The Turning Tide (10 page)

Harriet exhaled. ‘Thank you so much,’ she said. ‘It is a bit awkward. We should have done it when you were here, but you know . . . ’

‘Yes, I understand. Unexpected guests can sometimes mess with your internal protocol,’ Morag said. ‘It happens all the time in Westminster, let me assure you.’

‘And you don’t even have a bunch of dead bodies hanging about,’ Harriet said.

‘Now that’s an arguable point,’ Morag said. ‘But they do a good job of appearing animated enough to represent their constituents, mind.’ Harriet chuckled on the other end of the line. ‘If you don’t mind my asking, do you know who the man is yet?’

‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, but this could turn out to be an interesting one,’ Harriet said. ‘There’s a fellow who went missing in London in January, and so far all the particulars of the case match.’

‘Really?’ Morag’s hand paused above the desktop she had been drumming.

‘A researcher, some geology professor,’ Harriet continued. ‘The lab is working on the
DNA
and dental identification, but so far, a connection is looking stronger all the time. Nothing has been ruled out. Apparently the chap’s disappearance was kind of a big deal. They thought a suicide at first. Did you hear of it?’

‘Can’t say that it rings any bells,’ Morag said. ‘But when I get a chance to read anything other than the news . . . well, I read anything other than the news.’

‘I understand,’ Harriet said. ‘On which note I should mention this info is not common knowledge, for now. The forensic lab is still working through a backlog. If the press get hold of this information before police officially statement it, that could be awkward for me.’

‘I’m the last person to go handing the media vultures any confidential information,’ Morag said in what she hoped was her most reassuring voice. Though most people these days assumed all politicians had a handy leak on the side, or a reporter they slipped unattributed quotes to from time to time, that had never been how she operated. She liked her schemes to be a little subtler. Under the radar. ‘Anyway, I do have to get to a meeting, so . . . Harriet? Thank you again for calling. Why don’t we have lunch the next time I’m in Cameron Bridge.’

‘I’d love to!’ Harriet said eagerly, but Morag had already hung up.

: 9 :

‘Erykah, Nicole, you’re here.’ The coach popped his head out of his office as they walked from the weights gym to the changing room. ‘I was hoping to catch you. A quick word?’

This was unexpected. The head coach, Dominic de Besombes, was so seldom in his office that rowers called him ‘Dom the Doorknob’ behind his back on account of the fact that he never stayed on the premises long enough to let go of the door handle.

There had been a lot of excitement when he got the job, thanks to his reputation as a powerhouse in the gold medal winning Sydney Olympic eight. What quickly became clear, however, was that he was incapable of transferring any of his ability to anyone else. Unkind remarks started sprouting behind his back that he was past it.

‘Everything all right?’ Erykah asked. She needed a shower after a hard session on the deadlifts and squats. Nicole, after being frosty to her on the phone, had seemed fine tonight, even inviting Erykah back to hers after training. Maybe there was room for reconciliation after all. She hoped so. The atmosphere at home was unbearable. At least she had the club as an escape.

Erykah and Nicole stood in the tiny coaching office because two of Dom’s mates were already sitting in the chairs, leaning back at precipitous angles. Rupert and Oliver, or whatever they were called, eyed the women with the prurient leer that men of entitlement seem to be born with.

Dom tugged at the frayed, turned-up collar of his rugby shirt. He gestured to the evening newspaper on the desk. ‘I take it you’ve seen the news today?’

Erykah picked up the paper. Above the fold, a snap from the lottery shoot. They had cropped the shot of Rab spraying her with champagne, so only she remained. Without context her smile looked manic, almost threatening, like a snarl.

Below it, the headline ‘Lottery Dame Is Pop Cop Murder Moll’. Then in a smaller section header: ‘Notorious Rikki Barnes and her rich new life in Molesey’.

‘Thanks for the heads-up, Dom,’ she said and threw the paper back on his desk.

‘You don’t want to read the rest of the story?’ he said.

Erykah shook her head. ‘No thanks, I’m pretty sure I know how it goes,’ she said.

No doubt a curious journo had gone through old archives and found her. It was inevitable that someone would.

Grayson had been dealing to a former pop star called Rory Lovelace. Rory scored a few hits with his group Northern Boyz back in the day and a few more when he went solo, then dropped off the radar as his party lifestyle took over.

Erykah had no idea that Grayson knew Rory. A sale is a sale was Grayson’s motto. Except Rory had fallen behind paying to the tune of several thousand pounds. And Grayson being Grayson, well . . . this was not going to stand.

