The Burning (30 page)

‘Not now. Later. We’re not going to be far from where you’ve been posted. I’ll come over around two o’clock.’

‘Better bring three coffees,’ I said. ‘Sam and Katy won’t be pleased if I’m the only one who gets a caffeine fix.’

‘No problem. I really am sorry. I’d better go.’ He was walking backwards away from me, still with the cheeky grin on his face, looking about nineteen years old with his hair all ruffled and his T-shirt half-tucked into his jeans. ‘It is a shame, though. You had the best legs in the room. None of the UCs were even close.’

‘Get on with it, Langton,’ I said in as repressive a tone as I could manage, even though I felt a strange fluttering sensation in my abdomen that might have been my stomach flipping over when he grinned at me. I watched him walk away and my smile turned into a frown.

It couldn’t be that I fancied him. It wasn’t that. It was something else. Nerves about the undercover op, or the ongoing tension of hunting Rebecca’s killer as well as the Burning Man. It was something completely unrelated to DC Langton, of that I was completely sure.

It had to be.

I couldn’t swear that Judd had deliberately chosen the most depressing, bleakest and most godforsaken area on the map for our surveillance team to monitor, but if he’d wanted to find the worst place in the world for us to spend the night, he couldn’t have done any better than our current location. Sam had parked in a side street overlooking the recreation ground, which I recognised from the scene-of-crime photos of Alice Fallon’s body. It was nine weeks exactly since her corpse had been discovered by the wall on the far side of the park from where we sat, and as I surveyed the scene through my discreet infrared binoculars, the scorch marks were still faintly visible on the breezeblocks. In the children’s play area, a swing dangled uselessly, one side detached from its chain, and the plastic slide was splintered at the bottom, a semi-circular chunk broken off leaving an edge that made it too dangerous to use. There were more dead leaves on the ground now, and heavy rain had churned what grass there was into a lake of mud. Otherwise, nothing had changed.

‘Better put them down. Don’t want you giving the game away.’ Sam had reclined his seat as far as it would go and was squinting out through the windscreen, his massive arms folded across his chest. He was wearing a black sweatshirt that had seen better days, and now performed a useful function as the unofficial archive of what Sam had had to eat recently. Egg yolk (from a midnight snack of a breakfast butty) and crisp crumbs featured extensively.

‘Yeah, because we look so unobtrusive.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. It’s completely normal for a fat old bloke to spend the night with two beautiful girls. In a car. In the middle of winter. Fully clothed, but freezing my knackers off nonetheless.’ He leaned forward and flicked the heater on.

‘You’re steaming the windows up again.’ I slid down my window an inch and icy air struck in at me along with a scattering of sharp raindrops. I buried my chin in my chest, pulling my scarf up around my face to try to keep my nose warm. I had a down-filled jacket wrapped around me, but after hours of sitting still in the car, the cold seemed to have seeped into my very bones.

‘Adds to the overall effect, doesn’t it? Looks as if you’re giving me some reason to steam the windows up.’

‘Yuck.’ Katy was sitting in the back of the car, a rug over her knees, shivering. ‘This is the worst job ever. Remind me why we’re doing this?’

‘Proactive policing,’ Sam and I said in unison.

‘Total bollocks,’ the detective said, and I had to agree with her.

‘Two more minutes and then you’d better get out there again.’ Sam tapped the clock on the dashboard. ‘You shouldn’t be spending all night in the car. You heard what Judd said. You might miss your big chance.’

‘I bet Tom Judd has never had to wander around a park in fishnet tights and a mini,’ Katy said lugubriously. ‘Not in the middle of winter, anyway.’

‘I bet he has worn that kind of thing, though. In the privacy of his own home.’

We sat in silence for a minute, reflecting on the image I had conjured up. Sam spoke for the three of us. ‘Jesus.’

A rattle of rain splattered the windscreen and Katy flinched. ‘Is that sleet?’

I busied myself in checking the surveillance log on my knee, letting Sam break the bad news.

‘It is indeed. More where that came from, I’d say. I wouldn’t send a dog out in weather like this, would you, Maeve?’

‘Shut up, Sam,’ I said calmly. ‘Katy, do you think you could stand to have another wander around? It has been a while.’

