Lost River bcadf-10

by Stephen Booth

  Some entrepreneur had taken a massive punt on this project. Scattered around the area now were trendy venues and exhibition spaces. Barfly, Vivid, the Medicine Bar. All tucked in among the old factories, like wild flowers blooming in a desert.

  ‘Louise Jones was leaving the publisher’s offices in the Custard Factory,’ she said. ‘They’d been holding some kind of public event — a book launch party, or something like that. People had been drinking until quite late. Miss Jones probably stayed behind to help clear up.’

  ‘And to chuck out the drunks, from what I hear about publishing.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And as she came out to get her car, she looked down the street, and she saw two males running away from the patch of wasteland.’

  ‘That’s it. One black male and one white.’

  ‘Marcus Shepherd and Darren Barnes.’

  Fry looked around. ‘That means they must have been on the other side of the river, though.’

  As they went up the steps into Heath Mill Lane, the paving under the walkway was treacherously slippery after the fresh rain.

  ‘What was the piece of wasteland?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some old disused factory yard, or a demolition site.’

  The Connemara wasn’t the only pub in this area. She noticed the Floodgate Tavern standing on the corner of Floodgate Street and Little Ann Street.

  ‘So, if the DNA results are correct, there must have been a third person.’

  ‘I do have a vague recollection, but it’s too confused for me to be certain.’

  The entrance to the car park on Heath Mill Lane was bordered by a twenty-five-foot wall made of compacted cars — crushed engine mountings, ripped tyres, even the old carpets from footwells, still full of the debris left by their drivers. Another symbolic statement of some kind?

  In the nearby streets, taxis were parked by the kerbside waiting for repair. A small engineering workshop stood under the arch of the railway viaduct, now hung with weeds and saplings re-colonizing the brickwork. Every yard and alley was protected by steel security fencing.

  ‘I’m not sure this is going to help,’ said Fry.

  ‘Memories emerge gradually. The more reminders you get, the better.’

  Fry stood on the brick steps leading down to the river, watching the oily flow, touching the tall stems of the wild plants that she knew would burst into purple flowers later in the summer. She turned the page of her A to Z, trying to trace the river’s route. It wasn’t an easy task — the line on the map was narrow, and broken in places, weaving between a network of roads and canals.

  She found the Lickey Hills to the south of Birmingham. It was from here that the Rea came into the city, meandered its way through Canon Hill Park, skirted Edgbaston cricket ground, and crossed Belgrave Middleway, before being swallowed up by the industrial belt. From there, it was pretty much a forgotten river — visible only from derelict factories, or glimpsed from the car park of Maini’s cash and carry. Even train passengers might fail to notice it as they crossed the viaduct over Floodgate Street. Boaters on the Grand Union Canal might be aware of the dirty brown river flowing beneath their aqueduct at Warwick Bar. But within a few metres it had disappeared again under the freightliner terminal in Montague Street.

  Somewhere north of Washwood Heath, the Rea finally merged with the Tame under the shadow of Spaghetti Junction. Along the way, the river had picked up a tide of industrial debris, sucking the grime out of miles of crumbling brickwork and nineteenth-century foundations.

  The purple flowers were rosebay willowherb, she recalled — a weed that had been the bane of life for her foster parents, who’d run a plant nursery in Halesowen, a bit too close to a railway embankment that had been allowed to run wild. All of those clumps of weed were an unwelcome intrusion from the countryside. Their seeds must drift in on the wind from the Lickeys, or cling to the feathers of birds roosting in the parks. Maybe they even floated in on the rivers too, swept past Longridge and under the factories of Digbeth on the muddy surface of the Rea. Left to itself, she supposed willowherb would re-colonize the city, cover the whole of Birmingham in purple flowers and clouds of white seed-heads.

  Thank goodness for the parks department with their backpacks full of weed killer, spraying a barrier of poison against the forces of nature.

  Fry looked round for Cooper. Angie had backed out of coming with her on this visit, claiming that she had other things to do.

  ‘Does that mean I have to do this on my own?’ Diane had said.

