by John Harvey
He left it alone. Had half a mind to get in touch with Maxine and see what she’d discovered on her trip to London, always supposing she’d gone, but never followed through.
Other matters intervened. A pub brawl that ended with someone being pushed through a sheet of plate glass. State-of-the-art climbing gear stolen from the car park close by the old Carn Galver mine. A break-in at the post office and general store in St Buryan. At a campsite on Trevedra Common a caravan was set alight, the couple sleeping inside lucky to escape with second-degree burns.
Life, such as it was, went on.
7
Karen still couldn’t quite figure Tim Costello out. He’d been in her team for some nine months, detective sergeant down from CID in Leeds, where he’d been part of the Major Crime Unit for three years. Promotion overdue. Before that he’d studied for a degree in Criminology and Forensic Science at the John Moores University in Liverpool, his home city. Not that you could tell that from his accent, with which he could have read the Radio 4 news without causing a flutter. Nicely brought up, Karen thought. His mother probably had him scurrying off to elocution lessons from the age of six or seven.
Costello’s mother was Chinese, his father Irish. He’d inherited his father’s height and build, all elbows and sharp angles, and his mother’s features. His father’s father had migrated to Liverpool to work on the docks, back when such work was plentiful and the scratchings in County Galway were poor; his mother’s mother had come as a mail-order bride on a ship from Hong Kong. How his parents had met was a story still to be told.
Where Karen was concerned, he was suitably deferential; in his dealings with the other members of the team, including Ramsden, he was inclined to be a little cocky. A little too sure of himself, Ramsden reckoned, a bit too much mouth. Karen wasn’t so certain. Give him his chance, she thought, to come to terms, settle down — that happened and he might just blossom, come into his own.
Already had where transport was concerned. Cycled in from home, early hours, on a bike with a carbon-fibre frame and Shimano Deraillieur gears that cost, as Ramsden liked to say, more than his first fucking car. Home for Costello being a flat on the Hackney-Dalston borders he shared with a girlfriend none of them had yet seen.
Lycra padded cycling shorts, black tights and brightly coloured long-sleeved jerseys, headphones clamped to his ears listening to a menagerie of bands like Foals and The Geese, to say that he and Mike Ramsden were several lifestyles apart would be no exaggeration. Karen would like to have considered herself midway between, but she wasn’t sure of that either. Sometimes conversations with Costello beyond police work made her feel as if she were taking classes in how another world lives and failing.
Back in the dead days following New Year and their discovery of Petru Andronic’s identity, the temperatures low, the skies intent on giving new meanings to the word grey, there’d been a glimmer of a breakthrough in the Walthamstow shooting. The bullets taken from the dead youth’s body had been linked to a haul of illegally imported arms and ammunition seized during a raid by officers from the Central Task Force on a warehouse in Deptford. While those officers continued to probe into the identities of those who had both imported the arms and sold them on, Tim Costello was liaising with members of the Met’s Forensic Intelligence Team to trace a possible pattern from other shootings in which guns and ammo from the warehouse had been used.
As for the Wood Green stabbing, it was still a case of speculation and blame. The victim, a youth of fifteen, Derroll Palmer, had no known gang connections, but both of the young men previously arrested and then grudgingly released were members of the Bruce Castle Kings, one of the sets of the Tottenham Mandem gang, and were known to Operation Trident; both had records for minor crime, including assault, yet their alibis had been difficult to break down. One youth had admitted under questioning to being present at the scene, an admission almost immediately withdrawn, his solicitor asserting that the statement had been coerced in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.
Tell that to the kid laying dead, Karen thought, killed for speaking up when another youth had called his girlfriend, whom he was walking home, a skanky whore.
And of Wayne Simon, missing since the Holloway murders, there was still no clear sign. A possible sighting in Gateshead, nothing more. If the reports were right, farther and farther north. Soon, Karen thought, he’d run out of ground.
