The Score (15 page)

Thomas sat back in his seat, looked across at her, said nothing.

‘One of their guys moonlighting, you reckon? Or Small and co parasiting their system?’

Thomas flexed his lips non-committally and Cat took out her phone, called up Google, found Parcelforce’s website. It offered information listing the courier company’s services, coverage and prices. She typed ‘database of couriers’ into the search box. The results page showed: ‘There are no matches for your search’.

The redelivery section of the site featured a shot of a courier with a package standing next to a van, smiling as if he loved his job. He wore a high-vis orange tabard – he loved his tabard too – but his uniform underneath was similar to that of the biker.

Zoning in on the logo on the van on her phone, Cat then stared at the logo on the delivery box of the bike in front of her. She looked back at the screen. She pulled her head back, blinked. The curve of the stylised white globe on the Parcelforce website was clear, the lines of longitude and latitude sharp. The lines on the bike’s logo seemed indistinguishable. The Parcelforce wording on the website’s logo also had firm, clean lines. The letters on the logo on the bike’s delivery box had been arranged identically, but the outline was not quite as clear. It lacked the straight edges seen on the website. She narrowed her eyes, it probably meant nothing.

She passed the phone to Thomas, pointed at the screen. ‘Have a look at the lettering.’

Thomas looked, then across the road to the bike. It was beginning to rain again.

‘The official logo is sharp. The lettering on the bike is a little fuzzier. Most people wouldn’t notice the difference.’

Thomas still didn’t look convinced.

Cat took the phone back, logged into the DVLA database, keyed in the bike’s registration number. There were two recorded keepers for the vehicle, Parcelforce originally and now a company called All Solutions Ltd. She saved the page, called up Company House’s open-source database. All Solutions Ltd was newly formed, hadn’t yet filed accounts. She scanned the names and addresses of the director and company secretary. The addresses were in Bayswater, an area that she knew for its rooming houses and residential hotels. The names – Mike Martin, Paul Johnson – looked generic. Fake. None of these details would get them anywhere.

Cat tapped the screen. ‘That reg is one of a fleet sold at auction last year.’

‘You’d think Parcelforce would have taken the liveries off before they pass them through?’

‘My guess is whoever bought it copied in the logo again. Probably scanned it off the web and copied it. Maybe the scanning is why the focus isn’t quite all there.’

Cat scoped the street through the quickening rain. The houses were imposing Georgian and Victorian piles, most of which had been redeveloped from flats into houses, or had never been divided. Each property opened directly onto the street, although one or two were partially concealed behind hedges. They looked much like houses in any other inner-London suburb. But she knew that in this postcode they cost many times what an average
person
earned in their lifetime. The rich stuck together, paid over the odds to exclude the others. The street was quiet. Most of the owners would work long hours in the City, or else they’d be musicians and actors, still sleeping off a night in the clubs.

The biker was on the move. He’d climbed off his seat carrying a package. As he made his way across the street they could see the package was wrapped in midnight blue paper with silver stars. It looked innocuous, could be any birthday or wedding present, bought online, company-wrapped and couriered to cover up the embarrassment of a forgetful giver. The rider was heading for a white-painted house, a Meccano of scaffolding covering most of its front, raw stone walls visible on each side.

Behind the scaffolding, the rooms either side of the door appeared to jut forward, framing a Cape Dutch pediment. It was a seven-figure house maybe, and had just changed hands if the scaffolding and skip sat outside it told the usual story.

Cat watched the delivery rider make his way round the front. He went down a passageway along the side, disappeared. Cat and Thomas waited, neither spoke. After a couple of minutes the driver reappeared. Strangely, he was still clutching the parcel, its dark wrapping and silver stars clearly visible despite the now-sheeting rain. In fact, the parcel was all too visible. The rider was not even trying to shield it from the rain, holding it in plain sight.

Cat turned to Thomas. ‘Looks like he’s been unable to make the delivery, but my guess is he’s made a switch.’

Thomas did not look surprised. ‘It’s a nice spot for a drop. Nobody around in the day. Local residents loaded, a lot of courier deliveries from their online shopping. He fits right in.’

