A Place Of Safety(34)

‘I were egged on. There were a whole crowd of us.’

‘You held the knife.’

‘So? Everybody deserves a second chance.’

It wasn’t a whine, just a simple statement of fact. Barnaby wondered if the pensioner might have liked a second chance. Or the guy left lying in the gutter with a punctured lung. He said, ‘If you got what you deserved, Jackson, the world might be a sweeter smelling place.’

Downstairs the flat door opened and closed. Barnaby, watching Terry Jackson, marvelled at what happened next. A strong and heartless man was transformed, before his very eyes, into a persecuted, hunted creature driven by cruel fate to the very end of its despairing tether. All the steel dissolved from his muscular frame which had now become so soft and boneless it could no longer support him. His legs buckled. He crouched on the floor hugging his knees to his chest, hiding his face.

‘What on earth is happening here, Jax?’

The boy (yes, boy, for so he had become) slowly lifted his head and gazed with great agitation at the Reverend Lawrence. Both policemen stared in disbelief at the pale and fearful countenance, the troubled eyes now swimming with moisture, the shaking, tremulous mouth.

‘They just pushed in and started on me, Lionel. I ain’t done nothing.’

‘I know that, Jax. It’s all right.’

‘I promised you I’d never let you down.’

Lionel Lawrence turned and faced Barnaby. He looked severe and disappointed, giving the impression that if anyone had let him down it was Her Majesty’s Police Inspectorate.

‘Why are you persecuting this young man?’

‘There’s no question of persecution, sir. We are simply pursuing our inquiries into the death of Mr Leathers.’

‘I’d’ve thought,’ suggested Sergeant Troy, ‘you’d want that thoroughly gone into. Him being your employee, so to speak.’

‘This is my property. If you need to speak to Jax again, you call at the Rectory first. I shall come over here with you. There’ll be no more bullying. He has that right.’

‘Actually, he doesn’t.’ Barnaby nodded angrily to his sergeant who put away his notebook and got up to leave. The chief inspector followed, glancing back just once.

Lionel Lawrence was bending over, helping Jackson to his feet. Jackson was clinging to the older man’s arm for support. His tear-stained face glowed with pious gratitude as if he had received a blessing.

Barnaby, nauseated, slammed the door and hurried down the stairs.





‘Gay as a bent banana, that old geezer.’ Sergeant Troy strode towards the car, giving vent to his feelings by kicking furiously at the gravel.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘What, then? What’s he doing it for?’

What was Lionel Lawrence doing it for? Barnaby let the question occupy his mind as Troy churned up the drive and zoomed into the main road.

Unlike many of his colleagues, the chief inspector did not automatically lump all ‘do-gooders’ together and despise the lot. He had met very many, both professional and amateur, during his long career as a policeman and grown to recognise the different types and the many different angles from which they approached the business. There were always quite a few who denied they had any angle at all. And many more who were extremely muddled as to what their angle actually was.

Many were in it for the power it gave them, the opportunity to forge relationships where they would always be in charge. These were the sort of people whose personality and talents made it highly unlikely that, in the normal run of things, they would ever have authority over anything more charismatic than the office cat. With them, compassion was merely a mask for condescension.

This same rationale applied to the socially inept. Usually without stable, happy relationships in their own lives, these emotional inadequates would start off with the huge advantage of being able to call the psychological shots. Frequently for the first time in their lives someone needed them.

Then there were those romantically drawn to what they saw as the glamour of violence. Never, in reality, having been on the receiving end, these people sometimes excitedly took up prison visiting. With a warder always close by they could spend quality time with what they believed would be some of the wildest and most dangerous specimens of humanity. Barnaby had once had dealings with a Quaker visitor, a pacifist, who preferred to befriend only murderers. When this paradox was drawn to his attention, he saw nothing odd in it at all.

One could add to this the early retired with woolly, undirected feelings of altruism and the small number of comfortably off who still had a social conscience. Then one was left with the few, the very few remarkable human beings who, without a single string attached, simply loved their fellow man. Barnaby had met many who saw themselves in this role. In actual fact, in over thirty years, he had come across two.