Pain of Death (3 page)
Even in the dead of night, Keller ward is bright and clean. It smells of talcum powder and warm milk. Brightly coloured animals romp across the walls in primary colours and the distant reprise of cartoon soundtracks swoons through the halls of new life, like lullabies. It is a world away from Kerry Degg’s small room, just a couple of corridors away.
However, in a room built for one tiny human, a row of glum people huddle along one wall: a uniformed officer, a doctor and a nurse, who Staffe recognises from Kerry’s ward – the one with the golden hair.
DC Josie Chancellor sits by the plastic-domed cot. Within the germ-free bubble is the baby they have called Grace. The DNA has been sought and is being analysed, but the outcome is widely predicted: Baby Grace is the daughter of Kerry Degg. The father? That remains to be seen.
‘I found her, sir,’ says Josie, looking up with wide eyes, her kohl bled black in gothic zags down to her cheeks.
‘I’m sorry, Josie. I should have dealt with Degg myself.’
‘No!’ says Josie. Her eyes are glazed and her lips are plump, blood red. ‘If anything had been different about tonight, I wouldn’t have found her. She might …’
‘She won’t go home. We keep telling her,’ says the nurse.
‘She was so light, like lint. And she screamed for me. It was the most beautiful thing.’ Josie turns towards him and Staffe wraps her up in a tight embrace. ‘Sir, it was the most beautiful thing.’
He thinks, he must smell of drink and the club and maybe scent. ‘Thank God you went out when you did.’
‘Jombaugh got a call, sir. About two minutes after I found the baby. It sounded like a woman, but he couldn’t be sure. They were talking through some kind of device. We’re having the tape analysed.’
‘Where was the call made from?’
‘A prepaid mobile. No chance of a trace.’
‘They told Jom about the baby?’
‘Described the exact place. Said to call an ambulance, that the baby wasn’t taking its food properly and she was ill.’
‘Why wouldn’t they take it to a hospital?’
‘A police station’s the next best thing? You know how quiet the City is at night. They must have passed her through the railings. Might even have been on their way here and lost their nerve, or got spooked by something.’
‘And Sean Degg was here. He couldn’t have brought her. Not personally.’
‘I thought she was dead but she screamed. Another few minutes … They say she may die, still. Who would leave her like that?’ Josie pushes Staffe away and turns to the plastic bubble, staring intently at the baby, naked save a nappy that swamps her. Her eyes are shut, tight; her tummy swollen and her ribs push against her blue-white skin. She has a swirl of matted black hair that winds around the crown of her head. ‘She has nails. Have you seen, sir? She has nails and she can kick her legs and she held onto my finger. She made a fist.’
The nurse says, ‘Her brain is growing. Even in sleep, babies learn about their world.’ She smiles, beaming. ‘It’s proven.’
*
In the corridor, the ward sister tells Staffe that the baby’s depositor had ensured the baby was fed and wore a disposable nappy of the Mamapapa range. The doctors reckon she is a couple of days old and is very weak, quite probably premature. The baby has a chest infection and her heart is weak.
‘Consistent with being born in a cold, damp environment?’ Staffe says.
The sister nods. ‘I’ve heard about the woman Degg. If she’s the mother you will find the bastards that did it, won’t you?’
We might already have them, he thinks. Staffe can’t get his head round what might possess Sean Degg to be involved in treating his only child in such a way. He decides he needs Pulford, that his party will have to be interrupted. He makes the call, tells his sergeant to pour some coffee down and to get a taxi to Flower and Dean, meet him there in an hour. And he makes his way to Leadengate, to get the key off Sean Degg.
In the corridor, a commotion erupts outside Baby Grace’s private room. A doctor runs past them and when they look back, Josie is being led from the room in the clutches of a nurse. In the clean and brittle hospital air, a silence descends, into which the high-pitched squeal of a cotside monitor begins to soar.
