Screw Your Police Dog
“Why did you have to do this?” she asked, desperation in her voice, as she watched Gene pace his office. She’d come in to find him searching for his ‘redundant’ bottle of scotch. Now he was pacing, and he hadn’t been able to find it. The cleaners’d probably had it.
“Things weren’t gettin’ done. I don’ know how to police your way, the nineteen-eighties way, I on’y know my way.”
“Why? Why, Gene? You were learning. You were kicking and screaming and digging your heels in but you were learning, you were evolving, you were being a better man-”
“But not a better copper, Drake, it was only once we started doing things my way that we started to get somewhere-”
“But Gene… Guv,” she said, grabbing his arm to stop him pacing, “that doesn’t have to be your way. We could have worked it through. You were frustrated, I understand that, you felt out of your element. But you threatened to staple that boy’s hat to his head! I know you. You don’t know how much I know about you,” she said earnestly, softly, thinking of Sam Tyler’s detailed case report, and hoping that look on Gene’s face wasn’t anger. “Even in the old days, you’d have never threatened that. Physical coercion, yes, but that? Your attack on his was more personal-”
“‘Ow can you tell that?” Gene snapped. “Psy-bloody-chology, I know. Walk me through it, how d’you know how personally I was taking an interrogation-”
“Because of the hat,” she replied, gently. He’d stopped pacing. “The hat was representative of his character, it was personal to him. You could have beaten him up, but you threatened to staple a component of his identity into his skull. Aside from the sheer grotesqueness of the possibility, the whole act was symbolic, it was you telling him to tell you everything he knew because it was personal, and because of that you would pull no punches.”
Gene stared at her for a long time, clearly disturbed that her assumptions, her deductions were so accurate. Eventually he lowered his gaze, and she steered him towards a chair, squatting before him to look up, into his face. He avoided her eye.
“What I want to know is what he said that made it personal to you in the first place.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
She nodded. “I think it does.”
He looked at her again, Alex experiencing a combination of relief and anxiety, because when he didn’t meet her eye it usually meant he was nervous or guilty, and Gene Hunt was neither nervous nor guilty, and when he was it meant they all had something to worry about.
“It’s none of your concern, Alex,” he said, firmly, drawing a line.
“It was about me.”
He glowered at her, and she knew she was right. “It’s about me, isn’t it?” she went on. “It’s personal, it’s about me, it’s none of my concern. What did he say, what did he do to you, Gene?”
Gene sighed.
“Police dog.”
She frowned, shaking her head. “I don’t underst-”
“No, well you wouldn’t, you were too busy fussing over Holace and his bloody badges. When we saw them ska boys the first time, he said, ‘go screw your police dog’. You being the police dog.”
She still didn’t comprehend, and she knew he could see it in her face. He sighed again, leant forward.
“I can’t have scum calling people on my team, calling people I admire and respect thing like that,” he said. Alex looked at him, looked very carefully at his expression. At least he was looking her in the eye again.
“But if it had been Ray or Chris, would you have reacted like that?” she asked, bewildered. “I told you, I know you. People throw insults at the police all the time. It’s water off a duck’s back to you. So why this time…” Her eyes widened. She couldn’t stop them.
“And it appears the penny has finally dropped,” Gene said quietly.
Alex’s legs couldn’t hold her weight, suddenly. She sat down properly, on the floor, between Gene’s knees.
“You want to screw your police dog,” she muttered dimly. Gene almost chuckled. The side of his mouth twitched, anyway.
“Didn’t drop all the way, then.” His reached up, fingers on her neck, in her hair, and she just blinked. “I don’t want to screw my dog, I want to ruddy marry ‘er. Figuratively speaking, of course,” he added. Might be bad for her health if her eyebrows went much higher.
She appeared to have been rendered mute.
“Bolly, you might be a prissy bird, but you’re my prissy bird, and if I ‘ear anyone speak ‘bout you like that again I’ll do exactly what I did b’fore. Now I’m goin’ home to enjoy my leave in peace. I’ll see you if I ever get the sodding green light to come back t’work.”
And he left, rather suddenly, Alex thought, leaving her alone with her thoughts.
&
“It was definitely figuratively speaking,” she said, when Gene opened the door to his flat an hour later and saw her leaning there, against the door frame, a look of cool curiosity on her face.
“Definitely,” he said, swallowing.
She nodded. Looked up. “Meant to indicate that you didn’t just fancy me? That the feelings you have for me run deeper?”
Gene shifted uncomfortably under her gaze. “Well, you know, I wouldn’t say no, like, but essentially. Yes, yeah, that’s right.”
She nodded again, once. She raised an eyebrow. “Not love?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Bols.”
“Right. Well, in that case, I couldn’t find any Dover sole, but I’ve got salmon and lemon and butter and bottle of Luigi’s finest,” she said, holding out a brown paper bag and a bottle. “I think it’s time we rescheduled that dinner. Where’s the kitchen?”
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