The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

THE HOSTESS by Joel Lane

NOT LONG AFTER I moved to Birmingham in the 1980s, a family feud led to one of the worst crimes in my experience. It happened in Digbeth, an old industrial district now taken over by warehouses and wholesale businesses. The narrow backstreets and rotting factories hid a multitude of stolen goods. But most of the actual crimes happened elsewhere. The Digbeth police station was busier with drunks fighting in the Barrel Organ and the Railway Tavern than with professional villains.

For two decades, the O’Kane family had been significant players in the black economy of Digbeth. They were a family of craftsmen: one could hide the pieces of a stolen car in a dozen vehicles; another could work stolen gold and silver into brand new jewellery. Three of them had done time, but they were a close family and we’d have needed something much nastier to put them out of business. I think the Digbeth team had a sneaking respect for their dedicated work on the wrong side of the disused tracks.

The Marin family were something else again. New money, well-spoken, an attitude you could break a glass on. The three brothers formed the core of an under-achieving but vicious gang that specialized in drugs and prostitutes. Its informal office was the back table of the Bar Selona, a dive frequented by people who’d been banned from the Little Moscow. There were some severe beatings around that time, of men we knew to be involved in similar business. But the victims weren’t talking even when their mouths healed.

I saw the youngest Marin brother one night in the Railway Tavern, when I was relaxing off-duty at a rhythm and blues gig. The band finished late, and when I came out of the function room a lock-in was in progress. I might have been tempted to buy a drink, but just at that moment a thin-faced man in a suit entered the pub in the company of a young policewoman. Who wasn’t, of course. It was some lad’s birthday, and the girl put handcuffs on him before starting a strip-tease. I walked out, but the girl’s minder shot me a look that could have frozen vodka.

We had an informer at that time who warned us that the Marin and O’Kane families were at odds. There was a fight outside a pub near the Parcel Force depot that resulted in a close ally of the O’Kanes being glassed: a classic “Belfast kiss”. He lost an eye. Then the house of the elder Marin brother burned down when he and his wife were away for the weekend. We found the charred remnants of a petrol-soaked blanket inside a broken rear window. Just after that, something scared our informant so badly that he relocated to the Netherlands.

While we were struggling to get to grips with the situation, Theresa O’Kane went missing on her ninth birthday. She was the only daughter of one of the family’s more law-abiding members. He and his wife didn’t hesitate to call us. Theresa had been walking home from her school in Highgate with a friend when a car had stopped and two men had got out. One of them had hit the friend with a cosh, and she’d blacked out. When she’d recovered consciousness Theresa was gone.

That night, we put out an appeal on local TV and radio. Nothing. A day of frantic searching and questioning followed. The Marin brothers didn’t have perfect alibis – that would have been too obvious – but we had nothing on them. Another night fell with Theresa’s parents – both of whom were under thirty – in a state of numb desperation. Then another dark November day. Another night.

The call came at six in the morning. A homeless man, looking for a place to sleep, had wandered through the viaduct off Digbeth High Street after a troubled night. The mewing of seagulls had caught his attention. Behind one of the arches, near the porn cinema, he’d found a heap of dead rats and a few dying gulls. There was an acrid smell in the air. Using a stick, he’d pushed the rats aside – and then run to a phone box.

Theresa O’Kane had been garrotted with wire. Her body cavity had been opened up, packed with rat poison and sewn shut again. Poison had also been forced into her mouth and throat. We were shown post-mortem photos. The body had only been under the viaduct a few hours, but our pathologist estimated the time of death as the evening of the abduction. She hadn’t made it through her birthday.

Of course, the murder was in the papers for weeks – though we managed to keep the rat poison quiet. The O’Kane family had to go through the standard press cycle of bogus sympathy, suspicion, revelation, blame, abuse and final indifference. Twenty-eight per cent of Daily Mail readers thought the O’Kanes were tragic victims, while seventy-two per cent thought their criminal record was directly responsible for the child’s death. It was business as usual: the memory of a dead child being tainted, circulated to the masses and put to work on the streets.

