A group of about ten people stood by the Kendal Road entrance. Journalists. One of them, a woman, stood talking into a microphone and looking into a video camera wrapped in a black plastic bag to protect it from the rain. Someone else held a bright light over her head. Yorkshire Television, Stott thought. Or BBC North. And newspaper reporters. Pretty soon they’d be doing re-enactments for “Crimewatch.” Banks was right; the vultures had come.
“We haven’t had much of a chance to get to know one another since you got here, have we, sir?” said Hatchley, lighting a cigarette. “And I always find it helps to know a bit about one another if you’re going to work together, don’t you?”
“I suppose so,” said Stott, inwardly grimacing, trying to sit downwind of the drifting smoke. It didn’t work. He thought it must be one of those laws, like Sod’s and Murphy’s: wherever a non-smoker sat, the smoke was going to come his way, no matter which way the draft was blowing.
“Where are you from, sir?” Hatchley asked.
“Spalding, Lincolnshire.”
“I’d never have guessed it. Not from the accent, like.”
“We moved away when I was just a boy.”
“Where?”
“All over the place. Cyprus, Germany. My father was in the army.” Stott remembered the misery of each move. It seemed that as soon as he had made friends anywhere, he had to abandon them and start all over again. His childhood had consisted of a never-ending succession of new groups of strangers to whom he had to prove himself. Cruel strangers with their own initiation rights, just waiting to humiliate him. He remembered the beatings, the name-calling, the loneliness.
“A squaddie, eh?”
“Major, actually.”
“Pretty high up, then?” Hatchley swigged some beer. “Where does he live now?”
“ Worthing. He retired a few years ago.”
“Not a dishonorable discharge, I hope, sir.”
“No.”
“Look, sir,” said Hatchley, “I’ve been wondering about this here inspector’s exam. I’ve been thinking of giving it a go, like. Is it easy?”
Stott shook his head. All promotional exams were tough and involved several stages, from the multi-choice law test and the role-playing scenarios to the final oral in front of an assistant chief constable and a chief superintendent. How Hatchley had even passed the sergeant’s exam was a mystery to Stott.
“Good luck,” he muttered as a pasty-faced young woman delivered their food and Stott’s pot of tea, which was actually just a pot of lukewarm water and a teabag on a string to dunk in it. And they were stingy with the ham, too. “About one in four get through,” he added.
How old was Hatchley? he wondered. He couldn’t be older than his mid-thirties. Maybe five or six years older than Stott himself. And just look at him: unfit, a bulky man with hair like straw, piggy eyes, freckles spattered across his fleshy nose, tobacco-stained teeth. He also seemed to own only one suit-shiny and wrinkled-and there were egg stains on his tie. Stott could hardly imagine Hatchley going up before the chief for his formal promotion dressed like that.
Stott prided himself on his dress. He had five suits-two gray, two navy blue and one brown herring-bone-and he wore them in rotation. If it’s Thursday, it must be herring-bone. He also wore his father’s old striped regimental tie and, usually, a crisply laundered white shirt with a starched collar.
He always made sure that he was clean shaven and that his hair was neatly parted on the left and combed diagonally across his skull on each side, then fixed in place with spray or cream if need be. He knew that the way his ears stuck out still made him look odd, especially with his glasses hooked over them, just as they had when he was a young boy, and that people called him names behind his back. There was an operation you could have for sticking-out ears these days, he had heard. Maybe if it wasn’t too late he’d have his ears done soon. A freakish appearance could, after all, be detrimental to one’s career path. And Barry Stott felt destined for the chief constable’s office.
Hatchley tucked into his Yorkie with great relish, adding a gravy stain to the egg on his tie. When he had finished, he lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke with a sigh of such deep satisfaction as Stott had never encountered before over a mere physical function-and an unpleasant one at that. One of nature’s true primitives, Sergeant Hatchley.
“We’d better be getting along, Sergeant,” he said, pushing his plate aside and standing up.
“Can’t I finish my fag first, sir? Best part of the meal, the cigarette after, if you know what I mean.” He winked.
Stott felt himself flush. “You can smoke it outside,” he said rather harshly.
Hatchley shrugged, slurped down the rest of his pint, then followed Stott towards the door.
“Bye, Alf,” he said on the way to the door. “I hope our lads didn’t catch you serving drinks after hours last night.”
“What lads?” said Alf.
Hatchley turned and walked towards the bar. “Police. Didn’t they come and ask you questions last night? Whether you’d seen any strangers, that sort of thing?”
Alf shook his head. “Nah. Nobody in last night. I shut up at ten o’clock. Filthy weather.”
By the time Stott got to the bar, Hatchley seemed to have magically acquired another pint, and his cigarette had grown back to its original length.
Stott swallowed his anger.
“Were you open earlier?” Hatchley asked.
Alf snorted. “Aye, for what it were worth.”
“Any strangers?”
“We get a lot of strangers,” he said. “You know, commercial travelers and the like. Tourists. Ramblers.”
“Aye, I know that,” said Hatchley. “But how about yesterday, late afternoon, early evening?”
“Nah. Weather were too bad for driving.”
“Anyone at all?”
Alf scratched his stubbly cheek. “One bloke. He had nobbut two pints and a whisky and left. That were it.”
“A regular?”
“Nah. Don’t have many regulars. People round here are too stuck-up for the likes of this place.”
Stott was beginning to feel frustrated. This Alf was obviously a moron; they would get nothing useful out of him. “But you said you hadn’t had any strangers in lately,” he said.
“He weren’t a stranger, either.”
“Who was he, then?”
“Nay, don’t ask me.”
“But you said you knew him.”
Alf looked over at Hatchley and gave a sniff of disgust before turning back to Stott and answering. “No, I didn’t,” he said. “I said he weren’t a regular, but he weren’t exactly a stranger, either. Different thing.”
“So you’ve seen him before?”
Alf spat on the floor behind the bar. “Well, of course I bloody have. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? He’d have been a stranger if I hadn’t seen him before, wouldn’t he?”
Hatchley took over again. “All right, Alf,” he said. “You’re right. Good point. How often have you seen him?”
“Not often. But he’s been in three or four times this past year or so. Used to come in with a lass. A right bonnie lass, and all. But not the last few times.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“No. He always stuck to himself.”
“Any idea where he lives?”
“Could be bloody Timbuktu, for all I know.”
“Are you saying he was African-English?” Stott cut in.
Alf gave him a withering look. “It’s just a saying, like. Summat me mother used to say.”
“What did he look like?” Hatchley asked.
“Well, he were a tall bloke, I remember that. A bit over six foot, anyroad. Thick black hair, a bit too long over t’collar, if you ask me. Bit of a long nose, too.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No more than to serve him and make a few remarks about the weather. He didn’t seem to want to talk. Took his pint over by the fire and just sat there staring into his glass. Muttered to himself now and then, too, as I recall.”