Ash & Bone

38

The sun persisted behind a thin skim of cloud, but close to the Trent the air bit sharp into unprotected skin. Maureen wore scarf and gloves, her anorak zipped and buttoned. She had met Elder on the south side of the bridge, near County Hall, and they had set out along the river towards Wilford, the City Ground at their backs.

A few runners and the occasional dog-walker aside, they had the path pretty much to themselves.

'You believe her?' Maureen said.

'I believe her, yes.'

'Not Summers?'

'Without speaking to him face to face, it's difficult to know. He was obviously lying to me before.'

'Come on, Frank. His girlfriend's father and an ex-copper, what do you expect?'

'It doesn't help me to accept his side of the story at face value, that's all.'

'Katherine, though. She saw what she saw.'

'Yes, I suppose so.'

They continued walking. Nearing the pedestrian bridge that led across to the Memorial Gardens, a pair of swans and sundry assorted ducks swam towards them, hoping for bread.

'Bland and Eaglin, taking down the safe house and pocketing the proceeds, you think it's possible?'

'Anything's possible, Frank, you know that.'

'But likely?'

'Drug Squad, you know, a few of them, old school, pretty much a law to themselves. And these two, they're both known to sail pretty close to the wind. But this… I don't know, Frank, I'd need proof.'

'Yes.'

'Not easy.'

'If something like that went down, word would get around.'

'I know. It's a matter of who to talk to, who to trust.'

'Nothing different there then.'

Maureen smiled. 'Nothing at all.'

At Wilford Bridge they crossed on to the embankment and followed the curve of the river back around.

'What time's your train, Frank?' Maureen asked.

'Quarter past.'

'I'll nose around, see what I come up with. Let you know.'

'You'll be careful.'

She gave him a look.

'Thanks, Maureen.'

They shook hands.

'How's it going down there in the smoke?'

'Three steps up, two back.'

'Better that than the other way round.'

At the station he bought a paper and sat on an empty bench to make some calls. Katherine's phone was switched off and he left a message, 'Great to see you, don't worry. Love, Dad.'

Elder phoned Karen on his mobile as the train was nearing St Pancras: still no sign of Kennet, but they'd got a line on Jane Forest and she was hoping to talk to her later that afternoon.

The scar that ran down one side of Jane Forest's face, beginning just below her right ear and continuing down past her jaw, was only visible when she turned into the light. When her hair swung back from her face. Self-conscious, most days she wore a roll-neck jumper or a scarf inside the collar of her shirt or blouse.

'Why didn't you report it?' Karen asked.

'I was frightened.'

'Of him?'

'Yes, of course. But not just that.'

'What then?'

'What people would say.'

'People?'

'When it got out. Whoever I had to explain it to. The police. You. My parents. Everyone.'

'You were the victim. There's no blame attached to that.'

'Isn't there?' Jane Forest twisted the cap off the bottle of Evian and lifted it to her mouth. They were standing in a small yard at the rear of the florist's where she worked, one of a small parade of shops at the bottom of West Hill, adjacent to Parliament Hill Fields. Jane was wearing a green overall that tied at the back, the name of the shop embroidered in small yellow letters at the front.

'You know the North End of the Heath,' she said, 'up past the Vale of Health?'

Karen shook her head.

'We used to go up there, one or two in the morning. Park round the back of Jack Straw's Castle. Not that we were the only ones. That time of night it's mostly gays, lots of black leather, chains, that kind of thing. Real bondage stuff. Anyway, we'd go out into the middle of the Heath; up there it's mostly bracken, trees, really overgrown, but there are these paths running through. Quite high up, you know. And I'd walk along as if I were on my own, pretending I didn't know Steve was there. And I didn't. I mean I never knew exactly where he was.'

She took another swig at the bottle and wiped one edge of her mouth with the back of her hand.

'Sometimes he'd keep me waiting, just wandering up and down, for ages. Twenty minutes, more. These blokes every now and then staring out at me from behind bushes, wondering what on earth I was doing.'

'You weren't scared?' Karen said.

'Of course I was scared. That was the point.'

'Go on,' Karen said.

'Well, sooner or later Steve would jump out at me and I'd – I don't know – pretend to fight him off, try to run away.'

'And he'd catch you?'

'Oh, yes.' There was a certain light in Jane Forest's eyes, blue-green eyes.

'And then? '

'Then we'd have sex.'

'Consensual?'

'Sorry?'

'He didn't force you?'

'Yes, of course.'

'Against your will?'

'Yes. No. I mean, not really. But in the game, the game we were playing, yes. He'd hold me down, tear, you know, some of my clothes

'Hit you?'

'Not usually, no. Not hard.'

'Nothing more?'

'What do you mean?'

