Dead or Alive (8 page)

He knew this was a nothing situation. A situation any reasonable man would get up and walk away from. Just go into another room for a change, away from the racket. But Sep couldn't see why it was he who had to be reasonable all the time. Let someone else be fucking reasonable for a change. Let these noisy sods be reasonable. The noise grew louder, possibly magnified by his anger. He squeezed his eyes shut and heard himself growling. He was a pressure cooker at its limit. He put down his newspaper and got to his feet. He was a hefty man, six-feet-two and sixteen stone of mainly muscle. His size and strength had gone against him at his disciplinary hearing. He could be menacing when he wanted to be, and he wanted to be right now. He walked over to the noisy table, making his presence instantly felt, despite him not saying a word. The laughter subsided and seven pairs of eyes looked up at him. One youth had a patch of hair under his bottom lip. Sep pointed at it.

‘What's that?'

He knew what they called such things. He just wanted the youth to set him up for his next line. The youth didn't answer, one of the girls answered for him.

‘It's called a soul-patch.'

‘On him it looks like an arsehole patch.'

He pointed to a second youth who wore his hair in a ponytail. ‘I suppose you call that a ponytail do you?'

By now the menace in his eyes and voice was frightening the group.

‘Do you know why it's called a pony-tail?'

No answer.

‘Because when you lift it up, you see a horse's arse.'

To Sep this was a better joke than the one that had had them screeching but it didn't raise a flicker from them.

‘You're giving me earache. I want you all to leave.'

His rage was suspended on the finest of threads. The youngsters had come here for a good time, not for trouble. One of them put his palms up and said, ‘OK, OK, we're leaving.'

They got up to go and had all reached the door when a voice shouted. ‘You lot can stay! He can go.'

All eight of them turned to look at Joyce, the landlady, who had heard what was going on. She came from around the bar and, with folded arms, she confronted Sep.

‘You might be able to scare these kids but you don't scare me. I was married to a bully like you – kicked him out. I know you used to be a copper and there's a bit of a mystery as to why you left the police in such a hurry, but you can't come in here and tell my customers to leave my pub. If anyone's leaving it's you, and you don't come back. You're barred!'

Sep stared at her with wild eyes. She backed off, thinking she'd been a bit too brave for her own good. He snarled, picked up a chair and smashed it, repeatedly, on the heavy table, adding to its scars. He then hurled the chair at the stained-glass window that had been a major feature of the pub for over a hundred years. It had been salvaged from a chapel that had previously stood on this site since the reign of William III. It was known as Willy's Window but it was there no longer. The chair was now jammed in the window frame, wedged among the broken lead strips that had held the stained glass in position for over three hundred years. Outside, shards of David and Goliath were strewn all over the car park, in hundreds of coloured pieces.

The landlady was back behind the bar now. The youths and their girlfriends ran out of the door. Sep sank to his knees, weeping and hyperventilating and pounding the stone floor with his fists. The landlady picked up the telephone and dialled 999. She asked for both the police and an ambulance.

Sep went outside and sat on a low wall, staring into space. The weather was as foul as his mood, with black and grey clouds stampeding across the sky, driven by heavy gusts of wind. In the distance he could see the mist of descending rain and it wasn't long before the first drops lashed into his face. It didn't occur to him to take shelter. This was no more than he deserved.

A marked police car arrived first with its blues and twos flashing and blaring and, as if to add to his ignominy, he was arrested by two of his erstwhile very junior colleagues; two young constables who had been in awe of him when they had first arrived at the station, such was his reputation back then. It was he who advised them to cuff him.

‘I may turn violent. That's why you're arresting me.'

‘Yes sir,' said one of them.

Sep didn't correct him in his form of address. The rain was now drenching him and the constables. The young people and the landlady stood in the shelter of a doorway to watch proceedings as Sep was put in the back of the car just as the ambulance was arriving. It was waved away by one of the constables.

‘You should have let them take me to hospital,' said Sep, ‘with one of you in the ambulance and one of you following in the car.'

‘Are you injured, sir?'

‘I'm mentally disturbed and need treatment that I can't get at the station.'

‘We can take you to St James's if you like.'

‘It's OK. Just take me to the station and get me the duty doctor.'

‘Y
ou killed a man,' said Professor Gilmartin.

Sep shook his head. ‘No, I didn't.'

‘Explain that to me.'

‘For a start, that man accidentally dying in police custody is not the reason I'm in here. Had he not been epileptic, I'd still be a detective inspector with the West Yorkshire police.'

‘Had he not been a suspected paedophile would he still be alive?'

‘Who knows? The CPS found I had no case to answer and here you are, still banging on about it. The coroner's verdict was “sudden unexplained death in epilepsy”.'

‘Tell me about him.'

‘He was sexually abusing children. The evidence we'd collected was cast-iron, not to mention sickening. To me he wasn't a human being; he was an enormous, filthy pig with a foul mind and chins down to his belly button.'

‘So, you're glad he's dead.'

‘It was a result, no doubt about that. His death's made the lives of a lot of good people much easier.'

‘I assume you mean the victims?'

‘Yeah, and their parents. He did a lot of lasting damage did Johnstone. Dying is probably the only decent thing he's ever done in his life. I'm just pissed off that I'm carrying the can for it. His death attracted a lot of publicity and the IPCC needed a scapegoat to show that the police can't get away with a death in custody without someone being punished. They also took great care to cover up why he'd been arrested. I'm guessing you thought it was a driving offence – driving under the influence or some such thing.'

The look on her face told him he'd hit the mark.

‘I'm right, aren't I?'

‘You see yourself as a scapegoat, do you?' she said.

‘Of course I'm a scapegoat.'

‘What about the incident in the pub?' she asked him.

