If I was afraid I was showing my age there was no doubt that my old sparring partner Superintendent Chris Groom was showing his.
We were having what was supposed to be a quiet meal in a tiny newly opened trattoria, not far from his home in Edgbaston. Unfortunately our meal coincided with the arrival of a bunch of red-braced yobs, with loud public school brays and endlessly yelling mobile phones, who completely overwhelmed the waiters and destroyed the whole ambience.
Chris’s face was sinking into ever deeper lines of disapproval, and he called for the bill as soon as the forks were finally down on our main course plates. He declined the offer of sweet or coffee in tones so terse as to border rudeness, left the most perfunctory of tips and strode out. I followed, wishing my legs could produce a decent stride, but fearing that all they were managing was a scuttle. That’s what happens when you never make it above five foot one.
Chris was unlocking his car before I was halfway to the parking lot.
‘Coffee at my place or yours?’ he flung over the car roof.
‘Mine. It’ll save you the double journey, won’t it?’ I said sunnily. In other words, I wouldn’t be forking out for a taxi home from his place. To be fair, Chris was always abstemious whether he was driving or not. On the rare occasions he hadn’t been, he’d slept the night on my sofa on to which he’d keeled. Not that he’d ever blacked out: he was always so near the limit of fatigue that it only took a limp whisky to push him into sleep.
There had, of course, been a short period when he’d spent the night in my bed, or I in his, but neither of us ever mentioned that these days. We’d always functioned well as friends, but edgily, indeed abrasively, as lovers. And – with the exception of one or two significant issues, not least my son – we were back in friendship mode again. He seemed to have accepted I was with Mike, and had proved to himself that he could fall in love again, even if his choice had been singularly unfortunate. To the best of my knowledge he’d not visited the woman in question in her new accommodation, courtesy of HM Prison Service.
‘There’s another thing,’ I added, as he set off, as smoothly as if he were driving a hearse – Chris never took driving risks, no matter how angry. ‘Ivo’s on the loose. I want to run him to earth before he chews through the mains cable and blows himself to kingdom come.’ Or, worse still, stopped me videoing the late-night Test highlights. I’d left little piles of digestive biscuit crumbs at salient points, plus a couple of toilet roll inners, which always brought him infinite satisfaction. He’d crawl through them, balance on top of them, and, when he’d exhausted all the possibilities that occurred to him – apparently he’d never been to primary school or watched Blue Peter – he’d set to and gnaw them to confetti.
‘It shouldn’t take a Scene of Crime officer to tell me where he’s been,’ I added.
‘But they don’t always tell you where the perpetrator’s going,’ he said, his voice suddenly light with amusement.
Chris was back into grim mode by the time we’d spent thirty-five fruitless minutes hunting for Ivo, who’d refused all the blandishments I’d left scattered.
‘What you should have done,’ he said, with his penchant for stating the obvious, ‘was construct a trap for him – a deep tin with biscuits in the bottom, a ramp up with crumbs at enticing intervals …’ At least he revived at the sight of my new malt collection. I’d always been a Jameson woman, but several liquor purveyors had taken an interest in Mike’s ability to transform a dull innings into a sparking one – hence the champagne I popped from time to time. Hence too the row of esoteric bottles which completely occupied a shelf in my glory hole hitherto devoted to spare light bulbs and shoe-cleaning materials.
Chris opted as conservatively as I’d have predicted, with half a finger of Laphroaig. I plumped for the remains of a bottle of wine tucked into the fridge.
He raised his eyebrows.
‘Before it goes off. I’ve got one of those suction pump things that gets the air out, but even so the wine doesn’t last for ever.’
‘Not that it would have to with you around.’
‘A glass of wine for your stomach’s sake,’ I quoted. A sanctimonious voice in my head was about to point out I was as careful as Chris when it came to drinking on my own. I stifled it. There was no point in needling Chris these days. No fun, either. Though someone would have to do something about his joyless life. Another woman, that was what he needed. A friend if not a lover. I’d have to organise something. Even if I’d hated it when people tried to organise me into relationships in pre-Mike days.
‘So how’s life at Piddock Road Police Station, Superintendent Groom?’ I asked. What little conversation we’d been able to sustain in the trat had been devoted to mutual friends. We always left business till last.
‘I can sum it up in one word,’ he said. ‘Budgets.’
I nodded. The ground bass of all discussions on the public sector. He might add a tenor line about cost centres, I a soprano one about my poor old college, William Murdock – not to mention UWM! Nice harmony: shame about the theme.
‘I had this WPC in tears in my room today,’ he said, rolling the whisky thoughtfully round his glass. ‘Pregnant.’
‘What’s that to do with budgets? Apart from hers?’
‘Who does her work while she’s away? More to the point, what work does she do when she’s too big to go out on patrol?’
