Good Bait (16 page)

‘He's not dealing himself, I suppose?'

‘Not as far as we know. There was a suggestion a while back that he might have been smuggling in drugs along with his shipments from the Baltic. Couple of containers were opened and searched – nothing but plastic wraps of cheap clothing on their way to small-scale shops and market stalls up and down the country.'

Karen sat back, starting to run the possibilities, the variables, through her mind. ‘How do you want to play this?' she asked.

‘You run with your investigation, let your team know as much as you think they need. We'll keep up our surveillance on Dooley, maybe widen it to take in a couple of the others. Anything important starts to show, I'll put you in the frame.'

‘Likewise.'

‘Okay, good.' He got to his feet and Karen followed. A scattering of scruffy pigeons made as if to take flight but their hearts weren't in it.

Karen thanked him, meaning every word, shook hands, and set off towards Westminster Tube station. The protesters she understood to have been moved on from Parliament Square still seemed to be present in quite large numbers. No tents any more, no one sleeping rough, but banners a-plenty.
Capitalism STILL isn't Working. Stop the War in Afghanistan. Bring Our Troops Home Now
. And alongside that last, writ large, the ever-increasing numbers of fatalities from what some general or politician, without irony, had named Operation Enduring Freedom, the total growing, growing, growing, year on year.

Compared to that, she thought, crossing against the slowly moving traffic, what she had to deal with, serious in its way, was small beer indeed.

25

The cemetery was just south of the road that separated Heamor from Penzance proper, an expanse of land protected by trees and closely studded with markers in marble and stone. Late afternoon, the winds that had earlier scoured the day had all but died and the light was fading in the sky. Cordon's own father was here, had been here for some little time; his grave, as he would have wanted, plain and largely unadorned. Three lines from Robert Louis Stevenson, cleanly carved …

Under the wide and starry sky
,

Dig the grave and let me lie
.

Glad did I live and gladly die
.

Cordon had found them in a book of verse that had lain beside his father's hospice bed, uneasily underlined.

Three plots away lay the grave of an unknown French merchant seaman, a victim of the First World War, who for some reason had washed up on this part of the coast. There were other sailors buried there, too, Cordon knew; they had learned about it at school. Seventeen of the crew of the trawler
Wallasea
, killed in an attack by German surface craft down in Mounts Bay in January 1944. In his primary class they had made drawings, heavy the lurching blue of the heaving sea, the sky above erupting with the scarlet crash of exploding shells. The teacher had taken them to the causeway that leads, at low tide, across the edge of the bay towards St Michael's Mount and had them stand there, silent, staring out, thinking the unthinkable. His fingers had been cold, Cordon remembered, the first inklings of returning water pooling around the thin soles of his plimsolls.

Only the smaller of the two chapels was in use today, Maxine's friends a staunch but motley crew: some who'd known her from the streets, the squats and sleeping rough, those who'd survived; others she'd known from the Churches Breakfast Project or Addaction Community Support; a few neighbours from the street where latterly she'd lived, one of whom had invited mourners back to her house after the ceremony for sandwiches and tea.

Of Maxine's immediate family, there was no sign.

No Clifford Carlin.

No fostered children.

No Letitia: no Rose.

Seated on hard wood, knees pressed against the pew in front, Cordon struggled to concentrate on the clergyman's words, the benign platitudes, the elisions that skated over a misplaced life. An irregular death.

Behind him, an elderly man's suit exuded an almost overpowering smell of mothballs. Heads bowed, tears here and there were sniffed or coughed away.

When the organist wheezed out the introduction to the 23rd Psalm, ‘The Lord is My Shepherd', Cordon turned smartly and pushed his way outside.

She was standing immediately opposite the double doors, pale raincoat unbuttoned over a black dress, her mouth a dark red gash across her bloodless face.

Startled, Cordon stopped in his tracks.

‘Not a ghost,' Letitia said. ‘See.' She plucked at the skin tight on her cheek. ‘It's real.'

The lines, the gauntness made her somehow more attractive, Cordon thought, not less. Then banished the thought as quickly as it came.

