A Good Way to Go

by Peter Helton

  ‘I hope his window cleaning was better than his thieving.’ McLusky randomly picked up a few of the objects: fake pearl necklace, scratched, gold-plated bracelet, broken clasp. Fake Rolex watch, stopped. ‘Ha, look, it stopped at exactly the same time as my own crap watch.’ Somewhere in his jacket his phone chimed. ‘File it under assorted junk in a couple of bags, Frenchie. Don’t spend more than ten minutes on this.’ He found his phone and answered it as French moved on. ‘McLusky.’

  It was DC Dearlove. ‘Sir, we have someone reporting their boat stolen.’

  ‘That’s something,’ Austin ventured when McLusky told him.

  ‘Yeah, but hold back on the champagne.’

  Back in the incident room McLusky’s computer flagged up an urgent email. ‘Hallelujah!’

  ‘What?’ asked Austin.

  ‘Someone found a phone lying in the grass by the layby and handed it in. There’s a chance it could be Barbara Steadman’s.’

  ‘How did SOCO miss that?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said McLusky gleefully, ‘but I’ll not let them forget it in a hurry. It’s downstairs apparently.’

  Sergeant Hayes handed over the phone in an evidence bag. McLusky scowled at it. ‘Are you taking the piss, Sergeant? Barbara Steadman took home a hundred grand plus and this is a pay-as-you go phone. Ten quid in any supermarket.’

  ‘Don’t shoot the messenger, sir,’ said Hayes when McLusky stomped back upstairs.

  First he went off to fortify himself in the canteen. He loaded his pockets with chocolate bars and took his cup of black coffee upstairs with him, covering it with the saucer to keep it hot until he had reached the sanctuary of his office. Outside, typical April temperatures reigned; in his office, with the enormous radiator under the window grilling his back, McLusky luxuriated in fresh air from the open window. He distributed the chocolate bars among drawers and pockets for later. As he did so he felt something unexpected in his jacket; he fished it out and stared at it for a moment before remembering where it came from: it was the fake Rolex from among the recovered tat from the burglar arrest that French had been given to bag up. He must have pocketed it without noticing. Only now it was working. He realized it was one of those perpetual motion watches that wound themselves through the movement of the wearer. He set it to the right time, took off his own stopped watch, dropped it into the bin and put on the Rolex. He logged on to the computer. The list of emails was endless and depressing. This was the part of the investigation he found most difficult to cope with: nothing but conjecture on offer, hoping for a forensic miracle. One miracle would be if they could do their job in less than two weeks. Losing the Forensic Science Service hadn’t exactly helped, either. The government had closed it down because it had been losing money. Since when did justice have to turn a profit, McLusky wondered. They were now processing some things ‘in-house’, but anything more than fingerprint matching still took forever. He wished TV producers would screen a murder investigation on telly in real time and see how many viewers were left after three weeks when the first forensic results came in.

  He took a closer look at the phone and suddenly his mood lightened. He called Austin. ‘They said she was discreet. It’s Barbara Steadman’s shagging phone of course. Off to Technical Support with it.’

  As the door of the Royal Oak shut behind her, Fairfield looked up at the sky. Any promise of a warm and early spring had disappeared, it was cold April weather and would rain again any minute now. Her hand closed around the tin of small cigars in her jacket pocket; she hesitated only for a fraction before pulling it out and opening it. Only four left. She lit one of the long, slim cigars with a match and slid the tin back into her pocket. She should pack it in, really. It was Louise who had introduced her to smoking cigars but then it had been fine brandy and cigars at her flat. Exiled out here it was nearly impossible to have a drink and a smoke together, at least on a freezing cold night in April. What a time to start smoking, just when it became the leper thing to do. Naturally, Louise being Louise, they hadn’t been smoking Hamlets from the newsagents; the cigars Fairfield had become used to smoking were Davidoff Exquisitos, at £26 for a tin of ten. ‘Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into!’ She sighed, blowing smoke in the direction of Louise’s flat.

