John Harvey: A Darker Shade of Blue

January.

Tom Whitemore knocked with his gloved fist on the door of thirty-four. Paint that was flaking away, a bell that had long since ceased to work.

He was wearing blue jeans, T-shirt and sweater, scuffed leather jacket, the first clothes he had grabbed when the call had come through less than half an hour before.

January twenty-seventh, three seventeen a.m.

Taking one step back, he raised his right leg and kicked against the door close by the lock; a second kick, wood splintered and the door sprang back.

Inside it was your basic two-up, two-down house, a kitchen extension leading into the small yard at the back, bathroom above that. A strip of worn carpet in the narrow hallway, bare boards on the stairs. Bare wires that hung down, no bulb attached, from the ceiling overhead. He had been here before.

‘Darren? Darren, you there?’

No answer when he called the name. A smell that could be from a backed-up foul water pipe or a blocked drain.

The front room was empty, odd curtains at the window, a TV set in one corner, two chairs and a sagging two-seater settee. Dust. A bundle of clothes. In the back room there were two more chairs, one with a broken back, and a small table; a pile of old newspapers, the remnants of an unfinished oven-ready meal, a child’s shoe.

‘Darren?’

The first stair creaked a little beneath his weight.

In the front bedroom a double mattress rested directly on the floor; several blankets, a quilt without a cover, no sheets. Half the drawers in the corner chest had been pulled open and left, miscellaneous items of clothing hanging down.

Before opening the door to the rear bedroom, Whitemore held his breath.

A pair of bunk beds leaned against one wall, a pumped-up Lilo mattress close by. Two tea chests, one spilling over with children’s clothes, the other with toys. A plastic bowl in which cereal had hardened and congealed. A baby’s bottle, rancid with yellowing milk. A used nappy, half-in half-out of a pink plastic sack. A tube of sweets. A paper hat. Red and yellow building bricks. Soft toys. A plastic car. A teddy bear with a waistcoat and a bright bow tie, still new enough to have been a recent Christmas gift.

And blood. Blood in fine tapering lines across the floor, faint splashes on the wall.

Tom Whitemore pressed one hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.

He had been a member of the Public Protection Team for almost four years: responsible, together with other police officers, probation officers and representatives of other agencies — social services, community psychiatric care — for the supervision of violent and high-risk-of-harm sex offenders who had been released back into the community. Their task, through maintaining a close watch, pooling information, getting offenders, where applicable, on to accredited programmes, assisting them in finding jobs, was to do anything and everything possible to prevent reoffending. It was often thankless, frequently frustrating — What was that Springsteen song? Two steps up and three steps back? — but unlike a lot of police work, it had focus, clear aims, methods, ambitions. It was possible — sometimes — to see positive results. Potentially dangerous men — they were mostly men — were neutralised, kept in check. If nothing else, there was that.

And yet his wife hated it. Hated it for the people it brought him into contact with, day after day — rapists, child abusers — the scum of the earth in her eyes, the lowest of the low. She hated it for the way it forced him to confront over and over what these people had done, what people were capable of, as if she feared the enormities of their crimes might somehow be contaminating him. Creeping into his dreams. Coming back with him into their home, like smoke caught in his hair or clinging to the fibres of his clothes. Contaminating them all.

‘How much longer, Tom?’ she would ask. ‘How much longer are you going to do this hateful bloody job?’

‘Not long,’ he would say. ‘Not so much longer now.’

Get out before you burn out, that was the word on the force. Transfer to general duties, traffic, fraud. Yet he could never bring himself to leave, to make the move, and each morning he would set off back into that world and each evening when he returned, no matter how late, he would go and stand in the twins’ bedroom and watch them sleeping, his and Marianne’s twin boys, safe and sound.

That summer they had gone to Filey as usual, two weeks of holiday, the same dubious weather, the same small hotel, the perfect curve of beach. The twins had run and splashed and fooled around on half-sized body boards on the edges of the waves; they had eaten chips and ice creams and, tired of playing with the big coloured ball that bounced forever down towards the sea, Tom had helped them build sandcastles with an elaborate array of turrets and tunnels, while Marianne alternately read her book or dozed.

It was perfect: even the weather was forgiving, no more than a scattering of showers, a few darkening clouds, the wind from the south.

On the last evening, the twins upstairs asleep, they had sat on the small terrace overlooking the promenade and the black strip of sea. ‘When we get back, Tom,’ Marianne had said, ‘you’ve got to ask for a transfer. They’ll understand. No one can do a job like that for ever, not even you.’

She reached for his hand and as he turned towards her, she brought her face to his. ‘Tom?’ Her breath on his face was warm and slightly sweet and he felt a lurch of love run through him like a wave.

‘All right,’ he said.

‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’

But by the end of that summer, things had changed. There had been the bombings in London for one thing, suicide bombers on the Tube; an innocent young Brazilian shot and killed after a bungled surveillance operation; suspected terrorists arrested in suburbs of Birmingham and Leeds. It was everywhere. Security alerts at the local airport; rumours that spread from voice to voice, from mobile phone to mobile phone. Don’t go into the city centre this Saturday. Keep well away. Stay clear. Now it was commonplace to see, fully armed in the middle of the day, a pair of uniformed police officers strolling down past Pizza Hut and the Debenhams department store, Heckler amp; Koch sub-machine guns held low across their chests, Walther P990 pistols holstered at their hips, shoppers no longer bothering to stop and stare.

As the Home Office and security services continued to warn of the possibility of a new terrorist attack, the pressures on police time increased. A report from the chief inspector of constabulary noted that in some police areas surveillance packages intended to supervise high-risk offenders were now rarely implemented due to a lack of resources. ‘Whether it is counter-terrorism or a sex offender,’ explained his deputy, ‘there are only a certain number of specialist officers to go round.’

‘You remember what you promised,’ Marianne reminded him. By now it was late September, the nights drawing in.

‘I can’t,’ Tom said, slowly shaking his head. ‘I can’t leave now.’

She looked at him, her face like flint. ‘I can, Tom. We can. Remember that.’

It hung over them after that, the threat, fracturing what had held them together for so long.

Of necessity, Tom worked longer hours; when he did get home, tired, head buzzing, it was to find her turned away from him in the bed and flinching at his touch. At breakfast, when he put his arms around her at the sink, she shrugged him angrily away.

‘Marianne, for God’s sake…’

‘What?’

‘We can’t go on like this.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Then do something about it.’

‘Jesus!’

‘What?’

‘I’ve already told you. A hundred times. Not now.’