The Walking Dead

He swayed and felt weakness in his knees. Through the night, as truths were dragged out of him, she had belted him: 'You disgust me, you make me cringe with shame…Don't give me the craven excuse that there was a threat to Kathy, me, you. Policemen exist to protect us from such threats…It's not too late. You took the money and now you will hand it in to the court's authorities and come clean…If you have not done that by the time you come home this evening I will be straight down to the nearest police station and you will be looking at a charge, from your vantage-point in the cells, of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, or whatever they call it…Why didn't you just throw it back in that awful little man's face? Isn't there an iota of decency, pride, self-esteem, in you?…And you're a person responsible for overseeing the way children are brought up, your own and at school — God, what a damn Pharisee you've turned out to be, and unfit to have children in your care…There is, if you didn't know it, a clear division between what is right and what is wrong, but since you don't seem to understand that, it falls to me to kick you down the right road…Do you think I could ever look myself in the face, stand in front of a mirror, if I knew that our debts were paid off with that money? Do you? Well, think again. I'd prefer to starve in the street, destitute, and Kathy with me, than spend a penny of it…Get out of my sight because I don't want you in my room and most certainly not in my bed…So, there will be consequences — well, the police will look after us, and my trust lies in them, not in the word of criminals…' Always had had a way with words, his Babs.

'Hey, Jools, you been on the juice last night?' Baz had sidled close to him, and grinned.

'More like a right junket.' Fanny giggled. 'What did you have? A gallon or two?'

He reeled away from them and slumped on to a chair.

Fanny came to him and crouched beside him. She said softly, 'Don't mind them, Jools, they're just silly and spiteful. Is it that you're ill or is it Angst in the mind? You can tell me — I only share secrets with my cat.'

He thought her a dear and chaotic woman, with rather an admirable chest that was a usual attention point for him in post-lunch court sessions, but was damned if he would confide. 'There was no alcohol involved. I merely happen to have slept poorly,' he said sharply.

The hands of the clock on the wall advanced. The time came and went when the bailiff would normally have urged those who needed it to make a last visit to the toilets. The others had now retreated to the hard chairs round the walls and were buried in newspaper word teasers and crossword puzzles, except Fanny, who knitted from a pattern. Their bailiff had come back into the room, had hovered with an expression of crisis on his face, then had been called out, had returned again, then gone once more. By now they should have been gathering up their notepads and filing into court. Jools felt the earlier tiredness and sickness ebb out of him, replaced with a sensation near to exhilaration. None of them except him knew the cause of the delay. It was as if, and none of them had seen him do it, he had pulled the pin from a pineapple-shaped grenade, rolled it studiously across the floor, and it had wobbled to a stop in the centre of the room. The bailiff was back with them and coughed heavily, not to clear his throat but to attract attention — Jools was counting down the seconds till the explosion.

'I regret, ladies and gentlemen, that we have a delay this morning and I cannot say for how long it will be. Our judge asks for your patience. A matter has come to his notice that he has to deal with. As soon as he has an answer to a difficulty that has arisen, he will call you in. I am afraid I am not at liberty to discuss the matter, the difficulty, with you.'

Jools motioned to the bailiff to come to him, then reached into his trouser pocket for his locker key. 'In my locker there's a package that'll be corroboration for what's in the letter I wrote to old Herbert,'

he whispered. 'Please retrieve it, without a song and dance, and get it to him.'

He saw it done with discretion. He threw his sandalled feet forward, leaned back, yawned, and yawned again. They'd think of him as a bloody hero, wouldn't they? They would never know he was merely the spineless bloody coward who had crumpled under the weight of his wife's morality.

* * *

'You'll put it in place, Chief Inspector. I will rely on you to do that.'

'The cost, sir, of such a procedure is prohibitive.'