Sabbathman (13 page)

‘He died?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t try …’ he shrugged, ‘… anything else?’

‘No.’ Jo shook her head. ‘No point.’

Kingdom nodded, making a note on his pad. Then he looked up. Jo was studying the newspaper and for the first time Kingdom wondered whether she’d seen it before.

‘This new to you?’ he said. ‘All this stuff? Sabbathman?’

‘Yes.’

‘No one out there talking about it?’ He nodded at the door. ‘You didn’t hear the news this morning? Watch TV?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Have I missed something?’

Kingdom smiled. His question exactly. ‘I don’t know,’ he began. ‘There’s a theory that says Carpenter was down to a serial killer. Someone’s writing to the press. Claiming responsibility. Carpenter and two others.’

‘Why? Why should they want to do that?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

Jo was looking at the paper again, her eyes returning to the blotchy photograph of the dead MP.

‘You say you knew him?’ Kingdom said at last.

‘I met him. Once.’

‘Where?’

‘At Twyford Down.’ She hesitated. ‘You know about Twyford Down?’

Kingdom nodded, remembering the huge white scar in the hill
overlooking Winchester, the big yellow diggers clawing at the chalk.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘more or less.’

‘Well …’ Jo toyed with her coffee. ‘He’d gone along there to be interviewed. There was a big demo that day and everyone knew something would happen. There were security men there, hundreds of them, and police too. There was bound to be violence. It was bound to happen. He must have known it.’

‘Who?’

‘Carpenter. He turned up with a TV crew. I was there when he was being interviewed. He just milked it, the demo, the scuffles, everything. It was …’ She looked away, shaking her head. ‘Doing this job, it’s hard sometimes not to get involved. You shouldn’t but you do. You see the way people get themselves injured. Most of it’s carelessness. Domestic accidents. RTAs. People driving too fast, not paying attention, coming to grief. You get horrible injuries, truly horrible, and that’s bad enough. You get violence as well, fights, the drunks on Friday nights, knife wounds, people beaten up, even us sometimes if we’re unlucky, and that’s pretty awful, too. But Twyford Down …’ Her eyes were back on the paper. ‘That was worse, much worse, the way I see it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it was deliberate. They did it in cold blood. And that man didn’t give a damn.’

Kingdom was watching her carefully now, recognising a new tone in her voice, real anger and something close to disgust.

‘They?’ he said. ‘Who’s they?’

‘The security men. The goons they hire to protect the site.’ She looked up. ‘Isn’t that a joke? Protecting something they’re busy destroying? Signing on all those psychopaths? Two pounds an hour plus all the violence they can handle?’ She shook her head. ‘I’d never have believed it if I hadn’t been there. If you’d have told me that kind of thing could happen here, in England, I’d have laughed at you. Truly …’ She nodded, emphasising the point, telling Kingdom how naive she’d been, and how out of touch. She should have known better, she said. She should have taken the hint.

‘Hint?’

She nodded again. ‘We’d had a young girl in here about a month earlier. She’d been living up on the Down with the rest of them, one of the Dongas. There’d been some kind of scuffle about a Land Rover and she said she’d been beaten up. By the security guys.’

‘What was the matter with her?’

‘She was bruised around here …’ Jo tilted her head back, showing Kingdom her throat and the underside of her chin. ‘She said it hurt whenever she swallowed and she was obviously shocked. She said one of the security guys had put a choke hold on her but …’ She shrugged. ‘She was young and hysterical and you get to hear lots of stories like that.’

‘You didn’t believe her?’

‘I didn’t know. I gave her the benefit of the doubt but I didn’t know. She certainly had oedema – bruising – and there was a little bit of swelling round her larynx but … who can say?’

‘What about the police? Why didn’t she contact them?’

‘She said there was no point. The security guys were on their own property. I suppose, technically, she was trespassing. Anyway, she didn’t trust them. In fact the state she was in, she didn’t trust anyone. And I didn’t blame her.’

Kingdom nodded. ‘Is that why you went up there yourself? Later?’

‘Partly, yes. If you’re doing our job, it’s obviously better to be there. But I’m against it, too, what they’re doing with the road. I think it’s absurd, really stupid. I suppose you could say I was demonstrating.’

‘And what happened? When you went?’

