Ordinary Thunderstorms

22

THE TARGA CRUISED INTO the new steel jetty at Phoenix Stairs and Rita sprang ashore and figure-eighted the mooring rope around the big cleat on the jetty edge. Joey threw her the stern rope and she secured it. It had been a quiet day on the river. They had taken a diver from the Underwater Search Team down to a wharf in Deptford to investigate a potential submerged dead body — but it turned out to be three weighted sacks of rubbish. Then they’d intercepted a barge coming down river from Twickenham with inadequate paper work and passed on the details to the Thames Harbourmaster’s office. Finally they had checked in with the RNLI station at Lifeboat Pier on the Victoria Embankment, collected the inflatable pathway they had borrowed and had a cup of tea. Almost a pleasure cruise, she thought: sunny day, out on the water, what could be nicer? She asked Joey if he could go to the end-of-day debriefing as she wanted an urgent word with Sergeant Rollins.

“Any news, Sarge?” she said, when she found him in his tiny office in Portakabin 3, next to the humming, refrigerated mortuary in Portakabin 4. You could hear the unit through the wall: she wouldn’t like her office next to a morgue, that’s for sure. She was trying to seem merely casually interested, trying to keep the eagerness out of her voice.

“Yeah. They let him go.”

“What?”

Rollins shrugged, spread his hands. “That’s all I know. Kept him in overnight. Home free in the morning.”

“Let him go? No charge?” Rita felt a strange shock in her, an emptiness: this was the last thing she expected.

“You’ll have to go up Chelsea, Nashe. Find out what happened. You’re no longer required as arresting officer. There is no case.”

“He was carrying, for god’s sake. Two weapons and a six-inch blade. No ID. What’s going on?”

“An open-and-shut, I’d’ve thought, but there you go. There must be a reason.” He smiled fondly at her. “You’ll just have to arrest somebody else now, darling.”

“Please don’t call me ‘darling’, sergeant.”

♦

When she went off duty, Rita took the Tube up to Chelsea police station to find out if she could discover any answers. Sergeant Duke wasn’t on that night but she saw Gary going down a corridor, called and went after him.

“Hey, Rita,” he said, looking her up and down. “You all right? Looking lovely, as per. Great party, by the way.”

“What’re you doing here?”

“Just popped up from Belgravia. Paper work.”

She looked around, making sure no one could overhear. “We called in last night. Guy we arrested at Chelsea Bridge — two guns on him, no ident, wouldn’t talk, not a word. I came up here with him myself, filled in the IRB, then we handed him over to CID. Job done. Now, I just heard they let him go. What the fuck’s going on? Any idea?”

Gary looked up and down the corridor. “Yeah, I heard…” He tapped the side of his nose. “It was one of those calls, you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

He lowered his voice. “Someone very high up in the Met rings up: “Let this bloke go now — I take full responsibility.” That kind of number.”

“What’s that meant to mean?”

“Some sort of covert surveillance thing you surprised. MI5. Anti-terrorist. I don’t know. He’s obviously well connected, your Chelsea Bridge bloke.”

“I’m not going to let this go.”

“OK — See that wall there? Just bash your head against it for an hour or two. You’ll get the picture. Leave it, Rita — it’s way, way over our pay-scale.”

She paced up and down the corridor, thinking.

“I miss you, Rita.”

“Tough.”

“I was a fool. Tosser. I admit it.”

“Too late, Gary.”

“We could have a drink, couldn’t we?”

♦

They went to a bar near the station — a pseudo-Spanish tapas place but with nice music. Gary continued his pleas to be forgiven and she half listened, still troubled by what had taken place, still angry in an unfocussed way, thinking back to what had happened the night before in that patch of waste ground by the bridge.

