by Gary Bell
By the twenty-first century, all that remained of the colliery was the branch railway that had once served it, running from Nottingham, down over the River Trent, hidden from the rest of the world by undergrowth and foliage that grew tall and fierce and wild on either side, forgotten, until the broken remains of the body were found upon it.
11
I felt a little harsh instructing Zara to hold the fort back in London on her own.
She probably thought I’d done it because of her dreadful introduction to Billy, but the simple truth was that her presence could’ve endangered my personal stake in the case.
Halfway up the M1 the following day, however, when the rainfall had finally abated, I found myself craving the companionship. It seemed the first in a long time for the loner I’d become.
Meeting on the station grounds seemed a bad idea from the off, considering how many adolescent evenings I’d spent at the enforced hospitality of the Nottinghamshire Police, so I’d arranged to meet McCarthy on the country park in Cotgrave, regrettably close to the site of the killing.
It was surreal, pulling into the car park at the south-east entrance in the early afternoon. The last time I’d seen those fields there had been nothing but a spoil heap there, so enormous I’d suspected it might never be moved, another permanent peak in the mountain belt left by collieries across the United Kingdom.
As I got out of the car and stretched my legs, shaking off the tedious drive, I could almost smell that familiar smoky burn of the coal somewhere deep below, dead money buried underneath the damp foliage and grass. There was only one other vehicle parked there, some way off from mine, and it reflected the crisp light in hi-vis yellow, black, white and blue.
I found him waiting on a bench, gazing into the dense reed bed at the bank of the Grantham Canal. He was dressed in full uniform: a padded stab vest over white shirt and tie.
‘Inspector Sean McCarthy?’
He looked over, startled, and rose to his feet, those sharp cheekbones locked in a stern cast, green eyes summing me up from head to toe and hip to hip.
‘You must be Elliot Rook QC.’
I nodded seriously, and we held on to our guises a moment longer, before a great grin split his face in two, mirrored in my own. A tight one-armed hug, plenty of weighty patting sounds on the back, and we both laughed hard.
‘You old fucker!’ he crowed, any trace of the old Irish accent I remembered now erased. ‘I thought it was a joke when I got the message from your assistant.’
‘My junior, Zara.’
‘Your junior?’ He switched to his best attempt at a haughty, snobbish accent. ‘Member of Her Majesty’s Counsel Mr Elliot Rook QC, Leading Counsel. Ha!’
‘You can talk,’ I laughed. ‘Inspector McCarthy of the Nottinghamshire Police. District Commander for Rushcliffe Borough and former football hooligan! How did you swindle that?’
‘Same way you did, I imagine. Years of hard work for low pay, and just the slightest omission of, well, only the majority of my youth! That isn’t the same bloody Al Capone hat you were wearing in the eighties, is it?’
It was. We laughed some more, and then he suggested we take a walk together.
If anything could’ve added to the peculiarity of traipsing through the old colliery grounds after all those years, it was doing so alongside Sean in a civilised meeting between a barrister and a police officer. How times had changed. We rehashed the years while we wandered through the immense sprawl of trails winding between lakes, juvenile trees and immaculate open fields, far away from the smog of the city.
I’d forgotten just how beautiful the sky could be, clear and cold with orange-pink undertones speckling the horizon, and it was a pity when, inevitably, the conversation had to come around to the cheerless reason for my return.
‘You’re actually doing it then?’ he asked. ‘You’re really defending Billy fucking Barber?’
‘Somebody has to, don’t they?’
‘Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be you. He’s not blackmailing you, is he?’
‘What?’
‘Tried it on with me a couple of times, back when I joined the force, but he had nothing on me. No proof, anyway. As if people would give a shit about a few stupid scraps at the footy more than thirty years ago.’
‘No, no,’ I lied. ‘He hasn’t tried anything like that on with me …’ I decided to pull focus away from the subject. ‘So, on Saturday the fifteenth of April, the morning the body was found, did you visit the scene?’
‘Nah, thank Christ.’
‘Personal choice?’
