Detective Inspector Damen Brook woke with a shudder and gathered himself for a moment, eyes clamped shut, damp fists clenched, poised between realities, each one disagreeable. With a mind divided he could escape both, have a foot in neither, bliss, for that second, before he opened his eyes to take in the blankness of his conscious world.
He raised his head from his desk and looked around his spartan office. He scanned the floor and listened. Nothing. No scratching, no telltale scurrying.
He pulled himself upright and massaged his aching neck, then stood to do the same for his back. He checked his watch. Gone midnight. His shift had finished four hours ago. He could have been at home now. Home. He could never resist a smile at the word. What would he do there?
He picked up the phone and yawned, tapped a pencil on his notepad and began to doodle. He moved his head from side to side in a silent Eeny meeny miney mo then punched the keys
.
‘Taj Mahal.’
‘I’d like to order a takeaway please.’
‘Hello Mr Brook. How are you tonight?’
‘Never better. I’d like Chicken Jalfrezi…’
‘…and pillau rice. Would you like any bread with that?’
‘Do I ever have bread?’
‘Never.’
‘Well then. How long?’
‘Ten minutes.’
‘I’ll be right there.’ Brook replaced the receiver and left, closing the door of his office softly. He walked quickly and quietly towards the main entrance.
He was in luck. Sergeant Hendrickson had his back to the counter and Brook was able to slide across the door to Reception without being noticed. He was in the clear and about to stride away when Hendrickson’s voice held him.
‘Bastard! He wants stringing up.’
‘Too right,’ replied a voice. Brook recognised PC Robinson–Hendrickson’s straight man.
‘Well if we get whatever bastard’s done this, you’ll see me at the front of the queue when the knuckle sandwiches are being served up.’
‘Me too.’
Another voice, too indistinct to hear, said something by way of disagreement, judging by Hendrickson’s response.
‘No good at all. But it’ll make me feel a fuck of a lot better.’
Brook stood poised, grimacing, urging himself to make his escape. But he couldn’t let it go. He was a DI. He had rank. He took a deep breath and stepped back
in front of the counter. ‘Sergeant.’ All heads turned. ‘I could easily be a member of the public standing here listening to that language,’ he said, with an effort to sound forceful. ‘Or worse the Chief Super…’ He stopped in mid-sentence when he saw WPC Wendy Jones was the third person in the conversation. Their eyes locked briefly before each looked away.
Brook pursed his lips and let the sentence hang, hoping it would appear a natural break. He shouldn’t have said anything. He knew it. He could have been away. His resolve was melting so he pretended to examine the desultory Christmas streamers darted around the ceiling before returning his eyes to Hendrickson.
‘Still here? Sir.’ Sergeant Harry Hendrickson wore the mocking smile he reserved for his dealings with Brook. The pause he took before acknowledging Brook’s seniority was a new technique for him though Brook knew it well enough. It was one he’d used himself when dealing with any Joe or Josephine Public who stimulated his contempt. That was in the days when he could still be stimulated.
‘And people wonder why you didn’t make detective,’ smiled Brook, with a bravado he didn’t feel. Hendrickson’s grin vanished and Brook heard sharp breaths being sucked in. He took one himself and decided he had to play on for all it was worth. ‘Well?’
‘Well what? Sir?’ replied Hendrickson.
‘Foul language and threats of violence. Explain yourself.’ Brook knew he sounded lame. Hendrickson sensed it. He found his mocking smile again and stared back at Brook with unconcealed hatred.
PC Robinson decided to step in. ‘There’s been a murder, sir. Some old dear. Strangled and beaten to death.’
‘I see…’ began Brook.
‘And some of us with mothers get very hot under the collar,’ spat Hendrickson, ‘when we see what some scumbags will do for a few quid. Sir!’
There was a crackling silence that prompted even WPC Jones to look up for Brook’s reaction. When it came, it surprised even Hendrickson. Brook smiled a sad little smile and nodded. ‘Who took the call?’
‘DI Greatorix was on duty, sir,’ said Robinson.
‘Right.’ Brook turned from Hendrickson’s triumphant grin and his eyes sought the floor. A second later he spun back to face Hendrickson, trying to get control of his voice. ‘Some of us who had mothers also got hot under the collar, sergeant, until we realised those feelings made us worse policemen who couldn’t do their job properly. I may not find your language offensive in itself but it’s a symptom of a mind that’s not under control.’ Brook paused before adding softly, ‘And control is what they pay us for.’
