A Long Time Dead (The Dead Trilogy) (9 page)

His eyes fell away from hers. “Thanks for your vote of confidence.”

“It’s true.”

“If it was true, why the hell would I attack myself like this, why would I…”

She said nothing, only looked at him and raised her eyebrows in a question.

He turned away again, his head bowed. No fists this time.

“You were about to ask why you would decrease your own chances of getting the job?”

“So I would never find out if I could do it or not.”

“So you would never
need
to find out.”

“But I need this promotion.” His voice had conviction, and his eyes mirrored it. The window was there, inviting, daring him.

“Of course you do. It’s vital you have it. You can’t live without it.”

“Don’t take the piss.”

“You have a decent salary, a good home, and it’s obvious you still enjoy the job. So why do you
need
this promotion badly enough to put yourself through hell?”

Roger slumped into his seat and rested his elbows on his knees. He stared at the floor, fingertips playing with each other. “Nice. Never noticed that before. Your anklet.” He smiled at her. “Suits you.”

“You think I’m a tart?”

“I like it is what I meant. No underlying meaning, Alice; just a couple o’ words, that’s all.”

She leaned in closer now, forcing him to look at her. “Are you going to tell me why it’s so important you get this promotion?”

“My dad,” he whispered at last.

“I thought your dad was dead, we went through your family already.”

Roger’s face was ashen. No emotion pulled its features one way or the other. Impassive. “He
is
dead. But that’s not important. I still need to prove myself to him.” He tried a smile to cover his growing embarrassment, but it felt awkward.

“He’s dead? And it’s not important?”

Roger thought of looking out the window again, and then changed his mind. It was just games, just bluffs. He sat there and let it out. “My brother and sister were born with business wings, highflying accountant and highflying solicitor. They’re both senior managers in London now. Whenever visitors came to our house, Dad always bragged of their successes in Eton and Cambridge but somehow forgot about me, about how I was getting along at Bristol University doing my engineering course.” He looked back at the memory, and it hurt. He still wanted to smash the window, just to get the poison out. “And when I told him I…” he stopped, hung his head.

“Go on, it’s okay, Roger. You’ve come this far, might as well finish it.”

“I had prospects. That’s what he said. But I always struggled with figures and equations. When I was young, I’d pull radios apart just to see how they worked. Of course, they never worked again once I’d finished with them. But I was inquisitive. Practical, not academic.

“When I enrolled at Bristol instead of Cambridge, the old man couldn’t hide his disappointment, didn’t even try to, really. But you should have seen him when I told him I’d flunked out, and that I’d met a girl.” He looked up at Alice, smiled and said, “He punched me. Can you believe it; he freaked out and punched me. Eventually, he came around and tried to talk me back ‘on track’. He said there was still time if I applied myself.

“My dad wasn’t a bad man. I made him like that, I guess. He nearly had a fucking heart attack when I told him I was marrying the girl I’d met.”

“Yvonne?”

“Christ, you’re sharp today, Alice.”

“Hey—”

“Sorry, sorry, I’m… Anyway, he was disgusted, and that was one thing he
did
say about me. Actually, he said it frequently. Annoyingly so.” He tried to appear nonchalant, as though none of it bothered him. “At least when I moved out he didn’t have to hide me anymore when The Influential came around. Didn’t even say goodbye.”

“Were you around when he died?”

Roger shook his head.

Alice clamped her bottom lip in her teeth, and stared at him. “And you want promotion to make up for that?”

And then he did laugh. Loudly, as if purged. “I see you attended the same diplomacy school as Weston.”

“Who’s Weston?”

“Never mind.”

“I don’t understand your position, Roger.”

“Me neither. It’s stupid, isn’t it? But it won’t let go;
especially
now he’s dead. I can’t change the ‘Yvonne’ part of my past, but I can show him that I have wings too.” He realised how pathetic he must sound, and sat up straight, taking a moment to calm down. “You know the infuriating bit? I don’t know who I detest more for making me do this: him or me. My motives have turned me into the very person I hate. I’m doing something like this… I’m busting my arse to be something—”

“You don’t want to be?”

That capped it. Roger stopped dead as though slapped in the face with a breezeblock. His eyes were still and his jaw slack.

“You want to be a pretend manager, a phoney, a fake?”

“You know how to cheer—”

“Shut up, dammit! Stop being the jester, Roger, just for ten minutes.”

Her hands were together as though in prayer, their bright red nails pointing at him, and he was tempted to say something humorous, but thought better of it.

“Put all those poignant thoughts of your dead dad to one side for a moment and think about the job you’d be doing if promotion were offered.
Think
about it! You could
actually
do it – for
you
, Roger.” Alice pulled closer, tugged at his sleeve, and made him look at her. She nodded, “You could do it for you.”

