Jack didn’t know what to say back. He didn’t recognise the person’s voice, so he had no idea how he knew it was his first week. Perhaps he smelt of enthusiasm and naiveté.

  ‘Listen, it gets better. Well, I say it gets better. Maybe we just acclimatise to it. I’m not sure if that’s helpful or soul-destroying. I’m probably not being much use, am I?’

  Jack didn’t want to tell the man he was actually helping, if only in some small, strange way. Instead, he said nothing.

  The man said nothing, too, at least for a few seconds. ‘Look, I’ll leave you to it. Just keep your chin up, okay?’

  Before the man could leave, Jack pulled back the bolt on the cubicle door. It swung slowly open of its own accord. He could see the man’s feet and lower legs. The suit trousers told him it was a fellow CID officer, although it wasn’t one he knew or had encountered in the past.

  ‘You know,’ the man said, ‘some people will tell you these days are the easiest. Perhaps it’s because as you get further along you’re given more responsibilities. People expect more of you. Maybe it’s because at this stage you’ve still got the chance to get out. Because you’ve not yet been snared by that strange grip the job has. The thing that keeps you getting up every morning to stare at dead bodies, comfort families whose lives have been ruined and get given the run around by violent and dangerous criminals. We’re always chasing, you know. We’ll never be one step ahead. The ultimate aim is to prevent crime before it happens, but we’ll never get there. It’d put us out of a job. The best we can hope for is to sweep up neatly afterwards.’

  Jack didn’t know what to say. Instead, he dried his eyes with his shirt sleeve.

  ‘So, what was it? First dead child? Distraught family?’

  Jack sniffed. ‘I chose not to arrest a burglary suspect. He went out and did another one, and this time he put an old woman in hospital.’

  The man raised an eyebrow. ‘You chose not to? You’re only a DC, surely? Who’s your senior officer?’

  ‘DI Taylor.’

  The man let out something that sounded somewhere between a laugh and a grunt. ‘Makes sense. The one thing about Taylor is he won’t take the rap for anything. He’ll go out on a job and act the Big Shot, but when it comes down to making a call he’ll leave someone else to shout it. Then, if it goes tits up, he’ll shift the blame onto you. You aren’t the first DC to fall foul of that. But I’ll tell you something — he’s a good officer. He gets results. He just doesn’t always go about it the right way. Lot to be said for that, actually. Ask yourself how many grieving families would rather have their loved one’s killer banged up in jail, regardless of how he got there.’

  ‘Try telling that to Mary Stokes’s family,’ Jack said.

  ‘That the old dear who got done over?’

  Jack nodded.

  ‘You shouldn’t have to tell them anything, other than point out the fact that your senior investigating officer, DI Taylor, chose to leave an officer fresh out of uniform — no offence — to make a critical decision over whether to arrest a potentially dangerous suspect. There’s another thing you need to know about Taylor if you’re going to survive around here. Every now and again, you need to stand up to him. He respects that. He might seem like a bully, but really what he’s looking for is someone with the balls to stand up for what they believe in and get results regardless. He’s the sort of guy whose respect you need to earn. Otherwise, you’ll spend the rest of your career — as long as he grants you it — apologising to families and sweeping up the mess while he’s down the pub or sunning himself in his professionally landscaped, south-facing back garden at four o’clock in the afternoon. And you don’t want to know where he got the money for that, either...’

  Jack swallowed hard and furrowed his brow.

  ‘Sorry, lad. Went a bit far there. DI Taylor’s not that bad. There’s just been rumours, you know...’

  ‘No. It’s not that,’ Jack said. ‘South-facing. Gary McCann’s parents’ house faces west.’

  ‘Right... Sorry, I’m not quite sure I’m following you. Gary who?’

  ‘He said he was sunbathing at half-four.’

  ‘I think it’s probably best you go home,’ the man said. ‘Get yourself some rest. Clear your mind.’

  Jack shook his head and looked the man in the eyes. ‘Trust me, sir. My mind’s perfectly clear now. I think you might have just saved my career.’

  The man looked a little surprised. ‘Well, I’m not entirely sure how, but I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘Trust me. If this pays off, I owe you one. Big time.’

