He watched the baby in the pram throw the teddy out again and this time his long-suffering mother plucked him from the pram and hoisted him onto her hip. The baby smiled. He had a result. The dodge with the teddy bear was just a distraction. Who’s the dummy?
Of course, he thought. Dempster dropped his fag and ground it into the concrete, cursing. I am.
29
BERLIN’S MOBILE RANG. She answered, the wind whipping her hair into her eyes.
‘What’s that noise?’ asked Dempster.
‘Waves breaking on the shingle.’
‘So I’m guessing you’re not in Bethnal Green?’
‘Correct,’ she said.
‘Brighton?’ he asked.
‘I thought I’d get some fresh air and do some of your dirty work at the same time.’ She picked up a smooth black stone and tossed it into the grey sea. ‘Kill two birds,’ she added.
‘What time will you be back?’ he said.
Berlin held out the phone to capture the hiss and crunch of wind and waves. She hung up. He didn’t own her.
He could imagine her. A wasted figure shrouded in black, head down, shoulders hunched, hands in the pockets of her Lenin overcoat, tramping across the pebbles at the shoreline, her knee-high Cossack boots marked with a salt tidemark from the breaking swell.
He realised he was listening to the static of a broken connection, not the sound of the sea.
He put the phone down.
Berlin had always thought of the man who answered the front door as Pink Cheeks. For years they’d exchanged polite nods and nothing more. She guessed he was in his early sixties, well-preserved and, of course, pink-cheeked. He was apparently in the middle of cooking something because he had a wooden spoon in one hand. It smelled wonderful. He took a moment to put Berlin’s familiar face into the right context, then stepped back.
‘You’d better come in.’
Berlin followed him down the hall into a large, homely kitchen. He gestured to three saucepans bubbling on the cooker.
‘I’ve got people coming later. This evening actually,’ he said, flustered.
Berlin looked at him. She’d bet he’d been up half the night cooking because he couldn’t sleep. His agitation oozed from every pore.
‘How did you find me?’ he asked.
Berlin had a sudden flash of Traitor’s Gate, but ignored it and went into her spiel. ‘I’m sorry for this intrusion. I know it must be disconcerting to have me turn up on your doorstep like this.’
She paused to give him an opportunity to put her at ease. He didn’t take it, so she went on. ‘You had an appointment that day. Just before mine. I know you would have kept it, but when I got there the waiting room was empty.’
He stared at her, aghast. Berlin watched the pink drain from his cheeks.
‘Christ. You’re not a police officer are you? I’ve already been interviewed. I can’t believe they’d employ someone like you. Someone like us, I mean.’
Uninvited she sat down at the beautiful scrubbed deal table. He turned off the gas under the saucepans and sat down too. Now she could see the tremor in his hands, the sweat at his temples. He was doing it the hard way. He put his head in his hands.
‘When I saw you at the front door and realised who you were, I thought perhaps you had come to, well, that is, I thought perhaps you were connected to …’
Berlin recognised his desperation. Dempster could take him off the list.
‘You thought I’d come to sell you heroin. You hoped that I had the stuff that was stolen from Lazenby,’ she said.
He didn’t look at her, just nodded.
‘And if I had – if I was “connected” to whoever killed Lazenby, or if indeed I had killed him, a man who did the right thing by us for decades – you wouldn’t have said a word to the police, just paid the price and hoped and prayed that I would call again? Right?’
His head hung in shame.
‘Am I right?’
He nodded.
‘You disgust me,’ she said, thinking I disgust me.
‘You know what it’s like!’ he protested. ‘I went to a local GP who just palmed me off on a methadone clinic. I can’t use that poison. I tried it years ago. The list of heroin-prescribing doctors is closed pending a Home Office review. Someone told me it’s been going on for seven bloody years. I’ll end up buying on the street. I’ll lose everything!’
Berlin tried not to let her sympathy overwhelm her. She smacked her hand down hard on the table and Pink Cheeks sat bolt upright.
