Good Bait

15

Terry Martin walked through from airside with the look of an ex-footballer for whom life on Sky Sports News was always going to be a step too far. Close-cropped hair, stubble, pricey suit that he somehow managed to make look cheap. Carry-on held in one large hand.

Costello had written Martin’s name in marker on a piece of card and stood amongst a gaggle of minicab drivers and other meeters and greeters, holding it high above his head. His little joke.

Humour him, Karen thought. She was interested in seeing for herself how he handled himself in situations like this. ‘You do the talking,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll listen.’

‘What’s this?’ Martin said, his face too close to Costello’s for comfort. ‘Someone looking to do me a favour?’

‘Not exactly.’

The airport had allotted them a small room devoid of decoration save for a CityJet calendar for 2009, open at October, a picture of the Dundee Botanical Gardens in autumn. There was an air vent, a small window that didn’t seem to open out on to anything, several stacking chairs and a square metal table.

‘Whatever this is about,’ Martin said, sitting heavily, ‘make it snappy, okay? I ain’t got all day.’

‘How was Tallinn?’ Costello asked chirpily, sounding as if he really cared. ‘Successful trip? Business, was it? A little R amp; R? Bit of both? Sex tourism’s the big thing, apparently. Several hundred per cent rise in prostitution. AIDS too, of course. Hand in hand these days, unfortunately.’

‘What the fuck is this? Some kind of market fucking research?’

Close up, beneath the stubble, Martin’s face was slack and pale. His breath, in Costello’s face, was sour. Not enough sleep. Too much airline booze. Burning Tallinn at both ends.

‘We’ll say business then, shall we?’

‘Say what you fuckin’ like.’

‘What is the nature of your business, Mr Martin?’ Karen asked, stepping in, the voice of reason.

‘My business?’ A burly shrug. ‘Textiles, import and export. Tallinn it’s mainly sportswear, a little Gore-tex, women’s clothing. We bring it in, sell it on.’

‘We?’

‘My partners and me.’

‘Which partners might that be?’ Costello asked.

‘Never you mind.’

‘Dougie Freeman? Mad Mike Carter? Some of your pals from the BNP?’

‘You little shit!’ Martin slammed a fist down on the table, hard.

Holding his nerve, Costello had scarcely blinked.

‘Instead of losing your temper,’ Karen said firmly, reckoning Martin was disorientated enough, ‘why don’t you tell us where you were on the evening of December 21st last.’

‘What?’

‘December 21st.’

‘How’m I supposed to know that?’

‘21st December,’ Karen said, ‘the night you locked your daughter, Sasha, in her room, and left her there till the early hours of next morning.’

‘Who says?’

‘Sasha. Your wife. They both say.’

‘The fuck they do.’

‘I could show you the transcript,’ Karen offered.

‘I’ll show you a fucking transcript.’ Martin was half out of his chair. ‘I’ll transcript you into the middle of next fucking week.’

‘Sit down,’ Karen said. A voice that broached no argument. ‘Sit down and answer the question now. Either that or I can have you hauled down to the local nick and let you stew for an hour or so before you answer the same questions there.’

Martin tugged at the front of his shirt, hitched up his trousers and sat back down with a shake of the head.

‘Okay, okay. You’re just winding me up, I know. But I tell you, dealing with those people, it gets to you. It really does.’

Lowering his head, he pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, then looked back up.

‘Trying to get some factory owner to realise if he doesn’t up his output without hiking his prices, he’s going to lose every ounce of his work to fucking China before he can turn around. Jesus!’ He shook his head, more vigorously this time. ‘To think we used to have a textile industry in the country served two-thirds of the fucking world. Now look at us. Having to import every pair of bloody women’s knickers from Eastern Europe or the depths of the Third fucking World on account of we can’t make jack shit.’

Costello looked impressed; he hadn’t been expecting a lesson in world economics. Karen gave it five seconds and repeated her question.

‘That evening?’ Martin said, Mr Reasonable, ‘I went down the pub, didn’t I? What else? Wife’d thrown a wobbly over nothin’ and gone stalking off, God knows where. Me daughter’s been lying to her back teeth, giving her arse away to some drug-dealing little shite from just about the poorest country on the globe outside fucking Africa. Went down the Four Hands and got stinking. Christmas piss-up on so it weren’t a problem. Someone must’ve poured me into a minicab in the small hours, ’cause I can’t remember getting home at all.’

‘And you were there all evening?’

‘When I arrived to when I left.’

‘So there’ll be witnesses to that?’

‘I suppose so. It was busy, rammed, I don’t know.’

‘That’s not very helpful.’

‘The bloke whose shoes I threw up on in the khazi, you could ask him for starters.’

‘He have a name?’

‘Jimmy. Jimmy something-or-other.’

‘I thought it was your local. Regular, anyway.’

‘So ask the landlord, why don’t you?’

‘We already did. Said he remembers you coming in, not leaving.’

‘Makes the two of us, then.’

‘No memory of seeing you after ‘round eleven, eleven thirty.’

‘Like I said, it was busy. Wall to wall.’

‘Leave there the right side of midnight, cab across London, Hampstead in forty minutes, tops. Half an hour.’

‘And why’d I want to do that?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I don’t know, do I?’

‘Keep the appointment your daughter had made with Petru Andronic.’

‘You’re joking. You are joking.’

‘Teach him a lesson.’

‘No way.’

‘You’d already warned him what would happen if he tried to see Sasha again. And there he was, going behind your back. Getting his hands on your daughter. This — what did you call him? — drug-dealing little shite. And by the way, why drug-dealing?’

‘Why? Cause it’s what they do, isn’t it? Not the Poles, the Poles are okay, they know how to do a day’s work. Not now, mind you, they’ve clocked the writing on the wall an’ buggered off back to Warsaw an’ wherever else it is they come from. No, it’s the rest of them. Your Bosnians and Albanians, Moldovans and fucking Romanians. Breed like fucking rats, those Romanian bloody gyppos worst of all, just so’s they can send the kids out on the streets, begging. Soon as they’re old enough the girls are out whoring and kids like that Andronic are peddling drugs on street corners. All that on top of milking Social fucking Security.’

‘The world,’ Costello said, ‘according to the British National Party.’

‘Laugh, you smug bastard,’ Martin said. ‘Go ahead. One day you’ll be laughing on the other side of your cocky little face.’

‘Maybe that’s what it was,’ Karen said, reclaiming the conversation. ‘With Andronic. The chance to teach him his place, teach him a lesson. Only it went too far — you’d been drinking after all — got out of hand. Next thing you know …’

Martin rocked his chair back then forward. ‘No, you had the least bit of evidence put me near where it happened, you’d have had me in cuffs the minute I stepped off that plane. But you’ve got sod all and you’re fishing. That’s what this is. Only the line’s broke, and, any case, you wanna hook me you best get yourself some better fuckin’ bait — so I’m leaving. You want to stop me, arrest me. If not, I’m gone.’

And with neither Karen nor Costello making any attempt to stop him, he walked out the door.