Suffer the Children

by Adam Creed

  ‘She got the right place?’

  ‘I spoke to her myself. We checked and double-checked. It was the right door on the right floor.’

  ‘This is a disaster,’ says Pennington, making his way out of Staffe’s office. ‘Absolom’s got something up his sleeve. What if she tells them you interviewed her about Montefiore? You need to get a grip on this.’

  Staffe waits for him to leave. ‘There’s another visit I want you to make, Josie. A mother and daughter down in Raynes Park.’

  ‘The Kashells?’

  ‘Keep it to yourself. And when you go, I want you to …’ He softens his voice, ‘… I want you to suss the place out. See what sort of keys there are to the doors.’

  ‘Staffe …’

  ‘I need to be able to get in. Check for bolts. See if there’s a dog or neighbours overlooking.’

  ‘Why are you going out on such a limb, sir?’

  He pulls on his suede jacket, feels the stubble on his face, almost a beard now. He looks at cloudless London, the towers of the City’s eastern sprawl scratching at the Docklands sky. He gives Josie the Kashells’ address and makes his way through the thick air of the hot narrow corridors to the incident room. He knows he can’t put it off any more. He has to see Jessop.

  When Jessop first left Leadengate, Staffe couldn’t bear to visit his friend. Then there was a big case, then another and before he knew it, he’d left it too long and when he did call, Jessop’s bile was up. Even so, Staffe knows he should have made the effort. But he had his own problems. Sylvie was gone.

  Still, he is going to see him now, but it’s because Jessop has something to offer him. These are the wrong circumstances in which to call on a friend. And say what you like, they are friends. More than friends.

  ‘You could have done something, Staffe. Nobody said anything. They just stood aside and let me go,’ Jessop had said, carrying a small box with his personal effects down the back stairs to the car park.

  A voice says, ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ Staffe twitches, looks across and sees Jombaugh. ‘Shit, Jom, I didn’t see you there.’

  ‘What’s troubling you, Will?’

  Staffe checks behind him, as though talking about an old friend might damage him. ‘You remember Jessop.’

  ‘He thought the world of you. You not seen him in a while, right?’

  ‘Not in a while, no.’

  ‘You give him my best, Will.’

  Staffe leaves Jombaugh to it and goes to the toilet but he notices the light switches outside are off. They’re never off. He opens the door gently and hears a sigh from the gloom. It’s coming from inside a cubicle and he crouches down, sees the feet are pointed towards the pan. Dull light comes in through the high frosted window. Another sigh, an ecstatic sigh and he recognises the voice.

  He goes back out and eases the door closed, waits. The toilet flushes and he stands ready, to make as though he is just going in. When Johnson opens the door, he walks into him.

  ‘Sorry, Rick.’

  Johnson looks dead in the eyes, says, ‘No matter, sir.’

  ‘How come the lights are off?’

  ‘Some prick trying to save the world.’

  He watches Johnson go, slow, and once he’s out of sight, Staffe turns on the lights and goes into the toilet, inspects the cubicle. No smell, lid down. There is nothing unusual, anywhere, just a copy of the Mirror on top of the bin. He removes it, takes the top off the bin, and prods at a pile of blue paper towels. He puts his hand in, as if it was a barrel of goodies in a grotto, looking up at the tube light for some reason and he feels something sharp, as if he has been nipped by an animal. He tips the bin up, kicks the towels so they scatter and then he sees what bit him. A syringe.

  *******

  Josie follows Greta Kashell into the small kitchen at the back of the house, says ‘yes’ she’d love a cup of tea. Greta puts the kettle on and continues to make small talk about the summer.

  ‘Is your daughter in?’ says Josie.

  ‘Nicoletta? She goes to her grandparents for the holidays. They’re down in Hastings. She likes it there.’ Greta stops fiddling with the mugs and the sugar bowl and gives Josie a short, stern look. ‘Nobody down there knows what happened. When she first comes back here, she’s almost like she used to be. Then it’s back to the way it was. School’s the worst. It happened at school. I was late picking her up. I work, see. If I didn’t work I’d have been on time, maybe … Can you believe it – a classroom assistant. How could that happen?’

  ‘You know none of that was anything to do with you, Greta.’

