Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time (28 page)

“What the fuck’s going on?”

I spat out my demand towards the scarred face of the man who had my locks tightly in his grasp.

“Are you Joseph Ellington?” The plain-clothed copper asked me the question with the kind of assured timbre in his voice that told me that he’d been doing the job for a long time. I replied with an attitude and tone that showed little deference to his time served or rank.

“Yeah, that’s me . . . What the hell you doin’ busting into my pad at this time o’ morning?”

“I’m arresting you on the suspicion of the murder of Virginia Landry. You do not have to say anything if you do not wish to do so, but anything you do say may be used against you in a court of law. Now get a pair of drawers on this coon’s arse and run him back in the Maria pronto down to the nick . . . And nobody speaks to this black bastard until I get back to the station, is that understood?”

A Black Maria was the nickname for secure police vans with separate locked cubicles, used for the transportation of prisoners. The name was said to have come from a large and powerful black lodging-house keeper named Maria Lee, who helped constables of Boston, Massachusetts, in the USA in the 1830s when they needed to escort drunks to the cells. And so it was with a touch of twisted irony that I was flung unceremoniously into the back of the infamous police vehicle whose origins had gained a notorious reputation via the deeds of one Maria Lee, an American black woman feared by both crooks and police in the 1820s for her use of violent force to catch local miscreants.

My elderly neighbour Mrs Pearce stood on the pavement along with a sizable array of curious onlookers who gawped at me from outside of their homes. The gathering was tutting and nodding at my apprehension as I was led handcuffed towards the opened rear doors of the polished navy-blue vehicle. Oblivious to the crime I was accused of committing, each of the spectators seemed to share a certainty in their expressions as to my obvious guilt.

I wondered if the colour of my skin influenced their opinion in the matter of my alleged culpability and felt that perhaps little had changed in the hundred and sixty-five years since the abolition of slavery. I was certain of one thing no matter how much time had passed: whether we were secured in handcuffs or chains, if the accused were black, you were damn sure to be in one hell of a lot of trouble.

I was driven at speed the short distance out of St Pauls to Bridewell police station on Nelson Street, barefooted, a blanket wrapped around my partially clothed body, with the four coppers who had busted into my flat sitting at either side of me. The harsh echo of the klaxon rattled alongside the aura of confusion in my head as it rapidly travelled through the early morning fog-bound streets of the city. It wasn’t long before the Black Maria broke sharply and the driver shifted the gears and quickly reversed the paddy wagon.

The ear-piercing whine of the engine reverberated throughout the interior of the Austin van as it accelerated backwards towards my final destination. It came to a juddering halt, and the doors were thrown open and I was led from the police carrier into the rear of the station house by one of the officers along a series of spotlessly scrubbed-down corridors, each decorated with the kind of uniform olive-green paint work that could be found adorning the walls of nicks and jails spanning the four corners of the known colonial empire.

The copper leading me through the maze of passageways finally came to a standstill at a large iron door, which we waited briefly at until it was opened by another fresh-faced bobby who took me by my left elbow and walked me towards a chest-high counter. I watched nervously as a burly-looking desk sergeant with a balding pate appeared behind it, shirt sleeves rolled up, his arms revealing two blue-inked tattoos: a pair of crudely drawn crossed Gurkha kukri blades on one, and the emblem of a sphinx surrounded by a knitted ring of oak leaves and with the words “Egypt” and “Gloucestershire” inscribed underneath on the other. He gave me the once-over, not speaking, before returning his attention to the young constables who had brought me in and were standing behind me. When he finally chose to speak, he directed his question to his youthful colleague at my rear, his eyes showing that he was ignoring the fact I was even in the room but I knew from the way he held himself from behind his coveted place of power that he’d already got my card marked.

“Who’ve we got ’ere then?”

He made his enquiry as he began to write something in a large red-bound ledger in front of him.

“Joseph Ellington. The old man says he wants him banged up and not interfered with till he gets back.”

There was an apprehensiveness in his reply that gave away his lack of experience on the job and the intimidation he felt when addressing the no-nonsense desk officer.

