Down into Darkness (5 page)

Stella and Maxine exchanged reports. Maxine glanced at what Tall-Pale and Short-Bald had to say.

‘So this man's aggressive and repressed. Hey, that'll lead us right to him.'

‘One in a million,' Stella agreed. She was leafing through Maxine's documents: missing daughters, missing sons, missing husbands and wives and fathers. Missing mothers. ‘Are these up to date?'

‘Pretty much. It's a nationwide selection, so coming in piecemeal.'

‘Any likely candidates?'

Maxine laughed. ‘Take a guess at how many slim, dark-haired girls in their teens run away from home each week.' She handed Stella another file.

‘What's this?'

‘The house to house – so far. Silano's still out there with a uniformed WPC.'

‘Silano's joined us?'

‘He was late getting secondment.'

Frank Silano was a relatively new member of
AMIP-5
. He was softly spoken and skinny and looked as if he didn't sleep nights. Stella liked him.

‘The house to house so far,' she prompted.

‘No one saw or heard a thing… oh, except Mrs Hallam, who lives five streets away. She was there when it happened, knows the victim, knows the killer, and has a photographic record of the whole event which she's prepared to hand over to us if we undertake to help establish her credentials as Anastasia Romanov.'

‘Tell me, has Mrs Hallam ever been seen to bark at the moon?'

‘It seems she has a reputation for it.'

Stella took the missing-persons files, along with the scene-of-crime report, the graphology report and the post-mortem report, to Mike Sorley's office. Getting rid of paper was one of the subtle skills of police-work. Every development, every piece of evidence, every interview, every squad meeting and every phone call had to be papered. If there was an arrest, the paperwork trebled. The trick was to keep the paper moving. In a squad like
AMIP-5
, the DI was the last call for paper. When Stella walked through Sorley's door, he glanced up, saw the files and reached for a cigarette.

‘You've been through these.' It wasn't a question, it was a plea.

‘More or less.'

‘Which?'

‘DC Hewitt was first stop. She'll have logged them. But –'

‘I know.' Sorley lit the cigarette like a man who was already eagerly anticipating the next. ‘Leave them with me.'

Stella dropped the reports next to the pile that was next to the pile beside the pile in his intray. Which is where they would stay, with a file on Elizabeth Rose Connor about eight from the top.

Elizabeth Rose Connor aka Bryony Dean.

Stella's drive home was a dictionary of London traffic argot:
cut-up, rat-run, tailgate, red-light bandit
.

When her affair with Delaney had become unignorable, and George had left, she'd continued to occupy the Vigo Street flat she and George had shared, though, as often as not, she had stayed at Delaney's place in Notting Hill. To begin with, Vigo Street had always been ‘home'. Then it had become the place she went to when things between herself and Delaney were uncertain: a refuge from rows and responsibilities. Now she wasn't sure where home was, or what it was, and the uncertainty troubled her.

When she walked in, he was pouring red wine into two glasses. He looked up at her and smiled his lopsided smile. She took the glass he offered and kissed him. The narrow planes of his face were dusted with dark stubble, and, for some reason, that roughness on her cheek made her want him.

‘How did you know?' she asked.

‘You blip the engine before you switch off.'

‘Hundreds of people do that.'

‘I know your blip.' He was putting olives into a bowl. ‘The press are very excited by the mystery girl in the tree.'

‘They are, yes. Is there food?'

‘Olives?'

‘Other food.'

‘Some. They suspect you're holding information back. A few juicy details.'

‘They're right; we are. We usually do: it helps eliminate the crazies. Some what?'

‘Some food. But not much. We could order in. What is it? And how juicy?'

Stella smiled. She walked over to him and kissed him, then bit him gently on the neck. ‘I'm not telling you, you're one of them.' It sounded like a teasing joke, but there was more to it than that. Delaney's instincts as a journalist had caused trouble between them in the past.

He said, ‘I interviewed Stanley Bowman today.'

She opened the fridge and peered inside. ‘Wheeler and dealer. Upper slopes of the Rich List.'

