Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

by Joel Hames

  And if it didn’t, I’d be heading back to London soon enough.

  Serena Hawkes was sitting in Roarkes’ office when I walked in and before I’d even sat down she was staring at my face.

  “Beaten up again,” I said, and she gave me that look again, a sad shake of the head plus a hint of a smile.

  “You’ve got to stop pissing people off, Sam.”

  Roarkes had run clean out of sympathy.

  “Had a nice little jaunt, have you? Pleased to see you’re back. I take it we can forget all this crap about Carson being someone else?”

  “What’s got into him?” I asked. He’d been curt with me earlier, but that was just Roarkes. This was more than just Roarkes. Serena pointed to the newspaper on his desk. I picked it up.

  Mia Arazzi, again. It was a brief article, just a few short paragraphs, but one of those paragraphs threw in something new.

  “Questions are now being raised within Greater Manchester Police regarding the competence of Detective Inspector Gideon Roarkes to oversee this investigation. In particular, the failure of the force to probe Thomas Carson’s history in Argentina, including the mysterious disappearance of his one-time business partner, has set alarm bells ringing at a senior level.”

  Another bloody Folgate leak. Roarkes named, again, but not me, I noticed with relief, and then I looked back up at Roarkes and the relief was gone. He was wearing the expression of someone who’d been forced to watch while his car was set on fire and driven into his house. And he was looking at me like I was the driver. He stood up and walked around the desk until he was standing no more than six inches away from me, and then he lowered his head and stared into my face.

  “Was this you, you bastard?” he growled.

  I was at a loss, for a moment, and then I remembered my threat. If he didn’t follow up the Argentina angle, I’d make sure someone knew about it.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, staring right back at him with a boldness and conviction that didn’t extend past my eyes. He frowned and stepped back, and I decided it was my turn.

  “Sorry you’ve got your name in the papers again – both your names, in fact – but it’s not like it’s anyone else’s fault, Gideon.”

  I was warming to the battle. Roarkes glared at me, lips pursed, and I glanced down to see the fingers of his right hand tapping rhythmically against his palm, a silent countdown to a very loud explosion. Roarkes was ready for a fight.

  I was more than happy to give him one.

  “See my face?”

  He nodded. “Seen a bit too much of it lately, to be honest.”

  That was weak. I decided to let it go.

  “I told you someone was after me. I told you that car wasn’t an accident, and now they’ve gone after me in my own home.”

  He nodded again. “You’re right, of course.”

  The tapping had stopped. He was frowning, still nodding, gently, like he was thinking things through and starting to see my side of it. He walked slowly back to the desk and sat down.

  “Obviously there’s something going on here and your life’s in serious danger.”

  I hadn’t expected that.

  “I mean, they walk into your flat – how did they get in, Sam?”

  I paused, trying to remember, and then it came back to me.

  “I’d left the door unlocked,” I replied, quietly.

  “Right, so they walk in through an open door – how many of them?”

  “Just one, I think. I didn’t get a good look at him.”

  I thought I could see the faintest hint of a smile under that frown.

  “So this one person walks in through an open door, and – blimey, this is serious – he punches you in the face.”

  I could see where this was going and I didn’t like it. I opened my mouth to say something, but Roarkes was on his feet talking before I could get a word out.

  “Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but on the one hand we’ve got a couple of police officers getting shot in the head, and on the other hand we’ve got a sneaky little lawyer getting punched in the face.”

  “He said something about Carson. He said I should drop it.”

  It was true, but I could hear the words as I said them, and they sounded more like a plea from a psychiatric patient than the testimony of a solid, reliable witness. Serena had sat silently throughout the exchange, watching and listening. I forced myself not to glance in her direction.

  “I see,” said Roarkes. “I’m quite tempted to punch you in the face and tell you to piss off myself, Sam. Maybe he was just a nice, friendly police officer. Maybe he was my guardian angel.”

