Raking Up The Past

From 10am the UCOS team had divided into two parties and two interview rooms. The trampling of old coppers boots echoed up and down the stairs and through the corridors. Coppers boots that had become Italian leather shoes; suede trainers and hush puppies. Brian watched from his vantage point in the main office. He wasn't allowed to sit in or even observe the interviews. Their insurance officer had been quite definite, if apologetic, about that. So he contented himself with re-reading the case files and running a few background searches on their temporary recruit, and the newbie whose name Gerry had eventually relented and given him.

Gerry stood up and stretched, blowing out his cheeks. Apparently the new bird didn't believe in cigarette breaks. He looked at his watch, "Bleedin' 'eck!"

"What is it?" Carrie looked up as she collected the tape from the machine.

"Three and a half hours we've been in 'ere!" Gerry cringed. It had been a cringe-worthy three and a half hours too. If there was one part of the job that wound him up, always had and always would, it was dealing with thick coppers. For three and a half hours of his life, he'd been banging his head against a brick wall. He'd probably have made more headway if that had actually been what he was doing. Instead, he and Carrie had been questioning a load of people who knew nothing. Anthony Kaye had died in police custody; they hadn't seen anything; it had been an overdose, hadn't it? Yes, they'd known that Brian got the boot for it. No, they didn't know anything further on it.

Carrie sighed as she stood up, picking up the few items they had had about the room. "No wonder I'm dying for a smoke," she grimaced. "Sorry, not very professional, I know…"

"Hey, no problem," Gerry said, his day suddenly brightened as he looked at the young brunette in a new light. "Right then, check in with the guv'ner, then outside?"

"Right behind you, if not in front," she winked, leaving the room ahead of him.

He shook his head, she could definitely play with the big boys. They met Steve and Sandra in the corridor. Sandra looked green. Steve looked bored and worried.

"What's up?" Gerry asked quickly as Sandra walked past him to the toilet. "Guv? Sandra?"

Steve laid a quick hand on his friend's arm and shook his head ever so slightly. "How have you got on?" he asked as a distraction.

"Crap," Gerry fumed. "Nothing."

"Right, well we might have done slightly better," Steve said, his eyes flicking down the corridor as he spoke. "You been for a smoke yet?"

Gerry shook his head.

"We were just on our way, you joining?" Carrie asked easily.

"No, I don't, but I'll come for the air. Fill you in," Steve said.

"I'll just get my bag," Carrie slipped past to the side door into the main office. She'd detected pretty quickly that the two men needed to have a short exchange without her presence before the unofficial debriefing that they would have outside. She hadn't spent much time with the team as a whole, but she had seen enough to know that they cared about each other. It was very different to the teams she normally worked in. There would be friends; maybe even lovers; there was team ethos; but never had she seen a family. If a slightly unconventional one, that was what UCOS was. Nodding to Brian who looked exceptionally bored at his desk, she indicated her cigarette packet. "We'll be back in five," she said, to which he nodded in reply.

Sandra leant on the basin in the ladies toilet and looked at herself in the mirror. Too many times she had been in this position in the last few weeks. She re-entered the main offices, nodded to Brian who was clearly itching for company having been left on his own for the three and a half hours that they had been stuck in interviews. Perhaps she ought to have left the radio on, she mused as she indicated she'd be in her office for a few minutes. Flicking the pages in her diary until she found the number she was looking for, she went to lift the desk phone as it began to rang. Sighing, she lifted the receiver; "Pullman, UCOS?"

"Hiya, love, you ok?"

"Alright thanks, we think we've got something. Are you coming down this afternoon?"

Having assented that he was, she replaced and relifted the receiver, dialling the number she had been wanting to before he rang. Well, not wanted to perhaps but needed to. She watched through the window in her office door as the others returned to the office and went about making coffee. One of them would run up to the canteen, get some sandwiches. They'd make small talk to avoid letting on what her and Steve had come across that morning. Then they'd interview Brian. Then they could tell him. Tell him that he wasn't so crazy as he'd been led to believe. She recalled the exchange she'd shared with Jack ten years ago: No, it's not possible, I know what happened to him. No, no you don't, trust me; and offered thanks that she had trusted her old mentor.

It was weird now. Officially weird. Brian sat on the wrong side of the desk facing Sandra who he'd known for years and Carrie whom he'd only met that morning. He was worried about Sandra, there was something she wasn't telling them. He knew Gerry had tried to ask her only to have his questioning defected. She would tell them, when she was ready; or when she got tired of them asking. He knew that Rob Strickland was standing behind the glass. It amused the romantic in him that whenever the DAC walked into the office these days, Sandra's eyes softened. He knew that Esther was in the other room with Gerry and Steve. She was the best thing in his life. She hadn't been exactly ecstatic about their re-opening this case; even less so about having to talk to his friends and colleagues about how it had affected him; but had agreed for reasons that if he couldn't quite understand he was grateful for. If it hadn't been weird so far, it was officially odd now.

Sandra gave him an apologetic look and switched on the tape machine, recording her and Carrie's presence. What he'd learnt about their insurance officer through his computer searches that morning had been supplemented by conversation at lunch. She was thirty-five. Her and David, her husband, had been married for twelve years. They had two sons, aged nine and six. She was originally from Ripon in Yorkshire but had moved to London for university. She'd studied psychology. She'd got a first. She had brown hair, brown eyes, was slim and good looking (if Gerry's reaction that morning was anything to go by). And she was about to ask him to rake up the past as if thirteen years ago was yesterday.

"Mr. Lane," Carrie took the lead as she and Sandra had discussed briefly after lunch. "Brian, could you take us through the day in question, from the arrest of Anthony Kaye up to his death in police custody."

The day in question. The day in question was the day that had ended his career in CID; in the force. The day in question was the day when a young man had died on his watch. It was the day that had pushed him over the edge just far enough that it had taken a cocktail of drugs and the love of his wife several years to pull him back.

"It was a Thursday… " he began.