Four Below (20 page)

‘I am. Yes, I would,’ he said sincerely.

‘And if I turn you down now, you’re going to carry on as normal. It’s always good to have a spare, I suppose. Give me those papers.’

Reluctantly he pulled the thick envelope from an inside pocket of his jacket and laid it in front of her.

She slid the papers out and flicked through. ‘Sign at the bottom and initial the rest, right? I’m glad I thought of bringing my favourite pen.’ She signed and with a flourish
handed back the papers in their envelope. As she stood up and swung her jacket from the back of her chair, Paul got up too. ‘No, you stay and finish your drink. Carrie is a lucky girl. Tell
her I said so.’

Outside she zipped her jacket up and pulled tight her scarf. She took a deep sniff of the clean wintry air. Snow was falling thickly and audibly around her. The city sounds from across the water
were muffled by it. Ice was beginning to form between the boats and snow was settling on it. The boats themselves sat motionless under thick white blankets, making her dream of spring. She needed
to find a new pub. It was too early to go home. Far too early.

Chapter Fourteen

‘No, it certainly is not
man flu
, Inspector. It’s not any kind of flu.’

McLusky had not yet met Eve, DS Austin’s fiancée, so could not match her firm telephone voice to anything but a vague picture he had concocted in his mind, and which, for
Austin’s sake, he hoped bore no resemblance to reality. Eve worked at a primary school, and he decided she’d be a terrifying teacher. ‘Well, if it’s just a cold
…’

‘Just a cold, Inspector? It’s a
severe
cold and he’s staying in bed where he belongs. He’d only pass it on to you and other colleagues, and you certainly
wouldn’t want that. Besides, standing in the snow for hours on end and working in an office without heating could soon turn a severe cold into something much worse.’

‘Okay, okay. Tell him to
get well soon
.’ He returned the icy receiver to its cradle and morosely worked his hands into his jacket pockets. He had counted five ‘certain
lies’ in their short conversation and wished he could be that certain about anything. The woman had a point, of course. The third day without heating in the building had taken its toll.
Austin was not the only one to have called in sick; a lot of the civilian staff had suddenly developed colds and flu, and in CID the ranks had thinned too. How many of these were genuine and how
many had simply had enough of the working conditions, he’d never know. It was rumoured that the superintendent himself had made the journey into the bowels of the station to offer an opinion
about the lack of progress being made with the heating system. According to those working nearby, he had not minced his words, which could be heard as far as the front desk. As a result, there were
now not one but two vans of heating engineers in the car park and the noise coming from below had doubled as a result.

Other mills were grinding just as slowly. The autopsy for the second Leigh Woods body still hadn’t been done, and forensics took their time over everything, from examining DNA collected at
Wayne Deeming’s house and from the sites in Leigh Woods, to the new samples taken from Mike Oatley’s flat in St Pauls. The recent snowfall was offered as an excuse for almost everything
now, from delayed lab results to the dearth of hot chocolate in the vending machines.

The canteen was doing a roaring trade in soup, and McLusky went to stand in line for a polystyrene cupful for the second time this morning. Huge vats of it had been prepared and selections of
mushroom, tomato or chicken were being doled out to shivering officers all day. As he made his selection, his eyes drifted to a female canteen worker standing at a table at the back of the kitchen.
She closed a briefcase, then walked out of sight with it towards the door to the corridor. Being suspicious by nature, he quickly snapped a plastic lid on his mushroom soup and made for the exit.
Taking the stairs two at a time, he caught up with the kitchen worker carrying the case.

‘Is that for the superintendent? I’m just going to see him, I’ll take care of it.’ He held out his hand, and the girl, after a moment’s hesitation, handed it over
with an ‘Oh, okay then, thanks.’

McLusky waited until she had disappeared towards the canteen before lifting the briefcase to his face as if listening for a ticking bomb. The case radiated gentle warmth against his cheek.
Making sure first that no one else was near, he snapped it open. It contained a hot-water bottle with a Peter Rabbit cover. He delivered it to the superintendent’s secretary as casually as
though the delivery of hot briefcases was an everyday police matter: ‘The super’s briefcase from the canteen.’ Lynn Tiery, gently irradiated by a slightly smaller halogen heater
than the one her boss enjoyed, accepted it in the same spirit.

