Gideon pondered. “Look, Constable, did he tell you to ask me to come in again?”
“No, I can’t say that he did, but-”
“Then I don’t see the point. I’m not going to go barging in where I’m not wanted.” He realized as he said it how pompous it sounded and tacked on a gentler addendum. “Of course, if he does ask me, I’d be happy to.”
“I’m sure he will ask you, but, knowing him, it’ll take a few days for him to get around to it. And inasmuch as you said you’d only be here a few days, I was afraid it might be too late by then. Thought I should strike while the iron’s hot.”
Their waiter came by with Robb’s check and more coffee for Julie and Gideon. Gideon sipped and considered. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I just don’t feel comfortable-”
“Oh, go ahead,” Julie said. “You know you want to. If someone’s really been murdered, you’re not going to be happy walking away from it when you probably could be of some help.”
Gideon shook his head. “Nope, I don’t think so.” Being pressed from both sides was making him more stubborn than he might have been otherwise.
“Dr. Oliver,” Robb said.
“Gideon.”
“And I’m Kyle,” Robb said with his sweet smile. “Look, may I tell you a little about the sergeant? Do you have a few minutes?”
“Sure,” Gideon said, curious in spite of himself. Julie, always interested in what promised to be a human interest story, nodded as well, although it was likely to make her late for the consortium’s afternoon session.
Robb pushed aside the last quarter of his sandwich, drained his lemonade, and collected his thoughts.
“Well, you have to understand…” But he decided he needed another beginning and started again. “This is hardly the sort of thing I’d ordinarily tell anyone, you see, let alone a relative stranger, but…” Another false start. He thought for a moment more before hitting on the opening he wanted.
“Sergeant Clapper,” he said, “is not what he seems.”
That was putting it mildly.
Harry Michael Clapper had had quite a life before becoming a policeman. The son of a London liquor wholesaler, he had joined the army at an underage seventeen, spending over twenty years in the service. He had been wounded and twice decorated for bravery during the Falklands War and had retired in 1988 as regimental sergeant-major, about as high as a non-commissioned officer could go. He had knocked around for a while after that, and then, in 1990, at the advanced age of 40, he had submitted an application to the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary to become a police officer. To his own surprise he was accepted. He breezed through the local training program in Exeter, came in first in his class at the fifteen-week residential course at the National Police Training Centre in Bramshill, and was assigned to Torquay as a traffic constable.
While still in his two-year probationary period, he had gotten a rare chief constable commendation-the first one that had ever been given to a probationer-for actions over and above the requirements of the service. Off-duty, out of uniform, alone, and weaponless, he had broken up an armed robbery, subduing the two perpetrators and sitting on them (literally) until a couple of police cars, summoned by the Australian victim, could arrive.
On completion of his probation he was transferred to the Criminal Investigation Department and posted to Plymouth as a detective constable. There, he not only completed university but compiled an extraordinary record of cases successfully closed that made him the only person in the department’s long history to earn Officer of the Year honors three times. He was the subject of several Sunday magazine articles and was part of a BBC television special (“The New Sherlock Holmeses: England’s Greatest Detectives”). By 2000, he had advanced to detective chief inspector-
“Wait a minute,” Gideon said. He was shaking his head incredulously. “Hold on, Kyle. Are we really talking about the same Mike Clapper? He was a famous detective? He was a chief inspector? What’s he doing as a constable sergeant out in the Scillies? What happened to him? Was he demoted?”
“Not exactly,” Robb said. “But just when he was at the top of the heap, a lot of things began going wrong for him. His life pretty much came apart.”
First, and probably most important, his wife of nearly thirty years died after a long, exhausting battle with cancer. Then, only a few weeks after her funeral, he received word that the position of detective superintendent, for which he’d applied months earlier, had gone to a much younger man with little more than half his experience and nowhere near his record of medals, commendations, and successes. What he did have was training in community relations and three years’ experience as departmental ombudsman-two areas that, as far as Clapper was concerned, had nothing to do with real police work, the meat of which was persistence, legwork, and the dogged, life-encompassing determination to put the bad guys away.
After that it was all downhill. Clapper turned bitter and became increasingly solitary. Once the pride of the department, he became perceived by his higher-ups as an anachronism: a stubbornly old-fashioned copper who had stayed beyond his time and whose hard-nosed approach to the job was outmoded and discredited. His positions on what policing was all about-and especially what it wasn’t about-had brought a string of in-house complaints from the chief of Community Relations, the representative of the Gay Police Association, and the head of the Diversity Enhancement Task Force. More than that, his increasingly negative attitude was becoming a bad influence on the younger members of the force. And on top of that-
Robb hesitated. “Well, he began… he had… other problems too.”
“Alcohol?” said Gideon.
“Exactly. He was drinking too much.”
It was time for him to go, and various efforts, some subtle, some not, were made to retire him, either voluntarily or otherwise. But with two years left to qualify for a full pension, he wasn’t about to be “made redundant,” and there was no way to force him. After considerable dickering, an unusual compromise was reached. Clapper would be transferred from the large port city of Plymouth to the obscure, virtually crime-free outpost of St. Mary’s, where he could harmlessly serve out his time without getting into trouble or offending anyone. But for him to assume the position of the Scillies’ “neighborhood beat manager” required that he be downgraded from detective inspector to constable sergeant. This he reluctantly accepted, with the proviso that his grade for pension purposes remain that of chief inspector. To this the department agreed, and to the Scillies he came, and here he had been for the last six months, out of the mainstream and pretty much going through the motions.
“Not that much beyond going through the motions is generally required here,” Robb said with a smile. “We’re not what you might call a hotbed of crime. But you can imagine how tough it must be on the old man to be reporting to people in Exeter who don’t know the half of what he does.”
“Well, I admit,” Gideon said as their waiter came to pick up their payments, “I’m impressed. About the only thing I had right about him was that he was counting the days to retirement.”
“Which isn’t hard to understand,” Robb said. “Things haven’t been easy for him.”
“They can’t have been too easy for you either,” said Gideon. “I didn’t get the impression he was the easiest boss in the world to work for.”
“Oh, not so bad. One has to make allowances. One has to consider who he is. It’s been a privilege to work with him, really. I’ve learned a lot.”
“I admire your staying power,” Gideon said.
“Well, yes, it was a little hard at first,” Robb admitted, “but after a couple of months on the island he mellowed. He likes the idea of living at the police station, for one thing.”
“He lives at the police station?” Julie said, surprised.
“Well, above it. Above the store, as we say,” Robb said with a smile. “Upstairs, on the first floor. My wife and I do, too. There are several flats up there. It used to be a common arrangement years ago, but you don’t see it much anymore, except in out-of-the-way places like this. And then…” He hesitated. “The fact is, he’s gotten himself a lady-friend who more or less lives there too. That’s really mellowed him. For one thing, she’s gotten him off the sauce. He’s a teetotaler now, which has made all the difference in the world. He’s put his life together again. But any time he has to deal with Exeter”-he shook his head-“he’s an unhappy man.”