Blood At The Root

by Peter Robinson

  “No,” Craig said. “Not at all. Jason was violently antidrug. In fact, if you ask me, that’s where you might want to start looking for your motive. Because he certainly knew about it.”

  V

  “Another bottle of wine?”

  “I shouldn’t,” said Susan, placing her hand over her half-filled glass.

  “Why not? You’re not driving.”

  “True.”

  “And you’ve just wrapped up a case. You should be celebrating.”

  “All right, all right, you silver-tongued devil. Go ahead.”

  Gavin grinned, called the waiter and ordered a second bottle of Chablis. Susan felt her heart give a slight lurch the way it did when she first jumped the Strid at Bolton Abbey as a teenager. It happened the moment her feet left the ground and she found herself hurtling through space over the deep, rushing waters, because that was the moment she had committed herself to jumping, despite all the warnings. So what had she committed herself to by agreeing to a second bottle of wine?

  She took another mouthful of filo-pastry parcel, stuffed with Brie, walnuts and cranberries, and washed it down with the wine she had left in her glass. It hadn’t even been there long enough to get lukewarm. Already, she was beginning to feel a little light-headed – but in a pleasant way, as if a great burden had been lifted from her.

  They were in a new bistro on Castle Walk, looking west over the formal gardens and the river. A high moon silvered the swirling current of water far below and frosted the tips of the leaves on the trees. The restaurant itself was one of those hushed places where everyone seemed to be whispering, and food and drink suddenly appeared out of the silence as if by magic. White tablecloths. A floating candle in a glass jar on every table. It was also, she thought, far too expensive for a couple of mere DCs. Still, you had to push the boat out once in a while, didn’t you, she told herself, just to see how far it would float.

  She stole a glance at Gavin, busy finishing his venison. He caught her looking and smiled. She blushed. He really did have lovely brown eyes, she thought, and a nice mouth.

  “So how does it feel?” Gavin asked, putting his knife and fork down. “The success? I understand it was largely due to your initiative?”

  “Oh, not really,” Susan said. “It was teamwork.”

  “How modest of you,” he teased. “But seriously, Susan. It was you who found the killer’s name. What was it… Mark something or other?”

  “Mark Wood. Yes, but Superintendent Gristhorpe got him to confess.”

  “I’d still say you get a big gold star for this one.”

  Susan smiled. The waiter appeared with their wine, gave Gavin a sip to test, then poured for both of them and placed it in the ice bucket. Good God, Susan thought, an ice bucket. In Yorkshire! What am I doing here? I must be mad. She had finished her food now and concentrated on the wine while she studied the dessert menu. Sweets. Her weakness. Why she was a few inches too thick around the hips and thighs. But she didn’t think she could resist nutty toffee pie. And she didn’t.

  “Chief Constable Riddle’s pretty damn chuffed,” Gavin said later as they tucked into their desserts and coffee. “Sunday or not, it’s my guess he’ll be down your neck of the woods again tomorrow dishing out trophies and giving a press statement. As far as he’s concerned, this solution has gone a long way toward diffusing racial tensions.”

  “Well, he was certainly keen to get everything signed, sealed and delivered this afternoon.”

  “I’ll tell you something else. Golden boy isn’t exactly top of the pops as far as the CC is concerned.”

  “What’s new?” Susan said. “And I told you, I wish you’d stop calling him that.”

  “Where is he, by the way?” Gavin went on. “Rumor has it he hasn’t been much in evidence the last couple of days. Not like him to miss being in at the kill, is it?”

  “He’s taken some time off.”

  “Pretty inconsiderate time to do that, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sure he has his reasons.” Susan pushed her empty dessert plate aside. “Mmm. That pie was divine.”

  “How very mysterious,” Gavin said. “Is he often like that?”

  “Sometimes. He can be a bit enigmatic when he wants, can the DCI. Anyway, I’m glad Jimmy Riddle’s happy, but this just isn’t the sort of solution that makes you feel exactly wonderful, you know.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for Mark Wood.”