‘Now, you’re going to tell me everything you didn’t tell the police and when you’re finished, if I’m satisfied that I’ve got the truth, I might be able to help you out.’
He licked his lips – from fear or anticipation, she couldn’t tell. Berlin felt like shit, sitting in his kitchen, holding out the inducement of a salvation she couldn’t deliver. But Dempster was right. It takes one to know one. They weren’t called ‘users’ for nothing.
Pink Cheeks took a deep breath and gave it all up.
30
FLINT CHECKED OUT the bloke’s ‘Who’s Who in Business’ entry and made a few phone calls. The target’s club was listed in his biography because membership in itself was an indication of status. The club did the right thing by refusing to confirm or deny his presence. But Flint knew if he hadn’t been there they would have just said so.
Fernley-Price woke up in a single bed with clean sheets, all tucked in tight. He felt the strange peace that he used to feel at boarding school, knowing his life was completely out of his hands. A moment later he remembered. The peace left him, and he knew it would never return. Never.
He lifted his head from the pillow, which set the room spinning, but once it settled down he realised he was in one of the rooms at his club. He had no memory of returning here after that god-awful scene. The porters must have put him to bed. He ran his hands over his face and throat and winced. He was losing it.
His life had turned to shit. The ship was sinking fast and he had no idea how to save himself. He withdrew further into his high-thread-count cotton cocoon.
There was a soft knock at the door. He ignored it. The next knock was firmer.
‘Enter,’ he said.
The door opened and the porter peered in at him.
‘Sorry to disturb you, sir. There are two gentlemen to see you downstairs.’
‘What, at this hour?’ blustered Fernley-Price.
‘It’s nearly lunch time, sir,’ he said.
‘I’m aware of the time,’ said Fernley-Price, although he wasn’t. ‘Who is it, then?’ he asked with trepidation. It was probably some of his former colleagues who had seen him in the bar and knew he was holed up here. People he owed money to, no doubt.
‘Two police officers, sir.’
The porter, who had been working since six a.m., was about to lose his job because rubbish like Fernley-Price had trashed the economy and club membership was falling off. He padded away down the corridor and with each soft tread imagined the faces of the arrogant twats beneath his leather soles.
31
GAZING OUT OF the train window Berlin realised the sea air had done her good. It had reminded her why she never left London. The moment the express pulled into Victoria Station she was on her way to the British Library.
The BL had good coffee, free wi-fi and, most importantly, it was a secure public place where it was unlikely you would encounter a target – or a colleague, for that matter. And Berlin didn’t want Dempster to start feeling at home at her flat.
He slid into the booth opposite her. He was late.
‘What’s with this place? Are you implying I need an education? We have a book in Newcastle,’ he said.
‘I heard that book had never been returned to the library.’
He laughed. Then he got down to business. He passed a bunch of documents to Berlin and summarised while she leafed through them.
‘The woman who died at the town hall, Merle Okonedo, was a psychiatric i
npatient until three days before she died. She had been admitted with depression after her brother died of an overdose. In prison.
‘One of those documents is a ballistics report. The gun that killed Lazenby was a converted starting pistol – same as the gun that was used to threaten him at the town hall. The only difference was that this one had been modified to fire real bullets.’
Dempster kept talking. Berlin wondered why he had bothered handing her the documents if he was just going to tell her everything anyway. This bloke loved the sound of his own voice and obviously no one else would listen.
‘It was an Olympic BBM 9 mm revolver,’ he said. ‘Easily converted to the real thing, if you know what you’re doing. You sand off the orange paint and drill out the barrel so it can fire short ammo. Weapon of choice for London gangs fighting turf wars.’
Berlin leant back and folded her arms. ‘There’s no link between Okonedo and Lazenby except the type of gun, which you’ve just said is very common. And why would a gang want Lazenby out of the picture? Because they didn’t like him providing free heroin to potential customers?’
She could see her deadpan attitude irritated him more than it should have.
