The Bad Things (11 page)

‘Alex?’ Malone’s voice, mellifluous and cool, soothed her. She opened her mouth, but the words wouldn’t come out, her throat was thick with tears.

‘Alex? It is you, isn’t it?’ A note of worry in his voice.

‘Malone,’ she managed to say. ‘Malone, I need you.’

‘Where are you?’

‘On the beach. Somewhere…not far from the harbour. Christ, Malone, it’s…I don’t know what to do.’ Tears were falling freely down her face. She gulped down a sob. ‘Please, Malone.’

‘Stay there. I’ll be with you as soon as I can. Don’t move.’ The line went dead.

She sat, watching the white horses race to shore, listening to the drag of the waves on the pebbles, and felt almost calmed.

11

Kate turned off the A12 at Martlesham and headed to the police headquarters. Built in the late 1970s, it was an unlovely building of corridors and offices. At least the new Police Investigation Centre had a bit more of an airy feel to it, with more glass and open spaces, but the whole area was utilitarian, not made any cosier by the bleak winter scene of leafless trees and mud where grass should be.

She pulled into a parking space – lucky to find one near the doors just before lunchtime – and sat for a moment, closed her eyes and tried to empty her mind. She leaned her head on the steering wheel. Christ, she was tired. She was going to have to stir herself and get out of the car soon enough, but she wanted to think about the monumental fuck-up that had happened earlier. This was what she liked to do; turn things over in her mind and then let them settle, rather like dealing with a compost heap.

Kate’s day had begun early – three-thirty to be precise – and on a cold, drizzly, dark morning in a Fenland town. Even her trusty leather trench coat had difficulty keeping the damp air out. Sodium street lights – not yet the victim of council cuts – shone in the gloom. They’d pulled up at the end of a cul-de-sac of respectable middle-class houses. Semi-detached, solid, with front bay windows and probably, Kate guessed, built in the 1950s. Front gardens either paved over for car parking or sporting a patch of grass, and borders that had been put to bed for the winter. Bed. Kate yawned and sipped some of her thermos-flask coffee. That’s where she should be now. Just her bloody bad luck to be the one left in the office when DI Howlett’d had to go and tend to his wife who was about to give birth on the kitchen floor. This was his case, his intel; he should be here. The coffee slithered, lukewarm, down her throat.

She stepped out of the car and looked around, trying to stifle a yawn. This was not the normal sort of place they came for a serious early-morning drugs bust. Usually they’d be on some run-down council estate or at a whole load of soulless industrial units. This looked too, well,
nice
. Though crime was no respecter of class. She started to move towards the target. Number forty-three.

‘Are we ready then?’

Kate turned. Ed Killingback was standing beside her, notebook in hand, camera looped over his wrist. Behind him, a cameraman, reporter, and a guy she thought must be a producer, were fiddling with various bits of equipment. That would be the local BBC TV programme. She tried not to let the resentment grow. After all, they had been, in part, responsible for the success of the investigation; doing their own digging around and coming up with evidence they passed on to the police. So she’d had no choice but to say they could come along on the raid. Somehow Killingback had heard about it and turned up too. She tried not to sigh. Bloody press. A liability.

‘We’re ready,’ she said, smoothly. ‘Don’t forget what you’ve been told. Stay back. Don’t interfere. Don’t get in our way. We don’t know what we might find.’

‘Understood.’ Killingback touched a finger to his forehead in an irritating salute.

Eager young puppy. Kate’s bones ached.

‘Okay, let’s go.’ She signalled, and four officers in full riot gear jogged along the road and up the path of the house.

There were thuds as one officer pounded the white uPVC door with a battering ram to guttural shouts of encouragement.

‘Put yer back into it.’

‘Go, on, get in there.’

‘Come on, get the door out.’

The door gave way and was tossed aside like a piece of cardboard.

The officers stood to one side to let Kate through; the house exposed to the chill, the dark, and the huddle of reporters and photographers staring in.

She shone her torch around and realized she was in a hallway. Parquet flooring. Old-fashioned red rug. Landscapes hanging on the wall. Fresh flowers on a half-moon table. The smell of polish. Motioning to her officers, she pushed open a door to her left, allowing them to bundle through with shouts designed to frighten and quell any resistance. Nothing. The same for the room on the right. And the kitchen. All perfectly normal; perfectly respectable rooms with everything as it should be.

