was a gap or at least a thinness in the hedge where it met a wall at the apex of the bend.
Instead of slowing for the turn, he twisted the throttle to full open. There might be something coming the other way; he might find the hedge more solid than it looked; even if he got through, the close clustering trees would be almost impossible to avoid.
He went straight across the road.
The hedge parted like a bead-curtain. He felt its branches scrabble vainly to get a hold on his leather jacket, then he was among the trees, bucketing over exposed roots, leaning this way and that as he twisted through the copse, decelerating madly. His shoulder grazed bark, a low bough almost took his helmet off. Finally he mounted the steep mossy bank of a drainage ditch, let the bike slide from between his legs and lay on the ground, his ragged breath drawing in the odour of leaf-mould and damp earth while his pounding heart settled back into the monotonous rhythms of safety.
Distantly he heard the police car go by. He sat up and removed his helmet. He was hot in his leathers and he took them off too. Almost without thought, he continued undressing, peeling off shirt and trousers till he stood naked among the trees feeling the cool air playing on his feverish flesh. He was sexually aroused. He thought of Stella Mycroft. And he thought of Ellie Pascoe. His hand moved to his groin, but a sudden gust of wind heavy with a chilling rain got there first.
Like a pail of cold water over a rutting dog, he told himself sardonically, Thanks, God!
He pulled on his clothes and protective gear, pulled the bike upright and set out across country easing the bike along ploughed furrows but opening it up across pasture land. Sheep scattered; cows regarded him with gentle curiosity. A man on a tractor stood up and waved an angry fist, mouthing inaudible abuse. Colin Farr waved back.
Ultimately he hit a farm lane which took him out on to a minor road he did not know. Using the declining sun, he turned to the south-west and soon was back on a main road he recognized.
When he reached the outskirts of Burrthorpe, he stopped at a telephone box, went in and dialled.
The number rang a while, then the phone at the other end was lifted and the pips demanded his money before he could be heard, like ghosts gibbering for blood. He pressed in his coin.
A woman’s voice said, ‘Hello? Burrthorpe 227.’
He didn’t speak.
‘Hello?’ Impatient now. ‘Who’s there?’
Still he kept silent.
And now the voice changed, the pitch lower, the tone anxious.
‘Colin, is that you?’
But still he did not reply and the woman cried out angrily, ‘Get stuffed!’ and banged the phone down.
Colin Farr left the receiver dangling and went home.
Ex-Deputy Chief Constable Neville Watmough awoke on the Friday morning after the SDP candidate selection meeting with that dull ache of the heart which warns the mind of a disappointment before the mind itself has recollected it.
He had been rejected. Again. The local councillor had won the nomination after a period of debate so short that in a jury it must have meant one show of hands in the corridor outside the court-room. The bastard was a car salesman, for God’s sake, fit enough no doubt to sort out local problems of street-lighting and refuse-collection, but with little grasp of national or international affairs. As for his person – the suede boots, the two-tone shirt, the thin moustache which he kept on touching nervously while the anaemic tongue lubricated the narrow lips in preparation for yet another ingratiating smile – what kind of image was this for a Party with any real belief in its right to govern? Not that the selection committee itself had inspired any confidence. Schoolteachers, small businessmen, a solicitor’s clerk, a token manual worker, and in the chair, that fat female JP who never missed any opportunity of scolding the police like a stern aunt from the Bench. At least in court you didn’t have to look at her huge splayed legs.
Perhaps he had picked the wrong Party. Perhaps he should have listened to the frequent overtures from local Conservatives to become a bulwark of their Law and Order lobby.
But Watmough was not a stupid man any more than he was immoral or opportunist, and over breakfast he settled down to sorting things out into their true relations in the chain of causality.
‘It looks as if it could be nice enough to finish tidying up the garden today, dear,’ said his wife brightly.
He smiled and grunted and sipped his coffee. It might have been pleasant to discuss things with her, but after three decades of conditioning to regard her husband’s professional affairs as unapproachable, it would be as difficult for her to listen as for him to speak. Fleetingly he wondered if he had been altogether wise to treat, say, Mid-Yorkshire’s traffic flow problems as confidential within the bounds of the Official Secrets Act. But he had made that decision and now must live with its loneliness.
At least, he told himself with some complacency, he did not blame his wife. She had accompanied him dutifully the previous night and said all the right things on cue. He guessed that he alone had detected her mighty relief when the chance that they might have had to move to London had been trampled on by those suede boots.
No, the cause of his disappointment had been bad timing. He had come too late into the race. Or rather, he had come too early. And the cause of that was his failure to get the Chief’s job. Now that had been a real shock. No waking up the next morning then to the dull ache of disappointment, for he had been kept awake all night by its searing pain. It had shattered his hopes and scattered his plans, and worst of all, it had clouded his judgement. It had seemed a cleverly contemptuous act to chuck in his own resignation so quickly afterwards. He would have been wiser far, he now realized, to hang on and look around for a Chief’s job in another part of the country. The local man, because he was known and taken for granted, was always at a disadvantage in such matters – except in the case of car salesmen, it seemed. No, he should have withdrawn, regrouped …
A clock chimed. Ding dong ding dong. Ding dong ding dong. Dong ding ding dong. Ding dong ding dong.
The sound filled him with sudden fury. He counted himself back to control with the hours … seven, eight, nine.
‘I find those chimes a little irritating,’ he said mildly.
‘Do you dear? I’m sure they can be turned off. Most things can.’
Was this irony? he asked himself in amazement. A glance across the table reassured him and he let his mind count another link back in the chain of causality.
The support of his colleagues, their simple loyalty, that too had been missing. That cunning old bastard Winter, the outgoing Chief, had never liked him. God knows what he’d said to the Committee. And as above, so below. That gross grotesque, Dalziel …
He shuddered at the memory.
At least he was now free of them, free to make his own decisions. Free to set the record straight.
There was his book, a serious review of the problems and future of modern policing, based on his own experience
