Berlin’s own mobile rang as she made her way down the steps.
‘Berlin,’ she said.
‘Are you at the Mags?’
She recognised Kennedy’s voice, although he had spoken softly.
‘Just leaving,’ she said, edging through the press of bodies.
‘Keep going,’ he said.
The sergeant and Murat had separated now. Murat had gone to the top of the courthouse steps. From this vantage point he scanned the crowd. The sergeant was roaming through it.
They were looking for someone.
‘What’s all this, Kennedy?’ she asked.
‘You’re wanted for questioning,’ he said.
‘I just spoke to the listing clerk. They’re putting me on again next week.’
‘For god’s sake, Berlin. It’s got nothing to do with stalking,’ snapped Kennedy.
‘What is it then?’ she asked.
His voice dropped to a hiss, no more than static on the line.
‘Murder.’
42
Berlin was moving up in the world. She was a person of interest in a murder inquiry, just a notch below prime suspect. But promotion to those dizzy heights was only a matter of time, according to Kennedy.
The money in her boot wouldn’t get her far, so she went straight to the nearest cash machine and withdrew everything she had, which wasn’t much. It was too soon for them to implement alerts or have her mobile tracked. They would have to submit requests, make a case and negotiate layers of authorisation for that. But she wanted to get ahead of the game.
She dumped her coat and woolly hat in a skip behind a kebab shop. Further along Whitechapel Road the market was open. She bought a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘I Love London’, a Union Jack scarf, a baseball cap bearing the Underground logo, and knock-off, oversized Oroton sunglasses. The Whitechapel Art Gallery was open and she ducked inside to change in the toilets.
In the cubicle she sat on the toilet lid and took a couple of deep breaths. She tried to stop trembling. The pounding in her chest subsided but, as the adrenaline left her system, the pain flooded through the damaged nerves in her neck and jaw.
Twig was dead. The news had shaken her. Kennedy had not broken it gently. His perfunctory announcement was a poor disguise for his own distress at the loss of another young life. She could hear it in his voice. His fear was palpable, too.
Rolfey’s clinic was nearby, but she would have to rely on Scotch and low-dose over-the-counter codeine until she managed to get there. That could be a while.
Gingerly she wrapped the scarf around her throat, hiding the bandage, then jammed the cap on her head and slipped on the glasses.
When she stood up and looked in the mirror, she didn’t recognise herself.
She was a tourist in her own town.
43
Kennedy walked the perimeter of the British Library. The high red-brick wall reminded him of a prison. He thought of the special wing prisons had for crooked cops and kept walking past the entrance. The third time around he took the plunge.
You had to admit it was a clever choice of venue. It was highly unlikely he would bump into any of his colleagues or associates in here. They were neither scholars nor tourists. He went upstairs to the café, as directed, and found an empty table. He waited.
When the woman sat down opposite him his first instinct was to tell her the seat was occupied. Then he looked again.
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘You look like a walking bloody souvenir.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ said Berlin. ‘Two fig rolls and a black coffee. Grande.’
In the queue, Kennedy suffered another bout of trepidation. If he was smart, he’d call for back-up and take her in. But she was smarter. She knew this wasn’t a trap or she would never have come.
If arrested, she could say that he had questioned her off the record then told her Billy’s location. Despite the air conditioning he was sweating so much his glasses kept slipping down his nose.
The coffee and cakes cost a small fortune, but he reminded himself of the much higher price he would pay if he didn’t go through with this. If she were picked up, he would have to explain how he had identified her from Billy’s statement in the first place. Luck wouldn’t cut it as an explanation. Why keep this critical intel to himself?
He’d be finished. Somehow he had to persuade her they were in it together.
Berlin watched Kennedy in the queue and smothered her anxiety. She reminded herself that he was alone, and he was exposed.
