by Ian Mayfield
Her mother had long insisted that Nina’s corporeal state was a question of bad posture, and had campaigned long and hard to get her daughter to deportment or drama or dance classes, or anything. Partly to annoy her, Nina had joined the police instead, and they’d taught her to stand sufficiently to attention and march in a straight enough line to pass out of Hendon. Sod balancing books on her head; she’d worry about arthritis and back trouble when she was fifty.
She felt uncomfortable about her current journey, and at the same time silly. For all her physical shortcomings she knew she was still a looker. But so, even more so, was Larissa Stephenson. Nina was needled by the charm, the ingenuous enthusiasm, the elegance and above all, the Mediterranean beauty and flawless figure she had always coveted. Here, her primeval instinct said, was competition.
Also mildly disconcerting was the question of where everybody was. Unemployment was high in New Addington, but even though it was the middle of the day the place seemed deserted. The only human being she’d seen was a bony-looking youth who’d been jogging across the roundabout as she turned into King Henry’s Drive, presumably using it as a short cut to the tram stop. She glanced at the inside of her wrist where she’d written the house number in biro; it wasn’t a given that this was going to help. New Addington was a town planner’s laboratory and a postman’s nightmare. Numbers could run alternately, or concurrently, or not at all where a tower block leapt up from the concrete with its own floor-by-floor scheme, or they could even start again from scratch where the developers had built terraces with bucolic-sounding names, Oak Bank, Brierley, Applegarth, trying to make the place sound like paradise, as if they were fooling anyone. But she found her destination without too much difficulty and parked outside, a malicious impulse keeping her in the car. Like its surroundings, the house displayed no sign of life. She tooted the horn. Presumably Larissa had been told to expect her, and would be out soon enough.
After a minute nothing had happened. Blank, shut windows stared back at her. Sighing, she unclipped her seatbelt and got out, in her baggy black cardigan and long black skirt looking like a demented rook scurrying up the path.
She’d got halfway when she heard a wooden clatter, and Larissa appeared from the side of the house, pushing a gate to behind her. She’d changed since the morning, and now wore a plain white sweatshirt, stonewashed blue jeans, desert boots and a grey fleece.
‘Hiya,’ she said.
‘I was just going to knock,’ Nina said.
‘Yeah, I heard you beeping.’ Larissa had stepped onto the lawn and was peering up at the house. Nina felt annoyed.
‘Nina Tyminski,’ she said.
The Mediterranean beauty turned to look at her. ‘Larissa Stephenson,’ she said, shaking hands. ‘Most people call me - ’
‘Lucky.’ Nina grinned in spite of herself. ‘I heard.’
‘News gets around, yeah?’ Lucky crossed to the front door and pushed. Satisfied, she turned to Nina and said, ‘OK. Let’s go.’
Furious at her own irrationality, Nina was still smarting at that five minutes later as they headed towards Shirley. What right did she have to give orders? Lucky was the new girl, she should sit tight and absorb the wisdom. Of course, Nina fumed, stealing a glance in the mirror, that’s what she seemed to be doing, now. The cinnamon-coloured face was open and attentive but the eyes were cold, bleak and lost. She wondered why she’d ever thought of the kid as ingenuous; it had certainly worn off fast. Welcome to Special Crime.
Being fair, she was hardly in the best frame of mind to judge. With a twinge of shame she concentrated on the task at hand. ‘D’you know De Montfort Court?’
‘Old people’s home, yeah?’
‘We’re on a follow-up visit to Violet McMinn, age ninety, assaulted and robbed in the early hours of yesterday morning. The intruder got in by forcing the bedroom window.’
‘Not burglar-proof?’
Nina shook her head. ‘He beat her severely about the arms and torso, then swiped several items of jewellery and ornaments including a pair of brass candlesticks, one of which he sexually violated her with.’ She looked in the mirror again to see if this was having any effect, but Lucky’s expression was impassive. ‘The result of all this, she was so traumatised we couldn’t get anything out of her when we saw her yesterday.’
