It was dark and the icy weather was keeping most people at home. Berlin walked with care, watching out for treacherous patches of black ice and keeping a tight grip on her laptop in its soft sleeve. Snow began to fall again.
She almost envied Fernley-Price his nice warm bed under police guard at the Royal London Hospital. Thompson had left orders to be notified the minute he came around and was capable of answering questions, or at least responding to them. Thompson had extended an invitation for her to be there, a recognition that this breakthrough was down to her.
Of course, in the meantime they had no clue as to what exactly they had broken through, or what they would find on the other side. Fernley-Price’s last conversation with Nestor might complete the picture. She would email it to Thompson this evening so he could pass it on to forensics.
The tremor in her limbs was urging her to get home and have a hit. Her breathing was shallow and her brain was on fire. She felt the impulse to retreat into chemical serenity sapping her will.
The blank wall was in front of her again, but this time it was riddled with cracks. Lazenby, Nestor and Gina stood on the other side. The cracks were yawning now and through them she could hear a tumult of whispers. She strained to listen, to decipher what they were saying. But then the voices receded, the faces dissolved, the cracks healed.
She turned a corner, walked quickly across the courtyard into her block and ran up the stairs. The landing light was out again, but she didn’t hesitate, her usual caution in these circumstances overridden by desperation. She fumbled to get the key in the lock. As she turned it, two bodies behind her converged from out of the gloom and thrust her through the door.
Both men were wearing body armour, gloves, and riot helmets with the black visors pulled down. One shoved her to the floor and put his foot on her back, pinning her as the other stepped over her and began to ransack the place.
The smell of alcohol came off them in waves.
She had wrapped her arms around her laptop as she pitched forward and now it was trapped underneath her.
The pressure of the foot in the small of her back eased for a moment and she rolled to one side, putting the drunken man off balance.
‘Hey!’ he cried as he staggered and she leapt to her feet, ready to flee. But he was between her and the door. He yanked an Asp off his hip and swung it at her. It struck her shoulder and she gasped.
‘Stand fucking still!’ he commanded.
She did as she was told. As the agony radiated down her arm, she saw the other man emerge from the kitchen. He held up a small brown paper bag.
‘What have we here?’ he asked, as if he was talking to an infant. He jiggled the bag and the ampoules chinked together.
‘What the fuck are you playing at, Coulthard?’ she said in a hoarse whisper as she broke out in a cold sweat.
‘Give me the fucking computer,’ commanded the man with the Asp, whose voice Berlin recognised as Flint’s.
She clutched the computer tight with her good arm and took a step back. Flint smacked the Asp into the palm of his gloved hand in a rhythmic tattoo. He took a step forward.
‘Special delivery,’ said a breathless voice from the doorway.
It was Dempster, panting, the armpits of his thin charcoal suit stained with sweat and his shoulders flecked with snowflakes. He held a large envelope in his hands.
‘Sorry, mate,’ said Coulthard. ‘We had to start without you.’ He flipped up his visor. Flint followed suit.
Berlin stared at Dempster. He held up his hand as if to ward off the intensity of her gaze.
‘Perhaps you would like to do the honours, Detective Chief Inspector Dempster?’ said Flint with a sneer. ‘Caution her and make the arrest for possession of Class A and pervert the course of justice. That way you get the collar.’
The silence was thick with the scent of fear and betrayal.
‘Because if you don’t arrest her, I’m going to have to arrest you,’ said Flint. ‘On the same charges.’
No one moved. Berlin could see that Dempster was snookered. If he arrested her she would have to turn on him to save her own skin, concoct a plea in mitigation that would reduce her sentence. Bonnington’s evidence would corroborate her story of a blackmailing police officer.
If he didn’t arrest her, Flint would arrest them both. The uniformed officers who had nicked her in the first place would no doubt gladly give evidence that Dempster had interfered in the process and released her without charge, after the heroin had been found in her flat.
There was the sound of a siren approaching. The pitch rose, then fell as it moved away. The Doppler effect. She knew it was just a matter of perception.
