‘Get a hold of Spinel for me, will you, Owler?’ he said. ‘I’ll need to have a word with him.’
The young Kingsford officer turned away obediently to the nearest phone.
‘Thanks, Bri. That was useful. Will you process the rest of the names on the list? Find out how well they all knew Kara and when they last saw her. OK? And talk to her colleagues. One of them may have been a confidant.’
‘Sure, Guv.’
‘Spinel’s with his guv’nor,’ Owler said, turning back from the phone. ‘I’ve left a message for him to give you a bell as soon as he’s free.’
‘Right. Good. Anything from the CRD while you’re here?’
‘They’re faxing a list of unidentified rapists through to us, but there’s nothing that sounds exactly like our boy – in either phase.’
‘Let me see the fax as soon as it comes in.’ Femur smiled, Owler deserved it. He’d done OK. Not well enough to be called by his Christian name yet, but that’d probably come. He was a bright lad. ‘Meantime, you’d better get back to the old files. It may be a waste of time, but we’ve got to be sure.’
Barry Spinel was almost spitting with fury. He’d always thought the DI pathetic, but he’d never been this hopeless before. It was more than time he learned the facts of life. Flexing his powerful thighs in their tight, faded jeans and hunching his big shoulders, Spinel said, ‘What’s the point, sir? Supposing they do get Drakeshill on receiving or theft, or whatever it is their Neanderthal brains have come up with, what good’s it going to do anyone? He’d probably get no more than a slapped wrist, at the most a year or two inside. And we’d lose our best snout. He’s been funnelling gold-dust information through to us for over two years now. We’ve intercepted three major deliveries of smack, we’ve picked up God knows how many small dealers, and one reasonably big one. To put him out of action for a few nicked cars – cars that there’s no real evidence he had anything to do with himself – is just barking. Can’t you keep them off his back?’
‘I’m doing my best, Barry,’ said Detective Inspector Robert Lydane, with an irritating whining note in his voice, ‘but surely you can make him keep his nose clean and control those young men of his so that we can avoid upsetting our colleagues.’
‘How many more times do I have to say it, sir? Can’t you get it across to those brain-dead bozos that snouts are never model citizens? They wouldn’t have access to any useful information if they were.’
‘There’s no need to take that tone with me, Spinel.’
It was a relief to know the man had balls of a sort, even if they were the size of sugar lumps.
‘Sorry, sir,’ Spinel said, loading the apology with contempt.
‘Thank you.’ It didn’t sound as though the DI had noticed anything but the words. ‘Now, Barry, think about it from their point of view. In some ways it would be easier if Drakeshill was into drugs fair and square. Then it would be only our own cases we’d have to pull to protect him, not theirs. It would be our trade-off. As it is, the crime squad see us messing up their operations after a lot of work and some expensive stake-outs and they get royally pissed off. You can understand it, can’t you?’
Spinel shook his long curls, and rubbed his stubbly chin. ‘Can’t you just tell’em it’s hands off Drakeshill for everyone for ever? That way the crime squad won’t waste time trying to make cases against him and we won’t risk our best source of information.’
‘I can try,’ said the DI, sighing, ‘but they’re never going to be happy giving carte blanche to a known criminal.’
Carte blanche, Spinel thought. Must he sound so prissy? It would do him good to get back out on the street and face some real aggro. Wrapped in cotton-wool, sitting behind his desk all day, he’d forgotten what it was like out there – how violent.
‘Have a word with him, Barry, and get him to cool it on the cars for a while. And do it soon. I mean that.’
Spinel said nothing and watched the DI flush as he understood what the silence meant. So perhaps he wasn’t so thick, even if he was too pathetic to stand up for his own men.
‘It’s important, Barry.’
Spinel shrugged. ‘OK, sir. But he won’t like it. The information may well dry up and we’ll be back to square one. Class A drugs coming into Kingsford is a lot more serious than a few old bangers nicked for an evening’s joyriding by his mechanics, even if it was them that did it.’
