Child's Play

Chapter 12

The man who claimed to be Alexander Lomas Huby moved in the bed and the woman by his side thought: Christ! the bastard’s coming up for the third time! But she’d been paid generously for the whole night and like a good professional began to arrange her limbs for the onslaught.

Instead the man rolled out of the bed and began to get dressed. Immediately her suspicions were roused. They had settled a price for the whole night, but he’d only paid half in advance.

‘Where’re you going,’ she demanded.

‘I have an appointment,’ he said. ‘I will be back.’

He spoke excellent English but with an intonation which suggested it was not his main language.

‘Bit late for an appointment, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Must be nearly midnight.’

He pulled his shirt round his body. A fillet of scar tissue punctuated with small dimples ran diagonally across his right ribcage and round into the small of his back. She’d run her hands along it and commented, ‘National Health appendix, was it, love?’ but he hadn’t joined in her laugh.

‘How do I know you’ll be back?’ she asked.

She didn’t think of him as dangerous. Some men gave off a feeling of menace, of a personality delicately balanced, and she’d got no such vibrations here. But you never could tell and her hand under the pillow was gripping the heavy cosh she kept tucked between the mattress and the bedhead. She bought herself a measure of protection against general hassle by fucking that long gangling community copper every Tuesday, but that meant nothing here and now. A girl had to look out for herself.

He was fully dressed now and came to the bedside. Her muscles tensed. She should have got out of bed as soon as he did. On her feet she might have a chance. Recumbent, even with the cosh, she was almost completely vulnerable. He reached out a hand. She prepared to scream and strike.

He caressed her shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry. You will get your money. See, I leave my grip in your care. I will be back in one hour, two perhaps. Then we will ride the dolphin again.’

She rose as soon as she heard the door close and went to the window. She saw him under the streetlamp below, getting into the old green Escort he had brought her home in from the pub. She watched it move away down the quiet street, flashing to turn left at the junction with the main road.

She bent down and pulled his grip from under the bed. The zip fastened with a lock. It would probably be easy to force it with a knife, but it wasn’t worth it, not when he was coming back.

There was a noise in the bedroom and Wield was instantly awake. He reached out and snapped the bedside light on. The boy was standing in the door. He was completely naked and the soft light gave his skin the glow of dark gold honey.

‘What do you want?’ asked the sergeant with a thickness in his voice he tried to disguise as sleep.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ said Cliff sullenly.

‘I could,’ said Wield. ‘Make yourself some cocoa.’

‘You know what? This is fucking stupid,’ said the boy.

‘You’re right. Close the door as you leave.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Mac, what’s the matter with you? I’ve been sleeping on that sodding couch for a fortnight now!’

Wield pushed himself upright.

‘What are you trying to say, lad. See anything you fancy, big boy? is that it?’

‘Well, don’t you? I’m young, I’ve got needs too. You’ve let me stay here, we seem to get on pretty well. You can’t blame me if I wonder where it’s all leading.’

Wield ran his fingers through his thick crinkly hair.

‘Me too,’ he said wearily.

He should have given him his marching orders as soon as he’d talked to Maurice. He should have put the fear of God into him, then slipped him some spending money and his ticket back to London. It wasn’t a permanent solution but at least it would have bought time. Time to make decisions in his own way, under his own control, with no external pressure. It was a matter of dignity.

And then he thought: Dignity? Crap! It was just another excuse to do nothing, to continue in this dull limbo which he had chosen to inhabit for God knows how many years. He recalled again that first moment when he had heard Cliff’s voice on the telephone, the sense of shock and of threat; had there not also been a tremor of delight at what was perhaps the first intimation of liberation?

He looked at the young body and yearned for it. See anything you fancy? He had parodied the gay come-on savagely but the answer was yes, oh yes!

And why not? What would be changed if he pushed back the sheets and held out his arms.

‘What’s your hang-up anyway, Mac? Scared of AIDS, is it? Or are you saving yourself for the Chief Constable?’

The lad had blown it. Like an inexperienced interrogator, he had pressed hard when all that was required was silence. Wield let the detumescent anger sweep over him.

‘Listen, you little bastard,’ he said with measured savagery. ‘I know all about you and your nasty little mind. You’re a thief and a liar and you probably fancy your hand at blackmail too. And don’t look all falsely accused and innocent, I’m used to that kind of ham acting, remember? Did you imagine I wouldn’t check up on you? I know what you got up to in London, sonny. And all that crap about hitchhiking and just happening to get dropped here! You bought a bus ticket, son. This was your destination, and I was your mark.’

‘That’s what you think, is it?’ cried Sharman. ‘That’s what you think?’

‘No. That’s what I know,’ said Wield wearily.

