Eoin Miller 01 - Faithless Street (3 page)

     
Here it comes.

     
“So why are you a cop?”

     
That wasn’t exactly the come on I’d
been expecting. Maybe it wasn’t going to come. I didn’t know if I was relieved
or disappointed.

     
“I could say the same to you. A
Romani cop? What are you trying to prove?”

     
He raised his glass in a toast as if
to say, good question. For a second I thought he was shaping to open up, to
tell me what was going on behind his dark eyes. And I realised just how much I
wanted to find out.

     
Then he finally got to it, “I mean
it though. Why? You’ve got a degree, you’re smart, you don’t take shit, and
you’re really cute. Why waste yourself on the force?”

     
Even though I’d been expecting the
moment, I still felt my cheeks flush slightly, and then we were alone In the
universe for a second, and my next move was the only thing that mattered. Even
more, I felt myself shaping to open up, and just for a second I thought I was
going to tell him why I was on the force.

     
I hid behind a familiar move, “You
think I’m cute?”

     
“I think you should let me take you
out to dinner.”

     
I pretended to think about it for a
while, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

***

“So a dead body on our first date,
right? What are the odds?”

     
Miller doesn’t answer. He ignored my
question about Becker, too. We sit in silence for a minute as we head down the
road, and I know we’re both thinking about what might happen when we get to the
other end. I’m open to stopping off somewhere for more drinks, but I want him
to ask.

     
“Come on. What did you say to
Becker?”

     
“What did you think of the body?”

     
“Shame, something like that. Wonder
if he’s got a family.”

     
Miller just smiles, and it’s both
irritating and cute.

     
“What you grinning at?”

     
“What did you notice? About his
feet, I mean?”

     
“About his feet?”

     
He runs his free hand over the back
of mine, and that seems to make something official. Then he takes his eyes of
the road for long enough to give me his nicest grin.

     
“They’re smooth.” He says, as he
turns his attention back to the traffic. “His feet were smooth, like your
hands. He was wearing shoes and socks when he died. Someone took them.”

     
I can’t help but laugh.

     
Beneath it though, something is
nagging at me like it did at the crime scene. Miller is patient with me. He
knows I’ll get it, and he’s not going to prompt me or make me feel stupid.

  
Why would it matter if someone stole a tramp’s shoes?

     
Shit.

     
“That guy’s not slept rough a night
in his life, has he?”

     
Miller’s grin widens into a proud
smile and something in my chest expands a little bit.

     
“I don’t think so, no.”

     
“He’s not a tramp. He’s used to
clean socks and comfortable shoes.”

     
He nods and then stops the car in
front of a pub.

     
“Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble
to make him look like a tramp. And Leek is thick enough to buy it. But Becker’s
hungry, he’ll run the right checks and make a case for himself.”

     
“And you gave it to him.”

     
“What do I know, I’m just a gypsy.”

     
Something else that’s been bugging
at me, “That thing you called him, a Gavver, I’ve heard that before, it’s cop,
right?”

     
He shuffles his head a little on his
shoulders, like he’s juggling a thought, “Yes, but it’s not a friendly term.
It’s like saying filth or pig.”

     
“So your best insult for him was
that he was a cop?”

     
“Yup.”

     
“But you’re a cop too.”

     
“Yup.”

     
I smile and let out a simple laugh,
a relaxed moment, “You’re a bit of a puzzle box, aren’t you?”

     
He grins and drums his fingers on
the steering wheel.
     

     
I lean across and kiss him, its soft
and gentle, and his lips feel right. There’s a spark in there somewhere when we
kiss, and our tings touch, briefly. He pulls away and nods toward the pub, and
I open my door to get out. We link arms on the walk across the car park. The
first date’s going to be nothing compared to the second.

"I think I'm
pregnant."

How do you respond to
that?

I offered my wife
another salted peanut. We were in our local and someone was murdering a 60's
country song on acoustic guitar. A special level of hell is reserved for
open mic nights. There's only so much Oasis and Rod Stewart I can take without
becoming homicidal.

But what had Laura
said?

Focus, Miller.

"I'm late. It's
been three weeks."

"Are you sure?
You eat a lot of fibre, maybe you're just, you know, bunged up."

Not the best thing to
say.

She stood up and
left. I turned back to the music to hear about someone's sex being on fire.

***

The house was dark
and quiet when I got home. I found my mobile phone in the living room.

It was never very
mobile.

I'd missed several calls
from my best friend, Terry Becker. I could already hear him complaining about
it tomorrow. He'd not left any messages, though, so we both failed at the whole
phone thing.

