The Reckoning

by Jane Casey

  ‘Not sure I can do that.’ Derwent stretched. ‘Freedom of Information Act. It’s a bugger, believe me. If anyone wants to see it—’

  ‘—we’ll find a reason to say no,’ I finished calmly. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll look after it.’

  Derwent handed over a piece of paper with Colin Vale’s email address on it. ‘Send it to that address. Now, if you don’t mind.’

  There was a laptop open on the coffee table and Drew leaned forward to do what Derwent asked, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he typed.

  ‘It’s just a starting point, you know. The email is the beginning. It’s the stone in the pool. The ripples go a long way. Half the people on the list won’t have considered going. But they probably passed it on to a few of their friends, and they passed it on to their mates, and we ended up turning people away on the door.’

  ‘Cheyenne got in. She was only fourteen. Not quite in your target demographic either.’

  ‘We weren’t checking IDs.’ There was a tightness about Drew’s mouth that I hadn’t noticed before and I put it down to guilt: if they had done their job properly, Cheyenne would never have made it through the door. ‘I sort of remember a girl with long fair hair and a ton of make-up, but there were lots of girls there who looked like that. And it was a masked event, remember, so I couldn’t see most of her face. I can’t be sure if it was her.’

  ‘Who else worked the door?’

  ‘Not Lee. He was managing the bar. We had a couple of temporary guys – freelance door staff. Bouncers to you and me.’

  ‘How did you recruit them?’

  ‘They’re friends. We got to know them at the gym. They’re a bit rough and ready, but they sort out the troublemakers and no one argues with them. If they say the place is full and it’s one out, one in, that’s what happens.’

  ‘Rough and ready? Does that mean they might have criminal records?’

  ‘We don’t ask that kind of thing. They’re just useful to us, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m going to need their names and contact details. And anyone else who was working for you that night.’

  ‘Sure. We had a couple of DJs and three girls working the bar. And one of our mates helped with the lighting rig – setting it up and taking it down again.’

  ‘Was he there on the night?’

  ‘No. He doesn’t like loud music.’

  ‘What time did you get there to set up?’

  ‘We were there from lunchtime. I drove the van over with the lighting and sound stuff and met Sam. Lee was getting the booze so he took the car. We unloaded in the yard, then hauled everything up two flights of stairs. Never again, am I right?’ He grinned at Lee. ‘Ground-floor events only.’

  ‘Sam is the one who set up the lighting,’ I checked.

  ‘Yeah. He’s an electrician. But like I say, he was gone by seven.’ Drew pressed a button on his laptop and a printer in the corner whirred into life. ‘That’s the staff list. Names and numbers. Matthew Dobbs and Carl McCullough were the door people.’

  ‘Any idea where we might find them?’

  ‘Cotter’s Gym.’ The brothers spoke in unison, then laughed at one another.

  ‘It’s in Kentish Town,’ Drew added. ‘They spend most of their time there. It’s sort of a social club as well as a gym. If your idea of chit-chat is talking about muscle-building supplements.’

  ‘And do you hang out there too?’ I was looking at Lee.

  Drew was the one who answered. ‘We work out there. But we don’t stick around to chat. Too busy.’

  ‘Being the Brothers Grim keeps you on your toes, does it?’ Derwent sounded frankly sceptical.

  ‘It takes a lot more effort than you’d think,’ Drew said defensively. ‘We put on at least two events a month. Not always nightclubs or bars. We do exhibitions in unusual venues. During London Fashion Week we organised a shop in a vacant retail space so young designers and fashion students could sell a few pieces to the buyers that were in town. We had a model-scout working in the shop, taking Polaroids of likely looking girls. That drove a lot of business our way. Everyone wants to be a model these days. Easy money.’

  ‘I’d have said everything you do is easy money.’ Derwent slid an inch further down in the sofa, as if he could barely keep his eyes open. ‘What do your parents think? Don’t they want you to get a real job?’

  ‘Our parents aren’t around any more. It’s just the two of us. And we’re happy doing what we’re doing.’

