Four Below

by Peter Helton

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you and your sister use the same dealers?’

  ‘Mostly.’

  ‘But not today?’

  ‘Look, I don’t know, do I?’ Carole became animated for the first time. ‘I wasn’t with her, okay? I come home and she’s dead. Is all I know. Junkies die. It happens. If it isn’t one thing that kills you, it’s another.’

  Fastening her seat belt in Sorbie’s car, Fairfield echoed Maar’s conclusion. ‘One thing or another. Let me have a look at the wraps again.’

  Sorbie passed them over inside the evidence bag.

  ‘Ever seen one that looked like that?’

  ‘One or two. Little food bags.’ Dealers didn’t normally bother spending money on bags. Wraps usually came in any old bits of plastic. ‘Posh. But I haven’t seen it that colour for years.’ For a long time now heroin on the street was Afghan stuff, yellow or brown.

  ‘Quicker we get it to the lab the better.’

  ‘Junkies,’ Sorbie complained as he drove off. ‘I can’t believe Denkhaus has us traipsing after dead junkies. Or even live ones.’ In Sorbie’s book, a dead junkie was a good junkie, one that was unlikely to cause more grief, commit more crime, suck more drugs into the city.

  Fairfield’s mood turned as bleak as the streets they travelled along. ‘Until we nail the source of the anthrax, we’ll be chasing every bloody junkie, dead or alive. And all points between.’

  ‘It’s useless,’ Sorbie insisted. ‘We’ll never find it that way.’ Fairfield knew that users never revealed the source of their supplies. To do so was suicide. Once you ratted on a dealer, you were never safe again, not at home, not on the street, not in prison, not in rehab. In Mexico, dealers were raiding rehabilitation centres, shooting everyone inside. To discourage the rest. It wasn’t quite that bad yet in Bristol. But for how much longer? Sorbie was doing nothing to lighten Fairfields’s mood. ‘Drop me back at my car, Jack, I’ll call it a day.’

  It had been snowing continuously, and the short drive home to her little maisonette in Cotham had taken twice as long as it should have done. Why was it that the British found it so impossible to cope with snow? In Sweden or Canada they had routinely several feet of the stuff and everything worked just fine, roads got cleared and gritted and people coped. Here, two inches of it fell and the headlines read ‘Commuter Misery as Big Freeze Grips British Isles’. Perhaps they were just more used to it in those countries. Her own street of large Victorian houses looked softened and seasonal, with every parked car and every tree hooded white. The path to her front door had been cleared and gritted by the couple in the upper maisonette; she was glad, since she was laden with bags of shopping she had picked up on the way. She would make sure she’d do her bit and sweep the path tomorrow.

  In the kitchen, she elbowed the radio on even before she had set down her carrier bags. With the cork pulled on her bottle of Australian wine, she studied the cooking instructions on the sleeve of her ready meal and turned on the oven. This had long become routine now. Who had the strength to cook after work? Cooking was what you watched people do on TV while your ready meal heated up. And if you liked what you saw on telly, you looked for it – or something vaguely similar – next time you were at the supermarket. Anyway, she did cook sometimes, pasta mainly, so there. It wasn’t that she was a useless cook; she used to cook quite a bit back in the early days, when there was someone to cook for. But hey. Supermarket’s finest lamb moussaka. Her mother would finally disown her if she ever found out.

  Junkies. Had they all become junkies of one form or another now, relying on their dealers to survive? A bottle of wine nearly every night was probably overdoing it too, but then sometimes she fell asleep before she had a chance to finish it. At least she didn’t drink at lunchtime, like some. She had smelled cider on Sorbie more than once, but he never admitted to more than a quick half. She might one day have to breathalyse him to find out just how much he put away each time he went out for lunch.

  When the timer went and she opened the oven door, the moussaka even smelled acceptable. With her first glass of wine poured and the food dished up in a fashion that bore little resemblance to the picture on the packet, she settled on the sofa in the sitting room. Balancing the plate on her lap, she reached for the TV remote, hoping to find some news item of people being pathetic in the snow. When she did, the phone rang. Typical.

