Author: Peter Robinson
Category: Other
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The sprawling estate of decrepit terrace houses formed a no man’s land to the west, beyond the more upmarket detached and semi-detached houses that straggled up tree-lined Elmet Hill and its tributaries towards The Heights, Eastvale’s most desirable and expensive enclave. Because the Hollyfield Estate was earmarked for development, many of the buildings were already empty, their windows broken, roofs missing slates, their inhabitants long rehoused elsewhere. Though Hollyfield hadn’t earned quite as rough a reputation as the East Side Estate, it had certainly been one of the poorest parts of town in its day, a poverty that was only thrown into relief by its proximity to its more affluent neighbours to the east.
Sean Bancroft and Luke Farrar, the ten-year-old boys who had reported finding the body, were at home with their parents, and someone would talk to them later. First of all, the police needed to examine the scene.
The smell of decay assaulted Annie before she had even got through the front door. Fortunately, the responding officers and attending paramedics had been careful and sensible enough to disturb things as little as possible, and both Annie and Gerry kept their distance as they studied the corpse. The smell didn’t come from the dead man, though; he hadn’t been dead long enough for that. It came from the house itself – neglect, unwashed dishes, damp walls, rotting food, old socks and blocked drains.
The man appeared to be in his late sixties, though it was often hard to tell with a drug addict. He had long, straggly, unwashed hair, thinning at the temples and on top, and a bushy beard stained yellow around the lips. He was slumped sideways on a mobility scooter wearing baggy corduroy trousers and a threadbare pullover. His left sleeve was rolled up almost to the shoulder, and a needle dangled from a vein at the bend of his elbow. Lucky man, Annie thought. Not so many junkies as ancient as he seemed to be had usable veins left in such an easily accessible part of their bodies. From what she could see of his arm, it was scarred from previous injections, and at one point above his wrist, the skin bulged an angry red, a sign of infection from a dirty needle. The room itself was sparsely furnished, and what there was looked as if it had been salvaged from a scrap heap. The ancient wallpaper was faded and peeling from damp where the walls joined the ceiling. Wet patches dappled the walls, throwing out of kilter the symmetry of the flower pattern.
‘Was the overhead light on when you arrived?’ Annie asked PC Carver.
‘No, ma’am. I turned it on. Had to. I could hardly see a thing.’
‘That’s OK. I just needed to know. Have you searched the house?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ PC Helms said. ‘We had a quick shufty around, at any rate. Nothing. It’s all much the same as this room. More like a squat than anything else.’
Annie nodded and gestured for Gerry to check the place out, then she turned her attention back to the body. ‘Do you know who he is?’ she asked PC Helms.
‘No, ma’am.’
‘OK. There’s not a lot more we can do until we get Doc Burns here to check him out. Did the kids say the back door was open?’
‘Yes. No signs of a break-in. Neither there nor here at the front.’
Annie squatted and peered more closely at the corpse. She noticed the edge of a worn leather wallet sticking out of his hip pocket. She was already wearing her latex gloves. ‘Take note, constables,’ she said as she reached forward carefully, grasped the wallet between her index finger and thumb and slowly pulled it from the pocket. ‘In case it ever comes up, for any reason, I’ve removed his wallet from his pocket at the scene.’
PC Carver nodded and made a note in his book.
Annie smiled up at him. ‘You never know. Sometimes these little things make all the difference. Let’s have a look.’ She carried the wallet over to the table by the front window.
Gerry came back from upstairs in time to join the three of them. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Though there’s a mattress on the floor in each of the two bedrooms, and it looks as if someone’s been sleeping on one of them recently.’
Annie started to rifle through the wallet. It was certainly bare. ‘No driving licence,’ she said. ‘And no debit or credit or loyalty cards, either.’
‘Judging by the state of his arm,’ said Gerry, ‘it’s probably a good thing for all of us that he didn’t drive. I mean, you know, before he . . .’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Annie. ‘Aha. He’s got a senior’s bus pass here. Howard Stokes, age 67.’
