by Adam Creed
‘Bring back Lotte Stensson?’
‘So you can do it again?’
He shakes his head. ‘No, man. You just don’t get it, do you?’
‘You can leave us, Sergeant,’ says Staffe.
Pulford stands, befuddled, and Staffe waits patiently to have Kashell to himself, bar the smoking PO. He lowers his voice to barely a whisper. ‘I know how you feel, Nico. Really I do.’
‘How can you?’
‘Trust me. Does a part of you wish you hadn’t done it? Do you sometimes wish you had gone the other way – tried to forgive her?’
Nico plays with his fingers, as though he has invisible worry beads.
‘It’s a design fault,’ says Staffe, ‘that the anger comes first, the pity later. It’s too late for some, isn’t it, Nico?’
‘How do you know this?’
‘Somebody murdered my parents.’
‘And have you caught up with them?’
‘Not yet.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I pray I can forgive them.’
‘I hope your prayers find their answer, Inspector.’
On the journey up the A1 to Middlesbrough, Staffe says, ‘I’m not convinced Kashell could do that to Stensson.’
‘You think they’re copying him? Maybe it’s someone who’s done time with Kashell and been released.’
Staffe looks across to Pulford and smiles. ‘Call the station. Get them to liaise with prison probation and check everyone who’s been released from Wakefield in the last three months and living in London. And add a filter – anyone who shared a wing with Kashell. And make sure they weren’t banged up again by the time Karl Colquhoun was killed.’
‘There is a problem, though, sir. How would they know to go for Colquhoun or Montefiore? They were never prosecuted.’
‘We need to find out why – exactly why – the CPS didn’t push Lotte Stensson’s prosecution,’ says Staffe.
‘She was a classroom assistant. It’s bad for the government.’
‘I don’t buy that. But if that is the case, we need to dig it out.’ Staffe pulls the Peugeot out into the fast lane, turning his thoughts to Linda Watkins and what kind of a basket case they are about to uncover in Middlesbrough.
He wonders whether, had Linda Watkins got hold of Montefiore and fashioned the most grizzly of tortures, she would have been at all placated by such revenge. Or would she be left wanting some other resolution – just like Nico Kashell.
Staffe’s phone rings, shows Pennington.
‘You sitting down, Staffe?’
‘You could say that.’
‘We’ve received another photograph,’ says Pennington. ‘Montefiore. Just as he’s going down on to the wood.’
‘Jesus! And the message? Is there a message?’
‘It says, “Road Safety: is that all you’re good for? Look left, look right. Look ahead, look back.” I want you here as soon as, Staffe. Sooner!’
‘Sir? Sir? I think my battery … Can you hear …?’ And Staffe hangs up. Always hang up when you’re speaking, someone once told him. It might even have been Pennington. He turns his phone off and replays the words of the latest message – the reference to an impotent police force reduced to hoodwinking motorists. He wishes he was better at crosswords, the way his father had been.
If only you could go back in time.
Go back, he thinks. Look left, look right. Look ahead, look back. Is he being told to look back – at Kashell? Is he being told to look all round? He checks his mirrors, sees a speed camera flashing.
*******
Linda Watkins has unblemished, alabaster skin and a thick tousle of shiny dark hair, expensively cut. She is tall and slim, elegant in a dark-grey, woollen trouser suit with a short, tailored jacket and hipster trousers. You’d never guess that she had a daughter on the game or had settled for a man who watches cable TV all day on the Villiers estate.
She speaks in measured, calm tones. ‘If truth be known, I am surprised it has taken you this long to check up on me, not that I have done anything illegal, of course. Even in this day and age, I’m sure a woman is still entitled to leave her husband.’
Staffe picks up on her finely crafted sentences. ‘And your daughter,’ he says.
‘You have probably come with your own conclusions as to what sort of person that makes me. I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’
She stands to one side and shows Staffe and Pulford into the front sitting room of her Edwardian semi. It has stripped floors and waxed doors with porcelain handles and finger plates. The walls are cream and there is a display of dried flowers in the fireplace. Staffe can’t see a stereo but he can hear a jazz ballad being sung somewhere. Peggy Lee, he thinks. Black Coffee.
