Lost River bcadf-10

by Stephen Booth

  She began to dream of standing on the Lickey Hills, way up on Beacon Hill. She could feel the wind up there, whipping through her hair, cooling the sweat on her brow. She could see that view of the city from a distance, its cluster of towers faintly blurred, as if standing in a mist. A first glimpse of the Emerald City. The far-off promised land.

  ‘Are you all right, Diane?’

  She jerked at the sound of Gareth Blake’s voice. She’d almost forgotten where she was. But suddenly she was back in the here and now, sitting in the passenger seat of Blake’s car, pulling up to the traffic lights in Deritend High Street. She saw a Peugeot dealer, the Old Crown, and the brick campanile of Father Lopes’ Chapel, which now seemed to be used as a car wash.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said.

  ‘I thought you’d fallen asleep there for a minute.’

  Fry tried a smile for his benefit.

  ‘Wide awake,’ she said.

  ‘We’re here, anyway.’

  Well, this part of Birmingham hadn’t altered much. Ironic, when it was the one area that she would have been glad to see transformed. But these factory walls hadn’t changed, or those side streets full of workshops and warehouses. The pub was still there, too. The Connemara. How had that particular pub survived, when so many others had closed?

  The arches of the railway viaduct were certainly the same. Black brick, chipped and scrawled with graffiti. It stood exactly as it had been built centuries ago. Well, except for the graffiti, maybe. The messages were pretty modern.

  And the scrubby expanse of waste ground — that was still there, of course. Dense with clumps of weed, bounded by a barbed-wire fence. Even from here, she could see the gaps that had been prised in the fence. Someone still used this spot for their own purposes. Drug dealers, crack whores, sexual predators hidden in the shadows…

  Fry took a deep breath. She was in danger of losing objectivity, letting her emotions run away with her.

  ‘We have your statement, of course,’ said Blake. ‘But sometimes more details will come back to you, once you have some distance from the incident. Distance in time, I mean.’

  Blake and Sandhu watched her carefully, noting every movement she made, everything she looked at or reacted to. Fry was trying to fill the scene with other people, apart from herself. She hadn’t been alone then either. Far from it.

  ‘This witness you have,’ she said. ‘Where did she come from?’

  ‘She was on her way home,’ said Blake. ‘She worked for a small publisher based in the Custard Factory.’

  ‘The Custard Factory? Does it still exist?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Fry was surprised. By all the rules of logic, the Custard Factory was an idea that shouldn’t have survived this long. The five-acre sprawl of industrial buildings had once been the territory of Sir Alfred Bird, the inventor of custard, who employed a thousand people there. Now, old factory buildings had been restored and converted into an arts and media quarter for Birmingham’s brightest young creative talents. A bohemian community of artists, with cafes and dance studios, art galleries and holistic therapy rooms. It should never have existed. Not in Digbeth.

  She supposed the Connemara would at one time have been frequented entirely by factory workers — men leaving their hot, exhausting jobs in the engineering works. Maybe employees from Mr Bird’s custard factory, too — though she imagined most of those would have been women. Perhaps they would have been covered in a fine yellow powder, the way coal miners used to be distinguishable by the black layer of dust around their eyes.

  ‘You had left your partner in the car,’ said Blake. ‘You were going to check the factory premises up the street here, to see if there was activity.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Your partner was DC Andy Kewley.’

  ‘Yes.’

  That night, she and Kewley had been in an Aston CID pool car, a Skoda Fabia. The blokes hated driving a Skoda. They always used to grumble about Traffic cops getting flashy BMWs to use as RPUs, the unmarked road policing units. Since they were unmarked, they said, why couldn’t they be shared with CID? Some hopes.

  They had been just one of several units drafted in from the divisions for a big operation headed up by the Major Investigation Unit. Kewley was driving, and she was observer. She had responded to a request over their radio from the officer in charge of the operation.

