Author: Peter Robinson
Category: Other
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‘I don’t want us to be seen to be sparing any expense on this one,’ said ACC McLaughlin. ‘I know things have been tight recently, and it might seem like a cynical move, releasing more resources for what we know to be a high-profile case, but that’s the way these things go.’
‘I can’t see anyone objecting, sir,’ said Banks. ‘It is the murder of a child, after all.’
McLaughlin nodded and turned to Gervaise. ‘Catherine?’
‘Plainclothes officers are rather thin on the ground,’ said Gervaise, ‘but I can let you have civilian staff to man a murder room here at the station. We can also find a few more uniformed officers to help with the door-to-doors and so on. You, DI Cabbot and DC Masterson will be working the case full-time, and I hardly need tell you there’ll be no leave until the matter is settled. You can also use our CID resources as you need. Just come and ask. They can also take over general duties day-to-day while you’re occupied with this business.’
It was nothing less than Banks expected, though he did feel he could do with another detective on his team. With DS Winsome Jackman away on maternity leave, expecting her first child at any moment, and his second DC, Doug Wilson, having recently left the force, he was lower than he had ever been on staff. The extra uniformed officers would help, of course, but there would still be a lot of work for the three detectives. ‘I suppose I can manage with Gerry and Annie for the time being, but I’ll want a major trawl for information, especially possible sightings. As of now, we don’t know where the lad came from, or how he got here. Someone must have seen him. We doubt he’s from around here – nobody on the estate admits to recognising him – and when we found him he had nothing but a small stash of coke in his pocket. No money, no belongings, no identification, no keys. Nothing. That stuff must be somewhere, and someone must have seen him coming and going. Bus station. Taxi ranks. Trains.’
Gervaise nodded. ‘We’ll get extra uniformed officers and PCSOs out on it today.’
McLaughlin cleared his throat. ‘You should also perhaps liaise with drugs squad officers at County HQ, as you require.’
‘Thanks, sir,’ said Banks, though after his conversation with DI MacDonald the previous evening he wasn’t sure which drugs squad detectives he should be trusting.
McLaughlin stood up and straightened his uniform. ‘Right. I’d better get back. Catherine. Alan.’ He nodded to them, put his cap on and left the office.
‘Well . . .’ said AC Gervaise, visibly relaxed after her boss’s departure. ‘That went well. What do you think about the drugs angle?’
‘We only found a small amount. Just enough for personal use. As yet, there’s no reason to think the boy’s murder was drug-related.’
‘Come on, Alan. If you take into account that his body was found on the East Side Estate and that DI MacDonald felt it necessary to let you know Connor Clive Blaydon was in the area at the time, I think we can live with the assumption that something might have been going on. It has county lines written all over it.’ Gervaise stood up. ‘I have to go. Don’t forget, Alan, brief me after your morning meeting.’
Zelda sat by the window of her hotel room and gazed over the river at the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral surrounded by cranes and half-built modern structures that would soon, along with the gherkins, cheese graters, shards and tulips, dominate the entire city skyline. She had had a difficult night, and she was still recovering, feeling tired and numb. It had started, as it usually did, with a nightmare at about three o’clock in the morning, the details of which scurried back into the dark recesses when she woke, leaving only vague impressions of unbearably slow journeys across darkening post-industrial landscapes, through crumbling ruins and over mud as sticky as treacle. There was always someone, or something, chasing her, or hiding in the shadows, and she could never get far enough ahead to feel safe. She also felt that there was nowhere she would feel safe, for the place she was seeking didn’t exist, and if it should suddenly be conjured into existence, she wouldn’t be able to find it, or she would have to swim so far underwater that she wouldn’t have enough breath to get there.
As usual, she woke gasping for air, her heart thudding, and that was when things got worse, when she started remembering the real terrors of her years as a sex-slave: the pain of her first anal rape, a broken nose, a messy abortion in a cheap backstreet clinic in Belgrade, all in excruciating detail, faces included.
