‘The consummation devoutly to be wished,’ said Atherton. Conroy grunted agreement. ‘So you’ve got him on tape letting the previous train go?’
‘Oh, yeah. I’ve edited the whole thing now, like I said. I like to have the whole story on record. I’ve gone back and got him from the moment he arrives at the entrance up in the street.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘Course you can.’ He got up and went to the shelf.
‘I want to see if he buys a newspaper,’ Atherton said.
‘I can tell you that – he doesn’t. Here it is. I file ’em by date order, so it’s the end one.’
He put it into the slot, and the monitor came on. A moment of blankness, and then the movie started. There was no preamble, just the shot of the station entrance from the camera mounted opposite. ‘There he is,’ said Conroy, pointing. Peloponnos walked into view, paused a moment in the entrance, then walked on. The view changed to the ticket hall camera, showed him walking to the barrier, deploying his Oyster card. Other viewpoints watched him descend on the escalator, his face blank – grimly blank, not the switched-off look of the normal commuter but that of someone turned inward on an unpleasant landscape. Another camera received him walking onto the platform, and standing there as the train came in, somewhat buffeted by other passengers as they boarded and descended around him while he stood immobile.
It departed, and Peloponnos turned his head to watch it go. Then he walked a little further along the platform, and stood still, in the pose Atherton had seen before, staring at the wall, his hands by his side clenching and unclenching.
‘Thinking about it now,’ Conroy commented. ‘Working himself up to it.’
‘What was wrong with the previous train?’ Atherton asked.
‘Hadn’t thought of it then. You can see.’ He ran it back. ‘See, he’s staring at the ground at that point, as if he doesn’t even know the train’s there. Thinking about the trouble he’s in. He’s trapped in a situation, can’t escape it. And there—’ he tapped the screen as Peloponnos lifted his head to watch the train depart – ‘there’s where he sees his way out.’ He spread his hands and let the tape run on. ‘The rest is history.’
Atherton watched it in the interests of thoroughness, though he got no satisfaction from the last frames of Georgie’s life. He declined to see the rest, the aftermath, and Conroy stopped it.
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Any help?’
‘Can we go back to the beginning again?’ said Atherton.
‘Sure.’
They watched the opening frames. ‘Why does he stop like that, in the entrance?’ Atherton said.
‘Suddenly realized it was his way out?’ Conroy suggested.
‘But you said that was the moment on the platform when he watched the train leave.’
‘Yeah. Well, premonition, maybe. Goose walked over his grave or something.’
‘Run it again.’ Atherton watched. ‘There!’ he said. ‘Take it back a couple of frames. And freeze.’
There was a man standing by the entrance, leaning against the side column, in fact, apparently reading a newspaper. As Peloponnos came level with him, the man raised his head and said something.
‘Move on, frame by frame. You can see his lips move,’ said Atherton. ‘He says something, and Georgie stops. God, I wish I could lip-read! He says something else, and Georgie walks on.’ Atherton peered at the screen, trying to make it tell him more. ‘Don’t you think his walk looks different? Sort of wooden?’
Conroy looked at him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘What, you think this bloke put a curse on him or something? Hypnotized him and told him to go and top himself?’
Atherton ignored that. ‘Can you isolate him, enlarge the image?’
Conroy obliged. ‘Know him?’
‘I don’t think so. I don’t know. Maybe he looks familiar. No, I don’t think so. Email me that image, will you? I’ll put him through the system.’
‘Okeydoke. I’ll see if I can enhance it any more, and zap it through to you.’ He looked again. ‘It might be nothing. He might just have been talking to himself. Or singing. Or talking on his Bluetooth.’
‘I know. I wish you had him approaching, so I could see which direction he came from.’
‘Don’t have a camera pointing that way. But there are plenty of ’em around the Bush. You might find him on someone else’s.’
‘It’s a long and tedious job,’ Atherton said, ‘and we haven’t got the manpower.’
‘It’s always the way,’ said Conroy, with sympathy.
Slider listened to Atherton’s report with reserve.
