Sirens

by Joseph Knox

  His eyes were fixed on mine.

  When Parrs spoke, the police officer leaned forward off the wall. He turned and pushed through a swing-door, still hugging himself. He didn’t come back.

  At length, a young Asian doctor appeared. He strode into the room with the ease of someone who was doing what he loved and had his whole life ahead of him. He had a bright temperament and an even brighter smile. His teeth looked as though they’d been artificially whitened.

  ‘Think you could turn those things down?’ I said. He shone a torch aggressively into my face, then gave me the middle finger and asked how many I could see.

  ‘Just the one.’

  ‘He’s fine,’ said the doctor, turning on his heel and pushing through the swing doors.

  Parrs scowled down at me. ‘Anything you want to tell me, son?’

  I shook my head and winced. ‘She was like that when I got there. Did you find anything?’

  ‘My office. First thing tomorrow.’

  I nodded. It hurt.

  He looked down at me pityingly and left.

  I lay there alone for a while, listening to the strange rhythms of the building, imagining the lives attached to passing voices, feeling unreal. Catherine was pregnant. It compromised me on every level, my disgrace come true. I was too stunned to know what to think, what to do. I thought about how frightened she must be. I’d almost shoved her down a staircase as soon as I heard the news. I felt another pulse of self-loathing work its way through me. Then I rolled out of bed, put my feet on the floor and got my things together.

  11

  Detective Kernick and his dishwater-blonde partner, DS Conway, were waiting for me when I left. Kernick gave me a hard look and almost said something. In the end he just shook his head and walked me outside to his car.

  My head was spinning. I felt numb. Stupid and confused. I’d left her, alive in that room, after a Saturday night. Between then and 5 p.m. on Sunday she’d had sex. Someone had left a message on her mirror and then smashed it. Her phone had gone missing. She’d used Eight. She’d died.

  We drove out to an ugly business park somewhere and checked into a cheap hotel. I was never left alone for a minute. Kernick put it gently: ‘Wouldn’t want you taking the easy way out, now would we?’

  We slept with the light on. I should say I was so damaged and sad about it all that I lay awake that night. The truth is I was exhausted, starving and hollowed out by the stabbing pain in my head. I dreamt of traffic. When I sat up, awake, my jaw hurt. I had been grinding my teeth so hard that I’d woken Kernick. He was sitting at the edge of his bed, staring at me, frowning slightly. He looked away when I sat up.

  ‘Coffee?’ he said.

  Over breakfast I read the morning paper. Monday, 16 November. Isabelle got the entire front page of the red-top rag that Kernick had brought up to the room.

  ISABELLE ROSSITER DEAD AT 17

  Squatting with notorious Northern drug lord

  ‘Dangerous, destructive sex life’

  History of mental illness

  Inset was a picture of David Rossiter, undoubtedly from the files, but caught in a moment where he was frowning, looking concerned. The caption beneath it said: MP and daughter had been living ‘sad, separate lives’.

  The story continued on page four, mentioning six times that David Rossiter was Secretary of State for Justice. The rest of it was just padded-out facts of the Rossiters’ lives. That the mother was born a millionaire, that the father was a world-player, that Isabelle had been a bright, beautiful child.

  The quotes, attributed to a source close to the Rossiters, told a different story. They hinted that there was madness and unhappiness within the family. The tone implied that, even with all that money, they still weren’t satisfied. When I looked up from the paper, Kernick was watching me closely. I got up and got ready. Took a shower. I stood motionless under the burning water until one of them banged on the door.

  12

  We parked a few streets over from the station and walked the rest of the way. When we arrived I saw why. Dozens of hacks and photographers, shouting questions, taking pictures of anyone who went by. From a distance I heard the same repeated words:

  ‘Sex?’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Suicide?’