‘Upstairs.’

‘Just get out of my house.’ A tremulous voice came down the stairs. ‘Now. I’ve called the police. They’ll be here any minute.’

Kate shone her torch upwards.

Blinking in the beam was a man, probably in his seventies, Kate estimated, judging by his balding head and collection of wrinkles. He was clutching the edges of a dressing gown together with one hand and waving what looked like a brass statue in the other in what he clearly hoped was a menacing way. Behind him stood a woman of similar age, thinning hair, eyes wide with shock, lips trembling.

‘I said get out.’ Another wave of the statue. ‘I’ve told you, the police will be here soon.’

‘We are the police,’ Kate said, feeling very weary as she took her warrant card out of her pocket and held it up.

‘Come here. I can’t see it.’

Conscious of the officers in their riot gear behind her, Kate climbed the stairs.

‘Stop there. Now, throw your card up to me.’

‘Mr—?’ said Kate, trying not to let her exasperation show. Exasperation not just with the old man, but with the intel that was proving to be bollocks. This man did not look like the group of ten Vietnamese they had been told would be in the house. If this was the right house, which Kate was now seriously doubting.

‘Williams. Jeffrey Williams.’

‘Mr Williams, I can only apologize.’ With the flick of her wrist she threw her card like a Frisbee and it landed at his feet. ‘There seems to have been some sort of mistake.’

‘A mistake? Mistake? I should bloody well think so.’ He bent down with some difficulty and picked the warrant card up off the floor to examine it. ‘And what about my door?’

‘I can assure you—’

‘And what about my suffering? And that of my wife?’ Wife nodded vigorously. ‘We could have had a heart attack, or anything.’

‘Mr Williams,’ began Kate, feeling at a slight disadvantage, as she was still halfway up the stairs. ‘I am so very sorry for—’

Then she heard the screeching of sirens coming ever closer.

‘There we are,’ said Mr Williams, a note of triumph in his voice. ‘The police.’

Kate nodded. ‘Right.’ Jesus. What a monumental fuck-up.

So it was no wonder she was dog-tired, with a sodding headache to boot. Another row with Chris hadn’t helped, either. They had been more frequent since she’d seen Jackie Wood on the television, staring out of the screen at her, mocking her. Seeming to say, ‘See? I told you I would get out. One day.’ And she had.

The argument that morning had been a humdinger though. Chris had started to talk about some friends who’d been trying for a baby for years until they found out that she couldn’t have children. Then they went for IVF, and now they had twins.

She’d whirled round, slopping muesli over the table – the bread had been mouldy again – and looked at him disbelievingly. ‘IVF? You want me to pump myself full of hormones and have my eggs harvested in some vain attempt for a baby that’ll probably never happen because there isn’t that great a success rate and everyone I’ve ever spoken to about it, everything I’ve ever read about it says it is a hard, hard thing for couples to go through. Is that what you want?’ God, she was so tired, she didn’t want to be talking about this, thinking about this.

‘Why not? Surely it’s worth thinking about? Please? That’s all I’m asking. Just to think about it.’

Kate had wanted to hurl the cereal bowl across the room and watch it smash into tiny pieces. Instead she set it down carefully and walked to the door. ‘I wish you could just leave it alone.’ She picked up her jacket. ‘I’ll be home later.’

Kate sat down at her desk, trying to push all thoughts of Chris out of her head. She was at work; she could do this. And she was good at compartmentalizing her life. The past in one compartment. Locked, key thrown away. Home life in another. That compartment was hidden in a corner. Work, on the other hand, was allowed to be right there in the front. Work she could cope with. As messy, despairing, and soul-destroying as it could be, it was better than anything else. Though when she let herself think this, she felt guilty.

‘Hey, Kate, how you doing?’ Steven Rogers, a stalwart of a detective sergeant brushed sugar crystals off the front of his shirt. He put a doughnut down on the greasy bit of paper sitting on his desk. Kate could smell his takeaway coffee. So much better than the rubbish the machine spewed out.

‘Fine, Steve. Just fine.’ She switched on her computer, not quite able to shake the feeling of doom that seemed to hover above her head. Maybe this time things were so bad that she couldn’t tidy away those bits of her life she didn’t want to think about. She was going to have to talk to Chris. Sort it out with him, tell him she’d been to the doctor. Hell, even go to counselling. Her marriage was important to her. ‘Got a lot to get through.’

