Birdman

  Caffery smiled. ‘We met about four months ago. You were treating a friend in a follow-up Hodgkin’s clinic. Gave her an ultrasound.’

  ‘Plausible, plausible. To check the spleen.’

  ‘We’re very grateful.’

  ‘Thank you. How is she progressing?’

  ‘Not good. She’s had a relapse. You treated her yesterday afternoon at Guy’s.’

  Cavendish’s eyes narrowed. ‘Ah yes, I see. I believe you are confusing me with Dr Bostall?’

  ‘No—Veronica Marks. You saw her yesterday.’

  ‘Well, yes. I know the name, but I didn’t—’ He broke off and crossed and uncrossed his legs under the table. ‘You’ll appreciate that I am bound by the ethics of my profession. At the risk of appearing offensive I will refrain from discussing individual cases.’

  ‘But you did see her last night?’

  ‘Hmmm.’ He opened the book and put his glasses on. ‘I think we’d be best advised to truncate this conversation now, Mr—?’

  ‘Caffery.’ Caffery sat down opposite him, his heart thumping. ‘Dr Cavendish, I need to ask you some thing.’

  ‘I think not. I find myself rather embarrassed.’

  ‘Not linked to any particular case. It’s just, I—I’m intrigued by some of the new diagnostic tests for Hodgkin’s.’

  Cavendish looked up. ‘Intrigue is healthy and devoutly to be desired. Especially in the young.’

  ‘The dye test.’

  ‘Not related to a specific case?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Gallium or lymphangio?’

  ‘The one that goes in through the feet. The one you can see.’

  ‘The lymphangiogram. Indicates if the cancer has spread to the lower body. My patients lead me to believe it is an uncomfortable procedure.’

  ‘You haven’t changed the test recently? You don’t put a different dye in? One that fades more quickly?’

  ‘No, no. Still linseed oil. It takes several days, sometimes weeks, to leave the system.’ He ran a finger across dry lips. ‘Mr Caffery, if you find you have a true interest in this I’d draw your attention to an article on vinblastine in the British Medical Journal this month. Very interesting, written by a colleague, coincidentally, but I recommend it in the true spirit of impartiality.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Caffery offered his hand. ‘I think you’ve told me everything I need to know.’

  ... 26

  By 7 p.m. the day had become windy, the breeze yanked low, brown clouds across the sky, drivers pulled visors down against the on-off flashing of the late sun.

  Caffery didn’t want to go home. Veronica would be there, faux pallor and weariness, and he was afraid of what he might say—or do—to her. Nor did he want to go to the office and have conversations die around him, the knowledge that he was backing a loser against all the odds, holding out for Gemini who even now was on his way to Greenwich police station. What Caffery wanted was to see Rebecca. The excuse, when it came, was reassuringly legitimate.

  He dropped Essex at the station, in the heart of a sudden shower, did a U-turn and retraced his steps through rush-hour traffic on Trafalgar Road. At Bugsby Way the rain stopped as suddenly as it had started and the evening sun came back for one last try at drying the world, glinting on the silt-heavy Thames, casting the long shadows of peeling advertising hoardings across the road. The only things that moved were stray plastic bags rolling along the empty service routes, and Caffery was struck once more by the strange, end-of-the-world loneliness of this landscape.

  The aggregate yard had changed dramatically. The scene hadn’t yet been released, but the forensics team had finally completed their fingertip search; the GPR equipment had gone, the conveyor belt and the sieves lay unattended, and the alloy crush barriers intended to restrain the press stood redundant, a length of police tape fluttering lazily from one.

  DC Betts sat, unobtrusively, in the team car parked at the end of the service road, quietly warming his face in the evening sun. Caffery acknowledged him and ducked under the perimeter tape. Since he was last here the ground had sprouted a fine summer cover of new vegetation, wet from the rain. He headed back towards Bugsby Way, retracing the steps he’d taken with Fiona Quinn that first night. It was hard going, strange long grasses, the colour of mud, clung to his ankles, and by the time he’d reached the far perimeter fence the shadows were longer, his socks sodden, studded with seed heads.