‘He was knitting a jumper on Sunday night?’
‘And watching television with his mum, which is a cosy, domesticated sort of activity. He wasn’t pacing the floor and biting his nails. And he whistled while he did his little jobs. I think it means he was not acutely worried, not to the point of considering suicide. He’d been worried for weeks, but it was more of a long-term thing.’
‘But you can’t know the rate of build-up. Everyone has their tipping point, and it often comes quite suddenly.’
‘OK, but I’m just saying, I don’t think suicide was on his mind on Sunday night, and since nothing changed, why should it have been on Monday morning?’
‘Well, go on,’ Slider said warily.
‘And then he stops in the station entrance, as though he’s been shot through the heart. As though the tipping point has just arrived. And why does he stop? Because the man he passes says something to him.’
‘Really? You’re going with this?’
‘I’ll show you the tape. You can see his lips move, and Georgie stops dead.’
‘Does he look at him?’
‘Georgie? No.’
‘Then the man might not have been talking to him. He might have had a hands-free phone somewhere and be talking to that.’
‘I don’t think so. He looks at Georgie. You can see it for yourself. And I’ve got a good still of the man. I’m going to put it through the system, but even if he’s not on record, someone who knew Georgie might recognize him.’
He produced the still with a flourish – ever the showman, Slider thought.
Slider took it. ‘I know this person,’ he said gravely. ‘It’s Marler’s right-hand man. What was his name? Easter. David Easter.’
‘Well,’ said Atherton with enormous satisfaction, ‘there’s a coincidence.’
A movie of the complications that were about to arise flashed through Slider’s mind. ‘I almost wish it were,’ he said.
FOURTEEN
Call Girl
Porson watched the monitor with disfavour. ‘Coincidence. Marler lives just round the corner. He’s probably waiting for his boss.’
‘Holland Park Station’s nearer for him,’ said Slider.
‘Not by much.’ Porson did a couple of laps, then stopped in the middle and exclaimed, ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ A stray beam of sunlight from between the clouds backlit his head, toyed with the bumps on it for a moment and wandered away. ‘You’re suggesting he hung about outside the station just to tell Peloponnos to go stick his head in a train?’
‘I think he passed on a message, sir, yes.’
‘There’s a handy new invention called the telephone.’
‘Communication between Marler and Peloponnos was almost all through his office, where it could be explained away. I think they’re just savvy enough to know we can get hold of phone records. And see how he doesn’t obviously stop Peloponnos and talk to him, just speaks as he passes. He knows there’s a camera somewhere about.’
‘You’re clucking at straws. Maybe he doesn’t stop him because he doesn’t know him – ever think about that?’
‘Marler knew Peloponnos very well, so I think Easter must have too. He never seems to leave Marler’s side.’
‘Well, thinking’s not going to cut any mustard. Maybe there is some piggery jokery going on – nothing would surprise me less – but you’ve got to have some idea wh
at it actually is.’ He shook his head. ‘Can’t go with this. Go away and get more.’
Slider could see he was worried, which meant he thought there was something in it. He stood his ground. ‘Peloponnos’s home computer, sir. No obvious connection with Marler that anyone could object to. But the guarded files might have something material in them to give us a lever.’
Porson considered a moment, then nodded. ‘All right. I’ll go along with that. I’ll get the warrant out.’
Slider turned away, and Porson called him back. ‘How’s Hart making out?’
‘She’s good. I wish she would stay permanently.’
‘Fits in all right?’
‘As if she’d never been away.’
‘I’ll have a word,’ Porson said. He fidgeted. ‘It’s been suggested upstairs that we need to get more diversified.’
‘Oh,’ said Slider.
The fire came into Porson’s eyes. ‘But I’m damned if I’m going to let them think I’m willing to take on a totem black just to make their figures look right. I want to say I want her because she’s good.’
‘She is.’
‘Exactly,’ he said with defiant jaw. ‘We don’t care what colour anybody is – or what sex, come to that. We just care that they do the job.’
