composing himself.

Hewitt also put on a serious expression. ‘Bob, we're still going down the path you set us on. Not reactive policing but problem solving and partnerships with our different communities to forestall criminality. However, times have changed. You were able to switch the money from people into technology so we could work smarter. But these days the government is squeezing us so hard we have no money to invest in more technology. So we shed even more people without getting the technology to fill the vacuum that creates. We're stretched very tight.'

‘And I'm guessing you've still got the same problem with the public and the politicians,' Watts said. ‘You put all your efforts into reducing domestic burglaries and your critics moan that means some other kind of crime is being ignored.'

‘Exactly.' She gave Watts a sardonic look. ‘Sure you want to get drawn back into all that?'

He smiled but said nothing.

Hewitt spread her hands. ‘As you say, the public isn't always happy with the choices we make dealing with the competing demands on our resources. And as you'll remember, a dissatisfied public is an unhelpful public.'

‘Tell me about it,' Watts said, recalling all the public meetings he'd had to manage during his stint in her seat. He knew the importance of keeping the public onside.

Hewitt looked at her tablet. ‘If you're free the Force Command Team would like to meet you on Friday. Some familiar faces; some new ones.'

Watts looked at the calendar on his own tablet. ‘Sure. Let me know the time.'

Hewitt leaned forward and touched his hand on the table. ‘In relation to those kind of PR exercises there's one thing you could do,' she said. ‘One thing I beg you to do, actually …'

‘I'm on tenterhooks,' he said, glancing down as she squeezed his hand.

‘Be the public face of Southern Police. You're brilliant at that. I'm rubbish – plus, I hate it. If you would take over that role, among all the other things I hope we'll be doing together, I'd be really grateful.'

Bob Watts smiled as he withdrew his hand. Sure he could do that. Forgetting, in the flattering moment, that the last time he'd shot off his big mouth as the public face of Southern Police he'd swiftly lost his job.

Karen Hewitt gave her cosmetically restricted smile right back. Only when he left the meeting did he recall that she, on the other hand, was a woman who forgot nothing.

H
eap was standing by Gilchrist's desk with what looked like the same sheaf of papers as before. Stanford was behind Heap, towering over him, holding down a yawn. She saw the expression on Heap's face.

‘There's someone who stands out?' Gilchrist said.

‘A certain Bernard Rafferty, ma'am,' Heap said.

‘Bugger,' Gilchrist mouthed.

‘Quite,' Heap said.

The constable looked from one to the other of them but didn't speak.

‘You don't know who that is?' Gilchrist said to him.

‘Why would I, ma'am?'

‘Because he's the director of the Royal Pavilion.'

‘Yes, ma'am?'

‘You've heard of that, I suppose?'

‘Nice pub,' said the constable.

Stanford was not her type at all.