  “Sorry? I thought he was supposed to have kicked his mate to death?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Isn’t that about as vicious as it gets?”

  “I suppose so. But he was provoked. Anyway, I don’t mean that. It’s not so much him I feel sorry for, it’s his family. He has a young wife and a baby. Poor devils. I can’t help but wonder how they’re going to manage without him.”

  “He should have thought of that before he killed Jason Fox, shouldn’t he?”

  Susan drank some more wine. It tasted thin and acidic after the sweetness of her dessert. “I know,” she said. “But you should have seen where they live, Gavin. It’s a dump. Thin walls, peeling wallpaper, damp, cramped living space. And it’s a dangerous neighborhood, especially for a young woman alone with her baby. Gangs, drugs… And it was partly because he was defending his wife, her race, that he ended up killing Jason.”

  Gavin shook his head. “I never took you for a bleeding heart, Susan. You can’t allow yourself to start getting sentimental. It’ll make you soft. He’s a villain and you’ve done your job. Now let’s just hope the court puts him away where he belongs. Poverty’s no excuse. Plenty of people have it tough and they don’t go around booting their pals to death. My dad was a miner, for crying out loud, and more often out of work than in. But that doesn’t give me an excuse to go around acting like a yob. If you want anything in this life, you go out and get it, you don’t idle around moaning about what a bad hand you’ve been dealt.”

  “I suppose so,” Susan said. She refilled her wineglass and smiled. “Anyway, enough of that. Cheers.”

  They clinked glasses.

  “Cheers,” Gavin said. “To success.”

  “To success,” Susan echoed.

  “Why don’t we pay the bill and go,” Gavin said, leaning forward. His hand touched hers. She felt the tingle right down to her toes. “I’ll walk you home.”

  Susan looked at him for a moment. Those soft, sexy brown eyes. Long lashes he had, too. “All right,” she said, her hand turning to clasp his. “Yes. I’d like that.”

  VI

  No more than a few hundred miles away, over the North Sea, Banks and Craig McKeracher had passed the Rijks-museum and were walking down the quiet streets toward Prinsengracht.

  “Basically,” Craig was busy explaining, “Nev met this right-wing loony in Turkey who had a load of heroin he wanted to shift, and he wondered if Nev could help. Nev couldn’t, of course. He knows bugger-all about dealing drugs. Doesn’t know a fucking joint from a tab of acid. But he’s always one to leave the door a little ajar, so he tells this bloke, hang on a while, let me see what I can do. Now there’s only two people he knows with any brains who have ever had anything to do with drugs. One of them’s yours truly, and the other’s Mark Wood.”

  Banks paused. “Wait a minute. Motcombe knew Mark Wood?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Jason’s business partner?”

  Craig snorted. “Some partnership that’d be. There wasn’t a lot of love lost between them, as far as I could see.”

  “Is Mark a member of the league?”

  Craig shook his head. “No, he wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”

  “Then how-”

  “Mark and Jason met on this computer course, and they got on well enough at first. They were both good at it, too. Anyway, when they finished, Mark couldn’t get a job. I understand he’s got a wife and kid and lives in a shit-hole out Castleford way, so he was pretty desperate by then. Nev
finances Jason in the computer business – only because he knows it’s something he’ll be able to use to his advantage down the line – and Jason decides he’ll take Mark on as partner, seeing as he came top of the class. Naturally, because Nev’s putting money into the business, he’s curious about Mark, so Jason arranges a meeting. I wasn’t there, but I gather Nev had got details of his record by then and quizzed him about the drug arrest.”

  “What were the details?”

  “Mark used to be a roadie for a Leeds band, a mixed-race band, like UB40, and one of the Jamaicans, a Chapel-town bloke, was into dealing in a big way. Used the group van, and got Mark involved. They got caught. End of story. So Nev finds out that Mark has some contacts in Chapel-town who might know someone who’ll be interested if the price is right.”

  “This wouldn’t involve a bloke called Devon, would it?”

  Craig raised his eyebrows. “Yeah. How’d you know about him?”

