After the Fire (34 page)

‘Look, everything she’s told us fits in with what we know,’ Derwent said. ‘She left him getting dressed. He was half-dressed when he died. She admits she punched him. He had a mark from that. She didn’t know anything about the pepper spray and why would she have needed it? They were the same height and I reckon she’s stronger than most women, even though the hormone treatment would be taking the edge off her. She could have taken him in a fight. He didn’t hit her back when she punched him.’

‘So who did need pepper spray to subdue him?’

‘Someone who wanted to kill him,’ I said. ‘Someone knows he’s there. Someone starts a fire. Maybe they pretend to be a firefighter when they knock on the door. He opens it, gets hit with the pepper spray, which incapacitates him. Then he’s strangled and thrown out the window. We’re meant to assume he jumped or fell while trying to escape the fire.’

‘How does Justine fit into that?’ Una Burt asked. ‘She was there too.’

‘It’s possible she was in on it.’ I looked at Derwent. ‘Did you believe she loved him? I’m not so sure.’

‘He didn’t strike me as a particularly lovable person,’ Derwent agreed. ‘But then again, Justine was trying to distract us from the prostitution angle.’

‘Or maybe she didn’t want us to think of her as a possible suspect. She’s part of a community that had no love for Armstrong – quite the opposite, in fact. And she’s an angry person.’ I remembered how she’d jostled me, how she’d looked at me with total disdain. There was something ruthless about Justine. She’d had to hide the real her while she grew up; she’d had to fight to become what she was. That required strength of character and determination and an ability to dissemble. ‘She could have set him up.’

Derwent glowered at me. ‘Got any evidence?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Then go and get some,’ Burt said crisply. She shooed us out of her office and we straggled back to our desks.

‘Tea?’ Pettifer suggested.

My stomach lurched and it wasn’t just because Pettifer made legendarily bad tea. ‘No thanks.’ I sat down, feeling exhausted, and sick, and miserable. I’d slept badly. Derwent had been back in my flat, since Melissa Pell was out of hospital and staying in his place. I should have felt safer to have him with me but it bothered me that he was there, knocking things over in the bathroom, opening drawers, watching me,
judging
. It bothered me a lot more when he got up at a quarter past five and slammed the front door on his way out for a run that had ended with muddy trainers in my hall and a sweaty, rain-soaked Derwent stretching in front of the television while I tried to eat a piece of toast and ignore him.

I leaned back in my chair and frowned at Derwent, who was standing near my desk, staring into space. ‘Why are you being so nice about Justine Rickards? It’s not like you to be so understanding.’

The corner of his mouth twitched. ‘I feel sorry for her.’

‘Really?’
You’re capable of that?

‘She must have been miserable for her whole life. Still is, probably. I can’t imagine what it would be like to hate yourself. I’ve never wanted to be anything other than what I am.’ He drew his shoulders back, standing tall. ‘There’s nothing better than being a white man, is there? Especially an Englishman.’

‘Yep. That’s the kind of thinking that won the Empire,’ I said acidly.

‘All right, half-breed.’

‘One hundred per cent Irish, thanks.’

‘Genetically. But you were born here. What does that make you?’

‘It makes me tired of this conversation.’

Instead of answering, Derwent sank to the floor in front of my desk. I sat in silence for a second, then broke.

‘What are you doing?’

A grunt. ‘Thinking.’ Another grunt.

I stood up to see what he was actually doing. ‘Push-ups. Of course.’

‘It helps.’ He was rattling through them and it pained me to admit that his form was good, his back flat. ‘Gets … the blood … flowing.’

‘You’re not in the army now.’

‘Thank God.’ He paused in the up position, holding it for a moment, then stood up, tucking his shirt in. ‘What are
you
doing?’

‘Going through the threats against Armstrong that Elaine Lister gave us.’

‘Anything interesting?’

‘I’m learning some new vocabulary.’ I sat down again, staring at the piles of paper that had spread across my desk. ‘I’m trying to organise it by date first. Then thematically. I’ll say this for him, he pissed off a lot of different types of people.’

‘Who votes for someone like that?’

‘People who want to shake things up. People who don’t trust the main parties, the career politicians who always say the right thing. People who love a character.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘People who shouldn’t have the vote.’

‘Have we got Armstrong’s phone records yet?’