Slider smiled to himself as he went away. It wasn’t only for Slider’s faults that Porson would be denied promotion. If you didn’t love statistics, quotas and targets, you’d never make the top.
When he got back, the office was bubbling like a cup-a-soup in a microwave.
‘We’ve got a ping on Shannon’s phone!’ Swilley exclaimed, her receiver to her ear, listening as she spoke. ‘Outside Kensal Rise Station. Oh.’ Disappointed. ‘She made one phone call and turned it off again.’
Slider addressed Mackay. ‘Get on to Willesden. Get them round there, pronto.’
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Ask nicely. Send them Shannon’s photo, ask them to do a run round the nearby streets, try and spot her.’
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Outside a station, most likely she got on a train,’ McLaren pointed out.
‘Not much we can do about that,’ said Slider. ‘We can’t check every stop on the North London Line. But if she’s used that station, she’s probably staying somewhere in the area.’ He turned to Swilley. ‘Who did she phone?’
‘I’m checking that, boss.’ Fingers skittered. Then she looked up with a grin. ‘Mobile phone registered to a Jessica Bale.’
‘That’s the friend the girl at the home told me about,’ Connolly said.
‘And we’ve got an address,’ Swilley continued. ‘Wornington Road, North Kensington.’
‘That’s just off Ladbroke Grove,’ said McLaren, who came from round there.
‘Half a mile from Kensal Rise,’ said Atherton. ‘If that.’
‘Right. Let’s go find Jessica, bring her in for a chat,’ said Slider. ‘Hart, you’re the one, I think. You’ve got the street cred. She might open up to you.’
The house was one of a terrace of tall, shabby nineteenth-century family houses that had been chopped – minced, almost – into numerous lodging rooms and bedsits; a poor street, neglected and unloved, home to the shifting, the shiftless, the fractured and the refractory. The very sort of area, Hart thought as she looked for the number, to attract the benign attention of Peloponnos’s trust. Legal and illegal immigrants, drug users, the hapless and hopeless naturally migrated to a place with lots of cheap accommodation and no questions asked. And girls thrown out of care homes, with no family to turn to – or none that cared, anyway.
The target house had four storeys plus the semi-basement. A jaunty spray of buddleia was growing out of the roof gutter like the feather on a fascinator. The window frame paint was so blistered and flaked it was impossible to tell what colour it had been, and one of the first-floor windows had a long crack across it mended with parcel tape. The rendering on the walls had fallen off in patches, exposing the brickwork underneath. It looked like a skin disease.
The front door stood open, and a large West Indian woman was sweeping the steps leading up to it. She stopped and leaned on her broom as Hart got out of the car. Her straightened hair had recently been in rollers and sat in fat cylinders around her head, waiting to be brushed out; her ample curves were confined in a tracksuit bottom and a sweater of sparkly turquoise knit; but her eyes were hard and noticing. She let Hart get all the way up to her before moving an elegantly economical step to block her passage to the door.
‘Help you?’ she said. She put her hand in her pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, and proceeded to light one.
‘I’m looking for Jessica Bale,’ Hart said pleasantly. ‘Is she in?’
The woman took her time. ‘Never heard of her,’ she said, blowing smoke out in Hart’s face.
Hart did not flinch. ‘You live here?’
‘I’m the caretaker, honey, I live in the basement, take care o’ the house, make sure there’s no trouble.’
‘Ain’t gonna be any trouble,’ Hart said. ‘Not from me.’
‘I promise you that,’ the woman put in with a menacing smile.
‘Yeah, and I promise you I’m gonna have a word wiv Jessica. Is she in?’
The woman considered. Hart stood her ground. ‘She’s at work,’ she said at last, conceding the address, at least. ‘What you want her for? She in trouble?’
‘No, no trouble. I just wanna chat with her.’
‘Cause she’s a good girl,’ the woman continued. ‘Got a job, doin’ OK. I don’t want her upset, you hear? These girls, it’s easy to set ’em back. They fragile.’
‘You care about her,’ Hart accused.