  ‘She goes to high school in September. She’s a nervous wreck about it. I want to teach her at home but the experts say she has to relearn to be sociable. Sociable! She was the friendliest girl you’d ever meet. What good does that do you in this world?’

  ‘Does she visit her father?’

  ‘No. She loves him. She loves him more than me.’ Greta Kashell looks away when she says this, and Josie slips her hand into her pocket, feels for the mobile phone. She is ashamed of what she is about to do but does it anyway. Before she came in, she had put Greta’s landline number into her mobile.

  She makes sure she’s talking as she presses ‘call’. ‘There’s often a strong bond between father and daughter. I know from …’

  The phone rings and Greta Kashell flinches, lets it ring. ‘She won’t let me hold her, you know. It was a woman, see. A woman that did it.’

  ‘You’d better get that,’ says Josie.

  Greta Kashell goes into the hall, head down, and Josie moves to the back door as quick as a flash, takes the key out of the lock and presses it into the tablet of plasticine she has brought with her. The ringing stops and she hears Greta saying, ‘Who is it? Who is it!’

  Josie hurriedly takes the key from the plasticine and replaces it in the lock. She makes sure there are no bolts on the back door. No signs of an alarm. She hears Greta slam the phone down and she flicks off her mobile, starts busying herself in the making of tea. ‘So, Greta, you say you work …’

  Before she has even finished her tea, Josie makes her apologies and leaves, knowing exactly when and for how long the house will be empty, allowing Staffe to snoop for God knows what.

  *******

  Staffe parks the Peugeot just off Kilburn High Road, his head pounding. He needs to change his clothes, and traces of last night come back at him, strangely reminding him of Sylvie, not Rosa. Why did she return his call so quickly? The fact that she is in his phone makes his pulse quicken.

  He locks the car and makes his way up to the main entrance of Jessop’s dishevelled four-storey terraced house and even though this is a different urban backwater, a new postcode, he feels a refrain from those days when he felt like shit most of the time – going into Leadengate on two or three hours’ sleep, having to gargle with Listermint and spray himself down with Right Guard before the DCI clocked him.

  His finger hovers over the buzzer to flat four. Funny that Jessop lives so close to Staffe’s Kilburn house. Funny, they never see each other around but maybe Jessop has seen him, has chosen to look the other way.

  What ravages might retirement have wrought on Jessop? Jessop who loved the Force more than it loved him. He wonders whether Delores will have stuck by him. Delores who was younger and had a twinkle in her eye. He takes a deep breath, presses the buzzer. Perhaps he will be out.

  ‘Who’s that?’ The voice rattles in the cracked aluminium intercom grille: deep, belligerent.

  ‘It’s Will, sir. Will Wagstaffe.’ Staffe knows it’s stupid to call him ‘sir’, but can’t help himself.

  ‘What the hell do you want?’

  ‘Do I need a reason?’

  ‘It’s been too long for there not to be a reason.’ There is an electronic whirr and the latch clunks open. Staffe pushes the door and hears Jessop bark an instruction through the grille as though time has been rewound. ‘All the way to the top and take it slow, I need some time.’

&nb
sp; Staffe laughs to himself and makes his way past a dismantled motorbike in the hallway. The place smells damp and he guesses it’s tenanted. The carpets are shiny and the walls are grubby. When he gets to the top of the final flight, Jessop is standing in the open doorway, practically filling the frame. He has aged more than three years; he’s wearing an old cardigan and hasn’t shaved for a couple of days. His hair has thinned and his eyes are dark; his trousers bag, and while he is well built in the shoulders and chest, the gut has dropped and the legs have gone spindly, like a drinker’s. ‘You could have called.’ A tight smile betrays him.

  ‘It didn’t seem right. So I left it. Then I called and you bawled me out. Remember?’

  ‘I always bawled you out. It never put you off before.’ Jessop smiles, like a roguish uncle as he remembers older days.

  ‘And you moved.’ Staffe looks around the place, trying not to turn his nose up.

  ‘You’re supposed to be a detective. Did I teach you nothing?’

  ‘You don’t snoop on friends.’

  ‘Aaah. I’ve got friends now? Lucky me.’ He turns his back.

