In Her Blood

by Annie Hauxwell

  They talked about growing up in London and the bonds of prejudice, myth and history that ensnared them. The conversation was never domestic. There were no references to husbands or children as yardsticks of achievement. Their exchanges were genuine, unsentimental. It was a relief.

  Finally she was forced to tell Juliet Bravo the investigation was dead on its feet. The ferocity of her informant’s reaction was a surprise: she insisted Doyle mustn’t be allowed to get away with it. Berlin pushed back and told her it was down to her: she had to come up with hard evidence, something Berlin could use to kick-start the investigation again, something that her boss couldn’t ignore. Juliet Bravo said she would get it.

  The next time Berlin saw her she was floating in the Limehouse Basin.

  10

  BERLIN STOOD OPPOSITE the block of flats where Doyle supposedly lived. Number fourteen: a former Council flat bought by the original tenant in the eighties under the Right to Buy legislation. The right to make a fast quid for anyone in London. The flat had been sold a number of times since. Now it was owned by a company and Doyle wasn’t listed as a director.

  Dumb and Dumber had managed to fire off a few grainy shots of the flat’s occupant with the telephoto before they had been rumbled. The photos were still on Berlin’s phone, ready for Juliet Bravo to confirm the ID when they met at the lock. That was also when she was to hand over the hard evidence that Berlin had demanded. A demand that had apparently proved fatal.

  Berlin’s problem now was that she could stand in the street until kingdom come, shivering in the dim morning murk, and never see anyone enter or exit number fourteen. It was on the second floor. She could hardly hang about on the landing. The angle from the street was too acute and on her own she couldn’t cover the stairs at each end of the building. Surveillance had never been Berlin’s strong suit. She gazed around and tried to assess the layout.

  The flats overlooked Weaver’s Fields, in the middle of which was the children’s playground. There would be a direct line of sight from there to the landing and the front door of number fourteen. A morning stroll around the park was in order, followed by a go on the swings. Better than the gym, and cheaper.

  Chilled to the bone, two hours later she was listening to the traffic build up on Bethnal Green Road and watching two dog walkers and one little old lady brave the cold. The old dear was bent double over her sholley, a hybrid of shopping trolley and Zimmer frame. Berlin, now sitting on the kids’ slide, clocked her shuffling along the nearby path and expected her to just shuffle on past.

  She fixed her gaze on the second floor of the flats across the park, trying not to yield to boredom and distraction. But the squeak from the sholley stopped and when Berlin looked back, the old lady was standing directly opposite her with her head twisted as far round in her direction as it would go.

  ‘Chilly, isn’t it?’ offered Berlin.

  The old lady’s mouth worked for a while, lining up her false teeth. ‘Fuck off out of here, you junkie cunt!’ she finally managed to spit out.

  Berlin stared at her, impassive, and said nothing. The old lady clung to the sholley, her body shaking with the effort.

  ‘Fucking kids’ playground! I’m sick of you lot hanging around here, leaving your fucking needles everywhere. So fuck off!’

  Before Berlin could respond to the old dear with a suggestion as to where she might like to shove her sholley, she caught a movement at the flats. The front door of number fourteen had opened. A fat figure sallied out along the landing into the brisk morning.

  Berlin took off towards the park gate. She would follow him, identify his victims and get them to confirm he was Doyle, then find the connection between him and Juliet Bravo. She was a civilian investigator and didn’t have the luxury of just arresting him.

  The old lady watched her go, amazed and delighted. She lined up her teeth. ‘See, they just need a good talking to!’ she congratulated herself, and stood a little straighter.

  Berlin sprinted for the gate, her eyes fixed on the landing. The man raised a hand to greet someone and the pale sun glinted off his heavy gold rings. She realised she’d seen those hands before; the fat face in the photos hadn’t rung any bells, but the fat fingers banded with sovereigns, signet rings, antique wedding bands and snake rings were unforgettable.

  The man disappeared for a moment as he turned into the stairwell. Berlin slowed down and craned to see him appear on the next landing. It had to be Doyle.