Small wonder that the O’Kane family sold their homes and were scattered overseas before the end of the year. The Marins continued their operations. We never managed to prove their connection to the murder, let alone the vicious symbolic gesture that followed it. But within a couple of years, we had some luck with their drugs racket and put the two elder brothers away. They weren’t sufficiently big-time to own the police or local authorities. Then the youngest brother died of a septic ulcer, and the gang was finished. Other bastards replaced them, of course.

Years passed. I moved to the Acocks Green station and lost interest in Digbeth. The area slipped further into silence, with old houses and even churches being used as storage space for construction materials. As rents fell and concern for preservation became increasingly absurd, the ground was laid for the area’s colonization by offices – but that was still a decade off. Turf wars were still going on: pubs were set on fire, building projects were subject to overnight “accidents”. The only people living in the district were in hostels or on the streets.

I’m not sure when it started – some time in the early nineties. We thought it was one of the new gangs making its presence felt. An old man who’d been drinking in the Eagle and Tun was found dead in Lower Trinity Street, a few yards from one of the arches of the railway viaduct. Two days later, a homeless woman was seen dying in convulsions under the railway bridge by the Taboo cinema. Both deaths were the result of strychnine poisoning. Which could be rat poison, though we found no sign of it in the area.

A week after that, three children aged nine or so were found dead. They’d been playing with a ball in a disused car park near the Digbeth viaduct. Again, it was strychnine. Some of the powder was found smeared on their mouths. The local police station went into overdrive, trying to find a drug dealer who might have sold them (or given them) a wrap of painful death. They arrested every addict they could find. It was late October. A few days before Theresa O’Kane’s birthday.

Childhood memories are strange things. Who can predict when a buried memory will come to the surface and cause harm? It could be at puberty, or on leaving home, or after a broken marriage, or after the loss of a child. And when the trauma is profound enough to tear you out of the world… what then? I’m not de Richleau, I don’t have those certainties. The best I have is guesswork. There was no way I could banish Theresa unless I could stop the ruthless from controlling others. But maybe I could make her back off.

We kept a police watch on the viaduct, and no one was going there at night any more. At 3 a.m. we packed up and left the poorly lit brickwork to whatever crept in the shadows, picking over scraps of litter. An hour later, I came back alone, wearing a black tracksuit, surgical gloves and a scarf over my face. Under the scarf, I was wearing a flesh-toned Latex mask I’d got from a Soho colleague with underground contacts. The eyes and mouth were narrow slits.

A half-moon was just visible through a skin of cloud. There was frost on the pavement. Miles away, fireworks were slamming doors in the night. I paused under the bridge where the homeless woman had died. Rain had drawn spikes of lime from the brickwork. Then I walked slowly on, past the private cinema to the viaduct.

From the pub in Lower Trinity Street, you can see three railway arches. I stood in one of them and lit a cigarette, then dropped it and stamped it out. A trace of smoke filtered through the cold air. The smell of rotting brick was overwhelming. About twenty yards away, against the wall, a Victorian iron urinal had been closed up for decades. She was standing there, watching me. Her face looked slightly out of focus, as if one of us were shivering.

I waited under the viaduct, cupping my hands over my mouth to trap the warmth. She was hesitant, but determined. It was her birthday and no one else had come. Did they tell you it was a surprise party? I thought. Her hair was dark and tangled. Her face was as white as the frost. Her school blouse and skirt were torn and smeared with oil or tarmac. As she moved towards me, looking sick, I held out my arms. Then I turned my face so her lips would touch my cheek.

Her small hand pressed into mine. I felt her grip more as intent than as sensation, since her hand was as weak as fresh snow. Her mouth fastened on the slick non-flesh of the mask. Then she let go of me. Her face closed in on itself, flickered like old celluloid. I watched her turn and walk slowly away, back into the shadows of the industrial estate.

When there was no further sign of movement on the street, I peeled off the mask and gloves and slipped them carefully into a plastic bag. I’d dusted them with strychnine powder before putting them on. I wasn’t sure if I’d told her a kind of lie or a kind of truth. Either way, she’d got the message.

There were no more unexplained deaths in the Digbeth area for a while. A few more children died from poisoning, but that was just a result of the amount of toxic waste in the ground. If police work teaches you anything, it’s that gradual death is very rarely a crime.