Dead North

by Joel Hames

  18: Dead Teeth

  I MANAGED WHAT I thought was a decent night’s sleep, undisturbed by the chaos outside, but I was awake at eight, exhausted before I’d even moved, with the kind of headache that should have cost me half a bottle of Scotch. My arm was aching again, and I was surprised to see the scrape had turned the colour of boiled lobster and felt warm when I touched it. It must have been the arm and the head that had woken me, because without something getting in the way I’d have slept till lunchtime – and fragments of the night’s dreams tumbled together in my mind into a disconcerting vision of Boris Crick, with a mop of blond hair and a knowing smile, telling me to get a grip.

  The smile didn’t need much explanation. As I strolled across the car park at Folgate the first thing I saw was Serena Hawkes, frowning at her feet as she walked towards me and spoke on her phone.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said into her phone, and then noticed me and flashed a weary smile. I smiled back.

  “Client,” she mouthed silently at me, and then I saw it, behind her, heading for me, for both of us, moving too fast. An Astra, a red Astra, a balding man with glasses at the wheel staring straight in front of him.

  We were straight in front of him. There was no way he hadn’t seen us. But he hadn’t slowed down, either. Without thinking I reached out my right arm and dragged Serena to the side, up against the row of parked cars. She moved like a ragdoll, too surprised to offer the slightest resistance, which was a good thing, because that arm was still aching and wouldn’t have shifted her an inch if she’d fought it.

  I looked back up and the car was gone, except it wasn’t. It had turned and was slowly backing into a narrow space four cars down. Serena was gaping at me like I was a lunatic, her phone still pressed to one ear. I recognised the balding man with glasses. He’d stopped for a brief chat with Roarkes in the corridor when we’d returned from our crisp butty lunch. He was a police officer, parking his car, in the car park outside the police station.

  “Yes, OK, you’re the boss,” said Serena into her phone.

  I smiled at her, weakly, and whispered, “Sorry.”

  Get a grip.

  Roarkes seemed happier than he’d been the day before, but not a lot happier. He was putting down the phone as I walked in, shaking his head and breathing slowly out through his teeth.

  “What’s up?” I asked, trying to sound as cheerful as I could, and wondering if I’d get the truth.

  “Upstairs. No progress, they get pissed off, crap in the papers, they get more pissed off. Nothing I wasn’t expecting. Nothing I haven’t dealt with a hundred times before. Doesn’t make it any nicer, though.”

  I nodded. It was convincing, it was probably true, but Serena’s doubts were beginning to infect me. I didn’t think it was the whole story, but I didn’t have the energy to press for more.

  “What’s the latest with Serena? I just saw her on the way out.”

  He looked back down at his desk. “Ask her yourself. She won’t even talk to me.”

  This was turning into one of those conversations where nothing gets said, and even that gets said badly. I tried a different tack. A more direct one.

  “So what have you got on the attacks?”

  Roarkes looked up. It was a start.

  “What attacks?”

  “On me, Roarkes. Three of them.”

  He frowned and looked back down.

  “Two.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, and then thought better of it.

  “Tarney’s in custody. I’ve reported the love tap you got in London. I told you. Uniform are sending someone to talk to you about it.”

  “When?”

  He shrugged. “When they get to it. It’s not exactly a red-hot lead, is it?”

  “Fair enough. So I guess that means you’re working on all the other red-hot leads, right?”

  He grimaced, and nodded at me.

  “OK. You’re right. From what you’ve said, there’s clearly some connection between the attack on you in London and our investigation. If Carson’s our man, he’s not working alone. But it’s a punch in the face, Sam. If you want to go and get yourself shot, then you’ll be our number one priority. Until then, it’s a minor assault.”

  I took a deep breath and exhaled through my teeth. On one level, he was absolutely right. On another, though, it was a lead, and it wasn’t like we were rolling in leads. And less than five minutes with the man had me adopting his mannerisms, the bitter sarcasm, the hissed breath through the teeth. Roarkes wasn’t good for me. I’d do better looking elsewhere.

