Post Mortem (30 page)

She shook her head and bit her lip. He grabbed her face and held it so that she had to look at him. ‘Listen to me.'

‘OK.'

He let her go.

‘I know it's shitty: I've got a wife and a child and none of this works out like a fairy tale. But you always knew that, right from the start. I
never
lied to you. I liked you, loved you even, and I wanted to make sure you didn't come to any harm. I was never dishonest with you. Hadley and that girl? I'm not responsible for any of that. Not at all. No.'

Lizzie wiped her hand across her face. Her throat hurt with the effort of trying to stifle her sobs. She spat on the earth. Somehow she seemed to have got earth in her mouth. It must have been that stupid piece of wood.

Kieran was continuing. He sounded more urgent now, more insistent.

‘You say you can't live with this. Well what's the alternative? Are you going to die for it? I don't think so. But go ahead, prove me wrong. You going to prison? Really? They'll put shit in your food because you're a cop. Those people on
Question Time
, they'll have a field day with their opinions and their, their fucking applause, and you'll be on the nonce row.'

He paused. She had been listening to him with something like
horror, and now she actually shuddered. He seemed to treat it as a confirmation. He went on.

‘Yes, turns out life's complicated and messy, and you've made a mistake. Perhaps
I
made a mistake.' He swallowed and looked at her coldly. ‘Perhaps more than one. Maybe I did, yes.'

The dog had picked up a scent and trotted away along the stream. Kieran whistled for her and she stopped and began to move back towards him, tail wagging obediently. He turned to Lizzie.

‘So what are you going to do now? Are you going to put up or shut up? Are you going to let this screw you up for the rest of your life or are you going to man up and put it behind you and learn to be a good cop?'

She clenched her jaw and returned his look. ‘A good cop, Kieran?' she asked. ‘What the fuck is a good cop?'

Briefly he considered her with disbelief, as though she were as alien as a Victorian explorer complete with pith helmet asking questions of the natives.

‘Do you really not know? Well for all his faults, Hadley was a good cop. And I'm a good cop too. Those bleeding hearts, they think they want something different but they don't, not really, not when it matters. When the shit hits the fan and their loved ones are in danger, they don't want you, Lizzie. They don't want someone who will worry and doubt and hesitate. And they don't want that frumpy DS Collins from the DSI either. They want someone with balls. They want Hadley or me.'

He withdrew the phone from his jacket pocket and held it out to her. ‘I risked keeping this for you so that you would know what bullshit the whole thing was. Bin fucking Laden! I'll be disposing of it on my way home. If and when you are interviewed by the DSI, we never met today. You rang me and I told you to hand yourself in.'

The Labrador was wagging her tail, waiting. He bent down and slipped the lead on to her collar, then stood up. ‘I hope you make
the right decision. I don't want you to come to any harm. I cared for you . . . no, I
care
for you.
Still
care for you, Lizzie . . .' She felt another sob rising in her chest. She clamped her throat shut harshly against it but it escaped in a ragged bark. He was still talking. ‘. . . But I want to be absolutely clear that you are responsible for yourself. If you decide to destroy yourself, don't think, not for a single moment, that you can drag me down with you, because you can't.'

He walked away, the dog trotting at his side, over the bridge and out towards the open hillside.

40

C
ollins had pulled over a few yards from the house. No one could leave or enter without her seeing.

The evening star was shining in the dark purple of sundown. Warm light spilled out from the cottage windows. A smell of woodsmoke was in the air. A woman came to the window and drew the curtain against the night. Collins caught only a glimpse of her, but the glimpse made sense enough. She was willowy, dark-haired. Her hair, held back in a single thick plait, showed her long, slender neck.

The Land Rover pulled up and Inspector Shaw let a brown dog out from the back.

Collins watched him approaching his front door. The woman she had seen earlier came to greet him. She stood in the doorway in jeans and a T-shirt. A girl, in bare feet, ran out. Shaw lifted her into his arms.

Five minutes later, he left the house carrying a mug, the dog following him. He walked up and tapped on the car window.

