by John Harvey
Kiley had thrown him a towel on his return, lent a sweater, poured a glass of Scotch and set it down close to Cordon’s right hand.
‘The father,’ Cordon said, ‘he’s supposed to run a bookshop down in Hastings. At least he did.’
‘Thinking of going down?’
‘Thinking of it.’
‘Hour or so on the train. Victoria, probably. Charing Cross? Come all this way, shame not to check it out.’
Cordon knew he was right. After leaving the house where, according to her mother, Letitia was reputed to have lived and worked, he had stopped off at the local nick and found a uniformed sergeant of around his own age who wasn’t averse to talk. There had been reports of the place being used for immoral purposes, but nothing had ever been proved. Not enough to prosecute anyone, at least, take them to court. And, yes, there was some suspicion of the fire being started deliberately, but nothing conclusive in the Fire Officer’s preliminary report. Certainly not enough to bring charges, always assuming they’d been able to untangle the maze of paperwork that surrounded the building’s actual owners. And no casualties, that was correct. Whole place seemed to have been cleared before the fire took hold.
How much better off, Cordon thought, he would have been pottering around in Newlyn, doing his level best to give community policing a good name.
‘Later,’ Kiley said, ‘there’s a pub down Kentish Town, the Oxford. Jazz upstairs some nights. Decent food in the bar. We could give it a try, if you like.’
‘Why not?’
The guitarist, over from the Continent somewhere, made noises like a scalded cat. Seated behind a kit that included five cymbals, three tom-toms and a bass drum that looked to have come from a kid’s practice set, the drummer bashed and crashed through a polyrhythmic world of his own. Only the pianist, perched high behind an electric keyboard, seemed touchingly aware of old-fashioned words like ‘melody’ or ‘tune’. Eric Dolphy was one thing, Cordon thought, some people’s idea of far out, but this was altogether something else.
Downstairs saved it. The premium guest beer was Sussex Old Ale from Harveys in Lewes, rich and dark, and both the steak and the lamb fillet were tasty and tender, nicely pink. An hour or so from closing, Kiley rang Jane and asked if she fancied joining them, which she did. Dark hair; small, neat features; a true and open laugh; hands that were rarely still, emphasising this, demonstrating that. Cordon, enjoying her company, could just see her in front of a class of kids. When she and Kiley headed off together at the end of the evening, leaving him with the key to the flat, he felt a regret he fought hard to understand.
14
It would have been her father’s birthday. A picture of him in her mind, another fixed by magnets to the fridge door. A tall black man, open-necked shirt, hair brushed back, the beginnings of a belly, hands — large hands — down by his sides. A street in west London where they had lived. She looked for a smile on his face that was never quite there.
Serious he had been. A serious man.
This country, I don’t like the way it’s goin’.
Rioting on the streets of Brixton after a black woman was shot during a police raid; more rioting on an estate in Tottenham, in the midst of which a white police officer was hacked — hacked — to death. Earlier that year, the Miners’ Strike, police and pickets in pitched battles every night on the television news. And everywhere now, it seemed, her father looked, knots of men, young men, young men black and white, on street corners, unemployed.
At parent-teacher evenings, her father, dressed in his best suit, the one he wore for church, shoes shining for all they were worth — My girl, how’s she doin’? - pride reflected in his eyes.
Education, my girl, that’s the thing. College, university even. Make somethin’ of yourself.
A kiss on the forehead after he had read her school report, silver coins pressed down into the palm of her hand.
Make somethin’ of yourself, you promise me that. Make a difference if you can.
As if, somehow, he knew he would never live to see her grow.
‘You think this is what he would have wanted?’ her mother had asked, when Karen told her she was joining the police.
‘I don’t know,’ Karen said. ‘But I think so, yes. Yes, I do.’
Her mother had squeezed her hands and said, ‘God bless,’ uncertainty in her eyes.
