‘And when’s the emergency’s over?’
The doors clattered open again, and in came the Mayor... and Deputy Crawley. Toby shivered at his presence – here was a man who had that night murdered. Toby looked his way benignly, and got an equally innocent look in return. Neither said a word, but both knew what had happened that evening.
The Sheriff knew it too, thought Toby. But Lloyd Thornton seemed to get a dose of the vapours just then, and didn’t look his new visitors in the eye.
As for what the Mayor knew, Toby guessed that it was only what Crawley had wanted him to hear. Though the man wasn’t daft.
Crawley was cleaned up now and seemingly calmed down; though, as events would show, only relatively so. Along with the Doctor, a council formed around the Sheriff’s bed, the Mayor leading,
‘How’s he looking, Doctor?’
‘He’s done for this winter, Bob.’
The Sheriff groaned, ‘He’s right, Bob. I can’t walk.’
‘How’d you get yourself into this mess?’
Toby saw a flickered look between the Sheriff and Crawley. The Sheriff said nothing. The Mayor’s tone hardened,
‘The town’s relying on you, Lloyd. And then you let this happen? A boy dying... and you’re not even on your feet to stop it?’
The patient stammered out, suddenly serious, ‘Sir, I respectfully request a hiatus of my responsibilities...’
‘Hiatus? More like a cessation. You won’t wear that badge again, Lloyd.’
‘Mr Mayor,’ said Toby automatically.
‘Cut it, Deputy. He doesn’t need you defending him. You’re old, Lloyd. You’ll never be yourself again.’ The Mayor’s voice lowered, ‘Either one of the boys did this to you, or one of your own men. Now, I’m not going to ask you which, but you see how you can’t hope to keep your old authority.
‘Anyway, I’ve been talking with Crawley here, and we’ve come up with a plan...’
The soon-to-be-ex-Sheriff interjected, ‘Then I make one last request.’
‘Hit it.’
‘That my successor be Toby here.’
Crawley’s hopes for an easy succession had been postponed, yet even he couldn’t have expected what the Mayor said next,
‘Well, that’s your prerogative. And in the circumstances, your right to name.’
Crawley took the bed frame and shook it, shouting at the Mayor,
‘But you’d said I’d got it?’
‘I said a senior Deputy would take over. The Sheriff runs his Office, not me. If he wants it to be Toby...’
‘You lied to me. You promised!’
‘Please, please,’ the Mayor tried to laugh. ‘Don’t make a scene here.’
‘You lied to me!’ Crawley nearly tipped the Sheriff off the bed with the force he imported on the frame. ‘You lied!’
‘Gentlemen,’ the Doctor interrupted. ‘Please, not on the ward. Take your argument elsewhere.’
Crawley fixed the Mayor in one of his trademark glares – Toby feared he would wring the man’s neck right there – before he threw down the side of the bed he was holding, and stormed off.
‘Well, what’s rattled his cage?’ asked the Mayor, trying to make light of it. But every other man in and around the bed breathed hard at the near miss.
‘Ambition, I think,’ said the Doctor.
‘Well, well,’ said the Mayor. ‘Toby, my office in twenty minutes?’
Toby nodded, before the Mayor took his leave.
This left the Doctor and Toby at the bedside. The Sheriff saying,
‘Does that idiot realise who he’s just jerked around?’
With only a moment to do so, Toby had to think on his feet. Among the Deputies who’d helped him with the carrying, Tort and Eddie had already disappeared. Yet a couple of others had lingered by the coffee machine. Toby summoned them thus:
‘Can one of you get to the School for Girls, tell the Head Mistress about the changes. And the other of you...’ He gave them Sarah’s home address. ‘Can you get the same message to Sarah, tell her we’ll need her in in the morning to help Margaret work up a new roster. Tell her I asked for her personally. You’ve got that?’
‘Got it, Tobe... sorry, Sheriff.’
‘Thank you.’
