Bright Spark (18 page)

“I
could get used to this.” Harkness devoured an almond slice in seconds in a
frenzy of nostalgia for his last square meal. He gestured to the teapot. “Will
you be mother?”

“I
will never be
my
mother.”

“But
she seems lovely.”

“Doesn’t
she? By the way, do you want me to pour or not?” Sharon stared pointedly at the
milk jug.

“Alright
then.” Harkness poured an inch of milk into the cup, pinching the delicate
scrolls and folds of the jug’s handle between thick, calloused digits, with his
pinkie extended in a parody of delicacy. “You believe that milk first makes a
difference?”

“You
should always let it temper for a while before you pour on the boiling water,”
she said, pouring. “Apply the heat too quickly, things get sour.”

“That’s
me told.” He grappled with the hallmarked sugar tongs.

“I
pegged you as a ‘milk and three sugars’ kind of guy.”

Harkness
made the second lump his last, hating being predictable.

“Formal
legal complaining?”

“Ah.
Jeremy. He’s my elder brother but I’m still his big sister.”

“A
dangerous felon, is he?”

“Nosey,
aren’t you?”

“It’s
in my job description alongside intolerant, sarcastic and fat.”

“Once
or twice, he knocked his ball into next door’s garden. Not the Murphys - the
other side. Then he half-demolished the fence and smashed a pane in their
greenhouse getting it back. He’s clumsy. They were old and grumpy.

“A
PCSO called in and had a word with JJ. Didn’t know what to expect and went away
mortified. Mum hammered the lesson home. To her mind, having a uniformed
official knock on the door with cap in hand is shameful or dire. Now JJ thinks
he’s Al Capone.”

“Is
your dad ok?”

“You
know he’s not. Lung cancer if you must know. Anyway, I thought you were in a
headlong, desperate pursuit of a murder suspect, you know, one of those frantic
races against time I’m always reading about.”

Harkness
sipped daintily at his tea and helped himself to another almond slice.

“I
am. But right now, what I’m desperate for is the inside scoop on Firth versus
Murphy and I’m trying to wear you down with blather.”  

She
slumped, shook her head, sipped her tea, savoured it then allowed herself a
brittle laugh.

“You
don’t give up. Neither do I. We’re both professionals. Name, rank and serial
number is all you get from me. That and a solid tip – you are wasting your time
with Nigel.”

“Mind
if I finish these almond slices then? I’m famished.”

Inevitability
found him on Carholme Road at 4.30pm and clapped its sweaty mitts on his
shoulders. He glared through the late afternoon haze at the red traffic light,
willing it to change yet tempted to let it pin him to his sticky seat and will
him into the sleep he was aching for. Nobody would mind. Nobody would know.
What else could he usefully do in this meandering, lazy river of caravans and
people carriers, all clogging the city’s arteries in their headlong retreat
from bank holiday fun?

       “You
still there?” enquired Harkness’s mobile phone, perched on the dashboard next
to the rear view mirror.

       “Nowhere
else I’d rather be.”

       “Sorry.
Had to tell someone to piss off.”

       “And
that took five minutes?”

       “Boss
was trying to send me home. Always takes longer when you’re being polite.”

       “You
could have called back.”

       “No
chance. It’s not often you answer your phone. Couldn’t let you slope off
again.”

       The
lights changed briefly, allowing him to inch the Mondeo over the stop line. A
siren whooped somewhere behind him and blue lights fluttered across his wing
mirrors. He shrugged inwardly. It wasn’t as if he had anywhere to go to get out
of their way.
360 degree awareness. Get out there. Own the road. More gas.
Get yourself seen. If you can see the oncoming car, you can plan that overtake
properly. Go now.
Now! Clip another wing mirror and you’re off the
course.
  Driver-training mantras looped through his head.

       “Get
the hammer down, you utter cock. Drive like you mean it.”

       “Come
again.”

       “Not
you. Anyway, what about you? What news?”

       “We
should meet. Very interesting lack of cooperation at the prison and some under
the counter intel on what a premiership shit Murphy was. Is. Whichever.”

       “I
abused legal privilege and antagonised Firth’s ambulance-chasing lawyer who
also happens to belong to the Jennings clan. You couldn’t make it up.’”

       “A
fair day’s work then.”

The blue lights behind him hadn’t
moved, trapped like electric butterflies behind the smeared glass of the
driver’s side mirror.

       “These
new response drivers are just spineless. So, what news from the office?”

       “Aren’t
you my supervisor? Don’t you know?”

       “You’d
think so. 360 degree awareness. Horizon scanning. Pro-active policing. I’ve
heard of all those things.” Harkness squinted as a shadow passed across the sun.
    

