by D. B. Thorne
‘Bring in a medium-to-large player in organized crime,’ she said.
‘Because?’
‘Because?’ Fox said, confused by the question and sounding, she knew, stupid. Christ, she hated coming across as stupid.
‘Because you’re a key member of Task Force Jehovah,’ said Goven. ‘And you’ve got hard targets to hit. This is your KPI, and if you don’t hit it, you’re going nowhere. Understand?’
‘Yes,’ said Fox. ‘We’re on the same page.’
‘So okay, tell me again. This girl, this …’
‘Tiffany Mullan. Luke Mullan’s sister.’
‘Right. I thought, you told me there was nothing to it. You told me, and I have it in writing, that she was just a way in to Luke Mullan.’
‘She was.’
‘Was.’
‘Well,’ said Fox. She paused, chose her words carefully. ‘It depends on what we want to do with this new information.’
‘This new information being that some junkie was found in the same canal that she was.’
‘Just after a date. Or a supposed date.’
‘This Tiffany Mullan,’ said Goven. ‘Is she a junkie too?’
‘No. Not as far as I’m aware.’
‘Coroner’s report?’
‘For Rebecca Harrington? Suicide. There was a note.’
Goven stood up straight and turned his back to Fox. Fox watched the semicircle of sweat on his shirt, just above his waist. Watched him breathe in, out, in, out, deeply.
‘So,’ said Goven, slowly, ‘there’s basically no link at all between the two of them, except that they both fell into the same fucking canal?’
‘There’s more,’ said Fox.
‘There’d fucking well better be more,’ said Goven. ‘Because your time might be worth eff all, but mine isn’t. Understood?’
Fox took a deep breath. ‘I had a call from Islington nick. Another girl had been found, drugged, after a date.’
‘Drugged? What, dead?’
‘No, just drugged. She’d been out for two days.’
‘And?’
‘And the sergeant there—’
‘The sergeant.’ Goven turned back to Fox. ‘Really? The sergeant?’ He shook his head, then said, ‘Go on.’
‘This … sergeant, he’d heard about the Tiffany Mullan case and thought there might be similarities.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the girl, the one who’d been drugged, she’d been on a date. With some guy she met online and who couldn’t be traced.’
‘Where was she found?’
‘In a church.’
‘A what?’ Goven tapped the side of his temple with three fingers, hard. ‘God help me. A church?’
‘And drugged.’
‘Barbiturates? Same as Tiffany Mullan?’
‘No.’
‘No. So you’ve got the mystery date. That’s your link.’
‘Not my link. Sergeant Bright’s.’
‘Right. The sergeant. And this didn’t come down from his superiors?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Fox. ‘He wanted my case notes, but obviously there aren’t many, given that we’re going after her brother. So I told him to send me his, since I picked the case up first.’
‘Okay.’ Goven nodded, seemed almost satisfied by this action. Getting a compliment from Goven was rare, Fox thought, trying to remember a time he’d praised her and coming up short. ‘Heard from him since? This sergeant?’
‘No.’
Goven nodded again. ‘So, let’s recap.’ He put an index finger to a thumb and said, with a heavy dose of unfriendly sarcasm, ‘If I may?’
Fox nodded.
‘Number one. We have Tiffany Mullan, a stripper, found in a canal, head wound, barbiturates in her blood.’
‘Yes. After an online date.’
Goven nodded. ‘Two, we have this Harrington disaster, found in the same canal, suicide note. Supposed to have had a date, but the coroner ruled suicide.’
‘Yes.’
‘So we can forget her. Finally, we’ve got a girl found drugged in a church. After a date. Maybe.’
‘A date who can’t be traced.’
‘They all use fake names nowadays, you know that,’ said Goven. ‘Fake profiles. Proves nothing.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Fox.
Goven nodded once more, this time to himself, and then to Fox’s surprise sat down. He leant back and swivelled his chair slightly, left then right, holding Fox’s gaze as he did it, which made Fox respect him a little less. That kind of thing was fine for Bond villains, but come on. Please. At last he said, ‘I need to know we’re aligned here.’
‘Of course,’ said Fox.