Hendrickson’s grin remained but it had lost some of its wattage. Now it was Robinson’s turn to look at the floor as Jones looked up at Brook. He, in turn, permitted himself a brief dart towards her eyes and fancied he detected a scintilla of approval in her expression. He couldn’t hold the look for long and turned away, throwing a ‘Good night’ over his shoulder as he left.
Brook walked away more calmly than he felt, listening for the telltale mutter and laugh that signalled some
further insult. It arrived, as usual, as Brook rounded the corner and descended the stairs to the car park. He shook his head.
‘Why didn’t I just slip away? Why?’
‘Who does that twat think he is?’ spat Hendrickson. ‘Fucking London ponce.’
‘He’s from Yorkshire originally,’ offered Jones, not looking at either of her colleagues. This was a subject best avoided.
‘Yeah. So what the fuck was he doing in the Met then?’
Jones took a breath and looked straight back at Hendrickson to signal her final say on the matter. ‘He was some kind of rising star, they say. The best criminal profiler on the Force. Until he got sick.’
The portly figure of PC Aktar walked in. ‘Come on, my duck. Let’s get out there,’ he said to Jones. ‘We’ve got a city to look after.’
‘Coming.’
‘Sick my arse. I’ve seen his file. He had a fucking breakdown. So what’s he doing here then?’ asked Hendrickson. ‘I’ll tell you what he’s doing here, my girl…’
‘I’m not your girl…’
‘…he couldn’t hack it in the Met, see. A college boy who thought he could do a better job than us ordinary coppers but he couldn’t handle it, could he? So what happens?’ He glanced at Robinson as though he wouldn’t continue unless people insisted then carried on a split-second later. ‘We have to take him off their hands, don’t we? Why? Because Derbyshire’s a second class county and we can make do with middle-aged burn-outs who
are treading water until they retire. That’s why. We’re shit and he’s better than us so we should all bow down and kiss his arse.’
‘Sounds like fun, sarge,’ laughed Robinson.
Hendrickson smiled back at him. ‘Ai. It’s true though, innit? And there’s not a copper in this nick who doesn’t agree with me.’
‘He does his job,’ chipped in Jones, on her way out.
Hendrickson smirked. ‘I might have known you’d defend him.’
‘What does that mean?’ flashed back Jones, her colour rising, though she knew only too well.
This time Robinson joined in with a leer. ‘We all know he’s your boyfriend, Wendy.’
‘He is not my boyfriend,’ she replied through gritted teeth, ‘I danced with him once and he gave me a lift home. Nothing happened. How many times?’
‘Would that be a fireman’s lift?’ asked Hendrickson. He and Robinson cackled as Jones headed for the corridor.
‘Piss off the pair of you.’
‘Please try and control your language, constable,’ Hendrickson shouted after her. ‘Your boyfriend might hear you.’
As they headed for the car park, Aktar kept his eyes trained on Jones, waiting for the explanation. She ignored him for a few moments then, without looking at him, said, ‘Not a bloody word.’
Brook pushed through the heavy metal door at the foot of the stairs and stepped into the artificial half-light.
It was cold and dark, the chill winter’s day having left a permanent freezing damp coating the ground. Brook shivered and pulled the collar of his overcoat up.
As was his custom, he stepped into the middle of the ramp to get to his car. He couldn’t go near other cars. He needed space between himself and any obstacles. There’d been a rat once. So now Brook trod a path equidistant from both lines of vehicles.
He reached his old sports car, all the while scanning the floor for movement. He opened the creaky door and launched himself onto the cracked leather seat to avoid being nipped on the ankle by a stray psychotic rodent. He felt like a child launching himself into bed to escape the talons of the Bogey Man skulking below. He didn’t care.
As he swung his battered Austin Healey Sprite out of the car park, Brook was appalled at its throaty din. The reverberations of the old car’s straining engine clattered against the dark structures gathered around Derby’s Police Headquarters and were flung back at Brook in a fit of pique by the empty office building across the road.