They watched the driver reach his bike, begin to do his paperwork. They looked at the house: all was quiet. The view into the front room was limited, obscured by scaffolding.
Little
furniture was visible. Cat found the land registry site to check on the owners, keyed in the street address. She paid the small access fee with her debit card. The house was owned by a company registered in Panama. Cat punched the name into Google. It was mentioned on several sites with names like Overseas Property Dreams and seemed to be an international investment shell.

She showed the reference to Thomas. ‘These places get bought and sold as tax vehicles. My bet is whoever owns this place doesn’t know what it’s being used for.’

He nodded. ‘They’re hardly going to use an address traceable back to themselves.’

The courier kicked his bike into life, made a U-turn then headed away. Cat slid out of her seat, winced slightly as she straightened up on the pavement. She had been so intent on the chase she’d forgotten her withdrawal. But now she noticed that all her limbs ached, the stress had brought the symptoms on again with a vengeance.

She stepped back into the cover of a spreading beech tree, glanced up and down the road. But there was nothing; the street was quiet still. About five houses down a silver Merc reversed onto the road, drove right past. Its driver, a middle-aged woman, studiously ignored them.

Cat leaned into the car and patted Thomas’s arm. ‘Buzz me if anyone enters. I’m going in.’

She made her way across the road to the house. With the withdrawal aches came thoughts of Martin. Images of their old friendship, the blood-stained T-shirt. Every step she took across the Hampstead street was guided by that blood. Suddenly everything felt clear and stark. The gusting wet brought with it the smell of damp foliage from the Heath, the sound of a large dog barking. Underlying everything was the habitual London
undertone
of traffic, a sound that she guessed wouldn’t be audible to a local, but that was agitating her now as though her head was stuck inside a hive.

She pushed on, entered the passageway that the delivery rider had taken. The high house wall cut out much of the light. The looming scaffolding gave it a weird, mechanical appearance. The plastic tarpaulins snapped and cracked in the wind, making her head hurt.

A slatted gate stopped her progress. She looked closely. There was a slight gap between gate and post. Cat teased a key into the gap, ran it up and down, found a catch and lifted it, pushed the gate open.

Beyond it was a small yard, empty apart from a green garden refuse bin. More scaffolding on the back of the house. Always the same with big London houses: you pay ten million and get a prison yard for a garden. She glanced around. There was no obvious drop-off. Cat lifted the lid of the bin, the smell of decaying vegetation filling the air. She sneezed, then looked again. At the back of the bin was a rectangular box, built into the container. It held only a pair of rusted secateurs. Nothing for it, she’d have to go fishing. She dipped her hand into the decaying grass beneath, could feel only slime and grit. She pushed down deeper, felt a hard object. She moved more of the grass aside and saw a package, lifted it out.

The pristine wrapping paper was now splattered with decaying compost. She opened it carefully without tearing the paper. Inside was a box, filled with used notes. She didn’t count, but there looked to be about thirty thousand, mostly in twenties. She put everything back as she had found it, made her way out through the gate.

Just outside the house she stopped, had the sense of someone watching her. She glanced around, expecting to see a face. But
there
was nothing. The windows around her were now empty, if they hadn’t been before.

Several streets away a child screamed, broke off into laughter. There was the faint buzz of a motorbike, a distant grinding on a gear change. She listened to its progress until she could hear it no more. She glanced up the street, saw a corner shop. Outside the shop were the usual hoardings advertising the lottery and that day’s
Evening Standard
. Beyond that another street rose steeply, towering above the neighbourhood. She recognised the incline of its house fronts. Had she staked it out when she was in London? Or attended a private party there working undercover? She’d definitely seen the street before.

She struggled for clarity – and then it came. The front page of the
Echo
with that photo of a thin man struggling up the steps of a large Hampstead house. That was where she’d seen the street before.

Bloody hell
. Her disenchantment with the Hywel Small trail evaporated. She bolted back across the road towards the car and jumped into the driver’s seat. ‘You know where we are?’

Thomas raised a finger at the street sign that stood just ten yards from them. His way of saying,
Stupid question
.

She didn’t care. The street name wasn’t the point. ‘We’re only a block from Morgan’s house.’ She pointed.

