Beggars Banquet (24 page)

Again, I used the court records. I even had a quiet word with his solicitor. Meeting casually, we spoke of the identity parade, and laughed about it. Then I asked him about Barry Cooke. Barraclough didn’t seem surprised or suspicious that I was asking. We were just two lawyers, enjoying a bit of a chat.

The more I looked at Barry Cooke, the more feasible it all seemed. A mugging gone wrong. Violence taken too far. And the MO fitted his own: I knew that already. All he had on his side were his alibi, his protestation of innocence, and the fact that the witness had singularly failed to identify him. He was still the chief suspect. However, the police had no reason to disbelieve the witness, to suspect that she was playing some game. Not unless it could be shown that she was. I had a picture in my head: an apparent witness who has come forward not to assist the inquiry but to ensure it takes a wrong turn. That she picked me out was an accident; it could have been anybody . . . anybody but the actual culprit. I liked this picture and wondered if Jack could see it too.

As I was leaving the court, I saw a figure dart round a corner. I went to my car and sat in it for a moment, pretending to look for something in my briefcase, but really keeping an eye on my wing mirror. The figure reappeared, seeking me out.

It was Barry Cooke.

I drove out of the car park and a couple of hundred yards down the road to a burger restaurant, where I pulled in. I waited, but there was no sign of a following car. Now that I thought about it, I’d read in one of the court reports that Barry Cooke could not drive. It was on his side in the Marshall case, for as Barraclough had said, Cooke’s alibi was that he was at a party four miles away from where Sophie Marshall’s body had been found. No way could he have walked that distance and back. Someone would have to have driven him there, which, as Barraclough said with a smile, was most unlikely.

Still, Barry Cooke had been to court several times. So had Ray Boyd. And so, in all probability, had Boyd’s girlfriend. Any one of them might have seen Sophie Marshall before. Maybe she’d been picked out . . .

None of which got me any further. Proof was the thing. The police needed proof. I waited, but there was no sign of Barry Cooke, so I started the car again and drove home to my wife.

‘Are you following me?’ I asked.

Barry Cooke shook his head. ‘Got a right to be here, haven’t I?’

‘I saw you yesterday, skulking.’

He shrugged. ‘So?’

‘So why are you following me?’

He considered a response. Bad liars usually take their time. ‘That witness picked you out,’ he eventually said.

‘Yes?’

‘But the coppers are still hassling
me
.’

‘You want me to do something about it?’

He frowned. ‘No, I just . . . that witness picked you out.’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous. She made a mistake, that’s all.’ I paused. ‘Maybe she was paid to make a mistake.’

He narrowed his eyes. ‘How do you mean?’

But I just shrugged. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘are you going to stop following me, or must I call DI Preston?’

He screwed up his face. ‘Preston, that bastard. You’re all in it together, you lot. All matey, all favours and stuff.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

He just made another face and walked away. I watched him go. Then, trembling a little, I went into my office and opened a fresh bottle of brandy.

It was difficult. I was finding it harder to get things straight in my mind. I knew I was in dangerous territory, and that things might get worse still. I spent all the rest of that day watching for Barry Cooke, but I never saw him. Maybe my warning was enough; maybe he was keeping his distance for reasons of his own. But someone did scratch my car. I phoned my wife and told her about it, explaining that after work I was going to get respray estimates from a couple of garages.

Then I headed out to Sophie Marshall’s estate.

I parked at a distance and had to walk down the very alley where she’d been attacked. It was a dreary spot, a narrow corridor bordered by high brick walls covered in graffiti. There was a railway line nearby, trains thundering past. A terrible place to die. I had to stop for a moment and control my breathing. But I went on.

It is difficult, more difficult than I’d imagined, to hang about on these estates while remaining inconspicuous. People came to their windows, and children stopped playing to stare at me. So I climbed the stairwell and walked about a bit outside the lines of flats, looking like I knew where I was going.

It was hopeless. After a nervous half-hour, I decided to return to my car. I was sitting in the driver’s seat, hands clutching the steering wheel, trying to calm myself down, when I saw her. She walked on loud high-heeled boots, spiky things, as spiky as she herself was. She wore tight black denims, ripped at the knees, and a baggy black T-shirt. She hadn’t brought Boyd with her, thank God. I didn’t want to have to deal with Boyd, not if I could help it. She had her head down, either sullenly or just to avoid eye contact with other pedestrians. Standard practice these days, sad to say.

She passed within feet of my car, but didn’t so much as glance at it. I gave her half a minute to walk down the alley, then got out of the car, locked it, and followed. I was giving her plenty of time. By the time I got to the far end of the alley, she had already crossed the quadrangle and was somewhere in the block. Then I saw her appear on the third floor. She walked to the fourth door from the stairs, and opened it with a key.

I followed.

