Ordinary Thunderstorms

28

SERGEANT DUKE PAUSED AT the door.

♦

“I wish you wouldn’t do this, Rita. Believe me—”

“I’ve got no choice, Sarge. Nobody will tell me anything. I can’t just walk away.”

“That’s exactly what you should do. Things are going on here you don’t understand.”

“Do you understand?” She confronted him, hands on hips, looking him in the eye, and he seemed to quail slightly.

“What would you do if you were in my position?” she said, forcefully, not letting him off the hook.

“It’s not my problem. I’m not meant to understand.”

He pushed the door to the meeting room open and Rita sensed she had won a small victory. She stepped in and Duke closed the door behind her. She exhaled, thinking — Chief Inspector Lockridge wouldn’t see me in his office. OK. He’s confining me to the meanest meeting room in Chelsea police station. Why?

The room was almost worthy of some paradigmatic status as ‘ROOM’ in a typological dictionary: a table, two chairs, a battered plastic Venetian blind, a blazing strip light in the ceiling, bare walls. She sat down and waited.

Lockridge bustled in, after a couple of minutes, some sort of cardboard file in his hand that, she knew, had nothing to do with her complaint, but was an indication of the business he had waiting after he had peremptorily dealt with her. They shook hands.

“Good to see you again,” he said, sitting down, not mentioning her name, then raised his hand as if she was about to interrupt (which she wasn’t). “This is off the record, by the way. I’m only doing this because of your good service here.”

“I don’t want any favours, sir,” Rita said, bravely. “I’m just looking for some answers.”

“Fire away,” Lockridge said with his uneven smile. His face looked as though it had been kicked askew in his youth by a horse or a bull, his jaw bent right, making him talk out of the side of his mouth. He was known in the station as ‘Twisted Kisser’. Rita banished this nickname from her mind as she detailed the events of her arrest of the unnamed man at Chelsea Bridge, and outlined the reasons behind her asking for this interview.

Lockridge sighed: “This was a matter of the highest security. Word came down to us. You stumbled in on something — something even I know nothing about. I was told that this man should go free. These things happen. Particularly in the current climate. Terrorism, insurgency, etcetera.”

“We’re all on the same side,” Rita said. “Fighting the same fight. Why can’t we share information — even of the most basic sort? If this man had shown me some ID, we might have been able to assist him. Even if he had told me, in so many words, what he was doing, what he was up to — then you and I wouldn’t be sitting in this room, sir.”

Lockridge smiled, patronisingly, Rita thought. “There are some operations that are so secret that…” he said, shrugged, and then left his sentence unfinished.

“So that’s your answer, sir?”

“What do you mean?”

“It was an ultra-secret security operation. This man I arrested was some kind of security operative.”

“So to speak, as it were.”

Rita drew a breath, inwardly, summoning her reserves of self-confidence, trying to quell her nervousness and keep any tremor out of her voice. “Because I’ll have to report this to the Borough Commander,” she said, unaggressively, she hoped. “And if he won’t help me I’ll have to go to the DPS. I arrested a man with two handguns on him. He was freed within twelve hours — no records, no statements, no prints, no DNA samples, as far as I can tell. The DPS will need to know where you stand.”

Lockridge’s twisted face seemed to contort further. Rage, she presumed.

“Our meeting is completely off the record,” he said.

“But I’m afraid you may have to speak to the DPS—on the record. Once I make my complaint.”

Lockridge stood up and picked up his prop-file. Mr Busy, trying to keep his rage under control.

“That would be extremely unwise, Constable.” There was a tremor in his voice now as he emphasised her rank.

“What happened to the weapons, sir?” She didn’t know what made her ask this. It was the first time she had thought about them.

Lockridge looked at her — suddenly very uncomfortable.

“What are you talking about?”

“Did they go to Forensics? They might help us.”

“We’re not looking for help. You don’t seem to have grasped that fact.”

He hadn’t answered her question. She knew she was beginning to anger him beyond countenance.

“Did they go to Amelia Street, sir? His two automatic pistols? Or did we let him take his guns away when we released him?” This was her killer blow, she knew. “We didn’t just give them back to him, did we, sir?…”

“Where are you now, Constable Nashe? Since you left us?”

“The MSU, sir.”

“Lucky for you. And I’m sure they’ll be the first to tell you — don’t rock the boat. Excellent advice — I would take it.”

He left the room at the same brisk pace that he had entered.

Rita stood across the road from the triangle of waste ground on the west side of Chelsea Bridge, wondering what answers to her many questions this forgotten, tiny corner of London might have offered up. Two hundred square yards of overgrown river bank, she reckoned, yet a place that she had visited twice in a week. How unusual was that? And what could possibly be the connection between a man killing a seagull at dawn and eating it and that big ugly bastard hiding in the bushes with his two handguns? Was she going too far? Was it just strange, bizarre coincidence? Was she simply making life difficult for herself, as Sergeant Duke had implied? What had happened to those guns? But she knew the answer from Lockridge’s shifty evasions — they’d just been handed back, like personal effects, a watch, a wallet. Surely that was inexcusable? She had no other clues to follow, no way of making any link other than her own vaporous, woolly intuition…

She walked slowly across Chelsea Bridge towards the Battersea shore, wondering what she should do next. She could try and set up an audit trail on the guns…And what did the custody record say about the disposal of the prisoner? She laughed at her naivety: dream on, girl. She knew a firewall when she saw one — and this was being built higher and thicker as each hour went by — and she thought hard about what she should do, whether she could do anything. Maybe it was all pointless, maybe it was something ‘bigger’, security-related…She flipped open her mobile and called her father.

“Yes?”

“Hello, Daddy-O, it’s me. What do you want for supper?”