Suffer the Children (7 page)

‘You should go to the hospital with this, sir,’ says Josie, tying the bandage around Staffe’s wrist.

‘How did you get on with tracking Leanne’s ex down?’

‘Rob Boxall? He’s doing two years in Bellmarsh for dealing MDMA and C meth. Been in since May, so he’s off the hook.’

‘You’d better get someone to pay him a visit, see if he knows Ross Denness?’

‘Sure, sir.’ Josie is examining Staffe’s arm. Still holding his hand, she says, ‘That youth outside the Rag …’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s saying you went at him with the knife. His mates are backing him up. And so’s that girl.’

‘Have we got an ID on him?’

‘We’ve got a couple.’ Josie sits down on the opposite side of his desk and leans forward with her elbows on the desk, her face resting on the backs of her hands. She raises her eyebrows and says, ‘He said to say, “Jadus knows”.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Josie leans back in the chair. She looks at him long, hard, quizzical.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘You should be on a beach or up a mountain and here you are with your arm all bandaged up and some gangland fatwa out on you. Let me buy you a drink.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘It’s a case of you “won’t” do it, not “can’t”.’

‘Thanks for the lecture.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ she says, standing up and walking out of the office. As she gets to the door she leans back into the room, says, ‘If anybody ever
needed
a drink …’ and she laughs.

Staffe gestures for Josie to close the door behind her; as she does, he dials Johnson’s home number. ‘Rick?’ he says.

‘Just going out for the takeaway, sir.’

‘You can do me a favour,’ says Staffe.

‘Ahaa,’ says Johnson.

‘I want you to go down to Peckham, scare the living shit out of a lowlife called Paolo Di Venuto.’

‘For doing what?’

‘For being a bastard.’

‘Can you be more precise?’

‘He’s seeing my sister. Scare him off with anything and everything you can think of: benefit fraud, immigration,
dealing
or possession. You’ll get the drift when you see him. And see how he responds to an allegation of ABH. Just say you’ve had an anonymous complaint.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s any point asking why I’m doing this?’

‘26d St John’s Road,’ says Staffe, hanging up, punching in Debra Bowker’s number in Tenerife. As it rings, he writes
himself
a note to get the ‘see justice done’ photograph remastered, to investigate its every detail, to get the Tech’s take on the hood’s material, any labelling on the clothes and match the hair in the photo to any samples taken from the scene and from Leanne Colquhoun.

A woman answers the phone.

‘Mrs Bowker? Debra Bowker?’ says Staffe.

‘Miss.’

‘I’m DI Wagstaffe from Leadengate CID.’

‘I spoke to one of your colleagues.’

Staffe leans back in his chair, puts his feet up on the bottom drawer of his desk. On the other end of the line, he can hear children playing. ‘I just wanted to be sure about your
movements
over the past few weeks.’

‘I told your colleague.’ She sighs. ‘Look. If I was you, I’d have me at the top of your list but I can assure you, I had
nothing
to do with it. Much as it would have pleased me to see the bastard suffer.’

‘What do you know about Rob Boxall?’

‘Nothing.’

‘And what about Ross Denness, Mrs Bowker?’

‘Miss!’

Staffe sits up, quickly. He scrawls a note – ‘debra colquhoun. check passports and airlines’. ‘I apologise. As a matter of
interest
, when did you stop being called Debra Colquhoun?’

‘The minute I slammed the door on him.’

‘But when did your divorce come through?’

‘Ten months. Are we done?’

‘If you remember anything, about Ross Denness, let me know.’ In the background, a child screams out and Staffe says, ‘We’re done. For now.’

‘How’s his mum taken it? Maureen?’ says Debra. There is another child’s scream in the background. ‘I have to go. Give her my love if you speak to her. And tell her Danielle and Kimberley say “hi”.’

Staffe buzzes through to the incident room and tells Josie to get on to the airlines again and check the name Debra Colquhoun. Then he tells her to pay Karl’s mother a visit. ‘Don’t push her, just get her talking about Karl, and about the first wife too if you can. Softly, softly. And tell her that Danielle and Kimberley say “hi”. Tell her they send their love.’