Goven leant back in his chair. ‘I run organized crime. We can agree on that.’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t run Helen Fox’s home for druggie slags.’
Fox didn’t answer at first. This was harsh, even coming from Goven. This was beyond harsh. Fox suddenly realized that she had entirely underestimated how angry, how furious, Goven was. She didn’t answer, instead did her best to hold his bleak stare.
‘Can we agree on that?’
‘Yes,’ said Fox, ‘although I must object—’
Goven sat forward in his seat and brought both hands down flat on his desk. ‘Shut up. Shut up. Do not say another word. Yes? Do not answer that.’
Fox didn’t answer.
‘My job,’ said Goven, ‘is to bring in criminals. Criminals who contribute to the underground economy, who launder substantial amounts of cash. This is my job. It’s what I have been tasked to do. And if I don’t do this, I don’t just get shit from the Chief Constable. I get shit from the Home Office, I get ministerial-grade shit, the kind of shit I do not want. The kind of shit I will not have.’ He paused, took a breath. ‘Inspector Fox, understand this. I will sell you, your colleagues, your family, anyone I think might help, I will sell them all, crucify the lot of them, to avoid one second of one uncomfortable meeting with one government minister.’ He rubbed his eyes, then pulled his hand downwards over his face. He fixed Fox with his gaze and spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘Let me be even plainer. You are facing a fucking existential decision here. Bring one more speculative dead-woman hypothesis to me, instead of the warm body of Luke fucking Mullan, and you will be out of a job. Do you understand me?’
Fox blinked. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Are we aligned?’
‘Yes.’
‘Task Force Jehovah is all I care about. And it is all you care about. It is the only thing that matters, because I have got targets to hit and I will hit them, with or without you. Because my pension matters more than you. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Luke Mullan. You told me you’d bring him in. Didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then, Inspector for-the-moment Fox, I suggest you fucking bring him in. And soon. Because it’s been too long already, and as you can probably tell, my patience is very nearly run out.’
‘Sir.’
‘I picked you because I thought you were a career copper. Some posh sort with a chip on her shoulder, trying to prove her parents wrong, make it through the ranks instead of becoming an investment banker, which I will bet my bollocks they’d have preferred you did. This is your reputation as much as mine, if I’m right. So get out there and start knocking on some more doors, start rattling some more cages, and get me a fucking result before you end up knocking on your mummy’s door, telling her that you fucked up and can you come home for a while, to regroup because the nasty police force was way beyond you.’ Goven breathed in deeply and closed his eyes, leaning back again in his chair. ‘Once more. Are we aligned?’
‘Yes,’ said Fox. She barely managed to get the words out, thinking of her parents, of her mother, her baffled and betrayed expression when Fox had told her she was joining the force. Goven might be a stone-cold bastard, but he’d had her right, skewered her right where her heart ought to be, if she hadn’t sold it long ago
. She had to make this job work. If she didn’t, her parents would have won. And she could not allow that.
‘Then good,’ said Goven. ‘Good. And do yourself a favour. The next time you knock on that door, you make sure you’ve got Mullan handcuffed to your wrist. Because you’re on my list now, and it is a list, let me assure you, that it is very fucking difficult to get off.’ He paused, reached for a pen, picked it up and then said, looking at it rather than at Fox, ‘Now piss off.’
Outside in the corridor, Fox felt her ankle give on one of her high heels, and put a hand out to the wall to steady herself. She needed to make a decision, she knew that. Make a decision about her career, about how serious she was about it. But even as she thought this, she realized that that decision had been made long ago, had been made the moment her parents had told her that she was making a mistake, that she would regret it, that she would never make it. Not in an environment like that. But she would make it. She would play the game. Be a team player, get aligned, get on board, get a result. This she would do. Whatever it took, and however it played out. She had targets to hit, the team had targets to hit, and she was going to make sure they hit them. Whatever the hell it took.
twenty-four
‘YOU KNOW HOW MANY OF THEM THERE ARE?’
‘I know,’ said Solomon. He’d never regretted not studying Shakespeare in detail, but he did now. This was a hole in his knowledge that he was trying to fill. ‘Let’s start with the key texts, the canonical ones. Who have we got?’