‘There must be lots of work you can do from a desk. Not to mention community liaison, crime prevention work—’
‘They’re specialised areas, Sophie. You can’t fish people out and slot people in – not just like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Thing is, I want to be quite sensitive. It seems at her last nick, during her first pregnancy, some clown had the idea of getting her to work through a whole lot of files about paedophilia and child abuse and enter all the salient details on to the computer. She’s afraid we shall do something like that to her.’
‘I wondered why she’d gone straight to the top,’ I said. Chris was what was these days referred to as an Operational Commander, and thus cock of the whole dung-hill. ‘It wouldn’t normally be your bag, would it?’
‘You know my open-door policy,’ he said.
I did. And approved of it. Even if Chris was chronically tired, he seemed to be enjoying his job these days. His new secretary, Bridget, might be partly responsible. I’d only met her a couple of times, and been embraced the second like a long-lost cousin. When Chris mentioned her, it was always with affection as well as respect. She was motherly, efficient, humorous, and not above telling off anyone she thought deserved it. Her only trouble, as far as Chris, a not-quite lapsed Catholic, and I, a deeply lapsed Baptist, were concerned, was her devotion to the Sacred Heart and her habit of entrusting all her problems to it.
Nose deep in the glass, he inhaled. Then just the tiniest sip. He set the glass down on the floor beside him. He was waiting for something, wasn’t he?
‘So how are things apart from budgets?’ I obliged.
‘Don’t ask. We’ve had an attempted sexual assault in Sheepwash Urban Park. And another in Greets Green Park.’
‘Any connection?’
‘It’s almost axiomatic that sexual offenders move from a comparatively minor crime to bigger ones. I’d like to get hold of him before he turns his attention to rape. If it is one man, of course. The incidents took place tennish at night, so none of the victims got a good view of his face. Nothing we could start putting together as a description, let alone a photofit. Crazy, women walking in open spaces at that time of night!’
‘You’re not suggesting they’re asking to be attacked,’ I asked, keeping my voice under maximum control.
‘No.’ He raised his hands in a pacifying gesture. ‘Absolutely not. But there are certain precautions everyone has to take. And I wouldn’t fancy prowling round a park alone at night. Would you?’
‘I’d like to think I could if I wanted to. But no, not these days. I even lock myself in the car when I drive through certain parts of Brum.’
‘So I should bloody hope. So, to go back to your original question, I’d bet they are connected.’
I tried to imagine a page from my A–Z. ‘There is another link, isn’t there? Don’t both parks link up to cuts?’
‘And neither is all that far from the Oldbury Road, either. Easy to get away by car.’ His voice tailed away, as if he was thinking hard. Then he gave a grim snort of laughter. ‘Funny thing, though, we have got one incident in the canal system.’
‘The cut,’ I corrected him.
‘OK, the cut. Anyway – sorry, any road up!’ he corrected himself, using the Black Country phraseology. ‘Any road up, one of our cuts had a body in it the other day. Nicely decomposed. A woman. With the pathologist at the moment. Seems there’s something he wants to check on before he gives his final report. Such as: cause of death. And, more interesting, race.’
‘Not some citizen of your fair patch?’
‘Hard to tell. From what was left of her. She’d been there … some time.’
I swigged my wine. A jab in my stomach told me that might have been foolish. ‘I thought bodies … bodies floated up to the surface. Eventually,’ I added.
‘Not if their left wrist was trapped in an old bed-spring,’ he said. ‘Some bloke got something tangled up in his propeller and – you don’t want to hear the rest of this, not with your dodgy tum.’
‘Superintendent Groom, you must know that the cuts are my birth-right,’ I declared, grandiloquently. I made a wide sweep with my wine-glass. It was either that or throw the wine over him: I thought by now I’d trained him not to try and protect me.
‘OK. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. This old geezer’s chugging along the cut – or is there any Black Country term for chugging?’
I shook my head. ‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘His propeller fouls on something. He has a look, expecting – oh, whatever you find in cuts – an old hosepipe, a Sainsbury’s trolley, whatever. And he finds he’s got what looks horribly like a human thigh bone.’
‘How would he know that?’
‘TV programmes.’ He got back under way. ‘So he reaches for his traditional navigational aid, the mobile phone, and calls for assistance. The poor sods of the Police Diving Team retrieve the rest of the skeleton, its wrist, as I said, stuck firmly in the springs of this cast-iron bed frame.’
‘Lovely.’ I took another, smaller swig. ‘And have your colleagues found anyone to help them with their enquiries?’
‘Neither literally nor euphemistically.’ His grin invited me to trump that.
I declined.
‘So what about this course of yours?’ he asked, changing the subject with a crash of gears.
It was easier to plunge in, telling him about my new tutor, and his reaction to my plea for help.
