Pain of Death

by Adam Creed

*

  Staffe catches up on his texts as he has a cup of tea with Jombaugh in Leadengate’s reception. One is from Jasmine Cash about Jadus, saying he’s got a formal warning from probation for a failed employer’s report. She says he has a week to find a job, otherwise his parole will be in breach. Staffe curses, thinks of the home Jasmine Cash has made for Millie and her dad. Good intentions amount to Jack Shit if you haven’t got a job and a house and a family. You need all three to get straight – and stay that way. He feels an idiot for thinking he might be able to help.

  Jombaugh takes a call of his own, nods across to Staffe with an upward jolt of the head.

  ‘Pennington?’ whispers Staffe.

  Jombaugh nods, making a theatrical glum face.

  Pennington isn’t wearing a jacket. A piece of A4 in front of him has a list of names and numbers on it, in his handwriting. On the face of it, it would appear that this DCI has spent at least some of the day tending to police work.

  ‘You can forget Sean Degg for a while, Staffe. Jesus Christ, how could you let him get away like that?’

  ‘I’m more interested in why he’d want to get away. But I’ll catch up with him soon.’

  ‘Not any time soon, you won’t.’

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘Bet your arse it has. Christ, this is getting nasty.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Just had a call from a DI Flint of South Liverpool CID. There’s another pregnant woman missing. You’re going up north, my man.’

  ‘My case is here. I need to talk to Phillip Ramone, and to all Kerry’s friends.’

  ‘Twenty-four weeks pregnant they reckon. It made the evening edition of their local rag.’

  ‘You think it’s related? How could it be?’

  ‘Half an hour ago, we got another letter from Breath of Life. They knew all about the woman. She’s called Zoe Bright.’

  ‘And what about the husband?’

  ‘Forget it, Staffe. He loves her to bits, apparently.’

  ‘Sounds familiar.’

  ‘She nearly died having their first baby. It didn’t survive.’

  ‘He loves her as much as Sean loved Kerry Degg?’

  ‘You make sure your team stays all over Lesley Crawford while you’re up there.’

  ‘There’s a couple of things I have to do first,’ says Staffe, thinking of Phillip Ramone.

  ‘There’s a train from Euston in an hour. They’ll be waiting for you at the other end.’

  ‘There’s a couple of things …’

  Pennington leans forward and in his softest voice says, ‘Please, Will. Just this once, be a good lad.’

  PART TWO

  Ten

  In no time, and with a rackful of reservations, Staffe is transported to Liverpool. The railway tracks have magicked him with their tittle and tattle, and along the way he spoke to Pulford about staying on Lesley Crawford’s case. Then he had called Josie, to tell her to follow up on Kerry’s list of friends.

  Now, the daylight is almost gone and the train jolts, slows. People press their faces to the windows. As the carriages draw towards Lime Street station, the tracks breathe in and the train is sucked along a narrow chasm in the sandstone bedrock. Anybody who has travelled into this Celtic city will know that its gates open like rock thighs, as if it were delivering you into a new world.

  And then it is dark.

  In the vaulted, glass-roofed station, he steps down, valise in hand, and looks for a uniformed welcome. There is none.

  A tall, beautiful woman approaches him. She has layered red hair, cut to her shoulders. She is, in fact, very tall. ‘Inspector Wagstaffe?’ she says.

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘You have to be able to spot your friends as well as your foes.’

  ‘You’re police?’

  She offers her hand. ‘How else would I know you were coming?’

  He takes her hand, finds a firm grip. She looks him in the eyes. Hers are the palest green.

  ‘I’m Flint,’ she says.

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Charming.’

  He expects her to smile, but gets the reverse and she spins on her heel, shows him her back and walks off at a fine clip.

  *

  Anthony Bright’s house was a model for modern living when Lord Salisbury gave the land up for artisans and clerks in the preamble to the First World War.

  Now, on a tree-lined street of immaculately coiffeured gardens and ringing birdsong, Staffe walks up a gingerbread path and has the front door opened for him by a bright-eyed constable who looks about twelve.