Noisily slurping at the vaguely mushroomy gloop, sending unheeded drips of it into his keyboard, McLusky sifted through papers and clicked ill-temperedly through the items
flagged up on his computer screen. The BMW in the hedge had once been a BMW on a drive, it said, not far away in Cheltenham, from where it had been stolen six months ago. It had been cloned with an
identical model in London. Traffic police had long been looking for it, since the owner of the properly licensed car could prove she had not been driving recklessly around the West Country clocking
up speeding fines and parking tickets. So Mr Whoever-he-was with his Beretta, heroin and strange traces of gold plate on the window frame really was as stupid as Austin had classified him. No doubt
the man had thought of himself as a successful criminal, with his gun and his flash ripped-off motor. But clocking up speeding tickets and parking fines was as good a method as any for getting your
car pulled over, whether cloned or not. It never failed to amaze McLusky how many career criminals got caught because they flagged up their criminality by not getting an MOT, or some other trivial
driving offence. Sooner or later the BMW driver would have been stopped by the police. The question was: would he have pulled his Beretta on the officers doing it? And where was the damn thing
now?

McLusky balanced the empty soup cup on the teetering mound of rubbish rising above the rim of his bin, then dived for a pile of files on the floor. Everything else was being held up by snow and
sniffles, and he never had finished reading the accident investigator’s report on the crash or the PM report on the driver. He dug them out from the ever-growing heap behind his desk. After a
moment’s hesitation, he slid the file under his jacket, clicked the computer off and left the office.

Upstairs at the Revival Café, armed with a large cappuccino and a doorstep slice of coffee cake, he took possession of a table and let himself sink on to the chair. For a while he just
sat and enjoyed the warmth and sanity of it. The café was busy, but the place was big enough to absorb the bustle. He opened the file, sipped frothy coffee, speared some cake. Who said all
police work had to be done in neon-lit offices with a view of the bins?

Reading accident reports was tedious work at the best of times. Estimates on time and speed, braking distances, the road and light conditions at the time, the roadworthiness or otherwise of the
vehicle, all was there in detail. Probable cause of the accident was an excess of speed and a puddle of red diesel on the road. Tax-reduced red diesel was used by farmers for farm machinery and
vehicles not operated on public roads, and one little puddle of the stuff had done for Mr BMW as he took the bend too fast, without wearing his seat belt. McLusky remembered well what the result
had looked like. Bringing back to mind the hand of the dead man, stretched up towards the window, he wondered how long after the crash he had still been alive, broken into pieces, twisted,
shattered. It made him reach for more cake and turn the page. The next paragraph arrested his own hand in mid-air, coffee cake balanced precariously on his pastry fork.

The rolling car had scored the road surface and deposited mud on the tarmac as it travelled out of control towards its eventual resting place in the hedge. Those deposits contained tyre marks
made by a motorcycle travelling in the same direction some time after the accident.

McLusky clamped his lips around the cake and savoured the gooey layer of coffee-flavoured cream. There was another witness after all. And therefore another candidate for Beretta- and
drug-ownership. A biker … The report went on to suggest that the tyre size indicated a motorcycle of 350cc or more, belonging to a large trail bike. The tread pattern was so common, it
failed to narrow down the possible make.

It was something, albeit a pretty hopeless something. Taking that as a basis for a search was like looking for
a car with a medium-sized engine, possibly a hatchback
. McLusky’s eyes
lifted off the page and focused on the desultory snowflakes dancing above Corn Street outside the windows. The weather had magicked motorcycles off the roads. Even before the snow, the exceptional
cold had forced all but the most determined motorcyclists to switch to alternative transport. Who was left? A few fanatics, and those who had no choice. The accident had happened early in the
morning, in mist and darkness. The biker could be a commuter. Someone who didn’t have a car or a car licence and who had little choice but to use his bike because bus services in the country
were few and far between. Where was he now that the roads had disappeared under five inches of snow? Standing at a bus stop with a Beretta and a kilo or two of smack? Probably not for long.

