Finally, towards lunchtime, Kathy lost patience. Knowing that her voice sounded too angry, she declared that it was pointless to go on like this, and proposed that they pack it in until everyone was in a more constructive frame of mind.
Her outburst was met with a surprised and embarrassed silence, and Kathy felt herself blushing, not quite sure what to do next. Then Jay ran a hand through the bristle on her head, and adjusted her lozenge glasses, which appeared to be a shade of blue today. ‘Yeah, well, that’s right,’ she said. ‘I mean this whole thing is crap. We’re not getting anywhere because we haven’t even begun to address the fundamental problem.’
‘Which is?’ Robert blinked at her as if waking up. He seemed genuinely interested to know her opinion.
‘The nature of the police, Robert. Ranks, uniforms, mind-set-they’re an army. A male army, of occupation.’
This produced a stir of interest. The administrator smiled languidly and said, ‘Oh, come on. Two of the three officers on this committee are women.’
‘Yes, and there are women in the all-male rugby club, too. They clean the toilets and serve behind the bar. Sorry Kathy, Shazia, but it’s true. The whole organisation is founded on a male model of domination and aggression. Until you deal with that, you’re wasting your time. Look at this stuff.’ She lifted her pile of the supporting documents, the effort making the tattoos on her biceps swell. ‘Cosmetics. Public relations crap. Rape-denial.’
Everyone began talking at once, some laughing, others serious. Kathy caught Robert’s eye. He was beaming at her, pink lips pursed with amusement as if to say, what an absolute fool, but what else can you expect? She suddenly found his complacency very irritating indeed.
As the voices died away she called the meeting to order and said, ‘Jay’s obviously made a point that we all find interesting. I happen to think that it’s a very valid point of view and one we ought to consider seriously in our report.’ She was aware of a choking sound from Robert. ‘But we need these ideas set out in a coherent form. We need a report. We need all our reports, mine included. They don’t have to be in fancy English. Dot points will do. Just something you can talk to and we can discuss. I think we should finish now so we can spend the rest of the day preparing them for circulation tomorrow morning. Come on, please,’ she added, feeling a sudden panic at the thought that in a very few days she would be standing in front of five hundred sceptical faces mouthing whatever feeble platitudes her group could cobble together. ‘Help me.’
As they left the room, Jay said to her, ‘Thanks for the words of support. Did you mean them?’
‘I think I’d need to know more about what exactly you mean.’
‘How about lunch? I’ll give you a run-down.’
Kathy hesitated and Jay added, ‘It’s okay, I identify as queer, but I’m not practising.’
‘Oh,’ Kathy said. ‘Right.’
The wine bar was crowded, and they were lucky to find a small corner table to sit at with their turkey and avocado sandwiches. ‘I think I need this,’ Jay said, raising the glass of wine. ‘I found it difficult to get my brain working this morning.’
‘Until the end,’ Kathy said with a smile.
‘Well, I believed what I said. Most of the time we just trot out formulae we know everyone expects us to say, but this I believe. They’re different from us, Kathy. We all know it, but we pretend it’s otherwise. That Y chromosome does something to them. They think differently, feel differently.’
‘You make them sound like aliens.’
‘It’s safest if we do think that. It’s when we believe we understand them that we get into trouble.’
A few days ago Kathy would have dismissed this as nonsense, but now she wasn’t so sure. She thought about Leon and the shock of realising that she had lived with a man for six months without detecting the most important thing going on inside his head. And about Sandy Clarke, whose secret life had, it seemed, been completely unknown to his wife of twenty-four years.
As Jay went on to explain her ideas about ‘degendering and demilitarising the police force’, as she put it, Kathy imagined what her colleagues would make of it. Total garbage, of course. But there was something excitingly radical and fresh about it, too, at least to her, and she determined that she’d put something of it into their final report, if only to give Robert palpitations.
Her mind drifted back to Jay’s opening comments about men, and she pictured Paul Oakley at Leon’s side in that pub. Did they understand each other? And how could she dislike Oakley so instantly, when she knew nothing about him? One look had been enough. Yet she’d been wrong about his incompetence, because she had wanted to believe it. The report on Bren’s desk had been quite clear in blaming a female clerk, Debbie Langley, for the error. In transcribing the original report she had apparently omitted the crucial item, then discovered her mistake a week later and amended the computer file without informing anyone and without realising that the file had already passed through the system.
‘Anyway, there’s no point in pursuing it in our report,’ Jay was saying. ‘Your five hundred Chief Constables won’t want to know.’
‘No, but it might be nice to stir them up a bit.’
‘Watch out, Kathy. Don’t make yourself too conspicuous. You know when something goes wrong they all gang up and pin the blame on a woman.’
‘True enough.’ Kathy laughed, then thought, could that be what happened to the clerk, Debbie Langley? She finished her sandwich and said, ‘Tell me, Jay, do you think a grown man, who was secretly gay, still living with his parents, could hide that fact from his mother? Don’t you think she would know, deep down?’
Jay shrugged. ‘Depends on her attitudes.’
‘Traditional, I’d say.’
‘Then, in my experience, she would probably be the first to know and the last to admit it to herself.’
Kathy wondered. ‘Somebody else said to me recently what you just said about not understanding men. Charles Verge’s first wife said she divorced him after twenty years because she couldn’t understand him.’
‘I think there was a bit more to it than that. Chalk and cheese.’
Kathy was surprised. Everyone seemed to have opinions about the Verges. ‘How do you know?’
‘A friend of mine knows Gail Lewis. She runs a homeless shelter, and Gail has done work for her. She reckons Gail is great, really caring and sincere, unlike Verge, big-noting himself in all the colour supplements. Mind you, she did wonder if they might be getting together again.’
‘How come?’
‘She saw them together one time, and they seemed to be very friendly.’
‘That must have been a long time ago.’
‘A year or two. My friend’s been at the shelter for a couple of years now. Verge dropped Gail off there one night. His silver Ferrari drew a bit of attention in that neighbourhood, and my friend recognised him.’
Kathy was puzzled-that wasn’t what Gail Lewis had told her. As she said goodbye to Jay the discrepancy troubled her, so she pulled out her phone and rang Brock’s number.
Brock made his way around Regent’s Park past Primrose Hill, eventually discovering the place tucked away in a back street of Camden Town, part of a terrace built of pale-yellow London stock bricks, blackened with age and the rain. There was a speaker by the front door, and a brass plate reading Gail Lewis, Architect. He pressed the buzzer and waited under his dripping umbrella. A male voice said, ‘Yes?’
‘Detective Chief Inspector Brock for Ms Lewis. I phoned.’
‘One moment.’
Gail Lewis opened the door, regarding him with a searching curiosity in her grey eyes, and Brock, getting an impression of sharp intelligence, felt as if he should have prepared more thoroughly for his visit. They shook hands and she led him down a hallway running the length of the house to a room at the back-her office, she explained- which had been extended into an L-shaped area around the small, paved rear courtyard. It was more like a workshop than an office, Brock thought, with its air of purposeful activity. Modest and informal in atmosphere, it could hardly be more different to the Verge Practice’s grandiose offices. It was physically different, too, the building and furniture made predominantly of pine rather than stainless steel. A man was sitting at a computer, a woman was building a balsa-wood model over by the windows. They both looked up and smiled at Brock as he passed, and he noticed how young they seemed; students, perhaps.