Mean Spirit

IX

He was driving down through darkened cheshire in a state verging on real fear. The genetic code, Bobby Maiden thought. What if there’s no breaking the genetic code?

He drove along the old A49, over the river — or was it the canal? — with all those iron bridges, towards the southern suburbs of Warrington, which went on for ever.

It was as if the old man was still in the car. Sitting up in the passenger seat, straight as a lamp post, glaring out suspiciously at the desultory night traffic. Noting the speeders and the ones with a brake light not working. Eyeing sullen youths outside an off-licence. Little toerags. Anybody under sixteen out past nine p.m. should be pulled in and banged up for the night. See that woman under the streetlamp, end of that wall? With the red hair? On her own? Bloody brass, tell ’em a mile off. Warn her off now, I would. Respectable people live in them houses.

Yes, Dad.

In the mornings Maiden had taken to looking carefully in the bathroom mirror for signs of his eyes hardening and growing closer together, his lips tightening between deep, disciplinary radials.

Couldn’t see it. Could he?

Every six weeks or so, usually on a Wednesday night if he wasn’t working, Maiden would drive north and take his dad for a meal. Tonight they’d been to this new Beefeater, out towards Irlam.

‘I like a good steak, me,’ Norman Plod had declared, as he always did. ‘Nowt beats a good steak, done rare, for keeping your eyes sharp and your gut tight.’

Then he was staring at his son’s plate with a look of blatant dismay not dissimilar to the one which had bloomed on his hard face that night, many years ago, when Bobby had expressed a wish to go to some nancyfied art college.

‘What the bloody hell’s that? Turning into a bloody rabbit are we, lad?’

‘I had a big lunch, Dad.’

‘Watching our weight, are we? By Christ, policemen eating rabbit food. No wonder it’s not safe to walk the bloody streets.’

‘Stomach’s a bit off, actually,’ Maiden had murmured.

Ashamed at the deceit, but this was not a good time to explain to Norman Plod about becoming a vegetarian.

In fact, there never was going to be a good time, was there?

‘Too much ale, eh?’ Norman looked up, lips wet with bloodied gravy. He winked. ‘I know what it’s like when the lads get together after a fine result, a grand collar.’

Maiden had been telling Norman about the neat smack circuit which Elham CID had broken after two weeks of freezing nights with a video camera on a church tower overlooking the Redbarn estate.

‘Excellent stuff. It’s just a bloody shame Mr Riggs weren’t there to see it,’ Norman said.

Meaning Superintendent Martin Riggs, now early retired.

‘Mmm,’ Maiden said, non-committally.

Norman had met Riggs just once, while visiting his son in hospital. But he’d followed the newspaper reports, read between the lines, knew Riggs was Old Force and his lad’d had the best boss he could wish for in these slack times.

‘Because’, Norman said, stoking his mouth with steak, the Brylcreem shining on his fuse-wire hair, ‘whichever way you look at it, busting them bastards — that were a direct result of the Riggs regime. Tight as a drum. Zero bloody tolerance. No little toerag shifted a bag of pills without Mr Riggs knew about it.’

‘Mmm,’ Bobby Maiden said.

How very true that was.

He’s gone. All right? He got out. You dropped him off at his bungalow half an hour ago.

But the smell of Brylcreem remained, half-manifesting the ghost of Norman Plod. Once a copper, always a copper. I’ll be seeing you, lad — Norman’s familiar finger-wagging warning to the toerags. Maiden almost snatched a glance in the driving mirror just to make sure that it wasn’t Norman’s eyes glaring back.

Norman Maiden: still very much alive, but his glowering ghost was following Bobby Maiden around. And getting closer? Bobby was thirty-eight years old; at what age did you start turning into your father?

While they were parked in front of the bungalow, Norman had asked his son, ‘They told you who’s replacing him yet? Mr Riggs? Likely one of them shiny-arsed, university fast-trackers, am I right?’

Maiden had told him how, in the light of Riggs’s sudden retirement, there’d been some reorganization in Elham Division. From now on, there wouldn’t be a Superintendent based at Elham; there’d be a Chief Inspector over the uniforms and for the first time — an experiment — an acting DCI in charge of CID.

On the way up here, he’d thought he might discuss this in greater depth with his dad. In the end he couldn’t face it.

It took him just over an hour to drive back to Elham. A diversion, due to the laying of new water pipes under the ring road, brought him into town past the General Hospital.

He found himself turning in between the two white lamps.

Just like …

… the old days.

The sprog coppers hanging round, drinking Sister Anderson’s strong coffee — these wee cops often smelling of vomit, arising from that first severed head on the hard shoulder or the fried child on the burnt-out back seat.

Casualty: where young coppers and young nurses met at moments of high stress, a great aphrodisiac. Casualty was a government-funded dating agency.

Wasn’t quite the same these days, mind, now that man-hours were rationed and the police had their own counselling service — which, of course, took a whole lot more out of the police budget than Sister Andy’s coffee cost the Health Service.