‘Not really. I’d taken Tracey and the kids up to Scarborough for Easter weekend. Primrose Valley, that Haven place. Only got us the bronze package, costs a bomb on bank holiday weekends, but it’s all right up there. You’ve got Filey, Bridlington and Whitby all nearby. The kids go mad for the slots. You married? Kids?’
‘Divorced. No kids.’ A great swell of sadness came upon me, hearing it out loud like that, but when I stroked my third finger, expecting to feel the cold metal, I found only naked skin there.
Panicked, I rummaged through my left coat pocket and discovered the ring, where it must’ve remained since Belmarsh, rolling around in the lint like so many more crumpled receipts of things I’d lost.
I swallowed hard and left it in the pocket.
‘Shame,’ Sean said. ‘We tied the knot twenty years back next August, me and Trace. Our second eldest, Annie, she’s coming up to sixteen now. That’s why I was glad to miss the call to be honest, but I still had to cut the jollies short and come back Sunday. Bit of a fucker really, considering it was all over by then anyway.’ He hesitated, pausing on the trail. ‘I saw her in the morgue though. Horrendous. Breaks your heart, seeing something like that, especially around here. Nobody to identify her either. What they’d call a Jane Doe over in the States.’
‘John and Jane Doe actually come from an old English law,’ I told him, trying to fill the silence left behind. ‘They were the names given to fictitious lessees of a landlord in the action of ejectment.’ I wasn’t sure why I said it; a well-worn habit of trying to impress peers.
‘Huh.’ He kicked a loose stone, skimming it across the dusty surface of the packed dirt, and then carried on ahead. ‘Something new every day.’
I opened my mouth to go on, but a small, rather fussy-looking elderly lady in a quilted cardigan and mittens came towards us down the track, her Yorkshire terrier yapping and pulling wildly on its chequered harness. She smiled apologetically as we passed. ‘Afternoon, Inspector McCarthy!’
Sean raised his eyebrows. ‘Keeping out of trouble, Margaret?’
She tittered, pulling at the lead – ‘Oh, come on, Ruby!’ – and we waited until she’d disappeared through the young trees before carrying on.
I laughed, shaking my head.
‘What can I say?’ he grinned. ‘I’m still fighting them off with a stick.’
‘Christ, Sean, what is she? Ninety years old? That’s somebody’s great-grandmother you’re talking about.’
He shrugged, glancing back. ‘I’ve had worse.’
‘At the rate you used to go through women, yes, I’d believe it.’
‘Irish charm, Rook,’ he winked. ‘Couple that with a uniform, and there isn’t a girl alive who could resist. Why else do you think I became a copper?’
‘Marriage must’ve slowed you down?’
‘Of course,’ he laughed. ‘What do you think I mean when I say I’ve had worse?’
This time my grin came out a little forced.
‘There’s a John DeWitt listed in the prosecution’s evidence,’ I said. ‘Investigating officer?’
‘Our illustrious Detective Chief Superintendent,’ he nodded. ‘Sheriff of Nottingham. You know him?’
‘No, and I can’t talk to him, either. All I need now is for them to start accusing me of tampering with witnesses for the prosecution. Anything I ought to know about him?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘don’t go invitin
g him to any of your fancy champers-soirées. It’s no secret that he fucking hates defence advocates … So do I, come to think of it, present company excluded. He’s a hard bastard, old DeWitt. Came down to us from Sheffield a few years back. Should provide a fun day in court for you.’
‘I look forward to it. What can you tell me about Billy?’
‘Billy?’ A hollow laugh. ‘What about him?’
‘Anything, really.’
‘Anything? You know what he’s like. It was handy having their family onside when we were lads, but he has never grown up. He’s pushing sixty, and I still pick him up from time to time, out scrapping at the weekends, or else we have Sarah, his missus, ringing the station whenever he goes AWOL. The man’s got four kids now, for Christ’s sake. Remember Carol Clay? She’s got his first, Michael, and the apple dropped straight down with that one, I’m telling you. Seventeen, and he’s already on his third antisocial order.’
‘Seventeen? He didn’t start having kids until his forties?’
