Lost River (11 page)

Still, they’d managed to spell his name right, and the subs in Chesterfield hadn’t messed up the story too much. He supposed he ought to be grateful for small mercies. The trouble with publicity like this was that everyone he met would want to ask him about it, to pat him on the back and say ‘Well done, anyway’ or ‘Hard luck – you tried.’ It wasn’t what he needed. Maybe he should keep his head down for a few days until it had all blown over.

Back in the office, everyone was pestering him for attention. They needed his advice, they wanted his signature, they had messages for him, they had questions. Always more questions.

‘Want me to follow that up?’

‘I can run with that if you like, Ben.’

‘The DI wants to know why it hasn’t been actioned.’

He really needed some advice. Cooper found himself automatically scrolling to Fry’s number on his mobile. At the last second, he remembered that she wasn’t around. Well, he could phone her, but she was in Birmingham. She would have no interest in what he was doing back in Derbyshire. And why should she?

Finally, Cooper called a meeting of his team. Gavin Murfin was the senior DC, as the longest serving. Luke Irvine and Becky Hurst made up the rest of the team. They were hardly an army of crime fighters. But they were doing their best, one case at a time.

‘So what’s the status of the drugs case on the Devonshire Estate? The Michael Lowndes enquiry.’

‘Our information says that there’ll be another meeting tonight,’ said Murfin. ‘We could nail them this time.’

‘Let’s do it, then,’ said Cooper.

‘Really?’

Three mouths fell open.

‘Diane would usually tell us to fill in all the paperwork and do a risk assessment,’ said Murfin.

‘It was all done the first time, wasn’t it?’

‘Well, yeah, but –’

‘I’ll sign it off, then. Let’s set up the tasks. If we pull it off, I’d like Becky and Luke to make the arrests. Is that okay with you, Gavin?’

Murfin managed to control his eyebrows. ‘No problem, boss.’

While the others busied themselves, Cooper picked up the paper, read the headline again, and sighed. Well, as long as he didn’t get all the nutters in Edendale phoning him up and writing him letters in green ink…

It was only when he read down to the end of the story that he discovered the writer knew far more than they ought to.

‘Police are believed to have received an anonymous letter making undisclosed allegations against the Nield family.’

How the heck had the
Eden Valley Times
known that?

A call to the news editor established that the paper had received a copy of the same letter that was sent to the police, and theirs had come in anonymously, too.

So it was used without checking? Was that the standard of journalism now?

‘We don’t have the staff,’ said the news editor.

Don’t have the staff? Cooper put down the phone and looked at his team of three. Join the club.

The pigeon park. That’s what she’d called it when she was a child. She would come here with Alice Bowskill sometimes when they were on a shopping trip in the city. The Bull Ring, New Street, and a stop off here for a sit down. The pigeon park.

In reality, it was the graveyard of St Philip’s Cathedral. Conveniently situated near shops and office blocks, it was full of people eating their sandwiches on the benches at lunchtime. Hence the pigeons. Grubby grey pests waddling about the pathways, eyeing up the public hopefully for scraps of bread.

She’d been nervous of the birds as a kid, anxious about their beaks and claws, startled by the sudden clatter of their wings. But she’d been fascinated by them too, in a way. These pigeons seemed to inhabit an entirely separate world of their own – clustering on the tallest buildings at night, stalking the parks by day. They lived apart from people, but took advantage of them when it suited. Now she could see nothing interesting about the birds at all. They were scavengers, pure and simple. They probably carried disease on their scaly feet and fleas in their feathers.

Fry looked up. She’d heard that peregrine falcons were nesting on the roof of the BT Tower these days. If falcons ate pigeons, they were welcome.
A few hundreds yards away stood the West Midlands Police headquarters in Lloyd House, on Colmore Circus. The old
Post and Mail
building used to stand next to it, with a digital clock high on its upper storeys. The last time she’d seen it, the building was in the late stages of demolition, all the journalists having moved out to a vast open-plan newsroom at Fort Dunlop.

Fry checked her phone to make sure there was a signal. It was a habit she’d got into while she’d been living in Derbyshire. Those Peak District hills were a nightmare. But here, she was actually able to stay in touch.

She was waiting for a call to arrange a meeting place. A message had been left at her hotel this morning. An old friend wanted to offer some information. A voice from her past, another reminder of her time here in Birmingham.

On the way to St Philip’s, she’d walked through the Bull Ring and into Selfridges, ‘the boob tube’ building, the Dalek’s Ballgown, covered in fifteen thousand aluminium discs in a design inspired by a Paco Rabanne dress. She’d inhaled the smells from the food hall on the ground floor as they wafted their way up through the cat’s cradle of escalators.

For a moment, she’d paused in front of Birmingham Town Hall. Its Victorian architects had made it look like a Roman temple, with forty marble columns. Once, on a school trip, a guide had explained that those pillars were modelled on the Temple of Castor and Pollux in Rome. The Temple of Bastard and Bollocks, the kids had called it, giggling among themselves.

