Good Bait (10 page)

A while since it had been that, Cordon ventured.

A double line of bell pushes was attached to the side wall, faded name cards alongside, all blank. Cordon set his hand against the front door, prised up the flap to the letter-box and peered through.

‘Done a bunk, mate. Scarpered and good fuckin' riddance. Set fire to the place before they left an' all. Someone hadn't nipped in quick with the alarm, whole soddin' street'd've burned down.'

Cordon had spotted the man earlier – ex-boxer, ex-wrestler, scar tissue around the eyes, muscle gone to seed – his dog off the leash ahead of him, in and out of gardens, cocking its leg, rummaging in bins.

‘It was serious, then?'

‘Serious enough. Half a dozen engines round here, more, middle of the bleedin' night, how serious d'you want?'

‘This was when?'

‘Last week, just.'

‘How about casualties? Anybody trapped inside?'

The man leaned a shade closer. ‘That's the thing. Right up till that happens there's people in and out all the time. Blokes, all of ‘em. Regular knocking shop, that's what it was.'

‘A brothel, you mean?'

‘Call it what you like. Never see the same face twice. Then this happens, fire brigade, police all arrive, ‘side from cockroaches and the like, the place is empty. Someone after the insurance, either that or clearin' out ahead of gettin' their collars felt. Mind you, don't take many blow jobs to get most coppers lookin' the other way.'

‘The people who lived here? Whoever was running the place, you've no idea what happened to them? Where they went?'

‘Why's that then? What's it to you?' At the hint of aggression in the man's voice, the dog growled and snapped and the man cursed it softly and aimed a kick at its ribs.

‘Just looking for someone. A friend. Might have worked here a while back. Letitia Carlin. Early thirties, most probably reddish hair. Could've been calling herself Rose.'

‘Could've been callin' herself Mary bloody Magdalene for all I know. Kept 'emselves to 'emselves.'

‘You don't recall seeing anyone like her then?'

‘Wastin' your time, mate, sorry.' With a hunch of the shoulders, he turned away.

Cordon stood back and watched him go. The rain continued to fall in a steady drizzle as he walked, damp seeping steadily into his shoulders and along his back.

‘So what now?' Kiley said.

They were sitting in the Tufnell Park flat, the sounds of Mose Allison's piano and Southern-inflected voice barely covering the stop-start of homeward-bound traffic as it made its cautious way towards Muswell Hill, Finchley Central and points north.

Kiley had thrown him a towel on his return, lent a sweater, poured a glass of Scotch and set it down close to Cordon's right hand.

‘The father,' Cordon said, ‘he's supposed to run a bookshop down in Hastings. At least he did.'

‘Thinking of going down?'

‘Thinking of it.'

‘Hour or so on the train. Victoria, probably. Charing Cross? Come all this way, shame not to check it out.'

Cordon knew he was right. After leaving the house where, according to her mother, Letitia was reputed to have lived and worked, he had stopped off at the local nick and found a uniformed sergeant of around his own age who wasn't averse to talk. There had been reports of the place being used for immoral purposes, but nothing had ever been proved. Not enough to prosecute anyone, at least, take them to court. And, yes, there was some suspicion of the fire being started deliberately, but nothing conclusive in the Fire Officer's preliminary report. Certainly not enough to bring charges, always assuming they'd been able to untangle the maze of paperwork that surrounded the building's actual owners. And no casualties, that was correct. Whole place seemed to have been cleared before the fire took hold.

How much better off, Cordon thought, he would have been pottering around in Newlyn, doing his level best to give community policing a good name.

‘Later,' Kiley said, ‘there's a pub down Kentish Town, the Oxford. Jazz upstairs some nights. Decent food in the bar. We could give it a try, if you like.'

‘Why not?'

The guitarist, over from the Continent somewhere, made noises like a scalded cat. Seated behind a kit that included five cymbals, three tom-toms and a bass drum that looked to have come from a kid's practice set, the drummer bashed and crashed through a polyrhythmic world of his own. Only the pianist, perched high behind an electric keyboard, seemed touchingly aware of old-fashioned words like ‘melody' or ‘tune'. Eric Dolphy was one thing, Cordon thought, some people's idea of far out, but this was altogether something else.

