Killing the Shadows

THIRTY-EIGHT

Detective Constable Neil McCartney was tired. Watching Francis Blake for twelve hours a day was a killer assignment, in no small part because the man led such a bloody boring life. Sometimes he wouldn’t see hide nor hair of his target for the whole shift. At least Neil had swapped over on to days, ten till ten, which was slightly less desperate than the long nights when all Blake seemed to do was watch videos and sleep. But Neil knew this was only a brief respite. With Joanne stuck in the office bashing the computer, it wouldn’t be long before John was hassling to get the day shift again. It wasn’t unreasonable he had a wife and young kids who didn’t want to be quiet all day because daddy was sleeping.

That could have been his life, Neil thought with an edge of sourness. If he hadn’t been stupid enough to choose the wrong woman. He’d met Kim on the job. She was bouncy and vivacious, the life and soul of every party. Not the sort he’d normally have gone for, being a quiet sort of bloke, really. He’d thought the looks he got were envy. It was only a long time later that he realised they were pity. He was her alibi for her affair with one of the custody sergeants, the perfect distraction to fool the man’s wife at every police function. And the best possible alibi was marriage.

At first, his bitterness had been turned on himself. But there was no point in being sour about Kim; she was the woman she was. So his search for somewhere to put the blame had ended with the job.

He could so easily have turned into another rancorous copper, taking out his spite on those he came into contact with professionally. But the transfer he’d sought had taken him into plain clothes and on to Steve Preston’s team. And that had saved him. It had reminded him of why he’d joined the police in the first place. Putting villains away, that was what it was all about, and to hell with the office game-playing. That was how Steve ran his squad, and officers who couldn’t live with that didn’t last long.

So now Neil’s loyalty, first and last, lay with his boss. That was why, however tedious the surveillance got, he was prepared to stick it out. The fiasco of Francis Blake’s entrapment and subsequent trial had only stiffened his resolve. That was what happened when politics got in the way of policing, and he was as determined as his boss to set the record straight and catch Susan Blanchard’s killer. So he stifled his doubts about the point of what he was doing and stuck to Blake like chewing gum.

He yawned. The rain drizzled relentlessly down his windscreen. It seemed a fitting counterpoint to the lack of excitement in his and Francis Blake’s lives. If he had the kind of money that Blake had trousered over his newspaper deal, Neil was bloody sure he’d be living somewhere with a bit more class than this. No two ways about it, this was a dump.

The flat Blake had rented on his release was less than a mile from his old place in King’s Cross. The new place was in a busy but faintly seedy street off the Pentonville Road, the sort of place where the locals were off-duty hookers, the hopelessly unemployed, the elderly poor and the mentally ill. The best you could say about it was that it was handy for public transport. Halfway up the road, some uninspired architect had designed a utilitarian block in grey brick that looked like it had been jerry built in the sixties. It was cut off from the neighbouring terraced houses by a service lane that ran up either side and round the back. On the ground floor were half a dozen shop units, a news agent, an off-licence, a betting shop, a mini market a kebab shop and a minicab office. The two floors above were divided into flats, and it was in one of these drab boxes on the second floor that Blake had taken up residence. It depressed Neil just thinking about it.

Not only would he be living somewhere with a bit more class than this, he’d be doing something a bit more exciting than the occasional trip to the bookies or the video shop round the corner.

From what Neil could see, Blake might as well still have been locked up in the Scrubs.

A couple of miles away, Steve Preston and Terry Fowler were having a very different evening. For once, Steve had managed to drag himself away from work with time to spare, leaving Joanne ploughing her way through apparently endless criminal record searches. Neil had had nothing of significance to report, so there was no specific professional worry niggling at the back of his mind to distract him from the company.

Terry had been five minutes early, claiming pathological punctuality made it impossible for her to be fashionably late for anything. “I’m always the one who arrives at parties while the hosts are still in the shower,” she’d said. “Makes for an interesting start to the evening.”

Steve didn’t mind in the least. He was perfectly happy with an extra five minutes in the bar to enjoy admiring her. Terry was wearing a simple knee-length black dress in some material he didn’t recognize that seemed to flow and shimmer around her body whenever she moved. For someone who’d been languishing in the doldrums for what he now realized was far too long, Steve allowed himself warily to wonder if his luck had truly changed as much as it appeared. Careful, he cautioned himself. You know as soon as your emotions are engaged you build too much too fast. Take it easy, don’t let her see how much you need this. Just for once, treat your personal life with the same circumspection you bring to building a case.

But nothing happened over dinner to change that feeling of overwhelming luck. He was aware of being an engaging companion, and she seemed more than willing to appreciate him. The conversation never lurched into one of those awkward silences while someone figured out what to talk about next. They’d swapped stories, made each other laugh, started to sketch the details of their lives. For a man accustomed to containing himself in a private place for most of his waking hours, Steve was pleasantly surprised to find that Terry’s apparent candour had the knack of making him open up. For the first time since he’d met Fiona all those years ago at university, he recognized a woman who allowed him to relax, who made no demands other than that he be himself. Ironic, intelligent and apparently lacking all pretension, Terry seemed to Steve to be as attractive inside as she was on the outside. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what she’d seen in him. When she left him at one point to go to the toilet, he found himself watching the door, eager for her return as he hadn’t been with anyone for years. I feel like a teenager again, he thought, bemused. This is insane, Preston. Put the brakes on.

