by Dal Maclean
Ingham nodded and rose to her feet, reaching for the jacket on the back of her chair. “I’ll come with you then. I go back a long way with Pauline.”
Will grimaced. “Boss . . . .”
How could say it? But she seemed to read his expression quite easily.
“Right.” She sank back into her seat. She looked ill. “If I’m bent . . . if I’m on Joey’s payroll . . . you shouldn’t take me along. I could help her.”
“Boss . . . .” he said again helplessly. He was pleading. No question.
But Ingham said, “I’d make the same decision in your place. So who do you trust to take with you? You can’t interview her alone.”
“If he’s willing to take the risk—Jamie.”
Ingham’s mouth twisted but she nodded. “All right. Ask him. I’ll take over the day-to-day on Daria. Maybe your line of inquiry’s the only one that’s going to get anywhere, but the team doesn’t know why you keep fucking off. I’ll say you’re working on something for me.”
Will hesitated. “And Des?”
It was ridiculous to be asking her for favors in the circumstances, but he couldn’t shake his trust in her. It felt hooked into his bones.
“I’ll keep him occupied. And I’m not going to mention this to anyone.”
Will nodded and turned to the door, and stupidly, after the things they’d talked about, he felt lighter. “Will?” He looked back. She held his gaze. “Well done,” she said.
Will took Salt out into the carpark to tell him discreetly that it was too dangerous for him to continue working Hansen’s investigation.
He’d expected Salt wouldn’t be happy, but not the force of his outrage. Salt declared himself “affronted” and continued to hiss Northern Irish insults until Will conceded he could still help, just not conspicuously. Will wasn’t going to have another Sanjay on his conscience. That was the only thing that finally shut Salt up.
Will did his best to scare James off too when he came into the office, by taking him into a corner and spelling out in detail the potential consequences of pursuing the inquiry. They’d very probably be hung out to dry by some of their fellow officers if Joey didn’t get them first. And even if they broke the Ricky Desmond case, they’d always have to watch their backs because they could never flush out every copper Joey controlled.
But James waited with polite patience till he finished, then asked where they were going first.
Half an hour later they were watching from a police saloon as Joey’s wife unloaded plants in containers from the back of a shiny black Range Rover onto the pavement outside her open front gate, like any other middle-aged woman just back from a spree at the garden center. And to complete the grotesque ordinariness of the scene, Eddie Butts trotted back and fore, carrying the containers up the path and into the front porch.
Watching Eddie do something so humdrum felt as wrong to Will as hearing he wanted to spoil kids with McDonald’s. But even Himmler had been kind to animals.
He took a bracing breath. “You ready?”
“Yup,” James said.
Pauline spotted them as they crossed the road toward her, and Eddie moved closer to her at once, though the plant pots in his hands dampened his glowering menace.
“Well, well,” Pauline drawled. She was dressed with practicality—jeans and a Barbour jacket. Her hair looked the color of new brass in the bright daylight. “They sendin’ out pretty boys in pairs now are they? A blond one, an’ a dark one . . . somethin’ for everyone. What d’ya reckon, Eddie? They meant to weaken our knees? Drop our knickers?” Will and James stopped beside the car. Will thought James’s skin looked flushed. Eddie focused his sneering smirk on Will.
“I preferred the ginger, myself,” Pauline went on. “More normal. Never trust pretty men.” Her voice hardened. “Joey’s not in.”
“Mrs. Clarkson.” Will’s tone was stoic. His copper-in-pursuit-of-his-duty voice. “This is DI Henderson. We’re here to see you. Just a few questions.”
Pauline threw him a bored look, but he realized she didn’t seem remotely surprised. She’d been expecting them.
Will’s gut flipped. Had Ingham phoned ahead? Something must have shown in his expression because Pauline frowned.
“You’re here about June Winton, aint ya?” she asked. “Seein’ as how I’m on her visitors’ list.”
Will let out the breath he’d been holding.
He was a paranoid wanker. With every reason to be paranoid.
