Dear Departed (17 page)

‘Number six,’ Slider said. There were two doors off the hall, and stairs straight ahead. ‘Let’s assume these are flats one and two.’

‘Let’s,’ Hart humoured him.

On the next floor there were three doors, behind one of which a baby was crying monotonously. The stairs that went on up were much narrower, and the thumping music came from the door at the top.

‘That’s gotta be six,’ Hart said.

‘No worries about creeping up on them,’ Slider said.

They went on up. It was quite dark at the top, and the sheer volume of the music seemed somehow threatening. Slider began to feel vulnerable. With only a small landing and the steep narrow stairs behind them, they would be an easy target for whoever opened the door. If they opened it. He glanced at Hart, who seemed cheeringly unperturbed, took a deep breath and thumped long and hard with the side of his fist on the door. He was so sure there would be no answer that he almost fell back down the stairs in surprise when the door was flung open and someone said, ‘Dow?’

Despite the crepuscular gloom, Slider recognised Jassy Whitelaw at once from the descriptions. She evidently recognised the Bill when she saw it, too, for alarm widened her eyes, and she said, ‘Shit!’ and tried to slam the door. Hart inserted her body and Slider his foot in the path of it, and between them they forced it, and her, back.

‘Iss all right, girlfrien’, it ain’t grief for you,’ Hart said soothingly. ‘We jus’ wanna talk.’ She was exaggerating her accent for purposes of winning trust. Slider still had no idea whether it was deliberate or instinctive.

‘Better let us in, Jassy, so we can talk where it’s private,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to talk out here where anyone can see you.’ They inched her backwards until Slider could close the door behind them, preventing her from trying to bolt. ‘He’s not here, then, your boyfriend?’ he deduced. When Jassy had said, ‘Dow?’ she had not been offering Slider a glass of port. It was the Londoner’s pronunciation of ‘Dal’, which was the Londoner’s abbreviation of ‘Darren’. She had been expecting him back, otherwise she might not have opened the door at all.

Her way forward blocked, Jassy turned and ran. The short, dark hall led into a large, lighter room with a sash window straight ahead and the shadow of an old-fashioned iron fire
escape outside. They caught her while she was still trying to heave the part-open window further up. Like most old sashes it had not only warped but had been so often and so badly painted that there was no chance of it gliding effortlessly as it had been originally designed to do.

‘Don’t be daft, girl,’ Hart said, pulling her round. ‘You jus’ makin’ trouble for yo’self. We gotta talk to you some time. No sense puttin’ it off. You wanna sit here and talk nice, or you wan’ us to take you down the station? ’Sup to you.’

Seeing she had the situation under control, Slider sought out the source of the brain-pulping beat and turned it off. Hart was coaxing Jassy backwards towards a sofa, and he had his first good look at her. She was thin – not just slim but last-chicken-in-the-shop bony – and it was emphasised by the skimpy dress she wore, sleeveless, low-necked and nearly backless, which left her collarbones, shoulder-blades and spine sticking out and clearly visible under her sallow skin. There was clearly no room under the dress for anything by way of underwear, and her hip bones and ribs and nipples were outlined seamlessly by the clinging pink knitted cotton. The skirt was short, above her bony knees; her feet were bare, with matching pink varnish on the nails; her bony arms ended in nervous hands with bitten fingernails.

But it was above the neck that she was truly remarkable. Her hair was coke-black and cut in haphazard spikes. She looked like a cartoon character who has touched a live wire, except that the spikes were not symmetrical. Her face was very white, her eyeshadow and lipstick a very dark near-black red, her eyes a mass of thick, black mascara. She had four rings around the rim of one ear and three round the other and black shiny studs in the lobes, a stud in her nose and one between her lower lip and her chin, two rings in one eyebrow and a row of studs in the other.

She had done everything she could to make herself look disagreeable; but someone else – presumably the absent Darren – had still done more. Her eyes were red with crying and her mascara had smeared clownishly below them. Under the white foundation her face had a bumpy look with which Slider, like other policemen, was sadly all too familiar. She had a large bruise on her right cheekbone, a cut on the left
side of her mouth, which was swollen, and a bruise on her left cheekbone, which had spread round the eye. Three blows, he thought, with sad expertise. A right-handed assailant: hit the left side first, then a backhander to the right (the cut was probably caused by a ring), then the left again. It was the carelessly callous assault of accustomedness. And yet still she expected him back and opened the door to him.