‘Yes. Holland Park Avenue mansion, houses in Courcheval and Tuscany, apartment in New York –'

‘Money in Liechtenstein.'

‘It's a fair bet.'

‘When you say food, Delaney, do you mean this egg?'

She called him Delaney more often than she called him John: it was part of a fondness code. He reached for the stack of meal-delivery cards by the phone and handed them to her.

‘These guys,' he said, ‘these rich guys… They don't think of money the way we do. You know – we get some, we spend it, end of the month we get some more. To them, it's an abstract.'

‘Abstract…? Like love or hate?'

‘Yes.' He paused. ‘It's not just having lots of money. It's a matter of degree. These guys aren't rich like moderately rich people are rich. It's something beyond that. Like they live in a different country with different customs and a language that only they speak.'

‘Chinese or Indian?'

‘You choose.'

She dialled a number and asked, ‘What do you want?'

He said, ‘You choose.' Then: ‘Not hate, obviously, but not adoration either.' He paused. ‘More like tough love.'

*

The dream took her to the very centre of the Bull Ring, the heart of the Harefield Estate. The place held special significance for her, because she had killed a man there.

When she was growing up on the estate, Stella knew the Bull Ring was a place to stay away from after dark. If she was sent down eighteen floors to buy a quarter of vodka, she would hurry round the perimeter to get to the booze store rather than walk across. Like all the estate kids who weren't gang members, she had mapped Harefield in her head, and the Bull Ring, like the walk spaces under the tower blocks, carried large diversion and no-entry signs.

She had been working on a case: asking questions that some people on the estate didn't want answered. She should have known what was coming when the cab took a short-cut through Harefield. The driver left her and the cab in the Bull Ring, where two guys were waiting. One was wearing new, white sneakers: Nike Man. She had reached back into the cab for a weapon and come up with a wheel-nut crank. When she swung it, the crank took Nike Man in the side of the neck. He went down like a dropped log, but she didn't know she'd killed him until a few days later when one of her informants gave her the news.

She should have told Mike Sorley, written a full report, cooperated fully with the SIO and accepted suspension for the duration of the inquiry. In fact, she had told only Delaney.

Now the dream held her in that self-same spot. Nike Man was propped up against the cab, where he'd fallen, eyes fixed on her and wearing an expression of infinite regret. Stella's mother walked towards her, wearing the farcical clothes that were fashionable in the late 1970s. She was smiling the tight little smile that meant trouble.

Stella began to cry, anticipating the slap that would rock her head sideways and leave her ears ringing, but then she was in her mother's arms,
It's all right, everything's all right
, and
then she was standing by the big sash window in Delaney's apartment, fully awake and still crying.

A blush of light-pollution in the sky at 3 a.m., sirens over the low rumble of traffic. Stella stood in the darkened room, eyes closed, trying to recapture the feeling of being held, because in all her childhood that had never happened to her.

In his scorched room, high above the Strip, Gideon Woolf was also watching the night.

It was late for the whores, but there were a few still working the kerbs, picking up small-hours punters from the casinos and shebeens who, for some reason, imagined that getting a high-speed blow-job in a reeking alley would be the perfect end to a night of waste and loss.

Gideon liked the Strip: it was a place to come home to. In the
Silent Wolf
computer game there was a location called Gasoline Alley where all manner of bad guys hung out, where all manner of bad things went down. The girls of that place were hot and tough-talking, their short skirts and deep cleavages spoke of sex, but at a heavy cost. Some of the men had work-out bodies and strong jawlines; others were ratty and mean and carried custom-built breech-loaders.

The Strip and Gasoline Alley were the same place to Gideon. Like Silent Wolf, he would take a straight line through the dealers and the down-and-outs, the hookers and the hard men, imagining his eyes a pale yellow, his home-dyed yellow hair a spiky ruff across his shoulders.

