‘I don’t understand how you can just give up. I know you’ve been ill and probably feel different about things now, but you came through it. You survived. You’ve been given another chance.’
‘That’s right. I have to be prepared to make a new life for myself, form new friendships. Without police work taking up my time, I can start planning a future. I’d like to travel. I’ve hardly seen anything of the world.’
The truth dawned on April. ‘You’ve met someone,’ she said.
‘As it happens, I have. Her name is Brigitte. She’s French and completely impossible, and I can’t imagine that we would ever be good for each other, but I want to spend some time with her, just to see if it’s possible for me to let go. Work imprisons us, April; we only do it because we have to. I see that now. I have some savings, enough to enjoy a little time off. I want to travel home with Brigitte to Nice. I’m fed up with always doing the right thing and being broke.’
‘And I don’t suppose the fact that she’s a sexy French divorcée has clouded your judgement in any way.’
‘How did you know she’s a divorcée?’
‘Oh, come on, they always are. When it comes to women, you reveal a painful flair for the obvious. Most men do. Where did you meet, in some dimly lit Soho dive bar?’
‘No, at the wet fish counter in Waitrose. She was having a fight with the fishmonger over prawns. She only wanted the ones with their orange tails on, and started shouting at him in French. I helped her out, then we went for coffee. I knew a little about her hometown because of that business Arther keeps referring to as the White Corridor case. She poured cognac into her café au lait from a hip flask. It was ten-thirty in the morning.’
‘So she’s an alcoholic, too.’
They walked on in silence. If a woman came between Bryant and May, April doubted that her grandfather’s partnership could ever be restored.
5
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
The first punch sent the postman slamming into the oak table at his back. The second knocked him over the bench and onto the floor. Glasses from the tipped table rolled and smashed about him. Colin Bimsley had barely wiped the blood from his grazed fist when the other postmen jumped on his back and dragged him toward the door. One of them punched him in the kidneys while another planted a boot on his coccyx, propelling him outside and sprawling into the street. They swore and spat on him, emptying packets of crisps over his head, before returning to their fallen mate and their waiting pints.
Bimsley had not expected postmen to be so ready for a punch-up, but they had not taken kindly to being described as a bunch of useless work-shy tossers. Contrary to popular belief, Londoners are generally hard to entice into a scrap. Usually they’ll settle for a sarcastic remark and a withering look before walking away, but the postmen of the Pakenham Arms, the pub nearest to North London’s Mount Pleasant Royal Mail Sorting Office, were clearly made of sterner stuff.
Bimsley dusted himself down and examined the torn sleeve of his jacket. This had been his third fight in as many days, and none of them had proven really satisfying. Anger and alcohol were a lousy combination, he told himself, but for now it suited his mood. He felt betrayed, not by Bryant and May, who had done everything within their power to keep the unit open, but by their cowardly bosses, men who hid behind their computer terminals as they totted up the savings to be made on each closed department.
Bimsley had no job to go to. The Met would never take him back, because he had repeatedly failed his medical. Only the unit had agreed to overlook his condition, which was brave of them considering that Diminished Spatial Awareness, an inability to judge distances, was a pretty serious drawback in a job that required him to chase criminals down alleyways and over rooftops. He had hoped to make Detective Inspector, but was now considering taking a position as a private security guard. As his self-respect faded he had started hitting the pubs, and then their patrons. Bimsley had trained for three years at Repton Amateur Boxing Club in the East End, but the fact that a bunch of postmen could whip him suggested it might not be worthwhile pursuing a career as a pugilist.
Meera Mangeshkar had stopped returning his slurred late-night phone calls. Bimsley’s hopes of winning her respect and her love had vanished along with his ambitions. Tucking his ripped shirt back into his jeans, he headed off toward the next pub in the street. He was vaguely aware that he smelled of sweat, spilled beer and crisps. So much for the innate dignity of the unemployed, he thought with a grimace.
‘Hullo? Are you open?’ Dan Banbury, the late unit’s Crime Scene Manager and IT expert, pushed back the door of the little red-painted shop in Camden High Street. Yield to the Night was named after a noir film starring buxom British sex-bomb Diana Dors, and sold clothes from the 1950s and 1960s. Its windows displayed the kind of sequined battle-dresses that could transform a shy, slightly overweight woman into a hardbitten, sexy nightclub hostess.