  He stood still and lifted his face into the air, eyes half closed, smelling the bad, bitter perfume of wild poppy mingling with the river smells. The search had revealed only one sizeable gap on this side of the fence. On the service road the holes were numerous. The accepted theory was that Birdman had parked in the service road and carried the bodies almost a quarter of a mile across this difficult terrain, going back to the car to retrieve the gardening spade which they thought he’d used to make the graves. Caffery believed that Birdman had had reason to come here before the killings, or to pass it on his way somewhere. For a St Dunstan’s worker this could be part of the homeward journey to any number of places: Kent or Essex, even parts of Blackheath.

  A snarl of DS Quinn’s fluorescent tape, peeled and discarded in the fingertip search, lay at Caffery’s feet. He picked it up and studied it thoughtfully, turning it in his hands. All the bottles and cans recovered from here were now speckled in fingerprint dust and bagged in the evidence room at Shrivemoor: Heineken, Tennants, Red Stripe, Wray and Nephew.

  Wray and Nephew—Gemini—drugs. Something about that connection glittered with significance. Drugs and the ligature marks on Spacek’s wrists and ankles.

  Only Spacek had struggled. A connection buried in there somewhere. Two seagulls swooped over the yard, eyeing him. Caffery’s thoughts rolled slow as clouds.

  Four of the girls were users. Only Spacek wasn’t. There was a continuity. He dropped the tape and turned it over with his toe.

  Something—tape?—to bind Spacek. Drugs.

  And then, abruptly, he knew. He put his head back and breathed deeply, surprised to find his heart was thudding.

  The offender had to tie Spacek up because she was the only one who wouldn’t stay still. She wasn’t a user, he couldn’t talk her into taking a needle in the back of the neck. The target wasn’t drugging the girls to keep them still, nor was he threatening them. The truth was far simpler, far more tragic.

  The victims were doing it voluntarily; rolling over, maybe even holding their hair up, looped over a wrist, to give him access to that vulnerable knot of bone, ligament and fluid which is the body’s second-to-second, day-to-day neural switching centre. The brain stem. He’d convinced them this was what they wanted, a fast way to get high—‘Quickest way into the blood stream‘—and they were just desperate enough to try it. He had enough rudimentary medical knowledge, confidence, a little jargon. It was a real possibility, especially if the girls, with wills eroded by years of heroin use, already knew and trusted their killer.

  ‘Oi. You!’

  Caffery turned. The man coming towards him was tall and barrel-chested, dressed in a pinstripe suit, the jacket flying open to reveal braces over a dark blue shirt and blue tie. His thinning hair was greased back like Diamond’s. Gold glinted at his neck and wrists. ‘The Bill should’ve stopped you. I’ve had enough of your sort clambering around.’

  Caffery showed his card, and the man stopped a few feet away. ‘No, mate. I’m sorry. A little flash like that. It ain’t good enough. Hand it over here.’ He tapped his palm. ‘Poxy press card, is it?’

  Caffery leaned forward and held the card up. ‘OK?’

  The man rubbed his nose and shoved both hands hard in the pockets of his trousers. ‘Yeah, yeah. You can’t blame me. I had the place crawling all yesterday.’

  ‘You’re North. The owner.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘We weren’t introduced, but I saw you. The first night we were here.’ He returned the card to his pocket. ‘I’m having a look around.’

  ‘Think he?
??ll come nosing back here, do you? They say a dog returns to its vomit.’ He tipped back on his heels and looked at the sky. ‘Well? When can I expect to see you off my land, then?’

  ‘As soon as we’ve charged someone.’

  ‘I was on to your super this afternoon. I hear they’ve got someone up at the station. Is it true?’

  ‘I can’t discuss that.’

  ‘Black lad, is it?’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  North shifted his weight and rubbed his nose. ‘Heard this morning the whole area is under compulsory purchase orders. It don’t rain but it pours, doesn’t it?’ He jingled change in his pockets and looked up at the sky where new clouds were gathering. ‘Maybe I should be approaching you for compensation. Eh?’

  ‘I can’t stop you trying.’ Caffery turned. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me.’

