When the Music's Over (25 page)

Gerry was making a face and mouthing, “
Calories
.”

“It's all right,” Annie whispered. “You don't have to eat the bloody thing.”

“Not from round these parts, are you?” the man asked. “I'm Sunny, by the way. This is my caff. Sunny's Kebab and Pizza.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Annie. “No, we're not from around here.”

“Thought I hadn't seen you before.”

“Do you live nearby, Sunny?”

Now he started to appear suspicious. “Who's asking?”

Annie showed him her warrant card.

“Fuzz,” he said. “I should have known.”

“
Fuzz
?” echoed Annie with a wide-eyed glance at Gerry. “Fuzz? Nobody calls us fuzz anymore.”

Sunny shrugged. “It's the nicest word I know.”

“I'm confused,” said Annie. “What have we ever done to you that ‘fuzz' is the nicest word you know for us? Just a few moments ago you were calling us ‘my lovelies.' Now some women might find that offensive, but my friend and I don't mind, do we, Gerry?”

“Always nice to be called lovely,” mumbled Gerry. “Better than fuzz.”

“We get harassed all the time. Insulted. Threatened. One of my friend's sons got beat up just walking home from the mosque the other night. My friend down the Strip had a brick thrown through his window not so long ago. Did you lot do anything to help? No. You
should have seen the trouble he had getting anything out of the insurance company.”

That is hardly a problem of racism
, Annie thought.
Nobody can get money out of an insurance company
. But there was no point arguing. She had worked in racially sensitive areas, and she knew the score. Eastvale wasn't one of them, but Wytherton clearly was. It was a delicate exercise in political correctness and positive discrimination. You really had to know your catchphrase of the day and jargon of the moment. Annie took the drawing out of her bag. “What my partner and I would really like to know is whether you've seen this girl around here.” She held up the image.

Annie could have sworn that an expression of shock and fear flashed across Sunny's face before he said, rather too quickly, “No. I've never seen her before.”

Annie gestured to the cook. “What about your friend?”

Sunny called him over. His name was Faisal, and he was more surly than Sunny. He glanced at the drawing and shook his head.

“He doesn't know her, either.”

“We hear she came here for takeaways.”

“Lots of people come here. I can't remember every customer I've ever served.”

“No, but she's an attractive girl, don't you think? What about last Tuesday?”

“No. I told you. We don't know her. If she came here, she wasn't a regular. Maybe she came once and didn't like our food. It happens, believe it or not.”

“Funny that,” said Annie, leaning on the counter.

“What is?”

“Well, we know she lived around here. In fact, we've just come from her mother's place up the road. And one of the local coppers tells us your food is popular with the young people from the estate.”

“Lots of people live around here. They don't all eat here.” He pointed across the street. “Maybe she preferred fish and chips?”

“Maybe so. But this girl was murdered last Tuesday night, Sunny, and do you know what the pathologist found in her stomach contents when he did the postmortem?”

“What?”

“Pizza and kebab. Now, what do you think of that?”

Faisal placed their orders on the counter without looking their way, and Sunny put the boxes in a paper bag. “That's sick, that is,” he mumbled. “Here. Take it. On the house. Just go away.” He handed Annie the bag.

But Gerry placed some money on the counter. “We'll pay,” she said. “Keep the change.”

“And do you know?” Annie held up the bag as they were leaving. “Our CSI people are very clever these days, just like on telly. They can match anything with anything if they've got a sample.”

O
NE OF THE RESPONSIBILITIES BANKS HAD YET TO
face in his new job was administering a bollocking to officers under him. He'd done it often enough over the years as a DCI, mostly on an informal basis, but as detective superintendent and head of Homicide and Major Crimes, it was his job both to stand up for and to discipline his team. So his heart sank when Superintendent Carver from Wytherton strutted into his office early on Tuesday morning with a complaint. He had known last night that it would be a long day but he had never imagined it would start like this.

Though Banks was a detective and Carver wore a uniform, that didn't count for anything; in rank, they were equal. But Banks could tell by Carver's arrogant manner that he clearly felt coming from a tough urban patch made him somehow superior to these lowly sheep-shaggers on the edge of the largely rural Yorkshire Dales. Carver was all brass, bulk and Brylcreem, slathered with an aftershave that smelled like a tart's window box. He wedged himself into a chair by the conference table and began his litany of woes. Before he could get too far, Banks sent for Annie and Gerry, who had just got back from taking Sinead Moffat to identify her dead daughter at the mortuary. They turned up a few minutes later, coffees in hand.

“Sit down,” said Banks. “Superintendent Carver here has brought
some very serious complaints to me regarding you two. What do you have to say for yourselves?”

“We'd like to hear what we've been accused of first, sir,” said Annie.

“You ought to know by now,” Banks said, “that it's a matter of courtesy to inform the officer in charge of a neighboring policing area when you intend visiting his patch.”

