Out of the corner of his eye he’d caught sight of a trio of black-suited bouncers elbowing their way fairly nonchalantly, but effectively, through the crowd. Best to get a move on, he thought, tugging hard at Roscoe.
At that precise moment, Henry took a punch delivered by he knew not who. It landed smack-bang on his left cheekbone, jarring something at the back of his head and behind his eyes, sending a pulsating shockwave through his brain, spinning him backwards between several women. As he fell he saw once more the floppy breasts of the drunken female who’d started it all, followed by the flashing disco lights whizzing past his eyes, then he landed hard on his coccyx and caught the back of his head on the edge of a table.
After that, things became slightly less clear.
‘Didn’t see that one coming,’ Henry admitted with a short and bitter laugh, then groaned as a sharp needle of intense pain seared through his cranium. ‘Dear me,’ he added stiffly. He was sitting on a low wall surrounding flowerbeds in Fleetwood town centre, holding the side of his head, cradling it in his left hand. The front of his face below his left eye was tender, already slightly swollen, his eye starting to close. His cheekbone felt like it could have been fractured, but then he was always one to exaggerate the extent of an injury. ‘I can’t take you anywhere,’ he moaned.
An unruffled Jane Roscoe sat on the wall beside him, philosophically inspecting the knuckles on her right hand, which were grazed and sore. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It was an instinctive thing. I just swung in the direction of whoever grabbed me. Unfortunately it just happened to be you.’
‘You pack a good punch.’
‘Sorry, again … but then maybe I actually knew it was you who got hold of me and maybe punching you good and hard is something I’ve been wanting to do subconsciously for a long time. Y’know — a sort of Freudian thing?’ She grinned maliciously. ‘But I guess neither of us will ever know, until maybe I go for some deep counselling.’
‘Let’s hope it’s out of your system, then.’
She shrugged doubtfully. ‘Who knows?’
Henry touched his face gingerly and winced. ‘Gonna be a shiner,’ he said. ‘God, I hate fighting women. So much nastier than blokes.’ He checked his watch: ten thirty-five p.m. ‘What d’you think about calling it off for the rest of the night?’ he asked Jane. ‘Maybe we could get a drink somewhere decent on the way home?’
‘You asking me out?’
‘For a drink … in the workplace sense, not the romantic sense … I thought we’d moved on from that,’ he said, hoping it didn’t sound too cruel.
She nodded. ‘OK, I’ll have that.’
Henry spoke into his new Generation 2 TETRA personal radio. He ensured the rest of his team, who were scattered about in various hostelries about town, were receiving and stood them down with instructions to resume duty at nine a.m. on Monday. They all acknowledged Henry and he breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Phew — a weekend off. I think I’ll have Monday, too.’
‘Going to surprise Kate?’ Roscoe probed, her mouth twisted rather like the metaphorical knife she was holding.
Henry shrugged, not wanting to answer. The affair he and Roscoe had was a thing of the past, for him at least, but there were still some raw nerve endings exposed. He could tell from the tone of her voice that she still had ‘issues’ to deal with and put to bed, so to speak. It didn’t help matters that they worked in such close proximity. Sometimes it was hard to get away from each other, as tonight had proved.
They walked in silence back to Fleetwood police station where their cars were parked in the back yard. Henry’s eye throbbed painfully, the swelling growing, maybe a visit to A amp; E on the cards, but not tonight. Friday meant busy with drunks, accident victims and a long wait. Maybe he’d get Kate to run him in in the morning if it was still a problem.
‘We did well to get out of that place,’ Henry said, breaking the silence. He had a hazy memory of himself and Jane staggering out of the pub — which had been still fighting in lumps — as the uniformed police contingent arrived en masse. ‘We’d have looked pretty stupid in a cell, wouldn’t we?’
Jane did not respond, her face cold, her attitude now icy.
Once in the yard, he and Jane stood awkwardly by their cars. Jane scraped the toe of her shoe on the ground and looked up at Henry. ‘I know I’ve given you a hard time since we … y’know … since you dumped me, but that’s because it hurt… it hurt me so much, you hurt me. I thought we were on the verge of something,’ she said quietly. ‘But it didn’t happen. I fell in love with you and it hurt, OK? Still does.’
Henry nodded dumbly. He was trying not to do ‘feelings’ any more, because he was basically very bad at ‘going there’. All he wanted to do now was get on with his life, not get involved with anyone again, concentrate on making his life good with Kate, buy an expensive hi-fi system, maybe indulge in a plasma screen TV, collect films on DVD and go away for as many foreign holidays as possible; he was due to retire in three years — when he reached the grand old age of forty-nine — and he wanted to approach that time with a light heart and an easy existence. He’d had enough trauma with feelings, enough of making a fool of himself over women, he hoped, yet he did have a weakness of character that meant he had a tendency to press the self-destruct button without thought of consequence. Something he had to fight.
He sighed. ‘Maybe going for a drink isn’t a good idea.’
‘Maybe not,’ she agreed. ‘Get a bit of alcohol down me and next thing you know, we’d be shagging. See you Monday.’
‘Oh, about Monday … can you cover for me?’
‘Cheeky bastard,’ she uttered through gritted teeth. She regarded him chillingly and exhaled a long, aggrieved breath, very close to telling him where he should stick it. ‘OK,’ she relented.
‘Thanks, appreciate it.’
‘I wonder what Chief Superintendent Anger’ll say about you not being there on Monday?’ she teased.
Anger was Henry’s boss. Jane and Anger had formed a close alliance, both seeming to want to get Henry ditched, each for their own reasons. ‘Depends on what you tell him, I suppose. You could just say I’ve worked like hell for the past three months and I deserve a break. How about that?’
‘Or I could tell him you’re a lazy git who hasn’t got a cat in hell’s chance of getting a result and should be replaced as SIO. Mm,’ she said, tip of her forefinger on the cleft of her chin. ‘I wonder which one?’
‘Follow your conscience,’ he said abruptly. ‘Whatever, I won’t be in on Monday.’ He strutted angrily to his car, his brittle mood not made any the better when he saw how busy the seagulls had been on his windscreen.
He watched Jane reverse, or lurch, her car out of the parking bay, slam it into first with an angry crunch and screech dramatically out of the police yard with a squeal of rubber. He had a friend, a frequently divorced friend, who had once told him without a trace of irony that women were not worth the hassle. ‘Henry, me old mate,’ he’d said drunkenly once, ‘losin’ it all for the sake of a wizard’s sleeve is bloody crass stupidity.’ He’d gone on to explain what he meant by ‘wizard’s sleeve’, but with a bit of imagination Henry had already worked out what he meant. Henry believed that if he and Jane had tipped over the ‘verge’, as she had called it, he would now be living to regret it. He would have lost his family, which included two great daughters, and would have been nowhere near buying a plasma screen TV … all for the sake of a wizard’s sleeve. He allowed himself a chuckle at his friend’s crude metaphor, started his car, cleared the screen of bird shit and allowed it to warm up before setting off into the night.
He drove to the Esplanade, Fleetwood’s seafront promenade, then did a right past the North Euston Hotel on to Queen’s Terrace, the Isle of Man ferry terminal to his left. Way across the mouth of the River Wyre were the lights of the sleepy village of Knott End on Sea, and in the far distance to the north the hulking structures of the nuclear power station at Heysham, illuminated by an eerie orange phosphorescent-like glow.