Текст книги "The Risk of Darkness"
Автор книги: Susan Hill
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One
There was no fly and there should have been a fly. It was that sort of room. Grey linoleum. Putty walls. Chairs and tables with tubular metal legs. But in these places there was always a fly too, zizzing slowly up and down a window pane. Up and down. Up and down. Up.
The wall at the far end was covered in whiteboards and pinboards. Names. Dates. Places. Then came:
Witnesses (which was blank).
Suspects. (Blank.)
Forensics. (Blank.)
In each case.
There were five people in the conference room of the North Riding Police HQ, and they had been staring at the boards for over an hour. DCI Simon Serrailler felt as if he had spent half his life staring at one of the photographs. The bright fresh face. The protruding ears. The school tie. The newly cut hair. The expression. Interested. Alert.
David Angus. It was eight months since he had vanished from outside the gate of his own house at ten past eight one morning.
David Angus.
Simon wished there was a fly to mesmerise him, instead of the small boy’s face.
The call from DS Jim Chapman had come a couple of days earlier, in the middle of a glorious Sunday afternoon.
Simon had been sitting on the bench, padded up and waiting to bat for Lafferton Police against Bevham Hospital 2nd Eleven. The score was 228 for 5, the medics’ bowling was flaccid, and Simon thought his team might declare before he himself got in. He wasn’t sure whether he would mind or not. He enjoyed playing though he was only an average cricketer. But on such an afternoon, on such a fine ground, he was happy whether he went in to bat or not.
The swifts soared and screamed high above the pavilion and swallows skimmed the boundary. He had been low-spirited and restless during the past few months, for no particular reason and then again, for a host of them but his mood lightened now with the pleasure of the game and the prospect of a good pavilion tea. He was having supper with his sister and her family later. He remembered what his nephew Sam had said suddenly the previous week, when he and Simon had been swimming together; he had stopped mid-length, leaping up out of the water with: “Today is a GOOD day!”
Simon smiled to himself. It didn’t take much.
“Howzzzzzaaaattt?”
But the cry faded away. The batsman was safe and going for his hundred.
“Uncle Simon, hey!”
“Hi, Sam.”
His nephew came running up to the bench. He was holding the mobile, which Simon had given him to look after if he went in to bat.
“Call for you. It’s DCS Chapman from the North Riding CID.” Sam’s face was shadowed with anxiety. “Only, I thought I should ask who it was c”
“No, that’s quite right. Good work, Sam.”
Simon got up and walked round the corner of the pavilion.
“Serrailler.”
“Jim Chapman. New recruit, was it?”
“Nephew. I’m padded up, next in to bat.”
“Good man. Sorry to break into your Sunday afternoon. Any chance of you coming up here in the next couple of days?”
“The missing child?”
“Been three weeks and not a thing.”
“I could drive up tomorrow early evening and give you Tuesday and Wednesday, if you need me that long—once I’ve cleared it.”
“I just did that. Your Chief thinks a lot of you.”
There was a mighty cheer from the spectators and applause broke.
“We’re a man out, Jim. Got to go.”
Sam was waiting, keen as mustard, holding out his hand for the mobile.
“What do I do if it rings when you’re batting?”
“Take the name and number and say I’ll call back.”
“Right, guv.”
Simon bent over and tightened the buckle on his pad to hide a smile.
But as he walked out to bat, a thin fog of misery clouded around his head, blocking out the brightness of the day, souring his pleasure. The child abduction case was always there, a stain on the recesses of the mind. It was not only the fact that it was still a blank, unsolved and unresolved, but that the boy’s abductor was free to strike again. No one liked an open case, let alone one so distressing. The phone call from Jim Chapman had pulled Simon back to the Angus case, to the force, to work c and from there, to how he had started to feel about his job in the past few months. And why.
Facing the tricky spin-bowling of a cardiac registrar gave him something else to concentrate on for the moment. Simon hooked the first ball and ran.