‘Yeah, why not.’ She gathered up her bag and checked her make-up in the rear-view mirror. Under her breath, she added, ‘I was just starting to get the feeling back in my feet. Wouldn’t want to get used to that or anything.’

‘Never mind, darling.’ Sam stretched and then scratched his belly. ‘I can think of a few ways to warm you up when you get back.’

She slammed the door hard enough to make us both jump and I scowled at her as she walked away, hoping that she hadn’t woken anyone up in the houses on either side of us. It was an odd area, a mixture of housing and industrial units, and owed much of its character to having been bombed to smithereens during the Blitz. The odd half-terrace of townhouses hinted at a prestigious past but most of them had been converted to flats, and not well-maintained ones at that.

‘No one about. Not surprising, given the weather,’ Sam observed.

‘Yeah, and the serial killer. Don’t forget about him. He’s probably putting off a fair few of the locals from taking a nice nocturnal stroll.’

Katy wandered across the recreation ground as if taking a shortcut and stopped halfway to light a cigarette. The microphone she was wearing picked up the rasp of the lighter and every rustle from her clothes. She took a long, slow look around while she dragged on the cigarette, and while her hand was still covering her mouth, whispered, ‘Still nothing.’

We watched her move away, walking slowly.

‘What’s this?’ Sam sat up straight for once and pointed at a car that was creeping along the street on the other side of the park, going at about five miles an hour. ‘One occupant, silver saloon car – Ford Focus, something like that. What’s he up to?’

I lifted the binoculars again and focused on the driver, feeling my heart thudding. There had been plenty of silver saloons on the CCTV I’d watched over the past few weeks. Maybe we’d missed something. He was poking at his sat nav, his face illuminated eerily. I estimated he was in his mid-forties, white, with thick greying hair and a heavy beard. After a moment, the car started to pick up speed and took one of the other streets that led off the park, driving towards Stockwell.

‘Nothing doing,’ I said, putting the binoculars down again. ‘But you could get on the radio and mention he’s driving around, in case someone else sees him acting suspiciously, I suppose. I don’t think he even saw Katy, to be honest with you. He didn’t seem to look at the park at all.’

The wind gusted again, tossing the bushes that lined the recreation ground and setting the broken swing to twist uselessly. The rain that had been speckling the windscreen suddenly gathered strength and the world outside the car blurred. Sam swore quietly and flicked on the windscreen wipers. One of them dragged on each pass with a squeak that set my teeth on edge. Katy had made it to the other side of the park and was wandering down the street, head bent, with only a brightly coloured umbrella to protect her from the elements. She flickered in and out of sight as she passed behind the bare trees.
Now you see me, now you don’t
.

I jumped about a mile as the car door behind me suddenly opened with a blast of cold air. It was tinged with the scent of coffee, and as Rob sat into the back seat, balancing a little cardboard tray in one hand, I twisted around to look at him. Rain was dripping from his hair and down his nose. He was wearing a navy-blue windcheater that was slick with water and his jeans looked soaked.

‘Wet out, isn’t it?’

‘Just a touch,’ he said pleasantly and handed me a cup. ‘Black coffee for you. Sam, black or white?’

‘White, two sugars.’

Rob rummaged in his jacket pocket and produced a handful of packets of sugar, little cartons of UHT milk and a couple of coffee stirrers, which he dumped into the coin tray behind the handbrake. Sam looked at them and raised an eyebrow. ‘Didn’t realise we had a branch of Starbucks in the back seat. Any chance of a blueberry muffin?’

‘Just be grateful for what you’ve got. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a coffee around here at this hour of the morning?’

‘Not very? These came from the garage down the road,’ I pointed out. ‘Must have taken you all of three minutes to walk there.’

‘Yeah, but it was raining, in case you hadn’t noticed, and cold.’

‘Poor angel.’

‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’ Sam said. ‘Bored, are you?’

‘I promised I’d do a coffee run.’ He caught my eye for a second and gave me the ghost of a wink and my stomach flipped over again – what was
wrong
with me? ‘And besides, Andrews keeps farting. I had to get out of there or I’d have passed out.’

‘We’re having the same trouble. Sorry, Maeve, but it’s true. I warned you not to have baked beans for dinner.’

‘Fuck off, Sam,’ I began, but before I could say anything else, Rob’s hand came down on my shoulder and gripped me, hard.