“I could do it for the glory, for the fame. Imagine the autograph-hunters and the magazine journos camping on my doorstep—” Alice slapped his face, and the breezeblock stopped him dead again. “Ow! You slapped me!” he laughed. “I’m your patient and you slapped me.”

“You needed it.”

“Do you slap all your patients?”

“Only the annoying ones.”

“Do I pay extra for that?” Smiling, Roger straightened his glasses. “I thought you were supposed to be helping—”

“That’s exactly what I am doing.” She stood, smoothed out her tight skirt, hands flustered, attending to her well-kept hair. She opened a window and let in a rumble of traffic noise, embellished by a distant siren. The smell of Wakefield, of industry, commerce and learning, encroached into the room.

The rain had stopped, but naked trees still danced in the wind.

“Let your siblings lead their own lives, Roger. And if you want to honour your dead father, take some flowers to his grave. You can’t live your life for someone else,” she looked as though the thought repulsed her. “Don’t waste this chance you’ve got trying to prove to distant relatives something that doesn’t matter. Prove to yourself that you can do it.” And then her face relaxed. “I think you’d be very good at it, too.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t do this for the wrong reasons, Roger. If you do, it’ll find you out and it’ll knock you off your pedestal. You can’t use it to get back at your family.”

Roger sat in silence. He considered her words, and in a weird kind of way he supposed, they actually made sense. “Thanks.”

“That it? Thanks?”

“No, I mean it. Thanks.” He reached up and held her hand. “Does this mean the nightmares will stop?”

She shrugged, didn’t pull her hand away. Instead, she retook her seat and shuffled nearer, knee to knee, and she leaned forward, closing her eyes and kissed him softly for a second before withdrawing. “I don’t know. We can only hope…”

“How long can we keep these visits under wraps?”

There was noise in the corridor outside Alice’s office; and though it was nothing of concern, they separated. Roger stood, fingers tucked into his waistcoat pockets, admiring prints on the wall that held no interest for him. The noise was Melanie, but her voice, a length of razor wire wrapped in a soufflé, eventually faded.

“Why the paranoia about your counselling, Roger?”

“Allegedly, it has no bearing on promotion, but I think it does; I know how people’s minds work, even if I don’t know how mine does. Bell and his colleagues wouldn’t want a SOCO Supervisor who’s mental.”

“You’re not—”

“You know what I mean. They’d frown upon it. That’s why I don’t want any record of it. They dredge files from everywhere when making a promotional decision. And that’s why I can’t afford to have Chris finding out.”

She appeared perplexed. “What’s Chris got to do with it?”

Roger shook his head, “Look, it doesn’t matter.”

“I’ll judge that, thank you. Go on.”

Sighing, Roger said, “He made it plain that I’m his opposition. And something like this… well, he’d swing from the chandelier if he found out because he’d win on a technicality.”

“You think he’d try to sabotage your chances?”

“You don’t know how important this is to Chris.”

“That’s irrelevant, Roger. If you want the job, you have to pull yourself together. You can do this job better than anyone can. But you have to believe in your own ability. Otherwise you may as well retract your application and start getting some sleep again.”

Her hair shone in auburn waves around her slender neck; her petite hands toyed idly with the pen as she looked at Roger. “It’s about time you went shopping and bought a truckload of self confidence.”

Eventually, he grinned. “Can you get that at Asda?”

“That’s the good news. The bad news is that we only have another two weeks to see each other as we please before Angus comes home.”

The Scenes of Crime Office was freezing. The heating was still dead and Roger sat alone at his desk with a thick woollen sweater on, head pulled into his shoulders, blowing breath rings through his nose. He detested working nights; sitting here waiting for the phone to make him jump, wondering what abhorrent mess the caller would send him to. Damned nights.

All was silent. The computer was blank, life signified by a blinking cursor. For once the telephone was quiet, the fax machine also, just one of many inanimate shadows in a room full of hollow stillness. The entire police station seemed asleep as though on standby, waiting for its own abhorrent mess.

It had been a long night. Roger spent the first two hours spreading dust and lifting fingerprints and footwear impressions at three domestic burglaries in the poorer districts of Wakefield, working by torchlight while the complainants stood over him with their arms folded, stern looks on silent faces, as if they blamed him for the burglary, pointing out every surface the intruder could have touched, every dirty mark they hadn’t noticed until now, suddenly becoming aware of the place in which they lived. He could have written a book on the cunning of burglars. And another two on the complacency of occupants.

Roger spent a further hour at an aggravated burglary in a Normanton Post Office. He stood outside for a moment and held his breath, listening to the shrieks and wails of the Post Office staff who lived above the premises, and who were sleeping as the attack took place. Upon entering, and learning the details of the crime, his frustration grew; frustration at the people who did this, frustration at those who staggered home from the nightclubs of Wakefield, too drunk to be of any use as witnesses, and frustration at coppers walking through his damned scene. Roger screamed. Everything stopped.