‘Oh, shit,’ he said, feigning dismay.
‘Oh, shit is right,’ said Bertie. ‘And the very bad news is that it’s a murder.’
A murder inquiry was a round-the-clock operation with a lot of scrutiny from the command structure. The logs had to be kept up to date, every move had to be accounted for and there wasn’t much opportunity to pursue other interests. Kennedy’s cup flowed over. There would even be overtime to make up for his losses.
‘Of course, this means we’ll have to sort out our mutual interests,’ said Bertie, who was watching him closely.
‘Of course,’ said Kennedy, maintaining an air of disappointment. ‘But how?’
‘We’re going to bring it to a swift, and if necessary bloody, conclusion quick smart,’ said Bertie.
Kennedy wasn’t sure what Bertie had in mind, but knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. He tried to ignore a frisson of anxiety.
‘What about this morning?’ asked Bertie. ‘Don’t suppose there was any sign?’
Kennedy shook his head. ‘Some junkie hanging around down there again. She paid Sonja a visit apparently, then took off towards the river with that dog from out the back. Going nowhere, from the look of it. Chasing, I suppose.’
‘We better up the ante with the CHIS,’ said Bertie, using the term loosely. The snout wasn’t registered, so strictly speaking couldn’t be referred to as a Confidential Human Intelligence Source. Bertie had long ignored such formalities. ‘We’re going to need more input from that quarter now that our surveillance will be reduced,’ he added.
Kennedy noted the way Bertie referred to it as ‘our’ surveillance, though it wasn’t him who had sweated out the hours in the van.
‘Right. I’d better go and get briefed on this new job,’ Kennedy said, and stood up, exercising his new-found freedom to turn his back on his erstwhile boss.
‘Don’t be a stranger,’ said Bertie.
*
A gang of hoodies were hanging out in the lea of a derelict factory, drinking from two-litre bottles of cider. Berlin took no notice of them, but they watched in silence as she and the dog passed on their way back to Sonja’s.
One of the boys detached himself from the group.
‘Oi!’ he shouted.
Berlin turned around. The dog kept going, but jerked to a halt when it ran out of rope.
‘Where’d you get that fuckin’ dog?’ demanded the boy as he stomped towards her, shrouded in his voluminous hood.
When he got close, the dog sat down in the dirt. It tucked in its tail, bowed its head and watched the boy with a sideways look. It could smell something bad.
The boy, who was about sixteen, brandished a fist at it. Berlin noticed he had ‘Diamond’ tattooed on the back of his hand.
‘What’s it to you?’ said Berlin.
‘That’s my fuckin’ dog, innit,’ said Diamond. ‘I lost it.’
‘Oh, yeah? How?’ asked Berlin.
‘How what?’ said Diamond.
His mates had moved closer, in order to enjoy the event.
‘How did you lose the dog?’ said Berlin.
Diamond seemed incapable of normal speech. He could only shout. ‘It got off the chain, down here near the river, we were just mucking about.’
‘And?’ said Berlin.
Diamond frowned, apparently trying to think.
‘And . . . some chick took it,’ he said.
The mates had formed a tight circle around her.
Diamond reached for the rope. ‘Give me the fucking dog!’ he demanded.
‘Had you seen her down here before? This chick?’ she said.
‘What’s it to you?’ he sneered, mocking her. He waggled his fingers, indicating he wanted the rope.
Berlin gave it to him, but slid her hand along so she still had a grip on it.
‘When she took the dog, where did she go?’ she asked.
Diamond blinked. Berlin could see him reaching for something. The lights were on, but no one was home.
‘Get fucked,’ he said.
The mates pawed the stony ground with their Doc Martins, a herd ready to stampede.
Berlin released her grip on the rope.
Diamond screamed like a banshee. His hood flipped back as he broke through the circle of his mates, dragging the dog behind him. ‘You fuck!’ he yelled at the cowering animal. ‘Man’s fucking best friend. You fucking ran out on me!’
His face was flushed, his ruby lips twisted in a sneer, flecked with drool. He’s smashed out of his tiny mind, thought Berlin.
Dragging the rope from the dog’s neck, he scooped the animal off the ground and held it high above his head, a trophy. His mates roared with laughter and whooped in unison, hopping from one foot to the other in a circle, a crude imitation of a Native American war dance.
Diamond ran screaming to the embankment wall and with a bloodcurdling cry threw the dog into the river. The splash and frantic yelps soon evaporated into silence. It was high tide. The current was fierce and the riverbank was a steep wall of stone.
Diamond turned to face Berlin, defiant.
The sullen faces of his mates watched her, a spark of interest in their otherwise dull eyes. What would she do?
Nothing.
21
Berlin’s flat trapped the heat. At night it was an oven, and she’d be glad to be out of it for a while. She dragged a sleeping bag from under the bed. It was stained and worn, all the better for her purpose.
Instead of going back to Sonja’s she had come straight home. Sonja might not ask about the dog, but if she did Berlin had no answer. The incident had shaken her and she didn’t want to talk about it.
She swallowed a morphine cap with a shot of Demir’s cheap whisky. The caps kept her pain under control, but they weren’t strong enough to take her to that special place. It was the difference between a nice cup of tea and a large single malt.
