Death's Bright Angel

by Janet Neel

  She smiled, briefly. ‘He wasn’t even my first love you know; I had had some experience, and even so the whole marriage turned out to be a catastrophe. You aren’t the only person who cannot imagine why we ever got married. But if I can make a crashing mistake like that once, I can do it again. Easily. So what I decided was not to settle down with anyone, even to go out with, but to try a lot of relationships and see what suited.’ She glanced up at him cautiously. ‘I knew you wouldn’t like it, but I do mean it. I’m not ready just to stick to one relationship, never mind marry anyone.’

  She was tense with the effort to communicate, and he laughed involuntarily.

  ‘John, don’t be so patronizing. Listen, will you — or go away.’

  McLeish looked at her incredulously, not quite able to believe in the storm that had arrived from a clear sky.

  ‘What is all this, Frannie? Look, darling, with our schedules if we are going to manage to see each other at all, neither of us has time to have it off with other people as well. I don’t want to, anyway.’

  Francesca had removed herself pointedly from his protective arm, and was standing under a street light, her hair spiking up, with exactly the same expression of miserable ten-year-old stubbornness that he had provoked by trying to stop her running at night. He stood in scowling consideration of her, his temper rapidly growing in the face of this apparently causeless intransigence, and was suddenly assailed by a particularly unwelcome suspicion.

  ‘That bloke Hampton — is that what this is about? You stay clear of him, Francesca, whatever else you do. I’m warning you!’

  Her eyebrows peaked up and a flush appeared across her cheekbones. ‘This is exactly what I object to. I’m not prepared to be told what to do. By anyone.’

  ‘You need telling when you are making a fool of yourself.’ He stopped, and took a breath. ‘Frannie. Darling. Have some sense. Come home.’

  He moved towards her, but she backed away, shaking with temper. ‘Leave me alone.’

  He stopped in his tracks, almost too angry to speak. ‘All right I will. There is your car; get into it and let me see that it starts. Then you can go home and do what you like. I give up.’

  Francesca, white with temper, slammed her way into her car, started it noisily and made to pull out, forgetting to put on her lights. Grimly he indicated the problem and she flicked them on, dazzling him, and pulled away, missing the car parked in front of her by a coat of paint. He found his own car and sat down in it heavily, miserable with rage and disappointment, and incredulity at the way the quarrel had got out of hand. He turned on the radio to soothe himself and managed to listen to ten minutes of a discussion on St Luke’s Gospel before deciding that he would drive round and sort this out with Francesca, preferably in bed, rather than let the sun go down on so comprehensive a quarrel.

  Full of virtuous determination he drove to her house, and nearly ran her over as she shot across the road in front of him dressed in Charlie’s tracksuit, plainly in too much of a temper to notice him or anyone else. He turned the car, swearing, and followed her at a discreet distance, grinding his teeth as he drove down the poorly lit streets through which she was so defiantly pounding. Pindar Street, for heaven’s sake, where Fireman had been murdered. Chatterton Street, which had been the scene of a gang rape the week before, and Arnold Terrace which contained three squats, each a nest of addicts of one sort and another. He sat in the car, watching her sprint to her own door, and realized for the first time that the phrase about blood boiling might not be a metaphor after all. Deciding reluctantly that he was too angry to cope sensibly with her, and that he would have to leave any reconciliation till the next day, he turned sadly for his flat.

  18

  ‘Francesca? It’s Peter Hampton. Did I wake you?’

  ‘No, no,’ Francesca lied groggily, fighting clear of the thick sleep she had finally achieved at 6 a.m. ‘Are you in Geneva?’

  ‘Yes, I am, but I am getting the 4 o’clock plane. Can you have dinner with me — I know it’s short notice. We could go dancing at the Hammersmith Palais.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure I could.’ She sounded fractionally hesitant, and Hampton said easily, not to worry if it was difficult, another day …

  ‘No, it’s not difficult, I’m just not awake. Seven o’clock? Fine.’

