In Her Blood

by Annie Hauxwell

  ‘Yours or his?’ Mrs R would know both options were improbable. ‘I should call him,’ she said.

  A buzzer indicated another customer at the security door. Cold sweat ran down Berlin’s back. ‘He’s not there. The surgery’s closed. Please, Mrs Ranasinghe. It’s an emergency.’

  Mrs Ranasinghe shrugged. ‘What the hell. I’m retiring anyway.’

  She disappeared for a moment and returned with a brown paper bag. Berlin reached for it, but before she handed it over Mrs Ranasinghe cautioned her.

  ‘Seven days,’ she said.

  ‘Seven days?’ echoed Berlin.

  Mrs Ranasinghe was solemn. ‘I’ve given you enough medication for one week, Miss Berlin.’

  Berlin took the bag, nodded her thanks and went to the door. She waited for a click, the signal that Mrs Ranasinghe had released the security bolt.

  ‘Miss Berlin?’

  Berlin forced herself to remain calm and turn around.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Enjoy your trip.’

  7

  DOYLE RELEASED THE padlock, removed the chain and tugged at the rusty iron gates. They grated on the cracked concrete as he dragged them open, acting as an early warning system for the reclusive, paranoid old man who dwelt beyond. The family had been East End for generations and Doyle could never understand what drove Frank out to his ‘premises’ in Chigwell all those years ago.

  Nineteen eighty-six. A year best forgotten. One thing after another. Nancy had buggered off without so much as a by-your-fucking-leave. She had taken her savings and left Doyle with their eleven-year-old, Georgina. He and Nancy had been childhood sweethearts and he’d worshipped the ground she walked on. Okay, they were de factos. But she’d never minded. None of them went in for certification.

  It was the year of Thatcher’s bleeding Big Bang, which had made it nigh on impossible to get a decent crew together. All the villains with brains had gone into the City. Only the muscle was left. Frank had said they had to diversify to make best use of it. Somehow he’d come up with a bit of capital and started lending to cash-strapped single mums. It built from there.

  Nancy went and then Frank decamped to Chigwell. No support from that quarter. Doyle was left with Gina, a right little madam, who blamed him for her mum pissing off.

  Eventually it all went pear-shaped. Gina walked out the day she was sixteen, and not so much as a Christmas card since. He was left on his tod in Bethnal Green to carry on the business. He loved it, mind, the business. But found the nights a bit long.

  Frank’s premises consisted of a crumbling, featureless postwar bungalow, a sprawling place of silent, square rooms and stained Danish furniture. It was on a couple of acres, dotted with ramshackle sheds, garages and outhouses. The land would be worth a fortune now. No mortgage – Frank paid cash for everything. He’d never borrowed money in his life.

  Doyle had to close the gates behind him and secure the padlock after he’d driven through or Frank went ballistic. The grating noise irritated the shit out of Doyle. Just once he’d like to surprise the old man. Sometimes he didn’t bother to fasten the padlock, a small act of defiance. Frank never went out; he would never know. The supermarket delivered his tins of spam, tea bags and what have you to the gates and Doyle paid the bill.

  Towering weeds either side of the drive obscured the booby traps and broken glass that Doyle knew littered the grounds. Anyone would think Frank had the crown bloody jewels in there.

  The old man opened the front door before Doyle got out of the car. He turned back down the hall as Doyle stuttered a greeting.

  ‘Hello, Frank. How goes it?’

  ‘Shut it. The premises are freezing.’

  Doyle resisted the temptation to tell him to turn on the fucking central heating. It was pointless. Frank still lived in a fog of World War Two austerity.

  ‘And a bit of fucking respect. I might be eighty-odd but I’m still your fucking father.’

  ‘Yes, Pop.’

  Frank drew the ledger out. He used to keep it in a kitchen drawer, but lately he’d taken to tucking it in behind his belt. He clutched it in his huge, trembling hand.

  Doyle reflected that the old man was literally losing his grip. But the sinews in his skinny arms were still taut as wire, the knuckles great red ridges of bone, hard as iron. He was a foot taller than Doyle, his eyes sunk so deep into black sockets their colour was obscured. Grey hair curled from his ears and nostrils, adding to the gargoyle look.

