Blue On Blue

by Dal Maclean

  He remembered telling Tom once that there were no guarantees, that the risk of loving involved blind faith and courage. But it was so much easier to walk that walk when the stakes weren’t this high, when he didn’t already know what losing Tom felt like.

  And when he really let himself think about it, he felt as if he’d been hoping, stupidly and against experience, that a wild bird would choose to stay on the ground when the sky was up above.

  He clenched his fist on his lap, nails digging deliberately into the meat of his hand, punishing himself back into focus. He had to get a grip.

  Daria Ivanescu’d had worries too. And she’d expected to see tomorrow. She was his responsibility now.

  Hawthorn Gardens was a narrow, cobbled street which veered sharply right to follow a U-shaped, five story red-brick building, packed with flats, windows lit up. Twenty feet away, an overground railway bridge squatted into the distance, its arches bricked and windowed to create business premises.

  Salt parked the car at the base of the U.

  Each floor of the building had a run of small terraces fronting it, many with bicycles propped against railings and covered with drying laundry. It wasn’t a rundown area; in fact, it seemed to be in the first stages of gentrification, but it wasn’t wealthy either.

  “Monique said the flatmate’s workin’ from here too,” Salt said as he led the way up an inside stairwell. It was an old building and the walls were a stained and grubby cream, though there seemed to have been some effort at upkeep. Even so, the air was sharp with the ammonia stench of urine. “Can’t believe she’d do much business.”

  “People fuck even in Bethnal Green, Des.”

  Will grinned up at him, and he felt his spirits lift with that same irrational surge of optimism as he’d experienced in Soho. This he could do. He could be a copper.

  “Maybe she has a wee speciality,” Salt said. They reached the top of the fourth set of stairs and Salt pulled a door open with a dramatic flourish, emerging onto one of the mini-terraces which fronted two flat doors. Neither of the overhead lights seemed to work. “Trainspotters,” Salt finished with satisfaction. He nodded toward the bridge. They were now high up enough see the rail lines. It wouldn’t be a quiet place to live.

  As a matter of principle, Will rolled his eyes.

  The door Salt knocked on, then hammered on, was painted bright lime green, and artificial light shone through the muslin curtain covering a frosted glass window beside it. The door of the neighboring flat was a clashing marigold yellow, and the window beside that was also lit and covered with a grimy net curtain that twitched as Will glanced at it. He resisted the urge to wave.

  They were on the point of giving up when the door opened to reveal a young woman of medium height, tanned and slender, dressed in a short pale-blue silk robe and apparently not much else. She had neat, pretty features, big blue eyes, cropped spiky blond hair, streaked with purple and a piercing in her eyebrow. She looked fit, confident and very irritated.

  Nevertheless, she kept her voice low and reasonable. “C’mon guys . . . you’re not supposed to just turn up without callin’ ahead.” She had a strong Australian accent.

  But then she very obviously noticed Will, standing behind Salt in the dimness of the terrace, and her expression flipped from careful impatience to rage.

  Will kept forgetting the effect of the uniform.

  “Scarlett Monk?” Salt asked, as he and Will flashed their warrant cards.

  Salt had loved the irony of her surname when they’d checked her background on the way over. They discovered she came from Melbourne, was twenty-two, and studied international relations at London South Bank University. Hers was the only name on the flat lease. She had a police record for aggravated trespass—an arrest during some demonstration—but apart from that, she’d avoided police notice.

  “I can’t fuckin’ believe it!” Scarlett hissed. She didn’t examine their cards. Instead she leaned out of the door, craning her neck to look along the terrace to the next flat.

  “It’s about your flatmate Miss Monk,” Salt said.

  Her head snapped back to him, eyes narrowed dangerously. “I don’t have a flatmate.”

  Will sighed and stepped forward. “This isn’t about how you pay your way through university, Miss Monk.”

  Scarlett’s lip curled. In fact, she almost snarled.

  “Or whether you’re illegally subletting a rented flat,” Will glanced at the yellow door and the unmoving net curtains. “Actually . . . this would be better dealt with privately. We don’t want to disturb your neighbors.”

  Scarlett struggled with herself for a moment, then she snapped, “Inside! An’ if you’ve given that old bag any more ammo . . . .” The hallway was tiny, with a door on each wall. They could barely all fit in it. “In there!”