‘The thefts sound considerably more serious than that. But it’s important Barry. I should like you to do it, and to do it now.’ There was a surprising hint of steel in the DI’s face at that moment, and Spinel, who had been intending to have a jar with Drakeshill in any case, decided he’d be too busy to do it until the next day at least.
He turned away and sauntered back towards his own desk without another word, every muscle in his hard-toned body expressing his feelings. That was probably a waste of time, too.
‘Sarge, someone from AMIP wants to talk to you about the Huggate case over at the incident room,’ said one of the woman constables, whose first name Spinel could never remember. She was Becky or Betsy Deal, plain as her surname and just as uninteresting: hardly even worth winding up since she took everything he threw at her and never reacted, just like a lump of uncooked pastry. He always thought of her as Doughface.
‘Get him for me, will you, darling?’ he said casually, still hoping for a rise one day but not prepared to put in much effort. She didn’t answer back, she didn’t even wince at the sarcastic endearment, or smile. She and the DI would make a good pair, Spinel thought, impervious to insult. Fucking boring.
When Doughface had put the call through to his phone, she picked up a file and appeared to block out of her mind not only him and his call but everything else that was going on around them. He wondered what it would take to crack her, but stopped thinking about her as soon as he heard the voice of the AMIP officer introducing himself and asking about his dealings with Kara Huggate.
Spinel took a moment or two. ‘Yeah. I do remember her,’ he said. ‘She had a client whose nine-year-old son was sold a microscopic rock of crack by the school dealer. The mother wanted the dealer hanged – or at least castrated – and Huggate came to me with the name. It’s one we knew well – we’d been watching the little toe rag for weeks, hoping to get on to his supplier – but we’ve had trouble getting enough evidence to go after either of them. Huggate and I had a couple of meetings a few months back when she tried to persuade me to make an arrest on the unsupported word of a frightened nine-year-old, who wouldn’t have stuck by his story in court for more than five minutes. We had a bit of a fight – you could tell she’d not had many dealings with the CPS. Still wet behind the ears, like most of these do-gooders.’
‘Right. I’d like all the details, as soon as possible,’ said the chief inspector, with stupid politeness. It made him sound as though he was as much of a big girl’s blouse as the DI, but that didn’t square with the powerful voice that came so confidently through the phone. Spinel began to feel vaguely curious about the man. ‘Names, dates, and so on. And your personal impressions of Huggate, too. Could you fax it all over? Or you could give the details to one of my officers over the phone, if that would be simpler.’
‘Sure,’ said Spinel, through his teeth. Why should he waste time helping their investigation? Of course, there would be compensations. He grinned to himself. It would piss off the DI if he spent so long producing information for this Femur bloke that he had to put off the drink with Drakeshill. A murder inquiry definitely took precedence over warning off an iffy snout. But Spinel was damned if he’d look too co-operative with the AMIP team, that would ruin his reputation with the local boys if they got to hear of it. And they probably would. Everyone seemed to know just about everything in this nick that wasn’t protected with serious threats.
‘If you think it’s worth doing, sir,’ he said, as though he was commenting on someone’s urge to use doilies.
‘Let me be the judge of that,’ said Femur, sounding much mo
re on the ball than the DI. He’d have to watch that. ‘It sounds as though you didn’t like Ms Huggate much, Sergeant.’
‘She was all right, I suppose, as social workers go. But she had stupid ideas about what can be done to protect children who go out looking for drugs.’
‘Right. Idealistic, was she?’
‘You could say so. Or you could call it naive. She once told me I’d never make a difference until I got over my cynicism. Cynicism!’ Spinel was still outraged. Kara Huggate had been one of the few people he hadn’t even tried to wind up, so she’d had no reason to give him aggro. Uppity cow. ‘I told her if she’d seen the half of what I have to deal with on a daily basis she’d be cynical too.’ Spinel laughed then, and after a moment Femur joined in, which made it sound as though they’d be able to work together.