‘Was she hurt badly?’
‘Bad enough. However, she’s wheelchair-bound and very frail. The doctor thought it was best for her not to be moved, so they’re looking after her at the home. Which is why we’re going there and not the hospital.’
Lucky hesitated. ‘You said “he”.’
‘Good point.’ Nina caught herself being impressed. ‘Inconclusive. No semen deposits, just the candlestick, which we know about from swabs of verdigris the FME got from the vagina. CSI lifted some size twelve footprints off the carpet. Faint denim imprints on the sill, looks like he parked his bum on there and swung his legs over.’
‘What’s outside?’
‘Concrete path.’
‘Course.’
‘Which at the moment leaves us with just Mrs McMinn. Apparently she’s now lucid enough to talk to us...’
The heavy sigh that escaped Lucky caused Nina to take her attention off the road for a second. But again the dark eyes gave nothing away. Strange girl. Give her credit, though: keen as mustard. She’d picked up on every point of what Nina had abstracted from the report. She was beginning to understand why Sophia (rumour had it) had headhunted her.
Which reminded her. Nina, who devoured gossip like peanuts at a party, said, ‘This medal, then.’
Lucky looked surprised. Understandable, Nina thought with a fleeting pang of remorse: sudden friendliness from this misassembled crone who’d been giving her a hard time from the moment she’d stepped through the gate. She smiled and said, ‘All mine.’
‘I hear you talked down a suicide from the Norwood mast.’
‘Yeah.’
‘How’d you do it?’ Nina smiled back. ‘If it’s not breaking a confidence.’
‘I don’t want to sound bigheaded.’
‘Course not. I won’t tell anyone.’
Lucky smiled again and brushed a hand in front of her face. ‘I said to him,’ she replied, choosing her words cautiously, ‘look me up and down, and did he really want to chuck away a world when there were girls like me in it to chase after.’ She flinched as she saw Nina’s expression start to change. ‘It was the first thing that came into my head.’
Aghast, Nina heard herself laughing. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, tapping Lucky on the knee with her gear hand, ‘I don’t believe in hiding my light under a bushel either.’
‘I dunno about that - I’m not vain,’ Lucky said. ‘But when you’re sitting on a girder with half a mile of fresh air under your arse you get a very clear perspective on sin.’
‘You a Catholic and all, then?’ Nina giggled.
‘Bulgarian Orthodox,’ Lucky said. ‘Much as I try not to be.’
She stared into her lap, and Nina was still trying to work out what that meant when the Mini breasted Spout Hill, trundled down into Shirley village and the building she was looking for appeared on the right. She said, ‘Let’s go to work.’
‘You know what gets me,’ Nina broke a long silence on the drive back afterwards, ‘why we always feel so guilty.’
‘Guilty?’ Lucky said.
‘Don’t you?’ Nina tried to inject a lighter note into her voice. It came out as a squeak. ‘I mean we’re there to detect. What’s to feel guilty about?’
The question hadn’t been intended as rhetorical, but even as she repeated it the answer came to her in fragments. It was the terrible fear, the knowledge, that though they might detect the perpetrator of the crime against Mrs McMinn, nothing, absolutely nothing, they did or said could take back what had happened to her. This was a woman who’d lived through a century during which the world had changed beyond recognition; who’d battled, loved and mothered through a world war, a depress
ion, the collapse of an empire, the Cold War, man on the moon, the opening of the atomic and electronic ages; who’d witnessed it all, and come through adversity and triumph with a lifetime of achievement to mark against her name. But for Violet McMinn, an invaluable treasury of experience had been indelibly tainted in one hellish moment; what should have been final years passed in quiet, proud dignity obliterated by the senseless act of a slag with no regard for that worth.
Some time since the previous day she’d fought and suppressed the demon in her head, and greeted them with the stoical calm bred into so many of her generation. Her blue eyes were the only part of her now that was not lucid: they stared bleakly beyond the two policewomen and into purgatory. She gave calm and courteous answers to their questions, made her statement, and seemed to reach into Nina’s heart and see the ill-defined revulsion that lay there. She understood that there was only one thing they could do.