The pony neighing from the paddock woke Cat Deerbon from a sleep of less than two hours. She lay, cramped and uncomfortable, wondering where she was. She had been called out to an elderly patient who had fallen downstairs and fractured his femur and on her return home had let the door bang and had woken her youngest child. Felix had been hungry, thirsty and cross, and in the end Cat had fallen asleep next to his cot.
Now, she sat up stiffly but his warm little body did not stir. The sun was coming through a slit in the curtains on to his face.
It was only ten past six.
The grey pony was standing by the fence grazing, but whinnied again, seeing Cat coming towards it, carrot in hand.
How could I leave all this? she thought, feeling its nuzzling mouth. How could either of us bear to leave this farmhouse, these fields, this village?
The air smelled sweet and a mist lay in the hollow. A woodpecker yaffled, swooping towards one of the oak trees on the far side of the fence.
Chris, her husband, was restless again, unhappy in general practice, furious at the burden of administration which took him from his patients, irritated by the mountain of new targets, checks and balances. He had spoken several times in the past month of going to Australia for five years—which might as well be for ever, Cat thought, knowing he had only put a time limit on it as a sop to her. She had been there once to see her triplet brother, Ivo, and hated it—the only person, Chris said, who ever had.
She wiped her hand, slimy from the pony’s mouth, on her dressing gown. The animal, satisfied, trotted quietly away across the paddock.
They were so close to Lafferton and the practice, close to her parents and Simon, to the cathedral which meant so much to her. They were also in the heart of the country, with a working farm across the lane where the children saw lambs and calves and helped feed chickens; they loved their schools, they had friends nearby.
No, she thought, feeling the sun growing warm on her back. No.
From the house Felix roared. But Sam would go to him, Sam, his brother and worshipper, rather than Hannah, who preferred her pony and had become jealous of the baby as he had grown through his first year.
Cat wandered round the edge of the paddock, knowing that she would feel tired later in the day but not resenting her broken night—seeing patients at their most vulnerable, especially when they were elderly and frightened, had always been one of the best parts of working in general practice for her, and she had no intention of handing over night work to some agency when the new contract came into force. Chris disagreed. They had locked horns about it too often and now simply avoided the subject.
One of the old apple trees had a swathe of the white rose Wedding Day running through its gnarled branches and the scent drifted to her as she passed.
No, she thought again.
There had been too many bad days during the past couple of years, too much fear and tension; but now, apart from her usual anxiety about her brother, nothing was wrong—nothing except Chris’s discontentment and irritability, nothing but his desire to change things, move them away, spoil c Her bare feet were wet with dew.
“Mummmeeeee. Tellyphoooooonnne c”
Hannah was leaning too far out of an upstairs window.
Cat ran.
It was a morning people remembered, for the silver-blue clear sky and the early-morning sunshine and the fact that everything was fresh. They relaxed and felt suddenly untroubled and strangers spoke to one another, passing in the street.
Natalie Coombs would remember it too.
“I can hear Ed’s car.”
“No you can’t, it’s Mr Hardisty’s, and get downstairs, we’ll be late.”
“I want to wave to Ed.”
“You can wave to Ed from here.”
“No, I—”
“Get DOWNSTAIRS.”
Kyra’s hair was all over her face, tangled after sleep. She was barefoot.
“Shit, Kyra, can’t you do anything for your bloody self? c Where’s your hairbrush, where’s your shoes?”
But Kyra had gone to the front room to peer out of the window, waiting.
Natalie poured Chocolate Frosties into a blue bowl. She had eleven minutes—get Kyra ready, finish off her own face, find her stuff, make sure the bloody guinea pig had food and water, go. What had she been thinking. I want to keep this baby?
“There’s Ed, there’s Ed c”
She knew better than to interrupt Kyra. It was a morning thing.
“Bye, Ed c Ed c” Kyra was banging on the window.
