Gagged & Bound (7 page)

Trish was glad she’d chosen a particularly good bottle of wine. She reached for the corkscrew, but Caro shook her head, saying abruptly, ‘I don’t want a drink. Have you heard about what happened to Stephanie Taft this morning?’

‘Yes.’ Trish put down the bottle unopened. ‘Did you know her?’

‘It was she who warned me about me about my rival taking bribes.’

‘Oh, shit!’ It wasn’t the most elegant or sympathetic of expressions, but it was all Trish could produce in time. Ideas poured through her brain like rafts in white water, churning and banging against obstructions as they went.

‘One comfort must be that she was for real,’ she said, hoping she wasn’t trampling too hard on Caro’s sensibilities. ‘I mean, she can’t have been part of a set-up designed to manipulate you after all. It would be too much of a coincidence for her to be shot by accident only just after she asked you for help in blowing the whistle on a corrupt cop working with a violent crime family.’

‘It isn’t a comfort.’

Trish looked at her friend’s face and saw in it an expression she knew far too well from her own mirror.

‘You’re not telling yourself you’re responsible for her death, are you, Caro?’

‘How can I not?’ Her voice was high and thin with strain. ‘If I hadn’t been so keen to protect my own interests … If I’d been quicker about deciding how to handle her information, I might have been able to get her out of the front line in time to save her.’

‘I doubt it. Not in less than twenty-four hours. In any case, that doesn’t make you responsible for what happened,’ Trish
said steadily. ‘You didn’t ask her for information; you didn’t betray her to anyone; you didn’t set up the raid this morning, or put her in the front of it. Nor did you organise the shooting. None of it’s your fault.’

‘I know that,’ Caro said with a snap like a bulldog clip. ‘Sorry. I didn’t come to shout at you. I just wish I could believe it as well as know it.’

‘What are you going to do now?’ Trish forgave the snap; she knew all about the way fear and misery could emerge in the guise of fury. ‘You’ll have to tell someone on the investigating team, won’t you?’

‘Listen.’ Caro dragged a chair away from the table and plumped down into it. ‘Listen, Trish.’

‘I
am
listening.’ She sat on the opposite side of the table. ‘Carry on.’

‘I told you how Stephanie had tried to use the whistle-blower’s phoneline all those times, as well as telling a whole lot of senior officers what she thought about John, didn’t I?’

‘You did,’ Trish said, registering the suspect officer’s first name.

‘And they’ve done nothing. Which has to mean he’s been investigated and found to be clean. So if I go repeating Stephanie’s allegations …’ Caro’s voice died as though the prospect of the disaster that might cause was too much to contemplate.

‘I’m not sure you’re right,’ Trish said, recognising a new possibility that made sense of a whole lot of things that had been puzzling her. ‘Caro, has it occurred to you that it’s odd you were allowed to see John after your interview, when you were told everything about the job is incredibly secret and you have no idea who either of the other two candidates are?’

‘It must have been chance.’

‘Maybe. But isn’t it possible that it could have been deliberate? I mean, what if they
have
investigated John and
failed to find any evidence to show conclusively whether or not he’s bent? Mightn’t someone be hoping you could do better?’

Caro shook her head. ‘Not possible, no. What could I ever do that they can’t with all their surveillance techniques, and all their powers? I have nothing to work with.’

‘Forget the idea then. Why are you so scared of reporting that she came to you? Is it because she’s been shot? I could understand that, but it doesn’t sound like you.’

‘It’s not the shooting. It’s the same dilemma she had. Who could I go to? How would I know who to trust?’

‘There must be someone in all the Met who’s above suspicion,’ Trish said.

‘There are hundreds of people. Thousands. Of course there are. But how could I be sure of any particular one? There’ve always been stories about long-standing officers believed to be cleaner than clean by everyone, who turn out to have been on the take in the end. There’s a whole secret squad that was set up years ago to track them down.’

‘Then why not go to the squad?’

‘Because I don’t know who or where they are.’ Caro was looking puzzled, as though she couldn’t believe anyone could be such a fool. ‘That’s the point of the secrecy.’

Trish had to work hard to stop herself protesting. There had to be a safe way to report important suspicions like this. Caro just had to find it, but that wouldn’t happen until she stopped this unlikely dithering.

