‘No.’
‘Did it give you thrills? Did you get hard?’
‘It wasn’t me!’
‘You hated Carlton Savage too, didn’t you? Brash and flash; everything you’re not. Did you decide to plant that evidence on him when you realized he was in the frame, or was that your plan all along?’
‘You’re wrong. I didn’t do any of it.’
‘Yes, you did. And I think you’ve done it before.’ Harper stared at White, daring him to deny it. ‘I think you became Mark White to cover old tracks, and I’m going to prove it.’
White set his jaw. ‘You’re wasting your time.’
‘You’re going to spend the rest of your life behind bars.’ Harper smiled nastily.
But White straightened, staring back with unexpected defiance. ‘I think you’re full of shit. I can see it in your eyes,’ he sneered, turning the tables. ‘You’re the sham here, Detective Inspector Harper. It’s you who’s hiding who you really are.’
Harper bristled. ‘I’m going to take you down,’ he said coldly.
White met his glare, unflinching. ‘Whoever killed them is out there laughing at you right now.’ He grinned darkly. ‘It’s going to be your face on the TV this time, not mine.’
29
Another wasted day, covering old ground, removed from where he should be, from what was important. Much like his next port of call.
Stark dutifully summarized the relevant events of the last week, for Doc Hazel. She made the most notes while he was describing the return of Harper and Stark’s consequent frustration at being deliberately kept out of the investigation loop. And his side assignment for Groombridge. Whatever else he might say about her, Hazel was discreet.
In the faint hope of returning to monthly sessions he tried to keep things light.
She opened the batting. ‘This spinning class …?’
‘My first. Agony. Don’t know what I was thinking.’
‘About a girl, it seems.’
‘I paid the price.’
‘Nothing by halves, Joe.’
‘It helps.’
‘To forget about life for a while?’
‘Yes.’
‘To forget about Kelly?’
‘I suppose.’
‘So long as it stays exercise, and not punishment.’ She knew him too well. ‘You’ve been busy.’
Statements from Hazel were rarely anything but leading, and best tackled head on. ‘You think I’m taking on too much.’
Hazel smiled faintly. ‘That’s for you to say.’
‘You’re suggesting I’m overcompensating for the void in my life.’
‘Your words.’
‘Life doesn’t feel empty, it feels … chaotic,’ he conceded.
‘It must be hard to plan. Not knowing when a new case might erupt,’ she suggested. A lifeline?
‘It’s easy to go from overstretched to flat out,’ said Stark. ‘It’s not just me, it’s the whole station, the whole force.’
‘Is your job under threat?’
The best traps presented like lifelines. ‘You think I feel insecure?’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘No. But I might say, uncertain. You don’t appear to doubt your abilities, but you often seem to doubt your suitability.’
Suitability. Stark almost smiled.
‘You’ve always demonstrated a level of indifference about the job,’ Hazel continued. ‘Has that changed?’
‘I’m not sure what else I could do,’ he replied honestly.
‘Just about anything you put your mind to, I suspect. But that’s not what I asked.’
‘But it is the answer,’ said Stark. ‘The job has good days, and for the rest …’
‘For the rest you man up and crack on,’ she smiled, ‘to quote the vernacular.’
‘Yes.’
‘A lot like life, you might say.’
He might. Stark often wondered if one of the reasons he kept coming here was admiration for the attention with which she placed her words; like chess moves, or a string of primary and secondary IEDs.
‘I’m confused, though,’ she continued, frowning. ‘You reject a girl at work, whilst pursuing a girl at your gym?’
Boom. Stark permitted himself a smile. She wasn’t in the least confused. And there was no way to gloss his answer. ‘The girl at work likes me, or some version of me. It can only end badly. The girl at the gym … I’m hoping she’s less … interested.’
‘You’re looking for meaningless sex?’
Stark shrugged. ‘You think that’s wrong?’
Hazel looked thoughtful. ‘That’s not for me to say. But it’s a notable shift from where you were a year ago, I think.’ She avoided statements of certainty where possible; professional circumspection. It added a level of amusement to their question tennis. But when she did fire one, it was usually an ace. ‘And what of sentiment?’ she asked.