  But Cooper had stepped forward. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  And that had been that. Fry hadn’t commented on her sister’s attitude, but Cooper couldn’t resist.

  ‘I would have thought that Angie could be with you,’ he said. ‘Now, of all times.’

  Fry had shrugged then.

  ‘You know, Ben,’ she said, ‘I don’t care any more.’

  Fry gestured at the water as Cooper came alongside her.

  ‘There you go,’ she said. ‘That’s the River Rea. Birmingham’s forgotten treasure.’

  Cooper was startled by the change in her. This wasn’t the Diane Fry he knew. The look she gave him when she said ‘I don’t care any more’ was almost a challenge, as if she wanted him to provoke her, to push her too far. She was turning into a different person in front of his eyes, and he wasn’t sure that he liked it. Perhaps he hadn’t really got to know her very well in these past few years. This side of her had been pretty well hidden, anyway.

  Now, standing in Digbeth, he looked down at the dirty brown water, trying to see it as a treasure. But the River Dove was still in his mind, clear and cold, flowing down from the hills.

  ‘People associate London with the Thames, Liverpool with the Mersey, and Newcastle with the Tyne. But to generations of Brummies, the River Rea is a mystery. Most of them don’t even know their city possesses a river. They think they just have canals.’

  ‘To be honest, it’s not very impressive,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Maybe not,’ admitted Fry. ‘But it’s not the river itself that’s important, is it? It’s what’s on the banks of the river that matters.’

  Fry’s phone rang. She could see from the caller display who it was.

  ‘Do I want to talk to her?’ she said out loud.

  ‘Who?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘My sister.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better.’

  Cooper walked away a few yards, to give her some privacy. Perhaps he thought they were going to have a row. If so, he was disappointed.

  ‘You need a bloke called Eddie Doyle,’ said Angie.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘William Leeson’s partner. Or ex partner, at least.’

  ‘How did you find that out?’

  ‘I looked him up on Facebook.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, ask a stupid question…’

  Fry turned impatiently, scowled at Cooper as if it was his fault.

  ‘What was that name again?’

  ‘Eddie Doyle. They say you might find him at the Irish Club, if the bar’s open.’

  ‘Thanks, Angie.’

  ‘You didn’t sound all that pleased to hear from me, Di. Were you expecting someone else?’

  ‘I was hoping for a call from Vince. He hasn’t been in touch yet about getting me within arm’s length of Shepherd and Barnes. He agreed to do it, but I suppose he’s got cold feet.’

  ‘Vince? I wouldn’t rely on him. He was never the toughest kid on the block.’

  ‘No.’

  Fry finished the call and gestured to Cooper. He ambled over, too slowly for her liking. She felt like telling him he was in the city now. People here moved at a pace that was a bit faster than a ruminating sheep.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘To a little bit of Ireland.’

  The Irish Club stood in a prominent position on Deritend High Street. Here, the River Rea formed the dividing line between Digbeth and Deritend. At Deri
tend Bridge was the very spot where Birmingham had first developed. Someone once told her that the early settlers had just called this stretch of water ‘the river’, and nothing more — ‘rea’ was a word meaning river in Anglo Saxon. That was good Brum, calling a spade a spade.

  Drum and accordion music drifted from an open fire door at the Chapel House Street entrance of the club. There was a dance going on in the main hall. Fry glimpsed middle-aged couples swinging each other around the floor.

  In the lobby, old Gaelic Athletics Association posters were framed on the walls. Carroll’s GAA Allstars of 1974. A bit of nostalgia there, definitely. Posters in the windows advertised wrestling matches and concerts by two singers called Sean Nenrye and Mick Flavin. In their publicity photos they looked so similar they could have been twins. The same Irish twinkle, the same hazel eyes.

  ‘Want me to go in and ask?’ said Cooper.

  ‘What? Do you think you’ll pass as Irish?’

  ‘Better than you will,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you might want to keep an eye out front here, in case he legs it.’

  ‘Legs it? Like he’s a suspect?’

  ‘Well, I’m just thinking — nobody else seems to want to talk to you at the moment, Diane. Mr Doyle might be no different.’

