Post Mortem (4 page)

‘If it helps . . .' She pulled out her warrant card.

‘Oh. I see.' He took in the fact of it with something like disappointment. ‘I would never have guessed.' He considered her with an appraising eye, as though her appearance and the warrant card contained confusingly contradictory information. ‘One of those volunteers, are you? You're too pretty to be arresting people.'

She smiled. ‘Look, I know it's a bit irregular, but I can pay cash and leave you my credit card number for the deposit.'

He tapped his cheek with his index finger. ‘OK. How long do you want it for?'

‘Just a couple of days.'

‘It's more than two hundred quid. You've got that much cash?'

She started to open her purse. ‘Thanks, really. You've got my details and you know you'll be able to find me. I am a cop, after all. I've just got myself into such a state.'

Even at this time of night, the traffic crawled. The suburbs rolled slowly past: shuttered dress shops, twenty-four-hour corner shops with metal grilles, the empty tarmac expanses of superstore car parks. Lizzie's hands were shaking on the steering wheel.

After about forty-five minutes, she pulled over and went into an all-night café. There was a strong smell of cooking fat. An overweight woman with a purple chiffon scarf on her head was sitting in the corner. She had a small white dog on her lap. It had pink weepy eyes and its skin showed through its fur. The man standing at the counter swiftly stubbed out his cigarette and stashed the ashtray. He waved his hands about in a vain attempt to dispel the smoke.

‘Sorry, darling.'

Lizzie shook her head. ‘No, not a problem. Buttered toast and coffee, please.'

‘White bread's all we've got.'

‘That'll be fine.'

At the table was a well-read
Evening Standard
, probably abandoned by some other customer. She unfolded it and saw that the story had made the front page of the late edition.
Police officer and teenage girl in death fall
. The man came over with her order and she put the paper down. He wiped the table with a dirty rag.

‘You look as though you need a bit more than coffee and toast.'

‘No, that's great. Looks delicious.'

She stared at the photo on the front of the
Standard
. It was the usual impersonal crime-scene cliché: blue and white plastic tape, the concrete concourse, figures in white forensic suits, and in the background, the tower itself.

The call that had begun it so many weeks ago had come over the airwaves graded
Soon
. The traffic had been moving sluggishly that day too, and the police car had nudged forward slowly. It had not been an emergency, not something requiring an immediate response, just an outstanding dispatch from the day before that
the night duty had managed to avoid. It had been routine activity. Anyone could have taken it.

The early-morning streets had been busy with the legitimately purposeful: the employed making their way to work, shopkeepers rolling up blinds and setting out vegetable stalls on lead-drenched pavements. The tall buildings, like needles on a sun dial, had cast sharp cold shadows on the waking streets. The name of the ubiquitous London Road suggested that the city was not here but further on: a place to which one journeyed from a rural village. But the streets with their pastoral echoes had long since merged into the metropolis. Heath Lane, Chase Road, The Green: all were concrete and tarmac, lined with halal takeaway shops, cash converters, pound stores, Tesco Metros.

Lizzie had turned her head and read,
Unblock your phone here
. This was the place where robbers came to offer up their pickings, BlackBerries and iPhones that had made their owners suddenly vulnerable and fearful. The premises were still shuttered: the shops' suppliers would be sleeping. Staring at the cold streets, Lizzie imagined them in their Victorian squats, in 1930s estates, in 1970s tower blocks, sprawled across unmade beds, on sofas, prostrate on floors, sleeping off the effects of late-night fighting and crack use. But the police were always on duty and they woke early. Alarms prodded them from their beds before the light had broken and they dressed in the other room so as not to wake their partners. The marked cars cruised aimlessly, five at a time flocking to any
Immediate
call that promised action. Police officers drifted around in the morning sunlight like tired crows, waiting to see if they were needed and dreaming of breakfast.

She could so easily have ignored the call – as indeed all the other cars had – but she liked to work and for the team to know she was working, and so she had put up for the uninspiring dispatch that everyone else was avoiding.

‘OK for that?' she had said to Hadley, and he had put his blue lights on just to make the traffic give way and to turn the car in the direction of the call.

‘Yes. OK. Why not?'

Number 5 Kenley Villas was part of a Victorian terrace on one of the gentrified streets of the borough – media types living next door to drug dealers. A street that was asking for trouble. Lizzie noticed that it had a heavy Victorian-style door – hardwood, with leaded lights in the top panes.

