by David Mark
For an instant there is no reply. Then the voice continues, as though Ray has not spoken.
“The house on Division Road is not expecting you, Chief Inspector. The details of my arrangement with your colleague were clearly miscommunicated.”
Russell reaches out to take the phone, mumbling words of protest. Ray raises his arm and splays his fingers. Keeps the phone beyond the other man’s reach, until Russell sinks back into his seat.
“Like I said, son, bad day for you.”
“I have experienced bad days before. What happens today will be of significance to you, but of little or no consequence to me and the people I represent.”
“And yet you took the time to ring . . .”
“If inconvenience can be avoided, I believe it to be worth the gesture.”
“You’re not going to avoid this inconvenience, boy. One of your little helpers took a swing at me with a fucking crucifix. That doesn’t buy you much in the way of goodwill.”
Ray catches Tremberg’s eye. Winks. He seems to be enjoying this.
“Some of my associates are spirited individuals,” says the man. “They have unique character traits and skill sets that we attempt to harness. I am not one to stand in the way of youthful exuberance.”
Ray laughs. “That what you call it when you nail somebody’s hands to their knees? When you petrol-bomb a police van? You’re no fucking big shot, whoever the fuck you are. You run a few cannabis factories. You’ve scared a few Chinks. You think you’ll make my memoirs when I retire?”
Now it is the other man who emits a chuckle. “I presume that you are recording this conversation, Chief Inspector, so I will refrain from unburdening myself with regards to my regret for recent incidents. But to presume my associates are limited to such matters represents a degree of shortsightedness that they will find amusing.”
“Did you actually want something, lad? Only I’ve got a drug den to raid and a couple of fucking Chinks to arrest.”
The man does not speak for several seconds.
Finally he gives a little sigh.
“Your colleagues,” he says. “The large gentleman who looks like he should be carrying a claymore. The lady in the biker boots and breasts. Tell them not to feel guilty. They had a job to do. Miss Marvell was big enough to make her own decision. And do tell Detective Superintendent Russell that I will be in touch.”
The call is terminated. The speaker begins to emit slow beeps, like a life-support machine.
Ray looks at the side of Russell’s face for a spell. Looks as though he is about to spit.
“Sir?” Tremberg is the first to speak. “Do you think that bloke runs this lot, then? That he’s the boss? He didn’t sound right. Didn’t sound like just some drugs thug . . .”
Ray picks his teeth for a spell.
Says nothing.
Finally picks up the radio from between his legs.
“Go.”
A dozen car lengths ahead, the double doors swing open at the back of a white van. Half a dozen uniformed officers emerge, fast and furious.
Farther up the street, four plainclothes Drugs Squad detectives step into the rain.
As one they descend upon a deceptively large town house halfway up the street.
Tremberg opens her own door. Puts her left foot down in a puddle. Pulls her extendable baton from the pocket of her raincoat. Listens, above the footsteps and the resurgent rain, for the sound of the police dogs as they pour into the property’s backyard, straining at the leashes of their handlers . . .
Watches a burly officer muscling his way to the front of the pack.
He hefts the Enforcer, the rubber-ended metal battering ram that can deliver three tons of kinetic energy in a single swing.
Brings it forward: expert and practiced.
The wooden door at the front of the house is smashed back off its hinges.
She hears shouts. Warnings. Watches the officers streaming forward—a blur of color and rain—as they surge through the busted door.
Colin Ray puts out a hand.
“No point being in there first, love. Being last out, that’s what you want. Slapping the cuffs on and watching as the bastards take their last look.”
Tremberg looks at him. At the rain running down his sallow, unhealthy-looking face. At his stained teeth and sodden, stained pin-striped suit. Wonders whether, if he could just be a bit less of a cunt, she could learn a lot from this man.
More shouts. A roar, full of frightened energy.
“Fuck! Fuck!”
One of the detectives emerges from the property. He is breathing hard. Puts out a hand to steady himself against the redbrick wall.