She felt momentarily guilty at her failure to follow up on the Demir situation: the confrontation with the son, and then the encounter in the shop with him and the mother had been a bloody nuisance. There was something perturbing about that situation which she couldn’t articulate. But it was a family issue and by definition beyond the power of an outsider to resolve, or even comprehend half the time.
Now she had her hands full looking for Princess and Twig. The police would know where the boy was, but she couldn’t exactly ask them. And she had one lead on Princess. If it didn’t work out, she was calling the cops, despite Sonja’s vehement protestations.
On top of everything else there was the nagging problem of Rolfey weaning her off the caps. She couldn’t imagine abandoning a relationship that had sustained her for most of her adult life. Leaving was always tough, even to save yourself.
She stashed her cash, credit card and front-door key in her boots, drew on a black woolly hat and slipped a Ziploc bag containing her morphine underneath it. She checked in the mirror. With her current Hammer Horror looks and the limp she would have no trouble blending in.
That afternoon she had sat in the tall weeds watching the fence for over an hour, enduring the stinking heat while the dog slept. When finally someone approached the yard, she’d moved a bit closer and watched carefully. It was ingenious.
The fence was constructed of heavy-duty mesh, connected by thick concrete posts about every twenty feet. The mesh was intact, but one of the concrete posts had been severed from it, except at the very top. The dirt around the base was loose. The post hung neatly in place, but if you gave it a shove it shifted about a foot, leaving an ample gap.
The people who came and went were young and old, fat and thin, black and white. They all had one thing in common. They were sleeping rough. Berlin was going to join them.
Anxious to leave the flat, she took another quick shot of Scotch, then put the bottle in her overcoat pocket. For authenticity.
But before she set off for Silvertown, she had to sort the Demir job, such as it was. Loose ends had a habit of tripping you up.
/> A telephone call wasn’t her preferred method of reporting to a client, but she had to tell Mr Demir about the doctor and where his wife went in the mornings.
She didn’t want to confront Murat again, let alone his mother. She picked up her phone and dialled Mr Demir’s mobile. When he answered, she adopted her professional voice. The one she used for delivering bad news.
On the DLR out to Silvertown she thought about Mr Demir’s dignified reaction.
‘I’m not a well man, Miss Berlin. Perhaps my wife is right to seek . . . companionship elsewhere.’
God, human relationships were so messy. What was the bloody point? She took a surreptitious pull on the Scotch, careful to turn away from the CCTV, lest the British Transport Police board at the next station and drag her off.
The other passengers averted their gaze from the alcoholic tramp.
She was just getting into character.
The concrete post swung aside silently. Berlin tossed her sleeping bag ahead of her and stepped through. Once inside, she was faced with a blank wall of steel. She eased along the gap between the fence and the shipping containers, searching for a way through the apparently impervious barrier.
A dog barked. She turned around, her heart skipping a beat. The head of a mutt protruded from the bottom of one of the containers. But of course it wasn’t Princess’s dog. For Christ’s sake. She was losing her grip, expecting a happy ending.
This dog stood apparently half in and half out of one of the containers. It barked again. It wants to be let out, she thought. She hesitated, but then went back and shifted the concrete post. The dog ran off into the night.
When she got down on her hands and knees she could see the hole in the container where the dog had appeared. She crawled inside.
22
Kennedy stifled a yawn as he scrolled through the witness statements and logs on the computer. He should be at home, giving his wife a break from the routine of back rubs and inhalations that his son needed just to be able to breathe. But he was working late to try to get up to speed on this murder.
It was a privilege to be assigned to a homicide, a vote of confidence from the bosses and one that he knew he didn’t deserve. Perhaps it was more a reflection of how few bodies they had available to redeploy.
All the money and resources had gone into counter-terrorism, although Kennedy was of the view that neither he nor his family were any safer as a result. They were now more at risk from muggers and online creeps. He kept that opinion to himself.
The murder of Kylie Steyne was a case in point. The uniforms who had done the door-to-door had done a good job but there wasn’t much to go on. They could have used a lot more forensic support on the ground.
None of the residents who overlooked the canal were peering out of their back windows in the middle of the night, although all commented that the path under the bridge was often busy after dark. The accumulation of rubbish collected by the Scene of Crime officers bore testimony to that.
Kennedy came to the garbled statement made by the deceased’s brother, William Fitzgerald Steyne, known as Billy. Dad was in the nick, Mum was an invalid. The kids and their mum had been cared for by her mother, their gran, but when Gran passed away it all went pear-shaped.
Mum went into a government nursing home, the council took back the flat and the kids were put up by a variety of relatives and friends until they outstayed their welcome, swearing, thieving and fighting.
The children’s home where they had been placed had shut down: the private-equity firm that owned it had subcontracted the operational side of the business, the operators defaulted on their loan and then the bank, which was a major shareholder in the private-equity firm, had repossessed it.
So by the ages of fourteen and fifteen and a half they were sleeping rough. Their local authority was obliged to house them, but the various authorities involved couldn’t agree where the kids belonged: in bureaucratic parlance this was known as a stand-off. The kids wanted to stay together, but faced separation as part of a deal that would be done by agencies with different statutory responsibilities. Buck-passing.