‘I’ve requested them from the phone company. The techs are still trying to get something out of Armstrong’s phone. They never found the SIM card.’

‘Chase up the phone company.’

Phone calls made and received, numbers we could link to people we knew or those who hadn’t cropped up in our investigation yet, records of text messages although not their content, not unless the phone could be persuaded to give up its secrets … It could make Armstrong’s last moments three-dimensional for us, shade in the background, make him live again for long enough to find out who ended his life.

All that from a phone.

The irony wasn’t lost on me that Chris Swain was using mine in much the same way: to know what I did and where I went, who I was communicating with, and how. And he probably knew much more about me than I could ever find out about Geoff Armstrong. We had to stay within the law, by definition. We had to fight to get every scrap of information that might help us. The playing field was by no means level but we still had to win.

I got off the phone after a long journey through buck-passing middle managers to someone who promised me that yes, it would be today, or tomorrow at the latest, they understood it was urgent, they would do their best. Frustration knotted my stomach. I needed to eat something, I thought, but I couldn’t think of anything that didn’t make me feel sick. I found half a cereal bar in my desk drawer and picked at it. I was thinking about whether I’d ever be well again, whether being sick like this was a response to the way I lived – whether my job was, in fact, killing me. Then again, most of the stress and worry in my life was outside of work, when I had nothing to distract me from the shadow Chris Swain cast across my life, or when I was alone, replaying the last minutes of my relationship with Rob, changing what I said and did. There were times when concentrating on my job felt like sanctuary.

Conclusion: I just wasn’t very good at having a life.

Derwent knocked on my desk, interrupting me midgloom. ‘We’re wanted.’

I looked around to see Una Burt waiting at the door of her office as Colin Vale went in after a man with dark hair. I recognised the people-trafficking expert, though it took me a little longer to remember his name: Tom Bridges. And Kev Cox was already inside, standing by Una Burt’s desk with a folder. I followed Derwent across the room, my misery shelved for the time being in favour of curiosity. Pettifer and Mal Upton were right behind me. The small office filled up quickly and felt more than crowded with eight of us in it. I found a filing cabinet to lean against, judging that Derwent would disapprove of me sitting in one of the two chairs by the desk. Bridges took one, Colin Vale the other. Pettifer and Derwent battled briefly for the window sill and Derwent, of course, got it.

‘What have you got, Kev?’ Burt asked.

‘It’s about the door on the eighth floor.’ He flipped open his folder. ‘Quite a few DNA profiles, as you’d expect, and I don’t think it’s too surprising to anyone to hear that we were able to attach the profiles to individuals who are known to the police.’

‘Not on that estate,’ Derwent said. ‘They should give them CRO numbers at birth. It would save time.’

‘Kev sent the list to me.’ Tom Bridges looked around, checking that he’d met us all before and he didn’t need to explain who he was. His expression changed very slightly when he got to me, interest narrowing his eyes and I looked down at the carpet. When I looked up again, Bridges was addressing Burt but, inevitably, Derwent was watching me.

‘I had a scan through the names and records and one of them jumped out at me,’ Bridges said. ‘Ray Griffin. He’s a local fixer for a gang of Albanians who’ve been running a people-smuggling operation across Europe for the last five years. They are some bad lads.’

‘The kind of people who’d have three girls locked in a flat on the Maudling Estate?’ I asked.

‘Exactly that kind.’ He took a photograph out of a folder and held it up. ‘This is Ray.’

Ray was maybe thirty, with dark hair, a square jaw and a wide neck, his mouth a little bit slack in the picture. I was wary of reading too much into a custody photograph but he looked blank, as if there wasn’t much going on behind his small eyes.

Colin leaned in, staring at the image intently. ‘What do you think, Maeve?’

I bent to see, holding up a sheet of paper to cover half the picture so all we could see was a square jaw, an ear, a hint of downturned mouth and a wide neck. ‘That looks like the guy from the hallway to me.’

‘Scientific approach,’ Pettifer commented and I glowered at him.

‘Did you look at the CCTV, Chris? Or did you assume that was someone else’s job?’

‘Colin hadn’t shown it to me.’

‘You didn’t ask.’ Colin said it in a matter-of-fact way.

‘We got skin cells and saliva from him. You were looking for someone who touched his face,’ Kev said. ‘He fits on that front. Scientifically, I mean.’ He caught my eye and grinned.