Before he could say anything else though, Pauline declared, “Springfield Park Café. Twenty minutes. It’ll take you fifteen to walk there. Get me a skinny latte, not too much froth.”
Will and James looked at each other.
She’d taken control, just like that. But Will couldn’t see the point of objecting, and James’s expression told him he couldn’t either. If she liked to feel she was in charge, that was fine. Just so long as it gave results.
Pauline was a gangster’s daughter and a gangster’s wife. She wasn’t going to give them anything for free.
Their walk to the café was surprisingly pleasant. They followed directions on Will’s phone, past the pretty architecture of Hawkwood Mount and along Springfield, with a long red brick stretch of modern flats on one side and Springfield Park on the other. Then they turned right into the park itself, following a curved pathway past cherry trees laden with pink and white blossoms, until they reached a large cream-painted building with a columned Doric porch. Will’s phone informed him it was called “White Lodge Mansion”—Grade Two listed, early Victorian—and it housed the Springfield Park Café.
The interior bones of the building were as beautiful and elegant as the exterior, with multipaned floor-length windows, arches, cornicing and old wooden floors. The café counter was backed by a large blackboard with an enormous range of menu choices written in chalk, and outside, people sat at white tables on the grass in the spring sunshine.
Tom would love it. Maybe, Will thought, he could bring him here in the summer. They could bring a football. And Will realized that after the previous night he was beginning to hope that anticipating a future for them may not be tempting fate.
It felt bizarre to be in such a lovely place though, to spar with Joey’s wife.
Will and James chose an inside table by a window, as far away from other people as possible, and nursed their coffees. They’d already mutually agreed the best approach to take.
Pauline walked into the room, pretty much on the dot, with Eddie at her heels. She strolled to their table; Eddie went to the counter.
“Don’t worry about ‘im,” she said as she sat down in front of the mug of latte Will had bought her. “He’s loyal to me.”
Rather than Joey? Will thought skeptically. James took out his notebook and pen.
“Mrs. Clarkson—” Will began.
“This skimmed milk?” Pauline demanded.
“We’ll caution them if it isn’t,” Will said.
She took a suspicious sip of coffee, made a face of grudging acceptance and put down her mug.
“Right. Just listen. Don’t interrupt. I went to see June in the nick cuz Joey said she might get out.”
Will didn’t react. But that was evidence. Proof of something.
Joey had known before June died that her conviction was in doubt. Which meant he must have known Will had got her DNA sample, very soon after it was taken. And that suggested he’d got information from Bronzefield or from the lab. Possibly both.
Pauline pressed on. “I wanted her word—June—that she wouldn’t try an’ talk to Holly, whatever ‘appened. Because Hols don’t know, see? She don’t know she ain’t ours.”
She took a distracted sip of coffee and behind her, Eddie left the counter and went to sit at another table across the room, carrying a mug and a plate with cake on it. He didn’t take his eyes off them.
“I couldn’t ‘ave kids,” Pauline was saying. “An’ adoptin’ weren’t exactly easy wiv you lot sniffin’ round Joey and his dad.
An’ then . . . one day Joey comes ‘ome and tells me ‘bout this fifteen-year-old kid who’s gonna pop in a few months. But she didn’t want it. I mean, who would, at fifteen? She’d offered us to adopt the baby. An’. . . she signed all the forms, an’ ‘anded her over to Joey. An’ it was . . . .” Pauline frowned. “It was like a miracle.” She drew in a deep breath through her nose and sighed it out. “But June started ‘anging round the house. She’d follow me when I took Hols out in her pram. I mean I’d send someone to warn ‘er off an’ she’d stop for a few months. But then she’d start again. Went on for two, three years. I didn’t tell Joey, case he got angry. But when she went down for knockin’ off Ricky Desmond, I was fuckin’ relieved I can tell you. No more seein’ her lurkin’ at the nursery gates.”
“So did June—” Will began.
