IV
"I have to get back to my work," Alex said, pushing hard on the heavy swinging door that led to a ramp and the entrance to the women's remand prison. Hunt followed, jingling the keys to the Quattro.
"Yeah, yeah, but first … I'm not wrong am I? There's something strange about that Conning woman? If she'd confessed to a dozen murders right in the interview room, I wouldn't have been surprised."
She contemplated the last twenty minutes of her conversation with Vicky Conning in the visitor's area. Vicky hadn't said much – she hadn't kept quiet, but she hadn't been effusive. It had only taken five minutes to ascertain one thing. "She's Asberger's, Gene."
"Ass what?"
"She has a syndromecalled Asberger's. It's a neurobiological disorder. I can't tell how extreme in her case, but it's why she seemed odd to you when you interviewed her. She has very limited social or communication skills." They strolled down the ramp slowly as she gestured to demonstrate the points she was thinking aloud. "You would have thought that she seemed odd and cold when you interviewed her because to you it seems she's guilty, a ruthless killer. When in fact that is just the way she relates to the world. Or doesn't relate, more to the point." She glanced his way, noting the unyielding sternness in his expression when he was grappling with anything harder than pouring a glass of wine. "I just bet she was bewildered trying to deal with you. I can imagine that you stood there and shouted at her, and she would have been mystified. She probably can't read sarcasm, or follow cues. Nothing. Understanding someone like you … it would be like navigating a ship through a coral reef."
"She's a chemist, Bolls. She has to deal with customers every day."
"Gene," she sniffed. "You and the team have been doing your usual half-arsed investigation. She's not a retail chemist. She doesn't give people advice about cough medicines. Vicky works in a research lab too, like her husband. Probably spends all day alone."
He remembered how Vicky had looked to her lawyer as if for a translation of what he was saying. "So, you're saying she's mentally ill and she probably didn't kill her husband?"
Alex slid into the front seat beside him. "No. She may veer towards the extreme scale for Asberger's, but she's not by any means impaired. Like all of us, she's just as capable of plotting terrible revenge over love gone wrong." Breathing out those last words – in the consciousness of how quiet the car was, with the windows fogging up from their body warmth – she quickly covered with, "It sounds like her husband may have been treating her very badly by carrying on with someone else. She mentioned it to me, and she seemed open about it."
Hunt rolled his eyes and showed her a photo of Russell Conning from the folder in his back-seat. "I'm not a bird, so I'm asking for your expert opinion. Would you risk a long prison sentence over this bloke?"
"Errr, love is a many-splendoured thing." Alex glanced back at the folder. "I thought that was the Artemis file." Her brows were knitted together, peevish now. "I've given you my opinion, as you asked. We're even. Now where's the file?"
"There's no hurry, Bolls." The car jerked forward as he took the brake off. They sped through the winding prison road, the dead leaves of the surrounding trees carefully raked into the gutters. "Besides, you left my underwear drawer in a right state. Fair's fair. You'd better rectify the situation." At her refusal to taunt him back he added, "You could have just asked, you know."
"Could I?" I don't want to be pulled back into this, she thought. This to and fro that will never go anywhere.
They were soon in the back streets of a dozen suburbs leading back to Lambeth. She couldn't relax in the car. It wasn't just him, his driving or the lingering annoyance at having been caught in his flat, flinging his underwear around the room. Vicky's stillness, her dignified calm, had touched her in the interview room, as had her lawyer's whispered plea outside afterwards. The lawyer - a woman whose name she had not caught - was very worried that Vicky would present so badly before a judge and then a jury, that a murder conviction was certain. Alex knew it was all too likely. Vicky could not fake emotion, could hardly even show the grief she perhaps felt if innocent. A jury would look harshly on her and judge Vicky Conning a ruthless, callous killer. It was obvious Hunt was still wavering toward that conclusion.
But it's not my concern, Alex thought, now sneaking a glance at Hunt as he drove one-handed, the other on the gear-stick. She had no time to ensure that, guilty or innocent, Vicky Conning was given the benefit of a thorough investigation and fair trial. After all, for all she could reach out to touch the faces of those she talked to, they were still constructs. My objective is to leave this place, and when I do they will disappear in a second.
And although the fact that Gene Hunt had caught up her hand on that day of her parents' deaths had woken her many times in the night – it happened so he might be real – she still knew that the end of this world, and the return to the real one, was a zero-sum outcome. I am only a connection away from you, Molly. One world opens back up to me and this one disappears.
"You can drop me here." It was around the corner from the entrance to the Forensics Unit car-park. "Better not have anyone spotting us and reporting back to your master." Her hand was on the door.
"I didn't tell CID any rubbish about you … what Ray was saying. I didn't say it." He'd heard the rumours doing flying about the building – in his ill humour, the thought that her transfer was being blamed on her passionate and unrequited love for him had even made him smile – but he hadn't started them.
"It doesn't matter, Gene. It's just so 1980s." That all those zip-up loafer wearing buffoons at CID would look at her and Gene Hunt, and still ridiculously assume that she had fallen bleakly in love with him. He was their leader, and in his glamour they hoped to see themselves reflected. "Besides, I don't need you defending me. I have a new team here, and they actually aren't frightened of women. Some of them even like us."
The lies were coming so easily that she could gloss over the guilty, pathetic thought that she was making him jealous with a spotty little weirdo named Royce. "I have all new defenders, Gene, and if sometimes they think I'm the teensiest bit strange, unlike you I doubt they'll throw me under the bus at the first opportunity. Now give me the bloody Artemis file and get your team of muppets to do some real investigative work. Leastways, ensure the poor woman gets a fair trial."