‘I must go,’ she said before Trish could comment. ‘Jess will be waiting. Oh, I nearly forgot. Here’s Bill Femur’s phone number. I hope he tells you something that will help your biographer.’

Taking the small piece of paper and shoving it in her pocket, Trish hugged her friend’s resistant body. It felt like a tree, unmoving and unmoveable.

‘You didn’t kill her,’ she said with her arms still wrapped around Caro. ‘And you couldn’t have stopped whoever did. Believe it. When you do, you’ll see your way through this.’

‘How
can
I believe it?’

Trish had never heard Caro’s voice throb like that.

William Femur lived alone in a small house near Streatham Common. Trish found it without difficulty but was surprised to see parking restrictions in every street nearby.

‘In
Streatham
?’ she muttered. When she had manoeuvred her big soft-top Audi into a Pay & Display space and found the right change and stuck the ticket in the approved position on her windscreen, she began to think wistfully of public transport. But Streatham had no tube yet. It wasn’t a bad area, but she found the rows of identical red-brick houses depressing, in spite of the care that was taken of them. Very few had the kind of splitting paint on the window frames and doors that would have been commonplace only five years ago, and their front gardens were full of plants instead of rusting bins and wheel-less bicycles.

She had to pass an estate agent’s windows on her way back to Femur’s road and paused to look at the prices. There was something wrong with a system, she thought, in which one of these basic little houses in an area with no unusual charms of its own, and without a tube, cost more than fifteen times a teacher’s annual salary. No wonder the whole economy was held up on the shaky pillars of consumer debt. And no wonder there were still people living on the street and depending on individuals like Jeremy Marton to offer them shelter.

Femur’s door was plain black and very glossy, as though he
had repainted it in the last few weeks. Trish had only a vague picture of him in her mind from their few meetings five years ago, but she recognised the stocky white-headed man as soon as he opened the door. It was his diamond-shaped grey eyes, she thought, that made him so familiar.

‘Trish Maguire?’ He sounded puzzled, then his face cleared. ‘Ah. I know what’s different: you had spiky hair.’

She smoothed back her expensively cut hair and admitted she’d changed her image.

‘It makes you look a lot more important. Come on through. I’ve got a pot of coffee in the conservatory. Your journey all right?’

‘Fine, thanks.’ She didn’t want to waste time in one of the route-finding conversations so many men used to establish status or break through social constraint, so she launched straight in. ‘Caro thought you might help me with some information about Jeremy Marton and the bombing of X8 Pharmaceuticals in 1972. Do you remember the case?’

‘I’d forgotten how blunt you are,’ he said, pulling out a cane chair with a soft-looking patchwork cushion for her. ‘It was always disconcerting, but better than wasting time.’

‘Do you remember the case?’

‘Not well. But Caro told me that’s what you wanted, so I’ve invited a mate along. He’ll be here in the next ten minutes or so and will be able to tell you more than I can. How is Caro? I haven’t seen her for a while, and she said she was too busy to talk yesterday evening when she phoned about you.’

‘She’s fine, I think. Worried to death by the shooting of this woman officer, but otherwise fine.’

‘Why should Caro be worried? What’s it got to do with her?’

‘Nothing in particular, as far as I know,’ Trish said, remembering Caro’s determination to keep the relationship secret. ‘But any man’s death diminishes me and all that. Look, while we wait for your friend …’

‘Here’s your coffee. Help yourself to shortbread.’

‘While we wait, can you fill me in on London’s organised crime families? I asked Caro about them, but she came over all official and discreet and wouldn’t tell me anything. I thought that being retired might make it easier for you to talk.’

‘I wouldn’t know anything useful. I’ve been out of the job nearly four years now.’

‘But you must have mates who are still working. Don’t they gossip?’

‘Not about things that don’t concern outsiders. Why’re you asking anyway? You don’t do crime.’

‘Which is why I don’t know enough about it. But I’m really interested.’ Trish laughed to show how frivolous her curiosity was. ‘I’d never realised how many families there were until I heard a couple of colleagues talking the other day,’ she went on. ‘One of them said the police know more or less exactly what they all do but can rarely catch them at it with enough evidence to bring a case.’

‘True enough. But that’s because of your colleagues, not mine.’

A brisk tattoo sounded at the front door. ‘That must be Dick. Help yourself to more coffee.’