  Fry nodded. ‘Okay. Let’s do that.’

  Standing at front of the club, near the pedestrian crossing, Fry looked towards the city centre. The clean light after the spell of rain lit a panorama of contrasting buildings — the blue sheen of the Beetham Tower, the Paradise Circus multi-storey car park, the spire of St Martin’s in the Bullring, the Rotunda, the shimmering aluminium curve of Self ridges.

  Cooper came out a few minutes later.

  ‘They know Eddie Doyle pretty well, but he’s not here at the moment. They suggested trying a pub called the Connemara.’

  Well, the Connemara wouldn’t feature very highly in the tourist guides to Birmingham. It stood a few hundred yards too far east to be part of the gay scene, and it hadn’t quite made enough effort on its food or decor to attract the cultural crowd from the Custard Factory. And from what she’d heard, all the really beautiful people went to the Rainbow in Deritend High Street anyway. So the Connemara was left with the flotsam and jetsam, the type of hardened drinkers who still gravitated to old-fashioned back-street pubs, no doubt for their own good reasons.

  When Fry worked in the West Midlands, there had been a thousand pubs like the Connemara, magnets for petty criminals and prostitutes, the scenes of regular Saturday-night brawls, and the occasional all-night lock-in. But there weren’t many of these places left now, even in Birmingham. Times had changed, and people wanted more than a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps and a pint of Double Diamond on a damp beer mat. Customers expected food and cocktails, and a bit of an ambience. If they didn’t adapt to changing demands, these back-street pubs were doomed. During the past few years, they’d been closing down faster than teashops in a street full of Starbuck’s.

  There was a reason she hadn’t remembered this pub at first. It had changed its name a few times. Leaded windows and ornate Victorian brickwork, red and white, with a top storey like a half-timbered Elizabethan addition. Spotlights. Above the hanging baskets, a CCTV camera enclosed in a steel cage to protect it against vandalism.

  ‘Let’s do it the other way round this time,’ she said.

  Cooper shrugged. ‘Whatever you like.’

  ‘Give me five minutes. If I don’t come out, you can follow me in.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Fry walked through the door, and the atmosphere hit her immediately. Stale beer and body odour, no longer masked by cigarette smoke. Or was it?

  My God. It was the second decade of the twenty-first century, and she still felt uncomfortable going into a pub on her own. Well, going into the Connemara she did. It was probably something to do with the distance she’d put between herself and civilization the moment she walked through the door. She caught the powerful odour of spilt beer, sour as if it had been spilled last week and no one had bothered to wipe it up. And wasn’t that cigarette smoke she could see hanging in the air in front of the dartboard? Maybe she should just pretend it was a trick of the light.

  She asked at the bar, and a man sitting on his own in the corner was pointed out to her.

  ‘Eddie Doyle?’

  He jumped as if he’d been shot.

  ‘Jesus and Mary! Who the Hell are you?’

  Fry sat down across the table from him.

  ‘A bit jumpy, sir?’

  He wiped a splash of whisky off his shirt.

  ‘You don’t creep up on people like that around here. Jesus.’

  Eddie Doyle was small and flabby, and had grown a brown moustache in an attempt to make his face look more interesting. It wasn’t working. The sly look in his eye was more reminiscent of a salesman, calculating the odds, weighing up his chances of closing a deal.

  He reminded Fry of a part-time college lecturer she’d dealt with once. He was some kind of expert on the history of the industrial revolution. He’d spent a lot of his time poking around in the back streets of Digbeth, admiring the contour of a factory wall, excited by a line of brickwork on a railway viaduct.

  The lecturer had been a heavy drinker, too. He’d run an elderly woman over in his car on a pedestrian crossing, his blood test showing that he was nearly three times the drink-drive limit. He’d got a custodial sentence for causing death by dangerous driving. He might still be in Winson Green now.

  Doyle peered at her through watery eyes.

  ‘No, I don’t know you. Are you on the game? You don’t look like a tart.’

  ‘I’m looking for William Leeson,’ she said.

  Doyle took another drink. ‘You still haven’t told me who you are.’