*
Sean Degg is beginning to look as if he hasn’t slept in a long time. The skin under his eyes sags. His face is grey and he stares into his clasped hands. Stan Buchanan comes in and sits alongside him. He chews on gum, but the stain of the night is still thick in his air.
Sean Degg says, ‘They told me a baby was found. A girl.’
‘We’ll be needing your key, Sean.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t need to give you a reason. We have the warrant.’
‘Something has happened,’ says Sean.
‘The baby might not survive. She has an infection.’
Sean puts his head in his hands, says, ‘What do you know about the baby?’
‘We’ll check her out. Someone will be in for your DNA.’
‘Is she mine? Mine and Kerry’s?’
‘All I know is we won’t rest until we find who left Kerry down in that tunnel and who dumped that baby. So you’d better tell us now, everyone she knows. Anyone who hated her.’
‘Nobody hated her.’
‘Then who loved her?’ says Staffe. ‘You can love someone too much, can’t you, Sean? What about family?’
Sean looks at his feet, looks cagey. ‘You want me to do your job for you?’
‘You want us to find who did that to Kerry, don’t you?’
‘And you’ll release me – if I help?’
‘He should be with his wife,’ says Buchanan.
‘Tell us,’ says Staffe.
‘She has a sister, Bridget,’ says Sean.
‘Maybe Kerry went to stay with her, when she left you.’
‘They don’t get on.’
‘Where does she live?’ Staffe hands him a piece of paper and a pen. ‘And what about any friends Kerry has? Special friends.’
Sean shakes his head. ‘I’d be the last to know. I always was.’
‘Why did you stay with her?’
‘Because I can’t leave her. I tried once, but I can’t be without her.’
‘My client has co-operated fully,’ says Buchanan. ‘His wife is in hospital and there is no evidence that he has had any contact with her since he reported her missing nearly three months ago. He hasn’t had a proper meal …’
‘So take him, Stanley,’ says Staffe. ‘Take him for a pub breakfast in Smithfield Market. Jom will sign him out.’
*
Staffe looks at the address for Kerry Degg’s sister, Bridget Lamb: 16 The Green, Thames Ditton. ‘Shit,’ he says. He knows the house, less than half a mile from where he grew up. It is a smart place. A different world from Flower and Dean.
As he drives to Degg’s house, he rings Josie. Her voice sounds gluey and he can tell she has been crying. ‘How is the baby?’ he asks.
‘They’ve put her on life support. They say they can’t increase the dosage for the infection. She can’t take it.’
‘Try and get some sleep, Josie.’
‘Good night, sir.’
It is a bright spring morning.
Staffe flips through his notebook, runs his finger down to the name of Paul Asquith of the Underground Victorians. He calls the number, apologises for the hour, but needn’t have worried. When he asks if Asquith would mind terribly helping him with a further investigation of the Smithfield tunnel, the amateur historian actually gasps with uncontained pleasure.
*
The deeper Staffe scratches at Sean’s house, the more he realises that he isn’t close to understanding Kerry Degg, née Kilbride. Apart from her book collection, which includes first editions of Philip K. Dick and Angela Carter, he soon uncovered notebooks full of poems and sketches; untravelled charts of life-affirming journeys, by foot, across the continents of Africa, Asia and South America. There were self-scrawled vocab books for Spanish and French, and he flicked through the Spanish one, gleaned from the familiar shapes of the foreign words that she was of an intermediate standard.
He sits cross-legged by her desk in the bedroom and reads her poems, soon gathers that they follow two themes: the futility of the search for a perfect love; and the loneliness of her childhood.
Staffe doesn’t know how long he has been here, reaching into this dying stranger’s life, but when he hears a creak in the hall, he looks at his watch, realises he will be late for Asquith. Without looking up, he says, ‘You done, Pulford?’