  ‘I’ll remember that,’ the older man said, laughing. ‘I never forget someone who owes me a favour. What’s your name?’

  ‘Jack Culverhouse.’

  The man extended his hand. ‘Nice to meet you, Jack. I’m Bill Knight.’

  8

  Jack Culverhouse had a fire in his belly and a new sense of purpose in his eyes as he strode up the corridor and opened the door to the incident room. He looked around, and noticed that the other officers hadn’t even registered his arrival.

  ‘Where’s Taylor?’ he asked, of no-one in particular. Tony Robson was the only one who spoke.

  ‘Interviewing McCann. Trying to clear up the mess you left, no doubt. Trying to pin something on him other than witness statements. Courts don’t put as much sway on witnesses as you might think.’

  ‘I know,’ Jack said. ‘I didn’t join the police force yesterday.’

  ‘No, but you’ll be out on your ear by tomorrow lunchtime if you carry on like that.’

  ‘We’ll see.’ Jack forced a smile and left the room.

  He headed for the stairs, which he descended two at a time, before jogging down the corridor to the interview rooms. ‘Which one’s Taylor in?’ he asked the officer on the desk.

  ‘Room two. Although I wouldn’t go barging in if I were you. He’s not exactly in a—’

  Jack didn’t hang around to hear the rest of the sentence. As soon as he’d heard the room number, he’d yanked the handle and pushed open the door to Interview Room 2. He wasn’t sure whether the look of contempt was more obvious on the face of Taylor or McCann.

  ‘Detective Constable, if you wouldn’t mind...’ Taylor said, before shooing him back towards the door.

  ‘Just a moment, DI Taylor. Gary, do you have a solicitor?’ Jack asked.

  McCann shook his head.

  ‘He declined one,’ Taylor said, before speaking mutedly to Jack. ‘Probably for the best, if you catch my drift. They tend not to take too kindly to their clients being leant on. Just like I don’t take too kindly to having my interviews interrupted.’

  ‘Oh, it won’t take long, Detective Inspector,’ Jack replied, taking a seat at the table next to where Taylor had been sitting. Jack leaned forward and cupped his hands together on the desk. ‘Gary, you told me and DI Taylor that you’d been sunbathing in the back garden up until four-thirty in the afternoon the day before we came to visit you.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You got a good tan from it.’

  ‘Was a sunny day.’

  ‘It was. The morning was particularly hot, if I remember rightly. Must have got pretty warm down at the far end of the garden. Where the sunbed was, I mean. You’ve got a west-facing garden, so the lawn must be drowning in sunshine around eleven-ish, no?’

  ‘It’s alright, yeah.’

  ‘I imagine after that, once the sun’s moved round and gone behind those big oak trees, the best area for sunbathing would be the patio.’

  Gary McCann not only stayed silent, but seemed to purse his lips as he cottoned on to Jack’s line of questioning.

  ‘Yeah, I can imagine it’d be pretty nice on the patio after lunch,’ Jack continued. ‘Especially if your sunbed was facing south. Not down the end of the garden, on the lawn, facing west. Which is where it would have been if you’d been sunbathing, say, in the morning, as opposed to four-thirty in the afternoon.’

  ‘I wanted to sit in the shade for a bit,’ McCann said. ‘No harm in that.’

  ‘You sunbathe in the shade?’ Taylor said, speaking for the first time since Jack had begun his questioning.

  ‘I wondered about that, too,’ Jack said. ‘Which made me also wonder why you’d drag a sunbed down the end of the garden rather than just put up the parasol on the patio. Boom. Instant shade.’

  By now, Jack had enough experience to know when someone was fishing for desperate excuses as they felt the net closing in. He could see that Taylor had spotted it too.

  Taylor leant forward on the desk and cocked his head slightly as he considered McCann.

