The Unburied Dead (18 page)

Found time for a brief word with Bathurst. Curious about that remark of Crow's when I first arrived. Bumped into her downstairs, on her way home at the end of her day. I was wondering if she had told me everything there was to tell. People very rarely do.

'Went to see Crow this morning,' I said to her.

She looked frightened straight off. Saw it in the eyes, heard it in the voice.

'What did you say? You didn't mention me?'

'No, don't worry.'

'Why did you tell him you were there?'

Didn't know what to say to that and I wasn't going to admit to being so clumsy.

'Just asked him a few questions. Suppose he might have worked it out, but his brain must be so pickled it's hard to tell whether he's capable of any clear thinking. Look, I really don't think he or Bloonsbury had anything to do with Monday night. Don't worry about that, all this is nothing to do with what happened last year.' She nodded slowly – unconvinced. 'There was something else he said. About having had dealings with Bloonsbury and Herrod last month. You know about that?'

She looked even more worried. Puzzled.

'He assumed at first that was why I was there,' I said.

Kept shaking her head. Bit at a nail. Not at all happy.

'Look, I don't know,' I said. 'I'll dig around, but I have to be careful. Don't want people getting suspicious.' Then I suggested a way out for us both. It would need a lot of courage from her and nothing from me, but it wasn't me that created the situation in the first place. 'You could go to Miller, tell her everything. You're going to look bad, but if it's bothering you that much...'

The thought of that scared the shit out of her.

'I can't,' she said.

'She's not as bad as she seems,' I said. Personal experience – get her in bed and she's a kitten. 'If this is going to bug you, if it's going to make you not want to be on the force, then you've got to let it out.'

'It'll be the end of my career,' she said.

I wondered if I could deny it, but I couldn't. If she wasn't kicked out for her part in it, who would want to work with her after she'd done this?

'Depends how much you want your career. Cause if you do, you're just going to have to forget it, get on with your life. It was a year and a half ago – you've done all right so far. You'll have to let it go. Believe me, Monday night had nothing to do with those guys, so you've either got to accept what you were part of and forget about it, or get it out and face the consequences.'

She kept shaking her head. It was a big discussion and warranted a hell of a lot more time, but I didn't have it.

'Look, Evelyn, I've got to go. Think about what I've said. Don't do anything yet and we'll talk at the weekend.'

She smiled weakly at that and nodded. Not sure, of course, if I'll have the time to see her.

That was it, and we went our ways. We're both in work tomorrow and we can take it from there. A right bloody shambles.

Had a brief interview with Charlotte as she disappeared for the evening. Wants to go away tomorrow evening, spend the night in some hotel somewhere. Said she had a place in mind. I didn't fight it and as I stood in her office having the brief discussion on the subject, I just wanted to leap over the desk and rip her clothes off.

Not long after that the expected phone call from Peggy came through. Juggled enough women in my time to sound cool about it. Even so, like a complete idiot, I couldn't bring myself to say definitely no about tomorrow night. Put it off until tomorrow.

So, just after nine on a Friday night, up to my eyes in paperwork, and I can't concentrate on a single line of it. Charlotte, Peggy and Evelyn Bathurst keep intruding into the thought process. Mostly Charlotte.

As far as I know, she's spending the evening alone. Very tempted to go down there when I've finished at the office. Utterly succumbing to infatuation and there's only one road to go down once you start feeling like this; there's only one thing that's going to happen. You're going to make an idiot of yourself.

I'm forty-four for God's sake. Bit of a slow starter, but after the war I had all those women and by God, I don't believe I made an arse of myself with any of them. Too messed up. There may have been several who were pissed off, certainly several that were hurt, and my behaviour might be considered reprehensible in some quarters, but I never actually made an idiot of myself. Now, however, we're right smack in the middle of the biggest murder inquiry we've ever had in this patch, and I'm acting like a total lovesick knob.

The quicker I fall flat on my face and screw everything up – get dumped by Miller and screw up with Peggy, end up with no one but two-bit scrubbers picked up in the pub on a Saturday night – the quicker I can get on with things. So if I go to see her tonight I'll either get put in my place, not before time and just what I'm needing, or else I'll get into her bed for the night and plummet deeper into the abyss of infatuation.

First, however, I've got to get this work done. Christ, who joins the rozzers to do paperwork?

Finish off the cup of tea at my right hand, sit back in the seat, stare at the ceiling. Begin contemplating getting out of here, doing all the crap tomorrow. Ponder what my reception will be in Helensburgh, because no matter how wrong it is to do it, I know I'm not going to be able to stop myself going down there. Uninvited.

*

Of course – because it's the way of things for there to be copious amounts of crap dropped onto the path of life from an enormous height – however shit I imagine I might end up feeling when I get there, it doesn't even begin to wipe the backside of how shit I actually end up feeling. Not a bloody patch.

Evelyn Bathurst looks not unlike Jo.

