by Adam Creed
‘A fella? Nah.’
‘A woman, then. Or women?’
Petal shakes her head.
‘If she’s a friend of yours, you should tell me if Zoe said anything unusual. If she was planning a change.’
‘She can’t change. She’s got a baby coming, hasn’t she?’ Petal says this with a disapproving gurn of her face. ‘Look, I hope she’s OK, I really do. She’s a good woman, an intelligent woman, but I’ve nothing to say about that girl.’
*
Pulford says to Josie, ‘I could go in on my own, you know.’
‘You think it’s too risqué for me, David?’ She gives him a knowing, sidelong glance and looks up at the Rendezvous. ‘You should know better than that.’ A distant memory wafts through the unilluminated glass doors. Tonight, the curious will queue beneath the pink and blue neon, waiting for their fix of Phillip Ramone’s taste of old Soho. He was here before they cleaned it up. And he’s still here.
Pulford raps on the glass and they wait.
Josie came here with a hen party, years and years ago, and then just a couple of years since, on a weird date. She should have known better. The Rendezvous is no place for a second date.
Nobody comes and Pulford raps again.
The bloke who brought her here was a doctor, for crying out loud, and he had tried to show her the middle toilet: one for girls, one for boys, and the middle one for the unsure or inquisitive. Doctor Finney had certainly possessed an enquiring mind.
Inside, the light flickers on and a big man comes. He walks slowly, wide-gaited, as if he has a problem ‘down there’. He mouths something through the glass and his face is angry. He has black stubble all over his head and a low hairline. Pulford takes out his warrant card and holds it to the glass. The big man talks into his lapel, squints at the warrant card as he speaks.
He unlocks the door, and as he heaves it open, he breathes heavily, smells of garlic. ‘What you want?’
‘Mr Ramone.’
‘What you want?’
‘It’s about a woman called Kerry Degg.’
The man turns his back which pushes out against his chalk-stripe jacket. He has haunches like a bull and a small waist. He talks into his lapel again, turns and says, ‘You lucky.’
They follow the man in, through the lobby with the ticket office on the right and the cloakroom on the left. The place smells of too many humans and bleach. However, when they make their way past the three toilets and round along the raised dining area opposite the stage, the smell evolves into a blend of booze and greasepaint and cologne. The lights are dim, but you can almost hear the echo-garble of good times: a bodiced woman, or man, in a spotlight, crooning, seducing the willing.
Phillip Ramone is in an office off the first floor, up a winding stairway and past a raised mezzanine with six small tables, tight up against a gold-speckled balustrade which overlooks the stage.
The proprietor – and this is only one of six businesses he runs in this parish – is waif thin and has his legs crossed like a forties Hollywood dame, talks with a cigarette drooping from his lips, which appear to have a tattooed outline, so that they can be distinguished from the rest of his grey face. He has a pencil moustache which Josie thinks must be to draw his gender. His hair is silvery thin and back-combed into a candy fluff that almost covers his skull. The light is low and his voice disarmingly so. The big man sits down next to him.
‘You offered Kerry Degg a residency,’ says Josie. Ramone has a standard lamp on behind him and she has to squint. Plumes of smoke curl around him.
‘Kerry? You mean Lori. Lori Dos Passos.’
‘That’s her stage name,’ says Pulford.
‘And you have come to that stage. This is her world.’
‘Was.’
‘Yes, I heard. A tragedy.’
‘When did you last see her, Mr Ramone?’ asks Josie.
Ramone shifts, square to Pulford. He might have taken a shine to the tall young policeman. ‘I thought I had done something to upset her. Either that or her idiot husband had her shipped away onto a cruise. Have the child at sea, perhaps. The shame of it.’ He laughs, unconvincingly, at his own joke.
Josie says, ‘Would you say Kerry was upset at the pregnancy?’
Ramone leans forward, presses a button on his telephone. ‘Not upset. Pissed off, more like. Her career – her blooming life – was about to take off. She was going to get rid, that’s for sure.’
‘And you encouraged her?’
‘Me? I love children.’ He laughs. ‘It was really of no consequence to me.’
‘But what about the residency?’