For a moment, it all felt clear in her head. The murderer who couldn’t have killed anyone. The victims who were nevertheless perfectly dead. A line of light bulbs shone: the graffiti in the cottage – the Mandrax traces there – the dead girl in the landfill and the Mandrax found in her flat – the link to Diamond Evans and Hywel Small. And now to Morgan. For half a second, it was as though everything was there, as though the logic was all in place, just needing to be teased out.

Then the bulbs disappeared abruptly. She was plunged back
into
darkness as completely as if she had been in the mine tunnel. Nothing made sense any more except their immediate reality. She saw Thomas’s forehead was corrugated in a frown. ‘He’s not going to shit where he eats.’

12

SHE PULLED THE
seatbelt around her. ‘The drop’s cash. My guess is he wants an eyeball.’

Thomas smiled impassively. She started the car, following the satnav around the one-way system, down Well Road to the end, then left onto East Heath Street. The houses looked even bigger, most of them set back from the street. They might even have enough garden for a kick-about. They followed Heath Street until they reached the hill that formed Morgan’s street.

They got out of the car, spotted a loose group of people hanging about in front of the house. Journalists, she realised, the remainder of the scrum that would have been camped out for Morgan’s release on compassionate grounds, trying to get the last shot of Morgan before he died.

She looked down the hill towards the house where they had just found the cash. The way the roads were positioned meant she had a clear view to the back of the drop house, the one with the scaffolding. She glanced up at the edifice of the Morgan house; somebody in the upper storeys of that mansion would have a good view of the back yard, of the seemingly everyday garden-waste bin.

Things were coming together, pointing in the same direction. But this clear view from Morgan’s house also meant she could have been spotted herself poking around in the bin. She wondered if this was the reason she had felt watched. Not from the house
she
was investigating maybe, but from up on the hill.

She felt angry with herself. She had moved too fast. She leaned back into the car, told Thomas to hop into the driver’s seat, park it, and walk back towards her.

‘Ma’am,’ he came back with, but he did it anyway.

She studied the Morgan house. It stood above the street and all the curtains were closed. In the stillness, with its black front door and black railings, the place seemed already in mourning for its owner. To the side, a gate gave onto a private parking area where three black saloons stood like a cortège in waiting.

She looked again at the journalists. They seemed dispirited, had the air of having given up on seeing Morgan. A couple were kicking a ball through the puddles. Another was huddled over his BlackBerry. Others were sitting on the terrace of the street’s gastro pub, smoking as the sun peeked out hesitantly between the clouds.

Cat scrutinised the journalists outside the pub, her attention caught by a women sitting on a heavy wooden pub bench, sheltering beneath a large, designer umbrella. Beneath the curve of the umbrella, Cat gained a partial sight of her face: a taut profile, a mane of immaculately maintained black hair. The woman yawned, and stretched her arms up as she did so, the umbrella moving up in the same motion, showing Cat the woman’s whole face, sleek as a racehorse: a face that seemed accustomed to soak up glances.

Della Davies – Cat had last seen her following Morgan at the marina. In a former life Davies had been a press officer at Cathays Park. But then she had begun walking both sides of the street, making spare cash by running her own press agency on the side, handling stories with a Welsh connection. When the agency had taken off, Della had left the force, got herself a column in the paper, equipped herself with a Merc, a town house in Llandaff
and
a weekender in the Mumbles. Become a proper rich tart and a handful to deal with.

Cat dipped back close to the walls of the houses opposite Morgan’s, out of the sight line of Davies. Her limbs ached again, the tick started up in her left temple. She tried to get a better look at who Davies was with.

Up close one noticed the twitching lines of determination around her pillowy lips, the loneliness behind the eyes. She was talking to a stocky mixed-race girl with a buzz cut. Perhaps a photographer. It made sense that Davies was here. Morgan was a national figure, but he was also a Welshman. Many of the press stories – the human interest ones, ‘Griff Morgan: the person I knew’ – would link back to Wales. Davies’s agency would be the first and easiest line of enquiry for most of the nationals. This was her chance to cash in.

Cat didn’t like Della’s life choices, but she couldn’t hate her. After the Dinas case, Cat had gone up to Della’s country house a few times, had even gone there with Thomas; the three of them tied together by a case that had screwed them all up. But then Della had stopped being so fragile, had got better; returned to her press agency, dredging up the misfortunes of others to make her own fortune. Della had returned to her venal game-playing and Cat had let things slip. She had not spoken to Della in three years.

