Down into Darkness (19 page)

She liked it that she could recognize him from a distance: his hair falling to the nape of his neck, the duster-coat he liked to wear over a T-shirt and cotton combats tucked into high-lace boots. He wasn't like anyone she'd ever known. Dressed like that, he looked ready for anything; ready for her.

Little by little, she would get to know him. For now, she loved him and that was enough.

There were two clubs in Orchard Street, and it was a tough call. One was a dining club where the waitresses wore French maids' uniforms and bent low over the tables to serve the food. The other was a high-class drinking club with a backroom poker table and a two hundred per cent mark-up. Stella chose booze and bets over butts and tits and got checked in at the entrance desk by a blonde ball-breaker in an Armani suit. She showed her warrant card, and the girl said, ‘I'm not sure that will do.'

Stella leaned on the desk and smiled a winning smile. She said, ‘This is a top people's club, so it'll be full of top people. If Clubs and Vice turn up here and find those very same people gambling, or doing a line in the men's room, or coming on to high-class whores, they'll be obliged to make arrests. And I expect word will get round. You're lucky, because I'm not here to make any of that happen, I'm here for reasons your bosses need never know about. Now' – the smile disappeared – ‘is Abigail in tonight?' The girl tried a shrug. ‘This would be the Abigail,' Stella told her, ‘who has a special friend called Neil Morgan, MP. And please don't tell me that the private lives of the members are none of your concern, because inside knowledge requires discretion, and discretion buys Armani.'

‘She's in.'

‘Her friend?'

‘Expected.'

Stella climbed a flight of polished mahogany stairs to the bar, which was about the size of a football pitch. It was
the kind of place where everything smelled of money except the money, which smelled of nothing at all: an electronic connection, a deduction made in the stratosphere somewhere between dusk and dawn. She asked for a glass of champagne and started a tab which she had no intention of paying, then sat in a leather club chair by the door so that people entering wouldn't see her unless they looked back.

The clientele was smooth-rich or rough-rich or wannabe-rich. The blonde on the far side of the bar was wannabe: the Donna Karan dress and the ragged highlights just overstated her case, and the Fendi bag wouldn't have been charged to her own card. She was toying with a cigarette that she was struggling not to light. Morgan came in twenty minutes later, when Stella was on her second drink and the blonde had got through three unlit cigarettes. Stella watched them together for a while; watched them
being
together. The body language was interesting: the way she leaned in towards him, touched his hand with her fingertips; the way he smiled and chuckled at whatever she was telling him, then fixed her with a look that was solemn with desire. It was difficult to see where need merged with greed.

When Stella came up to them, having made a wide circle to approach from behind, Morgan was talking about a fact-finding trip he had to make soon. They couldn't go together, of course; couldn't travel together; but they could certainly find one another once they were there.

Stella said, ‘Mr Morgan?'

His shoulders tightened as he turned, and she said, ‘I'm not a journalist.' She waited a beat, just a beat or two, before adding, ‘Though I do know a few.'

The blonde said, ‘Neil –'

‘It's all right,' Morgan told her. ‘She's the police.'

*

They sat at a corner table by a window, their reflections at their sides. Morgan looked out to the street. It was dusk, and London was lighting up against the night.

Morgan said, ‘So you think he meant to kill me?'

Stella had a fresh drink in front of her and could feel the merest hint of blurriness. ‘I think it's a possibility.'

‘Why me?'

‘Why Leonard Pigeon?'

‘The cowardice thing, wasn't it? I mean, this guy's crazy, isn't that it? He killed a prostitute, hung her in a tree and wrote on her, filthy bitch, then the same with Len, but with him it was the incident on the bridge, the woman they threw in…'

Stella's hand was stalled over her drink. The blonde appeared in the middle of the room and stood there a moment, as if waiting for a decision, her reflection merging with theirs. Morgan looked at her, then away. She waited another second or two, then made for the door, walking briskly.

