Dark Side (3 page)

We have three children of our own, Justin, Victoria and baby Mark, and two adopted, Matthew and Katherine, known as Katie, Patrick's late brother Laurence's children. Their mother is under seemingly permanent treatment for alcoholism and/or drug abuse and wants nothing further to do with them. Our three youngest are looked after mainly by the nanny, Carrie, and we could not manage without further help from the children's grandparents. My dear father died at a tragically early age of a ghastly creeping illness, my mother is another basket case and again, has no interest in her family, so the children have just the one set of grandparents.

‘Can I count you in for the choir on Sunday?' John asked his son, putting his head out of the annexe's front door as we entered the back way, through the conservatory. ‘We're very thin.'

‘Counter tenor or bass?' Patrick said with a grin.

‘Whatever you like as long as you
sing
.' John's fuse as far as Patrick's sense of humour goes is sometimes very short.

‘I'm a thin alto,' I offered, but inwardly quaking as I had never done anything like this before.

‘Delighted, my dear! Thank you. Elspeth'll find a robe that fits you.'

Seated in the choir stalls for the first time on that Sunday morning with a full view of the congregation, I noticed a man I had not seen before. When Joanna had told me about Benny Cooper she had quoted a woman who lived in the same square as Paul Mallory who had described him as being ‘sort of smarmy with dark hair and shades'.

So who was this man sitting almost at the back of the church who looked sort of smarmy with dark hair and shades? After the service I asked John if he knew him.

‘Oh, that's Jeff Bates. He and his girlfriend have recently moved into the one-time forge. He's a landscape painter but the poor chap's been having treatment for some kind of eye trouble. Everyone's hoping it won't affect his career.'

It appeared that the odious Cooper was preying on my mind.

T
here had been a suspected murder overnight and Manvers Street police station was in organized turmoil. Carrick, with his assistant Lynn Outhwaite hurrying just behind him, was descending the stairs from the top floor. As we approached a third person caught up with them, the new Detective Inspector, David Campbell, whom we had not previously met. After quite a long time without one a new DI had finally been appointed to Bath CID and it was his second week in the job. He had come from HQ in Portishead and everyone had assumed that another Scot would meld very nicely with the boss. Everyone, that is, except Derek Woods, the custody sergeant who, having read the history books, had warned darkly against making such presumptions. For the MacDonalds still hated the Campbells after the massacre of Glencoe, didn't they? Perhaps others did, too.

We had already gathered that Carrick, who had undertaken to mentor Campbell for a couple of weeks to show him, in his words, ‘how Bath ticked', was not particularly impressed. Apparently this was nothing to do with anyone being put to the sword but merely an apparent lingering prejudice on Campbell's part that everything in England was vastly inferior to the land of his birth. I thought there was every chance that James had merely disliked the man at first sight.

The DCI was annoyed now and I had an idea that our mission was already in ruins. We waited until they arrived on the ground floor where, upon seeing us, he came to a halt, causing Campbell to almost cannon into him and Lynn. Carrick gave him a look and the other man apologized.

‘Sorry, I have a possible murder case on my hands right now,' he said. ‘A woman's body was found near Oldfield Park railway station three quarters of an hour ago.'

‘We've just been told,' Patrick replied.

Carrick's normal good manners surfaced and he introduced Campbell to us, just giving our names. The DI smiled thinly and gave us a little nod. He was older than Carrick, stocky, possibly in his early fifties, with hard, pale blue eyes and coarse grey hair cut brutally short.

We stood aside and they went off in the direction of the side entrance to the car park.

As they departed I heard Campbell ask, ‘Who are they?'

‘SOCA,' Carrick answered tersely.

‘Right,' Patrick drawled as we strolled slowly in the same direction. ‘Tell me, oh, oracle mine, what is the chemistry going on there?'