  Fry drew further away from Doyle. Stale alcohol seemed to leak out of his skin in place of sweat.

  ‘I don’t need to tell you anything,’ she said.

  ‘Snap.’

  ‘You don’t sound very Irish, Mr Doyle.’

  ‘I’m third generation, which makes me practically royalty among this lot.’ He nodded at a crowd of men round the bar.

  ‘Look at these plastic paddies. Listen to them all, over there in the Irish Club, singing their pathetic rebel songs. They think the old country is some kind of romantic paradise. Tir na nog, the land of the ever young. A Shangri-la out in the west, on the edge of the world. My God. Have you been to Ireland recently?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter fact.’

  ‘And what did you see?’

  ‘A lot of pink bungalows, and new shopping developments,’ said Fry.

  ‘Exactly. And it’s as bad out west in County Galway as it is in Dublin. The Irish government got a shedload of European money, and they spent it building as much tat as could be fit into Ireland.’

  Doyle was smiling at her, which she didn’t like. Fry was starting to wish Cooper would appear. How long had she told him to wait? Could he actually tell when five minutes were up, or was he still on country time?

  Taking advantage of her silence, Doyle leaned closer.

  ‘Some of these people started drinking here when another Irish pub up the road was burned down in an arson attack a few years ago.’

  ‘Oh? Terrorism came a bit close to home, did it?’

  ‘Ah, well. No one was ever convicted of arson, so it might just have been kids, you know?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘No, really,’ said Doyle. ‘It was a decent place. Full of Brummie Irish, of course, but it served the best pint of Guinness in Birmingham.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  Doyle snorted.

  ‘Plastic paddies,’ he said. ‘You know what they say — a typical Brummie is the one wearing a shamrock in his turban.’

  ‘Very funny. You know what, Mr Doyle — I’m starting to get tired of the atmosphere in here.’

  ‘No, don’t go. We don’t get much female company in here.’

  ‘I can’t imagine why.’r />
  Doyle looked past her shoulder and nodded resignedly.

  ‘Oh, how typical. You didn’t say you’d brought the boyfriend with you.’

  Cooper stood over him, saying nothing. He did that pretty well, Fry thought. Maybe it would be better if he said nothing more often.

  Nervously, Doyle stared into his glass. ‘I suppose you’re the police.’

  ‘You want to see our warrant cards?’

  He flapped his hands anxiously. ‘No, no. Not in here. Let’s keep it friendly, all right?’

  ‘Suits us,’ said Fry. ‘Perhaps we could buy you another drink? That would look really friendly, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Okay.’ Doyle looked up at Cooper, and tried a smile. ‘A malt whisky. Laphroaig would be lovely.’

  Cooper didn’t smile back. His fixed stare and slightly unshaven look made him look a bit intimidating, as if he was a borderline psychopath who might lose control at any moment. He was getting good at that, too.

  ‘You could see if they’ve got anything non-alcoholic for me,’ said Fry.

  Doyle waited until he had his drink, and took a swig of whisky that added an extra flush to his face.

  ‘So. Is this about the ex-copper who got killed last night?’

  ‘What do you know about that?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s just what everyone seems to be talking about today. So I thought…well, obviously I was wrong.’

  ‘If you do know anything…’ said Fry.

  ‘Of course.’ He took another sip of his Laphroaig. ‘I’ll be a helpful citizen.’

  Fry didn’t altogether believe him. But the news of Andy Kewley’s death had undoubtedly been on the local news today, and would be in the evening papers later on. The murder of a former police officer was likely to create a few waves. It was certainly enough to take everyone’s attention off her for a while, which was a good thing right now.

  ‘So…’ said Fry.

  Doyle frowned at her, as if he’d forgotten the original question.

  ‘William Leeson. That’s who I asked you about.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Will Leeson used to be my partner,’ he said.

  ‘We know that.’

  ‘Leeson and Doyle. We were small scale, never likely to be among the big boys. But I was quite happy with that. A steady criminal practice, it kept me in whisky. There’s no shortage of crime in Brum.’