Blood Work (4 page)

The window was slightly open and the wind
whistling outside knocked the blind against the
wooden frame with an inconsistent rhythm. Kate
woke slowly. Lifting one eyelid, she winced a little
and closed it again. She murmured softly and turned
on to her side. She reached out a hand and snaked her
fingers through the man's curly hair and smiled.
'Jack, wake up.'

She slid her hand down over his shoulder to tangle
her fingers in his chest hair, only his skin was
completely smooth. She frowned, puzzled for a
moment, then her smile faded, her eyes shot open
with realisation and she looked, horrified, at the
naked man sleeping beside her in her bed.

'Shit!'

She turned over again and looked at the clock
radio on her bedside cabinet. It was half past seven.
She cursed again and tried to remember what had
happened the night before. And couldn't.

'Shit.'

Quarter to eight and the rain was still falling,
although lighter than it had been. Detective Inspector
Jack Delaney and Detective Constable Sally
Cartwright were stamping their feet as they stood
outside 'Bab's Kebabs' burger van round the corner
from the police station. Roy, the corpulent owner
and chef, was flipping bacon on the hot griddle plate
as Delaney and Sally sheltered from the persistent
drizzle as much as they could under the awning.

'Point in case . . .' He pointed his egg slice at
Delaney. 'What did you reckon of Madonna's
"American Pie", Inspector?'

Delaney shrugged. 'I liked it.'

'Yeah, well, you would. My point exactly. Every
man and his dog in the rest of the world thinks it's a
piece of shit, but you like it.'

'It's a song, not a sacred cow. People should be
more tolerant.'

Roy laughed. 'Ever heard of the pot and the
kettle?' He fixed Delaney with a puzzled expression.
'I heard you'd quit the job anyway.'

'I did.'

'What happened then?'

'Shit happened, Roy. You ought to know about
that. And they needed me to clean it up. Only man
for the job.'

Roy winked at Sally. 'And I bet you're right glad
to have this little ray of bog-trotting sunshine
back.'

Sally laughed. 'We're all glad.'

Roy shook his head. 'Yeah, well, I wouldn't be
betting any large change on that.'

Delaney stirred some sugar in his coffee. 'You got
that right.'

Sally took a sip of her herbal tea. 'Why?'

'He put down some of your own, Detective
Constable. Never very popular thing to do.'

Delaney scowled at Roy. 'I didn't sign up for the
police force to win popularity contests.'

Roy handed a bacon sandwich over the counter to
him. 'Just watch your back is all I'm saying, cowboy.
You put the Pied Piper away, doesn't mean there isn't
more of the vermin that were on his payroll still on
the job, scratching their feet and sniffing their noses
in the air.' He looked pointedly across as a couple of
uniforms approached.

Delaney took a bite out of his sandwich. 'I'll bear
it in mind.' He turned back to Sally. 'Come on, let's
get out of here.'

Roy called after him. 'Madonna? My doughnut
more like!'

Delaney walked off, Sally took a couple of gulps of
her tea and threw the cup in the black plastic dustbin
at the side of the van. 'Cheers, Roy.'

'De nada. And you watch your back too, Detective
Constable. That man is a disaster area in size ten
brogues.'

Sally winked at him. 'At least you know where you
are with him.'

Roy nodded. 'In fucking trouble most like.' Roy
turned to the two uniformed constables who had
arrived and were watching Sally hurry after Delaney
with undisguised appreciation. Roy grunted at them.
'Out of your league, boys. Out of your league.'

'Just give us a couple of bacon rolls, Roy.'

Roy leaned forward confidentially. 'Can I interest
you lads in some pirate DVDs?'

The older uniform sighed patiently. 'Go on?'

'I've got
Treasure Island
,
The Black Hawk
, and of
course
Pirates of the Caribbean
, the complete boxed
set.'

Neither of the uniforms laughed.

