He took it; tore open the brown paper with greedy fingers and peered inside, his eyes widening as he took in the contents, then narrowing as it struck him - so obviously she could have laughed - that it would serve him better to play it cool, to try to squeeze her for as much as she’d give.
“Fifteen hundred?” he asked her, though she thought he’d probably done the sums already in his head, multiplied the number of notes by their denominations and arrived at a conclusion.
“The rest to follow,” she said.
“When?”
“When we’ve talked.”
“Doesn’t seem a lot, for the risk I’m taking.”
She held back a sigh; tamped down her frustration at his transparency, at knowing she’d have to suffer the rigmarole of bartering before he’d give her what she needed because he wasn’t bright enough to have realised earlier that he could take her for a higher figure.
“You’re asking for more?” she said, and something in her tone must have startled him - possibly some of the business-like coldness she’d been told sometimes carried in her voice, regardless of how she felt in the moment of speaking - because he drew back hurriedly, recoiling from her as if a tiger snake had risen up from her lap to hiss at him, fangs bared.
“No,” he said quickly. “No, it’s fine. Just wanted you to know that, you know… I’m sticking my neck on the block a bit here.”
And getting two months’ salary for the inconvenience, she thought.
“I understand,” she told him. It wouldn’t pay to antagonise him; not while he could still get up and walk away and take his information with him. “Thank you.”
He unzipped the jacket just enough to slide a hand inside and pluck out his cigarettes, treating her to a brief glimpse of a white shirt, black tie and epaulettes that disappeared as soon as he’d lit up.
“Go on, then,” he said. “Ask.”
“Ask?”
“Whatever it is you want to know.”
She thought back to the list of questions she’d made the night before, the neatly ordered bullet points and decision-tree branches she planned to use to guide the conversation, and wished she’d brought it with her, if for nothing else than her own reference.
“You’ve worked at Hendon since 1987, is that right?” she said.
“I have, yeah. D Wing and Enhanced, mostly.”
“And you were Charles Soames’ Personal Officer?”
“From ’90 to ’95, yeah.”
“Let’s start there, then. Tell me about him – about what he was like when you knew him. Anything you can remember.”
“I hate that I’m asking you this,” Rose had said, and Harriet had believed her - had believed, moreover, that Rose wouldn’t have asked her, unless circumstances had absolutely necessitated it. Circumstances, and the probable actions of their other sister, the one they tried very hard not to talk about.
“Here’s the thing,” the other woman had chipped in - the little fat Cockney one with the strange, sharp eyes, the one all the others seemed to defer to. The one Rose said had once saved her life in a fire - a fire their father had set, no less. “We need your help, I ain’t denying it. A job like yours… it can open a few doors the rest of us might have to pry open with a crowbar, if you know what I mean.”
“My job?” Harriet had asked - entirely disingenuously, since Rose had filled her in already, and in some detail.
“Not the teaching - the research. Rose says you’ve done a bit of work for the prison service?”
“In, not for. I did some interviews with prisoners for a project I was running, the year before last. At Wandsworth and Long Lartin.”
“And Hendon.”
“Yes, as it happens.”
“So you know people there. People on staff.”
“Some. But I was there to speak to the men inside, not form lifelong friendships with the POs or the Wing Governors. It’s not as if we’ve stayed in contact.”
“Still... good enough.”
“For what?”
This, too, Rose had explained already: they wanted her to reach out to a PO, a particular PO, and mine him for information. But first they needed her to find out which PO that was.
She wasn’t about to let the little fat one know that she knew, though. If she wanted Harriet to do her bidding, she was going to have to explain herself; not just behave, as Harriet had seen her do around the other women, as if Rose’s new-found sister toeing the line was some sort of sealed deal.
“For checking into him - Soames,” the little fat one had said, impatiently. “Seeing who he might have brought on board to help him stick a knife in one of my boys. And smoking out your Hannah while you’re at it – that’d be a nice bonus an’ all, wouldn’t it?”
“He was never trouble, Soames,” Briscoe said. “Even before he had that stroke and his breathing took a turn for the worse. Never unpredictable, either. Some of them, even the old boys - they look for ways to needle you any way they can. We’re not just talking verbal here - some of them will go for you, really go for you. Or they’ll throw things - food and bits of paper, foam they’ve torn off their own mattress. And that’s the good end. I’ve had more shit thrown at me than a zookeeper, doing this job.”
“But Soames wasn’t like that?” Harriet asked, remembering how the inside of the prisons she’d visited had seemed to her during her interviews: the stench of sweat and disinfectant - and yes, shit - that had permeated everything; the casual bovine cruelty of so many of the officers, even the ones who’d been pleasant enough to her; how horribly unlikely she’d found it that so many men with so many complex needs could possibly have lived, and worked, and slept in so small and confined a space.
“Never. He was polite as you like from the get-go. Always said hello, always asked how I was. Always very respectful.”
“You liked him?”
“I didn’t say that, did I?”
“So you didn’t like him?”
She suspected he’d think that she was needling him too, playing deliberately dumb to goad him, and found she didn’t care in the slightest.
