Persons of Interest

by Peter Grainger

Murray said with a straight face, ‘Yep, that works for me.’

  Smith realized then that he had been looking at an empty desk for some seconds.

  ‘Where’s the boy wonder?’

  ‘I don’t know. He had a phone call about a quarter of an hour ago. He went outside with it and hasn’t come back. Want me to find him?’

  ‘No. We’ve got nothing on for a few minutes. I take it you know there’s a bit of trouble in paradise?’

  John Murray nodded and said, ‘It never did run smooth...’

  ‘Smoothly – it should be smoothly. I’m amazed no-one ever corrected the Bard’s grammar. Anyway, how are you fixed for tonight if Waters has to go and play in the forest? If Maggie wants you at home, it’s not a problem.’

  Murray sat down on the chair in front of Smith’s desk.

  ‘Her sister’s come down to stay, and it’s a godsend, to be honest. They’ve got plenty of catching up to do. She’s going to be here until we’re done. She’s had two of her own and they’re old enough to be left. I’ve never been so pleased to see a relative in all my life. I’d only be in the way.’

  ‘OK. I’ll see herself and clear it. There’s not much more that you and I can do at the moment.’

  It was true, and he did not feel so badly about that, come to think of it. Senior officers would be discussing strategy in some other room, and Harry Alexander would be phoning someone so near the top of the tree, probably in the Met, that the said person would have lost sight of the figures on the ground below years ago. Assistant chief constables would be keeping in touch because halting a murder investigation was politically sensitive and because talking about an actual case made a pleasant change from re-writing policy documents and mission statements. Some of these people knew more than the officers on the ground had been told, of course, and the thought troubled him momentarily - especially if there was something that might help to find the missing pair - but overall Smith was alright with allowing the others to make the decisions. Watching the pub would be something useful to do while they did so.

  When Waters finally reappeared a few minutes later, his face looked somewhat blotchy and pale. He returned Smith’s nod and sat down at his desk, clicking the mouse and frowning at the screen as if he had been in the middle of something important before he had been interrupted. Smith continued to watch him and Waters continued to watch the screen. Eventually Smith glanced across to Murray, who raised his own eyebrows in return – he had noticed as well. To speak or not to speak – that is the question in these situations. But whether one uses the adjective or the adverb, that’s how the course of it runs, and it never did run any differently.

  Smith picked up the internal phone and dialled Alison Reeve’s number. It was engaged. Senior officers would be discussing strategy in some other room...

  The prospect of another sixteen-hour day meant that Smith had gone home in the late afternoon for a change of clothes and a decent cup of tea. He stood at the back bedroom window, looking down at the garden, the Taylor acoustic in his hands, its strap across his shoulder. One of the dodgy pubs on their list had proved to be dodgy no longer; it happens sometimes with a change of landlord, and now the The Bell had quiz nights, sausage suppers and, every other Saturday evening, an open mike for amateur players and singers. Without the investigation he would never have known, but the idea had been on his mind for a few days now – did he still have the nerve, never mind the fingers and the voice?

  His mind went from Taylor to James to “Sweet Baby James”, and he played it through, humming the melody and looking down at the frets for the more difficult things, repeating one or two to get them as he thought they should sound. Beautiful when you got it right, among the best of them, with always that mellowness, that little note of sadness even in the brightest of his songs... So intricate, too, even though the man had enormous hands. When it was over, he found a smile on his face. It was the sort of thing that would go down well in the backroom of a pub, late on a Saturday. He would look it up, see when the next open mike was, give it some serious thought.

  The female blackbird was still feeding the young – she had flown across two or three times while he was playing. They must almost be ready to leave the nest, so perhaps he could take a final look; if one or two jumped out because of the disturbance, it would hardly matter now. Somewhere there were photographs that Sheila had taken of the many nests there had been in the garden over the years, and once a pair of Goldfinches had built in the lilac bush. They had fledged all five young and stayed around the garden for weeks, much to Sheila’s delight.

