After the Fire (Maeve Kerrigan)

by Casey, Jane

  ‘A meeting? Nah. Just a group of friends.’ The man put his palms together, long fingers folding against one another. His soft voice was pure north London. ‘Not somewhere you need to be, Miss Detective.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I know you’d prefer it if I could leave you alone. I’d prefer that too. But I really do need to speak to Mrs Cole and if I can just come and talk to her now, I’ll make sure she’s left in peace.’

  ‘Didn’t you call already? She spoke to you.’

  ‘That’s right. I didn’t get your name, sir.’

  ‘No, I didn’t give it to you.’ He gave me a long, hostile look. ‘I think you should leave now.’

  ‘Better me on my own now than a gang of us in a couple of days’ time.’ I hated using bullying tactics but there was no way round it. ‘You know we’ll be back because we have to be. This won’t end here and now. And I’m not looking for an argument with Mrs Cole. I don’t want to upset anyone.’

  ‘You being here is upsetting for all of us. We’ve met the Met before.’ He turned his head and spat, the gobbet of saliva landing in the hallway, right beside my foot.

  ‘I’m aware of that.’ This wasn’t going my way. I’d tried charm, I’d tried threats. Time for honesty. ‘Look, I know I’m part of the Metropolitan Police and you and Mrs Cole have every reason to be hostile towards me because of that, but it’s a big organisation. There are a lot of police officers working under the same name, and some of them are pretty shit at their jobs. Not everyone is in the game for the right reason. I have no way of convincing you that I’m one of the good guys, but I hate what happened to Levon. It shouldn’t have been that way, and the officer concerned made more than one mistake when he shot him. He didn’t follow the correct procedures and he’s been suspended ever since it happened, quite rightly in my view.’

  ‘It’ll all get covered up and forgotten about. That’s why the Police Complaints Commission haven’t released their report. They’re waiting for the public to lose interest so they can forgive and forget.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true. I don’t know why it’s been delayed but there are a lot of police officers who want to see that report published.’

  ‘And a lot who think we’re overreacting.’

  ‘As I said, it’s a big organisation. We carry the same badge, but that’s where it ends.’

  ‘You’ll say anything.’ The man’s voice was harsh with contempt.

  ‘It’s what I believe.’ When all else fails, tell the truth.

  Incredibly, it worked. Not on the man, but on the person behind him.

  ‘Let her come in.’

  ‘Claudine—’ the man protested.

  ‘Let her come.’ Claudine Cole turned away. I didn’t wait around for the man to argue back. I dodged past him and followed Mrs Cole into her sitting room. The layout of her flat was similar to the burned-out flats I’d toured in Murchison House, and the effect was weirdly disorientating. I knew I’d never been there before but it all seemed familiar to me. Maybe it was too much time spent around grief, too. The air was tight with it, and suppressed anger, and the utter disillusionment of a mother who did everything right for her child and still lost him in the cruellest way possible. Levon Cole’s face looked back at me from every wall, every surface that could hold a photograph frame. Every moment of his life had been recorded until a trigger-happy cop pressed stop.

  There were three women in the room apart from Mrs Cole and me. Two of them were middle-aged, the third young, and I looked at her with interest but she wasn’t the woman Mrs Hearn had described coming and going from Armstrong’s flat. She was plump, her face round, her hair a cloud of dyed red curls. She glowered, an expression that I saw on the faces of the women beside her.

  ‘I’m sorry for interrupting,’ I said. ‘I won’t be here for long.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’ It was one of the middle-aged women who’d spoken, a gaunt black lady with a lot of grey in her hair. Her friend had a very similar expression on her face, although she was built on a large, solid scale.

  ‘It’s all right, Barbara. Really.’ Claudine Cole sat down in a chair near the window and put a hand to her head. She looked exhausted. ‘I spoke with you on the phone.’

  ‘I know. I’m just following up.’

  ‘If there’s something you want me to say, you’d better tell me what it is. You can’t expect me to guess.’

  ‘I don’t want you to say anything more than the truth,’ I said.

