Roxanne, p.15
Roxanne, page 15
Allen said, ‘Did you have a conversation with Detective Constable Kumar here in Central on Wednesday morning?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Where did that take place?’
‘In the locker room, sir.’
Eileen Lennon’s fingers tapped away, making a record, making it permanent and irrefutable, that he had given these answers on this day, at this time. Waters glimpsed life on the other side; an accusation had been made, a charge might follow. He could be convicted and sentenced.
‘And in that conversation,’ Allen said, ‘did you tell the detective constable that your flat was for sale?’
‘No, sir.’
The answer seemed to puzzle the superintendent. He read something on the sheet before he said, ‘But your flat is for sale?’
Waters said, ‘Yes, it is, sir. It has been for some time and everyone knows it. I didn’t mention it to Detective Constable Kumar on Wednesday – she asked me about it.’
‘I see. Was anything said by you in the Wednesday conversation here in the station which could have been interpreted as an invitation to visit your flat?’
‘No, sir. When she asked me about it, I told her which estate agent has it on their books.’
Allen’s look went past him to Freeman, and Waters thought, where is she in this? How does she handle these things? And was it not yet two days ago that Smith had said of her “I used to wonder which way she’d go”, if she had to make the choice between her career and her people?
Allen said then, ‘Were there any witnesses to this conversation on Wednesday morning?’
‘Not that I’m aware of, sir.’
That was the first phase over – the superintendent had to move things forward now. Waters was a little surprised at himself. He felt alert but was not panicking, on edge but not frightened.
Allen took off the reading glasses and spoke in a more formal tone, as if the two events were somehow related. ‘I have to inform you, Detective Sergeant Waters, that an allegation has been made against you. It is a serious allegation of a kind that these days cannot and will not be ignored. At this point in time you are not being suspended but I am instructing you to leave Central station with immediate effect while further investigations take place. You are to go home and await further orders. Until further notice, you are to have no contact with your colleagues, who may be required to give witness statements. Have you understood everything I have said to you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Allen paused as if something had just occurred to him, and then said, ‘And I would strongly advise you, Detective Sergeant, not to discuss the matter with anyone outside the force. This is an internal matter until you hear differently.’
Waters nodded, concluding that he had said enough yes and no sirs for one day. Allen nodded curtly and said, ‘DCI Freeman will now escort you from the building.’
He followed her down to the staff entrance at the back of the building, the one that leads onto the car park. He thought she intended to abide by her word and say nothing, but after Waters had gone through the doorway, she came outside as well. As soon as she was clear of the building, Freeman’s demeanour seemed to change. She said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘OK. Been involved in anything like this before?’
He must have looked surprised, because she went on, ‘I don’t mean have you got previous. It wasn’t a leading question. I want to be sure you’re going to handle it properly.’
Waters said, ‘No, ma’am. I’ve seen a few other people be suspended and disciplined, that’s all.’
She didn’t seem to be in any hurry. She pushed her hands into her pockets and looked up at the ugly building with its small windows and crooked drainpipes; the entire rear of Lake Central looks like an unplanned sequence of afterthoughts.
Then Freeman said, ‘The individual concerned has alleged a serious sexual assault.’
It was what he had guessed. He looked at the detective chief inspector and simply shook his head.
She said, ‘To save everyone a great deal of time, trouble and embarrassment, be honest with me, please. Did you touch her?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Have you had any sort of relationship with her other than a professional one?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Has anything occurred prior to this which made you aware that the person concerned might behave in the way she has?’
Waters said no again, but with less conviction, and Freeman was onto it immediately. She said, ‘DI Greene remarked to me this morning that as far as he knows, the two of you have never worked as a team away from Central. Is that so?’
‘Yes, it is, ma’am.’
‘Why not? Should have happened by now, I would have thought.’
How had she got there so quickly? And how was he supposed to explain this?
‘It never felt appropriate, ma’am.’
Freeman was studying him closely now. She said, ‘Appropriate? That’s an odd word…’
Two uniformed men came out of the building. One of them was Holt, the sergeant who had been on the scene where Roxanne Prescott’s car had been found. He nodded and said good morning to the both of them. Watching the men walk away, Waters thought, this looks normal, us out here, a couple of detectives talking over the job, but in an hour or so word will be going around the station.
Freeman said, ‘Not appropriate in what way, detective sergeant?’
He was not trying to evade it now but putting the words into the correct order was taking time – too much time for the DCI, who said, ‘Are you telling me you knew there was something going on with her? Not going on, you know what I mean.’
He said, ‘I had the feeling sometimes that she might have the wrong idea about me, ma’am.’
‘A feeling?’
‘Ma’am.’
She was watching him with slightly widened eyes that said, is that it? Seriously? When he offered nothing more, Freeman said, ‘I don’t want this to get too personal, Chris, but I have the feeling that young women do get ideas about you. I don’t see it myself but there’s no accounting for taste. Anyway, you know what I’m talking about. So, what’s different on this occasion?’
