The Cold Calling

XII

‘Shit!’

Slamming the flat of his hand into his head.

An elderly man steered his wife away from the bus stop, throwing Maiden a glare of disgust. Bloody drunks, he’d be thinking. Bloody drunks on the street before seven o’clock, that’s what you get with all-day opening.

Maiden rocked on the kerb, hands pushing at his eyes. So he was making an exhibition of himself. So what?

He’d only left his wallet in the hospital safe.

So no money. Not even a few coins for a cup of tea with three sugars — he needed the sugar, he felt as though his brain was floating out of his skull like a balloon on a string.

Made himself take three deep breaths. Think.

OK. It wasn’t as if he was breaking gaol. It was only a hospital. He could go back and demand his wallet from the safe.

Except they’d probably know he was missing by now and, as he was a policeman, who would they tell?

Not worth the risk. He wanted to be well away before Riggs found out. Not that even Riggs could stop him; it wasn’t a police hospital. And, as he was hardly fit for work, he could do what he liked, go where he wanted.

Anybody to look after you at home? Girlfriend? Mother?

Girlfriend, no. Mother, no. Home. Get back to the flat. Must be some money there, a spare chequebook. Pack a suitcase, take a bus out of town — don’t even try to drive the car — find a hotel, sleep, sleep, sleep. Then consider stage two.

He wanted to worry Riggs, if that was possible. Make him lose some sleep about where Maiden might be, who he might be talking to. Worried people made mistakes. One day, Riggs would have to make a mistake; you could only hope somebody would be there to pick up on it.

Maiden started to walk, avoiding the town centre, slinking into the back streets like a vagrant, walking slowly, trying not to sway. Passing people were glancing sideways at him, as at some kind of downmarket street-theatre performer. The sneering sun hung like a cheap, copper medallion. He felt naked. He tried to run, but the pavement came up at him before he even realized he’d stumbled. Slow down; it was no more than half a mile to Old Church Street, he could manage that.

Oh no. Please, no. Fuck.

Now he was kicking a lamp-post. Again and again and again. Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Because his pockets were empty: not only no wallet, but no bastard keys.

He was supposed to break into his own flat?

Shit! Shit! Shit! Where had his mind gone? Not thinking like a copper any more. Not even like a human being. And he’d actually believed he was putting it on, for Riggs. Shit, he was half vegetable. Couldn’t work out really, really simple things. He looked wildly around him. No money, no keys. Nowhere to go, now. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to sleep.

The street swayed. His left leg had gone dead. He wanted to smash his head into the lamp-post. Again and again and again. His useless, damaged head.

He gave the post a final kick. Its light began to flicker on; he backed away in alarm. Then saw that lights were coming on all down the street.

Because it was dusk.

He started to laugh, pushing away the memory of a woman under a sputtering lamp in Old Church Street only seconds before … and walked on towards a row of mostly darkened shops, resting his right shoulder against the windows as he passed from doorway to doorway. Only one shop was lit. Or, half lit, drably, around a window-display.

H. W. Worthy: monumental mason.

Mottled, grey, marble gravestone, with a glistening black flowerpot, empty, and a dark green, tangly wreath. No bright, beckoning lights, no flowers, no fountains. Worthy had it right. The dark and true nature of death.

Bobby Maiden rested his forehead against the cool of the plate-glass window, staring death in the face.

And the face of death stared back, from the drab wreath. The dark leaves framed it, a face made of compost and fibre, broken twigs clenched in its earth-blackened teeth, its deep-set eyes darkly glowing, its hair and beard writhing with voracious organic life.

The face of death grinned at Maiden; his stomach pulsed, an acrid bile rose into his throat. He was only vaguely aware of a grey car gliding to the kerb, the passenger door swinging open before it slid to a stop.

‘You look lost, Bobby,’ Suzanne said.

‘We have a problem,’ Jonathan said on the phone to Andy. ‘Your friend has checked out of Lower Severn without leaving a forwarding address.’

‘Bobby Maiden? What’s he doing on Lower Severn?’

