Читать книгу A Bad Bad Thing - Elena Forbes - Страница 11

They walked together without another word into the village, Kershaw’s large black umbrella sheltering them both, his driver following slowly behind in the car. It was the first time she had seen him on his own since she had been suspended and the silence was awkward. Their working relationship had been relatively good, as far as it went, but the idea of a quiet drink, just the two of them, had an ominous feel.

The Cricketers’ Arms was the first pub they came to and she followed Kershaw inside into the main bar, which was still almost empty.

‘What’ll you have?’ he asked, as he placed his dripping umbrella in the stand by the door.

‘Coffee, if they have it, please. With a little milk.’

‘Nothing stronger?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Of course, I forgot, you don’t drink.’

She was surprised that he remembered, although in the after-hours heavy drinking culture of the Met, a non-drinker stood out like a beacon. He strode up to the bar, while she chose a table by the open fire. She caught sight of herself in the oval, brass mirror above the mantelpiece and grimaced. Her hair had been turned into a mass of stupid curls by the rain and her face looked pasty and drawn, with dark shadows under her eyes. She took a rubber band out of her bag and scraped back her hair, applied a thin layer of lipstick to her dry lips, then turned her back to the fire, trying to soak up as much of the meagre heat as she could. Seeing Kershaw returning with their drinks, she pulled up a chair and sat down.

‘This should warm you up,’ he said morosely, plonking a cup of milky coffee in front of her. ‘You look drowned.’

He put a full tumbler of what looked like whisky and soda down on the table and sank heavily into a leather armchair opposite. He ran a hand quickly over his thick, greying hair, and leaned back in his seat. He loosened his tie and undid his top button.

‘That’s better.’ He reached for his glass, took a mouthful, then shook his head. ‘I never dreamt you’d come to the funeral, otherwise I’d have said something. You must’ve known it was a bloody stupid thing to do, surely?’

His roughly hewn face, with its square, pugnacious jaw, glowed in the firelight. Although he spoke quietly, she sensed anger close to the surface and made no reply. With Kershaw, silence was often the best policy. Let him run, get things off his chest and eventually he’d calm down. He stretched his long legs out in front of him and gazed into the flames for a moment, then glanced over at her.

‘Why come here, when chances are you’d be seen? I’ve been trying to cool things down, put the lawyers back in their sodding boxes, keep everything under wraps and let the grieving widow have her day. I’ve done everything I can to limit the fallout to you, and to us. Then you turn up, with that effing reporter in tow, and all hell breaks loose again.’ He took another large gulp, then caught her eye again over the edge of his tumbler. ‘You’re reckless. Like you just don’t care about the consequences. Either to yourself or anybody else. Same with the shooting. You have to take everything to the bloody line. All the bloody time.’ He sighed heavily, still looking at her. ‘You baffle me, Eve. You know that? You could’ve got yourself killed.’ He raised his eyebrows, as though expecting a reply.

What could she say? The thought that she might have been killed, meant nothing, but he wouldn’t understand. She had worked for him for nearly twelve months and had always found him fair and relatively straightforward to deal with. From what she had heard, he had stood up for her, as far as he could, after the shooting and she wished things hadn’t turned out this way. Although barely fifty, he was heading towards retirement in a few months and had been anticipating a smooth ride. Instead, he and his team were now under the spotlight of a major internal investigation, with all the ensuing questions and political ramifications. She had compromised him and for that she was sorry.

‘Nick Walsh is nothing to do with me. I haven’t talked to him or anyone else and I had no idea he’d follow me here.’

He leaned forwards. ‘Don’t be so bloody naïve. They’re all over this like the pox, trying to dig up the dirt. I don’t need you giving them more ammo by creating a scene.’

‘I didn’t create a scene. I didn’t mean for anyone to see me.’

‘Really?’ He slammed his glass back down on the table, making the teaspoon on her saucer jingle, and looked at her searchingly. ‘Did you think you owed it to Jason to be there, is that it? Is that why you came?’

‘Owed?’

‘Felt you ought to be here.’

‘There’s no “ought” about it.’

‘Why, then?’

She met his eye. Did he really imagine that she could have sat at home, on her own, while the funeral took place, as if it had nothing to do with her? As if Jason had meant nothing to her? Standing in the churchyard, seeing Jason’s body carried high on the shoulders of his friends and fellow officers and put in the ground, mattered. The image of it would stay with her forever, along with the knowledge that it was her fault.

He was still looking at her. ‘Well?’

‘I just wanted to say goodbye. That’s all.’

The contours of his face softened a little. ‘Whatever you felt for Jason, you must’ve known it was a bad idea, with his wife and family there, with the press and all that shit.’

Jason’s marriage had been a sham and most of the people there, including Kershaw, knew it. But there was no point arguing. ‘I told you, I didn’t think I’d be seen.’

Kershaw narrowed his small, brown eyes and shook his head. ‘You just don’t bloody well care. That’s the problem.’

He scraped back his chair a couple of feet away from the fire, which was burning well now, the flames leaping high up the chimney, and took out a dazzling white cotton handkerchief from his breast pocket and mopped his brow.

‘Are you alright?’ he asked, carefully refolding the handkerchief and tucking it back in his pocket.

The question took her by surprise, as well as the note of concern in his voice. ‘About Jason, or the enquiry?’