  Fairfield was standing in The Mall in Clifton Village, just a few streets away from Louise’s. She had deliberately come up here without her car to give herself options: go and see Louise or go and get drunk. Or go and get drunk, then see Louise. Or go and see Louise, have a flaming row and then get outrageously drunk. So far she had been to three pubs, having a pint in each of them, putting things off, mulling things over. Going round in circles, if she was honest. Blaming all of it on her.

  Fairfield had always been a pub person. She drank wine at home but when she went out on the town she drank beer. Pints. Pints in traditional pubs. When she was out with Louise of course it had usually been brasseries, like the one just opposite, and bistros and restaurants which meant that not only was she now standing and smoking outside pubs, she was smoking outside pubs she no longer felt entirely happy with. But as long as they sold beer she could never go completely off pubs and the Royal Oak wasn’t so bad. The other problem with smoking bloody cigars was of course that you were meant to take your time with them – you couldn’t really pop out for a ‘quick cigar’ like you could with a cigarette. Another punter had come out after her, smoked his cigarette and disappeared inside again. ‘Freezing!’ was all he had said, and he was right. And now a thin, miserable rain began to fall. She took her tin of Davidoffs from her pocket, used it to stub out her half-smoked cigar on it and returned them separately to her jacket pocket. Then she went back inside and ordered another pint of Sharps Doom Bar, simply because the name suited her mood.

  McLusky drove, drove through the city. His new car had transformed it for him. Where before he had struggled in a screeching, limping motor he now glided across lanes, cornered with poise and surged up hills. There was no CD player but it played cassette tapes! At home he had nothing to play them with but now at last he had somewhere to play the huge box full of tapes he had lugged from flat to flat for the last decade or more. Several times he had come close to throwing the lot out but now he had a mobile tape deck with a five-litre engine and leather seats. Stone Roses, I Wanna Be Adored. He had been driving around most of the evening, stopping for fish and chips at Pellegrino’s, quartering the city, feeding cassettes into the machine. Some he flicked straight out again after the first few bars, music that reminded him of Laura; Laura in the bad old days. It was Laura who, while he was in hospital after having been deliberately run over by suspects in Southampton, had packed that very box of tapes along with the rest of his belongings and dropped the lot off at the section house. But not all the music plucked at the wrong strings, he was all right as long as he stuck to the loud stuff, Stripes, Chili Peppers, Led Zeppelin, and music Laura had hated, like Throwing Muses and early Bowie.

  He crossed the river in the dark. Raining again. It didn’t matter now; the wipers worked and the windscreen didn’t leak, which was unusual for a McLusky-owned vehicle. He turned off Clanage Road on to the lane along Bower Ashton allotments and zoomed to the end where it crossed the railway line. He left the headlights on as he got out of the car, zipped up his leather jacket and turned the collar up. He had forgotten to bring a torch. It didn’t matter. He hadn’t come back here to examine the place, and the car’s headlights were enough illumination for his purpose.

  He didn’t have a name for it. It wasn’t murderers who were irresistibly drawn back to the locus of the crime, it was DI Liam McLusky. The places where the victims were killed or their bodies had been discovered exerted a strong pull on him, bringing him invariably back to the locus once forensics teams were finished, police officers and coroner had departed and SOCOs had packed up. Something lingered there, like an invisible stain on his mental map of the city, or like an elusive smell that teased his nostrils, leaving him restless and tingl
ing with impatience to find the perpetrator. The place was witness. Stubborn in eloquent silence.

  And there were other reasons why he came to dark, dismal places like this railway cutting when no one was around. Ever since the attack – or the incident in Southampton as his attempted murder was sometimes referred to – he had been prone to sudden spikes of anxiety. They flew at him from nowhere, at odd times, in unexpected places, and for no reason he could discover. There never seemed to be a logical trigger; the dread appeared to fly at him on the wind or rise through his shoes from the ground, unannounced, unstoppable. He usually managed to shake it off by keeping busy, which was never difficult in his job, or by having a few beers; he had never felt anxious in a pub as long as the bar was open. But he came to these kinds of places to challenge himself, throw down the gauntlet to the irrational side of his mind.

