A Bitter Taste

by Annie Hauxwell

  ‘If I get back and the kid tells me you’ve been hassling her, I’ll be crushing more than your fingers.’

  Princess watched the exchange through her spyhole with satisfaction. The ogre sucked his fingers as Berlin walked away. She was old, but she was different. People always raised an eyebrow or laughed when Princess told them her name, but she hadn’t.

  She said she’d be back and Princess believed her. Anyway, she’s got nowhere else to go, she thought. Just like me.

  29

  It was apparent from the state of Sonja’s room that things were going downhill. It had never been a palace, but the mess was a sign of growing desperation. Whatever she was using had run out. Berlin knew Sonja would have to score. Even if it was talcum powder and speed.

  Now Sonja sat on the edge of the bed, arms wrapped around her thin body, self-protective.

  Berlin stood over her. She’d used the front door instead of coming in through the window. The old bag had clocked her but Berlin couldn’t care less. She was going to extricate herself from this business before it got any messier.

  ‘What the fuck, Sonja?’ she said. ‘You drag me into this with some bullshit story and say Cole is out of the picture. Then his mates beat you up because he’s gone missing. Now I find out he’s dead.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ whispered Sonja.

  It was the only confirmation Berlin needed.

  ‘Tell me the truth or I’m going to the cops,’ she said, and meant it.

  ‘You’ve found her, haven’t you? Where is she? Why haven’t you brought her home?’ asked Sonja.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Berlin, pacing. ‘What the hell’s going on here? Just for once be straight with me.’

  ‘Where is she?’ demanded Sonja.

  ‘Why didn’t you just say Cole was dead?’ retorted Berlin. ‘God knows the world’s a better place without him, so why all this crap about him being long gone?’

  ‘Did Princess tell you he was dead? I told you she makes stuff up all the time. It’s not true. Why would I lie?’

  But it was too late for her to backtrack now, and Berlin could see Sonja knew it. She stopped pacing and got in Sonja’s face.

  ‘I don’t know. You tell me,’ Berlin said.

  ‘She said it, didn’t she?’ said Sonja.

  ‘I’m going to the police unless I get the truth,’ said Berlin.

  ‘You wouldn’t do that. They’d take her away from me and put her in one of those homes.’

  ‘You’re confusing me with a bleeding social worker,’ snapped Berlin.

  ‘She’d be abused!’ said Sonja.

  ‘And what do you think is happening to her here, you worthless fucking junkie?’ said Berlin, her attempt at self-control deserting her. ‘For the last time, is Cole dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sonja quietly.

  Berlin shook her head in disbelief.

  ‘So why not just say so?’ she said.

  Above them a jet roared, soaring into clean, cool skies. The rumble died into an empty silence.

  ‘Because I killed him. I fucking killed him,’ said Sonja.

  They sat either side of the small table and drank strong, sweet tea from chipped mugs. Sonja kept staring at an old piece of carpet, purporting to be a rug, near the sink. Berlin got up and kicked it aside. A dark, irregular patch stained the worn floorboards. She felt a heaviness in the pit of her stomach and was seized by the sensation she was sinking into a tight space that she would never escape.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Sonja. Why?’ she heard herself ask.

  Sonja turned her back on Berlin and slipped off her T-shirt. Her thin shoulders were scored with deep welts that ran across her back. Some were a faded pink, old blows, and others were scarlet. Some were still weeping. A grid of pain.

  Berlin’s hand rose to the scars at her own throat.

  ‘Princess was there. She saw everything,’ said Berlin.

  Sonja nodded. ‘It had been going on for years,’ she said. ‘I just snapped. Grabbed a knife and stabbed him. I didn’t mean to kill him. It happened so fast, there was so much blood. Then it was over.’

  ‘What did you do with the body?’ asked Berlin.

  ‘One of those old cars out the back is ours,’ said Sonja.

  ‘You don’t mean —’ said Berlin. For a moment she could see Cole, still in the boot, liquefying in the heat.

