John Eider - Not a Very Nice Woman

Grey was agog at this inversion,

‘Patrick, your mother and Charlie, they were at Council meetings. They were on sides utterly opposed.’

‘So you say.’

‘You’re forgetting how it went that night. Your father kicked her out onto the street.’

‘She ran off to be with him.’

The man resumed crying, and Grey knew there was no point arguing.

The stretchermen came, they covering Mars’ mouth, they telling him to be calm, to relax, not to strain anything; yet he whispered to Grey as they lifted him to lead him off,

‘When we’d walk this way when I was growing up, my dad used to say, “You know, your mother would’ve hated these flats, she did all she could to stop them.” He sounded sad when he said it. She’d hurt him, you see.’

The day had seemed too bright to be wading through such murky waters, these matters better suited to the veil and shadow of the Confessional. Grey had listened to Mars with no desire to be the sharer of his secrets, his confessor by necessity maybe, but never a confidant. They didn’t need his words, they already had their case: the women’s statements, forensics from the house, and lack of alibi would do for Patrick Mars. Grey left the rooftop calmed by this.

Cori was standing by her car at the site of the earlier crowd scene, the shops now back to usual busyness, though the conversations of the shoppers given an urgent edge.

‘How’s my little soldier?’ she joked as Grey met her welcome presence.

‘Tired. I guess Rose wants to see us?’

‘Oh, hospital first, I think. Try not to bleed on the upholstery.’

He felt for his collar, remembering, and realised that for all the medics around him upstairs the cut on his neck hadn’t even been asked to be looked at.

‘You learnt a lot today,’ he said in the Infirmary waiting area, he proud of her achievements.

‘A shame it all came in the wrong order though, before we had a chance to bring him in.’

He shoved the letter from Derek Waldron, crumpled now from his adventures, into her hand.

‘He’s not too bad apparently, though he worried the doctors for a while,’ she said after reading. ‘It looks like Derek did get his “lucky blow” in before Mars got his.’

The doctor concurred when Grey got to see her,

‘It’s not good for someone Mr Waldron’s age to get beaten about like that; and as for Patrick Mars, he’d been bleeding internally for two or three hours before we got him. I’ve seen men die from smaller cuts.’

So Waldron was bad but far from fatal; and as for Mars, well, Grey knew he was unfinishable. He had the same faith in Mars’ immortality as we each have in our own. Mars would have many healthy years of life ahead of him, to be wasted in whatever institution the state chose in which to dispose of him.

‘Why don’t you get off home?’ had asked Grey while waiting to be seen.

‘Are you joking? Once we’ve gotten you patched up then I’ve three days of my notebook to write up.’

‘They’ll wait until till morning.’

‘No they won’t, because something else will be along tomorrow; as you well know.’ She bumped shoulders with him in a friendly gesture, just as his name was called from across the room,

‘Right then, you’re up. You want me to wait?’

‘No, I’ll see you back at the station.’

She gave his hand a squeeze. ‘My hero,’ she said and pecked him on the cheek. ‘Then I’ll go and see Natasha.’

At that moment though though the doors came the male Constable, who Grey had speculated before might have been seeing their now-injured colleague. Giving the senior officers a nod as he dashed to her bedside, as the uniformed figure passed through the room the waiting people whispered, their own complaints distracted from, ‘They’re the police who took down that gunman.’

The sense of pride and slight embarrassment at being the centre of attention would continue a while yet, as the regional news carried footage of the six of them in carbon-fibre vests rushing into the Hills shopping building. That he had done little other than hold cover behind a doorframe as the one-and-only shot at them was fired was neither here or there.

Back at the station, Rose echoed Grey’s own instruction to Cori, but backed his with authority. Ordered not to show his face again till morning, Grey couldn’t quite cope with home yet, even with it being not far off a normal worker’s knock-off time. Despite being put on strong painkillers that forbade drinking, and it being too early for him to start anyway, he needed company, faces, voices, and so walked the short walk to the Young Prince Hal Tavern.

‘Pint Grey?’ asked Bill Blunt at the bar.

Grey showed and rattled the plastic pillbox, Bill pouring him a pint of lemonade. His barmaid Janice, wiping a glass distractedly nearby, smiled at him before returning her gaze to the news rolling silently across the flatscreen television hoisted up above the door.

‘Lord, we’ve made the BBC,’ said Grey. ‘It must have been a slow day.’ That the TV was even on in the Prince Hal at any time other than a national sporting event was itself a turn up, Bill not a lover of technology in pubs.

‘Steak and eggs for The Holdup Hero?’ he offered. Grey gave him an equally sarcastic smile as he nodded and fell into a cushioned chair.

Friday

The next day was far from the rush Cori foresaw. After a straight five hours of report writing, form checking and statement rereading (for several of those he’d spoken to had since come in to go on record) Grey found himself hitting lunchtime; and what for him was a time of day that, with nothing happening to distract or excite him, could prompt a fall into a mid-afternoon lull. Cori was in a similar situation along the corridor with her own pile of paperwork.

Throughout the day new information had come in: reports on the plant matter found around Stella’s injuries proved inconclusive; though the walking stick was definitely covered in blood, and there seemed no way it wouldn’t be found to be Charlie Prove’s. However, in a shock move it later appeared that none of this fact checking might prove vital after all, a visit by Superintendent Rose to see and Patrick Mars, with his solicitor at his bedside, bringing the news that Mars would sign a confession if it saved his daughter Esther and second wife Ludmila from the trouble of a court appearance.

Perhaps Mars had loved the women in his life all along, pondered Grey; before realising that of course he had, it was letting this love show through the gauze of suspicion and distrust cast by his father that had always been the problem, and the confusion caused by this inner-conflict that had seen him lash out so violently.

He wrote a note of thanks to Kehoes, wishing Stacie the best with her studies; and made a mental note to speak with and thank Campbell Leigh next time his business with the Hills Estates Community Forum brought him to the station. The archive file on the killing of Eunice Prove sixteen years ago was also on his desk, to be looked at in detail when time allowed.

Grey then rang Andrea the solicitors’ secretary to make an appointment with Raine Rossiter for any time she was free the next week; for there was business in that office that he felt could still use going over. He worried later though that Raine might interpret his appointment as a wish to see her for herself. This wouldn’t have bothered him so much had he not from somewhere gained the impression that however married she may be, she would be quite willing to forget this fact while it remained inconvenient. He meant no offence to the woman, rejecting this imagined possibility, she was simply not his type.