  Scarlett ordered them through the door to the left into a modest open plan kitchenette and living room, with a wood-effect laminate floor. It held a futon, an armchair, a couple of small tables and a TV. There was a neatly folded pile of bedding beside the futon and a list of prices for sex acts on the wall near the door, similar to the one in the Soho walk-up. A poster extolling the English Collective of Prostitutes had been blue-tacked to another wall.

  When Will had taken part in the operation to evict sex workers from the Soho walk-ups, the ECP had staged a protest demonstration which was the first time he’d really believed that, while many sex workers were trafficked or forced into prostitution and some were doing it only to pay debts or feed a drug habit—others truly saw it as empowerment and sold sex from free choice. He still remembered one particular placard from the demo, waved by a woman wearing a pink feather boa. It had read: I’d rather sell my body in Soho than sell my mind to a corporation.

  “This’d better be good, mate,” Scarlett said to Will. Perhaps it was the uniform, but she’d definitely focused all of her aggressive dislike on him. “I have the ECP lawyer on speed dial and she eats up cases of harassment like this. For the record, I’m the only one workin’ out of this flat. That’s fuckin’ legal! I pay tax on it!”

  Will said patiently, “As DS Salt informed you, we’re here about Daria Ivanescu. We’ve been informed that she’s your flatmate.” He looked at the folded duvet and pillows stacked on the floor at the end of the futon.

  Scarlett followed his gaze, and her face flushed and contorted with outrage.

  “Oh, now I fuckin’ get it! Dar can’t just stay here! We’re whores, so of course we have to fuck for money whenever we get near a flat surface. Right mate? An’ two of us workin’ makes this a brothel, an’ maybe then you cunts get to arrest someone.”

  There was a sound of startled horror behind them.

  Will turned to face the open doorway. A man dressed only in his underwear stared in at them from the hall, his face distorted with a comically exaggerated expression of shock and fear.

  Roughly five feet ten, IC1, white Caucasian, age maybe . . . late fifties, thinning gray hair and beard, tanned, very overweight, with a large, hairy beerbelly hanging over pale blue Y-fronts. He wore a thick gold wedding ring on the hand he was using to try to shield his deflated crotch.

  “Derek’s my boyfriend,” Scarlett drawled. “We’re very much in love.”

  Will bit his lip hard. In other circumstances he thought he’d have enjoyed sparring with her.

  “Its not illegal to pay for sex,” he said to the man. “Unless the seller has been forced into prostitution. We’re not going to arrest you, sir.”

  The man made a terrified sound and scuttled out of sight.

  “You have no bloody right to scare him like that,” Scarlett seethed. “We’re not doin’ anyone any harm.”

  An image of the wedding ring flashed into Will’s mind. None of his business. But Scarlett read him easily.

  “Oh, judge away, you condescendin’ prick! Men like you . . . . Women climb you like a fuckin’ tree, right? You don’t need to pay for it. What the fuck would you know about bein’ lonely? Need
in’ human contact? We provide a service. It’s kindness. It’s. . . .” The rant cut off. Scarlett took a step back from them, her eyes wide with new suspicion. “You’re wearing an Inspector’s uniform. An Inspector wouldn’t come on a bust like this.”

  Will withdrew his warrant card again and held it out while Scarlett squinted at it. “You should’ve looked at that before you had it copied,” she mocked, but there was definite fear in her eyes. “What d’you really want?”

  And here was the moment. Will hated this part most of all.

  “I’m afraid Daria Ivanescu was found dead this evening.”

  Scarlett froze, then she sneered, “That’s . . . you think that’s funny? That’s sick.”

  The front door slammed, but no one reacted. Derek had done a runner.

  “She was found in a walk-up in Greek Street.”

  “No!” Scarlett spat. “That’s crap. Dar doesn’t work out of walk-ups.”

  “She hired it for half an hour from Monique Rembaud.”

  And at last, Scarlett gave way. “Feef?” She looked dazed. “Was it a punter? Did he think she was Feef? Did you get him?”

  Will and Des exchanged glances. They hadn’t even considered that scenario yet. But both Daria and Monique had long, dyed-blond hair.