  Staffe follows him into what appears to be the lounge and sees that his arse has all but gone to nothing. His mother used to say, ‘His arse has gone to gin.’ She never swore, but she said that when his father’s worst friends came and went.

  A duvet has been tossed in one corner, a pile of clothes in another. A thick pall of cigarette smoke hangs even though both sash windows are pulled right open. Outside, North London’s rooftops go on for miles under the cloudless sky.

  ‘You working that Colquhoun case, hey?’ says Jessop. ‘Got nothing?’ Jessop flops down into a threadbare chair, gestures for Staffe to sit on a piano stool at a junkshop desk and lights a cigarette. He tosses the pack to Staffe. ‘Off the booze? You’ve lost that boozer’s jowl. Doesn’t look like it’s doing you any good. Christ, I’m better off out of the fucking Force if that’s what things are coming to.’

  ‘What do you make of the case?’ Staffe tosses the cigarettes back. ‘Does it remind you of something?’ Staffe flicks through a magazine that was on the chair he’s sitting on. When he looks up, Jessop is making a tight smile.

  ‘She was still warm when I got there. You could almost hear her scream when we took the gauze from out of her mouth.’

  ‘Gauze?’ says Staffe.

  ‘They use gauze on Colquhoun?’

  ‘Why did the CPS drop the Stensson case?’ says Staffe.

  ‘Four hundred hours on a forty/sixty case when they’ve got seventy/thirties they can put away in half a day? And the perverts always do it again, so you’ll get a quickie in the end. It’s numbers, Staffe. Numbers everywhere.’

  He goes quiet and Staffe looks around the place. Jessop’s got a couple of nice things – a decent stereo in its day and a Sèvres vase, plenty of silver frames with different versions of the same pretty face.

  ‘How’s Delores?’ says Staffe, looking around as if she might be in an adjoining room.

  ‘Think she’d live like this? In this shithole?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘So you did come round because of Lotte Stensson.’ Jessop looks sad. ‘You know we got the man who did for her.’

  ‘Nico Kashell,’ says Staffe. ‘He confessed.’

  Jessop stubs his cigarette out, reaches down and pulls a bottle of Scotch from next to his chair. He pours an unhealthy measure into a coffee mug and lights another cigarette. ‘Poor bastard,’ he says.

  ‘Did you always reckon Kashell definitely did it?’

  ‘“Poor bastard.” Is that what they say about me? “Poor bastard never got his pension brought forward.”’ Jessop takes all the whisky back and grimaces.

  ‘It wasn’t right, the way they did it.’

  ‘You still work for them. And now you’re here.’

  ‘Jombaugh sends his regards.’

  ‘Why are you here, Will?’

  Staffe thinks about breaching security, telling Jessop about Montefiore. But he ponders too long and Jessop sees part of the truth.

  ‘There’s been another?’ says Jessop.

  ‘An unprosecuted child abuse. It was torture, again. You don’t have any doubts about Nico Kashell?’

  ‘He’s doing life. Why would he do that if he didn’t kill Lotte Stensson?’

  ‘Because he can’t bear not to have killed her? That’s what a decent father would do to someone who had pushed their fingers up his little girl. Who’d …’

  ‘I know! I fucking know, all right!’ Jessop gazes into his empty coffee mug, looking as though he’d prefer to forget.

  ‘Ruth Merritt was the woman at the CPS. We can’t find her.’

  ‘Ruthie was a good woman.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her since that case.’

  ‘She seems to have disappeared.’

  ‘That doesn’t make her a bad person,’ says Jessop.

  They sit in silence and Jessop smokes another cigarette, takes another mugful of whisky. This is nothing like what Staffe had wanted. He plays with the syringe inside his pocket. As he’s reminding himself to send it off to Janine, he catches Jessop’s eye. He smiles.

  Jessop smiles back, not so tight.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Will. It really is, and I hope you get your man.’

  ‘We should have been better friends to each other, Bob. Don’t you think?’ Staffe stands up, begins the process of leaving.

  ‘We were as good as we could have been.’

  ‘Did I ever thank you, for taking care of me? I’d never have lasted …’

  ‘No you didn’t. And don’t burden me with your police career. I won’t be responsible for that.’ He laughs and it turns into a splutter. Staffe moves across and pats Jessop’s back. He lets his hand rest between his friend’s shoulders. Jessop’s eyes are cloudy.