  Malhotra, it turned out, wasn’t done with the day job. There were other crimes committed by real criminals who hadn’t yet been caught, and there were plenty at Folgate who’d rather have her processing traffic offences than helping Roarkes. Gaddesdon was available, but he was bored and whining, and successful as he’d been with the McTavish memo, I didn’t think he’d hit a hole-in-one again any time soon. I had the feeling we’d got all we were going to out of the Corporation. I could sit and wait for Serena to defrost and sort out an interview with Tarney, or I could go and do something else.

  I ran through the options in my head. The piece of paper, the glacier: I still didn’t know where to begin. It wasn’t like I had contacts in the Argentine police. Sally Carson wasn’t going to be opening up for a while. There was the planning angle, the locals and the council, there were possibilities there, but I was damned if I was digging through the minutes of council meetings and trying to figure out what wasn’t being said. Tarney, the Land Rover, the missing CCTV, the Corporation, all dead ends or bumps in the road so big I didn’t see myself getting over them. Malhotra had someone looking into the bank accounts and Operation Blackbird, but that would take time and effort and I didn’t really believe it would give us anything we didn’t already have. Brian Betterson had lost his mobile phone and didn’t have anything useful to tell us.

  I stopped there. Brian Betterson. The one lead Roarkes had followed up on, and then declared dead. I was inclined to agree with the diagnosis, I’d been ninety-nine per cent sure of it and I still was, but the way things were going, one per cent was worth a shot.

  Gaddesdon was sitting in the canteen drinking coffee with a pair of pretty young community support officers. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but from the colour of his face it looked like they were teasing him. He was wearing a white, uncreased shirt and a dark tie, which wasn’t like him at all, and his smile suggested he didn’t mind the teasing.

  “Can you get us a car?” I asked, and he nodded. I had the feeling a marked patrol car might shake things up a little.

  “And grab Brian Betterson’s address, will you?”

  He stared at me.

  “Betterson. The guy from Burnley.”

  He carried on staring.

  “The one whose phone was stolen?”

  Nothing. The girls were starting to giggle, now, quietly, but clearly enough.

  “Come on, Gaddesdon. The phone that was used to call in about Carson, the call that Milton and Ahmet responded to, the call that got them killed?”

  “Oh,” he sighed. “That phone.”

  “I’d better let the DI know where we’re going,” he said, reaching for the radio, as we headed out of Manchester in the same Shogun I’d bled in a few days earlier.

  “It’s OK,” I lied. “I’ve already been through it with him.”

  I knew what Roarkes would have said if I had done. You’re not a cop. Leave it alone. Don’t push it. But I’d been through everything else. There was nothing left to push. I crossed my fingers and hoped Gaddesdon wouldn’t check.

  “OK,” he said, and put both hands back on the wheel. “It’s in the right direction anyway. Dead north.” He pointed at the Shogun’s satnav. “We’ll stop on the way.”

  “Why?”

  “The funeral.”

  What funeral? I nearly asked, and stopped myself just in time. Someone had mentioned it, I couldn’t remember who
or when, but I’d heard it already that day. Fiona Milton. Half the reason I was here, and her funeral was this morning in some town I’d never heard off halfway between Manchester and Burnley. Hence the suit and tie, I realised.

  The other half of the reason was Naz Ahmet. Gaddesdon’s friend. I’d done a decent job of avoiding the subject so far, but we were heading to his colleague’s funeral. It was time to break the silence.

  “You knew Naz Ahmet, right?” I asked. I tried to make it conversational, incidental, more fancy another pint? than I’m sorry for your loss, but it came out closer to the loss than the pint. Sometimes words make you say them the way they’re supposed to be said. And without taking his eyes off the road, without tears or even a break in his voice, Gaddesdon told me about his friend.

  They hadn’t just trained together. They’d worked together, in Manchester, before Naz had married and become a father and moved his young family to a village outside Blackburn. Gaddesdon had been there when Naz had met the woman who would become his wife, a night of alcohol-fuelled dancing and gambling the day they’d graduated police training. He’d been there at the wedding, at the celebrations after the child had been born, at the wheel of a rented van when they’d moved out of Manchester. At the small, private funeral after his friend had been shot.

