5. 3 Three’s a crowd
I joined CID at more or less the same time as Richard got his promotion to Detective Inspector. For some reason he chose me as his ‘bag carrier’ to accompany him when he went out to investigate cases. I suppose maybe he was afraid that he might find it difficult to impose his authority on a Detective Sergeant when he’d only just moved up from that rank himself. Anyway, it was excellent training for me in the art of detection and in particular in dealing sensitively with victims of crime and in interviewing witnesses without antagonising them.
Richard pushed me to take my sergeant’s exams and I think he also used his influence to get me promoted. I owe him an awful lot – not least, because I doubt if I would have felt able to propose marriage to Angie if I hadn’t had the extra security of a sergeant’s pay to offer her. That made the difference between being stuck in police accommodation for the foreseeable future and being able to get a mortgage on a small house in East Oxford.
When Jonah joined the team, I found that increasingly we were going round in a threesome. In theory, I was showing Jonah the ropes – and to be fair to Richard, he did make a point of getting me to demonstrate some of the key skills involved in the work of a detective – but often Richard appeared to treat us as equals and to value Jonah’s opinions as highly as mine. The experience stood me in good stead when I became a DI myself and had my own team to train up, but I couldn’t help feeling that, as soon as I’d shown Jonah how to do something, he was given the same opportunities to exercise that skill as I was. I don’t want to make a big thing of this, because in reality we all got on very well together, but it did sometimes seem that Jonah was being allowed to take on responsibilities that I wouldn’t have been permitted to have so early on in my career.
I remember one case in particular. It was not long after Jonah was transferred to CID. Up until then, I’d still been going out with Richard to view every crime scene and interview every witness, with Jonah coming along for the ride, to observe our technique and take notes. This time Richard had evidently decided that Jonah was ready to act as his assistant without me present as well – or maybe he just didn’t have the manpower to spare. Whatever the reason, I remember being left in the office checking through files while Jonah went off with Richard to interview the mother of a girl who had gone missing. And I remember it crossing my mind that perhaps this was the beginning of the end for my partnership with Richard.
Looking back, I realise now that Richard was just helping us each to play to our strengths. Jonah was never going to have the patience to stick with going through mountains of paper to extract a small piece of information – or at least, not reliably. His attention would start to wander and he’d miss things. But he did have a real gift for leaps of the imagination that sometimes really pushed a case along when we were struggling to make sense of the evidence we had before us. Anyway, we rubbed along pretty well for quite some time and, though I say it myself, we notched up a good number of successes during that period. Probably our friendly competition for Richard’s esteem and attention made both Jonah and me more effective – it kept us on our mettle and always striving to improve.
It didn’t seem long before Jonah was promoted. When I check the dates, I can see that, in fact, it only took him just one year less to make the transition from constable to sergeant than it took me, but somehow it felt as if he had been with us for hardly any time before he had become my equal in rank. I began to wonder if I ought to start looking to move on, in order to make room for Jonah to supplant me as Richard’s bag-carrier. However, no sideways moves presented themselves and Richard appeared content to continue with the two of us playing more or less equal, but different, roles in his team. And before long it became obvious that Richard had plans for Jonah to move on up the greasy pole. Now that Richard was a Chief Inspector, he had set his sights on his most recent protégé reaching the rank of inspector. To be fair to Richard, he also tried to persuade me to take the inspector’s exams, but I’ve never been a great one for book learning and sitting in an examination room terrifies me far more than tackling an armed criminal. So I kept putting it off, while Jonah – who is extremely bright and ought really to have gone to university – flew through the exams with top marks. And with DCI Richard Paige backing him, it wouldn’t be long before he got his promotion.