Janey would know within the half-hour. Toby wanted her to. He wanted her to know he was still out there and was engaged in the town’s interests – no kicking back with a root beer for Toby. Everything had changed, in ways he hadn’t even figured out yet. It seemed important that she knew it all that very evening, when every half-hour felt like it might be his last.
Jake too, who’d get the message just as quickly from Sarah. On any other night Toby would be heading to the Emsworth house right then, to find the only person he could talk to. But not tonight, not when it was the most important night of all, not when there was so much to do.
‘Toby,’ the Doctor reminded. ‘The Mayor.’
And he was right. Toby made his goodbyes and left.
Chapter 50 – Sheriff Toby
Margaret was still at the Sheriff’s Office when he arrived; but Toby dismissed her, telling her they’d be busy in the morning and to go and get some rest.
‘Thank you, Sheriff,’ she said, slightly prematurely though full of respect.
It was Toby’s office now.
He sat at Lloyd Thornton’s old desk for a minute – the Mayor was preparing for him just along the road. The scene at the bedside had moved Toby, the way Lloyd Thornton had known his time was up. Toby also felt a glow of pride that his boss had chosen him as his successor. Also that the Mayor had taken Lloyd up on the recommendation so quickly. Then Toby remembered that most of the other candidates were implicated in the murder of a child that evening. Given the field, Toby could have been Hannibal Lecter and still got the nod.
How had Jake put it? ‘You know, you don’t have to be very nice to still be the best of this town.’
There wasn’t much in front of Toby on the desk’s green leather top. There was an electric typewriter, used mainly for incident report forms. Beside it was a photograph of Lloyd’s daughter – about Toby’s age, he remembered, though not seen in town since she’d been old enough to leave. Also there were a pile of last summer’s brochures, with a cover photo of the sunlit town as seen from Compass Point.
There were cardboard coffee cups, and the wrappers of a sandwich the old Sheriff had not had the foreknowledge to tidy away. Given the desk’s uncensored state, Toby did a bad thing, in a season of bad things, and checked the drawers.
Those to each side of him were locked as he leant down to try them – these were probably repositories of personal files. Yet the long thin drawer above his knees was open to the touch. Toby paused a moment, then drew it fully.
As Toby expected, there was little of a confidential nature in there, only things Lloyd needed close to hand: a pack of mints, a notepad, Biros, some blank holiday sheets. But also less-classifiable items, such as two more photos of his daughter, a book of baseball scores, an old police certificate dated decades earlier, and beneath these keepsakes another photograph, one of Lloyd Thornton and three colleagues in black winter uniform.
The picture made him shudder – it was strictly off limits keeping any evidence. Toby was wearing that same outfit himself, yet he realised afresh how he had never seen a photograph of anyone taken during Winter Restrictions, not through all the Stove winters of his lifetime.
Just seeing that snapshot now was dangerous, electric. Toby looked again – the picture seemed familiar, though the Sheriff had never shown it, and Toby had never been through the desk before. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling.
The snap was from the old days, or the relatively old days; the middle-era, maybe the Seventies or Eighties. It was hard to tell, for the Stove winter fashion had hardly changed. Only an off-duty baseball cap that one of them wore gave it away, and the design of the labels of the bottles of beer they were holding.
It might have been Christmas, or New Year, o
r someone’s winter-falling birthday; for the four of them were pictured drinking, laughing. It just so happened that one of the revellers had his boot between an exhausted-looking teenager’s shoulder-blades, holding him to the floor.
They were joshing in a room he didn’t recognise, maybe only celebrating a successful night, a boy left tired and contained. Four Deputies kicking back. No, three Deputies and a Sheriff – Toby could tell by his wide-brimmed hat, the hat that Sheriff Mercer always wore. He recognised him now, as the shock wore off.
Toby looked at Mercer in the picture, and guessed he ran his office with a rod of iron – there’d be no shenanigans like those Crawley was causing this year. Toby looked at him laughing, and knew that behind the smile would be cold control. He looked a barrel of a man, a real charger.
Toby remembered that giant visiting their house when he was a little boy, which might have been around the time of the photograph. Later, when he was a little older, Toby would fall under his Office’s influence.
