by John Macken
Randle reached into his khaki jacket and pulled out a piece of folded paper. On it, an address, letters scrawled in blue ink. He checked his watch, glanced at the numbers on the dashboard. It was time, more or less. He opened the A to Z that was on his lap. Matched the road name to a page, matched a grid reference to the road. He ran his fingers across the streets, calculating the route, savouring the feel of the coarse yellowing paper his A to Z was printed on. He flicked to another page, following a wide road as it meandered between roundabouts and junctions. Then he placed the street atlas back on his lap and started the engine.
As he drove, Randle combed the streets for men who looked like his son. This was his constant motivation, he appreciated, the thing that kept him doing what needed to be done. Four years since his death, and not a day went by without him remembering Martin. And not a man went by of a similar age without Randle wondering what Martin would look like now, what he would be doing, how he would be getting on in the wide world.
Francis Randle drove with utter concentration, swift and efficient, anticipating problems before they happened. His mind switched to Reuben Maitland, the forensic scientist whose name he had read in the newspaper. Whose position as the lead officer in the case had kicked everything off. Maitland, whose son had been ill, but who had made a full recovery, treated with drugs that were tested on animals and then on humans. Martin Randle, twenty-one years old and never getting any older, rotting in the ground, treated with a drug that had also been tested on animals. Having it injected into him in a clinical trial to test it was safe.
Randle thumped the steering wheel hard. The horn sounded, a few people looked round. Randle’s eyes flicked to the glove box and back again. This thing had started and it wasn’t going to stop until the death of his son didn’t make him want to scream out loud, to drive round the capital from address to address in his dark blue Audi, doing what was right, doing what needed to be done.
5
Syed Sanghera walked quickly, his breath forming small clouds in the freezing air. He was wearing a thick coat and a pair of black woollen gloves. It was impossible for Reuben to tell whether his fingers were intact.
‘How close do you want to be?’ Moray asked.
‘As close as you can,’ Reuben answered.
Moray gunned the engine, picking up speed. ‘You don’t want to check his flat out?’
‘Not yet. Let’s stick to the plan.’
Sanghera was fifty metres ahead. The white Focus passed him, then slowed. ‘Get out the fucking way,’ Moray muttered under his breath.
As they watched, the CID officer brought his car to a quick halt. He jumped out and approached Sanghera, pulling out his warrant card. Reuben and Moray continued forward, slowing as well, Moray cursing. The officer spoke to Sanghera and checked his ID. Moray brought the car close enough to hear Sanghera confirm his name. Then the officer said something inaudible. Reuben leaned across and fired off half a dozen quick pictures on his mobile. The quality wasn’t great, but they would do. Sanghera looked a decade older than he did in the newspaper pictures Reuben had seen. The intervening few years hadn’t been kind.
The officer let Sanghera go, and climbed back in his car. Reuben watched Sanghera spin round and walk off in the direction of his flat. He looked spooked, eager to return to the safety of his residence. Moray groused as the CID officer circled the block then headed back towards Raddlebarn Gardens as well.
‘Fucking amateur,’ he said under his breath.
‘Doesn’t exactly inspire hope,’ Reuben answered.
‘What now?’
‘We cut our losses. Next one on the list. Michael Adebyo.’
Moray pulled off at speed, Reuben flicking through the images he had managed to take. He deleted most of the shots on his phone and kept the two best, examining and re-examining them. He also scanned a photo of Daniel Riefield that had been taken at GeneCrime. Riefield’s eyes looked wild, the swelling on his jaw brooding and red. Reuben stared into the grainy images, the silent question playing over and over in his head. Where the fuck is my son?
‘So what do we know about Adebyo?’ Moray asked, drifting into a bus lane to overtake on the inside.
Reuben closed his phone and picked through a wad of papers, with half an eye on the road. Driving with Moray was not for the faint-hearted. ‘Originally from Somalia, came here as a refugee four or five years ago. Unlike a lot of the people on the drug trial, he wasn’t a student. Presumably just trying to make some cash.’
