The Crime Trade

21

It was ten to six by the time we got back to the incident room. Tina had already received the list from Harrow and was going through it. Malik and I got coffees and sat down and helped her. It was a long, boring job, but by seven o’clock when we’d checked and double-checked a dozen times, we were all forced to conclude that none of the registered owners of Meganes appeared on the list of those who’d bought the suits.

Tina was disappointed. ‘All that work. For nothing.’

‘Life would be too easy without setbacks,’ Malik told her, with a reassuring smile.

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s get a drink. We’ve all earned one, and it’s Rich Jacobs’ leaving do over at the Roving Wolf.’

Rich Jacobs was a DC who’d been at the station for four years and was now emigrating to Australia, where his wife came from. He’d got a job with the police in Perth, and was young enough to make a good go of it. A lot of people at the station were saying that they’d like to have done the same thing, and on my bad days I was inclined to agree with them. Having had a car wheel almost park itself on my head only a few hours earlier, I was counting today as one of the bad ones.

The do had already started by the time Tina and I got over there, Malik having declined our offer to join us (‘I can’t go to the leaving party of a guy I wouldn’t even be able to pick out in an ID parade’ being his fairly reasonable excuse), and there were a good twenty CID in the place, including DCI Knox. As I bought us both drinks, and put one in for Rich, I managed to persuade Tina that there was no point getting down about what had happened, and she took me at my word, sinking five G and Ts in the first hour, and sinking her blues with them. For a while I watched her as she immersed herself in various conversations, more often than not the centre of attention within them, then decided that maybe I was being too obvious about gawking at her, and got involved in my own conversations with colleagues I hadn’t had much of a chance to talk with in a while.

In the end, it turned out to be a good night, made all the better by the relief I felt at having avoided serious injury during the Panner chase. By half-nine I was drunk and had my arm slung round Rich Jacobs’ shoulders as I told him how much I was going to miss him. As I recall, he gave me a look that suggested the feeling might not have been entirely mutual.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you hammered, guv,’ I vaguely remember him saying.

‘Make the most of it,’ I told him. ‘It’s the only time I ever buy the drinks.’

Then, in a moment of madness, I bought him a double Remy.

At quarter to ten, I ate a bowl of chilli at the bar in a vain effort to soak up some of the excess alcohol, but it was way too late for that, and at twenty past I decided to call it a night. Tina and I had hardly spoken all evening, keen as always not to let on that we were lovers, and we’d agreed on our way over that we’d go our separate ways and at different times. I went first, wobbling out the door, leaving her chatting to two young DCs who both looked like they fancied their chances. I felt a pang of jealousy, which was quickly replaced by a need to get home.

In the taxi on the way back to my flat, I remember thinking that, even with all the leads we were picking up, the solution to the case still seemed a long way away.

It never occurred to me that we were already moving rapidly and inexorably towards the endgame.