  ‘Yeah yeah.’ He stood motionless, watching Caffery make his tortuous way back to the road. Only when he’d completely disappeared did North move. He dropped his head and sank to his haunches, his face in his hands.

  Over the Thames Barrier it had started to rain again.

  After he’d done what he had to do with Peace’s body, he continued driving. There was only one thing left to do: keep going.

  Better not look down, Toby.

  He spent the whole day driving, as if he could blow the taste away by perpetual travel, through the storms and the sun, through the dripping, leafy Nash terraces of Camden, the green sweeps of Hampstead, the sticky red roads of Hyde Park, until the Cobra’s engine grew hot and hoarse and the sun dropped behind Westminster.

  Just after dusk Harteveld found himself on London Bridge. His breath caught in his throat. London laid itself out to him, from the diamond point of Canary Wharf, west through a million lights reflected in the Thames, to the Houses of Parliament.

  He stopped the Cobra, found his coke kit in his pocket and unwrapped it. Using his nail he scooped a small pile of coke into his left nostril. To his right, behind Guy’s tower, where it had all started, the moon hung low and smooth. Harteveld leaned back in the seat and stared at it.

  Beneath the bridge the water lapped against the pilings.

  He rubbed his temples and hurriedly started the Cobra.

  Better not look down.

  ... 27

  A short marigold dress, bare arms and a heavy copper Kara bracelet on her wrist: Rebecca was getting ready to go out when Jack called. A private view at the Barbican: ordinarily she’d have avoided it, but it got her out of Greenwich for the evening. She needed the diversion. Since the day Caffery and Essex had come to the flat Rebecca had thought of little else—she spent her days in front of the easel, not working, absently stroking a sable brush between thumb and forefinger, reconjuring the faces: Kayleigh, Shellene, Petra, while Joni hummed to herself and rolled cones of Acapulco gold with her tea and toast, staying stoned until bedtime. Joni had made it clear that she didn’t want to discuss what was happening—rarely came home and when she did a strange pseudo-quiet descended on the pair.

  In the quiet Rebecca heard the first faint knockings of a change.

  Well, Jesus, it’s been long enough coming.

  Worlds apart—everyone said it—the two of them were worlds apart. And their only link, which once had glittered with significance, was now fading.

  Rebecca was a Home Counties girl. Her father—a tall, solemn man with a classic philosopher’s face—only truly touched happiness alone in the study amongst his gold-tooled editions of Elizabethan love sonnets. Meanwhile his wife stumbled around upstairs pressing handfuls of prescription trazodone into her mouth. The professionals muttered about bipolar disorders. Sometimes she lay in bed for days, forgetting to wash or eat. Forgetting she had a daughter to care for.

  So this was what Rebecca had to build an identity on: Spenser’s Amoretti and amitriptyline. And bedtime beatings. If little Becky was noisy Mummy’s tranquillizers found their way into her orange juice.

  She grew into a thin, solemn teenager, believing herself quite alone, quite unique.

  It’s fathers who abuse—not mothers—nothing in the papers or on TV about mothers.

  She escaped from Surrey, setting out for university but landing instead in London. And suddenly there was Joni—sashaying towards her along the streets of Greenwich in shorts and heart-shaped sunglasses, a spliff between her teeth, raging like an evangelist about her shitty childhood. For her it had been high-rise council blocks, benefit queues, vomit in the stairwells and pigeons coupling on her windowsill. But the theme was so familiar it stopped Rebecca in her tracks.

  ‘Mum. It was Mum who got me onto drugs—if it’d been a bad day she’d make me take her just to keep me quiet—shove them in my mouth and scream the place down if I didn’t swallow. Should’ve been sectioned before I was born, the mad fucking cow.’

  Then Rebecca:

  ‘Once she made me wash her in the bath. She was crying. I was eight and I started crying too. She gave me sweeties to calm me down.’

  ‘Don’t tell me—Tofranil.’

  ‘Yes, or something like it. And if she wasn’t eating properly then neither did I—once I lived on banana Nesquik for a week. My father said I was getting thin and that scared her. She drove straight to Bejam’s in Guildford, came back with five tubs of Neapolitan ice cream and force-fed me until I threw it all up.’

  ‘And then beat the crap out of you, I s’pose.’

