Silvermeadow (35 page)

‘Oooh! It’s the police, Walter!’ the little woman called over her shoulder. ‘I think.’ She turned back to Kathy and squinted at her fiercely. ‘How do I know you’re not a fraud?’

‘I’ll give you a telephone number to ring, if you like. The Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard.’

‘Oooh! Scotland Yard! What do you want?’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Tell me what you want to talk about first.’

‘Your neighbour, Mr Reynolds.’

The door opened in a flash.

‘What has he done? You know he was a biker once? A Hell’s Angel.’ She said the name with hushed relish.

Kathy stepped into a hallway heavy with the smell of fried fish, and was led by the little woman into the front room from which she had been observed. An equally tiny man was in there, working intently with a pile of matchsticks, from which he was constructing a huge model of a sailing ship.

‘Good evening,’ he said without interest, and without looking up from his task.

It occurred to Kathy that it was almost big enough for the pair of them to climb on board the ship when it was finished, and sail away.

‘I just wondered if you’ve noticed any movement from next door this evening,’ Kathy asked.

‘Movement?’ the woman said, eyes gleaming, as she switched off a small TV set in the corner. ‘Drug dealing, do you mean?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Oh, it’s what you read in the papers, isn’t it? Everybody does it these days.’

‘Have you noticed anything?’

‘Well, we did see Speedy coming home in his van. When was that, Walter? About five, or six?’

Walter grunted noncommittally. He was preoccupied, checking his matchstick construction against drawings and photographs spread out on the table.

‘After that I went into the kitchen to cook dinner. But Walter saw someone else arrive, didn’t you?’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes, you know you did. You said, Speedy’s got visitors.’

Walter didn’t seem inclined to make the effort to confirm or deny this, and Kathy had to ask him to please think back. He put down his minute tools with a sigh of resignation.

‘I heard a car engine, but I don’t know if it was Speedy’s or someone else’s. I looked out the side window’—he nodded at a small window whose curtain was drawn back— ‘and I thought I saw someone out there.’

‘With a box,’ his wife prompted him.

‘How large a box?’

‘A big one,’ the wife jumped in. ‘Walter said, “Looks like they’re getting rid of a body”.’

When she saw the look on Kathy’s face, the woman sucked in her breath. ‘Oh, you don’t really think . . . ?’

‘It may just have been Speedy,’ Walter said. ‘You can’t see very clearly. Look for yourself.’

‘Yes, but his kitchen light was on then,’ his wife objected. ‘And you said—’

‘I know what I said.’ Walter sighed. ‘But I couldn’t really be sure.’

‘But Speedy would have been in his chair, Walter.’

Walter shrugged.

‘Do you remember when the house lights went off next door?’

‘I think that must have been while we were having our dinner. I don’t remember them being on when we came back in here.’

Unable to get anything more concrete, Kathy gave the woman a card, which she accepted with a very satisfied expression, as if this was a trophy that could come in very handy.

The east wind sighed and blustered as Kathy walked back out to the street, pushing the buttons on her mobile. Brock answered. ‘The house is in darkness,’ she said. ‘His neighbours think the lights went off sometime before eight p.m. But his van’s still in the drive.’

‘We’re on our way,’ he replied.

She walked along the street looking for any other observant neighbours, but the suburban bungalows were all buttoned up tight against the winter night, and she turned back to Speedy’s house and walked down the front path. She knew she was being observed by at least one pair of beady eyes from next door, and took comfort from the fact that the little woman probably had the phone in her hand, two nines already dialled.

She hesitated at the front door when a phone close by inside suddenly started ringing. She waited, but nobody made a move to answer it, no lights came on. The phone stopped ringing and she tried the doorbell, but got no response. She pushed on the door, but it was firmly locked.

She moved round the side of the house, down the drive where Speedy’s van was parked. It was impossible to see inside its tinted rear windows to make out if it contained a box. She was still visible from the neighbours’ window, but as she approached the gate leading into the back garden she came to thick evergreen bushes that blocked their line of sight. The gate clicked behind her. The windows were curtained, all in darkness.

A ramp had been formed up to the back door so that there was no step for a wheelchair to negotiate. She tried the door handle and it turned: the back door swung open and a billow of warm musty air spilled over her.