So she did what she always did: got up, took two of the tranquillisers her doctor had prescribed and made a cup of chamomile tea. Then she took out her Moleskine notebook and jotted down what she could remember of her dreams. The doctor had told her it would help her come to terms with her experiences, but she didn’t think it had done much good so far. Nevertheless, she persevered.
When she had written down as much as she could remember, she put on her headphones. Zelda had three favourite symphonies – Beethoven’s ‘Pastorale’, Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’ and Dvořák’s ‘New World’ – and she always turned to one of them at such times. She didn’t care how corny they were, or how many times she had listened to them. This morning she chose the Dvořák and settled by the window to watch the daylight gently nudge away the darkness as the city came to life in all its quotidian glory, from the first joggers on the embankment to the quickly multiplying hordes of pedestrians heading for work, the rumbling and clattering of commuter trains over Blackfriars Bridge, then the first tourist boats cutting their wakes along the Thames to Greenwich.
And by then the world was beginning to feel bearable again.
That day, the dawn had begun with an unusually rosy glow. Rust-stained tugboats and overloaded barges passed by below her window. The broad dark river fascinated her. It was like a living being, with its swirling oil slicks and currents like ropes of muscle twisting in the wake of the boats. Sweet Thames.
Sometimes her head felt almost as stuffed full of random quotes as it was of faces. The words all came from the boxes of books people donated to the orphanage, of course. There weren’t only lurid potboilers, detective stories, thrillers and romances, but also hefty Victorian novels and poetry collections, too – Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Hardy, Keats, Wordsworth, Spenser – as well as children’s books by Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and Jacqueline Wilson. Zelda had read them all, from cover to cover. Her recollection of words wasn’t as good as it was of faces – she certainly didn’t have a photographic memory – but it was probably better than average, and she remembered a lot. She was hungry to learn, and those hours spent reading in a foreign language that was becoming more her own every day, were the happiest times of her life. Until the day that life came to an abrupt end.
In those dark hours, as the bad memories ebbed with the growing light, the healing power of the music and the numbing effect of the tranquillisers, she often wondered why she had never been tempted by suicide. But she never had. Once, perhaps, she had come close. In a small and ugly motel near Banja Luka, exhausted and hurting after a particularly long night of rough and filthy long-distance lorry drivers, the idea had reared its head briefly. She had considered whether the belt of the dress that lay draped over the bedside chair would be long enough and strong enough for her to hang herself from the coat hook on the back of the locked door. But she had never got as far as finding out before the door opened again and another man came in.
Thoughts of the past began to dissipate, the music ended and Zelda put her headphones away to make more tea as she contemplated going out for breakfast. Then she began to think about Hawkins and all that had happened since that night Alan and Annie came for dinner just before Christmas. It seemed almost a lifetime ago.
If she was going to stay in London for a few more days, she could do a bit more detective work. She had lain dormant for too long, but news of Hawkins’s death galvanised her towards action. Over the past few months, she had thought more than once about reporting what she had seen that evening she had followed him. But to whom? She couldn’t be certain that she trusted anyone in
the department. It was the same reason she hadn’t told Alan. When all was said and done, she had withheld the information for her own reasons. If she had reported on Hawkins meeting Keane, a known criminal, that would have been the end of it one way or another. She would have been cut out of any investigation, if there was one, and she would never find Keane, or Petar and Goran Tadić, the ones she really wanted.
First, she needed a plan. If Hawkins had been meeting Keane to tell him about her interest in the photo of him with Petar Tadić – and what other reason could there be? – it meant that Hawkins was in bed with the enemy, perhaps feeding them information so that some of the most wanted men could evade discovery. Perhaps he had also informed them when Zelda would be on duty at a specific port, station or airport, so they could avoid it. If so, the enemy had turned against him – not unusual in that risky and violent business – and she would like to know why. Had he tried to escape their clutches, tried to break free from them? He should have known the price of that. She also remembered that Banks and Annie had told her that Keane liked fires. He would probably know all about chip pans.
