OOM: 2x01. SuperMac

[the_gene_genie]

 

Gene rarely gets credit for the way he can defy people’s opinion of him and that’s just fine in his book. It’s easier to be the Guv when you’re taken at face value, when your commands don’t invite speculation. He shouts, his lads respond. He asks for something, they get it for him. Easy.

It also makes it easier to hide certain things. For example, ask Ray what the Guv is like with women, he’ll smirk and say, ‘treats ‘em mean, keeps ‘em keen’. Ask Chris, and you’ll probably get a, ‘dunno, really. Always ‘ad a few about, even when he were married’. And that image suits him fine – shit, it’s even partly true. But there are some things that are not true. For example, Ray thinks he finds it funny when he recounts some of the more sordid things he gets up to with his girlfriends, or tells him some particularly lurid detail of the porno he watched the night before. And he doesn’t. He doesn’t like porn. He doesn’t particularly like strippers, though he’s got nothing against them, exactly. He’s never had more than one woman in bed at one time, he’s not kinky, and his idea of a hot date is a posh dinner followed by some fooling around on the sofa with a video on.

Which is why he finds looking at this particular corpse more than a bit distasteful. Give him blood and guts, no problem. Brutal stabbing, shotgun blast, fine. A bloke dressed up like a woman and seemingly choked to death while wanking with a rope around his neck?

No thanks.

And Drake proving she knows more than he ever will about the fine arts of masturbation is, frankly, just disturbing. Though he’s not surprised she’s got a posh name for what exactly this fella got up to before he carked it. Auto-erotic asphyxiation. Whatever. He just wants to get it done and dusted and get back to important stuff. Especially considering the Quattro’s parked in the road out there, blocking Princess Margaret’s limo.
 

~ ~ ~

‘Open an’ shut. Some tart was givin’ ‘im a five-knuckle shuffle, he ‘ollered his last, said tart freaked out, galloped off down Berwick Street, left the Polaroid behind.’

‘An accident.’

She sounds sceptical.

‘Y’know, that would’ve taken Colombo an hour.’
 

~ ~ ~

He watches his boss get out of his car. Detective Superintendant Charlie Mackintosh, known universally as SuperMac.  Good man. Good copper.

Except Gene’s being doing some digging around since that incident with Alan Harris’s son and while there’s nothing conclusive that can be seen on paper...he’s been here before. He looks down on his boss – portly, greying, expensive suit – and sees Harry Woolf. And he didn’t ever want to see that again, is still hoping that he’s wrong even though he knows he isn’t. Harry Woolf had been the example of what it was to be a copper, was his mentor, his DCI when he was still a DI, taught him everything he knows. Including, as it turns out, how to spot when your boss turns out to be a first class scumbag with a badge.

But there’s no evidence and Gene has learned over the years, learned a lot. Sam showed him that building a case properly usually equalled a watertight conviction and that’s what he needs here. So he’s waiting, keeping his mouth shut, knowing that eventually the man will make a mistake and hoping that no one gets killed in the mean time.

SuperMac informs the team that the dead bloke in Soho was a copper. A copper that was going to be fast-tracked into CID, no less.  No one knows what he was doing getting a hand job off a tart dressed as a pirate while there was a rope around his neck, but they’re told in no uncertain terms that the killer must be found and a line drawn underneath it. Because SuperMac wants a clean force. He wants whiter than white. He wants past transgressions to stay in the past but is drawing a line – no more, from this day on.

It’s all Gene can do not to punch the bloke in the face and toss him out of the doors with a sign saying Traitor stuck to his back. Because that’s what he is. A hypocritical, traitorous bastard.
 

~ ~ ~

‘Nobody knows anyone, Bolly. The great lie of this life is we pretend we do.’

‘...you never talk about Mrs. Hunt, do you. Ex-Mrs Hunt.’

‘That’s right. I don’t.’
 

~ ~ ~

Sal is from Manchester. Hyde, to be exact. He is very pleased to hear it and buys her a decent cup of tea. She turns out to be a good ‘un in his eyes as soon as she tells him her biscuit of choice is the Garibaldi, despite being a stripper and the last person to see their dead copper alive. There’s a photo of her sitting on his lap but she swears he was alive when she left and he believes her.

