City of Dreadful Night (7 page)

I groaned. She'd sold her story to the papers.

My first thought was to phone her. Except that I didn't know her number. Human Resources would have it, but I could hardly phone up and ask for it. Or ask Rachael, my secretary, to do so. I tried directory enquiries on my mobile. Nothing. Some detective I was.

Perhaps it was just as well. I was furious with her. Furious at myself, too. And sick of the thought of Molly hearing of my infidelity in such a humiliating, public way.

I phoned her. There was no answer. I left a message on the answerphone. I wondered whether I should go home but there was so much work to do.

Winston Hart, my Police Authority chair, phoned at eleven.

‘I think your position has become, if possible, even more untenable,' he said crisply. ‘I must also inform you that I have received a letter from the Home Secretary stating that he has lost faith in you and asking us to press for your resignation.'

Typical of the Home Secretary, the most right-wing one we'd had since World War Two, and one with an eye on the
Today
programme. He was too quick to give the sound bite and regularly had to back down.

‘It will blow over,' I said. ‘I'm not quitting.'

‘It seems to me that you don't care about your force – you're making it into a laughing stock. You just care about yourself.'

I hung up on him.

I left for home at lunchtime. Molly was sitting in a chair by the French windows, looking out at the green and velvety Downs. She didn't stir when I came in.

‘I came to see if you were all right. After the newspaper report today . . .'

She stood up and walked towards me. I looked at her, obviously for a beat too long. She swung at me.

‘You bastard!'

She whacked me just below my left eye, came in with her other fist and whacked my right ear. I held her off. She was shaking with rage.

‘I want you out of this house.' She was bellowing. ‘Today. You did this to us? You did this to us?'

I took a room at The Ship on the seafront in Brighton. I was worried the manager would recognize me as I'd been to lots of functions here, but he wasn't around and the blank-faced receptionists had no clue who I was.

That evening I stayed in my room, sipping a whisky from the minibar and gazing blankly out to sea and across at the Palace Pier in its blaze of white light. I refused to think of it as Brighton Pier, although that's what its sign proclaimed. That honour rested with the ruined West Pier. From time to time I phoned my son and daughter but I couldn't reach either of them. I went back to the minibar.

The next morning my mobile phone rang just after nine.

‘Bob, it's William.' William Simpson, my erstwhile friend. ‘Can't tell you how sorry I am about what's happening in the press.'

‘And?'

‘You'll be resigning now, I assume.'

‘Like hell.'

‘Bob.'

‘William.'

‘You must resign. They've only just started.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘The press. They'll move in on your family. Your wife, your kids.'

‘There's nothing there. How dare they?'

‘The press dare, believe me. Then they'll root –
really
root – for anything. Anything. If you've something in your background, they'll find it. Your family, your parents—'

I must have clicked my tongue.

‘Bob – I'm telling you as a friend. This could get very, very much worse.'

This time he hung up.

I was summoned to an emergency meeting of the Police Authority. Winston Hart was at his pontificating worst. He kept lifting his chin to ease his neck from the too-tight collar of his shirt and touching his moustache as if checking it was still there.

‘We've had a letter from the Home Office stating that the Home Secretary no longer has faith in you. We've had another letter from the Police Federation stating that they are unhappy with your conduct. I don't, to be honest, understand why you haven't already resigned.'

I forced a smile. ‘I feel I can best meet my responsibilities by staying in post until I can find out what has happened.'

‘Had you not, by your public declaration, already prejudged the investigation, that might have been possible. However, your position is now clearly untenable.'

Hart had a mobile phone on the desk in front of him. It rang. He picked it up without apology and looked at the number on the screen. He put the phone to his ear then wordlessly passed it across to me.

It was Simpson. There was no preamble.

‘They're authorized to give you a generous settlement. It won't be leaked to the press. You can walk away with it. But you have to resign before you leave that room. If not, the Home Secretary's letter will be leaked and worse will follow. Take your life back, Bob, I beg you.'

I handed the phone back to Hart. He started to smirk but stopped when he saw my face. He seemed to rear back in his chair as if he thought I was about to launch myself over the table at him.

I was tempted. I did want to hit him but I never would. Well, not never, just not now.

I was seething.

I didn't want to go, was stunned by the speed with which the media had turned against me. My every instinct was to stay and fight. But what concerned me was the thought of reporters dragging my immediate family into it. What family doesn't have its skeletons hidden in the closet? My mother was dead, but I couldn't put Molly, the children and my father through that.

I stared at Hart but I think he could see in my eyes that he had the upper hand. I dropped my gaze.

‘I'll resign.'

The press discovered I was staying at The Ship. They besieged me. I was wondering where to go next when family friends phoned to invite me to house-sit their farmhouse near Lewes whilst they went off to Spain for a month. I was touched by their thoughtfulness and accepted with alacrity.

I spirited myself out of The Ship and disappeared from view. Except that after two days I resumed my habit of early morning swims at the sports club I used in Falmer, on the Brighton University campus. Nobody else I knew was a member and I always kept to myself, so I had no worry about being tracked down there.

However, I reckoned without Sarah Gilchrist. At the start of the next week she doorstepped me in the club car park.

I was halfway from the club entrance to my car when I heard her call out. She was standing beside her dark blue Volkswagen Polo. She was in jeans and a fleece. Her hair was down. I have to say, she looked beautiful. However, my immediate response was anger.

‘What the hell are you doing here?'

‘There's no press,' she said, twisting her mouth into a grimace, giving a little shrug. She'd guessed what I was thinking: that this was some kind of photo set-up.