I stood outside her door for the best part of a minute, then bent down to look through her letterbox. I could hear music, probably a radio. But no voices, no other sounds. I stood up again and looked at the nameplate on the door. It was a piece of cheap lined paper, stuck to the paintwork with tape. AFFLICK, it said. I knocked a four-beat rhythm, a friendly knock, then waited.

There was no spy hole, so when she came to the door she opened it. No security chain either. I pushed the door open wide and went in.

‘Hoi,’ she said, her voice a squeal, ‘what the hell—?’

Her voice died as she recognised me. Her cheeks went red.

‘I just want to talk, that’s all. Five minutes of your time.’

‘I’ll yell bloody murder,’ she said.

I smiled. ‘I don’t doubt it. Look, I wouldn’t have come here, but I need to speak to you.’

‘What about?’

‘I think you know. Can we sit down?’

She took me into the living-room, which was little more than a hovel. She went straight to the fireplace, switched off the radio, opened a packet of cigarettes, and lit one for herself. She never took her eyes off me. She looked scared. I cleared a space and sat down on the sofa. I crossed my legs, trying to look relaxed, hoping she wouldn’t see me as a threat. I didn’t want that.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

‘Do you know a young man called Barry Cooke?’

‘Never heard of him,’ she said defiantly.

‘No? He was on that lineup with me. He was standing right next to me. Short, hair tied back, scruffy.’

‘You’ve got a nerve coming here.’

She had pulled herself together. I’ll give her that; she was strong-willed.

‘Barry Cooke’, I continued, ‘is the man the police think killed Sophie Marshall. They were hoping you’d identify him.’

‘I identified
you
. It was you I saw.’

I smiled and looked at the floor between us. ‘The police are trying to pin down Barry Cooke.’

‘So what?’

‘So . . . you could help them.’

‘What?’

‘You could remember something about the man you saw that night. You could . . . change your mind.’ I reached into my jacket pocket and brought out an envelope.

‘What’s that?’ she said, curious now.

‘Money, a lot of it. A one-off payment for your cooperation. ’

‘You want Cooke convicted?’

‘I want
someone
convicted, and it may as well be him.’

Well, hadn’t I left Sophie’s body that way on purpose, remembering Cooke’s MO? Hadn’t I taken her money and jewellery? But I hadn’t counted on Cooke having such a strong alibi. I hadn’t counted on there being a witness.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘take the money.’

‘But it was
you
I saw that night.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ I said, feeling this to be the truth. What did it matter, a brief affair gone badly wrong? A threat to tell wife and colleagues? A chase through an alley? What did any of it matter in the wider scheme?

‘You killed her.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘But you did, and now you want to fit up Cooke.’

‘What I want,’ I said quietly, ‘is to give you some money. What have you got to lose? The police didn’t believe you when you pointed me out at the lineup. They’ll never believe you. You might as well take the money and tell them some other story.’

She came towards me, her eyes on the envelope. I handed it up to her. She took it and placed it on the mantelpiece. ‘Barry Cooke,’ she said quietly.

‘Short,’ I said, ‘grubby, with a ponytail and spots and a few missing teeth. He’s mugged women before. You’d be doing society a favour.’

She stared at me. ‘Right,’ she said sourly. ‘A favour.’

I stood up and buttoned my jacket. ‘I think we understand one another,’ I said. Then I walked out into her hall. I was opening the front door when she called to me. I turned. She was standing in the living-room doorway. She had the cigarette in her mouth, her eyes slitted against the smoke, and she was hauling at the hem of her T-shirt with both hands, tugging it up. I didn’t realise what she was doing. Then I saw. There were strips of tape on her stomach, and a thin snaking black wire attached to a black transmitter. She was bugged.

I yanked open the front door and Jack Preston was standing there in front of me.

‘Hello, Roddy,’ he said.

Jack explained it all quite quickly. How Gayle Afflick
had
seen me in the courts, the day her boyfriend Ray was up for assault, and how she had recognised me as the man she’d seen that night. Her boyfriend told her I was a solicitor, and this worried her. Who would take her word against that of a solicitor? She knew one decent copper, someone who
might
believe her: DI Jack Preston.

That time in Jack’s office, it had been a setup, neatly played by Jack and Halliwell to get me into a lineup, where Gayle Afflick could identify me. Jack wanted to see how I’d react, what I’d do. He had a good idea I’d want to talk to the witness afterwards.

It all fitted, as far as he was concerned. There were rumours around the court that Sophie Marshall had been seeing a married man. It figured that this man most probably knew her from her professional life. (She didn’t have much of a social one.) When Jack found that my car had been ticketed on a road near the Horseshoe Estate, a long way off my usual patch, he knew he was on to something.

So he’d had Gayle Afflick tailed, and had her wired up too, taking the whole thing carefully, nice and slow, because he knew how easy it would be to lose me. But he hadn’t lost me. He had it all now, the whole story. And he had me. He asked if I wanted a solicitor.

‘Of course I want a solicitor.’

‘I hear Tony Barraclough’s good,’ Jack said.