‘I meant about Jason, but either will do.’

‘I’ll be OK. About Jason, that is.’

He was looking at her searchingly and she saw confusion in his eyes. She ought to feel more, demonstrate more, but the perennial numbness was there. She couldn’t cry or grieve in the way he expected, although she felt a deep, gaping pit of guilt and she missed Jason more than she cared to think about.

He leaned forwards towards her. ‘Are you having counselling?’

‘They gave me a number. But I don’t need it at the moment.’

She could tell from his expression that she still wasn’t reacting the way he expected, but she wasn’t going to pretend. She didn’t need therapy. She had had enough of it to last her a lifetime, although Kershaw wasn’t to know. What was the point of examining and re-examining every detail, reliving each terrible moment, when all she wanted to do was to forget? Whatever the experts said, endless picking away at a wound prevented it from healing. There were better ways of dealing with grief and pain and guilt. She would manage on her own.

‘You sure about that?’

‘Really, I’ll be fine,’ she said firmly, hoping he would stop probing.

He stared at her, then gave a curt nod in reply and sank back in his chair, eyes fixed gloomily on the fire.

‘Is there any news about the shooting?’ she asked after a moment. It was all that mattered.

He picked a white thread off his suit trousers, examined it between his fingers, then dropped it onto the floor. ‘Nothing concrete yet. We found the weapon a few streets away. Ballistics have linked it to an on-going investigation in Hoxton with Eastern European connections. But that’s no surprise. We’ve had to release the girl who was with them in the flat. She doesn’t know anything. The chief suspect got clean away, along with two other men. We think they’re all part of the same Ukranian mob.’

‘What about Liam Betts?’

‘Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him.’

‘He was never there.’

He jerked his head around towards her. ‘Of course he bloody wasn’t. Your info was shit.’

‘It’s more than that. I think it was a set-up.’

‘Come again?’

‘Someone set me up. Someone deliberately planted the info that Betts was going to be at that house, knowing that I’d fall for it and walk into the middle of whatever was going on.’

He frowned, as though it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. ‘Really? This what you’re going to say at the disciplinary hearing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Unless you got proof, it’s not going to fly.’

‘I’ll get the proof.’

He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t alter the fact that you went against orders trying to find Betts.’

‘But I’m sure Betts knows something about the Highbury shooting.’

‘And I told you to bloody well leave Betts alone.’ Kershaw’s voice carried across the room and a couple of people looked around.

‘That was to do with something completely different. As you know, I tried several times to get hold of you.’

He glanced over at the bar, where a couple were having a heated discussion. His phone had been switched off for a quite a while. It wasn’t the first time that he had been unaccountably out of contact. The rumour was that he had a mistress, who he was seeing on a regular basis during office hours and after. If necessary, she would make sure it came out at the disciplinary hearing why she hadn’t been able to get hold of him. The Met had been her world for nearly fifteen years and she wasn’t going to let it go without a fight.

‘When I couldn’t find you,’ she said pointedly, ‘I asked Superintendent Johnson and he gave me the OK.’

He looked back at her angrily. ‘He says he didn’t.’

‘He’s lying.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘To cover his arse, like he always does.’

‘There’s nothing on record.’

‘There wasn’t time.’

He took a small bottle of pills from his jacket pocket, swallowed a couple, and washed them down with the remains of the whisky, then he banged the glass down on the table in front of him.

‘You say Jason gave you the info, but you’ve no idea where he got it from, right?’

‘Yes, but I intend to find out. And whoever did it, needs to pay.’

‘You’ll do no such thing. You leave it alone. You’re in enough trouble as it is.’

‘So it doesn’t make any difference if I was set up? It certainly does to me.’

He leaned forward towards her across the table. She could smell the whisky on his breath.

‘OK. Maybe someone wanted you to fuck up, or maybe they wanted to screw up the surveillance operation and they used you as bait, but it all sounds farfetched.’

‘Doesn’t mean it’s not possible.’

‘But you have no idea where the info came from, do you?’

‘No. Not yet.’

‘Look at it this way – the way the panel at your disciplinary hearing will look at it. You go off on a fool’s errand in search of an informant who’s officially off limits, who you’ve been told to leave alone—’

‘As I said, I tried several times to call you and I got clearance to go ahead …’

He shook his head angrily. ‘You take with you a fellow officer, your subordinate, a married bloke, who—’

‘My relationship with Jason’s irrelevant.’

He held up his huge hand. ‘Let me finish. I’m making no moral judgements here. Jason Scott was no saint, but you were his superior and it doesn’t help your PR. So, you take your sergeant with you and together you blunder into the midst of a major potential drugs bust. Two months’ worth of expensive surveillance down the toilet, chief suspect’s out the door and probably out of the country too, and your sergeant dead. And now I’ve got to take the flak from above.’

‘I wasn’t to know.’

‘Yes you bloody well were. As I said, you just don’t care. That’s your problem, and now it’s bloody well mine too.’ He glanced at his watch and stood up. ‘You have to put up your hand and take the blame.’ He stabbed the air with his index finger several times for emphasis. ‘Don’t go wasting your time and energies on some fanciful idea that you were set up. And keep out of the bloody limelight. I’ll do all I can to support you, but don’t go pulling any more stupid stunts like the one today. Right?’