by Tony Parsons
‘I was a nurse,’ she said.
A roar came up from the street. I went to the window and stood by Edie’s side. As we looked down, a crowd of protestors surrounded a large white coach. A bottle bounced off the massive windscreen. A brick shattered it. I heard a cheer that chilled my blood. It was the sound of a mob that had just got its first scent of blood.
‘Christ. Where did this lot come from?’
‘There’s a march in support of refugees from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square,’ Edie said. ‘Some of them must have gone for a wander. I don’t see any coppers down there.’
‘There are only two of them,’ I said.
We headed for the lifts, hit the call button a few times and then decided to take the stairs. They were full of our people running down to the street. Uniformed and plain clothes, all floors and all ranks.
Some of them had already made it out of the double glass doors that mark the entrance to West End Central but they had not got much further because the protestors were everywhere, swarming around the waiting coach and all over the nine stone steps that lead from our front door to the pavement. The steps are divided by a metal railing and as the crowd surged for the coach it buckled and collapsed, taking police and protestors down with it.
And then I saw him.
Troy was forcing his way up the steps, his illustrated features twisted with something like pleasure, steadily elbowing his way through the mob as if he planned to enter West End Central.
But that wasn’t his target.
He had seen the two uniformed officers go down among those that fell with the metal railing.
A gap suddenly appeared in the crowd, one of those inexplicable gaps that are made for extreme violence, to give it the room it needs, and I saw the young black copper on his knees, holding a gash on his forehead, uncertain of where he was or what had happened.
And I was hammering against the glass doors of West End Central, pushing against the screaming tide of humanity that pressed up against them, preventing me from going anywhere, leaving me helpless to watch the vicious kick to the face that put the young copper on his back.
And then Troy was standing above him, the gap in the crowd getting bigger, so that Troy could take a step forward, his tattooed face seething with a pious fury and his boot stamping on the young policeman’s face, rising and falling, again and again, the hate without end.
25
I watched from one of the loft’s giant windows as Mrs Murphy came back from walking Stan and Dasher.
It wasn’t easy.
Freed from the role he had trained so long and so hard for, Dasher had good-naturedly decided to do his own thing. And water was his thing; the filthier the better. The muddy puddles that surrounded Smithfield meat market were his favourite habitat and I watched as he eased his hefty two-year-old golden body into a muddy puddle as if it was a Jacuzzi. As Mrs Murphy did her best to persuade him to get out, the Labrador-Retriever grinned at her, his pink tongue lolling, and rolled around, just to make sure he was completely mucky.
Stan had the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel’s allergy to water. He craved human contact as much as Dasher craved a muddy Jacuzzi. So while Mrs Murphy did her best to persuade Dasher to rise from the dirty water, Stan stood on his hind legs, scrabbling at her coat, bug eyes gleaming as he demanded her full and undivided attention. It was the dog walk from hell.
Dasher finally emerged from the puddle and began to furiously shake off the excess water as both Mrs Murphy and Stan recoiled with disgust. They had almost made it to our door when Stan spotted a pristine poodle on the far side of Charterhouse Street and attempted to throw himself into the oncoming traffic so that he could find true love, or at least have a sniff of it.
Mrs Murphy reeled him in, breathless with the trauma of it all.
As she struggled into our building with the wayward dogs under her feet, my face was hot with shame.
Every lone parent needs a network of support to help raise their child and Mrs Murphy was my network of one.
On too many nights, it was Mrs Murphy and not me who made sure that Scout was fed, read and put to bed. On too many mornings, it was Mrs Murphy who walked Scout to school. I could not imagine our lives without her hard work and kindness.
I knew she would do anything for our little family.
But two dogs were too much.
I walked Stan and Dasher to Smithfield ABC and let them off lead.
Stan made a beeline for Fred, a lifetime dog lover, knowing he was assured of a warm welcome. Dasher sniffed around the gym with shy good humour, a gleam in his eye and that irresistible Lab grin on his face.
Nesha was wiping down the weight machines. He held out the back of his hand and Dasher gave him a sniff, and then another. Nesha whispered to him in Serbian. Dasher acted as if he understood every word.
‘Do you like dogs, Nesha?’ I asked him.
‘My grandfather had dogs to guard his cattle,’ he said.
I thought about that for a bit as he scratched Dasher behind the ears. The kid had a reserve with the dog that I liked, as if he understood that the canine sense of decorum is at least as refined as any human’s.
‘I need someone to walk the dogs,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay.’
‘That’s me,’ he said.
Fred and I went out to the street to see the boy walk off with Stan and Dasher.
The big yellow dog and the small red dog trotted contentedly by his side as Nesha stared down at them, not talking too much because it is not necessary to talk to dogs when they are walking in their world of scent, but watching them carefully, walking with a loose lead, murmuring a few words when they stopped for a traffic light.
‘How’s he doing?’ I asked Fred.
My trainer flashed his pirate’s grin.
‘Nesha’s at that awkward age when you’re not sure of the way forward,’ said Fred. ‘When you’re lost and wondering what you can do that the world might want.’ He gestured at the figures of the boy and dogs. ‘Maybe this is it,’ Fred said. ‘Maybe this is the thing he can do.’