She closed the door against the warm blast of Accident and Emergency, sat down at her desk and motioned Bobby Maiden to the spare plastic-backed chair. Looked him over for signs of damage.

‘And there was me thinking it was all coming together for you, Bobby.’

‘And me thinking you were leaving to become an alternative practitioner down at St Mary’s,’ Bobby Maiden said.

He sipped at the coffee and winced. Andy smiled. Still killer stuff, eh?

‘It’ll happen,’ she said. ‘One day soon, I’ll be just a memory here. A grating Glaswegian growl in the night. A stale smell of high-tar smoke in the lavvy.’

Bobby shook his head. ‘You hate this place far too much ever to leave.’

‘Jesus God,’ Andy said. ‘This is what the psychological profiler course did for you, is it?’

He smiled ruefully. ‘What the psychological profiler course did is far worse than that.’

‘Oh?’ Andy peered into his eyes. The boy had been looking so much better lately, too, the brain-stem problem maybe causing less numbness. She could tell he still had some pain over the eye, though.

‘It put me in direct line for promotion.’

‘Oh aye?’

‘So they’ve offered me acting DCI.’

‘Acting?’

‘Eventual permanence implied.’

Andy thought about this. ‘That would be more of a desk job, right?’

Bobby nodded grimly.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘for a start, you should try and have your desk facing east and make sure you’ve no’ got a door at your back.’

‘Feng shui?’

‘Welsh style. Cindy Mars-Lewis dropped in while you were away and rearranged ma furniture. I’m a much calmer person now, is that no’ apparent?’

‘He’s been here?’

‘Just passing through. He was sorry tae miss you, Bobby.’

So they talked for a while about Cindy’s new fame on the Lottery Show. Bobby had only seen him the once. Andy said she was amazed how the guy kept getting away with it.

‘Stands up there and attacks everything the Lottery stands for. Rails at the audience for their greed. Warns them it’ll all end in tears. No’ him, of course, it’s the bird. How dare you say that, Kelvyn? Back in the case for you!’ Andy chuckled. ‘Audience loves him. I reckon even the boss guys at the BBC believe, in some weird, subliminal way, that they are two separate personalities, him and that bird.’

‘Shamanism,’ Bobby said thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if they know.’

‘Ach, it wouldnae matter a damn — he’s got the charm tae carry it off. Just like nobody ever asks about his sexuality and gets a satisfactory answer. So … does acting DCI give you a key to the executive washroom or are you still standing side by side with the guys figuring tae shaft you?’

Oh aye, Andy remembered Riggs. And all the things you couldn’t say about him, not out loud.

The one time Andy had actually met the Superintendent, he was urgently looking for Bobby. Because Riggs knew that Bobby knew. About Riggs.

And about Tony Parker, the ‘businessman’. Friend of Riggs from London, invited to Elham to ‘regularize’ a rather ‘chaotic’ drugs scene. Tony’s new system offering small dealers two simple options: either shelter under the Parker umbrella or get yourself very swiftly shopped to the police — thus providing the new chief with a terrific clean-up rate and a wonderful reputation in no time at all.

That broad, beaming face in the local paper week after week. Guest speaker at the Rotary Club. Guest of honour at the Magistrates’ Association dinner. And a copper’s copper, too, always popular with the troops. Excepting Bobby Maiden. Bobby had known Riggs from when he was with the Met. Known what he was.

Now Tony Parker was dead — natural causes — and Riggs had taken early retirement and calmly walked away before any of the shit could reach the Vent-Axia.

‘Where is he now, Bobby?’ Andy poured herself a killer coffee. ‘Tax exile on the Costa del Crime?’

‘Oh, no. Worcester. You heard of Forcefield Security?’

Andy shook her head. ‘They on the level?’

‘Far as I know, absolutely reputable.’ Bobby sighed. ‘Riggs is executive director. Nothing like a distinguished retired senior police officer to bestow that aura of tough respectability.’

‘Is there no bloody justice, Bobby? That scumbag tried tae have you killed. What about the guys close to him? Beattie?’

‘Still in there. And a few others. You can tell who they are. They’re the ones keep a formal space between you and them. They call you “sir” instead of “boss”.’

No doubt blaming Bobby for having to live off their pay packets again. So now he was going to have to organize guys who saw him as having profited from Riggs’s downfall while their own personal finances had taken a tumble. Who needed that?

‘Can you no’ apply for a transfer?’

Shook his head. ‘Not so soon after being virtually offered promotion. Obviously, I’d like to get out altogether, but what would I do?’ Still shaking his head, the old injury affected by the hard fluorescent light. ‘Sorry, Andy, I didn’t intend to burden you with this. I was just … passing. Just had supper with the old man. Who thinks Riggs was God.’

‘You never told him the truth?’

‘Like he’d believe me?’

