if I were to say the wrong thing, he would explode, his tightly controlled temper unleashed.
‘I think that Davey found someone in the nick that he could get leverage on or pay off, sir.’ I was proud of how calm I sounded.
‘And do you have any idea who that might have been?’
I shook my head. ‘Haven’t a clue, sir, but I can assure you I intend to find out. Jimmy is still weeks away from even leaving the hospital, and I can’t let it stand without justice being done.’
Pearson stared at me over his desk for so long that I began to get nervous, before he finally spoke. ‘I’m sorry, Gareth, but I’m going to have to put you on restricted duties. PSD will probably want to suspend and interview you, maybe even have you arrested, but I personally don’t think that you have anything to do with this and you’ll have my support. That’s all.’
I stood and left the room, my anger and fear surrounding me like a swarm of biting insects, all attacking me at once. Professional Standards has a horrendous track record of ruining officers’ lives and reputations and then discovering that the charges they’re trying to bring are false. They are every honest copper’s nightmare; they never seem to find the bent ones, few though they are.
Restricted duties meant that I wasn’t allowed any contact with the public, so I would have to stay in the office for however long it took, stewing slowly in my own juices as Davey sat around drinking, laughing at us and selling drugs.
As soon as I walked into DIU, Kevin waved me over and ushered me into the inspector’s office, which was empty owing to the fact that our guv’nor was off long-term sick with stress. He thought his job was stressful; he should have been where I was standing.
Kev sat down in the chair, leaving me to perch on the edge of a filing cabinet. ‘Talk to me.’
I shrugged. ‘What can I say? Someone found their way into the evidence and planted a rubber knife. God only knows what they did with the real one.’
He stared off into space as he asked, ‘Do you think it was someone from this office?’
I shook my head. ‘No way. No one in here would do that to Jimmy. I’d bet my job on it. My guess is that it was one of the temps they’ve been using in the store.’
The property store – G83 as it is known to us – is one of the dullest places in the building to work, and owing to the heavy lifting, long hours and lack of daylight, we have a hell of a time retaining store clerks, so over the previous eighteen months or so we had had a string of temps come in to do the job. It made it confusing as they all seemed to use a different system and, personally, I had already wondered how good a security check they were given before they were allowed to work in the building.
‘That’s not a bad thought; I’ll pass it on. You know you’re on restricted duties?’
I nodded. ‘Word travels fast, huh?’
Kev smiled and shook his head. ‘Not really. Pearson came down to see me, and I told him that if you were suspended you’d probably end up chasing after Davey on your own. He agreed, and decided to restrict you instead.’
‘No way!’ I exploded. ‘He told me it was his decision to just put me on restricted duties and that he was on my side! Just goes to show who you can really trust, doesn’t it?’
Kev just looked at me, smiling the smile that told me that he agreed, but wouldn’t say so openly.
‘I’m sure the chief super would never take someone else’s idea and pass it off as his own, Gareth. Who would ever dream of a senior officer doing that?’
It’s well known that if someone wants a promotion, they either steal a lower rank’s idea or invent a new form that makes life for the lower ranks even more complicated.
I shook my head in disgust and headed back into the office, throwing myself into my chair hard enough that it almost tipped over.
Sally turned to look at me, sympathy written all over her face. ‘Are you okay, Gareth?’ she asked, and for once I had no wish to drown in her eyes.
‘Not really. Someone screwed around with the evidence, I’m stuck in front of this damn desk for God knows how long, and Davey is probably in a bar somewhere drinking champagne and laughing at us right now.’ I tried hard not to sound like a whining teenager but I could hear it in my voice.
‘Has anyone told Jimmy yet?’ she asked as she turned back to her computer.
‘I hope not. I’ll grab a car and go and tell him. I’m sure they won’t mind me going up to the hospital.’
I jumped out of my chair, glad to be getting out of the office. Kev threw me a set of keys when I checked in with him, and within ten minutes I was walking into the ward at the Royal Sussex, where Jimmy was being looked after.
His little curtained off cubicle was awash with flowers, grapes and books of crossword puzzles, all sent by concerned colleagues and friends, and somehow they made Jimmy himself look smaller, as if he were shrinking under the weight of the gifts. His usually tanned complexion was pale and he had lost a good stone and a half since he had been in hospital. Where once he was all gym muscle and sense of humour, he was pale and skinny, a shadow of his former robust self.
‘How’s the knife magnet?’ I asked, sitting on the edge of the bed near his feet.
‘Almost ready to go home apparently,’ he said listlessly, not bothering to put on a brave face; we know each other too well. ‘How did the court case go?’ A hint of hunger entered his voice as he asked, a need for closure on what was probably the worst experience of his life.
I couldn’t meet his eyes as I explained the whole debacle, but I could still see his face drop as he realized that any hope of that closure was gone forever. Even with our statements and Davey being at the scene, the loss of evidence effectively stopped us from ever prosecuting him for what he did to Jimmy.
‘Any chance you can pop round to his house and cut his balls off?’ Jimmy asked, sensing my distress and trying to make me smile. That’s typical of Jimmy. He’s always the one to bring people out of bad moods with a joke or some idiot act that makes everyone laugh. On the morning that my marriage had finally fallen apart, he had strapped one of our removable blue lights to the top of his helmet and walked into a briefing for a murder inquiry. I laughed so much that I nearly choked and he got stuck on for inappropriate behaviour, but it had helped and I’d been pulled out of the depressive mood I’d been in.
I smiled at him and picked a grape off its stem, throwing it at his face with pinpoint accuracy. ‘Don’t be a knob. I wish I could, but they’d know it was me and then I’d be in a cell next to one of his friends, I have no doubt.’
He nodded and lay back, rubbing at the cannula embedded in the back of his left hand. ‘It’s a shame we can’t destroy his business then. Can you imagine what would happen if he started having trouble with his suppliers? They’d do the job for us!’
I started to laugh, then stopped as the idea ran through my mind, gathering speed as it went. We had details of his whole operation: who was working for him, where they dealt, who bought from them. In fact, there was so much information that we simply couldn’t deal with it all and we left many of his dealers in place purely so that we knew who to watch.
If
