Snapshot

12

Constables Pam Murphy and John Tankard, dressed as if they belonged to the Special Operations Group or the FBI, with peaked caps, waisted jackets and pants tucked into their boots, promptly began discussing Challis and Destry. Tankard thought they had a thing going.

‘No way.’

‘They’re always together.’

‘Tank, we’re always together.’

He subsided, muttering, but it was short-lived. ‘What about the newspaper chick?’

‘What about her?’

‘Is he still giving her one?’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care. It’s none of my business.’

Then, with his old nudge nudge, wink wink: ‘Has he given you one yet?’

‘Tank, grow up, okay?’

It was no joke, cooped up with John Tankard in the little sports car. It was bad enough that he was a big, fleshy man, but ever since coming back from six months’ stress leave for shooting dead a deranged and armed farmer, he’d been a little unstable. His mood today was pretty typical of the Tankard she remembered, the racist and bully who’d been called a storm trooper by the locals, the partner who was more interested in her tits than police work, but he was also given to moments of moody daydreaming and insecurity-which she attributed to counselling that hadn’t taken very well.

She could sense him looking at her, and confirmed it with a quick, sideways glance, disturbed to see and feel a queer, sulky heat coming from him as he asked, ‘Could you do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘What that newspaper chick did, have sex with a lot of guys, everyone watching.’ He cocked his head at her assessingly. ‘Nah, can’t see you doing that.’

As if throwing her a crude challenge, hoping she’d rise to it and come across for him. ‘She didn’t have sex with anyone. She was there as a reporter.’

‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. Bet Challis was pissed off. But if you can’t keep your chick in line, what do you expect?’

She ignored him.

‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘he couldn’t even control his wife. She sleeps around on him and tries to have him killed.’

‘Tank,’ Pam snarled, ‘only Neanderthals feel the need to keep their women in line.’

He sniggered to see her riled. She drove on, cross with herself. Early afternoon, and still the fog persisted. As they approached a roundabout, she said, ‘Mornington, Tyabb or straight ahead?’

But Tankard was in a reverie beside her and failed to answer. Maybe he was looking inwards again, at his sorrows. Pam was suspicious of Tank’s new-found introspection, wondering if it would slow his response times, blunt his survival instincts. Well, she wasn’t put on earth to cure him. Still, she’d always known where she stood with the old Tankard. He’d been reliably suspicious of everyone, confrontational but not unsteady, with the instincts of a cop driven by self-preservation rather than ambition. In fact, he’d been entirely lacking in ambition, relying on the police force for a sense of brotherhood and security, even as he distrusted or despised his fellow cops.

She chose to drive straight ahead, which would take them to Penzance Beach and Waterloo.

He stirred. ‘Did you say something?’

‘Forget it.’

Tankard struggled like a dim schoolboy caught staring out of the window. Finally he said, in the faintly lost manner of the new John Tankard, ‘Do you see the point of this? Spending four hours a day on the roads thanking people for the one time in a thousand they happen to show courtesy to another motorist or signal before turning a corner? This is bullshit.’

‘True,’ Pam said.

They were passing the detention centre near Waterloo when she was forced onto the gravel verge by an oncoming Subaru, which veered across in front of her and onto the centre’s main driveway, narrowly missing a silver Passat that had emerged to wait for a gap in traffic. Tessa Kane, who clearly didn’t deserve a showbag. Pam tooted, and so did the Passat.