       “Engine
off. Phone off.”

       “Slowey,
I’ll ring you back.”

With a start, Harkness found the bulky
form of a black-clad police officer looming at his door, leather gloves
gripping the sill, eyes shaded beneath the lowered peak of his cap. Twisting in
his seat, he glimpsed the cop’s partner behind the driver’s seat of their
liveried BMW, busily tapping data into a touch-screen computer.

“I said phone off,” growled the cop,
reaching in to kill the engine and take the keys.  

       Harkness
was dazed by this new inversion, mute as outrage and confusion jostled for
space. The old movie line came back to him and he had to stifle nervous
laughter: ‘if you’re not cop, you’re little people.’ He needed to offer proof
that he was a member of the club.

       “Keep
your hands where I can see ‘em,” barked the cop as Harkness reached for the
warrant card still clipped to his belt and amply hidden by his gut.

       “I’m
job,” he shouted back. “DS Harkness, Beaumont Fee. You must be off your
division or I’d know you.”

       “Course
you are, petal. Put your hands on the sill right there. Keep ‘em in plain
sight.”

       “You
are joking.”

       “Do
you see me laughing?”

       “I’m a
DS on a murder enquiry,” Harkness declared with patient indignation. “I don’t
know what you’ve been told, but I suggest you take some time to get your facts
straight before you do something stupid.”

       “What
exactly are you threatening me with, sir?” beamed the cop, head cocked
expectantly for an answer.

       “Hang
on. I get it.” The cop’s partner had left the BMW and was standing off,
watching impassively behind mirrored shades. “You know who I am and that’s why
you’re here. Where you from? East or South Division?”

       “In
one, Sergeant. East. Enjoying our trip to the big city.”

       “What
else? Someone report this heap of junk stolen?”

       “Not
quite. I’m sure we’ll find some construction and use offences without too much
effort though. Them tyres are balder than Kojak.”

       “So
what now?”

Guilty
memories fluttered like bats disturbed from their hanging slumber by unwelcome
light. A thousand minor transgressions wheeled and screeched: driving half-cut;
sharing a joint at a party; a few unethical punches and kicks to prone suspects
who deserved it; witnesses coerced into better versions of the truth. A
thousand faltering footsteps on a hard road. Who were these bastards to make
him feel like he hadn’t earned his privileges?

       “Cat
got your tongue? What happens now? Constable.”

       “We’ve
reason to believe you’re driving under the influence of intoxicating liquor.
Sergeant. Grounds being witness reports and our own observations of this car
veering in an erratic fashion.” The cop sniffed histrionically. “That and you
smell like you showered in vodka and slept on a barbecue.”

       Harkness
shrugged away his momentary crisis, really no more than fatigue and low blood
sugar picking at his stitching. He scented Biddle behind this.  He’d been
roaming alone for too long and a pair of sheep dogs had been sent to round him
up.

       “Fine.
Do you actually think I’m going to snot you or run? Can I at least get out of
this shit-heap for a minute?”

       The
traffic cop shrugged and took a step backwards. Harkness uncoiled himself from
the car, stretching to his full height to put himself a head above the cop.

       “Now
then. Where do I blow?”

       “Steady,”
exclaimed the cop, accepting the intoxilyzer from his partner and clipping a
disposable plastic tube to its receptor. “That might be seen as a kind of
bribe. But you probably know more about the promotion process than me.
Sergeant.
”

       He
studied his hands as they grasped the bars; scraped knuckles, singed hairs and
nails rimed with soot and filth fitting perfectly with the vertical shafts of
steel thickened by grey emulsion.  Wedging his clammy forehead in bored
exasperation against the cold metal, it felt like the very fabric of the
cellblock was exuding cold sweat.

He
imagined his life unspooling. Pounced upon in a busy road in stark daylight.
Dragged, cuffed, kicking and spitting into gaol. Every scrap of falsehood in
their words fuelling his raving indignation. Every plan, assumption and ounce
of self-worth being sloughed away as he writhed against clutching hands and
metal bands. Daylight banished by jaundiced strip-lighting.

Even
his strong hands, already scarred and burned by toil, couldn’t bend or break or
melt these bars. No power within his aching skull could frame a picture that
didn’t include bars. Nothing he could say or do could make the cops and lawyers
and hangers-on, bustling and hustling an arm’s length away, think of him as
anything other than a devalued commodity to be traded away, another problem to
be solved or deferred.