  Fry remembered being passed by a slightly battered red Mercedes truck. M. Latif The people’s warehouse — serving the Midlands since 1956. The Latif warehouse was in Digbeth somewhere. Bordesley Street, maybe.

  And then the street had been empty. Or so it had seemed. She soon learned her mistake.

  She had her personal radio in her hand when the attack came. But the first blow had numbed her arm, and she dropped the handset in the dirt without getting a chance to hit the red button that would have summoned assistance. She heard her radio crunch under someone’s foot. ‘Hey, she’s a copper.’

  As if the voice in her memory had just spoken to her again, Fry turned suddenly and looked around her. A piece of wasteland wedged between a railway viaduct and a factory yard. A battered fence protecting it with rusted barbs.

  It was as if this piece of ground had been preserved just for her, to create a permanent reminder of a landmark in her life.

  Blake and Sandhu stood back out of the way as she walked a few yards along the fence towards the parapet of a bridge and found a flight of steps. Below her ran the River Rea, Birmingham’s forgotten river, dirty brown and flowing under factories, invisible even from the bridges, overgrown with trees bursting from the walls of the factories. The Rea was hidden under the city, imprisoned in underground culverts to prevent flooding of the industrial buildings and working-class housing of Digbeth.

  The sound of the water reminded her. She was standing in the exact spot now.

  So this was it.

  She saw five steps down to the water, a patch of weed-covered dirt. A sagging fence, a damp brick arch. And a series of jagged shadows on the corner of the street, moving ever closer.

  But the day was bright, and the sun was overhead. Those shadows were in her memory.

  And then she seemed to hear that voice in the darkness. A familiar voice, coarse and slurring in a Birmingham accent. ‘It’s a copper’ it said. Taunting laughter moving in the shadows. The same menace all around, whichever way she turned. ‘A copper. She’s a copper’

  ‘Diane?’

  ‘Yes. Okay. I’m trying to remember.’

  ‘You weren’t examining the scene. You were looking towards the corner of the street.’

  ‘Yes. I think…’

  And then the memory came to her. From among the ghosts of factory workers and custard makers, darker figures stepped from shadow to shadow, walking into the present. Or almost the present.

  ‘Yes, I think…’ she said. ‘I think at least one of them came out of the pub.’

  ‘That’s great, Diane. See, it works.’

  Sandhu had taken a call on his mobile. He gestured to Blake, and they went into an anxious huddle.

  ‘Damn it,’ said Blake. ‘Oh, God damn it.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Fry.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Gareth?’

  Blake looked at her, then away. He kicked at a stone in frustration.

  ‘Bad news. Really bad news. We just lost our key witness.’

  9

  There was one more important person who Fry hadn’t met up with yet. She was about to put that right, but with mixed feelings. She’d spent all afternoon answering questions from Gareth Blake and Rachel Murchison, hour after hour with people watching her for a reaction every time she turned round. She had never imagined how exhausting it would be, what relief she’d feel when she was finally allowed to escape. And this was the only first stage of the whole ordeal. She knew there was first worse yet to come.

  ‘Not brought your farm boy with you, then? Nice Constable Coope
r?’

  Angie Fry sat across a table in a bar on Broad Street, close to Diane’s hotel. It had to be a bar, because Angie hadn’t offered to show her where she lived. And Diane hardly dared to ask. She was convinced that her older sister lived with a man, a totally unsuitable man who Angie knew she would disapprove of.

  Diane frowned across the table. She had a glass of spritzer in front of her, while Angie was drinking something out of a bottle that she couldn’t remember the name for.

  ‘He’s not my farm boy. Not my Constable Cooper.’

  ‘Oh? I thought he was part of your team.’ Angie held up a hand with the first two fingers entwined. ‘Like that, you and him, aren’t you?’

  ‘This is nothing to do with him, or anyone else back in Derbyshire,’ said Diane. ‘This is just me, and it’s personal.’

  Angie had the grace to look faintly embarrassed.

  ‘Okay, Sis. I’m sorry. I was just trying to keep it light, you know.’

