Lost River bcadf-10

by Stephen Booth

  Fry parked her Audi on the top level of the Jewellery Quarter car park in Vyse Street. She’d found the entrance tucked between the Creative Watch Company and the premises of Regency Jewellers. From the roof level, near the top of Staircase C, she had a clear view up the street towards the exit from Jewellery Quarter Metro station. After a few minutes a train went through, then a blue-and-red Metro tram unit quietly pulled into the northbound platform.

  She’d checked out the station earlier. She was confident there was only one exit. Kewley had to cross from the tram stop on a walkway over the railway lines and use the stairs or lift to reach the exit by the ticket office. He would emerge under the giant clock mechanism, near the old cast-iron street urinal that was locked and gradually filling up with rubbish. So he only had one route to choose from the station, which was to come towards her down Vyse Street, past the awnings of the gold and jewellery dealers to the corner of Pitsford Street.

  The Cultural Quarter, the Jewellery Quarter, the Irish Quarter, the Convention Quarter. And now there was a designation for the Gun Quarter — and they didn’t mean Handsworth, but the industrial area around Queensway and Lancaster Circus, where traditional gun manufacturers were still based. As for the city centre, the latest Big City Plan called this ‘The Core’. A core surrounded by quarters? It was just like the planners to come up with some giant fruit metaphor.

  A small trickle of people emerged from the station on to the pavement and headed off in different directions. Kewley was the last to come out. She recognized him even from this distance, even with the cap pulled over his eyes and the padded jacket to disguise his shape. There was something about the way people moved that made them recognizable whatever they wore. It took a lot of practice to disguise your body’s natural angle and rhythm.

  Kewley paused in the station entrance, looked all around him carefully, pretending to check his pockets for something. An old habit, of course. It would have been enough for Fry to identify him, even without the cap.

  Andy Kewley was an old street cop. He’d learned to scan every doorway and corner before he made his move. It just never occurred to him to look up.

  He reached the corner of Pitsford Street near Bicknell and Sons, and turned down the side of the cemetery. Fry noticed that there was no wall or fence separating their meeting place from the street here, just a low kerb. It would be possible to enter and exit the cemetery at any point, and the row of cars parked at the kerbside would obscure her view. But Kewley continued to stroll dutifully down Pitsford Street until he came opposite a bright yellow wall, then he turned on to a path between two plane trees and entered the graveyard like a respectable citizen going about his business.

  Fry knew she would lose sight of him now between the gravestones. But still she waited, watching a red Ford Fiesta and a white Transit van parked on the north side of Pitsford Street. No sign of movement.

  ‘Okay, then.’

  She looked at her watch. Kewley was bang on time for their meeting, of course. She, on the other hand, was going to be a bit late. And that was the way she liked it.

  Finally, she left the car park, walked down towards the Cafe Sovereign and stepped through the cemetery entrance. As she approached, she was assaulted by a powerful, sickly sweet smell. Some kind of white blossom on the bushes was filling the air with its aroma. She didn’t know what sort of pollinating insect it was trying so hard to attract, but when she breathed in she felt as though she’d been punched in the nose. Oh great, it could be hay fever time.

  The rushing sound she heard was the wind hissing through the trees, washing over her.

  ‘Diane?’

  Kewley took off the cap, revealing thinning hair streaked with grey. A warm breeze wandered through the plane trees, stirring a lock of his hair. When he raised a hand to push it back, she noticed that it wasn’t as steady a hand as it once had been. The cumulative effects of thirty years in the job? Or was Andy Kewley drinking too much, like so many others?

  ‘You’ve lost more weight since I saw you last,’ he said.

  ‘And you were never exactly the biggest lass in Brum, were you?’

  ‘No.’

  Fry looked around at the site he’d chosen for their meeting. In the middle of the cemetery, they were standing at the top of a terrace of curved brick walls. Two of the walls had rows of small, sealed-up entrances built into them, like arched doorways.

  ‘What is this place? I thought it was a cemetery.’

