The following day, the Monday, when the phone-call turned out to be for him, Billy thought it might be the community officer — he had left a message for her outlining his concerns — but it was Phil Shaw, about another job entirely…
Though Billy had put the report away, the look Rebecca had in the photograph still haunted him. I’ve tried, her face seemed to be saying, I really have, but it’s no use. He let his mind wander in the hope that it might offer him a strategy, a course of action that would guarantee her safety. It depressed him to think that he might already have done everything he could, just as it had depressed him on Sunday night. When Sue got back from the cinema, she found him sitting in the kitchen with his head in his hands, the vodka bottle nearly empty.
18
“I was planning to look in earlier,” Phil said when Billy opened the door, “but things kept coming up.”
Stepping into the mortuary, he seemed to scour the air with his nose, as if he relied on his sense of smell for a reading of the situation. There was a distinctly feral aspect to the sergeant, now Billy thought about it. There always had been.
Phil put both hands flat on the table, on either side of the scene log, and studied the recent entries. “I heard Sue was here.”
Billy swore under his breath. He’d been hoping to keep that from Phil. “She stopped in about an hour ago,” he said. “There was a problem with Emma.”
“It’s sorted now, though?”
“Yes.”
Still bent over the scene log, Phil looked at Billy across one shoulder, and Billy saw a question form: Is everything all right at home? He also knew this was a question that Phil probably wouldn’t ask. The last time he’d had Phil over to the house, they had got drunk in the garden, and when Sue went to bed, Phil had started talking about his life — his wife had walked out, no children luckily — and there had been no bitterness in him, just a wistful quality, a kind of disbelief: that it should happen to him…On that occasion Billy hadn’t pried, or pressed for details; he had simply waited until Phil had finished, then murmured, Fuck and poured Phil another drink. There was nothing else to say. If you were in the police, you rarely asked about each other’s marriages because you knew what the answer was going to be. All right? It was almost never all right. Police officers worked anti-social hours. They drank too much and slept too little. They ate junk. They were society’s dustmen, always cleaning up, dealing with the rubbish that no one else wanted to deal with. Most of them had gone into the job with good intentions, thinking they could be of use, but they soon realised that the task was well nigh impossible. If you closed one crack house down, a new one sprang up somewhere else. Book one prostitute, and three more would be doing business round the corner. As for burglary, forget it. Recently, a constable in his fifties had told Billy that he was now arresting the sons and grandsons of people he had arrested when he first started out. The crime figures might go up or down, but nothing changed, not really. The pressure on police officers was immense, and their home lives suffered. Phil knew that better than anyone.
“You need a break, Billy?” Phil said. “You want to go outside and stretch your legs?”
With those words, Billy understood that, as far as Phil was concerned, the matter was closed.
“I’ll wait till midnight, sarge,” he said. “It’s not long now.” He watched Phil yawn, then rub his eyes. “You’re probably the one who needs a break.”
“When this is over, I’m going to sleep for a week.”
“A week? They’ll never give you a week.”
“Right.” Jaw clenched tight, Phil smiled another of his grim smiles.
When Phil had gone, Billy returned to his chair. Yes, the pressures were immense. It wasn’t just the long hours, the bad food and the lack of sleep. It was all the temptations that came your way as well. Women often threw themselves at police officers. Was it because police officers were confident, decisive characters who knew how to handle themselves? Or was it because they were supposed to represent the straight and narrow, and there was a kind of thrill in leading them astray? Or was it just the uniform? He didn’t know. It definitely happened, though. On Saturday nights, when he parked outside a club like Pals at closing time, women would dance in front of the police van, taking off half their clothes. The previous summer, a dark-haired girl in a short skirt had leaned over the bonnet and given the windscreen a long, slow kiss. Tongue and everything. Sooner or later, most policemen weakened. They had one-night stands, quick flings — full-blown affairs. They would bring their lovers to parties in the police station and leave their girlfriends or their wives at home. They would claim to be on a training course and all the while they’d be on holiday with another woman. If you met a bobby who told you he’d never been over the side you didn’t entirely trust him. Nobody could be that bloody perfect.
Once, in the mid-nineties, Billy had been called to Sir Alf Ramsay Way on a grade-one response. A prostitute had thrown a brick through the plate-glass window of a car showroom. Jade was known to the Ipswich police; she was a good-looking girl when she wasn’t on the smack. Poor old Sir Alf, Billy thought as he drove across town; he’d turn in his grave if he knew that the street named after him was now a red-light area. By the time he arrived at the scene, Jade had a friend with her. The friend’s name was Carly, and she caught Billy’s eye the moment he stepped on to the pavement. He wasn’t making excuses, but Shena Coates had killed herself a week or two before, and then, a few days later, in a hostel, a dead baby had been found at the bottom of a bed. As a policeman, there were times when your life was so sickening and brutal that you felt you’d earned whatever came along, and Carly had such a cheeky, dirty look about her…For the six weeks it lasted, she always wanted him to do it the same way — from behind. By the end, he knew the back of her head like the back of his own hand. The soft groove that ran vertically from the top of her spine into her dyed blonde hair, the smooth curve of bone behind each ear. The smell of her neck: Anais Anais and the sweat of guilty fucking…“You’re rubbish, you are. You should be at home, with your wife.” Though she had been wearing very little when she said that. She’d been sitting on the bed and she’d given him a steady look that came up at him through her eyelashes, and then she’d moved her knees apart ever so slightly, not so he could see anything, but so he thought about it, what was there. Carly. Seven years on, he could still remember the taste of her earlobes, faintly metallic where they’d been pierced…
But infidelity could be subtler than that, and more contaminating. Though he was in the mortuary, he could no longer smell formaldehyde or disinfectant; now it was jasmine suddenly, a heady, cloying cloud of jasmine shot through with the much keener scent of lemons, and he found himself remembering the holiday he’d had with Sue and Emma in Newman’s villa in the hills above Cannes, and in particular the night when he met Newman’s girlfriend — if that was the word…
Billy had only agreed to go because Newman wasn’t there, but Newman called halfway through their holiday to say that he would be returning earlier than expected, and though Billy tried to reassure himself — in the five years since Newman’s surprise visit to the house, perhaps he would have mellowed — the thought of spending forty-eight hours in Newman’s company filled him with unease, if not with dread. “We should have left the moment we heard,” he told Sue later. “We should have booked into a hotel.” Sue thought he was overreacting. It hadn’t been that bad, she said. She didn’t know, though, did she?