  It was obvious that Angie had cleaned up her act since Diane first made contact with her again. She seemed to have more than one set of clothes, at least, and her hair was tidier. Diane no longer felt quite so embarrassed to be seen with her in a respectable bar. Whether Angie was clean in every sense, Diane still wasn’t sure. But then, it was a question she couldn’t ask either.

  Even now, she sensed a lot of unfinished business with Angie. There were so many things they hadn’t talked about. A gulf still existed between them, a chasm so wide that it could never be bridged now. The relationship they’d had when they were teenagers back in Warley — well, that was long buried in the past. It was the only thing they had in common, and it was the one subject they would never talk about.

  ‘Besides, Ben Cooper is Acting Detective Sergeant now.’

  Angie paused with a bottle halfway to her mouth. ‘What? He got your job?’

  ‘Temporarily.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Diane began to get irritated. She’d told herself she wouldn’t, but her sister had an uncanny knack of getting under her skin.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Things will be right back to normal the minute I get away from here.’

  ‘If you get away.’

  ‘Well, I’m certainly not staying in Birmingham for the rest of my natural life.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’re here for a start.’

  She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. But her sister looked smug, as if she’d scored some kind of success.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Angie, raising her bottle in a toast. ‘Here’s to sisterly love.’

  Her sister’s attitude made Diane reluctant to think about all the things she’d planned to say. All those questions she’d wanted to ask. We’re going to be all right, you and me? The moment didn’t seem right. Perhaps the time would never be right.

  She’d told Rachel Murchison only half the story of their lives. It was true that they’d both been taken into care when Diane was nine and Angie was eleven. And there had been a whole series of foster homes before they landed with the Bowskills. Angie had been trouble wherever she went, though Diane had idolized her in that blind fashion younger siblings sometimes did.

  It all went off the rails when Angie began using heroin and left home, not to be seen again by her sister for fifteen years.

  Diane was conscious that she and her sister were hardly unique cases. There were sixty thousand children in foster care or local authority homes. Half of those sixty thousand wouldn’t get a single GCSE, and would leave school with no qualifications, barely able to read or write, destined for deadend jobs, if not a permanent place on the dole queue. She was one of the measly two per cent who made it to university. Many were consigned to a life on the street, holed up in a filthy squat or crack house, pissing away their existence. Some care-home children felt unwanted and unvalued for the whole of their lives. Many never formed a normal relationship, because they didn’t know how. They’d never been shown.

  It was hard for her to think of herself as part of a huge, anonymous mass. But that’s exactly what she’d once been — just another statistic in a depressing flow of unwanted children, shuttling to and fro through the back alleys of society. Kids destined never to have a real family, or a real home.

  At least for a while it had been Angie and Diane together. That had made fostering a bit more tolerable. But even that had come to an abrupt end.

  Fry shut her eyes against the sudden stab of pain. It was a memory that tormented her, even now. That moment she’d realized the unbelievable: Angie had left for good, walked out of their foster home in Warley and disappeared. Ever since then, Diane had thought that she’d make things right by finding Angie. But perhaps the truth was that she had never forgiven her sister for that betrayal, and never could.

  ‘Let’s have another drink,’ said Angie. ‘You’re being slow, Sis.’

  Diane studied her sister. Yes, Angie herself had changed a lot in fifteen years, yet there was still the familiar rhythm in her speech, the faint buzz of a Black Country accent under the studied flatness. And Diane couldn’t avoid noticing a characteristic gesture, a tense lifting of the shoulders that she knew very well because she was aware of doing it herself.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever kept in contact with Mum and Dad?’ she said.

  Angie’s mouth became a tight line.

  ‘You mean Jim and Alice Bowskill? No, why should I?’

  ‘They were very good to us.’

  ‘They were good to you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was always the disappointment, didn’t you notice? I couldn’t do anything right in their eyes. You were the one they loved.’

  ‘Angie, you were a nightmare. You made their lives a misery. Just like you did with all our previous foster parents. That was why we moved on so often.’