He said, ‘Maya has given me some odd looks, ever since she started. I know that sounds as pathetic as “a feeling” but…’
‘No. Go on.’
‘For example, on Friday morning, when we were planning the interviews with Roxanne’s house-mates, when the team were joking about escorts, she stared at me as if she was furious. As if I shouldn’t be going. She seemed to take it personally.’
Freeman thought this over for some seconds before she said, ‘You never mentioned this to anyone else on the team?’
When he said no he had not, she said that was a pity, and then ‘But you’re saying you have actively avoided working one-to-one with her because of this?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
She nodded, more to herself than to him, and he asked her, ‘Can I ask what the procedure is now? I just go home and wait?’
‘You do. Superintendent Allen has asked me to speak to everyone concerned first – he wants to know if there’s a prima facie case for a formal investigation. If there is, it will be handled by another division. Don’t look so alarmed. One of those is the last thing he wants. He’d like me to make it go away.’
She didn’t need to add, however, that she would not do so to please Allen or anybody else. Instead, she said. ‘The call you made on Friday night will probably work in your favour.’
Waters didn’t conceal his surprise when he responded with, ‘Probably?’
‘Yes. I mean, it could be represented in more than one way. It might be made to appear that a clever detective was getting his ducks in a row, getting his defence in place early. Anticipating trouble…’
She looked at him again, and Waters wondered whether she was measuring the effect of her words, testing out such an idea. Did she actually believe anything he had told her?
She said, ‘Anyway, do as Superintendent Allen said. Don’t try to contact the team, you’ll be putting them in an awkward situation. If Maya tries to speak to you – and that’s not impossible – you do not engage with her at all. Note the time of the call.’
She smiled briefly for the first time, and Waters said, ‘I’m sorry about the case, ma’am. We had a lot on this morning.’
‘We still do. Don’t worry, we’ll get by without you. No one’s indispensable.’
Chapter Sixteen
The north-easterly was still blowing but against the ebbing tide in the river now, and there was a great swell, enough to capsize a small canoe. Sometimes the swell became a proper wave and then the wind whipped the crest of it into a muddy-coloured foam before tearing it off in handfuls and sending it upstream and into the air, like dirty April snow. On the beach last Saturday, the wind had made their eyes run as much with laughter as with the cold, but now, standing at the wall on the riverside, Waters couldn’t imagine a bleaker-looking scene.
Stone walls do not a prison make, someone had said, nor iron bars a cage, but he could not stay in the flat and brood about what had happened in Central that morning. He had his phone and it had a signal – he knew this part of the town well enough and didn’t need to check. If anyone wanted to speak to him, they would be able to do so.
It was a familiar walk to him, and he had stood here plenty of times. This was the place where he had first seriously confronted his feelings about Miriam, and made the decision. And now, would he soon be telling her something quite different, that he had been suspended? And later, that he had been dismissed from the police service? If that happened, would she believe him rather than the authorities who had taken such a decision? Would anyone believe him? His colleagues? His own parents? In these me-too days, there seems to be a certain presumption at play, but it isn’t new, really. People have been saying there’s no smoke without fire for a long time.
Obviously, he had analysed it to pieces already. There would be no evidence against him as such because he had done nothing wrong, but people can be convicted with surprisingly little hard evidence – he was in the right job to know that, wasn’t he? Police disciplinary proceedings are rigorous but are no more free from errors than those of the criminal justice system. Mistakes are made in both. And looming large, every time he thought this through, was the fact that Maya Kumar was from an influential family. Her mother was the Police and Crime Commissioner in a neighbouring county, and the first female Asian one in the country. This should count for nothing, of course, but we all know the reality in these situations. Smith had a phrase for it, when events took an unexpected turn thanks to some unseen hand – ‘Someone,’ he used to say, accompanied by the knowing look, ‘Someone has had a word…’
Waters turned right and began to follow the riverside path down towards the docks. Self-pity is pointless but he had to wonder why this was happening again. The last time, he had been seconds away from telling Freeman about his secret interview with Michael Wortley, and effectively ending his time in her squad if not in the police. And now, through no fault of his own that he could see, he was on the brink again. Smith once more, after their first case, sitting in the accident and emergency department of Lake General, waiting for the doctor to examine Waters’ broken nose – ‘I’m not saying you’re accident prone. It’s more like you’re, I don’t know, event-prone…’
At the time that had been an entirely novel idea because he wasn’t, never had been. Nothing remarkable had ever happened to him in his school years. He had been the quiet boy at the back of the class, in top sets but getting middling sorts of grades. In team sports, never the first picked, never the last, and socially he had been content to have a handful of friends. It had taken a school photograph at fourteen to make him realise he was the tallest boy in the year. His A levels had been better than predicted, good enough to get him into a proper university, not one of the wave created by the political machinations of Tony Blair, and there too he had led a quiet life. He’d done the usual student things but safely and sensibly, interested in the work because he had realised by then he was academically a late-developer and he was enjoying the experience. When he began the course, he would have settled for a lower second degree. By the end of it, his tutor had told him nothing less than a first would do and he should consider research.