‘These other guys know you’ve been offered the job? Beattie?’

‘I don’t know.’

Sister Andy sighed. It was a terrible indictment of how isolated Bobby was in this scrappy, bent little Midlands town. In his personal life too. Mother dead in a road accident when he was a kiddie. Some years divorced now from Lizzie Turner, the avaricious wee nurse he’d met as a sprog cop, on this very ward. And then there was Em, who was funny and smart and would have been so very right for him, had she not become the penultimate victim of the psycho-killer calling himself the Green Man. That whole episode, coming so soon after the personal death experience, throwing Bobby clean off his axis.

It was flattering to think he came back here because of Andy, as some kind of tough mother-figure. More likely he kept returning because this was where his heart stopped and was restarted. Where he’d died and where his second life began.

‘So, how long before you officially start as DCI?’

‘Acting.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘About three weeks,’ Bobby said. He had some leave owing. Was thinking he might go away for a few days.

‘On your own?’

He shrugged. Said he could do some painting. Find a lonely shore. Solway Firth or somewhere. Get really cold and wet and miserable.

Andy had one of Bobby’s paintings in her house. Sea and sky merging in shades of flat grey. The work of a guy who was always looking for the vanishing point. Most people, they had a near-death experience, they became born-again Christians or just wandered around in the warm glow of knowing there was something else. Bobby Maiden had to be difficult.

‘Just a thought,’ she said. ‘Would you no’ like to go spend a few days at Marcus Bacton’s place?’

Andy’s office door opened, Nurse Kirsty Brady’s big face in the gap. ‘Mr Trilling …?’ Brady made a face. The wee nurses were all a little scared of Mr Trilling.

‘Aye, I’m coming,’ Andy said. ‘Hey, give it a thought, Bobby. I believe, ah … I gather the wee American girl’s back.’

‘Grayle?’

‘Trying to put The Vision to rights.’

Bobby Maiden rolled his eyes. ‘Then she’s got enough problems.’

Because he never thought he’d stay long in Elham, he was still living in the same apartment in this grimy Victorian heap in Old Church Street. One day they’d extend the bypass and the Victorian block would vanish.

The flat wasn’t much more than a studio now. He liked it smelling of paints. He liked having the work in progress, a triptych of big canvases, covering a whole wall. Another life in progress.

The sequence was coming together from drawings he’d done, photos he’d taken, the last time he was down at St Mary’s — the three canvases joining up to show the line of the Black Mountains at dawn under mist. The point being that, viewed from St Mary’s, the Black Mountains were featureless, a long bank. But the whole of Wales lay behind them.

He remembered what it was like going up there with Cindy Mars-Lewis. Cindy with his Celtic shaman’s drum and his shaman’s cloak of feathers — ridiculous and yet unexpectedly dramatic, a big bird against the skyline. Cindy starting to chant, and it was like he’d thrown his voice into the mountains.

Meeting place (THUMP)

Meeting place (THUMP)

Here the Sky

Here the Earth

HEAR the Earth

Meeting place (THUMP, THUMP)

A weird bloke in a bird suit stirring up primeval forces. Now also the man with the big-money balls. Bizarre.

Maiden unlocked the communal front door, entering the hallway. Keeping the keys in hand as he strolled across to the door of his ground-floor flat. And found he didn’t need any keys for this one.

OK, he wasn’t expecting it — was anybody, ever? — but it was no big, devastating shock to find the door of his flat splintered again, all around the lock.

The first time this happened to you, even as a copper, you felt sick, invaded. You were never going to settle until you’d seen the bastards in court. The second time, it was a profound inconvenience but it didn’t keep you awake.

This was the fourth time. Maiden felt weary. There was nothing worth stealing in there, except the portable TV and the CD-player. Three hundred quid the lot.

Still, he went carefully. One time, they’d still been inside. A steel toecap had messed up his left eye.

He kicked open the door and stepped back into the hallway.

Nothing. Maiden was sure he could somehow tell these days if a place was empty, that he could sense a presence. He walked in and switched on the lights. Stood in the doorway and looked around.

Nothing. Everything as it was. The CD-player on its shelf, the TV on its stand over by the bricked-up fireplace.

He went back to look at the door. Unsubtle. A crowbar job. There would have been some noise involved, unavoidable, but it didn’t look as though they’d cared. Five flats in the building, but two of them empty. Students in the others, out most nights.

But why? What was the point? They hadn’t even turned the place over. He went back in, kicking something which skittered across the boards and finished up on the rug.

Stanley knife with the blade out. He didn’t touch it.

He looked across at the wall with the three canvases hanging on it.

Stood gazing at the joined-up picture for nearly a minute.

They must have spent quite some time on it, because the lettering was quite regular, spread over all three canvases, each letter about three inches high, carved out of the misty flank of the Black Mountains.

It looked like the Hollywood sign.

It said

CONGRATULATIONS SIR