3. 5 Five days of hell
I suppose it must have been a year or more later that Richard managed to get himself caught up as one of the hostages in a terrorist siege. I don’t know all the details myself, because it was all under the supervision of Special Branch and information was distributed on a “need-to-know” basis, which seemed to mean that no one was allowed to know anything! And what little I do know I probably still supposed to be kept under wraps, so I’ll gloss over all of that. The important thing, from the point of view of Bernie’s story, is that he was out of circulation for five days with pretty well no news coming through about what might be happening to him.
At that point I had no idea how close Bernie and Richard had become until she rang that Monday wanting to ask Angie if by any chance Richard might be away on police business with me and did she know when he might be likely to get back. Angie handed her over to me and I tried to explain without giving away any official secrets – which was pretty difficult. In the end, I told her about the hostage situation – just the bare fact that Richard was being held – and swore her to utmost secrecy. After that there was nothing much any of us could do except wait.
Eddie was extremely scathing when he realised that I hadn’t been aware of the arrangement that Bernie and Richard had whereby she entertained him to dinner (only she would insist on calling it “tea”) on Mondays and Thursdays and she would go round to his place on Tuesdays and Fridays. As I’m sure Jonah would be delighted to point out, it just goes to show how much good I am as a detective that I had noticed how Eddie never went round to Bernie’s for help with his homework on Tuesday or Friday and how Richard always tried to get away from work on time on those days too, and yet I never put two and to together.
Angie, of course, knew a whole lot more about what was going on than I did, but I think Eddie probably had a better grasp of the situation even than she did. He’d been round there on lots of Mondays and Wednesdays getting help with knotty problems in maths and physics, and he’d seen them together, which neither of us had.
Angie invited Bernie to come round to our place on Tuesday evening, but she turned the offer down and made it pretty clear that she intended to see this thing through on her own. Angie debated with me whether she ought to go round to check that Bernie was OK, but she wasn’t sure whether that might just make her more reluctant to accept help later if the worst were to happen. In the end, Eddie took charge. He declared that he had some chemistry homework that was completely impossible and he would have to get Bernie’s hep that very evening because it was due in the next day. Without another word, he was off out of the house and round to her place.
I was very proud of him in those five days. You don’t expect sensitivity from a fourteen-year-old boy, but he showed a remarkable level of understanding of how Bernie must have been feeling. All his teachers must have decided to set particularly challenging homework that week, judging by the length of time he spent going thorough it with Bernie each evening! The first night Angie went round to fetch him back after a couple of hours, worried that he might be overstaying his welcome, but she came back convinced that he was doing her good.
In the early hours of Friday morning it was all over. I don’t know the details, and couldn’t tell them to you if I did, but news came through that the siege was lifted and all the hostages had been freed safe and sound. Richard reappeared in the office around ten-thirty, looking tired and harassed but otherwise unscathed. My first thought was for Bernie. I accosted Richard as soon as I could get him in the privacy of his own office and asked him if he’d been in touch with her yet. I could hardly believe it when he looked back at me as if I had gone off my head. I honestly believe that it had never occurred to him that she might have been worried about him.
I did my best to impress upon him the importance of letting her know at once that je was safe and then packed him off with instructions to go straight round to see her. I told the rest of the team that Richard was taking the rest of the day off to recuperate after his ordeal and I rang Angie to make sure that she prevented Eddie from calling round on Bernie that evening. And we all expected that it wouldn’t be long before Richard and Bernie admitted publicly that they’d fallen for one another.