Chameleon

Chapter 16

The telephone rang at 5:37 a.m.

Constance Bannerman muttered darkly and pulled the duvet over her head. It's just part of my dream, she told herself. If I ignore it, it'll go away.

She ignored it, but it didn't go away.

Whoever it was, was certainly persistent.

With a grunt of frustration, Constance emerged from the duvet like a reluctant snail emerging from its shell. She rolled grudgingly across the cold, empty side of the double bed that she occupied by herself and picked up the phone. The light from the luminous digital alarm clock guided her hand and informed her, smugly it seemed, of the unearthly hour. She fumbled the handset to her ear.

'What?' she asked, her voice thick with sleep and deep annoyance. She listened to the reply for a few seconds and then said:

'He's not here. Try his fancy piece!'

Then she hung up and rolled back to the warm side of the bed.

* * *

Winston George Bannerman.

There was a name to conjure with.

Faced with the monstrous inevitability of being nicknamed "Winnie", it had been Winston George Bannerman's practice since childhood to insist on being called simply "Bannerman". Close friends and lovers were allowed to call him "B". It was the only term of affection he would tolerate.

In rare moments of introspection, Bannerman would muse upon the fact that his wife hadn't called him B in years. In fact, they rarely communicated at all these days. They had grown apart. Simple as that really. Inertia was the only thing that kept their marriage alive, and even that had started to slip into a decaying orbit lately.

Bannerman allowed Elaine Feathers to call him B. It was, after all, her right as his latest enamorata. He lay beside her, a great mountain of blankets next to her more modest hillock of sheets.

She lay on her back, snoring like a walrus. Something to do with sinus trouble, she maintained. Bannerman wasn't entirely sure if walruses did snore, but they looked like the sort of creatures who did, and if they did, he was sure they would sound just like Elaine.

Not that it was the cacophonous reverberations coming from that slim frame that kept him awake. Bannerman had been a martyr to insomnia for many years. It was something he had learned to live with. The job helped, of course. Keeping him out till all hours. He was a copper. A Detective Inspector, to be precise. A good one too, by his own modest reckoning. The fact that his file was littered with words like "stubborn" and "disrespectful" and "intransigent" didn't worry him unduly. He got results. That's why they tolerated him. When he stopped getting results they'd put him out to grass, but until then he got away with it. Just.

He heard the car pull up outside. Heard the engine die, the door open and close, the creak of the garden gate and the soft footsteps on the path. Then came the discrete knock at the door. Elaine continued with her walrus impression, quite oblivious to her nocturnal visitor.

Bannerman levered his substantial bulk off the mattress and padded across to the window. He pulled back the curtain and opened the window, leaning out into the chilly night air to see who was at the door.

The caller looked up, his face a ghostly blur in the half light.

'All right, Rafferty,' Bannerman called jovially, 'I'll come quietly, you can call the dogs off.'