Thomas hadn’t yet noticed her, and was walking over to the pub, chest swaying as he crossed the road. Cat beckoned him to stand back, out of sight, nodding towards Davies beneath her umbrella.

‘Fucking Davies’, was Thomas’s comment. ‘What now, Sherlock?’

In answer, Cat pointed almost directly upwards, to an open window in the building just to their left. The glass in the window
was
flickering, some of the meagre London light bouncing off something placed just inside, she guessed. The building was a large redbrick structure, a hostel or a student hall of residence maybe, and it was virtually opposite Morgan’s. Thomas followed Cat’s gesture, followed her logic, and grunted assent.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

They took the few steps towards the entrance, palmed the hefty wooden door open, stepped into a hallway. On the stairs a couple of paparazzi types were loitering. They went past the boys, up the stairs.

The landings were all empty. They carried on until they came to the floor where Cat thought she had seen the lens flicker. They didn’t need to speak now. Thomas gave the knock and pushed the door. By the window was a sallow boy in a Band of Horses T-shirt, his camera on a stand. Cat flashed him her card from the door so he wouldn’t see the details.

‘Out,’ she said, ‘there’s been complaints.’

Thomas stood over the boy as he picked up his camera, and when he’d gone, Thomas locked the latch. Cat looked for signs as to when the room’s real occupant might be back. On one side a desk with built-in shelves reached to the window. The desk was a mess, papers and files piled in no apparent order on top of a scuffed laptop. Cat rifled the pile, found a nurse’s timetable from the Royal Free Hospital. Parts were highlighted with marker. It looked like they had a few hours before the occupant returned.

It was a small space. The floor was covered in a cream carpet that had seen better days. On the fridge were a few basics: a kettle, teabags, a milk carton, a half-eaten packet of biscuits. The window gave a view down over the front of Morgan’s house but with the curtains closed there wasn’t much to see, beyond marvelling at its scale.

Cat scanned each window carefully. On the upper storey three
of
the curtains had been left with a small gap between them. She guessed this was deliberate. It allowed Morgan, or whoever was with him, to peer out without any movement that would attract the attentions of those outside. In the rooms where the curtains were parted the lights were out and nothing was visible.

‘We need the binocs, Price. They’re in the car.’

She smiled. ‘Go and get them then, Thomas.’

‘You go,’ he said. ‘You’re fitter than me.’

‘Let’s toss.’

Thomas agreed. Thomas lost. In the minutes he was away Cat studied the three windows but nothing moved.

With the binoculars only a little more was visible. A patch of wallpaper and something that might have been shelving in the first room. In the second there was more of the same wallpaper. In the third, a table was covered with dusty antiques magazines.

Cat tried to seem calm and on the level, but she was nothing of the sort. They might just be wasting their time, watching empty windows. Her temples pulsed and twitched, as though some epileptic fly was caught under her skin. Her limbs felt lactic and cold. She couldn’t bear it, and if she was like this, how was Martin? Worse, no doubt, exponentially worse, pacing his lonely house, sleep a stranger to him.

‘Where are you at with Kyle?’ asked Thomas.

‘Honestly? I’m not really sure. She told me to get back to Cardiff, but somehow I don’t think she wants me in that basement inputting data. Don’t know why, but I get the feeling she’s not going to kill me for this.’

‘No, I don’t think she is.’

There was something in Thomas’s face which signalled that he was withholding. ‘What?’ said Cat and then, when he showed no sign of answering, she gave him a swift chop to the upper arm, and said again, ‘What?’

‘Fuck off.’ He rubbed his arm. ‘She called while I was back at the car – said something about how she knew you were with me. But she didn’t sound pissed-off, not by her standards. She said it was all right as long as I had no objections. Of course, I
may
have objections.’

Cat decided that he was telling the truth about Kyle’s call, which meant that Kyle did want her involved. And that meant it had to be for personal reasons – because of her foster-daughter. But why pick Cat? Kyle had always indicated that she thought Cat a waste of space; now here she was making the opposite moves. Strange. Cat noted the issue and filed it for future thought.