‘We got nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. There were hundreds of us, maybe thousands. We weren’t lefties. We weren’t revolutionaries. We weren’t trying to bring down the state. We were just trying to make a simple point. We were just trying to say no. But there was no dialogue, no exchange of views. Just one lot of people shouting, and another lot of people itching to beat them up. It was the first time, truly. The first time.’

‘The first time what?’

‘The first time I realised you can’t do anything. The way the system works, it’s hopeless. The system is the system. It’s there,
and that’s it. There’s lots of stuff they tell you about consultation, and the democratic process, and all that, but it’s a joke. The decisions are made already. Whatever we did, whatever we said, the road would go through. It didn’t matter how strong our case was. It didn’t matter about the facts, the evidence, the way we all felt. None of that counted for anything. There could have been ten thousand of us up there that day, twenty thousand, and it wouldn’t have changed anything.’ She paused a moment, her eyes back on the newspaper. ‘And do you know what he said? During that interview he did? Carpenter?’

‘No.’

‘He said you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs. That’s all. Just that. Just dismissed the–’

Kingdom was leaning forward.

‘He said what?’

‘He said …’ She frowned, trying to think of another way of putting it. ‘He meant …’

‘No, no. What did you say just then?’

‘When?’

‘Just now? About omelettes and eggs?’

She stared at him, uncomprehending, and Kingdom reached for the newspaper. The quote was on the front page.
‘No more nonsense about omelettes and eggs,’
Sabbathman had written. Kingdom pointed it out and Jo read it, colouring slightly, aware of Kingdom watching her. Eventually she looked up.

‘That’s what he said,’ she repeated. ‘He said you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.’

‘When did he say it? When did this happen?’

‘Oh …’ She looked at the ceiling. ‘October last year. No, later, maybe November. I can check, if you think it’s important.’

Kingdom noted the date. ‘And what did he mean, do you think?’

‘Mean?’ She blinked, the colour flooding into her face now. ‘It meant he just dismissed us, just dismissed the whole thing. You want change, you want decent roads, you want five minutes off the journey to Southampton, then you just move the landscape round a bit. Easy as that. That’s the implication. That’s what he meant. That’s how simple it all was. To him …’ She paused, her hands
around the cup. ‘And it was the way he said it, too. He said it with a smile on his face. That nasty little smile they’ve all got. Mr Smug. From the Smug party. Yuk.’

‘You sound angry.’

‘Anyone would. Working here. In the NHS. The things they’re up to … But I was, yes, you’re right, I was angry, very angry.’

‘And you’re still angry? About what they’re doing? Up on the hill?’

‘I suppose so.’ She nodded. ‘Yes, I am. But what do you do about it? Where do you start?’

Kingdom said nothing. They were both looking at the newspaper again. The ring on Carpenter’s face was beginning to dry.

‘It was on television,’ Jo said at last, ‘about the omelettes and the eggs. I don’t know whether you’re interested but it was on the local news, that bit. I remember seeing it in the evening. It made me even madder. I felt like putting something through the set. Funny, isn’t it?’

‘Which channel?’

‘What?’

‘Which channel was it on? This interview? Which station?’

‘I don’t know.’ She frowned. ‘The one that’s on at nine-thirty. Before the weather forecast. BBC South. Try them.’

‘And do you have a date?’

‘I told you. October, November time.’

‘An exact date?’

‘No.’ She shook her head, startled by his sudden interest. ‘Should I? Is it important?’

Kingdom looked at her, not saying anything, then made a note on his pad. When he glanced up again, she was still watching him.

‘They took pictures of Carpenter after he died,’ she said quietly. ‘Have you seen them?’

‘Yes.’

‘You saw his face? What was left of it?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded, saying nothing for a moment. Then she sat back in the plastic armchair, her eyes glazing, and for the first time
Kingdom realised what it was that made her so attractive. She was totally honest. Whatever she thought, whatever she felt, whatever she believed, she let you see it. See it and share it.

‘That man was a real mess,’ she said. ‘Alive, he was pretty awful. But dead, he was much worse. No one deserves that. Not even him.’

She looked down at the coffee a moment, then tipped the cup to her lips. Kingdom nodded, remaining silent, knowing the conversation had touched an important nerve. She swallowed the last of the coffee and put the cup down.

