The Cutting Crew (13 page)

'Yeah,' I said. 'We'll need to check that.'

My mind had started whirling and I couldn't think properly.

Rosh rested his hand on my shoulder.

'It's going to be okay,' he said. 'We'll find the bastards that did this.'

But I recognised the tone of voice: it was the one you used when you were talking to a witness or a victim or a relative - not a fellow officer. He was talking to one of them, not one of us. It was an awful sensation, and I felt myself unravelling even further inside.

Had I become so incapable after just a few months? Had things disintegrated for me that much?

Rosh repeated it gently: 'We'll find them.'

Pull yourself together.

'Yes,' I said. 'We will.'

I don't remember much about leaving or about the drive back. We checked around outside carefully but there was nobody to see and so we headed off. Lucy had her car and Rosh had brought the van; without thinking too deeply about it, I went with him. We drove in relative silence, and a thought occurred to me: if I had brought the video with me, I could have been taken down and we would have lost it that way too. Even though I should have called Lucy the moment I'd seen it, leaving it at my flat hadn't been the worst error in the world. Perhaps I was being sensitive. I watched takeaways flash past, and flood-lit shopfronts, and bright amber porches; and it was hypnotic. Rosh kept the speed even and the ride fluid and smooth. By the time we pulled up outside my flat, Lucy's car idling by the kerb in front of us, I had been lulled into a dozy, nodding half-trance.

'Looks secure,' Rosh said as we got out.

'Looks it,' I agreed, getting my gun out but keeping it beneath my jacket. 'But there are back ways in.'

I unlocked the front door and we went inside. Off the shared entrance hall was a door into the hairdressing salon that I lived two storeys above. One floor up was my neighbour - a surly Spanish guy who played loud, thudding music day and night - and then the top floor was mine.

The corridor on the ground floor was dark but it looked safe enough. The door at the back, at least, was still shut tight and bolted from the inside.

'Looks okay.'

The three of us made our way upstairs.

My door was still locked, and so unless someone had scaled the outside of the house and broken in through a window, the flat was secure. I unlocked the door and led the way up the short series of steps to my hallway. Even after four months, the smell of must and paint from the redecoration was still present in the air - along with a slightly more underhand odour that I was immediately embarrassed by. My flat wasn't exactly a mansion at the best of times, and I hadn't been expecting company today. A couple of one-night stands aside, Lucy and Rosh were my first real guests.

'Sorry about the mess,' I said, switching on the front room light.

It wasn't as bad as I'd thought but, seeing it through their eyes, I cringed on my own behalf. The bed was half-made. The television was still on, flashing over at the far corner of the room, resting on a table covered with discarded bus tickets, receipts and creased flyers for clubs I'd never been to. Across from that was my computer, with a few empty, misty glasses beside it. There were also two empty bottles of vodka on the floor next to the chair, which I realised didn't look good. I saw Lucy eyeing them with a blank expression on her face and I wanted to tell her that it was okay - I hadn't drunk them both in one go, or anything. But then I realised that didn't really sound much better.

'Is the video still there?' Rosh said.

I checked.

'Yes.'

'We need to watch it.'

'Do you want a drink?' I said. 'A coffee, I mean.'

'Please.'

"Me too,' Lucy said.

'Okay.'

I went off to put the kettle on, and consoled myself with the fact that at least they hadn't seen the kitchen. While the water boiled, I washed out three mugs and thought to myself that decadence and living in hedonistic squalor were only romantic when there was nobody around to disapprove. I made the coffee with a clean spoon and took it back through.

'Thanks.'

Then we watched the video. This time I knew what to expect, and so I made a point of abstracting myself as much as possible from what I was seeing. Lucy and Rosh weren't so lucky; my description of it certainly hadn't prepared them, but then I imagined that nothing could. As police officers, we had often seen the after-effects of violence, but we'd never seen anything as extreme and upsetting as what was playing out on my television screen. At the end, Lucy was crying. Rosh was pale and his hands were trembling.

He said it again: 'We're going to find these bastards.'

Lucy nodded. 'And we're going to fucking kill them.'

That didn't leave me much room to make a suggestion and, once again, I felt a little removed from their world. Instead, I repeated what I'd discovered that day, finishing with the forwarding that had been set up on Alison's email account.

Rosh looked thoughtful.

'Do you really think Sean was killed because he was looking into that girl's murder?'

'Yes,' I said immediately. 'And I think he sent me the information because he was scared of something. He knew that he was in danger. There's the Missing Persons Report, for one thing. I think that someone in the department maybe knew something about Alison's death and kept her ID hidden from the investigation deliberately.'

Lucy was glaring at the television. 'We need to know who.'

'We can find out who,' Rosh told her. 'And when we find out who, we can find out why.'

'Right now,' Lucy said, 'I'd settle for the who.'

Neither of us disagreed with her.

'We have Harris to work with,' I said. 'I've seen his picture, and he looks like a sleazeball but not a killer. It feels to me as though maybe he's covering something up. But he'll be able to tell us that.'

'He's the first stop,' Rosh said, standing up. 'Can I use your computer?'

'Knock yourself out.' I gestured over towards my desk. 'Just don't look at the bookmarks.'

He gave me a wry, if somewhat reluctant, grin and then went over and booted up the laptop. While he had his back to us, I caught Lucy's eye and smiled. She smiled back, but her expression was complicated. Yes, I'm pleased to see you, it said; yes, I'm pleased you're okay; but no, I'm not convinced that you're really okay.

