Father and Son (21 page)

“You can use
this,” Baron says, showing Den into a small meeting room down the corridor from
the incident room.

He’s already told her about the Porsche. She didn’t need much in the
way of description. She could imagine exactly the scenario: John sitting alone,
all nice and calm, drinking till he was in a stupor, then doing something
ridiculously self-destructive. But he would have known there were security
cameras at the showroom. He wasn’t hiding. The day John Ray kills an innocent
person, she tells herself with absolute certainty, is the day he puts a bullet
through his own head. John did not kill Jeanette Cormac.

Baron places the file of the Leeds bombing on the table. Seventy
pages. And the Super wants Den to read it.

“Is this supposed to convince me that John’s guilty of something?”
she says, sitting down in front of the file and opening it. “A bombing that
happened over twenty years ago?”

Baron shrugs. He’s been as non-committal as possible since she
arrived, avoiding her eyes. Embarrassment? She can’t tell.

“We’re dealing with two murders,” he says, “possibly three, and there’s
a link back to the Leeds bombing. Reid was suspected of being involved, you’ll
read about it in there. And now he’s up here sniffing around, threatening Tony
Ray.”

“So why isn’t he your main suspect?” she says.

“He’s one of them.”

“And John’s the other? No way, Steve, this is bullshit!”

Baron rubs his face with his hands, talking as he does.

“John Ray was at both murder scenes, and he doesn’t have an alibi
for either. Her blood was all over his car. Don’t you think it’s about time to
stop being the obedient ex, Den?”

“It’s Reid,” she says. “Suddenly people are talking about the bomb
again. Journalist knows too much? She disappears. It’s gotta be Reid.”

“And Roberto Swales? Same MO. Same killer. But what’s the link? Old
employee of Tony Ray is what I’m thinking. Imports and exports, eh?”

“Where does Sheenan fit into all this?”

“They’ve not released the details, but he was also tortured. Just
like Swales.”

“And I suppose John did that as well?”

Baron sighs. “You’ve got fifteen minutes, then the Super wants you
out looking for him.”

“And you?”

“Don’t even try,” he mutters, turning to leave.

The door closes and she finds herself alone with the case file of an
unsolved bombing. She flicks straight through to the victim reports. A young
mother who’d been out shopping with her two-week-old boy. Craig Simpson was his
name. Fourteen days old and his life was over. She imagines the little gravestone
with his name on. Just the name, nothing else. He hadn’t done anything else, no
time to become a person. A name, all the mother would ever have to remember him
by.

She reads the interview with the boy’s mother, the horribly flat
language, the stark, unavoidable facts of that morning. They’d been out getting
things for his christening party. They were going to have it at her parents’
house, where she lived.

She?

Den scans the statement. No father mentioned. No father on the birth
certificate either. A mother on her own, two weeks after giving birth, and when
they pull her from the rubble they have to tell her the baby’s dead.

She feels a lurch in her stomach, trying not to think about what
happens to a two-week-old’s body as the blast of a bomb lays into it. And as
she does so she realises she’ll never make Superintendent. Fast-track? She’ll
go no higher than DCI, if that. As a detective working a case you can focus on
the leads, one after the other, identify, interview, eliminate. It’s a job,
nothing more.

Upstairs things are different. Cases multiply, victims become
numbers. You see the full span of evil, every crime in the city, file after
file, day after day. A dead baby? Just another piece in the jigsaw. Gotta keep
a clear head, don’t let yourself get involved. A dead baby’s mother? A useful source
of information, a detail from the crime scene, probably irrelevant to the enquiry.
What kind of a person can think like that?

She closes the file, lays her hands on the cover, taking a few deep
breaths. Then she opens it again, tries to focus. That’s why Kirk is up there
in her own office, she tells herself, running her hand over the first page, a
Superintendent because she allowed something inside her to wither and die.

