Down into Darkness (16 page)

Stella leaned over to get a better look. The same girl. There was no doubt about it. She looked at the MPB form, and the name leaped out at her.

Elizabeth.

Lizzie.

Melanie Dean said, ‘So it was her, then.' She hadn't even bothered to look at the Elizabeth Rose Connor mugshot Harriman held out to her. ‘It looked like her, I said so.'

‘You said it looked like her. You also said it wasn't her.'

‘I didn't know. Only that she'd gone.'

‘You thought it might be her, but you didn't say.'

‘No, it just looked like her. I could see it looked like her, but I never thought it was, not until now.' She half turned away. ‘I mean, I looked at the picture, and I could see something of Bryony in it…' She was trying to find an excuse for herself. ‘I didn't like to think about it.'

Stella said, ‘I'm sorry.'

Another flawless day apart from the carbon emissions, the jet-fuel offloads, the ozone factor. From 1136, Block A, all you could see was blue sky. Melanie went to the window and opened it; at that height there was a faint breeze.

Stella looked at the woman, searching for some trace of sorrow. She said, ‘Why would she be calling herself Elizabeth Connor?'

‘That was her nan's name. She loved her nan.'

‘Why would she use it?'

Melanie sighed, as if anyone ought to know the answer. ‘She had to live.'

‘Benefit fraud,' Harriman said.

‘She was on the Social already. I expect he put her on again. He always claimed twice. Most round here do.'

‘Your boyfriend,' Stella said. ‘Chris Fuller.'

Melanie laughed. It sounded like someone shaking pebbles in a box. ‘Yeah, bloody Chris.'

Harriman asked, ‘And would it be Chris that was sending her out whoring?'

Melanie didn't blink. ‘Yeah, that sounds right.'

‘And when he was living here,' Stella said, ‘did he send you out too?'

‘Yeah.'

‘And Bryony?'

‘Yeah.' There was a pause before Melanie added, ‘Course, we did think of being famous film stars or marrying royalty, but it seemed like a lot of bother.'

Stella asked for a photo of Chris, and Melanie found an away-day threesome, Chris in the middle looking solemn. She handed it over. ‘It rained that day. Day out to the sea, it was. Day wasted.'

Harriman said, ‘If you wanted to find Chris, where would you look?'

‘I don't know. How would I fucking know?' No one spoke for a while, then Melanie said, ‘He'll still be claiming for her. Saying she's sick…'

Stella looked round the room: chipboard furniture, bare floor, bare walls, a lick of grime over everything. Little Stella Mooney's home from home. She said, ‘I'm afraid we can't release the body to you, just yet. There'll be an inquest.'

Melanie said, ‘I can't afford no funeral.'

A squad-car siren started faint and grew, stopping somewhere eleven floors below. The Bull Ring, Stella guessed. Just the one vehicle, so not a major op: the dealers could go on cutting and wrapping, the whores whoring, the fixers fixing.

As they were leaving, she asked, ‘What do you think? Was it Chris? Did Chris kill Bryony?'

For the first time, there was genuine surprise in Melanie's expression. ‘Chris? No, course not.'

‘Why?'

‘He loved her, didn't he? That's why they went off together. First off, he loved me; then it was her.' She gave a shaky little smile. ‘He was always selfish like that.'

Cuts of sky between the blocks, a shimmer of heat-haze rising and bringing with it smells of fast food, dope, decay and a subtle admix of bad luck. Little Stella sitting all alone in a room on the eighteenth floor, watching birds drift by, hearing the slam of music, the blatter of TVs, the yells of pain and hatred filtering up the stairwell.

Harriman shrugged out of his leather jacket as they emerged on to the walkway. He said, ‘Shit, it's hot.' He started to walk away, then realized Stella wasn't with him. He turned and saw her standing utterly still just outside the door of 1136, Block A, staring across the gap to the door of 1169, Block B. A woman was standing there, arm raised.

Across that short distance, that limitless distance, almost near enough to touch, almost lost in planes of blue, standing on the concrete walkway, Stella's mother waved like an excited passenger on the deck of a ship coming gently in to dock.

She said, ‘Hello, Stell. I thought that was you.'

