Simon Kernick - The Crime Trade

‘It’s all right, love,’ he gasped. ‘I’m fine. It’s going to be OK.’ Not if you don’t fucking let go of me, it won’t.

She sobbed silently into his shoulder, unlike Luke who sobbed loudly into his ear, occasionally hitting it with pieces of half-eaten shrapnel. Stegs felt bad that he’d broken it to her like he had, and not for the first time he cursed himself for being so thoughtless. She didn’t have the most comfortable of lives at the moment and he ought to go a bit easier on her.

She pulled away from him and turned her attention instead to Luke. ‘It’s all right, Lukey, Lukey, Lukey. It’s OK, babe. Mama’s here now.’ Like a wild animal who’d met his match, Luke calmed down and his screams became the occasional hiccoughing sob. The missus took the porridge spoon from Stegs and began refilling her son’s face. He gave Stegs a nasty look out of the corner of his eye, as if to say, ‘Watch it, she’s mine.’ Stegs, to his shame, gave him one in return. That kid was going to have to learn a bit of respect.

The missus turned to him, still feeding Luke. She’d recovered now, but there were still tears in her eyes. She’d only met Vokes twice — once when they’d gone round there for dinner, and another time for a meal in the West End (neither occasion had been very successful, in part due to Gill’s rampant Christianity, which meant you had to be careful what you said) — but she was aware that Stegs had worked with him for a while, and that they were close. ‘Have you spoken to Gill?’ she asked.

‘Not yet. I will do, though.’

‘Poor thing. It’s going to be awful for her.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Imagine losing your husband like that. And with kids as well. You’re going to go round and see her, aren’t you?’

He didn’t feel any better about doing it than he had the previous night, but he knew he didn’t really have much choice. ‘I’ll go and see her later today. She’ll probably have her family and the police round this morning.’

‘It’s just so. . so awful, Mark. What happened?’

Stegs didn’t like talking about his job with the missus. He never had. To be fair, she’d never been that interested, and on those occasions when she had asked, he’d always cited security reasons for not saying too much. This time, though, he knew he wasn’t going to get away without at least telling her something, not least because she was going to be able to get most of the details from the news and the papers, so he gave her as brief a rundown as possible of what had happened, making no mention of his suspension. In his story, he’d been at the scene in one of the other rooms, but at no time had he been in any danger. Vokes had been the one taking the risks (Stegs explained that he didn’t get directly involved in the more dangerous situations, describing his responsibility as back-up, which she seemed to buy) and, unfortunately, things had gone wrong. ‘He was just unlucky, you know. It’s very, very rare that these jobs go tits-up.’

‘Don’t swear in front of Lukey, Mark.’

‘Why not? He can’t understand what I’m saying.’

‘It’s just not nice, OK? Please.’

Stegs took a slurp from his cup of tea. It was going cold. ‘Yeah, whatever.’

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘I’m fine. Tired, that’s all.’ And hung over, he thought. He’d sunk four in the Admiral, then two cans of Stella when he’d got home. He was amazed he hadn’t been up pissing all night, but then he’d always had a strong bladder.

The missus sighed and gave him her trademark calm-but-serious look. This was always a sign that she was going to nag him about something. And he knew straight away what it was. ‘I want you to think very seriously about changing jobs, Mark. Really. Linda was saying the other day that Clive could get you a job as head of office security at Warner Tomkins and Nash Associates. The current incumbent’s not doing a very good job and they want to make him redundant and replace him.’

Stegs thought that his missus was probably the only person he knew who actually used the word ‘incumbent’ in conversation. ‘Look, can we not talk about this now? It’s a bad time at the moment.’

‘When can we talk about it, then?’

‘Not today,’ he said, getting up from the kitchen chair and looking around for his cigarettes. ‘Please not today.’

‘The pay’s good,’ she called after him as he found the pack and retreated out the back door and into the cold for his first smoke of the day.

He locked himself in his study with the PC for most of the morning, explaining to the missus that he was doing some work from home. Instead he made a valiant effort to get Undercover Cop flowing, and after much scratching of head, he managed to get it to midway down page thirty. To spice up the otherwise boring details of his training, he put in the bit on his graduation night when he’d slept with a Scottish prostitute with a prosthetic leg. Stegs remembered how shocked he’d been when he’d bumped into it during sex and jarred his knee (it had been covered with a black stocking at the time, so wasn’t that obvious), but he didn’t mention how he’d got her to remove it for the remainder of their bout to see what it would be like, not wanting to come across like some sort of pervert. Having wound up Hendon, he was now on to chapter three where he was a probationer pounding the beat of Barnet (or driving round in a squad car, anyway). Soon he’d be getting on to the good stuff, having already decided to slap in a fictitious murder for him to help solve in chapter four. Then it would really start to flow.

But even the most hardy of scribes needs a rest, so at 11.30 Stegs emerged from the cramped little room which was the only one in the house he could truly call his own (no-one else could fit in it while he was in there) and told his missus that he had to go to a debriefing session at Scotland Yard.

‘Are you sure you’re OK to go?’ she asked him. ‘Maybe it’d be better if you stayed here for the afternoon. They really ought to give you a couple of days off after something as traumatic as what’s happened.’

‘I’ve got a duty to the people who need me,’ he told her piously. ‘And I’m fine, honestly.’

‘Are you going to call in on Gill and the kids?’

He nodded. ‘Afterwards.’

‘Give them my love. And my condolences. Maybe you should pick up some flowers on the way.’

‘Course I will.’ He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, then picked up Luke who was playing at her feet. The boy gave him a hostile look at first, then slowly his face broke into a smile. Stegs smiled back, suddenly feeling all soppy. ‘Hey, my little man, I’m going to miss you today. Kiss for Dada, eh?’

As he leant forward to give him a big slobbery one on the lips, he was suddenly assailed by a ferocious smell, so powerful that it could probably have stripped paint off walls. He swallowed hard, trying not to gag. An old man couldn’t have produced worse. No wonder the little bugger had been smiling. That one must have been brewing up for hours.

Swiftly he handed him back to the missus, having given him only a cursory lip-scrape across the cheek. ‘I think he needs changing, babes. I’d love to stop and help but the meeting starts in an hour. I’ve got to run.’

He was out of there like lightning, the smell fair chasing him out of the door, a noxious cloud warning him not to return. No chance of that, he thought. Not for a few hours anyway.

For a while he just drove around, not really sure what to do with himself. He knew he had to go and visit Gill but was desperate to put off the inevitable. Seeing her was going to be a nightmare. It was bad enough on a normal day. God knows what she was going to say to him. He couldn’t help thinking that he was going to get the blame for what had happened, even though there was nothing he could have done. He hoped Vokes hadn’t been too scared in the last few seconds before he died, and he hoped too that death had come quickly. It felt strange knowing he was never going to see his colleague again, that this was it: the end of their relationship. Vokes had always claimed to have believed in God, but Stegs was never a hundred per cent sure whether he really did or not. More likely he was trying to keep the missus happy and hedge his bets at the same time. In a job like theirs you never knew when your card might be marked. Better to be on the right side of the Good Lord if he did exist. Maybe it had given him some comfort in those last frantic moments. Stegs hoped so, and wished at the same time that he’d had a chance to say goodbye, so that he could have let him know that he’d always been a good mate. It upset him that his last words had been to tell him not to worry, that he’d be back in a few minutes, but that of course was the injustice of sudden death. It deprived you of the opportunity to tie up all the loose ends and finally close the book.