‘Hard to get your end away when you’re banged up for most of your twenties and thirties. Well, hard to get it into a woman, anyway!’ He laughed hard at that. ‘Then there are the two girls he had with old Big Tits Becky Fairburn, but I don’t think he has anything to do with them – probably for the best – and he’s got another one with Sarah. Oliver, I think his name is. Must be, Jesus, eight or nine by now.’
I’d forgotten what it felt like to be in a place where everybody’s personal business was common knowledge. I pulled it back a notch. ‘What do you mean, whenever he goes AWOL?’
‘Barber classic, handed straight down from his old man and his grandad before them, remember? Tells Sarah he’s nipping out for a swift one on Thursday afternoon, doesn’t show up again until Monday or Tuesday.’
‘Where’s he going?’
‘Wherever he can, with whoever will have him, I reckon.’
‘Affairs?’ I tried not to sound too hopeful.
‘Probably,’ he reasoned, ‘but I get the impression it’s more about staying out for the sake of being out of the house, as opposed to getting his leg over. The lads he knocks about with are little fuckers, half his age. Steroid heads. Big boys. Every time a group grows past him – settles down or gets nicked or whatnot – he moves on to the next generation, like a poor man’s Dean Moriarty. It must take a certain age and mindset to still be impressed by Billy’s shit.’
‘You think The Girl, the victim, could’ve associated with one of these groups? Even been a mistress, perhaps?’
‘No,’ he replied flatly. ‘Bunch of extremist right-wing wreck-heads, just like Billy. Wastes of oxygen, the lot of ’em. They wouldn’t stand for that. Not a Paki.’
‘Huh.’ The term caught me like a knife, and yet I didn’t chastise him for it. I should have, and I was ashamed to brush past it, but I had to remind myself that this was life among my old crowd. There was no venom in his voice. He was casual, entirely passive, and that was the worst thing about it. Some mindsets are never changed. ‘Billy wasn’t with his friends on the night of the murder,’ I went on. ‘He was alone. Why?’
‘Couldn’t tell you that. Maybe they’d had enough of his shit.’
We came to a fork in the trail divided by nettles and, through a clearing ahead, I caught sight of a tall mast; a solid black eye reflected the light at the very top of the pole. ‘How many cameras are on the park?’ I asked, pointing towards it.
‘Six, but the only two that could’ve helped weren’t operational at the time, and there aren’t any as far up as the old tracks.’
‘Is that normal?’ I asked. ‘The cameras being down?’
‘This is Cotgrave, mate. Before this, a complete history of crime in the park must’ve amounted to Rod Hudson’s three separate warnings for fishing without a licence, a few kids getting pissed on Frosty Jacks one weekend, and the occasional spate of travellers camping in the trees by Heron Lake.’
‘Travellers? You mean Gypsies?’ I wondered if you could call them Gypsies any more.
‘No.’ He wavered long enough for me to catch a slight shift in his expression, a sudden tightening of the lips, before he led me to the right. ‘We had a brief, a very brief, rash of vagrants squatting on the land here about a year back.’
‘Vagrants?’
‘Immigrants trafficked in from Eastern Europe. Couldn’t speak a word of the Queen’s. We found them here after they got out of Notts, sharing tents, waiting to get their bearings or else waiting for the benefits to start. They were drinking water right out of the fucking lake, catching fish to eat.’
‘Were any of them working girls?’
‘Prozzies? Wouldn’t surprise me, but we couldn’t find much before they moved on.’
‘Any connection to the victim?’
‘Rattled a few bushes, but nothing of any use came out.’
‘What about interviews with other local working girls? You reckon I could get my hands on the transcripts?’
‘Might if we had any.’
I glanced across, trying to withhold my frown. ‘You didn’t interview them?’
He shook his head. ‘Truth is, off the record, when we’re handed a slam dunk like this, we don’t have the resources to take it that far. It’s the same story across the country: understaffed and over budget. It’s not like the old days, when a pair of cuffs and a swinging truncheon did all the talking. Now it’s down to administration, liaising with the CPS on what we can or can’t do, and waiting around for charging decisions. We’ve got our best uniforms out on the motorway with hairdryers fishing for tickets. Even if we could spare the manpower, those women aren’t going to talk to us. Besides, she died a virgin, what are we going to learn from a bunch of prostitutes?’
