by John Harvey
'Don't worry,' Mallory said. 'Your secret's safe with me.'
As she stood up, Linda squashed the smouldering butt beneath her foot.
'We're all guilty of something, big or small,' Mallory said. 'Wouldn't be human, else.' The smile lingered in his eyes. 'Here,' he said, taking a packet of Benson & Hedges from the side pocket of his blazer. Blue blazer and brown trousers. Highly polished shoes. 'Have one of mine.'
'No, thank you, sir.'
Mallory shrugged and produced a lighter. 'I was hoping I might bump into you,' he said, the smoke drifting towards Linda's face.
'Sir?'
'Before you shut up shop and turn tail for Hatfield…'
'Hertford, sir. It's Hertford, actually.'
'Hertford, Hatfield, Hitchin - all the same. Penny-ante little market towns with scarce a pot to piss in. Low-grade drug dealing and a handful of public-order offences of a weekend the best you can hope for.'
Linda nodded noncommittally.
'Always the worry,' Mallory said, 'let one of your kind out of the box and you never know which way they'll jump. Chancy that. Like letting off a firework in the middle of the bonfire, Guy Fawkes Night. Any bloody thing could happen.' Almost imperceptibly, he moved closer towards her. 'Someone could even get burned.'
For a moment, maybe more, his eyes bore into her, before, with a deft smile, he stepped away.
'But you now,' he said, 'no need to worry by all accounts'. Everything by the rules. Light the blue touch-paper and stand well clear.'
'You've seen the report,' Linda said, challenging.
'Place like this, difficult to keep things under wraps.'
'But you have seen it. A copy at least.'
'You think so?'
She knew it. He'd read it, relished and relaxed. Exonerated in Times New Roman, double spaced. Her signature at the bottom.
'You may think,' Mallory said, 'I owe you a favour.'
'Not at all, sir. We did our job, that's all. Just like you said. And I was only the junior officer, after all.'
'Junior, maybe, but always pushing hardest, eager for the truth. Gave poor Maddy Birch a rough ride, from what I hear. Had her up against the ropes. To mix a metaphor or two. Still, no gain having your card marked by a fool and you're no fool.'
A wink and a smile and he was on his way, leaving Linda wondering if there wasn't something crucial that they'd missed.
* * *
'Cocky bastard,' Ashley said when she told him. 'Not enough to be ahead of the game, he has to let you know.'
'Why me, though? Why not you? You're in charge.'
Ashley laughed. 'Mallory's way of thinking, not worth getting out of bed to put one over on old jossers like me. But you. You're sharp, bright, on the way up. A woman, too. If he can intimidate you a little, then he will.'
'I don't see what he stands to gain.'
'Right now? Aside from pumping up his vanity? Control. Leverage, some time in the future. Who knows?'
She looked at him keenly. 'You think we've let him get away with something, don't you?'
Ashley shrugged. 'This time, I honestly don't know. But I did my time in the Met, before opting for a quieter life. Coppers like Mallory, old school, they've been getting away with stuff for years. Big, small, more often than not just to prove they can. It's what gives them a buzz.'
Thinking about the way Mallory had materialised almost silently alongside her and the sly superiority of his smile, Linda shuddered as if someone had just stepped close to the corners of her grave.
14
It bit into him, like a tick that had infiltrated beneath his skin. No matter where he went, what he did. The routines with which he'd bolstered up his life since moving west no longer seemed enough. Each day he made a point of listening to the radio, scouring the papers for news.
On page 2 of the Telegraph, mid-December, something caught his eye: the investigation into two deaths in a police raid carried out a little over two months before. The paper's crime correspondent, claiming to have seen a leaked copy of the report, forecast a positive outcome to the official inquiry carried out by Superintendent Trevor Ashley and officers from the Hertfordshire Force.