But her real ace was that she knew about his dealings with Sonja and Cole. She didn’t really believe that Kennedy had simply recognised her at the station on the basis of Billy’s description. If she had seen Kennedy at Sonja’s, then he may well have seen her. He had certainly had the place under surveillance, watching for Cole’s return.
He didn’t know it would be a bloody long wait.
They were all dancing around the same corpse.
*
Kennedy put the coffee and a muffin in front of her. She took off her sunglasses and looked at him.
‘They’d run out of fig rolls,’ he said.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ said Berlin. She didn’t have time for niceties.
Kennedy sat down quickly and lowered his voice.
‘You were arguing with him shortly before he died,’ he said. ‘And people heard him accuse you of killing Kylie.’
‘He was angry. He didn’t mean it literally, and if that’s all they’ve got it doesn’t add up to much of a case. Prospect of a conviction unlikely, I would have thought.’
Kennedy gave her a long, hard look and with a flourish took a document out of his suit pocket and laid it on the table in front of her.
It was a forensic report, a list of items found at a crime scene. One item had been scored through with pink highlighter. Berlin read it once, then again.
She looked at Kennedy. An emptiness unfurled in her chest.
‘This can’t be right,’ she said.
‘There’s no mistake,’ he said. ‘I’ve just come straight from the lab. The prints matched those taken when you were arrested on the stalking charge. Now it’s just a matter of matching the DNA when they catch up with you, and it’s all over.’
Berlin felt as though she were seeing and hearing everything from a great distance. So much for her ace. Kennedy had a full house.
She gazed at the report: an empty Scotch bottle found under the canal bridge was covered in her fingerprints, and hers alone. It was the brand Mr Demir always gave her.
For a moment Berlin was back in the alley with the pale child and the creep. She could almost smell his sweat and feel the Asp clenched in her hand.
‘Steady,’ said Kennedy.
He touched her wrist and she realised she was crushing her cardboard cup. Coffee trickled across the table. Kennedy mopped it up with paper napkins.
‘I thought you were talking about Billy,’ she said. ‘It never occurred to me that you meant her. His sister.’ It came out small and flat. The words died in her throat.
All her energy was focused on subduing her panic.
‘The witnesses in Billy’s case aren’t the most reliable and could be discredited in court,’ said Kennedy. ‘And it might be tricky to make murder fly, given the circumstances. But Kylie, well, the bottle together with Billy’s description of the nice lady . . .’
He let it hang out there, waiting for her response.
She tried to process what he was saying, but she couldn’t think fast enough to react, so she let him continue to the inexorable conclusion.
‘I’d say there’s a good chance you’ll be looking at two counts. Him and her.’
She couldn’t find her voice.
‘You haven’t touched your muffin,’ he said.
‘I’d like some more coffee,’ said Berlin.
When Kennedy returned from the counter, she was gone.
44
Morpheus, son of night and g
od of dreams, often brought Berlin the same vision. A towering wall, which somehow she could see over, and beyond it dead people calling to her. She could never hear what they were saying. Her father was always one of them.
Morphine had nothing to do with her reverie as she slumped in the back seat on the upper deck of the bus. Shock had been succeeded by fury, then replaced by dread; now she had succumbed to an anguished trance. Kylie and Billy stood behind the wall, reproachful.
If Billy’s death was ruled a homicide Kennedy was right, she would be looking at two counts of murder: the vicious slaughter of a brother and sister.
She was suddenly cursed with perfect recall of famous cases in which innocent people had been convicted on the basis of forensic evidence that at the time seemed damning: the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven. Even when it wasn’t particularly damning.
There seemed to be a terrible inevitability about her guilt; the trajectory of culpability led straight to her, even if she hadn’t actually killed anyone. She felt anguish and panic yield to resignation. The fault lay with her. It always did.
The bus passed her father’s old shop on Bethnal Green Road. Lenny Berlin had been a jeweller. When she was seven her mother and father bought a terraced house in Leyton with a shiny brass knocker. She and her mother moved in, but Lenny always stayed in the flat above the shop.
