‘Yes.’ The single word hung in the air.
‘This is not easy for you.’
‘No.’
‘I have to know.’
‘Yes.’
She walked over to a desk on the corner, also glass-topped with a laptop on it. Down both sides were rows of black metallic drawers. She opened one, pulled out a photograph frame and brought it over. A young man with wavy fair hair and clear blue eyes smiled out of it. ‘He disappeared shortly before the 1994 ceasefire.’ She stood the photograph on the table, angled so that they could both see it. ‘I haven’t seen him since.’
‘What happened to him?’
Was there a hesitation before she spoke? ‘I don’t know.’ She lifted the photograph and examined it, stroking his hair with a finger. ‘As we grew up together I loved Martin very much.’
‘And then?’
‘We went our separate ways. I’d rather not speak further of him.’ She walked back to the sofa and slumped opposite him. ‘For God’s sake, it would not have been a smart career move to be known as the sister of Martin McCartney. As I said, I had reason.’ She took a long, slow breath, the force subsiding.
‘I understand,’ said Carne softly. He allowed the moment to pass. ‘Let’s return to Joseph. You said he and Martin were friends.’
‘They were like brothers.’
‘And continued to be?’
‘Yes. As far as I know.’
‘Did Joseph Kennedy give any further detail in his phone call of why he wanted to see you?’
Was she hesitating again, or trying to recall? He felt every image and noise beyond the few feet between them screened out. The only sounds were her precise, deliberately even breathing and the background hum of ventilation. The only smell was her.
‘He said something about it all being a trick. I can’t remember exactly.’
‘And this was just a day or two after you were appointed a minister and David Wallis’s body was found.’
‘Yes.’
‘Wallis also disappeared at around that time in 1994.’
‘Yes.’
‘You must have thought about that.’
‘Of course.’ She abruptly grabbed the photograph, jumped from her chair, and walked over to her desk. She returned and sat down, pushing her chair back from him. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t talk about this any more now.’
‘Please . . . forgive me. just one more thing. You mentioned a document in Joseph’s pocket.’ For the first time, he thought she showed a glimmer of fear. ‘What was it?’
‘I can’t tell you that yet.’
‘All right. But I ask you to tell me this. Would anyone else, anyone at all from your past, also know what that document implied?’
He realized his window of opportunity was closing. ‘What I’m getting at is whether any other person could have put it there to convey some sort of message to you.’
‘It’s possible. Now, no more.’
She wiped an eye, pushed her fingers through her hair and cast a politician’s smile. The spell was broken, the buzz of traffic audible again, the night city panorama now vast and in focus behind her small face. ‘So you, Chief Inspector . . .’
‘It’s Jon. Jonny to some.’
She smiled, this time meaning it. ‘I’ll start again. So you, Jon – I’ll stick to that for the moment – you have an unfair advantage over me. You get to read about me, I get to know nothing about you.’
‘I’m not interesting.’ He grinned ruefully. It was the first time he had broken into a full smile. The act of transformation was surprising. It confirmed not just that he was an attractive man – handsome, even – it also seemed to take years off him.
‘You’re interesting to me. I’m sure there are lots of things. Famous cases. Starring in court. Wife. Nice family.’
‘Not even that.’ The grin subsided.
‘Alone in the world, then?’ She had a sudden apparition of David. The same colouring, the same grin, even. She remembered those words: ‘a lonely orphan’. But David’s grin had tended never to disappear.
‘My wife died,’ he said bleakly.
‘I’m sorry, I was prying.’
‘It’s fine. She was Irish too – though the other side of the fence from you. Not that she gave a damn.’ He could not understand what possessed him – perhaps because her example gave him the confidence – but he took out his wallet and produced a tiny photograph of a rosy-cheeked, fair-haired woman.
‘Pretty,’ she said.
