Free Troubled Midnight by John Gardner Page A

information. “Private house, eh? Another police officer?”
    “Matter of fact, yes, Chief. Inspector Turnbull, Chief. He has a kind of flat in his house. Offered it to me.”
    “Of course Sergeant Cox. Churlish to refuse, eh?”
    “Quite, Chief.” Shirley agreed, and Curry Shepherd came into the room without knocking and hardly opening the door; sidling noiselessly in as though wearing brothel creepers as Tommy remarked later.
    “Ah, you come back.” Tommy said now.
    “What?” Curry smiled. A bit of a supercilious smile, Suzie thought, then realised that under her clothes she was blushing and that she couldn’t keep her eyes off Curry.
    No, she thought. No. This is stupid. Curry Shepherd cannot be causing me this sense of indecision. No. No. And she heard her long dead father singing, ‘No! No! A thousand times no; I’d rather die than say yes.’ Like he used to when they had family get-togethers around the piano.
    Almost under his breath, Tommy began to sing the closing lines of the ITMA signature tune:
    When there’s trouble brewing,
    It’s his doing,
    That man,
    That man again.
    With Cathy’s help he had arranged a table with two chairs on one side and a single chair facing on the other.
    “Thought we’d talk to the late Colonel Weaving’s sergeant. ‘One who found the bodies. Fancy that, Curry?”
    Curry nodded. “Fine. Yes. Actually I’ve already had a few words with him myself.”
    “Really?” Tommy sounded as though nothing in this world interested him less.
    “Ali Oop,” Suzie said, not meaning to say it aloud and immediately feeling like a Bateman cartoon with them all staring at her.
    “Ali what?” Curry asked.
    “Oop,” she explained. “ITMA character. You said the catch phrase when you left. ‘I go. I come back.’”
    “Did I?” Curry looking blank.
    “Needs to lie down in a darkened room,” Tommy said, and the door opened again with the desk sergeant bringing in a short, blocky man with a tanned face, eyes that seemed out of proportion to the rest of him and a troublesome lock of hair that kept falling over his eyes, needed it cut off really.
    “Sergeant Gibbon,” said the desk sergeant.
    Sergeant Gibbon was in uniform, the lion with blue wings on his left breast – glider pilot – the Pegasus airborne badge on his arm above his sergeant’s stripes, below the parachute wings on his right shoulder, and his maroon beret sporting the Glider Pilot Regiment badge, the laurel wreath surrounding an eagle in flight and looking nasty enough to deserve its popular name of ‘shite hawk’. Not that you saw it much out and about. The Glider Pilot Regiment was not what you might call highly visible. The sergeant dressed exactly as Lieutenant Colonel Weaving, apart from the rank badges.
    “Come in, Gibbon,” Tommy showing deference to a fighting man, standing up ushering him in. “Do sit down,” indicating the chair opposite at the table. “You got a Christian name at all?”
    “Yes, sir. Roy…”
    “Well, sit down, Roy.”
    “… But people mostly call me ‘Monkey’. Monkey Gibbon, sir, if you see…”
    “Yes, very droll.” Unsmiling: always a danger sign with Tommy.
    Gibbon sat and the weak December light caught his face revealing him as a clear-eyed, hard-skinned man sitting silently, still, that watchful calm manner often present in good fighting men who have learned the art of remaining motionless for long periods, alert and listening.
    Tommy said, “Must have been bad. Unpleasant.”
    “Most unpleasant, sir.”
    “What was most unpleasant?” Tommy showing he could be tricksy.
    “Finding the Colonel and his lady, sir.”
    “Right. Go on.” Then, almost to himself, “ His lady?”
    “How I found them, sir?”
    “Good idea Sar’nt Gibbon.”
    “I was due to pick him up at six o’clock, sir. This morning, six a.m. Punctilious he is, sir. The Colonel. Most punctilious. He was, I mean, sir. The Colonel was. ”
    “And you were there in good time?”
    “I