  Doyle shivered as Frank passed him the ledger. He sat down at the kitchen table and Frank stood over him and watched, eagle-eyed, as he recorded the tally from memory. At least he didn’t have to go through this every sodding night, without fail, any more. He’d put his foot down. Now it was just most nights.

  When he’d finished the tally, Frank snatched it back and ran a finger down the neat columns of names, addresses and numbers.

  ‘Get the lads around to number fifty-one.’

  ‘It’s done.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Fr— Pop – she’ll make the payment.’

  ‘So you say.’

  Frank slipped the ledger back behind his belt and tapped it twice for luck. He held out his hand and Doyle handed him a thick roll of banknotes. Frank grunted and shoved it into one of his cardigan pockets. He wore three.

  Doyle relaxed. Frank had no idea he’d been growing the market, so to speak, with an injection of capital from his new silent partner. Frank would go mental if he found out, and that was never a pretty sight. On the other hand, it didn’t matter what he did, Frank would never be happy. Doyle only ever wanted to please, but it was never good enough. Now he would show his father what he could do. Initiative. Enterprise.

  Frank turned away without a word and left the kitchen, switching off the light as he went. Doyle was still sitting at the table. That’s that, then, he thought. Another fucking day, another fucking dollar.

  ‘Goodnight, Pop!’ he called.

  But the only response was a door slamming somewhere at the other end of the house.

  8

  THE NARROW RAN not quite parallel to the river, a broken link between the bright, soaring financial institutions that had swept aside the old docks, and the Square Mile, as solid as its name suggested, all squat stone and carved Britannias with lions at their feet. The goddess of passion and war. Narrow is the way, and strait the gate.

  Berlin walked into the past often, and always at night. The Narrow delivered her into Wapping, and then into the City of London proper, where a sharp right brought her to Newgate’s blood-drenched soil, compost to that sombre edifice of the criminal law, the new Old Bailey.

  She turned a corner and gasped. Someone was coming at her, striding, enveloped in a long black coat, a pale face and haunted eyes picked out in the headlights of a passing car. The figure receded with the vehicle and Berlin laughed. Her own reflection in a shop window had spooked her. She knew she was right to be afraid. She was her own worst enemy.

  After leaving Mrs Ranasinghe, she had legged it to her flat, stowed six precious ampoules of diamorphine in the bread bin and administered the contents of number seven. Heroin. It was her version of a stiff drink at the end of the day, although she would never claim her use was recreational. Her relationship with the drug was more complex than that, and at the same time a simple matter of addiction.

  The prospect of losing her free, legal and pure supply had induced blind panic and a callous disregard for Lazenby. She was a monster. His body had lain in a sticky pool of gore while she stole the prescriptions. Like a common junkie. No better than the junkie who’d killed him.

  She hadn’t murdered Lazenby, but when it came to her informant, it was a different matter. She wasn’t sure what role she might have played in Juliet Bravo’s ugly, terrifying end, but she had no doubt she was implicated.

  Two bodies in one day. It was a nightmarish coincidence, and whichever way you cut it, there was blood on her hands. Now she had six days to find another
doctor to prescribe her heroin. Six days to find Juliet Bravo’s murderer. She owed her that much.

  Six days because beyond that she had no idea how she would function if she found herself with no doctor, no connections and no dope. What would the seventh day be like if it came to that? The eighth or, God forbid, the ninth? She suspected she would be in no state to catch a cold, let alone a killer. She hoped to Christ she didn’t have to find out.

  Turning into Dorset Rise she found herself confronting the sculpture of St George and the Dragon. The dragon appeared to be winning.

  The Second Day

  9

  THE FIRST BLEAK hint of what passed for dawn in mid-February streaked the sky as Berlin returned from her nocturnal wandering. She turned the key in the lock of her over-priced Bethnal Green ‘studio’ and wondered why she had finally joined the real estate stampede. Did she just get sick of people telling her she was mad to rent because it was ‘dead money’? Or was it a final, doomed bid for respectability?

