Free Dust and Desire by Conrad Williams

‘I’ll be in after seven tonight.’
    ‘Melanie–’ I began. I must have been getting a bit gooey-eyed because she shooed me out, and quite right too. I gave Mengele’s chin a rub first, and I nodded at the old dears and their shivery dogs. Then I got in my car and drove to Westminster.
    It started to rain on the way but I wasn’t too bothered about that. I was busy thinking, why couldn’t I have been burgled before now?

7
    I parked a little way up the road from the Paviours Arms. I don’t like situating myself directly outside the building I’m aiming for. Even my own gaff, I park a hundred metres or so further along the road. Things shouldn’t be too cosy, too convenient. Even when it’s chucking it down. Things are too sweet, you start to ease off. You find, when you need it most, your edge has turned into a curve, and a big soft one at that.
    It was busy in the pub, but then it was getting on in the afternoon, on a Friday, and the suits were in a rush to get slaughtered. You could see the ones who had been here since lunchtime as they’d taken over the sofas, and their tables were audibly complaining under the weight of so much glass. I pushed past the acres of cheap jackets and women in black (why is it so many women in offices wear black, and nothing but? They must curse Marlboro for not doing black packs, or pray that John Player might become trendy some time soon) and, using two portly men at the huge bar as a mangle, fed myself through to the weary barmaid. I ordered a pint of Stella and, shielding my drink as best I could, jinked slow-motion over to the one space in any pub where you are unlikely to find anyone standing: the square inch by the gents’ toilet. Behind me was a space dedicated to food, and I sneered at the ranks of loosened ties as they tucked into their fish and chips and shepherd’s pies. A pub was for drinking. It ought to smell of spilled beer and urinal pucks, not of vinegar. Crisps, pork scratchings, peanuts: fair enough, because you need something salty to help your beer down. But meals? In a pub? Christ, it brings me out in hives.
    I forced my attention back to the scrum to see if Kara Geenan was around, but that would have been just too dashed lucky. A guy with a bunch of keys as big as a football attached to his belt appeared behind the bar and spent some time chatting to another guy at one end, who was sipping a pint of Guinness. I was about to set off on another life-threatening trek to the north face of the bar, when Big Keys disappeared into the back. Nathan, I thought and, by way of congratulating myself for such sterling deductive reasoning, drained my glass and went in search of another pint.
    I took my time with that one, because I could feel the buzz from the cocktails getting their second wind. I watched the various pockets of execs and secs and no-necks flirt and argue and play their little power games, all the while grateful that I’d bailed out of the great career jet just after take-off. I was no more a true policeman than a badger is an Olympic-class ice-dancer. It didn’t help that the helmet was an embarrassment and the pay – for wandering around in a uniform that might as well have had the words ‘HATE ME’ daubed on the back – was staggeringly awful. At least now, although my money situation was even more staggeringly awful, I could wear plain clothes, fall out of bed on my say-so and swear 24/7 at the boss. I had to make a go of what I was doing and, to a certain extent, I did. Fear drove me, more than anything else. Fear that I’d end up in an office wearing Homer Simpson ties and emailing the guy sitting two inches to my left to ask him if he had any spare paper clips I could borrow.
    When Rebecca died (when Rebecca was killed, when she was killed), a couple of months before Sarah went missing, it made it all the easier for me to hand in my notice at the Met. If they hadn’t accepted my resignation they would have sacked me within six weeks,