Third Degree

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Are there no secrets in this town?’ she asked with mock despair. ‘If I ever went out on a toot I’d never get away with it. There’d always be someone who knew me, dammit all.’

  ‘You took some blood from me once,’ he said as he palmed the pound she gave him and looked for change. ‘They tried to get it from me in the Sickle Cell Unit but they couldn’t and Dr Choopani was on holiday so they sent for you. I’m Gregory St Clair.’

  She remembered then. He’d been in a sickle cell crisis, in obvious pain, and she had seen to it that he was admitted and treated. She grinned at him. ‘You look great now.’

  ‘I’m always great even when I feel like hell,’ he said and then, as one of the girls in the group watching him said something in the West Indian patois, turned and shouted back at them, so George went on her way, marvelling not for the first time at the many different languages that could be heard in these streets. How would they cope if there was some major emergency that involved them all, the way it had been in the war when the whole area was blitzed night after night? Would they hold together now as they had done fifty years ago?

  It was an odd idea and she set it aside, amused at herself in a wry sort of way. The trouble was, she’d rather think about things like mangoes and language and community cohesion than about what she was doing. She had waited for Gus to call, as he had said he would, but the phone hadn’t rung and in sudden irritation she had gone ahead anyway: made some supper – all very healthy stuff, Tupperware containers of salad and barbecued chicken wings from her fridge, some good Stilton cheese and wholemeal bread and a bottle of Australian Chardonnay – and just marched out. Now she had added the mango. With a bit of luck he’d be hungry and glad to see her.

  Or not. As she reached the steps that led up to the entrance to Ratcliffe Street police station, she quailed for a moment. The last thing she wanted was to be seen as pushy, dependent, clinging, but wasn’t she being all three in not waiting till he did as he had said he would and called her before bobbing up on his doorstep?

  The double doors swung and someone came out to run quickly down the steps and then stopped at the sight of her.

  ‘Dr B.? How are you? Got over your early call yet?’

  ‘I’ve caught up on my sleep,’ she said, looking up at Michael Urquhart, who had stopped on the step above her. It was rare that she could look up to a man, tall as she was. There was something rather comforting about doing so, she thought inconsequentially. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Och, I’m used to it, the way they run me ragged. Here to see the Guv, are you?’

  ‘Uh, yes.’ She hesitated and then mentally shrugged. She’d known Michael Urquhart almost as long as she’d known Gus, after all. They were good friends, had worked together on a couple of dicey cases. No need to be shy of being honest with him. ‘How are things with him? Are the storm cones hoisted?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘I couldna say, Dr B.! We hardly see him these days. He’s dealing with some great big case and he’s playin’ his cards unco’ close to his chest. I can tell you that much, but no more, for he’s got a sergeant from over Canning Town way on his team, and a DC from Bow and only one of our DCs and it’s no’ me.’ He looked sore for a moment. ‘And I’ll not pretend to you that my nose isna a bit out of joint. I’d as soon be with the Guv as dealing all the time wi’ Inspector Dudley, but there y’are! The Guv’s got this big case an’ we’re out in the cold, puir wee us!’

  ‘Hmm.’ George looked over his shoulder. ‘And is – um – is Roop in at the moment?’

  Michael laughed. ‘It’s great when you call him that! He hates it so. He’s gone home to the family, left me to clear up the bits and bobs. But what’s a DC for, I ask m’sel’? You go away in, Dr B. He’s in the big suite towards the rear of the top floor, you know the way.’ And he nodded at her and went on down the steps and away.

  Inside, she showed her ID and pass to the desk clerk and went up the stairs slowly, relishing the coolness. Ratcliffe Street was one of the older police stations, and still had a good deal of green and cream paint and dark green tiles about, but the doors had been replaced with flat modern ones and in some areas the rooms had been knocked together to make a big open-plan workspace. The one Gus was in was on the third floor overlooking the scrubby recreation ground, which contained more wrecked children’s toys, old prams, garbage and drunken street people than trees and grass. She stood in the doorway, hesitating, and looked around.