Annie passed Gerry a scrap of paper she found stuck between two dirty five-pound notes, on which was scrawled something that resembled a mobile phone number. ‘Could be his dealer or someone?’
‘I’ll check it out,’ said Gerry. ‘Think it was an accident, guv?’
Annie peered at the body again. ‘No way of telling,’ she said. ‘Not yet. Not until the doc gets him on the slab and the experts go over the scene. Who knows, even then? We’ll need to find out if he was right-handed, for a start. If he wasn’t, we may have another murder to deal with. We also need to know whether his prints are on the syringe, where he might have got the drugs from, and so on. Even if we think we’ve got all the answers, there’ll always be a chance that someone else injected him, wiped the syringe and made sure his fingerprints would be found on it. Vic Manson’s good with this sort of thing. Odds are he’ll be able to tell us by the angles and impressions whether Stokes would have handled the syringe in that way to get it where it is. I can’t see any evidence of it, but there’s also a chance he was killed in some other way and it was made to appear like a drug overdose. But who would want to go to that much trouble, I have no idea.’
‘Should we call in the super?’ Gerry asked.
Annie shook her head. ‘No need. Let him have his evening out. I’ll talk to the AC in a while and see what she says. You have a chat with Sean and Luke. In the meantime, I’ll call for the forensics team. We’ll wait here for Dr Burns and the CSIs. We’ll get Peter Darby to take some stills and video, too. Then, when the doc’s finished, he can get the body wrapped up and transferred to the mortuary at Eastvale General ready for Karen tomorrow morning.’
‘She’s got the boy from the wheelie bin slated for tomorrow,’ said Gerry.
‘Right. Forgot.’ Annie looked at the late Howard Stokes again. ‘Well, he’ll just have to wait his turn, won’t he? I don’t imagine he’ll mind all that much.’
After a long telephone conversation with Raymond in New York, who urged her to go and see the Picasso exhibition at the Tate Modern if she had some spare time on her hands, Zelda picked up her book and went out to dine alone. She chose a waterfront restaurant that she had passed on one of her walks around the neighbourhood. The cuisine was French, which was her favourite. The restaurant was noisy inside, and though it was a mild enough evening, it was perhaps a little too cool for some people and she was able to get a table outside, from which she could see the river in all its twilit glory. The tourist boats were still out offering cruises, and tugs and barges plied their trade back and forth, as they had done for centuries.
Still on her Japanese reading jag, she had moved on from Kawabata to Mishima’s Spring Snow, the first of his Sea of Fertility quartet. But every once in a while, she needed a break from serious literature and went back to the books of her youth, sometimes even as far back as Enid Blyton or A.A. Milne. That afternoon, after her visit to Hawkins’s house and the pub, she had found a copy of Modesty Blaise in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road and decided to read through the whole series again. She had read them all years ago, back at the orphanage, but she didn’t care. Modesty Blaise was her heroine from her early teenage years, and she knew she could enjoy Modesty’s adventures with her right-hand man Willie Garvin all over again. She had already got well into the story in her hotel room. The evening light was still good enough to read by, and she flicked her eyes between the words on the page and the view. Modesty was tied up at knife-point and being forced to phone Willie and lure him into a trap by the time Zelda’s food arrived.
Zelda turned t
o her Sancerre and sea bass, put her book aside and thought over her day. Hawkins’s death still troubled her. She hadn’t known him well, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t felt anything at his passing. What a terrible way to go. Of course, she knew more than Danvers did – his meeting with Phil Keane, the man Banks and Annie were after – and that Keane favoured fire as a means of getting rid of people. That didn’t mean Hawkins’s death had been anything other than an accident, but given the world he and Keane inhabited, in Zelda’s opinion they were far more likely to die by violence than anything else.
