A Taste for Death (24 page)

It was the only place she had ever thought of as home. She was illegitimate and had been brought up by her maternal grandmother who had been nearly sixty when she was born. Her mother had died within days of her birth and was known to her only as a thin serious face in

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the front row of a school photograph, a face in which she could recognize none of her own strong features. Her grand-mother had never spoken of her father and she had assumed that her mother had never divulged his identity. She was fatherless even in name, but it had long ceased to worry her, if it ever had. Apart from the inevitable fan-tasies of early childhood when she had pictured her father seeking her out, she hadn't known any urgent need to discover her roots. Two .half-remembered lines of Shake-speare which had met her eyes when she had casually opened the book in the school library had become for her

the philosophy by which she intended to live. 'What matters it what went before or after Now with myself I will begin and end.'

She hadn't chosen to furnish her flat in a period style. She had little feeling for the past; all her life had been a striving to struggle free of it, to make a future fashioned to her own need for order, security, success. So she had lived for a couple of months with nothing but a folding table, one chair and a mattress on the floor, until she had saved the money to buy the austere, well-designed modern furniture she liked; the sofa and two easy chairs in real leather, the dining table and four chairs in polished elm, the fitted bookcase completely covering one wall, the sleek, professionally designed kitchen which held the minimum of necesssary utensils and crockery but nothing super-fluous. The flat was her private world kept inviolate from colleagues in the police. Only her lover was admitted, and when Alan had first stepped through the door, uncurious, unthreatening, carrying as always his plastic bag of books, even his gentle presence had seemed for a moment a dangerous intrusion.

She poured herself an inch of whisky, mixed it with water, then unlocked the security lock of the narrow door which led from the sitting room to the iron bal-cony. The air rushed in, fresh and clean. She closed the door then stood, glass in hand, leaning back against the brickwork and staring out eastward over London. A low bank of heavy cloud had absorbed the glare of the city's

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lights and lay, palely crimson, like a colour-wash care-fully laid against the richer blue-black of night. There was a light breeze just strong enough to stir the branches of the great limes lining Holland Park Avenue, and to twitch the television aerials which sprouted like frail exotic fetishes from the patterned roofs fifty feet below. To the south the trees of Holland Park were a black curdle against the sky, and ahead the spire of St John's church gleamed like some distant mirage. It was one of the pleasures of these moments, seeing how the spire appeared to move, sometimes so close that she felt that she would only have to stretch out a hand to feel its harshly textured stones, sometimes, like tonight, as dis-tant and insubstantial as a vision. Far below to her right under the high arc lights the avenue ran due west, greasy as a molten river, bearing its unending cargo of cars, trucks and red buses. This, she knew, had once been the old Roman road leading westward straight out of Lon-dinium; its constant grinding roar came to her only faintly like the surge of a distant sea.

Whatever the time of year, except in the worst of winter weather, this was her nightly routine. She would pour herself a whisky, Bell's, and take out the glass for these minutes of contemplation, rather, she thought, like a caged prisoner reassuring herself that the city was still there. But her small flat was no prison, rather the physical affirmation of a freedom hard won and jealously maintained. She had escaped from the estate, from her grandmother, from that meanly proportioned, dirty, noisy flat on the seventh floor of a post-war tower block, Ellison Fairweather Buildings, monument to a local councillor passionately dedicated, like most of his kind, to the destruction of small neighbourhood streets and the erection of twelve-storey monuments to civic pride and sociological theory. She had escaped from the shouting, the graffiti, the broken lifts, the stink of urine. She remembered the first evening of her escape, the eighth of June over two years ago. She had stood where she stood now and poured her whisky like a libation, seeing the momentary arc of liquid light as it fell between the grating,

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saying aloud 'Sod you, Councillor Bloody Fairweather. Welcome freedom.'