  We made our way to the south entrance. I’d never felt scared walking in there before. Inside the station, every person we passed had their ear pressed to a phone. Even so, others rang endlessly in the background. Uniformed officers were bursting out of every door, and there was a frenzy of people coming and going in all directions. I was escorted into the lift, to the fourth floor. Superintendent Parrs’ office. No one was worried about blowing my cover now. His frazzled secretary dispatched three callers in the time it took us to pass her desk. Detective Kernick took me right up to the door and knocked.

  ‘Come in,’ said a voice from the other side.

  Kernick opened it. ‘Waits,’ he said.

  Parrs was sitting behind his desk with his back to the window. He looked more gaunt than usual, his jawline like a downward-

  facing arrow. There were two telephones in front of him, and lights blinked from both. There was someone holding on every line.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said as I came in.

  Kernick closed the door, staying outside.

  Opposite Parrs sat David Rossiter. His face was puffed up from lack of sleep and his suit was crumpled. The top button of his shirt was undone. It seemed unnatural to see him without a tie.

  When I walked in he got to his feet and paced to the far corner of the room, leaning into the wall with his back to us. Even in grief there was an otherness about him. He hunched his shoulders, shied away from his full height. Diminished himself. I knew by now that this political theatricality was hard-wired into him, that he wasn’t necessarily playing to the crowd.

  There was a man I didn’t recognize in the third chair. He had the formal, relaxed look of an excellent lawyer. He was in his early thirties, older than me, but seeming younger somehow. There was no darkness around his eyes, no lines on his face at all, and his hair was perfect. He looked like he’d been in bed by nine o’clock every night of his life. I felt cheap and exhausted just standing in the same room as him.

  Parrs turned his red eyes on me. ‘Sit down,’ he said. I did. Neither Rossiter nor the other man looked in my direction. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘She was dead when I got there.’

  ‘You let yourself in?’

  ‘I knocked and saw the door was open.’

  The third man in the room exhaled loudly.

  ‘Detective Constable Waits, this is Christopher Tully,’ said Parrs. ‘Mr Rossiter’s lawyer.’

  ‘Mr Rossiter’s friend,’ said Tully. ‘And lawyer.’

  I nodded at him, but he just stared straight ahead. Each of us kept our voices low, out of some respect for Rossiter, standing grieving against the wall.

  ‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ said Parrs. ‘Why were you there in the first place?’

  ‘As you know, Mr Rossiter asked me to keep an eye on his daughter.’ Rossiter turned from the wall but didn’t speak. ‘I’d seen her the night before. She was drunk, so I took her home.’ I knew how it sounded. The room was suddenly quiet. The way things get when something unspoken and ugly hangs in the air. I went on quickly to fill the silence. ‘As I was leaving, she asked me to come back the next night. The night I found her.’

  ‘Why did she want you to come back?’ said Parrs.

  ‘She wanted to talk to me about something.’

  ‘What?’

  I could feel Rossiter’s eyes burning into me. The silence swelling back into the room, drowning us all.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, boy,’ said Parrs.

  I just looked at him.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about what we do know.’ He had notes to hand but spoke from memory. ‘Isabelle Rossiter was found dead in her rented room on Fog Lane ye
sterday. Your call,’ he nodded at me, ‘came at seventeen hundred and twenty hours. A syringe containing what is thought to be an opiate was recovered from the scene. Tests are ongoing, but this is thought to be the cause of death. There was evidence of recent sexual activity.’ He paused. ‘Now, what did she want to talk to you about?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Detective,’ said Tully, turning to me and speaking for the first time. ‘If you’re trying to spare Mr Rossiter’s feelings, then you can stop that this instant. I think I can speak for him when I say that he will accept damage to his pride, his reputation, even his heart, if you can shed some light on what happened to Isabelle.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  He frowned. ‘Superintendent Parrs tells us that pathology and forensics will take time, and we appreciate that. We have the probable cause of death in the syringe. What we don’t have is the supplier. What we don’t have is her state of mind. What we don’t have is the reason. You said she’d been drinking. Did you know she was using drugs?’