‘You want me to dig out my file and bring it over, sir? I’ve got plenty of time. Then you could ask whatever you want without waiting for your officers to get to it.’
‘Would you, Sergeant? That’s very good of you.’
Chapter Five
Trish’s day had gone well. In court for the sentencing of a man she had helped to prosecute for living off the immoral earnings of under-age girls, she had got pretty much what she wanted. The trial itself had finished a couple of weeks earlier. The CPS had done their stuff and provided all the necessary witnesses; there had been no nasty surprises, and none of them had been broken in cross-examination. The silk who’d been leading her had performed brilliantly, and Trish had thoroughly enjoyed herself as she and her leader had wiped the floor with the defence evidence as well as counsel’s arguments.
It had been particularly satisfying because there had been rather too many trials recently in which Trish had had to steel herself to argue an unattractive client’s case or make witnesses look untrustworthy to the jury, even though she herself had believed what they’d had to say. This time, from the moment she had first seen the case papers and read what the defendant had done to keep the girls under his influence, she had wanted him behind bars for as long as possible.
Sentencing had been postponed for the usual presentence reports, but she’d had few anxieties. And she’d been right. He had been sent down for the maximum of seven years, with a further sentence of five for unlawful wounding to run concurrently. Trish would have liked the sentences to be consecutive rather than concurrent, but she’d always known that was unlikely.
When it was over she emerged into Old Bailey and sucked in a great lungful of cold, exhaust-laden air then had to cough most of it out.
‘You sound as though you’re on sixty a day,’ said a familiar voice behind her. When she turned she saw Michael ffrench, an old acquaintance at the criminal bar, whose case must have just finished. He, too, was looking pleased with himself. ‘Share a taxi back, Trish?’
‘I think I’ll walk,’ she said. ‘I haven’t much to carry. But thanks.’
‘OK. See you.’
Hating gyms as she did, walking back to the Temple was almost the only exercise Trish ever took. As she emerged into Ludgate Hill she saw that some of the black clouds were grudgingly drawing apart to show glimpses of slightly paler sky, but the sun had set a good hour earlier so the only real light came from the street-lamps, glittering on the bumpers of cars and vans as they belched at the traffic lights. The orange glow made the faces of the hurrying people look even more ill than they did in full daylight, and most of them seemed to have chapped lips and dripping noses.
Ugh! A typical London winter. Trish shuddered. She didn’t want to loiter in the freezing damp, but she didn’t want to be back in chambers either. She was due to have a conference with Kara’s weird-sounding protégé Blair Collons.
Trish knew she had to meet him since she’d accepted the brief, but he’d sounded ghastly from Kara’s letter, and the case itself wasn’t of any real interest. Knowing she had a bit of time in hand, Trish decided to give herself a quick treat first. She turned back and took a short detour, crossing Ludgate Hill and walking down Carter Lane to Wardrobe Place, which was almost her favourite place in the City.
Built on the site of the King’s Wardrobe, which had been destroyed in the Great Fire, it was an enchanting secretive courtyard with a short row of Georgian houses down one side and decrepit shops opposite. Trish had first stumbled on it years earlier, late one summer’s night, and fallen in love with the place. One day it would probably be developed, but for the moment it was still the same as she’d first seen it. Pleased, she turned back towards the Temple, almost ready to face Blair Collons.
As she waited to cross Ludgate Circus, pulling her scarlet wool scarf higher round her neck to keep out the icy damp, Trish tried not to think too much about Kara. All the tabloids had been full of lurid details of what had been done to her, and to Trish they seemed to carry an insidious subtext of the kind of victim-blaming she most hated. Nearly all the articles had mentioned that Kara lived on her own, and several had included supposedly helpful hints about the ways other women in her situation could minimise the risks they took, which made it sound as though they thought Kara had almost invited what had happened to her.