“You don’t like any of them,” he said tetchily. “It’s basic self-preservation. When you start warming to them, telling yourself they’re just another bloke like you and there but for the grace of God go I… that’s when they get you. Doesn’t matter how nice you think they are - they’ve all got one eye out for the moment you start to let your guard down. But I will say this: he was never a pain in the arse. And that made my life a damn sight easier.”
“How would you characterise him?” she asked, recognising a dead end when she heard one and changing tack accordingly. “Beyond that he was easy to deal with?”
He scratched the back of his head with one hairy hand, pursed his lips and blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling.
“Slippery,” he said, when he’d finished exhaling - delivering the verdict with the learned conviction of an art historian appraising a Rembrandt. “Nice manners on him, but a bit of an opportunist is what I’d say. Not one you’d want to turn your back on.”
“You found him untrustworthy?”
He laughed aloud at this - a laugh which descended rapidly into smoke-filled coughing, then choking.
“Untrustworthy?” he gasped, ruddy face reddening further by the second. “They’re all untrustworthy. They’re cons."
“More so than any of the others, then.”
He caught his breath; picked up her lukewarm orange juice and, without asking permission, took a deep swig of it.
“No,” he said, swallowing. “No more than the others. But he was definitely a funny one. You wouldn’t have had him down for armed robbery, that’s for sure.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was too… neat. Meticulous. And clever, too. You couldn’t imagine him just sticking a gun in your face and screaming, not like some of the villains in there. Too thoughtful. Put a suit and tie on him and he could have been the manager of that bank he did over.”
>
“What about friends?” she asked - conscious of needing to bring the conversation back around to Hannah, to know how on earth she could have established contact with Soames while he was locked up. “Did he have any? Or did the other men agree with your assessment of him?”
Briscoe took a second, oblivious swig of her orange juice.
“There was one bloke, a few years back,” he said. “Another old guy. The Guv stuck him in with Soames on Enhanced. You’d know who he was if you saw him - he used to be on the telly. Sued the papers when they said he’d been cheating on his wife, then got sent down for lying to the judge at the trial. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.”
“Anyone else?”
“Not that I can think of. He wasn’t much for company. Liked to read, liked a smoke, but never really got stuck in with any of the usual bollocks you see going on - all the fights and beefs and grudges over who owes who a phone card and whose turn it is to change the channel on the box. You sort of got the impression he thought he was a bit above it all, though that could have been his age. It’s normally the younger ones you see looking for an excuse to kick off at dinner time.”
“And what about outside? Did he have many visitors?”
“When I was there? Not a lot. Had his brief in now and then to work on his case, but they can’t have been making much progress - he’d been pleading not guilty since the day he rolled in, and he never once got permission to appeal. Didn’t even get paroled, in the end – they let him out on compassionate grounds after he had his stroke. There might have been an old dear, once or twice - an auntie or a mother, something like that. And that’s it, I think. Unless you count his missus.”
“He had a wife?” she asked, surprised. Neither Rose nor the little fat one had mentioned Soames having a partner, in the strange briefing they’d given her before she signed up for their mission.
“I don’t know if they were married or not,” Briscoe said. “But they were definitely together. Long-term together, too - not one of those prison bride pen-pal arrangements. She’d been coming in to see him from the off - once a week, every week for twenty-odd years. Her and the boy.”
“The boy? What boy?”
“Their son – hers and Soames’. Don’t look so shocked,” he added. “He didn’t knock her up while he was inside. The way I heard it, she was already pregnant when he got sent down.”
Chapter 22
Follifoot, Harrogate
July 1997
Detective work, Kat was beginning to realise, was nothing at all like the con.
There were points of overlap, certainly. The need to make a study of the other person and their responses; to cold-read cadence and gesture, expression and reaction, and then adapt in the moment to what you’d decrypted. The teasing out of information, slowly and seductively, so soft-footed if you’d done it right that they’d never even know they were being worked over. The obligation to empathise - not just to talk and listen but to forge an emotional bond, a human to human connection that would make them feel better about spilling their guts to a stranger.
But the con was a dance, even if only one of you knew that you were dancing: a lithe, sinuating two-step that lasted only as long as you stayed on the floor but left you flushed with pleasure in the aftermath.
Investigation, by contrast, was a winter marathon: an endless, exhausting plod around the same grey circuit. It was possible, she thought, that there’d be some payoff as she sprinted to the finish line, when she’d uncovered the Rosetta Stone that would make sense of everything else she’d seen and heard on her travels; some runner’s high that would leave her smiling with the satisfaction of knowing that she’d done it, that it was over. But she was yet to experience it. The ribbon was a long way off, and she was very much still in the race, penned in on all sides - figuratively speaking - by panting first-timers and fundraising firemen in chicken-suits.