A social worker who’d had some involvement with the family had written that the children had ‘slipped through the net’. Kennedy snorted. That was probably because it was more holes than net.
Billy’s statement was almost incoherent, whether from drugs or grief or both, but one thing caught Kennedy’s eye. Earlier during the night that his sister Kylie was killed, ‘something happened’. It wasn’t clear what, but it involved ‘a lady’. The description of the lady made Kennedy sit up straight. Particularly the part about her black clothes, her scarred face and her limp.
Billy had been placed in an emergency shelter until the case was either closed or, if there was no quick result, put on the back burner: that is, until he conveniently ‘slipped through the net’ again. Kennedy had to speak to him before that happened, or before Billy decided that life on the street beat staying straight.
Kennedy rang the shelter’s night bell. When the light finally came on and the camera swivelled, he held up his ID. The solid steel door clicked open.
The worn sofa, threadbare carpet and bookshelves littered with battered toys and board games reminded Kennedy of home. He felt a surge of resentment that he couldn’t do better for his kids than this charity could do for its waifs and strays.
As the worker steered Billy Steyne into the room it was clear the boy had been woken from a heavily medicated sleep. The worker put a chipped mug of hot tea into Billy’s hand and glared at Kennedy.
‘He’s a minor, detective,’ she said.
‘Just one question,’ promised Kennedy. He thrust his smartphone at Billy, who was nodding off. The screen displayed a photo that Kennedy had downloaded from the surveillance camera.
Billy was holding the tea at a dangerous angle. The worker took it from him and put it on the table.
‘Billy, is this the lady? The lady who was there that night with you and Kylie?’
Billy peered at the photo, blinked and peered again.
‘Nice phone,’ he mumbled.
‘Concentrate, mate,’ said Kennedy. ‘Is that her?’
Billy looked harder.
He pointed at the photo.
‘The nice lady. Say thank you,’ he slurred.
The Lord works in mysterious ways, thought Kennedy, as the worker steered Billy back to bed, but what fucking wonders will He perform?
He picked up Billy’s mug.
The tea was hot and sweet. Just how he liked it.
23
Berlin took in the spectacle. She had crawled through the empty blackness of the shipping container and emerged into a long yard lit by fires burning in forty-four-gallon drums. The shadows of the inhabitants fell in monstrous relief across the tiers of steel boxes that enclosed the space on all sides. The labyrinth extended into the gloom.
Many of the containers were buckled and torn, the sides ripped away as if by a giant hand. Crude domestic arrangements were apparent, the spaces occupied by lone figures, couples, families. There might have been dozens of people living there, or hundreds, it was impossible to tell. The place was a maze.
The yard was littered with mounds of trash, each pile composed of identical items: a pyramid of warped plastic trikes; a leaning tower of cracked purple PVC sheeting; a heap of tarnished Christmas baubles. Thousands of discarded articles spilled from rotten cardboard boxes, or protruded from splintered timber cases.
A drunk’s mournful song drifted along with the smoke. Rancid oil sizzled on barbecues made from manhole covers. A couple danced to a tune only they could hear. The mangy dogs, the smell of rotten meat frying and the drunk’s dirge created a grotesque parody of a medieval peasants’ banquet. It was more Bosch than Bruegel.
A message sprayed on one side of a container declared ‘Welcome to Love Motel’.
Sleeping bag deployed, Scotch in hand, Berlin sat at the entrance to her new living quarters and watched and waited. She had
never felt more at home.
For a child, the concentration of desperate, chaotic adults in one place would be terrifying.
No one had spoken to her, but she was aware that she had been observed and that the more alert citizens had evaluated the level of risk she posed.
Her position gave her a good view of what had obviously been designated as communal space: anywhere within the circles of dim firelight. Beyond that, she would have to wait for daylight. The kid could be hiding out in any one of the hundreds of containers, concealed in a dark corner.
There appeared to be a couple of families who were well dug in with camping stoves, large water containers and mattresses: whatever was left from homes they had lost or abandoned for the usual myriad banal causes that brought people to their knees. It was nearly impossible to get back up again in the current economic climate.
A tall woman, swathed in layers of fabric and wool despite the humid night approached Berlin.
‘We have a rule here. We don’t shit in our own nest,’ she said.
Berlin nodded.
‘There’s a container there, three rows over, marked with an X.’ She pointed beyond the fire. ‘The bottom’s gone out of it. Inside there’s a pit.’
She held out her hand and Berlin passed her the Scotch. She took a long drink, then handed it back.
‘Watch your step,’ she said, and drifted off into the darkness.
It wasn’t just a friendly warning about treading in shit.
24
Sonja lay in the dark, fretting. She found it difficult to stay still, but could only pace up and down as she couldn’t leave the room for long. She daren’t go further than the petrol station down the road. Empty Pot Noodle packets and chocolate wrappers littered the table. She couldn’t keep anything else down, anyway. She touched a sore at the corner of her cracked lips.
If Princess wasn’t found soon, she didn’t know what she would do.
A Bitter Taste Page 6
