by M. R. Carey
“I don’t see where getting a fuller picture of Alex helps her at all,” Ms Munroe said. “Unless you’re going to try to blacken his character in some way.”
“He was just a child,” Paul pointed out.
“My point exactly.”
“We would never dream of attacking a child in court.”
“No? Not even if it would help your client?”
“Well, I’m not saying it hasn’t been done. But please believe we’re not thinking of taking that approach. We’re just trying to establish beyond a doubt what happened on the night of the fire.”
“So you think it hasn’t been established?”
“I’m wondering if it’s possible that someone else was there that night who hasn’t given evidence yet. A friend of Alex, or…”
“Or what?”
Paul decided to go for broke. It wasn’t like he had to worry about forfeiting Ms Munroe’s good opinion. “Possibly not a friend. Possibly something else. Somebody who didn’t like him much at all.”
“I don’t think I get your meaning.”
“Well, was Alex ever bullied at all? Perhaps when he first came to the school? Some kids find it hard to settle in, and then… well, you know. Other kids might target them.”
“Alex settled in just fine, Mr Levine. And we don’t have a problem with bullying here.” The teacher’s tone had become even harder and more brittle, from a hard and brittle baseline.
“No, I wasn’t suggesting that you do. I’m just…”
“Building a picture.”
“Trying to, yes.”
He heard the white noise of a sigh, and waited. People don’t usually sigh before hanging up.
“He didn’t have any friends or any enemies.” She said it flatly, with resignation – confessing her own sins, at least in part. “The truth is Alex kept himself to himself. I tried to coax him out, but he barely ever spoke in class. To me or to anyone else.”
“He was a loner?”
“Yes. Wonderful. Why not? If you want to sum up a dead human being in one word, he was a loner.”
“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “And I don’t. I don’t want to do that. I’d really like to get a sense of what made Alex tick. I just… it doesn’t seem to be there, in any of the testimony.”
“No. Well, I’m not surprised. I taught him for most of a year and I never felt like I knew him. I’m sorry.”
“Not at all,” Paul said. “I appreciate you agreeing to talk to me. And I assure you, nothing you’ve said is going to make it into any report or statement or submission. If there’s anything else you could give me, or anyone else you could point me towards…”
“Well, there are his school reports.” Ms Munroe sounded doubtful. “I could send you those. It’s just…”
“Yes?”
“Well, they’re written in a sort of tick-boxy way these days. There are a set of sentences in each skill area, and you choose the one that’s closest to a given student’s performance. They’re not likely to yield any startling insights.”
“But you could copy them for me?”
“They’re all stored as files on the system. I could send them to you. For what they’re worth. It will take me a while to dig them out though.”
“That would be great,” Paul said. “Thank you.”
“I really doubt they’ll be much use.”
Paul doubted it too. A school report might speak to Alex’s personality, but not to his friendships or enmities. He was just clutching at straws, and probably wasting his own time and hers. But Jess was relying on him. In the absence of anything useful to do, he was prepared to do futile things and take them to her as an offering.
But there was one other thing he’d promised to do, and he remembered it now. He’d said he would try to contact Brenda Hemington, Jess’s aunt. He’d called her once or twice but got no answer, which was no surprise since Jess had been doing the same thing with the same result. Maybe she was screening her calls. He decided to call round to her house after work and see if he could catch her in.
The house was in Effra Road in Brixton, only two or three miles from Paul’s flat in Clapham. He switched lines at Stockwell and made his way there. The light was starting to fade out of the sky when he arrived, but there were no lights on in the unremarkable Georgian semi. Paul stood on the doorstep and rang the bell about twelve times, noting how the paint was starting to peel on the lower panels of the door. A thick wodge of circulars was jammed into the letterbox. A glass panel to the right of the door showed him more junk mail piling up inside.