And now she was really on her way. If she made a success of this new job anything, well almost anything, was possible. It was perhaps not surprising that AD would choose at least one woman for his squad. But he wasn't the man to make routine gestures to feminism, or to any other fashionable cause come to that. He had selected her because he needed a woman in the squad and because he knew her record, knew that he could rely on her to do a good job. Looking out over London she felt confidence surge through her veins strong and sweet as the first con-scious breath of morning. The world stretched out below her was one she was at home in, part of that dense, exciting conglomerate of urban villages which made up the Metro-politan Police district. She pictured it stretching away over Notting Hill Gate, over Hyde Park and the curve of the river, past the towers of Westminster and Big Ben, briefly over that anomaly, the patch of the City of London Police, then on through the eastern suburbs to the boundary with the Essex Constabulary. She knew almost to a yard where that boundary lay. This was how she saw the capital, patterned in police areas, districts, divisions and sub-divisions. And immediately below her lay Notting Hill, that tough, diverse, richly cosmopolitan village where she had been posted after leaving the preliminary training school. She could remember every sound, colour, smell as strongly as on that torrid August night eight years ago when it had happened, the moment when she knew that her choice had been right and that this was her job.

She had been on foot patrol in Notting Hill with Terry Read on the hottest August night in living memory. A boy, almost squealing with excitement, had rushed at them and, gibbering, had pointed to a nearby tenement. She saw it again; the huddle of frightened neighbours at the foot of the stairs, faces gleaming with sweat, stained shirts stuck to steaming bodies, a smell of hot, unwashed humanity. And above the whispers a raucous voice from upstairs shouting its unintelligible protest. The boy said:

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'He's got a knife, miss. George tried to get in but he threatened him. That's right, ain't it, George?'

George, white, small, weasel-like in the corner: 'Yeah, that's right.'

'And he's got Mabelle in with him, Mabelle and the kid.'

A woman whispered:

'Blessed Jesus, he's got the kid in there.'

They had fallen back to let her through, her and Terry. She asked: 'What's his name?' 'Leroy.'

'His other name?'

'Price. Leroy Price.'

The hallway was dark, the room itself, unlocked since the lock was smashed, was even darker. The harsh glare filtered through a torn piece of carpet nailed over the window. She could see dimly the stained double mattress on the floor, a folding table, two chairs, one on its side. There was a smell of vomit, of sweat, of beer overlaid with the strong oily smell of fish and chips. Against the wall

cowered a woman, a child in her arms.

She said gently:

'It's all right, Mr Price. I'll have that knife. You don't mean to hurt them. She's your kid. You wouldn't want to hurt either of them. I know what it is, it's too hot, and you've had enough. We all have.'

She had seen it before, on the estate as well as on thc beat, that moment when the burden of frustration hopelessness and misery suddenly became too heavy an� the mind exploded into an anarchy of protest. He ha� indeed had too much. Too many unpaid, unpayable bills too much worry, too many demands, too much frustratior and, of course, too much drink. She had walked up to hirr not speaking, calmly meeting his eyes, holding out hel hand for the knife. She wasn't aware of fear, only the fea that Terry might come crashing in. There was no sound the group at the foot of the stairs was frozen into silence the street outside stilled in one of those strange moment:

of quietness which sometimes fall on even the rowdiest quar-ters of London. She could hear only her own quiet breathing and his harsh grating breaths. Then with a wild sob he had dropped the knife and flung himself towards her. She had held him, murmuring as she might to a child, and it was over.

She had overplayed Terry's part in the affair, and he had let her. But old Moll Green, never absent when there was a chance of excitement and the hope of bloodshed, had been one of those waiting, bright-eyed, at the foot of the stairs. The following Tuesday Terry had busted her for carrying hash, admittedly with small provocation, but he was behind with his self-imposed weekly quota of arrests. Moll, motivated either by an unexpected surge of female solidarity, or a revulsion against men in general and Terry in particular, had given her own version of the incident to the station sergeant. Little was subsequently said to Kate, but enough to make it plain that the truth was known, and that her reticence had done her no harm. Now she wondered briefly what had happened to that man, to Mabelle, to the child. For the first time it struck her as odd that, the incident over, her report made, she had never given any of them another thought.