Now some days, too many days, if truth be told, it was difficult to bring back, fresh to mind, exactly why she had made the choice she had. Too easy to become mired down in the quotidian, the day-to-day: forms and rotas and outcomes, the minutiae of personnel management and organisation. The lack of apparent progress.
One pace forward, one step back.
What was it that girl used to sing? The one who wished she’d been born black.
Something about little by little? Bit by bit?
Back when Karen had still been a PC — still in uniform, for God’s sake — she’d gone out with a hazelnut-complexioned swimming instructor with a predilection for white women who sang the blues. Blues and soul. Dusty Springfield — that was the one. Janis Joplin, Bonnie Bramlett, Lulu, even. All fine up to a point. Making love beneath a blow-up of the Robert Crumb cover for Cheap Thrills, with Janis hollering for someone to take a piece of her heart, a piece of something — just about acceptable if it helped the boy get it on.
She still had some of the CDs he’d given her; played them from time to time. Dusty in Memphis. Lulu at Muscle Shoals.
Little by little, bit by bit.
Police work to a T.
Once in a while you just had to pinch yourself, remembering why.
The night cleaner who had come forward in the Wood Green stabbing had picked out one of the assailants from a batch of photographs. Hector Prince, street name Mohock, a name derived from the two gangs — the Mohocks and the Hawkubites — who’d terrorised London in the early eighteenth century, beating up women, children and old men after dark. It was something Hector had picked up in a year ten citizenship lesson, one of those rare days he’d bothered showing up at school. A little learning, a dangerous thing.
Only problem was, when Hector had been invited to attend a line-up at the police station, the cleaner had failed to pick him out. And there he was, cocky as a prize-winning bantam when they told him he was free to go, bumping fists with his solicitor outside the station.
A closer look at Terry Martin, following the conversation with his wife, revealed that, in addition to three minor drug busts which went back quite a few years, more recently he had been charged with two serious offences: involvement in a post office robbery in Greenford, and possession of a large amount of high-grade cocaine with intent to supply. The first case had come to court, then fallen apart on the issue of identification; the robbers had worn rubberised Blair and Bush masks throughout and the Crown’s other evidence had been less than foolproof from the start. What had stymied the second case, even before the CPS had agreed to prosecute, was the disappearance of the confiscated cocaine from police hands. One of the officers concerned had been warned about his future conduct and transferred to other duties; another had resigned.
In neither instance, then, had Martin been convicted, but even so, the company he was shown to have been keeping was tasty indeed. One of the men charged alongside him for the post office robbery, Graham Arthurs, was currently serving five years for malicious wounding and causing grievous bodily harm; and Arthurs’ older brother, Les, had been questioned about his suspected involvement in a payroll snatch at a supermarket in High Wycombe. A second suspect, Kevin Martin, Terry’s half-brother, was on police bail, pending an investigation into an incident in Lewisham in which a fifteen-year-old who’d been doing grunt work for one of the local drug dealers had been beaten so badly as to lose the use of an eye.
And there were others in Martin’s circle, mostly around the same age, thirty-five to fifty, almost all of them, a couple of Glaswegians aside, from south of the river.
Dougie Freeman. Jason Richa
rds. Aaron Johnson.
Michael John Carter. ‘Mad Mike’ to his friends.
Ramsden told Karen he’d seen Carter once, during a raid on a club in Peckham where he was employed as bouncer, lift an officer off the ground, two-handed, and hurl him against and almost through the windscreen of the nearest car. After that it had taken half a dozen men to overpower him and hold him down.
And then there was Martin’s involvement with the BNP. Several photographs and a short piece of video footage culled from Special Branch files. Martin at full throttle, mouth wide open, shouting racist abuse, singing ‘God Save the Queen’, the flag of St George fluttering behind him.
All of which was enough, Karen thought, to brace Terry Martin on his return from Tallinn. Taking Tim Costello along would give her a chance to see how well he handled himself, as well as, maybe, offering a little light relief.
15
Terry Martin walked through from airside with the look of an ex-footballer for whom life on Sky Sports News was always going to be a step too far. Close-cropped hair, stubble, pricey suit that he somehow managed to make look cheap. Carry-on held in one large hand.