Ed had turned from locking the front door. Kyra waved. Ed waved.
“Bye, Kyra c”
“Can I come and see you tonight, Ed?”
But the car had started. Kyra was shouting to herself.
“Stop being a pest.”
“Ed doesn’t mind.”
“You heard. Eat your cereal.”
But Kyra was still waving, waving and waving as Ed’s car turned the corner and out of sight. What the hell was it about bloody Ed? Natalie wondered. Still, it might give her a half-hour to herself tonight, if Kyra could wangle her way next door, to help with the plant-watering or eat a Mars bar in front of Ed’s telly.
“Don’t slosh the milk out like that, Kyra, now look c”
Kyra sighed.
For a six-year-old, Natalie thought, she had a diva’s line in sighs.
The sun shone. People called out to one another, getting into their cars.
“Look, look,” Kyra said, dragging on Natalie’s arm. “Look in Ed’s window, the rainbow thing is going round, look, it’s all pretty colours moving.”
Natalie slammed the car door, opened it again, slammed it for the second time, which was what she always had to do, otherwise it didn’t stay closed.
“Can we have one of them rainbow-making things in our window? They’re like fairyland.”
“Shit.” Natalie screeched to a halt at the junction. “Watch where you’re going, dickhead.”
Kyra sighed and thought about Ed, who never shouted and never swore. She thought she would go round tonight and ask if they could make pancakes.
It was the sun, brilliant on the white wall, that woke Max Jameson, a sheet of light through the glass. He had bought the loft because of the light—even on a dull day the space was full of it. When he had first brought Lizzie here she had gazed around her in delight.
“The Old Ribbon Factory,” she had said. “Why?”
“Because they made ribbons. Lafferton ribbons were famous.”
Lizzie had walked a few steps before doing a little dance in the middle of the room.
That was the loft—one room plus an open-tread staircase to the bedroom and bathroom. One vast room.
“It’s like a ship,” she had said.
Max closed his eyes, seeing her there, head back, dark hair hanging down.
There was a wall of glass. No blind, no curtain. At night the lamps glowed in the narrow street below. There was nothing beyond the Old Ribbon Factory except the towpath and then the canal. The second time, he had brought Lizzie here at night. She had gone straight to the window.
“It’s Victorian England.”
“Phoney.”
“No. No, it really is. It feels right.”
On the wall at the far end of the room was her picture. He had taken the shot of Lizzie, alone beside the lake in her wedding dress, her head back in that same way, hair down but this time threaded with white flowers. She was looking up and she was laughing. The picture was blown up twelve feet high and ten feet wide on the white wall. When Lizzie had first seen it, she had been neither startled nor embarrassed, only thoughtful.
“It’s the best memory,” she had said at last.
Max opened his eyes again and the sunlight burned into them. He heard her.
“Lizzie?” He flung the clothes off the bed in panic at her absence. “Lizzie c?”
She was halfway down the staircase, vomiting.
He tried to help her, to lead her back to safety, but her unsteadiness made it difficult, and he was afraid they would both fall. Then she stared into his face, her eyes wide and terrified, and screamed at him.
“Lizzie, it’s OK, I’m here, it’s me. I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you. Lizzie c”
Somehow he struggled with her to the bed and got her to lie down. She curled away from him making small angry sounds inside her throat like a cat growling. Max ran to the bathroom and sluiced cold water over his head and neck, scrubbed his teeth, keeping the door open. He could see the bed through the medicine cabinet mirror. She had not stirred again. He pulled on jeans and a shirt, ran down into the brilliant room and switched on the kettle. He was breathing hard, tense with panic, his hands sweating. Like a bitter taste, the fear was in his mouth and throat all the time now.
The crash came. He swung round in time to see Lizzie sliding in terrible slow motion from the top of the stairs to the foot, lying with one leg under her body, arms outstretched, roaring in pain and fright like a furious child.
The kettle gushed out steam and the sunlight caught the glass door of the wall cupboard like fire.
