The Element Of Death. Steve Wilson

Our remit was to investigate a sex club that was believed to be a front for a large drug importing and exporting operation. That was where I met her. It was exactly seven years ago to the day. Just to make it clear, she, too, was working undercover, and I was assigned to work alongside her. Our first meeting, though, didn’t augur well for the future. I remembered in great detail how she sashayed in at quarter past three in the afternoon as if she owned the place. She reminded me of the oval-faced actress Naomi Archer, star of one of my favourite television shows from my youth, All Saints and Sinners, but I tried to ignore that image. I disapproved of women who willingly worked in the sex trade and didn’t want to associate the person standing in front of me with the woman I had a crush on during my teenage years.

      “You can’t come in here,” I said as she tried to enter the club.

      From the look of disdain on my face, she obviously knew what I was thinking.

      “I’m working here,” she replied, in a voice without a trace of accent. She spoke slowly and carefully, as if she were explaining her actions to a child.

      “Not today, you aren’t. The club is closed. This is official police business. I suggest you go somewhere else and do whatever it is that you do. Go on, leave, achtung,” I added, thinking that she’d probably understand more if I used her native tongue.

      I expected her to go, but she just said, “Gott im Himmel, dummkopf.”

      I looked startled, and she laughed, icily. “I thought that would get a reaction. You English think we all talk like that. I will not leave because I am on duty here.” She pulled out a card and held it close to my face. It read ‘Monika Ziegler, Polizeimeister’. “Satisfied? We are to work together on this case.” She flicked her head, sending her flowing blonde locks cascading over her face, but the look she threw at me indicated that she had no hope that ours would be a successful collaboration.

      I tried to make up for the bad first impression I had made by buying Monika what I thought was an amusing present as a reminder of my misunderstanding during that meeting. It was a purple aluminium mini vibrator. Unfortunately, Monika failed to see the funny side of this, as she said, “I wouldn’t be seen dead with that inside me!” I realised that, instead of improving matters, I had made an awkward situation much worse.

      However, despite our rocky start, the joint operation was a success. I soon saw that she was extremely proficient in her job, and I think that she found me to be a fairly competent policeman and gradually began to have a little respect for me.

      The more we worked together, the more we began to understand each other, and we found that we shared common interests in music and literature. I knew that the appeal of Conan Doyle was worldwide, but I hadn’t expected Christie, with her tales of predominantly upper-class middle England, to travel so well. Monika was twenty-seven, three years younger than me, and lived in Mönchengladbach, a journey of around half an hour by rail from Düsseldorf. She had always wanted to work in England, and this case gave her the opportunity to experience, at firsthand, British policing procedures. When the case was successfully concluded, I returned to Preston, but we kept in touch and six months later she transferred to the Lancashire Constabulary, and came to live and work at what we termed ‘the station’ at Hutton.

      Our working relationship extended our friendship away from the station, that friendship became a romance, and eventually we moved in together. That was six years ago. In the months and years since, a lot had happened. Being a front-line detective brought me into contact with some of the lowest of life forms. I would defy anybody to witness some of the brutalities that man inflicted on his fellow man and remain unchanged by them. Some people could get through this and come out the other side unscathed. I wasn’t some people.

      My response was to immerse myself in my work, almost to the exclusion of everything else. I didn’t even notice the effect this was having on Monika, although, with hindsight, I suppose it was obvious. The more I withdrew into myself, the more my compulsions began to take over. At first, she found my little foibles endearing. I was obsessively neat and tidy. She wasn’t. She would come in from work and fling her jacket across the room, then smile while I stopped whatever I was doing to ensure it was picked up and neatly put away in the correct place. I couldn’t settle until the washing up was done; Monika would happily go out leaving a sink overflowing with pots.

      She stopped smiling about my idiosyncrasies when they began to affect her life. My obsession with the clock was becoming so serious that it affected everything I did. I viewed it as therapeutic, as concentrating on the clock allowed me to temporarily prevent the gory images from overwhelming me, but I hadn’t taken into consideration the effect I would have on Monika.

      What had initially been an inconvenience, as I would wait until the second hand reached sixty before doing anything, became a problem when I found I had to wait until the minute-hand also reached a five-minute mark, and then it was further extended to my only being able to enter or leave a room at quarter-hour points.

      Whenever we went out, it became a major operation, and on numerous occasions we were late because I had been unable to leave until the minute hand completed its slow traverse across the clock face. It put a strain on our relationship, although I worked hard to combat my illness. Eventually, when my inability to make an instant decision almost led to a colleague’s injury, I had to admit that it was having an effect on my ability to do my job, and I applied for a transfer to a less onerous position.

      Management were sympathetic and allowed me to transfer to a back-office role at constabulary HQ in Hutton, where my technical expertise came to the fore. I knew more than most about computers, and I had the type of mind that could solve logic problems that baffled many people. Working on the crime-fighting software packages seemed the natural way to go, especially as in that job my obsessive behaviour was less likely to put any other officers at risk. Away from the front-line action, I was once again able to make a valued contribution to the crime-fighting team, and I began to exert a level of control over my obsession, although I was never able to banish the images that were imprinted on my mind.

      Although I kept my rank — indeed, in some aspects I was seen as important as any DI as cyber-crime was becoming one of the biggest problems for forces worldwide — Monika was less happy with the change. I had told her it would be healthy for our relationship, as to be together every day at work and every night at home, especially given the stressful nature of much of what we encountered, would have put too much strain on any couple. At least, that was my opinion.

      I didn’t see how much things had deteriorated until a few weeks ago. I remember every moment clearly. It was the first day of autumn, and with the changing of the seasons came an unexpected — for me — changing in our relationship. The time was shortly after three in the afternoon and we were at home, watching the DVD of The Hobbit, but Monika seemed distracted. I paused the film and asked if anything was bothering her. It was. I wasn’t making her happy any more. The clock chimed the quarter hour, but it was as if it were sounding a death knell to our relationship. Half an hour later, Monika was leaving, her bags already packed, to ‘stay with a friend’ while she thought things through.

      I resolved to become a new man, to win her back, and began to court her at work with gifts of chocolates and flowers, while giving her the time and space to ‘find herself’. I had decided to leave it exactly four weeks from the night she left, then I would ask her to move back in again. I used those days well. Monika’s leaving had an effect on me that no doctor had been able to match, and I gradually began to take control of my life again. I still had obsessions, and I supposed I always would, but I didn’t let them govern my life any more. I was looking forward to her surprised reaction when she saw that the clock no longer influenced my actions.

      The day before the four weeks was up, I found out that the ‘friend’ she was staying with was Theo Atkins, one of the detectives who we had both worked alongside when I was on the front line. It was hard to put into words how I felt when I found out. I supposed if I had to describe my feelings in five words, they would be desolate, betrayed, hurt, bewildered and angry. I tried to exclude Monika from blame, reasoning that she must have been extremely vulnerable and lonely after the break-up. No, there was only one villain of this