  ‘Not Eight.’

  ‘Eight?’ said Tully, looking around.

  ‘Heroin,’ said Rossiter darkly. It was the first time he’d spoken since I entered the room.

  Tully feigned confusion. ‘So you didn’t think she was using heroin. Just other things?’

  I looked at Parrs. His unreadable red eyes.

  ‘She drank, took the odd pill. She was acting out.’

  ‘Acting out?’ said Tully.

  ‘She was a teenage girl.’

  ‘A teenage girl,’ he said. ‘And you didn’t think to have her removed from the influence of a drug dealer twice her age?’

  ‘I had her halfway home,’ I said, turning to Rossiter. ‘I had her halfway to your house the night before she died.’ He looked at me, unguarded. All the politics and premeditation fell away for a moment. He was just a father.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I found money in her bag.’

  No one spoke for a second and then everyone spoke at once.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Parrs, taking the floor. ‘What money, Waits?’

  ‘Franchise. She’d been collecting for them.’

  A sound like a restrained scream came from Rossiter, and he turned to face the wall again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Tully. ‘Are we talking about drug money?’

  I nodded, not looking at anyone now.

  ‘So, you were approached by the Secretary of State for Justice to extricate his seventeen-year-old daughter from a bad situation. You observed her drinking, doing drugs, collecting drug money –

  acting out, as you put it – and did precisely nothing.’ He let that sink in. ‘You’ve made rather a farce of things, Waits.’

  ‘I wasn’t there to extricate her.’

  ‘That’s actually a fair point,’ he said, feigning enthusiasm. ‘According to Mr Rossiter, he asked you not to approach his daughter at all. Is that right? Because from what we’re hearing now, it sounds like the two of you grew rather close. Unprofessionally so, in your case.’

  My eyes went to Rossiter.

  I thought of the photographs.

  ‘She approached me—’

  ‘She approached you. And you went along with it.’

  ‘It would have looked worse if I’d ignored her.’

  ‘No one asked you to ignore her.’

  ‘You can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell me I got it wrong for talking to her and got it wrong for not talking her into leaving.’

  ‘My point, Waits, is that once you were in contact with her anyway, once you saw her using drugs, once you saw her collecting drug money: why didn’t you just get her out of there?’ Tully’s voice had risen throughout the exchange, but he looked away from me and spoke quietly now. ‘My point is that she clearly needed your help.’

  ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ said Parrs.

  Tully looked over at Rossiter, who was still turned away from us. His frame shook slightly. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said, standing to comfort his friend. As his hand touched Rossiter’s shoulder, the MP shuddered, suppressing a sob. It cut through the room like a death rattle, the sound of something powerful and natural becoming extinct.

  He shook Tully off him, took a handkerchief from his suit pocket and dried his eyes. He stood still for a moment and then began to compose his appearance. He started by pulling his sleeves straight and then fixing his collar. He rose up to his full height, at least half a foot taller than anyone else in the room, and looked at me with his face set, welded in hate.

  ‘You said something there, Waits. You said Tully couldn’t have it both ways.’ His voice broke. ‘Well, I was her father, and I can. You were wrong to talk to her. And you were wrong not to talk her into leaving.’ He walked towards the door. When he snapped it open the aggressive sounds of the station filled the room again. ‘Save the world one person at a time?’ he said. ‘Like shit.’ He walked through the door and closed it behind him.

  Tully gave me a hard stare but spoke to Parrs. ‘Next time we meet, Superintendent, I hope the Detective Constable can express some sensitivity for the grieving.’ He gathered up his things. ‘You know, when David came to me for advice about all this, I looked into you, Waits. Told him he should steer clear. Your record’s starting to look like the bloody obits.’ When I didn’t reply he looked at me with genuine surprise. ‘But you don’t really care, do you?’ he said. ‘Not really.’

  I started to speak.