That her parents had separated was never mentioned; Peggy took the bus every day to work in the shop, then returned to Leyton in the evening. Her father went upstairs to the flat. Lenny never set foot in the house in Leyton, and her mother never went upstairs at the shop.
The shop’s latest incarnation was as a payday loan operation. Legal loan sharks. Berlin sat on the bus, reassured by the sensation of movement but unable to think clearly about where she was going, or why. She longed to dissolve the fear that infested her veins and to slow the sharp, relentless wheels turning in her brain as she went over it again and again. The loop took her back to the same place each time. Heroin. She craved a hit.
45
‘This is a bad business, Sonja,’ said Rita.
Sonja gulped from the grimy tumbler of spirits. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said.
Rita poured her another. She knew desperation when she saw it, so she had invited Sonja in for a drink. Sonja had nowhere else to go. A friend in need was a bloody good opportunity, and Rita was going to make the most of it.
If she spoke slowly, her dentures didn’t slip and slide about too much. The vodka didn’t seem to be affecting the superglue. She poured herself another shot. They’d run out of ice long ago.
They raised their glasses and drank.
‘It’s time you and I were straight with each other, love,’ said Rita, pouring more of the oily liquid from the half-gallon plastic orange juice container. It was home-brew from a lock-up in Plaistow. The distillery was run by a couple of Russian blokes. Rita figured they knew what they were doing. They had invented vodka.
‘The two cops. You’re their snout,’ said Sonja.
Rita nodded. ‘For my sins,’ she said. ‘Look where it’s fucking got me.’
Her scrawny arms were black and blue. She lifted her blouse to reveal the unmistakable imprint of a trainer on her ribs. It matched the one fading from Sonja’s face.
‘You bruise easy at my age,’ said Rita.
‘Yeah. But what can we do? Call the police?’ said Sonja.
‘You know what they want, love,’ wheedled Rita. ‘They just don’t believe you when you say you don’t know where he’s hiding. I’m sitting here night and fucking day, terrified that I’ll miss him when he does come back, and then that fucking Bertie will take it out on me.’
‘He’s not coming back, Rita,’ said Sonja.
Rita considered her next gambit.
‘My grandson’s been helping me out, you know,’ said Rita. ‘Terry. He’s in number four upstairs. He has his moments. He snaps, like.’
She hoped the threat wasn’t too obvious. Or too subtle.
‘There’s no point threatening me,’ said Sonja. ‘They’ve already tried. Cole’s gone for good.’
‘Bullshit!’ shouted Rita. ‘They’re going to get him eventually so give him up and save us both a lot of grief.’
Sonja leapt to her feet and threw her tumbler across the room. ‘Fuck off, Rita. He’s not coming back!’
Rita was almost tempted to believe her. Sonja was so strung out she couldn’t remember her own lies. Rita knew all the signs.
‘Why don’t we just sort this out between us, woman to woman?’ said Rita. ‘We can put a lot past these blokes if we work together.’
Sonja seemed to consider this for a moment.
‘I know it’s the kid, Sonja,’ said Rita.
Sonja grabbed her by the hair and thrust her face into Rita’s.
‘Leave my fucking kid out of this. I’m warning you. I’ll fucking kill you if you breathe a word about her to anyone. Understand?’
She banged Rita’s head down on the table and left.
Rita would have smiled if she wasn’t afraid her dentures might fall out. That was all she needed to know. It was definitely the kid.
46
The double rap on the knocker echoed through the house. Peggy wiped her hands on her apron and hurried down the hall. She glanced up the stairs.
The bedroom door was ajar and she could see Princess bent over the little desk, beavering away with her felt-tip pens. Peggy had tried to interest her in the old plastic-bead bracelet kit she’d found stuffed in the top of Catherine’s wardrobe. Another disdained Christmas present. Princess’s reaction had been similar.