I looked round at the other parked cars. She started to walk towards me. Usually she had a rangy, easy lope. Today she moved stiffly, awkwardly.

‘I hope they paid you well. Have you any idea what you've done to my wife?'

She stopped ten yards or so away from me.

‘What
I've
done? She's not
my
bloody wife.'

I shook my head, exasperated with her, with me, with the whole mess.

‘I shouldn't be talking to you. The investigation.'

I was aware of movement to my left. I glanced over at a woman walking up from the club, her wet blonde hair plastered to her skull, her gym bag over her shoulder.

‘It wasn't me.'

‘They quoted you,' I said.

‘Hardly. You know I don't talk like that.'

‘I don't know you at all.'

Gilchrist walked over to me and looked down.

‘Sir, I'm truly sorry it got in the newspapers – but it wasn't me.'

I took a deep breath. I realized my fists were clenched. I flexed my hands.

‘You can call me by my name,' I said quietly. ‘In the circumstances.'

She nodded.

‘How did you know I'd be here?'

She shrugged.

‘I didn't really. I just took a chance.'

‘You must have told somebody,' I said.

I was watching the woman unlock her car and sling her bag in the back seat. She was a swimmer too. We often shared a lane but never acknowledged each other, in the water or out of it.

Gilchrist cleared her throat, perhaps to draw my attention back.

‘Somebody I thought I could trust,' she said.

I could smell her musky perfume.

‘On the force?'

She sighed.

‘Doesn't matter. He betrayed me.'

She had kind eyes. I'd always felt they would be a problem when she had to deal with hard cases. They'd see her eyes and think they saw weakness. I didn't know her well enough to know if she was weak. Hell, I'd only spent one drunken night with her.

‘They made up your quote?'

She sighed again.

‘That first time. Then they phoned me, said they'd got the story, said they'd do a real number on us unless I spoke to them. I panicked.'

The woman was in her car, moving out of her space.

I put my arms around Gilchrist.

‘It's OK.'

She was stiff inside my embrace. I released her.

‘It's not OK,' she said, pulling back. ‘It's fucking awful. You're screwed and, frankly, I'm screwed.' She looked fiercely at me. ‘Again.'

My turn to step back.

‘Are they giving you a hard time in the office?'

Police officers are essentially tribal.

‘I'm suspended, remember? The shootings . . .'

‘What the hell happened in there, Sarah?'

She dropped her eyes.

‘Sarah, I really need to find out.'

‘Why bother?' Her voice was harsh.

‘So many reasons.' I gripped her arms. I felt her muscles bunch. ‘Please.'

She shrugged me off.

‘What about this thing you thought you saw in the dead man's hand in the kitchen.'

She looked furious.

‘I thought I saw? I imagined it, you mean?'

Her head was thrust aggressively towards me.

‘You tell me.'

‘No.'

‘What was it – a gun?'

She shook her head, stepped back. I heard the metal door of the gym clang closed.

‘Leave it. You need to focus on what's happening to you and not worry about the rest of this.'

‘What's happening to me has already happened.'

She smiled faintly as she turned away and started walking back to her car, lithe again.

‘I somehow don't think that's the end of it,' she called back. ‘Sir.'

A couple of days later I went to see my father, Victor Tempest. His real name was Donald Watts but he'd used his nom de plume for years. I thought I should tell him first-hand what had happened.

He lived in a cramped-fronted house across the road from the Thames in west London. On the big Georgian house to his right, a blue plaque commemorated Gustav Holt's stay there when he was in London at the turn of the twentieth century. Another plaque on the house to his left commemorated dancer Nanette de Valois's time living there. My dad probably hoped there would be a plaque for him when he passed on.

You could almost miss his house as it was set back from the road. The narrow courtyard at the front was dominated by a huge, low-hanging tree that all but hid the doorway. The flagstones were littered with empty fast-food packages, crisp packets and a crushed beer can. He kept his downstairs front room shuttered. The windows were grimy.

He kept it like this deliberately. Deters burglars, he used to say.

Inside was a different story. From the first floor there was a lovely view over the Thames and across the graceful iron bridge. His walled garden at the back was secluded and tranquil.

My dad had made a good living as a thriller writer and although his books were not so much in demand these days he still got feted when people remembered he was alive.

He'd bought this house with his first big lump of money after he'd divorced my mother. I never lived here, nor even stayed over. My father never remarried. He was a womanizer until late into life. Even now, probably, if he could get away with it.

He was expecting me but there was no answer when I rang the bell. I stepped back into the street and looked towards the pub a few hundred yards away on the riverbank. He'd probably be there.

I waited for a break in the traffic then hurried across the road. I walked under the bridge, on to the towpath and headed for the pub. I inhaled the sour smell of the river. I liked it almost as much as the briny tang of the sea in Brighton.

Ye Olde White Hart had a long balcony overlooking the river and, below them, long tables with benches attached set in concrete right at the river's edge on the towpath. When the river was high, the towpath flooded and the concrete was the only way to ensure the tables didn't float away. I'd always thought it would be a pleasantly surreal experience to drift down the river sipping your drink at your table.

My father was inside the pub. It was big, Victorian with a high ceiling and a circular bar in the middle. A boat was suspended from the ceiling – this was a popular venue for watching the boat race.

He was in conversation with a young barmaid who was standing by his table. He was leering at her and when she moved off he turned his head to watch her backside. Ninety-five and still a lecherous bastard.

He had a live-in nurse/factotum/cook. He'd had a series of them. He usually made a pass, so they either laughed it off and stayed on, or took offence and left. At the moment it was a Polish girl, Anna, who coped with him very well. She'd been with him a couple of years.