  ‘No. He’s gone,’ said Sonja.

  Berlin didn’t want to know where.

  ‘Jesus, Sonja,’ she muttered. Her hand went to her woolly hat. Her scalp was hot and itchy but that wasn’t it. She touched the morphine caps stowed underneath it in the small Ziploc bag. Talismanic.

  Sonja reached out and gripped Berlin’s arm.

  ‘What are you going to do? When are you going to bring Princess home? You won’t turn me in, Cath, will you? You’re not a grass.’

  ‘This life, Sonja – the kid.’ She tugged her arm away.

  ‘I know!’ said Sonja. ‘Don’t you think I want to get away from it? Get clean, do something right for Princess.’

  Sonja’s urgent tone didn’t impress Berlin. ‘Get clean?’ she asked, sceptical.

  ‘This is our chance, mine and Princess’s, to get away from this shit once and for all,’ said Sonja. ‘I couldn’t do it while Cole was around. He would never let us go. But now it’s different. We have to get away from here, from this dump, from London, from the blokes looking for him.’

  Berlin picked up her tea and drank it down, longing for something stronger.

  ‘He owes them money and they won’t stop,’ said Sonja. ‘If I tell them he’s dead they’ll want to turn me out to cover the debt. I’m too old to go on the street.’

  Berlin nudged the carpet back into place with the toe of her boot.

  ‘You’ll help me, won’t you, Cath?’ pleaded Sonja. ‘For the kid’s sake, not mine.’

  ‘Give me the car keys,’ said Berlin.

  30

  Berlin was too preoccupied to pay attention to the police car outside her block of flats as she drove past looking for a parking space. It was hardly unusual in Bethnal Green. The sound of sirens was a perpetual melody against the traffic drone: urban muzak.

  She needed to get home, take a cap and try to come up with a sensible plan to address the various messes she had created by failing to mind her own business.

  Not the least was what to do about the murder of Kylie Steyne. She really wanted to speak to the brother before she went to the police, but in all conscience she couldn’t leave it any longer. She would pick up Parr’s licence and family photo and go straight to the station as soon as she had sorted Princess.

  That she was about to embark on a criminal conspiracy to conceal another murder seemed almost trivial. She didn’t want to see Cole’s demise come to light. If Sonja went down, the kid would suffer.

  Sonja could probably get away with manslaughter: loss of control or self-defence. The scars on her back would bolster her case. On the other hand she was a junkie, she had disposed of the body, and only Princess could say whether Sonja had really been in fear for her life when she stabbed Cole.

  Berlin would bet pounds to peanuts that Sonja would do time, and then it would be straight into care for Princess. The kid’s life would be even more of a bloody disaster if that happened.

  One thing was certain. She couldn’t leave Princess in that battered shipping container another night; she had to go back there and somehow get her to a safe place.

  Sonja had lost it after Berlin announced she wasn’t going to bring Princess straight home. She only calmed down when Berlin described what would happen if Princess kicked off in the street as Berlin dragged her back to her mother: someone would call the cops. The last thing Sonja wanted.

  The kid needed time to accept what had happened. That might be a challenge. What effect would it have on a child to see her mother kill her father? Even if she hated him, would that make it any easier to deal with? No matter how tough she was, a ten-year-old would fi
nd a load like that difficult to carry.

  Adults were often compelled to unburden themselves, against all self-interest. The whispered secret inside the kid could become a roar. If the kid needed to talk about it, she could choose badly, confiding in some low-life at Love Motel who might exploit the situation. Which was another good reason to get her out of there, fast. The warning to the ogre would last only as long as the daylight.

  Berlin thought about her own dad. The conversations he and her mother conducted in low, strained voices, that she would struggle to decode. The times she witnessed exchanges with his ‘associates’ that he implored her not to mention to her mother. But it was no time to go there. Her feelings about her father were a quagmire. She had to focus on the job at hand.

  She had told Sonja she would stow Princess in a safe place, but she had no idea where. How many people did she know who could be trusted to care for a kid and watch her twenty-four seven? It would be a very short list.

