Post Mortem (14 page)

He said his name was Janusz but he didn't say much else. He got himself a tabloid and leafed through it as if she wasn't really there. After about twenty minutes he gathered himself together and stood up to leave.

‘You want sleep in garage?'

‘Maybe.'

He nodded. ‘OK. But you need keep warm.'

‘Yes, I get it. Listen, thanks.'

She could not bring herself to relinquish the warmth and comfort of the café. She got her phone out of her bag and considered it for a while. It was, she recognized, another sort of warmth, and equally tempting. Could she perhaps just touch her index finger to his name?
Kieran
. She imagined him picking her up in the Land Rover. She imagined sinking into the leather seat and driving, driving away. She could picture the countryside, a cottage on a hill perhaps. Dry-stone walls. But she knew this was a fantasy. Her phone would summon police, or Kieran would inform – would have no choice perhaps other than to inform – Detective Sergeant Collins.

He had been her protector before, or at least she had thought so.

After her father's death, when she had found it hard to do anything for herself, she had stayed at his flat. He had bought her takeaways and cooked for her as though she were ill. He had gone to work; she lay in his bed wearing his old T-shirts and watching black-and-white films on his laptop.

Alone, while he was at work, she had wandered his flat. On the wall in the sitting room was a framed black-and-white photo of a six-year-old girl in a tutu. A skinny girl with fair hair tied up in a
bun. Her right foot, clad in a ballet pump, pawed the ground in the manner of a horse before a set of Cavaletti jumps.

His bathroom was pungent with the smells of masculine soap and deodorant. The shelf held two toothbrushes in a cup, one a child's. Lizzie's face was pale in the steamy mirror as she brushed her teeth with her index finger.

When her mother had left, there had been no shouting, no door-slamming. Lizzie had come down for breakfast, and instead of being at work as usual, her dad had been there in her mother's place, making golden toast.

‘This is always my favourite breakfast,' he had said. ‘I can never have too much of it.'

She was putting her plate on the table, her back to him, when he spoke. ‘Mum's gone away for a bit. Try not to worry. Everything will work out.'

That afternoon her father had taken her on her favourite outing – the traditional sweet shop with the doorbell that pinged against its taut spring. She had stood at the counter and gazed at the panoply of sweets. Banana and custards, sherbert lemons, rosy apples. Her father bought her a mixed bag of stripy bullseyes, barley sugars and fruit rounders. Lizzie had walked out across the playing fields and sat on the stream's muddy bank. The sweets were like balls of tangy coloured glass, holding a mystery of sugary dissolution within them, but the bag had tipped over beside her and the sweets rolled down the hill, coating themselves in soil. She left them where they fell, like spilled treasure.

That was all she really remembered of that time. It was like a silence inside her. And then her mother had come back. Lizzie had watched from an upstairs window as her father helped unload her suitcases from the boot of the car. There was a little attaché case, pink leather with rounded edges and a zip.

Kieran, she remembered, had brought her gifts of old-edition
Penguins from a local junk shop, and when the clothes she had brought with her ran out, he arrived with pants and shirts as though she were a child who had fallen in a stream.

He came home from work and cast off his T-shirt, kicking it to the bottom of the bed. When he slept, she put her hand against the muscle on the side of his neck where her teeth had left a mark.

He had taken his wedding ring off and driven her to her father's funeral. She didn't know what it meant that he was there with her except that, for this moment at least, he was by her side. He sat beside her in the chapel, holding her hand firmly.

Before the funeral, her mother had given her a box of photos. She had taken the lid off and flipped through the images. Her father teaching her to ride a bike. Pagham Beach on a summer day, the sky a brilliant blue and the sun shining off the bonnet of the family Volkswagen. On the front of the order of service had been a picture of her father, youthful, dashing in his army uniform, his dates in italics underneath. She had googled him on her phone but he was not to be found. He had left no mark at all. More obscure than an ammonite, he had fallen to the seabed leaving no trace.