Max felt tears running down his face. The kettle was too full and splashed as he poured it, the water scalding his hand.
At the foot of the stairs, Lizzie lay still and the sound that came from her was the bellow of some animal, not any noise that she would make, not Lizzie, not his wife.
Cat Deerbon heard it, holding the telephone.
“Max, you’ll have to speak more slowly c what’s happened?”
But all she could make out, apart from the noise in the background, were a few incoherent, drowned words.
“Max, hold on c I’m coming now. Hold on c”
Felix was crawling along the landing towards the stairgate, smelling of dirty nappy. Cat scooped him up and into the bathroom, where Chris was shaving.
“That was Max Jameson,” she said. “Lizzie c I’ve got to go. Make Hannah help you.”
She ran, zipping up her skirt as she went, avoiding his look.
Outside, the air smelled of hay and the grey pony was cantering round the paddock, tail swishing with pleasure. Cat was out of the drive and fast down the lane, planning what had to be done, how she could make Max Jameson understand, finally, that he could not keep Lizzie at home to die.
Two
Serrailler was in the room without a fly. With him were the senior members of the CID team investigating the child-abduction case.
DCS Jim Chapman was the SIO. Not far from retirement, amiable, experienced and shrewd, he had been a policeman in the north of England all his working life, and in different parts of Yorkshire for most of it. The rest were considerably younger. DS Sally Nelmes was small, neat, serious and a highflyer. DC Marion Coopey, very much in the same mould, had been newly transferred from the Thames Valley. During the session she had spoken least, but what she had said had been sharp and to the point. The other Yorkshireman, Lester Hicks, was a long-term colleague of Jim Chapman and also his son-in-law.
They had been welcoming to a member of an outside force when they might have been suspicious or resentful. They were focused and energetic, and Serrailler had been impressed, but at the same time he recognised the incipient signs of frustration and discouragement he had known in the Lafferton team working under him on the David Angus case. He understood it absolutely but he could not let his sympathy create any sense of impotence, let alone defeatism.
A child had gone missing from the town of Herwick. He was eight and a half. At three o’clock on the first Monday after schools had broken up for the summer holiday, Scott Merriman had been walking from his own house to that of his cousin, Lewis Tyler, half a mile away. He had carried a sports bag containing swimming things—Lewis’s father was taking them to a new Water Dome half an hour’s drive away.
Scott had never arrived at the Tyler house. After waiting twenty minutes, Ian Tyler had telephoned the Merrimans’ number and Scott’s own mobile. Scott’s eleven-year-old sister Lauren had told him Scott had left “ages ago.” His mobile was switched off.
The road down which he had walked was mainly a residential one, but it also took traffic on one of the busiest routes out of the town.
No one had come forward to report that they had seen the boy. No body had been found, nor any sports bag.
There was a school photograph of Scott Merriman on the conference-room wall, a foot away from that of David Angus. They were not alike but there was a similar freshness about them, an eagerness of expression which struck Simon Serrailler to the heart. Scott was grinning, showing a gap between his teeth.
A DC came into the room with a tray of tea. Serrailler started to make a calculation of how many plastic cups of beverage he had drunk since joining the police force. Then Chapman was on his feet again. There was something about his expression, something new. He was a measured, steady man but now he seemed to be sharpened up, shot through with a fresh energy. In response to it, Simon sat up and was aware that the others had done the same, straightened their backs, drawn themselves from a slump.
“There is one thing I haven’t done in this inquiry. I’m thinking it’s mebbe time I did. Simon, did Lafferton use forensic psychologists in the David Angus case?”
“As profilers? No. It was discussed but I vetoed it because I thought they simply wouldn’t have enough to work on. All they would be able to give us was the general picture about child abduction—and we know that.”
“I agree. Still, I think we ought to turn this thing on its head. Let’s play profiling. Speculate about the sort of person who may have taken one, or both, of these children—and others for all we know. Do any of you think it would be a useful exercise?”
