The Score (23 page)

So perhaps this whole thing was wrong – perhaps those teenage girls, for example, were hooked on ‘Street Spirit’; perhaps the Deptford thing was pure coincidence. Or something else.

Cat was betting on something else.

She checked the back of the café. There was no yard, not really. You could just about jam a car in, but it would have been obvious and intrusive to the café owner. There was no side street, which left the front, or maybe an upstairs room of a neighbouring property.

Cat went outside to check the buildings on either side, but there was nothing vacant. Nothing boarded up, or easily accessed by a fire-escape.

She went back to the CCTV footage and checked the cars immediately outside. None of those parked had any occupants. Another car was parked opposite Currys. A white estate, nondescript. Running across the top of the windscreen a strip of green plastic doubled as a sunshield and advertising banner. Cat halted the video, leaned in to the screen, squinted. Just managed to make out some of the lettering: the word Pegasus, it looked like. There was a yellow and black rectangle on the side of the car advertising something.

She let the footage run on for a few seconds, focused on the car’s interior, stopped it again when she saw the outline of a man appearing, sitting in the back on the opposite side to the driver, hunched over something resting on his thighs. It was not clear but from that range she thought it would still be possible to piggyback the café’s wi-fi.

She went outside with her own laptop to check how far she could go before the connection broke. Two yards, five, ten, twenty-five. She was beyond the relevant parking bay now, and her signal was one-bar but still working.

Back to the café. The owner glared at her, like she was a weirdo, but without much malice. If you want to avoid weirdos, don’t set up an internet café.

The white car’s registration number wasn’t visible. She viewed
the
fifth video, then the fourth, hoping that she could catch the moment when it arrived, getting a different angle on the plates to read them. It was in the middle of the third section of footage that the car arrived. She stopped the film there. The plate was blurred, needing sharpening and contrast enhancement in Photoshop, not the whole of it visible, but the yellow-and-black advertising section resolved as the details of a minicab firm: Pegasus Cabs.

She exhaled slowly, feeling the cold rush of adrenalin prick through every capillary in her body. Benzos? Screw them. Her current intoxicant of choice was altogether sweeter.

She used Google to get the company location and drove there fast, feeling pumped. The cab firm was positioned four blocks west of Deptford Bridge station. She noted how close it was to Rhiannon’s first address, only two streets away.

She was moving in ever diminishing circles.

The area was a mixture of social housing and small, down-at-heel businesses. The mini-cab company stood next door to a take-away kebab shop, little more than a kiosk. The two businesses occupied a property that had once been single usage, but someone along the way had put in a crude dividing wall.

She parked, climbed out, walked straight in the front door. The cab office had little to it beyond being a place where clients’ calls could be taken and drivers directed via a two-way radio system. In one corner of the room sat three casually dressed men in their mid-twenties – cabbies, waiting for a fare to call. They were occupying chipped chairs while conducting a desultory conversation about the Premier League in heavily accented English.

Most of the back of the office was occupied by a counter topped with a built-in shutter that had been left open. Behind this sat a squat individual with sleek, black hair. He wore a garish open-necked seersucker shirt in pink and yellow. Tendrils of chest hair were clearly visible above the top buttons. On his
wrist
sat a heavy gold Rolex watch. Cat pulled her warrant card out of her pocket, waved it in front of him.

‘I’d like to see your fare book from June.’

Rolex was almost too quick for her, but she managed to stick her fist under the shutter to prevent its closure.

‘You want a charge of ABH against an officer, do you?’ she shouted into the gap between shutter and desk, refusing to retract her arm.

He seemed to understand the situation. Gradually the shutter was raised, the fare book pushed begrudgingly across the counter. The records had been entered in a leatherbound ledger with a stained cover. Inside, there were greasy smears hinting at a more than casual link with the kebab house next door. Cat turned the pages quickly, searching first for the correct date, then the time that she had seen the cab parked opposite the cybercafé. About halfway down the page she found a reference to a drop-off.

‘So which driver is seventeen then?’

