Dead Man’s Footsteps

65

When Roy Grace had started his career he worked as a beat copper in central Brighton, then for a brief time in the CID with the drugs surveillance unit. He knew most of the faces and names of the street dealers, and some of the major users, and had busted most of them at one time or another.

It was normally only the smaller people who got caught – the low-hanging fruit. Frequently the police ignored them, watching them instead, even making friends with some of them in the hope that they would lead to the bigger fish, the middlemen, the suppliers and, very occasionally, a major consignment. But every time the police achieved a result and took out a handful of players, there were always new ones waiting in the wings.

At this moment, though, as he parked his Alfa Romeo in the Church Street NCP and switched off the engine, killing the Marla Glen song that was playing, the Brighton drugs underworld might suit his immediate purposes well.

Wearing a light mackintosh over his suit, he walked down through the lunchtime crowds starting to emerge from their offices, past cafés and sandwich bars and the Corn Exchange, and made a left turn into Marlborough Place, where he stopped, pretending to make a phone call. The area immediately to the north of here, and across the London Road to the east, had long been the downtown domain of the street dealers.

It took him less than five minutes to spot two shabbily dressed men in a hurry, walking faster than everyone else, easy targets. He set off after them, but kept a good distance back. One was tall and thin, with rounded shoulders, and was wearing a windcheater over grey trousers and trainers. The shorter, stockier man, who was wearing a tracksuit top over shell-suit bottoms and black shoes, walked in a strange strutting motion, arms out wide, and was shooting a worried glance over his shoulder every few moments, as if to check he wasn’t being followed.

The taller one carried a plastic bag, almost certainly with a can of lager inside it. Street drinking was illegal in the city, so most street people kept an open can in a plastic bag. They were walking really fast, either in a hurry to get money, in which case they were about to commit an offence – maybe a bag snatch, or some shoplifting – or on their way to meet a dealer and buy their day’s supply, Grace supposed. Or they could be dealers going to meet a customer.

Two single-decker red and yellow buses thundered past, followed by a Streamline taxi and then a line of private cars. Somewhere a siren wailed and both men’s heads twitched. The stocky one only ever seemed to look over his right shoulder, so Grace kept to the left, close to the shop fronts, shielding himself behind people as much as he could.

The two men turned left into Trafalgar Street and now Grace was starting to feel even more certain about his hunch. Sure enough, in a couple of hundred yards they turned left and entered their destination.

Pelham Square was a small, elegant square of Regency terraced houses, with a railed park in the centre. The benches near the Trafalgar Street entrance had always been a popular lunch spot for local office workers on fine days. Now, with the workplace smoking ban, they seemed even more popular. Few of the people eating their sandwiches or having a lunchtime cigarette took any notice of – or indeed even noticed – the ragbag assortment of people clustered around another bench at the far end of the park.

Grace leaned against a lamppost and observed them for some moments. Niall Foster was one of three people sitting on the bench, drinking beer like all the others from a concealed can in his carrier bag. A man in his early forties with a sullen, mean face beneath a strange haircut that looked like a monk’s tonsure gone wrong, he was wearing a singlet, despite the chill breeze, over blue dungarees and workman’s boots.

Grace knew him well enough. He was a burglar and a small-time drugs dealer. He’d be the one serving up now, for sure, to the sad group of people around him. Next to him on the bench was a grimy, strung-out-looking woman with matted brown hair. Beside her sat an equally grubby man in his thirties, who kept putting his head between his knees.

The two men he had been following walked up to Foster. It was a textbook migration. Foster would have told each of the users to meet him here, in this park, at this exact time. If he then became nervous that he was being watched, he would abort, leave the park, select a new location and phone each of his customers to come there instead. Sometimes there could be several such migrations before dealers felt comfortable. And often they would have a young assistant to do the serving up for them. But Foster was cheap, he probably didn’t want to pay anyone. And besides, he knew the system. He was fully aware that he was small fry and would simply swallow the packets of whatever drug he was dealing, if challenged, and retrieve them from the lavatory later.

Niall Foster looked over in his direction and as Grace moved up the pavement, not wanting to be spotted, he found himself almost colliding head on with the man he had come to find.