There was a ripple in the atmosphere and she watched Dempster smile and saunter over to Coulthard.
‘Give it to me,’ he said, extending his hand.
Coulthard smirked at Berlin and gave up the bag, but his smirk turned to dismay as Dempster dropped it on the floor. The ripple became a tsunami. Before Coulthard could stoop to pick up the bag, Dempster trod on it. The soft crunch of the ampoules disintegrating reverberated through Berlin’s body.
She watched, aghast, as a dark, wet tidal mark of pain oozed through the paper bag. The floor seemed to drop away beneath her.
Seized by a monstrous craving she uttered a cry and flailed at Dempster, smashing the computer into his temple. Flint rushed at her, wielding the Asp, but she ducked under it and Coulthard caught the full force across his arm. Dempster staggered and dropped the envelope. Berlin threw her weight against him and he careened into Flint. They both went down.
She ran, slamming the front door behind her.
*
Dempster and Flint rolled on the floor, each trying to use the other as leverage to get up while keeping the other down. Dempster locked his arms around Flint’s neck and smashed his head into the wall. Flint crumpled. Dempster dragged himself to his feet. When he looked up, Coulthard was pointing a gun at him.
‘What the fuck?’ said Dempster.
Coulthard’s left arm hung, useless, at his side. The gun in his other hand wobbled with the tremor of fading adrenalin. Dempster looked into his eyes, which were wide with fear and confusion, and then at the gun. There was only four feet between them.
Dempster stepped forward and raised his arm as if to reach for the gun, but as Coulthard’s eyes followed the movement, he kicked out. His size fourteen Peacekeeper boot, handmade in Yorkshire, cracked Coulthard’s wrist bone. Coulthard dropped the gun with a yelp and Dempster grabbed him, slammed him to the floor and bent his damaged left arm up his back.
‘Where did you get the gun?’ he whispered in Coulthard’s ear.
‘Let me go!’ moaned Coulthard.
Dempster twisted his arm a few more inches. Coulthard screamed.
‘Where did you get the fucking gun?’ demanded Dempster.
‘I nicked it. From this bloke.’
Dempster wrenched the arm higher. He was careful. He didn’t want Coulthard to pass out.
‘What bloke?’
‘Bonnington! His name’s Daryl Bonnington.’
56
BERLIN HADN’T BOUGHT drugs on the street for over twenty years. In fact, even back then she’d rarely bought from the proverbial shady character lurking on a dark corner. Illicit substances were just part of the culture of her friends and acquaintances in the seventies and eighties. A couple of phone calls, a friendly chat in a pub and a friend of a friend would deliver whatever you wanted.
One day you would be partying at a pop star’s flash house in Knightsbridge, helping yourself from a supermarket bag full of cocaine, and the next you would be at a lock-down in a room above a seedy pub in Hackney using cheap H. The IRA would march in, banging their drums, buckets at the ready for your donation. The hard stuff would be on sale downstairs, confiscated from Irish dealers by men in balaclavas who had smashed their kneecaps.
Those heady days were long gone. The people she knew then were either dead or running B ’n�
� Bs in Todmorden. Or QCs, CEOs and academics who wouldn’t want to be reminded of their former lives as party animals. Now they stuck to growing a couple of dope plants at the holiday home in Wales, and drank decent reds.
Berlin blamed the war on drugs.
Her transition from recreational user to career junkie had been seamless and unremarkable. It wasn’t until her usual connection failed and she was seized with blind panic, that she realised a relationship she had regarded as casual was now serious. It was love.
The cold was numbing the pain and her head cleared a bit. She realised she was crouched in the lee of the plinths that shouldered the burden of the tall iron gates of St John’s, at the crossroads near the Underground station. She had no idea how she had got there.
She peered back down Bethnal Green Road, but the snow swirling in the sulphurous yellow of the streetlights kept visibility to a minimum. She didn’t think anyone had followed her out of the flat, but even if they had, they wouldn’t be able to see her in this.