Kate stood for a long while in the bathroom. The
clothes she had been wearing last night were in a
heap in the corner. She pulled the belt tight around
the towelling robe she had on and looked at herself in
the mirror. Her waterproof mascara had lived up to
its name, but her eyeshadow and lipstick were
smeared and her face looked pale against the almost
black of her tangled and disarrayed curls. Whatever
slight tan she might have picked up in the summer
months seemed to have disappeared overnight. She
walked across to the shower unit and put her hand
on the tap. She held it there for a moment or two, the
metal chill on her hand. And then she took it away
again. She wouldn't shower that morning. She took
the towelling robe off and carefully folded it, then
picked up her clothing from the night before and
dressed herself.

In 1903 Holloway Prison became a purely women-only
facility. Coupled with the ending of transportation
and the closing of Newgate, it meant a new
prison for male offenders had to be built, a place to
house those prisoners who were to be evicted to
accommodate the fairer sex. The site chosen in the
last, dying breaths of the Victorian era was a bit of
undeveloped park and scrubland some two miles or
so south of Hampstead Heath and a mile or so west
of Delaney's new house in Belsize Park. Bayfield
Prison was an all-categories facility that held up to
six hundred prisoners. As the urban wealth of
Hampstead and Belsize Park spread further out, the
building was an incongruous intruder, a social blot
on an increasingly upmarket landscape. But it lay
hidden in its own ten acres of land, tall trees sheltering
the place from view on the main road; it was still
a lot closer, in many ways, to Kilburn than it was to
Hampstead.

Sally pulled up at the iron gates that stood at the
end of the long driveway and waited for the
uniformed guard to check her identification. She
wound her window down, flinching as the rain
lashed at her face, and held her warrant card out. The
guard grunted, monosyllabically, then waved her
forward and signalled to the guard house. Electric
motors whirred and the heavy iron gates swung open.
Sally slipped the car in first gear and drove down
through the gates and along the quarter-mile or so of
private road that led up to the prison.

'What's Norrell got to say do you think, guv?'

Sally's question pulled Delaney out of his reverie.
He had been thinking along the same lines. 'I've no
idea.'

'You reckon he was involved in the petrol station
hold-up?'

Delaney shook his head. 'Maybe, but who knows?
If he was involved he'll have lived to regret it.'

Bayfield Prison, finished late in 1902, was three
storeys high and had four wings on four sides, forming
a central exercise area which could be monitored
from observation posts on each corner. There were
no windows on the exterior walls, which gave the
brick building an imposing, severely functional
look.

Sally pulled the car up to the parking area and they
walked over to the visitors' entrance and, after the
usual security checks, were shown through to a
waiting area in the front of the prison. Delaney sat on
an orange plastic chair bolted to a wall underneath a
window, then stood up again and paced impatiently,
looking out of the window and wishing he could fire
up a cigarette. He kicked his shoe against the wall
and looked at his watch. Ten past eight and way past
time they should have seen Norrell.

He paced around the room for a minute more and
had just decided to go and have a hard word with
somebody when he heard the door open and looked
across to see the warden walk in. Ron Cornwell was
a tall man, six foot five but thin. He had pale blond
hair and an apologetic smile on his face. 'Sorry,
Inspector, I tried to get hold of you on your mobile
earlier. And I've been held up on the telephone.'

Delaney walked over to him. 'What's going on?'

'You've had a wasted journey, I'm afraid.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Kevin Norrell was assaulted this morning. By
some of his fellow prisoners. It was a very serious
incident.'

'He's dead?'

The warden shook his head slightly. 'He's in
intensive care in the South Hampstead up the road.
He hasn't recovered consciousness.'

Sally joined Delaney. 'Comatose?'

The warden shrugged. 'Unconscious is all I know.'

'What's the prognosis?'

The warden spread his hands. 'I don't know; you'll
have to talk to the hospital but it's probably too early
to say.'

Delaney nodded. 'Who did it?'

'We're not exactly sure.'

Delaney glared at him. 'What the hell do you
mean, you're not exactly sure?'

'All right, Inspector. Just calm it down, will you?
Five men attacked him in the showers early this
morning. He was knifed, hit his head badly. He lost
a lot of blood.'

'Who were they?'

'We don't know who all of them were. Two of
them got away.'