It had been a few years, but even so Grace was shocked by how much the old villain had aged. Terry Biglow was a scion of one of Brighton’s bottom-feeder crime families. The Biglows’ history reached back to the razor gangs, who fought turf wars over protection rackets in the 1940s and 1950s, and there were plenty of people in Brighton and Hove who would once have been scared by the mere mention of the name. But now most of the older members of the family were dead, while the younger ones were either serving long prison sentences or were fugitives in Spain. The remnants still in the city, like Terry, were busted flushes.

Terry Biglow had started life as a knocker boy, then he had become a fence and some-time drugs dealer. He used to cut a mean, dapper figure, with a slick haircut brushed up in a quiff and cheap, sharp shoes. He must be in his mid to late sixties now, Grace thought, but he could have passed for a decade more.

The old rogue’s hair was still tidily coiffed, but it looked greasy and threadbare, and had turned a listless grey. His rodent-like face was sallow and thin to the point of being emaciated, while his sharp little teeth were the colour of rust. He wore a shabby grey suit with the trousers fastened by a cheap belt far too high up his chest. He seemed to have shrunk several inches too and he smelled musty. The only signs of the original Terry Biglow were the big gold watch and a massive emerald ring.

‘Mr Grace, Detective Sergeant Grace, nice to see yer! What a surprise!’

Actually not that much of a surprise, Roy Grace nearly said. But he was pleased at the ease with which it all seemed to be dropping into his lap on this visit downtown.

‘It’s Detective Superintendent now,’ he corrected.

‘Yeah, course it is! I was forgetting.’ Biglow’s voice was small and reedy. ‘Promoted. I heard you was, yeah. You deserve it, Mr Grace. Sorry, sir, Detective – Detective Superintendent. I’m clean now. I found God in prison.’

‘He was doing time too, was he?’ Grace retorted.

‘Don’t do none of that stuff no more, sir,’ Biglow said, deadly serious, completely missing – or ignoring – Grace’s jape.

‘So it’s just coincidence you’re standing outside the park while Niall Foster serves up inside, is it, Terry?’

‘Total coincidence,’ Biglow said, his eyes shiftier than ever. ‘Yeah, coincidence, sir. Me and my friend – we’re just on our way to lunch, just passing.’

Biglow turned to his companion, who was as shabbily dressed. Grace knew the man: Jimmy Bardolph, who used to be a henchman for the Biglows. But not any more, he imagined. The man stank of alcohol, his face was covered in scabs and his hair was awry. He didn’t look as if he’d had a bath since his afterbirth had been washed off.

‘This is my friend, Detective Superintendent Grace, Jimmy. He’s a good man, always fair to me. He’s a cop you can trust is Mr Grace.’

The man extended a veined, filthy hand from the overlong sleeve of his raincoat. ‘Nice to meet yer, Officer. Perhaps you could help me?’

Ignoring it, Grace turned back to Biglow. ‘I need to have a chat with you about an old friend of yours – Ronnie Wilson.’

‘Ronnie!’ Biglow exclaimed.

Out of the corner of his eye, Grace could see that Foster had very definitely clocked him now and was hot-footing it across the park. The dealer sidled out of the entrance, shot Grace a wary glance and set off down the street, half walking, half running, lifting his mobile phone to his ear as he went.

‘Ronnie!’ Biglow repeated. He gave Grace a wistful smile and shook his head. ‘Dear old Ronnie. He’s dead, you know that, don’t you? God rest his soul.’

The fresh air was not doing it for Grace’s headache, so he decided to follow Bella’s earlier recommendation about hot, greasy food. ‘Have you had lunch?’ he asked.

‘Nah, we was just on our way to dinner now.’ Terry Biglow smiled suddenly, as if pleased with the alibi that had just presented itself. ‘Yeah, you see, that’s why Jimmy and I – why we is here. Just walking down to the café, it being a nice morning and that.’

‘Good. Well, in that case, lead the way. I’m buying.’

He followed them down the street, Jimmy moving in jerky little steps, like a clockwork toy that needed rewinding, and into a workmen’s café.