‘Sentimentality is the indulgence in emotions one hasn’t earned,’ replied Stark flatly, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde.
Hazel smiled at her mistake. ‘Love, then. Another indulgence, to be judged on benefit?’
Wilde also said that life without love was a sunless garden, and Stark couldn’t disagree. But too few people pontificated on the dangers, the damage. If the price of love was holding your loved ones a safe distance from you, then Stark could stand some time in the shade. He shrugged. ‘I suppose.’
Hazel snapped her pen shut. ‘Same time next week, then?’
If Hazel thought he was depressed going in, he was closer coming out. Curry and beer would set things right, he decided, dropping in at his local Indian takeaway on the way home. He had just ordered his usual when his phone rang.
‘Sarge?’
‘Where are you?’ demanded Fran.
‘Heading home.’
‘Not any more. You’re on night duty.’
‘No. I’m not. I know this because my sergeant sets the rota and she never lets me forget it.’
‘Your sergeant has revised the rota.’
No, she hadn’t. But she was too dutiful or proud to admit Harper had. Stark would not put her on the spot. ‘Understood. I’ll head there now.’
‘Stark …’
‘Sarge?’
Fran sighed. ‘Nothing. I’ve taken you off tomorrow. Get some rest.’
He waited for his food. Harper might cheat him out of some downtime and a cold beer, but not out of dinner. He ate at his desk, updating his report on the Longshots before catching up on the case file. Try as he might, Harper wouldn’t cheat him out of that either. Savage was still on the lam; no sightings. No progress on unpicking White’s past or true identity. He’d walked. Literally. Impolitely declining the offer of a ride home.
Stark’s mobile rang. ‘Good evening, Major.’
‘For some,’ she replied tersely. ‘You haven’t just spent precious hours of your life on a wild goose chase being stonewalled by one condescending French tit after another. I’ve never met a more obtuse, bureaucratic, evasive bunch of arseholes in my life and I work for the Ministry of Defence!’
‘Ahh …’
‘Trying to get a straight answer out of them was almost as infuriating as trying to get one out of you,’ she continued, on a roll.
‘And yet …?’
‘And yet I did finally manage to establish two things. The first, hitherto suspected and now proved, that you are an arse who gets his perverse kicks wasting other people’s time. And second, there is not now nor ever has been a French Foreign Legionnaire named Mark White.’
‘They checked pseudonyms?’
‘Have I done anything, other than agreeing to your fool’s errand, to make you think I’m an idiot?’
Stark sighed. Until very recently recruits were still forced to enlist under a ‘declared name’, one tradition that had survived from the days when the Legion was considered a refuge for fugitives and sundry scum. Nowadays they did background checks with Interpol, but Stark had already checked with them.
‘Yes.’
There was a pause. ‘Are you well?’ she asked.
Stark blinked at the question. ‘Yes,’ he replied cautiously. ‘Why?’
‘You gave a straight answer to a direct question. And you sound like crap.’
Her roundabout version of concern. Stark smiled.
‘Forget it,’ she sighed impatiently, ‘I don’t care enough to ask twice. I’ve emailed you the confirmation. Don’t waste my time again, Sergeant. And get some rest.’
Some time later Stark was watching the White interview when he became aware of someone behind him.
‘Don’t mind me,’ said Groombridge, watching the recording over Stark’s shoulder. ‘Just catching up too.’
The film finished with White’s adamant prediction. He sat back, arms folded tight.
‘Not quite what DI Harper hoped for, I would think?’ said Groombridge.
‘Guv.’
‘Still keeping you where you can do little good, is he?’
‘It’s not my place to second-guess my superiors, Guv.’
Groombridge suppressed a smile. ‘As I’m sure I’ve told you on numerous occasions. Any luck on the problem I set you?’
Stark shook his head. ‘Hard to keep one’s eyes open and ears to the ground while also keeping one’s head down, lip buttoned and nose to the grindstone, Guv.’
