‘Don’t threaten me in any way,’ Yewdall spoke sternly, ‘and you have to remember you don’t get that in prison.’ She pointed to Anna Day’s vodka.
‘I can live without it if I have to.’ Anna Day shrugged. ‘I’ve been inside a few times. You ache for a drink for the first week; after that it doesn’t bother you and you sleep better and have really interesting dreams if you don’t drink. Since the only time a prisoner is free is when they’re asleep, well, that’s a fair exchange. And don’t kid yourself anyway, darlin’, pretty well anything can be smuggled in if you’ve got the right contacts. And I’ve got the right contacts.’
‘So I hear, so I believe,’ Yewdall replied dryly, ‘but nevertheless, try to keep your threats to yourself, especially since we’re on the same side.’
‘You reckon?’ Anna Day sneered. ‘Since like when has the Old Bill been on my side? Since when?’
‘We’re on the same side this time.’ Penny Yewdall glanced round the interior of the Thames Lighterman. It was, she saw, wholly in keeping with the sixties redevelopment of Tower Hamlets. She found it superficial and cheap, and even on a hot day like today, she felt cold within the pub. She thought the tables were too small, and the chairs round them also too small. The faded brown carpet was matted with spilled beer which had been trampled into the pile and was clearly long overdue for replacing. The bar was a single long bar behind which the Afro-Caribbean publican was serving Ainsclough and doing so with evident distaste. Prints of old London Town hung on the walls of the pub but did nothing to provide any sense of depth or history. The Thames Lighterman was not a pub Penny Yewdall would want to spend an evening in, no matter how convivial the company. ‘Yes,’ she said again, ‘if Cherry Quoshie was a friend of yours, then we are on the same side, at least on this occasion.’
Anna Day nodded, picked up her drink and sipped it. ‘All right,’ she said quietly, ‘… so long as you know that it’s only on this one occasion, just this once that we’re on the same side. I can’t be seen as being a friend of the Filth. Not in this boozer. So why are you and me on the same side apart from me being a mate of Quoshie’s? There has to be more than that – there’s more going down than that otherwise you wouldn’t want me on your side.’
‘There is,’ Yewdall said flatly, ‘you’re very clever … it’s because she was tortured before she was murdered.’
Anna Day gasped, ‘Tortured!’
‘Yes. Tortured.’ Penny Yewdall spoke softly and matter-of-factly. ‘There was a massive circular burn on the inside of her left leg, just above the ankle. It is believed to have been caused by something metal being heated until it was red-hot then pressed against her flesh. That sort of treatment can get a lot of information from anybody.’
‘Dare say it would.’ Anna Day’s jaw sagged. ‘It would get a lot of information from me, that I can tell you for nothing. It would get a whole shedload of information.’
Tom Ainsclough returned from the bar carrying three drinks on a tin tray. He placed the requested double vodka in front of Anna Day and a fruit juice in front of Penny Yewdall. He also bought a fruit juice for himself. He put the tray on a vacant seat and sat down at the table.
‘Thanks, darlin’.’ Anna Day swallowed the vodka she was drinking then exchanged her empty glass for the full one Ainsclough had bought for her. ‘I’ve just told your good mate here not to annoy me because if you do I’ll spit at you.’
‘Yes,’ Ainsclough sat down, ‘we know. Your housemate warned us.’
‘I also told her, your mate here, that I am an accurate spitter, and she told me I could get five years inside for deliberately transmitting sexually carried diseases. Just to fill you in on what we’ve been nattering about when you were at the bar.’
‘Yes,’ Ainsclough smiled, ‘that’s true. You could also get life.’
‘I didn’t know that.’ Anna Day looked worried. ‘I thought five years, out in three … that’s a holiday … but life … I never knew that.’
‘Life if you persist,’ Ainsclough explained. ‘First offence you’ll collect five years, second offence you go down for life. You’re a persistent danger to public safety, you see.’
‘Oh …’ Anna Day gasped.
‘So … Cherry Quoshie,’ Penny Yewdall refocused the conversation, ‘we understand that she was frightened of something or someone when she disappeared just before last weekend? Did you see her after Friday last?’
‘Yes, she was frightened … and no, I last saw her on the Wednesday, the day we both get our Giros. We had a printers ink in here. She was edgy … constantly looking over her shoulder.’ Day sipped her drink.
‘Do you know what she was frightened of?’ Yewdall asked. ‘Or who?’
