Christopher was stillness amid the buzz and bustle of the incident room. He wasn’t working on an investigation but, on the verge of retirement, he could increasingly afford to sit and simply immerse himself in a life he was about to leave.
It was an almost cinematic experience. The images running in front of him, imprinting themselves indelibly on his brain as he ate metaphorical popcorn and connected the various plot lines, identified the main characters and judged them sympathetic or otherwise.
Christopher could feel himself vanishing. Like a solitary viewer in the cinema as the lights first dimmed, then blackened and only the screen’s luminescence and the green word ‘Exit’ stood out starkly against the dark.
His presence in the room was amiably tolerated. He’d been around a long time and was popular, if always slightly apart, from the teams of detectives that came together in intense bursts of energy and then broke up again as a crime was either solved or a trail went so corpse cold that resuscitation of a case was impossible.
They’d tease him good-naturedly about being lucky. Out. Safe. Pensioned. And Christopher was, after all, a handy source of reference with all his years of experience banked, logged and filed. He drank it all in like a traveller about to enter a desert. These last few weeks would have to sustain him across the lone and level sands. ‘Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!’ He thought.
“One last look, mate?”. His boss. Old friend. Surpasser and master. They’d been through school and then the college at Hendon together. Marched out, passed out together, white-gloved and focused on keeping in step in front of the Union flag and a picture of the Queen.
He’d done better, strode quicker. If Christopher had always been the better instinctive policeman, Francis, Peter Francis, had trumped him with political nous and the ability to find himself in the right pub at the right time back when coppering had been a beery occupation and favours were swapped after hours and on a trip round the optics with a tired landlord wishing they’d all go home.
If it were true that villains had a habit of running out of the back door and into Christopher’s arms, it was a fact that Francis always remembered the kids’ names and had just the right quip for any occasion.
For all that, they got on. A ying to the yang, they’d cleared each other up after a wade in the messy moral margins of criminal investigation. They’d seen the worst the world had to offer and helped each other summon 4am courage in the aftermath when the ghosts came out from under the bed and the demons rattled from inside the wardrobe. Best of all they’d helped each other resist that most corrosive of police assumptions; that because all villains are people, all people are villains. Somewhere, they retained a sense of humanity and held it safely between them.
Christopher emerged blinking from his film. “Something like that, boss” he smiled easily up at Francis. “Got something for me?”
“Think so.” Answered Francis, unusually tentatively and dropped a case file into his friend’s lap. A file. Intriguing in itself. Old, manila, the definition of analogue in a computerized world where the Police National Computer (PNC) was Watson to HOLMES, the major investigation system. Where had he got it from? These weren’t stumbled across, these harkings back.