So what could she do? She was marooned in London for a few days, which wasn’t an unpleasant situation. Normally, she would invite Raymond down for a mini-break, but he was away in America for meetings in advance of an important US exhibition coming up soon. She could do some shopping, go to the Picasso exhibition at the Tate Modern, try to get some last-minute theatre tickets. Shakespeare at The Globe, perhaps? But no. She remembered the last time she’d been there, trapped at the far end of a row, feeling claustrophobic and unable to escape a dreadful production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It had been more like a midsummer night’s nightmare.
Anyway, there were plenty of diversions for her in London, but the main thing, she realised, was to work out what she could do about Hawkins and Keane. Danvers and Deborah wouldn’t tell her anything, that was for certain, and she didn’t really know where to start. She had drawn a blank following Hawkins on those few occasions over the last months she had been able to do so, but perhaps if she applied herself now, with so much free time on her hands, she might be able to find out more. At least she could make a start by going to have a look at his burned-out house.
Unlike the numerous television depictions of large open-plan offices crowded with scruffy detectives in a fug of cigarette smoke, shirtsleeves rolled up, ties askew, resting the backs of their thighs against desks overflowing with unfinished paperwork, Styrofoam coffee cups in hand and phones constantly ringing, there were only four people present at the Tuesday morning briefing in the boardroom of Eastvale Regional HQ, and all were seated, none smoking.
The room was wood-panelled with ornate ceiling cornices, a chandelier and a large and highly-polished oval table. The accoutrements were all present – the large flat-screen TV set, the ubiquitous whiteboards plastered with photographs of the victim from all angles, indecipherable scrawls and arrows linking one thing to another. And the coffee cups, not Styrofoam but paper. From large gilt-framed oil paintings on the walls, nineteenth-century wool barons with mutton-chop sideboards and roast-beef complexions watched over the proceedings.
Banks gathered up his notes. He had enjoyed his dinner with Joanna MacDonald the previous evening. When she let her guard down even just a little, she was charming and entertaining company – funny, sharp, intelligent – wise, even. He wondered again, as he often had, why she so rarely allowed herself the lapse, kept herself on such a tight rein. After dinner, he had got home in time for a fairly early night, with very little to drink, and as a result he felt unusually refreshed that morning.
‘As of now,’ he began, ‘we still have nothing much to go on. The boy looks about thirteen years old, he’s dark-skinned, maybe of Middle Eastern heritage, but he could have grown up here, for all we know. He’s been stabbed four times, and we found a small amount of cocaine in his jeans pocket. Most likely he didn’t live locally, or the odds are that we’d have located someone who would have seen him around. I know, as you all do, that the East Side Estate in general can be pretty uncommunicative, if not actively against us on occasion, but though there are plenty of drugs circulating, there are few murders there, and it’s my sense that the people are in shock. I don’t believe everyone we’ve talked to so far is lying about not knowing the boy.’
‘So how did he get there and where did he come from?’ asked DC Gerry Masterson.
‘That we don’t know,’ admitted Banks. ‘And we need answers. Out of town, most likely, I’d say. There aren’t any Middle Eastern families living in Eastvale, as far as I know. It’s possible he was a student, I suppose, but I’d say he was too young to be at the college. Again, that can be easily checked. He may have been visiting friends in the area. Something else we’ll have to follow up on. Wherever he’s from, someone dumped him on our patch and it’s our job to find out who. We’ve got an appeal out with the media, so someone will have to collate the responses, should any come in. The ACC has authorised a working budget, AC Gervaise has okayed overtime and civilian staff to man the murder room, and we have extra uniformed officers pounding the streets.