  She put the phone down, and to her own amazement burst into tears and wept painfully for several minutes. She considered her reddened, blotchy face in the mirror, along with the unnerving conviction that she had made an almighty fool of herself the night before with John McLeish. She made coffee, her lips moving as she rehearsed what she might say, but stopped as she realized she was in no position to open negotiations, having just agreed to go out with Peter Hampton that night. She realized also that John, being a generous man, was likely to decide to reopen negotiations himself, and hastily arranged to have lunch with her mother.

  She had been gone five minutes when McLeish rang from Edgware Road where he had gone to finish some work. He listened to the phone ring, angered by not being able to find her, and decided she could stew in her own juice. He had more than enough to do if he was to find Ketterick and persuade him to talk. He hesitated momentarily, and decided to ruin Brady’s Sunday by ringing him in Doncaster, and getting him to find an address. Brady promised obligingly to go into his station and find the address, and McLeish decided while he was waiting to read the whole file again: in fact, he acknowledged to himself as he worked through the file, his affair with Francesca had been getting in the way of his work. Hampton and Blackett had each had the opportunity to attack both Fireman and Sheena Byers, and they were in key positions in Britex and Alutex: he needed to check their statements very carefully. The phone rang, and he reached for it, expecting it to be Brady; it took him a few seconds to recognize the duty sergeant from Heathrow.

  ‘A Peter D. Hampton is confirmed on the 2 p.m. Swissair flight from Geneva,’ the voice was saying in his ear. He thanked his informant grimly and looked at his watch, hoping very hard that the reason Francesca was not answering her phone was not because she was meeting that plane. As he was deciding to give her the benefit of the doubt and call her again later, Brady rang him.

  ‘Simon Ketterick is away,’ he said, without preamble. ‘He lives quite near the station so I ran round there — literally, I mean. I’ve lost eight pounds since you saw me, just from running.’ McLeish, mentally dancing with impatience, congratulated him. ‘Anyway, so I turned up on his doorstep, along with four pints of milk and three days’ newspapers. Neighbours don’t know where he is either. But I did see something interesting. An old acquaintance, you might say, chap we had in on a charge of supplying dangerous substances, but didn’t prosecute — not quite enough evidence, witnesses vanished, you know, the usual — he was hanging about, though he faded pretty fast when he saw me. The neighbours said he had just asked all the same questions as me, saying he was a friend of Ketterick’s. I didn’t quite remember who he was until he had gone, or I would have asked him a few questions myself. Sorry. But it would be interesting if Ketterick was a user, wouldn’t it? I mean, come to think of it, he looks terrible.’

  ‘Shit!’ McLeish, who rarely swore, sounded appalled. ‘Too right he looks terrible; I even wondered myself if he’d been ill. No I didn’t think of that. I wanted to talk to him because he was very jumpy when he saw me at the funeral and I knew he’d been in London the night Fireman was killed. If he’s a user, he really needs cash and that puts him right in the frame to be running a fiddle with someone at Britex. Look, can you get his bank account checked, too? And will Julie know where he’ll be — I mean, he is her cousin? I’m sorry, this isn’t doing much for your Sunday.’

  ‘Say no more, John. Did me a lot of good seeing you again. I’m off for lunch with the mother-in-law but I’ll start the hunt there, all right? How’s your young lady?’

  McLeish made lying and non-committal noises down the phone, and rang off with renewed thanks, wondering what it was that was stop
ping him from telling the friendly and sympathetic soul at the other end of the telephone the full strength of his worries. He decided it was simple, idiotic, masculine pride: he was just not prepared to admit to Brady that he, too, was having trouble with his girl and Peter Hampton. At that moment he was distracted by the realization that he had not checked where Ketterick had been on the night Sheena Byers was attacked, and started sifting through statements to see if he had been with Blackett, or was placed somewhere else.

  Two miles away, and two hours later, Francesca was saying good-bye to her mother. She had explained McLeish’s absence by saying, more truthfully than she knew, that he was working. Her mother had not been deceived. ‘A good man, darling.’

  Francesca had agreed with her, sadly, both of them knowing exactly what they meant. ‘Too bossy, though.’

  ‘Darling, all the good men are. John seems to me to know what he is doing, and to want to look after you. A man like that is going to suit you much better than Francis, whom you had to mother. Don’t drive him away.’

