Cold Light (32 page)

“Hello? Mrs. Skelton? This is Helen Siddons.”

“It's also practically the middle of the night.”

“I'm sorry, I wouldn't have called at this hour if …”

“If it wasn't important.”

“That's right. Is your husband there?”

If he's not with you, Alice thought, I suppose he must be. “I expect he's still sleeping, don't you? He tires easily these days.”

“Could you get him for me? It is …”

“Important, I know.” She let the receiver fall from her hand and it banged against the wall, bouncing and bobbing at the end of its twisted flex. “Jack,” Alice called up the stairs, “someone for you. I think it's the massage service.”

Helen had been backtracking through the Rogel interviews, never quite certain what she was looking for but trusting it would leap out at her when she found it. Motive, opportunity, some connection that somehow they had missed. Something which they had failed to find important then, but now …

Those who had been brought in for questioning fell into three broad categories: anyone who might have had a grudge against the three principals involved, known villains with a penchant for extortion, and finally a more haphazard collection of people who had been in the area at the time, possibly acting in a manner that aroused suspicion. In the case of primary suspects, their backgrounds were well-documented, profiles fairly full; other individuals, notably those from the last group, had been lingered over less lovingly. At the time, that hadn't been seen to have mattered. But when those people were brought into the limelight, the gaps in knowledge were prodigious.

Helen wondered how assiduously some of these stories had been checked—the first alibi but not the second or third? And what was known about them once they had been eliminated from the inquiry? She guessed, very little. In some cases, nothing. How easy, then, for one of them to lie low a short spell, up tracks, and move away. Start over again somewhere else.

“Take someone with you,” Skelton said. “Another detective, someone who can do some leg work if it's needed. Divine, for instance. He could drive you.”

Mark Divine was less than happy, playing chauffeur to a sodding woman! Still, at least he was getting a decent motor; top a hundred in the fast lane with no trouble.

“Divine,” Helen Siddons said. She was wearing a dark suit with a mid-length skirt, her hair pulled back and severe. Divine had in mind she'd not have been out of place in that video he'd rented last night:
Death Daughters From Hell
. He could just picture her wielding a whip.

“Yes, Ma'am.” Divine coming to mock-attention, giving her as much of a come-on as he dared with his eyes. Never knew, if they got a result, might not be above letting her hair down on the way back.

“One word out of turn from you, Divine, and I'll have your balls cut off and dried and strung up for auction at the next divisional dinner-dance. Understood?”

Lynn had sifted through the mass of material on and around her desk, checked the CID room notice board, the message log; during the course of the morning, she contacted the officers who had rotated duty on the desk, got through to the switchboard, and asked them to go through all incoming calls. Finally, it seemed incontrovertible—no personal message had been left for her inside the past thirty-six hours. For whatever reason, Michael had lied.

“Problem?” Resnick stopped by her desk on his way back to his own office. A bulging brown bag from the deli was leaking gently into his hand.

Lynn shook her head. “Not really.”

“Worrying about your dad?”

“Sort of, I suppose.”

“Any news when he's going in for the operation?”

“Not yet.”

Resnick nodded; what else was there he could say? He had promised to call the Phelans this afternoon with a progress report, not that any progress had been made. Whoever had sent the ransom tape, they were in his hands. Every other trail, such as it had been, had long gone cold. Behind his desk, he opened the bag and stemmed a rivulet of oil and mayonnaise with his finger, then brought it to his mouth. Only a few drops fell over the Home Office report on responses to private policing. How long was it since he had spoken to Dana? He should ring her, make sure she was all right. If she suggested meeting for a drink, well, what was wrong with that? But the number snagged in his brain like a wedge of ill-digested food stuck in his throat.

Lynn spent the afternoon with several copies of Yellow Pages and the other business directories. On her eleventh call, the receptionist said, “Mr. Best? He's often out on call, but if you'll hold on I'll see if he's available.”

“Excuse me,” Lynn said quickly. “But that is Mr. Michael Best?”

“That's right, yes. Can you tell me what it's pertaining to? If he's not here, perhaps someone else can help.”

“Look, it's okay,” Lynn said. “Don't bother now. I'll catch up with him some other time.”

That evening she turned down all offers of a drink, left pretty much to time, skin beginning to tingle as she neared home. But there was nobody stretched out across the stairway reading the newspaper, no note slipped beneath her door. So many times she went to the window and looked down over the courtyard, always expecting him to be there. At about quarter past nine, she realized that she'd dozed off in the chair. By ten she was in bed and asleep again, surprisingly unconcerned.

Forty-four

As if it weren't enough of a liability being born black, her parents had to christen her Sharon. One of the few names in current English instantly recognized as a term of abuse. “Don't want to waste your time with her, right little Sharon!” In addition to all the innuendo and insinuation she'd grown up with from childhood, to say nothing of the outright bigotry, the head-on insults—“Black scrubber! Black cow! Black bastard!”—for the past five years she had been the butt of Essex girl jokes too numerous to mention. The fact that there was no resemblance whatsoever to this mythical blonde in a shell suit with breasts where her brains should be seemed to make little difference. It was all in the name. It could have been worse, she sometimes consoled herself, she could have been Tracey.

Sharon Garnett was thirty-six and had been a police officer for seven years. She had trained as an actress, two years at the Poor School, worked with theater companies, mostly black, doing community work on a succession of shoe-string grants; two small parts in TV soaps, the obligatory black face with a heart of gold. A friend had made a thirty-minute video for Channel 4 with Sharon in the lead and for five or ten minutes it had looked as if her career might be about to take off. Six months later she was back in a transit van, touring a piece about women's rights from an abandoned hospital in Holloway to a youth center in Cowdenbeath. And she was pregnant.

