by Mark Hill
‘It’s a waste of time and resources.’ Ray Drake folded his arms. ‘And I’m surprised we’re even talking about it.’
First thing on Sunday morning, and Flick was struggling. She’d lined up the cuttings on her desk, but Drake barely gave them a glance.
‘Kenny Overton researched these—’
‘You’re making basic mistakes.’ He spoke over her. ‘Concentrate on your gaps analysis – working out what we know and what we don’t. The movements of the victims, compiling phone data, interviewing—’
‘With respect, sir,’ she said, ‘we’re doing all that.’
The Incident Room was full. Flick could see her team bashing the phones, chasing up reports. She held out the list of names, but Drake went to the window. It was as if he didn’t want to look at it. Flick could understand his scepticism, but she had never seen him so agitated. She wondered how much grief Harris had given him in the aftermath of Ryan Overton’s death. She couldn’t get the memory of his prowling about in the Property Room out of her mind …
A cough – a sound – he stepped forward.
Now wasn’t the time to mention it. She felt that the Sword of Damocles was poised above her head, and that her promotion would be rescinded before she’d even had time to get her feet under the desk. The irony wasn’t lost on her. Flick had a reputation as a plodder; Drake himself had urged her to work more instinctively. Now she was, and he was slapping her down.
‘Kenny researched all these people because they went to the children’s home Ryan mentioned. Look.’ She held up one of the clippings, but Drake made no move to take it. ‘He tried to find the kids he’d known at the Longacre in the eighties and discovered many had died.’
‘How many?’ Drake asked.
‘Five.’
‘So, in actual fact, very few.’
‘There could have been fifty kids at that home, or just nine.’
‘Kids who have been institutionalised for any length of time can be damaged. Many become addicts, criminals. They form self-destructive habits and their lives spiral out of control. The death rate will naturally be higher.’
‘Did you read the cuttings?’ Last night he’d said he had, but now she wasn’t so sure. If he’d read them, he’d understand what she was trying to say. ‘Most of these people were killed in unexplained circumstances.’
‘Jason Burgess committed suicide. As did Karen Smith and her partner.’ Drake propped himself against the sill. ‘There’s nothing in there that has any significance to this investigation.’
She spaced all the cuttings apart on the desk. ‘David Horner was burned—’
‘Listen to me, Flick.’ Drake’s voice lifted irritably. ‘Kenny Overton was a fantasist, a dreamer – Ryan admitted it himself – who spent his life trying to figure out where it all went wrong. Trying to find some kind of meaning to every bad choice he made.’ He gestured at the plastic slips. ‘What about all the other cuttings he threw away because they simply didn’t fit with the idea he’d formed in his head that he was a victim? Besides, there’s no evidence to suggest he knew any of these people. These could be articles torn randomly from old newspapers.’
‘That’ll be easy enough to check,’ said Flick.
Drake looked away. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’
‘Their families, sir.’ She counted on her fingers. ‘Karen Smith, Jason Burgess, Ricky Hancock – they all died with their loved ones, everyone except David Horner, who didn’t have any. And now Kenny is murdered … along with his family.’
Drake watched all the activity in the Incident Room, as if there were far more important things that they should be doing. ‘What did I tell you last night? Don’t overcomplicate things. You know as well as I do that there’s a tight window of opportunity in any investigation. Don’t get dragged off on some ludicrous flight of fancy.’
He was closing her down in every direction. There was a good reason why Drake didn’t want to follow this line of inquiry further, and they both knew what it was. She’d avoided mentioning it till now. She picked up the cutting with the photograph torn away.
‘We know Kenny went to the Longacre. The photograph is missing.’ She showed him the torn edge above the caption. ‘But his name is here, along with some others, including …’ She placed a finger beneath the names of Leonard and Myra Drake.
‘I saw it.’ Drake’s left hand ticked impatiently against his leg. ‘Leonard … my father was involved in a number of children’s charities back then. It was a long time ago.’
‘Perhaps your mother would remember something …’
‘Myra can barely remember the day before yesterday.’
