As soon as he took a seat, Punch lay down on the lino floor and rested his head on Jon’s foot.
‘Did you ring Fiona?’
Jon sighed. ‘Rang her, met her and went to that motel. She’s got quite a temper, hasn’t she?’
Alice grinned. ‘Fiona? Yes, she’s got a strong sense of right and wrong.’
‘So why has she stuck by a husband who knocks her around for so long?’
Alice gave a sad frown. ‘We’ve tried to work that out in the salon many times. You should hear her with customers who don’t keep their appointments. She’s straight on the phone asking where they are, demanding to know why they haven’t shown up. But then she goes home and seems to adopt this submissive personality with her husband.’
‘What the hell does she see in him?’
Alice ran her hands through her long hair. ‘I don’t think it was that bad to begin with. She’s always reluctant to talk about it — pride I suppose — but I think they were happy for a while. God knows, something happened to turn it sour.’
He ran a finger down his beer can. ‘Has she got a problem with the booze?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘The night manager at the motel she stayed in said she’d downed a load of brandy, and she was slurring her words on the phone tonight as well.’
Alice nodded. ‘She turns up for work late sometimes. There’s always a legitimate excuse, but you can smell it on her some mornings. If it was a big chain salon she’d have probably lost her job by now. Lucky for her Melvyn’s happy to turn a blind eye.’
‘Well, she certainly believes she heard something the other night. And she certainly wasn’t happy when I said I couldn’t do much.’
‘Can’t you?’
He took a long gulp, almost shuddering as the ice-cold beer went down his throat and hit his stomach. ‘I’m not convinced she heard anything more than a bit of energetic shagging.’
‘Why not?’
He hooked a nail under the tab of the can, lifted it up and then let it snap back with a ping. ‘She only heard something. There’s no evidence of anything else. The night manager says she didn’t see anything, and I believe her. Didn’t believe everything she told me, but I believed her on that count. All Fiona has is this.’ He flicked the card from Cheshire Consorts on to the table. ‘It could have been lying in the room for weeks, if not months, judging by the state of the place. A name that’s probably made up, and a disconnected mobile phone number that isn’t registered to anyone.’
Alice bit her lip. ‘Oh, well. She’s got her own life to sort out. She’ll let it drop soon, I expect.’
Jon took another gulp of beer. ‘The other big news is that I can’t decide whether my new partner’s reporting everything I do straight back to McCloughlin.’
Alice rolled her eyes. ‘You mean he’s still sulking about. .’ She stopped, unwilling to refer directly to the case that had almost cost them so much last summer.
‘Just a hunch, but yeah.’
Alice blew a strand of blond hair out of her eyes. ‘The arsehole.’
He gave a rueful smile. ‘Oh, and another thing about my new partner. He’s gay.’
‘So?’
Jon examined his knuckles.
‘Oh, please. Don’t tell me you’re scared he’ll threaten your masculinity by trying it on with you?’
Jon picked at the can’s tab again. ‘Well, I don’t know. It makes things awkward, you have to admit.’
‘Why? It only makes things awkward in your head. Don’t flatter yourself. A big grunt like you with scars all over your face? He might prefer smooth-skinned, gentle types.’
‘Let’s hope so.’
Alice sighed. ‘Surely you’ve worked with other gay officers?’ Jon shook his head. ‘It’s not like your job, Ali. We don’t have people flouncing around like Melvyn.’
‘Not every gay man’s as camp as Melvyn. Besides, he puts a lot of that on for the blue-rinse brigade.’ She smiled. ‘The old dears reckon it’s like getting their hair done by Graham Norton.’
‘Yeah, well, this is the police.’
Alice put a hand on her hip and extended one foot slightly in front of the other. Jon called it her barrister stance, because it was a posture she adopted whenever they got into one of their verbal tussles.
They’d started seeing each other almost twelve years ago after a chance meeting in a city centre pub. Jon and several team mates were sitting at the centre table to watch the final of the 1991 Rugby World Cup on the pub’s giant screen. As the match ground its way to England’s eventual defeat at the hands of Australia, a few of his friends had got increasingly annoyed at the referee’s decisions.
When the drinks on Alice’s table were all knocked over she had no hesitation in standing up to have a go at their entire group. Before offering to replace them, Jon had watched her feistiness with admiration. It was the first thing he’d noticed about her and whenever it reappeared he was reminded why he’d fallen in love with her.
‘What about all the equal opportunities stuff we’re always hearing about?’ she demanded. ‘Those posters around town…What was the headline? Something about “All walks of life walk the beat”?’
Jon rolled his eyes, relishing every second of the exchange. The recruitment campaign posters, with their Home Office allocation of ethnic minorities in the photo, had generated plenty of jokes around the station, but not many non-white job applicants. Besides, bobbies walking the beat? They were too busy stuck at their desks completing paperwork for that.
‘There’s a culture in the police, Alice. You know it, I know it. It doesn’t matter how much lip-service they pay to the drive for ethnic minority officers and all that.’
‘And all that,’ Alice tutted. ‘Watch out, Jon, you might find yourself left behind in the last millennium.’
‘I don’t agree with it, Ali, but it’s life. Besides, you say society’s changing, but what you actually mean is that your experience of society’s changing. I’d say that, on the whole, the age-old prejudices are just as alive and healthy as ever.’ He thought about the poster’s headline. ‘It’s just that your walk of life doesn’t take you into contact with them.’ He gave her a glib smile and waited for her response.
She scowled. ‘You’re bound to get racists and anti-gays in the deprived areas you get called out to. You always will until people are educated differently.’
Jon laughed. ‘I’m not talking about housing estates. I’m talking about country estates. Those living at the top of the pile, not the bottom: the aristocracy, the establishment, the elite, whatever you want to call it.’ He pictured the huddles of senior officers, the judges, the politicians. Old, white, married and male. ‘I’m talking about people who’ve had the best educations money can buy. It’s that lot who are most against change. The system suits them just fine. After all, it was created by them, their fathers and their fathers’ fathers.’
Alice was silent for a moment. ‘That’s depressing.’
Jon realised he’d come out of this one on top, but the victory gave him precious little satisfaction. ‘That’s life,’ he shrugged.
‘Anyway, don’t worry. I’m not going to creep around the canteen whispering to everyone that Rick’s gay.’
‘I know that.’ She tipped her head back to yawn and saw the clock on the wall. ‘You coming to bed?’
Jon finished his beer and nodded.
Chapter 10
Dawn Poole could almost see the waves of pain radiating out from the back of the patient’s throat with every swallow. Breathing was obviously still difficult because, after a few more sips, the straw was released.
‘Enough?’ Dawn asked, her concern showing in her face.
The patient leaned back against the pillows and gave a single slow nod.
Dawn put the carton down. ‘You’re being so brave.’ She ran her fingers gently through the short spikes of hair on the patient’s head. The haircut reminded her of a singer’s, someone who sang of bruised feelings and life’s injustices. Annie Lennox? Sinead O’Connor? She couldn’t remember.