The springs on the bed behind him heave and when he looks up, he sees not Pulford’s long legs or trendily sculpted hair, but the hunched and emaciated frame of Sean Degg, who talks to the floor: ‘She never let me into her notebooks. And I never looked. I could have, but I didn’t. Nobody knows her like I do. Does she write me in a bad light?’
Staffe closes the book. He can’t work Sean Degg out. To look at him, you might think he is a low-life loafer, scruffily dressed and unkempt. But the things he says suggest someone else. ‘In this job, it sometimes pays to think ill of people. It’s an instinct.’
‘So she did write ill of me?’
‘She writes ill of herself and of love and her childhood. If it is her wish that you don’t read them, you wouldn’t want me to say any more than that. But I wouldn’t say she wrote ill of you.’
‘I couldn’t ever harm her.’
‘Before, you said you “curated” Kerry.’
‘I have always worked in performance. I went to university, you know. I studied stage design.’
‘Where do you curate?’
‘Residencies, tours, one-off nights.’
Staff tries to disguise his scepticism, says, ‘Tell me about her father.’
‘Because I am older than her?’
‘She was sixteen when you met.’
‘And I was twenty-nine. You think that’s sick, do you?’
‘It’s unusual, but not sick.’
‘I couldn’t stay at the hospital. It was too much.’
‘You think this baby is yours?’
‘They said she might die.’
‘The baby, or Kerry?’
‘I have a feeling one of them will be taken from me.’
‘I asked you about her father.’
‘I don’t know him.’
Staffe watches as Sean looks away. He can tell when a man is lying but has a lesser instinct for the truth. He gathers together what he feels he needs and makes a list, hands it to Sean, returning the rest of Kerry’s possessions to her desk.
Degg looks at the list:
notebook, red; notebook, blue; school records; doctor’s notes; sundry photographs x 12
. He doesn’t look up or reply when Staffe bids him farewell.
*
‘What exactly are we looking for?’ whispers Pulford, to Staffe, straining to see beyond the twenty-foot beam from his head torch. Paul Asquith marches ahead, carrying a larger lamp, casting a wider beam far into the dark. He strides confidently into the Spitalfields tunnel where he had discovered Kerry Degg. ‘We’ll have to watch him,’ Staffe whispers.
‘You don’t think …?’
Staffe raises a finger to his lips and glares at Pulford. The ethanol afterburn of the sergeant’s party is strong.
As they follow Asquith, Staffe ponders quite what sequence of events might have brought Kerry Degg to this place, having had her baby already. Could that be possible?
When they reach the spot where Kerry Degg had been found, with its dark stains illuminated by Paul Asquith’s powerful torch, Staffe says to the historian, ‘Where would you hide something – from here?’
‘There is a series of spurs – some were trial tunnels, others to accommodate machinery. We haven’t actually finished mapping them. The documentation isn’t what it might be.’
‘But you have maps?’
Asquith smiles, proudly, and holds up a clipboard, to which he has taped a plastic envelope. He shows it to Staffe. ‘The
red-hatched
areas are what we sourced from the original documents.’
‘And the yellow?’
‘That was our mission. To verify these minor tunnels and spurs.’
‘And we are here?’ Staffe points to a red area.
Asquith nods, sagely.
‘Knowing what you do of the system down here, and if you had brought someone down here, say, a week ago, and wished their presence to be untraceable, where would you store the provisions – and secrete the traces of life?’
‘Food and water and ablutions? I can’t be sure, but there is a link a hundred yards or so to the west. It is in some documents but not others.’
‘Is it safe?’ asks Pulford.
‘This could have been a station. That’s what I think. But they chose Aldgate.’
‘Is it safe?’
‘We shall see.’
Pulford takes a step away from Asquith’s arc of light, holds Staffe’s sleeve and tugs, waits until Asquith has advanced beyond earshot. He hisses, ‘They could be down here, still.’
‘Who?’
‘We have an officer on the door. Nobody has come out. If they were down here when you answered Asquith’s call, doing whatever they were doing with Kerry Degg – they could still be here. They would have to be.’