Across the room, Rosh accessed the net and logged on to the police system. In less than a minute, he had Mark Harris's address on screen, and - moving towards the computer with Lucy and standing a little apart from her - I was reminded of the ease with which they could get information I had to scrabble for, and aware again of the gulf that had grown between us. It didn't matter, I told myself. Because this wasn't police business: this was our business, and what was important was that we had the address. Harris had a flat in Turtle, of all places. In fact, I knew the street.

That was what mattered.

Chapter
Nine

In terms of the city's annual competition, my allegiance on paper was to the green and red flag of Turtle. I grew up there, soaking up its atmosphere and imbibing a sense of its civic pride. But I was never sporty and never particularly interested when, every year, the flags and tapestries were hung out, and the lanterns lit, and the older boys began their marches through the streets, decked out in the district's colours. Perhaps it was just because I knew most of them, and had been beaten up or robbed by a few, and so I figured that the apparent pride and discipline on display were somewhat at odds with the fact that a good percentage of them were bastards who I knew would end up in prison. Of course, at the time, I didn't realise that it would be me that put some of them there.

But Turtle is that kind of place. In many ways, it's a good, solid district to grow up in. You might end up getting a few knocks, but that's not necessarily the worst thing in the world - depending, of course. I met people there now, and I'd notice that a lot of the parents had the same look on their face: one that says they're always watching who their kids are hanging around with and always aware that things can go either way for them, and sometimes very quickly. Characterising the district as a cop, it's the sort of place that needs a clip round the ear every so often. It's not serious or nasty, and it's mostly good humoured. But nevertheless, it's still in occasional need of a firm hand and a watchful eye.

I'd always liked it, and I'd never wished I'd been born anywhere else. You could live in Rabbit and be rich, but that was more of a nice place to aspire to: maybe you missed out on something if you grew up there and got it for free. Or there was Snail or Mouse maybe even Bull - with their shabby back-to-backs, but unless you were very lucky then you were starting off too low. Once you get to a certain depth, fighting your way to the surface can be difficult, no matter what the movies might tell you. Where else? You can have a condo in Elephant, but that kind of shit is transitory at best. Those places are filing cabinets for very important bits of paper that won't matter much inside two years. Horse? It's all students - nobody lives there for long. In every sense, it's almost all takeaways.

But Turtle? Like Goat and Bear, it's not too rich, not too poor.

You can generalise a little by playing district zodiac: if you're born in Turtle then you have little truck with airs and graces. You work hard. You swear too much - you may even burp while you're swearing - and you never take anything good you get for granted.

Turtle is where I grew up, and it's also where I lived with Rachel; and where she still lived, in fact - only two streets away from Harris. As Lucy headed off to the department to work the evidence she'd taken from Bull, Rosh and I drove away from my flat and went to pay him a visit. I felt slightly awkward. I hadn't been that close since I'd moved out, and in some ways it felt like my old district wasn't mine anymore. But I wasn't thinking specifically about Harris's flat being close to Rachel's, because that was just a coincidence. And of course, that's all it was. Later, I would begin to understand exactly what that meant.

Ten o'clock at night found the streets of Turtle quiet, the houses curtained and secure, and the late-night shops amber-bright and busy. Rosh drove us slowly and evenly: only ever turning the wheel enough to take the gentle corners. Although I'd worked with him and knew him quite well, I'd never partnered him officially, but on the times we'd been out on private business he'd always been like this: never wasting movement, as though he knew instinctively what was needed and what wasn't. He was all minimum effort, whether he was walking around, beating on someone or driving somewhere - just plain efficient, cutting directly to whatever chase he was on and taking it slow. His conversation was the same. No unnecessary introductions.

'There was a shooting in Wasp the other night,' he said.

'Oh?'

'Yeah. Nobody got hurt - just some guy firing shots up in the air to break up a fight.'

I shook my head. 'These have-a-go heroes.'

'Yeah,' Rosh said. 'You know anything about it? It's just that if you don't then somebody's stolen your gun. We matched the bullets to it.'

I'd considered that the morning after without really thinking about it. The department kept a record of all our firearms.

Whenever we'd gone out as a group, we'd used unlicensed, unmarked weapons and disposed of them afterwards. Sensible and careful. And then outside Spooks I'd just happily discharged my own gun. I didn't say anything, figuring that Rosh wasn't about to drag me in over it.

Instead, he said: 'So do you miss being a cop?'

'No.'

The streetlights in Turtle were like whalebones: thin, looping up from the pavements on either side, almost meeting above the centre of the street. There was little other traffic tonight, and most of the houses were keeping to themselves. This part of Turtle was filled with people you couldn't see; it was as though they knew something you didn't, like villagers locking themselves away on the night of the full moon, pretending they couldn't hear the stranger in town knocking on the doors in panic.

Rosh corrected himself.

'Well - maybe "miss" is the wrong word.'

I watched the houses go past: short, black blocks, randomly illuminated from within. Being with Rosh could sometimes feel like being with my parents - I knew he meant well, so I couldn't quite bring myself to tell him to fuck off and mind his own business.

Rosh had started all of this for Sean, Lucy and me, but his approach had always been a little different, and I didn't think he understood exactly what was going on in our heads. Lucy could be borderline psychotic; Sean had been delusional; and I was just a mess. I had no doubt that Rosh, who had always been so exact and grounded, felt responsible, concerned, worried. It was only natural that he would intrude a little, and I tried not to take it too badly.