‘Hello?’ she called into the darkness. ‘Speedy? Anybody home?’ There was total silence for a moment, then a soft thump from somewhere inside the house.

She took a deep breath and stepped into the dark kitchen, making out unusually low worktops. The dark void of the doorway on the far side was broad, the proportions of everything subtly different from what she was used to. She walked carefully towards the doorway, ears straining, trying to acclimatise her eyes to the interior darkness, unable to see the light switch. There was a hall beyond, another wide doorway facing her, leading into the other back room.

She made out that this door was closed, and she put out a hand and found the handle and very gently began to ease it open. A flickering green light came through the opening, and a smell, rancid and unpleasant. Then suddenly, low down and fast, a dark shape leapt through the gap towards her. Kathy jumped back with a cry, then saw a cat disappear through the kitchen door. She swore softly and put a hand to the light switch now visible at her shoulder, and blinked as light flooded the hallway. Then she pushed open the door and looked into the room. There was enough light coming from the hall and from the digital displays on a rack of electronic machines for her to see the outline of Reynolds’s wheelchair. Her eyes were drawn to the void above the back of the chair where his head and shoulders should have been.

The smell was overwhelming now in the hot room. Vomit. She reached to the wall beside the door and fumbled with the switch, then saw the limp forearm on the floor beyond the wheelchair, the syringe nearby. Behind her she heard voices, then Brock calling her name.

They found Wiff in a bedroom at the front of the house, lying curled, fully dressed, on the bedding. He was clutching a brand-new pair of roller blades to his chest, and the headphones of a Walkman were in his ears. There was an angelic smile on his face, a dribble of foam at the corner of his mouth. There was no pulse in his skinny little throat, and his hand was cold.

*

Leon sniffed as he got in and closed the door of the car. Kathy said, ‘Sorry. I think I’ve still got some of the mess on my shoe. I tried to clean it, but I can’t seem to get rid of the smell.’

‘You sound tired,’ he said.

‘Yes. It’s just hitting me. It’s been a long day.’ What she really wanted was to put her arms round him and close her eyes for a few minutes, but what with the ambulance and the patrol cars and the SOCO vans and the neighbours, there wasn’t much hope of that.

‘How’s it looking?’ she asked.

‘Dead around three hours, he thinks. Probably of asphyxia. Choked on his own vomit after he fell to the floor.’

‘The bottle on the floor beside him, was it ketamine again?’

‘That’s what the label says. He’s got a fair old chemist’s shop in there: grass, amphetamines, a variety of other pills, and Ketapet. There was a pack for two dozen bottles in the fridge, with two unopened and one half-used as if he’d been experimenting with doses.’

‘Could somebody have killed him?’

‘It’s possible, but there’s no indication of anyone else having been there.’

‘No visitor, like the neighbour said?’

Leon shrugged. ‘No visitor, no box. How reliable are they?’

‘They’re not really sure what they saw.’

‘I think the view is developing that he gave Wiff a shot back in the plenum to calm him, then brought him back here and gave him some more, then took some himself and OD’d. There were wheelchair tracks in the dust of the duct floor leading to Wiff ’s den, though we can’t say how old.’

‘Is there anything else to connect him to Kerri?’

‘Yes. We’ve found the green frog bag, in one of the bedrooms, in a cupboard.’

‘Oh,’ Kathy said, voice flat, and turned away. It all seemed somehow both inevitable and wrong at the same time.

‘We’re concentrating on that room at present, looking for hair and fabric samples. We’ll take his van away to check it.’

‘What was that equipment in the room he was in?’

‘Video editing and copying machines. There are quite a number of tapes. I don’t know what of.’

‘Maybe of us.’

‘Maybe. I don’t care.’

She was still thinking about Kerri’s green bag in Speedy’s cupboard and didn’t pick it up right away—the slight edge in his voice, as if he’d been thinking about this and come to some decision.

‘Don’t you?’ she asked.

‘Why should we care? What kind of job is it if you have to care about that?’

‘It isn’t that. It’s just that it’s private, between us. Nothing to do with anyone else.’

‘Yes, but if it isn’t private any more, does it matter?’

‘. . . I’m not sure.’

He gave a short laugh. ‘No, you’re not, are you? Christ, Kathy, it happens all the time. Boy meets girl. Who cares?’