It was a long story: she lost that baby, sat at home in her parents' Hackney flat, day after day, not speaking to anyone, staring at the walls. One afternoon, between three and four, the sun shining and even Hackney looking like a place you might want to live—she remembered it well, right down to the smallest detail—Sharon went into her local nick and asked for an application form.

“Open arms where you're concerned,” the sergeant had said, “racial minorities, you're actual flavor of the month.”

Despite the occasional remark, the groups that grew silent and closed circle as she entered the room, the excrement-filled envelope with “Eat Me” stenciled on the front found one day in her locker, Sharon's training passed pretty much without incident.

Surprise, surprise, her first posting was Brixton, policing the front line. Out on the streets with her black woman's face and shiny uniform, she exemplified the ways in which the Met was changing; black men called her whore and her sisters spat at her feet as she passed.

Three applications for detective were turned down; finally, back to Hackney with the domestic violence unit, but that wasn't what she wanted. She had done her share of caring and consciousness raising already; if she'd wanted to be a social worker, Sharon told her inspector, she would never have applied to join the police.

Fine: back on the beat.

Eighteen months on, a relationship splintering around her, she left London, joined the Lincoln CID; nice, quiet cathedral city, Sharon as out of place as papaya in a Trust House Forté fruit salad. Oh, there was burglary and plenty of it—the recession bit deep here, too—drug-dealing in a minor kind of way, anything and everything you could imagine to do with cars as long as they were other people's. The most excitement Sharon had was when a small-scale row about shoplifting on a prewar council estate suddenly flared into a riot: youths throwing petrol bombs and insults, ten-year-olds hurling stones as the police retreated, outnumbered, behind their shields. It had taken reinforcements from outside the area and the arrival of a specialist support unit to regain control.

Since then she'd been seconded to King's Lynn. Even quieter.

It was quiet now, thirty minutes shy of sunrise, frost heavy across the hawthorn and the oak, the dark ridges of ploughed fields. Sharon was hunkered down behind an ancient Massey-Ferguson tractor, with two of the other officers, passing back and forth a thermos of coffee unofficially laced with Famous Grouse. The coffee was hot and their breath, dove-gray in the clearing air, testified to the cold. She drank sparingly and passed it on; last thing she wanted to do, crawl off somewhere and squat down for a pee, difficult enough without wearing tights over her tights the way she was that morning.

“They'll never bloody show,” one of her colleagues said. “Not at this rate.”

Sharon shook her head. “They'll show.”

She had been working this investigation for five months now, ever since the first incident had been reported, seven pigs slaughtered on a farm this side of Louth, dragged off and butchered in the waiting van. Market stalls the length and breadth of Kesteven had flourished special offers of pork belly, legs, chump chops.

“Times like these,” Sharon's governor said, “people do what they can.”

She supposed it was true: reports of sheep rustling on Dartmoor and in the Lakes had tripled in the past two years.

“Look! There!”

Her heart began to pump. Headlights, dull in the slow-gathering light, steered between the intervening trees. Sharon spoke into the radio clipped to the shoulder of her padded jacket, instructions that were concise and clear.

“Good luck,” somebody said as he moved swiftly past her.

The breath inside Sharon's body threatened to stop. The lights were clearer now, funneling closer, the van shifting out of silhouette against the slowly lightening sky. Resting on one knee, the other leg braced and ready, Sharon's mouth ran dry. Over by the sheds, a few of the animals moved around morosely, rooting at what remained of the straw that had been thrown on to the frozen ground.

The skin beneath her hair tingled as the van slowed and slowed again. Before it had come to a halt, three men jumped out, dark anoraks, black jeans, something bright in one of their hands catching what little light there was.

“Wait for it,” Sharon breathed. “For fuck's sake, wait!”

Two of the men launched themselves at the nearest pig, one seeking to club it hard behind the head. The animal squealed, terrified, and slithered as the club came down again. Running to join them, the driver of the van lost his footing and went sprawling, longbladed knife jarred free from his hand.

“Go!” Sharon called, sprinting forward. “Go! Go! Go!”

“Police!” The shouts sang out around them. “Police! Police!”

Sharon jumped at the man who had already gone down, the heel of her trainer driving into his back and flattening him again into the ground. Satisfied, she carried on running, leaving whoever was in her wake to wield the handcuffs, drag the man away. The hardwood stave that had been used as a club lay in her path and, without stopping, she scooped it up.

Angry voices tore around her, curses and the sharpening clamor of the pigs. One of the thieves broke free and took off in a run towards the van. Sharon watched as two of her colleagues set off in pursuit, feet catching in the ruts that rose like frozen waves from the ground. Two of the others were involved in scuffles, while a third was already on his knees, head yanked backwards with a choke-hold tight about his neck.

The runner had managed to start the van and now it lurched towards them, one of the officers hanging from the side, an arm through the window, grabbing at the wheel. Sharon jumped back as the vehicle slewed round and stuck, the driver's foot on the accelerator serving only to dig deep into the ground, showering black earth high into the air. A fist landed on his temple and a cuff secured him to the wheel as the ignition cut off.

“Sharon!”

A warning turned her fast, pulling back her head to evade the butcher's cleaver swinging for her face.