  Standing beside death, that’s what it was. Standing in precisely the place where a victim had been killed or discovered, the place any ordinary citizen would avoid at all cost, was where McLusky looked for inspiration, and sought to purge his anxieties. Tonight he felt good, had enjoyed his driving, yet in the end his worries about the investigation had won: he needed to stand here on top of the railway cutting and breathe. Sometimes he hallucinated smells, very brief snatches that went with the thoughts he was having at the time, flowers or coffee or fresh laundry, and just now, looking down on the overgrown embankment, the aroma of railway carriages as he remembered them from his childhood. The smell vanished after a moment, overwhelmed by the very real one of damp earth close by. The rain intensified. It was stupid to stand here in the freezing rain when he had a warm and comfortable car waiting for him.

  It was as he turned away that he thought he saw a movement below him on the slope of the embankment, in the dark where the beams of his car’s headlamps did not reach. He thought he had heard a crack, too, like a twig snapping underfoot. Animal, vegetable or mineral? The sound of the rain made it difficult to decide what was moving down there. What would anyone be doing there in the dark at this hour? Even the most hard-bitten drug addicts could surely find a more salubrious place. He took a few steps down the slope but suddenly thought better of it and stopped beside a twisted shrub. ‘Who’s down there? I’m a police officer!’ He became uncomfortably aware that standing up here he was well illuminated by his car’s headlights while whoever was moving down there was hugging the darkness. He climbed back up the slimy slope and turned. The beams of the headlights reached as far as the opposite side of the railway cutting but left a black chasm in between. From it, on the other side, emerged the figure of a man, surely a man, tall, in a dark hooded rainproof and dark gloves, moving away swiftly to the right. ‘Stop! Wait right there!’ Without slowing or turning the figure lifted one arm and gestured back at him, briefly holding up two fingers. McLusky shouted and ran forward. Almost immediately he slipped; he saved himself from landing on his back with his hands and dug his heels in to stop the slide. When he regained his footing and looked across the tracks the figure had disappeared into the dripping darkness. McLusky too stood in the dark now, an unpleasant sensation of sticky mud on his hands. It was about here that Bothwick’s bludgeoned corpse had lain. The desire to be clean, dry and back inside his car was stronger than the urge to crash after the hooded figure. He slipped twice more on the slick mud before he gained the top of the embankment.

  Had it been the same man that he had seen standing stock still like a sentinel from across the canal? Back then he had held up one finger, now he had flashed two fingers at him: a good old-fashioned insult or the number two? Had he just seen the killer of Barbara Steadman and Stephen Bothwick and let him get away? His stomach went into freefall and fear of failure made his skin tingle. He wiped some of the mud off his hands on a wet tuft of grass and got behind the wheel of his car where he found the wrapping paper from his parcel of chips and completed the job as best he could. Then he turned his huge car in a six-point turn and drove furiously towards Clanage Road and the light.

  Light, that was what he wanted, light and clarity and so far this investigation had neither. As he crossed back over the river he thought he understood what he liked so much about his new car, it reminded him of Louise Rennie and the way she surrounded herself with simple, uncluttered luxury, something his own life lacked in spades. And perhaps that was why a little later he found himself cruising up through Clifton into Clifton Village where Louise lived. He felt ready for a drink, the only thing capable of signalling to his brain that his workday was over. Somehow the thought of his usual refuge, the Barge Inn, left him decidedly unexcited tonight but before he could make up his mind which pub to aim for instead, all his attention was taken up by a figure trudging towards him on the pavement through the cold west country rain. It was Kat Fairfield. He only hesitated for a fraction before pulling over. She did not spare the car a single glance. McLusky parped his horn and let the passenger window down. Fairfield slowed, frowned, approached the car and bent down to look inside. Her face was streaming with rain. Her frown deepened when she recognized him. ‘Liam?’

  ‘Get in, Kat, before you drown.’

  A moment’s hesitation in which she made a show of examining the interior before getting in. ‘What are you doing with this thing?’ she asked once she had slammed the door shut. ‘Don’t tell me this is yours?’

  ‘Bought it yesterday.’

  ‘It’s enormous. It’s monstrous. How do you park it?’

  ‘I can’t, I have to keep driving it.’

  ‘Ha! Tricky. You’ll be moving your office in here then.’

  There was a short pause during which McLusky tried to calculate just how much Kat had had to drink. A fair few, he was sure.