She was busy finagling her responses to the latest set of quarterly crime figures that had filtered down from on high, when Ramsden knocked on her door and breezed through.
Sod’s law, a SIM card been found in the last but one bag of gubbins from the Andronic crime scene to be methodically searched, sorted and labelled; missed on a first, preliminary sortie, it had been buried inside a sodden wedge of shredded newspaper, along with rotting sweet wrappers, flattened cigarette butts, a smear of dog shit and a toddler’s missing sock. The original location was noted as the undergrowth to the eastern edge of the pond.
‘We know it’s his? Andronic’s?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Sent through to Telecommunications Intel. Couple of days back.’
‘And?’
‘Pay as you go.’
Karen shook her head. The problems with pay as you go from her point of view were legion: little or nothing was straightforward, cash sales and so no bills, to say nothing of the possibility of bogus names, bogus addresses, trails that could easily become meaningless when tracing owners. T. Rex now living in Nirvana. Bollocks like that.
‘Any luck,’ she asked, ‘with the registration?’
Ramdsen grinned. ‘Radu Rebeja. Some trumped-up London address.’
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Google him, the guy from Intel said, laughing up his sleeve. Radu Rebeja, the most capped soccer player in Moldovan history. Played most of his career for FC Moscow. Currently Vice President of the Football Association of Moldova. Resident of Chisnau.’
‘Probably not his phone, then?’
‘No. But Andronic aside, how many other Moldovan soccer fans do we think might have been on Hampstead Heath that night, that exact location?’
‘There’s a record of calls?’
‘Intel still working on it. No promises when, snowed under, the usual. So, you know, don’t-’
‘Don’t hold my breath.’
It could lead somewhere, Karen thought, or it could send them up a zillion blind alleys. Too much information sometimes as defeating as too little. She forced herself to concentrate on her paperwork, one eye on the clock, one ear cocked towards the phone, which failed to ring. By the end of the day, there was nothing further about the SIM card, either way.
It was dark out, had been for the best part of three hours already, the false dark you find in big cities; everything shot through with shop lights, car lights, clouds like a stage set, painted on, the sky an unreal blue, like day for night, the horizon washed in an unreal orange glow.
On a whim she stopped off at Ottolenghi on the way home and picked up a portion of roast chicken with chilli and basil, another of mushrooms with cinnamon, and some pear and cranberry upside-down cake for dessert. Treat yourself, girl, and to hell with the expense.
Back at the flat, she poured herself a generous glass of wine, arranged the food on a tray and settled down to watch one of the Swedish Wallanders she’d recorded from BBC4. Angst and murder on the shores of the Baltic. As long as she could divorce it from reality, her reality — and here the subtitles really helped — she could enjoy the somewhat ramshackle way in which the Ystad police were able, week in week out, to wrap up a case within a mere ninety minutes. And her feelings about Wallander himself, or, rather, the actor who played him, Krister Henriksson, had gone from sheer exasperation — as head of a murder squad he could be about as organised as a sack of kittens — to a resigned pleasure in the way he moved from anger and confusion towards a kind of resolution.
Except where his love lif
e was concerned.
There, she knew how he felt.
A night’s clubbing, a fit body, a good-looking face in a crowded bar, the slip and slither that moved from the dance floor to the taxi to the final fuck, slow and generous or quick and hard, that was no longer enough. As if, since she’d been in her teens and early twenties, it ever really was.
She pushed away the tray, drank down the last of the glass, switched off the TV. Stood at the window for a few moments, staring out. Saw her own reflection imprinted on a terrace of houses opposite, the darkened tree line that marked the edge of Highbury Fields. Along the street, a quick flicker of light from the interior of a parked car illuminated, for the briefest of moments, the shape of a man hunched behind the wheel.