Stella said, ‘Dirty girl.' Morgan laughed, but made no comment. Stella shook her head. ‘Not her. Not Abigail. The prostitute. He wrote dirty girl, not filthy bitch.'

‘Oh.'

‘Filthy bitch is your thinking.'

‘I knew it was something like that.'

‘Filthy bitch is what you might have said.'

Morgan's face darkened. ‘What do you want?'

‘A few things,' Stella told him. ‘To begin with, I'd like to know who told you about the girl in the tree and the writing. For instance, was it the same person who told you about the writing on Leonard Pigeon and the possible connection with the incident on the bridge? I ask because none of this has been released to the press – the writing, the bridge – so no one has connected the two deaths.'

Morgan said, ‘I'm a Member of Parliament.'

‘Yes, I know that. Who told you?'

‘I think that's covered by privilege.'

‘No, it's not, and you're coming dangerously close to obstructing –'

‘It was common knowledge. People saw the girl in the tree; people saw Len on the bench by the river.'

Stella sighed with annoyance. ‘No. Very few people saw the girl, and when we brought her down, it was dark. People walked past Leonard Pigeon without noticing he was dead – or else they didn't want to notice. The couple who found him thought the writing was a tattoo… and, in any case, weren't all that eager to go public on the fact that they were together at the time. If it was common knowledge, it would have been in the papers. Try again.'

He tried. ‘Paula Pigeon told me.'

Stella smiled. ‘She knew about the writing on her husband, sure; she knew nothing about the girl in the tree.' Morgan turned to the window, and his own reflection confronted him with a stern look. ‘You were expecting me,' Stella said. ‘You knew that I was a police officer.'

‘Not here. I wasn't expecting you to come –'

‘Someone got in touch. Someone who thought you ought to know.'

‘Yes, you're right,' Morgan said, suddenly combative, ‘one of yours, yes, to give me a bit of background. So you'd better sort it out yourself, hadn't you?'

Stella wanted to hit him; it was a strong impulse. She said, ‘Let's assume it was you he wanted – that the killer got the wrong man, that it was your throat he wanted to slit.'

‘All right, assume it. Now tell me why.'

‘No, you tell me. Filthy coward, that was what he wrote. Now, why would that have fitted you better than it fitted Leonard Pigeon?'

‘Some lads on a bridge, a woman being attacked… Would I have made a better showing than Len? Run towards them instead of away? Taken them on? Well, I don't know. I've never been in a situation like that, so I've never had to make the choice.'

‘No reason why anyone should think of you as a coward?'

‘Honestly? No.' He was turning a drinks coaster in his fingers:
flip-flip
. He said, ‘If you were coming here to talk to me about this, you must have intended to tell me yourself – about the writing on Len's arms and so on.'

‘But not about the girl in the tree, not about the connection between the killings, so listen: if I hear it's being talked about or it appears in the press, I'll be looking for you with a warrant.'

Morgan allowed her to see his smile. ‘Yes, sure…'

Stella laughed. ‘Try me…' The smile disappeared. After a moment she said, ‘You don't think much of my theory, do you?'

‘Not much.'

‘So no protection, then.'

The question startled him. ‘Sorry?'

‘If we'd agreed that it was a possibility you were the target, that someone somewhere might think of you as a filthy coward who deserves to die, then I would have suggested surveillance-and-protection cover for you and your family. After all, two murders, both in public places, people around, but no one seems to see or hear anything – this guy is good at what he does.' She finished her drink. ‘Still, if you're not worried, I'm not worried.'

They sat in silence for a full minute, Morgan with his head lowered. Finally, he looked up and said, ‘I can't think of anything. I can't think of a single thing. Some act of cowardice…' He shook his head, as if trying to remember and failing. ‘But this man, whoever killed them, he's not sane, is he? He could
pick on anything, anything I might have done, anything he decided he didn't approve of.'

‘Anything he thought cowardly.'

‘Yes, that's what I'm saying. It won't necessarily be rational.'

‘You mean it won't necessarily have been cowardly.'

‘Exactly.'

‘You're opting for protection.'