  I opened my mouth again, and again Roarkes stopped me.

  “What he wasn’t, I can assure you, was an emissary of the South American mob or the local planning department out to silence a dangerous witness.”

  I felt the blood drain from my face. White was a good look for rage, but by now I was so angry and so humiliated I didn’t have any words to pair the colour with. All I could do was shake my head, slowly, and hope the message was getting through.

  Roarkes was still talking, and from what he was saying, the message wasn’t getting through.

  “I’ll get uniform to take a statement from you, because something’s going on, sure, I won’t deny that. But you’ve got to stop overreacting. You’ve got to calm down.”

  Calm down. I’d already reached boiling point and come down the other side. Calm down was too much. I turned and walked out of the office. I stood in the corridor for a minute, breathing slowly, thinking through everything Roarkes had just said, and then I remembered Serena’s comment in the restaurant, Roarkes ignoring the best leads he had, and the phone call he’d taken, mouthing “fuck off” and waving me out of the room with a face like a plum tomato. He’d dragged me up to Manchester for whatever talent he thought I had, and now he was shutting me down every time I tried to use it.

  What was he hiding?

  I stood for another minute, just breathing and turning things over, and then I walked back in without knocking and started talking before he could say anything to stop me.

  “Here’s the deal, Roarkes,” I said. “You want me to stick around?”

  He shrugged, then nodded, then grunted.

  “Yeah. S’pose so.”

  I’d expected more of a fight. I’d been ready to threaten a full-page spread, just me, Mia Arazzi, and whatever I decided to tell her. I tried to keep the surprise off my face and went on.

  “I’m not ready to drop the question of Carson’s identity. I’ll look into any other crap you want to throw at me, but I want someone looking at some names for me.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll give you Gaddesdon.”

  “I want Malhotra.”

  There was a pause, while Roarkes frowned and sucked the air between his teeth. I hated it when he did that.

  “OK,” he said, at last. “But you take Gaddesdon too.”

  I thought about it for a moment. As far as I could tell that left Roarkes with Roarkes and no one else, but given he didn’t have any leads, he didn’t exactly need the manpower.

  “Done. So what have you found out while I’ve been off sampling the delights of London?”

  Roarkes looked at Serena. She looked back at him, at me, down at the table. Maybe she was right about Roarkes. So many possibilities, so little action.

  “Nothing?”

  Roarkes nodded. I looked down at the newspaper, still open on his desk.

  “Mia Arazzi’s right, you know. What about Tarney? What about the glacier? If Alejandro Lopez isn’t six feet under the snow right where those coordinates point then I’m Buffy the fucking Vampire Slayer.”

  Roarkes stared at me, blank. Clearly he’d never heard of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His voice, when he spoke, had the flat, restrained tone of someone saying something for the last time.

  “Forget the glacier, Sam. This is Manchester. The glacier’s in Argentina.”

  I stared
at him. He shrugged and gave a long, slow sigh.

  “For Christ’s sake. Alright. You’ve got Gaddesdon. You’ve got Malhotra. You want to bang your head against a fucking glacier, be my guest.”

  I’d just seen Roarkes back down twice in the space of five minutes. I wasn’t sure I’d seen him back down once before. I decided to ignore his less-than-gracious tone, twisted my stare into a conciliatory smile, and wondered how precisely one would go about investigating Argentine glaciers anyway. Maybe Malhotra would know. She seemed to know everything else.

  As I turned to go, Roarkes laid a hand on my shoulder. I glanced back round at him, ready for a fight, conditioned by all my previous encounters with the man, but all I saw on his face was that strain, again.

  “Look, Sam, I’m sorry about your face,” he said.

  I waited for the punchline, but there wasn’t one.