Sally Nelmes tapped her front teeth with her pen.
“Yes?” Chapman missed nothing.
“We’ve no more to go on ourselves than a profiler would have, is what I was thinking.”
“No, we haven’t.”
“I think we need to get out there, not sit weaving stories.”
“Uniform and CID are still out there. All of us have been out there, and we will be again. This session, with DCI Serrailler’s input, is about the core team taking time out to think c think round, think through, think.” He paused. “THINK,” he said again, louder this time. “Think what has happened. Two young boys have been taken from their homes, their families, their familiar surroundings, and have been terrified, probably subjected to abuse and then almost certainly murdered. Two families have been broken into pieces, have suffered, are suffering, anguish and dread, they’re distraught, their imaginations are working overtime, they don’t sleep, or eat, or function normally, they aren’t relating fully to anyone or anything and they can never go back, nothing will ever return to normal for them. You know all this as well as I do, but you need me to remind you. If we get nowhere and all our thinking and talking produces nothing fresh for us to work on, then I intend to bring in an outside expert.” He sat down and swung his chair round. They formed a rough semicircle.
“Think,” he said, “about what kind of a person did these things.”
There was a moment’s charged silence. Serrailler looked at the DCS with renewed respect. Then the words, the suggestions, the descriptions came, one after the other, snap, snap, snap, from the semicircle, like cards put down on a table in a fast-moving game.
“Paedophile.”
“Loner.”
“Male c strong male.”
“Young c”
“Not a teenager.”
“Driver c well, obviously.”
“Works on his own.”
“Lorry driver c van man, that sort c”
“Repressed c sexually inadequate c”
“Unmarried.”
“Not necessarily c why do you say that?”
“Can’t make relationships c”
“Abused as a child c”
“Been humiliated c”
“It’s a power thing, isn’t it?”
“Low intelligence c class C or below c”
“Dirty c no self-esteem c scruffy c”
“Cunning.”
“No—reckless.”
“Daring, anyway. Big idea of himself.”
“No, no, dead opposite of that. Insecure. Very insecure.”
“Secretive. Good at lying. Covering up c”
On and on they went, the cards snapping down faster and faster. Chapman did not speak, only looked from face to face, following the pattern. Serrailler, too, said nothing, merely watched like the DCS, and with a growing sense of unease. Something was wrong but he could not put his finger on what or why.
Gradually the comments petered out. They had no more cards to snap down. They were slumping back in their chairs again. DS Sally Nelmes kept snatching glances at Serrailler—not especially friendly glances.
“We know what we’re looking for well enough,” she said now.
“But do we?”Marion Coopey bent forward to retrieve a sheet of paper by her feet.
“Well, it’s a pretty familiar type c”
For a second the two women seemed to confront one another. Serrailler hesitated, waiting for the DCS, but Jim Chapman said nothing.
“If I may c”
“Simon?”
“I think I know what DC Coopey means. While everyone was throwing their ideas into the ring I started to feel uneasy c and the trouble is c it’s just a familiar ‘type’ c put everything together and it paints a picture of what you all suppose is your typical child abductor.”
“And isn’t it?” Sally Nelmes challenged.
“Maybe. Some of it will fit, no doubt c I’m just concerned—and this is what always concerns me with profiling when it’s swallowed whole—that we’ll make an identikit and then look for the person who fits it. Great when we really are dealing with identikit and it’s of someone several people may have actually seen. But not here. I wouldn’t want us to become fixated on this ‘familiar type’ and start excluding everyone who doesn’t fit.”
“You’ve got more to go on in Lafferton then?”
He wondered whether DS Nelmes had a chip on her shoulder or had simply taken a dislike to him, but he dealt with it in the way he always did, and which was almost always successful. He turned to her and smiled, an intimate, friendly smile, with eye contact, a smile between themselves.