‘No … but I definitely think it was more of a “who” not a “what”,’ Day explained. ‘She was frightened of some heavy face but I don’t know which one. But I will tell you this, Quoshie was full of guilt, I mean, really full … brimful.’
‘Oh?’ Ainsclough sat back in his chair. ‘That sounds interesting. Did she say why she felt guilty?’
‘Yes, she said that she had once helped put a good man, an innocent face, away for life. She said the poor guy was set-up.’
‘Did she mention his name?’ Yewdall pressed.
‘She might have … I can’t remember it, though.’ Day shook her head. ‘Sorry.’
‘Cogan,’ Ainsclough suggested, ‘could it have been Gordon Cogan? We believe that Cherry Quoshie’s murder is linked in some way to the murder of a man called Gordon Cogan who was sent down for life, but we are unsure as to how they are linked.’
‘Gordon,’ Anna Day nodded, ‘that name … that name rings a bell … yes … yes I think she did say that his name was Gordon.’
Yewdall turned to Ainsclough. ‘That’s how they link,’ she said. ‘That’s the link we have been looking for.’
‘Has to be,’ Ainsclough replied, ‘has to be.’ He turned to Anna Day and asked, ‘Did Cherry Quoshie give any details of what she did to help him get sent down for life?’
‘She didn’t tell me all the details, but guilt was really eating into her in a big way.’ Anna Day took a deep breath. ‘Quoshie, she was a hard case … but even hard cases can feel guilty and Quoshie was carrying an awful lot of it, a real boatload of guilt and she had plenty to spare.’ Anna Day paused, took a sip of her drink and then said, ‘I suppose I’d better tell you this … Quoshie told me recently that this geezer, Gordon Cogan had contacted her and that he only wanted her to go to the Filth with him. I mean, that wasn’t going to happen but she did say that she told him she’d help all she could. She said that she didn’t know that she was helping to fit him up. She remembers being strung out … her supplier was holding back on her horse … she didn’t get any for two days, no H for forty-eight hours. For two days she was climbing the walls and in that state she would have done anything for a fix … and I mean anything. I’ve been there, I know how it can get you.’
‘You’re a smack head?’ Yewdall asked.
‘I was.’ Anna Day spoke calmly. ‘I was, darlin’. It’s behind me now, I kicked it. I went into rehab. I’m one of their success stories. Most smack heads do rehab then return to being a user, that’s because after rehab they go back to the same streets where they’re known as users … the pushers give them freebies … and before they know it they’re hooked again. It’s a merry-go-round that isn’t so merry.’
‘But not you?’ Yewdall smiled.
‘No, darlin’. I knew the dangers of going back to where I was known as a smack head, so when I left rehab and I came to live in Tower Hamlets where I wasn’t known … but I was where Quoshie was that time, you live your old life from fix to fix; heroin, crack … whatever the addiction is it’s always the same, you live from fix to fix. You get to the state where you start to chew your finger ends off if you don’t get a fix. Like I said, I was there … you’ll do anything for a fix.’
‘So, is that how you got AIDS,’ Yewdall asked, ‘from using
dirty needles?’
‘No … I was infected; I was deliberately infected by a geezer who was out for revenge. He offered well over the odds for some unprotected. I was younger then and I was short of cash, and I mean well short, and so I agreed. I even felt a bit complimented, to tell you the truth. A white geezer asking a black girl for some unprotected … it made me feel good about myself. Anyway he put himself together again, and as he walked away he then turned round and said, “That’s what you get for being promiscuous”. So I wondered what he meant but it began to worry at me and so three or four days later I went to the clinic and had myself checked out and there I was: HIV positive. So that’s how it happened to me … it was then I began to learn how to spit accurately. Dead accurate. If you get my meaning.’
‘We get your meaning,’ Yewdall replied. ‘It’s not lost on us.’
‘So I might look healthy, but like I said, I could convert at any time. I can take anyone down with me if I want … you two, some frightened little chick in Holloway, in for a month for shoplifting … there’s justice for you but that guy, I made well sure he didn’t do it to no other girl.’
‘He won’t?’ Yewdall asked. ‘You reported him?’
‘No, I murdered him, darlin’,’ Day replied calmly. ‘I chilled him. I iced him.’
