“Where are they going?” Burkin asked, appearing at Tennison’s side.
“I don’t think they know. Arrange a car for them,” she said. “I think Mrs. Allen may well need to see a doctor. Probably they both do.”
Burkin nodded, about to do her bidding, when he noticed her face. “Are you okay, Guv?”
“Right away, please, Frank.”
Burkin went after them, leading them out.
Tennison leaned weakly in the doorway for a moment. She felt nauseated, as though she’d been kicked in the stomach. She went back into her office.
Kernan had taken off his jacket and shoes and was lying on the leather sofa in his office, listening on the phone to Commander Trayner. He’d crunched three aspirin and swilled the mush down with neat whisky. He shaded his eyes, waiting for it to take effect, as he half-watched the television picture, the sound turned low. The by-election count was still going on. It was going to be a close one.
At one time, Kernan reflected, in the dim and distant past, he’d been a copper on the beat. A real policeman. Doing real police work. Now he was trapped and tangled up in bleeding internal politics and PR and career moves, like a fly in a sticky web. On top of which he had a murder investigation that threatened to go off the rails, a dead black boy in the cells, and a rowdy DCI who’d been caught fucking a junior officer. He shut his eyes, and through the dull pounding in his head, tried to concentrate on what the commander was saying.
“Has the family been informed? Good…”
Immaculate in a dark-blue suit, pale cream shirt, and polka-dot tie, Trayner stood in the hallway, keeping one eye on the TV in the living room. He’d invited the Thorndikes around to dinner, and they were sitting with his wife Dorothy, lingering over brandies and Harrods’ mint crisp wafers, while they watched the election result.
“What about MS15?” Trayner asked. “Well, get onto them right away.” He passed a pink, plump hand over his smooth glossy hair, graying at the temples. “David Thorndike should lead the investigation, which is good news for us,” he said glibly.
At the mention of his name, Thorndike swivelled around in his chair, sharp nose in the air, all ears. Trayner winked and favored him with a conspiratorial smirk.
“Absolutely.” Trayner was nodding, agreeing with Kernan. “A complete bastard-but a complete bastard who is the most likely candidate to take over from you if you get the move upstairs.” He added silkily, “And that will surely depend on how you handle this business from now on…”
Dorothy had turned the sound up, and Trayner said, “One moment,” leaning towards the living room door as the party official stepped up to the microphone.
“Kenneth Trevor Bagnall, Conservative… thirteen thousand, one hundred and thirty-seven.”
“Not enough,” Trayner muttered tersely, shaking his head.
“Jonathan Phelps, Labour… sixteen thousand, four hundred…”
The rest was drowned in a storm of cheering from the Labour supporters in the hall. Phelps, smiling broadly, had both fists raised in the air. Trayner turned his back on it.
“Did you hear that?” he said into the phone. “It’s in David’s best interests to stop Southampton Row being dragged through the mire. Keep me informed.”
He hung up. Thorndike came through, buttoning his jacket. “Well, we’d better be going.” The two men looked at one another. Things might work out after all. The MS15 investigation, with Thorndike in charge, couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment, everything considered. If nothing else, it would cast a cloud over Tennison’s promotion prospects. And if Thorndike could perform a damage limitation exercise on the Met’s reputation, impressing the powers-that-be, he’d come out of it smelling of roses.
Trayner patted him on the shoulder, and Thorndike responded with his thin-lipped watery smile. “Looks like I’ve got an early start in the morning,” he said.
“I’m a black bastard, I deserve all I get, I’m a black bastard, I deserve all I get…”
“Stop that!”
Tennison sat at her desk, her elbow on the blotter, her head propped in one hand. She tapped the ash off her cigarette and put it to her lips. She inhaled deeply and breathed out, the smoke pluming from her nostrils. The tape reel slowly turned, semaphoring plastic gleams under the lamplight with each revolution.
“I’m a black bastard, I deserve all I get, I’m a black bastard, I deserve all I get…”
“Tony, just stop it, man!”
Tennison closed her eyes and took another long drag.
This was worse than she had feared. Much worse. What in heaven’s name had possessed Oswalde? Why had he allowed it to go on? Pushing and pressuring the boy when it was obvious that he was stricken with hysterical panic, teetering on the edge of a complete nervous breakdown? What the hell was he trying to prove? That black coppers were superior to white ones? Or that he had nothing to learn from the Gestapo?
The procedures laid down under PACE were quite explicit, and this interview was a case-book study on how to disregard every one of them. Whoever was appointed from MS15 was going to have a field day.
“That’s enough. Can I have a word with you, Sergeant Oswalde.” Burkin’s voice.
“In a minute.”
“Now, Sergeant Oswalde!”
Tennison mashed her cigarette next to the five stubs and switched off the tape.
10
Tennison had the nine a.m. briefing put back to nine fifteen. First she wanted Burkin in, and she told DS Haskons to send him along as soon as he arrived. He came in, pale and hollow-eyed, a shaving nick on his chin, and stayed standing and silent while she tore into him. The second time in under two weeks; it was getting to be a bad habit.
“I’m not talking about Oswalde’s part in this,” Tennison stormed at him. She stayed on her feet, pacing, because if she sat down she’d have had the cigarette packet out. “You and Mike Calder had the authority to stop those interviews. Instead, you let them continue-no, better still, you let Oswalde interview the boy on his own while you sat by the telephone waiting for me to do your job for you-”
She broke away to answer the door. It was Haskons.
“Ready when you are, Guv.”
“Right.” She closed the door and walked around Burkin to the desk. He was looking carefully at nothing in particular, as long as it wasn’t her. She didn’t care what he was feeling, or what he thought of her; this was a professional matter; she was expected to do her job, and she expected him to do his.
“The rank of inspector is supposed to mean something, Frank. It carries responsibility. It’s supposed to denote a certain authority.” She stared up at him, hands clasped at her waist. “You won’t make excuses. You’ll face the music like a man. That’ll be all.”
Burkin turned and left the office.
He went directly to the Incident Room, where Muddyman was perched on the corner of a desk, sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup. The other members of the team were lounging about, and Muddyman was saying, “I don’t understand it-we’re at Harvey’s bedside getting a confession and meanwhile Oswalde’s off chasing Tony. It doesn’t make sense.”
“His ass is grass,” said Rosper, the jive slang specialist, with a shrug.
Haskons was more sympathetic. “It’s a dreadful thing to have happened. You carry that around with you for the rest of your life,” he said.
Still smarting from his encounter with Tennison, Burkin didn’t see why anyone else should be let off the hook. “The spade should be suspended. I mean, why was he brought here in the first place?”
“You know why,” Muddyman said.
“To talk to his people,” Jones said.
“Yeah… and now one of them’s dead and it’s down to him,” Burkin growled. He looked around the circle of faces, aware that not all of them were convinced. “Look, I’m not exaggerating or nothing,” he told them stridently. “That boy was really weird, I mean climbing the walls, screaming and shouting, like mental or something. And believe me, I tried to tell him…”