What a racket. He was aware of it now, once the bustle of the day had long departed. The roar he savoured with a connoisseur’s pleasure on a sunny Sunday drive in the Peaks made him wince in the echo chamber of the night. It was a cacophony that could have shattered the walls of Jericho, had the biblical city been no more than a 50 mile round trip from Derby.
Brook picked up his takeaway and was home in a few minutes, one of the advantages of living in a city as small as Derby. A quick trip round the inner ring road past
the Eagle Centre, skirting the new shopping precinct, and Brook was back at his down-at-heel rented flat on the Uttoxeter Road.
It wasn’t much of a front but it was as good a place as any. And it was central. No Barrett home in a suburban development for Brook. No tasselled sofa and MFI flat packs. Brook was used to city living, where he could be quiet and anonymous: unless, of course, he was driving the Sprite home after midnight when everyone could mark his progress through the streets. Not that he cared about disturbing people. Like all insomniacs, he assumed everyone else slept like babies.
Brook slowed the Sprite to a crawl and carefully manoeuvred the delicate bodywork onto the pavement-cum-drive outside his ground floor flat. He killed the engine, heard the fan belt call a cranky halt to its day’s work and stepped out of the driver’s seat holding his Chicken Jalfrezi, listening to the pre-ignition running before the engine finally died. He closed the door gingerly, not bothering to lock it.
Instinctively he turned to the upstairs window of the flats next door in time to see the curtain fall. Brook nodded, satisfied. Old Mrs Saunders probably slept less than he did. He supposed she’d be having ‘a word’ with him tomorrow about ‘all that noise in the middle of the night’. Comforting really, having such a busybody keeping an eye on the place. Not that he bothered about security. He had nothing of value. But then again, he
was
a policeman and, as such, was as interested as Mrs Saunders in the ‘comings and goings’, if only out of a kind of default curiosity.
Brook hesitated before going in. He wanted a cigarette. He’d gone without for two days. He extracted a dog-eared pack from the boot of the car and flipped open the box. One left. That was good. And bad. If he were still in Battersea, he could have gone for more, any time of night. But he wasn’t. He was in Derby and it was closed.
Brook lit up and inhaled deeply, enjoying the sting and feeling an immediate and gratifying nausea. He stood by his car and looked out over the building site across the road and on, past the sweep of Derby’s low horizon. There wasn’t much to be seen. It was a dark, misty night and cold air was blowing down from the Peaks.
For the first time in the three years since his transfer, Brook was beginning to look at the skyline like an old friend. He hadn’t chosen Derby as a place to live and work. He’d picked up the first available transfer out of London. If it had been to Baghdad he would have taken it. Just to get out.
And Derby hadn’t let him down. It was a pleasingly unremarkable place to lose himself. An engineering town by tradition, which marked out the population as hard working and straightforward, it also boasted a large and well-integrated Asian population.
Frank Whittle, pioneer of the jet engine, was much honoured in a city where Rolls Royce was the main employer. Derby also had one of the largest railway engineering works in the world. It was a city built on transport, going nowhere. Obligatory retail parks ringed the city and much of the population and traffic had followed, making Brook’s neighbourhood, if not any more glamorous, then certainly a little quieter.
And despite the inevitable decline of such an industry-dependent city, crime was not excessive and murder was rare.
But what really marked out this East Midlands backwater was the Peak District, a few miles to the northwest. Brook had fallen in love with it and took every opportunity he could to drive into the hills and soak up the peace of the countryside. Ashbourne, Hartington, Buxton, Bakewell, Carsington Water. All were favoured haunts, where he could dump the car and walk for hours alone, clearing his mind of all the clutter.
And now, as a bonus, he was discovering a sense of belonging. That was good. It would prepare him for the biggest challenge of all; retrieving a sense of himself.
For the first time since joining the Met as a callow, yet confident twenty-three-year old, Brook began to believe that it might be possible to wash the garbage from mind and body. Now, here, he was only wading in the gutter. In London he’d been drowning in a sewer.
Brook took a final urgent drag and tossed the cigarette. He walked up the communal access road and unlocked the back door into the kitchen of his flat. He never used the front door as it opened into his living room, a quaint reminder of a childhood spent in a back-to-back terrace, with which he wasn’t comfortable. Memories of strange, rubicund men collecting rent or insurance and breathing light ale fumes into his pram were still keenly felt forty-odd years on.