by Tony White
She took the card, and put it in her own purse. ‘Thank you, Rex,’ she said, then handed him hers. ‘Swap you. If you’re ever in York, give me a call.’
‘Thanks, Susan Hollander,’ he said, reading her name from the card. ‘Good luck with your niece.’
As he picked up his newspaper, Rex wanted to say, ‘Please ring me – please!’, but resisted, figuring it was obvious. Though perhaps he should put a bet on the Derby after all, whistle around the corner to the bookies on Southampton Row, because it was starting to feel like his lucky day.
In other respects, Saturday or not, it was business as usual, and back at the station Webster’s investigation-team meeting was to be held in the same tenth-floor conference room that had played host to the Tennyson crisis meeting earlier in the week. Although, since this time there were significantly fewer high-ranking officers in attendance – just Lollo – the venetian blinds were raised. There was a pleasant breeze. He could hear the traffic a few floors below. It was better than all being crammed into the office with the phones ringing every five seconds. It also meant that, even if it didn’t qualify for Major Incident Room status, the investigation was being taken seriously. All of the senior team was there: Socks, Fuck Me, the house-to-house co-ordinator, investigative team members and more. Everyone was chatting. A couple of uniforms were offering around one of their caps – and the remaining scrunched-up pieces of paper it contained – and inviting a last few takers for the Derby sweepstake: ‘Fiver,’ he said to Rex. ‘You in?’
‘Oi, Bill and Ben,’ said Webster loudly before Rex could respond, and brandishing a twenty as he did so. ‘Have you two quite fucking finished? I’ll take the last however-many-the-fuck you’ve got left. So fucking sit down, eh?’ He turned his attention to the rest of the room: ‘Okay, everyone, mobiles off, please. We’ve got a lot to get through …’
Webster was right: they did. There was obviously some pressure to move the investigation along, because Lollo not only kicked things off by offering some opening comments – and a generalised bollocking – but he even stayed on to chair the meeting, where normally this would be deputised, particularly on a Saturday.
The gist of Lollo’s overview was that low-information investigations were a fact of life, so stop moping: get used to it and get on with it. He reminded everyone that here was not only an as yet unidentified victim, but also a credible suspect who was a missing person. ‘No wonder it’s low-bloody-info!’
Everyone laughed. But then they stopped laughing, because they’d noticed that Lollo wasn’t joking any more. He’d gone serious on them. What was not acceptable, he went on – and this was where it turned into the generalised bollocking – was if or when that lack of information was due to police failures, and material being missed first time around. And this was what had happened here. He was surprised at them for this, disappointed even. He’d thought this was a good team, he said; don’t prove him wrong. He looked them each in the eye. It was time to pull their fucking socks up. He didn’t need to remind everyone that, if the community or the media suddenly decided to take more of an interest in the case than they had to date, then they’d be getting it from all sides, and at this rate they wouldn’t have a pot to piss in. It was time, in other words, to bloody well get on with it.
Rex was relieved that the bollocking seemed to have been directed at everyone except him and Webster. More than this, Lollo had actually singled them out for their teamwork, and for their tenacity in going back to the scene and finding new evidence. The fact that they hadn’t let the lack of progress get them down. And if that was not quite how Rex remembered it happening, he was happy to share the credit with Webster. After all, it could have gone the other way. And Rex had been a policeman for long enough to know that it was better to be commended as part of a group than to be singled out and criticised for flying solo. Rex figured that being patted on the head by the DCI might also get Eddie off his back for a bit.
As to the content of the various briefings, house-to-house had turned up precisely nothing new, ditto CCTV. Rex’s suggestion that there might have been two offenders was merely referenced by both teams as a point of action to be followed up. It had not been implemented in either line of enquiry yet. The tickets database threw up a good few criminal records, but none in this bracket.
Webster gave a quick rundown of the discovery of the knife, and the Kilroy cartoon; the suggestion that this latter might be connected with the mysterious chalk writing on the door.
