The Trawlerman, стр. 35
Danny was right behind her, inches away, hands out.
The jolt made her feet slip on the wet metal and she lost her balance. Throwing out her hand to catch hold of the ropes above her, she missed, and started her fall. For a second she thought she was going into the net, to be pulled down into the cold water with it, but a big hand had shot out already and grabbed her by the upper arm, yanking her back into the boat.
She looked up at Danny, heart thumping. ‘What the fuck were you doing, creeping up behind me?’
He had been standing so close, as if ready to push her into the water. Danny looked down at the deck, not answering. She turned towards Curly, but he had disappeared into the wheelhouse.
Twenty-five
She scrabbled back towards the wheelhouse and stayed inside as a thin grey rain fell. The sky darkened behind the grey drizzle and the distant outline of the white cliffs vanished.
They motored on for almost two more hours on autopilot while Danny and Curly gutted plaice with little scoops of their knives and cut the flesh from skates. The boat was a ball of light in a black landscape, illuminating the white gulls that crowded towards them. Alex stayed in the dry. Nobody talked much.
Back in the harbour, Curly ran the tender alongside the ramp so that she could get back onto dry land.
‘I’ll be a while helping Danny finish up with the catch and tidying up the boat,’ said Curly. ‘It’ll be an hour yet. Wait in the truck.’
‘Was that how it happened – what happened to me? Danny was there, ready to push me.’
‘Don’t be daft. If he hadn’t been there, you’d have gone straight in. He was looking out for you. Dangerous places, trawlers.’
‘Seriously?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ll take you home in a bit.’
‘I’ll catch a cab. I need some sleep. I have to work in the morning.’
The little boat accelerated away from the dockside, back to the trawler. She stood on the dock a long time, waiting for a taxi. It was gone two in the morning by the time a car arrived. In just a few hours she would be back at a desk for the first time in weeks.
‘Light duties’. No phrase had ever left a heart so heavy.
She was to work alongside two data analysts, on loan from the Performance section, and an IT specialist seconded from Sussex Police. They had been given a two-month project to devise and test a new system for reporting and categorising data for various crimes of violence that would satisfy new criteria that had been handed down from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. She walked into the small room in the modern outbuilding behind the main HQ building, and three men looked round, warily.
‘Kill me now,’ she muttered quietly.
Here, crime would manifest itself only as numbers, to be subjected to quantitative or qualitative analysis. There was nothing triggering about working at this desk, and that was entirely the point.
‘How is it?’ Jill called her from the incident room after she’d been at her desk for the first hour.
Alex closed the door to her small, bare room. ‘My initial analysis is that the workforce are a hundred per cent men,’ she said.
‘Good-looking men?’
‘Sixty-six per cent bearded.’
‘Are you going to be OK, Alex? Are you going to have enough to do? I know what you’re like.’
‘Thirty-three per cent with personal odour problems,’ said Alex.
‘You crack me up. This is going to be good for you, Alex. Change is the law of life.’
‘You talk such utter bollocks sometimes, Jill.’
Jill laughed that high, tinkly laugh that would normally bug the hell out of Alex when she was trying to work. Now she missed it. ‘They seem nice enough, to be honest. One of them even told me a joke this morning.’ Alex could hear the hubbub in the background of Jill’s room. People were chattering, swapping jokes and information. Her workplace was silent.
‘McAdam is next to me. He sends his regards. Do you want a word?’
‘Tell him I’m fine. Thank him for getting me back to work, I suppose.’
‘It’s OK. You’re safe. He’s gone now. So. What’s the joke?’
Alex pulled open an empty drawer and closed it again. ‘How do you kill a data analyst?’
‘I don’t know. How do you kill a data analyst?’
‘You don’t have to. They just get broken down by age and sex.’
Jill’s laugh was as high and piercing as the last. Alex held her phone a little further from her head.
‘They sound like a great bunch,’ enthused Jill. ‘You should look on this as an opportunity. Maybe it’s a perfect fit for you and where you are now.’
Alex didn’t answer.
‘Buy some new clothes. Get some new trainers instead of those beaten-up ones you always wear. Or wear heels to the office for a change. Shock me.’
‘That’s your answer to everything, isn’t it, Jill?’
‘Because it is the answer to everything.’ She sighed. Her voice lowered. ‘Listen. I thought you should know. They’ve made an arrest in the Younis case.’
Alex sat up. ‘Who?’
‘Robert Glass. The ex-squaddie. You know what? They found him living not far from the Younises’ house. He had a little tent set up in the corner of a field there where no one could see him. Found it after we saw him but he’d scarpered. Left surveillance on it. Turned up back there last night. It took fifteen people to bring him in. He ran and climbed a tree. They had to call fire services to get him down and he put one of our guys in hospital on the way, apparently.’
‘Did they find a gun?’
‘No. Turns out he’s an evangelical Christian, though, if that counts as a smoking gun. He doesn’t talk much at all, apparently. They’re interviewing him this afternoon.’
Alex was puzzled. ‘Do you want to have a coffee or something?’
‘Yeah. Course.’
‘Later today?’
Jill hesitated. ‘I don’t know. Up to my bloody eyeballs