Bertie and the Kinky Politician (16 page)

‘No, I don't think so. Look at the way he is with her. This bird has been around people all its life – how else could it talk so well?'

Bertie craned his neck to one side at the sound of Cath's voice and peered at her partially concealed face. She saw an intellect in his steady brown eyes which shattered for ever some of her basic assumptions on life. ‘Hello,' he said amiably, ‘I'm Bertie.'

‘Hello, Bertie,' replied Cath nervously. ‘I'm Cath.' Like Pete, the thought that she was holding a rational conversation with a fully sentient creature was simply overwhelming. She struggled for equilibrium.

Mary clambered back on to her stool, losing her remaining slipper in the process. She dipped into the pack for another nut and passed it to Bertie, oblivious to the petrified amazement of her parents. To her, it seemed natural to make friends with Bertie. He spoke to her, she spoke to him. Simple. The fact he was a macaw didn't bother her in the slightest. Mary's childish trust gave Cath a sudden lump in her throat. How long would it be before that wonderful innocence was lost for ever? ‘What shall we do?' she asked nervously.

‘Well, he must be very valuable so we better phone the police and get them to collect him.' Pete and Cath looked at each other. They both knew the effect this would have on Mary. She had been pestering them for a new kitten since last Christmas when Rooster, her fat ginger tom with the zig-zag tail, had been found crumpled on the patio with a broken neck. Having indulged generously in the remains of Cath's Yuletide sherry, he'd staggered outside for a seasonal wee, but an ill-advised stroll along the top of the fence had been inevitably doomed. With his normally urbane feline poise suffering significantly under the influence of Spain's most famous export, he'd succumbed to gravity, with fatal consequences. Although Bertie was short of a paw or two and definitely the wrong colour, Mary obviously considered his arrival as a timely gift from the gods to ease her loneliness.

There would be heartache.

‘I'll do it now.' Pete abdicated his paternal responsibilities with typical alacrity and disappeared upstairs to make the call leaving Cath, as ever, to deal with the difficult situation. There were times when she could gladly strangle him. Her daughter fussed over the macaw as if it were a baby. The bird lapped up the attention, closed its eyes and began to purr, impressing Mary mightily. When the inevitable question came, Cath knew it would be the hardest of all to answer.

‘Mummy, can I keep him?'

Pritchard parked the car and walked the few yards to his flat still smarting from the humiliation of the abortive burglary. His desperate call to Chaplain resulted in a torrent of vitriol, followed by a stony silence even more difficult to stomach. He and Coberley were ordered to dress each other's wounds and make their way home. Coberley's ear was a mangled mess requiring a little home surgery to tidy up. Fortunately, the van was equipped with an excellent first aid kit, including powerful sedatives as well as a range of recreational drugs generously donated by HM Customs, all stored in handy self-seal plastic bags ideal for planting on innocents and other folk of a similarly awkward disposition.

Jesus, his face hurt! The swollen skin felt tight and buzzy under the dressing and itched abominably. Nearly two-thirty – with luck, his wife would be asleep. Sadly, his hopes were short-lived. Despite the lateness of the hour, a light still burned in the lounge. ‘Suzy?' he whispered tentatively. Pritchard was a man fearless in the face of danger, but he was most certainly frightened of his wife. Suzanne Pritchard rivalled Xanthippe with PMT. The wife of Socrates was a woman of legendary shrewishness, and no doubt this fact was instrumental in old Beardy's decision to take refuge in philosophy!

His shoulders slumped when he caught sight of her on the sofa, head turned away in a gesture of rejection and fluffy dressing gown wrapped tight like chain-mail armour. Her body language revealed less of a welcome than he was hoping for, her aura bristling with anger.

‘Hi,' he said, placatingly, and headed straight for a comforting shot of whisky. Silence. Damn, now he was in some kind of pretty poo! That particularly haughty disdain was reserved for only very special occasions.

‘Still up, then?' For a man who possessed a degree in psychology, he was, nonetheless, still capable of uttering the most breathtaking banalities.

‘How remarkably observant.'

He grimaced at her tone. It was as cold as a banker's conscience. A riptide of hostility swept across the room. ‘Sorry I'm late. Bad night at the office.' Despite the rigours of the Official Secrets Act, Suzy knew exactly what he meant. That damned man again! She'd met Chaplain on only one occasion and found him utterly repellent. The man oozed about as much charm as a disease-ridden swamp full of interesting forms of death.