All day now, all through the evening, the scenes which showed Wallander trying with some desperation to bridge the gulf between himself and his grown-up daughter — trying and failing — she had fought to keep her own father at bay. His birthday — late January — little more than a week away. Seventy-three. Seventy-three he would have been had he lived. The car outside, headlights burning, pulled slowly away from the kerb and passed from sight. He had been running, her father, across the street towards where a group of teenage boys was hassling a single, frightened girl. The boys white, the girl light-skinned, mixed race. Jostling, pushing, grabbing, calling names. The girl, her face besmirched with tears, stumbling to her knees and Karen’s father, with a roar of righteous anger, rushing out towards her, towards the surrounding youths, unable, in his haste, to see or hear the van that swung, at that moment, around and into the road, accelerating hard.
Her father’s body, as she had never seen it, other than in her imagination, lifted — hurled — into the startled emptiness of the night air, only to fall, broken, torn, by the pavement’s edge.
Three days in hospital he lived on, unconscious, sustained by drips and tubes and prayer. Her mother scarcely left his bedside till there was only prayer left and then he died.
Karen came and went, just thirteen and unable to withstand the pain.
Her father dead, her mother had gone back to Jamaica. Unlike her sister, Lynette, who had agreed to go, only to return three years later, Karen had dug in her heels, refused. Not wanting to leave her school, her friends. Already close, her aunt and uncle agreed to take her in. Now, they too, distressed by a city that was no longer, in their eyes, the same place where they had chosen to live most of their adult lives, were back in Spanish Town, retired, resigned.
Karen pulled the curtains closed.
Her father’s face flickered like a passing light, then disappeared.
‘Cry, Baby, Cry’ and then ‘Good Night’, from Ramsey Lewis’s version of the Beatles’ White Album, piano and strings, accompanied Karen as she removed her make-up and undressed for bed. After just three pages, the book she was reading slipped from her hands and she was asleep.
8
Morning. Cold. Overcast. Upper Street and St Paul’s Road at a standstill, cars stacked up in both directions. Karen’s mobile rang just as she reached the counter in Caffe Nero. Juggling coins and loyalty card, she flipped open the phone as she gave her order.
‘Sorry,’ said the voice in her ear, ‘no lattes here. Must be a wrong number.’ The suggestion of a Midlands accent. Wolverhampton, West Bromwich. She guessed the man from Telecommunications Intel.
‘You’ve got something for me?’
‘Sugar? A sprinkling of chocolate?’
‘Information?’
‘A brand new SIM card, only five calls. Three to a Lesley Tabor, that’s Lesley with an E-Y, T-Mobile. Other two to an Orange phone registered to an Ion Milescu — I-O-N, Ion — Milescu, M-I–L-E-S-C-U. All the details in an email. On its way.’
‘Thanks. I owe you.’
‘Double espresso. Two sugars.’
‘Deal.’
By the time both addresses had been traced and verified, Mike Ramsden was on his way to Wood Green to check out a possible break in the investigation into the Derroll Palmer murder. A fresh poster campaign and some door-to-door leafleting had jogged the memory of a night cleaner who’d been making her way into work when the stabbing had occurred and she’d contacted her local station. Now it was a question of teasing out the details of what the woman had seen and heard, Ramsden only too aware of the need to proceed with caution. Push too hard and the danger is the witness becomes confused — either that or gives the answers he or she feels are wanted, only to falter later under crossexamination.
Karen picked up the phone. ‘Tim, a minute?’
He was wearing a loose-fitting casual jacket over a muddy green V-necked T-shirt, slim-line black trousers and blue-black suede shoes with a rubber sole.
Karen allowed herself a smile. Elvis and the Beatles in one.
‘Fancy a break from arms and ammo?’
‘Please.’
She brought him up to speed.
‘As far as we know, these were the last people he spoke to before he was killed. Just in case they know one another, I want them seen as close to the same time as possible. Less chance of either of them contacting the other. Concocting stories. Okay?’
Costello nodded.
‘I thought you could take the girl.’