She reads through the report, skimming where necessary. There’s not
a lot about the bombing itself. Pro job, nothing much in the way of clues.
Semtex packed into champagne bottles. The Semtex itself had been traced back to
a theft from a secure storage unit in Kiev, right when the Soviet union was
collapsing, when everything was up for grabs. Wednesday the 20th of June, 1990,
just a week before the bombing. Given the distances involved, it probably
entered the UK at the weekend.

That was all the information they had. Bernard Sheenan had refused
to name any of those involved. There was a note suggesting that it was a crew
from the north of England, possibly Leeds. But the source of the information
wasn’t given, and follow-ups had proved fruitless.

She ploughs on. Steve’s right to be non-committal. He was right
about it all, most often is. John is in the frame, and he’s gotta come in and
talk. It shouldn’t be her that brings him in, though. They shouldn’t be sending
her to find a suspect. But it’s not as if she has much room for complaint, not
now.

The door opens.

“Den?” a young woman says. “Is that you!”

It’s a support clerk whose name Den can’t remember. And she’s pregnant.

“Wow,” Den says, “look at you? When’s the big day?”

“A month,” the woman says, rubbing the bottom of her back. “Aches
like a bastard, and they’ve dragged me in on a friggin’ Sunday.”

She staggers to a chair and flops down, legs wide apart like a straight-backed
Falstaff, cradling her huge belly with pride. “Is that the file?”

“Yeah, I’m just about done.”

“Good. I need to make some copies.” She tuts with disgust. “Couple
of weeks old that baby was. Do you remember it? I was only a kid, but I’ve just
seen it on YouTube, that lad coming out, little bairn in his arms. I hope they
get ’em this time. Think of the poor mother.”

Den flicks through the file again, finds the mother’s statement, name
and address.

“Right, I’m done. Hope everything goes well with, y’know, that!”

“Thanks,” she says, patting her belly. “Nice to see you, Den.”

The Super is in the doorway of the incident room.

“You still here?” she says. “Come on, you’ll need someone to sign
you out.”

They take the stairs in silence. You can almost hear the cogs
grinding inside Kirk’s head as she tries to make things fit, dead babies, shipments
of explosives, ex-terrorists, John Ray…

“Hope you had a good look at the file,” she says as they get to the
security doors leading out to the public reception.

“I did,” Den says.

“Nasty case, this one,” the Super says. “Don’t quite know what we’ve
got yet. Anyway, off you go.”

She yanks one of the heavy security doors open.

“Make it snappy, Den. We’ll be putting a wanted report out on him this
afternoon.”

“He won’t be far,” Den says, eyes down as she goes.

“Hope you’re right.”

But Den’s not sure. As the cold wind that swirls around Millgarth
hits her square in the face, she’s not sure about anything. Champagne bottles?
That was never made public. So how did Jeanette Cormac know? And why was she
trying to tell John?

Jeanette knew too much, and it may have cost her her life. But what
about John?

The pain begins in
his neck, where it is the most acute, and spreads out across his shoulders and
down both arms. There’s more pain right across the upper half of his back and
in his hands. But this is flatter, duller. He pushes his head back down beneath
the water, wincing as once again the pain intensifies, to be followed by a
moment’s respite as he comes up for air. Then the pain returns.

He’s got the place to himself, the sky threatening rain, the wind
picking up. His breathing is racked with phlegm and his lungs heave like an
asthmatic’s.

“John… Ray…” he says, forcing himself on, further and further,
punishing his body until it shrieks with agony. But he powers through it,
pushing himself on until something breaks. “John… Ray…”

From just above his nose a faint line of blood runs each time his
head comes out of the water, the gash wide open, the scab washed away. And when
he reaches the edge of the pool and stops, sucking in breath so hard it seems
impossible that he might go on, the thin pink line of blood makes its way down
his face, and his wheezing turns to sobbing.

Then he pushes off again, arms pulling through the water as hard as
he can make them, his face screwed up in agony.

