Brought in Dead

Detective Sergeant Nicholas Miller was tired – more tired than he had been in a long, long time. In the ten hours he had already spent on duty, he had served as investigating officer at two burglaries, a factory break-in and a closing-hours brawl outside a pub near the market in which a youth had been slashed so badly across the face that it was more than likely that he would lose his right eye. This had been followed almost immediately by a particularly vile case of child cruelty which had involved forcible entry, in company with an N.S.P.C.C. inspector, of a house near the docks where they had found three children huddled together like animals, almost naked, showing all the signs of advanced malnutrition, squatting in their own dirt in a windowless boxroom that stank like a pigsty.

And now this. Compassion did not come easily at five o’clock on a dark February morning, but there was fear on this girl’s face and she had suffered enough. He smiled and his whole personality seemed to change and the warmth reached out to envelop her so that sudden, involuntary tears sprang to her eyes.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Everything’s going to be fine. Another couple of minutes and it’ll be all over.’ He turned to Detective Constable Brady. ‘Let’s have them, Jack.’

Brady nodded and pressed a red button on a small control panel on the wall. A hard white light illuminated a stage at the far end of the room and a moment later, a door opened and half a dozen men filed in followed by two constables who marshalled them in line.

Miller took the girl gently by the arm, but before he could speak, she started to tremble violently. She managed to raise her right hand, pointing at the prisoner who stood number one in line, a great ox of a man, his right cheek disfigured by a jagged scar. She tried to speak, something rattled in her throat and she collapsed against Miller in a dead faint.

He held her close against his chest and looked up at the stage. ‘Okay, Macek, let’s be having you.’

A thick-set, fourteen-stone Irishman with fists like rocks, Detective Constable Jack Brady had been a policeman for twenty-five years. A quarter of a century of dealing with human wickedness in all its forms, of walking daily in squalor and filth and a gradual erosion of the spirit had left him harsh and embittered, a hard, cruel man who believed in nothing. And then a curious thing had happened. Certain villains now serving collectively some twenty-five years in one of Her Majesty’s Prisons had thrown him down a flight of stairs, breaking his leg in two places and fracturing his skull, later leaving him for dead in a back street.

Most men would have died, but not Jack Brady. The priest was called, the last rites administered and then the surgeons took over and the nurses and physio-therapists, and in three months he was back on duty with a barely perceptible limp in his left leg.

The same, but not the same. For one thing he was noticed to smile more readily. He was still a good tough cop, but now he seemed gifted with a new understanding. It was as if through suffering himself, he had learned compassion for others.

The girl painfully signed her name at the bottom of the typed statement sheet and he helped her to her feet and nodded to the woman P.C.

‘You’ll be all right now, love. It’s all over.’

The girl left, sobbing quietly, and Miller came in holding a teletype flimsy. ‘Don’t waste too much sympathy on her, Jack. I’ve just heard from C.R.O. She’s got a record. Four previous convictions including larceny, conspiracy to steal, breaking and entering and illegal possession of drugs. To cap that little lot, she’s been on the trot from Peterhill Remand Home since November last year.’ He dropped the flimsy on the table in disgust. ‘We can certainly pick them.’

‘That still doesn’t excuse what Macek did to her,’ Brady said. ‘Underneath that surface toughness she’s just a frightened little girl.’

‘Sweetness and light.’ Miller said. ‘That’s all I need.’ He yawned, reaching for a cigarette. The packet was empty and he crumpled it with a sigh. ‘It’s been a long night.’

Brady nodded, applying a match to the bowl of his pipe. ‘Soon be over.’

The door opened and Macek entered, escorted by a young probationer constable. The Pole slumped down on one of the hard wooden chairs at the table and Miller turned to the probationer.

‘I could do with some tea and a packet of cigarettes. See what the canteen can offer, will you?’

The young constable went on his way briskly, for Miller was a particular hero of his – Nick Miller, the man with the law degree who had made Detective Sergeant with only five years’ service. All this and an interest, so it was rumoured, in his brother’s business that enabled him to live in a style to which few police officers were accustomed.

As the door closed, Miller turned to Macek. ‘Now then, you bastard, let’s get down to it.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say,’ Macek said woodenly.

Brady laughed harshly and there was a heavy silence. Macek looked furtively at Miller, who was examining his fingernails, and said desperately, ‘All right, so I knocked her around a little. Bloody little tart. She had it coming.’

‘Why?’ Brady demanded.

‘I took her in,’ Macek said. ‘Gave her a place to stay. The best of everything. Then I find her sneaking out at two in the morning with my wallet, my watch and everything else of value she could lay her hands on. What would you have done?’

He sounded genuinely aggrieved and Miller picked up the girl’s statement. ‘She says here that you’ve been living together for five weeks.’

Macek nodded eagerly. ‘I gave her the best – the best there was.’

‘What about the men?’

‘What men?’

‘The men you brought round to the house every night. The men who called because they needed a woman.’

‘Do me a favour,’ Macek said. ‘Do I look like a pimp?’

‘Don’t press me to answer that,’ Miller told him.

‘You’ve kept the girl under lock and key for the past two weeks. When she couldn’t take any more, you beat her up and threw her out.’

‘You try proving that.’

‘I don’t need to. You said you’ve been living together as man and wife.’

‘So what? It’s a free country.’

‘She’s just fifteen.’

Macek’s face turned grey. ‘She can’t be.’

‘Oh, yes she can. We’ve got her record card.’

Macek turned desperately to Brady. ‘She didn’t tell me.’

‘It’s a hard cruel world, isn’t it, Macek?’ Brady said.

The Pole seemed to pull himself together. ‘I want a lawyer.’

‘Are you going to make a statement?’ Miller asked.

Macek glared across the table. ‘You get stuffed,’ he said viciously.

Miller nodded. ‘All right, Jack, take him down and book him. Make it abduction of a minor and rape. With any luck and his record, we might get him seven years.’

Macek sat there staring at him, horror in his eyes, and Jack Brady’s iron fist descended, jerking from the chair. ‘On your way, soldier.’

Macek stumbled from the room and Miller turned to the window and pulled the curtain. Rain drifted across the glass in a fine spray and beyond, the first light of morning streaked the grey sky. The door opened behind him and the young probationer entered, the tea and cigarettes on a tray. ‘That’ll be six bob, sarge.’

Miller paid him and slipped the cigarettes into his pocket. ‘I’ve changed my mind about tea. You have it. I’m going home. Tell Detective Constable Brady I’ll ’phone him this afternoon.’

He walked along the quiet corridor, descended three flights of marble stairs and went out through the swing doors of the portico at the front of the Town Hall. His car was parked at the bottom of the steps with several others, a green Mini-Cooper, and he paused beside it to light a cigarette.

It was exactly five-thirty and the streets were strangely empty in the grey morning. The sensible thing to do was to go home to bed and yet he felt strangely restless. It was as if the city lay waiting for him and obeying a strange, irrational impulse he turned up the collar of his dark blue Swedish trenchcoat against the rain and started across the square.

For some people the early morning is the best part of the day and George Hammond was one of these. Lockkeeper in charge of the great gates that prevented the canal from emptying itself into the river basin below, he had reported for duty at five-forty-five, rain or snow, for more than forty years. Walking through the quiet streets, he savoured the calm morning with a conscious pleasure that never varied.

He paused at the top of the steps at the end of the bridge over the river and looked down into the basin. They catered mainly for barge traffic this far upstream and they floated together beside the old Victorian docks like basking sharks.