His figure in the coffin had been a simulacrum. Her father was no more there than he was anywhere. Her mother had shown her halting colour-bleached Super 8 film: children in duffel coats at a zoo; her father looking at the camera and then pointing towards the penguins; her mother and father emerging laughing from a house in the rain and running to a car.

As they followed the coffin out into the sunlight, Kieran put his arm around her shoulders. The grave was a deep black mouth. Her sister's children ran to it as to a party and threw red rose petals on to the descending coffin.

After the burial, they cut across the countryside in Kieran's Land Rover. There had been a late hoar frost. The fields were white and the branches of the trees were crystalline. The lanes dipped
into deep banks and threaded between high hedges from which birds exploded like gunfire. The coverage on Lizzie's iPhone kept vanishing. The Land Rover showed as a pulsating blue blip travelling through a limitless grey grid, as though what she saw through the windows was a mirage. They could be in a boat on an ocean. They could be travelling over the moon.

Kieran had got a handle on it. He didn't need the sat nav. Somehow he could follow the hopeless pencil-drawn map on the back of the order of service. He always seemed to know where he was.

He said, ‘Have you got a charge agreed for Mehenni?'

Why, she had wondered, was he troubling her with this now?

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I'll charge him when he comes in on bail.'

The M40 had sped along, grey tarmac and white lines. She had not seen the landscape flashing by as the sun began to fall in the sky, but rather the memory of learning to ride her bicycle, her father running behind holding the seat.

22

S
teve was sliding open the office window to step out on to the low roof for a fag, but he paused when he saw Collins pushing open the door.

‘What did Baillie say?'

‘Yes, he's agreed to go public that she's missing. He's going to do a press release in about an hour. We're using screen grabs from the hotel CCTV.'

‘Cigarette?'

She glanced at her watch: 7:30. If Arif was on time, he would be with them in half an hour.

‘No, it's fine. I want to crack on.'

‘We've got the subscriber's check back on the phone number in Farah's pocket.'

‘And?'

‘It's a historic number. Belonged to Lizzie Griffiths. She changed it on the thirteenth of April.'

A pause.

‘And were there any phone calls between Farah and Lizzie?'

‘Joe's checking that now.'

‘OK.'

Collins watched Steve step outside. He leaned with his back against the wall and began to smoke. The crow loitered at a discreet distance, hopping about on the edge of the roof.

She opened the working copy of the tape and slipped it into the
player. It was the recording of the radio traffic during the incident; the nearest she could get to the experience of the officers at the time. She closed her eyes and listened, imagining it into life. The traffic over the main channel crackled. Officers cut in with routine requests and were told to move to the other channel. The call came out for the person on the roof.
Units to attend
. 761 showed himself on scene. He could see two figures on the roof, he reported. No, three figures.

The radio was busy. It was hard to make it all out. Commands from the duty inspector. Updates from the scene. Paramedics being assigned. She noted the absence: the continuing radio silence of 611 and 170, Griffiths and Matthews. Their silence was a void, a negative space where the important things were happening unrecorded.

She stopped the tape and slid open the window. ‘Steve. Put that bloody cigarette out, would you, and come and listen with me?'

‘OK. Stand by, Met Police.' He took a final deep inhale, trod on his cigarette and stepped in through the window. She rewound the tape and listened with the transcript in her hand.

Confirm two people on the roof, no, three people
.

Go ahead, 761. Informant said two people. Confirm three people
.

Steve wrote on a piece of scrap paper:
761?
Collins took his biro from him and wrote:
Arif
.

A third figure has joined. Repeat: a third figure has joined. I can't identify them from this distance. They are right at the edge
.

The transcript showed Inspector Shaw transmitting.

Control, show me making my way. ETA about a minute. I'll go up the stairs
.

Control receiving 761
.

Go ahead, 761
.

One of the people on the roof appears to be a police officer
.

Confirm, please. One of the people on the roof is a police officer?