‘Mrs Grunwell, in whose wheelie bin the body was found, says that she put the rubbish out at ten o’clock on Sunday night, as usual, and she heard a car nearby between eleven and eleven-thirty that same night. She also thought she heard someone kick or bump into the bin about the same time. She’s eighty-five, but in my estimation, we can take her as a reliable witness on these points. We also got confirmation of the car and the bump from two other houses at that end of the street, so we can probably accept that the body was dumped between eleven o’clock and eleven-thirty on Sunday night. Not so late that there might not have been someone about, but it was a Sunday, and things tend to get quiet fairly early then, even on the East Side Estate. What we don’t know, in addition to who dumped him, of course, is where he came from or how far he was driven. Gerry, any theories?’
‘Well, you wouldn’t want to drive very far with a body in your boot, would you, guv? Or in your back seat. I mean, you might get pulled over for speeding or driving through a red light or something. It’s risky. There’d also be traces in the car. Blood, for a start, if he was stabbed. You know how hard it is to get rid of those sorts of things completely.’
‘You’re saying you think he wasn’t transported far, then?’
‘That would be my guess.’
Banks nodded. ‘OK. Sounds reasonable.’
‘That may indicate that whoever did it knows the area,’ said Annie. ‘Its reputation. Knows that we might not be too surprised to find a dead drug user dumped there.’
‘Good point.’
‘What about CCTV?’ Gerry asked.
‘There isn’t any functioning CCTV on the East Side Estate and not a hell of a lot nearby, either. Right now, it’s important for us to keep circulating the computer-generated photo. We’ve already been sending copies around the media and liaising with local police and representatives from Middle Eastern communities and mosques in Bradford, Dewsbury, Leeds, Huddersfield and other nearby towns and cities. The problem is that we don’t know whether he’s from Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon or any of the dozen or more other countries that make up what we call the Middle East. We don’t even know if he was a Muslim, though we are making inquiries in mosques. It could be a lengthy process, or we could get lucky.’ Banks paused and sipped at his bitter, tepid coffee. ‘We also need to know why he was dumped. And perhaps more specifically, why he was dumped in Eastvale.’
‘You think it was personal, guv?’ Gerry asked. ‘Something to do with the owner of the bin?’
‘No. As I said, Mrs Grunwell is eighty-five, and I think we can pretty well rule out a vendetta or gang war involving her. No, I think we need to look elsewhere. And why a rubbish bin?’
‘Well,’ said Annie, ‘it might simply have been convenient for someone passing the end of Malden Terrace on the way out of town. I suppose if you had a body in your car and you were afte
r somewhere to dispose of it, a wheelie bin’s as good a place as any.’
Banks nodded. ‘It would help if we could determine whether it was a warning or a statement,’ he went on, ‘or simply a matter of arbitrary convenience, as you suggest. Could there be some other reason? It’s not as if whoever killed him could hope to conceal the crime for very long by dumping him there.’
‘Unless they didn’t know which day was bin collection day,’ said Annie.
Banks smiled. ‘There’s always that. We should be glad they’re not on strike right now, too.’
‘Could it be a hate crime?’ Gerry suggested.
‘It’s a possibility we should keep in mind,’ said Banks. ‘There’s certainly plenty of casual racism. Even Mrs Grunwell referred to “darkies”.’
‘He could have been dumped as a warning,’ Annie suggested.
‘Yes. But to whom? And about what? I mean, if his murder and placement in a rubbish bin was a warning of some kind, the person being warned had to be made aware of it, didn’t he? That would surely be the point?’
‘Can we be absolutely certain that there’s no connection with Mrs Grunwell, like Gerry suggested?’ Annie asked.
‘I very much doubt it,’ said Banks. ‘You’ve talked to her. You know what I mean. I doubt that referring to “darkies” necessarily leads to murder.’
‘Even so, guv,’ Gerry said. ‘Maybe she caused some trouble for someone? I mean, old people can be pretty wrong-headed or stubborn sometimes. Cantankerous, even. Maybe somebody wanted to do something and she wouldn’t give way? Does she own her house? Did someone want very badly to buy it?’