‘Wait a second. What’s that?’

The silver car was back, cruising past the end of the street with its lights off. As we watched, the brake lights glowed and it ground to a halt, engine throbbing. The driver was a silhouette but I could make out the beard and the streetlight struck a metallic gleam on his hair. All of his attention was directed towards the other end of the recreation ground, where a brightly coloured umbrella was bobbing along in time to the staccato stride of a very cold UC officer. I picked up my radio.

‘Katy, we’ve got a man in a four-door saloon car, silver, no licence plate yet, parked on the west side of the park. He seems to be watching you, but we’ll leave him be for a minute and see what he does.’

Her voice was muffled as she whispered a quiet OK. Not far away, a moped engine whined. The sound came through the open car window and was echoed by Katy’s microphone; it had to be at her end of the park. I could see now that the silver car was indeed a Ford Focus.

‘We need the index for a PNC check.’

Rob had already opened the car door and was easing himself out, keeping low to the ground. ‘I’m on it. Back in two.’ He stopped. ‘My radio is buggered, by the way. Can you run the check for me?’

‘Will do,’ Sam said. ‘Off you go.’

The moped engine changed note, sounding like a stuttering hornet, and it sounded louder through Katy’s microphone as it neared her. I watched Rob move cautiously down the street until he reached a point where he could see the back end of the Ford but remain unobserved. He started back towards us after a couple of seconds and Sam lowered his window, holding his hand out for the bit of paper Rob lobbed to him.

‘MP from Tango Alpha Six Five,’ he muttered into the radio.

‘MP receiving, go ahead.’ The controller in the main Met control room sounded harassed, as if it was a busy night.

‘Would you oblige me with a vehicle PNC check.’ Sam gave the controller the car’s location and the licence-plate number, sounding as calm as if it was routine. My throat was aching with tension.

‘Wait one.’ The controller went off the air for a few seconds. ‘Comes back to a Ford Focus, silver, MOT current, insurance good, registered owner is the
Sunday Courier
. No reports. All received?’

‘Tango Alpha Six Five, all received, nothing further.’ Sam turned to Rob, who was crouching beside his door. ‘He’s a fucking hack, out trying his luck. Do you want to go and have a word, or shall I?’

‘I’d be delighted to speak to the gentleman if you don’t mind me doing it.’

‘Be my guest,’ Sam said, and Rob ghosted back down the street, almost invisible in the shadows. This time, he moved to the back of the car and along the passenger side, stopping halfway along. He knocked on the window with the back of his hand, two sharp raps that carried over the sound of the rain clear across the quiet street to where we sat. They must have been shockingly loud inside the car where the journalist had been completely oblivious to Rob’s presence. I saw him jump, his head whipping around so fast it was almost funny. Having given him enough time to panic, Rob bent down and held his warrant card where the man could see it, then pointed down meaningfully.
Window down, tosspot
.

A muffled voice spoke over the radio and I picked it up, holding it to my ear to try to make it out.

‘Hi,’ Katy said, with a laugh in her voice. She sounded amused. I could only hear her end of the conversation clearly and I held up a finger to shush Sam, who had been embarking on a long commentary on the state of the reporter’s trousers after Rob’s interception.

‘Yeah, it is late. I’m waiting for my boyfriend – he’s supposed to be meeting me, but he’s running late.’ Katy delivered the cover story beautifully, sincerity ringing through every word. ‘He’s just texted me to say he’ll be another twenty minutes.’

More muffled sounds. The rain was pummelling the roof of the car as if it was about to bore through it. Rob had hauled the reporter out to pat him down, which seemed a bit keen.

‘I know. Freezing.’

Mumble mumble mumble
.

‘I do like pizza.’ She laughed. ‘I’m not hungry, actually. But thanks.’

Mumble
.

‘Really, I’m OK. But thanks for asking.’

There was a pause. Rob was shining his Maglite into the back of the silver car while the man stood beside him, gesticulating angrily.

The moped engine revved a couple of times, then trailed away into the distance. Katy laughed into her microphone. ‘Did you hear that? The delivery guy wanted to give me a free pizza. Said it had been ordered but there was no one in when he went to deliver it. It was his last run of the night and he was feeling generous.’