Tooth And Nail (8 page)

‘Thousands of man hours solved it,’ he said casually.

‘That’s not what the chiefs think,’ said Flight. ‘They think you’re some kind of serial killer guru.’

‘They’re wrong,’ said Rebus. ‘I’m just a copper, the same as you are. So who exactly
are
the chiefs? Whose idea was it?’

But Flight shook his head. ‘I’m not exactly sure. I mean, I know who the chiefs are – Laine, Chief Superintendent Pearson – but not which one of them is responsible for your being here.’

‘It was Laine’s name on the letter,’ said Rebus, knowing this didn’t really mean anything.

Then he watched the midday pedestrians scurrying along the pavements. The traffic was at a standstill. He and Flight had come just over three miles in the best part of half an hour. Roadworks, double (and triple) parking, a succession of traffic lights and pedestrian crossings and some maddening tactics from selfish drivers had reduced their progress to a crawl. Flight seemed to read his mind.

‘We’ll be out of this in a couple of minutes,’ he said. He was thinking over what Rebus had said,
just a copper, the same as you are
. But Rebus
had
caught the child killer, hadn’t he? The files on the case credited him with the collar, a collar which had earned him the rank of Inspector. No, Rebus was just being modest, that was it. And you had to admire him for that.

A couple of minutes later, they had moved a further fifteen yards and were about to pass a narrow junction with a No Entry sign at its mouth. Flight glanced up this side-street. ‘Time to take a few liberties,’ he said, turning the steering-wheel hard. One side of the street was lined with market stalls. Rebus could hear the stall-holders sharpening their patter against the whetstone of passing trade. Nobody paid the slightest attention to a car travelling the wrong way down a one-way street, until a boy pulling a mobile stall from one side of the road to the other halted their progress. A meaty fist banged on the driver’s side window. Flight rolled down the window, and a head appeared, extraordinarily pink and round and totally hairless.

‘Oi, what’s your fucking game then?’ The words died in his throat. ‘Oh, it’s you Mister Flight. Didn’t recognise the motor.’

‘Hello, Arnold,’ Flight said quietly, his eyes on the ponderous movement of the stall ahead. ‘How’s tricks?’

The man laughed nervously. ‘Keeping me nose clean, Mister Flight.’

Only now did Flight deign to turn his head towards the man. ‘That’s good,’ he said. Rebus had never heard those two words sound so threatening. Their road ahead was now clear. ‘Keep it that way,’ Flight said, moving off.

Rebus stared at him, waiting for an explanation.

‘Sex offender,’ Flight said. ‘Two previous. Children. The psychiatrists say he’s okay now, but I don’t know. With that sort of thing, one hundred percent sure isn’t quite sure enough. He’s been working the market now for a few weeks, loading and unloading. Sometimes he gives me good gen. You know how it is.’

Rebus could imagine. Flight had this huge, strong-looking man in the palm of his hand. If Flight told the market-traders what he knew about Arnold, not only would Arnold lose his job, but he’d be in for a good kicking as well. Maybe the man
was
all right now, maybe he was, in psychiatric parlance, ‘a fully integrated member of society’. He had paid for his crimes, and now was trying to go straight. And what happened? Policemen, men like Flight and like Rebus himself (if he was being honest), used his past against him to turn him into an informant.

‘I’ve got a couple of dozen snitches,’ Flight went on. ‘Not all like Arnold. Some are in it for the cash, some simply because they can’t keep their gobs shut. Telling what they know to somebody like me makes them feel important, makes them feel like they’re in the know. A place this size, you’d be lost without a decent network of snitches.’

Rebus merely nodded, but Flight was warming to his subject.

‘In some ways London is too big to take in. But in other ways it’s tiny. Everyone knows everyone else. There’s north and south of the river, of course, those are like two different countries. But the way the place divides, the loyalties, the same old faces, sometimes I feel like a village bobby on his bicycle.’ Because Flight had turned towards him, Rebus nodded again. Inside he was thinking: here we go, the same old story, London is bigger, better, rougher, tougher and more important than anywhere else. He had come across this attitude before, attending courses with Yard men or hearing about it from visitors to London. Flight hadn’t seemed the type, but really everybody was the type. Rebus, too, in his time had exaggerated the problems the police faced in Edinburgh, so that he could look tougher and more important in somebody’s eyes.