  They knew they were different but they swore that inside they were sisters. Together they lived out their happy, slap-dash early twenties, sharing boyfriends and lipstick—neither caring to stop and note that while Joni spent her days sleeping off the night before, Rebecca was getting up early and taking a bus to Goldsmiths College. Slowly their intimacy was fracturing and now Rebecca confessed as little to Joni as she might to a child.

  Especially the things she’d thought about DI Jack Caffery.

  A cop? A cop, for Chrissakes, are you mad?

  But the other day, outside the pub, she’d become momentarily transfixed by his neck—such a stupid thing, but she’d been obsessed—by the junction of tanned skin and white collar, the hair cropped close around his ears. And she’d caught herself several times wondering how he’d look as he climaxed …

  Now—sitting in the studio in her party dress—she put the image away carefully.

  Really, Becky, just get some nice, clean, middle-class thoughts into that diseased little head of yours.

  She waited for the blood to go from her face and arms, and buzzed him into the building. Soon he was standing outside her door, tired and faintly unshaven.

  ‘Come in.’ She opened the door wide and hooked her leg up to slip on a leather pump. ‘I can’t be long.’ She pressed her other foot in its shoe and followed him into the kitchen, switching on the wall lights as she went. ‘Glass of Pouilly?’

  ‘Is it open?’

  ‘Wine flows when I’m nervous.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Apart from the obvious? The Millennium Ripper?’

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘Fear of arty gatherings, if you must know, terror of the black turtleneck, goatees, endless arguments. Fluxus versus German expressionism blah blah blah. You know the routine. Coxcombs paying two hundred guineas to have paint flung in their faces or whatever the saying is. So if I’ve got to come out of my atelier and make intelligent noises, I’m bloody well going to fortify myself with an intelligent little Fuissé.’

  Seeing he wasn’t smiling, she closed her lips and took the wine from the fridge, placing it on the wooden table, where condensation pooled around it. ‘You said you wanted to tell me something.’ She stood on tiptoe to search the cupboards for glasses.

  ‘Gemini’s been taken in for questioning.’

  Rebecca stopped, two long-stemmed glasses poised mid-air. ‘I see.’

  ‘I thought you’d want to know.’

  She dropped to her heels and stood very still, staring at the fridge. ‘We talked about this.??
?

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘We talked too late. If you’d told me about Gemini and Shellene when I first asked—’

  ‘Are you blaming me?’

  ‘Or when we were at the morgue.’

  ‘So you are blaming me.’

  ‘Wasn’t what you saw in that body bag more important than your friend’s drug supply? Maybe I should have shown you more of Petra. He cut them, you know. Cut their breasts, opened them—’

  At that she turned to him. Caffery stopped, a blank look on his face as if he couldn’t quite believe what he had just said. ‘Shit. I’m sorry.’

  Rebecca shivered. ‘It’s OK.’ She put the glasses on the table, poured the wine and handed him a glass. Her fingers were trembling. ‘I used to work in that pub. It could have been me. Or Joni.’ She looked at him. ‘That is where he finds them, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s something we need to talk about. You and I.’

  ‘So that is where he finds them.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘He follows them when they leave?’

  ‘That’s been the assumption.’ He lifted the wine and looked at it thoughtfully, rotating it to catch the last splinters of sunlight from the window. ‘But you need to know what I think.’

  ‘Go on. What do you think?’

  ‘I think they’ve arranged to meet him. To do a trick, or to score. I think they knew him, even trusted him to some degree, certainly enough to be somewhere private with him: his car, probably even his house. I think he seems very well adjusted; maybe he’s a doctor, a lab assistant, a hospital worker.’ He paused, choosing his words carefully. ‘He’s certainly someone they trusted enough to let him inject something into their bloodstream.’

  Rebecca stopped, the glass halfway to her mouth. ‘What?’

  ‘He told them it was a fast way to get high. Maybe he was someone they had dealt with before. Someone they had scored from before.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because I think you’ve met him. Met him, maybe even know him. And I think Joni has too, although she doesn’t realize it. So I’m asking you now—if you’re protecting anyone else for any reason, no matter how insignificant it seems—’