Ada Otley’s bit of gossip had been interesting; useful, even. But all but one of the half-dozen names the woman had passed along to Kat - once Faye Tuttle-of-the-Wirral Advocate had passed her a hundred quid in twenties for the tip - had turned up nothing she hadn’t gleaned already from her time in the Otley guesthouse. Namely: Ted Wainwright’s wife had been having it away with Bob Kingsley, the gardener; the abducted baby might not, strictly biologically, have been Wainwright’s abducted baby; and, most importantly to Kat’s mind, nobody had any bloody clue at all what the hell had happened to the kid, after she was taken. And Kat’s patience for the beige rugs and ornamental teacups of the old-lady living rooms of West Riding was growing thinner by the hour.
The last name on the list Mrs Otley had given her - a scattergun Greatest Hits of everyone she could remember who might have known, slept with or been distantly related to Kingsley - was one of his cousins, Lucille Salter: a now-eightysomething spinster still living in a village on the outskirts of Harrogate.
“I couldn’t tell you if they were close,” Mrs Otley had said. “But there’s not many of them left now, the Kingsleys or the Salters, so it might be worth a knock at her door. I shouldn’t go getting my hopes up, though, if I were you. She could be senile now, if she ever had anything to tell you to begin with.”
Lucille Salter’s cottage sat at the top end of a cul-de-sac of nearly identical structures, all built from the sort of dark stone that gave the road the appearance, even in sunlight, of a particularly forbidding Central European castle. There was a garage but no obvious car, and a wheelchair ramp and grab handles - of the kind Kat had resisted installing at her own place – that suggested the old lady inside was, at the very least, infirm. Playing the odds, Kat swung the Mini into the driveway and parked up.
The delay between Kat ringing the doorbell and Lucille Salter actually opening the door - once she’d shuffled, centimetre by centimetre, up the hallway - felt to Kat interminable, and not only because of the havoc wreaked on her aching head and stiffening hips by the perpetual northern rain. When, finally, she did open it, she kept the chain on - treating Kat to little but a sliver of the corkwood floor and stippled walls inside, and, in the gap between chain and door, a single suspicious grey eye set into a face the colour and texture of a dried apricot.
“Miss Salter?” Kat said, slipping back into the spiel she could have recited by now in her sleep. “I’m Faye Tuttle with the Wirral Advocate. I was wondering if you might have five minutes to spare for a chat? I’m doing a piece on the Ingrid Wainwright abduction, and I was told you might be able to offer a bit of background on the case. We’d pay you for your time, of course,” she added - mentally calculating how much an elderly, single woman on a fixed pension would consider appropriate recompense for a bit of forty year old scuttlebutt.
The grey eye narrowed.
“A journalist, did you say, love?” she answered, voice scratching and crackling like tissue paper on gravel.
“That’s right, Miss Salter. With the Wirral Advocate.”
The apricot-face vanished, momentarily, from view, affording Kat a fuller picture of the cottage interior: a Scandinavian-style kitchen with a surprisingly expensive-looking Aga, and two sets of bookshelves stacked with serious-looking hardbacks.
“Miss Salter?” she said, with genuine hesitation.
The face reappeared, now sporting a pair of thick-lensed, ludicrously overlarge plastic reading glasses.
“Got your press pass on you, have you, love?” she asked amiably.
Press pass? Kat thought. What sort of pensioner knows what a press pass is, let alone asks to see it?
She made a show of searching her pockets; opening her handbag and rifling through it.
“I’m so sorry, Miss Salter,” she said, when she came up empty, “I must have left it in the car. Do you mind if I don’t go and get it? My legs are playing up a bit this morning,” she gestured down her body, to the hated walking sticks, “and I’m trying to avoid walking where I can.”
It wasn’t a gambit she’d had cause to use much, since she’d taken her blow
to the head - but it couldn’t fail to work, could it? Especially not on a woman who clearly had her own issues with mobility.
Lucille Salter - a home owner, in Kat’s estimation, for whom every census-taker and gas meter-reader would need to have their lanyard at the ready if they wanted access to her property - seemed to think hard about this before replying.
“Go on, then,” she said, without enthusiasm. “Come in, if you have to. But you’d best give me a minute to tidy ‘round.”
Abruptly, the door closed, leaving Kat to twiddle her fingers on the doorstep. When it opened again, what had to have been five minutes later, the chain was unfastened, and Lucille Salter appeared to be holding the door open for her - crouching half-hidden in the shadows behind it, humped and bowed as a five foot-high vampire bat.
Kat stepped inside, leaning exaggeratedly on her sticks, the old woman still lurking behind her.
She heard the door click closed again, which was when she felt it: something hard and metallic, pressing up between her shoulder blades.
She turned around slowly, letting the sticks bear the brunt of the movement - and there, behind her, so unlikely a sight that she might have laughed out loud in other circumstances, was Lucille Salter, her own stooped shoulder taking the weight of an ancient, long-barrelled and partially rusted hunting gun that was more blunderbuss than rifle. A gun pointed, very firmly, at Kat’s face.
“Right, then, cock,” she said, her finger resting on the trigger with a practised ease that Kat found alarming. “You’re not press, and I don’t reckon you’re police. So how about you tell me who you are, and what it is you’re really after?”
“There’s no stress,” Ruby had said. "You ain’t gonna be on the front line with this one. More like… out in the back office. Doing the filing.”
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 18