In Her Blood

by Annie Hauxwell

  Flint smiled as she approached. A bad sign. Thompson was bent over the rail, staring into the water.

  ‘What’s this about and why the hell are we down here?’ she asked, trying not to sound nervous.

  Flint ignored the question and gestured at the lock. ‘No accident that they both went in here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t play smart with me, Berlin. Doyle’s daughter and Ludovic Nestor. What do you think the connection was between them?’

  ‘I’ve no bloody idea.’

  ‘But you agree there must have been one?’

  ‘I don’t believe in coincidence.’

  Flint cocked his head and widened his eyes in mock admiration, as if she’d said something clever. ‘So what was the link?’

  ‘Come on, Flint, enough with the games,’ she snapped.

  Flint shrugged and pointed at her. ‘You. You’re the link.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about? She was an informant and he was my boss. If you call that a link.’

  She could see that Flint was having the time of his life. Thompson was still gazing into the water as if he could read the flotsam and jetsam like entrails.

  ‘He never met her or spoke to her?’ persisted Flint.

  ‘Not to my knowledge. He could have got her mobile number from the log, I suppose, but why would he want to talk to her?’

  Detective Chief Inspector Thompson slowly straightened up, his hand in the small of his back. His tone was mild. ‘You tell us. He made one hundred and twelve calls to her in the week before she died. But the last call he ever made was to you.’

  A small hollow feeling invaded the soft area beneath Berlin’s ribs.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t.’

  Flint extended his hand. ‘We’ll need your phone.’

  She took a step back. ‘Get a warrant. Or arrest me. But you’d better be bloody clear why or I’ll have you for false imprisonment and harassment before you can say Police Complaints.’

  Flint took a step forward.

  ‘And assault,’ she added.

  Thompson smiled and put a restraining hand on Flint’s arm. ‘We’re not here for a confrontation. We’re just running an investigation and no one’s being straight with us. Including you. We didn’t do this at the station out of professional courtesy.’

  He was a reasonable man who’d become tired, she thought. Weary not just because he was working long hours, with two bodies on his whiteboard now, but worn out by the constant lying and perfidy of the human race. Especially those members of it who were supposed to be on his side.

  Seagulls skimmed the surface of the lock, alighting on the rafts of rotting garbage that hung in the water, squabbling over morsels of decay. Their raucous, mocking cries were an insult.

  Berlin realised she had no alibi for the nights that Gina and Nestor died. From some distance she heard Flint’s voice. ‘We have evidence you met Gina on a number of occasions that you didn’t log. Nestor was obviously also involved with her in some fashion. He shut down your investigation and you were angry about that. Any comment?’

  A bleak future yawned in front of her. She turned and walked away as fast as she could without running.

  ‘Miss Berlin,’ Thompson called after her. ‘Please come back.’

  She stepped onto the iron footbridge and felt the vibration as someone stepped onto it behind her. Even as she picked up speed she knew it was a stupid thing to do, but her legs seemed to have a will of their own. She ran.

  ‘Hey!’ shouted Flint. She heard the disbelief in his voice, then the sound of feet pounding across the bridge behind her.

  The adrenalin surged through her and she flew off the bridge and around the Basin towards the Narrow. She was aware that Flint was gaining on her and that her heart was about to burst, when ahead she saw the passenger-side door of a parked car swing open.

  A voice she recognised shouted ‘Get in!’

  She did as she was told. The car took off at such speed she had to hang out and grab the door to stop it swinging. She dragged it shut and fell back into the seat. She turned to look at her knight in shining armour.

  ‘You bastard,’ she gasped between gulps of air. ‘You knew they were waiting for me!’

  ‘Yeah. Well they can have you when I’ve finished with you,’ said Dempster.

  33

  DEMPSTER WAS UNLIKE any policeman Berlin had ever met. Intense, tossing wild theories about with scant regard for the evidence, and making rash moves. Like snatching her from the street while other officers were in pursuit.