“Oh, Sally, I wish c” he said.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Jim Chapman had registered every nuance of the exchange.
Sally Nelmes shifted slightly, and the trace of a smile lifted the corners of her mouth.
They broke for lunch, after which Serrailler and Jim Chapman took a walk out of the flat-roofed, 1970s HQ block and down an uninteresting road leading towards the town. In Yorkshire there was no sun and apparently no summer. The sky was curdled grey, the air oddly chemical.
“I’m not being much help,” Simon said.
“I needed to be sure we weren’t missing something.”
“It’s a bugger. Your lot are as frustrated as we’ve been.”
“Just not for so long.”
“These are the ones that get to you.”
They reached the junction with the arterial road and turned back.
“My wife’s expecting you for dinner, by the way.”
Simon’s spirits lifted. He liked Chapman, but it was more than that; he knew no one else up here and the town and its environs were both unfamiliar and unattractive and the hotel into which he had been booked was built in the same style as the police HQ with as much soul. He had half wondered whether to drive back to Lafferton at the end of the day’s work rather than stay there, eating a bad meal alone, but the invitation to the Chapmans’ home cheered him.
“I want to take you over to Herwick. I don’t know about you but I generally get a feel about a place by mooching about it. We’ve no evidence, there’s nothing c but I want to get your reaction.”
Serrailler and Chapman went to Herwick with Lester Hicks in the back. Hicks was a taciturn Yorkshireman, small and chunkily built with a shaved head and the chauvinist attitude which Simon had encountered before in Northern men. Although apparently without imagination, he came across as sane and level-headed.
Herwick was a town on the fringes of the York plain and seemed to have spread haphazardly. The outskirts were a ribbon of industrial units, DIY warehouses and multiplexes, the town centre full of charity shops and cheap takeaways.
“What’s the work here?”
“Not enough c chicken packing factory, several big call centres but they’re cutting back—all that work’s going abroad, it’s cheaper. Big cement works c otherwise, unemployment. Right, here we go. This is the Painsley Road c there’s a link road to the motorway a couple of miles further on.” They continued slowly and then took a left turn. “This is where the Tyler house is c number 202 c”
It was a road without feature. Semis and a few run-down detached houses; a couple of shopping rows—newsagent, fish-and-chip shop, bookmaker, launderette; an undertaker’s with lace-curtained windows and a flat-roofed building at the back.
The Tyler house was two doors away from it. Bright red herringbone bricks were newly laid where a front garden had been. The fence was gone too.
They slowed.
“Scott should have approached the house from this end c he would have come from the junction.”
No one took any notice of the car crawling along the kerb. A woman pushed a pram, an old man drove along the pavement in an invalid buggy. Two dogs mated by the side of the road.
“What kind of people?” Serrailler asked.
“Tylers? He’s a plumber, the wife works as a shrink-wrapper in the chicken factory. Decent sort. Kids seem fine.”
“How have they been?”
“Father doesn’t say much but he’s blaming himself for not fetching the boy by car.”
“Scott’s parents?”
“On the verge of killing one another c but I think they always have been. His sister seems to carry the weight of the family on her shoulders.”
“And she’s c”
“Thirteen going on thirty. Here’s where Scott would have turned the corner c this road leads to his own house. It’s in a small close a couple of hundred yards down, set off the main road.”
“No sighting of him along here?”
“No sighting, period.”
Another bleak road, with the houses set behind fences or scruffy privet hedges. Three large blocks of flats. A disused Baptist chapel with wooden bars across the doors and windows. Traffic was steady but not heavy.
“It’s hard to believe nobody saw the boy.”
“Oh they’ll have seen him c just didn’t register.”
“It must have looked normal then, there can’t have been any sort of struggle, just as there can’t have been any when David Angus was taken. No one misses the sight of a child being forcibly dragged into a car.”
“Someone they both knew?”