Tremberg follows Ray as he walks briskly up to the house.
“Well?”
The officer is around Tremberg’s own age. Fleshy cheeked and earnest, all supermarket suit and inoffensive haircut.
“Fucking forest up there,” he says, wheezing. “Got one lad. The other did a bunk out the back.”
The radio in Ray’s hand crackles. The dog unit has cornered an Asian-looking gentleman in the backyard.
“Job well done, then,” says Ray, about to step into the property.
The constable shakes his head. Something is wrong.
“There’s a woman up there, sir. Big girl. There was a report, couple of days ago, a misper . . . missing person . . . I think it’s her . . . fuck, sir, what they’ve done . . .”
Tremberg steps inside the house. Pushes past the throng of uniformed officers who line the hallway and staircase, uncomfortable in their damp raincoats, and makes her way up the stairs.
The carpet beneath her feet is patterned with swirls, and her head spins as she pushes open the doors to room after room set up for the cultivation of the finest-quality marijuana. Here blocks of resin, stacked like house bricks, set up for collection. There sacks of leaf, dried out and also ready for collection, sitting like bags of Christmas presents against white-painted walls.
She follows the sound of foreign shouts. Of brutal curses and angry threats, frothing on a tongue bitten bloody by gnashing teeth.
Sees a young, dark-haired Vietnamese man, in vest and shorts, writhing on the ground, tie-wrap cuffs behind his back, an officer on his legs and another pinning his shoulders.
Looks past him. Past the detective leaning against the door frame of a bedroom wrapped in plastic sheeting and hemmed with snaking wires.
Takes in, briefly, the plants in their varying stages of growth: some flowering, verdant and glossy, beneath yellow hydroponic lights.
“In here.”
Tremberg approaches. Looks inside.
The woman is alive, but barely. She lies on her side, hair plastered to her face, an officer’s uniformed jacket covering her naked, fetal form.
“We’ve called an ambulance. We didn’t like to move her.”
Tremberg crosses to the woman’s side. Gently pulls back the coat.
The heads of the nails scarcely protrude an inch from the putrefying entry wounds in the back of her hands. The tips are buried three inches into her kneecaps. Blood has run down her legs to her ankles and blackened her feet. She was sitting up when this was done to her, before being thrown down here for more blood to trickle and congeal upon the lumpy, linoleum floor.
Her bare breasts appear, at first glance, to be covered in a matted, sticky hair.
Tremberg peers closer.
Sees the horror of the mutilated flesh. The blackening and burning of her skin.
Tremberg, face gray, turns back to the door. Colin Ray is standing there, smile gone.
“Pharaoh’s snout,” says Tremberg through bile. “McAvoy’s admirer.”
Ray scowls. Turns away.
Tremberg brushes Leanne’s hair back from her face. Feels the big, well-muscled woman shiver and pull away. Her eyes
flicker open and closed. Her lips move. Tremberg has to place her ear next to her mouth to make out what she is saying.
“Shaun—is he okay? Shaun? They wouldn’t tell me. They kept asking me where he was, then laughing when I said I didn’t know.”
Tremberg, despite herself, feels tears prick at her eyes.
She wonders who will have to tell this tortured, broken creature that the man she has been protecting is already dead. That she has been mere practice, and sport.
THE REPORTER is in her thirties and plain as a cheese sandwich. She has brown hair, glasses, and her waterproof coat betrays no flair or sponsor. She’s BBC to her bones.
Helen Tremberg tries not to let the sauce from her bacon sandwich drip as she stands in the canteen and watches the bulletin.
The reporter is being lashed by a heavy, gusting rain, and winces slightly as she talks to the camera.
“I’m here on Division Road, just off Hessle Road in the west of the city, where residents were this morning witness to the latest in a series of citywide raids by Humberside Police. We’re told that this morning, in an operation involving the force’s helicopter and a dozen officers, Drugs Squad operatives smashed their way into the property you see behind me and recovered hundreds of cannabis plants, along with equipment used for their cultivation. There are reports that one of the suspects removed from the house was transferred immediately to a medical facility, though where they sustained their injuries remains unknown.