Collins got out. Shaw was taller than her and she felt her disadvantage.

She said, ‘You failed to stop for me earlier.'

His expression didn't alter. ‘I don't know what you're talking about.' He handed her the mug. ‘I think I've got this right. You don't take sugar?'

Collins felt the humiliation of it.

Shaw said, ‘What are you doing here, by the way?'

‘We're getting a warrant to search your house. I'm waiting on the rest of the team.'

Shaw shook his head. ‘You've somewhat lost the element of surprise, Detective.' Nevertheless, his condescension did not conceal his annoyance. ‘You're bringing this into my home now. What's the point? Even if I had something, it would be gone by now.'

‘Yes, I apologize for disturbing your family. It's unavoidable.'

‘Unavoidable.' He had virtually snarled the word, but he cleared his throat and controlled his demeanour. He even managed a smile. ‘Just leave the mug outside the car when you've finished.'

It got colder.

Collins turned the engine on and slid the seat back.

From her wallet she took out the black-and-white photograph Mehenni had given her. It was a picture of a dark-haired girl aged about eight. She was wearing an Alice band, smiling. She had on a smocked top and jeans. She was sitting on a wall and her legs were swinging. Collins tried to imagine where it had been taken: some city in North Africa, the heat baking off the concrete.

A fog was settling in the valley. Collins was stiff and frozen. Inspector Shaw stood at the window of one of the first-floor rooms. He gazed out at her. Then he drew the curtains shut.

41

I
n Caxton Street, some black lads sat in a parked BMW, the car lit up as orange as Lucozade. At first they would not open their window to Lizzie, but when they did, she bought a wrap of cannabis from them for £15. She walked in her stranger's clothes through the fluorescent London night. On Oak Road, a fox trotted beside her down the street.

Someone had left a mattress and a fridge against a wall. A young, lean white man in jeans and grey hoody was crossing towards the building, and Lizzie tailgated him into Portland Tower. He barely even clocked her, walking on ahead, hands in pockets, hood up. The entrance lobby was unevenly lit. Someone had broken two of the orb-like lights so that only one remained. The caretaker's office had long since been abandoned, the victim of ancient cuts that were no longer even part of memory. Lizzie hit the push switch for the stair lights and they flickered on. She climbed to the landing.

The concrete stairs, confined and smelling of urine, bore the usual stains and darkening marks. She sat on the second stair of the second flight, out of view of the entrance hall. Inexpertly she rolled a joint. She hadn't smoked cannabis since university, and only occasionally then. She hadn't liked it. Now, however she craved the sense of disconnectedness it had given her. She needed some kind of anaesthetic, and alcohol wouldn't do it.

At university, there had been a girl who read the Tarot, laying the cards out in a Celtic cross on the table and turning them over
with a satisfied snap. The Lovers, the Fool, the Chariot, the Hanged Man. With incense burning and a joint in her hand, she had liked to invite interpretation from her subject. As the fumes of cannabis surrounded her, she would urge that each arcana be construed in the broadest sense. Death, she had conjured airily, symbolized an ending, and hence a new beginning.

Lizzie reached into her pocket and took out the business card she had been given when she was sitting in the ambulance and carried with her since. She ran her finger over the printed name.
DC Steve Bradshaw
. She remembered the moment among the chaos. The paramedic reading her pulse and the section sergeant outside the door on his radio. The DC with the face like a used paper bag handing her his card.
That mobile's on 24/7
, he had said,
and it's always OK to ring me
.

She was beginning to feel giddy. She rolled another joint and lit it, inhaling deeply. The drug expanded inside her.

Hadley had been an entire Tarot pack in his own right. The Fool, Justice, the Emperor. Or the Magician, perhaps: the manipulator, the sometimes beneficent guide, a stick in one hand and coins scattered on the table. She remembered that he had once said he had a tortoise.

A light came on in the stairway. A woman with her daughter wrapped up in coat and gloves walked up the stairs. She saw Lizzie and looked away.