Screwing up his courage, he knocked on the door of the house to the left. Then, when nobody answered there, he went to the house on the right. An elderly man opened up on the third knock. His wispy hair was in wild disarray, so it was possible that Paul had woken him from a sleep.
“I’m really sorry to disturb you,” Paul said. “But I’m trying to get in touch with your neighbour, Mrs Hemington.”
“Miss,” the old man said with fragile dignity. “Miss Hemington. You won’t find her here, I’m afraid. They took her back in again.”
Paul’s thoughts were so Moulson-centric that he mistook the old man’s meaning. He was about to ask what the charges were when he realised that Moulson’s aunt had been taken into hospital rather than custody.
He’d come far enough now that he didn’t want to give up halfway. Jess would want to know how her aunt was doing. He followed the trail to ward 22 in Lambeth Hospital, where Brenda Hemington was currently recovering from a third round of spinal fusion surgery.
She looked like the wreck of a noble vessel: tall and solidly built, but with a waxy pallor to her skin and black rims around her eye sockets like make-up that she hadn’t managed to wipe away. She was weak and in a lot of pain, but conscious. Paul was impressed by her willpower. She was self-medicating via a morphine drip but she didn’t touch the clicker the whole time he was there: once he told her he was Jess’s emissary, she clearly wanted to stay awake and relatively sharp.
She’d received Jess’s letter on the day she was taken into hospital, and had been writing a reply when her back gave out. She’d had to crawl across the floor to the phone so she could call 999, and then she’d stayed there on her hands and knees for the thirty-odd minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive. She was scared to move because the pain was so great.
“I want…” she whispered to Paul. “I need to talk to her. Can I talk to her?”
“Do you have a mobile phone?” Paul asked. “If not, I can get you a disposable. She’ll have to call you, obviously. There’s no way for her to receive calls. In fact, she’s got to stand in line for—”
“I meant face to face,” Brenda muttered. “Can she come here? Compassionate leave, or something like that? Because I’m sick?”
“To be honest, I doubt it,” Paul admitted. “But we can ask.”
Brenda grimaced. “How long will it take?”
“Days. Weeks. It’s hard to tell.”
She nodded. “All right. The mobile, then. Thank you, Mr Levine. You’re very kind.”
“Only what I’d do for any client,” Paul said. Which was close enough to a flat lie that it made him blush.
Alice Munroe’s email was waiting in his inbox the next morning. He opened up the files and read through them with increasingly glazed eyes. They were as vapid as she’d hinted, full of generalised statements about core competences and personal targets. The kind of net that’s mostly made out of holes.
Paul read every last word of those reports and found nothing relevant or helpful there. Like all of the paper evidence, it was just a hydra-headed dead end. So what did that leave?
It left the CCTV footage, which might possibly show someone entering or leaving the block earlier in the day.
The film came from a council-owned camera about fifty yards down from Orchard Court, where Moulson had lived, set up to monitor a bus lane. The prosecution had entered the footage into evidence because it corroborated Street’s
account of his and Moulson’s movements on the night of the fire. His leaving the flat at 6 p.m. His returning two hours later with the drugs he’d just scored from an acquaintance at the Hay Wain public house. The fire starting. The 999 call, which he made from the pavement outside the block. It was all there, and it told a simple enough story.
Paul watched the footage in a tiny window on his PC. Grainy black and white with a running time stamp at lower right. The resolution was terrible, but enlarging it just made the image break up into a jungle of edge noise. The first time signature that was relevant was 22:54:33, when the fire became visible in the window corresponding with Jess Moulson’s living room. Paul started there, but skipped backwards and forwards between the high points. The spectacular plume of flame that rose into the sky from the rear of the block when the bedroom windows blew out. John Street running out of the front door of the block (at 23:00:58), his upper arms pressed tight to the sides of his body but his forearms horizontal, pointing forward, chargrilled hands spread wide. Street trying to place an emergency call with his phone balanced in the crook of his elbow, stabbing at key after key in staccato desperation.