  She didn’t notice the three hoodies barring the gate until she was nearly on top of them. She kept going, expecting them to step aside, but they didn’t move. She was forced to come to a sharp stop.

  ‘Excuse me, lads,’ she said, breathless.

  Their eyes were dull pinpricks as they peered out from deep within their hoods. They closed in on her, no taller than she, but wiry and street hard. And there were three of them.

  ‘Give it up,’ growled one.

  ‘What?’ asked Berlin, in a tone that conveyed no fear.

  ‘The cash or the smack or both. Whatever you’ve got. You’re not out there freezing your fuckin’ arse off having a fuckin’ swing,’ he said. ‘So hand it over, bitch.’

  Their hands were thrust into their pockets and she wondered if they had knives. But she was so intent on not losing Doyle she abandoned caution.

  ‘Fuck off,’ she said, trying to shove her way through them.

  One kicked the back of her knee and the other two jumped her, punched her in the head and dragged her to the ground. The kicker sunk his boot into her while the others went through her pockets. When they came up with an old mobile and a fiver they weren’t happy. They stomped on the phone and kept the money, then ran off, swearing about the wasted effort.

  Berlin rolled over and threw up. A couple in matching lycra jogged around her into the park. She tried crawling, without success, and lay there in a puddle of freezing puke, semi-conscious.

  After a while she became aware of a pulsing blue light. A police car. Amazing. Someone must have called it in. She waited in vain for a kind police officer to assist her. Eventually she managed to turn her head enough to be able to see two constables emerge from the flats. She heard one bark into his radio, ‘Looks like we just missed him, sir.’

  You and me both, she thought.

  11

  THE CUT ABOVE Berlin’s eye was bleeding sporadically and the bruising was coming out nicely. Her back hurt like hell and her right knee was already swollen. Muddy, bloodstained, she had limped home, dumped her shattered mobile on the table, and gone straight to the bread bin. It was breaking her usual routine, but this was an emergency. Heroin was, after all, a painkiller.

  Now she was in that comfortable, clear space she inhabited in the first hour after a hit. It was a holiday from anxiety, but the package came with strict terms and conditions. Years of effort and self-control, not traits that most people associated with addiction, had gone into stabilising her dose and the fix routine. The rush had gone out of it long ago and she had resisted the temptation to seek it out again by increasing her dose. Tolerance. Which, after all, was all that she asked?

  Some of her colleagues believed she was a diabetic because of her regular doctor’s appointments. She let them. It was a strategy that kept nosy parkers at bay. She used a variety of injecting sites to avoid tracks, although her puncture marks didn’t constitute tracks in the conventional sense.

  Years before she had learnt to switch between intravenous, intramuscular or subcutaneous administration. It was part of her strategic approach to managing her dependence. Sometimes it just depended on her mood. She didn’t use blunt picks or get infections because she always used a fresh kit, courtesy of Mrs Ranasinghe.

  Berlin had felt little in the way of emotional attachment to other human beings in the last twenty years. But her sense of belonging to the dead was strong. When the backwash had roiled Juliet Bravo’s body it had exposed more than just the violent wound at her throat; it had exposed Berlin’s vulnerability. A
crack in the carapace. She could still feel.

  But that was then. A hit and a hot bath and she didn’t feel anything except a sublime lack of concern about her suspension, her informant, her doctor, or Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

  Everything drifted away on a gentle sea of indifference. Only one tiny worry tugged at the corner of her consciousness. She had only five ampoules left. Five days. She closed her eyes and that too faded to nothing.

  12

  DOYLE COULDN’T BE arsed driving out to bloody Chigwell. The first flakes of snow settled on his shoulders, merging with the dandruff, both tinted yellow by the sodium streetlights. He thrust his hands deeper into the pockets of his camel-hair overcoat and stamped his feet. Rings on his fingers, bells on his toes. It had been a bloody long day.

  Word had got out that the law was looking for him, which gave some of his clients a notion that if they kept out of his way, he might get banged up and they would be home free. So he was avoiding the police, while his creditors were avoiding him.