One night they were on the way to a dinner date when Grayson made a side trip to a client’s house, a quick stop, he said. He had been arguing with Erykah, again, about the amount of time she was spending with the university rowing club. ‘Your studies are number one, I’m number two. You should be investing any free time in your man,’ Grayson had said. He kept taking his hands off the wheel, gesticulating in the air to make his points, but his eyes were staring straight ahead. ‘That coach of yours is putting nonsense in your head with this Olympic talk.’ She bridled at his suggestion. Sure, Grayson had given her a lot, but she was still her own person and this was her decision. Wasn’t it? Who would turn down the offer to do GB trials for the national squad?

It was a moist night, summer came early that year. The air felt as thick and close as the tension between them. He parked on double yellow lines and told Erykah to stay in the car; he wouldn’t be long. She sat and waited, stewing over what he had said. Grayson came back five minutes later.

He opened the boot of the car and Erykah looked at him in the wing mirror. Was that blood on his shirt? He didn’t
look
hurt. He reached in the back and pulled a fresh shirt out of a bag, unbuttoned the one covered in blood, and put the new one on. No marks on him. So it wasn’t his blood.

‘What happened?’ she said when he got back in the driver’s seat.

‘Shut up, bitch,’ Grayson snapped. Erykah was shocked. He had never spoken to her like that before. Had he killed someone? Would he kill her?

They sat silently through dinner that night. He dropped her home without a word, didn’t even walk her to the door. She couldn’t sleep. What had he done? In the past, if anyone didn’t pay, Grayson turned up and waved a gun around. That was usually all it took. And if they still didn’t pay, he let someone else handle enforcement. She had never wanted to think about what that meant before, but now she couldn’t ignore it.

She went to her early morning training session the next day, then to uni. The police were waiting outside her Differential Equations lecture. They didn’t cuff her in front of the other students, but it hardly mattered. Everyone froze where they stood, watching as she was led away to a waiting Rover.

The drive to the station was short. ‘So you’re Rainbow’s girl,’ one of the cops said. ‘With a mum like that I’m surprised we haven’t seen you sooner.’

The other cop smirked. ‘Rainbow Barnes, yeah. I wouldn’t touch that cunt with someone else’s knob.’ His eyes met Erykah’s in the mirror. ‘Guess not every man thinks that way though.’

The driver shook his head in mock sorrow. ‘Trying to turn Streatham into Brixton is what they’re doing,’ he said. The other one nodded. It was not necessary to explain who
they
were. ‘Used to be our kids could play in the streets. If we weren’t in negative equity I would have moved the family out of London a long time ago.’

At the station, another cop patted her down, smiling as his hands lingered over her waist and hips. The knowing glances he exchanged with the police who had brought her in frightened her. She was led to a small room with reinforced glass on the door and told to wait there.

After three hours a couple of investigators came into the room. They sat in the two chairs opposite hers and switched on a tape recorder. ‘I guess you know what this is about,’ the first one said. His close-cropped hair looked plastered to his head, as if he had just been washing himself in the bathroom sink.

Erykah said nothing.

‘So you’re going to “ride” for your man, is that it?’ He nodded. ‘Come in here and give us the silent treatment, and go down for that drug-dealing murderer you think loves you?’

The other one shook his head. ‘It’s always the same story with these girls,’ he said. ‘Some gangster promises them the moon on a stick, grooms them to do his time for him.’ Erykah looked away, at the spindles of the tape recorder slowly turning. ‘Oh, you think your man is different, do you?’ he said. ‘You think you keep your mouth shut and go home to him and he’s going to pat you on the head and thank you and put a diamond on that skinny finger?’

Erykah bit her bottom lip. ‘Yeah, that’s what she thinks,’ the other one said. ‘She thinks she’s her man’s only woman, and she’s going to ride for him, and they’re going to live happily ever after.’

He pulled a folder from under the table. Inside were glossy photos, taken from some distance away. He spread them out carefully on the table as a card dealer might.

‘Take a good long look at this,’ the first detective said. ‘So here’s you, last Thursday, waiting by the offie for Grayson to pick you up. Right?’ Erykah didn’t need to acknowledge what he said, it was clearly her. His hairy finger jabbed another photo. ‘And here’s you and Grayson, an hour and ten minutes later, and he’s dropping you off.’ The men exchanged glances. ‘Short date, huh? Or just a quickie?’

Erykah stared hard at the white edge of the photograph. She would not lose it in front of these people. She would not turn him in. She would not cry.

‘Now here,’ said the other one. ‘Here’s Grayson again. About twenty minutes after you left, he’s back again. Only, is that someone in the car with him? Oh yes, it most certainly is. That’s Tasha Jones, isn’t it?’ He dipped his head and forced Erykah to look at him. ‘You know Tasha, don’t you? Grayson has mentioned all the time he spends with her, hasn’t he? I mean if he didn’t, that would be odd, right?’