Alongside, two columns wide, there was a photograph of a smiling Detective Superintendent George Mallory, taken outside the Old Bailey, his DCI, Maurice Repton, standing several paces behind, almost squeezed out of the frame. At the time, we were reminded, Mallory's commanding officer had been quick to attest to the professionalism with which the raid had been planned and carried out. A further paragraph referred to the tragic death of Detective Constable Paul Draper, a small head-and-shoulders shot rendering him almost impossibly young. If it had not been for Superintendent Mallory's quick thinking and resolute action, more lives might have been lost. Nothing about Draper's young widow and child.
Two pages on, a single paragraph near the foot of the page attested to the fact that the investigation into the death of Detective Sergeant Maddy Birch was still ongoing and that no arrests had so far been made.
Let it alone, Frank, he told himself. Let it be.
After yet another restless night he rose early, made coffee, walked down to the coast path to clear his head, rang Robert Framlingham and caught the London train.
* * *
Paddington station was thick with travellers, the natural hubbub and bustle overlaid with the saccharine wail of poorly amplified voices wishing them all a merry little Christmas. As Elder crossed the forecourt, a Big Issue seller with tinsel in his hair and two extravagant sprigs of mistletoe tied either side of his head like horns, lurched towards him, puckering up rouged lips.
The Underground platform was dangerously crowded — delays on the District, Circle and Bakerloo — and, when it arrived, the first train was near impossible to board. At Oxford Circus there was a five-minute queue to get out of the station.
In daylight, the skeletal snowflakes and reindeer that hung high above the street looked ugly and incomplete. Shop windows burgeoned with tawdry and expensive imprecations to buy, and Elder, hating it, hating every bit of it, felt nonetheless guilty he had neither bought a present for Katherine nor thought of one; had, in fact, bought nothing for anyone.
The restaurant was on one of the narrow streets that ran between Regent Street and Great Portland Street, home, for the most part, to small clothing wholesalers, their windows sprayed with fake snow. A sign on the door wished Elder Merry Christmas in Italian and inside red and green streamers looped cheerily along the walls.
Framlingham was already seated at a corner table, tucking into an antipasto of tuna and fagiolini. He was wearing a tweed suit that reminded Elder of damp heather, a cream shirt and a mustard tie.
Levering his tall frame out of his chair, the Chief Superintendent held out his hand. 'Frank, how long?'
'Seven years, eight?'
'And since you and I were the scourge of every bully-boy and malefactor in Shepherd's Bush?'
Elder smiled. 'Thirteen or so.'
A waiter took his coat and pulled out his chair.
When Elder had first moved down to London with Joanne, Robert Framlingham had been his immediate superior. Now, after one or two high-profile successes, his standing, as head of the Murder Review Unit, was growing. He had a house in Chiswick that he'd had the foresight to buy against the boom, and a cottage in Dorset, near the coast. Sailing was his passion.
There was a wife whom Elder had met no more than once or twice; three children, the youngest still at university, the others out in the world, paying back, no doubt, their student loans.
'You and Joanne,' Framlingham said once they'd settled. 'I was sorry to hear things didn't work out.'
Elder shrugged.
'Still see much of her?'
'Not a lot.'
'And the girl — Katherine, is it? — Frank, that was a terrible business. Nothing worse.' He broke off a piece of bread and wiped it round his plate. 'Coping, is she?'
'I'm not sure.'
'And you?'
Elder said nothing.
Framlingham leaned forward. 'All this kowtowing to civilised values and decency is all very well, but, cases like that, left to me, the bastard would've been given a taste of his own medicine and then sent for the long drop off some nice corded rope.'
The waiter, a sprig of holly pinned to his red waistcoat, had reappeared, smiling, at the table.
Oil ran down between Framlingham's fingers. 'Calves' liver's good, Frank. Sage and butter, nice and simple.'
Elder nodded, looked quickly down the menu and plumped for lamb cutlets with rosemary, saute potatoes and spinach.
'You'll have some wine, Frank? Red or white?'
'Red?'
Framlingham ordered a bottle of Da Luca Primitivo and some mineral water and for ten or so minutes they allowed themselves to gossip about half-remembered colleagues. Framlingham's liver leaked blood, pink across the plate.
'What I have to wonder, Frank, this current business, Maddy Birch, why it matters so much? To you, I mean.'
'I've told you, we worked together.'
