Scar Tissue (23 page)

‘Really? And which lot of people do you think I ought to let find me?’

I’ve never seen Paula move so fast: perhaps she wanted to salvage what very little was left of the evening. She drove her hatchback like Attila the Hun late for an invasion, charging round country lanes as if they were a racetrack – quite unlike her usual sedate self. She plunged us into the middle of Ashford, heading round the back of the police station to the parking spaces by the library. Talk about déjà vu. The police station car park must be full: Todd’s Range Rover was parked there too, the bike still in the back, one of the wheels turning idly. No sign of Taz’s Ford. There were also a number of unmarked plush cars, which didn’t look as though they belonged to librarians.

Paula had obviously meant to drop me off and speed off home – to whoever. But, leaving the engine running, she got out, transferring weight from one leg to another and back again, like a toddler wanting a wee. Goodness knows she deserved a private life, but I’ll admit I would have liked some moral support.

We turned to each other. ‘Look,’ we said, at exactly the same moment. We giggled.

I managed to jump in first. ‘Have you still got those photos and the rope fibres safe?’

She nodded.

‘Well, go home and sit on them. You never know,’ I added, meaning to say it darkly, like in books, meaningfully.

‘Know what?’

‘How I shall be treated in there. And if there’s evidence they don’t know exists –’

‘Do you want me to bring it back straightaway?’ She sounded burdened and put upon but I knew she would if I asked.

‘Not unless I phone you. If anything goes really wrong, you may have to take it to the media. And there’s that MP, Chris Someone, who investigates miscarriages of justice.’ Provided I was still in one piece to experience the miscarriage, of course.

We hugged. Not at all a Paula-ish thing to do. She must be anxious behind that calm smile. Then she flashed an urgent look at her watch, and she was away.

Straightening my back and shoulders – hell, they felt as if I’d been heaving coal – I walked purposefully round to the police station front door.

If it had been chaos during Sherree’s shift, it was completely calm now. Not so much calm as deserted. No one at all in the reception area. No Sherree substitute to introduce myself to. Not even a bell to ping to announce my presence. I retired to the seats to read those educational posters all over again.

And again, and again. Where the hell was everybody? Had they abolished crime in Ashford? Or was it all committed behind the locked doors of the administrative area? Ten minutes passed. Paula was only half an hour from whoever and their spoilt supper. I wished I’d asked her to stay.

Domestic violence. Animal passports.

And the outside door flew open to admit –

‘Jan!’ I flung myself into her arms.

I think she’d rather I hadn’t. She wasn’t on her own, you see, but followed by a couple of very suave-looking men – the sort who look as if their wives polish them before they go out
in the morning. But she hugged me reassuringly before she pushed me away, and introduced me as if the men’s names might mean something. Thanks to Meg and her news programmes, one did. He was a long-haired barrister whose sole mission in life seemed to be to irritate the Establishment, so off the wall were the cases he took on. I recognised his face as well as his name. I couldn’t place the other, a shorter man with hair cut viciously short as if to disguise the fact it was very thin. But it was he who shook my hand with a friendly smile, not like the other who seemed to be expecting something like a curtsey, for all his left-wing credentials.

I hardly expected them to join me on the plastic chairs, nor did they. Marcus, the one I recognised, was tapping away at his mobile as if his life depended on it; James, the other, held a quick but muttered conversation with Jan. I tried to pick up what they were saying, but failed. I wasn’t about to interrupt: I had the strongest suspicion that lawyers wouldn’t do gigs like this for free, even for a mate. At their rate per minute, I didn’t want Jan picking up an even more enormous tab than she thought vital.

When at last there was a nice little pool of silence to drop my stone in, I said, ‘I found about ten kilos of cocaine at Fullers. I don’t suppose it was for personal use, Jan?’

Three legal eagles turned as one.

‘In a priest hole in the library,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t stay to investigate because the police were just dragging Todd away with them.’

‘You let him go?’ Jan exploded.

I put a pleading hand on her arm. To her infinite credit, she didn’t shake it off. ‘Wasn’t anything I could do,’ I protested.
‘And we’d promised each other that if one of us was in danger, the other would save his or her skin. So I escaped down a tunnel and ended up near the Military Canal. And Paula brought me here. No, she couldn’t stay – she had to get back to her new squeeze.’

