Business of Dying (11 page)

And that was it. Carla made some effort to get her charges to speak, but it was a losing battle. They weren't going to tell the police anything, not if they could help it.

After that we interviewed the other members of staff present, four of them altogether. Two of them recognized the photo of Miriam and identified her as a friend of Molly's, but once again, neither had had any meaningful contact with her so couldn't, or wouldn't, add any further information.

'I don't know how much help that was,' said Carla when we were finished.

'It's difficult to tell,' I said. 'That's the thing with murder inquiries. It can often be a long, slow process and it always involves talking to a lot of people. Most of the time you don't hear anything significant, but just occasionally you do, even if you don't notice it at the time.'

'Well, I hope you're successful. It's worrying thinking that there's some maniac out there who could easily kill again.'

'We'll catch the perpetrator. I'm sure of that.' I stood up, and Malik followed suit. 'Anyway, thanks for your assistance this morning. It's appreciated.'

'I'll show you out,' she said, getting to her feet and leading us out of the office.

At the double doors, I shook hands with her while Malik nodded briefly and walked out. 'We'll need to come back and speak to the other clients at some point,' I told her.

'Of course. It would help if you could phone ahead, though. I'd like to be here when you come.'

She had nice eyes. They were a deep brown colour, with laughter lines round their edges. I would make sure she was there when I came back. 'I'll do that. It'll probably be sooner rather than later. It's important to close every avenue of inquiry.'

There was a sound of hysterical yelling and
shouting from one of the rooms down the hall. It sounded like one of the female clients was experiencing a lack of customer satisfaction. In reply, we could just about make out the calm, measured tones of one of the social workers. It was greeted with another blast of abuse. Talk about a hiding to nothing.

Car la Graham sighed resignedly. 'I'd better go and see what all that's about.'

'You certainly have a difficult job to do here,' I told her.

'We've all got difficult jobs to do,' she answered, a rueful smile playing about her lips, and turned to go.

'I think you had a bit of a thing for her,' Malik said when I joined him outside.

I grinned. 'She's an attractive woman.'

'A little bit old.'

'For you maybe. Not for me.'

'A social worker, though, Sarge? It would hardly be a match made in heaven, not with your views.'

'Yeah. Somehow I don't think it's a goer.' But in an odd way I wished it could be. I needed some romance in my life.

It was getting on for one o'clock, so we grabbed some lunch at a nearby McDonald's. Malik plumped for Chicken McNuggets while I took the traditional route of Big Mac, fries, and a hot apple pie for pudding, washed down with a regular
Coke. Not exactly the ideal start to my new diet.

'I didn't like her,' Malik said as he slowly chewed on a McNugget.

'I know you didn't.'

He swallowed. 'She was too cynical, you know? Like nothing would faze her.'

'It's no different to the way it is in our game. You build up a shell so that things don't affect you. You have to. I mean, let's face it, how would you like to work with those little fuckers?'

'No discipline. That's the problem.' He picked up another McNugget with his fork. 'Do you think any of them knew anything?'

'Anything of interest? I doubt it. I think we'd have known if any of them were lying through their teeth. They're not that good actors.'

'So it was a bit of a waste of time going down there, really.'

I smiled. 'Well, in some ways maybe.'

He ignored my comment, and changed the subject. 'I was surprised this morning by the preliminary findings.'

'That there was no sign of sexual assault?' He nodded. 'So was I. It sort of begs the question, what was she killed for?'

Malik hunted down and pinned his last McNugget. 'That's why we need to talk to the pimp.'

But talking to the pimp had not proved any easier for our colleagues than it had for us the
previous day. When we got back to the station we heard that he hadn't been at home when DS Capper and three others had called there several hours earlier. Apparently, he had a girlfriend who lived in Highbury, and he was supposed to spend quite a lot of his time with her, but he hadn't been at her place either. Nor was she in residence. Both properties were now under surveillance and all patrols had been advised to bring him in for questioning should they come across him. So far no one had.

When I left that afternoon at 4.20, citing a nonexistent doctor's appointment as the reason for my departure (Malik made me feel guilty by looking concerned and asking if it was anything serious), the inquiry was heading towards thirty-six hours old with few substantial leads and a suspect against whom there was pretty much no evidence and who, so far, hadn't even got a viable motive.

There was, of course, still a lot of the race left to be run, as a sports commentator might say, but whichever way you looked at it the start hadn't been particularly inspiring.

After picking up the suitcase at King's Cross, I took it home, counted the contents (it was all there), and stuffed a jiffy bag with Danny's cut. I sealed the bag and placed the rest of the money, bar a couple of hundred spending, in a safe in my bedroom. It wouldn't stay there for long. I have a personal deposit box at a hotel in Bayswater where I stash my ill-gotten gains. One day I'm going to have a hefty lump sum. It doesn't pay interest, but it keeps growing.

I've known Danny for about eight years now. He was the brother of a girl I used to go out with. Her name was Jean Ashcroft and she was the only non-Force girl I've ever had a relationship with since joining up. We were together about a year, and for a while it looked like it was going to get serious. We'd even started looking at places to rent together, which is the closest I've ever been to any sort of real
commitment, and I think it's probably fair to say that I loved her, as much as I've loved anybody in the sexual sense. But then Danny fouled things up. Not intentionally, mind, but a foul-up all the same. You see, in those days he was a bit of a rascal. Although he was intelligent and came from a respectable family, he didn't have a job, nor did he want one. He preferred dope dealing. It was easier, and it was more profitable. Somehow he managed to keep his illicit activities hidden from the rest of his family, including his sister, and so it turned out to be a terrible shock for them when one of his pathetically small-time deals went pear-shaped, and he ended up on the wrong end of a savage beating.