She parks the car on the road at the bottom of the garden of the large house in Helensburgh, steps out into the rain. Stares at the lights in the house fifty yards away along the driveway, wonders about what she is doing. Shivers, pulls her jacket closer around her.

She locks the car door. Her own car under repair
–
faulty brakes
–
she has borrowed the car from Constable Forsyth, on duty through the night. Forsyth believes that she may repay the favour sometime.

She will not get the chance.

She swings back the gate, feels the beating of her heart. Looks at her watch, wonders if the Superintendent will be at home. A Friday night, not long after ten o'clock. Whatever it is that Miller does, she will find this an unwelcome interruption, with unwelcome information.

Takes a deep breath, tries to calm herself; begins the long walk up the driveway. She has somewhere else to go, someone else to whom she could talk – not that she was going to mention that to Thomas Hutton – but she has decided to come here first. Perhaps she'll move on later. Perhaps not.

Should she have listened to Hutton? But it wasn't Hutton talking, it was her conscience. She had been meaning to do the same thing for the past year. Slowly the desire had worn off. The months will do that to you. But now it was back, born of fear, guilt and self-loathing for what she had been a part of. There was no need to confide in Hutton any further. What he had said earlier in the station had been all that she'd been needing to hear.

Her ponderous steps take her nearer to the house, her stomach crawls with nerves. She wonders if she is about to be dismissed, in the manner she has heard Miller dismiss so many officers in the past. Not as bad as she seems, Hutton had said, and she hopes it is true.

She automatically rings the bell, without a clear thought in her head; moves back from the second step so that she is outwith the meagre protection of the front of the house. The rain soaks her head. She shivers again in the cold. Throat dry, nervous fingers.

The door opens, catching her unaware. She stares into the dim light of the house, feels the rush of warmth. Charlotte Miller stands in front of her. Doesn't recognise Bathurst at first. Miller wears a long, blue silk pyjama top, her legs are bare. Bathurst looks at her skin, smooth and gold in the dim light from behind.

'Constable Bathurst?' she says, surprise in her voice coming with sudden recognition.

Bathurst nods, says nothing. No words. They stare at each other for a few seconds, before either awakes to the other. Miller shakes her head, feels the cold, summons her inside and closes the door behind her.

Bathurst stands in the hall, looking around. Unaware of what her husband does for a living, she wonders what Miller earns as a superintendent to afford such opulence.

'I'm sorry to bother you on a Friday night,' she begins, but Miller stops her with a shake of the head.

'Don't be silly. Take your coat off and I'll get a towel. How long were you standing out there?'

Bathurst thinks of stepping out of the car, seems like an hour ago. Doesn't answer, removes her coat, Miller ushers her into the sitting room.

'I've just got a quick phone call to make, then I'll get the towel,' she says.

She disappears. Evelyn Bathurst stands in the middle of the room, suddenly warm, aware of the dampness of her hair.

*

There was nothing special about the story of the kid walking along the road, bumping the head of a dead baby in the potholes. Fuck, I grant you, it sounds special. It sounds like the kind of thing that doesn't happen every day. But that's just what people think nowadays because most of the population haven't spent time in a war zone.

Previous generations, those bastards were always going to war. That's what they did. Everyone went to war, everyone got used to it, learned to live with all the complete shit you see when you're in that situation. You got home, you coped. If you didn't cope, they locked you up, or you became the guy stuck away in the corner of the village that everyone told their kids to stay away from.

These days, it's all about coping. Society is about the individual. It didn't use to be. It used to be about society functioning as a whole, and if that meant that individuals got shafted to enable society to function, then so be it. These days individuals have the right not to get shafted. Very thoughtful of society to put the individual first, except it's the very reason why society is falling apart.

So everybody hurts and everybody cries and everybody has a story to tell, and this is just me telling mine. Except I don't want to tell it; I don't want to talk. There's so much of it, that if I have to think about it, if someone was ever going to force me to think about it, then by fucking God, I won't just cry, I won't just go quietly fucking mental…

I don't know what I'd do. I just don't want to think about it.

There was nothing special about the kid and the baby with its head bouncing off the road, except it was the only story I told to the psychiatrist I saw a month after I got back from the Balkans.

I sat down, she asked me a couple of questions, I cut her off and told her the bouncing baby's head story, and then before I'd got to the end – although, of course, it's a story that doesn't really have an end – I got up and walked out. I didn't want to tell her any more, and if I wasn't going to talk to her then there was no point in being there.

As I talked, I stared at her throat. She had an unusually large Adam's apple for a woman, and I just stared at it the whole time wondering if she was really a man, or if the Adam's apple wasn't actually all that big and I was exaggerating it in some bizarre attempt to distract myself.

I never saw her again. Looking back, her Adam's apple probably wasn't all that big and she probably wasn't a man.

*

Not much after six a.m. The rain still falls in a steady drizzle, as
Constable Bathurst arrives at the station, leaving Forsyth's Peugeot in the car park, the keys in the exhaust. He will be off duty in a couple of hours. From there she will walk home, a ten minute promenade through wet, deserted streets in the middle of the night.