  “Same source I heard about the steaming. Just a lucky guess. Carry on.”

  “Right. Well, like I said, living in this shit-hole with his wife and kid, Mark was definitely interested in making money, even though he didn’t give a flying fuck for Nev’s politics. But he made a perfect go-between. Devon and his mates probably wouldn’t be any too happy if they knew their supplier was a fascist bastard who thought they should all be sent home to rot in the sun, at best. But Mark got on with the black community okay, and they seemed to accept him. And he wasn’t a member of the league.”

  Banks nodded. “Okay. That makes sense.”

  They spotted a vendor at the street corner, and as neither had eaten that evening, they bought bags of chips with mayonnaise, something Banks would never think of eating back in Eastvale. Here, they tasted wonderful.

  “But how did Jason square all this with his politics?” Banks asked as they walked on. “You said he was dedicated. Straight.”

  “He didn’t. That’s the point. I’ll get to it in a minute. See, in general, neo-Nazis aren’t only racist, they’re also anti-drug, same way they’re anti-gay.”

  “Even though many of Hitler’s lot were homosexuals or junkies?”

  Craig laughed. “You can’t expect logic or consistency from these buggers. I’ll give Nev his due, though. Normally, he could make raping and murdering old ladies sound like a good thing to do for the cause. A true politician. A week or so later, when Mark’s out of the way, he has another meeting with just me and Jason, and he tells us about this idea he came up with after traveling in America and talking to fellow strugglers there. What he thinks is that by providing a steady and cheap supply of heroin, you weaken and destroy the fabric of the black community, making them much poorer and more vulnerable when the big day comes, blah-blah-blah. It’s his version of the smallpox blankets the whites gave the American Indians. Or, more recently, that newspaper story about the CIA financing the crack business in south-central Los Angeles. As a bonus, the blacks become complicit in their own destruction. That’s the kind of irony Nev can’t resist. And all the while he makes a tidy profit out of it, too. Couldn’t be better.”

  “Jason fell for this crap?”

  Craig kicked at an empty cigarette packet in the street. “Ah, not exactly. There’s the rub. Motcombe needed one of us, someone inside the league, just to keep an eye on Mark and make sure everything was going tickety-boo. He didn’t fully trust Mark. Jason, being Mark’s partner, seemed a natural choice. But Jason didn’t go for it. Jason wasn’t interested in profit; he’d have starved for the cause. Nev seriously underestimated his right-hand man’s dedication. Jason didn’t fall for all that rubbish about weakening the community from within. In fact, he saw the scheme for exactly what it was – a money-making venture on Nev’s part. Apparently, he already suspected Nev of skimming for his own gain, and there was quite a little power struggle brewing between them. They argued. Jason said he knew the organization needed money, but this just wouldn’t work, that there was no way they could limit the sale to blacks, that it would spread to the white community too and sap their spirit as well. He said drugs were a moral evil and a pure Aryan would have nothing to do with them. He also said heroin wouldn’t encourage the immigrants to go back home, which is what the organization was supposed to be all about, and that they’d be better concentrating on making the buggers feel uncomfortable and unwelcome than plying them with opiates.”

  “Impressive,” said Banks. “But surely Motcombe must have suspected he’d react that way? Why did he even tell Jason in the first place?”

  “I think Nev really did miscalculate the intensity of Jason’s reaction. It would also have been pretty hard to keep anything like that from him. Nev fell in love with what he thought was his impeccable rhetoric, and he figured the best thing was to bring Jason in right from the start. No way, he thought, could anyone not see the absolute perfection of his logic and irony. At that point also, remember, he’d no idea how violently anti-drugs Jason was. It had simply never come up before.” Craig shook his head. “I was there. Nev was absolutely stunned at Jason’s negative reaction.”

  “What happened next?”

  “They argued. Nev couldn’t convince him. In the end he said he’d abandon the idea.”

  “But he didn’t?”

  “No way. Too much money in it. He just cut Jason out.”

  “But Jason knew?”

  “I think by then he was pretty certain Nev wouldn’t give up potential profits that easily.”