‘I never said it was a gang. There is another connection between Okonedo and Lazenby.’ He paused. Waiting for a drum roll. ‘Bonnington.’
‘What? They said on the news he was anti-drugs. It was someone who wanted Lazenby’s drugs bad enough to kill for them,’ said Berlin.
‘You’re looking at this all wrong,’ he snapped. Dempster leant across the table and retrieved the reports. ‘He didn’t want the drugs to sell; he wanted them out of circulation.’
Berlin raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you serious? You think that Okonedo was working with this Bonnington? The bloke who struggled with her, defending Lazenby?’
‘Suppose he knew her gun was a dud?’
Berlin worked her way through the implications. Dempster stayed quiet.
‘Okay,’ she said slowly, with more than a hint of scepticism.
Dempster couldn’t help himself; he had to give her a nudge in the right direction.
‘He wanted Lazenby out of the way. It’s the perfect cover. Be a hero and save a man’s life at lunch time so no one suspects you of killing him after tea. Anyway, who tackles a deranged woman with a gun? Someone who knows it’s not real,’ he expostulated.
‘You’ve been watching too much television,’ said Berlin.
Dempster snorted. She could see he was pissed off, probably because she didn’t ooh and ah in the right places, awed by his superb powers of deduction. In his irritation he seemed to have forgotten they’d met so she could brief him on the outcome of her recent ‘mission’: that which others might call blackmail. Dempster was obviously something of an expert in that field himself, although he would probably prefer to call it leverage. She took her time, wanting it to play out on her terms.
‘Yeah, it’s a nice theory. There’s just one problem with Bonnington as Lazenby’s killer,’ she said.
‘And what’s that, Sherlock?’
‘It was a woman.’
*
The combination of cold, wet bodies and not enough space turned the Underground into a fetid sauna. Jammed between two enormous Australian backpackers, Berlin reviewed what Pink Cheeks had told her. She’d left a peeved Dempster in the BL, digesting the same information.
According to Pink Cheeks, when he’d arrived at the surgery there was a woman in the waiting room he’d never seen before. It struck him as odd because he’d seen very few women there over the years, apart from Berlin herself. Also, the regular appointment before him was usually someone he’d described as a tall gentleman with ‘Mediterranean looks’. Whatever that meant.
The woman, enveloped in a hoodie, was standing by the consulting-room door, gazing up at the green light, clearly anxious to get in. Pink Cheeks had sat down and got out his newspaper before he heard the click that meant that Lazenby had released the lock. The green light came on. The woman shot straight into the consulting room without looking at him.
Sound didn’t travel well through the heavy door, but Pink Cheeks was aware of a sort of thumping: more a vibration in the floor. Like a couple of heavy steps. Then he heard a bang, like a whip cracking, and another heavy thud.
Lazenby hitting the floor, thought Berlin.
Pink Cheeks said he was startled and froze for a moment until he heard the door of the self-administration room slam. He caught a glimpse of a man running down the hallway. On the way out people usually moved more sedately. Whoever had been in there had felt compelled to get out, fast.
Pink Cheeks was pretty sure the running man was Mr Mediterranean, the patient before him. He had no doubt recognised the sound of a gunshot and bolted. So far this man had eluded Dempster, having gone to ground, perhaps, after seeing news of Lazenby’s demise. But anyway, it was unlikely that he had seen the woman. While he was running away, she was still in the consulting room, presumably cleaning out the drug safe that Lazenby always stupidly left open to save time between patients.
The routine was that after a brief chat with Lazenby the patient would take the ampoule into the other room, do the business, then leave. Lazenby would give them about ten minutes before he switched on the green light to summon the next in line. These people were experienced users, stabilised on a maintenance dose. They didn’t experience the rush any more, throw up or nod off on the spot.
Lazenby also gave a few of them the privilege of taking ampoules home, if they lived at a distance or had other commitments. This was in breach of the Home Office guidelines and one of the reasons Lazenby had been constantly harried by the GMC. He’d argued it was a clinical decision and nobody’s business but his and the patients’. In other words, up yours.