‘Sound like the kind of geezer who would kill people and kidnap a child?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. Today is about covering all the angles, no matter how obtuse. According to his DSS records, he’s got a young family himself, so presumably there’s the possibility of childcare there. Comes from atrocity-torn Somalia, so his boundaries could have been altered. Maybe, compared to a sustained machete attack, removing someone’s fingertips is a piece of cake.’
Reuben kept scanning all the available information. Don’t feel, just think, he told himself. No point in pausing to consider the consequences. Just do what you have to do.
‘His address looks pretty kosher. Confirmed in the DVLA records, as well as from his hospital records. The Royal Free continue to see him as an outpatient, so he should be where we think he is.’
‘He still has regular contact with the place where this all happened? You think that’s significant?’
‘It’s going to stay fresh in his mind if he’s there every month. He’s hardly going to be able to put it behind him, forget all about it.’
‘How bad were his injuries?’
‘Like the others, peripheral vascular damage. From what I can see in his hospital records, he had significant finger damage, some psychological scarring, probably other long-term health issues.’ Reuben squinted at a section of extremely dense and uneven handwriting. ‘Looks like the doctors were monitoring the increased possibility of a stroke or seizure. That’s if I’ve read that scrawl correctly.’
‘Poor fucker,’ Moray said.
‘Until I have my son, Moray, there are no poor fuckers other than Joshua. Someone who kills four men is not a poor fucker.’ Reuben shivered, a small spasm through the shoulders. ‘These men have suffered. Daniel Riefield, the guy I arrested, he’s a real mess. But there isn’t one of them I wouldn’t hurt severely to get my boy back.’ He focused intently on the side of Moray’s face. ‘I want you to appreciate that, Moray.’
Moray glanced across at him and then back at the road. Reuben understood the look but tried to ignore it.
They stopped at some lights. A small convoy of traffic squeezed across the main road ahead of them. The lights changed and then they were moving again. They drove on in silence for a few minutes, Moray taking well-worn routes through back streets, skipping the worst of the traffic, Reuben focusing intently on an A to Z, tracking their progress. A couple of junctions, a roundabout, on to another desperate housing estate, and they would be there.
None of the four men they were hunting had prospered since the trial. Reuben thought again about Riefield’s squalid flat, about the damp, the air of decay. Damaged men living in damaged houses, slowly rotting away. He turned to Moray. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘For what?’
‘I might have come over a bit strong just then.’
‘Look, your baby boy could be in one of these houses. I think I’d be a bit strong.’
‘But?’
‘But take it easy, Reuben. Don’t go crazy. We’ve got to do this calmly and logically. We have a plan. Let’s stick to it, eh?’
Reuben chewed the side of his cheek. The shady security consultant was right. All eighteen stone of him. ‘You’re the boss,’ he said. ‘Now, first on the left and I’ll direct from there.’
They entered a maze of high-rises. Broken windows, cracked tarmac, stained concrete. As they drove between half-empty car parks, something caught Reuben’s eye in the wing mirror. A dark blue car. Moray swung right. The car behind didn
’t make the turn. Reuben closed his eyes for a second, mining the image for information. The same colour, large and German, one occupant. Not the sort of vehicle you often saw on an estate like this. It had been the briefest of flashes, but Reuben had just caught it.
‘Did you see a car behind us?’
‘What sort?’
‘Dark blue Audi A6.’
Moray glanced in his rear-view. ‘Not that I can recall.’
‘Funny . . .’ Reuben said, almost to himself. He checked around, on parallel roads, in the car parks they were skirting, in his mirror. There was nothing. He frowned, catching a glimpse of himself in the wing mirror. His skin looked pale and tired, but his light-green eyes shone like they were on fire. He turned away. Maybe he had imagined the Audi. Another case of paranoia, Randle starting to haunt him. He dragged his attention back to the A to Z. ‘Take this right,’ he said. ‘Then we’re there.’
