The Saint Valentine's Day Murders (4 page)

Entering the bar, they found a free stained and pitted plastic table. Amiss bought the beer from the grudging barman, averting his eyes from the sweaty hairy chest revealed by the almost buttonless shirt. As he sat down beside Charlie he looked at him despairingly. ‘I didn’t suggest a drink just to say goodbye. I’ve been hoping you’d be able to explain things to me. You see, after six months here I still don’t understand what’s going on in the BCC. Everyone must know PD is a disaster area. I know the union blocked Personnel’s attempts to abolish it, but surely the top brass could have pushed it through if they’d wanted to?’

Charlie began to snigger. ‘You mean you haven’t realized they don’t want to? Hasn’t anyone told you?’

‘Who the hell is going to tell me anything?’

‘True, true, I suppose I only know because I’ve still got a few friends scattered about. It’s funny, really. You see, because the unions got a no-redundancy deal, the BCC can’t get rid of duds so they send them off to serve out their lives in PD. They can’t do any harm there because all their work’s crap. It’s a sump.’

Amiss digested this in silence and spotted a flaw. ‘But you weren’t a dud?’

‘No. But my last boss thought I was cheeky and needed taking down a peg. I think it was supposed to be a short, sharp shock. Maybe he didn’t realize that everyone in PD with any authority is making bloody sure that if he can’t get out, no one can.’

‘Well, what about me, then? What did I do to deserve this?’

Charlie’s snigger was even louder this time. He composed himself and took a swig from his glass. ‘A pal of mine told me that the BCC didn’t really want secondees. They agreed because they were being leant on by your Department, but they stuck you in a crap job on purpose. They figure you’ll be the first and last guinea-pig.’

Amiss felt a wave of fury sweep over him and then caught Charlie’s eye. They both burst out laughing.

‘I suppose you’ve got to admire their ingenuity.’

‘Sure. No flies on those fuckers.’

‘Wait a minute. If they only want duds in PD, why are we getting a graduate entrant to replace you?’

‘There’ll be a reason. It’s a girl, for a start. Personnel aren’t too keen on them. She’s probably got something else wrong with her as well.’

‘So everyone else in PD is doomed to spend the rest of his life there?’

‘Yeah. Well, why not? Look at them. What a shower of shits! I don’t know how I haven’t gone mad, what with Henry drooling over his girlie-mags and Tony counting his money. I used to spend hours trying to decide if Graham was more boring than Bill or the other way around. Tiny’s a bit better, but you get sick of all those practical jokes.’

‘I thought most of them were directed at me.’

‘Christ, no. You don’t know what’s going on, living in that stupid box of yours. He never stops: funny labels on people’s coats, hoax messages, out-of-order notices on the lift, hiding briefcases. I used to get back at him sometimes, but it only made things worse, so I just put up with it. Anyway, he livens the place up a bit, and that’s got to be good. And he’d probably go mad if he didn’t have some safety valve.’

Amiss sighed. ‘You’re probably right. I might as well go on letting him get away with it.’

Charlie looked at his watch. ‘Sorry. I’ll have to be off.’

‘Yes, of course. Just one more thing while I’m finishing my pint. What do the others think of me now? Is it as bad as when I came? I sometimes think I’m not getting through to them at all.’

‘You’re wasting your time trying. I’m the only one that changed my mind about you. And in the beginning that was because you were my only hope. The rest still can’t stand you because you’ve had all the breaks with education and career and all that. You’ve got a snotty accent. You earn more than any of us and you’ve got freedom to spend it the way you like. The last straw has been you coming into the office a few times with a bag of duty-free goodies from Paris airport. Monday mornings, too, with all the lads plunged in gloom. Guaranteed to choke them.’

‘Oh, God. I never thought of that. It’s only because I go there for the odd weekend to visit a girlfriend and I come straight to the office from the airport.’

‘Oh, that’s it, is it? Henry thinks you’re having it off with every whore in Paris. Takes it as a personal insult that you’re living out his fantasies.’