The main sticking point in her theory was that given the talents Alan had outlined, Keane would have been a documents man, a facilitator of movements across borders, of identity creation and manipulation. Such assets weren’t usually asked to kill people. That pleasure fell to others, to specialists whom Zelda had met, men who enjoyed their work and did it as professionally and as bloodily as possible. Still, Keane might have become an obvious choice for some reason – the fires, perhaps – and Hawkins may somehow have fallen afoul of those he worked for. Or it could have been something personal, something between Keane and Hawkins. But the gang wouldn’t like that, losing one of their well-placed informants on a whim, so where would it leave Keane? Was he still alive?
But that was all speculation. She needed to find Keane and, if possible, get him to lead her to Goran Tadić. Only then, when she had done what she had to do, could she hand Keane over to Alan and Annie.
She was well aware that she had lost much of her impetus in tracking down Keane after that one sighting had led nowhere. True, she hadn’t been in London very often since then, and never for long, but she would be the first to admit that she had felt discouraged. She was no detective. She had no resources to call on to find someone. And for what? True, Keane might lead her to Goran, but there could be other ways of locating him, through contacts she already had. She was in no hurry. She knew that whatever small dent she made, the organisation and its trade in female flesh would go on as ever. This was personal. Of that she was under no illusions.
But Hawkins’s death, for whatever the reason, had rekindled her interest in the task.
There was really only one other place she might find out something useful, she realised. When she had followed Hawkins that rainy night just before Christmas, when he had met Keane in a Soho restaurant, a woman had come out with them. Keane’s girlfriend, or so it had seemed. Zelda had taken photographs and followed the two of them afterwards while they went window-shopping and finally jumped in a taxi on Regent Street. There was a slim chance that the woman and Keane might have been regulars at that restaurant. In which case, perhaps someone who worked there might know something about them. It was a long shot, but then so was this whole business. It would have to wait until tomorrow, anyway. She had had enough of sleuthing for today. She considered checking out the dessert menu, then decided not to bother, drank some more of her Sancerre and went back to Modesty Blaise. Modesty would escape. She always did. That was one of the things Zelda so admired about her. The lonely call of a ship’s horn sounded from far away, downriver.
It was after nine o’clock and getting dark when Gerry finally arrived at Luke Farrar’s house near the top of Elmet Hill. Sean Bancroft was present, too, as were both boys’ parents. The boys were sipping hot chocolate and their parents red wine. Mrs Farrar asked Gerry if she would like a glass, but she declined. Much as she would have enjoyed a glass of wine right then, it wouldn’t do to accept alcohol from interviewees. Maybe Banks could get away with it, but he was Superintendent and Gerry was a lowly DC. She did, however, accept the cup of tea offered as an alternative. The children seemed no worse the wear for their adventure, and no doubt when the immediate shock wore off, they would end up with an exciting tale to tell at school. Out of the window, the tree branches silhouetted against the night sky swayed and creaked in the breeze that had sprung up. Cars were parked on both sides of the hill, but there was hardly any traffic at that time. Things would be different when the shopping centre was built.
‘I won’t keep you long,’ Gerry said, when she had her mug of tea in one hand and her pen in another, the notebook open on her knee. While she questioned them, she looked primarily at Sean, whom she knew was the elder of the two by several weeks, and who appeared to be the leader. ‘Do you often play down on Hollyfield Lane?’
Neither boy said anything at first. They glanced shiftily at one another and eventually Sean said, with a guilty glance towards his father, ‘We’re not supposed to go down there. But we weren’t doing any harm.’
‘There are all sorts of dubious characters on the streets,’ Sean’s father added.
‘But you do go, sometimes, right?’ Gerry insisted.
Sean nodded. ‘Most of the houses are empty now,’ he said. ‘We thought that one was empty.’
‘We like to play in the empty houses,’ Luke added.
Sean gave him a withering look.
‘That’s all right,’ Gerry said. ‘I was the same when I was a girl.’