‘Dr Connelly had him moved. Couldn’t see why he was still in Accident and Emergency. Now he’s gone.’

‘Brian Connelly wouldnae see his own-He’s gone?’

‘Taken his clothes and left.’

‘You mean you let him just walk oot? ‘

‘It was before I came in, Sister Andy. He had visitors, apparently. His father and the Superintendent. Nobody liked to disturb them. Then they had a death on the ward and tea was delayed, and when they brought Mr Maiden’s, he was gone. And his clothes from the locker. The man in the next bed says he simply got up and strolled out.’

‘Staggered, more like. You checked around the building?’

‘Virtually everywhere except the ventilation tunnels. We assume he became disoriented. Wandered off. Sister Fox has informed the police. I thought you’d want to know.’

‘Taken his clothes? Aw hell. The boy’s no fit to be out.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Like I havenae enough problems,’ Andy said.

The half-packed suitcase lay on the bed. If she didn’t leave soon she wouldn’t make St Mary’s before Mrs Willis was asleep.

‘Just let me know, OK?’

She sat in the back with him. Thigh to thigh. Just like before.

‘This is nice, Inspector.’ She was luminous in the dimness of the car. Wearing an orangey sweatsuit, her hair down. A lot was different about her. ‘This is really nice. In fact, when we spotted you I really couldn’t believe it. We thought you’d be in hospital for a long, long time.’

He said nothing. Same driver too. Victor Clutton, father of the late Dean. No mistaking him this time.

The old Sierra rattling off into the twilit town centre. Suzanne gazing at him, looking genuinely, spontaneously happy. A glow about her that shone through the ubiquitous grey, kindling something half forgotten in the late Bobby Maiden.

Don’t get fooled again.

‘This the very same car, isn’t it? Bit of a risk.’

‘Not a dent on it, Bobby. You went whizzing over the bonnet, banged your head on the kerb. Jesus, I really can’t believe this. In the papers, it was touch and go. Touch and gone, in fact. Inspector Lazarus, you might say. Pretty scary all round, Bobby. Especially as Vic was trying so hard to avoid you. As it was, in fact, all your own fault.’

‘That’s the story you’ve agreed, is it?’

‘That’s the truth.’

‘Just like Tony’s your uncle?’

‘Well, yeah, that was a lie. I also know a Van Gogh from an Atkinson Grimshaw. And a Wordsworth from a Larkin. I was just having fun, Bobby. You know that. Hey, I’m not kidding.’

Suzanne crooked her head to peer directly into his eyes.

‘Whether you remember or not, it was a genuine bloody accident. We just couldn’t believe you didn’t get out of the way.’

Vic Clutton said, ‘Ask him why he was walking down the middle of the road, sorter thing. Ask him what he thought I was supposed to fucking do.’

‘You did look awfully strange, Bobby. Like you’d been dropped out of a UFO.’

‘I was walking towards you. You were under a street-lamp. You were waiting.’

‘I was in the car, Bobby. I went straight back to the car. Vic’d been parked round the corner the whole time, hadn’t you?’

‘You were under the bloody-’ The faulty streetlamp, coming on, going off, lighting the figure of the woman. Had he imagined her?

‘Waste of bleedin’ breath.’ Clutton hit the accelerator to overshoot the junction with Old Church Street. ‘Like I said. He’ll either finger us or he won’t.’

Suzanne said, ‘Just do the driving, Vic.’

‘He thinks we fitted up his son, isn’t that right, Mr Clutton?’

‘Don’t be naive, Bobby. Vic knows Dean was dealing, freelance. He was a very silly boy, was Dean, God rest his poor, corrupt little soul. Had to prove he was smarter than his old man, didn’t he, Vic?’

Vic said nothing, drove down towards the suburbs, the sun low over a horizon spiked with pylons.

‘They were never close,’ Suzanne said. ‘But we won’t open that particular can of worms.’

‘OK.’ Maiden leaned his head back until it was almost on the parcel shelf. ‘If it was an accident, why, not long before this … accident happened, did you advise me to go back in the flat and lock the door?’