Asquith turns, thirty yards ahead, says, ‘I’m willing to take my chances.’
‘And so am I,’ says Staffe, who turns to Pulford, says, ‘Go back above ground, start phoning around everyone in Kerry’s address book. And check out all the Underground Victorians. I’ll be up when we’re done here.’
‘Are you sure you want to go further down there?’
‘I’ll be fine, Pulford. Go on.’
Staffe feels his chest tighten as he watches the shape of his sergeant fade to nothing, his light dying. Just him and Asquith left. One map, two torches and God knows how many tunnels.
DCI Pennington slaps his rolled-up
Telegraph
in the palm of his hand, with a steady beat. He has a smile on his face as he approaches Pulford’s desk. Opposite, Josie’s desk is empty. She is at the hospital, but must have left Baby Grace at some point the previous evening because, as is proven by the unfolding of Pennington’s newspaper, the national papers had photographed her, palpably worn by events. She looks straight into camera, beneath the headline ‘Blue Angel. WPC saves abandoned baby’.
‘For once, the press regards us kindly,’ says Pennington, ever aware of the political aspects of his job. A smile forms on his gaunt face.
‘It’s wrong, though,’ says Pulford. ‘The baby is not saved yet. She is on life support.’
Pennington turns the pages, trails a finger along the columns, and taps the newsprint where his own name is writ. ‘As I say, had DC Chancellor not found the baby and acted with such professional instincts, Baby Grace would be dead now. She gave that baby a chance.’
‘But I know her, sir. She’ll blame herself if anything happens to the child.’
Pennington reinstates his resolute exterior. ‘We’ll have a chat with her. Now, how’s the investigation going?’ He looks around the room. ‘And where’s Staffe? He’s not in his office.’
Pulford feels a pang of dread, having left Staffe down in the tunnel with that spooky amateur historian, Asquith.
Pennington sits in Josie’s chair, looking across the shared desk at Pulford. ‘I hear the husband is the father – not so for the other kids. If she was going to get rid, he could have held her, against her will. You can tell this Degg that if he confesses, he will not get a rough ride. The public will be with him. It’s a saved baby we’re talking about, and he played his part. Do you understand?’
‘Have you spoken to Degg, sir?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t think he could harm Kerry Degg.’
‘I’ve read the notes. He was saving the baby, not harming the mother. Think positive, Pulford. Now, where did you say Staffe was?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
*
Staffe lies in the dark. He is flat to the cold, damp ground, imagining what it would have been like for Kerry Degg. Rats scuttle and he sniffs at the putrid air, wonders how long you could stand it down here – let alone with new life growing inside you every second, every minute, getting closer to that moment when another human pushes and strains and finally punches their way out of you and into the world.
He is at a low, tight dead end within the petering network of tunnels. According to Asquith, the engineers may have decided the geological substructure was wrong here. Asquith had suggested that money, or lack of it, might have had a part to play in abandoning plans for a station on this part of what became the Metropolitan Line, a line along which they generally cut and covered rather than burrowed.
Staffe’s breathing is constricted and he twists over, looks across at the array of plastic bags. He can’t help sniffing. The bags hold the detritus from weeks, maybe months: drink cartons, vitamin supplements, rotted fruit skins, takeaway dishes – and shit. Human shit.
He is exhausted and slides his way out of this low enclave. From what they have discovered, he is certain that Kerry Degg didn’t have the baby above ground and then come down here.
Staffe picks up the plastic bags, trying not to inhale the smell as he makes his way out. The uniformed officer at the entrance to the tunnel looks at him oddly as he passes, watching Staffe put the bags in the footwell of his Peugeot, then open all the windows.
He places a smaller bag on the front seat. It holds what looks like dried-out offal. He suspects it might be the placenta – from the little he knows of such human biology. And they found an iron loop, low down on the wall at the dead end of the furthest tunnel. It could have been used to restrain Kerry. It would account for the bracelet marks on her wrists. What must it have been like for her? She is strong. He thinks she will survive, speculates as to what kind of a tale she will tell.