  Naz had been buried as soon as his body had been released, in accordance with Islamic tradition. The family, he told me, as he turned into the cemetery car park and nudged his way into a space between two other police cars, were still in a state of shock.

  I doubted Fiona Milton’s family would be much happier.

  They weren't. The widower and the children, the funeral tears, both shed and unshed, the anger that sparked inside me as I witnessed their grief. And that little chat I’d had about Naz Ahmet had turned him, too, into something more than just another dead victim. I was tired and hungry, and possibly a little unwell, but that didn’t account for the sense that this was about more than making a name for myself and avenging my nose. I didn’t think Roarkes had spotted me, and he’d given Gaddesdon no more than a nod, so our visit to Brian Betterson was still on. As we pulled out of the cemetery car park, I noticed the red Astra again, the one I’d fled from back in Folgate. Same man at the wheel, bald, glasses. It was a police funeral and he was a police officer. I couldn’t see his clothes through the car window, but he was probably dressed like a penguin, too. Gaddesdon turned onto the main road and I closed my eyes. I must have been asleep moments later, because next thing I knew we were coming to a halt on a road that looked like somewhere no one bothered cleaning up between riots.

  Betterson’s flat was on the ground floor of a three storey house that had once been white but was now the dirty grey-brown of dead teeth, with splashes of unaccountable black thrown in like the flattened remains of giant insects. There was a buzzer by the door, and the letters “BB” scratched onto the wall beside it, but nothing happened when I pushed it. I tried again, held my finger down. It probably wasn’t even connected. I tried banging on the door and shouting Betterson’s name through the letter box, and after a couple of minutes the door was opened by a squat, angry-looking woman with a cigarette in her mouth.

  “What ya want?” she spat. I took a step back, almost colliding with Gaddesdon.

  “Brian Betterson. Do you know him?” I asked.

  She narrowed her eyes and puffed up a cheek and I had the uncomfortable feeling of being observed by a predator. I sensed Gaddesdon, behind me, edging away. She was wearing a blue towelling robe, but there was nothing fluffy about her.

  “’E’s gone. Packed up ’is stuff and gone. Yet’day night.”

  “Oh,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else. Gaddesdon, amazingly, could.

  “Do you happen to know where he’s gone, ma’am?” he asked, and to my surprise, she smiled. It was the ma’am, of course. I’d used that trick often enough myself. A bit of deference. Everyone likes to think they’re better than they are.

  “Sorry, son. ’E’s paid up, and when they’re paid up I don’t know aught about ’em and I don’t care neither. Can’t help ya.”

  “Thanks anyway,” I said, and she smiled again. I didn’t like the smile a whole lot more than the narrowed eyes, but when she shut the door on us, she didn’t slam it.

  Gaddesdon was already across the road and climbing back into the car. I stood there, for a minute, thinking through the implications. Betterson hadn’t said anything about leaving. We hadn’t asked him anything that would have led him to say it, true, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that would slip your mind. We call him in, twice, to ask him about the phone, and two days later he’s gone. I wondered if there was a connection. That one per cent was starting to look a little bigger.

  I turned and started across the road, only to find my way blocked by a tall gentleman with grey hair and a stick. He was wearing a suit jacket and a shirt buttoned right up to his neck, and although the jacket and shirt looked nearly as old as he did, he didn’t quite fit in with the street.

  “Took yer time,” he said, and I stared at him. He pointed his stick at an open door two houses down.

  “That’s my place. I called, last night. Your lot said you were too busy.”

  Another one taking me for a police officer. Given my mode of transport, it was hardly surprising.

  “I’m sorry, Mr—”

  “Lennox,” he said. “It’s Lennox. I’d have thought they’d have told you that before they sent you out, at least.”

  I couldn’t help noticing that in a street of grey and brown, Mr. Lennox’s house was still white.

  “Well, Mr Lennox,” I began, but that was as far as I got.

