The sergeant had a faraway look in his eye. Rose realised that until this moment she had known absolutely nothing about his background beyond the fact that he had been a graduate entrant to the force.
‘So, if you were so wild, how did the Reverend Morris tame you the way he did?’ she asked. ‘He must be a very persuasive man.’
Peter Mellor smiled again. ‘He is. He makes you trust him and he makes you want to please him. But there was more to it than that. I was just ten years old when I was caught trying to break into a car to nick the radio.
‘There used to be this policeman then who patrolled St Paul’s, an old-fashioned copper. A big man, in every sense of the word. He wasn’t put off by the riots either. He was like the Reverend, he believed that kids like me should always be given just one chance to make good. And he ran his patch by his own rules. So he didn’t take me in, didn’t put me through juvenile court or any of that crap. Instead he gave me a deal. I had to join Reverend Morris’s youth club, I had to do exactly what the Reverend told me, and if I didn’t keep my nose clean, the next time he caught me he’d lock me up and throw away the key. I believed him. I understood deals. I was streetwise.
‘That was the beginning of it. The Reverend made me feel as if I was worth something. Nobody had done that before. I started working at school instead of fooling around all the time. The rest is history.’
He paused again, then, as if remembering that he was supposed to be a coolly cynical police detective, added: ‘Sorry, all a bit cliché-ridden really, isn’t it?’
Rose leaned back in her chair. ‘And that’s why the Marty Morris thing makes you so angry?’
‘Of course. He was born with more chances than any black kid in Bristol, with a father like that. Look what he became. A rent boy, a poof and a druggie. It makes me sick.’
Rose could see the sergeant’s brow furrowing again. She still didn’t like to hear him talking like that, although maybe she understood his motivation a little more. And she remained much less convinced than most of her colleagues seemed to be, not just Peter Mellor, that Jonathon Lee would eventually be proven guilty of murder. But then, neither was she as prejudiced, either racially or sexually, as most of them. She decided to try to lighten the moment.
‘Speaking of clichés, don’t tell me it was because of that one good policeman that the poor little underprivileged black kid grew up to join the honkie police force?’ she asked, her affectionately bantering tone taking the edge from her words.
‘No way,’ said Mellor. ‘I wanted to go to university and I didn’t want to survive on a grant. It was either the police or the army and I reckoned I stood marginally less chance of getting shot if I became a cop.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ responded Rose with a grin. ‘I’ve always had you down as a cold calculating bastard, Mellor. I’d hate to have to change my opinion...’
The sergeant gave a little snort which may have been the beginning of a laugh.
‘And you, boss? So what about you? Why did you become a cop?’
Rose looked away. It was so long since she had even thought about it.
She had been born and brought up in the Somerset seaside town of Weston-super-Mare. Her father, whom she adored, had held down a stupefyingly boring job as a clerk with the local council. And he worked ceaselessly in order to satisfy the unquenchable desires of Rose’s mother to keep up appearances. In latter years Rose had regarded her mother as a kind of slimmer Hyacinth Bucket without any of the humour.
Rose’s father, still only in his early forties, died of cancer when she was thirteen and Rose had blamed her mother entirely for this on the grounds that it was she who had forced him into mindless soul-destroying daily drudgery and therefore destroyed his will to live. Only much later did Rose accept that this arbitrary judgement was completely unfair. But at the time she was going through a stage when she blamed her posturing and rather unintelligent mother — not always so unfairly — for almost everything.
From that moment on Rose had only two great aims in her young life. She wanted to escape from her mother, whose small-minded attitudes she came increasingly to resent and dislike, and at the same time she wanted to shock the woman.
Failing dismally to find a dreadlocked Rasta or anyone else suitably disreputable enough with whom to run away from the lace-curtained terraced house, Rose decided to go to the opposite extreme. She announced that she was going to join the army, ironically the same alternative Mellor had considered to a police career. This also had the required effect. Her mother was horrified — but so, when she began to find out more about her allegedly chosen profession, was Rose. She didn’t like the idea of square bashing one little bit and she certainly was not going to join any outfit which didn’t treat women as equals.
This made her eventual decision to switch her allegiance to the police force even more baffling, Rose reflected wryly. Even now she could recall no positive reasoning behind it. Often, and only half jokingly, she would remark that she could merely assume that she had been going through a stage of having a uniform fetish. However, joining the police also produced the required result of both winning the disapproval of, if not actually shocking, her mother who certainly did not think it a suitable career for a young lady, and efficiently securing Rose’s escape from home.
Something else, quite unexpected, happened. From the moment the nineteen-year-old Rose was taken on as a probationary constable by the Avon and Somerset Constabulary and installed in a Bristol section house, she had known at once that she was in the right place — that she had chanced upon the only job she would ever want. And she knew also that she was going to do everything within her power to get to the very top of her trade. Her determination disturbed her sometimes. Even she sometimes found her habit of getting what she wanted rather disconcerting.
She glanced back at Sergeant Mellor. Oh no, she thought. Oh no, you don’t. This is not going to turn into a mutual therapy session.
‘Why did I become a cop?’ she repeated, smiling. ‘You’ve just given the answer to that, Peter.’
‘Sorry, boss?’
‘Exactly — to hear a man call me boss!’
That night Peter Mellor carried on drinking, which was totally out of character. Normally he rushed straight home to his wife and child at the first opportunity. He was that kind of man.
On this day, though, he was depressed, which was also unusual, and angry with himself. He had lost control on more than one occasion lately. Now he also considered that he had made a fool of himself. He sincerely wished he hadn’t told Rose Piper the story of his life. He’d even come precariously close to telling her his mother had been a Tom, and the only person in the whole world he had ever revealed that to was his wife. He somehow couldn’t have married Rebecca without confiding in her and the complete lack of concern she had demonstrated had made him love her more than ever. The truth about his mother remained Peter Mellor’s deepest, and in his opinion, darkest secret. He could never quite get over the idea that he had in some way been to blame for what his mother had been, or at the very least that he shared what he saw as her shame. He had cut the woman out of his life as soon as he’d become old enough to stand on his own two feet and for some years had succeeded in hardly even thinking about her. Not until this damn case. The DCI was right. It was having quite an effect on him. Certainly it wasn’t like him to open up the way he had. And his lapse had been made all the more apparent, he felt, because the guv’nor had so starkly refused to share the same kind of confidence. Something of a betrayal that, he reckoned. She’d coaxed all that stuff out of him and then backed right off, just making that silly crack about being called boss which had been guaranteed to make him feel even more of a prat.