Four Below (11 page)

‘The surgeon is upstairs with the body in the back bedroom,’ he informed Fairfield. ‘The sister, who found it, is in the kitchen. PC Purkis is looking after her.’ He
nodded his head backwards towards the end of the narrow hall, where a door stood ajar. The door to the front room was open. Fairfield stuck her head in, quickly summing up the interior. A
three-piece suite, framed pictures on the wall, hard-wearing carpet, an old-fashioned sound system. Tidy. It didn’t look too shabby, considering there was a dead junkie lying upstairs. To get
to it required a quick shuffle of officers in the desperately confined space at the bottom of the stairs.

‘In here, Inspector.’ The surgeon’s voice guided them to the right bedroom, though it would have been hard to get lost. The bedroom was small and in twilight; pink curtains
were drawn. There was little here apart from a 1970s dressing table, chair and bed. The woman’s body was kneeling and slumped face down on the bed. Fairfield guessed she had been in her late
thirties. She was clad in a woollen dress. The furnishings gave out a strong scent of incense, almost masking the smell of escaped urine coming from the body. The air felt damp.

‘Cause of death?’ Fairfield asked.

‘I’d put money on an overdose. I’d say the needle had only just left the vein in her arm. You can see it under her body; she’s still holding the syringe with her right
hand.’

Fairfield bent to take a look at it, then surveyed the paraphernalia on the bedside table. ‘Deliberate or accidental?’

‘I wouldn’t want to venture an opinion. We’ll leave that to the pathologist, shall we?’

‘Any sign she might have contracted anthrax, like our chap in the shopping centre?’

‘None at all as far as I can see. The autopsy will show it.’

‘I don’t see the wrap,’ Sorbie said, looking closely at the mess on the bedside table. He crouched down in what little space there was and searched the floor.

Fairfield made room for him. ‘Nothing’s been removed, has it?’

The doctor snapped shut his case. ‘Not by me. And not by anyone else while I was here.’

‘All right. What’s the story here? Did she live alone or with others?’

‘With the sister, I believe,’ the surgeon said, in the doorway. ‘I’m finished here.’

‘Right, thanks. Sorbie? Let’s have a chat with the sister.’

In the kitchen, Carole Maar sat dry-eyed and still, staring straight ahead at a spot on the wall between the calendar picture of a cat and a leaning mop handle. Her hair was a dull straw that
matched her eyebrows. She was dressed in washed-out, unfashionable jeans and several layers of sweaters, the top one a light shade of charity-shop orange. She was thirty-nine but looked much older.
PC Purkis, who had vacated the only other chair when Fairfield entered, had made her a cup of tea. It remained untouched.

Formalities over, Fairfield pulled the chair opposite the woman, who was still avoiding eye contact, and sat down. She signalled to the PC that she could leave the room. ‘Ms Maar …
can I call you Carole?’

Maar shrugged. Why not.

‘I’m very sorry to have to ask you questions at a time like this, but it’s important we establish some facts. It was you who found her, is that right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And it was you who called the ambulance?’

Carole hesitated. ‘I didn’t know who else to call. I knew Pat was dead. I knew they couldn’t do anything. But who do you call? I didn’t know.’ Her voice was hard
and flat.

‘You did the right thing.’ Fairfield looked around the cramped kitchen. ‘You were both living here together?’

‘Yes.’

‘And do you use drugs yourself?’

A nod.

‘What exactly, heroin?’

Another nod.

‘And … do you inject …?’

A shake of the head. ‘I smoke.’

‘So what happened here today?’

It was a short and simple story. They had quarrelled. They quarrelled a lot. These days mainly about money and drugs. Both had left the house independently in the morning, not speaking to each
other, trying to score. Carole had tried and failed to raise money for a wrap and returned empty-handed. She had been home some time before discovering her younger sister in exactly the position
she was in now. Her sister obviously had managed to score drugs. Enough to kill herself with.

Fairfield wondered about the arrangement. Two sisters, pushing middle age, living together, using heroin together, waiting for the inevitable to happen. And here it was.

‘Had she been suicidal? Was it deliberate, d’you think?’ Sorbie asked.

Carole didn’t even look up. She shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. But you can never tell, can you? It’s easy to get … tired.’

‘I’ll have to ask you to hand over the remainder of the heroin your sister scored today.’

