There were no tears in her eyes as she replied: “I can’t do that, Frank. But there’s one thing I can do: I’m going, as you so delicately put it, to bugger off!”
In full control of herself she turned the catch on the Yale lock, and the door closed quietly behind her.
Chapter nine
He looked at me with eyes I thought
I was not like to find.
It had been the previous day, Thursday, when after collecting her boss’s mail Barbara Dean had walked along the corridor, white blouse as ever perfectly pressed, flicking through the eleven envelopes held in her left hand. And looking with particular attention (again!) at the one addressed with a scarlet felt-pen, in outsize capital letters, to:
The execution of this lettering gave her the impression of its being neither the work of a particularly educated nor of a particularly uneducated correspondent. Yet the lowercase legend along the top-left of the envelope — “Private and Confidencial” (sic) — would perhaps suggest the latter. Whatever the case though, the envelope was always going to be noticed — by whomsoever. It was like someone entering a lucky-dip postal competition with multicolored sketches adorning the periphery of the envelope; or like a lover mailing off a vastly outsize Valentine.
What would her boss make of it?
Barbara had been working at Police HQ for almost six years now and had enjoyed her time there — especially these past three years working as the personal secretary of Chief Superintendent Strange; and she was very sad that he would be leaving at the end of the summer. “Strange by name and strange by nature” — that’s what she often said when friends had asked about him: an oddly contradictory man, that was for sure. He was a heavyweight, in every sense of the word; yet there were times when he handled things with a lightness of touch which was as pleasing as it was unexpected. His was the reputation of a blunt, no-nonsense copper who had not been born with quite the IQ of an Aristotle or an Isaac Newton; yet (in Barbara’s experience) he could on occasion exhibit a remarkably compassionate insight into personal problems, including her own. All right (yes!) he was a big, blundering, awkward teddy bear of a man: a bit (a lot?) henpecked at home — until recently of course; a man much respected, if not particularly liked, by his fellow officers; and (from Barbara’s point of view) a man who had never, hardly ever, sought to take the slightest advantage of her... well, of her womanhood. Just that once, perhaps?
It had been at the height of the summer heat wave of 1995. One day when she had been wearing the skimpiest outfit the Force could ever officially tolerate, she had seen in Strange’s eyes what she thought (and almost hoped?) were the signs of some mild, erotic fantasy.
“You look very desirable, my girl!”
That’s all he’d said.
Was that what people meant by “sexual harassment”?
Not that she’d mentioned it to anyone; but the phrase was much in the headlines that long, hot summer, and she’d heard some of the girls talking in the canteen about it.
“I could do with a bi’ o’ that sexual harássment!” confessed Sharon, the latest and youngest tyro in the typing pool.
That was the occasion when one of the senior CID officers seated at the far end of the table had got to his feet, drained his coffee, and come across to lay a gentle hand on Sharon’s suntanned shoulder.
“You mean sexual hárassment, I think. As you know, we usually exercise the recessive accent in English; and much as I admire our American friends, we shouldn’t let them prostitute our pronunciation, young lady!”
He had spoken quietly but a little cruelly; and the uncomprehending Sharon was visibly hurt.
“Pompous prick! Who the hell does he think he is?” she’d asked when he was gone.
So Barbara told her.
Not that she knew him personally, although his blue eyes invariably smiled into hers, a little wearily sometimes but ever interestedly, whenever the two of them passed each other in the corridors; and when she sometimes fancied that he looked at her as though he knew what she was thinking.
God forbid!
It was not of Morse, though, but of Strange that she was thinking that morning when she tapped the customary twice on his office door and entered. Sometimes, when he sat there behind his desk — tie slightly askew, a light shower of dandruff over the shoulders of his jacket, hairs growing a little too prominently from his ears and from his nostrils, white shirt rather less than white and less than smoothly ironed — it was then, yes, that she wished to mother him. She — Barbara! — less than half his age.
That he’d never had such a complicated effect on other women, she felt completely convinced.
Well, no; not completely convinced...
Chapter ten
He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
“Probably some nutter!” growled Strange as he slipped a paper knife inside the top of the envelope and unfolded the single, thin sheet of paper contained therein. And for a while frowned mightily; then smiled.
“Have a look at that, Babs!” he said proudly, making as if to hand the sheet across the desk. “May well be what we’ve been waiting for — from my appeal, you know.”
“Won’t there be some fingerprints on it?” she asked tentatively.
“Ah!”
“You can get fingerprints from paper?”
“Get almost anything from anything these days,” mumbled Strange. “And what with DNA, forensics, psychological profiling — soon be no need for us detectives any more!”
But in truth he appeared a little abashed as he held the top of the sheet between his thumb and forefinger and leaned forward over the desk; and Barbara Dean leaned forward herself and read the undated letter, typed on a patently antiquated machine through a red/black ribbon long past its operative sell-by date, with each keyed character unpredictably produced in either color.
“Bit illiterate?” suggested Strange.
“I wonder if he really is,” said Barbara, replacing her spectacles in their case.
“You should wear ‘em more often. You’ve got just the face for specs, you know. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?”
No one ever had, and Barbara hoped she wasn’t blushing.
“Thank you.”
“Well?”
“I’m not in the Crime Squad, sir.”
“But you don’t think he’d last long in the typing pool?”
“You fairly sure it’s a ‘he’?”
“Sounds like it to me.”
Barbara nodded.
“Not much of a typist, like I say.”
“Spelling’s OK — ‘recognize,’ and so on.”
“Can’t spell ‘was.’”
“That’s not really spelling though, is it? You sometimes get typists who are sort of dyslexic with some words. They try to type ‘was,’ say, and they hit the ‘s’ before the ‘a.’ Do things like that regularly but they don’t seem to notice.”
“Ah!”
“Grammar’s not so hot, I agree. Probably good enough to pass GCSE, I suppose, sir.”
“Does anyone ever fail GCSE?”
“Could do with a bit more punctuation too, couldn’t it?”
“Dunno. Not as much as Morse’d put in.”