‘Heard it all went tits up.’ He sniffed.

‘It did,’ she said, grimly. ‘I’m waiting for the flak.’

‘Well, the Artist wants to see you.’

She jerked her head up. ‘Already? I thought I might have some time—’

‘When you came in, he said.’ Steve nodded towards the closed door of Detective Chief Inspector Grayson Cherry, generally known as The Artist, not just because his name was similar to that of the famous cross-dressing artist, but because he also liked to paint and several of his ‘works’ hung in his office. Mostly blank canvases with a single blob of colour on them. It was the placing of that blob that was integral to his art. Apparently.

‘Sit down, Kate,’ said Cherry.

Kate sat in the chair across from his desk and tried not to stare at the new painting hanging on the wall behind him. It was obviously his first venture into nudes. Like Picasso, it had odd protuberances in odd places. Unlike Picasso, Cherry couldn’t draw. So instead, Kate tried to keep her eyes fixed on his thick, straight eyebrows and hair that was beginning to show some streaks of grey. He was a handsome man, and sharp to boot. Idly she wondered if he plucked his eyebrows – they were so straight with not a stray hair in—

‘Now, Kate.’

Kate blinked, dragged away from thinking about Cherry’s facial hair. She tried not to yawn. Or think about the mountain of work she had to do. Or how much of her back she had to cover.

He steepled his fingers. ‘This morning.’

‘It was – er – unfortunate, sir.’ She tried not to squirm.

‘Unfortunate.’ He raised one of his thick, straight eyebrows. ‘I see. Is that what the Independent Police Complaints Commission will see it as? Hmm?’

Kate wanted to sigh. Only Cherry would give it its full name and not just use the acronym like every other bugger. ‘Sir, I was acting on intel received.’

‘And it was DI Howlett’s case; I am well aware of that. And if he had not been called to minister to his wife he would be sitting in front of me now and not you. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘But it is you.’

‘Yes sir.’

He leaned forward across the desk. ‘A cock-up all round, I think. We are left with egg on our faces and stern questions from above.’

‘Yes sir.’

He blew some air out of pursed lips. Kate watched a few strands of hair jump in the sudden breeze. ‘As yet, Mr and Mrs Williams have not employed lawyers, threatened to sue, or shouted for compo.’

‘Right.’

‘Right. Leave it with me, Kate.’

‘Really?’

‘Don’t look a gift horse in the face.’

‘Mouth.’

He shrugged. ‘Face, mouth, you know what I mean.’ He shuffled a couple of files on his desk. ‘To more…ah…pressing matters. I know that you know we have an unexpected visitor in our midst. An unwanted visitor, we should say.’

Jackie Wood. All at once her tiredness and irritation vanished and her heart began to beat fast. This was the first confirmation they’d had that the woman was holed up somewhere in the area. Rumours had been rife at headquarters for the last few days and Kate was surprised it hadn’t got out. The place was as leaky as a sieve when it came to secrets. But she guessed that the recent arrest and charging police officers for accepting bribes from the press had stopped up the leaks, at least for now.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

‘And do you know where she is?’

Cherry liked to play guessing games. Kate played along. ‘No, sir.’

He leaned across the desk and tapped the side of his nose. ‘The bad apple never falls far from the tree.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘So she’s definitely back in Suffolk.’ She nodded, as if she hadn’t already guessed. It was the only logical thing for her to do, to come back to the place she knew. She would have been advised to change her name, go elsewhere in the country, but she would have been drawn back to the place where she grew up, and drawn back to the scene of the crime.

‘Now, I don’t have to tell you, Kate, that if anyone found out where she was, and by “anyone” I specifically mean the gentlemen and women of the press, then we would be in deep
shitenstrasse
–
comprende
?’

Kate nodded, willing her mouth not to twitch into a smile. ‘I won’t say anything, sir. Of course.’ She bit her lip. ‘Would it be a good idea for me to go and see her, sir? You know, tell her we’re here, that we know she’s there, and all that?’ At last.

Grayson Cherry gave a deep sigh. ‘Kate,’ he said, not unkindly, ‘I am well aware of your previous involvement in the Clements case, so, no, it would not be a good idea. We leave her be unless it becomes necessary to talk to her. Otherwise her bloody lawyer will be all over us like a rash.’