‘Cordelia, Desdemona, Juliet, Lavinia, Ophelia,’ said Kay.
‘And Cleopatra.’
‘Obviously. I mean, not obviously like duh, obviously, but, you know. We’ve been through it.’
‘Yes,’ said Solomon gently. ‘I know what you mean.’
Kay sighed. ‘It feels too big.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Just … I don’t know.’ It was the evening after the Brain Pool meeting, and Solomon was talking to Kay over his laptop. He didn’t know if it was his imagination, but he thought Kay might be wearing make-up. Eyeliner. He supposed he could find out for sure by comparing the images from tonight with cached images from previous conversations, but he figured that might be creepy, or a key indicator of some especially deviant tendency. Besides, he didn’t want to think about make-up, not after what had happened on the Tube. Stop thinking, he thought. You think too much. Enough.
‘Solomon?’
‘Sorry. I think we need to break this down. Approach it systematically. Okay. We know about Ophelia and Cleopatra. So we just need to choose somebody else.’
‘Desdemona.’
‘Okay. So, Desdemona. Victim of?’
‘Othello.’
‘Yes, I mean, what happened to her?’
‘Well, Othello smothered her. Because he thought she was unfaithful, even though she wasn’t, but he wouldn’t listen to her, and basically he acted like, well.’ She stopped, then said, ‘He was a moron.’
Solomon smiled. ‘We’re together on that one. So the thing to do is look for news stories where a woman was suffocated.’
‘Exactly how I like to spend my Thursday nights.’
Solomon was silent, then said, ‘You’re right. I’m sorry, Kay, this isn’t your problem. You shouldn’t be doing this.’
‘No, I didn’t mean it like that,’ said Kay. ‘It was meant as a joke.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Oh God. I’m such an idiot.’ She put her hand to her forehead and shook her head, her eyes covered.
‘No, Kay, come on …’
‘Why do I always get it wrong?’
‘You don’t,’ said Solomon. ‘I just mean—’
‘I can’t even ask you on a date without basically scaring you off. What’s the matter with me?’
‘It wasn’t you,’ said Solomon. ‘Really. It’s just …’ He couldn’t think of what to say, then realized he knew exactly what to say, just didn’t want to say it. So he did. ‘It’s just that I look like a monster, and you will be horrified. You will be. I guarantee it.’
Kay looked up at the camera on her laptop, as if by staring hard enough into it, she’d see behind the avatar, get some idea of what Solomon meant. Then she said, softly, ‘Don’t you think I should be the judge of that?’
‘Kay …’
‘I’m an intelligent person. I know I don’t always sound it, but I am. I’m brilliant and I often make good decisions. Like, more often than not.’
‘I’m not ready,’ said Solomon. ‘For people to see me.’ He paused, then said, ‘For you to see me.’
‘Me?’
‘You. You especially.’ Solomon willed himself to stop, to go no further, to reveal nothing more. Kay didn’t need to know how he felt. What good would it do? None. It could only do harm.
‘You mean that?’ said Kay.
‘I …’ Solomon swallowed and blinked back a tear. ‘Please, can we just get back to work? Kay? Please?’
Solomon had been to see his sister earlier, who had been pleased to see him but distracted, frustrated at her loss of memory. She’d told him that she felt like when she’d forgotten some actor’s name in a film; she knew it but just couldn’t think of it, like it was there, somewhere, but she couldn’t access it. She’d sighed and swallowed and said that she didn’t even know if she wanted to remember it, didn’t know what had happened to her, what had been done to her. And Solomon had sat and held her hand, and wished that Luke had been there, that they were all together, like they’d always been before.
