Exile (26 page)

A sudden knock at the door heralded DI Inness’s first visit of the day. Inness had been getting the brunt of McEwan’s recent moods. He knew it was wrong, he knew he shouldn’t allow himself the luxury, but he found Inness deeply annoying. And the more he bullied him, the more Inness sucked up to him.

“Sir,” he said, stepping into the office clutching a piece of paper. Inness always carried a bit of paper, as if his mum had given him permission to be in the police force. It was a standing joke at the station. When he was off duty and didn’t have his bit of paper he always carried a plastic bag. “The DI and the DC from the Met are downstairs. D’you still want me to handle it?”

“Yeah, I’ll sit in. Take them to conference room two, please,” said McEwan, starting the day as he started every day, meaning not to pick on him.

Inness showed them in and DI Williams and DC Bunyan took their seats at the table without being invited. Williams was a pudgy man with a bald head and small gold glasses. Bunyan was a pretty little thing, petite and slim with short blond hair and a modest trace of pale lipstick. They were dressed in smart dark suits, he in trousers, she in a skirt that just reached her knees, and McEwan didn’t altogether approve. If they had been from any other region he wouldn’t have bothered attending but they were the Met and he wanted them to know whose patch they were on.

“First of all, thank you for your cooperation, sir,” said Williams, and McEwan recognized the accent. “It’s been very helpful.”

“You from the south side?” asked McEwan.

“Aye,” said Williams, and he smiled. “My da was a copper. Govan, ‘sixty-two to ‘seventy-nine.”

“Why are you in the Met?”

“Form of rebellion,” he said, and McEwan smiled at him. Regional forces resented the Met. They were considered arrogant and lax. Williams’s dad would have hated it.

“Did you stay with your family last night?”

“No, they’re all gone now. We stayed in a guesthouse in Battlefields.”

“That’s a bit out of the way.”

” ‘S familiar, though.”

“Yeah.” McEwan signaled to Inness to start the briefing.

Inness flipped through the notes in front of him. “There isn’t much intelligence on the deceased,” he said, “so I don’t know how helpful we can be to you. The husband was interviewed when she was first reported missing and he claimed he hadn’t seen her since November. Notes say he was a quiet man, very concerned for her safety. The area’s not bad — poor but not bad.”

“Who’s in the frame at the moment?” asked McEwan.

A little startled by the intrusion, Williams sat up. “Well,” he said, “the husband beat her up quite badly before, but we can’t place him in London and we haven’t had the chance to question him yet.”

“Didn’t you go there last night?”

“Yeah,” interrupted Bunyan, “but we couldn’t question him because he hadn’t told his kids yet.”

McEwan ignored the short-skirted woman and continued to look at Williams, answering him as if he were the one who had spoken. “He hadn’t told them she was missing?”

“He hadn’t told them she was dead,” said Williams. He raised his eyebrows.

McEwan tipped his head to the side and sighed. “How many kids?” he asked.

“Four,” said Williams.

McEwan shook his head at the notes. “They’ve always got kids,” he said heavily. “All these nightmare couples have got kids.”

“Yes, sir.” Williams nodded. “Always got kids.”

Williams was quietly spoken, deferential but firm, and McEwan thought he might like him if they worked together.

Inness turned the page on his notebook and started reading again. “They’ve got four kids, which you already know, and you know about the Place of Safety shelter, obviously.”

“Yeah,” said Bunyan, sitting forward and leaning her hands on the desk. “We’re going there later.”

Hugh McAskill knocked on the half-open door and looked in. “What is it?” said McEwan.

“They’ve got Hutton’s girlfriend downstairs, sir.”

“Well,” said Williams, standing up, “I can see you’ve got a lot on so we’ll leave ye to it.”

“Right,” said McEwan. “Well, let us know how you get on. If we can do anything, you know.”

McAskill stood at the door, holding it open for the visiting officers, and followed them out to show them downstairs. Inness lingered in the doorway.

“She’s a bit of a hotshot, isn’t she?” said McEwan, assuaging his conscience by giving him credit.

“Yes, sir, she is.”

