Christopher glanced at it. Historical. Well, he’d expected that though it wasn’t really his remit. He looked up at his boss who was watching him keenly, pensively. Was this just to give him something to do? He scanned his old oppo’s face trying to find some kind of clue. Was there an uncharacteristic malice there? Faint jealousy of a man who was on the verge of his pension but didn’t have the decency not to hang around and make a show of paid up idleness. No. It wasn’t in him and, anyway, his old mate wasn’t far behind. Slightly younger, better connected but still coming into the final bend.
Francis winked at him. Not his usual matey, ‘let’s have another’, cheeky boy wink. Complicit, cryptic, almost willing him to understand something. Christopher knew faces. Honest, dishonest, the ever-shifting blend in most of us. The dead-eyed Satans he’d interviewed several murders in, remorseless and amoral. The shocked disbelief of the one-punch killer and the ‘fuck off, copper’ defiance of the truly nasty villain, refusing in the face even of a lengthy stretch to acknowledge the authority of the law. For the moment, anyway. But he could see only his friend in front of him. Same as ever.
“Take a look” he said. “Might interest you.” And, as though reading Christopher’s mind, added smilingly. “Give you something to do, anyway. Cluttering the place up and rubbing it in. Do something while you still can.” And he wandered off before Christopher could interrogate the quip.
Swivelling his chair round to face the empty desk he’d parked at, Christopher opened the file, noting it smelt of must, pulled on the glasses that aged him ten years every time he glanced professorially over their top, and began to read.
—
The mid-Seventies in London were a blast only for the IRA and lit up only by the blazing heat wave of 1976. Christopher remembered both for different reasons.
He remembered the endless sunshine of a summer that lasted from May to September. Each day an endless roaming of London’s parks and swimming pools at Greenwich, Charlton and Eltham. There was the river too. He and his brother and a dare to swim in it, climbing down the slime green stairs of Greenwich pier and into the muddy swirl of the Thames.
A memory, snapshot clear, of waking from a somnolent sun-induced study to take a catch at school cricket, the hard red ball inches from his face and the last grass on Blackheath savannah brown in the heat. Congratulations from his teammates on a courageous ‘grab’ close to the bat and the ball at terminal velocity. His teacher winking at him as if to say, ‘you woke up just in time.’ Christopher smiling back at a secret shared; his instinct for self-preservation.
Christopher smiled again at the brief and ancient glory.
