THE NEWS THAT LAUGHTON REES is joining the investigation raises all kinds of eyebrows. Baker is impressed Tannahill managed to talk her into it; Bob Chamberlain, knowing the backstory and bad blood better than most, is surprised he managed to clear it with the big boss. The rest of the team, who don’t know much more than what was printed earlier in The Daily, google her name and quickly realize that their own various slightly dysfunctional family lives are actually like a sun-drenched sitcom compared to the Rees family saga.
Commissioner John Rees finds out from the head of the National Crime Agency after he forwards Tannahill’s email notifying them of his intention to hire Professor Laughton Rees as an expert consultant on the Miller case, along with a one-line question.
“Any objections?”
A simple question with a complicated answer.
Rees looks up at a framed photograph he keeps on his wall showing a slim man with a sharp, intelligent face wearing the full-dress police uniform of a Metro Police commander. The man is Peter Fairweather, Rees’s first boss, the person who had taken him under his wing and taught him more about police work than possibly anyone else in his life. He had become a good friend too, and in the absence of a wife or anyone else close enough to trust had often been the one Rees called whenever he faced tricky personal decisions like this.
On a professional level Rees has no objection to Laughton consulting on the case; he knows her credentials and has followed her work enough to know she would be an asset on any complex investigation like this. But as a father, even one as remote as he has become, he can’t help but feel protective toward her and therefore hesitant. Once she becomes part of the investigation she will become a target, fair game for the professional haters whose job it is to conjure outrage, and the slimy legions of trolls who then feed on it and crap it out as online anger. If he objected to her appointment he would protect her from all that, though she would know it was he who had blocked her, and it would add another reason to hate him to her already stacked pile.
He stands and moves over to the window. Outside, the gray autumnal light is fading to nothing and the lights of London glow through the dirty mist.
In the beginning he had reached out constantly, offering her anything he thought might help rebuild the bridge that had gone up in flames when Grace had died: financial help, a place to stay, a place of her own, anything. And after every direct approach had been angrily rejected and only seemed to add more fuel to the fire of her already burning hatred for him, his relationship with her had changed, become more indirect, more secretive.
He had helplessly watched from a distance as she spiraled down, keeping painful tabs on her through intel gleaned from street informers, arrest sheets, and social services reports. It was through one of these he’d found out she was pregnant and addicted to prescription meds. He’d pulled strings to funnel her into the best rehab and social care streams, without ever letting her know he was behind it. He’d found out who his unborn grandchild’s father was and dealt with him too.
Shelby Facer, a charming snake twenty years Laughton’s senior and a known associate of some pretty bad streel-level people, was like a modern, sleazier version of Fagin. On the surface he seemed like a glamorous, old-school piece of Eurotrash, cash to burn but with no discernible means of employment, on first-name terms with every nightclub doorman in London, a rolling one-man good time. In truth his public-school accent, not-quite-film-star looks, and charm masked a calculating borderline sociopath who groomed a succession of “girlfriends” through dates and good times until they got addicted and he got bored, then he’d introduce them to his associates who would put them to work in the sex industry—porn shoots, escorting, whatever paid best. He was a scumbag, but a cunning and dangerous one, and Rees sought to surgically remove him from his daughter’s life.
It had taken him two months and pretty much every favor he could call in to first introduce Facer, then push him as close as he could to the center of a huge, international drug trafficking sting operation that was already underway. It ended with Facer flying first class to Miami to meet what he thought was the U.S. contact to finalize details of the shipment only to be arrested by a group of undercover DEA agents instead. By this time Scotland Yard had given the U.S. authorities everything they had on Facer, certainly enough to make sure he was going to spend most of the rest of his life in a U.S. supermax penitentiary. That was the kind of parenting he practiced.
How much his unorthodox parental intervention contributed to Laughton coming out of her tailspin and pulling her life together he was never quite sure. What he did know was that her attitude toward him remained unchanged, even when she became a mother. He had hoped motherhood might mellow her a little, change her perspective on life enough to cool the fires of her hatred toward him, but nothing had changed. He had watched his granddaughter grow up from a careful distance and learned to harden his heart against his situation, for his own emotional protection as much as anything.
As time wore on it got easier. He could almost pretend his relationship with his daughter was normal because plenty of fathers hardly ever saw their grown-up children. They watched them from afar, proud but distanced, just like he did. Just like he always had. Laughton is grown-up now with a family of her own making. She doesn’t need him to look out for her anymore. She should stand on her own two feet. He turns back to his laptop, hits reply on the email, types “no objections,” then sends it.
He glances at the photograph of his old boss, then looks back out the window and down at the people walking home along the embankment eight floors below him, back to their homes, and their families, and their relatively uncomplicated lives. He stays like that for a long time.