  ‘Are you finished?’ Lee asked abruptly.

  ‘For the time being.’ Derwent got to his feet slowly and winced, leaning from side to side to stretch out his back. ‘I’m getting stiff. Must be my age.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to offend you by saying you were too old for the Brothers Grim events.’ Drew smiled. ‘We’ll add you to the mailing list, if you like. You can come along. See if you fit in.’

  ‘Not sure I’d like to. We’ve been tracing people who were at the club – people who have convictions for violent offences. What do you think about that?’

  Drew shrugged. ‘I’m not comfortable with sitting in judgement on anyone, okay? I just provide the venue. I don’t care about people’s pasts.’

  Derwent shook his head, disgusted. ‘The two of you have no idea, do you? You created a perfect hunting environment. It was dark, it was badly supervised, it was in a building that was borderline dangerous and certainly full of places to hide. You did things on the cheap, and it shows. No booze licence. No proper bouncers. Tickets sold on the door to people you didn’t know, whose ID you didn’t check. Cash only at the bar so we have no receipts to trace. If it wasn’t for the fact that your punters are as dim-witted as the pair of you, we’d be struggling to find anyone who was there.’

  ‘You’re making it sound seedy, but it isn’t. You should come along to our next event.’ Drew was still working his charm offensive on Derwent, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was never going to succeed. ‘I’ll send you an invitation if you give me your email.’

  ‘Don’t bother. I think you were right the first time.’ He looked down. ‘What about you, Maeve?’

  ‘Not my speed either, I think. No offence.’

  ‘None taken,’ Drew said lightly.

  ‘What’s your first name again?’

  I looked at Lee, surprised, and Derwent replied for me. ‘Maeve.’

  ‘How do you spell it?’

  ‘Mike alpha echo victor echo,’ Derwent said. ‘Not too bad, considering it’s an Irish name.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’ I glared at him, then smiled at the brothers. ‘And thank you. We do appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.’

  ‘Anything we can do to help. We’re just really sorry that you didn’t find her alive and well.’

  ‘Us too.’ I followed Derwent to the door, turning to shake hands with both of them before we left.

  Derwent made it all the way down the stairs to the street before he started to take the piss. ‘Well, you pulled, so that’s something. “How do you spell your name?”’ he mimicked.

  ‘Maybe he was curious.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe, but why would that be?’ He cocked his head to one side, waiting for an answer.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ He laughed all the way back to the car, where a yellow and black penalty charge notice wiped the smile off his face.

  ‘It is a loading bay,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I was on police business. I had the fucking card in the window.’ He flung both the card and the ticket into the back seat.

  ‘Were you really not interested in interviewing them?’ I couldn’t help asking. ‘What was all the fake yawning?’

  ‘Who says it was fake?’ Derwent got into the car and slammed his door. I hurried to do the same on my side of the car since he was quite capable of driving off without me. ‘I hate hipsters. I hate all those bullshit jobs they do. You know that pair probably earn more than we do? And for doing what, exactly? Sending out emails and r
enting space so people can imagine they’re cool. Do me a favour.’

  ‘You can’t stop people from wasting their money.’

  ‘Shame, isn’t it? And now we have to go and see these bouncers too.’ Derwent sighed. ‘Would it have killed them to make sure the people they hired were clean?’

  ‘They don’t strike me as too worried about that kind of thing.’

  ‘Me neither.’ He glanced across. ‘You might want to do up that top button on your jacket, love. I’m guessing you’ve never been to a real gym before. They won’t know whether to throw you out or hang you on the wall if you walk in with your tits on show like that.’

  It killed me to do what he suggested, but looking down, I had to acknowledge that he had a point.

  Cotter’s Gym was a small, white-painted square building that lurked down an alleyway off Highgate Road. No frills didn’t even begin to describe it: the place was bleakness itself, with basic equipment and rubberised flooring. A couple of large men were using the free weights, hefting dumbbells the size of bin lids. They were not Dobbs and McCullough, they conveyed by grunting. But if we wanted Dobbs and McCullough, we should go through to the back room.