“Not interfered with, is that so? Well, that’s fine by me; I’ve no interest in making small talk to a bloody wog at this time of the morning. Did the governor say whether he wanted his fingerprints rolling?”

“No . . . He didn’t mention anything ’bout prints, just to get him in a cell.”

“If it’s a cell he wants him in, it’s a cell he gets.”

I watched as the canny copper lifted a thick pottery tea mug to his mouth, swigging back the last of his breakfast cuppa before lifting a large set of brass keys from off of a hook at the side of his desk. He open up the bar hatch and strode out in military fashion to where I was standing. I could smell the stale odour of cigarettes and the cold tea he’d just consumed on his breath as he squared up to me, the edges of his spit-polished shoes no more than an inch from my bare toes.

“Right . . . Let’s find this gentleman a nice comfortable room, shall we?” He winked cruelly before turning on his heels. “This way.”

He marched me towards another sealed entry, which he unlocked with one of the fat keys, and I was escorted along a dim, short hallway towards the lock-ups. The duty officer’s martial stride was curtailed as we reached the end of the jail block. He opened the door to the final cell, held out his hand for me to enter, and flashed a wide grin at me as I was pushed inside by the copper behind. I sat on the edge of a concrete bench and stared down at my cold, exposed feet, my broken spirit left in no doubt as to the certainty of my detention and the swiftness of my confinement.

A lengthy period of time spent in a cell alone allows a man to do one thing well, and that’s to think. The solitude that comes hand in hand with any incarceration sanctions the mind to consider, reflect and deliberate the whys and wherefores of a life gone bad. It is not unnatural for an individual who finds himself imprisoned to question what has brought him to such a desperate end and what he could have done to alter the course of his felonious actions. Few at the time of undertaking such lawless acts would have accepted that their servitude to crime would be their undoing until they found themselves caged. My time as a police officer had allowed me to witness in many souls all number of reactions to their confinement, from the old-time lag who craves the security of his repeated custody to the first-time offender who begs to be released from the barren, foreboding confines of his captivity. Our freedom, normally always taken for granted, is never really appreciated until we are denied it. At least I knew that my false internment was not due to any crime I had committed and that I was innocent of the charges that I had been accused of. But knowing one’s own guiltlessness stands for very little when you find yourself detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure and the incriminating facts are lined up against you, and I was still very much in the dark as to what evidence there was linking me to the murder of a woman I’d met only once.

As I sat alone in the six-by-eight-foot cell, my own gloomy thoughts were mulling over the death of the beautiful Virginia Landry and how I had perhaps unwittingly played a part in her murder. Whoever had taken the poor girl’s life obviously wanted to silence her from divulging any further information about the brutal experience she had endured at the hands of a bunch of degenerates out at the Blanchard estate. Whether it was Papa Anansi, crooked coppers or Terrence Blanchard’s henchmen who had tailed me, I had stupidly led them straight to Virginia’s door and she had suffered at their brutal hands and paid the price for my questioning. Try as I might to deny it, I had her blood on my hands.

I stood up from the stone bench and pulled the blanket tight around me in a poor attempt to stave off the shivering that quaked through my unclothed body. The cell stank from the fusty-smelling piss that had been sitting in a galvanised bucket for days and I was beginning to gag from the intense, ammonia-like smell that was saturating what little fresh air there was to breathe in such a confined space. I paced the short length of the chamber to try to keep warm, counting out in my head the seven steps it took to pace from door to wall. I kept that up for a good ten minutes, finally stopping when I heard the sound of a key being turned in the lock.