Princess heard the knock. She was dying of boredom. Peggy had tried to get her to make a charm bracelet from some old box of plastic beads because she said it had her name on it: ‘Fun for a Princess’. Bollocks. It was just advertising.
She leant back in her chair so she could see the front door. She saw Peggy open it. There was a bloke standing on the step, but she could only see his legs from this angle. He said something she couldn’t hear and then Peggy said, ‘You’d better come in.’
The man stepped into the hall and Peggy showed him into the front room. Princess caught his profile as he turned.
He followed Peggy up the stairs, hard on her heels.
The bedroom door was closed. Peggy knocked on it out of habit and an ingrained sense of propriety. Her view was that you couldn’t expect children to behave correctly if you didn’t do so yourself.
Lenny had been more inclined towards the ‘do as I say, not what I do’ school of child-rearing. It had been nearly impossible to stop Catherine from burping loudly at the end of a meal, just as her father did. That wasn’t the only bad habit Peggy had acquired from him.
When she tried to reprimand their daughter, Lenny would back her up with a gruff ‘Listen to your mother’, but it was unconvincing. She’d watched, helpless, as Catherine grew up with a fierce sense of injustice. If her father could do it, why couldn’t she?
Peggy knocked again.
‘Princess,’ she called. Perhaps she had fallen asleep.
She turned the handle and peered around the door.
The room was empty.
The man pushed past her, took in the situation and swore.
‘Is there a back way?’ he demanded.
Peggy nodded.
He ran down the stairs, taking two at a time. Peggy heard him run through the house. She went to the open window and peered down, saw him reappear in the empty garden, then turn and run back inside. His footsteps thundered up the hall, then there was a crash as the front door banged against the wall.
Peggy turned away from the window.
The bedroom door swung back to reveal Princess. She was standing behind it with her finger to her lips, cautioning Peggy to remain silent.
Her warning was backed up by the gun she held in her other hand.
Berlin turned into the road just in time to see a man in a suit emerge from Peggy’s gate.
The house was on a corner and he took off down the side street.
Instinctively she picked up her pace and broke into an awkward jog. When she reached the house the front door stood wide open and there was no sign of Peggy.
‘Peggy!’ Berlin shouted.
Down the hallway and through the silent house she ran, checking each room. Nothing had been disturbed. Returning to the stairs she took them as fast as she was able.
When she reached the landing she saw Peggy standing stock-still in the middle of Berlin’s old bedroom, her gaze riveted on something behind the door. As she watched, a trickle of urine ran down Peggy’s leg. Berlin hurried to her, wondering if she was having a stroke or something. After all, she was eighty-something and on a lot of tablets.
‘Peggy? Are you all right?’
She turned around, following Peggy’s frozen stare.
Princess stood there with her pack on her back and her feet planted wide. She was clutching a gun in both hands; it was a heavy piece and it wobbled up and down.
Her finger was on the trigger.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ said Berlin.
Princess glowered at her, all defiance.
There was a small, whimpering noise. Berlin realised it came from Peggy.
‘It’s okay, Peggy,’ she said very quietly. ‘It’s not real.’
Princess exclaimed, enraged by this disrespect. She squeezed the trigger with all her might, the gun recoiled and a deafening noise enveloped them.
Peggy crumpled to the floor. Berlin’s ears were ringing as she dropped to a crouch beside her.
‘Mum!’ she cried. A cloud of plaster dust settled around them.
Berlin felt for the pulse at Peggy’s throat. It thudded under her fingers, strong and steady. She had just fainted. Berlin touched her cheek.
‘You’ll be fine, Mum,’ she said, and glanced up.
Jimmy Page had copped it right between the eyes.
Her taut nerves snapped. Rage replaced fear. She leapt up, grabbed the gun with one hand and a handful of Princess’s hair with the other. She yanked the kid’s head back hard, forcing her to look Berlin in the eye.
A Bitter Taste Page 12
