The Home Secretary had mulled this over with a piece of lamb's liver. 'You know, I'd never thought of it that way before,' he said finally, running a hand over his greasy hair. 'I suppose they have to.'
'Have to what?' asked the Director.
'Fuck. Must do, I suppose. Stands to reason.'
'Fuck what?' asked the DPP, who was beginning to think his own preference for prostitutes was being got at. For the life of him he couldn't remember one called Pandora.
'Other worms,' said the Home Secretary. 'All the same sex or both sexes, worms are. I suppose that's what bifurcated means.'
The DPP tried to pull his thoughts together. He couldn't see the significance of worms bifurcating. 'About the Twixt 'n Tween Serious Crime Squad,' he said. 'The thing is we've got Sir Arnold Gonders up there and, while I can't say he's my cup of tea, he pulls a certain amount of weight at Central Office. She appointed him and he's something of a favourite.'
'Really?' said the Home Secretary, with the private thought that in that case Sir Arnold Gonders must be extremely bent. 'Did his bit in the Miners' Strike against that shit Scargill, I suppose?'
'Absolutely. Never shrank back for a moment. Wanted to use armoured police horses against pickets and that sort of thing. And water canons with some sort of acid dye in them. Gets his instructions from God, apparently, like that other lunatic. Makes God sound fucking weird, if you ask me.'
The Home Secretary looked at him doubtfully. You never knew with DPPs these days. 'You've got a thing about fucking, haven't you?' he asked. 'Ever thought of bifucking?'
The Director of Public Prosecutions smiled unhappily. He was never entirely sure about the Home Secretary either. There had been some talk about cross-dressing.
Altogether it had been a most unpleasant lunch, but he had finally got the Minister to agree that the Twixt and Tween Serious Crime Squad and the Chief Constable should be left in peace for sound party political reasons. These had to do with a property development company in Tweentagel which Sir Arnold had shown himself to be rather too well informed about during their private discussions over the phone. It had never crossed the Director of Public Prosecutions' mind that the ex-Prime Minister's family business arrangements were so involved. Sir Arnold's implied threat made him glad he hadn't dipped his hand into that particular barrel. In short, Sir Arnold Gonders knew far too much to be trifled with.
Now, sitting at the top table looking down over his lads, the Chief Constable preferred his own blunter version of events. It accorded more with the picture of himself he liked to have in his own mind, that of the kindly father to his men who would cheerfully sacrifice his own career to maintain their belief in themselves as the guardians of the law. Of course God came into the picture too. He would never have got anywhere in life without God being on his side all the time. Well, most of it anyway.
As he'd once put it to his Deputy, 'You ought to take up religion, Harry, you really ought. Beats Rotary any day of the week. I mean, it gives meaning, know what I mean. With God beside you, you know you're right. My golf handicap improved four strokes when I got religion. I'd been on twenty-two for almost as many years and suddenly I'm on eighteen. That's proof enough for me.'
The celebratory party was undoubtedly an excellent one. There was plenty of champagne and half a dozen cases of brandy had been donated by the main drug dealer for the area. It had been nicked from the cellar of a well-known connoisseur of fine wines and was known to be good. There was even a kissogram girl, naked except for painted convict's stripes, who had been paid for by the ex-Prime Minister's son with the message, 'To the dear old Bill. Keep it up, lads, and top the bastards.' This was much appreciated, although Sir Arnold, who, having started the evening on gin and tonics, had gone onto whisky, and had then been prevailed upon to drink a couple of pints of Newcastle Brown with some detective constables before progressing through the champagne to a particularly virulent Côtes de Provence and finally brandy, wasn't altogether sure about having naked women with stripes on them strutting about the room waving their fannies.
'Wouldn't have done in my young days,' he told Hodge. 'Still, it's only fun and it helps keep morale up.'
'Keeps other things up too, I dare say,' said his Deputy, but the Chief Constable chose not to hear. He was wondering whether he was up to putting his own thing into Glenda or not. Probably not.
In the meantime Chief Inspector Rascombe was making a speech. Sir Arnold lit another Montecristo No. 1 and sat back contentedly to listen. 'You can't expect a good detective like Rascombe to be a bloody orator as well,' he had told Hodge before the dinner, and Rascombe was proving him right.
It was only towards the end of his allotted ten minutes that the real meat of the speech became apparent. Until then the Inspector had concentrated on the excellent work the SCS, and particularly the retiring Detective Inspector Holdell, had done and the crimes they had 'solved'. But then he changed tack and spoke with surprising eloquence about the unbridled campaign of vilification the media was conducting against the finest body of men and women he had ever had the privilege to work with in defence of law and order. 'What the public have got to understand,' he said by way of conclusion, 'and what the fucking do-gooders are going to bloody learn, is that we are the Law' (cheers) 'and an Order means just that and, if they don't like it, they can piss in the pot or get out of the kitchen!'
The applause that greeted this analysis of the police role in society delighted the Chief Constable so much that he helped himself to another brandy and rose to his feet a truly happy man. In his own speech he praised Holdell for his dedication to making Tween a safer city which, since it was graded second in the league for violent crimes among all provincial cities, would hardly have reassured a sober and unbiased audience. One of the younger waiters did in fact have a coughing fit. But the Chief Constable went on, and on, and ended by reminding 'all you officers present that our island nation stands on the very brink of a new and terrible invasion, this time by organized international crime. Already the criminals and we all know who they are are trying to subvert our great traditions of justice and fair play by undermining the very foundations of morality which as we all know lie in family life. The so-called single-parent family a non sequitur if ever I saw one because you can't have a mother without a father and vice versa this so-called single-sex family is the dry rot of everything we Britons stand for. And I for one can tell you I am not having women with short hair and men with you-know-what and the out-of-town monkeys' (here he looked with facetious caution round the dining-room) 'with the big johnnies sticking their noses into the way we've always done things in this country.' He finished with his usual prayer to 'Almighty God, Father of all Things, help us in our struggle against the Powers of Evil, and those of impure heart who seek continually to hamper the Serious Crime Squads everywhere, to do Thy will. Amen.'
He sat down to the applause he expected and looked more favourably on the kissogram girls. Very favourably indeed. Oh yes, it was good for morale to have some properly sexed girls at a party like this. The tables had been pushed back and a space cleared and it was obvious there would be some dancing. Well, that was fine for the younger folk, but the Chief Constable had better things to do. In particular he was going to spend the rest of the night with Glenda and get her to show him some new tricks. That was one of the advantages of having the Old Boathouse up by the reservoir that his wife liked so much. Gave him the opportunity to get to see Glenda here in town. He had bought the boathouse at a very favourable rate when the Twixt and Tween Waterworks had been privatized and had spent a lot of money doing it up and modernizing it. Nice little bolt-hole was the way he'd seen it then but, now that Lady Vy had adopted it as her own, he tended to stay away as much as possible. And this weekend he had special reasons for staying out of the way. Vy had been over to Harrogate to pick up her so-called Auntie Bea and they'd be up at the boathouse by now and doing God alone knew what. Not that he cared any longer. Glenda was a good girl and knew how to give a man the sort of thing he liked. Yes, he'd go over to her flat and...He was just considering this happy prospect when Sergeant Filder came over and bent down. 'I'm afraid there's that fellow Bob Lazlett from the Echo outside asking for a statement, sir,' he said.