CHAPTER 6
I rang Eric and let him know the change in my circumstances. The really good thing for us was that if I was now down as the schools ‘face’ I would be coming off shifts, which meant that we might finally be able to synchronise our lives.

Then I rang Merry.

“So what exactly does that mean, Annie?”

“I go around the local schools and give talks, answer questions, act as a conduit if anyone has a concern, aye? And I might start a bike clinic, do some security marking, that sort of thing”

“And you want to come down home for a weekend or so? I shall prepares some beds for you”

“No, love, we’ll get a B and B, aye? Eric and I sleep together”

“Surely, for a weekend, you can adapt?”

“No, Merry, I don’t sleep without him, as in I do not sleep, aye?”

“Ah. The dreams?”

“Yes, there is that, and there is also the simple fact that I feel warm and safe and, well, loved when he is there. Look, I know you take your morality seriously, that’s why we won’t put you out. Look, we are hoping to have Steph and Sarah across with their husbands, you could put them up, a couple at least”

“Sarah? Have I met her?”

“Don’t think so. You have met her uncle, Arwel, and her sister Elaine, aye? No way you could ever forget him!”

“Er, I don’t think the men will be able to do that, Annie. I shall offer my hospitality to Stephanie, then. Sarah may wish to stay with her own family”

“Merry, just a thought, but would you be able to cope with a young boy?”

“Who would that be?”

“Steph’s neighbours are fostering a boy, and Sarah and Tony come with their own”

Merry chuckled. “This boy, he is housebroken?”

I thought back to Darren and cells. “He is now, love!”

Oh, most definitely, now. I closed up and rang Steph, who could make it, and agreed to speak to Naomi about Darren.. Then on to Sarah. Jim answered.

“Hiya Mizz Price! Dad’s in, Mum’s still at work. Want me to get him?”

“Yes please!”

There was the sound of a dog barking, and then Tony was there.

“Hiya Annie! You should call more often”

“Just a thought, Tone, but we are going over home, that’s Steph and me and our blokes, and Darren, in about three weeks. We wondered if you fancied coming over, making a few days of it, depending on shifts, aye?” Merry, my cousin, says she can put up the Woodruffs, and we can sort out a couple of B and B’s”

He laughed. “Annie Price, you are going soft. What’s wrong with taking the camping kit? If where your family lives is where I think, I know a little camp site not far away…it would be a sort of pilgrimage for us, as well”

“Oh?”

“It’s where we met, and she was very, very drunk. Be good for Pie, too”

“Sorry?”

“Jim’s dog. He was reading National Velvet at the time. Not a bad hound, just lively. Of course, it depends on whether she’d prefer to be over at Arwel’s with Alice, of course. I shall have words. How’s that mate of yours doing?”

“Den? Back on light duties at the moment, but the smile’s back. Tony…I really thought I’d lost him, back then. It was...I can’t put it into words, and then, when he woke up, fuck, it was almost worse.”

I trailed off for a bit, but he was patient on the line, and I realised that here was another steady man, someone who had been through his own nasties and could recognise when it was best to just sit and think.

“Look, Tony, I’ll have words with Merry and the rest, but where is this place you were thinking of?”

“By Llanddeusant, just over the hill from Ammanford. Next to a pub”

I had to laugh at that. “I would expect no less. That might work out better, rather than having family all weekend we can have a bit of family silliness, aye”

“Darren coming?”

“Jim asking about him?”

“Yeah, they seemed to click"

"...and it would be nice to see them away from computer games, aye? And Darren will be without his girlfriend”

“Girlfriend, yeah?”

“Yup, Chantelle’s her name. No way I will be playing chaperone for two teenagers, aye, got my own family to sort!”

“And the trial first? Could be a shitty one”

“Er, I can’t get onto that one. We’ll get it out of the way, OK, whatever happens, then it’s family fun”

“Annie, can I be cheeky? Would it be OK if I asked some friends along?”

Why the hell not. “I will have some family stuff I need to do, so I won’t be there all the time”

“It’s another couple, three kids, you met them at your engagement do? And they met the same time as Sar and me. Trust me, you’ll like them. Sar’s oldest friend, really”

“Go for it, Tony. I remember the kids, they were good with Shan Now, I’m off to do a bit of work now before home, so send me an e-mail or something with directions, aye, and I’ll run it past Eric and the others”

We wound it up, and I got through the rest of the shift, part of which---OK, almost all of the rest of it, was spent setting up the mountain bike. It was a heavy thing, made for riding down flights of steps, and manufactured by a gunmaker. I realised that I would have to work hard to keep it moving, and that my weight loss programme had just received a boost.

A week later, I was in the same uniform the Super had scored for me, making my way with Den, Kirsty and Jim to the CPS room. Our barrister swept in an hour later, robes trailing behind him and wig perched on his brief.

“Hello, hello! Sergeant Price? Armstrong? PC Armstrong?”