  ‘You know you did it, son. I know you did it. And Detective Constable Culverhouse bloody well knows you did it. But d’you know what? It really doesn’t matter. We don’t need to prove a thing. At the end of the day, this is just a bit of housebreaking. Yeah, so you bashed a granny over the head. You were seen leaving the house. Sounds like Charlie Emerson wasn’t the most loyal old schoolfriend, so we’ve got you bang to rights. We could charge you. Mary Stokes’ll probably recover, and you could claim self-defence if you didn’t mind looking like someone who couldn’t get away from an old biddy with a handbag. You’d probably get, what — a suspended sentence? Doesn’t do me much good, nor does it reassure the good people of Mildenheath that their houses are safe — not to mention their grannies.

  ‘No, we could pin that on some other local scrote. Someone more prolific. Someone who’s only another burglary away from breaking his own suspended sentence and being put inside for a couple of years. It’s amazing what you can do when you’ve got unfettered access to the evidence stores. You see, next time there’s a burglary in Mildenheath, whether you did it or not, whether you were even in the fucking country or not, that nice reformed lad who’s getting his life back on track after getting away with it at court all those months ago, he’s going down for it. And he’s taking the rap for yours, too. You, on the other hand, wouldn’t be let off the hook. Not by a long shot. I’ll chuck something else at you instead. Something a lot worse than bashing an old granny over the head. Do you know what a nonce is, Gary?’

  McCann didn’t react. There was nothing other than a vaguely scared look of anger in his eyes, but both detectives knew he was following their train of thought.

  ‘You see, Gary, nonces tend to get jail time regardless. It’s frowned upon, see. And they don’t tend to fare much better inside. I’m talking razor blades in your porridge. Nails in your soap. Not to mention a daily cock up your arse. That sort of thing’s child’s play for me, Gary. It’s easy. It’s a case of switching a couple of bags, changing a couple of numbers on the records. It goes on all the time. If you think you’re the Billy Big Bollocks playing the system, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

  ‘So. In a minute we’re all going to stand up. We’re going to shake hands. Then I’m going to open the door and we’re going to walk up to the desk. I’m going to let the custody sergeant know I’m releasing you without charge. You’re going to leave here and tell all your mates on the Northwood Road estate that Mildenheath is now a burglary-free zone. You’re all going to go out and get hobbies. You might take up horse riding, or tiddlywinks. But the burglary game’s over. Because Big Tony’s waiting for you in his cell, and he’s got a raging hard-on.’

  McCann didn’t need to say a word. It was clear from the look on his face that he understood.

  Taylor stood up and extended his hand, which McCann shook. McCann then held his hand out to Jack, who returned the handshake.

  Once McCann had been given back his personal belongings and let out through the back door, Taylor took Jack to one side.

  ‘This game’s not as difficult as it seems,’ the DI said. ‘Sometimes you just need a little something to swing the balance of power in your favour. You managed to provide that today.’ Taylor started laughing. ‘Fucking sunbed, though. Where the hell did you pluck that one from?’

  Jack shrugged. ‘Call it divine intervention.’

  ‘Well you’d better keep saying your prayers, then. Looks like it’s working.’ Taylor looked at his watch. ‘Fuck a duck. Almost five. Get upstairs and grab my coat, will you? Grab yours, too. The Prince Albert’s calling.’

  9

  ‘Worked out alright for you, hasn’t it?’ Taylor said, as they started off on their thirty-second walk to the Prince Albert.

  ‘How do you mean, sir?’

  Taylor looked at his watch. ‘Three minutes past five, No Knock. None of that “sir” bollocks. And I meant the shift patterns. Two days at work and you’ve already got a weekend off. Carry on at this rate and you’ll be doing even less work than the Chief Constable.’

  ‘That’s always the aim,’ Jack said, smiling.

  Taylor chuckled. ‘I like your style.’

  Although the noise level and the number of people in the pub was the same as it had been the night before, tonight’s atmosphere seemed more jovial to Jack. Perhaps it was just because he was in a better frame of mind. Either way, he liked it. And having two days off work meant he would be able to enjoy it.

  ‘Do you reckon that’ll have worked, then?’ he asked the DI. ‘McCann, I mean.’

  ‘Who knows,’ Taylor said, more as a statement than a question. ‘Not really my problem if he doesn’t. He’s the one who’ll be walking funny. Meanwhile, the good people of Mildenheath get to sleep quietly in their beds. Everyone’s a winner.’