Pulford raises his eyebrows at Staffe when Linda goes out of the room. Staffe mooches around the living room. Watercolours hang: Mediterranean harbours, Swiss villages and English dales, but no photographs. Not a sign of Sally Watkins.
Linda comes back in, saying, ‘Am I what you expected?’ She sets down a tray, hands coffee across.
‘Preconceptions are difficult to resist,’ says Staffe. ‘It’s good for us to have it reaffirmed, once in a while – that everything is not what it seems.’
She hitches her trousers up at the knee, the way a man would, and sits on the edge of the wingback chair, leans forward with her forearms on her knees, slightly apart. ‘What did you expect? Peroxide? Bad skin? Split ends and leggings?’
‘I’m not talking about appearances, Mrs Watkins.’ As he says the name, Linda flinches. ‘My mistake. I assumed you had kept your daughter’s surname.’
‘The surname is my husband’s.’
‘And Sally’s too, of course.’
‘She’s not in trouble, is she?’
‘You know what she’s doing, don’t you, Linda?’
She looks out of the window, keeps her head held high.
‘It’s none of my business, of course,’ says Staffe.
‘Except it is, Inspector Wagstaffe.’ She looks at him. ‘It’s illegal. Or are you too busy with your speed traps?’
The hairs on Staffe’s hands prickle. He thinks of the latest photograph and its caption.
‘I had a female officer speak with her, about safety. Precautions.’
‘So she has been in trouble? It’s an awfully long way for you to come, Inspector.’
Staffe tries to see beneath the surface. He tries to imagine a younger Linda somehow getting knocked up by a young Tyrone. Then doing all the right things and having it thrown back in her face.
She stares out of the window as if she is trying to muster more strength, then says, ‘Sally has only got one life and she has to make the most of it. I couldn’t teach her that. You know we can only ever be truly responsible for the life we lead ourselves. We have to do right by ourselves. I learned too late.’
To rescue at least one life from this mess, it’s almost enough to make Staffe ashamed to be human. ‘Could you ever forgive Guy Montefiore, Linda?’
‘Has he had his dirty middle-class fingers in the pants of some other poor estate girl? Is it finally time the bastard got what was coming to him?’
‘I’m going to have to ask you where you were on Tuesday – between ten p.m. and six the next morning.’
She gets up and takes a diary from a reproduction writing desk in the alcove by the window. She opens it up and hands it to Staffe. ‘There. I had dinner at Leoni’s on the Tuesday night in Newcastle and I got the 7.40 train on Wednesday morning down to Leeds for a ten o’clock meeting. The telephone numbers are there. If that would make you feel as though you are doing your job.’
‘It would,’ says Staffe, making a note of the numbers.
As Staffe and Pulford leave, Linda says, ‘You probably think I’m a bad person, but you know if I had stayed, I would have been buried alive. They’d have come for me in fifty years or so and put me in a box and nobody would ever have known I had been there.’
*******
/> Josie gasps as she takes the photograph from Janine: the frozen look of horror on Montefiore’s face. His mouth is bound with gauze and his eyes are wide and wild – two streaks of mascara running from the corner of his eyes. But she knows it’s not mascara. His silent screams so loud the pain transformed itself into bursting vessels of blood. They say that pain is simply fear leaving the body. In Montefiore’s case it is leaving through the most unlikely conduit.
The caption at the bottom of the top photograph says Road Safety: is that all you’re good for? Look left, look right. Look ahead, look back. Janine’s notes are attached to the photograph, as are blown-up sections of parts of the image.
‘The image is digital, probably captured from a video stream.’ Janine rests her bottom on the edge of Josie’s desk, plays with her hair. She looks Josie up and down, says, ‘The pixelation is inferior to a silver image and it would have been impossible to capture the moment …’
‘The moment it went into him, you mean,’ says Josie. She studies Janine, narrows her eyes and makes a thin smile.
‘The wood wasn’t chamfered. It intruded between 55 and 60 millimetres. I’ve extrapolated from a CAD model of the room and the measurements from the wood to the walls and ceiling, that he was still falling. There’s no blurring.’