  ‘How’s Sylvie?’

  ‘She left.’

  ‘That’s what happens, Will. I told you that all along.’

  Making his way down the stairs, Staffe feels the low thudding bass of a gangsta rap beat, can smell something that’s not cigarettes or weed being smoked, and he makes a call. He gets through to Jombaugh and knows something isn’t quite right when he’s put straight on to Pennington.

  ‘He’s recovered consciousness, Staffe.’

  ‘Montefiore?’

  ‘And the first thing he says when he comes round is he’s got to see you. He says you can save him. Is that right, Staffe?’

  ‘Save him?’

  ‘What the hell’s going on!’

  *******

  ‘You look terrible,’ says Josie. ‘Are you growing a beard? I’m not sure I like it.’

  He wants to stay here all afternoon and into the evening but knows he can’t. They are in The Steeles down the bottom end of Belsize Park. He used to come here on his own. He’d sit right here on the corner of the curving bar, watching the sun stream in, lighting up the specks of dust; watching it turn his glass a burning amber.

  She takes hold of the rim of his glass with her thumb and middle finger, twirls the Jameson’s round. It forms legs down the sides of the glass. She leans towards him.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew Montefiore.’

  ‘I don’t!’ He takes the glass and their fingers touch. He drinks it down and then finishes the water. ‘How did you get on with Greta Kashell?’

  ‘He says you can save him.’ Josie takes the plasticine out of her bag and lays it on the bar. Straight away Staffe knows which master will get him into Greta Kashell’s home. ‘She goes to the restaurant every night from six until eight. It was their restaurant until Nico went down. Her brother-in-law runs it for them now and she helps out with the books.’

  ‘I went to see Jessop.’ He tries to catch the barmaid’s eye but fails. The Jameson’s burns his throat and he wants more. ‘He used to be a top man, and now he’s fucked.’ He looks her in the eye. ‘Totally fucked.’

  The barmaid comes across and Josie say
s ‘Sorry, I think we’re going’ to the barmaid. She hands Staffe the plasticine imprint and says, ‘You’ve got what you wanted,’ and gets up from the bar stool.

  Staffe looks across to the barmaid and she smiles. Her eyes shine, glassy.

  He goes to the toilets and runs the water as cold as he can get it, packs the basin’s plughole with paper towels and fills it to the rim. He takes a deep breath then dunks his head in the cold water. He looks at himself in the cracked mirror and says, aloud, ‘Come on, you prick.’

  *******

  According to the nurse, Montefiore hasn’t eaten since the assault, on account of the lacerations, bruising and haemorrhaging. As the nurse goes matter-of-factly through the details, Staffe looks into Montefiore’s sad, dark eyes. The pain has taken its toll on his grey face, but a glimmer of fear shines through. Only in the eyes is he alive. Kept alive with the threat that all this will happen to him again, just as soon as he is fit enough to take it.

  Staffe sits alongside and can’t imagine this man stalking, catching and violating Sally Watkins, trying to do the same to Tanya Ford. After all the years in the job, it’s still sometimes impossible to equate people to the things they do. Apparently, Montefiore used a sex toy on Sally. How much disclosure does the CPS want?

  ‘Who fucked with you, Guy?’

  ‘They had a balaclava on.’

  ‘How many of them were there?’

  ‘One. Only one that I saw.’ He gulps air after every few words.

  ‘And they said they’d come back, finish the job?’

  He nods again.

  Staffe remembers what Nico Kashell said to him, about wanting Lotte Stensson back. To do it again? Like this? ‘They told you to get in touch with me, did they? Well tell me: who really fucked with you, Guy? Who made you think it was all right to do those things to Sally Watkins? Was it a teacher? Was it your father? Maybe your mum or just some bad bastard you didn’t know from Adam.’

  Guy Montefiore looks afraid but he won’t look away. ‘There’s hate in your voice. I don’t hate anybody.’ He looks done in, but he musters himself, reaches out and puts a hand on the back of Staffe’s neck, pulls him closer. Gasping for air between phrases, he says, ‘Love makes the bad things happen. Not hate. Sometimes … we love too much.’