A pause descended around the table. It was broken by Tom Ainsclough who said, ‘You’d better be careful what you say to us, Anna.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Anna Day took another sip of her drink and grinned broadly. ‘Am I really going to sign a statement or make a taped confession in a police interview room … I don’t think so. No, it won’t happen so I can talk free. I knew the geezer, you see, knew who he was … I knew where he lived. So I waited outside his drum one dark and lonely night. I was all in black. I am black. I wore black sports shoes. I was as silent as a mouse – he didn’t see me until the last minute and the chiv was in his stomach, right up to the hilt, before he knew what had happened. I saw the look in his eyes and he knew it was me. Then the blade went in again and again. Then I took an old woollen sock from my shoulder bag … it had a rock inside. I bounced that off his head a few times. He didn’t get up. He was well still. Next day the newspapers, they were full of his murder … police appealing for witnesses … all that number, all that old malarkey … witnesses, some hope. I made well sure there’d be no witnesses.’
‘Where was that?’ Tom Ainsclough asked. ‘And when?’
‘Why? Are you going to look the murder up,’ Anna Day looked at Ainsclough, ‘so you can close a cold case?’
‘Possibly,’ Ainsclough replied cautiously. ‘Possibly.’
‘Well, it wasn’t in the Smoke, darlin’. I wasn’t even in old England.’
‘Scotland? Wales? Ireland?’ Tom Ainsclough pressed. ‘Abroad even?’
‘Possibly. Possibly. Possibly.’ Anna Day wasn’t giving anything away. ‘And as to the when … well, sometime in the last fifteen years. That’s when. And that’s all I’m going to say. But the point is … the old point is … I’ve got a victim. I can take another. So don’t you two annoy me.’
‘Point taken,’ Yewdall replied coldly. ‘So, Cherry Quoshie?’
‘Yes, like I said, I don’t know no details but she told me she wiped her hands all over a dead girl.’ Anna Day continued to speak in a calm, matter-of-fact manner.
‘She did what?’ Yewdall queried. ‘Wiped her hands all over a dead girl, did you say?’
‘Yes, so she told me,’ Anna Day continued. ‘She said that the girl was brown bread. I believed her. It was the way she spoke, like she was getting something off her chest so I was listening, wasn’t I? Real intently like. She told me she’d wiped her hands all over this boy Gordon’s chest and then wiped them all over a dead girl … and then put her hands all over the girl’s room and in her drawers and cupboards. Then she took a pair of the dead girl’s knickers and dropped them in the boy’s room.’
‘Why did she do that?’ Ainsclough asked.
‘To get a fix,’ Anna Day replied, as if irritated by the question. ‘I told you … she was strung out. She was crawling up the walls.’
‘Yes, but what was the reason she was told to do that?’ Ainsclough clarified. ‘That’s what I mean.’
‘Beats me, squire, beats me,’ Anna Day shrugged. ‘Don’t think Quoshie knew either. Tell you the truth, I don’t think she much cared either.’
‘Where was Gordon Cogan?’ Yewdall asked.
‘In his room, next room to the girl’s room, so Quoshie told me.’ Anna Day glanced round the interior of the Thames Lighterman. A few elderly isolated daytime drinkers had entered the pub and were keeping themselves to themselves. ‘He’d demolished a bottle of this stuff,’ Anna Day tapped the side of her glass of vodka. ‘He was half cut so Quoshie told me … in and out of consciousness. Quoshie said that she wiped her hands all over his body then wiped them on the dead girl, especially round the dead chick’s neck. It was a hot day … weather like this,’ she pointed to the windows of the pub. ‘The boy was sweating cobs and Quoshie’s hands were covered in his sweat and she smeared his sweat all over the dead girl and all round her room. Quoshie told me she could see no harm in it, not at the time. The girl was brown bread, well chilled, and like I said, she was well strung out, so she did it and she was given a wrap. She went straight up to her room in the attic and shot up. She was still out of it when the police came sometime later and bundled the boy into the back of a van. She was of no interest to the Filth. All they saw was a black heroin addict, in a daze, in an upstairs room well away from the action.’
‘So what happened after that?’ Yewdall asked, feeling a strong sense of dismay.
‘Nothing. In a word, nothing,’ Anna Day spoke calmly, ‘nothing at all. Life went on. The Filth took statements from everyone who lived in that house … in Acton it was, Acton Town, so Quoshie told me but she didn’t tell them nothing, the Old Bill just put her down as a spaced out, brain-dead, black as the Ace of Spades heroin addict who lived in the attic. There was nothing they could see linking her to the murder of the girl. She wore gloves, you know, washing up gloves, when she was putting the boy’s sweat all over the dead girl, so her DNA wasn’t mixed up with the boy’s and so the case against Gordon Cogan was solid. Quoshie said he protested his innocence, but she wasn’t about to speak up.’