“Aye”

“I’m Jolyon Bentworth, I shall be prosecuting in this one. They are here, so usual drill, sit in, wait for the plea, if they lack the necessary grey cells off you go till called. Yes, yes, I know you’ve done this before, but rather fewer times than myself, ya? I have habits that are deeply, deeply ingrained, so allow me my peccadilloes!”

I wondered if there was a special Law School that trained them to talk like that, but never mind. He had a smile, rather than a grimace, and it reached his eyes. He would do, not that we had any say in things.

In we trooped when the tannoy called us, and took our seats in the public gallery. This was so, so different to Croydon, the weight of history seeming to darken the courtroom. The jury were there, sworn in before our arrival, Ten minutes later, there was a small commotion, and our defendants were brought in.

Harton was a mess, a scar livid across the right side of his face, one eyelid drooped shut. Petherick looked nearly as bad, part of his ear gone, but Ma Pickstock just looked old. The nasty old bitch actually looked broken, all of her pugnacity gone. This was no longer someone who issued orders and demands, this was an old woman with her gaze fixed over her shoulder for what might be coming up behind.

There were four others in the dock, and I gathered that whoever else had been caught in the net must have given a plea already. One was a woman in her fifties dark hair in a pixie cut, and her eyes were everywhere till they lit on Dennis, and locked. I looked to my right, and saw Kirsty ostentatiously hold her left hand up, ring visible, and her own stare met Helen Dodd’s and it was Dodd who looked away. I could feel the hatred boiling off Kirst in waves, even without looking, so reached out and took her hand, out of sight of the prisoners. She crushed the feeling out of it until I wriggled, then eased off.

There was a fat old man there, with a really bad comb-over, and that I assumed was the elder Cuthbert, and two men in their forties. One of them looked at me from the dock, and it wasn’t like Dodd, there was no passion in it. The eyes were a pale, pale blue, and it wasn’t just passion they lacked, it was any sort of emotion beyond curiosity. I realised that I was not just being measured, I was being memorised, and I am not ashamed to say that I found it deeply unsettling.

Unsettling? Bloody terrifying.

“All rise!”

In he came, in red and purple, and took his seat as the Clerk gave him the necessary details. There was a short preamble, and then the Clerk began.

“Timothy Petherick. You are charged that you did with others conspire to murder Dennis Armstrong in the town of Crawley by use of an explosive device. How do you plead?”

He looked down. “Guilty”

“Peter Harton, you are similarly charged with conspiracy to murder Dennis Armstrong. How do you plead?”

“Guilty”

“Charity Pickstock…”

“Guilty”

“Archibald Dodd Cuthbert, you are charged with conspiracy to murder Dennis Armstrong, and with conspiracy to procure the murder of Dennis Armsstrong by others. How do you plead?”

He looked seriously ill, and I wondered what the relationship was. Den had told me how people up his way used their mother’s maiden names as a middle one, but what did that make Helen Dodd to him?

“Guilty”

It came out as a wheeze. This wasn’t someone long for the planet, but he still had enough fight in him to distance himself and his–relative?---from the three nonces. I could see there was no love lost there, a clear marriage of convenience. The woman, though, there was passion in her still, and for a moment I wondered, but Helen Patricia Crawford Dodd spat out her own acceptance of her guilt, with just a single sharp glance to her left at the Armstrongs before she settled her gaze into the imaginary spaces before her.

“Declan Fitzwilliam. You are charged with conspiracy to murder Dennis Armstrong, and the attempted murder of the same by the detonation of an explosive device. How do you plead?”

“Like I have a fucking choice? Guilty”

“Andrew Sean Hannigan, the same charges. How do you plead?”

Another long, dispassionate study of my face.

“And it’s guilty from me, as you fucking well knew it would be”

The judge called the Clerk over, said a few words, and then:

“I will consider reports and return here in a week for mitigation and sentence. Take them down”

I rose with the rest as he departed, and the prisoners went back to their cells, and just looked at Dennis.

“Is that it? They just roll over and cough, and we all go home in an hour?”

“Den, let’s just sod off, aye? There’s so much going on here I really, really don’t want to get any more involved with. That Hannigan bloke…Jesus, leave them to it. Kirsty, Den, if it is OK with you, I don’t want to come for the sentencing”

Kirsty was still smouldering, though. “I’ll be there, even if you two aren’t, and I intend to make fucking certain she can see my bump, yeah”

I looked at her, and she was taut as a fiddle string. “There’s more than one defendant, butt”

“Yeah, Annie, but there’s only one bitch who put the whole fucking thing together. The rest of them went along, like, but that whore was the one who got it moving. I want her to fucking SEE, yeah, my man, my husband, our kid, fuck you Helen Patricia Dodd!”

Suddenly the tension snapped in her body, and she was sobbing, and in my arms as Den held us both.

“She should have been ugly, Annie…”

I stroked her hair. “She is ugly, Kirst, she is, where it matters, aye? Inside. They don’t come any uglier…”