Page 18 of Copper Script
“Why?”Joel asked.
“Just a chat, sir.”
Joel did not want him to come in at all.He also didn’t want his landlady to take the hump about policemen cluttering up the halls, so he stepped back and Hollis let himself in.
“I was just making lunch,” Joel said, with an absurd sense of shame at being caught preparing food.“What’s this about?”
Hollis glanced at the kitchenette, but if he thought he was getting asked to sit, let alone offered a cup of tea, he could fuck off.Joel had his limits.“Bit of a question, sir.I understand you interpret people’s writing.Fortune telling, sort of thing.”
“I use the principles of graphology to analyse handwriting.It’s nothing to do with fortune telling: it’s a scientific study.There’s books on the subject.”
“There’s books on palm reading too.”
“There’s books on all sorts of subjects,” Joel said sharply, and bit back the urge to give ‘miscarriages of justice’ or ‘police corruption’ as examples.“I don’t do magic or tell fortunes, and I don’t claim to, either.”
“Mmm.We have received a complaint that you made a series of slanderous allegations against a gentleman on the basis of his handwriting.”
Shit.“I haven’t made any allegations against anyone,” Joel said.“I give assessments of character based on handwriting.I don’t ask who the handwriting belongs to.”
“I expect people tell you, though.No?This is my fiancé, this is my superior...?”
“That’s up to them,” Joel said.“For all I know they’re not telling the truth.And I don’t think it’s slanderous to sayThis hand suggests weak character.I think that’s free speech.”
“Oh, undoubtedly, sir.But making a specific allegation of immoral conduct against a gentleman which cause his fiancée to break the engagement—that sounds like slander to me, and I suspect there’s a very material claim for damages there.”
Joel was rapidly approaching panic.He couldn’t be sued for slander: even if he won, the lawyers’ fees would eat every penny of his painstakingly accumulated fund.
This had to be the Paul Napier-Fox business.But Fowler had said he’d been right about Napier-Fox’s post-love letter, and it wasn’t slander if it was true.
Of course, it wouldn’t matter if a thing was true if a Detective Sergeant and his posh cousin stood up in court and denied it.Joel knew exactly what value truth had to a policeman in the witness box.If Fowler said Napier-Fox had never admitted any such caddish thing, and Barbara Wilson gave only Joel’s stupid bloody insight as the reason she’d ended her engagement, he was screwed.Could you be gaoled for slander?He couldn’t remember.He felt cold all over, dizzy with fear, and with Fowler’s betrayal.
Not that he knew the man to call it a betrayal.Maybe he’d panicked him with that stupid fucking flirting: Christ, he was a fool.But still, for Fowler to side with his shitty cousin to the point of telling lies in court—
Joel shut his eyes and took a deep, steadying breath.
He’d had an extremely good look at DS Fowler’s handwriting, and if that man was going to err, it would be on the side of insufferable rectitude.He surely wasn’t going to perjure himself to help a shitty cousin sue; that simply didn’t mesh with anything Joel had seen.Which suggested there was more to this.
“I don’t know about that, Sergeant,” he said, as calmly as he could.“I’m no lawyer.I’ll have to look into the matter.Only, do correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t slander a civil matter?”
He said that with a look of intelligent curiosity, and held it on his face till Hollis said, “Yes, sir, it is.”
“Not the Met’s area, then.”
“No, sir.”
Joel didn’t say anything to that at all.One of the journalists at the paper had advised him, in a moment of slightly inebriated expansiveness, that silence was the greatest weapon.If you were silent in a negotiation or an interview, the other party felt compelled to fill the gap.So he simply stood without a word, keeping his eyes clamped on the policeman’s face despite the head-to-toe social discomfort, setting his back teeth to make himself not speak.
Hollis broke first.“Very well, sir.Just giving you a word to the wise.When people claim they can do the impossible, especially if they make allegations about their betters, that’s a good way to get in a lot of trouble.We keep our eye on that sort of thing.”
“Glad to hear it,” Joel said.“Very responsible.Is there anything else I can do for you?In that case, good afternoon.”
He shut the door behind Hollis, heart thudding.Then he went back to his half-cooked sausages, stared at them for a while, and threw them in the bin.It was a horrible waste of meat, but he’d lost his appetite.
By mid-afternoon, the waves of panic had subsided a little, which allowed the jagged rocks of his personality to re-emerge.He was deeply, intensely pissed off that a copper had threatened him in his own home, over a civil matter, when he’d told nothing but the truth.He was not going to be pushed around by a uniformed bully boy, and he intended to do something about this.
The question was what.
A formal complaint was not a possibility.He wasn’t going to poke the hornets’ nest, not with his record.But hewasgoing to complain to the only policeman he knew, and ask him what his cousin was up to and if he seriously intended to support it.After all, Detective Sergeant Fowler had come round to Joel’s home and accused him of dishonesty.He should have a chance to see how that felt.