  Jack found it hard to argue with that. Although his instinct was to play things on the straight and narrow, he was starting to see that just wasn’t viable. Not in this world. Criminals rarely played by the rules, so he didn’t see the harm in the occasional sleight of hand to give the police an advantage.

  ‘When are the others coming down?’ Jack asked, raising his voice to cut above the rumble of voices.

  ‘Whenever they’ve finished. I wanted to have a chat with you first.’

  Instinctively, Jack’s stomach lurched as he heard that, but he had a feeling that he wasn’t in for a bollocking.

  ‘I think we could say you pulled it out the bag today, No Knock,’ Taylor said, as the pair sat down at a table in the corner. ‘Alright, so it wasn’t exactly something we could use to put him inside, but prosecutions take time. We’ve got enough on our plates. If the Home Office ever listen to the Philips Commission and set up an independent prosecutor, fine. But right now we need to pick our battles.’

  Jack’s eyes were taken by the sight of the barmaid from last night, Helen, appearing behind the bar. She was dressed far more revealingly than she had been last night, and seemed to look around the pub as she took her place, her eyes landing on Jack before she smiled at him. He thanked his lucky stars it was his round next.

  ‘So I shoved the donkey in the suitcase and shipped him off to Beirut,’ Taylor said, Jack’s attention being yanked back to the table.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Yeah, didn’t think you were paying much attention. Mind you, can hardly blame you when she’s waving a pair of norks like that in your face. And you can wipe that innocent look from your face, too. I wasn’t born yesterday.’

  ‘Dunno what you mean,’ Jack said, smirking as he brought his pint to his lips and took a swig.

  ‘My arse you don’t. Why don’t you go up and ask her if you can have a go?’

  ‘A go?’

  ‘Well, yeah. She’s hardly marriage material, is she? But you might as well get your tuppence worth out of her. Beer’s bloody pricey enough. It’s a bit like nicking the little soaps out the hotel bathroom.’

  Jack didn’t know whether to laugh or protest. He found Helen very attractive, but he wasn’t quite sure that Taylor’s selection of chat-up lines would be the best ones to use. No, he’d wait until it was his round. Then he’d go up, order his drinks and strike up conversation.

  ‘So. Are you enjoying it? The job, I mean.’

  Jack thought about this for a moment. ‘I think so, yeah.’

  ‘Well don’t sound too bloody enthusiastic.’

  ‘It’s felt like a long couple of days. A baptism of fire, if you like.’

  ‘There’s no way of easing you in gently, I’m afraid. This is what the job’s like. There’s always Bejams.’

  Jack smiled. ‘Nah, I think I’ll be alright.’

  ‘I think you will too. Especially if we see a bit more of that attitude from this afternoon. You need to stand up for yourself, lad. That warrant card’s not just a bit of paper. It’s a bit of paper that says you’re the law. That’s a powerful thing. You don’t need to go pussyfooting around people like Gary McCann, never mind any of the other scrotes in this town. The law-abiding, tax-paying citizens trust us to get the job done and keep them safe. Sometimes — most of the time — that takes a bit of swagger, a bit of swinging your bollocks around. You know what I mean? And that’s just out on the streets. That’s the easy bit. It’s when you’re back at the nick that things can get heavy. Sometimes you want to watch out for the other coppers more than you do the cons. Some of them are bigger crooks than the ones on the outside.’

  Jack’s interest was piqued.

  ‘You’ll find out who they are in good time. In the meantime, it’s best to just be careful what you say, and who you say it to. That thin blue line is pretty bloody thin sometimes.’

  He’d heard stories while he was out on the beat about some of the more senior officers being bent, but this was the first time someone ranked higher than him had come out and explicitly said it. It was more something that was known but never spoken about, mainly because no-one really knew who was involved. Sometimes it was better to keep quiet and pretend it wasn’t happening.

  ‘Anyway, No Knock. It’s your round, isn’t it?’

  Jack looked at his still-half-full glass, then up at Helen, who was standing behind the bar.

  ‘I think you might be right,’ he said.

 

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