‘What’s she like?’ Jan asked, to my amazement plumping herself down beside me, apparently ready for a comfortable natter. ‘Lesbian chic? Or grunge?’

‘I’ve no idea. It may even be a bloke. We’ve never talked about such things,’ I added.

‘Nor even speculated?’

‘She’s my boss and my friend,’ I said, writhing with embarrassment and wishing I didn’t sound such a prig. I added more loudly, ‘and she has another set of the photos Taz gave to Moffatt. And another fibre of rope.’

‘Lezzy or not, she’s beyond rubies or pearls or whatever,’ James said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And she took me on without making a song and dance about my past. I take it Jan’s filled you in? Good.’ It spared me another repeat of the gory details. Maybe one day I wouldn’t mind.

‘Todd’s still here?’ Jan asked, rather late in the day, I thought.

‘He may be, his car’s still here. Or I suppose they may have taken him to Maidstone, the county police headquarters. Jan, I’m so sorry to have involved you in all this,’ I told her quietly, gripping her hand reassuringly. She returned the pressure.

James said, with a serious smile, ‘If Fullers is being used for drug-smuggling, Mr and Ms Dawes would have been involved sooner or later, I’d have thought.’

Marcus, meanwhile, had finished his call and was banging hard on the counter. I almost expected him to yell, ‘Shop!’

Nothing. Somehow I didn’t expect him to settle down to read posters.

He might have had to had the outer door not opened again, this time to reveal a couple of police officers with a great deal of silverware on their uniform considering how young they were. Although Jan got to her feet, holding out her hand and addressing them as Mr Parnell and Mr Gates, they only managed a nod, and ignored the rest of us, marching authoritatively to the door to the admin area. They were confronted, of course, by a touch-button lock. And they didn’t know the code.

There was nothing for it but to exchange frosty greetings with Jan’s lawyer mates, and ponder the next move.

‘Since there’s no one front of house,’ I said, ‘and there hasn’t been any sign of anyone for fifteen minutes or more, maybe someone should go round the back and knock on the back door. Or a window. Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘I do it, I get arrested, and that’s the last you see of me. I’d have thought with your insignia you’d be all right.’

Jan flashed me a warning, but what the hell? I was tired, I was hungry, I was getting cold and the salt in the tomato juice had made me thirsty. I’d done all the work and taken all the risks and I wasn’t about to be anyone’s door monitor.

‘You may have to knock hard,’ I added, ‘to be heard above the noise of the shredders.’

The policemen went off together; after a while, the admin door opened and one reappeared, the one with baby-blond hair and hardly any eyebrows. Parnell? He gestured the lawyers in. ‘Hang on, young lady. I’ll send someone out to deal with you.’

‘I don’t want to be dealt with,’ I said, already halfway through the door. ‘It’s my turn to do a bit of dealing.’ I wished, as I thought of all that coke, that I’d chosen a different word.

I don’t know what I expected to find: a huge room full of people looking like red-robed operatives of the Spanish Inquisition, perhaps. In fact, I found the rabbit-warren of corridors and plain rooms like the one I’d originally been interviewed in. I wasn’t the only one at sea, of course: it took one of the policemen – Gates, the mouse-haired one with wide shoulders and a peachy little bum – to stride purposefully thought some double doors I’d not noticed and up a flight of echoing stairs.

Parnell kept us back. Not unpleasantly, but definitely. We heard footsteps and slamming doors. Some shouting.

Gates returned, shadowed by a couple of anxious-looking uniformed officers who looked as if they were already working out their excuses. ‘It’s chaos up there. You were right about the shredder, young lady. It’s going to take weeks to put the evidence back together.’

‘Todd?’ Jan and I asked as one.

‘We’re fixing his release now.’

‘But why, may one ask, was he arrested in the first place?’ Jan was no longer an anxious wife but an authoritative lawyer.

Gates checked a file he’d acquired from somewhere. Eventually he had to admit it, though. ‘Some minor traffic infringement.’

‘In other words, a trumped-up charge?’

He nodded. ‘It seems to me –’ he turned to acknowledge a contingent of uniformed officers storming into the corridor, plain-clothes officers in their wake – ‘that you may as
well let the Fifth Cavalry here do what they have to do. Go home and we’ll talk in the morning.’

Jan and I now shook our heads as one.

