Dark Side (2 page)

‘I don't normally sit opposite doorways. Think.'

He nominally only has the rank of constable to enable him to arrest people, too.

The commander did not mind. ‘There's always the risk,' he acknowledged, not thinking.

‘I'm speaking from memory but I'm fairly sure that there were several areas on that Art Nouveau-style screen that were clear of pattern. I reckon you were sitting on a line just about opposite the doorway and would have been clearly visible to someone standing just outside through one of them. I think the first shot smashed the screen, the second and third went through the window behind, all on roughly the same trajectory. And, forgive me, you're a good target.'

He meant from the point of view that the commander is a tall man, taller than Patrick, who is six foot two and, as a former rugby player, broad-shouldered and well-built.

Greenway laughed. Then he said, ‘You're on leave until next Monday, which is five days away. If we've time from other work then we can find out if the Met's turned anything up and go from there.' Unconsciously, perhaps, he again touched the dressing on his neck. ‘What I don't want is for word to get around that there's a theory I might have been in the firing line.'

‘Damn, I was just about to call the
Sun
,'
Patrick said, but he wasn't smiling.

We had come to London for an exhibition of Chinese art at the Victoria and Albert Museum and also to enable me to walk round Soho, during the day and after dark, to soak up the atmosphere for my new novel,
Death Asks No Questions.
I'm not a particularly nervous person and have explored parts of London on my own in the past, but having a meaningful escort did have the advantage of being able to visit, as Patrick put it, ‘the more interesting places', meaning pubs with low-life customers.

‘Please don't start playing poker,' I had pleaded when this idea was first mooted. ‘You nearly always win, and/or spot the in-house professional cheats and it hardly ever fails to lead to some kind of fracas. You even got involved in a brawl last time and were arrested!'

‘But I was undercover on the job!' Patrick had protested. ‘Getting arrested was a damned good idea at the time.
And
I won almost two hundred quid.'

I had given him a look that showed I had definitely rested my case.

That afternoon there was a thunderstorm bringing rain of monsoon proportions. We went to the exhibition and, the deluge continuing into the evening, I had to content myself with a quick tour of Soho huddled inside an anorak. We then had a drink in a dingy subterranean bar followed by a meal in a Greek restaurant before scurrying, dripping, back to our hotel. I was fairly happy, though, having spent the evening people-watching. There had been the added entertainment provided by a lady, a real one of very senior years, who had had far too many G and Ts, trying to chat up my husband. In the face of promises of all the money he wanted and a stately home in Buckinghamshire that needed a real man to run it, he had told her that I had bagged him first.

That had happened very early in life when we were at school in Plymouth together. Before he had been made Head Boy he had merely been, to me and my female friends, that is, one of that sub-species into which we lumped together all boys. Then, when everyone had grown up rather a lot I suddenly noticed the tall, dark individual who, together with a girl of Nordic beauty who shone at just about everything, had been accorded the school's highest honours. Patrick, I knew, was the son of a clergyman, sang in the church choir and went fishing in the River Tamar with a boy called George. He was rumoured to regard all girls as an irrelevance. My contemporaries' reaction to this was acute disappointment amid worries that he might be gay. What a terrible waste, we thought, if he was!

Our fathers knew one another as there was a Parochial Church Council connection. John, Patrick's father, was utterly delighted that mine, upon being made treasurer, had discovered an old bequest to the church in a forgotten savings account – quite a lot of money – and had suggested that his eldest son could help me with my physics homework. It was the summer holidays and the physics was a project at which I had been staring in a kind of numbed horror on and off for days, proclaiming loudly to all who would listen that I did not understand one word of it. No internet in those days.

Patrick had duly arrived and sat opposite me at the kitchen table, simmering. I had gazed back in what I hoped was a cool and detached fashion, knowing that if I dropped my gaze and giggled I was finished. For here, the knowledge booting me into full womanhood in one split second, was the man I wanted for ever and ever.