Most interesting of all was Fuck Me. They were the only team that had acted upon the new material. More than that, they were already running with it, so the effect of Dr Sue Stanza’s presentation on the room was palpable. It was as if the sun had come out, and as if all those cups of bitter filter coffee from Building Services that everyone had been chucking down all morning had suddenly started working. The atmosphere changed, and it gave the team a bit of a lift. Suddenly it felt as if, instead of merely treading water, the investigation was actually rolling again, progress was being made, and all of this without Fuck Me even really trying, but rather just doing their job.
They had got a blood-type match on both knife and floor residue, and were hoping for a usable DNA sample within forty-eight hours, after which they would begin the process of searching and comparing with the National DNA Database, hoping for a cold hit and or a match with other samples from the scene that were already in train. If they had no joy with that, they’d go out to ENFSI partners, the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes, as well as CODIS, the United States’s Combined DNA Index System, and Interpol’s DNA Gateway. As to the knife, they said, if you had to choose a weapon that was ideally suited to lopping off someone’s nose, you could do a lot worse than a Mandragore billhook—
‘I say, I say, I say,’ said one of the uniforms, interrupting.
‘Oi, Bill and Ben,’ said Webster. ‘Have I got to tell you two again?’
‘Thank you, Eddie,’ said Lollo. ‘Now, where were we, Sue?’
‘Thank you, Detective Chief Inspector,’ she said. ‘I was just saying that our analysis suggests an ante-mortem wound, that the victim was alive when his nose was cut off—’
The collective reflex response to this further grisly detail was an audible cringe.
‘—even if he may not have been conscious.’
The obvious general disgust at the mere thought of nasal mutilation turned out to be the cue for everyone – not just ‘Bill and Ben’ – to drag out any nose jokes that they could remember: ‘That’s not to be sniffed at’, etc.
Once this brief diversionary buzz had worn off, and the laughter had died down, Sue Stanza turned to Webster and said, ‘That writing – forget whether it’s relevant or not for a second. Do we have any idea what it means?’
‘One thing, while we’re here,’ Rex put in. ‘I had a call from Mrs Bisika. You know, the cleaner? The woman who discovered the body? I spoke to her the other day. My interview notes are already up, but she called me again quite late—’
‘Aye-aye!’ said Ben, nudging Bill, as if he’d been woken up by the sudden, sexist realisation that there was only one possible reason for a woman to phone a man.
Rex ignored the provocation, ‘—I don’t know, couple of nights ago? And I was going to follow up today.’
‘Anything good?’ Lollo asked.
Rex took out his notebook and flipped back through the pages until he found it. ‘Ah, Wednesday night it was. One of her neighbours in the Peabody flats – lady called Iris? – apparently told her that she had heard male voices in the street that weekend. Late at night. Early hours. She’d been awake tending to her husband. Foreign accent, she said.’
‘Argument, was it? What’d they say?’
‘According to Gertrude – Mrs Bisika – this Iris couldn’t make it out, but she could at least tell they weren’t British.’
Lollo turned to the house-to-house team. ‘How did you fucking idiots miss that? Didn’t you do the Peabody Estate?’
>
‘It’s a date!’ Sue said, looking up from her phone.
‘What?’
‘The writing on the door. It’s French. It’s a date. Not “Trudi”, but Tridi—’
‘Tree-what?’ said Rex.
‘3D?’ said Bill. ‘Like Irish IMAX, innit?’
‘Tridi treize Ventôse – with a circumflex,’ she said. ‘CXCIII. It’s a date in the French Republican Calendar. Didn’t any of you knobs think to google it?’
‘Tridi? I thought it was lundi, mardi, mercredi, and so on?’ said Rex.
‘Republican-do-what?’ said Lollo, echoing the thoughts of many in the room: Republicans were Irish terrorists, weren’t they? ‘What’s that when it’s at home? Just assume I don’t have my phone on me, eh.’
‘So, Ventôse – I’m not sure how to pronounce it – is the name of a month in something called the French Republican Calendar?’ said Sue, a rising note of uncertainty in her voice. ‘It was adopted during the French Revolution, it says here. Ten-day weeks. Primidi, Duodi, Tridi, et cetera were their new names for the days of the week. Three-week months. Religious and royal holidays abolished, blah blah.’
‘Wot no Christmas?’ said Webster. ‘I’m not having that.’
‘No Sundays either,’ said Stanza.