  ‘I already did. Geoff Armstrong was never involved with us. He never came to a meeting of Justice for Levon. And there wasn’t a meeting the other night when the fire started.’ She made a helpless gesture with the hand that had been pressing on her temple. ‘So I can’t help you, I’m afraid.’

  I was still standing in the middle of the room. There wasn’t an empty chair and I didn’t dare ask for one. I left my notebook in my bag: I’d remember what she said anyway. ‘You said he made overtures to you a couple of months ago and you weren’t interested in his support.’

  ‘He wanted to apologise to me for things he said about Levon on the television. Armstrong said he hadn’t done what he was told so he deserved to die.’ Her voice was flat: Claudine had run out of emotion a long time before. I remembered Armstrong saying it, although he had been a sideshow to the main event, a distraction. We had been trying to work out why police officers were dying; Armstrong had been trying to hold the media’s fickle attention. I hadn’t cared what he thought then. Now it seemed hugely important to understand him better.

  ‘Did he apologise?’ I asked.

  ‘Eventually. He didn’t accept at first that Levon had no reason to trust the police, even though he had done nothing wrong.’

  ‘At first?’

  ‘I talked to him. I made him understand how this community feels about the police. I shared the statistics about black males being stopped and searched for no reason, about racial profiling of offenders, and the Met’s bias against black teenagers.’

  ‘Did he listen?’

  ‘He seemed to. He told me it was easier to change the institutions than the minds of young people. But he was still a racist. Still a hostile individual, always looking for common ground with the white middle classes. He didn’t care about black kids who were never going to vote for him or his kind. He thought we should be grateful to the police for hounding our children.’

  ‘Did anyone else speak with him?’

  ‘We all did.’ Barbara folded her arms. ‘We put him in his place.’

  ‘Did he form a – a friendship with anyone on the estate, do you know?’

  The young woman snorted. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

  ‘He came here every Thursday,’ I said. ‘He met someone in Murchison House.’

  The four of them stared at me, shocked expressions on their faces, and I thought none of them was faking. It was news for them, which was bad news for me.

  ‘Who?’ Claudine asked.

  ‘I don’t know. He kept it a secret from everyone. According to a witness, the person he was meeting was a black woman, and those meetings began after he visited the estate in connection with the fatal police shootings that took place here in September. So you see why I’m wondering if he developed a relationship with someone involved in your campaign, Mrs Cole.’

  ‘If he did, which I doubt, I certainly wouldn’t hand them over to you.’ Her voice was diamond-hard. The other women exchanged looks but Claudine Cole held my gaze, her face impassive. ‘I’m sure you would like to pin his death on someone involved in my campaign. That would be quite the publicity coup for you. It would discredit us, which is something that the Commissioner would dearly like.’

  ‘Anyway, none of us would have touched him,’ the young woman said. ‘He was a horrible, disgusting person. And he was ugly.’

  ‘What if he paid?’ I asked.

  ‘His money wouldn’t be any good here.’ She sounded definite. But Barbara’s eyes had flickered, then dropped to her
lap. Something had added up for her, something seen and not understood until now – which meant there was something for me to know. The frustration walked along my spine with spider feet.

  Claudine lifted her chin. ‘We’ve told you what we know. Now I’d like you to leave.’

  ‘If you think of anything,’ I said, slightly hopelessly, ‘here’s my card.’ I held it out. None of them moved to take it. A hand came from behind me and snapped it out of my fingers: Claudine’s bodyguard. I had forgotten him, which was unwise, and I hadn’t heard him move, which was unsettling. Derwent would have been livid with me, and rightly.

  ‘Mrs Cole asked you to leave,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going.’

  He was standing much too close to me, so close I could see the fine grain of his skin. There was something strange about his eyes behind the glasses and it took me a moment to realise what it was: he had no eyelashes. He jostled me as I stepped past him, hard, and I could have arrested him for it if I’d wanted to, for assault on a police officer, if I’d been being aggressive. If I wanted to leave them feeling intimidated and violated, all over again. I put my hand to my belt where my baton sat, my sleek extendable Asp, snug in its holster. I flicked open the Velcro on it so I could take it out quickly, but I left it where it was.