‘But he was convicted for it anyway.’ Penny Yewdall sighed and then took a sip of her orange juice. ‘Yes, we know what happened to Gordon Cogan. So tell us what happened to Cherry Quoshie.’
‘Life went on, like I said. She kept on working as best she could. She carried on shooting up. She moved out of that house in old Acton Town and got herself another drum.’
‘Did you know her at the time?’ Ainsclough asked.
‘Yes … yes I did.’ Anna Day glanced to her left and nodded at someone she recognized who had just entered the pub. ‘Yes, I knew her at the time, we go back a long way do me and Cherry but it was only a week or so ago that she told me what had gone down at the house in Acton Town all those years back. That was all news to me, darlin’, all news to yours truly.’
‘All right,’ Yewdall replied, ‘so do you know what, if anything, happened to make Cherry Quoshie want to tell you what she did?’
‘Gordon Cogan only found her, didn’t he?’ Anna Day responded in a matter-of-fact manner. ‘Like I said … he found her and asked her to go to the Filth with him.’
‘He did?’ Ainsclough commented. ‘That’s interesting.’
‘Yes, he did, he was a determined little weasel, I’ll give him that. Once he set his sights on something he went after it with all he’s got.’ Anna Day raised her eyebrows. ‘His memory of that night after being out of it on alcohol must have returned, and he went all over London looking for her. When Quoshie heard that Cogan was looking for her she got scared. Like her old past was catching up with her.’
‘But he found her …?’ Ainsclough sipped his drink.
‘Yes, it wasn’t difficult really. I
mean, ten million people live in this city, probably more, but if you want to find someone you use this, don’t you?’ Anna Day pointed to the side of her head. ‘If you know a little bit about someone, then there’s only a few places you need to search. I mean, use your old loaf. You go where they go, don’t you? I mean, if you’re looking for a bus driver you don’t go to the sort of wine bars that merchant bankers use, do you?’
‘Understood.’ Yewdall nodded.
Anna Day continued, ‘Quoshie was an old black street worker so he knew to look for her down the King’s Cross meat rack. You don’t look for lions where the penguins live, do you? So Cogan trawls King’s Cross and he asked the girls for Quoshie by name. The girls were well wary at first because he said he needed her help, but eventually they believed him and believed he wasn’t going to harm her. They put her in touch with him and after a while they met up with each other.’
‘Where?’ Ainsclough asked.
‘That table over there,’ Anna Day pointed to a table at the far end of the lounge of the Thames Lighterman. ‘Quoshie wanted me with her as a kind of insurance, and he wasn’t going to try anything because we let him know just how good we both were at spitting. It was like … don’t try anything little man or your body will begin to fall apart and you’ll be getting it from two directions at once. You just won’t get out alive. He was well worried and I reckon by then he was more frightened of Quoshie than she was of him. So we came into the Lighterman, they sat over there and I sat here in case I was needed. I didn’t hear anything that was said and I don’t lip-read so I can’t tell you what was said, but he got up after a while and he went away looking happy … Well, he was definitely looking happier than when he arrived.’ Anna Day took another sip of her vodka. ‘Any old way, Cherry Quoshie came over to me and said, “He only wants me to go to the Old Bill with him, doesn’t he”. That’s what he wanted. So I said, “Some hope!” and knock me down with a feather because Cherry Quoshie only says, “Dunno, Anna … I might”. She said she asked him if she could think about it, and he agreed to let her have some time. So I ask why does he want you to go to the Old Bill and she says he wants her to help him clear his name, so she says, “Yes, I remember what I did … but it means I’ll go down for conspiracy to murder” and she said she needed time to think about it. So I said, “You’re serious?” and Quoshie says she is. She was suddenly coming over all Gandhi, you see, banging on about doing some good in her life for once and she says, “What have I got to lose? I mean, look at me. I’ve got nothing and no one to be on the outside for … I’ve got nothing. I’m the lowest of the low, not good looking, HIV positive, black street worker, forty years old soon. I’ll make a confession. I’ll get five years, out in three. I’ll have company, decent food, but I’ve got to grass up Pestilence … that’s the only thing stopping me. I’ve got to grass up Pestilence Smith”.’
Denial of Murder Page 15