Anthony Gormley’s
Iron Man
stood nearby in Victoria Square, a twenty-foot mummy figure leaning to one side, as if rising from the tomb.

And then the call came.

‘Meet me at the old cemetery in the Jewellery Quarter Actually, there are two. Make sure it’s the southern one, Warstone Lane. There’s an entrance from Pitsford Street.’

‘A cemetery, Andy?’

‘It’s quiet at this time of day. And handy for the Metro.’

Fry ended the call and shoo’d away an inquisitive pigeon. The Jewellery Quarter had survived, then. That was a miracle. It was one of the legacies of the city’s industrial past, an area of Hockley with dealers and jewellery workshops providing a glimpse into a historic trade. Now it was a tram stop on the Metro line from Snow Hill to Wolverhampton.

There were other monuments still surviving in the city, here and there. Monuments to the 1960s, mostly. The Rotunda. The British Telecom tower. They were antiquities now, mere curiosities in the landscape, just the way that Neolithic stone circles were in the Peak District. History was a pretty elastic concept, wasn’t it? All a matter of perspective.

Fry parked her Audi on the top level of the Jewellery Quarter car park in Vyse Street. She’d found the entrance tucked between the Creative Watch Company and the premises of Regency Jewellers. From the roof level, near the top of Staircase C, she had a clear view up the street towards the exit from Jewellery Quarter Metro station. After a few minutes a train went through, then a blue-and-red Metro tram unit quietly pulled into the northbound platform.

She’d checked out the station earlier. She was confident there was only one exit. Kewley had to cross from the tram stop on a walkway over the railway lines and use the stairs or lift to reach the exit by the ticket office. He would emerge under the giant clock mechanism, near the old cast-iron street urinal that was locked and gradually filling up with rubbish. So he only had one route to choose from the station, which was to come towards her down Vyse Street, past the awnings of the gold and jewellery dealers to the corner of Pitsford Street.

The Cultural Quarter, the Jewellery Quarter, the Irish Quarter, the Convention Quarter. And now there was a designation for the Gun Quarter – and they didn’t mean Handsworth,
but the industrial area around Queensway and Lancaster Circus, where traditional gun manufacturers were still based. As for the city centre, the latest Big City Plan called this ‘The Core’. A core surrounded by quarters? It was just like the planners to come up with some giant fruit metaphor.

A small trickle of people emerged from the station on to the pavement and headed off in different directions. Kewley was the last to come out. She recognized him even from this distance, even with the cap pulled over his eyes and the padded jacket to disguise his shape. There was something about the way people moved that made them recognizable whatever they wore. It took a lot of practice to disguise your body’s natural angle and rhythm.

Kewley paused in the station entrance, looked all around him carefully, pretending to check his pockets for something. An old habit, of course. It would have been enough for Fry to identify him, even without the cap.

Andy Kewley was an old street cop. He’d learned to scan every doorway and corner before he made his move. It just never occurred to him to look up.

He reached the corner of Pitsford Street near Bicknell and Sons, and turned down the side of the cemetery. Fry noticed that there was no wall or fence separating their meeting place from the street here, just a low kerb. It would be possible to enter and exit the cemetery at any point, and the row of cars parked at the kerbside would obscure her view. But Kewley continued to stroll dutifully down Pitsford Street until he came opposite a bright yellow wall, then he turned on to a path between two plane trees and entered the graveyard like a respectable citizen going about his business.

Fry knew she would lose sight of him now between the gravestones. But still she waited, watching a red Ford Fiesta and a white Transit van parked on the north side of Pitsford Street. No sign of movement.

‘Okay, then.’

She looked at her watch. Kewley was bang on time for their meeting, of course. She, on the other hand, was going to be a bit late. And that was the way she liked it.

Finally, she left the car park, walked down towards the Café Sovereign and stepped through the cemetery entrance. As she approached, she was assaulted by a powerful, sickly sweet smell. Some kind of white blossom on the bushes was filling the air with its aroma. She didn’t know what sort of pollinating insect it was trying so hard to attract, but when she breathed in she felt as though she’d been punched in the nose. Oh great, it could be hay fever time.

The rushing sound she heard was the wind hissing through the trees, washing over her.

‘Diane?’

Kewley took off the cap, revealing thinning hair streaked with grey. A warm breeze wandered through the plane trees, stirring a lock of his hair. When he raised a hand to push it back, she noticed that it wasn’t as steady a hand as it once had been. The cumulative effects of thirty years in the job? Or was Andy Kewley drinking too much, like so many others?

‘You’ve lost more weight since I saw you last,’ he said.

‘And you were never exactly the biggest lass in Brum, were you?’

‘No.’

Fry looked around at the site he’d chosen for their meeting. In the middle of the cemetery, they were standing at the top of a terrace of curved brick walls. Two of the walls had rows of small, sealed-up entrances built into them, like arched doorways.

‘What is this place? I thought it was a cemetery.’