‘I met her over here. She was a trainee psychiatric nurse at the Maudsley. I was a young copper in south London. She was homesick so I followed her back.’ He paused. ‘That was one reason, anyway.’ He noticed the question in her eyes and chided himself for the slip. ‘She died seven years later. Ovarian cancer. It was aggressive.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Ovarian cancer. The memory of David’s description of his mother’s death flashed before her. Now just another lie.
‘You get over it. I wondered looking back if that was why we could never have children.’
‘I never had children either.’ Her remark cast them both into silence. She broke it sharply. ‘I’m surprised you stayed there.’
‘I like the hills.’ He hesitated, wanting to explain to this woman why to return was impossible but knowing it was too soon.
‘I like the city,’ she said. ‘Oh, hell, it’s nearly eleven and I have work to do.’
Carne realized his time was up. He had not talked even this much about himself for years; an incandescence flowing from this woman was unlocking him. He wanted to linger, to delay the solitary night. He gathered his coat and case.
‘Thank you, Jon. You have more to ask. I know that. But there’s time. First, I want to find out what happened to Joseph Kennedy. That’s in the here and now.’
‘And, er . . .’
‘Anne-Marie.’
‘Anne-Marie, I don’t want to frighten you but you were the last person to speak to Joseph Kennedy. You were the person who discovered his body. If I am to investigate his death properly, I’ll have to share that investigation with the local police. And it’s a habit of detectives to look upon people who discover bodies with suspicion.’
‘I’ve nothing to hide over the death of Joseph Kennedy,’ she replied sharply.
‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘You told me that you reported the discovery to your driver. Have you discussed this with anyone else? Anyone at all?’
She looked into his eyes and placed a hand on each of his shoulders. She gripped hard in a way that disturbed him. ‘I won’t tell you lies. But there are some things which I will tell you only when I choose to. In the same way that I trust you, you too must trust that I’m on your side.’
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘until we know precisely how Joseph Kennedy died, I urge you to take great care.’
‘I can look after myself,’ she replied. ‘And now I have my guardian angel, don’t I?’
Carne stepped out into the night, and set off down the river pathway. It was clear but not cold, yet he shivered, heavy with the responsibility she had placed on him. He felt afraid for her and an overpowering desire to give her the protection she wanted. Yet he had only scratched her surface and had no real understanding of what beat inside. He was the artist trying to paint an elusive, entrancing, energizing model, but seeing nothing.
He counted eleven floors up and saw a dim beam from a lamp casting a pale glow onto the expanse of glass. He imagined her sitting in the half-light alone. An elusive woman of contradictions. She was self-assured, confident, controlling at times. She seemed to need to live in the present; the past, like her birthplace, to be swept aside. She did not want to travel there. He must somehow prise the full story of that past out of her to help solve not just the disappearance and bullet in the head of David Wallis, but the death of Joseph Kennedy too. He shuddered at leading her on that journey.
Unless . . . unless she was leading him – the imagining he must kill.
It
was midnight. He headed on through Battersea Park – a couple of sprint cyclists doing late circuits passing him on the roadway to his right – finally arriving at Chelsea Bridge. He steeled himself for the walk to Sloane Square Underground station and the retreat to his budget hotel jail. He checked his phone – there was a message from Poots. ‘Any more clues re tiepin man? Billy.’ Carne texted back: ‘Need Amy here tomorrow. Another body.’
Bodies. A tramp was slumped across a park bench, telltale cans of cider scattered beneath. Briefly the moon illuminated him; Carne could smell the stains on his scuffed jacket and grease on his straggling hair. Wasted lives, reducing to universal black holes. Then he thought of her, alive and glowing, the small breasts showing in the blue blouse, the allure of the green eyes.
Stop fantasizing. She was a tough, successful career woman who, once upon a time, and in circumstances for which she was not responsible, had become unwittingly embroiled in some lethal game. Unless – the imagining was refusing to die – her eyes had been open all along.