It was hypnotic. The fire in the windows above the injured man was such a bright white that dropouts of black appeared within it where the camera’s CCD had given up trying. It almost looked like faces pressed against the glass.
Paul watched the sequence four times, fascinated. But nobody apart from Street himself went into or out of the building in that time frame, so he started working backwards and forwards from it.
Still no arrivals or departures, but at some point as he was scrolling through the sequence almost at random, his attention was caught by a flare of light that seemed to come out of nowhere. The time signature was 22:47:13, and the duration was very short – less than half a second. It was in one of the windows on Moulson’s floor of the building, but not her living room. And both the kitchen and the bedroom windows were at the rear of the property. Paul measured by eye and realised that the window was directly above the building’s front door. It must open on to the stairwell.
So what was the flare? It was too early to be John Street running out of the flat. By his own evidence, he wasn’t even awake yet. Paul pondered for a moment or two. It was easy to magnify the image, but it was so grainy and pixelated that the closer in you got, the less you saw.
He tried it anyway, and saw… something. Something that confused the issue further. The anomalous flash of light wasn’t from Moulson’s side of the stairwell at all: it was from the other side. The flat there had been empty, according to the notes from the first trial. There was no reason for anyone to be there.
Paul went back to the box that held the photos. There were dozens of internal and external shots of the building in the wake of the fire, and a few from before obtained with more difficulty for purposes of comparison. One of the “before” shots of the landing outside Moulson’s flat explained what he was seeing. But it didn’t answer the wider question of why he was seeing it.
The envelope that held the injury photos was sitting right in front of him again. And now he was thinking about oddities, anomalies, things that sat in the wrong place or at the wrong time. This time he gave himself full permission: took his old fetish off the leash. He spread the pictures out in front of him and stared at them hard for several minutes, interrogating them rather than just drinking them in. A feeling for wounds isn’t like a feeling for snow. There was no mystic communion going on here. But Paul was something of an expert in the things you could do to flesh and the results you could expect to get.
This time he saw it.
“Oh my God,” he whispered.
He went back to the CCTV footage and watched it in sequence from about 10.50 p.m. through to just after eleven, with lots of stops and starts and rewinds. He was so absorbed that he didn’t see the intern, Susannah Sackville-West, until she reached past him and turned off the monitor.
“Hey!” Paul protested.
“Sorry,” Susannah said indifferently. “But you weren’t listening. Pritchard wants to see you.”
“I’m working!”
“No, you’re not, Paul. That’s why he wants to see you. He says you should be doing trial docs on Bowker and he hasn’t seen hide or hair of you.” She was smirking just a little. He was the one on contract; she was the one working for free in order – gradually, painfully, evitably – to pick up enough experience to someday slide sideways into a salaried position. She had nothing against Levine besides finding him a little creepy, but if he fell down badly enough, she might be able (with no hard feelings) to walk over his prostrate body into his job.
Paul was almost certain that wasn’t going to happen. All the same, in dread of a severe and embarrassing shit-canning, he went to find his boss and tell him by way of mitigation that he’d broken open the Inferno Killer case.
Pritchard wasn’t in his office. He was in one of the boardrooms, walking around and around the table where stacks of paperwork relating to a completely different case (the Crown versus Liam Bowker) were being assembled into a three-dimensional labyrinth of truth and lies. Or four-dimensional really, since Pritchard’s path through them as he walked back and forth was a sequential one, adding the element of time as he decided on the best running order for the defence. He looked like a monk in a cloister, endlessly circling the same space and finding different things to meditate on every time he went around.
“You’re working Moulson,” he said without looking up at Paul as he entered.
“I am, sir,” Paul admitted.
“Bowker first. Then Attalie-Ziscou. Then Moulson. Is your calendar broken, Paul?”
“No, sir, but I… I think I may have found something.”
Best foot forward – offer the outcome as though the outcome justified the process. Because in this case it just might.
