A Dog's Life (The Romney and Marsh Files Book 4) (2 page)

The shit flew out of that particular fan to soil and taint reputations and working practices faster than one of the town’s Pencester-park-drinkers necked the first can of super-strength cider of the day. Few involved escaped the fallout.  The reputation of Dover police station had come under the spotlight. It had been tarnished and heads had to roll. It was the way of things. Accountability was its name.

Superintendent Falkner stood almost rigidly to attention as he prepared to deliver his farewell address. From his pockets he took his half-moon spectacles and a neatly folded sheet of paper. The room fell respectfully silent. Romney’s stomach growled and a pretty, young PC turned to look up at him. He smiled his apology and his stomach immediately intensified its need for attention. Two more heads turned in his direction and he ignored them. In a bid to give his insides something to do other than embarrass him, he reached for his pastry. He pulled awkwardly at the stubbornly elastic substance. At the end of its stretching tolerance it tore without warning. Unable to curb the momentum of his efforts quickly enough, the back of his hand collided with his Styrofoam coffee cup, sending it flying from the top of the filing cabinet to explode on the back of the head of the pretty PC sitting just under it. She screamed as the scalding liquid drenched her scalp and her shirted back.

*

‘No need to apologise again, Tom,’ said Falkner. ‘Truth be known, you saved me from a bloody awkward speech that my heart wasn’t in and probably wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone five minutes after I’d made it.’ Falkner sat behind his desk looking deeply disconsolate and Romney felt freshly abject for spoiling proceedings and his senior officer’s moment. Then, in a rare show of mischievous levity, Falkner added, ‘Besides, there was always the risk that I might have said something about my replacement that I would live to regret.’

Falkner stood and walked to the window. His hands linked behind his back in his customary pose, he looked out over the domain he had ruled for the last ten years and sighed heavily.

‘Got any plans for the immediate future, sir?’ said Romney, in a bid to lighten the mood a notch.

Falkner sighed heavily again. Still with his back to the room and Romney, he said, ‘Ann was so looking forward to my retirement. She wanted to travel. See the wonders of the ancient world. We could have done it, too. Money wasn’t going to be a problem. Now all she can manage is to sit in that bloody chair all day staring out the window and dribbling down her front. Life can be so cruel, Tom.’

Romney was aware of movement to his side. Superintendent Vine was standing on the threshold of the office. He got quickly to his feet and made a mental note to be mindful that she had the talent for sneaking up unnoticed.

Falkner was still speaking: ‘Did you hear that stupid woman’s joke about my wife?’

Romney felt a light sweat prickle his brow. He looked at his new boss’s face to see whether she had understood she was the stupid woman. Clearly she had. She cleared her throat loudly. Falkner turned back to the room.

‘Will you be in here much longer, Superintendent Falkner?’ she said. ‘The decorators are here and they want to get on.’ Sensitive as well as sneaky, thought Romney.

Falkner drew a deep breath and for one horrible moment Romney feared that the man was going to bellow at her, but he breathed out again quickly and quietly. He indulged himself with a last and lingering look around the space that had been his home from home and said, ‘No. Actually, I’m just leaving. It’s all yours now.’ He didn’t wish her luck and he didn’t offer his hand.

The departing senior officer picked up his regulation cap and moved to his cardboard box on the table.

‘Let me take that down for you, sir,’ said Romney, more for an excuse to get away than out of any great charitable sentiment.

‘Thank you, Tom. I’d appreciate that.’

Falkner adjusted his hat in the office mirror, straightened up and fixed a proud look to his face. He marched out of the room without another word or glance in the direction of his successor who had wandered in.

Romney gathered up the box, said, ‘Ma’am,’ and went after him.

The short journey down to the car park was an uplifting experience. On the staircases, in the corridors, in the foyer and even outside, every officer they passed offered Falkner their best wishes or a kind word for the future. Falkner’s step developed something of a spring by the time they got to the bins.

The superintendent lifted the plastic lid on one of the station’s industrial refuse receptacles. ‘In there, please, Tom.’ Romney hesitated. ‘Come on. Nothing I want now.’ Romney heaved it in and Falkner let the lid fall with a loud symbolic crash on the pathetic remains of his long career, ruffling Romney’s hair with a waft of foul-smelling air in the process.

They shook hands once more at Falkner’s Jag. ‘Good luck, Tom. You’re a good detective and a good policeman. I’ve enjoyed working with you.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘A word to the wise?’ Romney nodded. ‘Prepare to change. We bent the rules at times. We did it because that’s where we came from. We did it because we had to to get results. And results are what matter most to coppers like us. But those days are over. She won’t tolerate our kind of policing. It’ll be by the book. Her way or the highway. Short-cuts and sharp practice are things of the past. Mark my words, Tom. She’s got that rock she calls a heart set on higher offices than mine and woe betide anyone that looks to foul up her chances of that, deliberately or otherwise.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll bear that in mind.’

‘Good man. Take care.’

‘You too, sir.’

Romney stood and watched as his old boss negotiated the parked vehicles and other obstacles of the confined space to drive out of the gate, out of sight and out of the police. He felt a little sad for it. The end of an era.

As he stood indulging his melancholy, he became aware of an insistent tapping on glass. A memory was stirred and it confused him. The only person who ever tapped on windows for his attention had just driven out of the gate. He looked up to see Superintendent Vine staring down at him. In a horrible moment of history repeating itself, she crooked her finger at him and beckoned him up. She wasn’t smiling.

*

Vine was deep in conversation with a man wearing the uniform of the professional painter and decorator: white cap, white dungarees over a white T-shirt. His clothes were splattered with emulsion from previous jobs. After a few seconds of being ignored, Romney rapped on the doorframe. They looked up and stopped their talk.