Odd how much information gathering involves eating and drinking, Trish thought. It’s as though you have to swallow physically as well as mentally. Remembering Caro’s description of the way the Slabbs gagged their victims, she put down her shortbread with only a small bite taken out of it.

‘Dick,’ Femur said from just behind her. ‘This is Trish Maguire.’

She stood to shake hands with the new arrival, a big man whose lined and pitted skin seemed far too old for the darkness of his straight hair. Looking more closely, she noticed how unnaturally uniform the colour was and realised he must have resorted to dye.

‘Bill tells me you want to know what went on at Paddington Green in the seventies,’ he said, as he eased his ample body into the cushions of a deep cane chair.

‘Only in this one instance of the bomb at X8 Pharmaceuticals, when a busload of children were blown up.’

‘So I gather. He told me you’ve got a client facing a libel case. Obviously I haven’t got any files, but my memory’s good enough to assure you that we never had any other suspects for the bombing. And Jeremy Marton’s dead.’ He crossed his legs, which made the grey-flannel trousers ride up to show a patch of very white calf thickly patterned with coarse dark hairs above the top of a wrinkled sock.

‘You can’t have believed he was working alone,’ Trish said, trying not to stare at the gap, ‘so you must have asked him about the people who’d helped him.’

‘Of course we did.’

She had never heard a voice for which ‘gravelly’ was a more suitable adjective.

‘So, what did he say?’

‘Nothing. He claimed he’d done it all himself, which we knew was bollocks. Where would a lad like him have found the stuff to make a bomb? It wasn’t like now, when he could’ve just looked up the recipe on the Internet and ordered everything from there too. But we couldn’t shake him.’

‘How hard did you try? I mean, what did you do to him?’

‘We weren’t the Gestapo, you know.’ Dick didn’t notice the mug of coffee Femur was holding out, so Femur put it quietly on the low cane table in front of them and went back to his own chair without saying anything.

‘Of course not, but everyone knows that before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act things were done throughout the police that wouldn’t happen now,’ Trish said, hoping to avert the angry outburst she could foresee. ‘I’ve heard stories of nasty pressure being put on people who were “known” to be guilty.’

‘A lot of it was psychological,’ Dick said after a long pause. He looked down at his lumpy hands and began picking at the hard skin around one thumbnail. ‘I don’t mean at Paddington Green; just in general. You’d make them think there was going to be violence. You’d let them wait in grim surroundings, getting themselves worked up, and having to listen to scary sounds of banging and crashing through the walls. Maybe even the odd shout; occasionally worse. Then, when you got them in the interview room, everyone would start rolling up their sleeves and moving furniture about as if …’ His voice tailed off, and he coughed once, with a harsh sound that made Trish wince in sympathy with the effect on his throat.

Femur got to his feet, ostensibly to refill the coffee mugs, but probably to distract Trish from his old friend’s implied admission. She knew this wasn’t the time to push either of them or try to make Dick admit he felt guilty about some of his past activities. She believed strongly that it wasn’t fair to judge yesterday’s conduct by today’s standards. Instead, she smiled at Femur, took her copy of Bee Bowman’s book out of her bag and handed it across to Dick. He uncrossed his legs and leaned forwards to take it from her.

‘There’s a bit I’ve marked with a Post-it. It’s very short.’

Dick opened the book and looked down for a second, before raising his eyes again. He looked amazed as well as angry, and glanced towards Femur, who shook his head, as though to assure Dick that the book was new to him, too.

‘A diary?
’ Dick said at last. ‘Jeremy Marton wrote a sodding diary about the bombing?’

‘Yes,’ Trish said, looking from one man to the other and back again. ‘You mean you didn’t find it?’

‘Christ, no! That would have made everything different.’

‘Did you look?’

‘Of course we bloody did.’ Again Dick glanced towards Femur, but he had nothing to offer. He sat on patiently
watching the two of them negotiate their way through everything Trish needed to know and Dick didn’t want to say.

‘We were desperate for evidence. We turned his university rooms upside down, pissing off the lad who shared them, and went through his parents’ house like flea-trainers looking for new candidates. That took for ever and might’ve landed us with a hefty claim for damages. If the Marton parents hadn’t been such good citizens and so horrified by what their son had done, we’d have been in deep shit.’

‘Why did it take so long?’

‘It was a big house.’

Trish watched his expression and thought, you hated him. Why?

‘Big and glamorous?’ she suggested after a while.