Hadley turned off the engine.

‘We'll do this,' he said, ‘and then go back to the nick for breakfast. See if you can get it done in fifteen minutes. I'll set the alarm on my watch. If you succeed, I'll buy breakfast. Otherwise it's on you.'

Lizzie slipped quickly out of the car. Hadley followed slowly behind. In a gesture of anticipatory politeness, he hitched up his trousers – a useless action, the belt fighting its habitual losing battle with his belly. His gut had a physical presence as solid as a watermelon, and Hadley's bulk created the impression of settled indolence, however urgent the call.

Carrie Stewart answered the door. She was pleasantly scruffy in an affluent, educated style: leggings, blonde hair tied back with a scarf, green cardigan. Without make-up her face was pretty, faintly dappled with freckles, and tired. There was a dog, a spaniel, jumping up behind her. A boy with the same colour hair as his mother pulled the dog back by its collar and said, ‘Charlie, Charlie.' The boy was wearing a bear suit. He stared at the police officers, his cheeks red from heat. The dog wagged its tail enthusiastically.

‘He won't take it off,' the woman said, her hand on her son's shoulder. She led the way along stripped wooden floorboards, past some large framed black-and-white photos in the hall: children
on swings, the perspective making their feet big, Carrie Stewart herself in a white linen suit and a just-too-large hat, the glamorous incarnation that was implicit in her house and her clothing. ‘He even wants to sleep in it. I don't know what to do.'

She stepped down into the kitchen.

‘Can I get you tea?' she asked. Her voice was low and the accent was what Lizzie's fellow officers would call well-spoken.

‘No thank you,' said Hadley.

‘A glass of water would be nice . . .'

Carrie's back was turned as she reached for a glass. The shelves, Lizzie noticed, had no Delia Smith or Jamie Oliver on them, but a cut above – torn covers of River Café, olive-oil-stained Marcella Cucina. Crowded amongst them were novels, Booker Prize winners, a commentary on the Middle East, a history of the Ottoman Empire. Through the wooden-framed windows the garden was shady. York stone dusted with moss. A wrought-iron bench; beside it on the ground a discarded novel. A trough of bluebells not yet flowering. A red plastic child's tricycle. Hadley caught Lizzie's eye and tapped his watch face.

As the glass filled with water and bubbles, Lizzie said, ‘Why don't you tell me what this is all about?'

It was a minor offence, which Mrs Stewart recounted in too much detail. Hadley looked as patient as stone as the woman took out a large lined diary. But Lizzie wasn't fooled by his manner: Hadley's was the patience of a man who had spent a long career enduring the folly of others. Lizzie saw names and times scribbled in black italic handwriting. Carrie was explaining: she had taken notes of the dates and the increasing frequency and violence of the damage to her property. She knew who was doing it: it was her neighbour. She did not know why he had taken against her. She had always been friendly. She had cut back a buddleia that was growing in his garden. It had been blocking her light. But
she couldn't think it was this that had made him angry. Well, the garden was hardly well tended and the buddleia had obviously self-seeded. It was one of those pale purple ones you saw on railway tracks. And it had only been the branches on her property. She had been careful about that. She hadn't put the cut branches back on his land. She believed that was the law but it seemed so rude. She leafed through the diary. Hadley caught Lizzie's eyes and his own rolled heavenwards. Lizzie knew she should hurry the woman up but she didn't know how.

Hadley said, ‘Nothing else?'

‘Not really. I did have a word with his housing officer. I'd asked him to move some of his stuff off the pavement. He had dumped it out there and it wasn't nice going past it. He didn't do anything about it. It's not a lot to ask, to keep the front of the property clean. I don't like to interfere, but I didn't have any choice but to make a formal complaint. It all amounts to nothing much really, no reason to provoke this behaviour.'

‘How long have they been there?'

‘Oh, not long. A month maybe? I can give you the details of the housing officer if you need them.'

Lizzie said, ‘No, that won't be necessary, thanks.'

Hadley shifted in his seat. There was a pause.

‘You are sure it's him?' said Lizzie.

‘Absolutely positive.'

It was the worst possible outcome. A seething neighbour dispute; an educated victim who would not drop it easily; a minor offence without evidence to support an arrest and charge.

Lizzie said, ‘Do you have any proof?'