Lizzie wondered how Kieran had disposed of the phone. Was it crushed beneath his car, burnt in a fire, lying on a river bed or even at the bottom of the sea, turned back and forth restlessly by the tide?

She thought of that recording, the indistinct voices on which so much had turned. Perhaps it could have been worked up into the thing Farah had said it was. Perhaps it could have been enhanced. She imagined some technician pulling syllables out of the silence,
and from behind the crackles, words. But she suspected not. That was the stuff of TV dramas. Hadley had kept the phone. In its absences and its presences it had represented perhaps some sort of verification for him.

She thought of his tortoise foraging through the undergrowth. She thought of those Tarot cards with their naïve art deco pictures. The Sun. The Moon. The Tower hit by lightning, with two falling.

She began to climb. It was a long way, and she paused for breath. The stairway light came and went. Along the walkways many front doors were protected by metal grilles. Better to die by fire than to be burgled seemed to be the conclusion of the estate's inhabitants. One walkway was caged off at the end, and an ugly square-headed dog paced up and down by an iron gate.

She sat down again under a pool of stair light. She got out her new mobile and DC Bradshaw's card. She dialled the number. It rang three times before it was picked up. She heard a voice. ‘Lizzie? Lizzie?' She closed the call. Within a minute the phone was ringing. She held it tightly, feeling it vibrate in her hand until it went to voicemail. She switched it off. She turned away from the landing and climbed higher. Outside a door, a well-worn dirty doormat bore the words ‘Happy Home'.

She passed the last level and continued up towards the heavy metal service door. A remnant of blue and white plastic crime tape fluttered on the handle. The door was locked, but from her coat pocket she took out Hadley's fire door key. She had found it lying on the stairs when she had run up them a lifetime ago and held on to it. She turned the key in her hand. It was like a talisman of Hadley, a symbol of his mastery of the lesser-known skills of policing. The brown lace he'd used to attach it to his utility belt was still looped through it. She slid the key into the slot and the lock clicked.

She imagined Farah ahead of her, and hesitated. Then, with the fear of following a sprite, she stepped out on to the roof.

From the top of the building, a broad view opened. She walked towards the edge, which was bounded by a low wall. Beyond the complex of buildings and small patches of grass, London's lights twinkled out to the horizon. In the distance she could see the very hungry caterpillar of an illuminated tube train shuffling through the landscape. She imagined the people on board, mobiles and tablets out, earphones stuffed in.

The estate was lit in patches of tungsten. The leaves on the trees reflected light as if they were made of beaten metal. Further along was a children's playground. A group of young men in the estate uniform of hoodies and jeans had gathered. It was their manor: a place of rivalry and gangs, of territory, fortification and tribute. The estate was laid out like a maze, and, far better than the police, the drug dealers and robbers knew its many twists and turns, its Elizabethan alleyways and cut-throughs. It came to Lizzie what a fitting place this had been for Farah to bring them. Were we ever, it seemed to say, as bad as this? But in an idle moment Lizzie had googled the estate and found a website of fond memories – black-and-white photos of a street party, working-class men in woollen three-piece suits and flat caps and women in flowery aprons and Sunday-best hats.

A bitter wind was hurtling across the roof. Bracing herself against it, Lizzie gazed out over the city's lights and towards the borough's arteries and landmarks. She had always thought of it as her ground, a part of London that had been entrusted to her.

She saw Ben again in her memory, terrified. His face pale. His piping voice: ‘I trust you.'

Farah had wiped his upturned cheeks with her free hand.

There had been seagulls wheeling about in the sky.

She climbed over the wall, holding on tightly. She was shaking. She sat with her back against it, the drop in front of her, the sense of it like a void inside. A plummet into darkness and light. A flash
of memory of the boy in the bear suit, the girl with the long dark hair, and the fat policeman trying to catch her eye.

Voices from the playground carried faintly.

Farah had turned away from her and faced out towards the drop. She had been holding Ben's hand tightly, and he too had faced out, as though he could fly.

Lizzie stood up. This was it: the edge. She scanned London's glittering horizon. Then she made herself look down over the drop to the dark concrete beneath.

21 APRIL