“I’m joined here by Detective Superintendent Adrian Russell, who oversaw the hugely successful operation.”
Tremberg takes a bite of her sandwich and watches as the senior officer enters shot. He has pulled on a coat and made an attempt to slick back his hair, but the unhealthy pallor of his skin and fretting of his hands betray his discomfort.
Tremberg finishes her lunch in two bites as the reporter asks a series of bland questions, to which Russell gives anemic answers.
She tries to pay proper attention. Focuses in on what he is saying.
“It’s too early to say at this stage whether this setup has anything to do with a larger organization, but this is clearly an important result. These drugs would have a street value of hundreds of thousands of pounds. We found seedlings and plants in thirteen rooms in this abandoned house, as well as a complex setup. Corridors between the rooms were snaked with electric wires and pipes to vent the smell of the drugs out of the building. The energy to heat the equipment came from a generator that had been custom-built to hide the noise. The front of the property appears totally derelict—”
He is interrupted by the reporter, asking the only question that matters.
“And the two men you arrested?”
Russell looks as though he wants to be sick. “I can only tell you that a fifteen-year-old youth and a thirty-year-old man, both believed to be Vietnamese in origin, have been arrested and are currently being questioned by senior detectives.”
Tremberg smiles to herself. Wipes her face with a napkin. She likes being called a senior detective.
Throwing the napkin in the bin, she pushes through the swinging canteen doors and heads for the interview room. She was grateful when they took a break for a midafternoon lunch. She was starting to worry that the vein in Colin Ray’s head was about to pop. He is truly struggling with the concept of people not really being able to speak English. Seems about to reach across the desk and do some serious harm.
As she nears the interview suite, one of the doors bangs open and Colin Ray stomps out, furious.
“Fucking Chinks!” he screams at nobody in particular, and then glowers at Tremberg when he sees her. “They understood Ronan easy enough, and he sounds like he’s drowning half the time. And they don’t understand me? They can say ‘solicitor’ well enough, lying bastards. Where you been, anyway? Fucking part-timer . . .”
Tremberg bows her head as she is bawled out, and suddenly feels an extraordinary rush of affection for McAvoy and Pharaoh. She wishes to high heaven they were here. Wishes they were running this. She has seen Colin Ray get results today. Seen him, somehow, twist people inside out. And yet it only added to the acid in his gut and the distaste on his face. There is something vile within him. A genuine, bona fide malevolence. She realizes he is dangerous. That if he were not so damned obsessive about catching crooks he would be one.
“Is the translator on her way?” asks Tremberg at last.
Ray spits on the linoleum floor of the corridor. “Hours away. And the assistant chief constable is sniffing around. Talking about procedure.”
This morning’s brief sensation of victory is souring. The two Vietnamese farmers are saying nothing. If they speak English, they are hiding it well.
Ray stares into space for a while.
“Ronan’s picture,” she says. “Anything?”
Tremberg had stayed with the older man in the interview room while Ray worked on the younger one. She has not yet heard how it went, though from Ray’s face she can guess.
“Knows him, course he does,” says Ray viciously. “Eyes like bloody saucers when I showed him. Then it was all this Vietnamese shit and plenty of ‘No, no, no.’ Same with the picture of Shaun Unwin. And the two other Chinks from the foreshore. Christ, you’d think they’d want to help their mates. Don’t they know what they’re looking at? Even if they didn’t do the harm to Pharaoh’s informant, they’ve been busy growing weed while she lay there rotting and begging for help.”
Ray slams a fist into his palm. “They’re not going to talk, are they?”
Tremberg doesn’t answer.
“Neither’s Rourke. Or Ronan. His brief’s got him to shut his trap. Shaz can’t get a word out of him.”
They stand in the corridor, and for a moment neither knows what to do.
Within seconds of each other their phones begin to ring.
