‘I try not to let the hassles of the job get to me, on a personal level, more than they should. But I feel bad about this, with you. I don’t blame you for feeling the way you do, and I just wanted to say sorry. Sorry because I liked you, and sorry because I like to work with the best, and I thought you were a good officer. So, I’ll take these and go.’ He picked up the bunch of flowers and started to get to his feet.
‘Oh, put them down,’ Kathy said. He subsided into the chair again. She stood facing him, a hand on her hip.
‘Tell me how you knew it was Andy Rutherford and not me.’
Brock shrugged. ‘We gave each of you the same information about the drug raid, but then we gave each of you something else. We told Rutherford that we were about to do a deal with the Swiss Government to get at the assets which serious criminals were holding in Swiss banks. North shifted his money out of Switzerland just before he ran. We told you about his son having leukaemia. It was clear when we caught him that he had no idea about that.’
Kathy nodded. She remembered with relief how close she had been to telling Martin, and the thought of him brought the usual sharp stab, smaller now but still there. She shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of resignation and sat down opposite him. ‘Martin was very special for me. I know all the reasons why he was wrong, but I can’t deny him that. I’ve got over him now, more or less. Although I wish the bastard hadn’t taken his wife to Grenada. I’d offer you a drink, but I’m out of everything.’
‘Well now,’ Brock said, ‘in the faint chance that the flowers didn’t work, I did take the liberty of bringing this too,’ and he drew a bottle of Scotch from his coat pocket. Kathy laughed and went to the kitchen for glasses and a jug of water.
They stood by the window looking out over the city, sipping the whisky.
‘After those five days in Jerusalem Lane last year I became quite discontented here for a while,’ she said. ‘They have no views like this, nothing except of the street, but they don’t need them. They’re in a place. Here you’re on the outside. There’s no place here. No one knows anyone else. Mrs P only speaks to me occasionally because she needs me sometimes for help with the shopping. People like the anonymity, of course. I did until I spent that time in the Lane, then I realized what we missed.
‘They were a real family, the three sisters, weren’t they? You could tell, from the way they talked. They were talking in a family code that was sometimes hard for an outsider to follow. What they believed was a reflection not just of the kind of people they were, but of the part they played in the family. You know, the practical one who put the food on the table, the principled one who kept them on the straight and narrow, the tease who got them over the humps. I was brought up in what passed for a family of three, too-father, mother and daughter. But I reckon the three sisters were able to share more in one afternoon than we managed in fourteen years.’
Brock looked at her in surprise. ‘You didn’t get on with your parents, Kathy?’
‘I don’t think it was a matter of me getting on with them. Mum was all right, but her sole mission was to look after Dad. And Dad was, well…’ She thought for a moment and then smiled. ‘I remember Bob Jones used a phrase, when he was describing Judith Naismith: the north face of the Eiger. That was my dad. You don’t get on with the north face of the Eiger. You either affront it, or you don’t exist.’
‘Do you still see them?’
She shook her head. ‘They’re both dead. My father was a civil servant. He entered the Civil Service Commission in 1953, and transferred to the Department of Trade and Industry in 1962. In 1971 he was promoted to Under Secretary.’ She spoke as of a stranger she had once investigated. ‘He had this one vanity, a large Bentley. I found it excruciatingly embarrassing when I was a little girl, the way all the other kids used to stare at this huge posh car, and I’d try to slide down in the seat so I couldn’t be seen, which annoyed him no end. One day, when I was fourteen, he drove it into the pillar of a bridge on the M1. We thought it was an accident until things began to come out about his financial affairs. Apparently he had been involved in some kind of fraud, I don’t know exactly what. I have the idea that it was to do with the sale of surplus government land. That was the same year that the Home Secretary had to resign because of corruption investigations, do you remember? Reginald Maudling. I remember the Fraud Squad interviewed my mother a couple of times, and she didn’t handle it very well. I’ve sometimes thought about trying to have a look at Dad’s case file, just to find out what it was he did. But then, I’m not sure that I really want to know.’ Kathy paused, sipped at her glass.
Brock cleared his throat. ‘If you do decide you’d like to find out, let me know.’
She nodded. ‘Thanks. After a bit we discovered he’d been speculating large sums of money with some shonky developer who had just collapsed. We had lost everything. The house, the furniture, his pension, everything went. We moved up north to Sheffield, where my mother’s sister and her husband took us in to their two-up, two-down terrace.’
‘Was that your red uncle?’ Brock said. ‘The one you told the sisters about?’
Kathy laughed. ‘You’ve got a good memory. Yes, Uncle Tom, the red terror of Attercliffe. He was a bus driver, retired early with a bad back. He thought that what had happened to us was providential retribution-my father’s bourgeois greed attracting the proper consequences of the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system, or some such. He couldn’t resist reminding us at every opportunity of how far we’d come down in the world. Aunt Mary knew how to deal with him. She could put him in his place with a couple of words. But my mother couldn’t cope at all. She sank into a kind of despair. I suppose it was depression.’ Again she lapsed into silence, staring out of the window at the lights in the darkness.
‘It must have been very difficult for you,’ Brock said.
‘I’m sorry. You’ve probably had a hard day. I don’t know how we got on to this. I can’t remember when I last thought about it.’
‘It was talking about Jerusalem Lane, and families. So what happened, Kathy? I’d like to hear the rest of the story. You were, what, fifteen at this stage?’
She nodded. ‘Yes. I was getting much the same from the other kids at school as Mum was getting from Uncle Tom. I talked funny, and I didn’t know how to stand up for myself. God, why would I? My only experience of physical aggression up to that point had been a clip on the ankle with a hockey stick. I had a lot to learn.
‘Mum was a worry. She’d just given up, turned in on herself. I went to the Council, and pestered the social workers and the housing people until they gave us a flat on our own. I thought if I could get her to make her own home again, she’d begin to come round. It was a high-rise, like this. I liked it because all the rooms faced south, and always caught any sun that was going, unlike at Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary’s, which was dark and damp. But I don’t think Mum even noticed. She never went out on her own all the time we were there. Aunt Mary had to come and visit her, as if she was an invalid, and pretty soon she was. She lost weight and began to pick up infections, which got more and more persistent. Just before I reached sixteen she caught pleurisy. She died of pneumonia within a couple of weeks.