  When he looked in, parting the branches slowly after making sure that neither of the adults were present, he could see that there were only three young birds, and that they were not quite as advanced as he had estimated they would be. There had been four when he last checked – he leaned forward and counted again. No, only three, their eyes open but still gaping their beaks wide in anticipation. Smith looked through the adjacent twigs but found no young bird, and then he began to search through the vegetation on the ground below – sometimes they just fall out and he had put more than one back into its nest over the years.

  His fingers found it before his eyes. He felt the little bundle of feathers underneath the perennial geraniums and thought that it had moved as he closed his hand gently around it. But no – the head lolled to the side, the eyes closed, and the brown-speckled, half-formed wings were limp. It had fallen out, more adventurous than the others perhaps, and the noisy distractions of its siblings must have meant that the adult birds never heard its calls. Probably, by the feel of it, only that morning – if he had looked before hurrying off to work, he might have found it.

  He walked away, still holding the bird, examining his own thoughts and feelings. This was just evolution in action; some individuals take chances and sometimes the taking of a chance gains that individual a minute advantage in the all-encompassing struggle. If this fledgling had survived, those few hours earlier out of the nest might have amounted to something. But more often the chances that we take lead us only into blind alleys or worse, into disaster. The birds remaining in the nest had played it safe and they were still alive.

  In the shed he found Sheila’s trowel. He dug a hole underneath the yellow rose, where the sun shines early in the morning, and buried the bird. In a day or two no-one would even notice that the ground had been disturbed.

  Waters would keep away from The Wrestlers and the streets around it, for obvious reasons, but there were plenty of other pubs and bars in Kings Lake. That might be a relic from the days when there was a fishing industry, and the docks were amongst the biggest in Britain – he could look into that in his spare time, of which there would be plenty now. He had a degree in history, after all. A degree in history... Somehow the idea brought a smile to his face, but not a happy smile – the other sort. He continued to walk down the Wellington Road towards the town centre and after not many steps the smile had faded away.

  The evening was warm, and there were people out and about. It’s curious how you don’t notice that the world goes around in couples until you are not a part of one any more. Couples everywhere tonight, hand in hand, arm in arm, arms around waists – but it’s all about ownership, about possession, and when somebody quits they’re really saying, I don’t want to be owned by you any longer. They might not have someone else to be owned by in mind at that moment – and that’s what she had said – but they had at least the idea that it would be preferable to be owned by someone else, even someone as yet unmet, rather than him. It was difficult not to take it personally, not to start making a list of what it might be about oneself that led someone else to come to that conclusion – that they did not want to be possessed by you any longer.

  The street had disappeared now, and he walked automatically around the obstructions and the people, the couples, coming the other way. The job had to be on the list and near the top of it; some of her friends had reacted with amusement, others with ill-disguised dist
aste, when she introduced him and told them what he did. They were a liberal if not left-wing set and he had sensed from the beginning that she might have to make a choice if she felt as serious about him as he guessed he was going to feel about her. And at first she seemed to have made that choice, defending what he did in some lively conversations with this new group of people. At first. Then something had begun to change, a month or two ago; he couldn’t find the exact moment, and it didn’t really matter that much now because she had finally made up her mind. For Waters, however, the unforgiveable thing was that she had done it with a phone call. Yes, she was young, and now he realized that she was too young, but that was still unforgiveable. There was no way back from it.

  Waters turned left into a side-road and after another fifty yards or so he had reached The Rising Moon. It was on their list and no more than five minutes of brisk walking from The Wrestlers. The door was propped open with a chair because of the warmth in the air – he could hear voices and some sort of rap music playing. For a moment, he hesitated, but he wouldn’t actually be on duty if he went in and had a drink and a look around, and staying in the flat, alone, tonight was out of the question. Smith would probably not approve – re-phrase that, he told himself with another one of those smiles, because Smith would definitely not approve – but this job had already made a huge dent in his life, and he wasn’t going to let it take him over completely. If he wanted to go out for a drink on a Saturday night, then he could, and being twenty two and once more single and free, he could go where he liked. A pint in The Rising Moon was hardly taking much of a chance.