  The back room was the social hub of the place, by which I mean there was a kettle and a collection of chipped mugs, a few posters of naked women stuck on the walls as Derwent had predicted, and a couple of small round tables where you could sit and soak in the ambience. Five gym members were doing just that. Three of them were playing cards, while the fourth looked on. A heavyset black man looked up from his paper.

  ‘The Old Bill, if I’m not mistaken. What can we do you for?’

  ‘We’re looking for Matthew Dobbs and Carl McCullough.’

  ‘In connection with what?’

  ‘Murder,’ Derwent said baldly. It didn’t have quite the sensational effect you might have expected. The card players didn’t miss a beat, and the man who had spoke to us licked his finger and turned the page.

  ‘Sounds exciting.’

  ‘Come on. I haven’t got all day. Which one of you is Dobbs?’

  The man who had been watching the card game raised a finger.

  ‘McCullough?’

  ‘That would be me.’ The black man folded his newspaper and laid it to one side with an air of resignation. ‘What murder? Who died?’

  ‘A little girl who shouldn’t have been playing with the big boys.’ Derwent spoke softly but that made it all the more menacing. Without knowing why, I shivered. It had something of the same effect on the two men, because Dobbs moved over to McCullough’s table. The two of them were older than the Bancrofts, late thirties at least, and solid with muscle.

  ‘Are we talking about the girl who went missing on Saturday? The one from the warehouse?’ Dobbs asked.

  ‘Cheyenne Skinner.’ Derwent pulled out a copy of the school photograph and showed them.

  ‘She’s dead?’ McCullough shook his head. ‘Oh dear, dear, dear.’

  ‘Did you know she was missing?’

  Dobbs said, ‘Drew mentioned it to me during the week. He asked us if we’d seen anything strange. We didn’t, though.’

  ‘No more so than usual at one of those events.’ McCullough looked disapproving.

  ‘Do you remember seeing Cheyenne at the warehouse?’ I asked.

  There was an infinitesimal pause before Dobbs replied. ‘Possibly.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They wore masks. But there was a girl like that. On her own.’

  Another pause and then McCullough shrugged. ‘We weren’t going to let her in. Not alone. We wouldn’t if she’d turned up to a proper club like that. We’re professionals, you know. We just do the boys’ events as a favour.’

  ‘So if you weren’t going to let her in, who did?’

  ‘One of the brothers. I can’t recall which.’

  ‘He came and picked a few people out of the crowd. It’s something they do to liven up the queue. She was at the front. I suppose about ten of them got in at the same time. Mainly girls.’

  ‘Drew said he couldn’t remember letting her in.’

  ‘No reason why he should, if it was him. It was pretty quick. “You and you and you and you.”’ McCullough folded his arms. ‘We only remember because she was begging us to let her in. She said it was life or death.’

  ‘She did?’ I looked at Derwent. His face was unreadable. ‘Did you see her later on?’

  McCullough shook his head. ‘But there was another way out. Down the back stairs.’

  ‘You always need more than one way out for safety,’ Dobbs said sagely.

  ‘Didn’t you get people coming in that way if there was no one on the door?’

  ‘They weren’t too worried about that, they said. It was hard enough to find the main way in, let alone getting in through the back. That place was a rabbit warren. And Lee was keeping an eye on it anyway. It was near the bar.’

  ‘He didn’t mention it.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t see her either. It was a busy night. Lots of people. And the room was dark.’

  ‘Have you been spoken to by any other police officers about this?’

  ‘You’re the first.’

  Score another one for Godley’s team. We thanked them and headed back out to the car.

  ‘Call the girls who worked the bar. Let’s be thorough, for a change.’

  I got hold of all three of them, one after another, in varying stages of wakefulness and helpfulness. Yes, they had been there. No, they hadn’t seen anything strange. Yes, they had been working with Lee all night. He had gone out to change over the beer barrels a few times. That had taken a couple of minutes, not more. Otherwise, he was there all along.