And here was the surprise, for Carrie did. For the first time she brightened up and Lizzie saw in her the determined nature that lay hidden beneath her urbane vagueness. ‘Yes, I've got photos. Would you like to see them?'

The Mac was perched on a desk in the small front bedroom. Outside the window a cherry tree was in full bloom. The screen saver was passing through images of family holidays. A boy doing a handstand. Children playing with a plastic bucket and a net by a broad green river. This house, thought Lizzie, was an oasis, a force field of advantage. She knew the crime statistics for the area. It seemed fairly mad for this family to live here. And yet here they were, the adventurous middle classes, colonizing, transforming, improving the local schools, pushing property values up. And they got so much more for their money.

‘Please – sit,' said Carrie.

Lizzie took the chair before the desk. Hadley crammed himself into the doorway, making the wooden frame seem like a cartoon drawing and himself a milder version of Desperate Dan. Carrie leaned over Lizzie, moving the mouse and flicking through the images. There he was, this unknown neighbour. The photos were sequential and conclusive.

The man was dark, thin. He wore the uniform of the street – jeans, a hooded zipped jacket, trainers. He had a child with him, a girl with dark skin and long dark curly hair. She was caught at angles, turning away. One image had her at three quarters to the camera, her face tipped downwards. She would be pretty were it not for something caught fleetingly, something watchful, nervous in the face. She looked about fourteen years old. Father and daughter paused in the photos as a woman with a buggy passed by. The father glanced about him. He took out a can of paint. He sprayed it down the fence. A close-up of the word:
Bastards
.

It was the perfect montage of the offence. Suddenly the matter had gone from a dull report to an easy detection.

‘And who's the girl with him?' Lizzie asked.

Using the cursor, Carrie flicked back through the images. There was the teenager, small, a dark figure standing back from the action. Watching.

‘Oh, that's his daughter,' she said. ‘I think her name is Farah. What a pity he's sucking her into this.'

‘Do you mind?' Lizzie said, taking the mouse.

‘Please, go ahead.'

She zoomed in on the figure, but the image of the girl blurred and fragmented into its constituent pixels.

Hadley's watch beeped. Lizzie winced.

‘What's that?' said Carrie, looking up. ‘Do you need to go?'

Hadley caught Lizzie's eye and smiled. She owed him breakfast.

‘I don't know,' said Lizzie. ‘It's not my watch. Hadley?'

Hadley smiled again. ‘Sorry,' he said blithely. ‘I must have set it off by accident.'

Carrie glanced between the two of them, as if she sensed she was missing something.

Lizzie stood up. ‘I've got all the details.'

Carrie stepped back into the hallway. ‘What I don't understand,' she said, and this seemed suddenly to be the heart of the matter, the thing that was really troubling her. ‘What I don't understand is
why
. Why is he doing this? That's what really troubles me. Perhaps if we spoke with him . . .'

‘Yes, I will be speaking with him.'

‘I understand that. But I wondered whether instead . . . that is, whether you offered some kind of mediation?'

Hadley intervened. ‘We're the police,' he said. ‘We deal with criminal matters. We don't do mediation.'

The boy, still in his bear suit, was standing on the landing behind Hadley, watching warily. Instinctively, perhaps sensing the tone change, he grabbed on to his mother's leg. Lizzie thought how impressive they must seem to the boy, the two uniformed officers, with handcuffs and CS gas and radios chattering quietly away in this small room in the shade of the cherry blossom.

‘It's all right, Ben,' his mother said with an encouraging smile. ‘These officers are here to help us.'

Unlike in other houses Lizzie had visited, where the children watched warily from behind the legs of their parents, or stared at her, faces blank with an inherited hatred, the child in this house was trustfully curious. He must have been told that the officers were his friends. This was a vital part of his education, something essential to survival. Frontier people needed their children to trust the police. They needed them to learn not to try to deal with things themselves but to turn to the black uniform when matters got out of hand on the bus or when another child took their mobile phone at a street corner. It was the peculiar and relentless power of the privileged not to sink to the level of fisticuffs. Lizzie heard the bugle's reveille and saw herself and Hadley as the unlikely cavalry riding over the brow of the hill. Poor broken-backed horse that would have to carry Hadley! It was an image that also made her flinch: her sympathy had always been with the Indians rather than with the frontiersmen corralling their wagons in preparation for settling a prairie that did not belong to them.