  ‘What you doing up here, anyway?’ she asked.

  ‘I was thinking of having a drink.’

  ‘I could definitely do with one.’ Not once since McLusky’s arrival in Bristol had the two taken a drink together or socialized in any other way. First professional rivalry, then their mutual interest in Louise Rennie had kept them apart, but tonight Fairfield didn’t care or merely didn’t mind or perhaps she was even glad he had turned up, she wasn’t sure. When McLusky suggested the Royal Oak she said: ‘Just come from there. Let’s try the Albion.’

  McLusky drove. ‘Gastro pub,’ he commented.

  ‘I’m not in the mood for spit ’n’ sawdust tonight.’

  ‘Me neither, come to think of it.’

  The Albion was fairly quiet and they managed to find a table close to the bar. It was only when he lifted his pint of Guinness to his lips that he noticed his black-rimmed fingernails. Fairfield noticed too. ‘That doesn’t go with the image, Liam. Immaculate Merc and filthy fingernails. Have you taken on an allotment?’

  ‘Slipped in the mud earlier.’ He didn’t feel like discussing his excursion to the deposition site. Talking shop of course was a simple ice-breaker but tonight there seemed to be a lot less ice, though at the moment Fairfield was definitely avoiding his eyes.

  ‘Can’t believe we’re sitting in the pub together.’ Fairfield sipped her pint. ‘I’m as wet as a drowned rat, your hands look like you’ve been digging potatoes …’

  McLusky let her talk. She had suggested this drink, more or less, which meant there had to be something behind it, and until he knew what it was he was happy to keep quiet.

  There was a pause, into which Fairfield blurted: ‘That thing with me and Louise … I’m sorry that happened. I’m not in the habit of pinching colleagues’ partners.’

  ‘She was hardly that. I’ll get over it.’

  ‘Actually I think it’s all over between me and Lou.’

  ‘For once I can honestly say that I can imagine how you must feel. What happened?’

  Fairfield poured the whole thing out as though McLusky was an old friend and ally, and she found herself saying things like ‘you know what she’s like’ and ‘as I’m sure you can imagine’. McLusky bought a second round, even while wondering if it was wise to let
Kat have another drink.

  ‘I’ve always been crap with relationships,’ she continued. ‘I jus’ can’t do it, I always manage to louse things up. Right from my very first shag. My first boyfriend. Imagine … shy Katarina Vasiliou, as she was then. I was seventeen. He had his own flat. It was my first time at his place. We were about to go out and I went to the toilet to powder my nose. Had a crap. It wouldn’t flush away. I flushed twice. He asked if everything was all right in there. No, I’m fine, I said. I was mortified he’d come home and find that huge thing floating in there, I’d have been so embarrassed, so in the end I fished it out, wrapped it in layers and layers of toilet roll and put it in my handbag, thinking I’d chuck it at the first opportunity when we went out. Of course he went and looked in my handbag for matches in the pub while I was talking to someone else. And found a turd in his girlfriend’s handbag.’

  ‘Did you explain it?’

  ‘Didn’ get a chance. An’ of course he told everyone.’ Fairfield had begun to slur her words. ‘I think the thing quite disturbed him. See? I’m crap at relashionships.’ She had drained the entire pint while relating the story. ‘An’ I do believe I’m finally utterly pissed. Be a gennelman an’ cab me a call. Call me a cab.’

  McLusky offered to drive her home but was glad when Fairfield insisted on a taxi and he had eventually waved her off from the end of Boyces Avenue. When the cab had turned the corner he became very aware that he was standing two minutes’ walk from Louise’s flat; Louise who was now no longer seeing Fairfield.

  Probably, he thought. Then he walked to his car and drove home.

  TWELVE

  ‘Come!’ By now McLusky recognized Austin’s knock, which meant he did not need to hide his cigarette. Austin closed the door and seductively waved a piece of notepaper. ‘This is my first mug of coffee of the day,’ McLusky told him. ‘If you have come to spoil it with whatever you have written down on that nasty piece of paper you are holding I will have to push you out of the window. In fact, don’t read it to me for five minutes, that’s all I ask.’