Erykah swallowed. She knew Tasha a bit. They had been at school together, though not in the same year and had few friends in common. She had noticed that Grayson mentioned her lately. He said they were just friends, that Tasha was dating his cousin. ‘Man, that girl just don’t give a shit,’ he would say, approvingly. It was his highest compliment. Someone who didn’t give a shit was cool, desirable, someone like him. Erykah knew she was not someone who did not give a shit. She gave a lot of shits, all the time.

‘You tell us nothing, fine, we can’t arrest you.’ The second detective said. He leaned back in his chair and looked around the tiny room as if he was looking at buildings up and down her street. ‘You go home. And then what? You wonder. What he’s doing, who he’s really with. You wonder when you’re going to see us again and what we’re going to pick him up for. And then you won’t be able to say we didn’t tell you so.’ He nodded as if satisfied with this scenario. ‘By then you won’t be so clean. You will be an accessory. From now on, you will know what he is, and what he is capable of, and you will have kept that from us. That’s a crime. And guess who is going to be visiting your man, when you’re in jail and so is he.’ The two men nodded at each other. ‘Well it’s not going to be you is it?’

Erykah’s shoulders started to shake. ‘Ohh, I think we’re going to have a crier,’ the first detective said. ‘Wise up girl, this man doesn’t care about you any more than he cares about any of his other girlfriends. Did I say girlfriends, plural? Yes, I certainly did. We’ve been following Grayson for a few months now. Do you want to see the pictures?’

‘No, she is a tough nut, I can tell.’ The second detective collected up the photos and put them back. Now it was his turn to put a folder on the table. ‘She still thinks she’s the main woman. How about we show you what went down at the scene while you were waiting for your Romeo to finish taking care of business.’

Compared to the black and white surveillance shots of the corner by her house, the crime scene photos were lurid, full-colour, full of detail. Rory and his bodyguard had been gunned down in the door of his penthouse suite. Grayson hadn’t even tried to hide the crime. There was so much blood at the scene, the cops said, that the first police to arrive slipped and fell on the marble floor.

‘I didn’t know anything.’ It was the first time she had spoken since the police met her at her lecture, and the words stuck in her throat. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Come off it,’ the first detective said. ‘You know more than you are telling us.’

The other one nodded. ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t cooperate,’ he said. ‘Nobody will believe we just let you walk out of here without making a deal.’

‘Right now he’s wondering where you are,’ the first detective said. ‘Why you didn’t come home after your lecture. Maybe one of his boys is outside, and they know you have been in here four hours already. They already think you’re grassing. You know what that means, what they are going to say about you even if you deny it. So you might as well tell us everything.’

‘But everyone saw you take me away. People get arrested all the time. There’s no reason for him to think that I’m going to talk to you.’

‘Arrested?’ The first one smiled. ‘But we didn’t arrest you.’

The other one shook his head. ‘We just brought you in for questioning. No charges. You could have walked out of here any time. Didn’t you know that?’

The first one stood up and walked to the door, opened and closed it again. ‘Door wasn’t even locked. Nobody forced you to stay.’

She put her forehead on the table. They were right, of course.

The first cop patted her arm. ‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘Just tell us now and it’s all over. Isn’t that what you want? For the chaos to end. You can’t be with your man the way you want to be if his life is like this. You’re a smart girl with your whole life in front of you. You don’t want to ruin that now. It will do you both good. You’ll be better for it. Stronger.’

It was only during the trial she realised how easily they had played her. They didn’t have to deviate from their plan one bit. They never even had to offer her anonymity, or do a deal, or promise her any kind of protection. They showed her a photo of her man with someone else, and she sang like a lark.

Erykah felt as if the murder itself was her fault. Grayson was always so careful – had arguing with her that night made him careless? Or worse, had their row sent him over the edge? It seemed so out of character. She had no other explanation for why things had happened the way they had. If she had kept quiet would he even have been caught?

The trial for the double murder occupied the front pages for months. The press ran endless promo photos of Rory from Northern Boyz’s first album. Then it was the turn of Rory’s bodyguard, a retired policeman from Leeds, and the tragic family of seven he left behind. Then finally Grayson himself and Erykah.

And the shirt. The shirt he had changed into, calmly, when he came back to the car. When she had told the police this detail their faces had lit up. They were not just handling a cop killer, someone who had taken down one of their own. The shirt was enough to claim he had planned it to the last detail. No crime of passion here. Premeditated.

And it didn’t matter to the press that she had cooperated with the investigation, that she was a witness for the Crown case, that she had done what she thought was the right thing. That she dressed well, spoke well, had never been in trouble in her life. That she was a student, and a good one too. All that mattered was where she was from, the colour of her skin, and what that stood for in the narrow minds of the editors. Her boyfriend was a cop killer. Her boyfriend was a drug dealer. She was only trash.

In her bed, night after night, she stared at the ceiling for hours, unable to sleep. I did the right thing, she told herself over and over. But no matter how many times she said it she never quite believed it was true.