'Come on, Frank, it's got to be more than that.'
Elder shook his head. 'I knew her, liked her. That was all.'
Framlingham poured more wine. 'More than fifteen years ago. Around the time Katherine was born, a little after? You were tupping her, Frank, no great disgrace. Times like that, it happens. Feeling a little trapped, I shouldn't wonder. You looked around and there she was. Young, available I dare say.'
'It wasn't like that.'
Framlingham laughed. 'For Christ's sake, Frank, spare us the holier-than-thou. We've all been there. If we're lucky seen it slip between the sheets and out of sight, no one any the wiser.'
Elder bit into a piece of lamb. Well done was what he'd asked for and well done was what he'd got.
'Admit it, Frank. You had her. Once, twice, half a hundred times. That doesn't matter.'
'No.'
Framlingham read the seriousness in his face.
'It's worse then. You didn't have her, Frank. Just wanted to. Fancied her and most likely she fancied you. But somehow you let her get stuck inside your head. She was the one you pictured when you were screwing your wife or jerking off in the shower.'
Elder reached for the bottle and refilled his glass. 'She's dead and I want to know why. I want whoever was responsible to be caught. Is that so wrong?'
'No, it's not wrong. Not at all. It's more than that, though, Frank. More than wanting.'
'What do you mean?'
Framlingham smiled. 'Come on, Frank, you've not come all this way for a fair-to-middling lunch and a few questions asked and maybe answered. You might not want to sign back on full-time, but you'd not mind a bite at this. Am I right?'
'I suppose so.'
'Is that a yes?'
'All right. Yes.'
Framlingham steepled his fingers. 'This investigation, Homicide gave it everything. Overtime, technical support staff, everything. Maddy Birch, she was one of ours, after all. Then, when there was no early breakthrough, things were scaled down. You know the way it goes. Normally, by now, some of my lot would be moving in, putting the whole thing under review. Starting from scratch if needs be.'
'And that's not happening?'
Framlingham set down his glass. 'We're having to tread careful, Frank, this one, with Shields in charge.'
'I don't understand.'
'Come on, Frank. A woman officer and black. If we're seen elbowing her aside…'
'That's ridiculous.'
'Politics, Frank, that's what it is. Perception. That's what matters. I doubt she'd play the race card herself, Shields, but there's others who would.' He sighed. 'It's a quagmire, Frank. A bloody mess. On the one hand we're instigating anti-racist policies left, right and centre, practically dragging ethnic minorities off the streets and begging them into uniform, and at the same time, we'll spend half a million pounds to prove some member of the Black Police Association has been fiddling his expenses. It beggars bloody belief.'
Reaching out, he poured the last of the wine.
'We'll get there, Frank. Just a little more patience, that's all.'
Elder sat back in his chair.
Glancing at the bill the waiter had quietly left, Framlingham took out one of his credit cards and dropped it down. 'Go home, Frank, relax. It's nearly Christmas. I'll be in touch.'
15
Karen Shields began her day at five thirty-five with a sore throat, a thick head and a brace of Paracetamol. Just what she needed, going down with some bug the morning she had to explain to her superior why it was that after almost four weeks, not only had no arrests been made, the only serious suspect they'd had had come up pure as the driven snow. She could already see the look on her boss's face as he offered her a Kleenex for her cold and shuffled her aside.
Not only was Maddy's ex-husband Terry no longer a viable suspect, but any link with the Hackney murder now seemed more tenuous than before. A second attack, not fatal, but similar, had been carried out on a woman jogging in parkland no more than two miles away from the first incident, and two men had been arrested for both crimes and were being questioned. No links with Maddy's death had yet come to light.
In the kitchen Karen made coffee in a stove-top pot and slipped bread into the toaster. Everyone who'd been close to Maddy Birch in any way in recent years, from a cousin who lived in Esher to the roofer she'd haphazardly dated over a four-month period, had been interviewed, in some cases twice, and, where necessary, alibis had been checked.
'One thing you'd have to say about her,' Karen's sergeant, Mike Ramsden, had observed. 'She had a taste for blokes who worked with their hands.'