  ‘I may just have done so,’ Francesca confessed.

  ‘I wondered. I’m sure you can get him back, but don’t leave it too long if you want him. Don’t chew your fingernails, darling.’

  Francesca guiltily sat on her hands, looking miserable. ‘I don’t know if I do want him.’ She looked at her mother, daring her to comment, then rose and kissed her good-bye. ‘I’ll let you know.’

  Three miles away in the Glengarry hotel, Simon Ketterick was fidgeting round his room, unable to sit down or to settle to anything. He picked up the Sunday papers, read two paragraphs, and put them down again. He made himself a cup of tea, finding a surviving teabag among the debris on the tray, and drank it, gazing out of the window, crunching four aspirin as he drank. He put the tea down half drunk, and made two phone calls, neither of which was answered. He took another turn round the room, rubbing both hands up and down his face and yawning, every moment eloquent of acute physical irritation. The phone rang, and he snatched at it, spilling the half drunk tea.

  ‘About fucking time. I waited in for you and I need to go out. Yes, I bloody do. You have some? Well blessings on your name, and get up here, quick.’ He banged down the phone, and rushed into the poky bathroom, carved inadequately out of a corner of a room which had been none too big to start with, and opened a sponge bag, needing several tries to get his hands to work the zip. Lovingly he spread out the hotel’s bright blue flannel, and laid on it a syringe, a spoon, silver paper and matches. He looked at himself in the mirror above the basin, eyes huge above thin cheeks and a lined neck, and made a face.

  In response to a quiet knock, he rushed to the door. ‘Welcome friend. Where’s the stuff?’

  ‘Here. Get one in, Ketterick, then we can talk.’

  The visitor sat down in the only chair, and picked up the Sunday Times which he read in a desultory way, flicking restlessly through the pages and looking uneasily at his watch. After ten minutes, Ketterick appeared from the bathroom, looking a stone heavier, smiling and with his hands under control.

  ‘OK now?’

  ‘Yes, bless you. Good stuff, and it’ll keep me going till tomorrow, then I’ll need to score. Trouble is, I couldn’t leave a forwarding address. I rang the chap who usually gets it for me, to see if he had a contact, and he told me the police were there this morning. Time I took a little holiday.’

  ‘I brought enough more of the stuff to make sure you didn’t need to score in London where you don’t know what you are buying. It’s a present. You got money?’

  ‘Yes, but it won’t last all that long, and then I’ll be looking for more.’ Ketterick was watching his visitor carefully but the man seemed unmoved by the implied threat.

  ‘Cross that bridge when we come to it. For the moment you need to go away.’

  Ketterick nodded and yawned hugely. ‘Right now I have to sleep a bit, I had a fucking awful night. I’ll go tomorrow. Where’s the rest of the stuff?’ He closed his eyes briefly, swaying slightly on his feet.

  The visitor took a paper bag out of the capacious pocket of his overcoat, and tipped out of it a small plastic bag, stuffing the paper bag back in his pocket. ‘Here you are. I guess that it’s three days’ supply.’

  ‘More.’ Ketterick was holding it lovingly, and his visitor rose to go. Ketterick stretched himself on the bed with a deep exhausted sigh, and turned on his side, the plastic bag clutched tightly in his right hand. The visitor watched him for a minute, expressionlessly, then went quietly out of the room, tucking the key into his pocket.

  At Edgware Road, McLeish had finished an inadequate and nasty lunch, and was talking to Detective Sergeant Green. He was noticing with interest that Green’s long blond locks had just been retouched at the roots, but what he was saying made sense, as usual. ‘Depends what he is on, John. It’s most likely heroin, because you can function quite well if you keep up the dose, and you told me he was employed, right? In a senior job? Well, could be costing him anything from £70 a day up. That’s £350 a week, or was when I went to school.’

  McLeish nodded, considering Francesca’s table which he had spread out in front of him. If this was the documentation for a racket, rather than commission, then three people were splitting £5,000 odd a month, and two of them were getting £2,000 plus. Any of them could just about fund a heroin habit. He considered Blackett and Hampton, and decided that neither of them was a likely candidate for drug addiction, though Blackett was probably an alcoholic.