‘It’s a funny angle,’ says Josie.
‘The camera was pointing upwards, probably propped up on a chair or coffee table.’
‘So it could have been done by a single person.’
‘There was no alien DNA or prints at the scene.’
‘Just like Colquhoun.’
‘You’re with Staffe, then?’ says Janine.
Josie’s mouth falls open. ‘What …?’
‘His theory, I mean. The quality of the print is identical to the photograph we received of Karl Colquhoun. It is printed on identical paper.’
‘Looks like he’s right, then.’
‘He doesn’t always get it right,’ says Janine.
‘I heard you and him used to see each other.’
‘I wouldn’t have called it that, and the club isn’t that select.’
‘He plays his cards close, doesn’t he?’
Janine stands up, brushes a piece of cotton from the thigh of her skirt. ‘You don’t want to be in that club, do you, Sergeant Chancellor?’
‘Who’s Sylvie?’
‘You’d better ask him that.’ Janine opens the door, turns. ‘He won’t tell you, of course.’
‘What happened to his parents?’
Janine leans against the door frame, puts her head to the back of her hand and talks to the floor. ‘I studied Jung at med school and he reckoned that to understand a man you have to know what his grandfather lacked. Staffe’s parents died before he was a man. He doesn’t really know what made him.’ She looks up. ‘But what do I know?’
‘Did he hurt you?’
‘He only hurts himself. At least that’s his aim.’ The phone rings. ‘You’d better take that, before I say something I might regret,’ says Janine, closing the door.
‘Chancellor, do you know where the hell DI Wagstaffe is?’ says Pennington.
‘No, sir. Can I help?’
‘You can tell him he’s got his way. Tell him I hope it’s not enough rope to hang himself. Leanne Colquhoun will be released sometime tonight.’
Josie gathers her things together, including a scrawled message in Staffe’s hand: Why no CPS push for LS’s prosecution? Call WW, nil written. ‘LS’, Lotte Stensson. ‘WW’. DI Will Wagstaffe.
She pulls out the Stensson file that Smethurst sent over from the Met and scans through ‘all known contacts’, sees that Ruth Merritt was the lawyer representing the CPS on the case. Josie notes that she is different from the Crown’s lawyer on the dropped Colquhoun and Montefiore cases. No obvious conspiracy theory to be developed, then.
On her way down the back stairs to the car park, Josie is wondering why the Stensson case isn’t on the whiteboard, why Staffe is keeping it close to his chest, then she sees Stanley Buchanan a flight below, making his way up. He’s out of breath and has a sheen of sweat on his face, a film of booze all around him. When he talks she gets a draught of freshly sucked mint.
‘Staffe in?’ he says.
‘Out and about, I’m afraid.’ His eyes are on her – like hands. He gives out a lascivious smile. She leans back against the metal handrail, and watches him look away, swapping his papers from one arm to the other.
‘Well if he’s not here, I may as well come out with you.’ When they get to the door to the back car park, Josie swipes her pass and Buchanan holds the door open, says, ‘Fancy a drink?’
She looks him in the eye, thinks ‘no way’. ‘I’d love to,’ she purrs, thinking she might save herself an afternoon of reading up on CPS policy on child abuse – vast tomes that twist themselves up in knots of policy speak.
Outside the Griffin, Josie opens the door and lets him go in first. It’s pay day tomorrow and she’s down to a pound coin and coppers. ‘I’ll get a table,’ she says, smiling. ‘Let’s split a bottle of white, shall we? I’m off duty.’
When Buchanan gets back with the wine, he sits down heavily and looks around. House music plays up in the wooden eaves, bounces around the exposed brick walls. ‘Great place.’
‘You’d remember it as a proper pub, I suppose.’
‘I’m all in favour of progress.’
‘Progress is one thing we’re not seeing much of at the moment,’ says Josie. ‘There’s so many departments pulling in different directions.’
‘Hey, I’m only doing my job, just the same as you.’ Buchanan takes an unhealthy slug of his wine, tries a stoic ‘What can I do?’ smile. ‘It’s an adversarial system. That’s the way the truth gets squeezed out.’