In silence, with my wrists still handcuffed, I was escorted by a constable from the depths of the lock-up area to a drearily decorated interview room on the second floor of Bridewell station. As we entered, I noticed the straightened backs of two police detectives who sat in silence at a large polished timber desk; neither got up nor spoke as I was shown to a seat on the opposite side of them. The initial muted eeriness of the situation abruptly changed as one of the officers, who I recognised as the guy who had grabbed me by the hair earlier, casually excused the copper who had brought me up from my cell by jabbing his thick thumb towards the exit. In front of them were a couple of Manila folders and two fountain pens, their caps still firmly pushed on, next to an unopened packet of ten Park Drive cigarettes. The clock on the wall above the two men’s heads said it was just after two in the afternoon. We continued to sit in hushed quiet apart from the second hand ticking away. I placed one hand on the desk and covered the back of it with the palm of my other; the brass links of my handcuffs clinked together as I did. I stared down at my lap and waited for them to begin their interrogation. I didn’t have to wait long.

“Mr Ellington . . . You don’t mind if we call you Joseph?”

The scar-faced detective asked me the matter-of-fact question in the kind of way that told me he wasn’t used to being refused too often.

“You can call me whatever you want, man, just as long as it ain’t coon.”

I guessed from the look on the detective’s face that my reply to him wasn’t what he’d expected to hear. I watched as he blew out a hefty draught of air, his middle two fingers tapping the edge of the frame of his chair as he inwardly tried to reign in his still-hidden quick temper. He leant towards me, stroking the five o’clock shadow on his squared-off chin with his thumb and forefinger before sitting back in his seat and staring at me. Rather than stare back and antagonise him further, I returned my gaze to my lap. I had, however, in the short time I’d been in their presence got a pretty fair idea what I was up against. The first dude, the one asking the initial questions, was clearly the superior in rank of the duo. He was a big-set guy whose broad shoulders struggled to fit into a tight tweed jacket. I’d noted that his trousers had seams pressed into them that could have sliced a loaf of bread real thin and that his black Oxford brogues were polished so that the fluorescent strip light’s glare bounced back off of the pristinely buffed-up toes. His greying hair, complete with lengthy, immaculately trimmed sideburns, was cut neat into his neck, and his greased locks were combed back tidily, the faint hint of Brylcreem and Wright’s coal tar soap his only concession to male grooming. He must have been in his late fifties and carried the soldierly air of a Second World War veteran, which would most probably explain where he had acquired the deep three-inch scar that ran from his right temple to the centre of his cheek.

The other fellow was even easier to read: he was a skinny detective constable, in his mid twenties, new to the job, with a shaving rash stretching down his neck, and he was in awe of his gaffer. I’d come against his kind a hundred times before. He was the sort of copper who was dangerous to a man in my position because he was most likely to be ambitious, and devious to boot. His need to carve himself a name that would be respected with his boss and fellow officers would be high on his agenda. Integrity was rare in a beast like him, and I chose to mind what I said if I had to engage in conversation with him. His scar-faced superior decided to break the silence with an introduction.

“Joseph, my name’s Detective Inspector William Fletcher, and the gentleman sitting to the right of me is Detective Constable Nathanial Beaumont. We need to ask you a few questions, if you wouldn’t mind?”

“Oh, I mind . . . but that ain’t gonna cut it with you guys, is it?”

I waited for Fletcher to answer me; instead, he reached over for one of the Manila files and opened it so that all I could see were the sides of the blank brown covers. He began to read, taking his time over the content. He snapped the folder shut and dropped it back on the desk before speaking to me again.

“Where’d you know the deceased from, Joseph?”

“You talking ’bout Virginia Landry?”

I kept my cool and bounced off my reply in as relaxed a manner as I could summon up.

“You know any other dead women, Joseph?”

The DI uttered my Christian name with friendly warmth in his voice that belied his true intentions in questioning me.

“Course I don’t . . . Hell, the first I knew that the lady was dead was when you guys came crashing into my place like you was out to get public enemy number one this morning.”

Fletcher reached over to the cigarette packet and pushed the base up, revealing the ten fags. He pulled one out and placed it between his lips, then produced a brass Ronson lighter from his jacket pocket and lit it, drawing hard then pushing out a heavy plume of smoke into the room. He rolled the lighter round in his hand for a moment, looking at me, before returning it to his pocket.

“What’s your relationship to the deceased?”