The Bug House (3 page)

The reporters have gone when he comes out of the store. For a while he and Huggins talk shop with the uniformed sergeant, then the sergeant is summoned back to the front line. Fallow watches him trudging back up the hill towards the cordon tape, his shoulders visibly stiffening as he slips back into official mode.

‘So what do you think?’

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ says Huggins, brushing some stray crumbs from his tie. ‘Illegal immigrant.’

‘What?’

‘It makes perfect sense. Illegal immigrants jump into the undercarriage of a plane just about to take off from some godforsaken Third World country and hang on for grim death in the hope of making it to the Promised Land. Trouble is, most of them are either crushed to death by the wheels or else freeze to death because of the altitude.’

‘I’ve heard about that,’ Fallow nods. ‘When the plane comes in to land, it lowers its wheels and – bang – the body drops out.’

‘Happens at Heathrow all the time,’ says Huggins. ‘There was one last month: guy walking his dog in the park in West London, right on the flight path about ten miles out – next thing he knows this fucking stowaway from Africa lands on the path in front of him. Fell out of the undercarriage of a 747.’

‘Have you mentioned your theory to the boss?’

‘No,’ says Huggins, ‘the boss is in a foul mood.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s been told he’s getting a replacement for Vic Entwistle, that’s why.’

Fallow looks at him. ‘But there’s no way Entwistle was ever coming back.’

‘You know that, and I know that,’ says Huggins. ‘But don’t you think if the boss could have found a way to get Entwistle’s hospital bed moved to the Bug House, he would have done?’

A tractor is approaching along one of the single-track lanes leading from the main road through the village. The driver is a young man wearing blue overalls and a woollen hat pulled down over his ears. He stops outside the shop and turns off the engine.

‘You coppers?’ he shouts.

‘Can we help you, sir?’ Fallow says.

‘Aye. I found this. Thought you might be looking for it.’

The driver reaches down to the footwell and retrieves a plastic feed sack with something in it.

‘Phil, you’d better come and look at this,’ Fallow says, peering in the sack.

‘What is it?’ Huggins says. ‘Some magic beans?’

‘Nah,’ Fallow says. ‘It’s someone’s leg.’

Mhaire Anderson arrives shortly after 10 a.m. and, once she’s decked out in a paper suit, is immediately taken to see the body. She emerges ten minutes later, purse-lipped, and is escorted back to her car, which is then driven back through the village and along the lane, a circuitous route which terminates at a metal five-bar gate. Beyond the gate is a muddy track leading to a rusting iron cattle bridge over the railway line.

Vos is waiting at the gate. Gordon Watson and his team are on the bridge itself, while a dozen uniformed officers are down on the embankment and the track.

‘Morning, guv’nor,’ Vos says.

‘I hope you’ve stopped the trains,’ Anderson says.

‘Replacement bus service only between Newcastle and Morpeth.’

‘Good. So what have we got?’

They go through the gate and begin walking up towards the apex of the bridge.

‘The farmer found the leg in the field on the other side of the bridge,’ Vos says. ‘I say leg, but it’s actually just the thigh. Huggins and Fallow checked out the bridge itself and found the shin and the foot attached to a rope tied to one of the struts.’

‘Christ.’

‘The driver of the 8.30 p.m. East Coast Main Line train to Edinburgh reported hitting something last night,’ says Seagram. ‘He thought it might have been a deer.’

‘A deer?’ Anderson says. ‘Since when do deer hang down from railway bridges?’

‘He was going at 80 mph,’ Vos says. ‘It was dark and it was pissing down.’

‘He’s got eyes, hasn’t he?’

They have reached the middle of the bridge now. The CSIs have already erected a small tent, and inside it Gordon Watson is hunched down over one of the iron struts. He is examining a length of black, man-made rope that has been knotted to the strut. The other end of the rope hangs down for five feet above the northbound railway track; attached to it is the lower part of a man’s leg, sheared off at the knee.

‘I’ve seen it all now, guv’nor,’ Watson says to Anderson. ‘Looks like our victim was tied by his left leg to the bridge and just left there hanging until the next Edinburgh train put him out of his misery.’

‘Suicide?’

‘Possibly. Although it’s a funny bloody way to go about it.’

Anderson gazes back along the embankment to a stand of trees. Beyond the trees, its roof visible through the branches, is the house belonging to Enrico Cabaljo.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Watson says, standing up and massaging his aching back. ‘And yes, it’s perfectly possible.’