“It wasn't a planned visit,” said Annie. “We received an anonymous phone call identifying the girl found dead on Bradham Lane and we—”

“You should still have informed Wytherton Police Station of your visit. But that's the least of the problems. I have it on the authority of Superintendent Carver here that you intimidated two of his patrol officers on the street. PCs Reginald Babcock and William Lamont.”

“Intimidated? That's a laugh.”

Carver glared at her.

“Would ‘played silly buggers with' describe the incident more accurately?” Banks asked, with one arched eyebrow.

“Last night we returned to Southam Terrace on the Wytherton Heights estate to talk to the girl's mother, a recovering heroin addict who wasn't home during our first visit.”

“So this was your
second
unannounced call on Wytherton in the same day?”

“Yes.” Annie glanced at Carver. “Apologies for not ringing ahead. Perhaps we should have said we were coming, but we thought we had more important matters to deal with at the time. Sometimes you just get caught up in the momentum of an investigation. The case was breaking fast after several days of getting nowhere.”

Carver inclined his head in acceptance of the apology.

“When DC Masterson and I got out of our car,” Annie went on, “we were approached by the two officers in question. DC Masterson made a note of their numbers if—”

“I know who they are,” growled Carver. “Reg and Bill are two of my best men.”

“Then I'd hate to meet any of the others,” said Annie.

Carver gave her an appraising glance. “I imagine you would,” he
said. “I've been having a word or two about you, and it seems your record is hardly unblemished, not without incident.”

“That's out of order,” said Banks. “DI Cabbot was—”

Annie touched Banks's arm. “No, boss,” she said. “It's fine. Let him go on. I'm interested to hear.”

Carver coughed and fiddled with his tie. “It's just that your attitude to male police officers might be seen as prejudiced.”

“Am I prejudiced against men?” Annie said. “Is that what you're saying? Maybe I am towards some, but that prejudice doesn't necessarily extend as far as every thick sexist oaf on the force or I'd have a hard time indeed doing my job. Your men tried to bully and intimidate us.”

“That was because you didn't announce your presence as police detectives.” Carver's expression took on a distinct sneer. “Not because they're rapists or bullies. Not all men are, you know.”

“Listen to yourself,” Annie said, her voice rising. “Just listen to yourself.”

It was Banks's turn to touch Annie's arm. “OK, DI Cabbot, Superintendent Carver, that's enough of that from both of you. Let's agree to differ and leave personal slights behind us. Is that OK, Superintendent?”

Carver bristled. “Go on, DI Cabbot,” he grunted. “We're listening.”

“We were approached by the officers in question, who informed us that we couldn't park where we were because it was a double yellow line.”

“And?” said Banks.

“There were no double yellow lines, just a single.”

“But as I understand it, the officers were simply enforcing what they knew to be a parking law for that stretch of road,” Banks countered.

“There were no signs about not parking there, either. They said one of the lines had faded over time, and the council hadn't got around to repainting it yet, which I thought was a load of bollocks.” Annie looked at a smirking Superintendent Carver. “I'll bet they found time this morning, though.”

“Why didn't you just do as you were instructed and move on?” asked Banks. “Better still, why didn't you tell them who you were and why you were there?”

Annie bit her lower lip. She knew that in one sense she had behaved the way she had because she had wanted to provoke the officers, to push them, test their behavior. But she also knew that she had been sticking up for herself and Gerry, as members of the general public, trying to strike a blow against big hulking men who get pleasure from pushing women around. “It was their attitude,” Annie said. “Their manner was confrontational right from the get-go.”

“So you didn't like their attitude,” mocked Carver. “Funny, that's exactly what they said about you.”

“Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?”

Banks smiled, but Annie's Mandy Rice-Davies imitation didn't get her far with Carver. Perhaps he was too young to remember the Profumo affair.

“In fact,” Carver continued, pulling at the sharp crease in his uniform trousers, “they went on to say that you two were both abusive and belligerent. That at one point you—”

“Now hold on a minute,” said Annie. “It was one of your men who grabbed me by the elbow and pulled his baton. Not us.”

“Because he was provoked.”

“Provoked, bollocks,” said Annie. “He did it because he's a bully.”

“The officer said you were reaching into your bag. He thought you could have been reaching for a knife or even a gun. It's a dodgy area. Drugs and stuff. They have to be careful. Every night they go out on patrol they could face some serious threat to life and limb. That's why they might seem a bit more aggressive than some.”

“And I thought it was just in their nature,” said Annie. Gerry shifted uncomfortably in the chair beside hers.

“Again, I'd like to know why you didn't simply identify yourselves as police officers from the start,” said Banks. “That would no doubt have prevented all these problems from arising, including the parking.”

“I didn't see why we should have had to,” protested Annie. “We weren't asking for special treatment. As far as I was concerned, we had broken no laws. We were simply two women parking a car—legally, as far as we were concerned—and walking down the street minding our own business when those two brutes came over and started hassling us for no good reason. The fact that we didn't introduce ourselves
as fellow officers only means they thought we were members of the public. And members of the public deserve to be better treated than we were. I'm sorry if you don't like to hear it, but those two officers set out to bully and humiliate us from the start. Anything we did, whether you call it ‘intimidation' or whatever, was by way of defending ourselves.”