‘We have a very mixed clientele, but they’re decent people. Nobody would have objected to a pregnancy – except maybe the last month or so. That would have been her pigeon.’ He laughs again, louder, lights another cigarette.
An elderly woman appears through the door, stands beside Ramone and reads from a diary, as if it were sacred text. ‘Miss Dos Passos was last here, officially, in December. The twenty-eighth. But if I recall, she did come to the Hoot-a-Fanny.’
‘Of course,’ says Ramone. ‘New Year’s Eve. Oh my, that is some time ago. Has she been gone so long?’
‘You replaced her residency?’ says Josie.
‘I have a public, miss.’
‘Have you seen her husband since then?’ says Pulford.
‘An irascible little scrote.’
Pulford smiles at Ramone. ‘I wouldn’t have put her with him. Still, it was Sean’s offspring this time, apparently.’
‘You surprise me.’
‘He calls himself a curator.’
‘He’s nothing more than a pimp.’
‘A pimp with connections. Tell us about Sean’s connections,’ says Josie.
‘What do you mean?’ Ramone regards his cigarette, takes a deep drag, as if it was his last, and stubs it out. He smiles at Pulford. ‘I don’t know his connections. I doubt you’ll find anybody does. If I were you, young man, I would let that sleeping dog be. Now, if you wish to talk further, you can arrange an appointment with June here, but I must tell you I have little to add.’
Josie says, ‘We know for a fact that someone looked out for Sean.’
Ramone smiles at her. ‘I liked Kerry and I’m sad she’s gone, but I don’t make the world we’re up against. I have to try to survive it.’
‘And we are only trying to make it easier to survive. We’re not on opposite sides, Mr Ramone. Are we?’
He smiles at Pulford and pulls two tickets from his desk, hands them to the detective sergeant. ‘These are good for any night. Come along. I have nothing to hide, but I am a terribly busy man. Terribly.’
Thirteen
Staffe climbs up to Alicia Flint’s flat. When he gets to the second floor, her place is open. From the door, he watches Alicia hold her boy tight, his head nestled into the shallow of her collarbone. With her free hand, she takes his meal from the microwave. ‘You hungry, young man?’ she says to her boy, Ethan.
The flat is two-storey, but the whole of this floor is open-plan. Three large windows look out onto Princes Park. Every now and then, Alicia checks her watch whilst she feeds young Ethan. Staffe reckons he is eight months or so. He can’t walk, can’t talk. Staffe wants to ask what happened to dad, but doesn’t. Ethan pushes the food from his mouth with his tongue.
‘You enjoying our fine city?’ she asks Staffe, looking at Ethan.
‘I like it. It’s more a big village – after London. I even went to a second-hand bookshop yesterday. The Curious Cat.’
‘Lucky to have time to read.’
‘It’s where Zoe Bright got her books.’
‘How d’you know that?’ Alicia looks up at him, accusingly.
‘I wonder if you could check up on someone called Petal Broome. She runs the shop. Be nice to have a carrot to dangle.’
‘Or a stick. Petal’s holding out on you, is she?’
Staffe goes to the windows, looks out across the park. The sky is big
here and gulls squawk. He wonders where Zoe Bright might be, and is she reading her Beloved, her baby inside her?
The entryphone buzzer goes and Alicia lets them in without talking, and says, ‘It’s odd, chasing down Anthony Bright and the Flanagans and having this political angle, too, especially when you’ve practically got a confession from that Crawford bitch.’
‘We can’t touch her,’ says Staffe. ‘And the politicians are only people, too. The same urges and regrets and broken homes.’ He stops himself. He and Alicia look at each other, and he wonders how well he will come to know her.
Alicia’s mother comes in and seems startled to see Staffe. She raises her eyebrows and Alicia says, ‘Don’t start, Mum.’ She hands Ethan across and whispers something to her mother, which makes them both laugh.
As they make their way down, Alicia bemoans the fact that they can’t haul Lesley Crawford in and give her the third degree.
Staffe thinks twice, says, ‘Don’t you have mixed feelings? You’re a mother. A part of you …’
‘No. Absolutely not. We work the law, don’t we? There’s nothing but violation going on here.’
‘But if we were to find Zoe Bright now. Right now …’
‘That’s what we have to do. It’s all we have to do.’