  There were half a dozen desks and each was piled with paperwork as well as having its own computer screen and keyboard. The walls were covered with charts of all sorts and on one board were pinned series of photographs, all mug shots clearly taken of living people, which made an agreeable change from the sort of photo board she was used to in incident rooms, on which explicit pictures of very dead and damaged bodies were the norm. At three of the desks there were people with their heads down, all men, all clearly very busy.

  The one nearest the door, a bulky man with a thick neck and very sleek dark hair, looked up as she came in and tilted his head in enquiry.

  ‘I’m looking for Gu – Inspector Hathaway,’ she said and the man stared consideringly at her for a long moment.

  ‘Perhaps I can help you,’ he said smoothly. ‘I’m Sergeant Salmon.’

  ‘And I’m Dr Barnabas,’ she said. ‘Pathologist.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Sergeant Salmon with a faintly knowing air. ‘Then it is the Guv you want. He’s in his office. I’ll show you the way.’

  ‘I can manage,’ she said, irritated by the smoothness of the man and the clear implication that her relationship with Gus had been the subject of nick gossip. She looked across the big room to the far side where she could see a separate office behind a partition. There was a light on behind the half-glassed door, and she moved towards it with more assurance than she felt. She was aware of Sergeant Salmon watching her go, and was equally aware of the eyes of the other two on her. She knew neither of them, though by now she was on tolerably familiar terms with most of the Ratcliffe Street nick’s personnel, and she wondered briefly why Gus was working with strangers. It wasn’t like him; he was always happier with a team he knew well and whom he had trained to his own little ways.

  She didn’t wait at his door; just opened it and walked in. He didn’t look up, but continued scrolling something on his own computer terminal. As she stood there and looked at him she was very aware of the lines on his face, for they showed particularly clearly in the bluish light thrown by the monitor screen. He looked tired and not too well and she felt a momentary pang of anxiety.

  ‘Well, what is it?’ he snapped, not taking his eyes from the screen. Her anxiety vanished; he sounded so much his usual self.

  ‘Supper,’ she said, closing the door behind her and coming over to his desk. ‘I doubt you had any lunch, so it’ll do you no harm to stop and eat now.’

  ‘George!’ he said and blinked at her. ‘I thought you were Salmon.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch,’ she said tartly. ‘That makes me feel really great. I’m not that big! Do I have his sort of fishy-eyed look?’

  ‘Oh, very funny,’ Gus said, and went back to his screen, as though his eyes had been dragged back to it. ‘Do me a favour – no fish jokes in his hearing. He gets bored with ’em and when he’s bored he’s ratty.’

  George, who had not intended any pun, made a face. ‘I wasn’t referring to his name. It’s the way he stared at me when I came in. I suppose they’ve gossiped. Are you going to eat or aren’t you?’

  ‘In a minute,’ he said, clearly abstracted. ‘Let me get through this lot first, while it’s still clear in my mind …’

  She sighed and sat down and the room settled to silence broken only by the sound of the keys as he hit them, and she studied his face. Why was it this man had such an effect on her? All her previous attachments had been to classically good-looking types. She remembered Ian, the over-ambitious Scottish surgeon who had all unwittingly been the reason for her taking her jo
b at Old East in the first place, and the physician Toby Bellamy who had been a most splendid piece of male beauty who had attached himself to her in her first months at Old East, and sighed again. Gus was not a beauty by any stretch of the imagination. His hair was thick and curly but receding a little over his forehead, and he made no attempt to keep it brushed and neat or to use it to enhance his looks in any way. He had a pleasant face, modified by a considerable number of lines and pouches, and a solid squarish body that no one could call elegant, though it was a strong and clearly functional one; he liked jogging and when he had the time spent an hour in a gym making the most of his muscles. But none of it added up to beauty. So where did the charm come from, the pull of the man?

  And then he looked up and smiled at her and she stopped thinking about it at all. He was Gus and that was enough.

  ‘Bob,’ he bawled, still grinning, and there was a sound of movement from the big room outside. ‘Bob. Put a bloody move on, will you!’

  ‘I can’t fly,’ Sergeant Salmon said from the door which had opened behind George. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s enough already. It’s nearly eight o’clock.’ Gus glanced at the clock on the wall facing him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I thought you could tell the time,’ Salmon said and Gus laughed.

