– Listen Bruce, we’ve obviously had to withdraw your application . . . for the promotion. Now is not the right time for you to meet with the promotion board. You see that, don’t you?
We understand what Toal is saying. We cannot be bothered responding. They’ve now taken the job we coveted, the one which was ours by right, but the sense of loss that we feel is strangely negligible.
Toal’s looking around the house with distaste. It’s a mess: aluminium takeaway cartons, chip-shop wrappers, beer cans (purple? aye, it’s found us at last!), plates with rotting scraps of food on them, even a pile of dried sick in one corner. – Listen Bruce, Toal’s face pinches as he allows his nostrils to acknowledge the stench we have long been oblivious to, – you can’t live like this. Is there nobody we can get in touch with, to make sure you’re being looked after?
– No . . .
BUNTY
SHIRLEY
CHRISSIE
CAROLE
Carole. The only one who could give us anything. The rest would just take. We have nothing to give them. But Carole will never return.
– You sure?
– I’ll sort it out boss, we tell Toal. His face looks sourly down at us. – Honest, I try to force a smile.
– I want you to Bruce. The police welfare people will be round to see you soon. They’ll be able to offer professional help. I know things seem pretty bleak at the moment, but you’re not the first officer on the job who’s lost it and you won’t be the last. Busby’s had his problems. Then there was Clell. He seems on the mend now. Bruce . . .
Toal looks a bit sheepish. He’s rubbing his gloved hands together.
– Aye?
– You’ve got friends you know, he says softly. Then he smiles slightly. – We’re no as daft as you think. Your wife. We know she was having an affair with a black guy. It’s no a big city Bruce, and it’s a very white one. Things like that get noticed, no matter how discreet the parties are. But, as I said, you’ve got friends. We look after our own.
His words hit me in a slow, stupefying flood. I feel like a test-crash dummy on low impact. I’m trying to work out what he means. – You mean you knew . . . all the time . . . you . . .
– Don’t say anything Bruce, Toal says sternly, – Don’t say a word to me.
He turns and pulls the net curtains and looks out the window. Then he faces me, keen-eyed: – Sometimes things are best left the way they are. There’s reputations, morale and careers at stake. In some ways, aye, it’s penny wise and pound foolish. We’re a bit short-termist in our thinking. But then again, we’re burdened wi this wee problem of three score and ten. Needs must, he grins.
Same rules apply. I try to smile but I feel my face frozen, as if all the muscles and nerves in it have been severed.
– You know, all this stuff about a mystery woman? I wasted a lot of time on her, he laughs and shakes his head looking at me, slightly embarrassed. – I overheard Bob Hurley saying to you in the bar one time: They’re all fucking Jackie Trent. You know, I thought that this Jackie Trent girl was involved and was having it off with most of the guys on the investigation in order to get them to cover things up. I spent ages looking for a Jackie Trent to run checks on. Then I realised it was all just some canteen in-joke, a bit of silly rhyming slang.
– Yes . . . Jackie Trent, I hear the words reverberate in my head and parrot mindlessly out from between my lips.
– Anyway, I’m sick of it all. Funny Bruce, I misjudged you. You see, somebody half-inched a private document of mine. From my office. The bastard stole the hard copy, erased the file and the back-up disk. I had my suspicions, he looks at me and shrugs.
We know that our face is too blank to register anything.
– I got a bit paranoid for a while. I was testing out everyone, trying to find cracks. I mean, all that stuff I was giving you about poor Inglis, as if I care who he shags. You were good though Bruce, I’ll give you that. Anyway, I was daft to have this stuff at the work. I was doing some private stuff, during breaks you know, maybe when I had a spare minute. Sometimes I’d stay late and work on it, it’s quieter at the office than at home. I thought that perhaps you knew, well . . . what we knew. You see Bruce, I was writing a screenplay based on the case of a racist murder. I based it loosely on the Wurie murder, with my own fictive embellishments of course. In my screenplay, the murder is being covered up by a racist cop who has a motive . . . not to solve the crime.
– How does it end . . . I ask too quickly.
– Oh, we fit up some thugs. A happy-ever-after story.
I nod. The sort of ending people like.
– Yes, I got a fright when the document was stolen and the files erased. At first I suspected . . . certain parties. But I knew that the person would have had to have read it, and I would have been able to tell. Of course, I had another copy on the hard disk at home, so it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience. You can’t be too careful, eh! I still might finish it and send it off to a production company. A pipe dream, but nothing ventured, eh?
– Aye . . . that’s good . . . that you’ve done it . . . I mean that you have an interest . . .
– Aye. I’m fed up on the force. Had it up to here, a leather glove salutes his forehead. – Clell’s right. The law spends too much time demonising ordinary people who’re just trying to get on with their lives. Society’s changed and the law hasn’t kept pace; so it’s us, the mugs, who have to enforce them, who get it all in the neck. I’m sick of it. There’s enough genuine bad guys to lock up without sending some daft kids on a H.M.P. University of Crime course for smoking weed or selling pills. You can’t criminalise people for a consumer preference. Might as well jail them for preferring Cornflakes tae All Bran. A load of fuckin nonsense, he shakes his head. – Anyway, I have to go.
I feel an anxiety rising in my chest. I want him to stay. No. I want him to tell me something. I have to ask.
– Boss, one thing. What happens to the guy in your script . . . the, eh racist cop?
– Not got to that bit yet Bruce. Maybe you could help me! he smiles. – Anyway, the welfare will be round soon. As I said, try to hang on in there.
Toal departs.
A good man.
We are alone. We switch on the television. There is nothing on.
No. We love only ouerselves.
No. This is not us. We are thinking of somebody else.
Rhona.
We have to think of Rhona. The mob of hate reminded me, always the mob of hate. There were the pit villagers and then Gorman and Setterington’s thugs. In between them, another mob. Who?
No, it does us no good to think of that.
because it’s done and it’s in the fuckin past
I can’t even eat a thing
– Come if you want, I’m telling her on the phone, – just come if you want.
I put the receiver down on the cradle and I realise that I don’t even know who I was talking to. It was a her though. But I don’t know who it was. Bunty? Chrissie? Shirley? The polis welfare woman? Carole?
Naw, it wisnae Carole.
I’m sitting here inspecting the rash on my thighs. I’ve taken a felt-tipped pen and drawn the border around the extremity of the infected skin. This way I’ll be able to calculate the rate at which the infection spreads. If I could calculate my entire skin surface, I could work out how long it would take for me to be completely covered in the rash.
I’ll fuckin well tell Rossi. I’ll have the information before that useless quack can get it. In three years, four months, twelve days and six and a half hours from now, your patient, Detective Sergeant, no, not now Detective Inspector, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson will be just one, big festering scab.