The facts still had to be faced. Police work was all about paperwork and computers and somebody stepping forward with the truth.

‘Nearly there,’ said Flight. ‘Kilmore Road’s the third on the left.’

Kilmore Road was part of an industrial estate and therefore would be deserted at night. It nestled in a maze of back streets about two hundred yards from a tube station. Rebus had always looked on tube stations as busy places, sited in populous areas, but this one stood on a narrow back street, well away from high road, bus route or railway station.

‘I don’t get it,’ he said. Flight merely shrugged and shook his head.

Anyone coming out of the tube station at night found themselves with a lonely walk through the streets, past net-curtained windows where televisions blared. Flight showed him that a popular route was to cut into the industrial estate and across the parkland behind it. The park was flat and lifeless, boasting a single set of goalposts, two orange traffic cones substituting for the missing set. On the other side of the park three hi-rise blocks and some lo-rise housing sprang up. May Jessop had been making for one of those houses, where her parents lived. She was nineteen and had a good job, but it kept her late at her office, so it wasn’t until ten o’clock that her parents started to worry. An hour later, there was a knock at the door. Her father rushed to answer, relieved, only to find a detective there, bearing the news that May’s body had been found.

And so it went. There seemed no connection between the victims, no real geographical link other than that, as Flight pointed out, all the killings had been committed north of the river, by which he meant north of the Thames. What did a prostitute, an office manageress and the assistant in an off-licence have in common? Rebus was damned if he knew.

The third murder had taken place much further west in North Kensington. The body had been found beside a railway line and Transport Police had handled the investigation initially. The body was that of Shelley Richards, forty-one years old, unmarried and unemployed. She was the only coloured victim so far. As they drove through Notting Hill, Ladbroke Grove and North ‘Ken’ (as Flight termed it) Rebus was intrigued by the scheme of things. A street of extraordinarily grand houses would suddenly give way to a squalid, rubbish-strewn road with boarded-up windows and bench-bound tramps, the wealthy and the poor living almost cheek by jowl. It would never happen in Edinburgh; in Edinburgh, certain boundaries were observed. But this, this was incredible. As Flight put it, ‘race riots one side, diplomats the other’.

The spot where Shelley Richards had died was the loneliest, the most pathetic so far. Rebus clambered down from the railway line, down the embankment, lowered himself over the brick wall and dropped to the ground. His trousers were smeared with green moss. He brushed them with his hands, but to little effect. To get to the car where Flight was waiting he had to walk under a railway bridge. His footsteps echoed as he tried to avoid the pools of water and the rubbish, and then he stopped, listening. There was a noise all around him, a sort of wheezing, as if the bridge itself were drawing its dying breath. He looked up and saw the dark outlines of pigeons, still against the supporting girders. Cooing softly. That was what he could hear, not wheezing at all. There was a sudden rumble of thunder as a train passed overhead and the pigeons took to the wing, flapping around his head. He shivered and walked back out into sunlight.

Then, finally, it was back to the Murder Room. This was, in fact, a series of rooms covering most of the top floor of the building. Rebus reckoned there to be about twenty men and women working flat out when Flight and he entered the largest of the rooms. There was little to differentiate the scene from that of any murder investigation anywhere in the country. Officers were busy on telephones or working at computer terminals. Clerical staff moved from desk to desk with seemingly endless sheafs of paper. A photocopier was spewing out more paper in a corner of the room and two delivery-men were wheeling a new five-drawer filing cabinet into position beside the three which already stood against one wall. On another wall was a detailed street map of London, with the murder sites pinpointed. Coloured tapes ran from these sites to spaces on the wall where pictures, details and notes had been pinned. A duty roster and progress chart took up what space was left. All very efficient, but the faces told Rebus their own story: everyone here, working hard as they were, was waiting for the Lucky Break.

Flight was immediately in tune with the glaze of efficiency in the office, firing off questions. How did the meeting go? Any word from Lambeth? (He explained to Rebus that the police lab was based there.) Any news on last night? What about house-to-house? Well, does anyone know
anything
?

There were shrugs and shakes of the head. They were simply going through the motions, waiting for that Lucky Break. But what if it didn’t come? Rebus had an answer to that: you made your own luck.