“What’s that?”
Baron says as he walks into the incident room. The place is full, bodies
dragged in on a Sunday, CID officers and a small army of clerks typing up reports,
everything going into the database, two murder cases at full-tilt.

The Cormac murder has gone to DCI Rollin, who is nowhere to be seen.
It hardly matters. Rollin doesn’t have an agenda, and he’s a good copper; he’ll
listen to Baron if ‒ when ‒ things start to click together. There
are several small groups working on each murder, CCTV, friends and family,
murder scenes, and it looks as if they’re working pretty well without the
constant involvement of Baron or Rollin.

There’s no breakthrough on the Roberto Swales case, though. The
victim had no close family, and his only known associates are from way back.
He’d been keeping his nose clean for years, although his recent purchase of the
Park Lane bar from Lanny Bride is hardly the act of a man who’d turned his back
on crime. Neither is being shot, tortured, and having his head caved in.

“Is that Ray’s?” he asks, approaching a young DC in the corner who’s
staring at a Macintosh laptop, its large screen emitting a clear, bright light
that illuminates his pallid face.

“Found in the Porsche,” he says as Baron comes and stands behind
him. “Back from forensics.”

Steele appears in the doorway, joins them, and the three of them
peer at the screen. The DC is clicking through scanned newspaper articles,
dozens of them, all about the Leeds bombing.

“It’s Jeanette Cormac’s,” the DC says. “Username for her webmail was
saved.”

“A book,” Steele says.

The young officer glances over his shoulder, confused. His eyes are
bloodshot and his breath stinks. Out on the piss last night. This should have
been his day off, then a call from Baron first thing, about thirty rings before
he answered.

“She was writing a book about Sheenan and the Leeds bombing,” Steele
explains. “
The Reluctant Bomber
.”

“Yet the laptop was in John Ray’s car,” Baron says.

“I’ve had the hard disk copied,” the DC says. “They’re looking
through it now.”

“Who is?”

“Couple of blokes from forensics.”

“Get more people, anybody you can find. We need to know exactly what
she’s been doing in Leeds. Names, places. Anything.”

“I already know a bit,” he says, reading from notes scribbled on an
A4 pad. “Week before the Leeds bombing, a shipment of Semtex was brought into
the UK. Suspected gang from Leeds behind it. Hull ferry from Zeebrugge. June
22nd 1990. Friday.”

“Names?”

“None. She doesn’t seem to write names down. She uses ‘BS’ for Brian
Sheenan. Unless it means
bullshit
…”

Baron pulls a face. For a moment he doesn’t understand.

“Why are you joking about a murder?” he says.

Steve Baron loses all sense of humour when he’s this deep into a
case, his social skills becoming borderline autistic. At times like this he’ll
willingly give money to beggars on the street, automatically handing it over rather
than disengaging from his line of reasoning.

As for his home life, there came a point in his marriage when Stella
insisted he stay in the city when he was on a serious case; she didn’t want him
in the house, the boys’ happiness snuffed out by their father’s indifference,
and any affection that she might show him ignored; his gaze would go right
through her, as if his thoughts were written on the wall behind her and she was
merely in the way.

“Sorry, Sir.”

“We know the date of the ferry for sure?” Baron asks, as if the
apology is beside the point.

“It looks like she was taking that as the confirmed date, yes.”

“You,” says Baron, pointing a finger at him, although he’s only a
couple of feet away, “make sure we’ve got plenty of people looking at the hard
disk, then follow up on the ferry crossing. Ship’s manifest, vehicles,
passports. And make it quick.”

“Hull?” the young man says.

“
Now!
” Baron balls at him. “Take someone with you. And if you
get any trouble, knock some heads together.”

The buzz in the room dips almost to nothing, then immediately picks
up again as people return to their work with renewed energy. Last year Baron
got a result on the murder of Lanny Bride’s daughter. A lost cause, they’d all
thought,
black on black
, crime against other criminals hardly ever gets
solved. But Baron had solved it. No one would bet against him doing the same
again.