  And I was right to wait. One shove was enough to relieve his feelings. He stood, breathing hard through his nose, holding himself back with what looked like a tremendous effort.

  I walked out of the flat, feeling the air crackle with hostility as I went. I didn’t blame them for hating me. I represented the Metropolitan Police.

  For once, I wasn’t proud of that.

  Chapter 20

  I REALLY DIDN’T want to spend any more time on the Maudling Estate than I had to. In my mind I was already back in the office as I ran down the stairs and out across the car park. But I stopped beside the car, looking up at Murchison House, thinking about what a good opportunity it was and how turning my back on it was cowardly at best, unprofessional at worst. I squared my shoulders and went into Murchison House, ducking under the police tape. Somewhere high above me there was the sound of hammering. Otherwise the building was as silent as a tomb. My heels sounded too loud on the concrete floor as I ran up the stairs, counting off the floors. On the eighth floor I stopped to get my breath back and to look at a stain on the wall: dried blood, I thought. It was about five feet off the ground, and there was a further smear on the door that led into the hallway. I pushed it open carefully, and stepped inside. The hall was dark, lit only by the open staircase at one end. I took out my torch and flashed it around, seeing a dry and flaking substance on the ground. I squatted down beside it and caught a whiff of old vomit that made me turn my head away. This was where Melissa Pell had been attacked, I thought, standing up again. This was where she had been sick after her eye socket was fractured, an injury so painful that she’d passed out almost immediately. If the SOCOs hadn’t photographed this scene, they needed to.

  I went back into the stairwell and further up, reading the usual graffiti on the way. Long dark streaks marked the places where water from the firemen’s hoses had poured down the walls and steps, as destructive in its own way as the fire. It felt as if the building was about to be demolished, the charges laid, the fuses lit. The hammering got louder the higher I went and I was ready to explain myself to anyone who challenged me, but there was no one on the tenth floor when I leaned into the hallway and looked up and down. Someone had swept a path down the middle of the corridor but I still walked with care, on tiptoe, missing my boots as the sludge that still covered the ground seeped into the leather of my shoes. The wind whined through the devastated flats and I shivered.

  The door to flat 103 was open. I walked in, imagining what it had been like before the fire. An empty room. A bedroom with a double bed in it. No pictures on the walls. Nothing personal. A blank space to be filled with a secret fantasy. I crossed to the window, debris and glass crunching under my feet. Someone had put a piece of plywood across the gaping hole, leaving a gap at the top and the bottom. I peered over it, at the yard where Armstrong had landed. They had taken the broken bin away. From up here, the fence for the industrial estate looked close. I frowned, thinking about the physics of throwing a small, comparatively heavy object from a height. It didn’t look as if Armstrong had thrown the phone very far at all. If it had been further away from the fence, it might never have come to light. A broken mobile phone wouldn’t mean much to whoever found it outside their factory unit, if they found it at all.

  Armstrong had been tall. I remembered his body as it lay on the slab in the morgue. He’d looked fit for his age, softer than a young man but still muscled. I couldn’t see him being so feeble about throwing away his phone if that was what he was determined to do.

  If he’d thrown it away himself, of course.

  I took out my own phone and left a message for Kev Cox, aware of how loud my voice sounded in the hush of the abandoned building. The problem with Armstrong was that no one would admit knowing anything. The man was toxic, in death as in life. At least the phone couldn’t lie to us.

  When I’d hung up I looked out again, at the long drop. All too easy to imagine Armstrong’s body tumbling through the air, a dead weight falling to a shattering impact. My knee nudged some broken glass from the window frame over the edge and it bounced and skittered down the building. It was before noon but the November light was flat, lifeless as dusk, and the glass fragments disappeared into the gloom. The effect was hypnotic. I caught myself leaning too far forward, off balance, and pulled back before I tipped over the edge.