Which meant Costello heading south across the river to a large comprehensive in Catford. Alien territory though he didn’t intend it to show.
Behind a fascia of bare, stunted trees and tall railings, its main buildings a fortress of darkening brutalist concrete, the school, Costello thought, had all the welcoming aura of a Soviet labour camp from the last century. Even the first fractures of grey sky, a timid leavening of blue, didn’t do a lot to help.
The youth who met Costello at the gate was chirpy enough, however, if a little disappointed not to find an officer in uniform.
‘You sure you’re police?’
‘Sure.’
‘You don’t look like no police.’
Costello was quietly pleased.
‘So what?’ the youth asked. ‘You here to nick someone, or is gonna be another of them lectures on drugs and gangs and knives an’ keepin’ off cheap cider?’
The deputy head, uncertain whether to shake Costello’s hand or not, settled for some vague arm flapping and a sideways nod of the head and ushered him along to what looked to have formerly been an office, but was now a depository for some outmoded filing equipment and a convocation of broken chairs.
‘You’ll be able to talk quietly in here.’
He left the door ajar and reappeared a few minutes later with the sixteen-year-old Lesley Tabor at his side.
‘All right, Lesley …’
The door closed.
Costello smiled.
‘Lesley, I’m Detective Sergeant Costello. Tim.’
No reply. Slouch shouldered, mousy haired, a school uniform of white blouse, navy jumper, navy skirt, grey tights, the girl stared determinedly at the scuffed tops of her shoes.
‘Lesley?’
Her face angled up an inch.
‘You’re not in any trouble, you realise that, don’t you? This is not about anything you might have done. Okay?’
Another inch, a first sight of pale eyes.
‘I just need to ask a few questions, that’s all. A few quick questions, then I’m out of here. Never to be seen again.’ He lowered his face, swiftly, towards hers. ‘Think you’ll miss me? When I’m gone?’
She looked at him then. Miss him? What was he on?
He winked, face creasing into a grin.
‘What say we get out of here? Go for a walk in the palatial grounds? Take in some of that winter sun?’
‘We can’t …’
‘Come on …’ Reaching past her for the door. ‘What are they going to do? Arrest us?’
There were indeed a few vestiges of sun, just visible above the turrets of a tower block to the east. Sweet papers and food wrappings from break were scattered here and there on the ground around their feet where they slowly walked. Fac
es, curious, appeared at windows and then were called rapidly away, back to the pleasures of citizenship or ICT, considerations of the opposite angle to the hypotenuse or the importance of the slave trade to the rise of capitalism.
‘What are you missing?’ Costello asked.
She didn’t immediately seem to understand.
‘What lesson?’
‘Oh, history.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘S’all right, it’s boring.’
History, how could it be? Wars, alliances, betrayals, dates, the movements of great powers, Costello had loved it.
‘What’s your favourite then?’
‘Um?’
‘Subject? Lesson?’
‘Dunno. English, maybe.’
She was frowning, squinting up her eyes. Last night’s eye shadow not renewed, not properly washed away. They had reached the railings alongside the gate and turned.
‘Tell me about Petru,’ Costello said.
She stopped. ‘Who?’
‘Petru. Your boyfriend. Petru Andronic.’
‘He’s not my boyfriend.’ A quick flush of embarrassment or anger.
‘You do know what happened to him?’
‘Course.’
She looked at the ground, looked away; wanted to be anywhere but where she was.
‘I’m sorry,’ Costello said. ‘For what did happen.’
She was still avoiding his eyes.
‘Had you known him for long?’
‘I didn’t. Not really.’ Her voice quiet, quieter. ‘Know him, I mean.’
He waited. Knew she’d either talk or walk away.
‘Look, he wasn’t my boyfriend, right? I only met him, like, a couple of times. It wasn’t, wasn’t like that, it …’
She faltered back into silence.
‘What was it like then?Your relationship?’