The woman somehow withdrew without moving. ‘I keep ’em in order, honey, that’s all. Don’t want no trouble in ma house. I ain’t no social worker. I work for the landlord, and he’s trouble enough for me.’
‘All right, ma,’ Hart said with a cheeky grin. ‘I believe you. I ain’t gonna cause no rumpus. I just wanna talk to her, that’s all. Where’s she work?’
The woman gave her another long, hard look-over, and apparently made up her mind. ‘Agneska’s in Westbourne Park Road. Don’t you go making a noise and gettin’ her the sack, you hear?’
‘I hear,’ said Hart. She felt the eyes on her back all the way down the steps. That was a woman you wouldn’t cross, she thought, not if she had any power over you.
Agneska’s was, as it sounded, a Polish café off the Ladbroke Grove. Notting Hill was rising, and the area was full of smart restaurants, cafés and coffee shops, but there were still some of the old sort left, plain-and-simple workmen’s caffs. Agneska’s was obviously one of them, catering for the local Polish community of cleaners, builders and gardeners. The menu was a mixture of the indigenous sausage-and-chips culture and Polish staples like pierogi, stuffed cabbage and dill pickle soup.
Inside it was plain and clean, with laminate-topped tables and metal chairs, and the walls, innocent of decoration, were painted mid-green below the dado line and cream above. There was a decent sprinkling of customers, mostly head down and forking in the food, one or two reading a paper, nobody conversing. They were working people, with no time for frivolity.
The middle-aged man at the counter stopped wiping it with a cloth and gave Hart a friendly smile, showing gappy teeth below a threadbare moustache. ‘What can I get you?’
Hart showed her brief. ‘Can I have a word with Jessica? She’s not in trouble,’ she added quickly as she saw the alarm enter his eyes. ‘I’m looking for a friend of hers, that’s all. She might know where I can find her.’
He nodded reluctantly. ‘She’s in the kitchen. You’d better go round the back and I’ll send her out to you. Don’t want to disturb the customers.’
There was an alley down the side and a gate into the small backyard. The kitchen had a large window revealing cruel strip-lighting inside, and the door was open, letting out steam and a smell of chips, cabbage and sausages. There were
voices inside and the clashing sounds of pans. Hart had only just closed the gate behind her when a small, skinny black girl shot out of the door as if squirted from a tomato-shaped sauce bottle. She was furious.
‘Whatju want?’ she demanded. ‘Can’t you leave me alone? I gotta job, I’m doing all right. These are nice people. They don’t want the cops coming round, asking questions. If they sack me, I’m finished! Whatju want from me?’
The last was a wail, and her eyes filled with tears, part angry and part afraid.
‘Cool it, babes,’ Hart said. ‘I ain’t here to cause you trouble. It’s Shannon I want to talk to, really.’
Her eyes widened. ‘I don’t know anyone called Shannon,’ she said breathlessly.
‘That must a’been a funny conversation you had on the phone this morning, then,’ Hart said. The girl only stared. She seemed genuinely frightened. Hart took out her warrant card and showed it to her. ‘Look, love, I’m the police, I’m one of the good guys. If Shannon’s in trouble, it’s better I’m the one who finds her. I ain’t gonna hurt her.’
‘I dunno where she is,’ she said in a whisper.
‘What she phone you for this morning?’
‘To see if there was any news, that’s all.’
‘News about what?’
She didn’t answer. She was twisting her fingers around each other. She was wearing a pink overall with gingham lapels and a matching pink bow was clipped in her blurred halo of hair, which Hart found for some reason unbearably pathetic. Her eyes looked too big for her thin face, as if she had recently been starving. Refugees and the recently clean, Hart thought. Well, she’d have the chance to put on a decent bit of flesh in a place like this. Potato pancakes and kielbasa. Egg, beans and chips.
‘How long you bin clean?’ Hart asked kindly.
‘Three months.’
‘Good for you. I ain’t here to spoil your life, girl. I’m gonna make it clear to your boss that you ain’t in trouble. But you gotta talk to me. Why’d Shannon run away?’
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