He had thawed and explained the physics. No good – I was too busy looking into those grey eyes, the irises rimmed with black and flecked with gold … Finally, he worked it all out for me to copy later but made a couple of small mistakes – deliberate ones, I discovered quite a while afterwards – so the teacher would not suspect I had had help.

Our friendship grew and for the rest of the holidays we walked the dogs and took picnics up on Dartmoor, Patrick producing a bottle of wine from his rucksack and putting it in a stream to cool. His main attraction, other than those wonderful eyes, was his ability to make me laugh. Then one day we laughed until we cried, hugging one another under the hot summer sun, and I had felt the way his wiry body moved under the material of his shirt. He had held me even closer and kissed me.

I can remember nothing of us removing clothes. Just friends one minute and then as close as two people can become the next, the pair of us shocked speechless by the pleasure our young bodies had just given us. Finally, after quite a few such picnics – that summer broke all sunshine records for Dartmoor but we might not have noticed had it poured – Patrick had a crisis of conscience and asked me to marry him. He had been, after all, very strictly brought up. My reply that I was only fifteen caused him to attain a shade of pale that up until then I had assumed to be humanly impossible. But he had repeated the offer right then, come hell, horsewhips and jail, and I accepted.

Oddly, we ‘behaved ourselves' after that, which was just as well as we both had the notion that children – we still thought of ourselves as sort of kids for some strange reason, even though Patrick was eighteen by then – couldn't make babies. Naive wasn't the word for it – my mother refused to talk about such things. It was a miracle that I didn't get pregnant.

We married when we were both in our early twenties. But by then my new husband was in the army, a junior officer rising through the ranks like bread dough on a hot day. There was a whole world out there for him to explore, and he did not really want to be tied down. After a very stormy relationship there was one last terrible row which ended with me throwing his classical guitar down the stairs and then him out of my cottage – bought with my writing earnings and money left to me by my father – into the rain. We got divorced.

He served abroad, the second youngest major in the British Army, and was horribly injured in an accident – not his fault – with a hand grenade, finally having to have the lower part of his right leg amputated. Just before this, out of hospital and in agony as the pins in the repaired smashed limb were not holding, he had turned up on my doorstep to tell me that he had been offered a job with MI5. A stipulation was that he had to find a working partner, female, as socializing was involved and it was thought that lone men did not merge easily into a crowd. We had always got on famously in public, he had reminded me brightly – which was perfectly true – so did I want the job? It was well paid, and there would be lots of potential for ideas for future plots in my novels, he had wheedled.

I had found all this utterly unbearable and not just because he had fainted at my feet from pain and weakness not five minutes after crossing the threshold. It was somehow knowing that the real reason he was right here in front of me, almost literally on his knees, was to ask me, although he was maimed, to take him back.

I had taken him back and accepted the job offer. We rediscovered the old magic that had been between us and I soon found that I needed him just as much, if not more, than he needed me. These days he is almost as mobile as he was before his injuries thanks to a man-made construction below the knee with its tiny in-house computer, powered by lithium batteries, that reacts to his every movement. It cost roughly the same as a family car.

‘So you'd left the bother magnet switched on,' Detective Chief Inspector James Carrick of Bath CID said darkly. He seems to be convinced that we go looking for trouble. We were in the Ring o' Bells, the pub in Hinton Littlemoor, a village in Somerset where we live, having returned home from London the previous day.

Patrick chuckled and shook his head. ‘Not this time.'

‘D'you really think they might have been after Greenway?'

‘It's not impossible. He wasn't interested in giving it any thought at the time but as we know all too well head mobsters are using rogue private investigators to access police files and have even had incriminating and sensitive information deleted courtesy of bent cops. Mike's name has to be on several inquiries into enforcement operations where there's been insider criminal activity – inquiries that have actually been very successful. The empire has struck back and the gang leaders don't like it.'