Kathy blinked with surprise. This conversation had gone off the rails somewhere and she wasn’t sure how. ‘No, you’re right. It doesn’t matter. You sound angry. You don’t think I’m ashamed of us, do you?’

He sighed and looked away. ‘No, I’m not angry. I understand. I understand exactly, because I’m much the same. You want two lives, a public life and a private life, with no connection whatever between the two. And that’s impossible, especially while we’re working together like this. If it isn’t Speedy’s tapes it’ll be something else. Hell, these guys are supposed to be detectives. I’m astonished they haven’t spotted the difference in us already.’

‘Have I changed?’

He looked at her, face softening. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly.

Then he turned way again as another patrol car drew up fast to the kerb, lights flashing, and Chief Superintendent Forbes got out.

Leon reached for the door handle. ‘I’d better go. We’ll talk about this another time, when we’re not so tired.’

She watched him walk back to the house, and said to herself, bewildered, ‘Talk about what?’

13

I
t was late in the small hours by the time they returned, separately, to Kathy’s flat and fell exhausted into bed, and by morning Kathy had forgotten the conversation in the car. The wind had dropped, and from the bedroom window the city was bathed in a silvery light from low luminescent cloud. The sense of stillness matched Kathy’s mood. She had slept deeply and felt detached from the events of the previous day, as if they had unfolded too rapidly and needed time and distance to absorb.

She made a pot of tea and took it back to bed, and they made love. They were good at it now, with a developed understanding of each other, and when it was over she felt completely at peace.

‘We should get away this weekend,’ Leon said. ‘Get some time together after all the hours we’ve put in this week.’

‘Mmm. That sounds good. Do you think we can? Will we wind things up today?’

‘Depends on the preliminary PM results, I suppose. But I reckon there’ll be a lull, if not an end to it.’

‘Nice word,’ she murmured, curling into the crook of his arm. ‘Lull . . . lull . . . lull.’

*

By midday the evacuation of unit 184 was well in hand. Phil had finally been dislodged from his post at the door, and men with hand trolleys were moving boxes of computers and files out into the rear access corridor to the service lift, and down to a truck in the basement. Gavin Lowry came over to speak to Kathy.

‘Nice meeting you,’ he said. ‘Hope we get to work together again, next time I need a new car.’

‘Yes. Sorry about that, Gavin. And I’m sorry I won’t be able to see how your campaign against the grey crust works out.’

‘Read about it in
Th
e
Job
.’ He grinned.

‘Maybe Forbes can go for Harry Jackson’s job. I hear he’s resigning.’

‘He offered his resignation, but Bo Seager wouldn’t accept it. Reckoned he wasn’t culpable.’

‘Do you think that’s right? You’d have thought he should have picked up a few warning signals about Speedy. He was his appointment, wasn’t he? Knew him from the old days before his accident?’

‘Yes. I guess Harry’s fault, if he has one, is that he tends to be too loyal towards his team.’

Kathy smiled at him. ‘That’s not a mistake you intend to make, eh Gavin?’

He looked hurt. ‘This from the woman who trashes my car.’

They shook hands and Lowry left to accompany the truck back to Hornchurch Street. Kathy went through to the rear office, where Brock was sorting through papers, pushing most of them through the slot of a locked bin for shredding.

‘Well, Kathy.’ He stretched and straightened his back, and walked over to the door to check on progress with clearing the place. ‘I asked for twenty-four hours, but I honestly didn’t think we’d crack it in the time.’

He seemed relieved but hardly elated, she thought. ‘You’re sure we have?’

He glanced at her. ‘Certainly looks that way. Lowry and the others didn’t come up with anything suspicious in the shop units, and they did a pretty solid job this time. Bo Seager’s just been on to me about a deputation from the small traders led by our friend Bruno Verdi complaining about how thorough we were. Everyone seems very relieved to have us leave Silvermeadow. Our SIO especially. Can’t wait to have us off his patch. We’ll let his people wrap it all up.’

‘While we concentrate on North.’

‘Exactly. We’ve got plenty of leads on Keith Nolan to follow up. However, I was talking to Bren this morning . . .’ He turned back from the door and came and sat on a box next to the chair Kathy had taken, lowering his voice as he went on. ‘An idea occurred to me. I thought it might be worth us making one last little effort here tomorrow, unofficially.’