  ‘Go home, you cheeky bugger,’ he said amiably. ‘Enough’s enough. We’ll go on with all this tomorrow. Any joy yet?’

  ‘I’ve got a couple of possibles we can start on in the morning. There must be a tie-in between Hampden and whatsit and the Harlow set-up. They’re both registered at Companies House, but I did a run on some of their directors and there are a few names that come up in both.’

  ‘I like it,’ Gus said. ‘Even if they’re both as legit as the House of Lords it could be a lead in. Checked the McCann directors as well, did you?’

  ‘Not yet. I’m being alphabetical. I’ve done as far as half way through the aitches – that was how I spotted the link-up between Hampden and Harlow. Give me a coupla days.’

  ‘This is goin’ to take a bleedin’ lifetime at this rate.’ Gus stretched and yawned. ‘OK, Bob. Take the others with you. See you in the morning.’

  As soon as Bob Salmon had closed the door behind him, Gus pushed his monitor and computer keyboard back and flicked his thumb and forefinger at his forehead as though tipping an invisible hat. ‘Cleared the decks for you, Mum. Over to you, if you please.’

  ‘So you are hungry,’ she said, reaching down for the basket she’d brought.

  ‘Bloody starving.’ He watched her greedily as she unpacked the food. ‘Ah, now, there’s a bit of all right! Did you do the chicken with that barbecue stuff you use? Good. I love it. And is that your own mayonnaise or the bottled sort? Well, you can’t have everything – All right, I know. You’re busy. Me too. And what’s that? A mango? You sexy object, you!’

  ‘What’s sexy got to do with it?’ George was cutting bread and Gus reached for a slice, buttered it thickly and started eating a leg of chicken held in his other hand.

  ‘Mangoes are famous for it,’ he said. ‘Eat a mango together and soon you’ll be splashing in even sweeter juices. Everyone says that. Here, what are we drinking?’

  She ignored the mango pointedly and gave him some wine, still cool from the insulation envelope into which she’d stuffed it as soon as she’d taken it from her fridge, and the cluttered little office settled to contented greedy silence. After a while he sighed happily and reached for the mango and started to slice it, crisscrossing it with his penknife with finicky precision.

  ‘There’s a special way of doing this,’ he said. ‘We had a DC Patel once who showed me. Like this, see?’ He presented her with the open mango, the cubes rolling neatly apart on the rind and she took one. ‘So, how is it with you, sweetheart? I’m sorry I’m so buried in all this stuff. I miss our evenings together.’ He leered wickedly. ‘And nights.’

  ‘It’s your choice,’ she said, mopping her sticky fingers dry on a paper napkin. ‘It’s been like this for weeks. Months, even.’

  ‘And likely to be weeks more,’ he said. The laughter had gone. ‘It’s one hell of a case, George. I thought I was after just a bunch of robbers – the villains who cleared out the bonded warehouse towards Millwall as well as the whisky warehouse and the big supermarket and the safe deposit, but then it turns out they’re linked with a bookmaking scam here in my own patch. And then there’s some sort of protection rubbish going on that one of the local market traders is involved in, and though it looks like he’s just a trader it turns out that he owns the lease on the whole market site and is cleaning up. On top of that it looks as though there’re links with other businesses – they have Board meetings, I swear to you! I tell you, it’s like a bleedin’ octopus, only it’s got more’n eight legs. If I clean up this lot, I reckon I’ve got one of the biggest scams in London sorted. But I’ve only got a few weeks because of October, you know?’ He brooded for a moment, staring blankly at the opposite wall. ‘If I miss the next assessment, there’s a risk old Cumberland’ll take his cards and go before I’m ready for his job at AMIT, and that means someone else’ll get it, and I’ll have to wait another twenty years – and I want it now!’

  ‘Can’t you hand this job over to someone else?’ She was sympathetic. ‘Do your best but when it comes to the assessment course tell them you have to go.’