  He said he had driven back to her flat from the BL and waited for her to arrive. He hadn’t bothered to pretend he was doing anything except keeping an eye on her. Very trusting. He had watched her go up, then almost immediately come back down and get into the car. It had to be a police vehicle because the driver put her in the back. He just followed.

  She sat on his couch and watched him pacing up and down on the tiny balcony, phone pressed to his ear. His free hand swooped and darted through the air, an angry red-necked bird, as he harangued the poor sod on the other end. She suspected it was Flint.

  Finally he hung up, slid the glass door open and stepped back into the studio, one of hundreds in a new complex south of the river, near Waterloo. It was compact, and that was being kind. London rents were worse than Tokyo. The only place more expensive than either was Moscow, so she’d heard.

  ‘That’s sorted,’ he said with satisfaction, slipping the phone back into his suit pocket. ‘They were just trying to put the frighteners on you. They haven’t even got Nestor’s cause of death yet, let alone evidence to charge anybody. The Council invested with some Icelandic bank which has gone belly up, so there’s a freeze on post-mortems.’

  He paused and gave her a wry smile to see if she had picked up on the clever pun. She had, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

  He continued, disappointed. ‘Plus, the pathologist’s on holiday and they can’t afford a locum. Borough Command has just cut DCI Thompson’s budget, so he hasn’t even got the resources to put someone onto hassling the telco for your voicemail. SCD4 and Met Forensics have laid people off and say they can’t find the disc with the dump from Nestor’s phone. They think someone might have taken it home. Nestor left it at the office, by the way. His phone, that is. Did you know that?’

  He barely paused for breath, while she was still catching hers.

  ‘How can you get away with this?’ she asked him.

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘Snatching me from the grim arms of the law.’

  ‘Apart from Flint giving me an earful, what can they do? They were in the wrong dragging you down to the lock for questioning. Thompson knows that. If they go after me, that will come out, then we’ll all be in the shit. What have they got to gain?’

  ‘So it’s the pot calling the kettle,’ she said.

  Dempster laughed.

  She laughed too. Now I know I’m going off the deep end, she thought. Laughing. It’ll be crying next.

  He stood there looking at her, expectant. She knew he was waiting for her to check her phone messages. There was no point. It was the wrong SIM card. Anyway, Nestor was none of his business and she had always stuck to the ‘need to know’ principle when it came to sharing. He didn’t need to know.

  Dempster shrugged and moved on. ‘By the way, I’ve got something for you,’ he said, retrieving a battered grey file from behind the couch Berlin was sitting on. He dropped it into her lap.

  In the top right corner a steady hand had written in perfect copperplate ‘Doyle, F. DOB. 6 Sept. 1928’.

  She opened it while the unstoppable Dempster rattled on. ‘They’re a very interesting family. When she was eleven your informant walked into Bethnal Green Police Station and informed them her dad had murdered her mum. So you see, she had a history of dropping her old man in it.’

  That explained a lot, thought Berlin. How would you cope with believing such a thing? She m
ust have carried that burden for years – the conviction your father was a murderer and the ignominy of not being believed. Perhaps she’d finally seen a way to get him. Berlin had been right all along: demons had been driving her.

  The file contained a yellowing sheet of lined foolscap, half a dozen typed reports, liberally spotted with white-out, a couple of handwritten index cards and some carbon copies. One of them bore the name ‘Georgina Doyle’.

  Christ, thought Berlin, it’s like looking back into the Dark Ages. There was a slight change in her expression, which Dempster picked up on. Maybe he was getting used to her.

  ‘Yeah, it’s hard to believe it was 1986, not 1936, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘No computers. The quality of local records was down to the collator. This file was buried deep in the basement at Bethnal Green, along with stuff from 1888 on the Ripper inquiry.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Yeah, I am, actually. The Ripper files all went to the National Archive years ago, but there’s boxes and boxes of documents down there I bet no one’s ever gone through. Wonderful stuff on the Krays, Jack the Hat, the Bethnal Green Disaster even, remember that?’