Moray did as he was told, and slowed to a stop. They both peered up at the block they were beneath, then took in their surroundings.
‘There,’ Moray said.
Reuben followed his line of sight. ‘This poor sod’s got an Astra. But it’s white again.’
‘Why don’t they just announce that they’re doing undercover surveillance? Big sign in the window or something.’
‘It’s possible CID are doing this on purpose.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Letting the suspects know they’re being watched. Putting them under pressure.’
‘Why the hell would they do that?’
‘Otherwise it’s stalemate. Look what happened with Sanghera. A plainclothes stopped him, checked his ID, let him go. Maybe that wasn’t as amateurish as you thought. Sarah said they don’t have a warrant for entry, so there’s little else to do but observe from a distance. That’s one hell of a slow and labour-intensive process. Days and days of just hanging around, waiting for a potential murderer to lead them somewhere interesting. Meanwhile my son slowly starves to death. They won’t be quick enough. They won’t be able to save him.’
‘No?’
‘No. Joshua’s only chance is you and me. Shortcutting all the shit CID are bogged down with on what they think is an entirely separate case.’
‘I guess,’ Moray answered.
From his tone of voice, Reuben suspected he wasn’t entirely convinced. ‘But?’
‘But I still reckon this is just crap police work. Plenty of it about. Look, the fucker’s even dozed off.’
Reuben looked more closely. The occupant of the car was slumped forward in his seat. ‘You don’t think he’s . . .’
‘Nah. I saw him shuffling in his seat as we pulled up. Just a lazy bastard trying to get comfortable.’
‘Takes one to know one.’
‘Right, shall we do this?’
Reuben ran his finger along the telephone number listed for Michael Adebyo under his DSS record. A plan. That was what they had, nothing more. No back-up, no police checks, no support. Doing the things CID couldn’t, sidestepping the hoops they had to jump through if they wanted to get convictions. But Reuben was no longer interested in convictions. He wanted his son, and he wanted to stop the killer. Everything else was merely incidental.
‘Yeah,’ he answered, his hand tight on the door handle.
‘We’d better get to him before our man wakes up.’
Reuben climbed out of the car and began to dial. He pulled open the rusting metal door at the base of the flats and walked through it. Moray followed him in, and Reuben waited for the call to be answered.
6
The detached house in St John’s Wood had a faded glory to it. Once, Reuben suspected, as he slapped across the dull red floor tiles and into the high-ceilinged hallway, this place was something. Tidy it up and it would be worth money. Proper London money. But the place was a wreck. Nothing had been done to it for years. The wallpaper was brown and psychedelic, the lights dim and choked with dust, the carpet on the stairs worn to threads. And the air stank, a sour, stale smell of failure and defeat.
Laura Piddock led him through, a can of White Lightning in her right hand, a freshly lit cigarette in her left. She muttered over her shoulder as she walked. ‘I told the other policeman everything I saw. Detective Veno he was called. I remembered the name. Sounded like a bloody cough medicine.’ Laura Piddock laughed, a dry hacking rattle from somewhere deep in her lungs. She swigged from her can, dragged on her cigarette and laughed again. ‘Maybe I could do with some of that stuff myself.’
Reuben looked away. An unreliable witness, Veno had made her out to be. He was beginning to see why. The living room was worse than the hall. Bottles and cans everywhere, cups and saucers overflowing with spent butts, newspapers and magazines covering all the remaining surfaces. There was nowhere to sit, so they both remained standing.
‘I know that Detective Veno and his colleagues spoke to you at length.’
‘And I’ll tell you what I told them. I know what I saw. A man hanging around when I came out of the off-licence. Dropping his fag.’
‘And?’ Reuben prompted.
Laura Piddock was drawing deep into her cigarette, a small column of ash falling on to what remained of the carpet. She coughed, the same rattle in her chest that her laugh had disturbed. ‘He hesitated, looked around. Then he pushed the buggy away, down the street, through the crowds of people.’