Both boys stared at her open-mouthed, as if they couldn’t believe that a girl would be brave or adventurous enough to play the way they did.
‘Believe me,’ Gerry went on, ‘you’re not in any trouble for going in there.’ She glanced at the parents. ‘Not from me, at any rate.’
‘He won’t be going anywhere for a few weeks,’ Mr Bancroft said, through clenched teeth.
‘Had you seen the man on the mobility scooter before?’ Gerry asked.
‘Dunno,’ said Sean. ‘I mean, we didn’t get a really good look at him, did we, Luke?’
Luke shook his head. ‘We legged it,’ he said.
‘And it was pretty dark in there.’
‘So you don’t know if you’ve ever seen him before?’
‘There’s a bloke on a mobility scooter with long hair and a beard like his who comes in the park sometimes.’
‘What?’ said Mr Bancroft. ‘In our park?’ He glanced at Gerry. ‘It’s at the bottom of the hill,’ he explained. ‘Just a small park, like. But our kiddies play there. There’s been trouble about people from the old estate hanging around there before. There was a convicted paedophile—’
‘A park’s a public place, Mr Bancroft,’ Gerry said. ‘Hard to keep people out. But I get your point.’ She turned to Sean again. ‘What was he doing when you saw him in the park?’
‘Nothing,’ said Sean.
‘Just sitting there,’ Luke added.
‘On his scooter?’
‘No. On a bench. He’d have it beside him. The scooter. He could walk, but not very much.’
‘Did he ever say anything to you or any of the other children?’
‘No. He’d usually be reading a book or something.’
‘Did you ever see him with anyone else, talking to anyone?’
‘No. He was always by himself.’
‘Did you hear about that young lad we found on the East Side Estate yesterday?’ she asked.
‘The boy in the bin?’ said Luke, parroting a Daily Mail headline.
‘That’s the one.’ Gerry took the computer-generated photograph from her briefcase and showed it to them. ‘That’s what he looked like. Did you ever see him while you were playing?’
The boys shook their heads. ‘He’s an Arab,’ said Sean. ‘Dad says—’
‘That’ll do,’ cut in Mr Bancroft. ‘Just answer the lady’s questions.’
‘Yes, he’s an Arab,’ said Gerry. ‘Though that’s a bit of a broad description. Covers a wide area. We don’t know what country he came from yet.’
‘Is he one of those boat people?’ Luke asked. ‘Or an asylum seeker?’
‘I see you’ve been keeping an eye on the news.’
‘We do it at school,’ Sean explained. ‘Current affairs. Anyway, we haven’t seen him around here. If he did come from the Hollyfield he must be new there.’
‘But nobody’s new there,’ Luke said. ‘They’ve nearly all left.’
‘He c
ould be a squatter or something,’ Sean argued. ‘They take over empty houses, don’t they?’
‘Not seen him in the park, on the swings or anything?’ Gerry asked.
‘No,’ said Sean, adding for no good reason, ‘we always play there with other boys and girls we know, and there’s always a grown-up there to keep an eye on us.’
‘A good thing, too,’ said Gerry. She glanced up at the boys’ parents. ‘I understand you have a Neighbourhood Watch in the area. Do either of you belong to it?’
Mr and Mrs Farrar said they did. Gerry showed them the photograph, too, and the Bancrofts.
‘We’ve never seen him,’ said Mrs Farrar. ‘Mind you, we stay on our side of the park. That’s our boundary. We don’t go over to the Hollyfield Estate. No reason to. To be quite honest, we’ll all be glad when it’s been flattened to the ground. They say the plans for the new houses are quite nice. Then there’ll be the shopping. And the cinema.’ Mrs Bancroft smiled at her.
Gerry was running out of questions. Her cosy flat and a large glass of Chardonnay before bed were feeling increasingly attractive. ‘When you were in the house, did you touch anything?’ she asked the boys.