A smaller room off this main office was being used as a communications centre, keeping the Murder Room in touch with the investigation, and off this room were two smaller offices yet, each crammed with three desks. This was where the senior detectives worked. Both were empty.

‘Sit down,’ Flight said. He picked up the telephone on his desk, and dialled. While he waited for an answer, he surveyed with a frown the four-inch high pile of paper which had appeared in his in-tray during the morning. ‘Hello, Gino?’ he said into the mouthpiece. ‘George Flight here. Can I order some sandwiches? Salami salad.’ He looked to Rebus for confirmation that this would be acceptable. ‘On brown bread, please, Gino. Better make it four rounds. Thanks.’ He cut the connection and dialled again. Only two numbers this time: an internal call. ‘Gino has a cafe round the corner,’ he explained to Rebus. ‘He makes great sandwiches, and he delivers.’ Then: ‘Oh, hello. Inspector Flight here. Can we have some tea? A decent-sized pot should do it. We’re in the office. Is it wet milk today or that powdered crap? Great, thanks.’ He dropped the receiver back into its cradle and spread his hands, as if some feat of magic had just been performed. ‘This is your lucky day, John. We’ve got real milk for a change.’

‘So what now?’

Flight shrugged, then slapped a hand on the bulging in-tray. ‘You could always read through this little lot, keep yourself up-to-date with the investigation.’

‘Reading about it isn’t going to do any good.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Flight, ‘it helps you answer any awkward questions that may be asked by those on high. How tall was the victim? What colour was her hair? Who found her? It’s all in there.’

‘She was five feet seven and her hair was brown. As to who found her, I don’t give a tinker’s cuss.’

Flight laughed, but Rebus was being serious. ‘Murderers don’t just appear,’ he continued. ‘They’re created. To create a serial killer takes time. It’s taken this guy years to make himself what he is. What’s he been doing during that time? He may well be a loner, but he’s probably got a job, maybe even a wife and kids.
Somebody
must know something. Maybe his wife wonders where he goes at night, or how blood got onto the tips of his shoes, or where her kitchen knife disappeared to.’

‘All right, John.’ Flight spread his hands again, this time in a gesture of peace-making. Rebus realised that his voice had been getting louder. ‘Calm down a little. For a start, when you go on like that I can hardly make out a word you’re saying, but I get your point. So what are we supposed to do?’

‘Publicity. We need the public’s help. We need anything they’ve got.’

‘We already get dozens of calls a day. Anonymous tip-offs, nutters who want to confess, people snitching on their next door neighbour, people with grudges, maybe even a few with genuine suspicions. We check them all out. And we’ve got the media on our side. The Chief Super will be interviewed a dozen times today. Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV. We give them what we can, and we tell them to spread the word. We’ve got the best bloody Liaison Officer in the country working round the clock to make sure the public knows what we’re dealing with here.’

There was a knock on the already open door and a WPC carried a tray into the room and left it on Flight’s desk. ‘I’ll be mother, shall I?’ he said, already starting to pour the tea into two plain white mugs.

‘What’s the Liaison Officer’s name?’ Rebus asked. He knew a Liaison Officer himself. She, too, was the best there was. But she wasn’t in London; she was back in Edinburgh …

‘Cath Farraday,’ said Flight. ‘Detective Inspector Cath Farraday.’ He sniffed the milk carton, before pouring a dollop into his tea. ‘If you stick around long enough, you’ll get to meet her. She’s a bit of a cracker is our Cath. Mind you, if she heard me talking about her like that, she’d have my head on a plate.’ Flight chuckled.

‘And salad on the side,’ came a voice from just outside the door. Flight, flinching, spilt tea down his shirt and jumped to his feet. The door was swinging open now, to reveal a platinum blonde woman leaning against the jamb, her arms folded, one leg casually crossed over the other. Rebus’s gaze was drawn to her eyes, which were slanted like a cat’s. They made her whole face seem narrower than it was. Her lips were thin, lined with a thin coat of bright red lipstick. Her hair had a hard, metallic look to it, reflecting the look of the woman herself. She was older than either of the men in the room by several years and if age hadn’t withered her, the frequent use of cosmetics had. Her face was lined and puffy. Rebus didn’t like a lot of make-up on a woman, but plenty of men did.