The weather didn’t deter the dealers and buyers. They nipped up and down the steps of the three entrances that led into Bethnal Green Station, wearing puffa jackets, T-shirts and knock-off trainers.
As she watched, a desperate, wasted teenager missed a step going down and careened into a woman carrying a fractious toddler. He shouted abuse at the woman and kept going. She almost fell, but grabbed the handrail at the last minute and steadied herself as the toddler burst into tears.
Berlin thought of her father lying on those steps, crushed by the desperate and the dead. She felt dizzy and leant back against the church gates. Inside St John’s were fourteen famous paintings: the Stations of the Cross. She wondered if in her strung-out state she was getting a bit melodramatic.
Taking a deep breath she turned her attention back to the deals that were being done in the blink of an eye in the short tunnels that led to the ticket hall. Beyond the range of the CCTV.
There were three ways in and three ways out of the station. If the law mounted an operation, which they did routinely, they would have to man up each entrance and have people beyond the ticket barriers. That many plod gathering on the plot was obvious to the experienced eye and most dealers would melt away, leaving a couple of new kids on the block to learn the hard way. It was all part of the game.
In fact, most of the officers working out of Bethnal Green police station were on nodding terms with the dealers. They were more concerned with guns and knives on their patch. Heroin followed the same market logic as all other commodities. If dealers were taken off the streets and there was a shortage of supply, demand would force up the price. The curve of violent crime would follow.
Heart pounding, Berlin stood up, took the few short strides to the brink of the steps and took the plunge.
*
The short tunnels were bathed in the dull yellow reflection of cold light on cream tiles. The slight curve to the walls gave the impression of an endless, inescapable passage.
She approached a tall, skinny boy she had seen doing numerous deals. He was no more than fifteen, his face hidden deep inside a black hoodie and baseball cap. He didn’t look at her or acknowledge her presence in any way.
‘I’m chasing. Can you help me out?’ she said.
The boy still didn’t look at her. He raised his arms in a slow, expansive gesture that seemed to convey ‘What’s the world coming to?’
She swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘Please.’
The boy ambled away.
She walked through the ticket hall and checked out each tunnel. The signal had gone up and the dealers had evaporated. No one would sell to her. She wasn’t a face, and her profile – middle-aged and female – didn’t fit. They thought she was undercover law setting them up. How bloody ironic.
She left the Underground and turned towards Hackney Road, where she knew there was a cheap hotel with a bar and wi-fi.
She couldn’t go home tonight; maybe not for some time if they issued a warrant for her. But she couldn’t think about that now, or about Dempster’s part in what had happened. It was a bloody nightmare.
57
THOMPSON CHECKED HIS work email from his home computer for the umpteenth time. He couldn’t understand why Berlin hadn’t sent the voicemail. She wasn’t answering her mobile either. He thought they had reached an understanding but perhaps she didn’t trust him. He could hardly blame her, after the way that loose cannon Dempster had jerked her around.
He thought about calling the hospital again. He kept calling to check on Fernley-Price’s condition and to make sure that the uniformed officer was still in the room. The nurses on the ward were beginning to get fed up with him. Each time it was the same story: Fernley-Price was stable but hadn’t regained consciousness, and the constable was there drinking tea.
The doctor had told Thompson there was no way of knowing at this stage if Fernley-Price’s swollen brain was permanently damaged. The injury to the jaw was consistent with an uppercut, the injury to the brain with a kick in the head. Apparently it was a miracle Fernley-Price had been able to stand, let alone prop up a bar, and he should never have been discharged from the private hospital.
Inquiries there indicated his medical insurance had run out, and with it their compassion. The bottom line had been drawn just above the Hippocratic oath in the commercial sector.
No one even knew exactly where the assault had occurred. A Good Samaritan, probably the last one in London, had found him crawling along Liverpool Street and called an ambulance.
