She pulled into the Timmie’s below Kehoe Glenn, but she no longer had a taste for anything solid, all she wanted was a coffee. She’d have to manufacture her own sweetness with Willan. She was out of practice talking to others, she knew this, she didn’t even need yesterday’s experience at the Record as proof. Or her shortness with Wingate afterwards.
She wasn’t entirely sure why she’d behaved the way she did. Threatening that girl. Partly because she was on Gord Sunderland’s turf and that naturally made her lip curl, and of course there was the building stress associated with the case. But if she was being honest with herself, it was Becca Portman alone who’d triggered her anger. She was Martha’s age, and shiftless and stupid. Martha hadn’t found her way in the world yet, and girls of Martha’s age, perceiving diminishing returns, are as likely to cut their hair badly and go work for idiots as they are to dig in and try harder. She saw the possibility, in Martha, of a future of accepting second best just to have something and it terrified her. Emilia, the elder, was fully formed, even if she didn’t realize it, even if, like all first children, she felt like she’d been sent out into the world without a complete set of tools. But Emilia always landed on her feet; she was like her namesake, unflappable, possessed of solid common sense, and skeptical enough to avoid being taken in by dreamers and fools. Not so Martha, whose life had, thus far, been stocked by a rotating cast of lightweights, druggies, actors, depressives, and charlatans. She’d taken one look at Becca Portman and wanted to pound some sense into her. At least she hadn’t done that.
She paid for the coffee and pulled around the corner to buy a Record from one of the boxes. Maybe Portman had disobeyed her, or Sunderland had overruled her, and Wingate would get his chance to see things unfold in a more measured fashion. But she opened the paper and the story wasn’t there. There was no mention of its returning, nor a reason given why it hadn’t appeared. So, whether Hazel liked it or not, the next phase of the game was afoot.
She pulled back into traffic, the paper tossed into the back seat. There was no traffic at 5:45 in the morning, and she could have bombed down to Barrie in an hour, but she decided to drive at the limit and give herself some time to think, to go over her points. She found her mind too busy with the details of the mannequin and the man in the chair to focus. But she would have to put all of it aside if she wanted to get her message across to Willan.
She pulled into OPSC headquarters at ten after seven. Twenty minutes early might look desperate, she thought, and she sat in the car for another ten minutes before going in through the front doors. The middle of her back had relaxed, finally, and she was grateful she wouldn’t have to look like a hunched old woman in front of her new boss. She had to be buzzed in by Willan’s assistant: the building didn’t open until eight. “Chip’s been here since six,” said the assistant, whose name was Jeremy. He calls his boss Chip? thought Hazel.
At seven-thirty on the button, Commander Willan came to get her from the waiting area. He offered her a hearty handshake, and she took his hand and shook it distractedly, taking in the man who had come down the hallway to meet her. Willan was no older than thirty-five, tall and lean, with a glossy head of long black hair tied back into a ponytail. He wore a dark blue powersuit instead of a uniform, and he had brilliant white dress sneakers on his feet. He looked like the head of an animation studio, not a police commander. He put a light hand on her back and led her into his office. She’d only seen Mason’s office twice in all his reign, and it had been cluttered with official regalia, including the force’s colours on a staff behind the desk. All of his awards and medals had been framed on the walls to the left and right. Nothing about Mason’s office let you forget that he had it over you in rank, experience, and decoration. It had been an office to cow all opposition.
Willan’s office, on the other hand, was almost bare. Gone was the dark furniture, the leather chairs, replaced by a thick glass desktop supported by heavy silver legs. The only decoration in the room was a marble pillar with a sleek black ball on top of it, turning endlessly on a jet of water. A cord from the back of it ran discreetly along the side wall to a plug.
The commander’s chair was a strange, ergonomic device that he kneeled on, tucking his feet beneath him, the seat itself tilted forward at about sixty degrees. When he sat in it, it gave the impression that he might spring out of it, over the glass table, and into your lap.
Willan gestured to her to sit down and then he opened a wooden coffer on the desktop, taking a silver object from it, and pushed it over toward her. Were they going to smoke bloody cigars at seven-thirty in the morning? “Chocolate sardine?” he asked. She waved them off. “I’m an avid fisherman. And I have a sweet-tooth,” he said. “So I can’t resist them.” He unwrapped the fish and snapped it in half between his perfect teeth. “So, what a pleasure.”
“Is it?” she said.
“Absolutely. To meet the famous DI Micallef. I’m honoured.”
“Well, thank you,” she said. There hadn’t been a trace of irony in his voice. “I’m glad we’re getting a chance to talk.”
“Terrific,” he said. “So tell me what I can do for you.”
Maybe she wouldn’t have to charm this Chip Willan; he had enough charm for both of them. “Well, Commander Willan -”
“Good Lord,” he said, “it’s Chip, or you’re outta here.”
“Okay, then. Chip.”
“Hazel.”
“I’ve come to talk about the future of policing in Westmuir County.”
“Sweet.”
She rubbed her palms against the tops of her legs. “Chip… I know that there are fiscal issues the OPS needs to tackle, and of course, every detachment in this province needs to find efficiencies” – she cringed inwardly to use the word – “but I’m here today to say that I hope Central understands that it can use its voice within the provincial federation to protect its communities. Places like Westmuir, with its rural and small-town populations, can’t be policed the same way a big city is policed, and I’m a little anxious about the things I hear, about some of the changes being discussed.”
“Give me some specifics, Hazel. Specifics will help me see your issues more clearly.”
“Well, one specific is the questionnaire you – your office – sent my personnel recently. Asking them for, among other things, their redeployment choices. As in, should there come a time when they might be redeployed, what would their preferences be and so on. Before any kind of mission statement has even been issued by the OPS, to ask people where they want to go in case of clawbacks… well, I find that, with all due respect, to be a little underhanded.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” said Chip Willan. “I apologize for that. You have to understand, Hazel, I’m still cutting my teeth here.”
She felt herself relaxing into the chair. Thank God for new blood. Was this generation one that would actually allow itself to reason? “Okay, I’m glad you said that. Because I really feel we really need to sit down, all levels, and talk about what we need, and of course, keeping all of the fiscal issues in focus. But I think it would be educational, it would open your eyes, to see what we do with our resources, Chip. How well Westmuir’s detachments and community policing offices work and who they serve. And how, even though our police-to-population ratios seem high, they’re right for the places we work in. Hell, you know, we’re working on a case right now that couldn’t possibly be handled correctly if our detachments were centralized, or if there were fewer people to work on it. People’s lives depend on us being able to do the work we were trained to do, with the resources we need to do it with. It could be very bad for people if budget formulas invented for cities were applied willy-nilly to places like Westmuir County.”