They turn away. Ray to Archer. Tremberg to McAvoy.
“Hello, Helen. Are you okay? I heard about the raid. What’s happening? I thought you were going home last night. I would have come with you. Were you with Ray? And Leanne, she’s okay, yes? Does Pharaoh know? Are you okay?”
Tremberg gives in to a smile.
This is the most appreciated she has felt all day.
• • •
“COULD YOU BUTTER these, please, Suze?”
The middle-aged lady nods at a tray of bread rolls. The gesture comes as a relief to Suzie. The lady is wearing a plastic apron over what appears to be a corset paired with school socks, and Suzie had momentarily feared she was going to be asked to do something unusual with a tub of margarine.
“Don’t go mad,” she says as Suzie sets to work. “Just a scraping.”
This is the aspect of swinging and wild sex that Suzie finds most pleasantly surreal. Underneath the costumes and the impromptu blow jobs, these gatherings are little different from a normal house party. Although most of today’s guests will spend the day naked, the owners are putting on a finger buffet, and so far everybody who has arrived has brought a bottle, a plate of homemade cakes, or a card for the birthday girl.
It is four p.m. on a bright but cold Saturday afternoon. Suzie has gravitated toward the large, old-fashioned kitchen of the white-painted farmhouse that stands in a dozen acres of private fields and woodland. She is dressed in a short denim dress, thigh boots, and a Venetian mask, which sits on her head as she sips from a plastic beaker of lemonade and helps the host and her best friend make snacks.
“Throw a few cherry tomatoes on the tray,” says the woman. She shakes a bottle of homemade salad dressing with enough force to send her lopsided breasts jiggling. “Make it look pretty.”
Suzie is pleased she came. She is not planning on staying all evening, and has no hopes or ambitions for how the party will play out, but she is enjoying the feeling of relaxed escapism that always settles upon her when she finds herself in the company o
f people who, to some degree at least, understand her.
“I wish I’d brought a cake or something,” says Suzie as she gaily drops cherry tomatoes onto limp-looking ham sandwiches. “It was just a last-minute thing.”
“Don’t you worry,” says Christine. “Just nice to see you.”
Suzie turns. Adjusts her glasses so she can slide the mask back onto her face. Smiles at the hostess. “Are you having a nice birthday?”
“Ask me again when a few more turn up.” Christine laughs. She had greeted Suzie with a big, full-breasted cuddle and a kiss on both cheeks.
“Are you expecting many?” asks Suzie, taking another drink. “Maybe the weather will put people off.”
Christine looks out through the thick glass. The sky is a rich blue, but the trees that bound the paddock are shaking in a chill breeze.
“We’ll see,” she says. “Got a party with the family tomorrow anyway. This is just a normal club night, even if I do get a few extra presents.”
“I like your outfit,” says Suzie.
“Took some getting into,” says Christine. “It’s not real leather. You have to cover yourself in talc to get it on, and when it comes off, you can still see the shape of it on your skin. Hopefully be too dark for anybody to notice by then.”
Outside, Suzie hears the sound of a car pulling up on the gravel driveway. She heads to the back door and steps into the cold air; her boots precarious on the uneven cobbles.
On the patio, four or five couples are lying, in various states of undress, on deck chairs and sun loungers. When she came here with Simon, Suzie had thought it funny that wicker chairs were also laid out. They had laughed uncontrollably when she had nudged him and pointed at the back and buttocks of a sixty-year-old man who had recently vacated one armchair. “Crinkle cut,” she’d said.
There are smiles all around as she is noticed on the patio. None of the people who have turned up so far are particularly attractive, but all have enjoyed dressing up. Unfortunately the cold weather and muddy fields have rather spoiled their ensembles. On one striped deck chair, a woman in her early thirties is wearing a waterproof parka over a crotchless body stocking, while her fifty-year-old partner is holding his lighter as if it were a portable heater, cupping his hands around the flame as he shivers in denim shorts and a tight-fitting T-shirt.