  In his back room, sitting in a modern Swedish chair, Anthony stares into his garden. Staffe has read all the case notes and the interview transcripts. He wants to like Anthony but all he gets is a scowl. Nonetheless, he introduces himself, pulls up a dining chair.

  ‘She’ll be back. There’ll be some explanation, but if you lot are here, she’ll never call. She’d hate the fuss. I should never of called.’

  ‘It’s a serious matter, Anthony. I’m from London and we have had an abduction similar to this down there. We need to know everything about Zoe; everyone she saw, ever since she was pregnant this second time.’

  Anthony stares at the trees at the bottom of his garden. Through the windows, you can’t see any other property.

  ‘Did she bring anybody new to the house in these last few weeks?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Anyone new in her phone or her address book?’ he says as much to Alicia Flint as to Anthony.

  ‘I would never pry,’ says Anthony.

  ‘We’re having her phone analysed,’ says Flint.

  ‘She didn’t take her phone?’ Staffe takes the address book from Alicia Flint and scans quickly, looking for new names – in bold ink or interposed between old names. Zoe Bright is clearly very orderly and all the names are alphabetical. In four cases, names have been squeezed in, between lines.

  ‘Is this a new book?’

  ‘She spent all night copying everything across.’

  ‘Where’s the old one?’

  Anthony walks, round-shouldered, to a small pine sideboard and hands Staffe a dog-eared notebook. In turn, he gives it to the constable, along with the new book. ‘We need a list of all names that are in the new book, but not the old one.’

  Alicia Flint hands Staffe a typed list of three names. ‘These are they,’ she says, smiling.

  ‘You said in your interview that Zoe likes to read,’ he says, looking around for bookshelves. ‘Where are her books?’

  ‘She takes them to a charity shop when she’s finished them. She only keeps ones that are on the go. They’re upstairs.’

  On the landing is a small bookcase: photo albums and an atlas below, half a dozen paperbacks above. In the front of each book is a stamp which says ‘The Curious Cat’. On it, the outline of a cat in a fireside chair, legs crossed, reading. He checks in the bedroom and even in the loo. ‘What was the last book she bought?’ he says, coming back into the sitting room.

  ‘Beloved.’

  ‘Toni Morrison?’ says Flint. Her eyes flit as if she thinks she might have missed a trick.

  ‘It’s not here. We’ll leave you in peace, Anthony,’ says Staffe.

  Anthony nods and on the way out Staffe thinks how peculiar, that a missing woman would take a novel with her but not her mobile phone.

  *

  Pulford watches Lesley Crawford leave her Southfields home. She looks furtively up and down the street of mid-sized, late-Victorian terraces with modest bays and front gardens the size of picnic blankets.

  Staffe had warned him not to take any risks, just to monitor who came and went, but he has been here, off and on, for the best part of two days and the boredom has got to him.

  He calls Staffe and curses as the screen of his phone tells him the call has been ignored. He gets out of the car and locks it up, loiters out of Crawford’s eyeline behind a tree, waiting for her to reach the corner and
then he catches up, going up onto Replingham Road towards the Tube.

  Pulford rummages in his pockets, pulls out his travel warrant and follows her across Wimbledon Park Road and into the station, which is like something from Betjeman’s England, red brick and with tall, mock-Jacobean chimney stacks.

  He picks up the evening edition of the News and gets into the same carriage, sits on the same side as her so he can monitor her reflection in the window from above his paper. He looks at her as she stares right ahead. She has an exotic face: a hook to her nose and dark eyes. He knows from the case bio notes that she was educated at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Blackburn, then studied Greats at Cambridge. She did some lecturing but abandoned her DPhil and worked in Papua New Guinea with the VSO before doing a PGCE. From what they can gather, she hasn’t had a full-time job in five years.

  At Embankment, she stands up and moves smoothly to the doors. She is the first to step down. The train is not crowded and he waits as long as he dare, feels a tingle around his heart and a slow fold in his belly as he follows her onto the platform. She carries a hessian eco Waitrose bag. Did she have it before? He thinks not. He is sure of it. He lets the gap between them extend. The carriage doors close and the train jolts.