Amiss picked up his briefcase. ‘I’ll put the bottles in this next time. Beyond that, I give up. I think I’ll take a leaf out of Shipton’s book and sleep away the rest of my time in BCC. Good luck, Charlie. I’m glad you’ve got out anyway. Makes me feel this whole year isn’t a complete write-off.’

‘I won’t forget what you’ve done. But you shouldn’t be saying goodbye, Robert. We’ll be meeting up in a couple of weeks at the PD training weekend. Horace insisted I must come as well in case I had any bright ideas.’

‘What did you want to remind me of that for? I’ve been trying not to think about it.
Au revoir
, then. I’m catching a bus. I’ve found one that takes me most of the way home.’

‘Lucky sod. Good night.’

Amiss watched Charlie’s hurrying form disappear around the corner and felt suddenly very forlorn.

6

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13 November

Amiss had been looking forward to this Saturday night during the whole of the fraught five days that had preceded it. As he walked towards the Miltons’ house, he was trying to recall a worse week during the whole of his time in that frightful office.

For a start, on Monday the staff had been in a state of gloomy resentment occasioned by the sight of Charlie’s empty chair. One of their number had got away and they rotted in Colditz. The following day had brought the news that calculator purchasing was to be decentralized immediately. On Wednesday,
Personnel News
announced the names of those employees at equivalent rank to PEs and APEs who had been called for promotion board interviewing. Only Charlie’s name was on the lists. Amiss had called his staff in one by one to try to comfort them and offer some cheery word of hope. He had expected them to be upset, but hadn’t anticipated how far removed they were from the civil service ethos of licking wounds in private. Tiny had raged; Henry had griped; Graham had actually wept. Only Tony and Bill had said little other than that life was unfair and someone had a down on them. Amiss had an uncomfortable suspicion that they all – to a greater or lesser extent – blamed him for this new rebuff, despite the fact that not one of them had been even considered for promotion in years.

Thursday, to cap it all, had seen the arrival of the egregious Melissa Taylor. Amiss shuddered. This was not the time to think about her. Better to focus on Jim and Ann Milton, whom he hadn’t seen since before he left the Department. He wondered if Jim had yet become a Chief Superintendent. Ann, presumably, was still coining it as a management consultant. Agreeable people, he thought, as he negotiated their garden gate and looked at the unpretentious Edwardian house that lay a little back from the street. They would help renew his faith in the possibility of making a happy marriage. Even his feelings for Rachel were insufficient to withstand the horrors that overcame him every time he thought about what that state was doing to the people he worked with.

Milton opened the door and greeted Amiss with a slightly forced heartiness that was unsettling. When Ann followed him into the hall looking flustered and strained and made an unnecessary fuss about taking his coat and overnight case, Amiss’s unease deepened. Fighting? They all began to relax as they chatted over pre-dinner drinks, and, to Amiss’s relief, by the time they had finished soup and were on their second bottle of wine, they were both looking more as he remembered them. Over dinner he went to great lengths to make his account of PD as entertaining as possible and was gratified by the hilarity with which his best stories were greeted. He had been saving for the end his
pièce de resistance
.

‘And now we’ve got our graduate trainee – Melissa Taylor.’

‘Don’t keep us in suspense,’ said Ann. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

Amiss was savouring the moment. ‘Nice wine, this.’

‘Come on!’

‘Melissa is a dedicated member of the sisterhood.’

‘You don’t mean she’s a lesbian?’

‘She hasn’t actually said so yet, but there isn’t much doubt. She is certainly preoccupied to an inordinate degree with the struggle against male oppression. Not only is she an enthusiastic supporter of the separatists, but her spare time is spent in raising funds to aid the establishment of a women’s colony in Devon, on the sacred turf of which no man will ever set foot.’

‘But what in the name of heaven is she doing working in the BCC?’ asked Milton.

‘Oh, she was quite frank about that with me. She couldn’t find an ideologically OK job so she eventually compromised her principles and kept quiet to the BCC recruiters about her private beliefs. They were impressed by her first-class Economics degree and thrilled to learn that she had been accepted by a university in London to do a part-time MSc. Of course, as she explained it to me, once she had been offered the job formally, she couldn’t compromise any further, so she gave the relevant chap in Personnel a lecture on sexism. He retaliated by posting her to PD. She doesn’t care. She has no desire to spend more than a couple of years in a male-dominated capitalist organization, but the salary is useful at present. She’s scrapping the MSc, of course.’