Thompson had got the City of London uniforms to do a quick canvass of the immediate area as it was their patch, not Met territory. But they drew a blank. He couldn’t pursue it until Fernley-Price woke up.
He stared at the computer screen, his thoughts elsewhere, sifting the information he had and trying to identify the relationships that held the key to Gina Doyle’s murder. It was times like these he wished he had a grip on that software Berlin used. He scratched notes in the margin of his newspaper, next to an abandoned sudoku.
Jeremy Fernley-Price was Doyle’s son-in-law, unbeknown to Doyle. Doyle’s daughter was Mrs Fernley-Price. She had informed on her father. Fernley-Price was also Ludovic Nestor’s private banker. Maybe when he’d gone down in the crisis, Nestor went down with him.
Nestor had killed himself in the same place that Gina Doyle’s body was found. Did he do it there to make a last, ghastly point to Fernley-Price? Was it to leave a legacy of guilt, or was it because he was guilty? It was difficult to believe that Nestor would kill Fernley-Price’s wife just to get back at him for his financial losses.
What about Fernley-Price himself? You never looked for motive when spouses murdered each other but in this case there was one. What if he’d found out she had informed on Doyle? By informing on Doyle she was effectively informing on Fernley-Price. At the time of her death only Agency personnel knew she was the informant, and she had used the alias Juliet Bravo. They didn’t know who she was then. That last conversation between Nestor and Fernley-Price could really help.
He checked his email again. Nothing. Where the hell was she? He had a feeling she knew a lot more than she was letting on, what with all those charts she had stashed away in her computer. She was testing his patience.
58
THE HOTEL ROOM was bland and lifeless. Everything was screwed to the wall or the floor. Berlin put the internet-access token on the table and emptied her pockets of the Johnnie Walker miniatures she had bought at reception. She unscrewed two of them and poured herself a double in a paper cup.
She opened her computer and pressed the power button. She would at least try to keep moving forward with the investigation, and the next step was to email Nestor’s voicemail to Thompson. If she stayed on good terms with him perhaps he would help her out of this mess.
The LEDs blinked and the screen turned blue, but there was no Windows welcome, only a noise like a dying lawnmower. Berlin pushed various keys, to no effect. Her laptop was as dead as a dod
o, no doubt wrecked by forceful contact with Dempster’s head. If this was karma, she must have been Bluebeard in another life.
Before the voicemail could be cleaned up, a professional would have to recover the file from her hard drive. If indeed it was recoverable. She would have to courier the whole bloody computer to Thompson now and God knows how long it would all take. She’d lost her notes and charts too. All the intel she had carefully compiled since Gina’s body was found. Which seemed an eternity ago.
She’d lost everything.
A wave of utter exhaustion swept over her. It was all she could do to take off her coat, easing her swollen arm out of the sleeve. A deep purple bruise was spreading from her shoulder to her wrist.
She gulped two more Scotches, lay on the bed and wrapped her coat around herself. Before she could do anything she had to make it through the night.
Suddenly her bowels turned to water and she leapt up, only just making it to the bathroom in time. It could be shock or the beginning of withdrawal. But surely it was too soon for that?
It wasn’t too soon for fear. Life without heroin. Terror seized her guts and twisted. It was like the worst flu, food poisoning and sea sickness all striking at once. She crawled back to bed, although she knew sleep would never come. Maybe not ever again.
The dead swarmed out of the ether to keep her company. Gina, Lazenby, Nestor. Saying nothing, just looking at her, reproachful.
Just beyond them stood a young black man and a woman who seemed to be reaching for his hand. Merle Okonedo and her brother. In the distance, her father. Always her father, with his back turned to her.
59
FRANK SERVED HIS time in the prison of the wakeful. At three a.m. he was busy boarding up the past.
He had too many rooms and only lived in one. He slept on the couch so he didn’t have to waste money on heat and light. There were only four light bulbs in the house. One in the kitchen, one in the bathroom, one in the living room and one in the hall. Actually, that one was a waste.
In Her Blood Page 18