While she was busy with her can of White Lightning, Reuben inspected what he could see of her face. Puckered lips, dry wrinkled skin, rough and ready make-up. How did you end up like that? he asked himself. Lost, alone, dependent.
He surreptitiously checked his watch. Nearly nine o’clock. Today had been about identities. If this failed, the plan got altogether more direct. But first things first. What he was doing now, in a scruffy house with a broken inhabitant, was strictly against protocol. Reuben had to remind himself that as a suspect in the disappearance of his own son, he should not be contacting a witness in the case against him. Fuck this up, and there would be all sorts of repercussions. Veno would have the greatest field day of his entire life.
‘Look,’ he said, pulling out his phone, ‘I’ve got some pictures I want to show you.’
‘Holidays, is it?’ Laura asked, again breaking into a long and unpleasant laugh.
‘No.’ Reuben smiled. ‘Now, would that be OK?’
‘Sure. I’ve got nothing else to do.’
Reuben shuffled round so he could show her the screen of his phone. The pictures of Sanghera and Riefield had been easy to get. Michael Adebyo hadn’t been too difficult either. Reuben had managed to get a surreptitious shot of him as he opened his front door to Moray, who’d claimed to be a bailiff. He scrolled through the images, three of the four men who might have his son. Laura Piddock’s heavy eyelids blinked slowly as she concentrated on the screen. He went through them again. Riefield, then Sanghera, then Adebyo. Current, up-to-date photos in the memory of Reuben’s mobile phone, each of them looking older than his years.
‘Anything?’ he asked.
Veno certainly hadn’t shown her these men. It was just possible, pissed as she undoubtedly was, that something would shine out in her clouded consciousness.
‘One more time,’ she said.
Reuben scrolled through again. Then Laura stepped back, swaying on her feet.
‘And?’ Reuben asked, as patiently as he could.
‘Nothing,’ she answered. ‘I thought I recognized the coloured gentleman from my local pub. But it’s not him. He’s too dark.’
Reuben pulled a sheet of paper out of his jacket pocket. ‘I’ve also got this. Have a look.’ He passed her a photocopied newspaper picture of Martin Randle’s father Francis, taken eighteen months earlier at the official trial inquest. Laura held her fag in her mouth while she squinted at it.
They still hadn’t managed to track Francis Randle down. In the photo he looked solid, an ex-forces physique lurking under his jumper, his shoulders square, his arms broad, the top of his right
ear flat where it should be round. For the hundredth time that day Reuben asked himself whether it was coincidence that Randle had disappeared at the same time that several men involved in his son’s death had been killed.
Laura Piddock peered closely at the image, her cigarette almost burning it, before she jerked back again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not this one either.’
‘It was taken a year and a half ago. He could have changed. Do you think he could be the man who took the buggy?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Laura Piddock turned her dull eyes to him. ‘Anyway, I thought Detective Veno was the one who was leading the case.’
‘He is.’
‘So what’s this missing boy to you?’
‘I’m . . . I’m just looking for him.’
‘Well, it looks like you’re still looking. I don’t recognize none of those men. Like I told the detective, I only saw the man from an angle. Following that lady with the buggy, then waiting, then taking the buggy.’
‘But I thought you told Detective Veno—’
‘What?’ Laura eyed him suspiciously.
Reuben had a final look around the decay. As he looked more closely he saw burn holes everywhere, small black dots of intent, fires that nearly were. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Look, be careful, you know, with your cigarettes. Make sure you don’t leave them alight.’
The cackling laugh returned with a vengeance. ‘What? Now the police care for me all of a sudden?’
‘I just meant . . .’ Reuben didn’t know what he meant. He just didn’t want to read about someone who had fallen through the gaps setting her house alight. ‘You’ve been helpful,’ he said unconvincingly.
‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘And please don’t come back again.’