‘OK, off y’go Sal. Stop all this stripping nonsense, there’s a good girl. Felicity Kendal didn’t get where she is by taking her clothes off.’

Beat. He looks at Drake.

‘Did she?’

‘...I don’t think so, no.’

Sal makes to leave, and then stops.

‘Mr. Hunt?

You won’t tell my mum, will you?’

Sometimes he wonders if this is what being a father would feel like. Someone vulnerable, asking for your help. Being able to protect someone from things they’re afraid of.

‘No, luv.’
 

~ ~ ~

Turns out Sean Irving, the dead copper, was murdered and it wasn’t a sex game gone wrong after all. Suddenly everything’s a lot more serious.
 

~ ~ ~

Sal dies in his arms.

She only wanted to be an actress. The last thing she asks him is that he doesn’t tell her mum.

‘No, I won’ tell your mum.’

He doesn’t know whether she heard him because her eyes are closed, cradled in his arms, blood dripping from her mouth and the gunshot wound in her back. But she looks at peace.

He wishes he was.
 

~ ~ ~

The next day turns up two interesting revelations. That Sean Irving wasn’t the bent copper his best mate, PC Kevin Hales, has been making him out to be - and that SuperMac is having an affair with Irving’s wife. The man stands there and talks about wanting Soho cleaned up, wanting to find the killer and all he can think is that Charlie Mackintosh has been taking advantage of his position as a senior officer. Because how are you expected to keep morale up (and he talks about morale a lot) when you’re screwing one of your PC’s wives? If you're prepared to do that for your own desires, what other lines do you cross?

Something’s not right. He knows it and his gut knows it. Drake knows it too and he wonders if that’s why, later that day, she goes and gets herself abducted. Again.
 

~ ~ ~

What do you think of Mac now? he’d asked her. She thought he was attractive. That he was pulling the Met in the right direction, that he’d said the word ‘love’ in a police station. He treated the remark with the derision it deserved but when she throws the question back at him (what do you think of Mac?) he’d been glad of the interruption that turned up.

Maybe he should have told her the truth about his suspicions. Maybe someone thought he already had, which is why she got taken and strapped to a hospital bed and filled full of crap that knocked her out. Maybe it was nothing to do with all this; it seems that way later. But when he’s hearing her faint voice through the radio and trying to find her, when he’s unstrapping her from that bed, all he can think is please be alright, followed closely by, was this Mac?

He’ll bloody kill him if it was. Kill him stone dead.
 

~ ~ ~

‘Am I dead?’

‘Not unless I’m Sain’ Peter an’ I find tha’ highly unlikely, don’t you?’
 

~ ~ ~

Kevin Hales killed his best mate, and Sal. They find this out after Drake talks him down from the balcony outside his flat, where he’s pissed as a lord and firing bullets at them from his rifle. All Gene cares about at the moment is that he’s a copkiller – well, that and the fact that he shot a window out of the Quattro.

But he’s not drunk. He was told to confess. It’s not hard to work out once he passed the breathalyser test; the hard part is trying not to appear to Alex like he’s connecting it to Mac straight away. The implication seems obvious, given the man’s relationship with Irving’s wife and the way Hales told Bolly ‘we’re everywhere,’ – the man at the top would certainly be able to get at people in any department. But he doesn’t want her knowing this. It could be dangerous and anyway, without proof he’s got nothing.

It doesn’t help that she gets from Irving’s diary that he was meeting with the Super. As soon as she figures it out, things start to click into place and he knows he’s closer to getting something concrete. But she can’t know.

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘No. Enough. Leave Mac out o’this.’

Denying her is hard, closing the door in her face while he’s standing next to the bastard that may be connected to the deaths of two good people is even harder. But the job comes first and he has to make Mac believe that he’s on his side, that he can be trusted.

When he’s drunk, later that night, he tries to tell himself that he’s not attempting to forget the look on her face as he closed her out of that room.

He knows he’s lying. And when he’s really drunk, he wonders if there’ll ever come a day when he can explain all these things, these reasons for the things he does. Probably not, is the answer from somewhere and he tries to convince himself that’s not true as well.

Still lying.