‘What remainder?’ Carole asked.

‘The house will be subject to a drugs search anyway. And you’ll be searched, of course, so you might as well hand it over now,’ Sorbie said.

Carole dug the wrap from her jeans pocket and laid it carefully on the table.

‘Is that all there is?’ Fairfield asked. ‘It may be what killed your sister, so I think it would be very foolish to smoke it. You don’t know what’s in it. We have
reason to believe there is contaminated heroin in circulation that could make you very ill indeed.’

For a moment the woman did not react. Then she produced another wrap from where it had been tucked into her sock.

‘That’s all of it now, is it?’ The wraps looked different from most Fairfield had seen recently. The bright white powder was contained in small rectangular resealable bags. She
thanked Maar and let Sorbie drop the wraps into an evidence bag. ‘Is this what your usual supply looks like?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Did you and your sister use the same dealers?’

‘Mostly.’

‘But not today?’

‘Look, I don’t know, do I?’ Carole became animated for the first time. ‘I wasn’t with her, okay? I come home and she’s dead. Is all I know. Junkies die. It
happens. If it isn’t one thing that kills you, it’s another.’

Fastening her seat belt in Sorbie’s car, Fairfield echoed Maar’s conclusion. ‘One thing or another. Let me have a look at the wraps again.’

Sorbie passed them over inside the evidence bag.

‘Ever seen one that looked like that?’

‘One or two. Little food bags.’ Dealers didn’t normally bother spending money on bags. Wraps usually came in any old bits of plastic. ‘Posh. But I haven’t seen it
that colour for years.’ For a long time now heroin on the street was Afghan stuff, yellow or brown.

‘Quicker we get it to the lab the better.’

‘Junkies,’ Sorbie complained as he drove off. ‘I can’t believe Denkhaus has us traipsing after dead junkies. Or even live ones.’ In Sorbie’s book, a dead
junkie was a good junkie, one that was unlikely to cause more grief, commit more crime, suck more drugs into the city.

Fairfield’s mood turned as bleak as the streets they travelled along. ‘Until we nail the source of the anthrax, we’ll be chasing every bloody junkie, dead or alive. And all
points between.’

‘It’s useless,’ Sorbie insisted. ‘We’ll never find it that way.’ Fairfield knew that users never revealed the source of their supplies. To do so was suicide.
Once you ratted on a dealer, you were never safe again, not at home, not on the street, not in prison, not in rehab. In Mexico, dealers were raiding rehabilitation centres, shooting everyone
inside. To discourage the rest. It wasn’t quite that bad yet in Bristol. But for how much longer? Sorbie was doing nothing to lighten Fairfields’s mood. ‘Drop me back at my car,
Jack, I’ll call it a day.’

It had been snowing continuously, and the short drive home to her little maisonette in Cotham had taken twice as long as it should have done. Why was it that the British found
it so impossible to cope with snow? In Sweden or Canada they had routinely several feet of the stuff and everything worked just fine, roads got cleared and gritted and people coped. Here, two
inches of it fell and the headlines read ‘Commuter Misery as Big Freeze Grips British Isles’. Perhaps they were just more used to it in those countries. Her own street of large
Victorian houses looked softened and seasonal, with every parked car and every tree hooded white. The path to her front door had been cleared and gritted by the couple in the upper maisonette; she
was glad, since she was laden with bags of shopping she had picked up on the way. She would make sure she’d do her bit and sweep the path tomorrow.

In the kitchen, she elbowed the radio on even before she had set down her carrier bags. With the cork pulled on her bottle of Australian wine, she studied the cooking instructions on the sleeve
of her ready meal and turned on the oven. This had long become routine now. Who had the strength to cook after work? Cooking was what you watched people do on TV while your ready meal heated up.
And if you liked what you saw on telly, you looked for it – or something vaguely similar – next time you were at the supermarket. Anyway, she did cook sometimes, pasta mainly,
so
there
. It wasn’t that she was a useless cook; she used to cook quite a bit back in the early days, when there was someone to cook for. But hey. Supermarket’s finest lamb moussaka.
Her mother would finally disown her if she ever found out.