‘It seems the sensible thing to do.'

‘For you and your family.'

‘Yes.'

‘What about Abigail?'

Morgan looked startled. ‘How do you know her name?'

‘I'm not at liberty to say.' Stella almost smiled: those snippets of official bullshit that keep civilians at bay. ‘So… Abigail…'

‘Even in the best marriages,' Morgan said, and offered what he hoped might be a conspiratorial grin.

Stella nodded as if to say:
Why tell me?
She said, ‘I'll need to speak to her.'

‘There's nothing she can tell you.'

‘I bet you're right. I still need to speak to her.'

Morgan took out a business card, wrote a name and number on the back and handed it to Stella. In the same moment that she took it, she saw the sudden panic in his eyes:
My business card; her name on the back; how stupid is that?

She said, ‘Don't worry, I'm a cop, not a counsellor.'

Morgan was still flipping the coaster. As Stella got up to leave, he said, ‘By the way… Len wasn't impersonating me; he wasn't even standing in for me. He had some sort of business with an American company, I know that. Nothing to do with me.'

‘That's not the way I heard it.'

‘Then you heard wrong. Why would I lie?'

‘I don't know,' Stella told him. ‘No idea.' She paused. ‘Unless your involvement with the American company in question involved passing on privileged information of some sort, and you wanted to be able to say that you knew of no such company, had never met its representatives, there was no paper trail from you to them, and you had evidence to prove you were somewhere else entirely on the dates in question.' She shrugged. ‘Just a guess.'

The coaster speeded up. Morgan said, ‘You're on dangerous ground, DS Mooney. Len's business was his own affair.'

‘His wife claims he attended those meetings with the express purpose of pretending to be you.'

‘I wonder why Len would tell her that. I imagine he had something to hide. Still, he's dead now and beyond recrimination.'

‘She's pretty clear on the matter.'

‘If that's what he told her, I suppose she would be.'

The place had filled up: older men and younger women; older men and younger men; business deals going down in quiet corners; lone gamblers at the bar waiting for a place at the backroom table. Eyes followed Stella as she walked out, as if she had ‘Police' in large, white letters across the back of her much-older-than-last-year's jacket from T. K. Maxx.

Even in the best marriages
…

Stella drove down to the Embankment, parked and took a walk. She thought about her conversation with Tom Davison and the way she had felt when he'd stood close to her; she thought back to the evening at Machado's, strings of lights round the square, swifts circling, Delaney asking, ‘Are you happy with us?'

He was restless, she knew that, but she didn't know why.

The Imola-red Beamer went by. Someone had fitted blue sill-lights that shed a glow on the tarmac – car-bling. The sound-system slammed off the Embankment wall and the boys were hanging out of the windows, laughing, yelling, cruising for girls.

They saw Stella and ran through their repertoire.

Hey, bitch
…

Aimée lay in the arms of her lover, tucked into him, holding on. His chest, slowly rising and falling, was hard; his stomach carried little ridges of muscle; she could feel his bicep, bunched against her shoulder. She had made him a meal, they had drunk some wine, they had made love in a way that was new to her for its intensity and pleasure, new to her for its touch of pain, and it was what she wanted, what she now craved, even as she lay beside him, still damp between her thighs, still hot from his touch.

Gideon, Gideon
…

Love had taken her by surprise, but she had adapted
quickly to its demands. She had a mother in Oxford who was mostly deaf, somewhat infirm and a good alibi. If her daughterly trips became more frequent, if she had to spend the night down there, or the weekend, who could possibly complain?

Over dinner they had talked about themselves, lies going back and forth, each of them open to believe.

Aimée had lived in this flat for a year or so. She had been engaged, once, a long time ago; since then there hadn't been anyone, really. No one special, anyway. She worked as a dental nurse, he knew that. There wasn't much else to tell.

Woolf had worked as an engineer. He chose ‘engineer', because it was vague and sounded complicated. He'd been made redundant and got a really handy payoff. He was looking for a job but wasn't in any hurry. There wasn't much else to tell.