Josie knows that Maureen Colquhoun is sixty-one years old and has been widowed for three years. Her husband died of sclerosis of the liver, but they had been separated for some time. Karl Colquhoun was her only son.

Maureen shows Josie into the front room. It’s a museum piece of how somebody on a budget might conjure a model of Edwardian comfort, with its fat, veneered furniture and a
floral
tapestry three-piece; a busy, patterned carpet of purples and greens, a whiff of Mr Sheen. She fusses over Josie, running off to make tea and coming back with biscuits on a doily’d plate, sitting on the edge of her chair, knees together and hands clasped.

‘It is about Karl, Mrs Colquhoun.’

‘Call me Maureen.’

‘I’m very sorry, about what happened to him.’ Mrs Colquhoun nods earnestly, hanging on to Josie’s every word. ‘We’re obviously trying our best to find out what happened. And one of the things is … well, I’d like to know what sort of a man he was, Maureen. What sort of a son he was.’ Josie takes out her digital recorder, says, ‘Do you mind if I tape us?’

Maureen shakes her head, slowly. She looks nonplussed. ‘Does it matter what I say?’

Josie leans forward, holds Maureen’s hands and says, ‘Go on, tell me anything you want. About Karl or Debra or Leanne. Anything, Maureen.’

‘They said he had been drinking. When the police came round they said that he had been killed and it was murder and when I asked who they thought it was, they didn’t want to say but they said my son was inebriated. Well, I know that couldn’t be. He’s never touched a drop, not a drop. He’s done wrong, I know he has, and there’s things I can’t turn a blind eye to no matter how I try, but I won’t believe he’d been drinking. I won’t.’

Josie thinks it curious that a mother might become so agitated about a son who drinks when he is also a father who very probably abused his own children. ‘Do you miss the children, Maureen? Your grandchildren.’

‘How do you know I don’t see them?’

‘They’re in Tenerife.’ Maureen’s face goes tight and she purses her lips. A hard look comes easily to her eyes and she blinks something away. ‘He didn’t tell you, did he?’

‘She took them all the way over there? Mary, mother of God. All the way over there.’

‘They say “hello”, and send their love,’ says Josie, watching Staffe’s message exert its power on the smiling face of Maureen Colquhoun.

‘Poor Debra. God bless her. Oh, those children. Those beautiful children!’

‘You say Karl never drank.’

‘Never a drop and nor would you. Nor would you if you’d had his father.’ The smile has gone again now. ‘It got out of hand, so terribly out of hand.’ She lets go of Josie and puts her hands between her knees in a downturn prayer. ‘He always said it was a sad man who drank in the house, but when I had Karl, he brought whisky into the house. He’d come home from the pub and drink the bottle, the whole bottle. And then he’d go upstairs. Karl would cry as soon as he smelt the stench of drink coming.’

‘When you say he went upstairs, Maureen?’

‘There’s nothing I could do.’

‘If someone really wanted to hurt Karl, to take him to a dark place, they would make him drunk. Is that right, Maureen?’

‘Oh yes. That would be right.’

‘And if someone got him drunk, against his will, they would have to know him quite well. Not many people knew about his past, Maureen? He didn’t talk about it much?’

‘Why would he talk about it?’

Josie wants to stay longer, wants to talk about normal things with Maureen but she decides she will send a counsellor round. It’s something she agrees with Staffe about – there’s nothing to be gained by playing the amateur psychologist.

The day is ending and the heat begins to lift away from London’s tar and glass. Staffe puts down his mobile,
registering
what Josie has told him about Maureen Colquhoun and her son, the victim.

He switches back and forth from rat run to rat run, south and west to Queens Terrace. He remembers it, the first time. When he bought the flat, his mother and father were not long dead and the weekends there were long, bleak, lonely affairs.

Staffe double-parks and uses a beany hat on top of the dash to wedge a parking permit up against the windscreen. He flips the boot and takes out his thirty-year-old white plastic Adidas holdall. He feels the twinge of a sad and happy memory and closes his eyes, takes a deep breath and exhales in five equally measured orbs. Sometimes he thinks it’s bullshit, but
sometimes
it works and now, turning the key in the door, he gets a nostalgic glow.

