Hereford’s finest
IT WASN’T THE bright lights, Leominster. You didn’t drive into the town centre, you burrowed in through side streets. Strangers needed a guide.
Bliss quite liked that about it. Lot of things he liked about Leominster. One thing in particular he didn’t.
‘All right.’ Annie was suddenly straining against her seat belt. ‘Stop. Let’s stop this now.’
‘Annie—’
‘No, just… stop here.’
‘Yeh.’
Bliss pulled into a bay marked loading only, left his engine running, his lights on. His Honda was the only car on a short street where the shops were all closed for the night and the pavements were dully gleaming, about to freeze over.
‘Bad idea,’ Annie said. ‘At least, without thinking it out.’
‘It was your idea.’
‘No, it was yours, and I gave in. What was I thinking of? He’s cleverer than me. Always was. We have to do better than this.’
‘Annie, he’s not clever, he’s just—’
‘And a bloody sight smarter than you, too, if that’s what you think.’
Might even be true. Charlie didn’t break rules, he created what he thought were better ones. How, if not a wise and decent man, could he remain so popular with both the great and the good and the small and the needy?
The old bastard.
Annie had unclipped her seat belt, was huddled in her trenchcoat, hands gloved, her back to the door. She had her mobile in her lap, probably willing it to summon her back to Gaol Street. All the windows were silver with condensation.
Bliss switched off the engine. His own mobile was on the dash. It was after hours for both of them, but with two murder inquiries on the go you were never really off the leash. They’d had another go at Danni, another go at Lech, and also the feller on remand, awaiting trial in connection with the caravan site used as a halfway house for smuggled East Europeans. How many had subsequently been employed – if that was the right word – by Jag?
Annie said, ‘Charlie allegedly told Lech Jaglowski about giving migrant workers a better knowledge of the British legal system and how not to fall foul of it – had he acquainted Headquarters with what he’s researching?’
Bliss sighed.
‘Thought he might have,’ Annie said. ‘Like I said, not stupid.’
‘But how many other convicted felons has he spoken to, apart from Lech? As far as I can find out, none. He’s only interested in Jag. Who may’ve sent an employee – if that’s the word – to kill a farmer and make it look like an accident.’
‘But we don’t know why Jaglowski’s dangerous friend wants Lloyd dead.’
‘I bet Charlie does. And when he’s gorrall his ducks in a row he’ll present it to someone far more senior than us and collect all the credit at the end of the court case.’
‘Just in time for the election.’
‘We’ve gorrit all to lose if the bugger comes out of this a public hero. And he will. He’s gorra go on climbing, never looking back at the rising pool of shite below his shoes. I reckon he was glad to find out about us. Never a big family man. They just gerrin the way, families. He wants me out ’cos I know too much about him, and you were just a slight problem before, but now…’
It went quiet. An old lady, in a beanie like his own, tugged a shopping trolley brimming with kindling across the street. How Dickensian Leominster could look sometimes, despite its drug problems.
‘I remember when I was a kid,’ Annie said, ‘Charlie becoming very distant, you know? Never at home and, when he was, it was like I wasn’t there. Same with Mum. He was… I don’t know, maybe a detective sergeant.’
‘Long time ago.’
‘I was eleven or twelve. Mum saying, you’ll have to excuse your dad, he’s in line for promotion. If he gets it he might remember we exist again. And I began to notice – the higher he went, the more distant he’d become. Approaching superintendent, it was not only like we didn’t exist, it was like we’d never existed. Clear we weren’t part of the future any more, the grand plan. My mother left him not long after that – I was at university. Did he care? I don’t think so. He didn’t see her as a detective superintendent’s wife. That was all that mattered, you know?’
‘Is the lovely Sasha a crime commissioner’s girlfriend?’
‘Crime commissioners don’t have flashy girlfriends, I hope she realizes that.’
Bliss reached for Annie’s hand, couldn’t find it in the dark. He wasn’t sure if she’d ever actually told him that she’d only joined the police in some vain attempt to gain the respect of her old man. If Charlie had been straight, it might even have worked.
Annie prised herself away from the door and fastened her seat belt.
‘On the other hand, this is cowardice.’
Bliss didn’t move.
‘Go on.’ As if the memories had hardened her. ‘The only other option is the transfer list.’
‘We can come back over the weekend.’
‘Francis, start the damn car.’
Bliss nodded. He started the Honda and prodded it back into the roadway, taking a right into the town-centre car park and out the other side to pick up the zigzag one-way system that took them out of town towards the thinning streetlights. Of course, Charlie might not even be in. Busy man.
The tall terraced house was on the left before the Morrisons’ supermarket. Bliss spotted a space four cars past the house.
This time he switched off the engine as soon as they were parked. They’d both clocked lights in the downstairs rooms. Charlie wasn’t not in.
He came to the door with a whisky glass in his hand. Letting them in without argument. Without a word, in fact.