Stella dropped a single ice cube into a shot glass and followed it with a big slug of vodka, taking the liquid all the way to the top. The vodka had come straight from the freezer, but the ice was part of a ritual. She drank it off in one, then repeated the dose. She would be a little sluggish in the
morning, but it was a worthwhile price. She had learned that a clear head develops vivid dreams.

After the third shot, she felt an edge of weariness: her limbs heavy, her thoughts beginning to blur. She went back to bed. Delaney stirred and spoke a sentence in a jumbled sleep-alphabet.

Keep your dreams to yourself, she thought, then put her head on the pillow and fell asleep in the same moment.

Gideon Woolf lay on his bed under the charred beams.

His eyes were closed and he was dreaming, but he wasn't asleep.

Stella Mooney, images from the dream still floating in her head…

She parked her unmarked car a couple of streets back from one of the slip roads on to Harefield. Those two streets were a buffer. Any closer and she might come back to find the car up on blocks and the wheels gone. She was pretty sure she could get a fix on the apartment the man and woman had entered: go back to Apartment
II
36, Block A, walk towards the stairwell for… oh, maybe a count of ten, then look across. She seemed to remember something yellow: a yellow blind in the window perhaps.

She walked the narrow strip of asphalt that lay across the waste land of the DMZ, feeling she ought to be carrying a white flag.

I'll knock on the door, and if it's her –

If it's her… what?

It won't be her
.

You saw her
.

I saw someone who looked like her, that's all
.

Sure of that? Then why are you going back?

As she got closer, Stella noticed activity round the blocks at ground level and on the high walkways: people moving in one direction, all of them seeming to have a purpose. Generally, people on Harefield either sauntered or ran; this was more a little procession of people with the same thing in mind.

When she reached the first of the blocks, Stella pushed in through the glass-and-chickenwire doors, took the bare
stairwell to the first walkway and went to the elbow of the building for a clear view. Strings of people were converging on the Bull Ring: a thin crowd but determined, like the diehard supporters of a non-league football club. She took out her mobile phone and dialled Harriman's number.

The first thing he said was, ‘DI Sorley's been looking for you, Boss.'

‘Make an excuse. Before you do that –'

‘What kind of an excuse?'

‘A good one. Listen, call out the uniforms for an event on Harefield. Looks like a dog fight.'

‘You're down on Harefield?'

‘Took a wrong turn. Make the call.'

‘You're looking for –'

‘Make the call, DC Harriman. Advise them to request an ARV.'

Stella had left the estate seventeen years before, but there were still a few people who remembered her. To many of them she was the bitch-cop, the one who'd gone over to the enemy. You didn't have to be a bad guy to think of cops that way: a ‘them-and-us reflex' worked for most of the people who were sometimes labelled as the underclass. If you were a member of that anti-elite, ‘Us' was anyone like you; ‘Them' was anyone else.

Underclass wasn't quite right, though; they were beyond class, class-free, just as they were beyond rules or conscience or sympathy. There were those among them who would knife you for your hamburger; if you looked at them the wrong way, they would jump on your face until you were dead.

Stella joined the procession. In her jeans and trainers and scuffed leather blouson, she was as close to Harefield mufti as made no difference. They were heading for the Bull Ring.

*

The
AMIP-5
team had worked the street three times; someone was always out, or else not answering the door. Maxine Hewitt and Frank Silano had decided to make another pass at the fifteen houses where they'd failed to get a response. This time every door opened; and of the twenty-eight people interviewed, three had something definite to report.

Gerald Arthur Montague. Victoria Mary Sansom. Susan Joanna Phipps.

Gerry, Viki and Susie.

‘I saw them, it must have been them, she was leaning on his shoulder, like, you know, like someone in love.'

‘What I saw… it was a man and a woman. I thought she was drunk.'

‘Was it them? Was it her and him? Ohmigod, I saw them!'

They agreed to make statements there and then. Silano took notes while Maxine asked the questions.

Gerry had been walking through the park when he saw them. He thought it was them. It must have been them. The man was tall and broad, and the girl was a slip of a thing. No, he hadn't been close enough to be able to say what they looked like; they looked like lovers.