(2013) Collateral Damage by Colin Smith Page A

sitting-room table. It took them about three minutes to find the dope hidden in a plastic
bag under the mattress in her bedroom.
    'Never seen it before,' she said when they showed it to her,
fiddling with the belt around her wrap. Once she had got over the shock she became
very conscious of the fact that she was naked underneath, and the towel she had
knotted around her head had come off so that the wet hair hung down the sides of
her face like rats' tails. It took them a little longer to find the automatic where
Koller had left it in the lavatory cistern. 'I suppose you've never seen this before
either?' said the Detective Chief Inspector. That was the first time that evening
she had occasion to think what a bastard Hans was, but all she said was: 'Can I
have a cigarette?' 'I don't think we've got the sort you smoke,' leered the young
detective who had almost put a shot through the door. He had recovered his nerve
enough to be nasty. Fitchett scowled at him and gave her one of his own untipped
Senior Service and lit it for her. He also allowed the policewoman to take her into
the bedroom here she put on a faded pair of jeans and a sweater. He didn't intend
to take any chances. Everything was going to be done by the book and more so. The
head of the Branch had told him to make damn sure nobody was going to be able to
scream 'police brutality' and had made it plain that the Commissioner himself was
taking a keen personal interest in the case, as well he might with a peerage coming
up. Her father was bound to raise hell even if he wasn't in that faction of the
Cabinet who thought they were all fascist pigs.
    Fitchett himself had all the physical equipment to make him appear
a bullying, ham-fisted sort of man which was deceptive because, as his superiors
had come to realise rather late in his career, he had an ice-sharp analytical mind
that went some way beyond the native guile normally associated with successful policemen.
He was in his early fifties, was at least a stone overweight, drank more whisky
than his doctor advised and, when he was working or drinking, chain-smoked Senior
Service which he lit with an old petrol lighter fitted
with a wind shield. His face was a monument to his pleasures, being red and full
of broken veins and teeth stained an awful yellow. He had been squeezing blackheads
out of his nose since adolescence which, together with the gallons of spirit that
had drained through his system, had turned the ruddiness of his face to the characteristic
boozer's strawberry. He had a showy amount of nasal hair and, as with many intelligent men, his ears had also burst into foliage. His black hair,
turning grey, was longer than one would expect to find in a man of his age and position.
It partly covered his ears and a lock of it hung down over a high forehead. As if
to compensate for this physiognomy he was fussy about his clothes and dressed like
a successful lawyer in well-cut three-piece suits, for which he paid more than he
could afford, and striped shirts. His accent was the diluted cockney of the South
London lowermiddle class peppered with criminal argot, so that a car was always
'a motor', a bribe 'a drink', his boss 'the governor', and a gun 'a shooter'.
    Basically, Fitchett was a contented policeman and would have
probably remained one if the cabinet minster's daughter had not become his case.
The trouble was he didn't like interrogating a suspect, particularly a suspect he
knew he had bang to rights, as if he was walking on egg-shells. What's more he didn't
have the forty-eight hours the Terrorism Act said he did because his Governor had
made it quite dear earlier, when he was summoned upstairs to the floor with carpets,
that if a confession had not materialized by midnight he was to stop. 'After all,
we don't want her saying she was deprived of her sleep or you dropped LSD in her
coffee, do we?' the Commander had said. He was everything Fitchett wasn't. Lean, urbane, practically teetotal and not as