His mobile chimed; the display told him it was Albany Road. ‘I think your radio is turned off, guv,’ said DC Dearlove at the other end.

‘Oh? Oh yeah, so it is; now how did that happen?’ Airwave radios had built-in GPS, allowing control to establish the whereabouts of the officer. Or at least the radio. Which was why
radios tended to mysteriously go off air from time to time, apparently all by themselves.

‘Just calling to say, the mortuary sent word earlier; the PM of the second Leigh Woods victim is scheduled for one hour from now. And with DS Austin off sick …’

With a moistened finger McLusky dabbed at the last crumbs of cake on his plate. ‘Thanks, I’ll attend.’

Fragile
. That was how she would have described herself. Feeling a bit fragile today. To another woman, anyway. To a woman friend, she further qualified the thought. She
wouldn’t have told a colleague, female or otherwise. You kept your private life out, almost secret, especially if you were hoping to one day be elevated above their rank. If you got too
chummy with them, you’d only store up problems for later. Rumours could chip away at reputations. And
fragile
was not a good word to be mentioned in the same breath as detective
inspector, not unless you were happy to stay a DI for all eternity.

Fairfield was thrown forward into the tightening grip of her seat belt as Sorbie braked sharply, having driven too close to the back of a delivery van. ‘Jesus, Jack, watch what
you’re doing. That’s no way to drive a woman with a hangover.’

‘That bastard has no bloody brake lights on his heap. Am I pulling him over?’

‘Not unless you want to go back into uniform. Permanently. Just drive.’
Hangover
, now that was fine with colleagues, though certainly not superiors. You could come in, grunt,
make a show of taking Alka-Seltzer and say
Bit of a sesh last night
, and then get on with things. That was the accepted way of drinking too much and being one of the lads. But not
fragile
, not on the verge of throwing up all day or feeling faint because the thought of food made you want to retch.

Sorbie grudgingly adjusted his driving style; there were no more sudden jerks or stops. The call about the drug death had been anonymous, from a mobile. One that had been reported stolen,
naturally. He pulled up in front of the address as smoothly as a limousine chauffeur. ‘How’s that?’ he asked.

‘Hideous.’ Fairfield got out and took in the side street with as little head movement as possible. These were tiny, blunt-faced houses stubbing their noses on the litter-strewn
pavements. Besides the one they had stopped in front of, she could see two more that were boarded up. Everything in sight had been covered in graffiti and tags, walls, doors and cars, in red, blue
or black. Uncollected rubbish had been piled into two great heaps, someone’s valiant effort at making this stretch of pavement walkable. The small car in front of number eleven had no rear
window and was full of snow. The one next to it had a flat offside front tyre. Most of the cars parked in the street were so old that they made the brightly liveried police car, the doctor’s
Audi and even Sorbie’s Golf look futuristic; gaily coloured visitors from an unlikely future. An unhappy-looking constable outside number eleven straightened up as Sorbie pointed to him.

‘I’m glad he’s there to keep an eye on my motor. Jesus. If I woke up one morning and found I was living in Easton, I’d just walk out of the house and keep walking until I
found people who’d never heard of the place.’

‘If only it were that easy.’

‘It is that easy.’

‘And what if you had children, Mr Sorbie?’

‘Why would I have children?’

‘People do have them, you know.’

‘Yes, of course. I would look out of the window, see this shit and think, hey, let’s have children,
they’ll love it here
.’

‘Yeah, well, stop being a smartass for a bit, I’m not in the mood.’ She walked past the officer guarding the house as though he were invisible, followed by Sorbie, who merely
noted that the man had a shaving rash.

Okay, find out like I did, the PC thought, and sniffed at the cold city air.

The house was a shell. It had been condemned, boarded up, then broken into and squatted. In the hall, the temperature was the same as outside. There were only two doors off. The one at the back
gave on to a gutted kitchen. The nearer one was closed. The smell of damp decay was strong. Sorbie pushed open the door. It opened reluctantly. ‘Jesus.’