kept in regular contact, even though Dr Hunter had moved to New Zealand with her son Gabriel for a ‘fresh start’. (You could hardly blame her when you thought about what had happened to her.) ‘Why don’t you come, Reggie? Come for a visit. You might even think about getting a job here.’ New Zealand seemed to Reggie to be awfully far away. ‘Well, not when you’re actually here,’ Dr Hunter wrote. ‘Then it’s not far away at all. Then it’s just where you are. You’re here.’ Not so much a mentor as a guru.
Reggie did Taekwondo, Ronnie boxed. You had to do something when you were small and you were female and you were police. A triple whammy. Reggie was fast-tracking in Taekwondo as well as CID, already a third dan. Reggie harboured a daydream. The dark night, the sinister alley, the unexpected attack – and the surprise of her assailant when he was knocked to the ground. Hi-yah! Not that anyone said that in her class. And not that she was violent, but if you’d spent your life being referred to as a ‘wee lass’, or as ‘poor little Reggie Chase’, you were allowed the occasional fierce fantasy.
Reggie had been offered a scholarship to Cambridge but hadn’t taken it up. She knew she’d have sunk amongst all that privilege and entitlement, and even if they had accepted her they would still have looked at her and seen her unfortunate background every day of her time there. Her father had been killed before she was born in a ‘friendly fire’ incident (not very friendly at all, in Reggie’s opinion) in a futile war that everyone had pretty much forgotten now. And her mother had drowned in a swimming-pool accident when Reggie was fifteen, leaving just a brother for her to lose to drugs.
Derby had been a revelation: people her own age who liked her (She had friends!) and a relationship (Sex! Not embarrassing!) with a funny, polite boy who had studied Computer Science and was now working as an anti-hacker for the same evil multinational corporation that he had hacked when he was a post-grad, because of course that was what happened to every good hacker – coerced to work for the devil under threat of a long jail sentence or extradition. He was called Sai and had Asian good looks and they no longer saw each other because he was having an arranged marriage and had been poached by the FBI and was going off to work at Quantico, all of which seemed to Reggie to be an excessively dramatic way of ending a relationship.
Her heart wasn’t shattered, just cracked, although cracked was bad enough. And she had her career, and the black suit, as a comfort. ‘That’s the important thing,’ Ronnie said. Ronnie herself was ‘between girlfriends’. Reggie often found herself wishing that she was gay too, it might make life simpler, but Ronnie laughed her head off and said, ‘And how exactly?’
Reggie had started with the Taekwondo at uni. There were clubs for anything you fancied learning. Dr Hunter had been in the running club at her university – as well as shooting – and Reggie knew how useful those two things could be because Dr Hunter had demonstrated how.
Dr Hunter had been the nicest, kindest, most sympathetic person that Reggie had ever known, and Reggie knew for a fact that Dr Hunter had murdered two men with her bare hands (literally) and only Reggie and one other person knew about it. So it just went to show. ‘Justice has nothing to do with the law,’ Dr Hunter had told her once, and Reggie understood what she meant, as would that one other person who knew about Dr Hunter’s short career as an assassin.
Ronnie and Reggie drained their coffee cups, both finishing at the same time. They left a message for Gilmerton to tell him what their plans were for today, ditto with Control here. More of an operational issue, really, as Reggie got the feeling that no one actually cared.
‘Right then,’ Ronnie said. ‘We’d better get started.’
They had their warrant cards ready when Ronnie rang the doorbell of the Seashell. A woman answered and Ronnie said, ‘Good morning, I’m DC Ronnie Dibicki and this is DC Reggie Chase.’ Reggie smiled at the woman and held her warrant card higher for scrutiny, but the woman barely glanced at it. ‘We’re looking for a Mr Andrew Bragg?’ Ronnie said.