  ‘Yes, and these are the catacombs,’ said Kewley. ‘Built into the side of an old sandpit. Don’t you think they’re interesting? They always remind me of a sunken amphitheatre. You can imagine gladiators fighting to the death down there on the grass. The only difference is, the spectators are already dead.’

  ‘Long since dead,’ said Fry. ‘These places make my flesh creep.’

  Kewley laughed. ‘They’re harmless. Just our ancestors taking a bit of trouble over their final resting place.’

  ‘Only those who could afford it, I suppose.’

  ‘There’s another cemetery to the north of the station — Key Hill. That one has catacombs too. Joseph Chamberlain is buried there.’

  ‘Really?’

  Fry wasn’t sure who Joseph Chamberlain was. There was a monument of him in Chamberlain Square, of course, and she’d passed a clock tower named after him on the corner of Vyse Street, near the Rose Villa Tavern. She thought there was even a Metro tram with his name on its side. But he was just one more Victorian, wasn’t he? Dead beyond living memory. She imagined him with a monocle and mutton-chop whiskers. Part of Birmingham’s vanished past.

  ‘I don’t like Key Hill so much. It has a campaign group who are busy restoring it. The Friends of Key Hill Cemetery. There are fences and gates, and they lock it up at night to keep people out. Oh and there are too many trees.’ Kewley gestured around him. ‘This one doesn’t have any friends. Just the drunks. Just the dead and the desperate. And you can see who’s coming fifty yards away.’

  Fry imagined him using this cemetery for years to meet his informants. But it wouldn’t be wise to keep coming here after he’d left the job. Too many people might remember. Too many of them might have a grievance to settle. Maybe it was just one of those eccentric fancies that overcame old coppers when they retired. Some had a mad hankering to run pubs, or to look for a quiet life in Northern Ireland. Others chose to hang around in Victorian graveyards.

  ‘They say unhealthy vapours from these catacombs led to the Birmingham Cemeteries Act, which required non-interred coffins to be sealed with lead.’

  The upper walkway looked down past two tiers of catacombs to the circle of grass in the centre. From the safety rail, it was quite a vertiginous drop. Lower down, part of the wall had collapsed, scattering gravestones. It was supported by steel props, awaiting some future repair. The cemetery had been well used. Victorian gravestones marched across the slopes, lurked in the hollows and hid beneath shrouds of ivy. Some memorials were large, horizontal stone slabs that she couldn’t help walking over as she found the way down to the lower levels.

  On the circle of grass stood two or three dozen memorials under the shade of the trees.

  Andy Kewley had been a frontline detective, hardened by thirty years’ experience. According to his own story, he wasn’t the kind of officer who was afraid of work, but he’d started to want more routine, a bit of stability. The constant changes had unsettled him, made him wonder whether he was appreciated properly. Every officious memo he received had made him count the days to his retirement.

  ‘Sorry to be out of the job, or not?’

  ‘I miss it,’ admitted Kewley.

  ‘You know there’s still a lot of demand for more civilian staff. Prisoner handling, statement taking, file preparation. There are always cases under review. Any experienced officer can take his full pension and complete his Staff 1 at the same time. Unless you’re planning on retiring to the Costa del Sol?’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

&n
bsp; His expression said otherwise. He’d probably heard it all before. His eyes suggested that he was a man who’d heard everything before.

  ‘Cases under review.’ He laughed. ‘You can say that again. I wouldn’t be surprised if they re-opened the Nielson and Whittle enquiry, just to look as if they’re doing something.’

  ‘Donald Nielson and Lesley Whittle? They’re just relics of the 1970s, aren’t they? Most of the present West Midlands coppers weren’t even alive then. The Black Panther is as much ancient history to them as Jack the Ripper. Things move on, Andy. Times change.’

  ‘You can say that again. Brum was a British city once.’

  Fry grimaced, but didn’t answer.