From her window, Anne-Marie could see him by the river, disappearing into the shadows. The uncanniness of the resemblance pulsed within her. She wondered if memory was deceiving her – and David in middle age could only be imagined. Yet the clean-lined smoothness of youth would surely have turned into the attractive cragginess; the dark hair now cut short would, if allowed to grow, retain the curl tipping over the ear; the brown eyes would still have been twinkling at her. The voice – there lay the difference. David’s accent was posh – there was no other word for it – the policeman was not. She was no expert in the dialects of England but the burr was unmissable – most likely West Country. A provincial man with nothing grand in his background.
She had to believe she had captured him, that he would never renege on the trust he had promised. It was what the conversation had been about; everything else was trivial. If her judgement was wrong, she was making the third great error of her life.
She looked at the red box perched on the desk, forced herself towards it and sat down in the hard-backed chair, sufficiently uncomfortable to keep her alert. She hoiked the case onto her desk, engaged the lock and snapped open the lid. At the top were briefing notes for another conference on extradition and individual rights – once the subject of her undergraduate dissertation. She should be ticking with anticipation. Instead, she felt detached from it all; it was just talk. She put down the notes and stared out of the window. Her favourite, consoling sight – the city that had become her refuge, and her opportunity. Now it was beginning to feel like a city of lies.
Damn you, David whatever your name was! Damn you not just for what you did to me, but what you did to yourself! Did you mean to be a good man? Were you a good man? Doing what you thought was right, whatever the betrayals and the costs?
Again, Anne-Marie had a sense of going round in circles, of some disembodied narrative loop revolving around her, which she could not break out of, past and present circling in opposite directions on a fateful collision course. Perhaps that collision had to happen to allow her to free herself.
She felt an overpowering weariness. It shocked her – she never tired. She collected the papers scattered in front of her, patted them together and replaced them in the box. She closed the catches, reset the lock and let the case drop onto the floor with a dull thud. She rubbed her eyes, walked over to the window to lower the blinds, headed for the bedroom, stripped off her clothes, and collapsed onto her bed without even removing her make-up or brushing her teeth.
CHAPTER 23
Post-election, Thursday, 18 May
Amy Riordan ran her fingers over the dead man’s face and neck, raised his head, parted the long dark hair and gathered it towards the back of the neck. His full features were revealed: deeply cleaved forehead; sunken brown eyes; neglected, yellowed teeth, the colour of decades of nicotine; bristle on chin and cheek, the skin now drained bloodless and white. She hovered over him, apparently trying to summon some sort of judgement.
‘He must have been a good-looking man,’ she said. ‘Once upon a time.’ She pulled at the skin around his eyes, opening them wide, and then closed them again. ‘What age do we have for him?’
The local CID inspector flicked through a notebook. ‘Born 1969. Late forties.’
‘Ravaged body, ravaged life,’ said Amy.
‘Do we know anything about him after ’94?’ asked Carne.
‘We’ve made brief enquiries,’ replied the inspector, ‘but, till you came along, there didn’t seem any need for more. Man with a terminal illness, maybe came up to London to meet someone who stood him up, rope around the neck, jump from chair, QED. Neighbours didn’t see much of him, said he was a loner, a few sightings around the building sites, that’s it. Unless there are police records, there’d hardly be photos of him. No Facebook then.’
‘And the letter?’ asked Carne.
‘Short and simple. I’m dying, time to end it, don’t want to be a burden any more.’
‘Handwriting?’
‘Yes, we can look at that. Don’t know what there’ll be to go on. Maybe a signature at the surgery or something.’
Carne leant down towards the face. ‘So, my friend,’ he said, stroking any remaining wisps of hair off his forehead, ‘are you Joseph Kennedy? And why did you vanish without trace?’ He straightened his shoulders and back, and put an arm around Amy. ‘OK, did he hang himself? Or was he hanged?’