I climbed the stairs
and stood for a long time in the bedroom doorway. Laura was taking in the slow,
peaceful breaths of deep sleep. I watched her for awhile, breathing in and out,
until it started to feel creepy. Then I turned around and headed into the spare
room, the one that we'd talked about setting aside as a nursery. It was big and
empty, and I realized how much it was going to take for me to fill it.

My throat closed in
and my heart climbed up a few inches.

I swallowed it all
down and went to bed.

***

“Ground control to
Major Tom.”

I lifted my head of
the car window. I’d been staring at the scenery as we drove, watching it fly
past out of view. Somewhere between Wolverhampton and Bloxwhich I’d drifted off
into another world.

I turned to smile at
Becker, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove.

He took his eyes off the
road long enough to shoot me a look, “You okay?”

I shrugged and looked
back out of the window. His car was very new and very blue, and something about
that was annoying me. I decided maybe it was the smell. I’d never liked the
smell of new.

Or maybe it was his
CD player. He was offending me with some jazz shite.

Every few months he’d
go through a new phase, trying to prove that he was a middle class white man
with a brain. He’d buy some new CDs and learn a few new recipes. A few times
he’d dragged me along to some foreign film festivals at the Electric Cinema in
the city.

So far he had missed
the point of;

Alternative country.

Jazz.

Blues.

Palestinian food.

Italian cinema.

When he’d picked me
up that morning he’d asked if I’d ever seen a film called
Sholay
and I didn’t think the world was ready for his Bollywood
phase. He worked so hard at being something that he wasn’t.

Maybe that’s why we
were best friends.

“Laura thinks she
might be pregnant,” I looked over at him, watching his eyes jump a little. “She
told me last night. She’s missed her period.”

“Is she sure? Maybe
she’s just-”

“Don’t go there.”

He smiled. “You
should be happy, it’s exciting, yeah?”

I turned back to the
window. There were smudge marks on the glass from my hair, and just for a
moment it gave the car some character.

“You’re not him, you
know.” Becker’s eyes were on the road but his voice was on my past. “You don’t
have to be your father.”

I smiled thinly and
nodded.

I couldn’t think of
anything in the world I was less suited for than fatherhood. And, as we pulled
onto Fishley Farm, I couldn’t think of anywhere in the world I less wanted to
be.

***

I’d gotten to the
office early that morning to catch up on paperwork and get first dibs on the
newspaper crossword.
 
The in-tray
on my desk was a losing battle against official documents that I didn’t really
understand, but I wasn’t going to ask for help.

I sat and logged onto
the intranet.

The force had
attempted to modernize. All paperwork to the Crown Prosecution Service could be
handled electronically through a central system. To prove what a token gesture
it was, however, the CPS would only handle the information during normal office
hours. The guys in uniform usually got shit on; they had to submit the
paperwork the old fashioned way out of hours. In our office we had an agreement
that whoever was in first would clean up any problems and submit pending files.

Lately, I was always
first in.

I sat with my coffee
and loaded up the system, looking through the four files that had been left for
me to submit. Interviews, evidence, statements. All the fun of the fair. Three
messages came through the intranet from Becker, but I ignored them. I turned
instead to the messages from the people who shared the CID office with me. Each
one was addressed to me with two initials: P.D.

Positive.

Discrimination.

It was a dirty
hangover from my days in uniform, when the other guys in the locker room would
call me PC PD. A whole culture in the force that said the only reason I had the
job was my ethnicity.

Then I opened
Becker’s messages. I saw the subject, Fishley Farm, and knew the only reason he
was trying to contact me was my ethnicity.

***

I was already waiting
for him in the car park when he pulled up, stood in a fine drizzle of rain that
felt refreshing that early in the morning. I noticed both the newness and the
blueness of his car, and formed an instant dislike.

The other cops who
shared my office were huddled in their cars, sucking down one last cigarette
before the working day. Our boss was a smoking Nazi, and it was hard to get
away with sneaky breaks. They all tried to look like they were not staring at
me as I climbed into Becker’s car.

“You got my messages,
then?”

“Yup.”

“You’ve been ignoring
my phone calls.”

“Yup.”

He nodded, more to
himself than me, and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a moment,
before putting the car in gear and driving us away from the nicotine gallery.

“You read what I put
in the message then, I mean, you know what it’s about?”

“You want me to be
your token gypsy.”

He drummed his
fingers in the wheel again.

I knew this wasn’t
his idea. He was not the kind of asshole to cash in on my ethnicity. His boss
in the Walsall office, Tony Leek, was exactly that kind of asshole. He would
have seen a problem at a traveler camp and decided to call on the force’s token
Roma officer.

Fishley Farm was not
a Roma camp.

Tony Leek didn’t care
about the difference. He didn’t use words like Roma, Romanichal or Irish
Traveler. He didn’t even know where the term
Gypsy
came from. All he knew was that he didn’t like any of us. He
was the least of my problems, though.