Karen was looking at the scar on Jane Forest's face and Jane turned her head away and touched the tips of her fingers faintly to the pale, raised line.

'Sometimes, not often but sometimes, he would have a knife. It was big, broad, a sort of carving knife. This black handle with – what do you call them? – rivets through it. My butcher's knife, he called it. Want to make good and sure I don't butcher you.'

She was starting to shake now, first her arms, the upper half of her body and then the rest. Karen took the bottle of water from her hand before it fell.

'One night, it was my birthday, he said, "I've got something special for you, a celebration." He tied my hands behind my back. He… he put the point of the knife… inside me… and when, when I started to scream, really scream, he punched me in the face and when that didn't make me stop he cut me. Cut my face.'

'Here,' Karen said, moving an upturned crate away from the wall. 'Here, sit down. There. Now put your head down towards your knees. That's it. That's right.'

A blue tit alighted for a moment on top of the gate that led out from the yard into the alley behind, yellow beneath cobalt-blue wings.

'Afterwards,' Jane said, barely raising her head, 'as soon as it had happened, he was so upset, he really was. Almost beside himself with worry. And really gentle, caring, you know? He took me to the hospital, the Royal Free. Casualty, A & E. We said I'd been sleepwalking and stumbled over something, fallen against the window breaking the glass.'

'They accepted that?'

'They seemed to. They stopped the bleeding and then stitched me up. Steve, he held my hand the whole time.' She looked at Karen. 'He was so sorry, genuinely sorry. He knew he'd let it get too far, out of hand. He said he wouldn't blame me if I never wanted to see him again.'

'And did you?'

'At first I thought, yes, it would be okay. Him being so nice and everything. But after that night, I don't know, it was different. I mean, we never… it wasn't just that we stopped, you know, those games, we never had sex at all. He didn't… he wouldn't even touch me. And then, after a while, he told me he was seeing someone else.'

She looked away.

'It's happened again, hasn't it?'

'We think so.'

'Has he… did he… oh, Christ!' She let her face fall forward against Karen's waist and for several minutes Karen held her, stroking her hair, touching once, inadvertently, the ridge of scar tissue running down across her neck.

Together with another officer, Vanessa Taylor had spent two hours that afternoon interviewing a cocksure, snotty-nosed nine-year-old about throwing stones and doing serious damage to trains and train staff. The nine-year-old and his father and his social worker, neither of them speaking to one another but both quick enough to interrupt and intercede. The boy's mother had left home eighteen months before, taking two of his younger siblings with her and leaving the boy and an elder sister behind. The father's response had been to go running to social services claiming that he couldn't cope: result, the boy was taken into care, the girl went off to live with an aunt. Some time in the following months, she drifted back and then, after almost a year and two bouts of short-term fostering, the boy followed. Social services, meanwhile, were worried that the relationship between dad and thirteen-year-old daughter was inappropriate to say the least.

In the run-up to Christmas, the boy was excluded from school and a week later stabbed his home tutor in the back of the hand with a ballpoint pen, alleging the man had tried to molest him.

Armed with this background at the case conference beforehand, Vanessa began the interview feeling sympathy for a young person whom life had dealt a raw hand; thirty minutes later she wanted to use the same hand to slap the smirk off his ratty face. Sullen, even tearful when it suited him, he was quick as a trained solicitor to proclaim his rights and privileges, taunting them with their relative powerlessness over him.

By the time the interview was over, the boy released back into his father's care, the social worker chewing her way through a roll of mints as she wrote up yet another report, Vanessa was more than ready for a drink.

Two pints and a vodka and tonic later, she wandered into Nandos with a beat sergeant she vaguely fancied and devoured peri-peri chicken and rice while listening to him rabbiting on endlessly about Thierry Henry and glories to come once Arsenal had settled into their new 60,000-seater stadium at Ashburton Grove.

Scratch him off the list.

Nine fifteen. Too late to catch a movie, too early to go home.

There used to be music, she knew, at the Bull and Last. Sometimes it was jazz but sometimes it was okay. Tonight, when she pushed the door open into the bar, it was nothing, just the electronic jingle of a few brightly lit machines and a television mumbling to itself above the bar. Fairly busy all the same, mostly men sitting singly or in pairs. A trio of clearly underage girls wearing next to nothing, more slap than clothes.

She could have turned round and walked out again, but instead she asked for a vodka tonic and carried it over to an empty table near the middle of the room, a few faces turning to watch her progress but not many.

She hadn't been there more than a few minutes before she was aware of someone leaning over her from behind.

Steve Kennet, smiling, drink in his hand, jeans, check shirt and short leather jacket, still trailing the faint scent of aftershave. He was sitting down next to her almost before she could react.

'Regular bad penny,' he winked. 'That's me.'