  ‘Hello?’ It was a call from a mobile, and the connection was so bad she had to interrupt the man who was talking.

  ‘Look, I can’t hear a word you’re saying, it’s a really bad line. Hello?’ The call was interrupted and she hung up. How did they always know the precise moment when you were picking up your fork? She took a sip of wine and picked up her fork. The phone rang again. She answered it. This time the connection was only marginally clearer.

  ‘This better be good.’

  ‘I can’t promise that.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s me, Kats. It’s Paul. The guy you married?’

  Fairfield reached for her glass and drained it.

  There was never any quiet. Not real quiet. Who wanted to live in a city that never slept? Or a block of flats that never stopped reverberating with noise and anger? Mike wiped the condensation from the kitchen window, which looked directly on to the street. Snow. Perhaps that would muffle the sounds a little. More likely by tomorrow morning it would bring noisy kids on to the street. At least that would be a happy noise. Outside a van, grey or blue, hard to tell under the orange sodium lights, braked too abruptly on the settling snow and skidded to a halt opposite the house. It seemed no one was used to snow any more. He remembered his own childhood winters: there always seemed to be snow then, and everyone had wooden sleds shod with iron rails.

  The day it snowed, you got your sled out and sandpapered the rust off the rails, rubbed them with bacon rinds or a stub of candle and you were ready for it. Now all most kids had were flimsy bits of plastic or just bin liners to sit on.

  Was there a definite date when everything had turned cheap and tacky and flimsy, or had that all arrived gradually? Now he could see it everywhere. His counsellor had said he should avoid thinking about it. And all the other things. That they were just going to drive him back into a depressive state. That in the past he had used these thoughts as an excuse to start drinking again. As though it was that easy, that simple. Avoid the bad thoughts and stay sober. Three months in rehab hadn’t done it. They had decided he needed another three months. And afterwards he was not allowed to go back to his old life, his drinking buddies and failures. So now he was here, looking for a new life, new failures. It had all started well enough; the newness had been distracting. But he was still banned from driving and still hadn’t found a job. This tiny flat with its clammy walls took his breath away. It was small but cost a fortune to heat, and everything was always covered in condensation, the windows, the outside wall.

  He had to get out of here for a bit; at least outside he could stretch, breathe, move. Move carefully. It felt as though they had deliberately housed him in a block of flats encircled by pubs. He knew there were off-licences and pubs everywhere; you simply couldn’t avoid seeing them. What you could avoid was going inside, putting all your money on the bar and drinking until it was gone. You had to try not to think about it, stop imagining it. The warmth of it, the smells, the atmosphere, the instant feeling of relief, of coming home …

  The world was floating on a sea of alcohol. He just had to make sure his little boat didn’t spring a leak. Mike zipped up his jacket and pulled a woolly hat over his ears. At the kitchen table he put his ancient laptop on standby and unplugged his little camera from the charger. He hated it, ever since they had let him use a real digital camera on the photography course, but it would probably take years to save up for an SLR. And then the course had folded, of course. When the tutor suddenly quit, the community centre had cancelled the next one. Lack of funding. The cuts. He took good pictures, the tutor had said, and she hadn
’t just said it to humour him. She had picked them out for praise in front of the others. The others. They were all in the same boat, of course. They had all expected to see each other again, promised they’d see each other again when the next course started up, and then the letter came. Funding cuts … savings … in the current climate … regret … cancelled. He’d probably never see them again now. He had started saving for a real camera, in an empty honey jar, but kept having to raid it to charge the key for the electric. The camera he used came from a charity shop, but it did take pictures. He mustn’t indulge in self-pity. Get the best you can afford, the tutor had said, and work with what you’ve got.