  Gaddesdon might have been the free gift I didn’t want, but he was the one who found what we were looking for. Roarkes had ushered us into a tiny room with a computer and space for one person at a time to sit down and told us to get on with it, and I’d cursed his spirit of generosity before I remembered he was lucky to have got even this. Once we got started it took all of fifteen minutes for Malhotra to hit the first seam of gold with a list of old newspaper reports and CID notes, some digitised, some just references to papers in folders in boxes that hadn’t been opened for twenty years and were now stacked six deep in the basement. I’d been exaggerating when I’d mentioned looking at “some names” – there were just the two, Corporation, and Frank Grissom, and Grissom didn’t show up anywhere at all, but there were half a dozen references to the Corporation on the system. Nothing solid, though: informants who claimed to know something but never really said what, a sentence in white paint on the ruins of a burnt-out house, a victim babbling a word that might have been “Corporation” in the moments before he bled to death on a Burnley back-street. If it was gold, it was the shit sort of gold they sell tourists in North London markets: snitches looking for more money, kids pissing around with a can of spray-paint, a couple of drunk witnesses trying to make sense of a dying man’s last gurgles. The Corporation could be anything, but the chances were it was nothing at all.

  And then Gaddesdon followed one of those references to one of those boxes and came back from the basement clutching a memo written by a barely-literate detective sergeant following a fire at an Italian restaurant in Burnley in 1995. He found the article from the local paper ten minutes later. Four dead – the owners and their two children, a sixteen-year-old girl and a boy of just eight. In the handwritten note Gaddesdon had found, the DS attempted to make sense of what had happened.

  “Luca Moretti called at station May 18 10am. Spoke to me. Said thretened by corperation. I said what corperation. Luca Moretti said corperation again. At this point.”

  The memo appeared to end there. To my amazement, Gaddesdon had unearthed what followed.

  “DI Peterson needed holp on Op Blackbird so I told Luca Moretti to come back tomorrow. May 19 2am fire service attend Moretti restorant, kitchen fire, no suspicous circs.”

  Malhotra got to work straight away. The DS, an exiled Scot named McTavish, was long dead, as was DI Peterson. Blackbird, the operation Peterson had wanted some “holp” with, was an investigation into cigarette smuggling that had ended a year or so after the fire with no charges being brought. I didn’t think Blackbird was relevant, but I asked Malhotra to dig a little deeper, just in case. The glacier could wait.

  Crick had mentioned something remarkably similar. A family suspected of talking to the police, then burnt to death in their own home. Luca Moretti had spoken to the police, or at least he’d tried to. No suspicious circs. That was McTavish’s view of the matter, and he knew his patch and the people on it better than I did. But if there was nothing to it, why write the memo? Was he covering his back? Had he suspected something after all?

  And then I reminded myself how flimsy this was and what McTavish had actually done with this memo. He’d addressed it to nobody, shoved it in a file and forgotten about it. He might not have been sure everything was as clean as it looked, but he certainly wasn’t convinced it was murder or that anything like the “Corperation” was involved.

  Twenty years later I was in the same position. There was a gang that might have existed, there was a man who might have been in that gang, and there was the word of one ex-con that he was Thomas Carson. Roarkes was right. I needed to start looking elsewhere.

  Serena was still in Roarkes’ office. There was a slightly frosty silence between them, and I wondered for all of five seconds what was behind it before Roarkes set it out.

  “Serena here’s got the Tarney gig.”

  I smiled. It had worked, then.

  “Good for you.”

  She didn’t smile back. Whatever was going on between her and Roarkes clearly needed resolving.

  “Thanks,” she said. It didn’t sound heartfelt. I was about to walk out and leave them to it when Roarkes slammed his fist down on the desk.

  “Dammit, Serena, you’ve got to let me in with the bastard!”

  She shook her head and looked at me. Of course she wasn’t going to let him speak to Tarney. She didn’t trust him. But, I thought, there was probably a more diplomatic way to put it than that.

  “I don’t think she can,” I said. “Not yet. It’s too soon. Too much risk of conflict.”