He nodded sadly. ‘The thing is, Sophie, you went in with such high expectations, some disappointment was inevitable. And I’m not sure it was a good idea to use that research project you did at Muntz as the basis for this new qualification. I know everyone thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, and that you were proud of it – quite right: don’t get me wrong! But you can come over a bit cocky, you know. Maybe you set this geezer’s back up, and he’s having a subtle bit of revenge. In any case, I’m sure you can make an appointment to see him sooner.’
Anyone else tell me I’m cocky, and I’d yell. But Chris was clearly trying to help. And who knows, perhaps, in my anxiety to conceal my nervousness, I might have been brash?
‘If I was cocky—’
Chris grinned.
‘—he seems to have forgiven me. He’s put some work my way, teaching, that is. And now – Chris, you are not hearing this! – he wants me to cater for some dinner party.’
‘So I won’t ask questions about health and safety inspections of your premises, your public liability insurance or your tax declaration.’
‘I pay tax on all the teaching I do. At least, I shall when I get paid. It seems they only pay visiting teachers like me every high day, holiday and bonfire night.’
‘It must be tough after all those years of a regular salary – even an inadequate one like yours,’ he said, straight-faced enough for me to believe he meant it. Certainly, compared with his, mine was a pittance, though I was way up the scale and many of my colleagues considered me a veritable Croesus.
I nodded. I didn’t want to tell him that the very few rows I’d had with Mike had been over money – his desire to slosh dollops of dosh my way at every opportunity, when I battled to retain some semblance of independence. I gave my ring a surreptitious twiddle.
‘I shall survive,’ I said. ‘So long as Ivo doesn’t eat me out of house and home.’
‘How on earth did you come to be landed with a gerbil, of all things? I know you got on quite well with that rat—’
‘Do you mean the human or the rodent sort?’ I asked. It was a measure of how far we’d come: at one point Chris had fancied himself a rival to a two-timing poet, a period neither of us had ever alluded to. Ever.
He shrugged. ‘But choosing to have one …’
‘Looking after him for a tender-hearted friend,’ I said, comparing with some amusement my adjective with those Dave preferred to apply to himself. Fearsome, tempestuous, vicious? Something that went with snarls and war-paint – oh yes, his histrionics would have put Branagh’s Henry V to shame. Even Olivier’s, come to think of it.
And at that point I became aware of a movement. I said nothing. But the movement was heading purposefully towards Chris. And towards Chris’s immaculate trousers.
I couldn’t, could I? I couldn’t let those needle-sharp incisors sink themselves into those Aquascutum turn-ups! But if I warned Chris, he’d naturally whip them away as fast as he could. And poor Ivo would take fright.
I waited. Chris was recounting some conversation with Bridget. In went the incisors. On my knees in a nanosecond, I pounced. And the incisors sank into what I trust was a succulent part of my thumb. When I shook the little bleeder off, he dropped, straight as a stone. Into Chris’s glass.
It speaks volumes for the poverty of Ivo’s taste that he made frantic efforts to escape. So frantic it took me several moments to grab him by the base of his tail and fish him out.
I whizzed him at arm’s length – did whisky spots stain carpets? – to the kitchen and his residence. And came back to find Chris on his feet, dourly regarding the whisky he’d just been about to drink. In the expensive liquid floated a small but indisputable turd.
I’d been so busy soothing Chris – clearly, simply washing the glass was inadequate, so I’d found another crystal tumbler in a household more accustomed to your average Woolworth’s – that I’d left Ivo to his own devices. It was only when I realised that these included licking the offending liquid from his fur that I had to move. He was woozy enough to make a sitting target. I had ways of sobering him up.
‘I never knew they could swim,’ Chris said, watching without sympathy poor Ivo’s frantic attempts to haul himself from my washbasin.
I glared. I’d asked him to hold the poor inebriated creature while I gently showered him. His refusal had been curter and more pungent than I’d expected.
At last, after a couple of changes of water, I deemed Ivo clean. Now it was my turn to glare: Chris was about to wrap him in my new bath sheet. A clear case of overkill, but also rampant temptation – all that lovely fluffy cotton to chew. I found an old hand towel scheduled for the duster box: efficient and, yes, chewable. Ivo was in heaven. He might even tolerate the hair dryer.
‘Hair dryer! Sophie, for goodness’ sake. It’s an animal. You don’t need a hair dryer!’
‘Would you prefer the tumble dryer? I know he’s an animal, but he’s not my animal and I want him to be a live animal when his person gets back.’
By the time everyone’s ruffled fur was smoothed to their satisfaction – though Ivo’s could really have used some of my John Frieda Restructuring Serum – Chris had had far too much malt to risk his licence. He looked disdainfully at the sofa. Yes, I knew it would give him backache.
‘The spare bed’s made up,’ I said. If my voice didn’t ring with enthusiasm it was at the thought of what Aggie – who never missed a trick and certainly not one as large as Chris’s car – would say when I next saw her.