‘Did Darren do this to you?’ Slider asked, injecting fatherly tenderness into his voice.

‘None of your bloody business,’ she muttered.

‘You don’t have to take that, you know, Jassy. No-one’s got the right to hit you.’

‘What do you want?’ she asked irritably, but with a shade of weariness, as if she’d heard it all before.

‘Just to talk to you.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say. Not to Fascist lackeys like you.’ She glanced at Hart. ‘What’re
you
doing this job for? You’re the worst sort, sucking up to the enemy. Haven’t you got any loyalty?’

‘Just sit down, Jassy,’ Slider said firmly, ‘and let’s get this over with.’

‘Who d’you think you’re talking to? You can’t order me about in my own home. Get out of here and leave me alone. I’m not talking.’

‘I’m trying to make this friendly,’ Slider said, ‘but I’m not going to waste my time. Either you talk to us here, or I’ll arrest you and you can talk at the station. It’s up to you.’

‘Arrest me?’ she said, with a fair attempt at lip-curling contempt. ‘What for?’

Hart took it up. ‘We got some very nice lifts off that bag o’ charlie hidden in Chattie’s house. We gonna find out they’re yours soon as we print you.’ Jassy’s face registered dismay for a telling moment. ‘You know how it goes, girl. Own up and you get some credit. Make us work for it and you don’ get nuffin’. Plus, this is your chance to tell your side o’ the story. What’s it gonna be?’

Slider thought she was overdoing it a little, but it played like vaudeville with Jassy, in her, presumably, overwrought state.

‘Bastard,’ she said, but it didn’t seem to be directed towards either of them. She sat down heavily on the sofa, and tears began to well up in her eyes. She tried to sniff them back, and said, in an unsteady voice, ‘You got any fags? He cleaned me out, the bastard.’

Silently, Hart produced a pack and handed one over, and Jassy reached across to the coffee table for a box of matches. While she was lighting it, Slider took a quick and covert glance round at the room. It was sparsely furnished, but in a way that suggested this was a style choice rather than lack of money. The stereo system racked along one wall would have cost thousands, and there was a large, new plasma-screen TV on an expensive corner unit. The floor was stripped and polished – which must make life miserable for the people underneath, he thought, given the kind and volume of the music Jassy seemed to prefer –
and the black leather sofa and chairs were top of the range, and still smelt new. Whatever Jassy was doing here in Brixton, it wasn’t slumming – unless of the cultural sort. Though her language was not elegant, her accent was out of its place.

‘So where’s Darren?’ Slider asked at last.

She shrugged, without looking at him.

‘He hit you, and then he took off?’ Another shrug. ‘What did he hit you for?’ No answer. ‘Was it about the cocaine in Chattie’s house?’

She fidgeted a bit, but didn’t answer. One arm was folded across her waist, the elbow of the other resting on it so that her hand was by her face, handy for concealing it, and for smoking and nail-biting which she did alternately. She stared away from them, out of the window, which, being at the back of the house, had no view of the lovely tree, only the no-escape fire escape and the backs of other buildings.

Slider tried again. ‘Did you know that your sister Chattie was dead?’ he said, hoping that either way it might shock a response out of her.

It worked, though it was not the reaction he had expected. She looked at him balefully for an instant. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, what d’you think this is all about?’ There was a breath of a pause, and then resentment burst the banks. ‘It’s all her fault, stupid cow! She always had everything she wanted,
always, and I never had anything!’ And then she cried – not tears of grief and mourning, but what, in Slider’s experience, were always the most sincere and heartfelt of all, the tears of self-pity.

There was a residual reluctance to overcome, but Hart worked on Jassy with sympathy and sisterly solidarity. ‘Look at your face. I wu’nt take that from no-one, girl. He ain’t got the right to knock you aroun’.’

‘We had a row,’ Jassy confessed, wiping tears and kohl from under her eyes with a Kleenex.

‘About the bag o’ white at yo’ sister’s house, was it?’ Jassy did not answer this. Hart leaned forward a little and said earnestly, ‘Listen, grassing up a mate’s one fing, I know that, but this is different. This is serious. You don’t want to do time for that bastard, do you? After what he did? He ain’t wurf it, girl. I mean, that’s yo’ fingerprints on the bag, ennit, an’ we know you was there. We got a witness.’