‘What was the date yesterday?' she asked stiffly, still staring at the wall.

Pritchard froze, the cold hand of panic massaging the back of his neck. How many husbands throughout the land have suffered a sudden and total breakdown of bowel control on hearing that phrase? He quickly reviewed the essential dates upon which his life depended; their wedding anniversary, her birthday, her mother's birthday, her aunt's birthday, her sister's birthday, her other sister's birthday, her other sister's disturbingly masculine lesbian lover's birthday. The list was apparently endless and only included one person who needed to shave every day. No, he was confident he was in the clear.

‘Wednesday?' It was a feeble and wholly inadvisable attempt at humour.

‘Don't be facetious,' she snapped tartly. ‘You know damned well we were supposed to go to the cemetery.'

The bitch!

No, not his wife – their dog, or rather, their ex-dog.

Missy Wah-Hey had checked out this time last year after a terminal encounter with a speeding lorry loaded to the gunwales with toilet seats. The toilet seats were purely incidental to the proceedings, but Pritchard liked to think there was a deity with a delicious sense of humour up there somewhere. Suzy had arranged to have Missy's pulped remains interred at the Cricklewood Memorial Pet Cemetery with as much pomp as a state funeral.

Missy Wah-Hey! Damned stupid name. Pritchard felt sure that had Missy Wah-Hey been Mister Wah-Hey, his demise would have been catered for with far less ceremony, probably something involving a bin liner, a dust cart and the local landfill site. He considered this a much more fitting end to a deeply unpleasant, inbred shih-tzu imbued with a pathological compulsion to scent-mark his shoes.

‘Oh, yes, sorry,' he mumbled. Suzy had wanted to put flowers on Missy's plaque, which seemed an odd offering for an untrainable, half-savage, hirsute pissing machine. A side of freshly slaughtered buffalo, still warm and dripping with blood, would have been far more appropriate. ‘We'll go this evening.'

‘This evening is too late. You should have remembered. Really, Bob, you're worse than useless – I don't know why I married you! You've turned out to be nothing but a disappointment.' Having vented her wrath, she pulled the lapels of her dressing gown together beneath her chin in symbolic denial and stood, turning to glare at him for the first time with bitter disapproval. Her eyes narrowed. ‘What's that on your face?'

‘A broken nose.' Pritchard gave up any attempt at humour. Experience had taught him nothing he now said would make one iota of difference.

‘I'm not interested in that.' Sympathy was not one of Suzy's more endearing qualities. Not with him, anyway, which was why, under no circumstances, would he ever tell her about his recent distressing loss of bowel control.

‘Thanks for the concern.'

She pointed at his cheek. ‘What happened?'

‘I was attacked by a parrot.' It was the truth, of course, but his weary resignation gave the statement a hollow ring. Suzy stepped closer. She saw a trio of parallel scratches disappear under a great slab of dressing and without warning, ripped it away with furious wrench. Pritchard screeched spectacularly. His hand flew up to protect his cheek, but Suzy had seen enough.

‘You despicable little man!' she hissed venomously. ‘You've been with another woman, haven't you?' Until that moment, it had not even remotely occurred to Pritchard that the marks of Bertie's claws closely resembled those from human nails.

‘Don't be so ridiculous – it was a parrot, I tell you! A bloody big blue one!' He felt the first stirring of anger arrive to bolster his arguments, anger which gave him the courage to offer up a spot of mild swearing in her presence. His wife strongly disapproved of all cursing. She felt any intelligent person should be able to communicate their feelings without the use of profanity.

Suzy went ballistic. ‘That's a crock, you cretinous oaf, you foul faecal scraping, you snivelling blob of rectal discharge! You work in London, not Africa, so don't you dare lie to me, you vile, suppurating, loathsome pustule!' Still no swearing – but he had to admit she got her point across.

‘Dammit, Suzy –'

A stinging slap silenced his protestation. It was delivered without inhibition, her muscular arm swinging back to get maximum acceleration before arcing forward in a blur to deliver a full, open, scything palm strike that hurt. Considerably. She chose his lacerated cheek as her target and whilst his attention was distracted by the pain, closely followed up her tactical advantage with a technically perfect knee to the scrotum.