Chapter 28

COLDHARBOUR LANE

The passengers had thinned by the time they reached Brixton. Maureen got off and climbed down the stairs, enjoying a bracing breath of cold air in the street. Everyone in Brixton was dressed for a mild spring and Maureen was ready for the height of a Siberian winter. The sweat from the Underground had dried out, leaving her feeling crusty and damp. She stopped by Woolworths window and took out her A-Z. The lawyer’s office was just beyond the high street and Moe Akitza’s address was at the top of Brixton Hill, within easy walking distance. The pager in her bag began to sing and she felt for it, finding it at the bottom of her bag under a pair of pants. Jimmy said that the child-benefit book had been cashed yesterday.

She waited at the lights, crossed over to the Ritzy cinema and entered the mouth of Coldharbour Lane. The street ran around the back of Brixton high street, sloping away from it at a forty-five-degree angle. The start of the Lane was busy with bistros and wine bars, small restaurants and tasteful clothes shops. The brave push towards gentrification died suddenly at the intersection of Electric Avenue and the vegetable market. Coldharbour Lane crumbled into a ramshackle ghetto. A big police sign strapped to a lamppost announced that someone had been shot and killed in the Lane at 2:09 a.m., three days ago, and appealed to the public for information. Next to a shop selling nothing but neon yellow chickens stood a subsiding Victorian inn with a sinking stone portico. It was the Coach and Horses, the pub Mark Doyle had seen Ann in before Christmas. It wasn’t open yet but shadowy figures moved inside the small orange windows. It looked dirty and run-down and Maureen could easily see Ann drinking in there. Beyond the eroded brick railway bridge stood a row of pleasantly proportioned Victorian shops. On the corner, behind a bank of call boxes, was a whitewashed pub called the Angel, and next to it a long office window was barred with vertical strip blinds. It was McCallum and Arrowsmith, Solicitors. Maureen opened the door, tripping a tinkling alarm bell as she walked in, and stood at the counter, trying to attract the attention of a secretary.

“Don’t hold your breath.”

A tiny woman in a fake-fur box jacket was sitting on one of the plastic chairs against the window. She had sun-brushed skin, thin brown hair and buggy, goitrous eyes. She was resting her head against the window, her eyes half shut. She looked like a tiny, very beautiful tropical frog. “She’ll take fucking ages,” she said, her accent a muted upper-class Glaswegian.

For all her worldliness, Maureen found the stranger a bit frightening. But she didn’t look dangerous. Her hair was twisted into a loose roll at the back and her little slipper shoes looked expensive.

“Takes ages,” said the stranger.

“Aye, right enough,” said Maureen noncommittally.

Without sitting up the frog woman opened one bloodshot eye. “Glasgow?”

Maureen nodded a little.

“Whereabouts?”

“Garnethill.”

The tiny woman shut her eye and smiled softly. “Ah, Garnethill,” she said. “I was at the art school. Long time ago.”

Maureen wondered why she was in the lawyer’s. She might be a criminal, or getting divorced. Divorce seemed more likely, somehow. She seemed fairly content. A phone rang out on the desk and was intercepted by an answering machine. Maureen remembered why she had come in and turned back to the counter. The office was shallow with two desks standing in front of a door leading to the lawyers’ private offices. The young Asian secretary was alone, transcribing something from her headphones. Her hair was permed into tight spirals and hennaed burgundy. She was badly placed to see anyone at the counter but she was aware of Maureen and looked up at her a couple of times, nodding and lifting her hand briefly from the keyboard, letting her know she’d be with her in a minute. Maureen pulled a pen and the service-station notebook out of her bag, and stood at the counter, poised and ready to write, trying to look official.

“Wait till ye see her eyes,” whispered the fur-coated woman.

Maureen wasn’t sure she was even talking to her. “I’m sorry,” she said, “are you waiting to be seen?”

“Just wait till ye see her eyes.”

Confused by the irrelevant mantra, Maureen smiled. Despite having her eyes shut the tiny woman smiled too and smacked her lips, nestling her head back against the window.

Six long, hot minutes later the secretary took off her headphones, picked up a clipboard and meandered over to the counter. She wore colored contact lenses of such a pale blue that her pupils looked irradiated, as if the edges of them were melting into the whites around her eyes. Maureen almost let out a little gasp but caught herself. She looked at the frog woman. She still had her eyes shut but she sensed Maureen’s intense discomfort and grinned to herself.

