‘Looks like Oakley he had less hair then, than he does now! How old was he?’’ asked Erika peering closer at the picture at his thinning hair.
Amanda chuckled, ‘Twenty-three. He started wearing the syrup when he got promoted to the DCI rank.’
‘That’s Assistant Commissioner Oakley?’ said Moss, just catching on.
‘We trained together at Hendon, graduated in 1978,’ said Amanda. She cleared off some of the newspapers from the sofa and invited them to sit.
‘Oakley has only just retired, massive golden handshake,’ said Moss. It hung in the air for a moment. They all sat down.
‘Okay, so we’re just here informally to ask you about the Jessica Collins case. I’ve been assigned it,’ said Erika.
‘Who did you piss off?’ chuckled Amanda darkly. ‘It’s a poisoned chalice. I always thought they’d dump her in the quarry… although we searched it twice and there was nothing, so whether they kept her somewhere, or moved the body. That’s your job to find out.’
‘You were convinced it was Trevor Marksman?’
‘Yeah,’ she nodded holding Erika’s gaze. ‘He burned for it though. And you know what? I’d do it again.’
‘So you freely admit you tipped off the people who put the petrol bomb through his door.’
‘Yep.’ She looked at Erika, Moss and Peterson, adding, ‘don’t you ever want to take justice into your own hands?’
‘No.’
‘Come on, Erika. I’ve read about you. Your husband was gunned down by that druggie, plus four of your colleagues and he left you for dead. Wouldn’t you love to have an hour in a room with him, just the two of you and a baseball bat covered in nails?’ She blew on her tea and kept eye contact with Erika.
‘Yeah I would.’
‘There you go then.’
‘But I’d never do it. Our job as police officers is to uphold the law, and not to take it into our own hands. You also had an affair with Martin Collins?’
Amanda sighed and put her tea down on the coffee table. It was littered with rubbish.
‘I did. Him and Marianne were over, it was two years after Jessica went missing. We got close. I regret that more than Marksman, but I fell in love.’
‘Did he?’
‘No.’
She shrugged and pulled a pack of cigarettes from a pouch in the front of her jumper and lit up.
‘Did anyone in the MET know?’
‘They knew. But I was off the case. I often think it was the only good thing I did for that family. I couldn’t bring their daughter back, I made Martin forget, at least when he was with me.’
‘Now we’ve found Jessica. Do you still think Trevor Marksman did it?’ asked Erika.
Amanda took another drag of her cigarette. ‘I always think that if something is so bloody obvious then it has to be true… He had someone working with him though, and I think that when he took her. He her kept somewhere.’
‘You had him under surveillance?’ asked Peterson.
‘We did, but there was a week or so in between her going missing and us getting eyes on him… But then the first officers I had working on it were a couple of poofs. Turns out they used their night time watch to cop off a few times and fuck each other. I was never able to prove it, but they probably missed a few opportunities to catch him.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘I confronted them, they were thrown off the case. They started gossiping about me. Spread a lot of shit about me…’ she took a drag on her cigarette drawing it right down to the filter, then lit it with another.
‘I had a look at your file,’ started Erika.
‘Oh you did, did you?’ said Amanda squinting through the smoke.
‘After the Jessica Collins case, you were moved to the drug squad, and you were charged with selling on cocaine.’
‘Everyone was doing it. It was the nineties. They threw the book at me, no one else got done for it… I was in debt.’ She sniffed and crossed her arms defiantly.
‘You know what the drug problems are like in London, I don’t know how you could do that?’
‘Oh stop bleating… I was a bloody good copper. I paved the way for women like you, feminist DCI’s and little dyke DI’s,’ she added indicating Moss. ‘and you, DI Peterson, you would have been the token black guy twenty years ago, now you’re accepted, taken seriously.’
‘So it’s all down to you is it? Are you the Rosa Parks of the MET?’ said Peterson.
‘And I can call myself a dyke, not you,’ added Moss.
‘There we go, you’ve arrived in the force, haven’t you?’
There was an awkward silence. Erika gave Moss and Peterson a look.
‘We’re not here to do anything more than get your side of things.’
‘My side?’
‘Yes, what it was like working on the case, your insight. I’m coming to this blind with reams and reams of case files.’
Amanda was quiet for a moment and lit another cigarette,
‘When I worked in vice I was the only woman and I was given every rape case, I looked after those women. I took samples, I cared for them. I never ignored their calls and I supported them through months of waiting whilst the fuckers who raped them were on remand. The I held their hand through the court cases… No one gave me any support. They say that you fall in love with the force but it doesn’t love you back and that’s true. The blokes who used to piss off down the pub early, who used to demand free fucks from the sex workers, they got the promotions. And then when I finally get the Jessica Collins case, I was made to feel like I’d overstepped the mark, had ideas above my station.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Erika.
‘Don’t be sorry. But don’t judge me. You get to the point when you find out playing by the rules gets you nowhere…’ she indicated the photo on the wall with the butt of her cigarette, ‘Look. That arsehole Oakley, ended up as Assistant Commissioner,’ she stubbed it out in an overflowing ashtray, grinding it down. ‘We were on the beat a lot together in the old days. One night we were on Catford High Street at three am, and this lad holds us up at knifepoint in one of the side roads. He was off his head on something… he grabs Oakley and presses the knife against his neck, and Oakley shits himself. I’m not talking metaphorically, he actually shits his pants. The kid with the knife, who’s paranoid and wired enough as it is, freaks out at the smell, thinks he’s shit himself and runs away… Oakley was saved by his own shit. It’s ironical that years later, he gets a bloody MBE for his work in the force bringing down knife crime… I helped him that night, got him cleaned up and I kept my mouth shut. We were tight back then. Years later when it all went wrong for me, he was Chief Superintendent I think. He did nothing, left me out to dry.’