Junkies. Had they all become junkies of one form or another now, relying on their dealers to survive? A bottle of wine nearly every night was probably overdoing it too, but then sometimes she
fell asleep before she had a chance to finish it. At least she didn’t drink at lunchtime, like some. She had smelled cider on Sorbie more than once, but he never admitted to more than a quick
half. She might one day have to breathalyse him to find out just how much he put away each time he went out for lunch.

When the timer went and she opened the oven door, the moussaka even smelled acceptable. With her first glass of wine poured and the food dished up in a fashion that bore little resemblance to
the picture on the packet, she settled on the sofa in the sitting room. Balancing the plate on her lap, she reached for the TV remote, hoping to find some news item of people being pathetic in the
snow. When she did, the phone rang. Typical.

‘Hello?’ It was a call from a mobile, and the connection was so bad she had to interrupt the man who was talking.

‘Look, I can’t hear a word you’re saying, it’s a really bad line. Hello?’ The call was interrupted and she hung up. How did they always know the precise moment when
you were picking up your fork? She took a sip of wine and picked up her fork. The phone rang again. She answered it. This time the connection was only marginally clearer.

‘This better be good.’

‘I can’t promise that.’

‘Who is this?’

‘It’s me, Kats. It’s Paul. The guy you married?’

Fairfield reached for her glass and drained it.

There was never any quiet. Not real quiet. Who wanted to live in a city that never slept? Or a block of flats that never stopped reverberating with noise and anger? Mike wiped
the condensation from the kitchen window, which looked directly on to the street. Snow. Perhaps that would muffle the sounds a little. More likely by tomorrow morning it would bring noisy kids on
to the street. At least that would be a happy noise. Outside a van, grey or blue, hard to tell under the orange sodium lights, braked too abruptly on the settling snow and skidded to a halt
opposite the house. It seemed no one was used to snow any more. He remembered his own childhood winters: there always seemed to be snow then, and everyone had wooden sleds shod with iron rails.

The day it snowed, you got your sled out and sandpapered the rust off the rails, rubbed them with bacon rinds or a stub of candle and you were ready for it. Now all most kids had were flimsy
bits of plastic or just bin liners to sit on.

Was there a definite date when everything had turned cheap and tacky and flimsy, or had that all arrived gradually? Now he could see it everywhere. His counsellor had said he should avoid
thinking about it. And all the other things. That they were just going to drive him back into a depressive state. That in the past he had used these thoughts as an excuse to start drinking again.
As though it was that easy, that simple. Avoid the bad thoughts and stay sober. Three months in rehab hadn’t done it. They had decided he needed another three months. And afterwards he was
not allowed to go back to his old life, his drinking buddies and failures. So now he was here, looking for a new life, new failures. It had all started well enough; the newness had been
distracting. But he was still banned from driving and still hadn’t found a job. This tiny flat with its clammy walls took his breath away. It was small but cost a fortune to heat, and
everything was always covered in condensation, the windows, the outside wall.

He had to get out of here for a bit; at least outside he could stretch, breathe, move. Move carefully. It felt as though they had deliberately housed him in a block of flats encircled by pubs.
He knew there were off-licences and pubs everywhere; you simply couldn’t avoid seeing them. What you could avoid was going inside, putting all your money on the bar and drinking until it was
gone. You had to try not to think about it, stop imagining it. The warmth of it, the smells, the atmosphere, the instant feeling of relief, of coming home …

The world was floating on a sea of alcohol. He just had to make sure his little boat didn’t spring a leak. Mike zipped up his jacket and pulled a woolly hat over his ears. At the kitchen
table he put his ancient laptop on standby and unplugged his little camera from the charger. He hated it, ever since they had let him use a real digital camera on the photography course, but it
would probably take years to save up for an SLR. And then the course had folded, of course. When the tutor suddenly quit, the community centre had cancelled the next one. Lack of funding. The cuts.
He took good pictures, the tutor had said, and she hadn’t just said it to humour him. She had picked them out for praise in front of the others. The others. They were all in the same boat, of
course. They had all expected to see each other again,
promised
they’d see each other again when the next course started up, and then the letter came. Funding cuts … savings
… in the current climate … regret … cancelled. He’d probably never see them again now. He had started saving for a real camera, in an empty honey jar, but kept having to
raid it to charge the key for the electric. The camera he used came from a charity shop, but it
did take pictures
. He mustn’t indulge in self-pity. Get the best you can afford, the
tutor had said, and work with what you’ve got.