She’d gone straight to the clearing and had started searching, Joey and the other two shining torches here and there, when this man had reared up from behind a bush, giving her a shock, his hands raised above his head. “You got me,” was all he said. She searched him, found the weapons, arrested him and officially cautioned him, cuffed him and called the Chelsea boys for a couple of area cars. The man never said anything more, had no ID on him, wouldn’t give his name, was very calm. When she had pushed him into the back of the car he had turned to her suddenly as if he was about to say something before clearly stopping himself. Their faces had been close. Big, ugly bloke, weak chin with a deep cleft in it. Gary was still talking.

“Sorry, I was miles away,” she said. “So, what’s new? Any more Chelsea murders?”

“Not since your last rumble.”

“How’s it going?”

“About to close it down, I reckon — nothing, nada. Still got a murder room in Belgravia. Just a couple of DCs, a file and a phone line. For form’s sake, you know.”

“No sign of Kindred?”

He shrugged. “Kindred is either dead or being sheltered by friends and family.”

“I thought he had no friends or family in this country.”

“I reckon he topped himself.” Gary reached into his jacket pocket for a cigarette, then put the box back in his pocket, remembering he couldn’t smoke in pubs any more.

“You put out a reward like that,” he said, “that big — a hundred grand — you get a thousand calls. I think we got twenty-seven — all nutters. Then it dried up completely — he must be dead.”

“Or gone abroad,” she said. “Fled the country.”

He wasn’t interested, she could see. He reached for her hand. “I’d like to see you again, Rita. I miss you.”

♦

Rita climbed up the gangway to the Bellerophon, deliberately stamping her feet, and saw the glowing end of her father’s joint arc out from the stern into the water. He had a can of Speyhawk in his hand.

“Hi, Dad — nice and mellow?”

“I’ve been mellower, but I’m not complaining. Ernesto’s down below — you’re late.”

They had supper together — pizza, salad, apple pie — a monthly date that Rita insisted on and that they mostly kept. Once a month, she said, they should meet as a family and have a meal, share food and wine. She and Ernesto never talked about their mother, Jayne — Jeffs ex-wife — now living, as far as any of them knew, in Saskatchewan, Canada, re-married, to an unknown man, but Rita liked to think that the very fact that the rest of the Nashe family gathered together like this meant she was a ghostly presence — their pointed not-mentioning her making her all the more there, somehow. Rita wrote her a letter from time to time but she never replied — but she knew that Ernesto always received a card on his birthday and an occasional telephone call. But nothing for Rita, though, because Rita had chosen Jeff — Ernesto had been too young so he was forgiven. It was all misunderstandings and bad feelings and it made her sad if she thought about it too much: still, at least here the three of them were, having a meal.

“Busy, Ernesto?”Jeff Nashe asked his son.

“I could work fourteen days a week,” Ernesto said. He was a small, burly young man, two years younger than Rita. He looked like Jayne, Rita thought. He disguised his intense shyness under a badly assumed air of untroubled placidity.

“How’s the crane business going?” Jeff asked. “Soaring? Overarching?”

“When they’re building they need cranes. When they stop building we’re in trouble.”

Rita could see her father’s effort to feign interest. Ernesto was a tower-crane operator — he earned three times her salary.

“I arrested a man last night,” she said, keen to change the subject. “Down by Chelsea Bridge. He had two automatic pistols on him and a knife.”

Jeff Nashe turned his semi-befuddled gaze on her, eyes widening. “Are you armed-police, now?” he asked, accusingly. “The day you carry a weapon is the day you leave the Bellerophon.”

She ignored his idle threat. “He surrendered to me,” she said. “Me and my fellow officers.”

“You want to be careful,” Ernesto said. “Bloody hell, what’s it all coming to, eh? Jesus.”

“London’s been a violent city since it was founded,” Jeff said. “Why should we be surprised that anything’s changed.”

Fair enough, Rita thought, but, today, when we arrest a man carrying two unlicensed weapons on him we don’t let him go twenty-four hours later. She thought she shouldn’t just turn a blind eye and walk away — she really ought to do something about this.