Wet Graves Read Free Page A

who made phone calls and ran metal detectors over me. A young constable escorted me silently up two flights of stairs and along a corridor to Frank Parker’s office. We stood outside the door and I looked at the cop.
    â€œAm I allowed to knock or do you have to do it?”
    â€œYou can knock, sir.”
    â€œThank you.”
    I knocked and I heard Frank say, “Yes.”
    â€œWhat now?”
    The constable opened the door. “Mr Hardy to see you, sir.”
    â€œThanks, son. Come in, Cliff.”
    My escort had snapped back into a position resembling attention. I said, “At ease,” and went into the room. The door was closed quietly behind me.
    â€œTake a seat, Cliff,” Frank said. “What’s the matter with you? Why are you looking like that?”
    â€œI’ve been a prick to people twice in the last twenty minutes,” I said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I sat in one of the two well-padded chairs and looked around the room. Frank’s office in the old College Street police building had looked something like a World War I trench and smelled like a snooker hall. This was all beige carpet, off-white walls and tinted glass. The old fixed squads in the police force—homicide, vice, fraud and so on—had been broken up in favour of units that drew on personnel as required and pursued cases as directed by policy-makers who weren’t always policemen. Unlike the old top cops, who had diplomas from rugby league clubs and testimonials from priests and master masons, these guys had LLBs and criminology degrees and used terms like “targeting” and “social worth”. Frank’s job was to liaise between the thinkers and the doers, so he got carpet and tinted glass. He liked the new honesty but missed the old sweat and dirt.
    â€œCan’t afford a conscience in your game, Cliff,” Frank said. “Maybe you can do a few good deeds and get even. Meantime, I hate to push you out of the confessional, but …” He gestured at his thick stratifications of paperwork.
    â€œI thought we might go out for a beer.”
    â€œNo chance. I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes.”
    Frank looked greyer of hair and skin than he used to, but maybe it was the tinted glass. Then again, we hadn’t played tennis in months, or sat in a beer garden, so I suspected lack of sun was the cause. His nose was dipping towards his papers. Not the time to encourage him to take more exercise. I put my two requests to him, and he had the phone off the hook before I finished talking. He read while he listened, grunted and made notes through the two calls. He put the phone down and looked at his watch. I can take a hint; I stood and moved towards the door.
    â€œHold on, Cliff. Let me think. Yeah, I reckon I can do it. What about a beer around about six tonight?”
    â€œI thought you didn’t have time to drink beer. I got the feeling that if you did drink beer, you wouldn’t have time for a piss afterwards.”
    â€œDon’t joke. This could be serious. You’ve been mentioned in evidence given in the Lenko trial.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThat’s what Griffin tells me.”
    Beni Lenko was an alleged hitman accused of shooting and killing the husband of Didi Steller. Didi was a society woman with much more money than sense who’d ordered the hit on her hubby and then taken a kilo of sleeping pills. Beni complained about being short-changed on his fee and had talked his way into a murder charge. I’d read about the case in the papers but, to the best of my knowledge, I’d never met Didi, Beni or the late husband, whatever his name had been. I stood on Frank’s beige carpet with my mouth hanging open. “That’s crazy,” I said.
    â€œI’ll try to find out more about it and fill you in at six. Meantime, you’d better get on to Cy Sackville.”
    â€œI will.