Free Dead or Alive by Ken McCoy Page B

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.’
    â€˜Wife-beaters don’t get much sympathy.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Everyone?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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!
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Will you try and make things up with your wife?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜You hardly know him but you don’t trust him?’
    â€˜Well he did take my wife from me. He’s one of these good-looking, smarmy types.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜You haven’t explained why you went wild in the pub. Smashing a very valuable window.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Upsetting your equilibrium.’
    â€˜If you like. OK, I overreacted. I lost it and shouted at them.’
    â€˜You scared the life out of them.’
    â€˜I know. I’m a big bloke, I can do that, but I was never going to touch any of them.