  ‘I’m not quite that old,’ she said, without expression.

  ‘I meant had you heard of it. It was a stampede down at Bethnal Green Station —’

  ‘I know what it was,’ she snapped.

  Rebuffed, he shut up. Offence showed in his face.

  Jesus, he really is a romantic, thought Berlin as she flicked through the file. ‘Nothing on the current systems about the Doyles?’ she asked, business-like.

  ‘No. CRIMINT didn’t get going until the nineties, and I guess a lot of bods thought it was easier to dump files than enter them into a new system. There was a lot of resistance to computerisation.’

  The report Berlin held in her hand said it all. On 5 March 1986 a Senior Constable Marks had taken little Georgina Doyle home after her visit to the station to report her mum’s murder. Her father had explained to the copper that her mum had left him a few weeks before and his daughter was having difficulty accepting that she had been left behind.

  It was pretty much the same story Doyle had given her. Had Gina been right? Doyle was a murderer? Or had she just been a confused child lashing out at her father? She certainly hadn’t come across as a confused adult.

  The report noted that when the constable tried to reassure the girl, she swore at him in an ‘unbecoming fashion’, kicked him in the shins and went to her room.

  It turned out the mum and dad weren’t married, but their daughter didn’t know that. The report stated that the girl was ‘well nourished’ and the home ‘clean and tidy’.

  Berlin could see it all. Doyle grateful to the officer for bringing her home, a cup of tea, chocolate bourbons and a man-to-man about the heartless woman who would abandon her child.

  There was a postscript to the report. The mum, Nancy Baker, was known to the police. The report didn’t say how. But on another piece of paper Berlin found her record: convictions for soliciting, shoplifting and receiving.

  The senior constable’s report was signed off by a sergeant, who’d initialled it ‘NFA’. No Further Action.

  The last time Berlin had seen that acronym it was splashed across the policy log she had opened on Doyle. Nestor’s digital signature was beneath it and he had entered ‘Insufficient evidence to proceed’ under ‘Reasons’. Now they could engrave ‘NFA’ on his gravestone.

  She glanced up from the file. Dempster was standing over her with a cup of coffee. She didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, but he looked amused. She took the coffee and he plonked down on a stool at what she supposed would be described as the breakfast bar.

  ‘So there you go, the father’s got form too,’ he said.

  ‘The father?’ She was confused. Doyle didn’t have a record.

  ‘The grandfather, I should say. Archie Doyle’s father, Frank.’

  Berlin paused. She looked again at the name on the file. This was the man who supposedly knew her father. ‘His name didn’t come up in my inquiries,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, well, he’s a bit of a recluse these days, apparently. A wide boy from an early age, worked his way up to robbery and GBH in the sixties, quietened down in the seventies, then went off the radar completely in the eighties.’

  ‘He must be an old man now,’ she said, wondering about his connection to Doyle’s sharking operation. Was it a family business?

  Dempster clapped his hands together. ‘Right! You’ve got your intel on the Doyles and I’ve got Thompson off your back, for the time being at least. So let’s get back to business. Actually, I’ve done you another favour, so this isn’t going to be too hard.’

  Here we go, thought Berlin.

  34

  THE RECEPTIONIST WAS pleasant but edgy. Her name tag read ‘Polly Poh Li’ but Berlin could see the invisible writing underneath that said ‘In Recovery’. Polly thrust a clipboard and pen at her, and Berlin sat down to scribble her personal details on the form clipped to it. She was late.

  The soft cushions and pastel walls screamed ‘calming environment’ but the smell of sweat and fear hung in the air. A door opened and an open-faced young man in jeans and a Gap sweater emerged. He approached Berlin, his hand extended.

  ‘Hi. I’m Daryl Bonnington. Pleased to meet you.’ His grip was firm and warm, his smile genuine.

  Berlin’s first instinct was to run.