‘Well, I'll give you that one. That was possibly my own fault but there were mitigating circumstances. You see, to handle my getting the sack and my wife shacking up with Detective Inspector Cope, and my daughter not wanting to know me, and my colleagues turning on me, etcetera, etcetera, I needed a comfortable place to go that wasn't the tatty bedsit I'm living in right now.'

‘You mean everyone turned against you for no reason?'

‘No truthful reason. My wife, from whom I was already separated, claimed I'd assaulted her, which wasn't true, but it didn't stop her reporting it to the police – or to my colleagues, as they're otherwise known. It was her word against mine and she had the cuts and bruises to back her story up.'

‘Which she didn't get from you?'

‘No. I think she got someone to thump her so she could have some bruises. Don't ask me why.'

‘She might just have fallen.'

‘They weren't those type of bruises. There wasn't enough evidence to charge me, but enough for my colleagues to turn their backs on me … my daughter as well. Under any other circumstance my colleagues would have closed ranks around me when I was accused of killing the paedophile, but not one of them lifted a finger to help me, even people I thought were my friends.'

‘Wife-beaters don't get much sympathy.'

‘Wife-beaters don't deserve any sympathy. That room in the pub was my bolt-hole, if you like. That room helped me cope after everyone abandoned me.'

‘Everyone?'

‘Pretty much, with the exception of my brother who's blind and disabled. My sisters never had much time for either me or our Clive, plus they all live too far away. My dad's eighty-eight and in a nursing home, my wife and daughter don't want to know me, and my friends outside the job have all gone to ground. I'm a forty-seven-year-old has-been. I mean, who wants to be friends with a killer? All I had was a room in a pub. Actually, I made a few friends in that room. You deny me my room, you take away those friends, and that includes a lady called Winnie O'Toole who seemed to have taken to me.'

‘Have you taken to her?'

He gave this some thought. ‘Very much so. She's an old customer of mine. I arrested her three times. Once for drugs offences, once for prostitution and once for ABH – she stabbed a punter who got rough with her.'

‘She sounds a real charmer.'

Sep grinned. ‘She is, actually, but
you
might find her a challenge. Winnie's not what I regard as a natural born criminal, she was just … I don't know, born into the wrong circumstances, broken home, fell into bad company, but she has a real spark about her. Winnie's the only woman I've ever known who smokes a pipe. She's an intelligent woman, she makes me laugh and she could have that gold watch off your wrist without you knowing it was missing until you wanted to check that my hour's up.'

Gilmartin instinctively looked down at her watch, then looked up to see Sep still grinning her, as if to say,
Gotcha!

‘Has she been to visit you here?'

Sep shook his head. ‘No. I don't suppose she will. We're not lovers or anything. She's trying to turn her life around, whereas I don't seem to have one to turn around.'

‘Will you try and make things up with your wife?'

‘No, I can't forgive what she did to me, nor can I understand it. Anyway, she's found another man – one of my so-called colleagues. Not a man I'd trust, even though I don't know him all that well.' He omitted to tell her that he thought this copper might be behind a lot that had gone wrong with his life, and not just him losing his wife to the man.

‘You hardly know him but you don't trust him?'

‘Well he did take my wife from me. He's one of these good-looking, smarmy types.'

‘Not ugly like you then?'

Sep smiled at her. ‘Something wrong with your eyesight, prof?'

She smiled back. ‘Has your wife leaving you for a good-looking smarmy type offended your handsome male ego?'

‘I'm heartbroken about my daughter believing all her mother's lies about me and turning her back on me. I've tried to explain my side of the story but she doesn't want to know.'

‘You haven't explained why you went wild in the pub. Smashing a very valuable window.'

‘Ah, yes. I really regret that. I liked that window. What happened was a gang of really annoying kids came in and started braying like a bunch of hyenas.'

‘Upsetting your equilibrium.'

‘If you like. OK, I overreacted. I lost it and shouted at them.'

‘You scared the life out of them.'

‘I know. I'm a big bloke, I can do that, but I was never going to touch any of them. I've never in my life attacked anyone in anger. Being able to scare people is a handy thing in a copper. Some villains need a good scaring.'

‘Do they really?'

‘Yes, they really do. Then the landlady barred me from the pub. She was quite right to do so, but she was taking away from me the only place that was helping me hold my life together.'

‘Which is why you lost it?'

‘Yes it is. Every man has his breaking point and that was mine. I'd sooner have broken my own leg than break that window. My leg'll mend but that window won't. When I get out of here I'll have to find a new place.'

She looked at her notes. ‘I did wonder how you managed to rise to the rank of detective inspector in the space of seven years. You left the army in May 2004 at the age of thirty-seven, which is when you joined the police force. You've been a detective inspector since the age of forty-four.'

‘Sounds about right.'

‘In your psych evaluation before you joined CID, it says you had periods when you were bordering on bipolar.'

‘I had my ups and downs, yeah, mainly due to what happened to my brother in Iraq.'

‘Yes, I know about your brother.'

‘Does it say that I love my brother?'

‘No it doesn't.'

‘Maybe you should make a note of that.'

‘OK.' She turned over a page. ‘It also says that you have a unique talent for sensing guilt in a suspect and that they're often so amazed at what you appear to know about their involvement in the crime that they confess.'

Sep nodded. ‘It's all part of the vibe I was talking about. It's a question of using what knowledge you have to its best advantage and mix it up with a few potent lies that you know will really throw the suspect. It's possible to question a suspect in a way that makes them admit to things without realizing it. Some police interviewers do it. I just take it to a different level.' He grinned. ‘The villains think I'm some sort of mind reader.'

‘It's why you made detective inspector
despite
your psych evaluation.'

‘Is it? I didn't know that.'

‘According to this they made a balanced judgement and promoted you.'

‘Then they made an unbalanced judgement and sacked me.'