  She also had to figure out what she was going to do with Princess and Sonja once they were reunited. They’d have to be well out of the reach of the authorities, Cole’s thuggish associates and Sonja’s heroin connections. Which meant far, far away. Abroad. A two-week package on the Costa del Sol wouldn’t cut it.

  If Sonja was serious about getting clean, it would take time and money. Berlin had neither.

  How the hell had this become her problem?

  She had to park well down the road and walk back to the flats. The door of the police car opened as she passed. The kids in the street stopped kicking the ball to watch.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said an officer, putting on his cap. Berlin stopped. She noticed he was a sergeant.

  She also noticed that his offsider, who got out of the other side of the vehicle, was a very young Police and Community Support Officer. Her uniform was so new it squeaked when she moved. The more cynical warranted officers in the Met sometimes referred to PCSOs as chimps: can’t help in most police situations.

  ‘You need to come with me. Us,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘What?’ said Berlin.

  ‘You’re under arrest. Don’t give us any trouble,’ he said, although she hadn’t moved a muscle.

  ‘What for?’ asked Berlin, stunned.

  ‘Stalking,’ said the sergeant.

  The door of a nearby van slid open and a woman got out.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Demir. ‘That’s her.’

  Berlin stared.

  Murat was in the driver’s seat.

  At the station, Berlin deployed her sharpest legal argument.

  ‘This is bullshit.’

  The weary, grizzled old constable rolled Berlin’s fingers across the scanner and sighed. It was clear he agreed.

  It was also clear that Murat had pull with the arresting officer. No doubt Berlin wasn’t the only one being paid off by a member of the Demir family, although a sergeant wouldn’t come as cheaply as she did.

  He hadn’t been remotely interested in the fact that Mr Demir was employing Berlin to watch his wife, and, of course, she didn’t have a contract to back up her claim.

  ‘I’ll be glad to retire,’ said the constable. ‘How we get involved in this sort of rubbish I’ll never know.’

  Although she suspected he did. There was at least one rotten apple in every station and everyone always knew who it was, although no one did anything about it. You kept your mouth shut and held the line, which was already stretched to breaking point.

  Sweat ran down the constable’s forehead and disappeared into his bushy grey eyebrows. The air conditioning had broken down and there was a two-week wait for the contractor.

  Berlin overheard someone say the traffic boys were looking for an air-conditioning mechanic to pull over for a minor offence. Which would turn into a big one if he didn’t fix the station system quick smart.

  ‘It’s a civil matter, if you ask me,’ grumbled the constable. ‘Do you want a cuppa?’

  ‘How about a nice cold lager?’ suggested Berlin.

  He smiled.

  ‘Come on, love, we’ll get you signed out.’

  The constable steered her down a corridor towards a secure door with a wire-reinforced aperture. Before they reached it, the locking mechanism clicked and a bloke walked through. As they approached he politely held the door open.

  Berlin had to exercise every ounce of self-restraint as she walked past. It was one of the thugs she had seen at Sonja’s. The skinny one with the glasses.

  ‘Thank you,’ she muttered, eyes averted. She felt his breath on her cheek as she squeezed past.

  ‘How are you, Jack?’ he said to the constable.

  ‘Very well, thank you, Detective Kennedy,’ responded her escort, rather coolly, as he followed her through.

  Sonja had conveniently forgotten to mention that the blokes looking for Cole were cops. No wonder she didn’t want the police involved in the hunt for Princess.

  Berlin had recognised the detective, but there was no reason he would recognise her.

  The door clicked shut behind them and she relaxed.

  Kennedy felt a surge of optimism at his new prospects; he took off his glasses and cleaned them, patted his knee to calm the tremor and considered his options. He had wondered whether he could believe Sonja’s story, that the limping woman was an old friend with a habit: a professional investigator she had asked to find her runaway daughter.