Suzanne was silent for a long time.

‘Oh yeah?’ Vic said, suspicious. ‘That’s what you said to him, was it?’

‘Look, there’s a kids’ playing field back there,’ Suzanne said. ‘I fancy a bit of a swing. You up to pushing me, Bobby?’

The playground was deserted in the dusk. Maiden wedged himself into a metal roundabout; Suzanne sat on the lip of a rusting slide. Maiden felt calmer than he could remember.

‘What gets me, Bobby, is not so much why a halfway decent artist like you became a copper, as how you got so good at it. Putting two and two together and making seventeen.’

‘I was pissed. Out of interest, though … purely out of interest … was seventeen the right answer?’

‘You know it bloody was.’

Vic Clutton was leaning on his Sierra, parked fifty yards away. He was having a smoke, feigning unconcern.

‘Look, I’m not saying Tony’s a good man,’ Suzanne said. ‘He’s a businessman. In the free market. First and foremost, a businessman is what he is. He can be, like, awkward, if anybody threatens his regular income, but he’s never — and he wouldn’t lie about this, not to me — he’s never done anything terminal.’

‘Terminal.’ Maiden sighed. ‘You’re really into this vintage gangland vernacular, aren’t you, Suzanne?’

‘Look, Inspector, no bullshit … it would’ve upset him quite a bit if somebody’d suggested to him that the only way of removing a particular obstacle was that he might actually do something, like … I mean, cold …’

‘You mean a wet job in cold blood.’

‘Don’t laugh. I didn’t.’

Something close to anxiety in Suzanne’s eyes. The eyes were dark but no longer black. She looked a little older, but softer. Her voice had softened too, the brittle edges planed off.

‘Are you saying somebody did suggest something like that to Tony?’

She shrugged.

‘I wonder who that could have been.’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’ Suzanne looked him frankly in the eyes. ‘But you could probably expect it to be somebody who might not find it so convenient to do it himself.’

‘Or compatible with his chosen profession?’

Maiden thought about this for a while in his new state of calm. The double-glazing again; everything far below him, an insect world. Superintendent Martin Riggs had invited Tony Parker to help him decommission Bobby Maiden?

‘So …’ Closing his eyes to trap the thoughts. ‘… what I think you might be saying is that Tony thought … or was persuaded to think … before he went along with the suggestion of this other person … that he ought to have one attempt at dealing with the problem in an equally time-honoured but less drastic fashion. Based on Tony’s usual philosophy of everybody having his price.’

‘I wouldn’t know about any of that.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t.’

‘But someone else might’ve been strongly disapproving if he’d had it done. I mean the other thing.’

‘Who?’

‘Me, for a start.’

Suzanne stood up, smacking grass-cuttings from her trousers, as if she was brushing off extraneous lies.

‘Stuff this.’ Facing him, hands behind her back. ‘If you hadn’t worked it out. Emma Curtis. Nee Parker.’

Maiden grabbed the bars of the roundabout, almost losing his balance.

‘Oh,’ he said.

Tony Parker was known to have a grown-up kid Elham had never seen. A kid raised at the house he’d given his former wife in the nice part of Essex, where a daughter might attend a good school, learn languages, have riding lessons, grow up respectable.

‘Bugger me,’ Maiden said.

Of course, she’d have loved it: doing herself up like a faintly sinister tart: white make-up, little black number to spill out of when she reached for her drink.

He grinned. Surely the first time since his previous life. Was that your idea? The pictures?’

‘Not bad, I thought, Bobby, for a spur of the moment thing. I was quite proud of it. For a while. But then …’

Then, when it started to go badly wrong, the reality of her old man’s world thrown in her face like a bucketful of ice.

After which, she might have been expected to wash off the white-face in a hurry, go running back to Essex to hide under the bedclothes, avoid reading the papers for a while.

Only she hadn’t. A few coloured sparks started crackling across the drabness, the rippling electricity of sex.