‘She might’ve been trafficked in to join them, but escaped before it happened? You didn’t talk to any of them?’
He sighed.
‘We’re in the age of the Internet now. For every one of these –’ he tapped a compact box of black plastic clipped near to his left epaulette, which I only now noticed had a glass lens watching from the middle – ‘there are a dozen bystanders filming on mobiles, and we’ve got to keep them from pressing charges against us. It’s a fucking joke, I know, but if we go booting doors down, we’re the ones who land in the shit for harassment.’
We came out of the narrow trail and up to the edge of a smooth green field, cordoned off by a makeshift fence of portable steel railings. Sean checked around to make sure we were alone, then fumbled in the pocket of his trousers, offered me a cigarette out of a pack, and lit them in turn.
I realised it was a menthol one a little too late, but thanked him all the same.
‘I’m sorry to say it,’ Sean said, exhaling smoke, ‘especially for the poor lass, but the sooner that railway is torn up, the sooner we can all put this behind us. It’s not fair on the area.’
‘I saw that they’re resurfacing the tracks,’ I nodded. ‘Planning to make a nature trail, aren’t they?’
‘That’s the one. Another of the council’s big plans for this place.’ He gestured around us. ‘They’ve got new housing estates cropping up all over the derelict pithead site too, and then it’ll be the old shopping precinct after that. A hundred million it’s going to cost. Ninety acres of brownfield and rubble transformed into affordable housing in the next six years, and then that’ll be that. Like the colliery was never here. A hundred million quid investment, twenty-five years too late, if you ask me.’
All of a sudden, the surface of the field ahead of us seemed to ripple and bubble.
It wasn’t grass, I realised, but the opaque surface of thick, slimy water, the exact green of fibreboard underlay.
‘Toxic algae,’ Sean said through a plume of minty smoke, answering the question I hadn’t asked. ‘A dead zone. Something to do with the pH in the water, killing all the fish and frogs. Poor little fuckers.’
‘You reckon I could get much from talking to the council?’
‘I don’t know,
mate,’ he said slowly. ‘With regards to a murder trial? Seems a bit dodgy.’
‘Just trying to get a better grasp of the bigger picture. Feels like I’m at a bit of a dead end already.’
‘The bigger picture?’
He walked up to the edge of the nearest barrier, checked in both directions once more, and then spat into the green, splitting the surface like an axe. Uniform and grey hair aside, I could still see the tall, arrogant lad I remembered in there; the lad who’d loved only one thing more than fighting, and that was fucking almost anything that moved. Every month he’d have a different girl or two dangling from an arm, and it was strange to think of him being married.
‘This place has gone through a lot since you left, Rook. It all changed after Thatcher, but now …’ He shook his head and drew on his cigarette. ‘There’s something growing across the country, you know what I mean? You feel it, don’t you? Twats like Barber might pull focus by being the rowdiest of the lot, but it goes deeper than those idiots, and it’ll always be the outsiders that get the blame.’ Another spit, widening the void. ‘It all comes down to territory, like it always has. Lines in the sand. Survival of the fittest. The Peace Walls were already up when Dad brought us over from Ireland, but I used to get the shit kicked out of me every day through junior school for being Irish Catholic. See, it used to be us or the West Indians, and now Brexit is just another scapegoat to distract from Tory mistakes. Mark my words, Rook: this is how the Troubles start.’
Of course.
There were things I’d forgotten about Sean over the years, and one was his need to top-trump every situation with anecdotes from growing up in seventies Belfast.
You were running late? Sean was late once, after a loyalist firebomb targeted the morning bus.
Your uncle was reckoned to be hard? Sean’s Uncle Pat killed three members of the B-Specials in ’68, and then formed his own paramilitary.
You had a cold? Sean had pneumonia, after his family had been forced to hang wet blankets across every window of the house to slow stray bullets and shrapnel from the street outside.