One paper had even interviewed Jed Thomplon about the break-up of his relationship with Kara, eliciting, after the first routine expressions of horror and sorrow, several misogynist comments about the way feminism had destroyed women’s chances of safety and happiness by making them discontented with the kind of life that would have been right for them. The journalist had quoted Jed as saying that large numbers of his female patients suffered stress-induced illnesses that could be put down directly to the fact that they were trying to succeed in two mutually exclusive worlds.
Trish had her own views about the unreasonable demands made on women who did paid work all day and still shouldered the majority of their family’s domestic responsibilities, but she did not like the spin Jed had put on their difficulties. But then she wouldn’t have expected much better from him after the few things Kara had told her about their life together.
Trish was interested that he had let himself sound so bitter and took that as a sign that he knew he couldn’t be a suspect for the killing. Either he’d had an unbreakable alibi to give the police, who had clearly been all ready to suspect him, or else it had never even crossed his mind that anyone would think he could have been involved.
Like most of the journalists who’d written about Kara, Jed seemed to assume that she’d been the seventh victim of the Kingsford Rapist. Several articles lambasted the police for their incompetence in leaving him uncaught for so long.
The lights changed and Trish crossed Ludgate Circus. The traffic was even thicker than usual – there must be yet more road works higher up Farringdon – but there were also hordes of pedestrians, jostling, getting in the way, and not moving quickly enough. She pushed through eventually and made her way to Pret à Manger in Fleet Street for a cappuccino to go. With the tall cardboard cup in one hand and her briefcase in the other, her red bag slung across her back, she made her way across the crammed, noisy road into the peace of the Temple.
She stopped by the clerks’room to tell Dave what had happened in court and asked him to chase up some of her most outstanding fees. He looked hurt at the suggestion that he might not have done all he could to keep her income flowing in, so she reminded him that there were at least three cases she had done two and half years earlier for which she had still not been paid.
‘Well, you know how it is.’
‘Yes, I do, Dave. But I always have a lot of big bills at this time of year. It’s when I moved into the flat so all the annual things like insurance come up this month, and the January tax payment has cleaned me out. I hate this new system of paying tax in advance. Do your best for me, won’t you?’
‘Don’t I always? Now, you haven’t forgotten the con, with Mr Collons, have you?’
‘No, but I wish I could.’
‘It won’t take long and I know you’ll do a fine job.’ Dave was looking at her with qual
ified approval. That was rare enough to make her smile. As he opened his thin lips to smile back, his sharp teeth gleamed in the light of his cherished antique brass desk lamp.
He had once told Trish, in an uncharacteristically soft moment, that the lamp had come from what he called ‘Churchill’s bunker’ in the Cabinet Office war rooms. She didn’t believe the story, but Dave obviously did. She had occasionally seen him stroke the lamp when he thought no one was looking. Whenever he’d been particularly acerbic or difficult, it gave her a certain private satisfaction to think of his fantasising about being a great war leader, battling against the odds to get his troops to the front so that they could do their bit for King and Country.
She took her coffee back to her room and gave herself five minutes of self-indulgent relaxation before hanging up her gown, and tidying herself and her desk ready for her new client.
When he came, she was not impressed. He was a small man, probably in his mid-forties, with a tight, round belly pushing out the waist of his brown trousers. They were so deeply creased around the crotch that the suit couldn’t have been cleaned in years.
To be fair, Trish had to admit that he had done his best with the stains on the jacket. Even from across the desk she could see where the water he had dabbed on them had puckered the cloth and spread the grease way beyond the original mark.
He smelt faintly of stale sweat, bad teeth, and resentment, and he looked frightened. His thin brown hair was greasy and stretched across his scalp in unattractive strands. But he was hardly the first unappetising client Trish had ever had. She knew what she had to do.
Trying to look as though she was pleased to see him, she invited him to sit down and tell her all about his case. His solicitor, who was as clean and pressed as Collons was not, leaned forward to give Trish a crisp explanation.
‘I think, Mr Bletchley,’ she said, ‘that it would be of great benefit if I could hear about it from Mr Collons himself first.’ She turned to smile encouragingly at him again.
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