Anderson shakes her head. ‘So this poor bastard gets hit by the train and thrown – what? – two hundred yards over those trees into the footballer’s garden?’

Nobody says anything for a while after that. They are all imagining the victim frantically wriggling like a fish on a line while the headlights of a speeding Intercity train approached inexorably and at high speed.

‘OK,’ Anderson says presently. ‘What about ID?’

‘Fortunately he didn’t land headfirst, so we’ll be able to circulate a mug shot,’ says Vos. ‘John, what about security camera footage?’

‘There are cameras front and back at the footballer’s house,’ says Fallow. ‘We might get something from them.’

‘Any coverage of the garden?’

‘The cameras are remotely monitored from a private security firm in town. Phil and I are going round there this afternoon to see what they’ve got.’

‘Nothing from the door-to-door?’

‘Nothing, boss.’

‘What about tyre tracks? If he didn’t top himself, then somebody must have driven him out here.’

‘If there were any tracks, they’ve been washed away,’ Watson says.

Once again a rueful silence falls over the assembled detectives. It strikes everybody on the bridge that while they’ve said a lot, they still don’t know anything more than when they arrived.

Anderson sighs. ‘Well that’s just bloody marvellous.’ She checks her watch. ‘I’ve got to give a statement to the jackals in five minutes.’

‘What will you tell them?’ Vos says.

‘That a body has been found in Mr Cabaljo’s garden, identity currently unknown. For now I will
not
be mentioning anything about the circumstances until foul play is confirmed. And if anybody asks, you will say the same. Understood?’

At 6 a.m. on the morning of the biggest day of her career, Detective Constable Kath Ptolemy wakes alone.

Ray left four hours earlier for the ferry and a week-long tour of duty to the Baltic. The lilies he left for her are in the vase on the kitchen table, and in the meantime a couple of them have opened. Ptolemy can smell them as she forces herself to get out of the warm cocoon of her bed. She showers in lukewarm water, and by the time she returns the room is lit by murky, sodden daylight. She draws the bedroom curtains, partly to keep it out and partly because old Cyril, whose house backs onto theirs, likes to cop an eyeful whenever he can. He knows Ptolemy is police, and she suspects that’s half the thrill. She thinks that if he wasn’t eighty-three she’d send the armed response unit round, just to scare the shit out of him. Then again maybe she should be flattered by old Cyril’s interest. It’s not as if she’s got the sort of tits that are going to have Peeping Toms queuing round the block whenever she takes her bra off.

Ptolemy is originally from Frizington, a small town in west Cumbria, and for twenty-two years she never believed that anywhere on Earth could be more depressing. Then she moved to Blyth, a hundred miles east on the North Sea coast, and changed her mind. Even Ray, who was born here, jokes that one day space aliens will land on the old power station, take one look around and decide Earth is not worth invading. But beggars can’t be choosers, and much as they’d like to live in a barn conversion in rural Northumberland, the combined wages of a copper and a long-haul trucker will just about stretch to a terraced house with views to die for of the wind turbines on the north pier.

She looks longingly at the bed. But it’s no good. She has to get on with the day. She dries her hair, dabs on some moisturizer and a little bit of slap to make her look vaguely human, and thinks about what to wear. Not that she has much choice. Ptolemy regards it as one of the rich ironies of the modern, progressive CID that while women are now routinely promoted to superintendent rank and beyond, they are still obliged to wear two-piece suits to look like men. Some think it emphasizes their importance and equality – but as far as Ptolemy is concerned, all it does is exaggerate their fat backsides.

She gets dressed and opens the curtains. The rain has stopped. The strange, pale orb showing in the white, translucent sky is the sun. It may even be a nice day today. In the kitchen two more of Ray’s lilies have sprung open and the organic smell is getting overpowering. She slooshes down a cup of tea and tries and fails to eat a bowl of cornflakes and listens to Radio 2 until the seven o’clock pips. Then she collect up her car keys and leaves the house.

The BMW 4 Series with stolen plates arrives at the multistorey car park in the centre of Newcastle shortly after 8 a.m. In it are three men. The driver is a bag of nervous energy: he keeps rubbing his hands on his tracksuit bottoms, hissing through his teeth, clicking the indicator stem up and down, flicking the bill of the outsized baseball cap he always wears. His name is Delon Wombwell and he is getting on his passengers’ nerves. They are beginning to wonder if Delon has Asperger’s or ADD or Tourette’s or some other affliction that makes people want to fucking punch you in the face until you start acting normally.