Not into his office, where some secrets might be stored, but his high-ceilinged sitting room, newly redecorated as if for glittering receptions to come: magnolia walls under trembling light from an expensive-looking electric chandelier, an old-fashioned drinks cabinet opened to mirrors, crystal glasses and a bottle of Chivas Regal. Whisky fumes scenting the room. A log-effect gas fire putting out cold, curling flames.
Charlie was dark-suited, still bronzed from some late-autumn break or an out-of-town tanning parlour owned by a mate. Looking like he was ready either to go out for the evening or welcome significant guests.
Not these guests, obviously. Still, Bliss thought he didn’t look sufficiently displeased to see them.
‘Well, now.’ Raising the glass to his leathery face. ‘If it en’t Hereford’s finest.’
The three of them standing there under bright lights, empty chairs around the walls. Charlie didn’t invite them to sit down.
‘Won’t offer you a drink, folks, seeing as how you got some hefty crimes on your plates. And yet still time to spare for a senior citizen. Aren’t our modern police wonderful?’
‘We…’ Annie coughed, awkward. ‘We were in the area. And it seemed ridiculous to go on like we have been. Pretending.’
Charlie sipped whisky, looking into her eyes over the glass.
‘You know what, Anne? In all seriousness, I’m half wishing you’d gone on pretending. Just kept quiet. Let the ole man go on deluding hisself that his only daughter wasn’t as thick as the evidence suggested. Let this desperate fling play itself out.’
Half wishing? What did the other half want? Bliss’s morale was already sinking like the sediment in a river. The way it always was, in the end, with Charlie. He’d thought Annie’s presence might change that, put the old bastard on the back foot, but Charlie didn’t have a back foot.
‘And I…’ Annie trying again. ‘I was actually thinking that, for once, you could do the same for me.’
‘What you on about, Anne?’
‘Stop pretending. Level with us… me?’
‘In what way?’
‘You could be up front about why you’re poking around the edges of one of our inquiries. About what you’re trying to do. And to whom.’
Charlie grinned – surely more teeth than he used to have. Bliss looked at Annie, white-blonde hair tucked into the collar of her trench coat, skin pale as milk. Tried to see a family resemblance, but it wasn’t obvious. Not for the first time, he nursed the appealing thought that maybe she wasn’t Charlie’s daughter after all.
‘The word is, Charlie, that you’ve been prison visiting,’ Bliss said.
Charlie didn’t react. His back was straight, his crew-cut stiff and white as a new toothbrush.
‘Lech Jaglowski,’ Bliss said. ‘Ciggy smuggler. You talked to him about an RTI involving a van owned by his late brother, Wictor. Two cases here. One’s uniform, but one’s obviously ours.’
‘That’s what the boy told you, is it? No mention of my inquiry into the treatment of migrants by the justice system in West Mercia?’
Bliss squashed a laugh, recalling a story from the 1980s about Charlie Howe and a waiter in an Indian restaurant who’d kept on denying knifing the chef.
‘You think not enough of them are getting their heads trapped in cell doors these days, then, Charlie?’
Avoiding Annie’s eyes, wishing he hadn’t said that. It was possible she didn’t know about it.
Charlie frowned.
‘Brother Bliss, I feel we’re approaching, even quicker than usual, the point at which I invite you to leave the premises.’
‘And take your daughter with me?’
‘You’ve already taken my daughter.’
Charlie’s eyes were cold.
‘I do resent the idea,’ Annie said, ‘that I’m someone who can be taken anywhere, by anyone.’
‘Especially by him, eh?’ Charlie said.
All the sediment was gathering in Bliss’s gut with the realization that this was the first time in nearly a year that he and Annie had appeared together in front of anyone apart from an audience of coppers in an incident room.
Still, he pushed on.
‘Charlie, you’ve been suggesting to the media that there’s a connection between the murder of Wictor Jaglowski and the death of a farmer in a white-van accident.’
‘Oh really?’ Charlie’s head on an inquisitive tilt. ‘A shooting and a road accident? I suggested that? To the media?’
‘If you know something you think we don’t,’ Annie said, ‘why not come to us? How did you know we weren’t deliberately holding that connection back?’
‘And how could I, Anne, as a member of the general public, be expected to know how much – or how little – the police have in their back pockets?’
‘I often wonder that, too,’ Bliss said.
‘You know, Brother Bliss, it’s always been hard for me to take you seriously. If I was still running CID you’d still be in uniform, arresting drunks for pissing in High Town.’
Annie said, ‘Withholding information—’
‘Time you left, Anne.’
‘You’re—?’
‘I’m asking you to vacate my premises. I got people to see.
You want to come and talk to me on your own sometime, we can arrange that, if you promise not to bring the rubbish in.’
‘You—’
‘Annie,’ Bliss said, ‘I hate to say he’s not worth it, like somebody off EastEnders, but he thinks he can walk all over me now. And you. Knows how easy it would be to have certain pictures appear on the walls in Gaol Street. Or, better still, turn up on dozens of computers.’