Pritchard's legs finally called it a day.

He folded to the ground and watched his wife storm out of the room. She took the stairs two at a time, marched into the bedroom and slammed the door so hard their wedding photograph fell off the wall.

Wracked with agony, Pritchard sagged forward on his knees, hunched in a ball with chin resting on the carpet and eyes closed, hands clutched over his groin in the time-honoured traditional manner. All he wanted to do was retreat from a world of hurt, to escape just for one minute from the worst evening of his life. Wrapped in a haze of suffering and throbbing pain, he shook his head gently in denial. ‘I suppose that means sex is out of the question,' he mumbled finally.

Ellen Coberley lay in the darkened bedroom listening to the small noises of the night. Sleep was far from her mind. Suspicions did that to you. Greg had wandered before. Just once. But once was enough. She'd beaten the crap out of him, sentenced him to six months sexual denial and ordered a humiliating check-up at the STD clinic. Since then he'd been, as it were, on probation. Had Marks & Spencer offered a male chastity belt, Ellen would have been first in the queue with her credit card. Small size, of course. Something uncomfortable in rusty iron with studs on the insides and tasteful barbed wire trimmings.

She sighed heavily. He was never this late without calling. To put her mind at rest. To check in. To report. Not this time, and as the hours dragged on, doubts inevitably began to coalesce once more. After discovering him humping that cow Muriel, she could never quite get out of her mind the nagging thought he was dallying with some strumpet, but then again that unpleasant salamander, Chaplain, was just as likely to get Greg working on something at the last minute. She, too, was perhaps more acquainted with the nature of JSON than Chaplain would have liked, but there it was. Pillow talk was a natural consequence of being married – and she was now, by bitter experience, an unusually inquisitive woman.

Suddenly alert, she heard a stealthy step on the stairs. The bedroom door cracked open. His careful approach was charted by the faint rustle of clothing. Ellen shot out an arm and switched on the bedside lamp to reveal her husband frozen in the act of removing his trousers, one leg raised like a renegade nocturnal morris dancer caught in the glare of passing headlights. Ellen was far more observant than Suzy. The missing half of his ear was a dead giveaway. So was the bizarre patchwork of plasters covering his neck and face. She spotted them and what they failed to conceal immediately, and like Suzy Pritchard, also leapt to the wrong conclusion.

Her formidable temper ignited quicker than a rocket heading for Mars and she was on him in a flash. Handicapped by entangling trousers, Greg Coberley went down under a savage barrage of blows and kicks. Her screaming fury knew no bounds, and he found himself under merciless attack for the second time that night.

Chapter Nine

Wilfred Thompson had become a worn round peg in an increasingly rigid square hole. Once, and how long ago it now seemed, he'd been an ambitious and respected member of the Metropolitan Police Force, but a succession of indifferent transfers had left his career in a shaky condition. Wilf was a good copper all right, it was just that he was a bit – well, boring. And grumpy. Very definitely grumpy. Now bitterness tinged his personality like a tea stain on granny's best tablecloth.

An air of melancholy followed him around as if something unpleasant was stuck on the sole of his shoe. His record as a Detective Constable stationed at Greenwich was solid, which was the kindest possible description for unadventurous, unlucky, and unambitious. He was very much of the old school, a man of the beat who had cautiously worked his way into CID, promoted when there was no other option available to his superiors. Wilf would never make his mark, and that rankled. The Met had become a promising career area for pushy graduates breezing in from trendy universities with their obscure degrees in exobiology and Etruscan pottery. They hated the compulsory two years on the beat, regarding the time as an impediment to their management aspirations. These were officers who climbed the corporate police ladder in effortlessly energetic leaps, sprinting past him at frightening speed with their high-profile crack busts and televised gun sieges while he struggled valiantly with vandals and teenage shoplifting gangs. Important, yes, especially to those on the receiving end of such low-level crimes, but not really important enough to warrant any close attention from the promotions board. They were looking for drive, for ambition, for sexiness, and if there was one thing Wilf certainly was not, it was sexy. So, as time passed, he slowly became resigned to the fact he'd never become a Detective Sergeant – and, frankly, you had to be pretty awful not to make DS.