“Including insinuating that one of my men was ‘bent'?” asked Carver.

“I said he reminded me of a bent sheriff in a bad Western. He did. I don't think that constitutes calling him bent.”

“Semantics,” said Banks, again suppressing the laughter. “Let's put the incident with the officers aside for the moment. As if that wasn't bad enough, I understand the two of you then went on to inflame the local Asian community.”

“We most certainly did not,” said Annie. “I don't know who told you that, but whoever it is, he's a liar.” She held Carver's gaze as she spoke. “Mimosa's family told us that she sometimes hung out on what they called the Strip, a half-mile stretch of Wytherton Town Street between the overpass and the canal bridge. Mimosa's stepfather told us he didn't like it because there were too many Asians around, but it's the nearest place where there's anything happening at night, and most kids aren't as bigoted as Lenny Thornton. They like to hang out on the street, especially on warm nights. As Mimosa was from Wytherton Heights and our DNA specialist has informed us that the samples of semen taken from her body were Pakistani in origin, that's why we went there in the first place after talking to Sinead Moffat.”

“What do you think about that, DC Masterson?” Banks asked, turning to a terrified Gerry.

“It's true, sir, what DI Cabbot says. We didn't set out to inflame anyone in the community, and I don't believe we did. As DI Cabbot said, we were following a perfectly valid lead about the murdered girl.”

“Did you find the place swarming with young girls?”

“No,” said Annie. “But considering that Mimosa Moffat has been dead for almost a week, it'd hardly be business as usual, would it?”

“Even so, it's a thin lead, or so it seems to me,” said Banks. “I understand that certain accusations were made?”

“No accusations,” Annie replied. “I showed the two men behind the counter in a kebab and pizza takeaway an artist's impression of the dead girl. They said they didn't know her.”

“And then?”

“I wasn't sure I believed them. After all, if she hung out on the Strip and she ate kebab and pizza, there was a good chance she'd been in their takeaway, wouldn't you say, sir? It's the kind of place young people hang out, especially if they're under the legal drinking age. I might have mentioned her stomach contents as I left, just to make them think a bit.”

“There are dozens of such places around,” said Carver.

“Not as close to where Mimosa Moffat lived,” said Annie. “Not in her own neighborhood. And an area she was known to hang out in. And the PM did find—”

Carver waved his hand. “Even so. That was still no reason to strut into my manor and start harassing racial minorities. Wytherton is a balancing act. And the fact that the garbagemen are on strike and we have a heat wave at the moment doesn't help, either. Tensions are high.”

“Well, that explains the smell,” said Annie. “But as for harassing racial minorities, come off it, sir. In the first place, the Asians didn't seem to be a minority in the area, and in the second, I didn't harass anyone. Nor did DC Masterson. Maybe I didn't wear kid gloves, but I treated them all in exactly the same way I treat everyone else I question in a homicide investigation.”

“Well, if that's the way you go around—”

“Did you discover anything more on this Strip?” Banks cut in. Carver glared at him.

“No. Apart from the smell. We talked to some guys in the minicab office next door, but that's all. Everything else was pretty much closed, and there weren't a lot of people about. None of the ones we talked to admitted to knowing Mimosa. It was as if she didn't exist. I got the feeling that someone's got these people scared, or well trained, sir. They—”

“This is pure balderdash,” fumed Carver, getting to his feet. “Just because you couldn't get any leads in your investigation, you accuse a whole community of being involved in a cover-up. If they said they
didn't know her, it was probably because they didn't. I suppose you think my officers are part of the conspiracy, too?”

“I never said that, sir,” Annie answered. “But if the cap fits . . .”

“You certainly implied it. Don't you think your time might have been better spent asking them if they had noticed anything, instead of pestering local cafe owners and businessmen?”

“That's enough of that, Superintendent Carver,” said Banks. “Let's leave implications out of it for the moment. Sit down.”

Carver didn't look happy, but he subsided into his chair.

“And we did ask Reg and Bill if they'd noticed anything,” muttered Annie. “Or if they recognized Mimosa Moffat.”

“By which time you'd already alienated them.”

“Did they, by the way?” Banks asked him. “Notice anything?”

“No,” said Carver. “I talked to them about it once we knew why your officers were nosing around. And none of my men saw anything on the night in question, either. Reg and Bill weren't even on duty. But the fact remains,” he went on, “that Wytherton is a racially sensitive community. The place is like a tinderbox. It could go up at any moment. You don't go marching into such an area and start pushing people around and making arbitrary insinuations. If you go in there at all, you go there with all your facts straight—and preferably with specific names, warrants, evidence, the lot.”

“More than if they happened to be white?”

“Damn right,” said Carver.

“We didn't push anybody around,” Annie said. “I don't get it. Is this some sort of positive
non
discrimination?”

“Think about it, DI Cabbot,” said Banks. “Call it post-colonial guilt, if you like.”

“Even that doesn't explain it.”