Remains to be Seen (2 page)

He was revolted by this action, he told himself, rather than by the sight of her. She had come to him, two nights ago, and they had had sex upon his mattress in the other half of the cellar. It had been a strange coupling, urgent but joyless, a fulfilling of an animal urge without any of the trappings of human grace which he remembered from a former life. It had brought no comfort to him and none, he fancied, to her. She had grunted urgently at the climax, then made to leave him, but he had held her in his arms for the remaining hours of the winter night. The warmth they had given to each other had been a comfort. Indeed, when dawn clawed its way into the basement and the other denizens of this warren stirred themselves, that warmth was the only thing they could be certain that they had offered to each other.

His eyes were used to the dimness now. He gave her more bread, watching her eat with the same satisfaction he had derived from studying a puppy's urgent gobbling when he was a boy. She had dark hair and ears which were dirty and yet as delicate as porcelain; a well-shaped nose dominated an intense, thin face above a slim neck. She must have been elegant, even perhaps beautiful, once. He tried to picture her as she might have been before all this, but he could not do it.

She looked down at the injection marks on her arm, twitched her thin legs beneath the filthy blankets and said unexpectedly, ‘You're good to me, you are, Jack Clark.'

He would like to save this girl-woman, if he could. Get her on to a rehabilitation course, before it was too late. But he had bigger fish to fry. He mustn't let himself become distracted by this strange, half-wild and almost ruined creature.

He levered himself up from the edge of the tea chest and went and looked at the decaying covers from garden chairs and the discarded cushions which served people as mattresses in the other half of the cellar. There was no one else here at the moment, though he had heard the sound of movement in one of the upper storeys of the rambling house. Whoever supplied the changing population of this place with their drugs was going to have quite a turnover here alone, and there was plenty of other trade in the streets around, when you knew as much about the game as he did now. They were dangerous people, the ones who controlled the trade, but they had promised him the concession for this area. He was moving up the hierarchy in that lucrative and hazardous industry.

He went back to his own mattress and consumed the last two slices of the bread and marge. You could get stale loaves from the backs of the shops on a Monday, if you knew where to go. He hadn't yet been reduced to ferreting his way through the waste bins of the town, as the more desperate denizens of places like this did in search of food. You didn't last long, once you got to that stage.

With his belly full, he pulled the old feather eiderdown around him and lay down to doze for a little while.

He had no clear idea how long he had slept when a sudden shiver racked his whole body. He clasped his hands automatically across his chest beneath the cover for a few seconds. He had no watch; that had gone long since, to buy coke, when he had first come into the house. But it must be hours now since he had taken his early morning rock: good stuff, this latest batch, but you couldn't expect its effects to last for ever. You felt the cold, as the cocaine faded from your veins. But Jack Clark refused to consider the idea that the drugs became less effective as you became more addicted.

He wasn't going back to the girl. He spoke to no one in particular as he announced to the semi-darkness, ‘I'm going out now. Going into the park. There's people there, expecting their supply.' You never knew who was listening to you in this place, or what kind of state they were in. Or how they would react: horse and coke and E and LSD made people unpredictable, given to wild reactions and sudden bouts of violence.

He went out of the house again, blinking a little as the pale sun lit up the drabness of the street. He turned north, in the direction he had indicated he would take before he left the house, and resumed his quick, short-paced shuffle towards the park.

He had almost reached the main road which ran past the entrance when he turned abruptly at right angles, moving, without looking to his left or his right, away from his original route. He was a mile from the park, moving along a lane with a high hedge at his side, when a silver-grey Ford Mondeo eased to a stop beside him. He neither looked at the driver nor exchanged any words with him. Instead, he glanced swiftly up and down the deserted lane, then slid swiftly and wordlessly into the back.

He prostrated himself along the back seat and was conveyed swiftly for several miles in this supine state, invisible to anyone outside the vehicle. Only when it turned through the wide gates and became hidden from public gaze behind the high walls of the police car park did Jack Clark cautiously sit up.