‘Then fuck you, Sergeant. Fuck you!’

He turned and rushed out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

Wield listened for a while. Then he put out the light and pulled the sheet up over his chin. But it was a long time before he could get to sleep.

Neville Watmough lay awake beside his wife who was also awake because her husband’s wakefulness was never a restful thing. On the other hand, to ask him why he was awake would merely be to invite the answer that he wasn’t till she had woken him with her wittering.

It is not an easy thing to be married to an ambitious man. His mind is a turbulent sea of plans and projects, of policy and strategy, of deep thought and high aspiration. So Mrs Watmough told herself, trying as usual to bury her chronic irritation in her chronic humility and get back to sleep.

Meanwhile Watmough’s ferret-like mind pursued the bobtail thoughts which had been scuttling around his head ever since his lunch with Ogilby.

Who was the poofter in CID?

He had headed back to his office and dug out the files. Like many another middle-aged, provincial, professional man who had picked up enough modern jargon to get by pretty well in the here-and-now, his intellectual and moral roots were firmly anchored in that stratum of history where eighteenth-century evangelism had fossilized into Victorian respectability. Some truths seemed immutable. One was that a homosexual would most likely be a young bachelor of artistic temperament who frequented unisex hair salons and wore very pungent aftershave. Unable to find many on the CID strength who fitted this profile, he sought further guidance in the big bookcase behind his desk which contained, besides the conventional official tomes, the literary relicts of several of his predecessors, preserved because he felt that the crowded bookshelves added a certain ton to the ambience of his office.

As half remembered, there was a volume there on Sexual Deviancy. He opened it and began to read. To his horror, instead of narrowing things down, it opened up new and dreadful vistas. Oscar Wilde, he discovered with amazement, had been a respectable married man with two children.

This meant the bastard he was looking for was as likely to be married as not!

Nor, it appeared, was it something you grew out of. So it could be a man of some seniority, with a wife. This widened the field considerably. Of course, no woman would knowingly put up with such a husband. Mrs Wilde had sought a divorce when the truth emerged. So it could be a senior CID officer whose wife had divorced him with some acrimony …

Dalziel!

Oh, please God, if I must be given this burden to bear, let it be Dalziel!

Alas for Watmough, he was not a man blessed with a high, creative imagination. He could manage to conjure up various future triumphs in his career such as turning down the Commissionership because he had been offered a safe Parliamentary seat, or accepting an invitation to be the SDP Home Secretary in a coalition government, but his fancy balked at dressing Dalziel in a frilly blouse with a green carnation behind his ear.

But Pascoe now. That was quite different. Married with a child, yes, but that was, according to his recent reading, a matter almost of confirmatory evidence. He dressed smartly but often in that casual linen-safari-jacketed kind of way which Watmough had always found irritating and now found suspicious. Interested in books, plays, music; university educated and, through his wife, preserving links with the academic world; and wasn’t there sometimes just the discreetest whiff of lily-of-the-valley or some such stuff wafting off him as he passed by?

It all fitted perfectly; or rather, he could see no evidence to the contrary. It did not occur to him to wonder what evidence to the contrary might look like, though, in fairness, having had much to do with anonymous phone calls during his career, it did occur that it would probably all turn out to be nothing in the end.

So long as it didn’t turn out to be something in the next few days!

Meanwhile he’d keep a close eye on Detective-Inspector Pascoe. There was something about the way he laughed. And didn’t he walk funny …?

So Deputy Chief Constable Watmough let his restless mind worry him into wakefulness. And other players in this as yet uncertain drama woke and watched who would rather have slept and forgotten. Peter Pascoe nursed his restless daughter and told her the story of his life. Ruby Huby turned in bed and did not find her husband, but never doubted that he sat below in the darkened bar, soothing his chronic anxieties with a rich-fumed pipe. Sarah Brodsworth strained her eyes in the darkness and saw again the inquisitive, doubting face of Henry Vollans and heard his probing questions and knew he was an obstacle to be overcome, or removed. Rod Lomas too watched and waited and felt himself grow angrier with each minute of waiting and watching. Miss Keech heard noises, Andrew Goodenough heard an outrageous proposal, Eileen Chung heard an obscene phone call, Stephanie Windibanks heard heavy breathing, Lexie Huby heard a motor-car, and Superintendent Dalziel heard the late, late film.

It was, as most nights are, a night more full of fear than hope, of doubt than certainty, of pain than comfort. Mothers and fathers worried about their children; husbands and wives worried about each other; and sons and daughters worried about themselves. But not all and not equally, for children are unfathomable, unforecastable, in their treatment of parents. It is not always hatred that makes a daughter long to leave her family.

And it is not always love that brings a son back home.