Carrick pulled a face. The police attitude to private investigators tends to be that of toleration as long as they stick to checking up on straying spouses and searching for lost relatives or stolen dogs.

‘Another pint?' Patrick asked him.

The Ring o' Bells was under new management, having been closed down for a while after the previous tenants had been convicted of using the business for money-laundering purposes. The DCI, an old friend, had called in to have a drink with us on his way home from work. A fondness for real ale notwithstanding, he never thinks it a bad idea to maintain an occasional personal presence in hostelries on his patch to demonstrate to the landlords that they are on his radar.

‘No, thanks, I must away,' he replied, getting to his feet.

I did not ask the proud new father if he was dashing off to help his wife Joanna bath baby Iona Flora as I knew he would eagerly produce his phone and show us the latest photographs – ‘She's going to have red hair, just like her mother!' – of his daughter. And he had initially said he couldn't stay long, hadn't he?

‘Did I ever mention a man by the name of Benny Cooper to you?' Carrick said on an afterthought as he put on his jacket.

‘I don't think so,' Patrick answered.

‘Remind me to sometime.'

‘Why, is he someone I ought to know about?'

‘You talking about private investigators brought him to mind. He used to work for
The
Bath Times
as a crime reporter and also wrote a gossip column:
In The Know, it was called. I got him for being an accessory to GBH and, with the Vice Squad, for peddling child pornography some years ago. He's out of prison now, set himself up as a private eye and been seen locally with a mobster known to the Met.
He's
been linked to
a case in London where police files were tampered with. No pointers to Benny as yet, though – more's the pity,' Carrick finished by grimly saying.

‘Do you have a name for this character known to the Met?'

‘As usual, he has more than one identity but because of pressure of work I've had to postpone investigating further.'

‘Can you give us a few minutes Monday morning first thing to give us what you do know?' Patrick asked.

‘I thought you were back off to London.'

‘This sounds like being work-related. We can travel up later.'

‘Fine. Eight thirty?'

‘I know about Cooper,' I said a little later. We had stayed to have a meal in the pub's restaurant. ‘Joanna told me a while back. She was the victim in the GBH case.'

Patrick looked up from the menu. ‘
Really?
'

‘Cooper'd had his knife into James for a while as he knew he was on his case and somehow, some time previously, had got hold of the story of how he and Joanna, who was James's sergeant at the time, had an affair while his wife was still alive – she died from a rare form of bone cancer, if you remember. The super, now retired, hated women in the job and she was forced to resign by being moved to a dead-end posting.'

‘I can't imagine that happening now.'

‘No, nor can I.'

‘Sorry, go on.'

‘Cooper was knocking around with a man whose name I think she said was Paul Mallory – they had some kind of porn outfit together – and started shadowing James when he went out in the evening, trying to spot him drinking heavily or picking up a prostitute – anything that he could use to try to blacken his character. Apparently he already sneered anonymously at Bath CID through his newspaper column. Eventually, because James was closing in on the pair of them, he persuaded Mallory to rough up Joanna to muddy the waters of a murder investigation involving another woman with red hair, to act as a distraction. Only he almost strangled her and when James found her he had to give her the kiss of life.'

‘Bloody hell!' Patrick whispered. ‘I'm not surprised he's got him in his sights now he's out of jail and seemingly back in business. He'll be wanting, very badly, to nail the creep to the wall by his ears.'

The fact that men who have laid a hand on me during our time working together have ended up either in prison or extremely dead, mostly the latter, is never far from my thoughts.

We bought the old rectory in Hinton Littlemoor when it became apparent that the church authorities were about to put it on the market and move Patrick's parents John and Elspeth – John is the incumbent of St Michael's Church – to a small bungalow on a cheap and ugly new development at the lower end of the village, the site of one-time railway sidings. After a lot of building work had taken place at the rectory – including an old stable, harness room and garage turned into living accommodation which serves as an annexe for Elspeth and John, and an extension to the first floor above it – we moved in.