'Liked a bit of rough,' Lee Furness had said, the look on Karen's face, remembering how Maddy had been found, stopping him like a slap.
It nagged at her regardless: the possibility that the killer had been someone with whom Maddy had been involved, someone of whose identity they were still unaware.
She had gone back to Maddy's friend Vanessa, probing for some forgotten reference, some forgotten chance remark; she'd talked to other officers with whom Maddy had shared the occasional confidence and come up blank. Every square inch of where Maddy had lived had been pored over, every name jotted down, every number traced.
Nothing. No one.
Karen spread butter on her toast.
Could there have been someone nevertheless?
Someone who, as Maddy had feared, had taken to following her, watching her, slipping, unseen, into the security of her home.
More information, that was what Karen wanted, and she couldn't see where it might come from. If there had been a laptop, or even an email address, they might have found hits on some site or other that would lay open some secret predilection. Cross-dressing, water sports, rubber — it wasn't beyond the edge of possibility that Furness had been right, Maddy had liked an element of pain, loss of control, a bit of rough…
Outside it was still dark, the cars moving evenly along Essex Road behind dipped headlights. Another half-hour or so before the traffic would start to snarl up, north towards Canonbury, south to the Angel.
The roofer, Kennet, when they brought him in, had been politeness itself, due deference in his manner and calluses on his hands. In all the time he'd been seeing Maddy, he doubted if they'd met more than once or twice a week. 'You know how it is,' he'd said, smiling at Karen open-faced. 'Shift work. Overtime.'
Could she imagine him…? She'd been doing the job long enough to be able to imagine anyone doing anything.
She'd allowed the coffee to bubble for too long and in consequence it tasted slightly burned. Opening the fridge she took out some jam for her second piece of toast. Maybe she should be having porridge these mornings? Shredded Wheat? Start snarfing down vitamins and those seeds she kept reading about. Linseed? Sesame?
If Maddy had been right and she was being stalked, Karen realised it need not have been anyone she knew, but could easily have been someone she had come into conta
ct with accidentally and who had become somehow infatuated. Shit, it could have been anyone. Possible suspects on the Sex Offenders Register were still being checked, but with nothing from Forensics to help narrow the field, chances were slim. The same with information from National Records, the Holmes2 computer. Karen certainly wasn't holding her breath.
Six o'clock and she switched on the radio for the news. Another American soldier ambushed in Iraq, a few more Palestinian children killed. With only six more shopping days to Christmas, retailers were cautiously optimistic of a record year. Karen had bought presents for her immediate family in Jamaica, parcelled them up but not actually taken them to the post. They would arrive late, again. Her first few Christmas cards lay on the shelf beside the stereo, as yet unopened. Last year she had managed to sign and send her own just before New Year.
Come and spend Christmas Day with us, said her brother in West Bromwich, her baby sister in Stockwell. The children would love to see you, wrote her other sister from Southend.
She didn't know if she could take so much turkey, so much screaming, so much apparent happiness. Pouring the last of the coffee, she picked up her cup and went back into the bedroom to finish getting dressed.
16
Mindful of the season, and remembering Katherine sitting open to the elements on a city-centre bench, Elder bought her a double-weight wool scarf, long enough to wind round her neck more than once and then tuck snugly down. When she had first visited him in Cornwall, almost two years before, he had pointed out Eagle's Nest, the house where the artist Patrick Heron had lived and which dominated the landscape where Elder had then been staying; now he bought her a slim book with reproductions of the paintings Heron had made of the shrubs and flowers in his granite-bordered garden. He added a box of dark Belgian chocolates and, at the last minute, a pair of blue Polartec gloves, parcelled them up and sent them, along with a card, to Nottingham, first class.
Several days later, uncertain, he bought a card for Joanne, simple, nothing fancy, quickly wrote 'Happy Christmas, Love Frank', sealed it and slipped it into an already crowded postbox.
That was it.
He had cousins somewhere and when he had lived in London and later in Nottingham they had exchanged greetings at Christmas and, sporadically, on birthdays, but since his move west, they had lost touch.