  The wind was colder than he had expected. Snow was still falling, but more lightly now, whipped along the street by the icy wind. The van opposite the house hadn’t moved, still standing at a shallow angle by the side of the road. The driver sat huddled, motionless. Perhaps he was too scared to continue driving in these conditions. Mike set off, stomping his feet in the snow, enjoying the crunch it produced. He’d like to find an expanse of pristine snow to photograph, without footprints or tyre marks, something that suggested calmness or purity. He thought he knew where he might find something like it, but it was quite a hike from here.

  Traffic was light at this time of night. Many people had probably decided to stay at home in front of the telly. He stepped into the road to cross. Just then the van driver decided to move on. Mike slowed in the street to let him pass, but the van stopped right beside him with its side door sliding open. The man who jumped out drove his fist into Mike’s windpipe, then pushed him inside.

  Chapter Nine

  Evidence of dealing had been discovered at Deeming’s house but no significant amounts of drugs. Forensic analysis had thrown up a dizzying number of fingerprints, none of which looked promising. Some were of known drug-users, one or two of lowlifes who McLusky knew dealt small-time to finance other unsavoury habits. All of it was pond life that Deeming, who had been six foot tall and no slouch in dishing out violence, would hardly have been scared of. No matter, they still had to find them, pull them in, interview them.

  In the small, drab interview room, McLusky was sitting opposite one of them now, a creature by the name of Gareth Keep. Not a junkie, but a thief with a weed and alcohol habit and, as McLusky suspected, very few brain cells to spare for the toll that it was taking on them. He was twenty-six and still only managed to grow an unconvincing line of fluff above his upper lip, making him look like a teenager trying to look older. He was clad in a blue tracksuit with double white stripes and an imitation leather jacket that was patently too large for him. The hapless punter had been scooped up in a supermarket car park after he’d been seen shoplifting CDs. He was unperturbed at having been arrested. He had been pulled in by the police and then let go by the courts so many times that now it hardly registered. In court he had a good line in contrition and promises of reforming, and he knew that the most he could expect to be handed by the magistrate was a few hours’ community service, for which he rarely showed up anyway. When he did, he was usually stoned.

  McLusky had teamed up with DC French for this interview. As with the last lowlife they had pulled, he was happy to let her do most of the questioning. He was really there to take a sniff at the punters and pounce should he get the slightest whiff that the specimen in front of them might be involved.

  ‘No comment,’ was how Gareth answered most questions, watched over by his brief, who appeared equally bored by the occasion. Things got more animated when McLusky sprung the news on him of Deeming’s death.

  ‘Murder? Now you’re accusing me of murder? You’re mad.’

  ‘Your prints were found in Deeming’s hall. His blood was on the ground and on the wall. You were there.’

  ‘No comment.’

  The solicitor instantly protested about the unexpected turn of events and demanded to speak with his client alone. McLusky was glad. He felt his energy was being drained by the necessity and futility of spending time with these drifters. Gareth might quite conceivably one day break someone’s skull, stab someone in an argument or strangle his girlfriend, but McLusky found it hard to believe that he had snatched Deeming from his house, tied him up, put a bag over his head, driven him to Leigh Woods and there beaten him to death. Not unless he was taking some very strange drugs at the time.

  In the corridor, he handed Gareth Keep’s file to French. ‘He’s yours. Get all you can out of him about who else he saw at Deeming’s house, how often he used to go there et cetera. Oh yes, and charge him with theft for lifting the CDs, of course.’

  With a hardening heart, French watched DI McLusky walk off down the corridor. If ever she nursed doubts about being a police officer, it was at moments like this. She flicked the cover of the file with a fingernail. ‘No comment.’

  McLusky stuck his head in at the incident room. Dearlove sat at a computer, concentrating hard on reading the back of a crisp packet. No sign of Austin.

  ‘He’s just popped downstairs to dump some files,’ Dearlove told him through a mouthful of crisps.

  ‘When he gets back, tell him I’m in my office.’