‘What time is it?’ he says. Nobody replies. Delon doesn’t really want to know, so they aren’t wasting their breath telling him. There is a clock on the dashboard.

Click click. Click click
. The indicator.

Tssst. Tssst
. Delon’s teeth.

‘ ’Scuse me,’ says the man in the back seat. His name is Allen Philliskirk. The man in the front passenger seat, whose name is Sam Severin, hears the window being wound down and Philliskirk saying, ‘Jesus!’ – and then he feels a newspaper being frantically wafted behind him.

‘Pre-match nerves,’ Philliskirk explains. ‘Ten-to-three syndrome. Can’t help it.’

‘Thanks for the warning,’ says Severin.

Presently, Philliskirk says: ‘Mind you, there are worse things can happen. I ever tell you about Donnie Proudfoot?’

‘Jacka-fuckin’-nory.’ That is Delon.

Philliskirk continues: ‘Donnie Proudfoot. Lives in Benwell now. My old man was in the army with him in Gulf One. Anyway, Donnie got his balls shot off by an Iraqi sniper.’

‘No!’ says Delon, glancing into the rear-view mirror.

‘Anyway, right, Donnie gets pensioned out of the army and one day he’s down the job centre and sees this advert in the window: “Hod carrier wanted, three pounds an hour.” Spot on, he thinks, and he goes down to the building site to see the foreman. “It’s a tough job,” says the foreman. “Every day you’ll be required to hump sixty pound of bricks up and down a ladder.” Donnie just smiles and says, “When I was in the Gulf, I had to hump a hundred pound of kit across fifty miles of desert in just two days.” Well, the foreman was impressed by that. “You sound like just the kind of bloke we’re after,” he says. “You can start nine o’clock Monday.” Donnie’s chuffed to bits. Anyway, he’s on his way out of the foreman’s office when the foreman goes: “One thing, Donnie. How comes you left the army?” So Donnie tells him about getting his fucking knackers shot off. “Oh,” says the foreman, “in that case you’d better start at ten.” “Why’s that?” says Donnie. “Well,” says the foreman, “the lazy bastards who work on this site spend the first hour scratching their balls.” ’

Severin shakes his head. Delon is creased over with laughter. Delon’s laugh, Severin thinks, is just a little bit too hysterical. It is the kind of laugh you hear in pubs when people are pretending to have a good time.

Philliskirk leans forward and claps him jovially on the shoulder. ‘You all right, Sammy?’

‘Tiptop,’ Severin says.

‘Hello, hello,’ says Delon. ‘What have we here?’

The men in the car look to their right. A vehicle has just come up the ramp. It is a Porsche Cayenne, metallic black with sport alloys, worth in excess of £90,000. They watch it glide past, unable to see through the blacked-out windows. They watch it swing into a vacant bay and they wait for the driver to get out. They wait for him to flip the alarm system and then they watch him heading for the lifts.

The Bug House is the name Vos’s team have given to their room on the second floor of the West End police station, which is a singularly drab building overlooking Westgate Road in the Benwell district of the city. The room is officially known as 23E but gets its nickname from a long-dead, even-longer-forgotten city alderman called W James Buglass, whose bewhiskered countenance glowers over the detectives from an ornate gold frame fixed to the wall by the door. Apparently Buglass was instrumental in the formation of the Newcastle upon Tyne City Police, back in the days when the wharves were jammed with barges and collier brigs, and you couldn’t see from one side of the river to the other for masts and coal smoke. His portrait had pride of place in the old West End police headquarters at Arthur’s Hill until the building was demolished, whereupon an enterprising detective, thinking it might be worth a few quid, quietly ensured that it got lost in the move to Westgate Road. When he discovered it was worth very little indeed, he bequeathed it to West End CID, who in turn lost it to the Major Crime Unit in a game of poker. Now, scrawled onto Buglass’s luxuriant white mutton chops are the signatures of every detective who has ever worked on the squad.

Huggins and Fallow are in Vos’s office, spooling through CCTV footage from the four security cameras erected around Enrico Cabaljo’s house. The footage they are most interested in is from the camera positioned on the corner of the building, overlooking the rear patio, the koi carp pond and, hopefully, enough of the garden to see a man of Middle Eastern appearance plummeting to the ground at around 8.45 p.m. on Sunday night. This will at least confirm the theory that he was indeed hit by the train bound for Edinburgh.