‘Been a while,' she said.

‘Yes.'

‘How long?'

‘I don't know. Years.'

‘Too long, that's what you're meant to say.' Mocking him with her eyes. ‘You don't look any different – that too.'

‘It's true.'

‘Is it, bollocks.'

‘We all get a bit older.'

‘Not you. You were always fucking old.' She reached into her bag for a cigarette.

‘Now you're running some hotel in the Lake District.'

‘Anything wrong with that?'

‘Bit slow for the likes of you, I'd've thought.'

‘Gets too quiet we go down the Pencil Museum for a bit of a laugh.'

‘We?'

‘Me an' anyone else who's around.' She glanced towards the doors. ‘Let's shift before we get knocked down by the crowd.'

They stood by a section of stone wall, yew trees to either side. Car headlights hollowed yellow and amber along the road at their backs. Fifty metres away, the upturned earth of a freshly dug grave.

‘She came to see you,' Cordon said, ‘in London. Maxine.'

‘Silly cow.'

‘She was worried.'

‘Because I didn't want to spend time listening to my dad's old records while he tells me what I could've done with my life?' She flicked ash towards the ground. ‘I changed my mind, didn't I? No fuckin' crime.'

‘But you did see her? In London?'

‘Jesus, what's with all the questions?'

‘Did you see her?'

‘No, I never saw her. Didn't know she was there, did I?'

‘She had an address, Finsbury Park.'

‘So?'

‘She would have gone looking for you there.'

‘And not found me.' Letitia turned towards the doors. ‘They're coming out now, we better move. See her – what is it? – committed to the earth.'

Cordon fell in step beside her, rested his hand on the crook of her arm. ‘Maxine. The train. You really think she fell?'

She knocked him angrily away. ‘She's dead, right? Inside that soddin' box. A closed bloody coffin 'cause of what the train …'

She ran an arm across her face, her eyes.

‘You want to play the fucking policeman, don't do it with me. We understood?'

Fragments of earth showered against the coffin lid, small stones bounced once and slid off to the sides. The trowel passed from hand to hand. Ignoring it, Letitia reached down and scooped up raw dirt from the ground, then, leaning out over the graveside, let it fall between her fingers till there was nothing but air.

There should have been rooks cawing at the sky, Cordon thought, but instead there was silence, a moment of almost true silence, and then the awkward shuffling of feet, a few mourners already, hands in pockets, moving away. He had been thinking of his father, the meticulous way he would plan each step, each journey, each and every trip they made to this or that bird sanctuary or wildlife refuge; the small notebooks in which he would record everything they had seen. A meticulousness that had driven the young Cordon close to distraction.

If a thing's worth doing …

He did hear a bird then, rook, crow or jackdaw – his father would have known in an instant – but when he raised his eyes to look the bird was not there but in the past.

Shoulders brushed by him as he stood unmoving, remembering the last time he had bent to kiss his father's cheek, the roughness of the older man's unshaven face, the smell of something slowly rotting on his breath. Leaving, he had stepped out into a failing light much like this.

Gradually, he realised someone was standing beside him.

‘Are you all right, love?' A woman, round faced, bundled in black. He didn't know who she was.

‘Yes, thanks. I'm fine.'

‘Sometimes it takes a while.' She squeezed his hand. ‘You'll come back to the house? No sense letting all that good food go to waste.'

When he looked for her, Letitia had already gone. Taken one of the taxis, doubtless, that hung, like carrion, around the cemetery gates. From there to the station. The early evening train. Plymouth, then Bristol. Where then? East to London, north to the Lakes?

Back home, Cordon slapped some music on the stereo, splashed whisky into a glass.
You want to play the fucking policeman, don't do it with me. We understood?
And, underneath that, his father's patient tones:
If a thing's worth doing …

He jacked up the volume, stared out across rooftops to the bay.

Eric Dolphy in Champaign, Illinois, March 1953. ‘Something Sweet, Something Tender'.

Who did he think he was trying to kid?