Yes. Yes
.

Can you identify the officer? Repeat, can you identify the officer?

I think it's 170
.

Steve wrote:
170 – Hadley?
and Collins scribbled:
Yes
.

170 receiving Control
. A pause.
Repeat, 170 receiving Control
.

Under the tape Steve said quietly, ‘He'd already switched his radio off?'

Collins nodded. She closed her eyes again, straining to hear. She could not help but imagine it. The three figures on the roof, the boy in his bear suit at the edge. The duty inspector issuing commands into the radio. No to air support. London Ambulance Service to stand by. Everything correct, the timeline of a critical incident unrolling. She could picture the resources being deployed. The officers in other boroughs turning their cars and switching on their blue lights. The centre of the storm sucking in backup like a typhoon snatching up street furniture as the borough reached out to the rest of London for aid. The incident in full play and all the power available to the state being deployed to contain and neutralize it. And then, in the midst of this radio traffic, 761 cutting in, as clear and final as bad news always was: a sudden dissipation.

They've fallen
.

All units receiving Control. Radio silence please. 761 go again, go again
.

They've fallen
.

761 confirm, please. Confirm who has fallen
.

Steve's mobile rang. Collins stopped the tape and waited as he spoke into the phone. He ended the call.

‘Arif's waiting downstairs. I'll go and bring him up.'

The boy – for in spite of his office of sworn constable, that was how Arif Johar seemed to them both – was trim and lightly muscular. His skin was an even light brown, his cheeks marked by a hint of
stubble. He wore jeans, a tight T-shirt and sporty shoes that closed over the top with Velcro straps. His hair was gelled. He smelled of fresh aftershave. He smiled shyly and his hands stayed in his pockets.

Steve stretched out his own hand with warm masculine enthusiasm. ‘Thanks for coming in so early.'

Arif's right hand reached out. His shoulders relaxed. He smiled. ‘No worries.'

Collins remembered him at the scene: a young officer sitting pale and shaking on a wall. Amidst all the shock, he had escaped the net of care that had wrapped around the response team. She had directed the paramedics towards him.

She unsealed blank tapes to record the interview and slotted them into the machine.

Arif was still standing. ‘I don't think I've much information to offer really. I was on the ground. I saw it all at a distance.'

Steve said, ‘That's all right. Sit yourself down.' He patted the table opposite the chair. ‘We just need to get your account down on tape. You know all about that, yes? We have to record you because you're a sig wit – a significant witness.'

Arif cut in, naïvely keen to show he was not as green as grass. ‘Yes, I know all that.' And then, rowing back hurriedly, ‘Well, I've never done one myself, obviously. The guv'nor explained—'

Collins interrupted. ‘Yes?'

Arif shot a sudden watchful glance between the two of them.

Steve intervened, casual. ‘Well, that was good of him. He say anything else about this?'

‘No. Nothing. Just talked me through the procedure, that's all.'

Collins avoided Steve's eye. Steve smiled. They had stumbled on something that gave an appearance of difficulty but needn't really bother anyone.

‘Arif, you don't have to worry. I know you're new to the job. You've never been through anything like this before. We just need
to get an account of what you saw, that's all. You're not under investigation. There's no trick questions. We just have to record your evidence. It needs to be done properly. You understand that? You've seen the press.'

‘Yes, yes. Of course. I understand. It's not a problem.'

Steve sat back and let Collins ask the questions. She was clinical and swift in obtaining the account, as they had agreed she would be. Arif had been on foot patrol and had put up to take the report from the woman who'd called in the incident, who had first seen the figures on the roof. Her flat was on the ground floor of the building opposite. Spick and span. Lace curtains. Porcelain Siamese cats lined up on the mantelpiece next to some pictures of grandchildren. The woman was white, in her fifties, London working class; one of the estate's watchful inhabitants. Arif had been as quick as he could getting her details. Then he'd gone out to see what was happening. That was when he'd started transmitting on the main channel.