       Perhaps
he was missing something; the mental leap or lapse that allowed those who had
gone before him to tolerate the bars and thrive. Cognitive dissonance, the
headshrinkers called it. Some of them, anyway. The naïve ones, clever enough to
grasp the concept, if not clever enough to realise that beneath all the
conditioning, damage, dysfunction and inertia, not everyone is middle-class.

       The
prison hierarchy certainly depended on it, a rank structure based on both ruthless
violence and a skewed yet clear personal morality. Gangsters, armed blaggers
and knife murderers gazed down like bloodied Mayan priests from the top of the
ziggurat. In the offal-spattered gutters at the base cowered the paedophiles
and perverts whose appetites and compulsions made hard men wince. Clambering up
the middle terraces, the burglars, drug dealers, con men, drug users, muggers,
arsonists and wastrels clamoured for the right to liberty and an end to
consequences.

       Those
vying for the heights had succeeded in one vital aspect. They had accepted
their own transgressions as a necessary adjunct to a professional life. They
had forged a code of morality that permitted an indignant, self-evident
righteousness that no mullah or cardinal could outdo. So men who brutalised
security guards with pick-axe handles and shotguns for unspectacular sums of
money, or stabbed strangers for drunken gratification, or ravaged the savings
and mental health of pensioners, all knew with adamantine certainty that they
were superior to the broken creatures whose illicit appetites were merely sexual.

There
was no hand-wringing doubt. To take a stranger’s life for inebriated honour, or
to crush a skull for a few grand in pocket money, was neither forgivable nor
understandable; it was in fact respectable. Giving in to misplaced sexual urges
because your childhood had been warped and debased and you were emotionally
adrift, desperate to re-enact, to punish and be punished, to steal innocence
and taste it for a while; that was carte blanche for righteous violence against
you.

       The
code certainly had self-preservation at its core. Everyone needs somebody to
feel superior to. The higher your place in the pecking order, the greater your
chances of enduring untouched, unscarred, sane and alive. So where does
murdering a screw’s wife and kids by arson fit? The intended victim was a
screw, but every child-killer in the seventh circle of D Wing had an excuse. It
was always a fit-up. Once the gavel fell on the pleading and calculating and
over-educated noises off, you’re still a child-killer with a place in the gutter
awaiting you. How far down the ziggurat would Firth’s head bounce?

       Would
Firth survive it? What if Harkness had taken that road? Would he have had to
embrace the rules of his new society, cognitive dissonance just so much radio
static that sooner or later has to be tuned out? But for a few different steps,
were Firth and he so very different?        

       Damn
him to his private hell of concrete, steel and fear, thought Harkness. He’s
obsessing me and we’re not even through the bloody gate yet. Was it normal for
daydreaming to be this vivid? He was sure he used to think about sex and his
shopping list when his mind idled. When did he become an urban shaman? He
glanced at his watch, twice, initially failing to read the time. His first
fever dream had marked twenty-four hours without sleep. He was now approaching
thirty-six hours. He raised his head, punched the gate with the heel of his
hand, hating waiting.

       “Sarge!”
he shouted to either of the two men behind the elevated custody desk. Neither
one acknowledged him, both wholly consumed in delivering pro forma homilies to
teenage shoplifters in a bid to recycle cells.

       “Take
a break, Rob. Relax. Take stock. Think of this as a lull before the storm
rather than a complete fucking waste of time.”

Biddle
leaned against the other side of the access bay, the double-gated holding area
separating Beaumont Fee’s cell block from the outside world. Judging by the
tang of ingrained sweat and pipe tobacco, it seemed that Biddle had worn the
same thick tweed jacket all day, despite the lack of any kind of air
conditioning in the enquiry office.  

       “Just
let me ask you this. Again. Did you really tell traffic to put me through the
mill just because I didn’t return your calls?”

       “I was
concerned. I asked them to keep an eye out.”

       “And
they had to come from Boston to do that?”

       “We’re
a big county with few specialist resources.”

       “I
thought you were old school. I know traffic would love to bag a pissed up
detective, but I’m surprised you’d want to help ‘em.”

       “Come
on, Rob. What about our clean slate?”

       “Come
to think of it, you know perfectly well I wouldn’t drink on the job, but you’d
still find it sweet to have me harassed and shown up on company time.”

       “Rob,
don’t you think it would be more productive if we used this opportunity to
think about interview strategy.”

Biddle
glanced towards the glazed holding cell occupying one wall of the access bay.
Firth lay on the concrete bench projecting from the wall, one thickly plastered
leg outstretched, chest sucking in rapid, hoarse breaths, one arm draped across
his face, crutches propped against the door. Harkness realised he’d been loath
to look at Firth in case his flesh and blood reality somehow jarred with the
certainties he’d painstakingly stitched together.