Flick’s impression of the old woman was that she was still as sharp as a blade. ‘That’s not—’
‘Flick.’ Drake pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘I’m going to be honest with you. Harris is spitting feathers. He wants to know why Ryan was allowed to go home.’
‘Ryan insisted,’ she said quickly. ‘And we had an armed—’
‘He knows all that,’ said Drake, not unkindly. ‘But he’s thinking that right now this investigation, because of its profile, needs a more experienced lead officer.’ He looked annoyed when her mobile buzzed. She placed it in her top drawer. ‘I told him you deserve this chance because I have faith in your abilities. But the pressure to get motoring on this is intense. What we absolutely don’t need right now is to waste time flying off on a fantastical tangent.’
She swallowed. ‘Yes, guv.’
When he opened the door, the burble of the Incident Room, the chunter of printers and the ringing phones, poured into her office. For the first time he glanced at the cuttings. ‘Let’s talk later.’
The best thing Flick could have done right then was to knuckle down to work, God knows there was plenty piling up, but she was convinced she’d be replaced sooner or later, come what may. And besides, she’d already made the call …
‘One more thing, guv.’ She snatched a sheet off the printer. ‘Those other names on the list – the ones that aren’t crossed out – appear in the caption of the missing photograph. Elliot Juniper has a criminal file. Theft, burglary, handling stolen goods; a list as long as your arm.’ With a sigh, Drake closed the door. ‘Someone called Connor Laird is mentioned, and Deborah Willetts, I can’t find either of them in the system, but look.’ She placed the printout on the edge of her desk, as if she was trying to tempt a feral cat with a treat.
Drake looked exasperated. ‘Where’s this going, Flick?’
‘There’s only a single mention of the Longacre children’s home anywhere on the internet,’ she said quickly. ‘It burned down just hours after your mother and father visited it, in nineteen eighty-four. But Amelia Troy’s name rang a bell. A few years ago she was the biggest thing to hit British Art. She won the Turner Prize, her paintings sold for tens of thousands. Troy and her husband Ned Binns were this golden couple of the art world.’
Drake reluctantly picked up the sheet.
‘That’s a newspaper interview she did years ago,’ continued Flick. ‘She mentions being in a children’s home in Hackney called the Longacre.’
A photo below the interview showed Amelia Troy and Ned Binns on a sofa, dressed identically from head to toe in black denim and Doc Martens. Their legs were entwined so you couldn’t tell where one of them ended and the other began, their heads leaned together in a single massive explosion of bird’s-nest hair. They looked lazily at the camera from beneath heavy lids. Amelia wore thick make-up and blood-red lipstick. Ned’s face was hidden behind a riotous red beard. Burning cigarettes drooped languidly in their fingers.
‘And she’s still alive,’ said Drake.
‘Yes, but about seven years ago she almost died in a suspected overdose that killed her husband.’ She waited for a moment while Ray Drake scanned the interview. ‘It was all over the papers.’
Drake dropped the sheet. ‘So what are you saying?’
‘Point is, he died, she nearly died. Another kid from the
Longacre, another accident. I just think it’s worth talking to her.’ When Drake laughed shortly, Flick gestured to the Incident Room. ‘Everyone’s hard at work. Amelia Troy still lives at the same address in Bethnal Green.’
Drake shook his head. ‘You haven’t been listening to me, Flick.’
She blurted out: ‘I’ve already arranged to see her.’
Flick did her best not to shrink from his grim stare.
‘We’ll take my car,’ he said finally.
19
A whipping cluster of colourful balloons taped to a battered steel door wasn’t what Ray Drake was expecting.
He thought he knew all about Amelia Troy – had made it his business to know. There was a time when you couldn’t turn on the TV or open a magazine without seeing her unfocused gaze, or hearing her throaty, self-regarding laugh as she ranted about life, politics, art. There wasn’t a subject under the sun about which she didn’t have an opinion. When the papers required outrageous state-of-the-nation analysis or a provocative quote to spice up a tired news story, Amelia was happy to oblige.