Using the thumbs and index fingers of both hands, she cupped the corpse’s neck. ‘The marks of the ligature on the neck should be the telltale. I understand he was found hanging on a thicker-than-average rope. This can confuse the picture. But there’s a reasonably clear single ring of bruising. See it?’ Carne leant over to inspect the neck: the ring seemed less clear-cut to him but he took Amy’s word for it. ‘That indicates he was probably alive when the rope strangled him. If he was dead beforehand, the mark would be less precise.’
‘So he died by hanging? Rather than being dead first, then strung up?’
‘I would say so, yes.’
‘Self-inflicted hanging?’
‘That’s a different matter. You have to create a scenario where the killer – or killers it would have to be in this case, I think – either persuade him to hang himself or, while he’s still alive, hang him themselves.’
‘Tranquillizing, anaesthetizing him?’
‘We’re into hypothesis here,’ replied Amy tartly.
‘OK, Amy,’ said Carne respectfully, ‘I’m hearing you. But, assuming our friend didn’t simply agree to a polite invitation to hang himself, it would require more than one killer.’
‘Yes.’
‘And drugging him?’
‘If they’d used chloroform, I’d expect to find signs of irritation on the skin around his mouth. Or there might be a needle mark. The problem is that he’s been lying here too long. If the original pathologist made the assumption of suicide, which would have been wholly rational given the other circumstance, he’d have had no reason to look further.’
‘I’m trying to imagine a doable scenario. They hold a gun to his head, handcuff him, or somehow restrain his arms and legs, hoist him, let him drop, then remove the restraints.’
‘Yes, all of that’s possible,’ agreed Amy, ‘though they would have to take care to avoid bruising. The point is that expert killers could find a way of making a killing look like a self-inflicted hanging. I can’t prove it from the body.’
‘If this was murder, it was expert. A professional job.’
‘Yes. So you’d need evidence that goes beyond the corpse. And a motive.’
‘Unless this poor bastard,’ reflected Carne, ‘really is a sad loner called Brian Fitzgerald who decided he didn’t want to die a ghastly, painful death and tried to end it.’ He paused and turned to Amy. ‘Billy’s checked at Castlereagh. There’s sod all in the file, no prints, no nothing.’
‘They never pinned anything on him, did they?’ affirmed Amy.
‘No. Wh
atever was once there, the cupboard is now bare.’
‘And he disappeared a year before the DNA database came in.’
‘Correct,’ agreed Carne. ‘There’s only one way to know for sure.’
She had said he could ring her private mobile, though texting would be better. To his surprise, her response was instant: she would clear the evening to visit the mortuary.
At 7.30 p.m. Anne-Marie was there. ‘My driver brought me,’ she said breathlessly. ‘He’s in the loop on this. I told you that, didn’t I?’ She had changed from the controlled figure of the previous evening. Now Carne saw a coiled spring, agitated, wound up by the pressures of being on political parade throughout the day.
‘Would you like a moment to relax?’ he asked.
‘No, let’s get on with it.’ She engaged him for only the briefest moment. Carne wondered what precisely Joseph Kennedy meant to her. He led her into the white hum and chemical odours of the postmortem suite where Amy was waiting for them. She pressed a button to open a refrigerated compartment. The gleaming metal slab on which Joseph’s body lay slid out. Carne noted that it had been tidied after the afternoon examination and had the more benign appearance of a man in repose.
Anne-Marie stood gazing at it, expressionless. Carne had feared that she would flinch, or be repelled by it. Instead she remained motionless and silent. The only sounds were the heavy ticking of a dated, crude wall clock, and the irregular hum of south London’s evening traffic.
She bent down over the head and kissed it.
‘Yes, that’s Joseph.’
‘Thank you,’ said Carne softly. ‘I appreciate you doing this.’ The warmth of his tone attracted a look from Amy.
‘Ms Gallagher,’ said Amy, ‘it would be of great assistance if you were able to point to any identifying marks.’
Anne-Marie froze for a few seconds, lost in memory, then addressed Amy with a wary roughness. ‘Look on the inside of his upper left leg. High. Just below the testicle. There’s a birthmark. Shape of a half-moon.’
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