‘I know. But I’m not a mother.’
‘You ever get close?’ laughs Alicia, popping the locks to her car.
He watches her get into the car, thinks he might enjoy spending the day with her. As he gets in, he says, ‘Let’s think politics, then.’
‘Ahaa. You’re on my wavelength, Inspector. Let me introduce you to a friend of mine.’ She pulses the accelerator, indicates, looks over her shoulder and tears out into the road, cutting up a cab and keeping it in second all the way to five thousand revs.
*
It takes them six minutes to get from Alicia’s flat to Declan Hartson’s office in the centre of town. They park up on Water Street and Staffe looks up at the civic glory of Liverpool’s central business district, its aspic wealth.
They are shown straight to Hartson’s office, where the councillor sits behind a six-foot partner’s desk. He doesn’t get up. Staffe can tell the time by looking at the dial on the Liver Building through the window behind the diminutive, cheeky chap. Staffe recognises him, vaguely, and Hartson must clock this.
‘We had our moment in the sun, back in the eighties. Didn’t we, ’Leash?’
‘Speak for yourself,’ says Alicia Flint. ‘I was a child.’
‘She believed, too. And then she joined the police. A great loss.’
Alicia Flint helps herself to a glass of water and takes a seat. ‘Do you have that list, Declan?’
He hands her a sheet of paper and Flint puts on her glasses, reads, turns over the paper. Meanwhile, Staffe gets the feeling that the cut of his jib isn’t to Hartson’s liking. If he recalls correctly, Hartson was once an MP, involved with the far left. He has a slender recollection of scandal. ‘Nice office,’ he says.
‘Bourgeois spoils. I’d rather the money went to those who need it, but what can I do? We rage and we rage but the machine just gets stronger. See anything you like, ’Leash?’
Flint hands the list to Staffe, says, ‘This is every political group with an official presence on Merseyside.’
‘No Breath of Life?’
‘There’s plenty of right-to-life organisations here – as you’d expect. We’re Dublin’s eastern suburb, so some say. The Church isn’t what it was, but even so.’
‘Did you ever come across Vernon Short when you were in Westminster?’ says Staffe.
‘We overlapped. He loved it. Always in this bar or that, supping on the cheap.’
‘He’s having his time in the sun.’
‘He’s a bastard. Doesn’t believe in anything apart from himself. I don’t know who put him up to that bill of his.’
‘Put him up to it?’ asks Staffe. ‘His own party’s against it. Isn’t he just being bloody-minded – a final throe?’
‘He’s his father’s son. We have to do better than our fathers, don’t we? I’d say he was trying to gain some leverage with the PM or the Home Secretary, but that would take balls and Vernon isn’t overly endowed in that department. He’ll be acting from fear, if I know him.’
‘Fear?’
‘Or cash, of course. That’s a common cause.’
‘Does he have hidden depths?’
‘We all have hidden depths, Inspector. Even me,’ laughs Declan, too chirpily for Staffe’s liking.
‘The Ropewalks Caucus, Declan. Do you know them?’ says Alicia.
‘A few charity shops. We extended their council tax exemption the other month. All in a good cause.’ He looks quite pious, now. ‘They have a good bookshop.’
‘You come across a woman called Petal Broome?’
‘Aaah, Broome. Her mother’s an old SWP mate of mine.’ He taps his nose. ‘We go back. Virginia Broome. Hmm.’
‘Did she have any particular bees in her beret?’
‘The usual. Palestine mainly, and CND.’
‘Right to Choose?’
‘Of course, but she had her girl when she was young and on her own. I wouldn’t have thought …’ Councillor Hartson seems to drift into a private space. He plays with his lip, with finger and thumb. ‘This is to do with that Zoe Bright. Am I wrong? They kidnapped her.’
‘Not for me to say, Declan.’
‘Direct action – sounds so archaic now.’ A nostalgic glaze forms upon Hartson’s face. ‘… Got to take your hat off.’
‘You’re just an old traditionalist,’ says Alicia Flint, standing.
‘You’ll scratch my back some time, won’t you, ’Leash?’
‘What do you have for me?’
‘Virginia Broome is on the dragon’s tail.’