‘Just catch the evil little toerag,’ had been her parting words.
Easy to say.
‘Maybe it’s losing control,’ Lucky said, interrupting Nina’s dark thoughts.
‘Control of what?’
‘Sometimes you can’t master the disgust. You think you’re feeling it worse than the victim, and that’s why you feel guilty.’
‘I guess what it boils down to,’ Nina said, after a pause, ‘I just wanted to get out of there. No, worse, I wanted it never to’ve happened. I couldn’t handle it.’
‘That’s it exactly,’ Lucky said with sudden sharpness. ‘You’re meant to be tough, not feel like that. That’s the victim’s prerogative.’
Nina looked at her in surprise.
They got back to the office just as Zoltan Schneider said into the phone, ‘Right, guv. Yep. I’ll get it sorted.’ He hung up and called across the room, ‘OK. One volunteer for obbo tonight. Don’t all leap up at once.’
Nina, who’d just finished booking in, raised her arm and walked over to her desk without looking at him. She sat down and glanced up to find the DI smiling at her like a crocodile.
He said, ‘You feeling all right, Nina?’
‘I said I’d do it.’
‘It’s only for a couple of hours.’
‘Fine.’
He waited. Nina wiggled her mouse, waited for the screensaver to disappear and started typing in her password.
‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’ Zoltan enquired.
A taxi’s clattering diesel engine woke her and she sat up with a start, cursing under her breath. She looked at the dashboard clock. Twenty to midnight. ‘Shit!’ she said aloud. How many times? How often had she been told, had it hammered home again and again by the instructors at Hendon and every guv’nor since, never, never fall asleep on obbo? She scrabbled around for the log, peered out through the windscreen into Ballards Way, and said again, helplessly, ‘Shit!’
Then she stopped, and sat back. Her short-term memory had just kicked in, reminding her that she had not, after all, committed the cardinal sin. The rostered two hours had finished at half past nine and she’d spent some time unwinding, wondering about the prospects as regarded going home. She must have unwound too far. Heaving a sigh, she peered across the street to the Clarkes’ house, roof tiles thrown into sharp relief by the light of an almost full moon. The house itself was in darkness and the two cars were both in the drive, Mrs Clarke’s Golf in front. Halfway up the side wall a red pinpoint of light showed that the burglar alarm was on. No-one was coming in or going out tonight.
She drove home to Addiscombe. The house was still; presumably everyone was asleep. She let herself in and crept upstairs, closing the bathroom door before switching on the light to take out her contacts, remove what remained of her makeup and brush her teeth. This done, she tiptoed across the landing to the bedroom.
In the moonlight she could make out a shape under the bedclothes. The painful knot that had been drawing ever tighter about her stomach loosened. She stood for a moment in the darkness, listening to the slow, even rhythm of breathing. Satisfied, she undressed, found her pyjamas folded on the chair by the window, put them on and climbed gingerly into bed.
‘Mmm?’ a voice muttered.
Nina said, ‘You awake?’
‘You’ve just got in.’ There was a stirring, and an arm extended to encircle her waist. She was kissed, the prickle of encroaching beard growth stinging her lips.
‘Yeah,’ she answered, belatedly. ‘Just this minute.’
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Obbo,’ she yawned. ‘Tell you about it in the morning.’
‘Tell me about it now,’ came the affectionate wheedle. A twinge of irritation stabbed through her before she could stop it. Hard to believe she’d once found that wheedle endearing.
She sighed.
‘I just need to know you’re all right.’
Nina said, ‘What time were Mum and Dad home?’
‘Dunno.’
‘What d’you mean, you don’t know?’
‘I didn’t hear them.’
‘I tried to ring, let you know where I was.’
‘When?’
‘Couple of times. Went to voicemail.’
‘Must’ve left my phone when I went out.’
‘You went out?’
‘Yeah.’