“Both boys can’t have known the same person, that’s way off being likely. So, we’ve got two different kidnappers. Each one well enough known to the child to c” Simon trailed off. They all knew it was not worth his finishing the sentence.
“This is Richmond Grove. It’s number 7 c bottom right.”
The houses were crammed on to a skimpy plot. Simon could guess how much noise came through thin dividing walls, how small the area of garden at the back of each one.
Chapman turned off the car engine. “Want to get out?”
Serrailler nodded. “Will you wait here?”
He walked slowly round. The curtains of number 7 were drawn. There was no car, no sign of life. He looked at the house for a long time, trying to picture the gap-toothed boy coming out of the door, swimming bag over his shoulder, walking up towards the road c turning left c marching along, cheerful. He turned. A bus went past but there seemed to be no bus stop for some way ahead. Simon looked along the grey road. How far had Scott gone? Who had stopped beside him? What had they said that had persuaded the boy to go with them?
He made his way back to the car.
“Give me an idea of the boy c Shy? Forward? Old or young for his age?”
“Cheeky. Teachers said that. But OK. They liked him. Not a problem. Lots of friends. Well liked. Bit of a ringleader. Football supporter, the local team. They call them the Haggies. Had their logo on his swim bag, all the strip.”
“The sort of kid who would chat to a stranger, maybe someone asking for directions?”
“Very likely.”
Whereas David Angus was altogether more reserved but one who would have spoken to the same sort of stranger because it was the polite thing to do.
Hicks’s phone rang. Three minutes later, they were racing back to police HQ. Hicks’s wife, and Chapman’s daughter, had gone into labour a fortnight early with their first child.
Serrailler spent the rest of the afternoon alone going through the files on the Scott Merriman case. At one point he found the canteen for a mug of tea. At half past six, he drove over to the hotel.
His room was beige with gilt fittings and smelled of old cigarette smoke, the bath big enough for a ten-year-old. Jim Chapman had left with hurried apologies, saying he would “catch up later.” It was a toss-up as to which would be worse c lying on the bed in his room brooding, sitting alone in the bar brooding, or making the long drive back to Lafferton down overcrowded motorways. Heavy rain had set in. Simon did not fancy the drive.
He showered and put on a clean shirt.
The bar was empty apart from a businessman working at a laptop in the corner. The furniture was lacquer red. There was a cocktail menu on every table. Simon got a beer.
He was always content in his own company but the ugliness of these surroundings and the isolation from everything he knew and loved seemed to be draining the life out of him. In a couple of months he would be thirty-seven. He felt older. He had always loved being a policeman but something about the life was beginning to frustrate him. There were too many restrictions, too many political-correctness boxes to be ticked before getting on with a job. Was he making any difference to anyone? Had a single life improved, even marginally, because of what he did? He thought of the difference his sister Cat made, as a conscientious and caring doctor, of what his parents had done in their time to change lives. Perhaps they had been right all along, perhaps he should have gone into medicine and made his father happy.
He slumped against the shiny red banquette. The barman had switched on starlights around the bar but it did not lift the atmosphere.
What he missed, Simon thought suddenly, was excitement, the adrenalin rush, such as he had had pursuing the serial killer on his own patch two years previously, and which had almost always been there in the early days of his police career. His Chief Constable had hinted more than once that he should get on to the next rung of the ladder but if he rose to Superintendent and beyond he would spend even less time out on the job, even more in his office, and that he did not want. It was the old story c don’t become a Head if you love teaching, don’t take a senior medical role if you enjoy looking after patients. If you want the thrill of the chase, stay in uniform or as a DC. But he had not and there was no going back. Should he get out altogether? He knew what he would do if he left the force. Some of his drawings were to be exhibited in a London gallery; the show was opening in November. He would travel and draw full time, give them the attention and concentration they deserved. He would get by. Money was not his motive. But he wondered as usual whether he would gain as much satisfaction and pleasure from art if he had to live by it. Perhaps everything staled after a time.