  It had cost her dear. She’d bought at the top of the market, just before the crash. Now she was sunk deep in negative equity. If they sacked her, how long could she last? She thought about her one hundred and ten per cent mortgage, the spare room at her mother’s, and her personal habits. Not a happy combination.

  Closing the curtains she crawled under the duvet and switched on the TV. Lazenby had made the local news. An anonymous caller had alerted the police to foul play at the surgery. The doctor, a well-known figure in the locality and among campaigners for the decriminalisation of hard drugs, had conducted an ‘unorthodox’ practice for more than four decades and had been investigated by the General Medical Council for irregularities. A quantity of drugs had been stolen. Dr Lazenby’s patients came from all over London and the South and police were anxious to contact anyone who had attended the surgery yesterday.

  Berlin knew the police would pay her a visit sooner or later. They would go through Lazenby’s records and conduct interviews with all his regulars. But it would be routine. She hadn’t taken the whole prescription pad, just a few scripts; they’d have no way of knowing they hadn’t been issued by Lazenby. Her forging of his signature would go undetected. She was confident Mrs Ranasinghe wouldn’t say anything. After all, she had done the wrong thing too.

  Berlin switched off the TV. All she wanted to do was sleep, but as soon as she closed her eyes the vision that greeted her was the blue flesh of her dead informant bobbing up and down in the lock. She opened them again.

  Nestor may have been fishing when he asked her what else she had failed to record about Juliet Bravo, but he was right. They had met on half a dozen occasions, none of which she had logged. Berlin had recognised in the other woman an echo of her own angst. There was at least twenty years between them, but age was irrelevant. Nietzsche warned against looking into the abyss too long, lest it look back. They had both looked, and seen in each other the same response: a taut resolve to be unafraid.

  Berlin had been loath to initiate the usual process, which would have seen Juliet Bravo managed by an agency that took a one-size-fits-all approach to so-called covert human intelligence sources. Informants were usually victims of one kind or another. This woman didn’t fit the profile of the financially excluded. She’d said she was ‘something in the City’. That could cover a multitude of sins.

  Berlin touched her throat, choked with the memory of her informant’s savage wound. Whatever she was and whatever the demons that drove her to inform, now she was Berlin’s demon. Draping the duvet around herself, she got out of bed and sat down at the table with a bottle of Talisker Single Malt.

  Was there something in their early conversations that would give her an edge, something that would compensate for her lack of access to the official investigation? She could hear the boiler struggling against the plummeting temperature. Wrapping the duvet around her more tightly, she prayed the pipes wouldn’t freeze and burst.

  She would go back to the beginning.

  When all the standard inquiries came up blank Berlin had called Juliet Bravo and asked her why Doyle was absent from all official records. Her reaction indicated a certain lack of faith in British bureaucracy.

  ‘There must be a stuff-up somewhere,’ was all she’d said. Her cynicism echoed Berlin’s own.

  ‘Is there anything else you know about him that could help me? Before I can take further action I need something, reasonable grounds, to take it forward.’ She couldn’t get an authority for surveillance just on the basis of a phone call.

  She’d waited for a response but none came. ‘Hello? Are you still there?’ Berlin had asked.

  ‘I’m here.’

  Berlin gave her the company line in her best firm-but-fair voice. It sometimes worked. ‘You haven’t even given me your surname. We don’t act on uncorroborated, anonymous tips. I’m sure you understand.’

  The sense of struggle at the other end of the line was palpable. The more she tells me about Doyle, the more she gives away about herself, Berlin thought. That’s the real problem here. She tried a different tack.

  ‘Look, why don’t we meet, somewhere public, somewhere you’re comfortable with, and just have a coffee? Call it a goodwill gesture. Then we can move forward.’

  To her utter surprise, the woman said yes.

  The informant had described herself as mid-thirties, average height, medium build, shoulder-length brown hair, and said she would be wearing a black business suit and pink striped shirt with white collar and cuffs.

