Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (2 page)

May could have shaken them both off without much effort, but the contact, their grip, their concerned voices, started to wake up something human in him again. He was coming to after having been unconscious, all the madness that had been spiralling around his head contracting into a little black hole that he swallowed back down.

Just because the guy deserved this didn’t mean May could go around beating up defenceless citizens. He was not fucking Batman. He was better than this.

“Shit,” he said, appalled, and stepped away from the prisoner. “Shit. Jenny, Mark. I’m sorry.”

They let him go. Stood, looking at him with shocked and unsettled eyes, Jenny with that guilt back, all over her face like she somehow thought any of this was her fault.

Silence while it all sank in, and then Watkins raised his head and smiled. “I have friends in places so high you don’t even know they exist. I’m going to be fine. But you? I’m going to see you broken for police brutality at the least. At the very least.”

It was later, and he was standing in DS Egmont’s office, breathing in the smell of cardboard files, hot ink from the laser printer, and the sergeant’s cheap cologne that he wore in bucketfuls and refreshed every time he went to the toilet.

May wished it was stronger. Strong enough to scour the remembered scents out of him, take the inside off his nose and make it impossible for him to smell anything again. He couldn’t stand in front of the sergeant with his hands in his pockets, so he locked them together behind his back and felt the tremor travel up his arms, across his shoulders, and jangle the headache that sat like a fat crow on the crown of his head.

“Sit down, May.”

DS Egmont looked like he’d been left out too long in the sun. White shirt, grey tie, grey skin, white hair, white rims around his pale, pale-blue eyes. Rumours had it he wasn’t as old as he looked, nor as washed-up, but maybe he didn’t have the ruthlessness he needed to get promoted. Maybe he’d had so much of the stuffing knocked out of him as a lowly copper that there wasn’t anything left to rise up the chain. May figured he knew how that felt.

He sat down carefully, tucking his hands under his thighs to keep them still.

Egmont nodded at them. “You hiding the split knuckles, or are you hiding the shakes?”

Stuffing or not, he was a wily old bastard. “Shakes, sir.”

Shame was perhaps ninety percent of the weight lodged under May’s breastbone where a heart should be, but he had enough experience of the stuff to know the shame was only a sugar coating on something more insidious, so deep, so hollow he often wondered why he didn’t implode. Take himself out of existence, like a soap bubble with all the air sucked out. Right at this moment, he’d welcome it. Just to be able to stop. Stop thinking. Stop hurting. Stop being him. That would be fantastic.

Of course it carried on not happening. He bowed his head and addressed the blotter and pen set on Egmont’s desk. “I’m sorry, sir.”

Egmont got up and took his crumpled suit and dandelion hair over to the window. “First of all, good job on getting that sick bastard. He thinks he’s walking free from this, but he’s not. If there ever was an open-and-shut case, this would be it.”

“Yes, sir.” May wished he could believe it. Half of him still did. Under all the despair, part of him still believed in justice. Even in the criminal justice system. It was creaky and slow and weighted towards the criminal, but it wasn’t systemically corrupt.

It didn’t have to be, though. “I don’t know. He seemed pretty sure. Lots of money, best lawyer, one bad judge. What’re the chances?”

“That’s not our concern.” Egmont looked out over the scrubby miniature roses in their faded window box to the rooftops of his metropolis. “But it’s hard to coerce a whole jury, and if he tries, we’ll charge him with that too.” He took in a long breath. “That’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

In the light from the window he had all but disappeared: only a pair of dark trousers and a belt visible against the light; everything else a haze of white against a white sky. May’s imagination tasered him with the memory of a man literally severed at the waist. He’d seen one once, as a new constable: a man who had committed suicide by jumping in front of an underground train; his lower half intact, his upper half smeared along the train tracks for three miles.

He closed his eyes in an attempt to force the picture back into the dark, but all the graves were opening now, and his head was full of horrors he couldn’t even say he’d imagined.

“No, sir. I assaulted a prisoner. In . . . in my defence, sir, he deserved it.”

Egmont turned around, but it didn’t do much to make him more visible. He was just a condemning voice from the corner, disembodied, like a judgement handed down by God. “He deserves hanging, and not the long-drop kind either. But maybe you can comfort yourself with the thought of what he’s going to get when he’s banged up with the decent cons.”

He sighed, drifting back to his desk, suddenly visible again, a man made out of paper and regrets. “But you, May. I can’t have you going round assaulting my suspects. I don’t give a shit what he deserves.
I
deserve not to have my station under investigation for police brutality. Do you hear me? I need you to get yourself together and be absolutely squeaky clean from now on, or I will not go to the wall for you. As it is, I’m tempted to let you face this one on your own. The man was tied hand and foot, for God’s sake. You didn’t even have the excuse of an affray.”

May took his hands out from under his legs and tipped his face into them. How the hell had it come to this? He’d known he wanted to be a policeman from the age of five. He’d spent his school life getting between the bullies and their prey. He could no more walk away from someone else’s danger than he could leave his own arm behind, but . . .

But he was starting to think he couldn’t do it anymore. If he had to walk into another room with another dead girl in it, he couldn’t guarantee that anyone would be able to hold him back again. He wanted it all to stop so badly, he’d started fantasising about choking the next rapist with his bare hands, and if he ever met Watkins again . . . He could almost feel the man’s neck under his fingers, the cartilage cracking under his thumbs.