“Can I have your name,” asked the secretary, in a clipped lilt, “the time of your appointment and the name of the person the appointment is with, please?” The dye, the perm and the contacts seemed designed to contradict her every feature, as if she didn’t want to be her at all.

“I don’t have an appointment,” said Maureen. “I’d like to talk to you.”

The secretary looked up, startling Maureen again. “I wanted to ask you a couple of questions,” said Maureen, trying to sound official. “It’ll only take about three minutes. Would that be okay with you?”

“You’re not selling stationery, are you?”

“No.”

“Because I’m not authorized to buy anything.”

“No, no, I just want to ask you about something.”

“What is the nature of your inquiry?” she said.

“I wanted to ask you about a man called James Harris.” She let it hang for a minute. “He came into this office a week ago yesterday. He was under the mistaken belief that this office was a different firm of solicitors.”

The secretary grinned. “The little Scottish man who thought he was here for a will reading? Like in the films?”

“Exactly,” said Maureen. “He spoke to you, did he?”

“Yes, he did. He showed me the letter and everything.” She smirked. “Course, it was made-up rubbish. We do criminal work and it wasn’t even our name. We used to be McCallum and Headie but then, of course, Mr. Headie left three months ago.”

“And Mr. Arrowsmith came on board?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Headie left, did he?” Maureen looked up. The secretary looked uncomfortable but she wasn’t giving anything away “Did he retire?”

The secretary didn’t know what to say “Sort of.”

“Right,” said Maureen, jotting “fuck” in her notebook. “Did you get on with him?”

“He was a nice man to work for …”

“And where is he now?”

The secretary hesitated and glanced at the frog woman. “He’s in Wandsworth, I think,” she muttered.

“Could you give me the number of his new office?”

The secretary sniggered and held her clipboard up to cover her mouth. She tipped to the side to look behind Maureen and the frog woman giggled too. “I haven’t got the number of his office.”

“Well, thank you for your time,” said Maureen, closing her notebook. A shaft of sunlight hit her in the eye and she flinched. “Thanks again.”

Out in the street the sun was warm and Maureen desperately wanted something sugary to wake her up. The door to the Angel pub was pinned wide to let in the morning air. She glanced inside to see if it was open. It was empty but someone was standing behind the bar, reading a paper and drinking out of a blue mug. “You open?” she called.

“Naw, I’m waiting for a bus.”

The pub was tastefully furnished with dark wood cladding halfway up the walls and chalky white distemper over the ceiling. Plastic transfer etching on the windows softened the light. The person behind the bar was either a butch woman or a small man with nice skin. Little bumps under the T-shirt gave her away. She watched Maureen’s feet as she walked up to the bar and waited for her to speak.

“Can I have a lemonade with ice, please?”

The woman slapped her paper on the bar. She sauntered over to Maureen and poured her drink from a big plastic bottle with a 99p promise printed on the label. “Quid,” she said, flapping her hand for the money.

“Where’s the ice?”

“No ice.”

“You’re charging me a quid for a glass when the bottle cost less than a quid?”

” ‘S what it costs,” she said. “Same price everywhere.”

Maureen gave her a coin. “There ye are,” she said. “Ye can restock your entire bar with that.”

The woman screwed the lid back on the bottle and sidled back to her paper. Maureen drank quietly, wondering about the conversation with the secretary and what could possibly be so funny about Mr. Headie’s new office.

“You in the Salvation Army, then?” The butch lady-man was calling over to her.

“Why?” said Maureen.

The lady-man nodded to her drink. “Drinking lemonade in a pub.”

“I don’t think the Sally Ann come into pubs, do they?”

“They do if they’re looking for money.”

Maureen smiled at her glass and took another sip. “It’s nice in here.”

“Yeah”—the woman frowned—”my friend just done it up. She’s got good taste.”

“She has,” nodded Maureen. “She really has.”

“Course, you can’t choose your punters.”

“Rough crowd, is it?”

“Very rough. We were hoping for the lunch trade from the offices but they don’t make it up here.”

“What’s the Coach and Horses like?”

The woman waved her hand in front of her nose. “Wild men. Scots and Irish mostly, and you know what they’re like, duntcha?”

The woman sidled back over to her. “I know you Scots, tight as gnats’ arses, the lot of ya.” She lifted the bottle of lemonade from below the bar and topped Maureen’s glass up.