‘Come in, Detective Inspector. Give us a minute, would you?’ she said to the tradesman. He nodded and left. ‘Close the door and sit down.’ Romney did as he was told. She took Falkner’s old chair the other side of Falkner’s old desk without ceremony or obvious sentimentality.

Superintendent Vine put Romney in mind of Boudicca, or rather the more imaginative and colourful artists’ impressions he remembered from school of the leader of the Iceni.  Like the Boudicca of his textbooks, Vine exuded harsh authority. Like Boudicca, she was a tall and well built, athletic-looking woman, but her closest resemblance to the fearsome female warrior was her extraordinarily bright orange and dynamically-curly hair. At present, Romney could see this was restrained using a number of pins, clips, a band and probably a good deal of spray. She had a strong but not big nose, good bone structure and sharp, intelligent, pale grey eyes. Her face was a mass of freckles. She was certainly imposing and striking and therefore probably regarded as photogenic by the powers that be. Good equal opportunities publicity for the force – female and ginger. He guessed she was in her early forties. He looked for evidence of her marital status, but she seemed averse to wearing any jewellery at all. Romney idly wondered what she’d look like with a bit of mud and woad smeared across her cheeks. Or was that the Celts?

He was startled out his reverie by her strong, educated voice asking him a question that he was quite unprepared for. ‘Do you know why I’m here, Inspector Romney?’ Her tone did not suggest she might soon call for tea and biscuits.

He gave the first answer that came to mind, even though as he spoke it sounded a little facetious to his own ears. ‘Because Superintendent Falkner has retired and we need a commanding officer, ma’am.’

She studied him for a long and uncomfortable moment. ‘This station needs a lot of things, Inspector. An
effective
commanding officer is just one of them. This station needs some discipline. This station needs a bloody good shake-up. This station needs someone to turn it around and lead it by the nose so that it might catch up with the rest of Kent police. That’s why I’m here, Inspector.’

Romney just nodded. It seemed the right thing to do. Speaking didn’t.

‘I’m not revealing any great secrets when I tell you that Area is extremely concerned with the way things have been run and done here over the last year. Area is looking for quick and significant improvement. Area is looking for the depressing reading that is the statistics of this station to alter some of their trends – and soon. And CID is cause for concern. Am I making myself clear, Inspector?’

Romney felt his body temperature rising and had to wonder if she’d put the heating on.

‘Remind me: how many officers work in CID here?’

Romney was tempted to say, ‘about half of them.’ He didn’t think she’d laugh. Instead, he said, ‘There are six of us, ma’am. But one has been on extended sick leave for nearly three months.’

‘Why?’

‘Back injury.’

‘In the line of duty?’

‘Sort of.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘He fell off a chair hanging a curtain in CID.’

She raised her eyes to the ceiling and then quietly shook her head.

‘So, there are five CID officers available for duty.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Have they got enough to do?’

‘Ma’am?’ Romney was generally puzzled by what she meant by that.

‘Is CID busy enough to warrant six officers?’

‘We’re actually four and one acting DC. He was taken out of uniform because the four of us couldn’t cope.’ Shit. That didn’t sound good when he replayed it.

Thankfully, she seemed not to feel the same. ‘Where are they all now?’

‘In the CID squad room, ma’am,’ he said, hoping to Christ they all were and not loitering around the cafeteria.

She drummed her manicured fingers on the desktop. ‘In thirty minutes’ time we’re going to have a meeting in CID. Is there a meeting room?’ Romney nodded. ‘I want all five officers present. Organise it. What I have to say I’m only going to say once. I might as well say it to all of you so there is no confusion with Chinese whispers.’ Was that code for she didn’t trust him? She stood and so did Romney. ‘Send him back in on your way out, would you?’

*

Heading back to CID, Romney met his uniformed opposite number hurrying along a corridor.

‘Hello, Tom.’

‘Clive. Where’s the fire?’

‘Under my arse. The new boss wants to see me.’

Romney shared a grin. ‘Good luck. I’ve just come from there. Do you know why she’s here?’ The uniformed inspector shook his head. ‘I won’t spoil it for you then. It’s quite a speech. How’s that PC I shared my coffee with this morning?’

‘She’ll live. You might get a cleaning bill. A box of chocolates and a bunch of flowers might stop her making an official complaint.’

*

Next stop was the gents. Preferring the privacy of the cubicles to the exposure of the urinals, he was standing preparing to perform his bodily function when two officers burst through the main door, speaking loudly.

‘Yeah, well, you can take it from me, things won’t be the same around here any more. Old Falkner might have been one part soft, three parts useless but trust me, after a few
weeks in the grip of the ginger-ninja, we’ll wish he was back turning his blind eyes.’

Romney heard them relieving themselves and had to clench his buttocks tightly to prevent betraying his presence, something he suddenly didn’t want to do.

‘Mate of mine, works traffic out of Maidstone, says she went in there like a blood-thirsty Eskimo on a timed seal cull. Half of CID kicked out, demoted, put back into uniform or moved on. Even a DI got taken down to DS.’ They were washing their hands, now. ‘One person’s shoes I would not like to be in at the moment is Romney’s. Not for all the chicken chow mein in China.’ They laughed.

As Romney heard the door open and close and the still-laughing men leave, he let his stream go.  His great relief at that was tempered by his niggling anxiety at what he’d just overheard.

***

2

Romney went to CID and spoke to DC Harmer and the young man new to upstairs, acting DC Fower, about making themselves available in the meeting room shortly.

Detective Sergeant Marsh was at her desk. Grimes tested the properties of a chair next to her. Both were staring intently at the monitor of her computer. As Romney approached, they looked up – a little guiltily, he thought. By the time he was with them it was Marsh’s desktop image that filled the screen. He said nothing. If it wasn’t work-related, he didn’t want to know.