That smell was in my nostrils, that police station smell. There were, I decided suddenly, worse smells, far worse smells, in the wider scheme of things.

So now he sat with his head in his hands. Soon as the pain got to him, he’d top himself, couldn’t see any other way. He’d leave a note grassing up Hunter: revenge from the grave and all that. There was nothing in his flat worth hawking, and nobody to hawk it to at this time of night, this night of all nights. Everyone was on the outside. Hunter and Sheila and Dickie and his mum and gran, part of the party that was Edinburgh, kissing strangers and wishing Happy New Years less than an hour from now. Should auld acquaintance be forgot.

His acquaintance was the big H, and no way was it letting him forget it.

Methadone was a joke. He sold his. Some chemists had started taking the junkies in ten at a time, shutting up shop while each dose was dispensed. Standing in a line like cub scouts or something. One wee plastic cup . . . With jellies hard to come by, what was the alternative?

There is no alternative, that’s what heroin would have said. It wasn’t true it would kill you. It was the crap they cut it with did that. Anybody who could afford a good, big habit of the nice stuff, they could go on for ever. Look at Keef. Learned to ski, used to whip Jagger at tennis, made
Exile on Main Street
- skagged out the whole time. Skagged out and playing
tennis
. Nelly started to laugh. He was still laughing when the sound of the tenement door closing came crashing up the stairwell. Slow, steady steps. He rubbed tears from his eyes. His shoulder hurt where it had connected with Mrs McIver’s door. And here she was now, climbing towards him.

‘What’s the joke, Nelly?’

He stood up to let her past. She was getting her keys out of her bag. Big canvas bag with
Las Vegas
painted on the side in loopy red writing. Looked like big red veins to Nelly. He could see a newspaper and a library book and a purse.

‘Nothing really, Mrs McIver.’ A purse.

‘What’re you doing up here anyway?’

‘Thought I heard something. Wanted to check you were all right.’

‘You must be hearing things. I thought you’d be out on the town, night like this.’

‘I was just heading out.’ He stepped on to her landing. She had her key in the door. ‘Eh, Mrs McIver . . . ?’

As she turned her head, his fist caught her on the cheek.

Johnny Hunter was holding court in his local. He was in his favourite corner seat, both arms draped round the necks of the blondes he’d chatted up at Chapters on Boxing Day evening. He’d given them champagne, driven them around in his Saab convertible, keeping the top down even though it was cold. He’d told them they needed fur coats, said he’d measure them up. They’d laughed. The littler one, Margo, he’d told her that was the name of an expensive wine. The other one, Juliet, was quieter. A bit stuck-up maybe, but not about to duck out, not with The Hunter throwing his money and his weight around. He’d done a few deals tonight, nothing cataclysmic. The punters wanted speed to keep them going, coke to lend an air of celebration to the new beginning. He’d steered a couple of them towards smack instead. Fashion was cyclical, whether it was hemlines or recreational drugs. Heroin was back in style. That was his pitch.

‘And it’s safe,’ he’d tell them. ‘Just follow the instructions on the box.’ And with a wink he’d be off, rearranging the lines of his Armani jacket, eyes open to the possibilities around him. Margo seemed to be cosying into him, maybe to get away from Panda, who was seated next to her. Panda was the scariest thing in the pub, which was the whole point of him. He was paid to be a deterrent, and also did the deals outside. The Hunter didn’t touch the goods if he could help it. The cops had come after him three times already this year, never enough for a prosecution. And now he had a pair of ears in the Drugs Squad: a hundred a week just for the odd phone call. Cheap insurance, Caldwell had agreed when Hunter had told him about it. Cheap for Caldwell, at any rate.

Hunter didn’t know how much Caldwell was making. Ten, fifteen grand a week, had to be. House down in the Borders apparently, more a castle than a house. Six cars, each one better than the Saab. Hunter wanted to be Caldwell. He knew he
could
be Caldwell. He was good enough. But Caldwell had the contacts . . . and the money . . . and the muscle. Caldwell had made people disappear. And if Hunter didn’t keep business moving, he might find himself on the wrong end of his boss. There were other dealers out there: younger, just as hungry, and edging on the desperate, which meant reckless. All of them would like Hunter’s power, and his clothes and car, his women and money. They all wanted his money. And now Nelly of all runts was giving him grief - just by his very existence. Caldwell’s goons making sure Hunter knew what had to be done, making him acknowledge just how low he was on the ladder.

‘It’ll be you takes the fall,’ one of them had said. ‘You or him, so make it clean.’

Oh, he’d make it clean, if that was what it took. He knew he’d no choice, much as he liked Nelly.

‘Are we clubbing or what?’

Billy Bones talking: skinny as a wisp of smoke, seated the other side of Juliet, whose legs he’d been staring at for the past half-hour.

‘One more,’ Hunter said. The pub was heaving, table service impossible. There were a dozen empty glasses on the table. Hunter reached out an arm and swept them to the floor.