'How?' Delaney couldn't believe what he was
hearing. 'This is supposed to be a secure prison for
God's sake.'

'Three of the men were badly hurt by Norrell. Two
of them are dead, the other is in intensive care.'

'And you've got no security footage?'

'The camera was taken out. That's why the two
officers were dispatched. If they hadn't got there in
time, Norrell would definitely be dead.'

'And they just let two of them walk away from it?'

'They were prioritised on dealing with the injured
people.'

'Convenient.' Delaney couldn't keep the sarcasm
from his voice.

'What exactly are you implying, Inspector?'

'What motivated the assault?'

'You know as well as I do, there could be any
number of reasons. I have it on good authority that
Norrell was involved in the manufacture and
distribution of child pornography. Particularly nasty
child pornography at that. You know what happens
to people like that in prison if they're not in a
segregated unit.'

'And why wasn't he in a segregated unit?'

'Because he wasn't charged with paedophile
activities, Inspector, as you very well know. He was
charged with murder and conspiracy to commit
murder. He was a category-A prisoner and treated as
such.'

'I want to talk to the guards who broke up the
fight.'

'I'm afraid that won't be possible right away.'

'Why not? There's been a death, a serious assault.
This is a police matter now.'

'And an investigation is under way. Your
involvement will need to be officially sanctioned.' He
shrugged, apologetically. 'At this moment it is out of
both our hands.'

Delaney looked at him steadily. 'You know why I
was due to speak to him?'

'I do. And I'm sorry.'

'Then you also know why I'm not going to just let
this go?'

'Of course I do. And I want you to know that I will
do everything in my power to help you, Inspector
Delaney. Work with me on this.'

Delaney turned to Sally. 'Come on, Constable.'

'Sir.'

Delaney held the door open and turned back to the
governor pointedly as Sally walked out. 'I'll be
coming back. And in the meantime, you have my
mobile number. You call me night or day you hear
anything.'

'I
am
on your side, Inspector.'

Delaney held his gaze a moment longer and then
left. The governor took off his glasses, running his
hand over his brow, damp suddenly in the air-conditioned
room.

*

Kate Walker shrugged out of her raincoat as she
entered the suite of rooms and nodded distractedly to
Lorraine Simons, her recently graduated assistant,
who was still in the early days of training to become a
forensic pathologist. She hung up the coat on an old
wooden hatstand and walked past the trainee's desk,
straight to her own office. She heard the young woman
say something but had absolutely no idea what it was.
She closed the door behind her, sat at her desk and,
holding her head in her hands, cursed herself in a low
whisper as she tried to put together a picture from the
jigsaw pieces of memory from the night before.

She remembered travelling on the Tube, she
remembered deciding to go to the Holly Bush rather
than returning straight home, although now she
wished to God she hadn't, she remembered having
the first couple of Bloody Marys, and then she
remembered chatting to the tall, handsome man in
his late thirties, with dark curly hair and the kind of
dark, come-to-bed eyes that were lately proving to be
her undoing; but after that she had absolutely no
memory whatsoever. It was a complete blank. She
couldn't remember a damn thing from about eight
thirty last night to waking up with a complete and
total stranger in her bed at seven thirty that morning.
And that wasn't something Kate Walker did. Ever.

She had shown the man, Paul Archer, out in the
morning but had barely said ten words to him. Just
hurried him out before closing the door on him,
feeling the heat burn her face then as it was now as
she shamefully tried to recall the previous night's
events. Tried desperately hard, but failed absolutely.

The door to her office opened and Lorraine stuck
her head round the corner. She was twenty-five, with
strawberry-blonde hair, a body trim from cycling, a
heart-shaped face, innocent eyes and the kind of
optimism only found in the unworldly young or the
terminally stupid.

'I was asking if you wanted any coffee, Dr Walker?
I'm just about to make a trip to Starbucks.'

Kate found a smile from somewhere. 'Thanks,
Lorraine, get us a hot chocolate and a croissant. And,
please, it's Kate, not Dr Walker.'

Lorraine nodded. 'It's the weather for it. Don't
know what happened to the summer.'