  “I’d be kicked off the case,” she added. “It’s not like I’m on solid ground myself, acting for Carson and taking on Tarney when it’s perfectly possible there’s a connection between them. Nobody seems to mind very much with me, though. With you, Detective Inspector, it’s a very different matter.”

  “Why?” he asked, one of those long, slow, falsely-patient whys that are anything but. Serena smiled sweetly back at him, and I didn’t think a smile like that was likely to calm him down. I remembered how furious she’d been when she’d been prevented from seeing Carson. It looked like payback time.

  “Because I tend not to shout at people, bang my fist on tables, scream abuse at beleaguered custody sergeants.”

  I thought back to Tarney, standing there while Roarkes hurled word after pointed word at him. Just standing there. He hadn’t been laughing about it, but he hadn’t looked particularly beleaguered, either.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” she continued. “Chetwood won’t let you in. And even if they did, he wouldn’t talk. He won’t talk to me, and he certainly won’t talk to you.”

  “Can I see him?” I asked. “I’m not officially connected with this guy.” I jerked a thumb towards Roarkes and saw his face twist into a scowl. Roarkes in the dark, and his pet lawyer off getting the goods, if he could. He might have given me Gaddesdon and Malhotra, and let me loose on the Corporation and the glacier, but I wasn’t in a forgiving mood. I was, I realised, rather enjoying this.

  Serena shrugged. The state of mind she was in, that was about as positive as it was going to get.

  I turned around and left them to it. A defence lawyer and a police officer. Up to now, things had been going pretty well between them, but the truth was they had different jobs to do and different ways of doing them. She had two clients who didn’t want to speak to her. He had a local force who wanted him packed and gone, and journalists exposing his first name and questioning his competence in the national press. I thought about that scowl, the tension etched all over his face. Roarkes was always pissed off about something, that was the way he woke up in the morning, it was probably the way he’d been born. But I hadn’t seen him look so angry before, or so cornered. Roarkes wasn’t telling me everything.

  And I was in the middle, called in by him, doing her job. I was answerable to no one, but I’d had my nose smashed in twice in three days. I wasn’t so sure I had the best end of the deal.

  Back at the First Quality Inn there was a new girl on reception, bleached blonde and friendlier than the last one, which wasn’t saying a lot. Most snakes would
have been friendlier than the last one. Upstairs my room was still cold, but someone had finally managed to force the window shut after I’d complained for the fifth time. As I pulled off my shirt I heard the phone ring. I glanced at the display.

  Elizabeth Maurier, again. She wasn’t going to stop calling until I answered. My finger danced a jig between the green “ANSWER” and the red “REJECT”.

  I hit the red. I knew I was only delaying the inevitable. I knew I’d end up speaking to her sooner or later. There might even be something in it for me, and it wasn’t like I didn’t need it. But hearing her voice on that voicemail had brought it all back, painfully, dug up memories I thought I’d burnt and buried the ashes, and now they were out there, swirling around, waiting to flood in the moment I took a breath in their direction. Bill and Eileen Grimshaw, the bereaved parents, their pain not one tooth less sharp for all my genius. The pompous, smiling face of David Brooks-Powell. The longer I held off speaking to Elizabeth Maurier, the longer I could look the other way.

  I should have been asleep the moment my head hit the pillow, but something was going on outside. Male shouts, a door slamming, more shouts. Drunks, I thought, and then, rising like smoke, What if they’re not?

  Thirty seconds later there was a knock on my door, three knocks, then three more, a rhythmic rat-tat-tat that turned the smoke solid and pinned me to the bed. I hadn’t heard any footsteps, but a hand couldn’t knock on my door by itself.

  My breath was coming in short bursts and I was sweating, in spite of the cold. Three more taps, and then the footsteps. Moving away. My breath slowed.

  I waited five minutes and called down to the girl on reception, who apologised and explained that some country lads on a stag weekend were a little the worse for wear.