Out of the corner of her eye she caught a sudden movement. A rustling noise as a newspaper was put down. One of the three waiting drivers was leaving by a doorway to the right of the counter. The shutter slammed down loudly as she ran after the driver into the building’s back yard.

The yard measured no more than twenty feet from one end to the other; most of it taken up by overflowing bins. There was a door that would have given access to the street but had rusted shut. The wall was less than seven feet high and the cabbie was halfway over it. Cat grabbed the man’s legs as he scaled it, used all her weight to bring him back down. She wasn’t taking any chances. As he dropped, she wound her right arm around his neck, squeezed it back towards her shoulder so that it obstructed his windpipe, tensed her arm a little so that her hard bicep bit into his soft throat.

‘All right! Fuck’s sake.’

His face was contorted, his arms up in a gesture of surrender.

She kept her arm where it was, but loosened her hold slightly. He smelled of inexpensive aftershave with an overlay of sweat. She could feel his fear.

‘I’m not immigration, I’m not interested in your papers. OK?’

He nodded slowly. Half-turned and threw a longing glance at the wall, freedom.

‘Who was the man in your cab with a laptop?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t remember.’

Cat wasn’t too bothered; he’d have to resist at least one question for his self-esteem.

‘I am becoming a little more interested in your papers now.’

She saw him glance to the right, followed his gaze. She saw the office owner with the Rolex and the two other drivers now moving across the yard towards her. Rolex came in close, sneering. He must be as stupid as all hell to threaten a police officer, but if people weren’t stupid, policing would be a quiet job.

Cat gave driver 17 a last, hard squeeze on the Adam’s apple to leave him choking and temporarily incapacitated. Then in one flowing move stepped forward and kicked Rolex in the groin. It wasn’t a precise martial arts kick, Walter would be tutting disapproval, but she was Welsh and liked to allow herself a robust rugby punt, now and again. Rolex sagged to the ground.

‘Back off!’

The growl that emerged from her throat had the desired effect on the men who cupped their hands in front of their crotches. They hesitated, not wanting to lose face and retreat but looking as if they didn’t fancy it either.

Back to driver 17, who was beginning to revive. She pushed his head against a wall to give her back the initiative, then resumed her choke hold and pulled him backwards with her down some
steps.
She just managed to right herself in time to maintain her hold. The steps led down to a doorway. In the yard, the three men were moving closer, recovering their courage. She backed through the door, dragging driver 17 by the throat after her. They came into another small yard. The smell of spices mixed uneasily with the stench of the bins.

She had some time, but not much.

She moved against the wall, briefly increasing the pressure to remind her prisoner who was boss. He grunted in response, moved his head from side to side in an attempt to gain some freedom. And some air.

‘Who is he?’ Cat asked again.

‘Don’t know.’

He had a lot to lose by holding out, and she’d been told a lot of lies in her time but there was a tone in his voice that made her believe him. She tried another avenue.

‘Where do you pick him up?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Where?’

He pointed at the passageway out to the street.

‘That one, he always comes off the street.’

She sensed he was telling the truth. But it was a truth that didn’t tell her anything she could use. She increased the pressure on his neck again, was rewarded with a strangled grunt.

‘Up close what does he look like?’

‘Always he wears glasses, a scarf.’

‘The drop-off?’

‘By that café. He just sits there, uses his laptop.’

‘He get out there?’

‘No, he asks me to drop him on the street, different places each time.’

‘Accent?’

‘English man. I don’t know.’

She could feel the man relax, the tension in his muscles ebb away. This meant he’d told her everything, he knew he could not be made to give more. He even allowed himself a flourish now. He extended his arm, made a claw with his hand, then made a gentle throwing motion. ‘He’s there, then he’s gone.’

‘Like magic, huh.’

Cat slumped, relaxing her hold. She knew how close she had got, which made the dead end that she had hit all the more painful. Feeling Cat’s grasp weaken, the man slipped his neck from her hold and half-turned, cautiously backing off towards the white door. Cat closed her eyes. The killer had been there in front of her, then disappeared, as a dream evaporates on waking.