  ‘Well, that gives him an alibi.’

  ‘Drew wouldn’t have had a chance to slope off either. He was in plain view all night, according to the bouncers.’

  ‘They were decent enough,’ Derwent admitted. Any copper who had done a Saturday night town-centre shift knew the worth of good door staff; they could make the difference between keeping a tricky situation under control and a full-blown riot. ‘I’d trust them, to be honest. You want a safe pair of hands doing that job, and they both knew their stuff.’

  ‘You should be glad we can cross a few people off the list. What do you think DCI Redmond was playing at? She didn’t scratch the surface of this case,’ I said.

  ‘I know you want me to say something about how you should never put a woman in charge of an investigation.’

  ‘I don’t, actually.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I think.’ He was frowning, abstracted. ‘Why do you think Lee didn’t mention he was in charge of the way out?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe because we didn’t ask him.’

  ‘Mm. Let’s look the Bancrofts up on the PNC when we get back. And the bouncers. Run everyone who was working there through the system and see if anything pops up. Someone isn’t telling us what they know, and I’m buggered if I’m going to put up with it.’

  ‘Where next?’

  ‘To the home of Tom Malton, proud possessor of a conviction for GBH. He actually owned up to being there. Makes me think he’s trying to come across as open and honest because he’s got something to hide.’

  ‘You really are a cynic, aren’t you?’

  ‘And usually proved right in the end.’

  ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘Camberwell. Not too far to travel to the club.’

  ‘Not too convenient for us,’ I remarked.

  ‘The world doesn’t exist for your convenience, Kerrigan. You’re starting to sound like the Bancrofts.’

  Something – the parking ticket, or the sheer drudgery of the morning’s work – had put Derwent in a foul mood. I had enough sense to keep quiet and wait for him to vent it on the next interview, or the one after that. The explosion would come, I was fairly sure. I just didn’t want it to be aimed at me.

  I could have told you Tom Malton had enjoyed the privileges of a public-school education w
ithin a minute of meeting him; he had been indelibly marked by it. He had the sort of accent that turns ‘oh’ to ‘eau’ and since his favourite expression seemed to be ‘oh gosh’, we heard it a lot in the course of introducing ourselves. He was wearing unfashionably baggy jeans and a rugby shirt and he had the pink-and-white complexion of a Gainsborough lady. Derwent lasted all the way to the sitting room of Malton’s modern and very comfortable flat before he came out with it.

  ‘How the hell did someone like you get a conviction for GBH?’

  ‘Being stupid, really.’ Malton sat down on the edge of an armchair, his hands tapping his knees, his heels together. ‘I had a row with a guy at uni – I mean, we were both drunk.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I pushed him out of a window.’

  ‘What floor?’

  ‘The third.’

  Derwent whistled. ‘And he didn’t die?’

  ‘Almost. He fractured his skull. He was in a coma for ten days.’ Malton was trying to sound matter-of-fact, but he was clearly upset about it. The pink in his face had deepened to a rich rose colour. ‘They said he only survived because he was so drunk, he was relaxed as he fell.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yah. Absolutely.’

  ‘What happened after the coma?’ I asked.

  ‘He woke up. No idea what had happened. I couldn’t even remember what the fight was about, but around ten people saw me do it, so I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t me. Even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t.’

  ‘Did he make a good recovery?’

  ‘No. Not really. He dropped out. Still has memory trouble. Still walks with a limp.’ Malton looked as bleak as his boyish features allowed. ‘I keep in touch with him.’

  ‘How much time did you do?’

  ‘Oh gosh. Three years.’ Malton smiled at the expression on our faces. ‘Not much, is it?’

  ‘It’s more that you’re here now,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d survive.’

  He laughed. ‘It wasn’t too bad. I did my degree, but by correspondence. I got on okay with the other chaps. They didn’t know what to make of me, really, and I just take everyone as I find them, so it was all right.’

  I still thought he was tougher than he looked. Derwent seemed to feel the same way.