Stuart Pawson - Some By Fire

"What's all this about, Peter?" she asked.

"I… I don't know, love."

"I'm not leaving you alone with my husband," she said. "I want to know what this is about." We sat down. Pornography is a vague definition.

The tabloids and most women's magazines overstep the boundaries that our parents would have laid down. I'd wanted to have a chat with him, perhaps suggest he quietly hand in his resignation and take up welding or tyre-fitting. Something that wouldn't surround him with nubile young ladies. I couldn't have done his job. I wouldn't have fallen to temptation, like him, but I'd have slowly gone blind and mad.

"We didn't expect you to be here, Mrs. Handley," I said.

"I came back last night."

"Why did you leave?"

"Is that relevant?"

"I don't know. Is it?"

"You tell me. My mother suffers from Alzheimer's, with other complications. The doctor wanted to put her in a nursing home. One for geriatrics. She has four daughters, so we decided we could look after her ourselves, staying with her for a few weeks at a time. I've just done my first stint. At a guess I'll have one more to do. I can't see her lasting much longer than that."

"I'm very sorry," I said. It wasn't much to offer, but I meant it.

"Boss." I looked round and saw Maggie standing in the doorway. I walked over to her and she whispered: "Upstairs."

"Go sit with them," I told her, and went inside.

The loft ladder was down, with Dave leaning on a rung and Annette standing nearby. "Up there," she said. It was his den. His private world, his space, his fantasy land that nobody else was allowed to enter. I couldn't stand upright, even in the middle, but there was room for a cheap desk and chair, with a TV and VCR.

Mr. Handley liked pictures of young girls. Without their clothes on.

He liked to see them posing. He liked to see them struggling. But most of all he liked to see them suffering. At a guess he downloaded stuff from the Internet and dealt in imported magazines. I looked at just enough to satisfy myself it was illegal and went outside, to the real world, where the sun still shone. President Truman was right: sunshine is the best disinfectant.

His head was in his hands. Normally I would have invited Annette to launch her career with his arrest, but I didn't. "Peter Mark Handley,"

I began, "I am arresting you for the possession of material of an obscene nature. You need not say anything…"

I was aware of Mrs. Handley rising to her feet as I droned the caution. "Oh no," she sobbed. "Oh no."

The three of them took him back while I waited for her to lock up. We rode to the station in the patrol car we'd had standing by and I seated her in reception and told her about the allegations against her husband. It wasn't enough to stop her looking at me with hatred in her eyes, as if it were all my doing. Maggie would interview her, stalling for long enough for the porn squad to lift the stuff we'd found. I trudged upstairs to my office to read the mail and wondered if it was all worthwhile.

The ten ex-chemistry students we'd contacted told us very little, so we pressed on. After another couple of blips I decided to concentrate on the female members of the course, on the doubtful grounds that they'd be more likely to remember a male colleague and, being the more sentimental gender, might possibly have retained any photographs. Also, there were only sixteen of them. Also, if they went to university in 1975 they'd be in their early forties now, which is a dangerous age. I didn't mention that last reason to Sparky.

Four of them remembered Duncan, and confirmed the dropping-out bit. One supplied us with a first-year class photograph and a lady working for the EEC in Belgium said she had some pictures taken at a party. Duncan was there and he might have been with a girl, but not one with purple hair. She wasn't sure if she still had the pictures but would be going home in about six weeks. The others were all doing quite well for themselves: one had just resumed a career as an industrial journalist after rearing three kids, and we had accountants, an advertising executive, a megabyte of computer boffins and, would you believe, several chemists among the rest. All of which was about as much use to us as dog poo on the doorstep.

"How," I said to Sparky, 'do you fancy going to university?"

"I'd a feeling this was coming," was his glum reply.

"We're getting nowhere, and we need to know who the girl with purple hair was. So far, all we've established is that Duncan dropped out.

She was probably the reason but almost certainly wasn't on the chemistry course. She's the key to his problems and ours. I'll have a word with Roper-Jones, the registrar, and maybe you could have a day or two over there, going through the records of all the other students.

For Christ's sake, surely someone can remember a girl with purple hair!"

"How many is "all the other students"?"

"There's twenty-two thousand there at present, but it would be a lot fewer in '75."

"That's a relief."

"Are you OK for tomorrow?"

"University, here I come. Wait till I tell Sophie that I've got there before her."

Sophie is Dave's daughter and my goddaughter. She'll be starting university soon, when she decides where to go. Her results were brilliant and she's spoilt for choice.

"Tell you what," I said. "Why don't you take her with you?"

"You mean… to help?"

"I don't see why not, there's nothing confidential about the records.

I'll mention it to Roper-Jones; he didn't strike me as being a job's-worth. If he doesn't agree she could always explore the campus or do some shopping."

"Great. She'd like that. Do you mind if I tell her it was my idea?"

"Why?" I demanded, suspicious.

"I'm in her bad books. Not enough time to give her driving lessons."

"Well, pay for them."

"At twenty quid a throw? I should cocoa!"

When he'd gone I rang Jacquie and arranged to see her that night. I felt ready for another steak, possibly followed by a session of aroma therapy She was telling me that too much could be dangerous for my health and I was clarifying whether she meant steak or pongy massage when my other phone rang. I said a hasty goodbye and picked it up.

"Pop up, please, Charlie, if you don't mind," Superintendent Wood said.

He had Gareth Adey, my uniformed counterpart, with him, and they both had problems. Gilbert was catching hell from the Chamber of Commerce over the number of street traders who were selling fake jeans and T-shirts, and Gareth had double-booked three teenagers who were coming in to be cautioned. I agreed to do the youths and Gareth promised a blitz on the street traders at the weekend.

The first of the cautions was a young man with low aspirations; he'd been caught shoplifting at Everything a Pound. "It says here that you are a thief," I told him, waving his case notes. He was standing in front of Adey's desk in the downstairs office, his mother on a chair to one side. He nodded his agreement.

"Do you know what I normally do?" I asked him. He didn't. "Well, I'll tell you. I chase murderers, and here I am wasting time because you stole a cheap musical box from a two-bit shop." He didn't look impressed. "Yesterday," I continued, 'we had a meeting about you. Four strangers, round a table, discussing what to do with you. How do you think that makes your mother feel, eh?" He didn't know. "Don't think you've got away with it," I told him. "The reason you are not going before a court, and possibly to a young offenders' institute, is because we decided it wasn't best for you. We decided to give you another chance because we don't want you to waste your life. What do you want to do when you leave school?" He shrugged his shoulders.

"Pardon?" I said.

"Speak to the inspector," his mother told him.