A Gypsy cop?

I was a traitor. I
was the last person anyone at that camp was going to want to see. I leaned my
head on the window and watched the scenery drift by. At some point I zoned out.

***

Fishley Farm took its
name from the family business that had owned the land until the 1970s.
 
Most of the land was taken up by a
modern housing estate, a bland grid of bricks and plaster that had been thrown
up a few years before.

Beside the housing
estate, pushed into the margins of the old farm boundaries, was the traveler
camp.

Becker pulled onto
the estate and followed the road as it weaved its way through the maze of
houses and side streets. I noticed a theme in the street names as we passed:
Gladstone, Pitt, Thatcher. We were diving along Churchill Road. Our arrival
sparked the locals into life. Teenagers fell in behind us on their bikes and
adults stepped out of their front doors to watch us pass.

Long before we
reached our destination I could smell what had happened; the clinging scent of
smoke wrapped up in burned plaster and soggy timber.

I knew the smells
well.

I’d been burned out
of more than one home when I was young.

At the far end of
Churchill Road we turned into a cul-de-sac that was named, presumably, after
John Major. The tarmac was slick with water but the fire engine was long gone.
Two marked police cars were parked either side of the road, and the occupants
nodded at us as we drove passed, before coming to a stop in front of the house
at the end of the row.

As with the other
houses on the estate, this one was built by math. It was square and dull, with
symmetrical windows and white plastic doors. When I was young, my father had
told me he hated houses because they were prisons. Unmovable monuments made of
bricks and mortar. These days it seems like we build houses that look like
caravans and caravans that look like houses.

Peaking out above the
garden fence was the burned remains of a housing extension. The charred timber
beams of the roof were still damp with water. Becker nodded at the burned
remains as we climbed out the car, “What you reckon? Library? Science lab?
 
Homeless shelter?”

I smiled and mimed
playing pool, “Living the dream. When did the fire happen?”

“Last night.” He
mimed a phone call with his thumb and little finger, “All those calls you
ignored? That was while the fire crew were here.”

As we walked down the
short driveway the homeowner came out to greet us. He was just under six feet
tall, with thick skin and a shaved head. He had one of those bellies that
English dads feel the need to show off to the world when it’s sunny, but today
it was hidden away under a stretched Chelsea football shirt.

110 miles from
Chelsea.

He offered Becker his
hand for a shake and waited for introductions. Becker stumbled then caught up
with the moment, “Tom Bennett, this is a colleague of mine, DI Miller.”

Out of habit I showed
him my warrant card. My first name caught his eye straight away and he raised
his eyebrow, “Quite a name, how do you pronounce that?”

“Eoin.”

“Right, that Irish?”

I shrugged, I wanted
to say, does it matter?

His accent was a
faded, but there was enough of London in the middle of his words that I stopped
being offended by his Chelsea shirt.

Becker filled the
silence, “DI Miller’s going to help with the investigation, I thought I’d show
him the scene first.”

Bennett nodded and
waved at the open front door.

“After you, but you
already know who done it. I told you last night.”

We walked through the
house in silence. It didn’t matter that Bennett wasn’t leading the way, because
it was like every other house of its kind. The front door opened onto the
hallway, a door on our left would open onto the living room, and the stairs to
our right would lead up to three, maybe four, pastel coloured bedrooms. At the
rear of the hallway was a modern fitted kitchen, and a flimsy red wooden door
opened out onto the back patio.

The concrete slabs
were still dark with absorbed water and muddy boot prints showed where the
firemen had gone to work. The extension was still warm, a blackened timber
frame filled in with plaster. There were lumps of solid back plastic running
around the timber, melted into a shriveled trail. I guessed that the extension
hadn’t been finished, with sheets of black plastic covering the spaces that
hadn’t been filled in yet.

“How far from
finishing were you?”

Bennett paused,
wondering how I’d known, then said, “About halfway done.”

“Now it’s well done,”
Becker smirked before realizing what he’d said, then rambled to cover it, “So
they climbed over this wall here, lit it and climbed back?”

Bennett nodded again.
“Like I said last night, yeah.”

I looked at the
garden fence. It would have been difficult but not impossible. I’d gotten over
higher walls than that when I was garden hopping with my brother. I heard a
laugh, and looked up to the first floor window where a child was watching us.
Bennett smiled up at his son then waved him away.

“How long you lived
here?”

Bennett scratched his
chin and shrugged, “About five years. Moved in just before Matty was born.”

“And has anything
like this happened before?”

“They torched my car
a while back, you know that? Brand new Alfa Romeo, it was. Loved that fucking
car. Fucking Gypos.”

“Did you see them?”