That got a response. “Sit.”
She could live with monosyllables. Barbara did his bidding. She'd fetched herself a Coke and a chocolate donut from the cafeteria, and she set these down on the table in front of her.
“Rot your teeth, that,” Hextell noted with a nod.
“I'm a victim of my addictions.”
He grunted.
“That your plane?” Barbara asked with a nod at the picture on the top of his stack. It featured a yellow bi-plane of the sort that had been flown in World War I when aviators wore leather helmets and flowing white scarves.
“One of them,” he said. “The one I use for aerobatics.”
“Stunt pilot, are you?”
“I fly.”
“Oh. Right. Must be nice.” Barbara wondered if the years undercover had made the man so loquacious. She launched into the purpose behind tracking him down: Was there any case, any stake-out, any operation that leapt to mind as being particularly important in the history of his association with Andy Maiden? “We're looking at revenge as a possible motive for the girl's murder, someone that you and DI Maiden put away, someone wanting to settle the score. Maidens trying to come up with a name on his own in Derbyshire, and I've been scrolling through the reports all morning on the computer. But nothings ringing my chimes.”
Hextell began separating his pictures. He appeared to have a system for doing so, but Barbara couldn't tell what it was since each shot was of exactly the same plane, just of varying angles: the fuselage here, the struts there, the wing tip, the engine, and the tail. When the piles were arranged to his liking, he took a magnifying glass from his jacket pocket and began studying each photograph under it. “Could be anyone. We were rubbing elbows with first class rot. Pushers, addicts, pimps, gun runners. You name it. Any one of them would have walked the length of the country to rub us out.”
“But no one's name comes to mind?”
“I've survived by putting their names behind me. Andy was the one who couldn't.”
“Survive?”
“Forget.” Hextell separated one picture from the rest. It documented the plane head-on, its body truncated by the angle. He applied his magnifying glass to every inch of it, squinting like a jeweller with a diamond in question.
“Is that why he left? He was out of here on early retirement, I've heard.”
Hextell looked up. “Who's being investigated here?”
Barbara hastened to reassure him. “I'm just trying to get a feeling for the man. If there's something you can tell me that'll help …” She made a that-would-be-great gesture and gave her enthusiasm to her chocolate donut.
The DCS set down his magnifying glass and folded his hands over it. He said, “Andy went out on a medical. He was losing his nerves.”
“He had a nervous breakdown?”
Hextell blew out a derisive breath. “Not stress, woman. Nerves. Real nerves. Sense of smell went first. Taste went next, then touch.
He coped well enough, but then it was his vision. And that was the end of him. He had to get out.”
“Bloody hell. He went blind?”
“Would have done, no doubt. But once he retired, it all came back. Feeling, vision, the lot.”
“So what'd been wrong with him?”
Hextell looked at her long and hard before answering. Then he raised his index and middle fingers and tapped them lightly against his skull. “Couldn't cope with the game. Undercover takes it out of you. I lost four wives. He lost nerves. Some things can't be replaced.”
“He didn't have wife problems?”
“Like I said. It was the game. Some blokes keep their peckers up fine when they're pretending to be someone they're not. But for Andy, that's not how it was. The lies he had to tell out there … Keeping mum about a case till it was long over … It knocked the stuffing out of him.”
“So there was no one case—one big case, perhaps—that cost him more than the others?”
“Don't know,” Hextell concluded. “Like I said, I put it behind me. If there was one case, I couldn't name it.”
With that sort of memory, Hextell would have been a pearl of low price to the Crown Prosecutors in his salad days. But something told Barbara that the DCS didn't care whether the prosecutors found him useful or not. She packed the rest of her donut into her mouth and washed it down with Coke.
“Thanks for your time,” she told him, and added in a gesture of friendliness, “Looks like fun,” with a nod at the bi-plane.
Hextell picked up the propeller picture, held it top to bottom with the edges of his thumb and index finger so as not to smudge it. “Just another way to die,” he said.
Bloody hell, Barbara thought. What people do to put the job out of mind.