Groombridge nodded thoughtfully. ‘Enlisted any help?’
Stark couldn’t be bothered to lie. ‘Sergeant Ptolemy and Constable Peters.’
‘Ptolemy? Good choice. Likes a gossip, keeps a secret, knows the job. I don’t know Peters.’
‘The same, but with a penchant for matchmaking.’
‘All right. So what do you think? Have we sprung a leak?’
Stark shrugged. ‘I don’t like not knowing.’
‘That’s Fran rubbing off on you.’ Groombridge smiled, but when Stark didn’t join the joke his eyes sharpened.
He had the most penetrating gaze Stark had ever known. Not unkind but calm, measured and inescapable. A company sergeant major might blush and look away. Stark’s walls never felt secure under the assault. Groombridge had always been able to tell when he had something on his mind. ‘She’s gone quiet, Guv. It’s not good.’
Groombridge nodded. ‘With me too. Think she’s giving up?’
Stark was deeply uncomfortable now. It was bad enough being Groombridge’s eyes and ears on the leak. ‘Doesn’t sound like our Fran.’
‘No. Think she’s biding her time?’
Now Stark chuckled. ‘Neither does that.’
‘DI Harper had better tread carefully, I think. Though that doesn’t sound like him.’
‘Guv.’
‘Don’t get caught in the middle. You here all night?’
Stark nodded. Groombridge nodded, and left.
Stark’s eyes were drooping by midnight. He needed coffee. He was forcing himself to his feet to visit the canteen when the main phone rang. ‘MIT.’
‘Is that you, sweetie?’ Maggie. The matriarch of the emergency call centre had addressed him this way from their first introduction. Stark’s gradual acceptance of it was a testament to his regard for her. Some people in life wore scrupulous honesty as a badge of pride; Maggie just enjoyed reality so much she saw no need to embellish.
‘That’s a matter of ongoing debate.’
‘Poor baby. Better pop your coat on, though. Patrol car just confirmed a floater in the Quaggy.’
30
The waters of the River Quaggy rose near Bromley, where it was called Kydd Brook, and meandered all the way to Lewisham where they debouched into the River Ravensbourne and thence into the Thames via Deptford Creek.
Stark’s surname had encouraged him, as a boy, to take an interest in Old English etymology. Quaggy, he guessed, derived from quag, meaning bog or marsh; as in quagmire. As an indication of the places through which it had once flowed it was hard to picture now. London had swallowed up the rivers and creeks that once veined its surrounding countryside. Many were lost forever, dried up and forgotten in all but the idiosyncratic place names they’d deposited along their banks. The rest clung on, squeezed between vertical concrete banks, forced through unnatural turns, culverted beneath streets and buildings. They went largely unnoticed, marked where they passed beneath roads by brick walls or cast-iron railings thick with a hundred years of dull, rust-blistered paint and retrofitted with twentieth-century spikes or razor-wire.
Stark wondered how many such silent markers he’d passed without thought as his ride pulled up next to the uniform cars already blocking off a narrow side loop off Lee Road. It was a bitterly cold, cloudless night, but the assortment of post-booze fast-food establishments on the main road were enough to supply a small gaggle of gawpers. He checked his phone but Fran hadn’t called back. He tried again, but had to leave another message. He didn’t have Harper’s number and wasn’t in much of a hurry to ask Control for it.
SOCO were unpacking equipment from their vans. A rookie Stark didn’t recognize stood guard on the tape, looking miserable with cold and more. Stark flashed his warrant card and ducked under.
Sergeant Clark stood looking on.
‘Evening, Sergeant.’
‘I’d say you’ve been around long enough to call me Tony, Constable Stark.’ Clark was part of the bedrock upon which Royal Hill police station was founded. At some time he had assumed responsibility for shepherding rookies through their first few weeks, and as a consequence would accept calls day or night to show the poor newbies their first body. It wasn’t cruelty, just necessity.
‘What have we got, Tony?’