In the following moments the other faces came clear. Beside Mercer was Lloyd Thornton, still a Deputy then. Toby marvelled at his dark black hair. Hadn’t the Sheriff of Gaidon said that Lloyd had been a ladykiller in his youth? Looking at that photograph now, Toby could well believe it.
It was the man standing on the other side of Thornton who had bought Toby a pang of familiarity, for looking out at Toby was his own father.
And then the fourth figure; Toby recognised him too.
Sometimes the beatings Toby had taken had been delivered by his father: only through his Deputising role though – he was always caring other times of the year. This was simply the Stovian seasonally-affective interpretation of parental responsibility. The son of a Deputy was still just one child in the town though, and couldn’t guarantee his father wouldn’t be detained elsewhere. So sometimes Toby’s care would be administered by one of his father’s colleagues. Like the time he got his scar.
The man was standing at the other side of Sheriff Mercer. A young face, but one which had faded out of memory and out of Stovian public life. Toby wondered: what could have become of him? Though he didn’t think it could be anything good.
Toby shoved the photo back where he had found it. It was too much information already, too many secrets. The photograph was poison, it would bleed into his hands and stain them. Toby almost dropped it as he fumbled with the drawer. Sat there though, at the dead of night, waiting, with nothing else to distract him, Toby couldn’t rid the image from his mind.
It wasn’t a Polaroid, so where the hell had it been processed? For it could hardly have been taken to any old twenty-four hour developers.
And as for what the snap portrayed, well... even in the work they did, even once the fight was over, for Deputies to hold a child like that was dereliction. And to be drinking too – it was a shocking scene.
Toby tried to tell himself that all four men were equally culpable of that negligence, and that it didn’t matter whose boot had been holding down the boy. No, it really didn’t matter whose foot it was, it didn’t matter at all. It had been his own father’s, but even then Sheriff Mercer took the greater share of the blame for standing by and letting him do so.
And young Lloyd Thornton, the old Sheriff’s right-hand man, his obvious successor and second in command. Where was his leadership that day?
No, thought Toby, those two were the ones in charge. They were the ones worst at fault there, and not his father. Or so he tried to tell himself.
Quite apart from what the photograph displayed though, it was still against every rule of the town to have kept it in the first place. So why had Sheriff Thornton done so? Toby wondered if it was Lloyd’s insurance against the town if he was ever sold down the river, his proof that bad things had gone on for years and pre-dated his time in charge? Maybe the photo had been a gruesome reminder for him of what his office did, and all that they had to be ashamed of? Or perhaps it was the Sheriff’s way of instantly incriminating himself, if a secret guilt proved too much and he needed to go down the mountain and hand himself in?
Before long though, Toby realised that to those four men the boy under the boot was merely a detail of the work they were engaged in. And that Thornton might have kept the photograph – against all unspoken rules – merely as a memento of camaraderie, good times with good friends.
Toby asked himself: how had it come to this? How was he about to be put in charge of it all? There was a knock on the door though, and he was spared any further troubling thoughts.
Chapter 51 – The Mayor of Stove, for his Sins
There was the ritual to go through at the Mayor’s office, held as quickly as anyone could be gathered there to perform it. The hour was barely decent, the sun still hours from being up. Toby entered the annex at the back of the Town Hall, and was as brushed up as he could make himself. He greeted the Mayor’s long-standing secretary, and was ushered in to see the man himself.
The Mayor was the opposite of Lloyd Thornton: wide, avuncular, paternal, always smiling. He had probably kept his job for so long with these very qualities. The lack of political movement on the town’s single main issue was no more the Mayor’s fault than anyone else’s, considered Toby. Either way, the townsfolk could have no hope in their leadership, and so looked to the Mayor only for comfort in the yearly crisis.
‘Mr Mayor.’
‘Deputy. Or I should say Sheriff? We haven’t time or resources for a ceremony, so consider these next couple of minutes your investiture.