  It had all begun a few weeks back with those bald geezers in the motor. They didn’t look right. He’d got Ahmed in the drycleaners to ring up the Police and Community Support Officers and report two men sitting in a car near the park gate at the bottom of the flats, watching the kiddies. The PCSOs had been down there like a shot and Doyle had stood on the landing, watching the argy-bargy with these blokes.

  Ahmed caught most of the row and reported back to Doyle. Any law enforcement types on the plot were supposed to notify the local nick and get some sort of code number to quote in just these circumstances. These blokes had forgotten to get their code.

  Later, Ahmed made a cup of tea for the PCSOs, who told him the numpties were from some government department. Doyle guessed they were from that bloody interfering Financial whatsit Agency, intent on disrupting the wheels of commerce. It turned out he was right. He’d made a call. That’s all it took. After that he had been pretty sure they wouldn’t be back. Now he was bloody certain, because the grass who’d started all this aggravation was dead. It was sorted.

  But just to be on the safe side, he’d swapped the Audi, the car he used for shopping, for a modest Mondeo he kept registered to one of his clients – a deaf lady who couldn’t drive and wouldn’t dare give him up if anyone inquired.

  He stood beside the shitty little car now, cursing that he’d been reduced to this. He’d never had any trouble with the law before; he was a community service and he was sure most local coppers would take the view that while his clients were borrowing money from him it meant they weren’t stealing it. A result all round.

  But there was no point just standing there freezing his bollocks off. He struggled to open the car door with a key. The bloody thing didn’t even have electronic locking.

  Doyle crashed through the unfamiliar gears and wondered if the problem he was having with the bloody government was related to his move into commercial lending. Maybe getting mixed up with the banker wanker Fernley-Price had been a mistake.

  Doyle had been minding his own business in The Silent Woman when a City gent had approached him and asked if he could sit down. Suit yourself, he’d said. There were plenty of spare tables, so he knew the geezer wanted something. He had thought it would be the usual. Money.

  It was only when they were well into the drink and the conversation, about the state of the nation and the decline of the robust entrepreneur, that he had realised this Fernley-Price didn’t want to borrow, he wanted to lend. He’d seemed to know a lot about Doyle’s operation, and after a bit of a pitch, had proposed a joint venture, giving him a bloody economics lecture in the process.

  ‘SMEs!’ he’d exclaimed.

  Doyle hadn’t wanted to sound ignorant but the look on his face must have given it away.

  ‘Small and medium enterprises. That’s where the crunch has bitten hardest. No excess labour to lay off and they’ve got cash flow problems because the banks aren’t lending. In fact they’re calling in overdrafts. So these small firms are owed money by creditors who can’t pay up because they’re going broke too. No line of credit either. A vicious circle.’

  He had sounded convincing. Bigger loans and more of ’em, with more juice. No crying housewives to contend with or desperate gamblers who would put up with a broken leg. Doyle’s usual sphere of operations was messy compared to the cold logic of the higher echelons of the market. He’d liked the sound of it, and taken Fernley-Price up on his business proposition. That was nearly three months ago and it had all gone beautifully. For a while.

  *

  The road was icy, the tyres were crap and the windscreen was opaque with condensation. Doyle tried to rub it clear with his glove as he pondered Fernley-Price’s reaction when told about the geezers in the car. They’d been having one of their conflabs in The Silent Woman when Doyle mentioned he’d seen off surveillance. Fernley-Price nearly choked on his pint.

  ‘What? What the hell? How do you know they were watching you?’ he’d spluttered.

  ‘Calm down, mate, it’s sorted.’

  ‘That’s not the fucking point. Mate.’

  Doyle had noted the edge of sarcasm. The wanker had better shut up. But he didn’t.