Pettifer turned to Burt. ‘I’ve never heard of this guy before. He’s nothing to do with Melissa Pell. If he did attack her, what possible reason did he have for doing it?’

‘Can we connect him with Mark Pell?’ Burt said.

‘Maybe?’ Pettifer rubbed his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘If we can get something on Mark Pell, we should do it,’ Derwent said. ‘I don’t like him.’

‘Should we pick Ray up?’ Mal said. ‘No harm in asking him if he knows Pell, is there?’

‘I don’t see that we have much to lose,’ Una Burt said. ‘Do we have a good address for him?’

‘We’ve got his last known address from his probation officer, his ex-girlfriend’s house in Woolwich and we’ve got his mum’s address. He’s well known to my colleagues. They’re fairly sure we’ll find him,’ Bridges said. ‘I’d start with the Woolwich address, myself.’

‘Ex-girlfriend, though.’ Derwent gave Bridges his best chilling look. ‘Why would he hang around there?’

‘Two kids.’

‘Fair enough.’ Derwent was quick enough to drop an argument when it looked like a loser. He turned to Burt. ‘What’s the plan, boss?’

‘We’ll split up into three groups. There are enough of us to go to all three addresses at the same time. I don’t want him getting a tip off from his mother and disappearing on us.’

‘Anything we should know about? Any form for carrying weapons?’ Derwent asked Bridges.

‘Known to carry a knife on occasion. No firearms that we know of. He’s a big guy, over six foot.’

‘Stab vests, then,’ Derwent said. ‘We can get TSG support. They’ll put in the doors for us.’

They’d also be armed with Tasers, which was a lot better than turning up empty-handed.

‘Right.’ Burt cleared her throat, reasserting herself. ‘I’ll go to Woolwich. Josh, you take the last known address. Chris, you go to the mum’s house. I’ll sort out the TSG support and we’ll try and execute these warrants as soon as possible. So no wandering off.’

The last bit was transparently aimed at Derwent, who was looking restless. He stood up and stretched. ‘Can’t wait.’

‘Can I come too?’ Bridges was tapping his fingers on his kneecap. I recognised the hunter’s instinct that made a good cop; I knew it because I had it too.

‘Of course. You can join any of the teams.’ Burt smiled at him in a distracted way.

‘Can I look at the file?’ I asked Bridges as everyone began to shuffle out of the office.

‘Of course.’

I took it with me, stopping at the nearest desk so I could lay it flat and leaf through it. Bridges came to stand beside me, looking over my shoulder.

‘Small time stuff.’

‘He doesn’t look like a master criminal,’ I said. He looked like a violent but dim-witted goon, good for beating people up, including his ex-girlfriend. He’d been inside most recently for armed robbery, but he was the kind of criminal who spent half his life behind bars without fear or remorse. Like a long commute, it was the price he paid for doing what he loved. The idea of prison as a deterrent would have made him laugh.

‘Thanks for sticking up for the trafficked women the other day.’

I looked up, surprised. ‘Oh – when Belcott was being vile about them, you mean? Not a problem.’

‘It’s not the first time I’ve encountered that attitude to sex workers.’

‘Everyone needs someone to look down on. Belcott has to try very hard to find someone inferior to him.’

Bridges grinned at me. ‘You like working with him, then.’

‘I put up with it.’ I shut the file and handed it back to him. ‘He’s a twat and he always has been. Now and then I tell him what I think of him.’

‘Poor guy.’

‘He deserves it.’

I started to walk away but Bridges called after me. ‘Which address are you going to?’

‘Oh – probably the last known address.’

Mal looked up. ‘Do you want to come with us? The mum’s in Stepney.’

‘Um …’ I looked across at Derwent, who was on the other side of the office, talking to Colin Vale. ‘I think I’d better not.’

‘Don’t you want a break?’ Mal said, dropping his voice so Derwent couldn’t hear.

‘That would be nice. But it’s more diplomatic to go with him.’ Besides, I didn’t like to think what kind of trouble Derwent would get into without me.

‘That’s where I was thinking of going,’ Bridges said. ‘To the last known address, I mean.’

‘Don’t feel you have to put yourself through it,’ I said quietly. ‘Most people wouldn’t volunteer to spend time with Josh Derwent if they didn’t have to.’