Ray had Amanda Hook picked out as soon as he and Chris came through the doors into the long newsroom - desk after desk, most of them filled with fat-arsed journalist twats. As they made their way to her, the young bloke sitting next to her leaned in for a comforting hug. "It's going to be alright," he said to her as Ray flashed his warrant card.
Ray knew he usually came across as brutish, but still he was sensitive to the fact that she'd lost someone so recently.
"Stuart says I shouldn't even be here," Amanda Hook said with a shuddering smile as Ray and Chris sat down heavily by her desk. "But no one gives you a day off work because your married boyfriend's dead."
Carling nodded, noting that Hunt was pretty good at spotting pregnant birds because in person she didn't look so terribly expectant. He knew nothing about it of course, although people usually said the same things about pregnant women – they glowed, they ate odd food, they cried a lot. End of. "Has this come as a terrible shock to you?" Normally he would let Chris ask the soft questions, but he couldn't be brutal with her condition and all.
Yes, she nodded and she began to cry again. She blushed easily, and Ray had to glare at the idiot next to her so he didn't leap up to hug her again. After a minute she pulled a brass-framed photo of Russell Conning from her desk. "I know he was married, but we were in love." She held the photo out to them, and though Chris'd seen him dead and naked, he pretended to examine it in earnest. "He was a lovely man. He cared for me, and he would have made a wonderful father." If he'd had the chance, her look said. "People at his work would whisper about us, and I guess Vicky found out eventually."
"Do you know Vicky?" Chris asked.
"Not really, but I know how he talked about her." More in sorrow than in anger, she added, "I know I have some guilt here, but I loved Russell and he loved me. We wanted nothing more than to be happy. But we didn't want to upset Vicky. Even though we did."
"You think Vicky killed him though?" Chris handed the photo of Russell back.
Amanda's sub-editor whistled over a few desks that her story was due for filing by the top of the hour, but it seemed the last thing on her mind as she leaned forward confidingly. "Russell said he just knew that Vicky was very angry about … him and me. She said nothing, but he told me he was worried that there was something going on inside her. But you never act on those thoughts, do you? And how would you act anyway? Before someone has done something terrible?"
"I just got off the phone with Paulson, who tells me that woman who murdered her husband in St John's Wood is now out on parole." Out of his powder-blue sweater, Vanderzee was back to looking grim and unimpressed again. "Hunt, tell me how that happens?"
They were walking down the hall, snatching a moment before the Assistant Commissioner entered three hours of meetings with the Met Commissioner and Police Minister.
"Sir, it may not be a bad thing. She's not a danger to the community most likely." Hunt's hands were in his pockets. "Being able to monitor Vicky Conning's movements may actually help us with the investigation."
"What else do you need to investigate? Tie up the forensics and give the Crown something to prosecute. Do it quickly." Vanderzee paused to look at his reflection in the glass over a wall painting. "Cases like this should be wrapped up very quickly."
"Well it may not be as simple as it seems … I know the evidence looks like she did it, but-"
"Stop pissing about. I don't want to hear about you going down blind alleys. She's as guilty as sin, now wrap it up and move on." He was eyeing the grand carved oak double doors that led through to the meeting chamber, and he lowered his voice. "You are the only one in this whole place keeping up a decent conviction rate. The others around here have been covering their arses ever since Scarman told them new policing is about being the public's best friend. You know I rely on you, Hunt."
"DI Drake." Justin Marbury had a way of twisting in his office chair and examining you from a queer angle. As if the motion gave him some special insight. Typical psychologist move, she thought. "DI Drake, I hope you haven't found your transfer to Lambeth too hard to adjust to. I feel bad that we haven't sat down and talked before so... here we are."
His office was book-lined, neat enough. Marbury wore a great enveloping sweater instead of his usual suit. Even in a great heavy knit, with its slightly ridiculous Native American pattern, he seemed formal.
"I'm enjoying the quiet, Justin," she replied evenly. Always use their first name. Anything more formal and they instantly expected it.
"Marvellous. Yes, I know we're a studious bunch here, and not so much like your previous team over at CID. I've never had a lot of dealings with DCI Hunt's outfit before, and I was certainly surprised when the old gossip mill round here told me you'd landed there and that you were – lord knows – using psychological profiling as part of the mix. CID's famous for their arrest first, ask questions later attitude."
"That's not entirely..." Well in all fairness, yes it was true.
He interrupted anyway. He hadn't called her in for a conversation really. "I know it's close to Christmas now so things can get pretty casual round here, but I'd still like to make it clear that we have a bit of way of doing things in the psychological assessment team. For instance … you disappearing for most of the morning and afternoon. It's not that I don't want you to feel like you're free to come and go, it's just we have a heavy case-load..."
Alex had never met a bunch of people less usefully employed, but she let him continue until he seemed assured that she felt herself gently admonished. Justin then wished her a fond and cheery Christmas, and she shut the door after herself. Lingered in the dark corridor.
She hadn't noticed at first. How much like her father Justin Marbury was. The tone of his voice, his slimness, even the clothes he wore, the slight femininity in his manner. Had she ever noted those qualities herself as a child? No. Only in those last two days before his death had she met him again as an adult, and she felt now that of course she hadn't really met him at all. He had seemed to her just like the father of her eight-year-old self. Brave, kind, the most intelligent man in the world.
But then I never knew him at all. I thought he was the voice of Aslan. All things good.
Justin Marbury had invited her to join him in a drink of brandy at his desk. The thought had brought back the terrible sea-sickness feeling that came intermittently in this world. The offer as repulsive as if she were to sit down now with her father to toast Christmas and the New Year.