‘That cow of a cleaner, Maureen or whatever her name is,’ Jassy said viciously. ‘Always poking her nose in. Who does she think she is?’

Hart tossed Slider a quick look, and he took up the thread. ‘Jassy, I want you to understand this is something much more serious and important than the bag of cocaine. Now, if you help us by telling us everything you know, you won’t get into trouble for that. But if you won’t help us, then we’ll have no option but to arrest you. That was a very large quantity of snow in that bag. It’s not just possession. We’re talking jail here.’

She stared at his stern face, and then at Hart’s sympathetic one, and sighed. ‘I never wanted to do it in the first place,’
she said. ‘I mean, that’s Darren’s business. I didn’t want to know.’

Happy to live off the proceeds, though, weren’t you? Slider
could see the thought in Hart’s eyes, but fortunately Jassy didn’t.

‘So he made you hide the bag in Chattie’s house? Why was that?’

‘
I
don’t know.’

Slider looked at Hart. ‘I don’t think this qualifies as cooperation. I think we’d better continue this down at the station.’

‘Yeah,’ said Hart. ‘You can’t be nice to some people.’

Jassy stirred indignantly. ‘Look, I don’t know. He just said to take it there and put it in the cupboard behind the tins of tomatoes. I thought he needed a safe place to stash it, that’s all. I know some of your lot have had their eye on him. Maybe he had a tip-off or something that he was going to get turned over.’

‘He didn’t give a reason and you didn’t ask for one? You just hid a bloody great bag o’ white in your sister’s house, no questions asked?’

She gave a sulky shrug. ‘Why should I care about her? She’s never done anything for me.’

‘But Darren obviously knew his way about her kitchen all right, if he knew what was in that cupboard,’ said Slider. ‘How well did he know your sister?’

‘Look, if you’re suggesting there was something going on between them—’

‘I didn’t suggest anything, but it’s interesting that you jump to that conclusion,’ said Slider, with an air of intellectual enquiry.

Hart lowered the tone judiciously. ‘Was he bonking her, love?’

‘No!’

‘So it was a business relationship?’

‘I don’t know, and I don’t care,’ Jassy said. ‘I hid the charlie for him, that’s all. Then Wednesday night he tells me to go and get it. But when I get to the house there’s a copper on the door.’

Atherton got that done just in time, Slider thought.

‘So I came home and told Darren and he was furious. He just went off at me, as if it was my fault. I told him it was nothing to do with me, but he said the coke must have been found and I couldn’t have hidden it properly, and he shouted at me and then he hit me and then he took off and I haven’t seen him since.’ She drew a breath, and added, ‘I don’t care if I never see him again, either, the bastard. It wasn’t my fault. I put it where he told me to. He’d got no right to hit me.’

‘You’re right there,’ Hart said warmly. Jassy turned minutely towards her and away from Slider, responding, he saw, to female sympathy. Hart was good, he thought. ‘So where was Dow Wensday morning, Jass? Did he go out early?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t here. I went to see my mum Tuesday night and stayed over. But he wasn’t here either. He went up to Manchester to see some mates on Tuesday. That’s why I went to see Mum. He didn’t get home until about eight o’clock Wednesday night, and then he told me to go over to Chattie’s and get the coke.’

‘How come he’s got mates in Manchester?’ Hart asked.

‘He went to college there. Not for long – they chucked him out for selling weed.’ She smiled slightly as she said it – a proud smile for the rebel without a cause.

‘D’you think that’s where he’s gone now?’

‘I don’t know. It might be.’

‘You haven’t tried to find him? Rung round your friends?’

‘Why should I, after what he did? I never want to see him again. I hope he rots in hell, the bastard.’

‘Can you give us the name and address of these mates?’

She came down off her high horse, belatedly alarmed. ‘What d’you want that for?’

‘We’d like a word with him about that charlie – and we can do him for assault on you at the same time, if you like,’ said Hart.

But Jassy looked uneasy. ‘He’s got some funny mates up there, hard men. I don’t want to get mixed up with it. I mean, they’d be pissed off if they thought I’d put the coppers on their tail. They could be serious trouble.’

‘We won’t tell them it was you told us,’ Hart said. ‘There’s lots of ways we could’ve found it out.’ Jassy still looked uncertain, and Hart allowed a little toughness to creep into her voice. ‘In return for a bit of leeway on your prints being on that bag of coke.’