  “I’ve got all the details down here,” he said, rummaging in his trouser pocket and bringing out a sheet of notepaper folded neatly in half. “The noise they were making, enough to wake the dead, it was.”

  Gaddesdon had finally noticed my predicament and wandered over, a stupid grin on his face. He stopped a few yards away, watching and clearly enjoying himself. He didn’t look like he was going to do anything to help.

  “Honestly, the things they get up to, and they call it fun, that lad sounded like he was having his teeth pulled out but I suppose that’s a night out for young people these days.”

  “Mr Lennox,” I said, again, but having waited all night Mr Lennox was going to have his say now.

  “And in a car, they were, I mean, the car’s what you use for getting to a place, isn’t it? You don’t just sit in it all evening and shout.”

  “Yes,” I replied. Agreeing was probably the best way to get through this quickly.

  “So here it is,” he said. “Dark blue Land Rover, I’ve got the plates, they can do whatever they like as far as I’m concerned but I don’t want them doing it outside my house.”

  I held out my hand for the piece of paper and opened my mouth to say thank you very much or I can assure you we’ll look into this or whichever platitude sprang to mind, and then I stopped.

  A dark blue Land Rover.

  I opened the paper. The writing was small, neat, proudly vertical.

  “Land Rover Defender,” it read. “Colour: dark blue. Registration: PK11 VAX”.

  I passed it to Gaddesdon, who stared at it for a moment with a quizzical look on his face. Only a moment, though. Then his mouth fell open.

  Betterson in. Betterson gone. PK11. Land Rover Defender. The mysterious third car we’d all but given up on.

  This was one coincidence too many.

  Even Roarkes couldn’t ignore a lead like this one. He didn’t give me any of the shit I’d been expecting over our trip to Burnley, and before we were off the phone I could hear him barking orders to some poor sod to organise a full house-to-house and pass on Betterson’s description to the local hospitals. It sounded like the Land Rover had finally unlocked Folgate’s resources. Gaddesdon and I went back and spoke to the landlady, a Mrs Skilling, still in her blue towelling robe, who now seemed rather gratified to find herself so close
to the centre of something so very exciting, and made us sit down and drink hot sweet tea while she explained that yes, she had been in the previous night, but no, she hadn’t heard anything unusual, but she did sleep very soundly these days. Gaddesdon, with all the subtlety of a nuclear bomb, pointed to the half-empty bottle of gin I’d already spotted beside her armchair. I didn’t think Mrs Skilling was going to be much help. Maybe something would show up in Betterson’s room, but I doubted it.

  Details filtered through over the next hour or so. Roarkes was all energy, no trace of that tension and sullen hostility that seemed to have been haunting him lately. Serena was elsewhere, she had other clients after all, ones who’d actually appointed her and were prepared to talk to her, too.

  Betterson had driven, or been driven, to Liverpool, it emerged, because he’d been on the six o’clock ferry to Ireland that morning. There was a grainy still from the one-frame-a-second CCTV at the ferry port showing him making his way out. Even with a resolution that would have made me look like George Clooney, you could tell it was Betterson. He was holding a piece of cloth to one side of his head, and although the still was black-and-white, my bet was that cloth was very red indeed.

  But at least he was alive.

  The car was registered to a businesswoman from Preston by the name of Abigail Starke, except it wasn’t, because the car she owned with the registration PK11 VAX was a bottle-green Jaguar and she could see it in her driveway even as she patiently explained to Gaddesdon that yes, that was her car, and no, it wasn’t and never had been a Land Rover Defender.

  Another dead end, I thought. Betterson was in Ireland and we’d track him down eventually, but given the little we could say about him I didn’t think the police over there would be putting him top of their priorities. He’d been threatened and beaten, outside his own home, and he’d run away rather than run the risk of saying the wrong thing and getting worse treatment next time. Which meant Betterson knew something we didn’t, and if that secret was worth fleeing the country for, chances were it had something to do with the people who’d taken his phone and made the call that had put bullets in the heads of two police officers. The car might have helped, but now it didn’t look like the car was going to show up either.