  Will said, “She was shot.”

  Scarlett let out a sound of shocked pain and all of her spiky cockiness seemed to evaporate into the ether. All at once she looked very young, diminished somehow, like a wild animal finally accepting captivity.

  She slumped down on to the futon, her robe gaping open to reveal an improbably huge and firm naked breast, and a line of black script tattooed on her rib cage underneath: This isn’t yours.

  Will blinked and looked away, and when he looked back, Scarlett had wrapped the thin silk over her chest.

  Will said quietly, “Cup of tea, Des?”

  Salt’s face was bright pink from what Will assumed to be embarrassment at being flashed, but he set to work in the kitchenette.

  “Where did Daria usually work?” Will asked, pulling out his notebook. “Scarlett?”

  Scarlett met his eyes, dazed. “Mobiles,” she said.

  Where pimps drove women around the country, set up temporary brothels, then moved on. A step up from the streets perhaps. But . . . .

  Scarlett seemed to read his mind again. “She hadn’t been doin’ it long.” Her tone was defensive. “She was used to big clubs. Private parties. Celebrities, rich businessmen, city boys, bankers . . . you know? I mean when she first came to London . . . she showed me photos.” Scarlett’s voice trembled. “She looked like a movie star.”

  In the background Will could hear the familiar sounds of an electric kettle heating up, cupboard doors and drawers opening and closing.

  “What happened?”

  Scarlett sniffed hard, “What d’you think? That kind of bloke wants girls, not women.”

  “So she got too old for the high-end stuff?” Scarlett looked away. “Scarlett? She doesn’t need discretion now.”

  Scarlett let out a shaky breath and rubbed a hand over her mouth. “All right. Not just age.” She shook her head. “Those parties. They encourage the girls to—they have to persuade the punters to buy . . . you know.”

  “Party drugs,” Will finished. Maybe the euphemism would help.

  Scarlett shrugged, as if that could distance her from what she was saying. “They have to tell the clients to buy them some of the stuff too, to loosen them up. That sells more. So, the girls have to use every day. Dar . . . seemed able to cope, but then they moved her out to the mobiles.” She looked at him. “She was savin’ to go home, you know? Go home in style. She had a fair bit put by. She kept buildin’ it up, an’ then . . . she just . . . spent it.”

  “On using?”

  Scarlett passed her trembling hand over her face again. “She started to go under to it. It didn’t help her looks either. An’ she got flaky. Undependable.”

  Undependable. Did that merit a bullet in the head?

  “They were okay to her though,” Scarlett added quickly. “They didn’t chuck her out, or get her workin’ the streets. But if she’d kept it up . . . .”

  “When did she move in here?”

  Scarlett sniffed hard. “She used to get places to stay when she worked high-end, but then that stopped. She asked if she could stay for a bit, an’ I never asked her to leave.”

  “You were a good friend,” Will said. Scarlett’s face twisted with violent emotion. He asked, in exactly the same gentle, reassuring tone. “Who was running her?”

  She reacted as if he’d hit her. “You have to be jokin’.”

  “Surely you want to help us find who killed her?”

  Scarlett shook her head vehemently, but her eyes were wet.

  “Tell me anything then!” Will said. He had to use that moment of vulnerability. Get under her skin. “Tell me the name of the clubs she worked.” Scarlett looked uncertain, as if she couldn’t decide whether the information was sensitive or not. “We’ll find out anyway, Scarlett. All you’re doing is saving us time.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “Just before she was turfed out, Firefox,” she blurted. “And Fù. Mireille. They’re the only ones I know.”

  “Did she mention meeting someone tonight? Or any plans?”

  Scarlett shook her head again.

  Salt put a full mug onto the coffee table in front of the sofa. “There’s a wee cuppa for ye,” he said. “There’s a lot of sugar in it.” Then he went back to the kitchen, to lean against the units, watching.

  Scarlett frowned at the mug as if she didn’t understand what it was.

  “Did you notice anything different?” Will pressed. “Did she seem scared recently? Nervous?”

  Scarlett squeezed her eyes closed and bit her lip hard. But Will could only hope she was too grief-stricken to keep everything important back. Or too guilty at being alive. That was why the timing of these interviews worked.