‘How are the others taking it?’ Milton wanted to know. ‘Particularly Henry?’

‘Henry is so mesmerized by her bra-less tits that he hasn’t taken in the full horror yet. The others are in a bit of a state. Tiny’s the only one who’s fighting back. He’s trying to rally the others to back him in a litany of anti-feminist jokes, but they’re too scared of her, poor wretches. She’s cleverer than they are, overpowering in debate and she uses words and concepts that befog them completely. And she’s a nasty cow with it. She’s deliberately setting out to undermine them, sneer at the way they conduct their lives and threaten their manhood by dark statements about the irrelevance of men now that sperm banks are really getting going.’

‘How do you get on with her?’

‘Well, of course I think she’s appalling, but I know her kind and she doesn’t bother me overmuch. I’m adopting the Tiny approach on the whole. I’d hate her to know I’m unprejudiced about women; she’d think I’d been frightened into it. So I’m looking for opportunities to annoy her. Today I congratulated her on her woman’s intuition and told her she was looking pretty. That was so successful that I expect her to come in on Monday wearing a sack.

‘Anyway, that’s enough about me. I want to hear how things have been going with you two. Still enjoying the jet-set life, Ann?’

‘No, I’m not,“ said Ann starkly. ’Apart from anything else, I’m fed up with the kind of life Jim and I lead. We have hardly any time together. I’m a parasite, he’s in a job that stinks, and I wish we could both get the hell out and do something worthwhile.’

7

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Amiss hadn’t been expecting this. ‘I always thought you enjoyed your work.’

‘Not any more. I’m sick of flying all over the world to seminars in identical hotels to learn some bright new statement of the obvious from some academic who never got his hands dirty, and come back here to incorporate into our consultancy service some new gimmick I don’t believe in. After years in this business the only advice I have for British management is to scrap their self-indulgent perks and treat their employees like human beings. My only advice to employees would be to get a grip on reality, stop whingeing, be prepared to share jobs and stop demanding miracles. It’s all happening gradually anyway because of the recession. And I haven’t got right-wing. I’m sick of the ignorance of politicians as well.’

‘How do you feel about all this, Jim?’

Milton shrugged. ‘It’s been coming for a long time.’ He looked over at Ann questioningly and raised an eyebrow. She nodded.

‘That’s not the whole of it, Robert. You won’t have missed her crack about my job. Ann hasn’t forgiven the Met since I was told in so many words that my promotion was being delayed because there was a general feeling that I was too much identified with the wets in the force. I think I should stay and fight. She thinks I should abandon ship.’

Amiss didn’t feel he knew the Miltons well enough to come between husband and wife, and he was initially relieved when Ann broke in on his sympathetic murmurings. ‘You’re forgetting the main point. I don’t care about the bloody police force any more except that it seems to be changing you for the worse.’

There was an uneasy pause. Milton clattered around with a decanter and filled their brandy glasses. He sat down again and looked across at Amiss. ‘Ann was very upset by police conduct during the riots and after. Then something happened this week that made her think I’m condoning brutality.’

‘And that was?’

Milton looked embarrassed.

‘You’re not sure you know me well enough to trust me with the story?’

‘Oh, hell. What have I got to lose? You trusted me with your career last year. It’d be a relief to tell someone else about it. It comes down to a simple fact: last week I denied seeing one of my detective sergeants viciously hitting a suspect across the head during the course of interrogation.’

‘And…?’

‘I was lying. He hit him all right.’

‘Why? You lying, I mean.’

Milton had been leaning forward tensely, but he now sat back in his chair and smiled. ‘Thank you, Robert.’

‘For what?’

‘For asking why and not condemning me first.’

Amiss looked enquiringly at Ann, who was defiant.

‘The why isn’t central when it’s a moral issue.’

‘Maybe I’m more of an equivocator than you, Ann. I still want to know why.’

‘Because Pike believed the suspect was a drug pusher and his own daughter is a heroin addict.’