*
Jadus Golding sits in a wing-backed chair looking out across the Limekiln estate and sips from a can of Nourishment drink. In his left hand, a half-smoked spliff burns away. He is all alone in this room full of people: family and friends.
When he sees Staffe, his eyes brighten, temporarily, then close down their hoods, as if he is struggling not to surrender to sleep. Jadus’s way.
Staffe had gone back to his flat in Queens Terrace and cleaned up. He’d rustled up some coddled eggs and munched down an entire cantaloupe melon, washed that through with two cans of Red Bull, then dropped the bags off at Forensics. Two blocks away in a £5 car wash, a youth had given Staffe’s car the third degree. The youth had tied a West Ham scarf around his face to guard against the smell and quoted twenty quid for a quick valet. Danger money, he had called it.
He kisses Jasmine on the cheek and she says how nice he smells. She introduces Staffe around the room and he shakes the hands of Jadus’s family. His father is absent, which is a cause for relief. The last time Staffe saw him, Mr Golding spat at him; the day Jadus was sentenced to seven years. Partly because of Staffe’s efforts, the boy, now a man, had served less than half.
Jadus’s grandmother grips Staffe tightly by the hand and thanks him. The grandfather turns his back.
Jasmine puts some music on: calypso, he thinks. An uncle and an aunt get up and dance, gliding across the floor, hips undulating to the beat. The grandmother serves some punch. Jadus, unmoved in his winged armchair, catches Staffe’s attention, beckons him. ‘Didn’t think you’d come.’
‘I said I would,’ says Staffe.
Jadus smiles, doped. ‘Thought it’d be all crack pipe and Cristal and pussy, right?’
‘You have a good family, Jadus. You’re lucky.’
‘Oh, I’m lucky all right.’ Jadus looks around the room, a serious expression establishing itself. ‘Got my Millie to tend for now.’ Suddenly, Jadus looks sad.
Staffe doesn’t know why this twenty-one-year-old isn’t more pleased to be free once more.
‘You
are
going to be all right?’
‘That job’s not there. Jasmine’s cousin with the pie shop is a prick. I can’t work for him.’
‘When’s your first session with probation?’
‘If I can’t get a job, the whole thing’s fucked, man. I got no chance.’
‘Why did you lie?’
‘Who’s going to give me a job?’
‘Plenty of people. You’re an intelligent man, you’re prepared to work.’
Jadus feigns a weak smile and raises the spliff to his mouth, takes a long drag. ‘You know, I don’t understand why you chose me.’
‘Chose?’
‘Visiting me. You said you wanted to help me turn my life around. Your words.’
‘In my job, people like you and people like me … it’s a battle. We win, we lock you up. You win, you do it again. I just wanted to try the middle way.’
‘You really don’t think I’ll do it again?’
Staffe looks across at Jasmine Cash, beautiful and happy and surrounded by family in the home she has made from the sty; baby Millie on her hip. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Maybe I could walk the fucking beat, hey?’
Staffe sneaks a look at his watch, but Jadus catches him. ‘There’s somewhere I have to be. Sorry.’
‘I guess there’ll always be another me, waiting to fill the empty bed, right. You go catch the poor motherfucker, Inspector. Don’t let me stop you.’
Staffe mulls what Jadus had said, and, true enough, by the time he is caught in traffic, where Old Street meets City Road, his mind is turning towards the hospital, the bed of Kerry Degg. Will he get to talk to her, ever? Would she have known her captor?
*
A uniformed officer guards the door to Kerry’s room and the doctor brings Pulford up to date. They can’t prescribe any stronger doses of antibiotics even though the infection is spreading. Kerry isn’t strong enough to withstand an operation, but if she doesn’t improve in thirty-six hours, they will have to employ the knife anyway.