  When pressed, Sonja admitted that the kid had taken off after a parental punch-up during which Cole had given Sonja a good belting. According to Sonja, Cole went after the kid and never came back.

  Naturally, he had taken the recent shipment of heroin with him.

  Sonja thought Cole could be worried that the authorities would pick up the kid and the police would get involved. He might also fear she would report Princess missing and tell them why she had run away. It would be the first thing any mother would do.

  In any event, Cole hadn’t come home and the chances were that he wouldn’t if he thought the place was under surveillance.

  Which it was. Of a kind.

  This was the first time Sonja had provided an explanation for Cole’s disappearance, and it made sense. Sort of. But something about it didn’t quite ring true: the part about Cole being concerned that Sonja would go to the police to report the domestic violence or Princess running away. It seemed unlikely that she would report it, or that Cole would think she might, given their proclivities and criminal histories. She’d never reported him before.

  And they were already ‘involved’ with a police operation. Of a kind.

  But the kid was a different story. Kennedy thought it was more likely that Princess had scarpered after Cole had belted her, not Sonja, and that Sonja was afraid the kid might be taken away if child protection got wind of it.

  Which it would if Kennedy had anything to do with it. He’d made a few observations about the environment Princess was exposed to when the kid had been around during previous visits, but Cole and Sonja had seemed oblivious. Typical junkies.

  Apart from that, Sonja’s story was plausible. Princess had run away, Cole had gone after her, and neither had come back. So Sonja had someone out looking for her. A maternal instinct, of a sort, had finally surfaced.

  Now he had the limping woman within reach. Time to step up.

  The door of the Community Response Sergeant’s office was ajar. Kennedy gave it a perfunctory knock and entered.

  Sergeant Harvinder Pannu sat behind his desk briefing two of his PCSOs. The gist of it was that a Darby and Joan in their nineties were being harassed by vandals, whose latest trick had been to turn on the garden tap and shove the hose under the back door, flooding the kitchen.

  ‘All right. Off you go, and sort it,’ said Pannu.

  His charges left with enthusiasm. They’d been assigned to the crime of the century.

  Pannu turned his attention to Kennedy.

  ‘What can I do for you, Detective?’ he asked.

  ‘How’s business, Pannu
?’ asked Kennedy with a grin.

  ‘What can I tell you?’ said Pannu. ‘We’re failing to stem the tidal wave of crime that’s sweeping the capital.’

  It was a recent quote from an editorial in one of the broadsheets.

  ‘Diversification is the key to survival,’ said Kennedy.

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Pannu, suspicious.

  Kennedy laid a business card on the desk. It was embossed with the words ‘London Superior Systems’.

  Pannu got up and closed his door.

  ‘What’s your problem, Kennedy?’ asked Pannu. ‘One in ten Met officers has got a second job. It was in the paper.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Kennedy. ‘And that’s just those that appear in the register of police business interests.’

  Pannu didn’t sit down again.

  ‘I applaud enterprise, Pannu. This country needs more of it,’ said Kennedy. ‘There must be a great – what do they call it – synergy between your day job and this little outfit.’ He tapped the business card. ‘I understand you offer the best after-sales service available.’

  ‘What do you want?’ said Pannu.

  31

  The queue at the custody desk moved slowly. When she finally got out, Berlin left the station as fast as her leg would allow, clutching the documents that demanded she appear at the Thames Magistrates Court the next day. She could ask for an adjournment, but she had to attend or they could issue a bench warrant.

  Before she was even five yards from the station a van pulled up sharply beside her. Berlin took an involuntary step back as she recognised the driver. But when he beckoned it was clear there wasn’t much point arguing. She got in.

  Detective Sergeant Kennedy formally introduced himself and informed her that he wasn’t interested in the stalking matter. He drove away from the station at speed, while making the point that he had nothing to do with the sergeant who had arrested her. He was investigating the murder of Kylie Steyne, and had recognised Berlin from Billy Steyne’s description.

  Twig. The scarring had given her away.

  Billy had given him a pretty good idea of what went on that night and her role in it.