‘I know the fucking feeling,’ said Lollo. ‘So what’s that in old money?’
‘Sorry, chief?’ said Stanza.
‘You said it was a date. Tweedledee something Ventilator, I don’t bloody know.’
‘Yeah, Tridi, treize – that’s thirteen – Ventôse, CXCIII, and presumably the Roman numerals are the year. C’s a hundred, isn’t it? Anyone remember from school?’
‘What date is that, then?’ said Lollo. ‘Any way of telling? Some obscure historical reference, is it? Or a tip-off, a date for our diaries. Are they making an appointment?’
DS Webster made the mistake of looking at the Detective Chief Inspector blankly.
‘When he, she or it might strike again!’ said Lollo, in a tone of voice that suggested he was talking to a particularly stupid child. ‘Fuck’s sake! Wake up! Two hours ago you were moaning that you had nothing.’
‘Hang on,’ said Stanza, still looking at her phone. ‘There’s a link to a converter here. Okay, so the year is a hundred and ninety three of the Revolution.’ She fiddled with some drop-down menus on her screen, then: ‘Well, depending on the method used to calculate the leap years—’ She looked at Lollo. He shook his head, rolled his eyes. ‘—according to this, it looks like Tridi treize Ventôse one-nine-three is Monday the fourth of March 1985.’
‘Mean anything to anyone?’ asked Lollo.
No one said anything.
‘Okay, well,’ said Lollo, ‘if you could circulate the link, Sue, that’d be great, thanks.’
As they were wrapping up the meeting, the DCI told everyone to stick around after lunch, at least until they’d spoken to Rex. He said that he wanted the DS to spend the rest of the day following up with each of the teams individually, working with them to review progress, to put any questions he hadn’t had time to ask in the meeting – he’d emailed Rex a list – and to help them prioritise and plot next steps. Ideally this would mean that, once he’d fed back to the DCI and Webster, they could make sure to try to avoid ordering low-quality follow-up actions and thereby make the most of the next few days – the calm before the SiC storm – and get some results in the bag while they weren’t under the microscope. It was the perpetual challenge: to mobilise the collective mind in order to turn a slim information profile, a few vague wisps of material, half a lead and a hunch or two, into a solid case that might actually stand a chance of getting to court.
This all took most of the afternoon, but before shutting down for the day, Rex had forced himself to call Iris. She didn’t tell him much more than her near-neighbour Gertrude Bisika had done already, except for one thing: the argument, the foreign accent. No, she couldn’t hear much of what they were saying, she told him, but she thought they sounded French.
Was that the sound of a piece of the jigsaw falling into place?
As he walked along Great Ormond Street, past the hospital porters smoking under the old carriage-works arch, his phone rang. It was Susan Hollander.
‘Hi, is that Rex?’ she said. ‘It’s Susan from earlier. I don’t normally do this, but I am going to be here for a day or two, as it turns out, so I was wondering if you meant it about meeting up? It’s been a really rough day, so I’d love to see a friendly face, and have a glass of wine and a chat. If you’re not too tired, that is.’ She paused for a second or two. ‘I enjoyed our chat this morning, Rex. I was thinking about it this afternoon, in the hospital cafe. There was something I’d meant to ask you earlier.’
‘Fire away,’ said Rex.
‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but: do you have any children?’
The question came out of the blue, but despite his surprise – or perhaps because of it – Rex answered truthfully, which was something that, when it came to this subject, he never, ever did. ‘Yes, one,’ he said. ‘But that’s a long story, and she doesn’t live with me. Why d’you ask?’
‘Just getting to know you, I suppose,’ she said. ‘We’re all grownups, aren’t we. I don’t. Have any children, I mean. Sorry, I didn’t mean to get all serious. Listen to me! I didn’t think to check, are you still at work?’
‘No,’ said Rex. ‘That’s alright. I like you, Susan, if you don’t mind me saying so. I’m just on my way home right now. I’m pretty tired too, to be honest—’
‘Oh, well, of course. If you’d rather—’
‘No, no, that’s not what I was going to say. I’d love to meet up. Can you give me an hour or so? No, but I was just thinking, I could make us a simple supper at home. Do you eat fish?’ he asked. Then: ‘Oh, great. Why don’t I go and pick up a couple of tuna steaks, and a nice bottle of—’ He was going to say ‘red’, but paused and adjusted his course slightly: ‘What kind of wine do you like?’