I spoke first. ‘Todd: you have to get him out of wherever he is. Now.’

‘Once someone’s been arrested there are procedures –’ he began.

A look from Jan, augmented by the expensive smiles and upraised fingers of her colleagues, cut him off short. Parnell took the hint and a spare officer and disappeared.

Nicely in the ascendant, I added, ‘Then there’s a bike in the back of Todd’s Range Rover that has to be got back to its owner in the next hour. Seriously. You come off a tedious twilight shift and your wheels aren’t there: it’s not funny. The owner’s a skinny lad working as a skivvy in the kitchen. His name’s Mal.’

The guy’s eyebrows told me he needed a better description than that.

I smiled slowly, though my brain felt very noisy. Coins were dropping all over the place. ‘In fact, you’ll find a lot of skinny folk in the kitchen. But he’s the only Western European one. And I’ve never seen an English face doing any of the service jobs, you know, cleaning and serving in the restaurant.’

‘Most hotels depend on overseas staff.’

‘They don’t usually pretend to be anything else. One of them does, at least. There’s a bloke on reception with an excruciating French accent. You know, officer, it might pay you to go in mob-handed when you return that bike – so you can check the papers of all the poor sods working there. And I don’t suppose you’ll find a legal migrant amongst the lot of
them. Amongst the shreds,’ I added, ‘you’ll probably find some photos of some tired and miserable young men being loaded into a van. I was sorry for them, thinking they’d probably got miles to travel. I’m still sorry for them, but I’ll bet their destination was just down the road – the hotel where Mr Moffatt put me up. He wasn’t so much protecting me as keeping an eye on me, maybe. And charging it to the account of poor Police Constable Tadeuzs Moscicki.’

He looked across at Jan. ‘He’s the young man who accompanied you when you made your complaint.’

‘Yes. I was proud of him, risking his career like that.’ She smiled at me but I didn’t respond.

Instead I looked at my watch. ‘The bike,’ I murmured.

‘And Todd,’ added Jan.

Eventually, the top lawyers agreed that Jan no longer needed their support and remembered that they had lucrative court cases the following day. With courteous farewells all round, they headed back to London. Meanwhile, Todd, Jan and I trooped across to the County Hotel, tired out. Todd, who’d spent a tedious hour in a cell, for God’s sake, and Jan were no spring chickens, after all, and I’d had very little sleep the previous night and a very long, hard day. We scarcely noticed what accommodation we were offered or the fact the staff were bent almost double in their anxiety to treat a Celebrity as he deserved.

Any chance of oversleeping was ruined by Ashford’s efficient street-cleaners, who were busy hoovering at about seven. We had a hearty breakfast, attended by a no doubt specially wakened maitre d’ and a team of adoring acolytes.
When Jan started muttering to Todd ominous words about cholesterol and weight, he gave me an enormous wink and her a guilty smile. We soon returned to the police station, to be accorded the best of VIP treatment there, too. Todd soon excused himself, saying he could be more usefully employed elsewhere, but Jan promised to stay with me to make sure I wasn’t brow-beaten in any way,

‘Brow-beaten?’ Gates repeated when she told him. He looked as if he’d worked through the night.

‘How about lied to and betrayed?’ I suggested. ‘Look, wouldn’t it save everyone a lot of bother if I just told my story all over again? Starting with the body I found at Crabton Manor and my conversation with your Sergeant Marsh? That’ll mean –’

‘Body at Crabton Manor? I don’t think I know about this.’ He sat down at a desk that was until recently someone else’s, I suspect, his shoulders looking wider than ever. For the first time I noticed his eyes, so grey they looked as hard as flint. I was glad that fundamentally he was on my side. With him taking notes, I began my story.

‘You took photos?’ he recapped at last.

‘Not of the body, I’m afraid. Of the dents left in the duvet it had been dumped on. And we retrieved some fibres from the rope that had throttled him.’

‘“We” will be you and your boss? Paula Farmer?’

‘Yes. For some reason she didn’t hand all the copies to Taz – the ones that I presume are now destroyed?’

He didn’t take the hint.

I added, ‘When I got back – after DS Marsh had accused
me of wasting police time – I did search the grounds in case van der Poele had simply buried him. Nothing. But I’ve not checked recently – he’s got these really vicious dogs.’