One or two of the uniformed men who were passing gazed curiously at the filthy and unkempt figure who slipped from the rear of the Mondeo. They watched him shamble in front of the driver and into the building. Another druggy arrested, another broken man helping the Drugs Squad with their enquiries, they concluded.

The driver did not enlighten them. It would be more than his job was worth to break the cover of Sergeant Jack Clark.

T
here was an excellent view from the top storey of the new Brunton Police Station.

Crime being one of the indisputable growth industries of the twenty-first century, the station was eight times the size of the old nick, which had stood with its blue lamp in the centre of the town for almost eighty years. It was a charmless block of a building, its harshness emphasized by the raw newness of its orange brick. But it had six floors, and the rooms at the top were large, with penthouse views over the old town and the country which edged into its suburbs.

Chief Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker had made sure when the plans were on the table that he secured one of these large offices with a panoramic view of the town and the area to the north of it. That was only fitting for the Head of Brunton CID. The fact that the penthouse office isolated him from his team of officers, beavering away three floors below him, was another advantage, as far as he was concerned.

Tucker had long since divested himself of any direct connection with the investigation of crime. That was much better left to the younger men and women in his ever-growing empire. Public Relations was his strength – it loomed so large in his calculations that he always invested it with capital letters. Tucker was a suave, smooth-featured man in his fifties, whose years and silvering temples gave him the necessary gravitas for the weighty and meaningless simplicities he delivered on public occasions.

At such times, he appeared without fail in an immaculately pressed and well-fitting uniform: the increasingly fearful men and women in the street were more easily reassured by a man in uniform than by one in plain clothes, he maintained. He was probably right. When he was wheeled on to make his grave statements to television cameras or radio microphones, Thomas Bulstrode Tucker was usually successful, whether in proclaiming the latest successes of his underlings or in assuring an impatient public that everything possible was being done and they must remain patient.

His equanimity was hardly affected by the fact that his colleagues regarded Chief Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker as a complete tosser. That was one of the more polite phrases for him which circulated on the busy floors beneath the chief's splendidly elevated office.

On Monday afternoon, Tucker gazed out over the softly sunlit town and enjoyed the view for a few moments. From this height, you could appreciate the changing seasons. There were definite signs of spring today. The days were lengthening and the birds were nesting around his suburban home. Not too many springs now before he could contemplate a well-earned retirement and a splendid pension.

Just avoid banana skins and any serious cock-ups for another year or two, Thomas, and you'll be able to cement your position as a well-respected figure in the Lodge. Freemasonry had served him well; in retirement, he could see himself consolidating, perhaps even embellishing, what he saw as his burgeoning reputation within the brotherhood.

Tucker sighed deeply after his contemplation of the extensive but unremarkable sprawl of the old cotton town. Then he turned reluctantly away from the wide window of his private visions and back to the mundane business of self-preservation. He buzzed the number on the internal phone and said authoritatively into the mouthpiece, ‘Come up here for a few minutes, please, Percy.'

Chief Inspector Denis Charles Scott Peach had been given the forenames of the most charismatic cricketer of his father's young days, Denis Compton, but was now universally known as ‘Percy' in a police service which loved the simple pleasures of alliteration. This was the man who succeeded in carrying the considerable burden of Thomas Bulstrode Tucker upon his broad shoulders. A man who worked at the coal-face of crime and relished it. A man who produced the clear-up figures for crime upon which Tucker sailed, but which he could never have produced for himself.

DCI Peach knew what happened in Brunton CID better than any other man. He was also more than any other officer the man responsible for the unit's successes and considerable reputation. Tucker might be a bumbling fool at everything except public relations. But he was not such a fool that he did not know the worth of Peach, did not recognize how vital the man was to his own reputation and progress.

Tucker detested Peach, detested the liberties the man took and the insolence he suspected but could not pin down. But he knew also how much he needed his DCI.