‘Yes, and these are the catacombs,’ said Kewley. ‘Built into the side of an old sandpit. Don’t you think they’re interesting? They always remind me of a sunken amphitheatre. You can imagine gladiators fighting to the death down there on the grass. The only difference is, the spectators are already dead.’

‘Long since dead,’ said Fry. ‘These places make my flesh creep.’

Kewley laughed. ‘They’re harmless. Just our ancestors taking a bit of trouble over their final resting place.’

‘Only those who could afford it, I suppose.’

‘There’s another cemetery to the north of the station – Key Hill. That one has catacombs too. Joseph Chamberlain is buried there.’

‘Really?’

Fry wasn’t sure who Joseph Chamberlain was. There was a monument of him in Chamberlain Square, of course, and she’d passed a clock tower named after him on the corner of Vyse Street, near the Rose Villa Tavern. She thought there was even a Metro tram with his name on its side. But he was just one more Victorian, wasn’t he? Dead beyond living memory. She imagined him with a monocle and mutton-chop whiskers. Part of Birmingham’s vanished past.

‘I don’t like Key Hill so much. It has a campaign group who are busy restoring it. The Friends of Key Hill Cemetery. There are fences and gates, and they lock it up at night to keep people out. Oh and there are too many trees.’ Kewley gestured around him. ‘This one doesn’t have any friends. Just the drunks. Just the dead and the desperate. And you can see who’s coming fifty yards away.’

Fry imagined him using this cemetery for years to meet his informants. But it wouldn’t be wise to keep coming here after he’d left the job. Too many people might remember. Too many of them might have a grievance to settle. Maybe it was just one of those eccentric fancies that overcame old coppers when they retired. Some had a mad hankering to run pubs, or to look for a quiet life in Northern Ireland. Others chose to hang around in Victorian graveyards.

‘They say unhealthy vapours from these catacombs led to the Birmingham Cemeteries Act, which required non-interred coffins to be sealed with lead.’

The upper walkway looked down past two tiers of catacombs to the circle of grass in the centre. From the safety rail, it was quite a vertiginous drop. Lower down, part of the wall had collapsed, scattering gravestones. It was supported by steel props, awaiting some future repair. The cemetery had been well used. Victorian gravestones marched across the slopes, lurked in the hollows and hid beneath shrouds of ivy. Some memorials were large, horizontal stone slabs that she couldn’t help walking over as she found the way down to the lower levels.

On the circle of grass stood two or three dozen memorials under the shade of the trees.

Andy Kewley had been a frontline detective, hardened by thirty years’ experience. According to his own story, he wasn’t the kind of officer who was afraid of work, but he’d started to want more routine, a bit of stability. The constant changes had unsettled him, made him wonder whether he was appreciated properly. Every officious memo he received had made him count the days to his retirement.

‘Sorry to be out of the job, or not?’

‘I miss it,’ admitted Kewley.

‘You know there’s still a lot of demand for more civilian staff. Prisoner handling, statement taking, file preparation. There are always cases under review. Any experienced officer can take his full pension and complete his Staff 1 at the same time. Unless you’re planning on retiring to the Costa del Sol?’

‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

His expression said otherwise. He’d probably heard it all before. His eyes suggested that he was a man who’d heard everything before.

‘Cases under review.’ He laughed. ‘You can say that again. I wouldn’t be surprised if they re-opened the Nielson and Whittle enquiry, just to look as if they’re doing something.’

‘Donald Nielson and Lesley Whittle? They’re just relics of the 1970s, aren’t they? Most of the present West Midlands
coppers weren’t even alive then. The Black Panther is as much ancient history to them as Jack the Ripper. Things move on, Andy. Times change.’

‘You can say that again. Brum was a British city once.’

Fry grimaced, but didn’t answer.

‘I know,’ said Kewley, without even having to look at her face. ‘I’m not allowed to say things like that. If I was still in the force, you’d report me to the DI and I’d be suspended by tomorrow morning. Probably lose my job and my pension entitlement, too. Just for speaking the truth, eh?’

‘Andy –’

‘Well, thank God I’m not on the force any more. I got out at the right time, I reckon. It’s you poor bloody sods who have to button your lips and take the shit.’

‘No, it’s not like that, Andy. Not really.’

‘Oh? What, whiter than white up in sainted Derbyshire, are you? I thought I heard you had some very active BNP areas.’

‘Andy, what did you want to tell me?’

‘I thought I might be able to help you.’

‘How?’

‘Did you know there was an arrest after your assault? I was responsible for that.’

‘You produced a suspect?’

‘Let’s say I provided intelligence. It was good intelligence too, as it turned out. This wasn’t one of the primary suspects, but he knew who was involved, all right, and he helped to cover up. A real piece of work. He was as guilty as anyone I ever met.’

‘So what did you do?’

Kewley shrugged. ‘We needed information, and we didn’t want to spend days dragging it out of him bit by bit, with a brief at his elbow telling him to do the “no comment” stuff. So we fast-tracked the interview.’

‘Fast-tracked…?’

Kewley looked at her, gave her no more than a conspiratorial glance. But she understood.

‘I don’t want to know any more,’ she said.