  ‘How do you catch an addict, then, Doug?’

  The steady, shrewd country face that matched so oddly with the fashionable hair turned to him in surprise. ‘We don’t. We don’t even try — I assumed you knew that, John. For a start we want to get the bastards who are making fortunes out of supplying, and we don’t have time to waste on users unless we’ve got one who is willing to turn in his supplier. But the thing is, if we have a user who can afford his habit, we never see him. We only catch the ones who get involved with crime — either pushing the stuff or thieving — to pay for their habit. While your man has cash, we won’t find him.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’ McLeish sat in silence, accepting the unpalatable fact that he had been negligent in not following up the Alutex lead earlier, and that both luck and good police work would be needed to enable him to cover this mistake. If Ketterick had saved some cash it might be weeks before he was found, and by then Britex would be in receivership and staff probably scattered in other firms, so it would be that much more difficult to establish that Ketterick or his associate in Britex had ever been near London the night Fireman was killed. It all rested on a pretty delicate set of hypotheses which needed to be established quickly or not at all.

  ‘Win a few, lose a few,’ Green offered, watching him with sympathy, and McLeish nodded, unconsoled.

  ‘Should have got on to this one before, Doug. Thanks for your help.’

  Francesca, a mile away as the crow flew, had spread her entire wardrobe on the bed and decided that it was all far too serious and conventional for an evening at the Palais, and that she would very much rather not be going anyway. She stood uneasily, eyeing her clothes, and was suddenly visited by inspiration. She unpicked speedily the side seams of a long velvet skirt, originally bought as part of a defensive strategy for dealing with the ferocious draughts that whistled round the house of her husband’s father and his third wife, and chipped two feet off the bottom, converting it into a knee length skirt that split to the thigh whenever she moved. She added a tunic-type silk shirt and a heavy leather belt, long earrings and a lot of make up, and danced to the front door as the bell rang, feeling successful, cheerful, and disposed to take the evening as it came, including Peter Hampton if she felt like it.

  ‘Wow,’ he said, stepping back slightly. ‘You look marvellous.’ He hesitated on the doorstep, satisfactorily disconcerted, and she beamed at him.

  ‘You look nice, too. That’s a very good suit.’ She considered him, smiling, liking the look of h
is long legs and broad shoulders in the conventional dark grey.

  ‘Made for me by a little man in the backstreets of Doncaster.’

  ‘Who uses a very expensive Reid and Taylor cloth,’ Francesca observed, peering at it. ‘Henry Blackshaw has been teaching me that sort of thing,’ she explained, seeing him look disconcerted.

  ‘Aren’t you the clever one,’ he said drily, and Francesca, aware that she had been a bit over-intelligent, hastily offered him a drink, giving him the bottle to pour his own when he asked for whisky, and courteously enquiring after his flight.

  ‘That was OK. It landed a bit late, so I came straight here. Smashing house this is — did you live here with your husband?’

  ‘Briefly, but it was always my house. I bought it years ago with a legacy when property round here was cheap.’ Francesca spoke firmly, and blushed as Hampton looked openly amused.

  ‘Come up to the living-room,’ she offered hastily, and led the way, very conscious of her split skirt. She disposed herself on the sofa, and admired the cool with which Hampton took an armchair rather than sitting beside her. Watching his long fingers curl round the glass, she suddenly wanted him very much. He was watching her, too, and unhurriedly put his glass down and came over and knelt on the sofa beside her, sliding an arm behind her head as he kissed her. She kissed him back, opening her mouth against his, and felt him jerk the tunic blouse clear of her skirt at the back and then his hand on the skin of her back.

  The front door bell rang twice, sharply, and she pulled away. ‘Ignore it,’ Hampton suggested into her neck.

  ‘I can’t. It’s my brother, he has a key, the bell is only a signal. I’ll have to go.’ She scrambled to her feet, tucking her shirt in.

  ‘Frannie?’ Perry sounded absolutely confident of his welcome as he called from the hall below. ‘I just want my jacket, I left it in the livingroom sometime last week.’ Francesca gave Hampton a harassed look, and he got easily to his feet and picked up his glass, just as Perry clattered up the stairs.