  Bonnington’s office was even more calming than the reception area. She could detect a whiff of incense. Bonnington sat on a beanbag and gestured for her to do the same. No chairs. She chose a purple one.

  ‘Okay. Ms Berlin, you have been referred to this facility by the Home Office, via the Metropolitan Police Service Witness Liaison Service, following the tragic death of your GP. You’re here for urgent assessment pending transfer to detox and/or a methadone programme.’

  ‘Or another GP with a heroin-prescription licence,’ she said, shifting her weight, trying to get comfortable on the beanbag. It was bloody demeaning, being sprawled on the floor.

  Bonnington smiled, indulgent. ‘May I call you Catherine?’

  ‘Berlin.’

  ‘Fine. Berlin, may I ask you a personal question?’

  As if she could say no.

  He glanced at the open file on his lap. ‘I understand you found Dr Lazenby’s body. That must have been a terrible shock. How are you coping with that?’

  Berlin composed herself. ‘Pretty much the same way you’re coping with the death of that woman at the town hall, I should imagine,’ she said.

  Bonnington was good. He didn’t react, just made a note on his pad. Berlin would have bet it was ‘Defensive’.

  ‘That was a very sad accident,’ he said. ‘And one I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.’

  Berlin could have sworn he meant it.

  ‘Anyway, Berlin, we’re here to talk about you, not me.’ He read from the file. ‘Stress exacerbated by the murder of an informant. Feelings of guilt. Question mark. Unresolved until case closed. Question mark.’ He looked at her with the steady, non-judgemental gaze of the professional.

  ‘So. What sort of outcomes are you looking for from a programme?’

  She looked into the abyss and cursed the man who had put her at its edge.

  Bonnington showed Berlin out, pausing at the desk to ask Polly to make another appointment for her.

  ‘We need a little more time to thrash out these issues before we can agree on a way forward,’ he said.

  Polly offered a rueful smile with the card for the next appointment. She’d been there.

  Berlin tried to slam the door behind her as she left but it was controlled by a heavy-duty door closer and she just jarred her shoulder. Striding away she felt her feet slip on the ice but she was not about to slow down. Fury drove her on. She ignored the man in the vehicle kerb-crawling beside her.

  ‘Get in,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck off, Dempster.’

/>   ‘Come on. Get in.’

  She stopped, leaning in at the car window. ‘Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve left me at the mercy of a man who is pathologically opposed to heroin on prescription. He won’t support a referral to another licensed GP under any circumstances. He wants me on methadone, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, that is his job,’ protested Dempster.

  ‘You are an utter shit, Dempster. You said you had arranged an urgent appointment with someone who could help me.’ She kicked out at the car door.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted.

  She strode on. He drove up beside her.

  ‘Come on! I needed someone to get near him. It’s perfect,’ he said.

  She stopped dead and stared at him in disbelief.

  ‘Perfect? You selfish prick! I suppose you think while you’ve got those scripts as collateral you can do what you fucking well like with me!’

  A couple on the other side of the road had stopped to watch, concerned. Dempster got out of the car and gave them a wave. ‘It’s okay. She’s emotional. You know how it is,’ he called.

  The man nodded and tugged at his wife’s arm. They kept walking.

  ‘Well, I’m over it!’ shouted Berlin. ‘Do your fucking worst! You can keep your so-called favours. Whatever happens next, on your head be it!’

  She reached out and snapped one of his windscreen wipers, then marched into the traffic as if there wasn’t a car on the road. A road which was slick with black ice. The driver of a Vauxhall Cavalier was unimpressed. His muffled shouts of abuse included the words ‘stupid’ and ‘bitch’, accompanied by a horn blast. Berlin made it to the other side, turned and gave him the finger. She could see Dempster watching her. He looked frightened. Good. She strode on.

  He ran across the road and caught up but didn’t touch her. She kept walking, forcing him to trot alongside. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I realise now it was a stupid thing to do. I should have told you it was Bonnington. I’m not used to working with someone else,’ he said.