Darkside

Two Days

As soon as Jonas left in the Land Rover the next morning, Lucy Holly got the number of the mobile unit from Taunton HQ, then called it. When a man picked up, she said she wanted to make a formal complaint about DCI Marvel.

There was a pregnant silence at the other end of the line and Lucy braced herself for a hostile request for her address so that the appropriate form could be sent. She was prepared to argue the toss; she didn’t want an appropriate form; she wanted to drop Marvel in shit right up to his foul, hurtful, bastard mouth.

Instead of turning cold and official, the policeman – who identified himself as DS Reynolds – started to ask her quite pertinent questions, which allowed her to vent in the most satisfying way imaginable. She told Reynolds about Marvel nearly hitting her with the car; she told him how he had snatched the photograph of Jonas from her; she took a deep breath and told him that Marvel had said, ‘Fuck you’ and called her a name.

‘What name?’ asked Reynolds.

‘A horrible name,’ said Lucy.

‘I am writing these things down,’ said Reynolds. ‘It would be helpful if you could be specific.’

There was a pause. ‘He called me an angry cripple.’

Another long silence, which the words expanded to fill.

‘And are you disabled, Mrs Holly?’ asked Reynolds gently.

‘I have MS,’ she told him, filling up unexpectedly. ‘I use sticks to help me walk.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Mrs Holly,’ said DS Reynolds. And Lucy was amazed to hear that he did sound sorry – not just as if he was giving a required response.

It allowed her to collect herself and deliver what she considered to be her pièce de résistance. She told him that throughout the encounter she could smell alcohol on Marvel’s breath.

‘Whiskey?’ inquired DS Reynolds, as if he had some experience of Marvel in drink.

‘No,’ said Lucy. ‘Something sweeter. But definitely alcohol.’

‘And what time was this?’

‘About nine. In the morning.’

DS Reynolds was quiet for a short while and Lucy assumed he was writing. She tried to keep a lid on her optimism; she still had a suspicion that her complaint would disappear into the black hole of Masonic secrecy that she believed held sway among senior officers. But at least she’d said her piece. Even if DS Reynolds now told her that he’d be sending her a complaints form, she’d still had that satisfaction.

But DS Reynolds didn’t say he’d send her a form. Instead he said in a serious voice, ‘Mrs Holly, would you be happy to make a sworn statement about these matters?’

Lucy almost laughed with surprise.

‘Happy?’ she said. ‘I’d be absolutely delirious.’

When Reynolds hung up on Lucy Holly he was actually shaking.

He had the contemporaneous notes in his notebook; he had his private logs, he had his own detailed reports showing that John Marvel was an unprofessional, bullying prick who shouldn’t be left in charge of a chimps’ tea party, let alone a murder inquiry, but until this very moment, he hadn’t had the damning independent evidence that would tip the balance in a disciplinary case against the DCI.

He’d always known it would come. Always. People who behaved like Marvel were on borrowed time. For a start, he knew that Marvel had left the Met under a cloud. Quite what kind of cloud he’d not been able to determine, but the police grapevine had whispered of Marvel squeezing the facts to make them fit a suspect – or squeezing that suspect to make him fit the facts. Reynolds believed it. He would have believed almost anything ill of Marvel. He hated the man’s archaic approach – his reliance on ‘hunches’, his relaxed attitude to procedure, his personal whims and illogical vendettas; his secret drinking – none of these had any place in modern law enforcement.

Since he’d started working with Marvel, Reynolds had been shocked by his fixation on certain ‘suspects’. In Weston last year, Marvel had held a nineteen-year-old homeless man for two days because he’d been near the scene of the crime and ‘looked guilty’. Before that the married boyfriend of a strangled Asian teenager was terrified into a confession which took seconds to collapse once the girl’s father haughtily confessed to the ‘honour’ killing a few days later.

Sure, Marvel did get results – even Reynolds had to admit that – and those results had kept him grudgingly secure ever since he’d left London. There was a kind of inferiority complex going on at the Avon & Somerset force which had allowed the big-city cop to bulldoze his way through conventional practice and on to cases that should have belonged to others. Even senior officers were only human, and – Reynolds knew – most just wanted things to run smoothly. Attempting to rein Marvel in and put him in his place would have taken more effort than any of the current incumbents were prepared to expend – even from behind a desk.

From his place at Marvel’s side, Reynolds had been convinced that the man deserved to be kicked out. But because of Marvel’s constant, dogged results, he’d always known he would also need to get good, sworn, hopefully civilian evidence of serious wrongdoing to bring the man down.

The kind of evidence that Lucy Holly had just dropped into his lap like manna from heaven. The kind of evidence that he could see the Independent Police Complaints Commission putting right at the top of the pile. The disabled wife of a serving officer alleging conduct unbecoming and being drunk on the job.

Superb.

Reynolds signed and dated his notes of the conversation and tucked them neatly into a folder with a sense of self-satisfaction. He was harassed and balding, trying to do his job and Marvel’s, but as soon as he had a spare moment, he would go and see Lucy Holly, take her sworn statement and add it to the rest of the case he had built against his DCI in the past year.

Sergio Leone, eat your heart out.