‘I’ll likely wait till I got one of you naked.’ Charlie drained his glass, dumped it on the cocktail cabinet. ‘With your tiny dick.’
He sniggered.
‘Funny,’ Annie said. ‘I’d heard you could be like this, but I’d never seen it. Now I have, it makes me think everything else is true as well. That is frightening. Everything I’ve been in denial about all these years.’
‘Denial. I’ll tell you something you can’t deny.’ Charlie’s forefinger came out, rigid. ‘Now you’ve done the job for a few years, and seen how increasingly hard it is to get results… is that Charlie Howe was a bloody good copper. And the best… the best is yet to come.’
He went across to the drinks cabinet, poured himself another inch of Chivas.
‘And the wairst of it is, Annie,’ Bliss said, ‘he believes that.’
Worst of all, on paper it was true. On paper, if you ever looked at his record of arrests, he’d been an uncommonly good copper, nothing on file about the suppression of evidence linking a prominent landowner and freemason to a murder,back in the day. A good bent copper. Back in the day, a good bent copper never got found out.
When he turned back to face them, there was a twitch of a smile on Charlie’s face, swiftly removed. In the past, Bliss had seen Charlie’s eyes agleam with malice and triumph. None of that tonight. The eyes were slits, like the light on the rim of freezer drawers. A line. A line had been drawn.
‘It’s different now, Charlie,’ Bliss said. ‘You can’t just come back. Not the way you’re seeing it. It’s all different, now.’
‘Aye. Different.’ Charlie nodding. ‘True enough. But not in a way people like. Not in a way that makes them feel secure like it used to be. My day, they knew me, see. Knew who I was.’ Pointing at Annie. ‘Frightening. Aye, like Anne just said, to the scum, detectives like me were frightening. Now you’re all just part of some grey machine. Shiny-arsed computer-clickers. Public don’t trust you any more to defend what’s important. Way they see it, if they’re attacked in the street by some kid with a machete, cops’ll go into risk-assessment before they intervene. En’t that true?’
‘And with the PCC system, all that’ll change, will it? Most of the commissioners… they’re not even coppers, just public entertainers who know how to collect votes.’
‘Not me, boy, that’s the point. I been there, done it all. Still in its infancy, the idea of an elected police chief. Means you can mould it into whatever works. You put a real cop in the job – a man who can lead– then you’ll see the difference. And the fact that he’s elected… by the people… long as the people want him, he’s…’
‘Untouchable?’
Bliss glanced at Annie, saw the horror in her eyes. Saw that Charlie had seen it, too. He took a long breath that he hoped didn’t show.
‘Course, all this is academic, Charlie, if you don’t get elected. Which even with your loveable personality and all your contacts, is no… no cast-iron cairtainty.’
‘En’t it? You wait and see, Brother Bliss. You wait and see. Or, better still, don’t wait and you won’t have to see. Get yourself out of West Mercia while the going’s good. Both of you. Piss off out of Hereford, before my city shows you the door.’
‘Perhaps we’ll just quietly let ourselves out and forget we came. Lost cause, Annie.’
‘No.’ She didn’t move, except to tighten the belt of her coat. ‘Not going anywhere. I’m a DCI, and I’ve worked bloody hard for it. I didn’t want to get into a political argument, all I wanted was for him to tell us why he was so interested in the Jaglowskis – gangsters. I’m not having anything rebounding on us because he thinks we can’t touch him. I’d rather be completely open about this relationship and, yes, if necessary, get out of West Mercia. Because this is…’ Annie backing off, hands wiping the air between her and Charlie. ‘… this is a bad, bad joke.’
She stopped talking, nearer to angry tears than Bliss had ever seen her. Charlie looked at her with the kind of compassion he’d perfected. Then he had a pensive sip of whisky, and that smile came and went like a fast train in the night, and Bliss knew Annie was in trouble, heard it coming, heard it in the tone of voice.
‘Women, eh?’ Charlie said. ‘In the old days, look, when we were thief-taking with abandon, we didn’t have women detectives, not in any real sense. We weren’t up for senior woman cops of any kind – not in charge of men, anyway.’ Charlie left a pause. ‘Not that we didn’t like the WPCs. We liked them a lot.’
‘Let’s go, Annie,’ Bliss said.
‘And they liked us. Back then, there were wives and sweethearts. And there were policewomen.’
‘Annie,’ Bliss said. ‘Remember this man is only nominally your dad.’
‘But they were ambitious,’ Charlie said. ‘Even then. Still, they had their principles. And I never knew one… not one…’
Bliss looking hard at Annie. Don’t. Don’t.
‘I never knew one,’ Charlie said sorrowfully ‘who spread her legs for a lower rank. Let alone one with mixed parentage, out of a Liverpool gutter.’
He stopped when Annie moved. When her left hand pulled the glove from her right hand. Charlie stood still as a monument, chin lifted, that glaze of hard ice on his eyes.
Really, really wanting her to cross the line.