Downstairs saved it. The premium guest beer was Sussex Old Ale from Harveys in Lewes, rich and dark, and both the steak and the lamb fillet were tasty and tender, nicely pink. An hour or so from closing, Kiley rang Jane and asked if she fancied joining them, which she did. Dark hair; small, neat features; a true and open laugh; hands that were rarely still, emphasising this, demonstrating that. Cordon, enjoying her company, could just see her in front of a class of kids. When she and Kiley headed off together at the end of the evening, leaving him with the key to the flat, he felt a regret he fought hard to understand.

14

It would have been her father's birthday. A picture of him in her mind, another fixed by magnets to the fridge door. A tall black man, open-necked shirt, hair brushed back, the beginnings of a belly, hands – large hands – down by his sides. A street in west London where they had lived. She looked for a smile on his face that was never quite there.

Serious he had been. A serious man.

This country, I don't like the way it's goin'
.

Rioting on the streets of Brixton after a black woman was shot during a police raid; more rioting on an estate in Tottenham, in the midst of which a white police officer was hacked – hacked – to death. Earlier that year, the Miners' Strike, police and pickets in pitched battles every night on the television news. And everywhere now, it seemed, her father looked, knots of men, young men, young men black and white, on street corners, unemployed.

At parent–teacher evenings, her father, dressed in his best suit, the one he wore for church, shoes shining for all they were worth –
My girl, how's she doin'? –
pride reflected in his eyes.

Education, my girl, that's the thing. College, university even. Make somethin' of yourself
.

A kiss on the forehead after he had read her school report, silver coins pressed down into the palm of her hand.

Make somethin' of yourself, you promise me that. Make a difference if you can
.

As if, somehow, he knew he would never live to see her grow.

‘You think this is what he would have wanted?' her mother had asked, when Karen told her she was joining the police.

‘I don't know,' Karen said. ‘But I think so, yes. Yes, I do.'

Her mother had squeezed her hands and said, ‘God bless,' uncertainty in her eyes.

Now some days, too many days, if truth be told, it was difficult to bring back, fresh to mind, exactly why she had made the choice she had. Too easy to become mired down in the quotidian, the day-to-day: forms and rotas and outcomes, the minutiae of personnel management and organisation. The lack of apparent progress.

One pace forward, one step back.

What was it that girl used to sing? The one who wished she'd been born black.

Something about little by little? Bit by bit?

Back when Karen had still been a PC – still in uniform, for God's sake – she'd gone out with a hazelnut-complexioned swimming instructor with a predilection for white women who sang the blues. Blues and soul. Dusty Springfield – that was the one. Janis Joplin, Bonnie Bramlett, Lulu, even. All fine up to a point. Making love beneath a blow-up of the Robert Crumb cover for
Cheap Thrills
, with Janis hollering for someone to take a piece of her heart, a piece of something – just about acceptable if it helped the boy get it on.

She still had some of the CDs he'd given her; played them from time to time.
Dusty in Memphis
. Lulu at Muscle Shoals.

Little by little, bit by bit.

Police work to a T.

Once in a while you just had to pinch yourself, remembering why.

The night cleaner who had come forward in the Wood Green stabbing had picked out one of the assailants from a batch of photographs. Hector Prince, street name Mohock, a name derived from the two gangs – the Mohocks and the Hawkubites – who'd terrorised London in the early eighteenth century, beating up women, children and old men after dark. It was something Hector had picked up in a year ten citizenship lesson, one of those rare days he'd bothered showing up at school. A little learning, a dangerous thing.

Only problem was, when Hector had been invited to attend a line-up at the police station, the cleaner had failed to pick him out. And there he was, cocky as a prize-winning bantam when they told him he was free to go, bumping fists with his solicitor outside the station.