It was that period when Art was as big as rock ’n’ roll and enormous amounts of money were being made by a new generation of hungry, media-savvy young artists. Amelia Troy was right at the vanguard of it. She was never slow to regale interviewers with her traumatic rags-to-riches story. Chain-smoking, sipping from a hip flask, she’d explain how she bounced from institution to institution as a child, hinting darkly of brutal abuse, a life of terror.
The only way to cope, she said, was to harness the creativity within her. She drew her bleak, dangerous world on walls and windows using crayons, felt tips, chalk or boot polish, whatever she could get her hands on. One day she shoplifted a 99p painting set from a corner shop. That set, she said, changed her life. With the help of a couple of well-heeled benefactors, and the vaguest suggestion of sexual favours along the way, Troy got into one of the country’s top art colleges. From that moment, she proclaimed arrogantly, Art would never be the same.
Critics lapped it up. Troy’s work, they said, was a ‘tumorous clot of catastrophic energy, as treacherous and implacable as cancer’. She painted kinetic and intoxicating canvases of blood reds and sinister blacks, which almost, but not quite, obliterated the carefully detailed figures beneath. Instead of a signature, each painting was signed with a trademark Amelia kiss. A powerful clique of art dealers paid obscene amounts for it. Troy’s shows sold out. And her nihilistic lifestyle added a more dangerous context to her anguished body of work.
When she married another enfant terrible of the art world, a self-proclaimed conceptual terrorist called Ned Binns, her work and appearance began to deteriorate. Her uniform of shapeless Clash T-shirts and jeans only accentuated her dramatic weight loss. Commentators drily noted the way her mass of hair was knotted and uncombed, and her thick make-up more sloppily applied.
When a whisper campaign implied a dependency to heroin, Troy’s increasingly irrational behaviour did nothing to dispel the rumours. No society party was complete without the newly-weds hurling abuse at each other. Binns had his own demons, but despite his well-documented adultery and his controversial works, which involved sending threatening letters to politicians and celebrities and compiling a multimedia exhibition out of the tangled legal paper trail, Amelia Troy stood by her man.
But the moment she became forever known as a burnout – a totem of the wicked, hedonistic art scene – came when she showed up drunk for an awards ceremony and showered the attendees with a string of obscenities live on television.
Troy fell off the radar. She shuffled in and out of rehab, so they said, battling addiction and mental health problems. And by the time Troy and Binns were discovered naked and overdosed on the bed in their apartment, the fickle art world had moved on.
By all accounts Troy had a lucky escape. She was at death’s door, and her body would have lain undiscovered for weeks, perhaps months, if her husband hadn’t managed to rouse himself long enough from his terminal stupor to call 999. When the paramedics arrived, Binns was dead – and Amelia barely alive.
A comeback exhibition at a fringe gallery of work promising a more positive outlook on life was poorly received. The world, it appeared, only wanted to know Amelia Troy as an artistic fuck-up.
It had been a relief to Drake when she’d drifted back into obscurity. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d read anything about her, but he certainly remembered the precocious girl from the Longacre and her sketchbook filled with uncanny life drawings. There’d never been anything in her personality back then to suggest she’d become a gobby firebrand and, for a short while, the most famous artist in Britain. Amelia had been like the other children – quiet, anxious, someone who instinctively withdrew from the dangerous gaze of adults.
It was a risk to come to her warehouse. The danger was that she’d remember him. But something, someone, was circling, and he needed all the information he could get. He clung to a quote from the single interview she’d given following her overdose. A reporter had asked her why she barely painted any more.
‘Because I can’t remember any of it,’ she’d replied, ‘it’s gone.’ Asked what it was she couldn’t remember, she’d said: ‘Everything.’
Huddled against the wall.
Her hand hot and clammy in his.
Flecks of spittle arcing high.
Threats, obscenities.
Flick stared at the balloons whipping in the breeze. ‘Looks like a party.’