Instead of which he had joined the police service on an accelerated development programme, designed to produce the managers and leaders of the future. That had been going pretty well until he arrived at Kings Lake but he had no sense of regret and no intention of blaming anyone. He had chosen Central because the detective in whose team his father had been was still there, still working, and because his father had said to him one day, be funny if you ended up alongside DC Smith.
That was the turning point, when things had begun to happen to him rather than around him. The investigation into Wayne Fletcher’s death? Suddenly it wasn’t a job or even a career – it took over your life. It became your life. You didn’t think about what time you’d be starting or finishing work. You met the family, the friends, the heart-broken people left behind in the wreckage, as much victims as the one who had lost his life, and you had to fix it, you had to do what you could to bring them closure and some sort of justice. For the first time in his life he was doing something that mattered.
And soon he might not be. Again. Waters had reached the dockside café that had half been in his mind as a destination. He could have walked to Micky Lemon’s place but too many characters there might have recognised him, and Micky might have had a word about some funny business going on down at the snooker club or the dog-track, and that would be painful. Waters had his own small network of people now, and to think he might lose that as well was just another reason to feel depressed.
He went into The Cat and Saucer and ordered a coffee. There was no sophisticated table service here – you stood at the counter and watched a miserable-looking woman pull handles and press buttons on a pre-war machine. There was a knocking sound as if a wheel was about to fall off, and a jet of steam escaped from somewhere underneath, which absolutely was not part of the process. Eventually a brown liquid dribbled into a white porcelain mug.
The woman looked up at him and said, ‘Milk?’
Waters said no. This seemed to surprise her. After a moment’s reflection, she said, ‘Sugar?’
No again, and a smile but nothing in return, save for an expression that seemed to be saying, up to you, mate, your funeral…
He took a seat at a window which looked out over the docks. There was a freighter moored across the water. Once it had been painted red but it was mostly rust now, and the name in faded white lettering at the bows was indecipherable. It might even be in a foreign language. He could always join the merchant navy, if such a thing still existed. Then he took out his mobile but there were no missed calls and no messages.
Miriam had called him that evening, thinking he had probably finished work for the day. She talked about Patsy taking over the shop and about increasing her music teaching, and how he could help her by screening the people like last time. She was pleased, excited even, and he gave her no hint of his own troubles. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, Waters…
Smith again. Sometimes it was annoying, the way he was in your head, like a virus in your software you just cannot delete. Every time you re-boot, there it is. And there was the temptation, of course, to call him and say ‘DC. I’ve got this friend who’s in a bit of bother, and I said I’d give you a ring and see what you’d advise…’ – if only to hear the sardonic response. Have you ever considered getting some new friends? They seem a needy lot. Or, what sort of a plonker lets a dressed-up young woman he doesn’t know well but is a bit suspicious of into his flat on a Friday night? Or-
His mobile was ringing. Now it could be, because strange things like that have happened before, but when Waters looked he didn’t recognise the number. All his contacts had names attached – some not their real one, but a name nevertheless. When it stopped, he went through the list just to be sure but that had not been Maya Kumar, or at least it wasn’t from the number he’d put into his phone all those months ago when the squad became operational. Like his mentor, he had developed the habit of leaving his card in judiciously chosen pairs of hands around Kings Lake – those could produce unknown callers. April seemed to change her number every three weeks; perhaps it was her.
He was debating whether to call it and see when his phone rang again. The same number. He left it, began counting, got to eight and then pressed accept, calculating that if it was Maya he could do as Freeman said – make a note and say nothing. In an official disciplinary inquiry, that could count against her.
A voice said, ‘Chris?’
It was John Murray. Out of hours, Murray never addressed him as sir – it was an unspoken acknowledgement of their time as equals in Smith’s team, and of the fact that Murray himself had played a part in the new recruit’s education.
‘John. Have you changed your phone?’
‘No. Had this for ages. Why?’
‘It’s not come up as you.’
‘Not my regular phone, that’s why.’
‘You have two?’
‘Yes.’
This was the downside to dealing with the most taciturn man of his acquaintance. Sometimes it was like questioning a wary suspect.
Waters said patiently, ‘I never knew that. Why do you have two mobiles, John?’
‘So I can call people in tricky situations without leaving any prints. I’d say this is a tricky situation. Don’t you have one?’
He took the phone to his usual seat, the solitary red armchair bought from a charity shop when he first moved in here, and sat down.
‘No. Are you telling me you have a burner? You have an untraceable pay-as-you-go?’
Murray said, ‘Yes,’ still with that note of surprise.