‘Not so much glamorous as grand,’ he said at last. ‘Shabby, but grand in the way that’s more impressive than gold leaf and marble. You know the kind of thing. Big old iron gates and a drive and different rooms for different times of day: breakfast room, morning room and all that.’

‘And it riled you?’ He nodded, so she added, ‘More than the deaths of the children? And the maiming?’

‘Don’t be stupid. Nothing could’ve been worse than that. But I was young then. And innocent. I didn’t see how anyone with everything Jeremy Marton had – and brains and university on top of it – could chuck it all away like he did. So I … Yeah, I was riled.’

‘Read the diary entry,’ Trish said, thinking she could easily understand what Dick could not bring himself to say. She thought of the words she’d highlighted. There was silence for a long time, then the sound of the book snapping shut. This time it was Femur who coughed, as though in warning. Dick didn’t look at him.

‘Stupid bugger,’ he said. ‘Oh, the stupid, stupid bugger. Why didn’t he tell us about this Baiborn and his threats?’

‘Would you have protected his parents?’ Trish asked.

‘In return for the man behind the codename and the people who actually provided the bomb? Of course we would. Jeremy Marton would still have done time, but not as much. Nothing like as much. What else was there he didn’t tell us? Can I borrow the book?’

‘It’s not mine to lend,’ she said, thinking for Bee’s need of money and her publisher’s losses on the title. ‘But I’m sure your local bookseller could order you a copy.’

‘Yeah, right. Does it give any idea of who this Baiborn was or how our boy met him?’

‘Unfortunately it doesn’t. Which is why I came to Mr Femur. He thought you might be able to tell me.’

‘No chance. We went through Jeremy’s whole life, looking for the people who could have been involved. We interviewed everyone he’d been with in Africa; everyone at his chess club; all his tutors, teachers, scout leaders; his university friends, school friends. Everyone.’ At last he reached for the mug of cooling coffee and swallowed some.

‘You seem to remember an awful lot about the case for something that happened more than thirty years ago.’

‘It was my first big one. And something about Jeremy Marton got under my skin.’

‘What? Apart from his privileged life.’

Dick thought for a while, with anger tightening up all his muscles until his lips were white and his neck looked like a bodybuilder’s.

‘He was so wet; but nothing we could do made him talk. It was the combination that did it for me. Pathetic as he was, he should’ve been pouring out everything he knew and snivelling at us. We got plenty of snivels but no information. I hated the bugger. I must get off.’

‘Before you go,’ Trish said urgently, hoping to do something for Caro while she was here. He paused, halfway to the door
out of the conservatory, looking more uncomfortable than ever. Femur got to his feet too.

‘Yes?’ Dick said.

‘I heard a whisper that Jeremy might have been in cahoots with a South London crime family called Slabb, who were apparently operating then.’

Something that looked very like shock arrested him and he stood, arms dangling, one leg stretched to take the next step to the door. He didn’t say anything. Femur was frowning. She smiled to reassure him that she wasn’t going to do anything dreadful and said, ‘I wondered whether they might have provided the bomb, and whether you considered—’

‘No.’ Dick had got over his surprise and was talking to her as though she were an impertinent child. ‘The Slabbs never involved themselves with rich kids like Jeremy Marton. In any case, what would they have got out of bombing a chemicals factory? I don’t know where you get your information, but it’s a load of cock.’

‘OK. Fine,’ Trish said, wondering why he was so angry.

‘I haven’t got time for this, Bill.’

Femur escorted him to the street door, then came back to say: ‘Did you get what you came for?’ He was no longer frowning, but some of his earlier warmth had gone.

‘Not really. But it helped a bit. I’m very grateful. While I’m here, do you know anything about a man called Simon Tick?’

‘Not a thing. So there’s no point asking me whether he’s involved with the Slabbs too. Does Caro know what you’re up to? How you’re using this story about Jeremy Marton to dig into the Slabbs’ affairs? What are you really after?’

‘It was idle curiosity,’ she said, knowing he wouldn’t believe her any more than Dick had, but intrigued by the effect her questions had had on both men. ‘My interest is in Jeremy Marton and whoever provided the bomb. If I could find out, I might be able to fend off the libel claim. So I’m trying to look at
every possibility. From the little I’ve heard about them, the Slabbs seemed to be one; clearly not a very good one.’