26

One of these mornings, Karen thought, she'd step outside and not feel the bite of frost on her face and know winter was finally over. But not yet. She tightened the scarf at her neck and fastened the last button on her coat. Her breath curled like pale smoke on the air.

Carla had returned to her own flat and would be back at the National that evening, treading the boards. ‘The show,' as she'd said, ‘had best go bloody on. And I do mean bloody. More bodies per minute with these Jacobeans than Camden can come up with in a year.'

Karen had expressed her concern.

‘Best thing for me,' Carla had assured her. ‘After this week there's a break and then we're off on tour. Milton Keynes, Woking and points west. Bringing Middleton to the masses.'

But when Karen had clasped her arms round her in a farewell hug, she had felt Carla's body shake and read the residue of fear in her eyes. She wished there was more she could do for her, more to help, but didn't know what it was. Maybe, in time, the impact of what had happened would lessen, though she would never fully forget. Maybe, Karen thought, Carla would find a way to use it in her work.

She was crossing the street when her mobile rang. Tim Costello. Reports of a drug-related shooting in Camberwell had come in, a seventeen-year-old youth with known drug connections found in the early hours of the morning with gunshot wounds to his legs and back.

‘Some link with Walthamstow, that's what you're thinking?'

‘It's possible.'

‘On your bike, then, sunshine.' Karen felt herself grinning. She'd been wanting to say that for ages. ‘Get yourself down there. And don't let anyone bully you around.'

She snapped the connection closed.

Mike Ramsden was waiting in her office, cigarette smoke acrid on his breath, skin loose and baggy around his eyes. Karen found herself wondering, not for the first time, where he'd slept, his bed or someone else's, a couch, the floor.

‘You okay?'

‘Been better.'

‘Want to talk about it?'

‘What? You're my mother now?'

‘Suit yourself.' She slid into the chair behind her desk. ‘Terry Martin, how'd it go?'

‘Difficult to find a more innocent man. Shocked at what had happened over at Camden, what he'd seen on the news. Specially when he saw one of the blokes killed was someone he knew. Used to, anyway. Aaron Johnson. Hadn't seen him in a twelvemonth, maybe more. Not as much as clapped eyes on him. Bit of a falling-out. No idea what he was into these days. Something a bit iffy, he'd not be too surprised, but he'd no idea what.'

‘And Parsons? He knew Jamie Parsons?'

‘Just a name, he reckons. Heard it a few times, bandied around. Wouldn't know him if he bumped into him on the street. Not that he'll be doing that any time soon.'

‘You believed him?'

‘Like I believe water flows uphill, yes, I believed him. Not the same as having proof.'

‘And we still haven't been able to shake his alibi for the Andronic murder?'

‘Not so far.'

Karen sighed; shuffled some papers across her desk. ‘The car. Camden. Better news there?'

‘Some. Stolen from outside a house in Totteridge twenty-four hours earlier. Right off the drive.'

‘Reported?'

Ramsden nodded. ‘Some bigwig with a firm of financial consultants in the City. Bonafides checked down to the colour of his socks.'

‘Not turned up since?'

‘No, but it will. Dumped somewhere. Likely torched.' Ramsden shook his head. ‘Bloody waste. Nice motor like that. Next to brand new.'

‘And Tottenham? Hector Prince?'

‘Still waiting on Trident.'

Karen held a breath; released it slowly. ‘Okay, press on. We'll talk again later.'

‘I don't doubt.'

Karen switched on her computer. Time for a quick rattle through her emails before checking her in-tray, getting some shape into the day.

Tim Costello was back by mid-afternoon. First signs were the weapon used was a 9mm pistol, most likely a Glock. Pretty much the weapon of choice. Forensics would be checking the ammo against that used in Walthamstow and the chance it might have come from the same batch that had originated in Deptford, the pistol also.

‘Okay, Tim,' Karen said. ‘Let me know how things develop.'

She'd seen the victim's naked body in the morgue, the Walthamstow murder, skinny arms popped with needle marks, lesions on his skin. His face, parchment white, the face of a boy, a young man never growing old. Another victim, she thought, of the same lack of opportunity and education as Hector Prince. A different colour, but the same skewed culture.