And so afterwards Solomon had called Luke on the Bat Phone, and listened to Luke tell him about exactly how shitty everything was right now, how he couldn’t even wash his clothes so he’d given up on underwear, how he was living on tinned food, eating it out of a can and basically living like some kind of outlaw, which he guessed he was, like fucking Robin Hood or something. Solomon had never imagined his brother in the same terms as Robin Hood, had never placed him in the same moral bracket. He’d rob from the rich, sure, but he’d also rob from the merely wealthy too, and from the well-to-do, and the comfortably off, in fact anyone who had possessions worth enough to make the risk/reward equation make sense. Which included anybody who owned a high-end BMW, and Solomon had met people who could barely afford their rent yet who still somehow owned high-end BMWs. All of which had passed through Solomon’s mind as he listened to his brother complain about his enforced exile in an old caravan in the deepest, darkest Essex countryside.
‘This is depressing,’ said Kay.
‘Sorry?’
‘All this. Searching for news stories about women. Makes me actually never want to leave my flat again.’
‘Too much?’ said Solomon. He watched Kay. She was twisting a loose strand of hair around and around one finger, a mannerism he now recognized. She made an effort not to, would occasionally catch herself doing it and stop, almost guiltily. He imagined that she’d been warned about it as a child, perhaps by an over-strict mother.
‘No, just … It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. The number of women, the number of victims. You already know how bad it is, kind of, but then you actually start looking …’
Solomon glanced down at his notes. A litany of outrages, of stabbings and rapes and beatings and humiliation heaped on humiliation. Kay was right. You started to look more closely and the statistics became human, flesh and bone and blood and suffering.
‘Oh.’
‘What?’ said Solomon.
‘I’ve found something.’
‘What have you—’
‘Oh God. Solomon.’
‘Kay?’ Solomon watched her, reading something on her screen intently. She looked horrified, her mouth slightly open, her head still.
‘I don’t know …’ she said, then stopped and continued reading. ‘Oh, no.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’ll send you a link,’ said Kay. She didn’t look up, kept staring at her screen. Solomon heard the sound of a notific
ation, a link to a news story. He clicked it and a web page opened on his screen.
BURN HORROR IN VICTORIA PARK
A young woman suffered horrific burns to her face and mouth after reportedly ingesting the hot coals from a disposable barbecue. Onlookers were shocked to see the as-yet-unnamed woman collapse in front of them on a busy day in east London’s Victoria Park. Police are trying to trace a man she was allegedly on a date with immediately prior to the incident. She remains in hospital in a critical condition.
‘Portia,’ said Solomon.
‘I’ve got the reference here,’ said Kay. ‘From Julius Caesar. With this she fell distract, and, her attendants absent, swallowed fire.’
‘And this was …’ Solomon checked the date of the story. ‘Five days ago.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Kay. ‘I mean, how? How could he even have done it? In a park, in broad daylight?’
‘It might not be him,’ said Solomon.
‘Eating hot coals,’ said Kay. ‘It has to be. Solomon?’
‘Yes,’ said Solomon. ‘You’re right.’
‘We need to go to the police with this. You know the officer working on your sister’s case, right?’
Solomon thought of Fox, of her cold disdain. ‘Yes.’
‘So you need to go to him and tell him what’s going on.’
‘Her,’ said Solomon. ‘And I already have done. You know that.’
‘I know,’ said Kay. ‘But Sol, this is something else. This is … There’s somebody doing this, it’s obvious. Isn’t it?’
Solomon didn’t register her question, hadn’t got past her use of his name. Sol. She now called him Sol. It felt like, no matter how much he resisted, something unseen and intangible was pulling them closer. It made him frightened.
‘Solomon?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I know. I’ll speak to her. I promise.’
After they had finished, Solomon went to the bathroom and stood looking at his reflection for a long time. Then he took out the make-up that Marija had left him and once again applied it to his face, building up the layers, taking care. He went to the kitchen and found the eye patch that he had thrown away and put it back on, then brushed his hair so that it covered his ear. He looked at his reflection, turning his head, trying different angles. The light in the bathroom was on a dimmer and he dialled it down, trying to match the kind of light you might find in a restaurant at night. A dark restaurant. A romantic restaurant. He took a step back and regarded himself, tried to be impartial. Did he look like a monster? Not really, he didn’t think so. A little odd, with the eye patch. Eccentric, maybe. No, odd. But if he could meet Kay in a restaurant, then … Then maybe. Perhaps. Some day.