  “The opposite,” Scarlett blurted “It was like she woke up. Maybe a month ago? She was . . . I dunno, excited. She said she was goin’ to get back home, buy a house, set up a business.”

  “Why? What changed?”

  Scarlett rubbed one eye. “She wouldn’t say what. I thought she’d met some rich bloke who’d got obsessed by her. Maybe she did.” Scarlett began to cry. “Maybe that’s who killed her.”

  “Or,” Will prompted. “She could have had something on someone . . . tried some blackmail. One of her punters?”

  He expected defensive outrage, but Scarlett looked away, still weeping quietly.

  “She was stupid enough,” she said with acid grief. “She never thought things through. Never worked out consequences. I kept tellin’ her, ‘You have to watch your own back cuz no one else will.’ But she still believed people get what they deserve. Even after everythin’. Like a kid. She’d be useless at blackmail. Too—” Her mouth twisted into ugliness. “Innocent.”

  3

  Will managed a few hours sleep on one of the station’s camp beds. Then after a trip to the gents’ loo to shave, he shrugged into his suit—a pale gray, slim fit M&S sale bargain that Tom loved because he said it showcased Will’s arse. Will now tended to keep the jacket on where possible.

  Scrivenor was already waiting by the Briefing Room’s open door, gulping coffee from the vending machine when Will arrived.

  “When did the party break up?” Will asked, startled to see him in so early, and compos mentis, too.

  Scrivenor was a bulky, ginger, mustachioed Glaswegian who’d just hit fifty, and was, in Will’s view, a magnificent copper. He knew everyone, heard everything, gossiped just enough and never too much. Old school.

  “Nae clue. It wiz still ragin’ when me an’ the missus left on all fours.” Scrivenor shrugged. “Around ah . . . three.”

  “God,” Will wondered. “You must be fucked. Weren’t you on late shift to recover?”

  “Ah yer bum’s oot the windae,” Scrivenor dismissed.
“We dinnae dae hangovers.”

  Yer bums . . . ? Will thought he got the gist.

  “So coming in to work early after getting paralytic . . . .” Will said. “That’s some Glaswegian hard man badge of honor is it?”

  Scrivenor grinned. “Whit’s yon word Jamie uses for repeatin’ yersel’ in one sentence? Oh aye. A tautology.”

  “Me and the old man left an hour after you.” Ingham appeared from nowhere behind Scrivenor’s shoulder, dressed in a sharp gray trouser suit. She’d been meant to start late too. “So what does that say?”

  Scrivenor’s bushy moustache stretched into a grin. He went way back with Ingham, and now he was James’s sergeant, absolutely loyal to both of them. Will was still very much on probation with Scrivenor, though Scrivenor and Salt had formed an unholy office friendship . . . what James called the natural attraction of Tormenting Celtic Bastards.

  “By the way,” Will said. “Why would Joey Clarkson be monitoring James’s party? He had one of his people outside.”

  Ingham’s expression shifted from momentary surprise to blankness to near scorn. “Joey?”

  Everyone in the unit knew Will’s history. Everyone knew Joey had been responsible for Sanjay’s murder and Will’s subsequent resignation. But Ingham seemed to view Will’s loathing of Joey as an unexploded bomb. A grudge that affected Will’s judgment. Like now, when she clearly believed he’d seen what he wanted to see.

  A rolling burst of laughter from inside the Briefing Room called them back to business.

  Will swallowed down his defensive bitterness.

  “You want to take it Boss?” he asked, though Ingham knew almost as little about Daria’s murder as the morning staff waiting to be briefed.

  She inclined her head in acknowledgment. “I don’t think so, DI Foster. I’d have to fill in the time with card tricks.” She nodded toward the door, corkscrew curls bouncing. She looked to Will as fresh as if she’d had nine hours’ sleep. “Go on then.”

  Inside, the Briefing Room was almost full, and the faces Will saw, as he dropped his notes onto a table at the front, were alert but exhausted, not least the officers who’d been on through the night with Will and Salt. But their exhaustion wasn’t just the tail end of a long shift; it was too many weeks without leave. They’d all hoped they’d get through this duty week without a new case, allowing them to work on putting to bed the long backlog of solved and unsolved cases of stabbings and shootings.