  ‘Is it? Lucky for you that I left when I did, then. I bet Jim and Alice put everything into you then, didn’t they? Of course. They got you through your A-levels, and into university. That must have been the high point of their lives. Little Diane, their great success story.’

  ‘I worked hard for anything I achieved.’

  ‘Right. I bet you were really studious.’

  ‘I was. Angie, I gave you all fifteen years of it. I told you what I did at school, how I managed to scrape through to do my degree. I wanted to get an education. I needed it. And I told you about our parents coming to the graduation ceremony.’

  ‘Our foster parents.’

  ‘And how they got lost in Birmingham, so they arrived late.’

  ‘And you didn’t think anyone was coming, I know. I liked the bit about you getting drunk at a student party and being sick into somebody’s window box. I can’t imagine you doing that, Sis. You were always so prim and proper. A right stuck-up little prig.’

  Diane was beginning to get upset. This wasn’t the way she’d pictured it going. The hostility from her sister was growing with every mouthful of alcohol. She wondered if Angie had been drinking before she came, or whether she was high on something else.

  ‘Do you regret making contact with me again?’ she asked.

  ‘If you remember, I didn’t have much choice,’ said Angie.

  ‘Thanks to your Constable Cooper.’

  With an effort, Diane controlled herself. She found she was gritting her teeth so hard that it hurt.

  ‘You do know what I’m doing here, don’t you?’ she said.

  Angie took a swig of her drink. ‘Oh, yes. I know. It’s all about you again, isn’t it?’

  They went out into Broad Street to look for somewhere to eat. For Diane, it was a relief to get out on to the busy pavement. Angie was getting a little too loud for comfort.

  ‘Hey, have you noticed how Broad Street seems to have become the place for a chavs’ night out?’ she said.

  Diane wouldn’t have put it quite like that herself. But, yes — she had noticed.

  ‘I remember Broad Str
eet mostly for the theatres,’ she said. ‘It used to be where you came for a bit of culture.’

  ‘Nothing cultural about this lot,’ said Angie. ‘If you dropped a small nuclear device on a Saturday night and took out four or five of these clubs, you’d exterminate the entire chav population from Longbridge to Erdington.’

  Young men were hanging out of car windows as they crawled up the road, a youth in white trainers carrying a bottle of Magners cider was throwing up in the gutter. Further up the street, a group were arguing with bouncers in front of a club, others were shouting abuse at police officers in a riot van. An Asian taxi driver wound up his windows to shut out the racial insults.

  Birmingham hadn’t seen much excitement since the Eurovision Song Contest and the G8 Summit had come to town in the same week. Back in May 1998, that was. No sooner had Terry Wogan and Ulrika Jonsson left the National Indoor Arena with an army of cheesy pop acts, than Tony Blair was arriving to rub shoulders with Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin next door at the ICC.

  The International Convention Centre was in use now. That meant convention fodder, hundreds of black-suited sales people filling up the bars and restaurants on Broad Street.

  On the pavement, Fry saw a man with a thin, angular face and long grey hair prowling between the streetlights like a wolf. Sharp eyes watching her. Hungry eyes, full of desire for the next fix.

  ‘My God, I bet this is something you don’t have in Edendale,’ said Angie. ‘The range of bars and restaurants in Birmingham is amazing now. We can eat anything we fancy. What do you say to Thai? Caribbean? Mexican?’

  Diane was unimpressed. ‘Can’t we go down to the Balti Triangle?’

  ‘Sis — you’d live in the Balti Triangle, given a chance.’

  ‘Yes. So?’

  In the Balti Triangle of south Birmingham, scores of restaurants had combined to put the city firmly on the curry map. In fact, Brum claimed to have invented balti, just as it laid claim to the Mini and HP Sauce. Diane always thought of balti when she heard the bhangra music coming from cars cruising up the Soho Road. Music driven by the dhol drum, food sizzling in a balti dish with cumin and ginger. Both formed by ingredients from the Indian subcontinent.