The journey to Amelia’s apartment had been tense. Flick had spent most of the time on the phone to the office, furiously scribbling notes, eager to show that she wasn’t abandoning her other responsibilities. Approaching Bethnal Green, they drove down a winding road past industrial units – the prefab businesses, scrapyards and lock-ups shuttered this Sunday lunchtime – alongside a rail track. At the end was a hulking redbrick Victorian warehouse isolated on scrubland. The meshed windows on the ground floor were intact, but the building looked abandoned. There was a gravel area big enough to park a couple of cars. The steel entrance, with its jostling balloons, was wedged open.
‘She said to go to the top floor.’
The small lobby was cold and damp, but the elevator was still an impressive piece of machinery. When Flick hit the button its gears detonated into life in the depths of the building. A box trundled down towards them, cables grinding.
The panelled elevator was lit by a bare bulb. Closing the cage, they ascended past sealed-off stumps of corridor. Halfway up, Drake and Flick heard something unexpected in that gloomy place: the sound of happy children.
When the elevator shunted to a halt, and Drake pulled back the lattice, they emerged into the centre of a vast space saturated with blinding light from the surrounding tall windows. The floor was spattered with speckled blobs of dried paint, which made the surface uneven. Sitting at a long trestle table were a dozen kids, painting and drawing and filling the enormous space with chat and laughter. Other children bolted like unstable atoms, paint dripping from the brushes in their hands, despite the best efforts of a small group of adults to get them under control.
Flick frowned at the sole of one of her shoes, and the sticky yellow splodge of paint smeared there, as a woman walked towards them.
‘DS Flick Crowley.’ Flick held out her hand. ‘We’re looking for—’
‘Thank God.’ The woman threw up her arms. ‘I thought you didn’t look like parents. The last thing we need is for one of the kids to walk off with a stranger!’
It took a moment for Ray Drake to realise that this amiable woman, casually dressed in a splattered T-shirt and jeans ripped at the knees, dark hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, was Amelia Troy. She looked healthy and tanned and happy. Younger than he remembered from newspaper cuttings ten, fifteen years back, when she had seemed prematurely aged. And happier, by far, than the miserable, timid child he remembered from the home.
‘This is Detective Inspector Raymond Drake,’ said Flick.<
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Amelia took his hand. Her shake was strong, and despite the chill in the vast space, warm. Drake held her look, searching for any hint of recognition, but sensed no response.
‘You’re having a party,’ he said.
‘I see why you’re a policeman, absolutely nothing escapes your attention. I hold an open house for local kids every weekend, God help me. There aren’t many places in this world where they can come and have creative fun and make a mess.’ She gestured to a kid who was splashing orange paint on a roll of paper. ‘Every week I think, Never again! But they love it so much.’ She laughed. ‘They can lark about, get themselves filthy and express themselves. This is a working space – or it was.’
‘This is your studio?’ asked Flick.
‘This is my home.’
Drake turned to see that the other end of the massive warehouse, past the central elevator, was furnished as a living area, with sofas, lamps, a television on a stool; beyond that, separated by a long stretch of concrete, was an enormous double bed, a kitchen area. Everything was open plan, the areas separated by narrow paths of space like the floor of a department store.
‘It must cost a fortune to warm up.’
‘I may as well just chuck fifty-pound notes out the windows. Strategically placed heaters make it bearable, just about.’ She smiled at Drake. ‘And my beloved electric blanket, of course.’
‘It’s like something out of a movie,’ said Flick, incredulous.
‘I’ve lived here for nearly twenty years now and I’m too lazy to move.’ A toddler crashed into Amelia’s legs and fell over. ‘Blooming heck, Darnell, you can run fast!’ For a split second the boy looked like he was going to cry, but Amelia placed a hand against his cheek, and he calmed immediately. Plonked back on his feet, he ran off, screaming with delight. ‘I can’t hear myself think in here, why don’t we go upstairs?’
Taking a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from a ribbed radiator hidden behind a painting, she led them to a fire door. Canvases were leaned beneath the windows. Chaotic patterns, which, if you looked closer, began to take on the outlines of people. Some appeared finished but most were abandoned, or ruined by obliterating brushstrokes. In the bottom right-hand corner of each, the red imprint of her lips.