Acid Lullaby (10 page)

Harrison mouthed an obscenity at Dexter’s back as she left the office.

Jack Harvey sat in the consulting room that he had constructed in the extension to his house. He hunched over his computer typing up his conclusions regarding the treatment of John Underwood. His comments formed part of an
email message to Chief Superintendent Chalmers at New Bolden Police Station:

‘DI
Underwood
has
made
significant
progress
in
therapy
during
the
last
twelve
months
.’ he took a long drag on his cigar.
‘His
relapse
at
the
end
of
2000
seems
largely
to
have
been
the
product
of
his
marriage
breaking
up.
Underwood
was
at
this
time
co-ordinating
a
full-scale
murder
hunt
and
seems
to
have
been
unable
to
cope
with
these
combined
pressures.

‘He
has
been
receiving
prescription
anti-depressant
medica
tion
and
attended
weekly
therapy
sessions
with
myself
during
the
last
year.’

There was a knock at his door and Rowena Harvey appeared.

‘Hello darling, I’m off soon.’

Jack looked over his shoulder. ‘You look fantastic,’ he said.

‘Hardly! This skirt makes my legs look enormous.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘That cigar stinks, Jack!’

‘I’m allowed one vice.’

Rowena Harvey walked across the room and kissed the bald patch on top of her husband’s head. ‘What are you working on?’ she asked.

He turned quickly in his swivel chair and slipped his arm around Rowena’s waist, pulling her onto his lap. He gave her a long, hard kiss as she giggled. ‘I know what I’d like to be working on,’ he whispered.

‘Jack! I’ve just got changed. I’m meeting Petra in ten minutes.’

‘It only takes me a couple of minutes!’

‘I can’t.’

‘Spoilsport.’

‘When I get home tomorrow!’

‘I’ll be knackered by tomorrow. Pressure of work. Men of my age have to seize the moment. I might not be able to get it up tomorrow.’

‘Now who’s being ridiculous?’ Rowena pulled away and kissed her husband’s forehead. ‘I’ll be home in the morning.’

Then she was gone.

Jack turned back to his computer screen. The house was quiet now. The window rattled against its frame.

Ghosts.

He tried to concentrate.
‘The
symptoms
and
causes
of
DI
Underwood’s
depression
appear
to
have
receded.
In
my
opinion,
he
no
longer
poses
a
physical
threat
and
would
benefit
from
an
immediate
return
to
light
duties
.’

Harvey looked around his little consulting room. He had an uneasy and powerful sense that he was being watched. His case files lined two walls, filling three bookshelves. Many contained private ghosts and personal horrors, including John Underwood’s. Sometimes the ghosts liked to play tricks with him. His telephone rang suddenly. Then stopped. Harvey waited for a moment then continued typing.

‘I
would
recommend
a
reduction
in
DI
Underwood’s
consultations
to
one
session
every
eight
weeks.
I
have
also
decided
to
take
him
off
of
his
course
of
anti-depressants.
DI
Underwood
is
an
experienced
and
skilled
officer
and
can
still
be
an
asset
to
the
force.’

That was good enough. The Superintendent knew that Harvey and Underwood were friends. Harvey sensed his report was veering dangerously towards eulogy. He attached the Word file to an email and sent it immediately to Chalmers’ office address. Next, he called John Underwood and left him a message on his answerphone.

As he hung up, the telephone rang immediately. He answered.

‘Harvey.’

‘Is she on her period, Jack?’ asked the caller before the line went dead.

Jack Harvey ran to the window and looked outside. There was no one outside: no one visible anyway. His heart was racing. He had recognized the voice.

Jensen parked near one of the two central accommodation blocks of the Morley Estate. Dexter surveyed the grim expanse of concrete. It was a desolate place. Two miles north-east of New Bolden, the Morley was familiar to most local police officers. Dexter looked at the graffiti on the building walls, the upturned shopping trolleys and the rubbish that blew aimlessly past the line of steel garage doors. For a second it reminded her of Hackney, or of Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, or of some of the soulless council blocks in Leyton. Desperate.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ she muttered as she opened the car door.

‘Even the social workers call this place the “capital of cruelty”,’ Jensen observed as they approached the optimistically titled ‘Hope House’. ‘They get more calls out here than to anywhere else in Cambridgeshire.’

‘I’m not surprised.’ Dexter pressed the call button for the lifts. ‘People get brutalized living out here.’

The lift door opened. It smelt of piss.

‘There’s at least half a dozen animal neglect cases out of this estate every year,’ Jensen continued. ‘Pig ignorance. Man buys puppy for girlfriend. Puppy gets big. Puppy gets irritating. Man argues with girlfriend. Puppy gets locked in a broom cupboard and forgotten about. Place starts to smell of shit. Neighbours complain.’

‘It’s a cruel universe.’

‘Neglect’s worse than outright cruelty, I reckon.’

Dexter said nothing. She knew that it wasn’t.

Ian Stark’s flat was tidier than Dexter had expected. It was small with one tiny box bedroom and a kitchenette adjoining the main living room. Jensen started checking cupboards. Dexter sat at a small desk and began to riffle through Stark’s papers.

Electricity
bill,
gas
bill,
mobile
phone
bill.
A
five-hundred-
pound
mobile
phone
bill.

Dexter flicked through its itemized pages. Dealers lived via their mobile phones. It was a potential goldmine finding the bill. Stark’s numbers could prove very useful when cross-referenced with the mobile operators’ records.

‘Nothing here except dirty laundry,’ Jensen observed from a small airing cupboard.

‘Try the kitchen,’ Dexter replied, moving into Stark’s bedroom. It smelt stale. There was a poster of a Ferrari taped to a wall with a girl in a bikini draped across the bonnet. On the bedside table Dexter noticed a pile of pornographic magazines and a clod of tissue paper.