‘Will she make it?’ asks Pulford.
‘She’s very poorly,’ says the doctor.
‘If you had to say one way. If you were a betting man.’
The doctor looks at Pulford as if he is unclean. ‘We may well have to gamble, Sergeant. But I’m not a betting man. These conversations are worthless.’
Pulford sits with Kerry and is still there when Staffe arrives. He watches as his DI reads the spreadsheet analysis of all the Underground Victorians. Of the contacted members, none of the cells (address, employment, dependent profiles, performance, criminal activity) tally with Kerry’s.
Staffe looks at Kerry Degg. She appears calm, almost serene. Her eyes are closed, her limbs laid straight: still as a windless night. He tries to recall her bursting with life and theatrical allure, on stage back in October in the Boss Clef. He wonders if she knows she has a new baby daughter; and will she ever sing her a lullaby or see the baby’s father ache with worry about her?
He eventually says, ‘I found new evidence. Forensics have got it all, but I’m pretty sure the bastards kept Kerry down in the tunnel for weeks. And she had the baby down there, too.’
A knock at the door and the uniformed officer comes in, says to Staffe, ‘You’re needed, sir. Up at the station. It’s DCI Pennington. Said it was urgent. Apparently, he’s been after you for a while.’
*
On the way to see Pennington, Pulford says to Staffe, ‘How did you get on with your nurse the other night? You left early.’
‘You told her about Sylvie.’
‘She was asking about you. It was a party; I’d had a bit.’
‘I’d rather you keep out of my private affairs.’
‘Is that what it is?’
‘Shut up, Pulford.’
Staffe knocks on Pennington’s door and the DCI beckons them in. He is frowning. ‘Well, it didn’t take long for this to go tits up,’ he sighs.
‘How, sir?’ said Staffe.
‘The DNA results came through. It’s Sean and Kerry Degg’s baby all right.’
‘But that’s good news. And it consolidates his motive.’
‘You’d think. But I got this half an hour ago.’ Pennington passes an A4 piece of paper. Staffe reads it quickly, says, ‘Oh, God,’ then reads it again, slowly, before handing it to Pulford.
On the letterheading of a group called Breath of Life – which carries neither address nor telephone number – the letter briefly introduces Breath of Life as an independently funded community of Christians who ‘enforce the sacrosanct rights of our Unborn Population’.
It explains that their sources had advised them that Kerry Degg had attended a consultation at City Royal Hospital and had requested a termination which had subsequently been denied on the grounds of the unexpired term being too short.
Acting on reliable information regarding Kerry Degg’s intention to pursue her proposed termination through a ‘Private Murdering House’, Breath of Life felt they had no choice but to treat Mrs Degg themselves, providing an ‘Assisted Childbearing’ on a ‘Secluded Site’.
‘Is this right?’ says Pennington. ‘About her consultation at City Royal?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Well, you should.’
‘We’ll check.’
‘I already have. And it’s confirmed. She went there at the beginning of her twenty-fifth week. The sixth of bastard January.’
Staffe takes the letter back from Pulford, squints at the signature.
Pulford says, ‘I think it says “Lesley Crawford”, sir. I’ll get onto it and search for the group, too.’
‘Call themselves bloody Christians,’ says Staffe. ‘We have evidence that she had been held down there for weeks, sir. Forensics are checking it out, but we found food and drink debris down there, and faeces, too. There was tissue, or organs, as well.’
‘Christ alive,’ says Pennington. ‘We have to foreground the positive in this case, the Josie Chancellor angle.’
‘What will the press make of Lesley Crawford and her mob?’ says Pulford. ‘There’s plenty of people will see it as a life saved, sir.’
‘That’s nothing to do with us,’ says Staffe.
‘Exactly,’ says Pennington. ‘Let’s hope that mother and daughter both survive and we can pin this on Crawford sharpish.’
Staffe rereads the letter, examines the wording closely and fears the worst.