They shook, and in the handshake’s firmness reminded Toby that, for all the Mayor’s bonhomie, all leaders needed steeliness at their core. The steel to say what must be said, and to do what must be done, displacing personal affections. The same steel that Toby had seen an hour before at the old Sheriff’s bedside.
‘Now, Lauren,’ he called through to the office. ‘Could you and Paul come in now? And bring the scroll.’
Both men stood to greet the secretary and the man who came in with her, who Toby recognised as a town Councillor. He looked half-asleep still, in his jogging suit and sneakers.
The Mayor explained to Toby,
‘They will act as witnesses. Now, as we’re all standing, I think a reading of the Oath and then we’ll all get back to our beds.’
Squashed into the tiny room, Toby raised his right hand. The scroll was held open before him, but he recited it from heart:
‘On my honour, I will never betray my badge, my integrity, my character, or the public trust. I will always have the courage to hold myself and others accountable for our actions. I will always uphold the constitution, my community, and the agency I serve.’
Toby counted at least four breaches of that code that he had already committed that day. One even just by being there, by wearing the uniform, by accepting his role: for there was no ‘constitution’ in the land that authorised what they did.
After the swearing in, the others left. The Mayor sat down, bidding Toby likewise, his host ruminating,
‘There’ll be issues come peacetime.’ (He meant ‘springtime’, of course. That may have been a verbal slip, but Toby wasn’t sure.) ‘You have no training as an actual law enforcement officer, as Lloyd Thornton or young Tort do.’ (Tort being a year-round trainee.) ‘And I imagine you’ll be going back to Carvel anyway?’
‘I expect so, sir.’
‘I only wanted to avoid any disappointment, if you hoped to continue in your new role come spring.’
‘No, sir. I fully understand.’
‘Very well. You’ll be based in the town now, so you’ll need to delegate to your Mountain-siders.’
‘Job and Fitch, sir.’
‘Do you need to go back and instruct them?’
‘They’ll already be doing the job.’
‘Good. It’s good to have men around you who you can trust.’
Toby sensed the Mayor hadn’t kept him there to talk about personnel issues, ‘But that’s not all, sir?’
The man proved Toby
right,
‘Toby, when Crawley came to me tell me that Lloyd Thornton was down, well, if you really wanted to be the one taking charge of the situation, then that’s what you should have done. It should have been your first thought. If the town is without a Sheriff, then it’s without law enforcement, and the Mayor needs to know.’
Toby hadn’t given a first thought – or any thought that evening – to the Mayor, but he didn’t tell him that,
‘Sir, I only didn’t come and see you as I judged it most important to get the Sheriff to the Doctor. And also the body of Billy Meting.’
The Mayor winced at the boy’s name, and Toby recognised he was a coward too – as the Deputies had been when asked to carry the body. The Mayor responded,
‘I know, and if it had been any less than that keeping you from your duty to me then you wouldn’t be sitting here now. As it was, as I walked to the clinic with Crawley, I was all set to give him your role. It was something in the calm way you approached things at the bedside though, and Lloyd’s personal recommendation, that changed my mind. It chimed with the high regard I know you’re held in, and helped me make what had to be a snap decision.
The man paused to think, then continued,
‘The way Crawley reacted at the clinic, well, at the time it seemed to justify my choice. But thinking about it since, I can tell he was just disappointed, acting out childishly. Any young man could act the same. So I won’t lie to you, Toby – it could have been the other way around. And even now I wonder at my decision.
‘Young Crawley has been a rock for Town-side in recent winters. You see, he understands quite instinctively what a lot of us forget, or would prefer not to think about – that this is a war, Toby. We’re not doctors, we’re soldiers, and we’re fighting for our children.
‘I remember a man you’re too young to have known, though your father would have. He used to be the Sheriff of this town. He would thunder, “Kindness is false kindness, mercy is false mercy. To be cruel is to be kind. Strike hard and strike quickly, save the children from themselves.” Crawley reminds me of that man.
‘Someone went too far this night, I won’t deny it. But if one child is... hurt in saving all the others from themselves, then I judge that a success. And so would Crawley.’