For his part, Peach regarded the man he had christened Tommy Bloody Tucker with cordial contempt for most of the time, and with a contempt which was not at all cordial when Tucker perpetrated his worst excesses. Cloaking his disdain under the thinnest veil of subservience, he taunted his superior officer relentlessly, knowing that the older man needed him more than he needed any other person to preserve the fiction of his efficiency.

Percy Peach now appeared in answer to Tucker's summons, a squat, powerful figure, with gleaming black toecaps beneath an immaculate grey suit. He was only thirty-eight, but he looked at first sight a little older because of his shining bald head, the whiteness of which was emphasized by the jet-black fringe of hair around it and the equally black moustache and eyes in the round, alert face.

‘You didn't give me your normal Monday briefing on the events of the weekend,' said Tucker. Start as you mean to go on, he told himself. Assert yourself to this presumptuous upstart.

‘Written report was on your desk at nine forty this morning, sir,' said Peach stiffly. ‘I hope someone hasn't purloined it whilst you've been out and about on the tasks of your arduous day, sir. People are light-fingered everywhere now, sir. Even in police stations, it appears.' He was standing erect in the military ‘Attention' position, his eyes rigidly fixed not upon Tucker's face but on the wall three inches above the chief's head, a pose he adopted for no other reason than that he knew that this stance of exaggerated deference irritated and disconcerted his chief.

Tucker said, ‘I always prefer the informality of a verbal exchange when it's possible, you know.' He waved in exasperation towards the chair in front of his wide and uncluttered desk. ‘Do sit down, Percy. We have things to discuss.'

Peach noted the use of his first name with dismay. Attempts at intimacy from Tucker were always a danger sign. He positioned the chair very carefully, as if its exact proximity to the figure in charge of Brunton CID was a matter of supreme importance in some unwritten but important ritual. Then he sat upon it as if it might at any moment explode beneath him.

‘Yes, sir. Nothing remarkable this weekend. Bit of violence in the town centre on Saturday night. Routine stuff, I'm afraid to say.'

‘We mustn't just accept these things, you know.' Tucker was suddenly at his most sententious. ‘My policy is to charge these ruffians, if at all possible.'

‘Yes, sir. Zero tolerance, sir. Like Mayor Giuliani, sir.'

‘Pardon?' Tucker looked like a low-IQ rabbit stricken with incomprehension. His eyes contrived to be at once devoid of understanding and full of suspicion, a combination which his DCI found wholly intriguing.

‘Late Mayor of New York, sir. Zero tolerance was one of his watchwords. The policy worked well there, apparently. Might work well in Brunton, if the individual-rights lobby would think of the victims instead of the criminals, for once in a while.'

‘Ah!' For a moment, these two very different men found their enmity removed by the thought of a common foe. Tucker nodded his agreement and added a salvo against a second police
bête noire.
‘And even when we make out a good case against some young thug, the bloody Crown Prosecution Service won't take it on.'

‘Indeed, sir. The CPS want a cast-iron case before they'll consider taking things to court.' Peach brightened a little. ‘Which is what I'm trying to give them, with one of the toughs from the weekend.'

‘That's the style, Percy. Give 'em hell, eh! Well, at least you know your Head of CID is right behind you.' Tucker jutted his chin aggressively and set his head in his ‘leading the troops' position.

‘Good to know that, sir. Wouldn't like to come downstairs and question Mr Atwal yourself, would you?' Percy Peach raised his eyebrows in optimistic encouragement, although he already knew the answer to his question.

Tucker's scalp prickled as Peach had known it would at the mention of the name. ‘Atwal? Are you telling me that you are questioning a member of the immigrant community?'

Peach wrinkled his brow as if asked to deal with an extremely complex question. ‘Difficult to pronounce on that, sir. No doubt the man he was hitting with the baseball bat regarded him as an immigrant, but Mr Atwal assures me that he was born here and has lived in this area for every one of his twenty-four years.'