  “So Jason knew about the proposed drug deal and Motcombe was worried he’d go to the police.”

  “That was always a possibility, yes. But even more of a threat was that he’d talk to other ranking neo-Nazis. Nev’s peers and colleagues. Some of whom felt exactly the way Jason did about drugs. Think about it. If Jason could convince them Nev was nothing but a petty thief and a drug dealer, then Nev would never be able to hold his head up in the movement again. He’d be ostracized. Hypocrisy reigns in the far right every bit as much as it does in most other places. There’s another thing, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Jason had charisma. He was popular. Nev was coming to see him as a rival for power – and power meant money for Nev. So Nev was getting paranoid about Jason. It was Jason who made first contact with most of our members. It was Jason they went to when they had problems with the ideology of beating the crap out of some poor black or Asian kid. Jason who set them straight.”

  “So Jason was making inroads on Motcombe’s position?”

  “Exactly.”

  Banks nodded. He found a rubbish bin and dropped his empty chip packet in it. They were near Keizersgracht now, not too far from the hotel.

  “What was your role in all this?”

  “Like I said, Nev wanted someone close, someone in the league to keep tabs on Mark. Obviously Jason wasn’t going to do it, so I was the next logical choice. I hadn’t been around as long as Jason, but I did have an impressive criminal record, including drugs charges.”

  “So what it comes down to is that Motcombe had a pretty good motive for wanting Jason out of the way.”

  Craig nodded. “Exactly. That’s why I needed to talk to you. To fill you in on it all. I don’t know who killed Jason. I wasn’t privy to that. Nev likes to keep his left hand and his right hand quite independent from one another. But I do know the background.”

  They paused at a bridge. A young couple stood holding hands and looking into the reflections of lights in the water. “Where do you want me to go with this?” Banks asked.

  “Wherever it takes you. I didn’t have you brought here to tell you to lay off, if that’s what you think. And it’s not a competition, or a race. Whatever we can get Motcombe for is fine with me. And with Superintendent Burgess. That’s why he agreed to arrange this meeting. All I’m asking is that you hold off moving against Nev until you’ve got something you’re certain will put him away for a long time.” He grinned. “Oh, and I’d appreciate it if you don’t blow my cover. I value my life, and
I might need to stick around awhile longer to see what he gets up to next.”

  “When is this drug deal supposed to take place?”

  “The heroin’s already on its way.”

  They reached the door of Banks’s hotel. He thought for a moment, then said, “All right.”

  “Appreciate it, sir.”

  “Coming in?”

  “No. Got to go. I’m staying somewhere else.”

  “Take care, then.”

  “I will. Believe me.”

  They shook hands, and Craig wandered off down the canal. Banks looked up at the hotel’s facade. It was still early. He wasn’t tired and didn’t fancy sitting in a cramped room watching Dutch television. He also had a lot to think about. Zipping up his jacket against the chill, he wandered off in search of a quiet bar.

  VII

  Susan put her hands behind her head, rested back on the pillow and sighed.

  “Was that a sigh of contentment,” Gavin asked, “or disappointment?”

  She laughed and nudged him gently. “You should know. You had something to do with it.”

  “I did? Little old me?”

  And to think that not more than an hour ago she’d had cold feet. When they had got back to her flat, she had asked Gavin in and one thing led to another, as she had known and hoped it would when she agreed to the second bottle of wine. But when the crucial decision came out into the open, there was an embarrassing moment when it turned out that neither of them had any protection. Well, it was good in a way, Susan realized. It meant that he wouldn’t think she was a slut, and she didn’t think he had taken her out to dinner in the expectation of ending up in her bed. But it was bloody awkward, nonetheless.

  Luckily, there was an all-night chemist’s on York Road, not more than a couple of hundred yards away, and Gavin threw on his jacket and set off. While he was gone, Susan started to get nervous and have second thoughts. Instead of giving in to them, she busied herself tidying up the place, especially the bedroom, throwing clean sheets on the bed, and when he came back she found, after a little kissing and caressing, that her resolve was just as strong as before.