  ‘I know,’ said Kewley, without even having to look at her face. ‘I’m not allowed to say things like that. If I was still in the force, you’d report me to the DI and I’d be suspended by tomorrow morning. Probably lose my job and my pension entitlement, too. Just for speaking the truth, eh?’

  ‘Andy — ’

  ‘Well, thank God I’m not on the force any more. I got out at the right time, I reckon. It’s you poor bloody sods who have to button your lips and take the shit.’

  ‘No, it’s not like that, Andy. Not really.’

  ‘Oh? What, whiter than white up in sainted Derbyshire, are you? I thought I heard you had some very active BNP areas.’

  ‘Andy, what did you want to tell me?’

  ‘I thought I might be able to help you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Did you know there was an arrest after your assault? I was responsible for that.’

  ‘You produced a suspect?’

  ‘Let’s say I provided intelligence. It was good intelligence too, as it turned out. This wasn’t one of the primary suspects, but he knew who was involved, all right, and he helped to cover up. A real piece of work. He was as guilty as anyone I ever met.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  Kewley shrugged. ‘We needed information, and we didn’t want to spend days dragging it out of him bit by bit, with a brief at his elbow telling him to do the “no comment” stuff. So we fast-tracked the interview.’

  ‘Fast-tracked…?’

  Kewley looked at her, gave her no more than a conspiratorial glance. But she understood.

  ‘I don’t want to know any more,’ she said.

  ‘No, of course you don’t. You wouldn’t want to be contaminated.’

  ‘But you got what you wanted to know?’

  ‘Not entirely. We never got the names out of him.’ Kewley smiled. ‘But if we had…what do you reckon, Diane? Would the ends have justified the means, or not?’

  ‘What was he charged with?’

  ‘Attempting to pervert,’ said Kewley. ‘Pervert the course of justice, I mean. Obviously.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Miscarriage of justice. He got a “get out of jail free” card and a few quid in his pocket, and off he went.’

  ‘It’s hardly the first time, Andy.’

  ‘No, there’s a whole army of them out there.’

  Andy Kewley’s career could best be described as chequered. In his early days in CID, before she’d teamed up with him at Aston, Kewley had spent some time in the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad. The squad had been disbanded, more than two decades ago now, following accusations that its members had fabricated evidence, tortured suspects, and written false confessions.

  For years, lawyers had been demanding fresh enquiries into the scale of corruption, claiming that dozens of innocent people had served time in jail. One had been quoted as saying that the Serious Crime Squad had operated as if they were in the Wild West. ‘They were out of control.’

  ‘You lost a crucial witness, right?’ said Kewley.

  ‘You’re well informed, Andy. How do you manage that?’

  He ignored the question. ‘She pulled out of the case, decided she didn’t want to testify after all. The old story, eh? Someone got to her, Diane.’

  ‘One of the suspects?’

  ‘Or maybe their friends.’ Kewley shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘She was supposed to be on witness protection,’ said Fry.

  ‘How would they have found her?’

  ‘Information. It’s easy to get hold of, if you know the right people.’

  ‘Who?’

  Again Kewley seemed to ignore the question. Fry remembered this habit of his, recalled how it had often infuriated her. He always wanted to go round the houses before he responded. But later he would drop the answer in casually, as if he’d never been asked.

  ‘There’s a real hot potato bothering the bosses around here at the moment,’ said Kewley. ‘Some of the brass are shitting themselves trying to work out what to do for the best. If you ask me, they’re damned whatever they do.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  He glanced over his shoulder in a ridiculously melodramatic gesture, as if anyone would be lurking behind the gravestones to listen into their conversation.

  ‘Well, you know there’s been this recruitment policy in the West Midlands? Quotas for BME officers.’

  ‘Black and minority ethnics.’

  ‘Yeah. Trying to meet government targets.’ Kewley looked as though he might spit on the grass. ‘Like they say, political correctness gone — ’

  ‘Okay, I know.’

  ‘It’s turned into a real sensitive issue in Brum, and it’s not going away. A couple of years ago, there was a Channel Four documentary, Undercover Mosque. The chiefs got that wrong big time. They accused the production company of editing the words of imams to stir up race hatred. But they ended up having to apologize in the High Court.’