“Are you losing it, May? Is that what’s going on?”

It wasn’t such a hard question to answer after all. “Yes, sir. I think so. I think maybe I should resign before you have to throw me out.”

“You can’t promise me it will never happen again?”

“No, sir. I’m fairly sure it will.”

Egmont sighed. May could feel the pale gaze on the top of his bent head. Then the sergeant sat down and hunted in his desk before drawing out the appropriate form. “I understand your father just died?”

That was an unexpected stab. Smith must have mentioned it. May hadn’t taken time off for the funeral, just arranged it over the phone, and hoped the old bastard had at least one mourner, but it damn sure wasn’t going to be him. “Yes, sir.”

Another sigh and some warmth in the wintery old voice. “Well, I think I can sell this to the powers that be as an incident brought on by grief. With that and your resignation, we should be able to put it to bed in such a way that your pension is secure and your record is clean.”

“Yes, sir.” The prospect of being dishonourably dismissed hadn’t felt real until he narrowly avoided it. Grief and horror overwhelmed him again at the reprieve. “Could I . . . Could I come back? If I get this under control—some kind of anger-management thing—could I be reinstated?”

It was like asking,
If I sort myself out, could I be Michael May again?
The job was so integral to who he was.

But Egmont shook his head. “Maybe you could reapply, start again on the beat in some little peaceful station out in the sticks, but no one’s going to want you like this, Michael. Just be glad that you got out before you fucked it up any worse.”

“I can’t believe it.” Jenny tucked the ends of her scarf back into her green greatcoat and glanced away. Her mouth set hard and her chin crumpled a little in an effort not to cry. Out of solidarity, May looked in the opposite direction, over the lawns and trees of St. James’s Park to where the fountains were playing in the Serpentine.

October’s wet cold had taken a brief break in favour of the kind of autumnal weather you saw on postcards. The sky was clear deep blue, the ashes and oaks of the park had turned a dozen shades of burnt umber and orange and gold. Blown leaves whispered down the paths and the water in the fountains glittered like diamonds.

He watched London’s bundled-up passersby hurry along and saw murderers and their victims as though the day had been rolling in spilled blood.

“I shouldn’t have insisted you went in,” Jenny was saying, her voice under control now. He looked back, and her face was smooth again, her eyes only a little brilliant, and that could pass for the effect of the wind. “I could tell something was wrong. I shouldn’t have—”

“It was going to come out sooner or later,” he said, nudging a fallen conker with the toe of his shoe. It reminded him of childhood’s small pleasures, such as they were. At least his school days were all behind him. He’d have to go a long way before his life got that bad again.

“But you were holding it together until then, and I—”

The wind plucked the ends of her scarf out of her coat. A silvery thing that looked soft. She’d tied it in some kind of elaborate knot, and he hadn’t even teased her for it—that was how bad things had got.

“You know—” he started them walking again, over towards Paddington and Khan’s Indian restaurant, where they traditionally ate when everything was shit and they needed to be reminded that something was worth carrying on for “—I’m not sure I’ve been normal for months.”

Jenny laughed. “You’ve never been normal, May. It’s what I like about you. I ask myself every morning, ‘What kind of freak show are we going to get today?’ It keeps things interesting.”

The wind tussled with her hair, unravelling it from its braid. It never stayed as sharp as she wished. Two hours into the day she always ended up looking like she’d rammed it into a hedge full of teasels. Then she would bitch about it and spend twenty minutes in the toilets redoing it. He once suggested shaving it all off. She actually had the kind of strong-boned face that would look good under a buzz cut. But she’d just called him a wanker and laughed.

And now she isn’t your partner anymore.
Like taking hold of an electric fence, the thought tensed all his muscles to the point of pain, but he couldn’t let it go. He stopped and put his head in his hands. After a while, she took his elbow and tugged, and they walked on with her leading him, like a plough boy with his horse.

“But yes,” she conceded, “you haven’t been quite the life and soul of the party you normally are. I’ve missed the deadpan snarking. What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on!”

He managed the glimmer of a smile at her scepticism as they skirted the fountains and the little Victorian glasshouse that looked in the long rays of the setting sun as though it were made out of light.

“I don’t.”

A final screen of trees and they stepped out onto Bayswater Road, glowered over by monumental hotels. Had to run full pelt over one carriageway, then stand on the white line for ten minutes waiting for the chance to get across the second. Then they disappeared into the warren of narrow streets lined with white-terraced houses just like the one belonging to Watkins.

Queensway Tube station fell behind them in silence, then Bayswater.

“I just stopped being able to switch it off,” he volunteered finally as they proceeded past gardens full of chained-up bikes. Chained like her. A squat little discoloured church broke up the neoclassical façades with unexpected Gothic, and he thought about pederastic priests and the people behind them in the shadows whom he could never take on and win. It was like being a child forever in a house of fear, forever powerless to make the misery stop.

“You know? We get one guy and there’s always another. There’s always someone who’ll protect the criminals and the rich, and there’s an unending supply of victims, and nothing we can do to dismantle the whole . . . the whole fucking structure that props it up.”