‘Tell me,’ he said. What made Riggs decide drastic action was called for?’

‘Oh,’ she said. Well …’ She lay back in the arms of the playground slide, looked up at the darkening sky. ‘All right, what the hell? A guy called Percy Gilbert — I don’t know these people, I don’t spend much time up here — this guy’s a police informer, right? They all know that, but it’s tolerated because it works both ways, in his case, and these days he only grasses up the people they want grassed up.’

‘The little turd,’ Maiden said.

‘So this Gilbert knows you’ve been asking questions about Tony. But it was the Messenger that did it.’

‘The local rag?’

‘You had a brief thing going, word has it — Percy’s word, anyway — with a certain Siobhan Gallagher, journalist with the Messenger.’

‘Oh no,’ Maiden said weakly.

‘Whose boss — Roger Gibbs, Gibson …?’

‘Gibbs.’

‘… was informed by Laurie Argyle, the estate agent, who’s a member of his lodge, something like that, that this Gallagher’s been making inquiries about the unnamed names behind the Feeny Park development.’

Maiden moaned.

‘Not getting anywhere, because the Riggs connection’s buried much deeper. But it caused some anxiety. Not very bright, Bobby, if you don’t mind me saying so, letting your pillow talk stray into areas this dangerous. Mr Gibbs gave Ms Gallagher a very serious talking to and she buggered off back to Belfast anyway. But this is when — I understand — your Mr Riggs suggested it might be better all round, knowing you as he did, if Pa were to have you popped before you did any damage.’

‘You understand? ‘

‘This isn’t something I would normally ever learn about in a million years, because, as far as the little girl is concerned, her daddy is a bona fide businessman, a straight-down-the-line plain dealer. But I was up for the weekend and he was drinking like the proverbial. Worried? I’ve never seen him so worried. It’s not his thing, really it isn’t. The reason he moved up here in the first place was he was winding down. “It’s nothing but drugs,” he kept saying. “Drugs are taking over. It’s all hard kids now. I’m too old.”’

‘Somebody send for a violinist,’ Maiden said.

She scowled, sat up in the slide. ‘I’ll deny all this, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘I said, Have you never tried … you know? “Nah,” he says, “the geezer don’t do the circuit. Stays at home on his days off, apparently, painting pictures, you believe that?” Well, I thought you sounded interesting. I said, I want to meet him. Then I get all this “you’re staying out of it, princess, and that’s final” stuff. But I could always get round him.’

‘You surprise me.’

‘Honest to God, Bobby …’ Emma Curtis stood up. ‘I know when I’ve blown it. I was ready to go crawling back shamefaced that night. Then you just walked into us. Like you couldn’t give a toss. What the fuck came over you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I made Vic stop. I sent him to phone for an ambulance. I ran back. I thought you were dead. I didn’t know what to do. Vic came back. He’d parked down near the main road. When we heard the ambulance, he dragged me away. I’m sorry. I couldn’t be more sorry.’

He saw tears in her eyes. He believed her. She went to sit on a swing, kicked at the ground to get it moving.

‘What happens now, then, guv? They call you guv up here? I’m only au fait with the London vernacular, as you know.’ She found a shallow smile. ‘Life gets complicated, don’t it?’

‘Ain’t got nothing on death.’

‘Really?’

‘Never mind.’

The other side of the playground, Vic Clutton coughed impatiently, stamping on his cigarette end, sparks flying up.

‘He your regular chauffeur?’

‘Pa thinks I need a good, strong minder.’

‘You don’t live with Tony, then?’

‘I’m in one of his single-person’s apartments for the moment. In the, er, Feeny Park development. It’s quite nice, actually. For Elham.’

‘Has it got a bed?’

She stopped swinging. Her eyes widened, but not very much.

‘Bobby, pardon me for saying this, and I don’t wish to sound unflattered or anything, but quite frankly, at this moment, you don’t look like you could screw the cap off a bottle of Ribena.’

‘I meant a spare bed, actually. I’ve got a problem. Just for tonight?’

She bit down on a smile.