It was a typical piece of middle-class naivety, really. He was holding half a pound of speed he was meant to be selling to a contact of his, but the contact, deciding it was easier to steal the goods rather than buy them, set him up. On his way over to the contact's flat, three of the guy's mates ambushed him in the stairwell. However, since Danny hadn't yet paid for the stuff, he was loath to give it up. A very one-sided battle ensued and Danny ended up with a fractured jaw, smashed cheekbone, severe concussion, and God knows how many busted ribs. And he still lost the speed, which, by all accounts, had to be prised from between his broken fingers.

He was in hospital three weeks altogether, which, when you consider it was on the NHS, gives you some idea of the extent of his injuries. It really threw the cat among the pigeons as well. His dad seemed to think that, because it had happened on our patch, I should have known something about his activities and put a stop to them, or at least told him about them. So he turned against me. Danny's mum followed suit, being one of those people who are incapable of their own opinion. The thing was, I could have lived with that, no problem. I'd never liked either of them much anyway. The problem was Danny. Once he got out of hospital he wanted revenge on the man who'd set him up. He was also worried because the guy he'd bought the stuff from now wanted paying as well. In fact, he wanted a lot of favours and the only person he knew who was in a position to grant him any was me. I'd always got on well with Danny, even though he'd never been able to hide his dope-dealing activities from me, and I genuinely liked him.

So when he came to me begging for help, I said I'd do what I could. The guy who'd sold him the speed was a pretty low-level player, so a quick threat of prosecution and the possibility of worse got him out of the picture. It was the revenge thing that represented a problem. Danny wanted me to help him take the guy out, though help wasn't exactly the operative word since it looked like I
would be the one doing most of the work. Danny was only five feet six and of proportionate build, so he wasn't what you'd call a useful ally. He wanted to ambush the guy in the same way he'd been ambushed, and return the kicking, but I talked him out of that one. I don't even know why I agreed to get involved at all. I could have just told him to cut his losses and be thankful that he no longer owed the other guy money, but I didn't. Maybe it was a pride thing. Maybe I wanted him to look up to me, I don't know.

Anyway, I devised a compromise. A couple of months earlier I'd uncovered about fifty ecstasy pills in an unrelated search of a suspect's premises. Because we already had the suspect bang to rights on about a dozen other charges, I'd put the pills in my pocket, thinking they might come in useful at a later date, not so much as a commodity - even in those days there was a lot of controversy over the effects of E, and I didn't want anyone dropping dead of anything I sold them - but of course they had another use, and that was helping put away criminals who were proving particularly hard to pin down for their crimes. I'd never planted anything on anyone before, but I'd heard about enough cases to know that it usually worked. If it was carried out properly.

Which was the difficult part. The guy, whose name was Darren Frennick, didn't tend to leave his
flat very much, apart from to do the odd deal, and we needed uninterrupted access. We thought about it for weeks, racking our brains for a way to get in there, before we came up with a simple yet foolproof solution. Frennick was an ugly bastard but, like all young men, he had a healthy sex drive. I knew a girl at the time who was a professional escort and who could be trusted with difficult jobs. So what we did was this. Having paid her a substantial amount, funded by Danny, and given her the tablets, we sent her round to the flat. She knocked on the door, and when Frennick answered she told him she was his escort for the evening. He started to claim ignorance, but she was a good-looking girl and he didn't want to look a gifthorse in the mouth, so he invited her in and kicked out the couple of mates he'd had round there at the time.

As we'd guessed, he didn't want to escort her anywhere, preferring instead to get straight down to business. But within seconds of his amorous advances she was claiming she wasn't that sort of girl and an escort meant just that. He asked her what the hell she was on about and continued with his pawing, which was when she showed him some of her kung fu moves. One series of ferocious blows and kicks later and he was out cold on the floor. Quick as a flash, she used a pair of tweezers to remove the packet of pills from her handbag. She brushed them briefly against his fingers, then threw
them under his bed. He was coming round by that time so she ran out of there, shouting and screaming, and immediately phoned the police on her mobile phone, saying that this man had tried to give her some pills and rape her. She gave the address and his first name, and the cops, knowing who he was, were round there like a shot. By which time, of course, she'd made herself scarce.

Five minutes later she called the police again, saying that she was sorry, she didn't want to get involved in pressing charges against the guy, but she had seen him put the pills back under his bed. Despatch passed this information on to the officers on the scene, who'd entered the flat through the open door. A dazed and bloodied Darren Frennick was arrested and remanded in custody. He ended up serving nine months for supplying Class A drugs, which Danny didn't feel was revenge enough, but which I assured him was the best he was going to get.

And that should have been that. Except that it wasn't. I don't think Jean ever found out the full story, but somehow she got wind of the fact that I'd used an escort girl to set Frennick up, and worked out that this was a side of me she'd never seen before and one that she didn't particularly like. Things became strained after that, Jean repeatedly asking me if I'd ever slept with prostitutes, and not believing me every time I said no. First, the
living-together lark went on hold; then a couple of months later, the relationship followed suit.

By rights, I should never have forgiven Danny for fucking up what will in all probability turn out to be my one chance of getting hitched, but he was so grateful for what I'd done, and felt so guilty for the problems he'd caused, that I found it difficult to hold it against him. Jean and I never really saw each other again after that. She met this chartered surveyor from up north and moved to Leeds with him, but Danny and I continued to keep in touch. Occasionally we did business together. One time I sold him a couple of kilos of dope I'd liberated from its wrongful owner. He tried to move it on but ended up selling it to undercover Drugs Squad officers and getting nicked instead. They leaned on him hard, trying to get him to name his source, but his experience with Darren Frennick had hardened him. He feared prison - who doesn't? - but he kept quiet, even though they told him that cooperation would surely mean a lighter sentence. He ended up doing eighteen months.