‘Charming,’ she said quietly.

Instinctively, she opened the top drawer of Stark’s bedside table. Inside was a Navy blue 2002 diary. She immediately turned to the page showing the previous day: 29th April. It was blank. She smiled to herself – that would have been too easy. Dexter flicked to the back of the diary and found pages of initials and phone numbers. Stark’s client list seemed the most likely explanation. There were no full names.

She thought for a moment. What did Stark have lined up for the coming week? 30th April was left blank but there was a single entry for 1st May: ‘
MW.
2200.
MCP.
07911
4112370.’

Dexter started. The number was familiar. She felt a cold hand reach inside her and tear something out.

‘Guv, you need to see this,’ Jensen called from the kitchen.

Dexter picked up the diary and hurried through into the living room. Jensen had placed a shoebox on the dining table. It contained a small amount of cash and some plastic bags filled with multi-coloured pills.

‘What do you reckon they are?’ Dexter asked.

Jensen held a bag up to the grey light of the window. ‘God knows. ‘E’s I’d say at a guess. That’s what most of the clubs round here specialize in. To be honest, I thought we’d find more than this.’

Dexter didn’t agree with Jensen’s observation. Stark wouldn’t have left his entire stash of drugs in his own flat. He wasn’t that stupid. ‘Stay here, Sarah. There’s something I need to do. I’ll call for a team to help.’

‘No problem.’ Jensen suddenly realized that Dexter had never called her by her first name before.

On her way to the door, Dexter collected the itemized mobile phone bill from Stark’s desk. Once outside the flat she ran down the filthy stone steps to the car park and unlocked her Mondeo.

Sitting in the passenger seat, she opened the diary again to 1st May.

‘07911
4112370’
stared
back
at
her.

She turned to the itemized phone bill and ran her right index finger down the list of calls, trying to remain calm.

‘07911
4112370’
stared
back
at
her.

Lastly, she opened the glove compartment of the car and withdrew her personal mobile phone. She selected the ‘phonebook’ option and scrolled down to ‘M’.

‘07911
4112370’
stared
back
at
her.

She sat back in her seat and looked out through the rain-specked windscreen. The sky was darkening outside as the clouds began to thicken overhead. The desolate spaces and litter-strewn alleyways of the Morley Estate stretched around her. In their misery, ugliness and futility Alison Dexter saw that she had been turned inside out.

Jack Harvey awoke with a start. He looked at his watch. It was late. Just before midnight. He was still in his consulting room. His computer hummed efficiently in front of him. He had a terrible pain in his neck from where he had fallen asleep sitting upright in his chair. Jack tried to blink away his exhaustion.

The front door bell rang again. Just as it had to wake him up ten seconds previously. His immediate thought was of Rowena. Had she returned home early without her keys? Was his wife as forgetful as Underwood? Wearily, Jack rose from
his seat and left his consulting room. He flicked off the light as he left and climbed the three steps into the main hallway of his house. It smelt of Rowena’s perfume. The smell was reassuring and arousing.

‘Who is it?’ he called through the door.

There was only silence. Jack peered out through the frosted glass. It distorted his view but he couldn’t see anybody outside. He was suddenly nervous and hesitated. He had a decision to make: open the door and find out who – if anyone – was outside, or remain inside and face a night of anxiety starting at every shadow and sound. He chose the former and opened the door. In a second he was engulfed by the wrath of the Soma.

Harvey regained consciousness half an hour later. He was aware of an acute pain across his shoulders. He was lying down on his consulting room table, his wrists tied painfully together beneath it. He strained hard but found that he was unable to move.

Max Fallon tore around the room in a fury. He pulled Harvey’s case files down from the shelves and flung them to the floor. He tried to swat the demons from the air around him as they tormented him for his impotence. Paper spread and slid across the floor. Fallon grunted and mumbled obscenities in his frustration. He sat down at Harvey’s computer and tried unsuccessfully to log in.

Eventually, he gave up and kicked out furiously at the PC monitor. At his fourth attempt his foot smashed through the glass. He stormed over to Harvey, desperately trying to blink away the lights that swooped and swirled behind his eyes.

‘Where is it?’ he spat the words at Harvey.

‘Where’s what? Get me out of here!’ Harvey hissed back at him.

‘My file. All those banal fucking notes you made during our so-called sessions. I want them now.’

‘I destroyed them.’

‘Bullshit.’ Fallon grabbed Harvey’s neck. ‘Tell me where they are now!’

Harvey tried to remain calm. He knew Fallon was volatile,
that he was capable of violence. He would try to calm him down.

‘Okay! Okay!’ Harvey coughed for breath. ‘The file isn’t here. I keep my private client records elsewhere.’

‘I’ll bet you do,’ Fallon sneered, ‘bet the taxman would be interested in your little asides. Does that horny little wife of yours know that all the jewellery that drips off her has been paid for by the manias of the independently wealthy?’

‘This has got nothing to do with Rowena.’

Fallon watched him closely for a second then started laughing. He laughed so much it hurt him. He sunk to his knees and crawled out of the room on all fours, tears coursing down his cheeks. He returned two minutes later carrying two large blue cool-boxes. He was still giggling.

Fallon placed the boxes in the middle of the room and pulled up a chair so that he sat close to Harvey’s head.

‘So how are you feeling, Jack? Still worried about going bald?’ he giggled. ‘Don’t panic. Some women find it sexy apparently. Personally I think it looks bloody awful.’

‘Max, you have to let me go.’

‘Don’t call me that. Don’t call me Max. You should know better. I am not your friend, dickhead. Now, what did you write about me in those files?’