  As it moves out of the station, Pulford tries to clock anyone who was in her locale. A middle-aged man and a small group of foreign kids. He tries to picture her coming out of her Southfields house again. Did she have a bag? When he turns around, she is gone.

  ‘Shit!’ he says, too loud, and checks to see if anyone has heard him, but he is alone. He quickly calculates what connection she might make and realises there is only the Bakerloo or the Northern Line. He walks as briskly as he thinks you can without looking like a nutter – or a copper.

  He chooses the Bakerloo, because he hates the Northern Line, and as he approaches the platforms, with steps down, dividing, he opts for north because there are more options. A train-gathered gust builds and the rattle of the train gets louder. He bowls onto the platform, which is mainly full of twenty-something folk. Again, he tries not to move quickly or look concerned and waits, not seeing Lesley Crawford anywhere.

  There is a final push. He steps on and the doors close behind him. He works a pocket of space. There is little room and although he is tall, in the two minutes it takes to reach Piccadilly Circus, he can’t spot her, despite his surreptitious looks and adjustments of stance. The doors open and he takes the opportunity to step out, to allow people off. Seeing nothing, Pulford steps back into the thinned carriage and the doors close behind him. The train jolts and stutters out of the station. As it goes, he scans the platform for signs of Lesley Crawford.

  There she is, with a straight back and a high head, turning into the tunnels that will take her above ground or, more probably, further along on her journey.

  Pulford curses and tries to calculate where Lesley Crawford is most likely to be going. Before he knows it, the train is slowing again as they enter Oxford Circus. He could chase to the opposite platform and get the next train back, but he knows there is no point, so he sits on a seat and lets the long ribbon of travellers wend past him, into their night. He looks at their shoes and their faces and wonders where they might be headed. He looks at their clothes and the bags they carry, decides to get back to Southfields to at least glean how long Lesley Crawford stays out for.

  Then he sees it. A hessian eco Waitrose bag. There must be thousands of them, but he can’t recall ever having seen one before tonight.

  When she left, was Lesley Crawford carrying hers? He doesn’t think so, but he is already up, following the man with the bag. He is young and lean. He walks quickly and climbs the moving escalator. The neon mayhem of Oxford Circus meets them. The lean man barely wavers as he strides out through the hordes of late shoppers. Pulford struggles to keep up, but then the man slows, goes into the Argyll.

  Pulford follows him in, carries straight on through, clocking, in a panelled and paned snug on the right, who the lean man is here to see.

  This is a pub for tourists, but there is an upstairs bar, which is where the man and his companion go, sipping from their pints as they climb out of sight, achieving a further degree of privacy.

  Ten minutes later, when the Rt Hon Vernon Short comes down and leaves the Argyll, he is alone, save for his hessian eco Waitrose bag.

  *

  Staffe sees he has a missed call from Jasmine Cash. He trousers the handset and gives his undivided attention to the conversation between Alicia Flint and the doctor with whom Zoe Bright was registered at the Waverley Park Medical Centre for Women. Doctor Fahy looks at her watch repeatedly and punctuates her speech by blowing out her cheeks. She is homely with freckles and bright blue eyes. ‘I’d love to be able to tell you exactly what we talked about, but we’re not at that stage. All I can do is confirm that Zoe had an appointment that day and she attended.’

  ‘This woman is undoubtedly in a situation which compromises her well-being,’ says Alicia Flint, for the umpteenth time.

  ‘Then get your court order.’

  ‘It’s coming.’

  Staffe says, ‘What proportion of your consultations are related to terminations? This is a generic question.’

  ‘A significant percentage.’

  ‘A hundred per cent?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Anthony didn’t accompany her?’

  ‘Like I said …’

  ‘I’m telling you, he didn’t attend. She was twenty-four weeks and you saw her about a termination. Fair to say, you set her up with a date for the deed just an hour or so before she went missing.’

  ‘That’s what you’re saying,’ says Doctor Fahy, blowing out her cheeks for the longest time, staring at her watch. ‘In fact, it would have been only our second consultation. And I shouldn’t even be telling you that.’

