'Nah. We've just got too old. The acronym game keeps moving along, and personal y I'm looking forward to being a Bobo.'
'What the hell's a Bobo?'
'Burnt Out But Opulent. I've always fancied making it to that level.'
She chuckled softly as she sipped her Chablis. 'We're well on the way to the opulent bit now, with two superintendents' pay packets coming into the house, not to mention two superintendents' pensions at the end of the day. We'll be the envy of every copper on the force.. . apart from Big Bob and the Chief, who've both filthy rich anyway.'
'Aye, I suppose we wil be. Mind you, I'd stil chuck it just to be able to ditch the second part of dinky.'
Maggie frowned at him across the table. 'Wel that's not a runner, is it, so don't brood about it.'
'Sure I know, but…'
'Makes you feel less of a man, does it?'
'Something like that,' he muttered.
'Well don't let it, for it's nonsense. That's a fine piece of ordnance you've got there, officer; it's not your fault that it shoots blanks. It's not a sin not to have babies, you know. Looked at from a certain angle it's an advantage; we can plan our future in the knowledge that it's only the two of us on the payrol and always wil be. Plus, we can concentrate on making life miserable for the bad people. Who knows? Maybe that's what we were put here for.'
The arrival of their starters forestalled his answer. He sat in silence as the waiter set a warm goat's cheese salad before Maggie, and served his pasta and bean soup from a tureen.
'… Put here for?' he exclaimed, as the young man headed back to the kitchens. 'This is Planet Earth cal ing Superintendent Rose. This is Houston cal ing Maggie. In case you've forgotten, I became a copper because if I didn't there was a fair chance that I'd have ended up on the other side of the fence, or at the very least in regular skirmishes with the VAT man, like the rest of my family.'
'Come on,' she retorted, 'your family's very respectable, specially your mother. If you weren't a police officer you'd probably be in her business.' The light smile left her face, and her eyes flickered down for a moment. 'The fact is I've always envied you your family.'
He caught something in her expression, and in her tone.' Sure, because they're alive… but why do you say it like that? Mags, you've been ifiy for a couple of days. Have you got a problem?'
She opened her mouth to reply, then stopped, staring at the table as if she was considering something very important. Final y she looked up and into his eyes. 'I've had a letter from my sister,' she told him. 'She's had a birthday card from my father.'
'Your father?' he exclaimed, astonished. 'You told me your father was dead.'
'Oh how I wish…' The words came out in a long, malevolent hiss. 'I thought he was,' she continued. 'No, I hoped he was, I prayed he was, and eventual y I let myself believe he was. Now it turns out. ..'
'But why?' he asked her. 'What was so bad about him?'
'You don't want to know.'
'I bloody do, and you're going to tell me.'
She glanced around and over her shoulder, checking for anyone who might be within earshot. 'If you insist,' she said, quietly, her eyes narrowing with her frown.
'You know why I really became a copper, Mario?' She hesitated for a second or two then leaned toward him, her voice dropping even lower, until he had to lean himself to catch it. 'I did it to get even with guys like my old man.
'You ask me what was so bad about him? "Bad" doesn't cover it, not by a long way. That bastard abused my sister and me… damn it, no, he raped us. And as if that wasn't enough, he beat my mother bloody when she found out about it.
'I'll tell you something I've never told you or anyone else before, Mario. I felt guilty for years after that; not just because of what happened 28 between my old man and me, but because it was me who got her that tanking. When I told her what he was doing to us, do you know what happened? The first thing she did was to beat the daylights out of me!'
She glanced again at the nearest occupied table, but the couple there were too far away to overhear.
'That's right. When I told her she knocked me right off my feet. So I got up and showed her the bruises he always left on me. She hit me even harder, she actual y knocked me out. So I showed her the same marks on my wee sister. When my father came in from the pub, or the bookie's, or wherever he had been, she confronted him, and it was her turn for a thumping. I hate to think what would have happened to Eilidh and me if we'd stayed in that house, but I hauled her out of there and screamed bloody murder at the door of the woman downstairs.
'She took us in, and her husband, a great big man who'd been a boxer or something, went up and stopped my father. Yet no one cal ed the police. It never occurred to them to do that. It just wasn't part of their culture. What went on between husband and wife was their business, until the kids got hurt; then, the community usual y took care of it.
That's what happened in our case.
'My dad left, for good, that very night. We were actual y better off, for my mother had always been the breadwinner; he never had a regular job that I knew of, although he was always out and about. As far as I could see he just leeched off her. After he went, we never spoke about what had happened, not even when Eilidh and I were grown up. It was always there, though, hanging like a curtain between my mother and me, something unspoken that we knew nonetheless.
'It stayed that way, until she was dying. She developed breast cancer; she had a big lump but she kept quiet about it until it was way too late.
The afternoon before she died, I went in to see her. I was a probationer then; she didn't approve of my joining the police, and she didn't hide that from me.
'She couldn't speak above a whisper at that stage, but she beckoned me close to her, and she said to me, "I never could forgive you, Margaret."
And I said, "For what, Mum?" And she said, "For tel ing me. I loved your father." And that was the last thing my mother ever said to me.
'Oh, how I hated him then; far more than ever before. The fact is, I don't think I real y did hate him until that moment; not even when he was doing al those things, because he was my father and I didn't know any different and I didn't understand, until someone at school said something and it al rushed in on me.
'What it al comes down to is this. What I said back there was only partly true. I joined the police because of my father, but not just because of him. I joined because I wanted to change the culture I grew up in, the notion that even in the direst circumstances, the police are somehow the enemy of the working class. I wanted to be an accessible copper, to be the sort that people would rush up to in the street.'
She frowned, a deep dark frown, which pained him for her. 'Yet somewhere along the line I lost that; I became a control freak, an authoritarian, the sort of copper kids run away from in the street. And now, my junior colleagues see me as some, sort of dragon, and maybe, that's what I am.'
He waited, until he was sure that she had finished, that she had drained whatever well had overflowed inside her and brought her to spill out the deepest, darkest truths that she had withheld even from him, until that moment.
'Why haven't you told me al this before?' he asked her quietly, when it was time.
'I suppose I've been afraid you'd look at me in a different light. Now you know why I'm ambivalent about the kids thing. The truth is, there are times when I'm positively glad we can't have any.'
'Why? Because you'd be afraid to trust me with our daughters?'
He put the question gently, yet still her hand flew to her mouth in horror. 'No! Not for a second! No, it's because of me. I never had a proper, natural relationship with my mother; I'm plain scared that I wouldn't know how to begin to build one myself.'