The Queens Terrace flat smells lived-in and although the tenant has left a few things and not hoovered or even put the last meal’s dishes away, Staffe texts the managing agent to say they can return the tenant’s deposit. He sits in the beaten-up old club chair in the bay window and leans back. He eyes up the cornice mouldings and the ceiling rose, thinks maybe it’s time to move back into this one. It would certainly keep him and Marie from each other’s throats. He thinks about young Harry being dragged from pillar to post.

Staffe goes through to the bathroom, takes out his running gear from the Adidas bag and runs the shower. It’s what he’s done since he first joined the Force: a hot shower first, to get him sweating. Then a run and a cold shower when he gets back. He remembers the first time Jessop came round, saw what he was doing. ‘It’s like an exorcism,’ he had said. And he laughed.

The water jets down, hard on his scalp and shoulders and he turns the heat up a notch so it’s almost scalding him. He scrubs and scrubs with the soap, the smell of coal tar getting thicker and thicker, the steam getting more and more dense. As he scrubs, he plaits over and over, in different orders, the events of the last few days.

Josie rations out a glass of Semillon Chardonnay from a box in the fridge and takes a peek at the roasting medley of peppers, courgettes and whole baby carrots, drizzled with olive oil and sucking up the essence of two bulbs of garlic. Her mouth waters and she sets out two pork chops, seasons them and checks her watch, skips across the room and kneels into the diminishing space where her CD player sits on the floor under the small window that juts into the angle of the roof.

It took a leap of faith and every scrimped and saved
halfpenny
she could muster, but three years ago, with some help from her parents down in Hastings, Josie Chancellor bought this studio flat in the roof space of an old, unrefurbished house near Victoria. Even now, she just about covers the interest on the mortgage and once a quarter she feels her pulse race when she sees what kind of debt she is in with the Alliance & Leicester.

This is the first proper date she has had since she transferred to Leadengate six months ago and although it is David Pulford who is coming round, it’s not him that she is thinking about. ‘Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see,’ is what her father used to say. What would he make of DI Will Wagstaffe?

She sits on the floor with her feet tucked up under her
bottom
and sips from her glass, questioning her motives for
saying
‘yes’ to Pulford so readily. She curses herself for being so stupid as to invite him round for a meal.

The intercom buzzes and she drains her glass, stooping as she stands so as not to bang her head on the sloping ceiling. She pauses by the intercom’s crackling speaker, lets it buzz again. She sighs, then turns off the oven and puts the chops into a cereal bowl, puts a sideplate on top and places the
covered
meat in the fridge. The intercom buzzes a third time, long and hard, and she presses the button to receive.

‘Hi, Josie, it’s me,’ says Pulford.

‘Wait there.’

‘What?’

‘I didn’t have a chance to get anything in. Let’s go out.’ She checks in her purse. Three pounds fifty, nothing in the bank, and two days till pay day.

Pounding away, from street to square and on to the Brompton Road, Staffe feels the sweat coming faster and faster. He closes his ears to everything but the shock of the road
thudding
up from his feet, along his thighs and up into his torso and fast-beating heart. He’s too old for this, but he catches sight of the park on the other side of Knightsbridge and
jay-canters
through the traffic, up on to the sand-track bridleway. His muscles burn, his lungs roast. The sound gets duller, deeper.

He can see there is one truth that governs everything that happens under the blood-red sky of the city. He knows that this truth is stitched together by the actions of millions of
people
living alongside each other. Everything is connected and everything can be understood.

Even the clumsy or haphazard criminal will have a rationale. There will be a pattern to their behaviour. The trouble is: the more evidence you accumulate, the more obscured the reasons can become. Denness or Rob Boxall; Leanne or Debra Bowker. Or someone not yet uncovered. Whoever did it knew Karl Colquhoun’s darkest secret.

Staffe looks up into the dusking expanse of the park. He takes a long, arcing U-turn by the Serpentine lake and heads back towards the Knightsbridge lights. He soon has the streets beneath him again, hammering down towards Victoria. After six, seven minutes he accelerates into a sprint, full pelt, and pulls himself up quickly, hands on hips.