The Only Game

Sometimes you didn’t want to see the answer.

He walked twice round his car, got in, set off back to the station. The evening traffic was building up, smearing light along the wet roads. He got stuck at the roundabout outside Holy Trinity. They’d got the Christmas lanterns up in the old yew tree by the porch. He leaned across to peer at them. This church and the Shell Street Youth Club had been the poles of his boyhood world and the next turn left would take him past its centre, the old shop.

He wouldn’t make the turn. Church, club, shop, they belonged to another country, another time. Another person.

The person he was now had only one concern. What had happened to young Oliver Maguire? What odds would he recommend to WPC Scott now?

His radio crackled into life with his call sign. He responded and the metallic voice said, ‘Message from WPC Scott at City General Hospital. Maguire has absconded. Repeat, Maguire has absconded.’

‘Shit,’ said Dog. The traffic started to move. A gap opened in the outside lane. Engine snarling in protest, he forced his way into it, got one wheel on the central reservation, crowded the van ahead of him over to the nearside and swept round the front of the line onto the roundabout with emergency lights flashing.

Behind him, pressed back against the oak door in the shadowy porch of Holy Trinity Church, Jane Maguire watched him drive away.

5 (#ulink_31515d65-4b6d-5e17-9863-881352130a01)

Fear heightens perception.

Jane Maguire had spotted Dog Cicero the instant she stepped through the church door. One car in a line of traffic, one silhouette in a gallery of portraits, but her eyes had fixed on it. Then it had turned full face towards her and she’d been certain the magnetism was two-way.

Next moment, however, he’d spoken into a mike and driven away like a madman. She knew beyond guesswork what he’d been told and she almost felt a pang of sympathy for the young policewoman. Not that it had been her fault any more than it had been Jane’s plan. As she’d been wheeled down to X-ray, she’d heard the girl ask, ‘How long?’

‘Thirty minutes at least,’ had been the answer. In the event she’d been through in five, back in her room in ten. And she was alone, except for the almost tangible after-image of Cicero’s distrust. She saw again those coldly assessing eyes in the half-frozen face and she knew she’d made a mistake, not in lying, but in lying about things he could check. He would be back and she couldn’t keep fainting her way out of confrontation for ever.

It was time to go. Her body had made the decision before her mind and she was already out of bed and pulling on her clothes.

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.

6 (#ulink_4dfdd8b3-7a3e-51cd-8167-4ca80301591b)

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?’