‘Pick up or drop him on these streets?’

She reeled off the three local addresses, both Tana’s and Rhiannon’s.

‘Last one maybe. Once, I think.’

She gave the address again. He shrugged. It was a long street, she knew. She was clutching at straws now.

‘Fuck it,’ she shouted. The frustration was unbearable.

She heard the advance of feet from the adjoining yard as the cabbies gained the confidence to come again. Something told her she’d need to conserve her energy. She turned, jumped and slapped her palms on top of the wall of the yard, hoisted herself up, lifting her legs, she balanced momentarily on top of the wall, before dropping down into the street below.

The fading daylight did little to improve the look of Rhiannon’s former lodging. The rain had stopped for a couple of hours but was now returning intermittently, a skein of droplets on the windscreen. In Wales weeks could pass in this state of perpetual dampness. This felt like home.

She pulled into a space on the same side as the property, about thirty yards short. Out of the corner of her eye, by the dim light of a flickering street lamp, she caught a sign hanging in a window. A dirty flag, with a pentangle painted on it.

It was draped like a curtain from an upper window in the grimy brick tenement block. The front garden had a fridge-freezer rusting in the garden. A buddleia was trying to shoot from the old icebox. There was no doorbell, just a couple of wires poking out of a rotting doorframe. No lights on in any downstairs room. She knocked, her knuckles making little impression on the heavy door. She would have peered into the front room just beside her, but a red fake velvet drape hung in the window. A dead pot plant sat between the drape and the window, a little sanctuary for the home’s spiders.

She traversed round to the back of the house where the long low extension had a flat roof, sheeted with roofing felt. A couple of dustbins and a teetering drainpipe gave her a way up. She climbed onto the roof. Jumping down the other way would place her in the garden and allow her to try the back door, but there were no lights there either. A window faced out onto the roof. She banged on it a couple of times, just to check there was no one there. She prepared to smash the window with a boot heel.

But the second knock brought a face to the window. A thin man, Asian, wearing a yellow T-shirt, none too new. She banged again, pressing her warrant card up against the glass.

‘Police,’ she snapped. ‘Open up immediately.’

The face disappeared to be replaced by a woman’s face. Then the man fiddled with the window lock and threw the window up. Cat climbed in. The room was ten foot by six foot, and housed three people: the immigrant couple and a two-year-old daughter. There was a kettle and a pair of electric rings in the corner. The three of them shared a single, ancient mattress.

Cat was already on her way out and upstairs.

Deeper into the house, a red bulb on an upper landing glowed its seedy invitation. Cat wondered about exit routes. Wondered if it was right to be here. Wondered if she should tell Kyle her whereabouts.

Too late. She was heading up.

The stairs creaked under her. The place stank of an overflowing toilet and uncleaned carpet. She made for the top floor, trying to feel centred. Trying to find her fighting energy.

At the top there was a single door. Music was coming through beneath it. She knocked hard, yelled, ‘Police.’

Nothing. She knocked again and slammed the door with her boot. She was about to make a more serious effort when the door opened. A cadaverous man – maybe early twenties – in skinny black jeans and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt hung in the doorway smirking at her.

‘Fuller?’ The man hesitated. ‘Roberts?’ He still hesitated, but at the same time scratching his scrawny neck. She reckoned she’d got Roberts.

‘Pigs?’

‘May I come in?’ Cat was polite, because she had to be. She had no legal right of entry. She couldn’t step over the threshold without an invitation.

‘You got a warrant?’ Roberts smirked at her, enjoying his little one-upmanship. Incense and the sweet smell of marijuana hung in the air.

‘Buddy, I don’t have a warrant, but if you want me to come back here with a van full of cops and a sniffer dog, then I will, I will.’

He smirked a bit more, then flung himself aside so the way was clear for Cat to enter. She did so and the moment she did, he swung the door shut and locked it.

‘For your comfort and safety,’ he said.

Cat checked the lock. It wasn’t a Yale that could be unlocked from the inside, but a mortice lock and Roberts had pocketed the key.