Costello had written Martin’s name in marker on a piece of card and stood amongst a gaggle of minicab drivers and other meeters and greeters, holding it high above his head. His little joke.
Humour him, Karen thought. She was interested in seeing for herself how he handled himself in situations like this. ‘You do the talking,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll listen.’
‘What’s this?’ Martin said, his face too close to Costello’s for comfort. ‘Someone looking to do me a favour?’
‘Not exactly.’
The airport had allotted them a small room devoid of decoration save for a CityJet calendar for 2009, open at October, a picture of the Dundee Botanical Gardens in autumn. There was an air vent, a small window that didn’t seem to open out on to anything, several stacking chairs and a square metal table.
‘Whatever this is about,’ Martin said, sitting heavily, ‘make it snappy, okay? I ain’t got all day.’
‘How was Tallinn?’ Costello asked chirpily, sounding as if he really cared. ‘Successful trip? Business, was it? A little R amp; R? Bit of both? Sex tourism’s the big thing, apparently. Several hundred per cent rise in prostitution. AIDS too, of course. Hand in hand these days, unfortunately.’
‘What the fuck is this? Some kind of market fucking research?’
Close up, beneath the stubble, Martin’s face was slack and pale. His breath, in Costello’s face, was sour. Not enough sleep. Too much airline booze. Burning Tallinn at both ends.
‘We’ll say business then, shall we?’
‘Say what you fuckin’ like.’
‘What is the nature of your business, Mr Martin?’ Karen asked, stepping in, the voice of reason.
‘My business?’ A burly shrug. ‘Textiles, import and export. Tallinn it’s mainly sportswear, a little Gore-tex, women’s clothing. We bring it in, sell it on.’
‘We?’
‘My partners and me.’
‘Which partners might that be?’ Costello asked.
‘Never you mind.’
‘Dougie Freeman? Mad Mike Carter? Some of your pals from the BNP?’
‘You little shit!’ Martin slammed a fist down on the table, hard.
Holding his nerve, Costello had scarcely blinked.
‘Instead of losing your temper,’ Karen said firmly, reckoning Martin was disorientated enough, ‘why don’t you tell us where you were on the evening of December 21st last.’
‘What?’
‘December 21st.’
‘How’m I supposed to know that?’
‘21st December,’ Karen said, ‘the night you locked your daughter, Sasha, in her room, and left her there till the early hours of next morning.’
‘Who says?’
‘Sasha. Your wife. They both say.’
‘The fuck they do.’
‘I could show you the transcript,’ Karen offered.
‘I’ll show you a fucking transcript.’ Martin was half out of his chair. ‘I’ll transcript you into the middle of next fucking week.’
‘Sit down,’ Karen said. A voice that broached no argument. ‘Sit down and answer the question now. Either that or I can have you hauled down to the local nick and let you stew for an hour or so before you answer the same questions there.’
Martin tugged at the front of his shirt, hitched up his trousers and sat back down with a shake of the head.
‘Okay, okay. You’re just winding me up, I know. But I tell you, dealing with those people, it gets to you. It really does.’
Lowering his head, he pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, then looked back up.
‘Trying to get some factory owner to realise if he doesn’t up his output without hiking his prices, he’s going to lose every ounce of his work to fucking China before he can turn around. Jesus!’ He shook his head, more vigorously this time. ‘To think we used to have a textile industry in the country served two-thirds of the fucking world. Now look at us. Having to import every pair of bloody women’s knickers from Eastern Europe or the depths of the Third fucking World on account of we can’t make jack shit.’
Costello looked impressed; he hadn’t been expecting a lesson in world economics. Karen gave it five seconds and repeated her question.