I said, ‘Your guess is as good as mine but it could be something to do with the fact that although he's been desperate to be given someone permanent to spread the workload, James has been king of all he surveyed for quite a while now. Campbell's older, probably been in the force far longer but from what we hear has probably never really acclimatized to being down south. James is irritated, that's all. He'll get over it. He was probably looking forward to our chat this morning.'

‘You have to get on with your staff, though, don't you?' Patrick remarked disapprovingly.

I paused in my stride for a moment. ‘You can talk! I can distinctly remember you and one of yours fighting like tomcats on a village green after he'd taken a swing at you because he found you utterly insufferable.'

Patrick smiled reflectively. ‘You fell off a horse on to him too. That didn't exactly
help
.'

‘And shortly afterwards, still presumably all shades of black and blue, he left MI5 to live with an American divorcee who had four children.'

The pair of us hooted immoderately with laughter, causing the trio ahead of us to turn round and stare.

‘No real leads,' Michael Greenway announced without further preamble. ‘Not as far as any connection with yours truly, that is. The Met's convinced it was a gangland shooting, mistaken identity or whatever. The bike was found, burnt out, on waste ground and three boys, playing truant, presumably, were spotted and questioned. One of them said he saw a couple of youths running away from the area on the day the crime was committed – one thin, the other on the overweight side. They were carrying their crash helmets but he didn't recognize them. He may well have done, of course, but was too afraid to say so. There are local suspects and I understand they'll be questioned – if they can be run to earth. People like that, the odd job boys, tend to disappear as though they never existed. I suggest we let the Met get on with it and tackle more pressing matters.'

‘How is the woman who was injured?' I asked.

‘I'll find out for you,' the commander said with perhaps the merest hint of exaggerated patience. He hit keys on his computer, swore under his breath as a chunky forefinger landed on a wrong one and then remedied the mistake.

OK, so I was a bit annoyed with the way men sometimes airbrush things like that from their mindset.

‘Three stitches in a cheek wound and kept in hospital overnight as she was suffering from shock and has a heart condition,' Greenway reported. He flashed me a big cheesy grin, as though he knew his irritation had surfaced. ‘Now then …'

‘One thing,' Patrick said.

‘What?' Greenway grated.

‘I have a name for you. Benny Cooper. He used to be a crime reporter for a Bath newspaper and had his knife into DCI James Carrick, rubbishing the CID anonymously in a column he wrote and snooping on his private life. This was mostly because Carrick knew he had a porn business and was pulling out all the stops to close it down.'

‘Is it relevant to this?'

‘It might be insofar as you've been involved with CID cases in Bath.'

‘There's something I really think we ought to get on with. Right now. You have one minute.'

The commander had picked the wrong man to get flustered and almost certainly knew it. Patrick made himself more comfortable in his chair and said, ‘Carrick mentioned him to us in connection with police officers, especially those in charge of cases, being targeted by serious criminals, whether directly by personal attacks on their characters or through the use of dodgy private investigators who bribe dodgy cops in order to get evidence removed from case files or details of witnesses for the intimidation thereof. Cooper went to prison some years ago for being an accessory to a serious assault on Carrick's wife Joanna – this was before they were married. She almost died. The aim was to muddy the waters of an ongoing murder investigation at the time, to make Bath CID – and James – look bad. The man who attacked her, Paul Mallory, an oppo of Cooper's, also went to prison, obviously with a longer sentence. Carrick told us that Cooper's out now, and so is Mallory – I checked and read up about the case. Moreover, Cooper has set himself up as a private eye and been seen hobnobbing locally with a mobster involved in a case in London where police files were tampered with.'

Greenway knows James Carrick quite well and respects his judgement. He frowned for a few moments and then said, ‘I agree that it's interesting. Do we know who this mobster is and whether his name's cropped up in relation to any of the same cases that I have?'

‘Not yet. As is the norm these days, he has false identities,' Patrick replied. ‘We had to postpone a meeting with Carrick about it and I haven't been able to delve into it as I was told to remain on leave.'

