She went back at him angrily. ‘You aren’t discussing it. You’re telling me that Mike is going to be the scapegoat because somebody has to be held responsible for Oates’s escape. Too damned right I am not holding up my hand, but I will support Mike in this.’
‘Let me finish, for Chrissake! What I wanted to discuss with you was keeping a bloody united front, everybody singing off the same hymn sheet so that there’s no one person who’ll be singled out.’
She leaned back in her chair, knowing she had pushed the right button. Langton was basically making sure that he, as the most senior officer at the quarry, was not going to take the flak for the shit that had already hit the fan, and he wanted to find some way of sweeping the whole mess under the table.
Langton spread his hands out and, calming down, said they should now go over all the details that led up to Oates being released from his handcuffs not once but twice.
‘It seems to me the main issue is whether the decision was right to get Oates out the second time, especially with the bad weather conditions and related safety issues,’ Anna suggested to Langton.
‘The weather changed for the worse after the decision was made…’
‘Yes but you made it, not Mike,’ Anna reminded Langton.
‘I know, but none of you disagreed, and how could we have guessed what would happen next?’
‘Well, there’s a lot of the day’s events on video so it might be worth going over it…’
‘Well I hope the cameras were off when I head-butted Kumar.’
‘You did what?’ She was astonished.
‘I slipped in the mud,’ he said, smiling.
‘You know, your car was parked right across his and he couldn’t back out; he added to the chaos around Oates because he kept hooting his car horn. I wish I’d seen it.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s another point to make, but another is the intrusion of the press helicopter. I want whoever authorized that to give us the person tipping them off about the entire operation. We can lean on them as part of the screw-up.’
‘I already checked out the helicopter’s logo. News Flight Aviation – they’re contracted by independents or do film for themselves and sell the footage on. Whoever it was must be getting a big backhander from the aerial pictures sold to the press, never mind the TV. We all suspect that Kumar is leaking the information – proving it is a different matter.’
Langton nodded and then said they should get on with their so-called hymn sheet. He wanted all those involved to be aware that there could be a major enquiry, so they should be primed up and ready.
They sat together, smoking and drinking, making notes, and only when he was satisfied did he call it quits, saying that she could go home.
‘Don’t you have one to go to?’ she joked.
He nodded to the bottle.
‘Last thing I need is to be picked up over the limit.’
She left him in Mike’s office, wondering if, like the old days, he was going to do an all-nighter. She was, as ever, impressed with his stamina – he was smartly dressed as always, albeit with a six o’clock shadow, but she wouldn’t put it past him to have his shaving equipment in his briefcase.
Anna got into her car and could see that Langton’s Rover was still filthy, unlike her own Mini. She tried to calculate when Langton had taken a break. He had been at the site when the bodies were uncovered, then at Scotland Yard over Oates’s escape, and had then gone back to the quarry, leaving only at dawn. He had been at the hospital with her to see Barolli, and she knew he had spent time at the mortuary with the pathologist. She couldn’t imagine when and if he had slept at all. She was used to him being a night owl when she had worked alongside him; they had all joked about his laundry and dry-cleaning bags stacked in his office.
She tried not to think about him. She hoped that the promotion he had hinted at was on the cards this time round, that it might be the reason he was putting so much time in, desperate to get that next rank, plus there was a big difference between a chief super’s and a commander’s pension. Deep down, Anna also believed that the Langtons of the force were now few and far between. He wasn’t quite old school like her father, he was the next generation, but as he was coming up for retirement age she suspected that he did not want a blemish on his hard-fought-for career. She knew of a few incidents that were certainly more than blemishes, but that was yet again part of Langton’s character. He did bend the rules; he did unleash his fury and was unafraid to have a go at the Kumars of this world. There was no other officer she had worked alongside that had gained the respect of everyone who had worked with him.
Even though she didn’t want to be, Anna was still thinking about Langton when she let herself into her flat. His reaction when she had challenged him over making Mike Lewis the scapegoat interested her. He had denied it, but she still wondered if he would have been prepared to let Mike take the blame for the present debacle. He had been very fast to ask her if she wanted to step forwards and hold her hand up, and she had been equally fast to refuse. The truth was that Langton was the senior officer, and Mike, she knew, had been relieved he had shown up. By the time she was ready for bed, Langton was still occupying her thoughts. As well as everyone thought they knew him, and she believed that she maybe knew him better than anyone else, there was a part of Langton that was as unreachable as it was unpredictable.
Langton had rolled his coat into a pillow and was lying on Mike Lewis’s office floor. He was always able to take cat-naps, often for no more than twenty minutes or so, and it always refreshed him, but tonight he felt dog-tired. He was fascinated by Travis, and he also realized just how much she had grown, and not necessarily apart from him, as he was certain their past would always be a strong link between them. But again he had seen that stronger force within her. She was a fighter, that he had always known, but now there was something else beneath it, ruthlessness and a quiet yet determined backlash against him. In a way he was almost seeing a mirror image of himself when he was around the same age.
He sighed, trying to make himself more comfortable, punching at the rolled-up coat beneath his head. He knew what had taken its toll on his emotions, and he had attempted to make Anna aware of what it meant not to grieve for a loved one. She hadn’t, to his knowledge, ever let go, and it concerned him because he was certain that fury lurked beneath her controlled exterior. He himself had lost it completely when he had almost died after being attacked, and he had made sure the culprit who had tried to kill him paid the ultimate price. Anna, he suspected, knew what he had done, but it remained a subject they never spoke of. Besides, there was no way she could take revenge and justify the circumstances as he had done. The man she had hoped to marry had been brutally murdered and his killer would spend the rest of his life in prison with no hope of release. Langton suspected that there had been no release for Anna Travis, but that she had buried her fury, and he truthfully didn’t know if or how it would manifest itself. Finally he wore himself out thinking about it and fell into a deep sleep.
Chapter Nineteen
Mike Lewis was one of the first to arrive in the incident room, to find that a cleaner was just clearing his office, the window wide open. In her cart were the empty glass and bottle of Scotch and the disgusting beaker filled with cigarette stubs. Mike could still smell cigarette smoke; he guessed instinctively that Langton had been using his office. Fifteen minutes later he knew for certain because he found him in the canteen eating breakfast.
‘Good morning,’ Mike said pleasantly.
‘Glad you think it’s good,’ Langton grumbled. ‘Bring me another coffee, would you?’
He looked as if he needed a shave and his tie was loose around his unbuttoned collar.