‘There are answers,’ she said with a smile, ‘but you have to go a bloody long way to find them.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘I was up in Scotland, the start of the summer. I spent ten days on an adventure course. It’s the kind of thing I do occasionally, the kind of thing I love. And it was incredible, really tough. You had to be out of your mind to even think about doing some of the things we did. Crazy things. Things that made me shudder, just remembering them. But you know something? It worked. It really did. And there was a moment at the end of it all when none of this other stuff mattered. It was just you, and the mountains, and the silence. Amazing. Quite amazing. Made up for everything.’

‘Even the rain?’

‘Yeah.’ She stood up, the grin returning at last. ‘Even that.’ She held out her hand. ‘I have to go, I’m afraid. Was there anything else?’

Kingdom stood up, pocketing his note-pad. A jam-jar by the door held donations for a sponsored ambulance pull.

‘Not really,’ he said, ‘not yet.’

‘Yet?’

‘Yes.’ he smiled. ‘I might be back.’ Kingdom paused by the door, dropping a pound in the jam-jar. A trolley rattled past in the corridor outside. ‘Scotland sounds wonderful,’ he said. ‘I could do with some of that.’

Jo smiled, pulling her white coat around her, one hand feeling for the stethoscope in the pocket. ‘Me, too,’ she said, ‘the way this place is going.’

*

Back outside, in the hospital lobby, there were two public telephones. Kingdom rang Arthur Sperring and told him about the omelettes and the eggs. Carpenter had apparently used the phrase on television. If the report had only been transmitted locally, the field would begin to narrow.

Sperring listened without comment. He was too good a detective not to recognise a useful lead, or betray the slightest enthusiasm when one appeared.

‘When was this, then?’

‘November, last year, give or take.’

‘OK, leave it to me.’ Sperring paused. ‘Anything else?’

Kingdom thought about Fat Eddie for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You?’

‘Yeah.’ Sperring began to laugh. ‘Your guv’nor is coming down. Amazing what the telly does to some people.

Kingdom was back on Hayling Island by midday. A checkpoint on the bridge from the mainland was monitoring a long queue of northbound traffic, and for the first time Kingdom spotted armed police. There were two of them, on opposite sides of the road. They were wearing bullet-proof vests over black jump suits, and both men carried identical sub-machine guns, the stubby Ingrams BPK. At the bottom of the island, close to the sea-front, there was a line of white Transit vans parked by the side of the road. Uniformed men were piling out onto the pavement, each with a clipboard and a flat zip-up briefcase. Kingdom drove slowly past, recognising the scene for what it was, an extravagant display of police resources, a public flexing of muscles, more pictures for the evening news.

Kingdom drove west, along the sea-front. At the head of Sinah Lane, a traffic car was parked diagonally across the road, limiting access to the width of a single vehicle. Two uniformed officers stood on the grass verge. One of them was muttering into a radio, while the other was looking hard at Kingdom. Kingdom wound down the window as the policeman approached. He gave him his ID.

‘Where do I find the ferry?’ he said.

The officer nodded west, down the coast road, still examining Kingdom’s ID. When he gave it back, he lingered a moment by the open window.

‘A-T Squad?’ he said.

Kingdom nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘Your guv’nor’s here’ – a thumb jerked in the direction of a line of parked vans – ‘if you’re interested.’

‘Allder? Small guy? So high?’

‘Yeah,’ the officer permitted himself a thin smile. ‘Big car, though.’

The ferry lay at the end of the coast road. Kingdom parked beside a pub and walked down the pebbles to the water’s edge. The last of the flood tide was pouring in through the harbour mouth, tugging at the buoys that marked the deep water channel to the open sea. Fifty yards upstream, protected by a spit of land, a ferry was moored to a landing stage. Beyond the landing stage, as far as the eye could see, was the flat grey expanse of Langstone Harbour.

Kingdom walked back up the pebbles and wandered across to the landing stage. According to the timetable, the ferry sailed at weekends every half hour. The fare was £1.60 and bicycles were extra. Kingdom gazed out across the water. The harbour mouth was narrow, no more than a couple of hundred yards, but the last thing you’d do in a hurry was depend on the ferry. No, if you wanted to get off the island by sea you’d use a boat of your own or have someone waiting. That way, you could be over in Portsmouth or heading out to sea in minutes. Especially if the tide was right.