Nina frowned in the dark. ‘Well, if you went out you won’t have heard them come in.’
‘No, s’pose not.’
‘Why’d you go out, anyway?’
‘I got bored, rosebud. Rang Terry and went up the Cricketers.’
‘This late? On a weeknight?’
‘No, we had a couple of pints and then went back to Terry’s for a game of darts.’
‘They’ve got darts at the Cricketers.’
‘They keep falling out the board.’
‘Not if you throw them properly.’
‘Somebody hasn’t switched off yet...’ The hand pinched her waist where it held her, paused and began a tentative foray onto her belly under the pyjama top. She took hold of the wrist.
‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘Sorry, darling. Night-night.’ And she leaned over and delivered a kiss on the forehead, before turning over and drawing the bedclothes more tightly around herself. She was asleep in moments.
The hand was withdrawn, and nothing more was said.
Wrapped in a blanket, Larissa Stephenson sat propped in a chair in a corner of her room. Moonlight slanted in through the open curtains and spotlit the bed in a yellow glare. Every now and then the branches of the apple tree in the garden would move in the breeze, thrusting shadows in.
Lucky didn’t know how she’d got through the rest of the day, only that she’d had to. The initial horror of the visit to Mrs McMinn had turned to overwhelming relief that at least she hadn’t had to pretend to be cheerful. Nina Tyminski, she believed, had guessed nothing. She had some preoccupation of her own which was dulling her intuition. If only the others would be as easy. She felt they might. Carry on as normal, as if nothing had happened. At any cost, no-one must know.
But someone did. He was out there, dancing his mocking dance among the shadows of the tree, leaping through the window, throwing himself uninvited across her bed, her haven, sneering at her in the moonlight. She dared not draw the curtains. Then she would have only the dark. In both worlds lay horror.
The chair was hard, and the pain still gnawed in her abdomen like a parasite. But at last exhaustion overcame her, and her eyelids drooped closed as her body sagged. In a nervous sleep she dreamed of a vast dark room where her mother and father were, of the hallowed kingdom where dust motes flew in the sunbeams, and which would never again hold such terrors for Larissa as her own company.
Thursday
Detective Constable Jeff Wetherby had been walking in and out of the building for seven years now, and his provincial sensibilities still failed to be impressed by it. Jeff played to a fine pitch the lugubrious Yorkshireman who revelled in grandiose Victoriana and the mossy ruins of old castles. Croydon Police
Station, five storeys of rectangular 1980s functionality on one corner of the town’s busiest intersection, was neither of those things. The only remotely romantic features it possessed were the address - Park Lane - and the traditional blue lamp by the entrance, transplanted from the late, unlamented old Victorian station across the road, long since demolished.
On his way in Jeff paid the architecture as little attention as he did most mornings. Following the familiar routine, he showed his pass to the security guard on the barrier and parked in the first available space. Once indoors, he stepped into the empty lift and pressed the third floor button.
‘Hold the lift!’
The issuer of the plea was a woman in her late twenties with skin the colour of ripe chestnuts. High, prominent cheekbones gave her face an impish character accentuated by a sharp, triangular chin and fiery brown eyes. Her long straight black hair was tied back with a polished wooden clip carved like a bow; a few strands she’d teased forward into a thin fringe. She had a classic hourglass figure, broad shoulders and hips and a slim waist, although her short legs made her look thicker set. She wore a man’s grey houndstooth sports jacket over a mauve t-shirt, black cotton trousers and black leather shoes. A pair of large black plastic earrings rested as daintily as such things can against the hollows behind her jaw. Slung over her shoulder was a large black bag, and a briefcase was tucked under one arm. She was Detective First Class Jasmin Winter, on a year’s attachment from Amsterdam. Jeff had fallen for her almost the moment they’d met, on the team’s first day of operation six months ago. Jasmin did not - he believed - know this. He’d been careful not to let on, to keep his adoration secret, afraid to be anything more than friends in case knowledge sparked her to any word or action that could be construed as denial. Working together didn’t make life any easier.