Reginald Hill - The Only Game

No one challenged her as she walked along the corridor to Reception and out into the chill night air. It was still raining. She felt it would never stop. Momentarily she got entangled in a small queue of mainly old people climbing into an ambulance. Instead of passing through, she let herself be taken up with them. Soon afterwards when the first passenger was dropped near Holy Trinity roundabout, she got down too. Every day she passed the church on her way to the Health Centre. If she noticed it at all, it was with a sense of relief that she’d shed that particular delusion. Now she went inside, rationalizing that she needed somewhere quiet to sit and think. But as the door closed hollowly behind her, the smell, the light, the sense of echoing space sent her reeling back to her childhood and she felt her controlling will assailed by a fearful longing for the cleansing darkness of the confessional.

A priest came down the aisle. Sensing her uncertainty, he asked courteously, ‘Can I be of any assistance?’ He was an old man with a kind face but his accent was straight out of O’Connell Street.

‘No, thank you,’ she said harshly, and turned on her heel and left.

Flight or victory? Would any other accent have had her on her knees?

Then she had seen Cicero and for one superstitious moment felt that perhaps God was laying her options unambiguously in view.

Now she watched his car out of sight before hurrying down the side of the church, following a gravel path that continued between mossy headstones till it reached a graffiti’d lych-gate which opened onto a quiet side street.

Here she paused, sheltering from the rain under the gate’s small roof, and summoning reason back to control. Where should she go? Not her flat. Cicero had told her he’d got someone waiting there. Run home to mother? That’s what she’d done last time, with mixed results. But she couldn’t do it this time, not with the news she would have to bear. Besides, Cicero of the unblinking brown eyes would soon ferret her mam out.

No, there was only one place to go, one person to turn to. No matter if angry words lay between them. There and only there lay her hope of welcoming arms, of a sympathetic hearing, of lasting refuge.

Putting her head down against the pelting rain, she began to walk swiftly towards the town centre.

Dog Cicero parked his car obliquely across two spaces and ran up the steps into the station. A small man wearing oily overalls and a ragged moustache blocked his way.

‘Call that parking?’ he said. ‘You’re not in bloody Napoli now, Dog.’

‘I hate a racist Yid,’ said Dog. ‘You done that car yet, Marty?’

‘Report’s on your desk.’

‘What’s it say?’

‘Given up the adult literacy course, have we? All right, car’s a rust bucket but not a death trap. Should scrape through its MOT.’

‘How’s the engine? Poor starter?’

‘No. Fine. In fact in very good nick, considering. It’s the upholstery, not the mechanics, should be interesting you, though.’

‘Why’s that, Marty?’

‘Some nice stains on the back seat round the kiddie’s chair. That black poof from the lab’s looking at them now. Hey, doesn’t anyone say thank you any more?’

‘I’ll give you a ring next time I feel grateful,’ Dog called over his shoulder.

As he ran up the stairs to his office a youngish man in a shantung shirt and dangerously tight jeans intercepted him.

‘You’ve got a visitor,’ he said.

‘No time for visitors, Charley. Can you raise me Johnson at Maguire’s flat?’

‘No-can-do,’ said Detective Sergeant Charley Lunn, with a built-in cheerfulness some found irritating. ‘There’s no phone there and it’s a radio dead area. Shall I send someone round?’

Dog thought, then said, ‘No, I’ll go myself. You get anything for me on Maguire, Charley?’

He’d instructed his sergeant to run the usual checks, not with much hope.

But Lunn said, ‘As a matter of fact, I did. Maguire’s her real name, by the way, not her married name …’

‘I know that,’ said Dog impatiently, leading the way into his office.

‘… and she’s twenty-seven years old, born Londonderry, Northern Ireland, but brought up since she was nine in Northampton where her widowed mother still lives …’

‘You got an address?’

‘Surely. Here it is. To continue, our Maguire trained as a teacher at the South Essex College of Physical Education, qualified, and got a job at a Sheffield secondary school, but quit in her probationary year …’

‘Is any of this relevant?’ interrupted Dog. ‘And where the hell did you dig it up anyway?’

‘Obvious place,’ said Lunn modestly. ‘I punched her into the central computer and out it all came.’

‘Good God. What’s she doing in there? Has she got some kind of record?’

‘Indirectly. It’s a bit odd really. Seems that during this teaching year, she went with a school party on a walking tour up on Ingleborough in Yorkshire. There was some kind of row which ended with her hitting a girl who took off into the mist and fell down a pothole. The place is honeycombed with them, I gather. The girl was seriously injured and the family tried to bring a private prosecution against Maguire for assault but it never got off the ground.’

‘Then why the hell is it on the computer? And what did she do after she resigned from teaching?’

‘Don’t know. That was it. Any use?’

‘The address might be,’ said Dog. ‘Charley, get a general call out for Maguire, will you? Nothing heavy. Just to bring her in for her own good.’

‘It shall be done. You won’t forget your visitor, will you?’

‘I’ll do my best. Who the hell is it anyway?’

‘Not just any old visitor,’ grinned Lunn. ‘A real VIP. Very Indignant Person. It’s Councillor Jacobs. He’s making do with the super till you get back.’

‘They were made for each other,’ grunted Dog. ‘He can wait a bit longer.’

As Lunn left, he picked up the phone and dialled.

‘Dog, my man! Knew it was you. Recognize that ring anywhere, as the actor said to the bishop. It’s the stains in the car, right?’

‘Right. Got anything yet?’

‘Natch. Can’t hang around when it’s a job for Generalissimo Cicero, can we? It’s blood and it’s Group B. How does that grab you?’

He looked at the copy of Oliver Maguire’s record he had taken from the kindergarten. Blood Group B.

‘Where it hurts,’ he said and replaced the receiver. The phone rang instantly.

‘Dog, could you pop along to see me? I’ve got Councillor Jacobs here and he’s keen to meet you.’

Detective Superintendent Eddie Parslow had been a high flier till his late thirties when the heat of a peptic ulcer had melted his wings. Since his return to work, his sole aim had been to achieve maximum pension with minimum stress. A foxy face and lips permanently flecked with the white froth of antacid tablets gave him the look of a rabid dog, but none need fear his bite who did not disturb the even tenor of his ways.

Jacobs was a stout, florid man who needed no padding when he played Father Christmas at the council’s children-in-care party. He was clearly not in a ho-ho-ho-ing mood.

‘I gather this Maguire woman’s been stirring things up,’ he growled. ‘I thought I’d make sure you’d got the record straight.’

Dog glanced at Parslow and received a little shake of the head. He took this to mean that nothing had been said to the councillor about the real reason for their interest in Maguire.

‘That’s what we like,’ he said equably. ‘Straight records. So what happened, Councillor?’

‘She was massaging my back,’ said Jacobs. ‘When I turned over, she pulled my towel off and said, “Fancy a bit of relief? It’ll only cost a pony.”’