A very small smile twitched at Greenway's lips, a sort of silent
touché.
They both really enjoy these exchanges. Then
he said, ‘Make a note of it. Until we're asked for help or a good connection's made I think we ought to let Avon and Somerset do any work needed. Now then …'

I had gone along to this back-to-work briefing partly out of courtesy, to show my face, and also to learn of any important updates. My role only involves working part time, otherwise I would not be able to write a word, and anyway, most of what Patrick does on a day-to-day basis is just that – routine, involving liaising with and issuing orders to people ‘on the ground' who are mostly carrying out surveillance operations or working undercover. For this is he eminently suited, having worked in army special operations, and feedback from those under him shows an appreciation of his knowledge of exactly what is involved.

The real reason for my return to London for a couple of days was to meet an old friend – she lives very handily in Kensington – go shopping and generally have time off. That was today; tomorrow I was hoping to undertake a little more writing research in the Soho area, hopefully in the dry this time. So I excused myself from the briefing and left the building. As soon as I switched my mobile phone back on there was a text message asking me to contact Julia, my friend, immediately.

‘I've been trying to get hold of you for
ages
,' she complained.

I apologized, telling her that I had been somewhere where I'd had to switch off, which is perfectly true under most circumstances. She has no knowledge of my second career.

‘Look, I'm terribly sorry, Ingrid, but I can't go shopping and have lunch with you today. Mummy's been taken ill and I'm throwing things in a suitcase right now. There's a taxi coming in around ten minutes and I have to get a train to Oxford as the car's in for service today, which is a damned nuisance.'

I soothed her as best I could and said I hoped that her mother made a speedy recovery. I felt really sorry for her as her demanding mama is often ‘ill' at the most inconvenient moments with an uncanny way of seeming to know when her daughter has taken a day off work for an outing or something similar. I had a nasty feeling that the old lady was working towards moving in with Julia, who's divorced, which would mean she'd have no life of her own at all.

I found I was walking in the direction of the café bar where the shooting incident had taken place. It served coffee and food so why not have lunch there?

When I arrived I saw that the window had been boarded up, and the glass partition screen had been replaced by something a lot less attractive so perhaps was only temporary. I was slightly surprised that the violence did not seem to have dampened the enthusiasm of the local clientele and it was very busy, the serving staff expertly weaving their way through the narrow spaces between the tables with loaded trays.

I sat in the café area and ordered what I wanted, coffee first, and then sent a text to Patrick with my whereabouts and change of plan, one of our working rules. Fine, I then thought, but I did not actually have a plan for today. There was no response from him but roughly ten minutes later, when my cappuccino had arrived, he turned up.

‘Roast beef and horseradish panini with salad?' I hazarded as he seated himself.

‘Sounds just right. I told Greenway I couldn't concentrate while I was famished.'

‘This isn't the right place for you to feel happy sitting – near the door.'

He glanced around. ‘Can't be helped, the place is packed. Perhaps if we change places so I've a view outside …?' This we did. Then he said, ‘It occurred to me that although the Met will have interviewed everyone who was working here on the day of the attack, there's a chance one of the members of staff might have remembered something else since.'

‘I thought Greenway had something he wants you to work on – another case?'

‘He does, but this is my lunch hour, isn't it?'

A diminutive woman of Chinese appearance approached from somewhere at the back to stand by our table and I quickly realized that she was not one of the waitresses.

‘You were here when we were attacked by armed criminals,' she said very quietly in perfect English, but with a slight American or Canadian accent.

‘That's right,' Patrick acknowledged.

‘I want to thank you, that's all. For helping the injured people and … organizing things. And the big man, your friend. I – I ran into the office when it happened. I stayed there until the police came.' She blinked nervously a few times. ‘I thought that gunman would kill me.'

‘Why was that?' Patrick went on to ask.

‘Just … a feeling.'