  The bartender was young and friendly. Waters offered to buy him a drink – the first time in his life he had done that – and he said yes, he’d have one before it got too busy. Waters smiled back as he watched the beer being gassed into the two glasses. This wasn’t so hard. He could play new-in-town and ask where the action was – that might turn something up. In a way he was, of course, the past nine months since he arrived being spent almost entirely in Clare’s company. He had to start over, that was all, but when the barman raised his glass and said cheers, mate, he couldn’t help wondering what she would be doing tonight, and he couldn’t help wondering whether she would be wondering the same about him. It was one of those nights, though, when the beer goes down easily and the first was already more than half done. Over the rim of the glass, he looked around at the people in the corners and then he turned back to his new friend behind the bar.

  Murray said, ‘Nothing from Stuart, then?’

  ‘No. He’s between the two proverbials, isn’t he? If he tells us anything useful, it might help or it might be lighting the blue touch paper. It’s fifty-fifty whether we hear from him again. If you fancy a flutter, I’d go at those odds.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A fiver.’

  Murray thought it over. Murray thought everything over.

  ‘OK. A fiver says you’ll hear something from him.’

  ‘Done.’

  They were parked in the side-road, watching the side-door of The Wrestlers and out of sight of Wilson and Dunn. To their left, a few feet away across the pavement, were the frontages of terraced cottages with no gardens, just the doors opening onto the street – dockers’ and fishermen’s cottages that were run down, that had not yet been reached by the rising tide of redevelopment. They were old Kings Lake, authentic in a shabby sort of way, and Smith thought that he would be sorry to see it all go, to see it smartened up, all bright and shiny and soulless.

  Several of the inhabitants had already come out of those front doors and crossed the road to enter the pub; a mixed bunch they had been, including three youngsters who looked like emissaries from the undead - pale faces, long dark hair, black leather gear and studs and tattoos. Goths, Murray had explained. Two boys and a tall girl, with her in the middle, an arm through those of the boys either side of her; Smith watched them cross the road and thought that he didn’t really want to know. And then, after them, an elderly couple, the old man leaning heavily on a stick as he made progress across the road in a series of short diagonals, followed by his wife who carried a shopping bag that seemed to be empty. Smith tried to picture the scene, feel the atmosphere inside The Wrestlers; it didn’t look like the most obvious place for out-of-town villains to set up shop. Perhaps that sighting by Butler and Waters had been a one-off, and Mr Bridges had never set foot in here again.

  Perhaps – but the only reason the four of them were here was that they didn’t have much else, and they had to be seen to be doing something. In the conversation that afternoon that he finally managed to have with Alison Reeve (and DCI Freeman, of course, though she didn’t say much), Smith had learned that watch was now being kept on certain London addresses for any sign that the hostages might be there. It was a possibility but his own instincts were that they were much closer to home than that. It was also clear from what was being said that at least one officer was undercover in the docks, an RSCU officer, and Smith wondered how many senior officers at Kings Lake had had that knowledge before the present situation had developed; someone must have been told, surely. At any rate, every arrival of a ship in the docks was now being examined minutely, the general opinion seeming to agree with what Smith had concluded - that this was all about one delivery, a big one, and that it was imminent.

  ‘Do you know this pub, John?’

  ‘No, not been in it for years. It’s an independent, not part of any chain or it would have had the makeover by now.’

  ‘Not many left. What about The Bell? Do you know that?’

  ‘Quite nice these days, they say. Not been myself. To be honest, since you-know-what, Maggie and I have hardly been out.’