  McLusky’s earlier plans had been interrupted; now he was going to set them in motion. His office was far too small to install an espresso machine, however compact. There was such a dearth of surfaces, there wouldn’t even be enough space to set one down. This morning he had smuggled in a tiny electric travel kettle, which he hid in the bottom compartment of his desk, connected by an extension lead. How the mighty had fallen, he thought, as he stirred whitener into his instant coffee. He knew that according to Sod’s Law, someone would knock on his door as soon as he lit a cigarette. Naturally this never worked when you wanted someone to turn up, so perhaps by wishing someone to knock on the door he could prevent it? A kind of reverse superstition. He opened the window for ventilation and reached for his pack of Extra Lights. The knock on the door was Austin’s.

  ‘I’ve been looking up and down the station for you,’ he complained.

  ‘Keep you fit.’ McLusky lit a cigarette.

  ‘Don’t for one moment think you can’t smell that outside, Liam, because you can.’

  ‘My predecessor smoked a lot. The smell never goes away.’

  ‘Aye, they’ll believe that.’

  ‘Did we get anything from the house-to-house around Deeming’s address? Is it too much to hope that someone saw a man being led away against his will? Possibly with a bloody bag on his head?’

  ‘I think it might be.’

  ‘Naturally. Every day the emergency lines are jammed with idiots calling about their pizzas being late or their budgie having hiccoughs, but no one in this town takes any notice of what happens to other people.’

  ‘People opposite saw a van, double-parked, about a month ago. It was double-parked and annoyed them, that’s how they remember.’

  ‘Did they see anyone associated with the van?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Of course not. A van. What kind of van? Camper van, delivery van?’

  ‘Just a van. Blue or grey.’

  ‘Blue or grey? It’ll turn out to be red, then. Great. Is that it? Well tell them an arrest will be imminent.’

  There was a knock on the door and Austin opened it. DC Dearlove had added tiny specks of potato crisp to the array of cat hair on his suit jacket. ‘Call from area control, sirs. Suspicious death, male body found by the river. I’ve got the details here.’ He handed the note to Austin.

  ‘Marvellous.’ McLusky nodded to Austin and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Okay. You drive.’

  Austin got stuck in traffic twice, which meant they were the last to arrive. On the Ashton to Pill cycle path, just north of the Avon Bridge, two inches of snow had accumulated, now trampled into a brown mulch by many cold feet. There were several bicycle tracks too, running close to the body. People had cycled along the river without giving the dead man under the snow blanket a second glance.

  ‘Just a lump under the sn
ow. It was probably the black nylon jacket,’ Austin speculated. ‘At least two people came past here on bicycles but probably thought it was bin liners full of rubbish dumped under the bushes. With all that snow on top of the body, it was hard to make out.’

  The PC standing guard at the river’s edge spoke up. ‘Just recently there’s been a lot of fly-tipping along here.’

  McLusky whisked round. ‘Yes, thank you, Constable, you can update us on the local rubbish problems later.’ He turned to Coulthart, who puffed loudly through his face mask as he examined the body. ‘Killed here or dumped here, Doctor?’

  ‘Deposition site. Killed elsewhere. And brutally so. The face is … well, you can see.’

  McLusky could see. The face was a bloodied, broken mess.

  ‘I’m sure I’d be able to tell you more if you cared to join me at the post-mortem, Detective Inspector.’ Coulthart tried to make it seductive, being well aware of McLusky’s aversion to post-mortem examinations.

  ‘Thanks, I’ll wait.’

  ‘You may well have to. These are busy times at the mortuary. Death rates rise rapidly in these weather conditions. How the human race ever survived the ice age is a miracle.’

  ‘We went south for the duration, I expect.’

  ‘And a good thing, too. That’s exactly what I have planned myself. Though regrettably not until after Christmas.’

  ‘What’s his age?’ From where McLusky was standing, and despite having looked closely at the man’s face, he found it impossible to tell.

  ‘Late fifties, I’d say, perhaps early sixties.’

  ‘No ID on him, of course? Wallet? Library card?’

  ‘I went through his clothing,’ said a SOCO waiting nearby. ‘No ID, no car keys or house keys. Some small change and a packet of mints.’