  ‘You do a difficult job and I’m sure there’s good achieved here in some ways. I don’t give a toss about that. I’m here to do my job.’

  ‘Then we’re peas in a pod, Inspector,’ says Doctor Fahy.

  ‘Not quite,’ says Alicia Flint. ‘The lives we save are cut and dried. We have to do what we can how we can. Are you a partner in this practice?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want it to be closed down, indefinitely.’

  ‘Of course not. I hope …’

  ‘You have had a patient abducted and a national organisation, vehemently opposed to what you practise, has claimed responsibility. I’m not sure we wouldn’t be derelict in our duty to the public if we allowed such a situation to persist – at least until we have found Zoe Bright.’

  Doctor Fahy sucks her cheeks in and stares at Alicia Flint. After a long while, she nods, looks at her watch. ‘I have an appointment which I simply can’t miss.’ She clears her desk into a drawer, save for one file. She logs off the computer, says, ‘I’m sorry I can’t be more help. Please show yourselves out.’

  All three of them look at Zoe Bright’s file, on the desk.

  When Doctor Fahy gets to the door, Alicia Flint says, ‘You should think about security. I could send an officer down, to take names and addresses of everyone entering, and log vehicle registrations, too.’

  ‘That’s very kind, but we started doing that ourselves as soon as we heard about Zoe. We are a professional operation, Inspector Flint, we just don’t have quite the same access to double standards as some. Thank God.’

  She closes the door and Flint says to Staffe, ‘We got there in the end.’

  Staffe is reading the first sheet of the file. ‘Christ,’ he says.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Zoe Bright signed up for a termination. It was going to be today. And Anthony was in the consultation with her.’ Staffe continues to read, sees Doctor Fahy’s handwritten notes ‘pre-scan required. Patient dates dubious.’

  Eleven

  Staffe and Alicia Flint have discussed what to do about Anthony Bright and, for the moment, DI Flint has won the argument. Given that t
he information they have procured is by no means admissible, they will bide their time to use his deceit against him.

  Now, they are in the ten-foot-square front room of Teresa and Michael Flanagan on Gladwys Street. Teresa and Michael are Zoe’s mother and father. This is Toxteth and dusk has gathered. The kids are playing football in the street, watched over by adults. The women are already in pyjamas, ferrying fish suppers from the Chinese, and the men are in Everton and Liverpool replica tops. Never far away is the searing siren of a pursuit car.

  Teresa Flanagan dips into her box of Bestco tissues as if they are a dish of peanuts, constantly wiping her eyes and blowing her nose. Michael Flanagan sits silently as Teresa bemoans her daughter’s disappearance. On the floor, all today’s papers are piled. Teresa has given up on her daughter, says, ‘I don’t know what happened to my girl. All she ever wanted was a family like her sisters. They lead proper lives, but she had to go off to that place and she never was the same again. I lost her. She was never the same again.’

  ‘What place?’ asks Flint.

  Teresa addresses Staffe, as she has done throughout, and Alicia Flint quietly fumes. ‘That university. None of us have ever gone and it done us no harm, so what made her think she was any better?’

  ‘You see her regularly,’ says Staffe. ‘Anthony said she came round once a week.’

  ‘Anthony, now there’s a lad. I thought the first time she brought him round he might sort her out. A lovely lad, sees his mum all the time. She’s in Old Swan and he goes every Sunday teatime to see her. But oh, no, I don’t know why he said that. We don’t see Zoe one month to the next.’

  ‘Teresa,’ says Michael Flanagan. ‘It’s not like that.’ He talks into his lap and stirs his mug of tea.

  ‘It is and you know it is. I’m fed up of giving that girl chances.’

  ‘Why would Anthony say she came round if she didn’t?’ asks Alicia Flint.

  ‘He wouldn’t lie, that lad,’ says Teresa, to Staffe.

  ‘You’re not proud, that Zoe is an educated woman?’ says Flint.

  ‘And I bet you don’t know that’s not her name. Changed it, she did. She was Anne-Marie and one Christmas, that first Christmas she came back, she said she was Zoe. Disowning us, that’s what she was playing at.’