Meanwhile, she took out her phone to call and reassure Martin. But she had no reassurance to give. They were out on a limb and she knew it. She went through to the answer machine, said what she could, knowing that Martin would hear the lack of hope in her voice. She had managed to fake a message the night before, but she felt worse now.

Thomas sat in a chair by the desk, picked at his fingernails. Cat steeled herself, re-focused on the watch. Another hour and she felt she had been staring at the three windows all her life. Letting Thomas take over she palmed out her phone and checked her mail. There were three messages from Rob – Benzo Rob, her mentor – asking if she was coming to see him, as she’d said she might. He asked her to give him notice if she did come over, so he could clean the flat, which just confirmed to her his shyness around women. Rob had left her an address in Battersea: ‘Brand Wharf’. Must be one of those new blocks by the river, she thought. It was a fancier address than she’d expected for him.

As Thomas glassed the Morgan house, Cat stepped towards the window, peered down at the street, watched the movements of the journalists below. Some were already giving up for the
day;
others were milling about looking disconsolate. Cat knew it was a waiting game that could go on for weeks.

She saw Della had left the terrace of the pub. She was on the steps of the hostel now, smoking with the mixed-race girl. The girl was probably also using a room somewhere in the building. Cat had a better view of her now. She was wearing cut-off jeans and a khaki top and had the air of someone who’d knocked around on the streets. The girl followed Della to a waiting Jaguar, and Della turned and patted the girl’s shoulder before getting in. Then the car moved off and the girl sauntered back towards the hostel. Cat saw her take the entrance stairs below and disappear from view, in through the front door, no doubt.

Moments later Cat heard the girl’s boots on the stairs as she approached the room she was in. The steps neared, seemed to move away again. She guessed that the girl had climbed to the next floor. Then they heard footsteps in the corridor above them and a door opening. They waited, listened. A minute more and there was the sound of the same door locking, steps in the corridor above and on the stairway, then the girl surfaced on the entrance steps below, walked down to the pub. She was checking something in her hand, it didn’t look like a phone.

Cat knew it was common practice for paparazzi to set up several cameras on a stationary target. Sometimes they could be movement-triggered, but it looked as if the girl was keeping control from a handheld device.

Cat asked Thomas to keep an eye on the girl. Then she went upstairs and stood in the corridor. She couldn’t hear anyone in the other rooms. The lock on the door was a basic Yale latch. After a short struggle with a credit card and Vaseline from her bag, she opened it. Not exactly a procedure taken straight from the manuals of acceptable police practice, but you couldn’t have everything.

She locked the door from inside and leaned with her back against it until her breathing returned to something like normal.

The room had the same layout as theirs but didn’t look as if it had been occupied. There was nothing on the shelves and the mattress was bare. By the window there were cameras on tripods, each focused on one of the three gaps in the curtains. Cat checked their memories but no pictures had been taken except some test shots to get the light and focus right.

She looked around to see if the girl had left anything else behind, but apart from some back-copies of the
Echo
and plastic cups the room was empty. It seemed a fair assumption that, if the girl had got nothing through the windows, then neither had the other paps. Apart from that picture of Morgan on the steps, there was no evidence he was even still in the house. Cat sat on the bed and tried to think clearly. She felt the sweat gathering under her collar and a mounting sense of futility. An image came to her mind of herself standing, feverish, outside a series of locked doors, and nothing behind them.

Quickly she leafed through the three back-copies of the
Echo
to see what angle Della had on the story. On each day Della had devoted her whole column to Morgan, but the contents seemed thin. Della was trying to build human interest around Morgan, but so little was known about his life that this had not proved easy.

The first column quoted interviews with unnamed inmates at Belmarsh. It seemed Morgan had been aloof with the staff and other prisoners, hardly talking to them. The second column was titled ‘Morgan’s Lost Love’: it claimed that early in Morgan’s career there had been a fire on a yacht Morgan had been using as a drugs lab. Morgan’s first girlfriend had perished in the blaze and he had never forgiven himself. Over the years the guilt had eaten away at him and he had ceased to care whether he lived
or
died. No sources or names were given. The story had the feel of a rumour rather than an account by credible witnesses. It was sloppy journalism.