A closer look at Terry Martin, following the conversation with his wife, revealed that, in addition to three minor drug busts which went back quite a few years, more recently he had been charged with two serious offences: involvement in a post office robbery in Greenford, and possession of a large amount of high-grade cocaine with intent to supply. The first case had come to court, then fallen apart on the issue of identification; the robbers had worn rubberised Blair and Bush masks throughout and the Crown's other evidence had been less than foolproof from the start. What had stymied the second case, even before the CPS had agreed to prosecute, was the disappearance of the confiscated cocaine from police hands. One of the officers concerned had been warned about his future conduct and transferred to other duties; another had resigned.

In neither instance, then, had Martin been convicted, but even so, the company he was shown to have been keeping was tasty indeed. One of the men charged alongside him for the post office robbery, Graham Arthurs, was currently serving five years for malicious wounding and causing grievous bodily harm; and Arthurs' older brother, Les, had been questioned about his suspected involvement in a payroll snatch at a supermarket in High Wycombe. A second suspect, Kevin Martin, Terry's half-brother, was on police bail, pending an investigation into an incident in Lewisham in which a fifteen-year-old who'd been doing grunt work for one of the local drug dealers had been beaten so badly as to lose the use of an eye.

And there were others in Martin's circle, mostly around the same age, thirty-five to fifty, almost all of them, a couple of Glaswegians aside, from south of the river.

Dougie Freeman. Jason Richards. Aaron Johnson.

Michael John Carter. ‘Mad Mike' to his friends.

Ramsden told Karen he'd seen Carter once, during a raid on a club in Peckham where he was employed as bouncer, lift an officer off the ground, two-handed, and hurl him against and almost through the windscreen of the nearest car. After that it had taken half a dozen men to overpower him and hold him down.

And then there was Martin's involvement with the BNP. Several photographs and a short piece of video footage culled from Special Branch files. Martin at full throttle, mouth wide open, shouting racist abuse, singing ‘God Save the Queen', the flag of St George fluttering behind him.

All of which was enough, Karen thought, to brace Terry Martin on his return from Tallinn. Taking Tim Costello along would give her a chance to see how well he handled himself, as well as, maybe, offering a little light relief.

15

Terry Martin walked through from airside with the look of an ex-footballer for whom life on Sky Sports News was always going to be a step too far. Close-cropped hair, stubble, pricey suit that he somehow managed to make look cheap. Carry-on held in one large hand.

Costello had written Martin's name in marker on a piece of card and stood amongst a gaggle of minicab drivers and other meeters and greeters, holding it high above his head. His little joke.

Humour him, Karen thought. She was interested in seeing for herself how he handled himself in situations like this. ‘You do the talking,' she'd said. ‘I'll listen.'

‘What's this?' Martin said, his face too close to Costello's for comfort. ‘Someone looking to do me a favour?'

‘Not exactly.'

The airport had allotted them a small room devoid of decoration save for a CityJet calendar for 2009, open at October, a picture of the Dundee Botanical Gardens in autumn. There was an air vent, a small window that didn't seem to open out on to anything, several stacking chairs and a square metal table.

‘Whatever this is about,' Martin said, sitting heavily, ‘make it snappy, okay? I ain't got all day.'

‘How was Tallinn?' Costello asked chirpily, sounding as if he really cared. ‘Successful trip? Business, was it? A little R & R? Bit of both? Sex tourism's the big thing, apparently. Several hundred per cent rise in prostitution. AIDS too, of course. Hand in hand these days, unfortunately.'

‘What the fuck is this? Some kind of market fucking research?'

Close up, beneath the stubble, Martin's face was slack and pale. His breath, in Costello's face, was sour. Not enough sleep. Too much airline booze. Burning Tallinn at both ends.

‘We'll say business then, shall we?'

‘Say what you fuckin' like.'

‘What is the nature of your business, Mr Martin?' Karen asked, stepping in, the voice of reason.

‘My business?' A burly shrug. ‘Textiles, import and export. Tallinn it's mainly sportswear, a little Gore-tex, women's clothing. We bring it in, sell it on.'

‘We?'

‘My partners and me.'

‘Which partners might that be?' Costello asked.