Gideon Woolf was off territory. In a scabrous pub by London Fields, he sat with a beer and waited to be approached. He would have been noticed before he got to the bar to order his drink; being noticed was easy; being approached constituted a commitment. He was easy in his mind, though that area of London was a risk for the unwary. While he waited, he ran the movie scene again.

The car, the gate sliding back, the man getting out. Since devising the scene, Woolf had been on location: he'd scouted the venue, he had been the eye of the camera. To the left of the gate was a tall hedge and then a narrow path between the hedge and a screen of four skinny silver birches. The car is running, the gate is back, Woolf and the man are in that screened space. He acknowledged the need to be quick – the car is on the drive-up from the road, still ticking over, the gate is open, the man is nowhere to be seen.

That necessary speed was one of the reasons that had brought him to London Fields. A knife isn't always fast, isn't always fatal, and it can be hard work. But speed wasn't the only reason; a single gunshot was part of Gideon Woolf's story.

He drank his beer and bought another. It was early afternoon, and the pub was filling up, but no one sat at his table.

Bryony… Lizzie… down from the tree and laid out on a slab.

Stella was looking at the post-mortem blad when Maxine Hewitt perched on a chair at her side. Chocolate bar of the
day was TimTam. Maxine was carrying one for each of them. She looked over Stella's shoulder at the evidence of Sam Burgess's delicate butchery: Bryony laid open, her ribs sprung, the heart–lung system gone.

‘Do you think he killed her – the boyfriend?'

‘Her mother doesn't.' Stella shrugged. ‘It wouldn't be unusual would it? But then, did he also kill Leonard Pigeon?'

‘You don't think so?'

‘Not really. We'd better find him, though.' She let go a little hiss of annoyance. ‘DI Collier's insisting.'

‘DI Collier's fairly loud on the issue.'

‘DI Collier thinks boyfriend Chris is our man.'

Maxine tossed her wrapper towards a waste bin and missed by a mile. She said, ‘Surveillance, then: if he's still picking up her benefit.'

‘And his own,' Stella guessed. ‘Fancy it?'

‘Sitting in a car with a Tango, a cheeseburger and a sweaty cop, how could I resist?'

‘Ask Collier to get some local help, but coordinate it yourself.'

It was Maxine's cue to leave, but she didn't take it. After a minute she said, ‘When I came out to my mother, she slammed the door and locked it.'

Stella continued to turn the pages of the PM blad: Bryony at various stages of lack and loss. Eventually, she said, ‘It's not like that – a disagreement, a feud…'

‘No? What, then?'

‘I hate her. I always have.'

‘Always?'

‘So far as I can remember.'

‘Oh…' Maxine didn't know where to go from there.

Stella said, ‘Take Frank Silano with you. Tell him not to sweat.'

*

She leafed through the blad as if the sight of Bryony's body, broken down to spare parts, might cause a clue to spring out at her – an answer, a
reason
– but her mind wandered.

She remembered standing at the door of 1169, Block B, and ringing the bell; she remembered the splash of blood on the doorstep.

Harriman passed her desk and glanced sideways at the blad. ‘That's us in the end, isn't it?' he said. ‘Meat and bone and hair.'

Stella's reply was too soft to be heard. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘That's us.'

A tall man with razored sideburns and laughable aviator shades sat down at Woolf's table. He seemed a little vague, which might have been anything from coke to cool. After a few checks and trade-offs, he made some offers. He offered coke, crack, Billy, rophie, blow, scag, Nazi crank, skunk, rush, coco snow, black Russian, Texas red and acid.

Woolf said no thanks.

The man offered girls, boys, trans, black, white, Asian, Oriental, straight, bent, blow, hand, skin, anal, facial, pain, rain, rubber and leather.

Woolf said no thanks.

The man offered a Merc
C180
, a Porsche Boxter, a Lamborghini Gallardo, a BMW
Z4
, a Ferrari 360, a Jag
XK8
, a Maserati Spyder.

Woolf said no thanks.

The man offered a straight choice: a Swiss SIG Sauer
P220
or a Czech
CZ75
.

Woolf took the SIG Sauer.