We watched them until they were out of sight.
Then we went back inside Smithfield ABC, put on our gloves and spent the next hour hitting the pads, the speedball, the heavy bag, the upper-cut bag and each other.
Seven days had gone by since the riot. It was all quiet on Savile Row now. The famous old street was empty apart from a young blonde woman waiting on the nine stone steps of West End Central. She had a depleted beauty that made you think that good looks are a finite resource that can get used up just like anything else. It took me a moment to recognise her from the Champagne Room. It took me another moment to realise that she was waiting for me.
‘Bianca,’ I said.
She smiled at me as if this was all a beautiful coincidence.
‘Hello, Max. Do you have time for a coffee?’
We walked across to the Bar Italia and she told me she would have what I was having. I ordered two triple espressos.
I thought she wanted to tell me about the night the Champagne Room burned to the ground with Steve Warboys inside it. But that wasn’t what Bianca wanted.
‘It’s so good to see you,’ she said.
I nodded. ‘Were you at work the night the bar burned down?’
‘Night off,’ she said.
I stared at her, wondering if I believed her.
‘Night off?’
‘Horrible,’ she said, shuddering. ‘I’m at a bar in Ilford now.’ She made Ilford sound as exotic as the Serengeti. ‘But the manager is a pig.’
I shook my head. I still didn’t understand. Then her fingertips reached out and touched my face.
And finally I understood.
I was not flattered.
I felt like a mark, like another man who walked into another bar where the girls get paid to make you feel like a bigger man than you really are.
‘Frumos,’ she sighed. ‘You know that word in Romanian? Frumos, Max? It means handsome.’
> I downed my triple espresso in one shot.
‘I know another word in Romanian,’ I said. ‘Rahat. You know that word, Bianca?’
She chuckled good-naturedly.
‘Rahat means bullshit. Very funny! But it’s not bullshit, Max. You’re very frumos.’ Her face grew serious. ‘I wanted to see you because I’m not going back there to Ilford. They are not English gentlemen in Ilford.’
‘I thought you might want to tell me something I don’t already know, Bianca. Steve Warboys died when the Champagne Room was torched. Whoever killed him is still walking the street. We believe they may be the people who brought in that lorryload of dead girls.’
‘I know, Max.’ She ran her fingers through wispy yellow hair that had been dyed cheaply too many times. There was a touch of the drama queen about Bianca. ‘I know these things but I want to forget them. Fires and dead women.’
She touched my hand. I pulled it away. She looked hurt.
‘But what did the other girls say about the fire? You must have talked. Did you hear anything? Steve Warboys had done time for burning down his own places for insurance money. Did you hear anything about that? That Warboys might have started the fire?’
‘I heard nothing,’ she said.
‘Did you ever see a man at the Champagne Room whose face was covered with tattoos?’
I watched her mouth tighten with what looked like fear.
‘I don’t mean a black teardrop under one eye,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean a dolphin on his neck. This guy – his name is Troy – has tattoos over every inch of skin on his face. Did you ever see him?’
She said nothing.
‘You would know him if you saw him,’ I said. ‘It’s kind of hard to mistake Troy for someone else.’
‘Once,’ she said. ‘One night I saw such a man. Before you came for the first time. The other girls told me to stay away from him. Because he likes to hurt people. It gives him pleasure, they said.’
‘He talked to Warboys?’
She shrugged. ‘They were in the VIP room. I stayed away from them. And then he was gone. He just disappeared.’
No, I thought.
Someone who does that to their face can never disappear.
After the riot in Savile Row, and the assault on the young uniformed officer, Troy’s description was on every police Most Wanted list in the land.
How the hell do you hide an ugly mug like that?
By running off to Dunkirk, I thought.
And crawling back under your rock.
Bianca was smiling at me now, lowering her chin as she shyly peered up at me.
‘I thought about you so much,’ she said.
She placed her hand on my face and now I was embarrassed. They know me in the Bar Italia. I gently took her hand away.
‘Bianca,’ I said. ‘If you’ve got nothing to tell me then what the hell are you doing here?’
‘I want to work for you,’ she said. ‘I can do anything for you, Max. Clean. Cook.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Take care of you.’
I felt a stab of anger.
‘I don’t need you to do anything for me,’ I said.
She looked crushed.
‘But … you told me to come and see you.’
‘I told you to come and see me if you had any information.’
‘You told me to come and see you if you could help.’
Is that what I told her? Maybe it was.
‘You don’t need me,’ she said.
I made my voice go hard.
‘That’s right, Bianca. I don’t need you.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘Men say things they don’t really mean all the time. I understand.’
My phone was vibrating with new messages. It was time to go.
‘Aren’t you going to finish your coffee?’ I said.
‘I don’t like coffee,’ she said.
We stood together for a moment outside the Bar Italia and I could feel her disappointment. Had I really given her the impression that I was interested in her as something more than an informant? All I had done was show her some respect and kindness in a place where there was none.
And perhaps that was enough.