  Berlin arrived early in order to take up a position in the café at the Tate Modern that would give her at least some opportunity to assess if the woman was being followed. One-on-ones were a breach of procedure, but Coulthard had broken up her partnership with Delroy under the mantra of ‘upskilling’. Her skills or Del’s, he had never bothered to explain. She didn’t care to work with anyone else and she had wanted to get out of the office, away from Coulthard’s smirk. Get the jump on him if this shark turned out to be a great white. A trophy kill. So she had come alone.

  The only woman wearing a pink striped shirt to enter the café bore no resemblance to the description she had given. She was taller than average, willowy, with translucent, apricot skin perfectly complemented by a black designer suit. Her gold jewellery was subtle, and her thick, chestnut hair was cut with precision, so it bounced ever so winningly as she walked. She wore dark glasses, although it was the middle of October.

  She bought a coffee and sat down. No one followed her in and Berlin couldn’t see anyone outside watching her.

  Before Berlin could make a move an attractive, tanned tourist, complete with expensive camera and guidebook, approached the woman. He was carrying a tray of tea and scones and seemed to ask if he could share her table. There were plenty of spare seats elsewhere. He was suave, his body language insinuating, his smile confident.

  Berlin was astonished when the woman didn’t reply or even look up from her coffee, just raised her middle finger in an emphatic, silent gesture. She nearly laughed out loud. So much for British reserve. The man looked shocked, offended and sheepish in quick succession. He scuttled away with a scowl and Berlin took the seat denied the would-be Lothario.

  ‘Bravo,’ she said.

  The woman almost smiled.

  Berlin offered her hand. ‘Catherine Berlin. What should I call you?’

  The woman hesitated. ‘You said it, so how about Juliet Bravo?’

  Berlin was surprised by this reference to a TV cop lost in the mists of time – the early eighties.

  ‘You’re not old enough to remember the show, surely?’ she said.

  Juliet Bravo took off her sunglasses. ‘My mum loved it.’

  She had the saddest brown eyes Berlin had ever seen.

  The next time they met it was at Starbucks and official. Berlin scheduled it so that Delroy was the only other investigator available and Coulthard reluctantly had to assign him to go with her. Del was the only bloke on the team that Berlin could trust and Cou
lthard knew it. Which meant Coulthard couldn’t rely on him to do anything other than confirm whatever Berlin logged.

  Delroy went along with Berlin’s assessment that Juliet Bravo presented as a credible informant, whatever her motivation and despite her reluctance to identify herself. It was worth pursuing. So Berlin submitted the form seeking authorisation for surveillance. Signing off on an obs operation was usually Coulthard’s job, but he had just gone on leave, scuba diving in the Maldives. How he could afford holidays like that she had no idea. Nestor signed it off in his absence.

  There were only two bodies available to watch Doyle – two of Coulthard’s boys, who shared a brain. Both were white, heavily built and had shiny shaved heads. They’d sit in a nice clean vehicle with tinted windows in a predominantly poor Bengali neighbourhood. Like that was going to work.

  And it didn’t. Someone called the local cop shop and reported perverts on the manor. The boys had failed to log their presence with the Control Room Supervisor at the police station. They blamed each other for the oversight, but Berlin strongly suspected that they hadn’t wanted to sit in the car freezing their bollocks off for the likes of her, so hadn’t followed procedure on purpose. Maybe they weren’t as stupid as they looked.

  Whatever the reason, the surveillance was blown. By then Coulthard was back and she couldn’t get it started again, try as she might. Coulthard said there were bigger fish to fry than her target. She was trumped. Berlin couldn’t log Doyle’s movements, identify his associates or find his victims, which meant she couldn’t turn them with the attractive proposition that if they gave evidence he would go to prison and their debt would be wiped.

  There was a glaring gap in the intelligence because of the failure of the surveillance. But it was immaterial, because the next thing she knew Nestor had closed the file. She tried to raise it with him but he waved her away, told her to refer operational matters to Coulthard.

  Instead of just informing Juliet Bravo that it was over, Berlin continued to meet her, in the bars at Waterloo or Euston, busy railway stations where they had conversations she never wrote up. They both had a taste for good Scotch. But it was more than that. Berlin rarely made a connection with anyone, and she was reluctant to lose it.