‘That evening?’ Martin said, Mr Reasonable, ‘I went down the pub, didn’t I? What else? Wife’d thrown a wobbly over nothin’ and gone stalking off, God knows where. Me daughter’s been lying to her back teeth, giving her arse away to some drug-dealing little shite from just about the poorest country on the globe outside fucking Africa. Went down the Four Hands and got stinking. Christmas piss-up on so it weren’t a problem. Someone must’ve poured me into a minicab in the small hours, ’cause I can’t remember getting home at all.’
‘And you were there all evening?’
‘When I arrived to when I left.’
‘So there’ll be witnesses to that?’
‘I suppose so. It was busy, rammed, I don’t know.’
‘That’s not very helpful.’
‘The bloke whose shoes I threw up on in the khazi, you could ask him for starters.’
‘He have a name?’
‘Jimmy. Jimmy something-or-other.’
‘I thought it was your local. Regular, anyway.’
‘So ask the landlord, why don’t you?’
‘We already did. Said he remembers you coming in, not leaving.’
‘Makes the two of us, then.’
‘No memory of seeing you after ‘round eleven, eleven thirty.’
‘Like I said, it was busy. Wall to wall.’
‘Leave there the right side of midnight, cab across London, Hampstead in forty minutes, tops. Half an hour.’
‘And why’d I want to do that?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I don’t know, do I?’
‘Keep the appointment your daughter had made with Petru Andronic.’
‘You’re joking. You are joking.’
‘Teach him a lesson.’
‘No way.’
‘You’d already warned him what would happen if he tried to see Sasha again. And there he was, going behind your back. Getting his hands on your daughter. This — what did you call him? — drug-dealing little shite. And by the way, why drug-dealing?’
‘Why? Cause it’s what they do, isn’t it? Not the Poles, the Poles are okay, they know how to do a day’s work. Not now, mind you, they’ve clocked the writing on the wall an’ buggered off back to Warsaw an’ wherever else it is they come from. No, it’s the rest of them. Your Bosnians and Albanians, Moldovans and fucking Romanians. Breed like fucking rats, those Romanian bloody gyppos worst of all, just so’s they can send the kids out on the streets, begging. Soon as they’re old enough the girls are out whoring and kids like that Andronic are peddling drugs on street corners. All that on top of milking Social fucking Security.’
&
nbsp; ‘The world,’ Costello said, ‘according to the British National Party.’
‘Laugh, you smug bastard,’ Martin said. ‘Go ahead. One day you’ll be laughing on the other side of your cocky little face.’
‘Maybe that’s what it was,’ Karen said, reclaiming the conversation. ‘With Andronic. The chance to teach him his place, teach him a lesson. Only it went too far — you’d been drinking after all — got out of hand. Next thing you know …’
Martin rocked his chair back then forward. ‘No, you had the least bit of evidence put me near where it happened, you’d have had me in cuffs the minute I stepped off that plane. But you’ve got sod all and you’re fishing. That’s what this is. Only the line’s broke, and, any case, you wanna hook me you best get yourself some better fuckin’ bait — so I’m leaving. You want to stop me, arrest me. If not, I’m gone.’
And with neither Karen nor Costello making any attempt to stop him, he walked out the door.
16
‘What d’you reckon then?’ Ramsden said. ‘Martin?’
‘Do I fancy him for it?’ Karen said.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’d like to. Like to, but I don’t know.’
They were standing at the side door of a pub Ramsden favoured in the bowels of Camden. A fine view of the waste bins and a few parked cars. Ramsden, as he sometimes did, smoking one of his small tightly rolled cigars. Their breath visible on the night air.
It had been an Irish pub when Irish was more in vogue, plastic shamrocks in the window, a greenwood bodhran hanging down above the bar; this last year or so, evenings and weekends, it had been taken over by Goths and heavy metallers; Black Sabbath and Metallica on the jukebox and whip-thin girls with faces powdered white and lipstick the colour of dried blood. Other coppers never set foot there, unless it was a raid. The bitter wasn’t bad, either.
‘Trouble is,’ Karen said, ‘there’s not a scrap of forensics puts him even close. No murder weapon, no prints, no CCTV. Nothing.’