‘You have somebody else,’ she said.
‘I have an Irish lady who lives nearby who looks after my daughter, my dog and my home.’
I didn’t even know why I was telling her this stuff. Somehow I felt I owed it to her.
‘That’s not what I mean. You know what I mean. You have somebody else.’
I laughed at the idea. But she wasn’t laughing. She smiled sadly and I felt a flood of sympathy for her. She was trying to be a decent woman in a universe that was only interested in her when she was wearing a thong.
‘Where will you go, Bianca?’
‘Not Ilford!’
I held out my hand and she shook it, and that was when I saw the livid red marks on her wrists. Now she tried to take her hands away from me. But I would not let her.
‘Are they cigarette burns, Bianca? Who did this to you?’
She pulled her hand away, shaking her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No more white knights. No more pretending you will save me.’
‘Bianca—’
‘No.’
She turned up her collar and began walking north towards Soho Square. Already she looked like someone I had never met in my life. But then I had never seen her in daylight before.
I knew immediately.
I knew because MIR-1 was crowded with officers from every department in West End Central and they all had that look on their face.
It could have been me.
Here was the reminder of the knowledge that every police officer lives with, the terrible knowledge we do our best to ignore – the awareness that you might not actually be going home at the end of your shift, but to a hospital bed or a stainless steel slab in the morgue.
So I knew, and I felt that knowledge as a physical knot of grief and rage inside me, as real as a tumour, and it was in my gut and growing as I pushed my way into MIR-1, pushing too hard so that some of them looked up angrily and then looked away quickly when they saw it was me.
And I knew because I saw that DCS Elizabeth Swire was there, the Chief Super from New Scotland Yard, that this was big enough and bad enough for her to clear her schedule and come over from Broadway to Savile Row, and she was going to say something because somebody always has to say a few words when one of us is killed.
But I knew already, I didn’t need anyone’s meaningful words, I knew even before I got to the workstation where Edie Wren covered her face in her hands and I touched her red hair at the back of her neck and she looked at me and shook her head, and I knew long before the woman standing next to her, DCI Pat Whitestone, looked at me dry-eyed and impassive, her voice far calmer than I believed it had any right to be.
I knew everything already but she said the words anyway.
‘We lost Billy,’ DCI Whitestone said.
26
You could smell the sea.
I stood in the fast lane of the empty motorway and inhaled deeply, tasting the salty tang of it, sensing the wind on the open waves, feeling the sea but not seeing it or hearing it. The only sounds were the DO NOT CROSS tape flapping in the wind where Kent police had shut the road and the quiet voices of the CSIs as they worked around the lorry on the hard shoulder.
But the air was different here. I closed my eyes, breathing in, and I wondered if Billy Greene had smelled the closeness of the sea before they killed him.
A burly, white-haired sergeant from the Port of Dover Police had been given the job of briefing me. I was aware how hard it was for him.
‘According to port records, TDC William Greene arrived in Dover on the ferry from Dunkirk, cleared customs just after 10 a.m. and must have been forced to stop before he got far on the motorway.’ He hesitated. ‘Were you close?’
I didn’t know what to say. ‘I feel like I watched him grow up.’
‘
So he was a friend?’
I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said, my throat closing on the words, my eyes suddenly blurring with tears. ‘Billy Greene was my friend.’
‘Your friend put up quite a fight. He fought them all the way. But there must have been multiple assailants. And they knew he was coming.’
‘How did you know to call West End Central? He wasn’t carrying any ID on him.’
‘Didn’t you know? He has four numbers tattooed on his chest. Just above his heart.’ The sergeant tapped his chest. ‘Four plain, simple numbers. Nothing else.’
I almost smiled. ‘His warrant number,’ I said.
The sergeant nodded.
‘Those four numbers wouldn’t make any sense to most people,’ he said. ‘Unless you knew what a Metropolitan Police warrant number looks like. That was the only way we knew he was one of us.’
‘Somebody else knew without ever seeing his warrant number,’ I said.
I looked across at the lorry. The back doors were open and I could see the blaze of dazzling lights that make every crime scene look like a low-budget film set. As I watched, a body bag was eased out of the back doors, and the tenderness and care of the paramedics who had never known Billy Greene clawed at my heart.
‘What was he like?’ the sergeant said.
I remembered Billy Greene as a young uniformed officer, overwhelmed at the sight of his first murder victim. And I remembered him overcoming his fears, and his natural-born mildness of manner, and I remembered Billy putting himself in harm’s way for total strangers. I remembered the scars on his hands.
I coughed, clearing my throat.
‘He was all right,’ I said. ‘He was a good lad.’
I saw a car blazing blues-and-twos pull up at the perimeter. Pat Whitestone and Edie Wren got out. Edie held up a hand in salute but I looked away.
‘I want to see him,’ I told the sergeant.
He stared at me. This was not my investigation. I was not Billy’s next of kin. The Port of Dover sergeant had every right to tell me to go away.
‘Of course,’ he said.
We walked towards the lorry, towards the convoy of squad cars that surrounded it with their almost festive blue lights, towards the body bag resting by the side of the road.