All through dinner, Steve had kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it didn’t. She didn’t even demur when he insisted on paying for the meal. “You earn a lot more than me, sugar,” she’d said with a casual shrug.

It was after ten when they emerged on Clerkenwell Green. A thin rain had started while they’d been inside so they huddled together under the awning to wait for a vacant taxi. The white neon of the restaurant’s name cast its shadow on Steve’s face, turning it into a chiaroscuro of planes and angles. Terry’s hair flared platinum in its glow. She snuggled into Steve and grinned up at him. “So, handsome,” she said, “did you put clean sheets on this morning?”

Steve laughed out loud. “Why? Did you?”

“In spite of the fact that I figure your place will be a lot more civilized than mine, yes, I did.”

He shook his head, his smile crinkling the skin round his eyes. “OK, I’ll own up to being presumptuous. Yes, I changed the sheets this morning.” He squeezed her close.

In response, Terry shifted so that she was facing him. She stood on tiptoe and leaned into his body. She gripped his lapels and pulled his face down to hers. Then she kissed him. Long, languid and luxurious.

It was all the reply he needed. Any pretence at caution disappeared in the instantaneous heat of his desire for her. When they got back to his flat, for the first time in years, Steve unplugged the phone and turned off his pager. For tonight, there was nothing so urgent it couldn’t wait until morning. Nothing except Terry, and that was more than enough.

Night in the city. A few years previously, the streets around Smithfield Market would have been deserted at this time of night. Tall grey buildings, blank-faced, turned the narrow streets into twisting canyons. The streetlights hardly seemed to cut the gloom. The market itself was closed, the vast Victorian glass, brick and iron construction under restoration.

But now, all that had changed. Bistros and brasseries, bars and restaurants had colonized the area, their bright lights spilling on to pavements and making the streets lively with patrons. Old buildings had been developed into luxury apartments for the new rich and Smithfield had reinvented itself as a brave attempt at the epitome of cool.

The market halls had been restored to their former glory. Even when it was closed for business which was how most people only ever saw it — it was an impressive sight. Tall elaborate wrought-iron railings stretched the length of the avenue dividing the East from the West Building, richly painted in grape-purple, dark-cyclamen and deep-aqua, with their details picked out in gold. From their midst, ornate cast-iron pillars sprouted, acanthus leaves flowing into cantilevered struts supporting flat canopies that sheltered the roadway from the rain.

The inside was a marriage of magnificent Victorian ironwork and relentlessly modern technology. Lorries carrying carcasses backed into special sealed loading bays to protect the meat from the elements, then the meat was loaded on to a mechanical meat rail system and delivered directly to the tailor-made trading units. Smaller boxed and crated deliveries were brought into temperature-controlled service corridors running either side of both buildings. It was a far cry from the old market system of porters rushing hither and thither with meat exposed to whatever airborne contamination came its way. It was a system that should have made the killer’s job much harder.

Just before ten o’clock, Sarah Duvall’s team arrived. Some came in unmarked cars, but most had walked the short distance from their briefing at Snow Hill police station. Duvall had been adamant that the operation should be kept as low-key as possible. The last thing she wanted was a squad of liveried police vans and cars lined up outside Smithfield late at night. Such a sight would inevitably alert the news media and once they had the sniff of a story, it wouldn’t take them long to ferret out what was going on.

Darren Green had done his job well. The traders knew what was coming, and surprisingly few had complained about the potential disruption to the night’s trading. Now the search was about to begin, it was Green’s moment. His earlier irritation had given way to excitement and he was buzzing round the uniformed officers like a fly around uncovered meat, making sure they were all supplied with the overalls and headgear they needed to comply with the strict hygiene regulations.

Duvall surveyed the team before her. She’d managed to scramble together a dozen uniforms, half a dozen detectives, and four butchers who would assist the officers permanently based at the market in the search. Tom Blackett was there, along with two of his assistants from nearby Bart’s. As they waited for the last stragglers to arrive, Blackett crossed to Duvall’s side. “I’m amazed you got a warrant for this,” he said. It was half a grumble.

“I called so many favours in on this that if I end up with egg on my face, I’m going to be in payback city for years.”

“I can imagine. Not many magistrates would stick their neck out on something as tenuous as this.” Blackett’s smile was as cheerful as the drizzle that had just started to fall. “Let’s hope we find something.” He moved away to talk to his assistants.

Duvall cleared her throat. “Right, everybody. You all know what you’re supposed to be doing once we get inside. Professor Blackett and his assistants will wait with me under the clock in Middle Street. If anyone finds anything at all suspicious, come to us at once and the pathologists will go with you and examine whatever it is you’ve found. Mr. Green?”

Barren stepped forward with a theatrical gesture that looked completely absurd. “This way,” he announced.

“Good luck,” Duvall called as the team filed in. She followed them as they fanned out to their allotted sections. “We’ll need it,” she added under her breath.