  And heard something behind me. It was a shift in the air, a whisper of movement that had no obvious source when I whipped around. The scorched room was empty, the doorway beyond it blank. I listened, eyes wide, my heart thumping. The hammering had stopped. The wind keened. I breathed as shallowly as possible. My phone was in my hand but I swapped it for my radio. I had access to the full might of the Met with one touch of the emergency button that way, and a GPS location for anyone who responded, which would be everyone. My other hand went to my belt, looking for my Asp, and found air. I looked down, unable to believe it. I’d had it earlier. I thought back to the car, to Mrs Cole’s flat, to walking up the stairs in Murchison House. It had been on my belt then, hadn’t it? I remembered the weight of it. Or I was imagining that I remembered it. The images spooled in my mind: crouching down on the eighth floor to look at the pool of dried vomit, or off balance as Claudine Cole’s bodyguard knocked into me, when I’d opened the Velcro that kept it in place. And he’d backed off suddenly – too suddenly? Because he had got what he wanted?

  And yet it didn’t matter where or how I’d lost it. It was gone.

  I took out my torch instead, a heavy one with a rubber grip. It wasn’t standard Met issue. Like most police officers, I upgraded my kit whenever it was necessary, because what the bosses deemed good enough was hopelessly inadequate on the street.

  And I was feeling fairly inadequate myself. I had been a decent response officer in my time but I was out of practice. I was also lacking in the basic amenities such as CS spray or, better yet, a Taser. I crept across to the doorway, moving as quietly as I could, testing each place I put my feet before I trusted my weight to it. I kept my thumb on my radio’s red button. When I reached the doorway I listened again, then peered around the frame as slowly and cautiously as I dared, half-crouching, ready to defend myself.

  The room was empty, as it had been before. Nothing had changed. Nothing moved. The door stood a couple of inches ajar, showing me a sliver of empty hallway outside. I eased myself upright, feeling stupid, breathing again. There was nothing to fear here except shadows. I shoved my torch into my bag and headed for the door. I reached out to pull it open, and my fingers just grazed the latch before it jerked out of my reach and slammed shut. The wind, the logical part of my mind told me as terror caught in the back of my throat. I scrabbled for the latch, my nails dragging throug
h the soot that coated the back of the door, leaving white furrows in the grime. The latch turned in my hand but the door didn’t move; it didn’t shift so much as a millimetre when I tugged on it.

  Locked.

  Stuck.

  Deliberate.

  Accident.

  I could have argued with myself all day and it wouldn’t have made any difference. It really didn’t matter how it had happened. The result was the same. I was trapped. I put my ear to the wood, trying to hear if anyone was moving around outside. All I could hear was my own blood shuttling around my body at a pace too rapid for comfort. The glass in the peephole was dirty brown from smoke damage and there was no way to see through it, to see who was standing on the other side of the wood, if anyone.

  I stood for a second, trying to calm my racing thoughts. If someone had locked me in – if – they wanted me in here, on my own, unable to escape. If they’d wanted to attack me, they had their choice of locations. There were plenty of places to lurk in the deserted tower block, many of them out of earshot of help. So an attack wasn’t the ultimate goal.

  So I should calm down.

  And I should get the hell out of flat 103.

  But in case it was an accident, I’d try to do it without using my radio. I didn’t want to call for help because I’d wandered into an unsafe building unannounced and got stuck. Derwent would never let me live it down. I’d be buying doughnuts for the team for ever, the price paid for rank stupidity at work.

  Fear of embarrassment was probably going to get me killed one of these days.

  I started to rap on the door with my hand, then switched to the base of the torch, swinging it as hard as I dared against the wood. There were people in the building, I knew. People who wouldn’t mock me for getting locked into an unattended crime scene.

  No matter how hard I listened, I didn’t hear the sound of the cavalry arriving. I hurried over to the other side of the flat to look out of the window. Down below – far down below – a hard-hatted builder with a plank over his shoulder was walking through the bin yard. I leaned out of the window and yelled.