“I told ya,” Pauline snapped. “Don’t interrupt! An’ you can put that away now too.” Pauline pointed to James’s notebook. “That’s all you’re gettin’ on the record.”
James raised his brows and looked at Will.
It was Will’s case, that look said. His call.
Joey’s wife was offering them sensitive information.
“Off the record or nuffink,” Pauline said.
Will nodded, but James had already closed the notebook.
“I went to see June,” Pauline repeated. “To make her understand . . . me an’ Joey, we’re Holly’s parents now.” She tapped her fingers on the table. “She’d become this huge . . . fat thing. I couldn’t believe it. ‘ow she’d changed. But when I says that . . . about me an’ Joey, it was like she woke up. An’ she says . . . ‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m her parent. Me, an’ . . . . ” Pauline’s face twisted—but just for a moment. “Me an’ any of the thirteen men . . . who paid your ‘usband to fuck me bare. Or it could be ‘im. It could be Joey,’ she says. ‘’E took the last go’.”
Will put all his effort into trying to appear unaffected.
“My Holly,” Pauline said, to the middle distance. “You’ve seen her. She’s a princess. An’. . . .” Her hard mouth trembled. “She was conceived in a perverts’ gang-bang. A tickets-only party, to compete to knockup a virgin. She was fourteen . . . June. Round about Holly’s age now . . . in a care home that wiz sellin’ the kids. ‘Grantham Close,’ it was called. You got that?”
James started.
“Grantham Close,” Will repeated.
“June said . . . Joey and his dad ran parties like that for years, wiv care home kids like her . . . younger than her. For very important men wiv specialist tastes. An’ that’s . . . .”
They waited but finally it seemed she ‘d run out of things to say.
“You’re betraying Joey,” Will said. “Why?”
Pauline’s face contorted—all calm melting and reforming into an ugly mask of emotion. Anger. Pain. Disgust. Vindictiveness.
“Becuz he lied to me,” she spat. “An’ he cheated on me.” Her voice was brutal and unforgiving, woven through with certainty. “Becuz he swore he never involved kids in his business. Becuz ‘e gave me a child, by organizin’ the rape of a child. Becuz . . . you can’t ever brin’ him down. All you can do, is bloody his nose, an’ he deserves that. An’ I’ll deny I ever told ya.”
Will and James remained silent and preoccupied through the walk from Springfield Park to the car.
But the moment they had privacy, James said, “Grantham Close.”
Now he looked him, Will realized James was ashen. Will had heard the expression ‘as if he’d seen a ghost’ a thousand times, but this was the first time he understood what that was meant to look like. Harrowed. Haunted. James looked as distressed as he had when he’d heard Will’s suspicions of Ingham.
James said, “It was closed down in 2008.” His eyes glowed silver in the dull shadowed light of the car cockpit. His voice held no expression. “There were intimations of wrongdoing. But no prosecutions or disciplinary procedures.”
“You know a lot about it,” Will ventured. Why did Grantham Close sound familiar?
“It’s the care home Eve Kelly’s kids were put into,” James said.
That was it. Will had seen the name in the case notes. Then he made the connection.
“Ben?” he asked with horror.
James shook his head. “But I knew someone once who . . . I’ve always wondered why no one’s come forward about what went on in there. I was told no one would believe former care home kids over ‘reputable local authority employees’.” Clearly, James was quoting and he sounded very bitter. “But even since then, even since #metoo, and all the investigations into historic sexual abuse . . . nothing from Grantham Close.”
“Well,” Will ventured. “Now it makes sense. Who’d have the guts to come forward, with Joey waiting to destroy anyone who tried? June served thirteen years in jail rather than give it a go.”
James’s expression, as he stared through the front window, was a confusion of anger and pain.
“And we know now why Joey chose June to carry the can for Ricky Desmond,” Will went on. “He needed to make the investigation go away and to make her go away at the same time.”
“So she confessed with the info he gave her to save her own life,” James finished for him. “And the swapped DNA was security if she tried to go back on it.”
“Poor cow,” Will said.
James looked at him. “How the hell could you know, Will? It’s not your fault.”