  ‘Oh, that’ll make a great impression.’ He was sardonic. ‘You can’t just dump a job in someone else’s lap because you want to move up a rung. I doubt it’d be possible, anyway. I’m so embroiled. A lot of this has to be in my head. You can keep records till you’re blue’ – he jerked his head at the monitor screen – ‘but when it comes down to it, it’s what’s in human skulls that cracks cases of human villainy.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you know your own business best,’ she said. ‘But take care you don’t get too involved, Gus. You’ve got your own health to think about and you look …’

  ‘Awful, hmm? Come here, wench. I’ll show you how awful I am.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ It was her turn to be sardonic. ‘I can just see me settling down to a bit of nookie on the middle of your desk. Very nice and I don’t think. Help me clear up and we’ll go home.’

  ‘Now there,’ he said, ’is an offer I couldn’t possibly refuse.’

  The phone woke her at four a.m., shrilling furiously in her ear, and she emerged from sleep bemused and somehow frightened, which was unusual. She was so used to middle-of-the-night calls that they never alarmed her; annoyed her maybe, but they were part of the job. Why feel so bothered now?

  She picked up the phone, listened and said tersely, ‘OK. Repeat the address … Oh, I know. The new flats … Uhuh. Give me five minutes. What? A car? No, I’ll drive myself.’ And she hung up.

  Gus hadn’t stirred. He lay sprawled flat on his back, his pillow on the floor beside him as usual, and she bent over and kissed him; but he still didn’t move so she went and dressed, grabbed her emergency bag and scribbled a note for him in the usual way, with soap on the bathroom mirror. Gone to work. A fire. See you when I see you. Luv G.

  7

  Barely ten minutes later, since there was no traffic on the roads, she was pushing up Narrow Street towards Limehouse. Ahead of her the sky was showing the opal light of early morning, though behind her, westwards, it was still as dark as ever. But there was more than dawn lifting away from the deep blue; there was a faint orange glow in the sky, and her belly tightened at the sight of it. No intelligent person, in her view, could fail to be alarmed by fire. The sight of it, the smell of it – and she could already fancy she smelled the reek of burning on the cool air streaming in through her open car window – had terror built into them.

  The block of flats she was looking for was in Ropemakers’ Fields, just where Narrow Street turned northeasterly away from the river to curve round the dock before Limehouse Pier, and as she reached the end of the road she saw it clearly, the cluster of police vehicles
with their blue lights rotating and the fire engines and the ambulances similarly alight. A big one, she registered, as she thumped her window to point out her police pass in the corner of the windscreen to the uniformed constable who tried to stop her, before taking her car up the street as close as she could get to the action.

  Rupert Dudley was standing talking to a senior fireman, his face red in the glow from the fire. As George made her way towards the two of them, picking her way carefully over the tangled snakes of water hoses and cables, she looked up at the building.

  It was one of the more stylish of the blocks of flats that had sprung up all over Docklands in the piping days of the Eighties, when money had seemed to come from a bottomless well and no one ever dreamed things would change. The flats had sold well then, but now she could see to one side the row of For Sale boards adorned with the names of various well-known local estate agents, tilting forlornly against the light. So, plenty of empty flats here, like everywhere else in the district. But at least one of them must have been occupied, because the phone call had been quite specific.

  ‘A body, burned badly as far as we can see,’ the anonymous policeman had clacked in her ear. ‘Inspector Dudley’s called out the Soco and the Fire Investigation Team because the firemen reckon it’s a dicey one, and he wants you too, if you please, doctor.’

  Only one half of the building seemed to be burning, and the firemen were working as hard to stop the thus far unaffected part from being caught up in the conflagration as they were at putting out the part where it had taken hold. And it had taken a very firm hold; George could see that clearly. Windows gaped blackly through frames of fringed charcoal, and the front of the walls seemed to be dissolving as paint and assorted other finishes melted and slid down the underlying brickwork. At one point she could see through the window apertures to the interior, where a burned-out room was displayed in all its piteousness to anyone who cared to look. There was a fireman in there picking over the debris on the floor and George, from her vantage point standing on a low wall at the front of the building, both to keep out of the way and to see over the milling heads of neighbours and onlookers, could just see the wreck of a sideboard, a dining table and, miraculously, a scrap of blue curtain to one side of the window which had somehow escaped the flames. Her throat tightened again.