*
Baby Grace seems to look straight at Josie. Could this be the first time she has opened her eyes? She is stock still, pincushioned with her nutrient tubes. Josie rubs her eyes, knows she should get some sleep. Grace’s eyes close.
A nurse comes in and Josie says, ‘Can she see?’
‘It’ll be a blur for her, my love. It’s early days.’ The nurse smiles at Josie, as if she is a child. She cheerily jots on the board that hangs from the side of the monitor, then flicks each of the tubes that lead from the plastic sacks down into the baby’s blood and stomach.
When Josie has to leave, she seeks out the nurse – the jolly, golden-haired one called Natalie – to make sure she has her mobile number in case anything happens, but she can’t find her. In a recess down the corridor from Grace’s room, there’s another nurse she has seen before. This one has sad, dark eyes. ‘Can you give this to Nurse Natalie?’ says Josie, handing her number across.
‘Who are you?’ The dark nurse’s eyes flit. She looks as if she might burst into tears at any moment. Her name card says ‘Eve Delahunty’. Josie takes the card back, not wanting to burden her.
As she goes down the corridor, she looks back and Nurse Eve makes her way towards Grace’s room.
Outside, it has turned cold in the City and the early breath of summer seems to have expired. The sky is black and full of rain.
Josie thinks about the people she has met since she found Grace. Sean Degg and Cello Delaney and Phillip Ramone, and even though she is dead on her feet, they all pull her west, to the Half Moon.
*
Vernon Short tucks in his shirt, precisely buttons up his flies. He thumbs up his braces, then shifts the way he is dressed. He regards himself in the mirror and, for some reason, finds himself recalling the day he gave his maiden speech to the House. He takes his jacket from the hook on the back of the stall door. His heart beats fast and he considers where all the years and the hope went. He shoots his cuffs. He can still see the young man, can still feel the principles even though they were trampled into the Westminster earth a long time ago. He wonders what might be in his blood.
Are they finally going to see what he has to off
er? He looks at his notes, writ small in his fastidious hand on a business card. According to the Telegraph, sixty per cent of the people are now with him on the bill. Today, Baby Grace had been relegated to page five. The Liverpool woman hasn’t caught nationally. It will, if there is a baby – but that’s not now. Not today. Politics is a twenty-four-hour game, these days.
He checks his watch. A minute late, already, for the Home Secretary. Who would have thought it? Vernon breathes deep, thinks of his father, once a vociferous backbencher and universally regarded as one of the last of the House’s true characters: a landed, fuck-them-all free thinker. That look in his father’s eye – when he visits him on the farm in Sussex for the monthly Saturday lunch – dismounting after the drag hunt, four sheets to the wind and evaluating his son: no disgrace, but not nearly a match.
‘Bastards,’ he says, aloud, opening the door, stepping out into the halls he always dreamed he would bestride. They think he is a fool, but he got a double first and salvaged the family firm in the late eighties. In his time at Westminster, he has body-swerved all the scandals. No mud stuck to Vernon – somehow – but he was born just beyond his time. Until now. He looks up the corridor. It is a five-minute walk from here. ‘Bastards,’ he says again, striding towards Catherine Killick, Home Secretary.
*
Killick opens the door herself, shows Vernon in, even though she has people to do that for her. The modern way. She is ten years his junior and it’s an airbrushed, widely known secret that Killick was militantly pro-choice when she first cut her teeth on politics. Since Blair and the bland new Clause Four, though, it has been a relentless drift towards the centre for Cathy, especially after she was made a parliamentary private secretary to the PM, when he was in Trade.
She pours Vernon’s tea. Vernon: a man, a type, she has always despised. She beams the best smile she can at him. But she won’t fuck about. ‘We can’t be having this turn into a circus, Vernon,’ she says.
‘Serendipity,’ says Vernon.
Cathy Killick puts down his tea on her desk and goes behind, rests her feet up on a stool to the side of her desk and interlocks her fingers on her swollen, pregnant tummy. ‘Serendipity is a wanky shop for hippies that sells Indian scarves and moonstones up Camden Market. Been going for years. There’s nothing real about serendipity. It’s just what we’re dealt and, as you know, we can change what we’re dealt.’