She came in, closed the door and drew the heavy linen curtains, then went to telephone Alan. They had planned to see a film the following night but this would no longer be possible. It was pointless to make any plans until the case was finished. He took the news calmly as he always did when she had to break a date. One of the many things

she liked about him was that he never fussed.

He said:

'It looks then as if dinner next Thursday may not be possible either.'

'We may be through by then, but it's unlikely. Still, keep it free and if I have to I'll ring and cancel.'

'Well, good luck with the case. I hope it won't be love's

labour's lost.'

'What?'

'Sorry. Berowne is the name of an attendant lord in Shakespeare. It's an unusual and interesting name.'

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'It was an unusual and interesting death. See you next Thursday at about eight.'

'Unless you find it necessary to cancel. Goodbye, Kate.' She thought that she detected a trace of irony in his voice, then decided that tiredness had made her imagi-native. It was the first time he had wished her good luck with a case, but he had still asked no questions. He was, she thought, as punctiliously discreet about her job as she was herself. Or was it merely that he didn't care? Before he put the receiver down she said quickly:

'That attendant lord, what happened to him?'

'He loved a woman called Rosaline, but she told him to go and nurse the sick. So he went off to jest a twelvemonth in a hospital.'

There was hardly, she thought, much inspiration to be gained from that. She smiled as she put down the receiver. It was a pity about next Thursday's dinner. But there would be other dinners, other evenings. He would come when she rang and asked him. He always did.

She suspected that she had met Alan Scully just in time. Her early sexual education in the concrete underpasses of the high-rise flats and behind the bicycle sheds of her north London comprehensive, the mixture of excitement, danger and disgust, had been a good preparation for life but a poor preparation for loving. Most of the boys had been less intelligent than herself. This might not have mattered to her if they had had looks or some wit. She was amused, but also a little dismayed, to realize by the time she was eighteen that she was thinking of men as they were alleged so often to regard women, an occasional sexual or social diversion, but too unimportant to be allowed to interfere with the serious business of life; passing her A-levels, planning her career, getting away from Ellison Fair-weather Buildings. She found that she could enjoy sex while despising the source of her pleasure. It wasn't, she knew, an honest basis for any relationship. And then, two years ago, she had met Alan. His flat in a narrow street behind the British Museum had been burgled and it was she who had arrived with the fingerprint and scene of

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crime officers. He told her that he worked in a theological library in Bloomsbury and that he was an amateur col-lector of books of early Victorian sermons - it seemed to her an extraordinary choice - and that two of the most valuable volumes had been taken. They had never been recovered and she sensed from the calm resignation with which he answered her questions that he had hardly expected that they would be. His flat, small, cluttered, a repository for books rather than a space for living, was unlike any place she had ever seen, as he was unlike any man. She had had to make a return visit and they had spent about an hour chatting over coffee. He had then asked her, simply, to go with him to see a Shakespearian production at the National Theatre.

It was less than a month after that evening that they first went to bed together and he had demolished one of her firmly held assumptions, that intellectuals weren't interested in sex. He was both interested in and very good at it. They had settled into a comfortable, ap-parently mutually satisfactory, loving friendship in which each saw the other's job, without resentment or envy, as foreign territory, its speech and mores so far removed from any possibility of comprehension that they rarely spoke of it. Kate knew that he was intrigued, not so much by her lack of religious faith as by the fact that she apparently had no intellectual curiosity about its diverse and fascinating manifestations. She sensed, too, although he never said so, that he thought that her lit-erary education had been neglected. She could, if chal-lenged, quote angry modern verse about unemployed youth in the inner cities and the subjection of the blacks in South Africa, but this he saw as a poor substitute for Donne, Shakespeare, Keats or Eliot. She, for her part, saw him as an innocent, so deficient in the skills neces-sary for survival in the urban jungle that it amazed her that he should walk with such apparent indifference through its perils. Apart from the burglary, which re-mained mysterious, nothing untoward ever seemed to happen to him or, if it did, he failed to notice. It amused