And suddenly, as he hung up, Rex had an idea of where Terry Hobbs might have gone.
II
14: PISSENLIT (DANDELION)
‘But JJ, your badge,’ Pea-tag said, as they trudged up the rocky path, between gnarled olive trees and prickly pear cacti, passing aloes, the radial form and fleshy spiked leaves of which he recognised from the ones his mother had kept in pots on the kitchen windowsill at home, although these ones – the first he had seen ‘in the wild’, as it were – were about the size of a car. ‘The strike. It’s over, yes?’ said Pea-tag. ‘Milo ’eard it on the radio. The strike, it finish yesterday, non?’
Up ahead, JJ noticed a large standing stone next to the path. ‘Wow.’
‘It is our menhir,’ said Pea-tag, proudly. ‘It is néolithique. Which means that our village is also néolithique.’
At this point, JJ had absolutely no idea of what he was walking into.
Pea-tag was a French punk, or maybe a hippy, or perhaps something in between. Of indeterminate age, with his tanned and weather-beaten skin, tatty combat trousers and a grown-out Mohican that was bleached by sun and salt, he could have been about thirty, JJ thought. Give or take five years either way. Impossible to say. To JJ, who was nineteen, anyone over the age of about twenty-five seemed old. They had only met an hour or two earlier. Pea-tag had been begging on the seafront near the Hippodrome at Cagnes-sur-Mer when JJ, fresh off the train and looking for somewhere to sleep for the night, had bumped into him.
Though he generally liked to give a bit of change to beggars, JJ had been down to his last few centimes by the time he’d arrived in Cagnes, so he had nothing to give. He would need to find somewhere to cash one of the twenty-pound American Express travellers’ cheques that constituted his spending budget for the trip, and which he’d kept safely with his passport in a canvas money belt tied around his waist. What he had had to offer, though, was a filterless Gauloise cigarette from the second-to-last of the dozen packets he had bought in the duty-free shop on
the ferry from England a few days earlier. He had thought that two hundred pounds would be enough money, just as he’d thought the cigarettes would last him for months. JJ had thought lots of things, but perhaps he hadn’t thought very deeply, and the few French francs that he had allowed himself to cash had seemed to evaporate like smoke.
As he took a light, Pea-tag had admired the badges on JJ’s denim jacket. ‘Killing Joke,’ he’d said, pointing at the crouching silhouette figure taken from the stark cover of the band’s first LP. ‘I have this.’ Another badge featuring yet more silhouetted figures on a white background was for The Stranglers’ 1978 LP Black and White, and there was one with the hand-drawn Young Marble Giants logo from the cover of Colossal Youth. These were the kind of cheap badges you could buy for 20p or so from most record shops. They displayed them on boards by the counter in both Left Bank and Caterpillar Records. Most of the badges on sale had the logo of a band on them, or of a record label like Stiff or 2 Tone. Others, like JJ’s Stranglers badge, might feature just a reproduction of the actual record sleeve, however bad the quality could be once the image was reduced to an inch or so across. JJ also had a slightly more expensive enamel badge that said ‘US out of El Salvador and Nicaragua’, which he had bought – without necessarily fully understanding the United States’s involvement in Central America, beyond that it was not good – at the merchandise stall outside a benefit gig at the university.
The last of JJ’s badges said COAL NOT DOLE in black capital letters on a yellow ground. Firemen and other local trades unions had been out on the High Street near Princesshay one Saturday before Christmas collecting money to support the striking miners, and JJ had thrown a scrumpled pound note into the bucket. It had been cold enough in Exeter that winter, and they had good food and warm clothes, and paraffin for the heater in the hallway, and they could afford gas for the fire in the front room. Up north, there were miners and their families – whole villages – going without food, and with no money for bills or heating. Putting a pound in a bucket had seemed like the least JJ could do, and he had been proud to wear the badge ever since, and to contribute money or tins of food every now and then, whenever he saw that other collections were taking place.