  Smith nodded slowly and said, ‘Yes, and the next thing is you’ll need a babysitter if you ever do want to go out.’

  The thought struck him then that the godfather might be the first person to be asked. Good grief – how would he handle that? He’d better get to work on a response straight away. He hadn’t got very far with it, though, before the radio bleeped into life. It was Wilson’s voice and he was trying to reach them. Smith told him to go ahead.

  ‘Just wanted to check something with John. We’ve just had three characters go in, and I recognized one of them but I don’t know his surname. Barry something. I’m sure he used to be something to do with the Rouths.’

  Murray said immediately, ‘Barry O’Dowd. As far as I know, he’s still part of the set-up. What are the others like?’

  There was a muttering at the other end before Wilson spoke clearly again.

  ‘We don’t know ‘em. One’s a little Indian-looking bloke in a leather jacket that’s too big for him.’

  ‘That’s Singh, another one of Stuart Routh’s cronies. He runs the show in the Eastfields area, sort of an ethnic franchise. The other one?’

  ‘Youngish, followed on behind, didn’t look important.’

  Murray looked at Smith to see if he wanted to say anything but the answer was clearly that he did not.

  ‘Thanks, sir. Interesting that they’ve turned up. We might not all be wasting our time here.’

  Wilson thanked him for the information and signed off. Smith was already thinking it over – there had been no point in his speaking to Wilson. Whatever he had said would have been misinterpreted as patronizing or as sarcasm, even though it had been a good piece of observation.

  Eventually he said, ‘Well, that’s a bit peculiar, isn’t it? At least two of Routh’s people turning up here of all places?’

  ‘I’d call it a coincidence if I didn’t know better.’

  ‘Quite. And I’d quite like to know who else is inside already. Perhaps the old boy with the walking stick is the main man.’

  Murray shifted and settled back in the seat.

  ‘If we sit here long enough, I expect we’ll find out.’

  After an hour or so, Waters had moved on from The Rising Moon. The barman had been friendly enough but not especially forthcoming, and twice h
e had asked why Waters wanted to know what he wanted to know – in the end he had had to construct quite a tale. Part of the job sometimes; he remembered the little he had been told about Smith working undercover in Northern Ireland, and thought that it must have been something like this.

  His next stop had been at the Minster Tavern, closer to the centre of the town. To reach it, he had had to make a detour around the streets where The Wrestlers was; Smith and Murray were there, and Sergeant Wilson with Mike Dunn. Sitting around in cars for hours was not the greatest fun and neither was it very productive as far as he could tell; he’d done a few sessions now. Better to keep on the move like this, and by visiting these pubs in the surrounding area there was a chance that he would find or see something useful. If he did, they could put it down to his initiative and if he didn’t, well they need never know.

  The Minster was a louder, brassier sort of place and he only had one pint there before he continued his journey, his outer orbit of The Wrestlers, stopping next at The Cutter. He paused for a moment and admired the sign – a pretty good painting of a sailing ship, the sort that must have once moored here, perhaps a part of the nineteenth century tea trade – he knew something about all that, having a degree in history. It felt a bit odd, remembering that and also the fact that he was a policeman, a detective with a degree in history... There couldn’t be too many of those, too many of us, he told himself, as he went in, not unaware that the unfamiliar confidence he was feeling was to some extent a result of the unfamiliar amount of beer that he had already consumed. Unfamiliar because Clare was funny about that, she didn’t like him to have a lot to drink and so he hadn’t for quite a while. Oh well. Every silver lining has a cloud...

  He ordered another beer – never mix the grain and the grape, or something like that. Younger people in here, more his own age, a group of them around a table in the corner with a couple of nice-looking girls who had noticed when he came in; funny how we are aware of things like that, subconsciously, subliminally... He had trouble thinking the word, never mind saying it, but he knew what he meant. There were spaces nearby and he would just go and sit down, see what happened. He would put the investigation on hold. He was having a good time.