'I owe you both a vote of thanks,' the Assistant Commissioner said in his office. 'A difficult task professionally executed.'
'I owe you a slap-up dinner,' Ashley said later, broad grin on his face. 'Prawn cocktail, steak and chips, black forest gateau, the whole bit.'
'You owe me,' Linda told him, 'a sight more than that.'
The day after the final report had been delivered to the printer, the day before the bound copy was delivered to the Assistant Commissioner, she had been sitting on the low steps outside the Portakabin that had remained their temporary home, smoking a longed-for cigarette.
She had scarcely heard Mallory as he crossed the car park, light of foot, only glancing up at the last moment and dropping her cigarette hastily down, like a fourth-former caught behind the legendary bike sheds.
'Don't worry,' Mallory said. 'Your secret's safe with me.'
As she stood up, Linda squashed the smouldering butt beneath her foot.
'We're all guilty of something, big or small,' Mallory said. 'Wouldn't be human, else.' The smile lingered in his eyes. 'Here,' he said, taking a packet of Benson & Hedges from the side pocket of his blazer. Blue blazer and brown trousers. Highly polished shoes. 'Have one of mine.'
'No, thank you, sir.'
Mallory shrugged and produced a lighter. 'I was hoping I might bump into you,' he said, the smoke drifting towards Linda's face.
'Sir?'
'Before you shut up shop and turn tail for Hatfield…'
'Hertford, sir. It's Hertford, actually.'
'Hertford, Hatfield, Hitchin – all the same. Penny-ante little market towns with scarce a pot to piss in. Low-grade drug dealing and a handful of public-order offences of a weekend the best you can hope for.'
Linda nodded noncommittally.
'Always the worry,' Mallory said, 'let one of your kind out of the box and you never know which way they'll jump. Chancy that. Like letting off a firework in the middle of the bonfire, Guy Fawkes Night. Any bloody thing could happen.' Almost imperceptibly, he moved closer towards her. 'Someone could even get burned.'
For a moment, maybe more, his eyes bore into her, before, with a deft smile, he stepped away.
'But you now,' he said, 'no need to worry by all accounts'. Everything by the rules. Light the blue touch-paper and stand well clear.'
'You've seen the report,' Linda said, challenging.
'Place like this, difficult to keep things under wraps.'
'But you have seen it. A copy at least.'
'You think so?'
She knew it. He'd read it, relished and relaxed. Exonerated in Times New Roman, double spaced. Her signature at the bottom.
'You may think,' Mallory said, 'I owe you a favour.'
'Not at all, sir. We did our job, that's all. Just like you said. And I was only the junior officer, after all.'
'Junior, maybe, but always pushing hardest, eager for the truth. Gave poor Maddy Birch a rough ride, from what I hear. Had her up against the ropes. To mix a metaphor or two. Still, no gain having your card marked by a fool and you're no fool.'
A wink and a smile and he was on his way, leaving Linda wondering if there wasn't something crucial that they'd missed.
'Cocky bastard,' Ashley said when she told him. 'Not enough to be ahead of the game, he has to let you know.'
'Why me, though? Why not you? You're in charge.'
Ashley laughed. 'Mallory's way of thinking, not worth getting out of bed to put one over on old jossers like me. But you. You're sharp, bright, on the way up. A woman, too. If he can intimidate you a little, then he will.'
'I don't see what he stands to gain.'
'Right now? Aside from pumping up his vanity? Control. Leverage, some time in the future. Who knows?'
She looked at him keenly. 'You think we've let him get away with something, don't you?'
Ashley shrugged. 'This time, I honestly don't know. But I did my time in the Met, before opting for a quieter life. Coppers like Mallory, old school, they've been getting away with stuff for years. Big, small, more often than not just to prove they can. It's what gives them a buzz.'
Thinking about the way Mallory had materialised almost silently alongside her and the sly superiority of his smile, Linda shuddered as if someone had just stepped close to the corners of her grave.
14
It bit into him, like a tick that had infiltrated beneath his skin. No matter where he went, what he did. The routines with which he'd bolstered up his life since moving west no longer seemed enough. Each day he made a point of listening to the radio, scouring the papers for news.
On page 2 of the Telegraph, mid-December, something caught his eye: the investigation into two deaths in a police raid carried out a little over two months before. The paper's crime correspondent, claiming to have seen a leaked copy of the report, forecast a positive outcome to the official inquiry carried out by Superintendent Trevor Ashley and officers from the Hertfordshire Force.
Alongside, two columns wide, there was a photograph of a smiling Detective Superintendent George Mallory, taken outside the Old Bailey, his DCI, Maurice Repton, standing several paces behind, almost squeezed out of the frame. At the time, we were reminded, Mallory's commanding officer had been quick to attest to the professionalism with which the raid had been planned and carried out. A further paragraph referred to the tragic death of Detective Constable Paul Draper, a small head-and-shoulders shot rendering him almost impossibly young. If it had not been for Superintendent Mallory's quick thinking and resolute action, more lives might have been lost. Nothing about Draper's young widow and child.
Two pages on, a single paragraph near the foot of the page attested to the fact that the investigation into the death of Detective Sergeant Maddy Birch was still ongoing and that no arrests had so far been made.
Let it alone, Frank, he told himself. Let it be.
After yet another restless night he rose early, made coffee, walked down to the coast path to clear his head, rang Robert Framlingham and caught the London train.
Paddington station was thick with travellers, the natural hubbub and bustle overlaid with the saccharine wail of poorly amplified voices wishing them all a merry little Christmas. As Elder crossed the forecourt, a Big Issue seller with tinsel in his hair and two extravagant sprigs of mistletoe tied either side of his head like horns, lurched towards him, puckering up rouged lips.
The Underground platform was dangerously crowded – delays on the District, Circle and Bakerloo – and, when it arrived, the first train was near impossible to board. At Oxford Circus there was a five-minute queue to get out of the station.
In daylight, the skeletal snowflakes and reindeer that hung high above the street looked ugly and incomplete. Shop windows burgeoned with tawdry and expensive imprecations to buy, and Elder, hating it, hating every bit of it, felt nonetheless guilty he had neither bought a present for Katherine nor thought of one; had, in fact, bought nothing for anyone.
The restaurant was on one of the narrow streets that ran between Regent Street and Great Portland Street, home, for the most part, to small clothing wholesalers, their windows sprayed with fake snow. A sign on the door wished Elder Merry Christmas in Italian and inside red and green streamers looped cheerily along the walls.
Framlingham was already seated at a corner table, tucking into an antipasto of tuna and fagiolini. He was wearing a tweed suit that reminded Elder of damp heather, a cream shirt and a mustard tie.