Will grimaced and shook his head. “We have to decide which way we go now.”
James pursed his lips. “Go in at the top? Or the bottom?”
They were on exactly the same wavelength. Did they try to tackle the men they knew were at Eric Chan’s party the night Ricky died? Or try to find witnesses from Grantham Close, first?
“Personally,” James said, “I’d rather avoid all those expensive briefs as long as possible.” He gave a weak try at a smile. “Someone might hire Mark Nimmo.”
Will switched on the engine. “You sold me. Grantham Close it is.”
He called ahead to ask Salt to pull up available records for the home from 1996, until it closed.
“Right, Guv.” Salt still sounded a bit put out. “And er, some news.”
His tone told Will it was bad. Was there anything else these days? “Yeah?”
“Scarlett Monk was fished out of the river this mornin’. Sorry Guv.”
“Aw, fuck no,” Will moaned.
James looked at him sharply.
“From what’s on the PNC, she was beaten to death,” Salt said. “Or beaten unconscious so she drowned.”
All that intelligence and defiance. All that life.
“Have we got the case?” Will’s distress sounded in his voice.
“Southwark and Peckham. They were on call.”
“Not fucking Lawson!” Will banged his head back against the headrest in despair.
Lazy, by the book, always looking for the simplest collar, plodding in any direction he was pointed.
“She wiz in the water too long for any DNA traces on her. They IDed her from her arrest record. They’re going on the theory she pissed off a punter or a pimp.”
“Because that’s the only possible reason a prostitute could be killed.” Will’s mouth tasted sour. “Lawson must have seen her link to Daria’s murder. Surely this at least suggests if there was blackmail material, Daria’s killer didn’t find it when he offed her. So he went after the closest person to her.”
He slammed the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, needing the dull, stinging pain. Someone else was going to their grave because he hadn’t found the killer.
Scarlett, with her declaration of independence written on her ribcage. Just a kid. She’d only been a kid.
He had a unwanted sense-memory of her hand in his; soft and surprisingly small. He wondered now if the strength of her grip had been driven by grief for Daria, or fear for herself.
But she’d never given a sign of that. Never asked him for help.
“Has
n’t the DCI fought for it?” he asked in anguish. He met James’s worried eyes. They were taking it in turns to lose the plot, Will thought with distant, desperate amusement.
“I don’t know Guv,” Salt muttered. “She usually wins so. Maybe not.”
Maybe not.
By the time Will and James got back to the station, through midafternoon traffic, Will had more or less managed to force himself back to the detached fatalism they all needed to do the job. He didn’t even know, really, why Scarlett’s death had hit him so hard. Maybe because it came in the wake of a death he felt directly responsible for. Maybe he’d just liked her.
He and James settled at a spare desk and began to trawl through the records of Grantham Close. They got a few curious glances, not least from Scrivenor, since it was unusual to see two DIs working alone together, but they were left in peace.
Will found June’s admission to Grantham Close in 2001, aged thirteen. She was recorded as giving birth to a female child in March 2003, at fifteen. And then, three months after that, she was marked: “absconded” and not referred to again.
“So . . . Joey put her to work for him when she left,” James mused, as he spooled idly through the 2003 list of admissions. “Or . . . she went on to the streets and he . . . .”
“Stop!” Will snapped. James’s hand froze on his mouse.
Will fumbled for a piece of crumpled card in his pocket and handed it to James. Then he pointed to a name on the screen.
Lauren Newman.
Find out for yourself, Eve had said.
And now perhaps he had.
17
Lauren’s office was situated in Jockey’s Fields in Holburn. Holburn itself, was a very old and architecturally impressive area in the center of London, part of the ancient legal district—but Jockey’s Fields was nothing much to look at. It was a long, ruler-straight road, with a six-foot wall along one side, shielding what looked like a Georgian terrace; and on the other, a row of tall mismatched, unprepossessing terraced buildings, one of which housed the commercial solicitors named on Lauren’s business card.