  Fry remembered it well. One Muslim cleric had been recorded claiming ‘Allah created the woman deficient’. But the police had claimed that the programme itself was Sufficient to undermine community cohesion and likely to undermine feelings of public reassurance and safety of those communities in the West Midlands for which the Chief Constable has a responsibility.

  ‘Now, there are allegations that some Asian officers have sympathies with the extremist elements,’ said Kewley. ‘That they won’t take action over honour killings, for example. You can see how the management are in a bind.’

  Fry nodded. She could see it all too well. Community cohesion. It was the latest buzz phrase in multicultural societies. You didn’t hear it so much in the Peak District.

  She looked at the graves of the Victorian dead all around her. According to their memorials, many of them hadn’t actually died but had merely ‘fallen asleep’. If they woke up now, they’d get a shock. And over there was another one. Not lost, but gone before.

  ‘Euphemisms,’ said Fry. ‘Don’t you hate them?’

  Kewley looked as though he didn’t agree.

  ‘Have you heard the name William Leeson?’ he said.

  Fry’s ears pricked up. This was the way it worked with Kewley. He distracted you with something irrelevant. Then the important information was dropped into the conversation like an afterthought. You had to be paying attention, or you missed it.

  ‘Leeson? No. Who is he?’

  ‘A dodgy lawyer from Smethwick, who used to practise here in the city. I thought you might have come across him.’

  ‘I could have done,’ said Fry. ‘But hundreds of defence briefs come and go through interview rooms. I don’t remember all their names.’

  ‘You might want to remember this one,’ said Kewley.

  ‘Why?’

  Kewley didn’t answer directly. He seemed to be getting more nervous now, and jumped when a motorcycle with an unsilenced exhaust roared by on the Middleway.

  ‘William Leeson first came on to the scene in a big way during all that bother with the Serious Crime Squad,’ he said.

  ‘He loved getting the attention, calling for public enquiries and Appeal Court hearings. “Miscarriage of justice” was practically tattoo’d on his forehead, he said it so often.’

  ‘Was he the one
who said you were operating like the Wild West?’ asked Fry.

  ‘No. But he would have said it, if he’d thought of it. He was always small-scale, though — and he got pushed out by the smarter, more expensive briefs who elbowed their way in when they saw a lucrative bandwagon rolling. Leeson got really pissed off about it. That was why he turned.’

  ‘Turned?’

  ‘He started to give us information.’

  ‘What kind of information?’

  Kewley pulled his cap lower over his eyes, and wiped the palms of his hands on his jacket.

  ‘I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.’

  ‘Who says? You’re retired, out of the force. You’re a civilian now, Andy — as free as a bird. Get used to it.’

  ‘I could still get myself into deep shit. You don’t understand.’

  The bottom end of the cemetery seemed to back on to the middle ring road. Around it, she could see the commercial buildings of the Jewellery Quarter, the Mint in Icknield Street, a factory chimney, all the places that these affluent Victorians would have made their money.

  Fry noticed that the memorials nearest to her had names like John Eachus and Walter Peyton Chance. Strange how names like that seemed to have died, along with the Victorians themselves. She saw defaced angels, tombs blackened with soot. A wire mesh bin was filled with empty bottles of Olde English cider and Frosty Jack, the booze of choice for street drinkers. Nearby, a statue lay broken and beheaded, an empty vodka bottle on the ground at its feet. Many of the memorials had fallen, or had been pushed over. The ground in this part of the cemetery was covered in broken lumps of moss.

  And there was that sickly smell again. She would have to get away soon. It was starting to smell like the scent of death.

  ‘I’m just telling you, Diane. There are things you need to know. You could ask someone else, but whether you’ll get the truth or not…’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  ‘I just want you to know, there are political considerations at play right now. Much bigger issues than a successful conviction in any cold case — and I mean any case, no matter who the victim is. You understand me?’