  ‘Don’t bother.’ He walked the long way around me, like I was contagious. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ he said over his shoulder, and followed Rossiter through the door. The air was heavy with heat, sweat and argument.

  Neither Parrs nor I spoke for a minute.

  ‘So,’ he said finally. ‘No news was just bad news biding its fucking time.’ He exhaled, loosened the collar on his shirt and stretched his neck. I was grateful when he opened a drawer, taking two glasses and a decanter of whisky from it. He poured himself one while I stared at the other.

  ‘Eyes off the glass, son,’ he said. ‘Today. Tonight, tomorrow, next week. Everyone can smell it on you. Trouble you’re in, you don’t need any more.’ He downed his drink. ‘I certainly don’t.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘What were you really doing there?’

  ‘She’d asked me to go back.’

  ‘So you fucking said. Why?’

  I paused for a moment. Wondered whether I could risk taking Parrs into my confidence. As I saw it then, there was no choice.

  ‘She implied that her father was sexually abusing her.’ Superintendent Parrs’ head went slowly backwards. When he looked at me again, he spoke so quietly that I had to read his lips.

  ‘Did she say or do anything that could corroborate that implication?’

  ‘No.’

  He locked his red eyes on me. ‘Then I suggest that you never say that out loud again.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Don’t even hum it in the fucking shower.’

  ‘She was running away from something.’

  ‘Herself,’ said Parrs firmly. He eyed me for a moment then opened a drawer and took out a file. He pushed it across the desk and I opened it. Crime-scene photographs from her room on Fog Lane. They focused mainly on Isabelle’s body. ‘Start from number seven,’ he said.

  I flicked forward. Picture number seven was focused on one of Isabelle’s inner thighs. What I’d thought looked like a rash when I found her body. I saw now that it was actually a series of fine lines.

  Fine self-harming cuts, to be precise.

  I went through the pictures. Each cut had gone deep, carved into the soft flesh of her upper inner thigh. From the precision of the marks, I guessed they had been made at different times, using something very sharp. I thought of the bloody broken mirror I’d seen in a drawer.

  ‘They’re tally marks,’ said Parrs. Looking closer, I saw that he was right. They were engraved into her skin in sets of five. The way a prisoner
might count years in a cell. Most of them had healed over in ridged scar tissue.

  ‘What do they mean?’

  ‘That she was sick. We don’t know what else.’

  I counted the lines. Three sets of five and one unfinished set of three. Eighteen in total. The final picture was a close-up of the final cut. This single line looked fresh and had even bled out a little. I’d known Isabelle, liked her even, and I was sure that they meant something.

  She’d kept a diary after all.

  I pushed the file back across the desk to Parrs and he closed it. As far as he was concerned, it proved his point.

  ‘The girl had a history of mental illness. Self-harm and manic depression. I wouldn’t put too much stock in anything she said.’

  ‘And that’s that?’

  ‘She was another victim of our city’s drug culture. Far from that’s that. But from our perspective, we have to grasp the opportunity here.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘What opportunity?’

  He smiled. ‘Daughter of MP dies at the hands of a problem dealer.’

  ‘Zain Carver didn’t give her the Eight.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he doesn’t want to die in prison.’

  ‘Perfect place for him.’

  ‘He didn’t do this.’

  ‘Why are you so sure?’

  ‘He doesn’t let his collectors use. Was there CCTV in the building?’

  ‘Never hooked up, as far as we can see.’ Selfishly, I was relieved. It was too late to explain about Cath. ‘What about her friends? Who’d she hang around with?’

  ‘Friends is putting it strongly. She was a hanger-on, seeing how the other half lived for a while. They all knew that.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And from what I saw, they were pretty protective of her.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Clearly,’ he said. ‘I have a thing about all these half-truths, son. I don’t fucking like them. Tully’s got you sussed for a breached duty of care and an inappropriate relationship. There’d better be nothing mouldy in the cupboard.’