Melanie Dean sat on the floor and looked at the photographs. There weren't many; she kept them in a shoe box. They were baby photographs and class photographs and photo-booth
foursomes; some had been taken on disposables and were mostly from hen parties or a girls' night out. There was one taken when Bryony was six, a school photo, in which she was looking straight at the camera and giving a toothy grin. She looked so happy you could almost believe it.

Melanie had arranged the photos in a semicircular spread, so she could look at them all in turn. She had been down eleven floors and across the DMZ to a liquor store for a bottle of vodka, which was now almost gone, and she looked at the photos, which seemed a little blurred, a touch out of focus, which in fact some of them truly were.

She closed her eyes and, for a moment or two, slept. A little dream was gifted to her in which she could hear Bryony's voice but couldn't see her daughter, so she assumed she must be somewhere in the flat. She went from room to room, but the place was empty and, when she woke, just a few seconds later, it was with the realization that ‘empty' was the word for it, ‘empty' was the best possible description, and if she hadn't been able to find a word before to describe the way things were now and had almost always been, ‘empty' was it, ‘empty' was spot on, ‘empty' was right on the money.

She picked up Bryony with the toothy grin and slipped her into a pocket, stepped out of her front door on to the walkway, then hopped up on to the concrete balustrade and spread her arms. For a moment she was still, then she tilted an inch, then another, and then she was gone.

When Tom Davison's call came through, Stella was on her own in the squad room reading reports.

He said, ‘I used to enjoy these phone calls.'

‘Tom, it was a one-night stand, though I know you don't want to think of it that way, and there were things I should have told you, and it was my fault and I'm sorry.'

‘Sorry about?'

‘Misleading you. Disappointing you. I don't know…'

‘I wasn't disappointed. Not at the time, only later.' She didn't speak. He added, ‘You're with someone, I know.'

‘That's right.'

‘So what was I?'

‘You were lovely.'

She hoped it was what he wanted to hear, but she also knew it to be the truth. Her night with him had been strange: strangely exciting, strangely intimate. Stranger still was the fact that she felt uncomfortable using his given name.

He said, ‘Yeah, okay.' Then: ‘So, you've got a DNA match, and you've got a let-down. The match is in all twenty-six CODIS sites; that definitely gives you the same man at the two scenes of crime you nominated: Leonard Pigeon and unidentified female.'

‘Bryony Dean.'

‘Oh, okay.'

‘The same man in what role?'

‘Well, he killed them, I think we can safely say that.'

‘The let-down being?'

‘He's not on any database, so, apart from being able to put him at both scenes, I can't be much use to you.'

‘Well, we know it's not copy-cat. That was always a possibility.'

‘Okay, so…' Davison paused. ‘That's about all I have to say.'

Stella said, ‘I'm glad we're not doing this face to face.'

‘We already did it face to face.' Then he laughed: ‘Sorry. My mouth takes off sometimes.'

‘I'm glad because I should have spoken a long time ago, and I didn't, and that was weak of me, and I'm sorry.'

‘Don't be.'

‘Sorry if I…' She was going to say ‘hurt you' but that felt too intimate, and too likely. ‘If I made things difficult for you.'

Davison gave a little laugh; a neutral laugh. ‘Don't worry, Stella. That wasn't me; it was someone who looked like me.'

She drove home through an early-evening mist of petrol fumes, the sun filtering through, gold and orange, in-car sound-systems feuding with each other, the sky a high, pale blue fretted with white vapour trails, as one-a-minute planes bellied down into the Heathrow flight path.

There was something nagging at her, something someone had said, like a tune almost remembered or a name on the tip of the tongue, but she couldn't call it up.

Delaney was closing off his piece on a very wealthy man with a gunslinger's moustache and a wry sense of humour.

She sat down with him and told him about the encounter on Harefield, she and her mother looking at each other across an unbridgeable gap. It was the first thing she said: not ‘Hi', or ‘Fancy a drink?', or ‘How was your day?'

‘I saw my mother today. She came back. She's living on Harefield.'

Delaney knew the story of Stella and Stella's mother. He said, ‘What happened?'

‘Who knows. Maybe something fouled up in Manchester; maybe she got homesick.'

‘No – what happened?'