‘I’m not getting at you, Stan. It’s the CPS I can’t get my head round.’
‘We share the same enemy, then,’ he says.
‘They seem to drop the most unlikely cases.’
Stan Buchanan leans back, cups his glass on the ledge of his gut. ‘They’re only flesh and blood. Same as coppers.’
‘Success rates are important, I guess.’
‘Ahaa. You’ve nailed it, girl. You’ve nailed it.’ He takes a slug and recharges both glasses. ‘You might call it economy of effort.’
‘And it could depend on which particular person there is at the CPS?’
‘It’s only human beings at the end of the day.’
Josie softens her smile, sips from her wine without taking her eyes off him. ‘I’ve come across a woman, Ruth Merritt. What’s she like?’
‘Ruthie? Straight as they come.’ He laughs to himself. ‘Too straight for her own good. I always fancied my chances with Ruthie, but I haven’t seen her for ages. I assume she’s gone off somewhere quieter. Maybe having babies.’
Josie wants Ruth Merritt to be a cold-hearted career woman, playing the percentages and building a glittering career, but this doesn’t fit. Surely she would have pressed the Kashell case. ‘What else might stop someone like Merritt from pushing for a prosecution?’
‘The disclosing officer is the key to the evidence. If the officer doesn’t fancy their chances of a successful prosecution, they may stymie the whole thing. Workloads and targets, my girl.’
She gathers up her handbag, drains her glass.
‘You’re not going?’
‘I’m going out for dinner,’ lies Josie. ‘Shall we split this?’
Stan shakes his head and holds up a hand as Josie pretends to search in her bag. ‘Some lucky fella?’
‘No. It’s a girlfriend, actually.’ Josie winks at Buchanan as she stands up, watches him twitch, go red in his fat face. On the street, she looks through the large plate-glass window and sees Buchanan blowing his cheeks. He gestures at the barmaid for another bottle.
Thursday Evening
Staffe boots the Peugeot down the A1. It is pale dusk and as he sees signs for Cambridge he is tempted to stop for an overnight. An aperitif in a
backwater hotel, a stroll along the backs. Spires, young lovers and a leisurely dinner. Pulford is asleep and Staffe drives on, beyond tired now. He has pictures to hang back at Queens Terrace, and records to unpack. He should call Pepe Muñoz if he gets home before ten. He will phone the Thai Garden for a takeaway and he may also make another call. Sylvie.
Pulford grunts and Staffe turns the CD player up a notch. The loud swell of Charles Mingus retells Duke Ellington, and Staffe feels it, guns the Peugeot way, way over the limit down the bottom stretch of the A1, switchbacking across the North Circular, barrelling into London against the law.
Deliberately, Staffe brakes hard, jolting the car to a halt in the neon glow of Golders Green’s Tube station front. ‘Thanks for the conversation, Sergeant, you’re fantastic company, you know.’
Pulford blinks, bleary-eyed as Staffe leans across, pushes the passenger door open and points up at the station lights.
‘What? Where …?’
‘You’ve had your beauty sleep. I want that list of everyone released from Wakefield and living in London. Don’t go advertising it to Pennington just yet. And I want a list of all unprosecuted molestations in the last three years. Anything the CPS has dropped.’
‘Why’s that?’ says Pulford, rubbing his eyes, stretching.
‘Because if there’s going to be a next victim, there’s every chance an aborted CPS prosecution will be in their descriptor.’
Pulford puts up a sleepy thumb and makes a forced smile, slams the door shut, and Staffe pulls out into traffic. A red Merc stops short in front of him and Staffe block changes, undertakes, sees the driver holding a mobile phone, happy as Larry. But he lets it go. He sees the road three, four moves ahead and within fifteen minutes is pulling up outside his flat. On the street, he looks up at the night sky: starless and orange blue.
‘There will be another. There will be, but why put me in the picture?’ He says it out loud. ‘Why call me? Why watch me?’
Staffe needs to slow down. He breathes long and deep, leaning back against the car, crossing his arms over his chest, closing his eyes, saying under his breath ‘pacify yourself, pacify yourself’.