Lynda La Plante: Silent Victims

He pulled Hall behind the half-open door as Tennison glanced their way.

“… boy is Colin Jenkins, known as Connie.”

Otley punched Hall’s arm. He then made a show of arriving for the first time, all innocent, to be met face-to-face by Tennison, who’d marched smartly over.

“Sorry I’m late, ma’am,” said Otley with a straight face. “But I’ve been seein’ if I can get your drawers loosened.”

Everybody heard but nobody laughed.

Tennison stood with her back to the window. On the other side of the desk piled high with three-inch thick files, Otley waited, sardonic grin absent for the moment. He’d had to deal with this slit-arsed bitch before, and knew what to expect.

The room was still in an almighty mess, though WPC Hastings had managed to find her a desk lamp that worked and two more straight-backed chairs with the varnish worn through to bare wood. For the moment, Tennison had more important preoccupations.

“Right, Sergeant, I am not prepared to take any crap from you, or stand by and let you stir it up. So let’s clear the air.” Tennison jerked her head, eyes hard as flint. “Sit down.”

“Judging by the state of the rest of your office I don’t think I should risk it!” Otley pulled a chair forward and sat down, an uncertain half smile hovering on his face. “Joke!”

“If you don’t want to work with me, I can get you transferred.”

Otley studied his thumbnail. “I was out of line at Southampton Row, but, that said”-he shrugged-“I know you did a good job.”

“Thank you,” Tennison said, her sarcasm like a saw’s edge.

Her last case with the Murder Squad had been a racial and political minefield. Teenage half-caste girl dug up in the back garden of a West Indian area seething with antagonism against the police. Despite this, Tennison had stuck to the job like a terrier with a bone. Tracked down and collared a young white bloke with a sickening, sadistic streak who liked taking photographs while buggering his schoolgirl victims.

Otley was looking anywhere but at Tennison as she moved a stack of files from her chair and sat down. She stared at him a long moment, letting him sweat a little, and then flipped open the green cover of a file. She tapped the report.

“I have a lot of catching up to do, so, come on… are you going to help me or not?”

“I got an I.D. on the boy in the fire at Reynolds’s place,” Otley volunteered. He took a folded sheet from the pocket of his crumpled suit. “He was a runaway, fifteen years old. Colin, known as Connie, Jenkins. All the state-run homes have their kids’ teeth checked on a regular basis and filed on record-”

“What’s this boy got to do with Operation Contract?” Tennison asked bluntly.

There were connections here she couldn’t make. Otley and Hall seemed to be running some cowboy operation of their own. Plus there was an undercurrent in the department; she’d sensed it right away. Not unease exactly, more a kind of apathy. Lack of motivation. She had to get to the bottom line of all this before the whole bloody mess swamped her.

She strode along with Otley to the Squad Room and up to the board.

“It was supposed to be a slow start to a massive big cleanup.” He swept out his hand. “All the areas targeted were those specifically used by rent boys.” A glance at her under his brows. “It’s Halliday’s obsession.”

“Yes… And?”

“That’s what it is-cleanup operation.”

“So what’s the big deal? Why has it been taking so long?”

“Because it’s a bloody cock-up-if you’ll excuse the pun!” Otley said with some heat. “The Guv’nor before you got dumped. Somebody had to take the blame.”

Tennison saw a chink of light. The entire room, while ostensibly working, was taking in every word. Kathy and Norma were sitting at their VDUs, staring at the green screens. Otley was about to go on, checked himself, and looked toward Inspector Hall. Hall came up and the two men swapped some kind of coded message.

Hall turned to Tennison, keeping his voice low.

“Ma’am, a few of us think the same way. There was a leak, word got out. No gamblers, no boys on the streets.” His tone turned bitter. “We spent weeks getting ready for a big swoop, all hush-hush… came out empty-handed. Surveillance trucks, uniformed and plainclothes officers-it was a fiasco. It had to be a leak but Chiswick and Halliday keep on pushing it.”

Tennison looked at Otley standing a few feet away, head sunk on his shoulders, flipping through the pages of a report that just happened to be on the desk.

Under the force of her gaze he raised his eyes. “I’d say, now, the buck stops with you.”

She knew that. It was the sly curl of his lip she didn’t like.

“So we stop, and old John looks at this unattended vehicle, he looks at me, we’re both wet behind the ears, and I said, ‘What do you think?’ There it was, parked without lights in the middle of this copse on a housing estate in Cardiff…”

Chief Superintendent Kernan paused, smiling down at the man seated next to him at the top table, the “old John” in question. Kennington, receding silver hair brushed back, distinguished, with a supercilious air, returned the smile. He puffed on his cigar, smiling and nodding at the great and the good gathered for his farewell dinner in the banqueting room of the Cafe Royal. Every senior-ranking policeman on the Metropolitan force was here. These were colleagues he had worked with, served under, commanded during the nearly forty years of his rise to very near the top of the heap.

Several judges were in attendance, not one under sixty-five. Barristers who’d defended against him, prosecuted with him. Pathologists, forensic scientists, doctors, one or two people from the Home Office, a junior Minister, and a sprinkling of sober-faced top brass from the security services whose names and photographs never appeared in the newspapers.

Kernan took a sip of brandy before continuing. In spite of his apparent joviality, the puffy, pasty face with its mournful hangdog look seemed painfully at odds with his black tie, starched shirt, and black dinner suit. Leaning forward, hands splayed on the white tablecloth, he spoke into the microphone.

“So we drive across the copse. Midway across we get bogged down in the mud. So we get out and radio for assistance.”

Grins and nods from the rows of tables stretching down the long elegant room, chandeliers reflecting in the gilt-framed mirrors. Everyone relished a good cock-up story.

“… a Panda was just passing, so they followed us across the copse-and they got bogged down about ten feet away from us. Next came a Land Rover. They got as far as our patrol car. So there we all were… and John says, maybe we should check out this abandoned vehicle. So we wade across this bloody bog, and find a note pinned to the windshield. ‘GONE FOR HELP. STUCK IN THE MUD.’ ”

Thumps on the tables. Flushed faces guffawing. Everybody having one hell of a good time, getting better by the minute so long as the free booze kept flowing.

Three seats down from Mike Kernan at the microphone, Commander Chiswick took advantage of the laughter to mumble into his companion’s ear, “Sweep it under the carpet job. Now I’ve been warned to keep it there…” He met the other’s wide-eyed gaze, nodding meaningfully.

Kernan had consumed three large brandies while on his feet, and his speech was getting slurred. He now poured another treble, ready for the finale. “So I would like to propose my toast, and to give my very good wishes for a happy, productive retirement-to John Kennington. Gentlemen! Please raise your glasses!”

There was a gulping silence while everyone drank, and then a loud buzz of animated chatter, ribald comment, and hee-hawing laughter. Plump hands beckoned urgently to the waitresses, beavering around in their short black dresses and white pinafores. The speeches were only halfway through, a powerful incentive to get three sheets into the wind by the shortest possible route.