“Found something?” Pritchard’s tone was absent, his gaze wandering over the various piles of papers ranged before him. The facts in the case of Crown versus Bowker, insofar as there were such things as facts. “Such as what exactly?”
“Such as a suspect,” Paul said.
Which did the trick. The Crown and Bowker were left to talk among themselves for a while.
There was a big, glaring anomaly in the evidence, Paul told his boss with nervy, hectic eloquence. A wrecking ball for the prosecution case. Jess Moulson’s chances had just gone from snowball in hell to pig in clover. No, in shit. She was still in shit. But with a genuine shot at being hauled out of it.
He talked Pritchard through the CCTV footage – pausing when he got to the big clue that everyone had missed, even though it was so obvious it might as well have had BIG FUCK-OFF CLUE painted on it in neon yellow.
Then he spread out the injury photos and pointed to the odd one out.
“That was nicely done, Paul,” Pritchard allowed when Paul finally wound down. “You’ve given me something to work with. A great deal of something, in fact. Possibly even enough. But still, Bowker first. This will keep.”
He waved Paul back to his desk with a gesture that might have been considered dismissive. But Paul’s heart was singing. Pritchard’s faint praise spoke volumes. More importantly, Jess had put her trust in him and he hadn’t let her down.
When the fire that had destroyed her face had at last decided to speak, it had spoken to him.
59
The Devil was a little wary around Dr Salazar for a while after the Ecstasy incident. He was aware that he’d been coming off the spool that night, and he didn’t feel quite so good about it as he had at the time. He didn’t want to apologise to Sally, obviously. He just wanted the whole thing to pass off without comment.
By way of a peace offering, when he warned Sally about Treacher, he put a little tact into it. He made it seem like he was concerned for Sally’s safety rather than just not wanting him to get out of his depth and fuck up. But the underlying message was still clear. “Anyone asks you anything about Grace or drugs or Curie, you p
lay really stupid and you get out of there fast. Don’t even bother to lie. Just move to higher ground and stay there.”
Dr Salazar pointed out that since technically it was him who was bringing the drugs into Curie, at least for the last leg of the way, he wasn’t likely to be tempted to answer any of those questions. But in any case, nobody had asked him. “Who’d be asking anyway? There’s nobody in Fellside who—”
“Shit!” Devlin exclaimed. “I already told you. These aren’t inmates. They’re the people who used to supply over in Curie before we did. They’re hanging around the Pot of Gold trying to get a sniff of Grace’s operation.”
Sally drank at home. Red wines from the cheaper end of the Waitrose spectrum, one bottle lasting two nights. It was no surprise that all of this had passed him by.
“And they’re just walking up to people…?”
“Sally, you’ll know them if you fucking see them,” Devlin said. “They’ll offer to buy you a drink. Then they’ll get talking about something that’s a million miles away from drugs and prisons, and they’ll work you around to it so cute and slow you’ll think it was your idea. I’m telling you not to get into that conversation. Nod to show me you understand.”
Salazar nodded.
His mind was elsewhere, as Devlin had noticed. He wasn’t thinking about drug muling at all: he was thinking about murder. He’d begun to lay his plans for killing Devlin as soon as he came down from his involuntary Ecstasy high. By the end of the first day, he’d identified the simplest method, done a risk analysis, costed it and given it up as impossible. And he’d done the same thing every day since: he just couldn’t get his mind off it.
The obvious way to do the deed was with poison. Devlin’s pethidine addiction provided a perfect delivery system, and the doctor had access to plenty of things that were lethal in the right dosages. It would be almost too easy.
Looking at the risks, there really weren’t any that he couldn’t get around. The only people who knew that he was supplying Devlin’s habit were him and Devlin. And Devlin wasn’t going to offer that information up, even as he was dying, unless he guessed what was happening to him. The important thing was to choose a poison that took effect very quickly, to shrink the window for deathbed soliloquies.