Clark pointed down into the darkness. A body bobbed face down in the water, its jacket snagged on something, making it loll around in the fast current. ‘Reveller stopped to puke over the side. Spotted the body and called it in.’
Stark huffed the barest laugh. ‘Two ends of the civic spectrum in one.’
Clark nodded sagely. ‘She’s sitting in the patrol car when you want to speak with her. Doesn’t look like a drowning.’
‘No.’ Even from a dozen metres away it was obvious the back of the skull was not the shape it should be.
‘No blood up here. Old Quaggy’s up from the rain, body probably floated from somewhere further up and snagged here.’
Stark glanced around, consulting his mental map of the illogical, zig-zagging cartography of the borders between the boroughs. ‘Shame. If it’d made it under the road there it would’ve been Lewisham’s problem. ID?’
Clark looked around to make sure none of his lads were watching, then pulled out a battered pair of bifocals and put them on. He fumbled with his mobile phone keys until he found what he was looking for. ‘One of the lads snapped this when the body flipped over.’
A grainy, low-light zoom shot on a phone from a distance, but good enough. Stark stared at it, unflinching. He’d seen the startled expression of instant death too many times to be shocked, but it always looked surreal on the face of one recently seen full of life.
‘Well,’ he sighed. ‘That makes things more complicated.’
There was no safe way of securing the body. Clark was right; the river was up. What in the summer would’ve been a muddy trickle overgrown with weeds and brambles was now a dark, churning, unknowable force. No one wanted to explain waving the body away into Lewisham, but if whatever it was snagged upon gave, they’d be sent scampering to the other side of the bridge like some tragic game of Pooh Sticks.
Stark tried Fran again. Still no answer.
Eventually police divers arrived, conducted a rigorous risk assessment, made thorough preparations, and then sent in a bloke on a rope to lash the corpse to a buoyant stretcher. By the time they were ready to winch it out, distant dawn was lightening the sky and everyone was chilled to the bone.
Stark hated the cold. It reminded him of night exercises on Dartmoor and escape and evasion across the Br
econ Beacons. It made you slow and clumsy, sapped your will, seeped into your bones like poison. But he was duty-bound to see the dead man safely into the SOCO van and away. Yawning, he nursed the sweet tea he’d cadged from one of the divers, men who knew the value of a full Thermos. The dive officer circled his finger in the air slowly and the winch-man wound in the steel cable. After several stop-starts the stretcher inched up into view, water running from it. It caught on something and tilted.
Carlton Savage’s head lolled over to face his accusers, his ruined visage slack with death, one arm hanging from the bindings like some grotesque parody of Christ being taken from the cross, only with a bullet hole in the forehead for stigmata.
Then it was on the ground lost to view amid the attentions of the SOCO team. Stark had been hoping Marcus Turner would show up and conduct an initial assessment, but his junior was there instead. Even Marcus got the night off occasionally. And cause of death looked like a no-brainer, pardon the pun.
‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ Groombridge materialized at Stark’s shoulder.
‘Guv?’
‘I was up early when I saw the message.’
‘But I didn’t call you.’
Groombridge smiled awkwardly. ‘Strictly between us, since I’ve been forced to take my hands off the tiller I’ve had a little arrangement with Maggie.’
The perfect agent for tip-offs. Stark nodded in admiration. ‘Your secret’s safe with me, Guv.’
Groombridge looked Stark up and down disapprovingly. ‘You should get yourself a thicker coat, lad. Hat, scarf and gloves wouldn’t hurt either. Or did the army immunize you to cold?’
‘I stopped shivering a couple of hours ago.’
‘The latter stage of life-threatening hypothermia, I believe.’
‘I have the burning torch of justice to keep me warm, Guv. SOCO are still searching here, and now some areas upstream. The divers are planning a search of the river once the light gets better.’
‘Right, well there’s sod all we can do here,’ said Groombridge brightly. ‘There’s a cafe just opening round the corner. The burning torch of justice is all very well, but caffeine and calories serve better.’
Between the Crosses (Joseph Stark) Page 13