  ‘How did they know about you and how did you know about them? That’s what I want to fucking know. I’ve got a lot of cash tied up with you now. Serious money invested in your local SMEs!’ exclaimed Fernley-Price.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, okay,’ replied Doyle. He was used to the bloody jargon by then. SMEs meant the Indian grocers, the tobacconists, the real estate agents, the accountants and the builders’ yards. They were all doing it tough in the crisis. All except him and Fernley- Price.

  ‘Maybe one of our new clients got a little bit uppity. Perhaps these geezers from the SMEs don’t understand the rules yet. I’ll find ’em and make an example. Don’t worry, it won’t happen again. Anyway, those blokes have gone.’

  ‘But you can’t guarantee they won’t be back!’

  Doyle put his glass down and gave Fernley-Price the dead eye. ‘Yes I can, mate. I’m all about risk management. And I’m not the Bank of England, so you can trust me.’

  Fernley-Price had gone on and on that night about the bloody surveillance. The bloke had a temper and it got on Doyle’s nerves, so he had made further inquiries, just to shut him up. He had told Fernley-Price for the umpteenth time that it was nothing to worry about. Turned out it was some narky bitch, according to his contact. Anyway, it was over.

  He fiddled with the Mondeo’s heater, but the bloody thing couldn’t handle these temperatures. Something else to worry about. He was sick and tired of Frank’s demands and the endless nights waiting for another miserable dawn. He hadn’t had a decent sleep for bloody years. Since Nancy left, if he was honest with himself.

  He intended to keep Fernley-Price happy so he would deliver more supermarket bags of cash, capital for the well-oiled Doyle system. ‘Oily Doyley’. He had to chuckle.

  The prick was supposed to be a silent partner, but he hadn’t been silent enough for Doyle’s liking. All Doyle wanted was a bit of peace and quiet. For Fernley-whosit to stick to his end of the bargain and keep his nose out of Doyle’s end of the business, and for Frank to give him a break once in a while. Was that too much to ask?

  He took a sharp right onto a pub forecourt, causing havoc in the traffic behind him. He gave the hooters the finger. Fuck it, he needed a drink. Frank would have to wait.

  By the time Doyle got to Chigwell there was a foot of snow around the premises and the place was in darkness. He clambered out of the Mondeo and wrestled with the gates, his fingers numb with cold. He got back in the car as quick as he could, drove through the gates and kept going, not bothering to get out and shut them again. Bugger Frank and his bloody rules.

  When he got to the end of the drive and turned off the motor the soft silence of the snow was eerie. The front door didn’t open.

  A bit unsteady on his feet, he stumbled up the steps and grasped the knocker. The door was a
jar. He released the knocker and it swung open.

  ‘Fr— Pop? You there?’

  He spoke softly. He was a bit late and maybe the old fella had fallen asleep. He took a step over the threshold and a voice came out of the darkness.

  ‘What time do you call this?’

  Before he could reply, Frank came flying at him, a fucking banshee, wielding his thick leather belt. Doyle heard it whistle through the air. The next moment it struck him across the shoulder. He staggered under the blow. Before he could recover Frank struck again, this time at his head. He felt the buckle catch his cheek and the blood trickle down his neck. Suddenly he was fifteen again. He cried out.

  ‘Pop! Pop, don’t!’

  Frank’s face, scarlet with rage, seemed to glow in the dark, his eyes enormous white orbs protruding from their sockets. He struck again and again until Doyle sunk to the floor, his arms over his head, weeping.

  ‘Pop! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’

  As suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Frank fastened his belt around his trousers, walked back down the hall and left him to it.

  The Third Day

  13

  BERLIN WOKE WITH a pounding headache, a raging thirst and an overwhelming sense of her own stupidity. She swung her legs off the couch and as she put her feet to the floor her right knee shrieked with pain. Her back was stiff and one eye puffy and difficult to open.

  The first thing she did was check the bread bin. Five ampoules remained in the brown paper bag. After the belting at the park gate and her resort to ‘analgesia’ she had done precisely bloody nothing. She swore.

  She should have been sorting things out, trying to find Doyle, preparing her defence for the suspension hearing and finding a new doctor who would prescribe her heroin.