When the man ran past the open door of the waiting room Pink Cheeks took this as a bad sign and decided he should also scarper. He didn’t see the woman again. His description of her – ‘ordinary’ – wasn’t helpful. Her back had been to him, it was only a minute and he’d been anxious to get in and see Lazenby for what he referred to as his ‘little helper’. Berlin reflected that this euphemism was reminiscent of drinking a full bottle of red while preparing dinner, then describing it as a ‘cook’s nip’.
She extricated herself from the backpackers at Bethnal Green and gratefully ascended from the pit into the freezing air, weaved in and out of the beggars on the corner and made her way home.
Her key was in the lock when the sound of footsteps thundering up the stairs behind her made her turn defensively, her heart pounding.
The postman was taken aback by the fear in her face. ‘It’s all right, missus. Just me,’ he said.
‘Sorry,’ she said, her shoulders sagging with relief.
‘I don’t blame you. Around here I keep looking over my shoulder, too,’ he said, thrusting a thick brown envelope into her hand.
‘What’s this?’
‘Registered, innit.’ He handed her a stylus and held out a touch screen.
She signed.
‘Thanks, missus,’ he said, and took off down the stairs.
She tore open the envelope and took out a letter from work and a pamphlet. The letter summoned her to attend ‘an initial interview in relation to allegations of serious misconduct’. There was a long list of her infractions, and the associated penalties should she be found guilty.
Suspension without pay for six months was the best result, termination the worst. She could bring a support person, but not a lawyer. The pamphlet explained the Agency’s disciplinary process and her rights.
The final paragraph warned in sombre tones that if she failed to attend without a reasonable excuse the inquiry would proceed without her. The interview was scheduled for five p.m. the next day. A time, she noted, when the office would be emptying out. A one on one. The letter was signed by John Coulthard, General Manager (Acting).
She had barely turned the key in the lock and pushed open the front door when her landline
rang.
‘Oh, fuck off,’ she said. It was probably Dempster with another wild theory. He seemed intent on this Bonnington, one way or another. The phone kept ringing. Or it could be her mother. She picked up.
‘Hello?’
‘Cathy, how are you? Roger Flint here.’
‘Acting Detective Sergeant Flint,’ she said. Her voice was tight.
The over-familiar little prick.
‘We’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ he said.
Berlin glanced at the pieces of her old mobile on the table. Flint didn’t have her new number.
‘Inspector Thompson and I would like another word,’ he continued when she failed to respond.
‘I’ve already made a statement.’
‘We would like further clarification on some matters.’
‘Such as?’
Flint’s tone hardened. ‘It would be in your interests to attend.’
‘When?’
‘There’s a car downstairs.’
She crossed the room to the window and looked down. A bored-looking woman got out of an unmarked car and looked up.
32
WHEN THEY DROVE past the police station Berlin had a bad moment. The woman driving hadn’t spoken a word, just opened the back door and gestured for her to get in. She knew the doors were locked automatically by the driver.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Not far,’ came the oblique response.
Talk about a little power being a dangerous thing. Unfortunately, a lot of power was an even more dangerous thing, and once the police had you in their grasp that’s exactly what they had, despite the oft-heard complaint that the villains had more rights than police. Until you’d been banged up in a cell you couldn’t appreciate the enormity of powerlessness and the fear that went with it.
From the moment Berlin got into the car she had wanted to get out again, but when they pulled up and the car door was released she was strangely reluctant to make a move.
The Limehouse Basin. The water was as still and grey as it had been that morning when she came to meet Gina. Berlin could see Thompson and Flint waiting for her on the other side, just beyond the footbridge across the cut where the Basin ran into the river. Their hands were plunged into the pockets of their overcoats, their shapes indistinct against the granite sky and leaden water. Wraiths.
In Her Blood Page 9