Birdman

  ‘Well.’ Julie sat at her desk, crossed her legs and regarded him thoughtfully. ‘Caffery. Now there’s a name. Are you Irish?’

  He smiled. ‘Probably, generations back. County Tyrone via Liverpool.’

  ‘Dark hair, dark blue eyes. Typical Irish. My mother always warned me off the Irish boys. ”If they’re not stupid they’re dangerous, Julie.”’

  ‘I hope you listened, Miss, uh, Darling.’

  ‘It’s my real name.’

  ‘Yes.’ He put his hands in his pockets and looked up at the low ceiling. It was covered in glossy publicity photographs, countless faces staring down at him. ‘I’d like to hear what you can tell me about—’ He stopped.

  Under a smiling blond face the name was printed. Shellene Craw.

  So that’s what you looked like.

  ‘Shellene Craw was on your books?’

  ‘Ah, so it’s Shellene you want. This is no big surprise, Detective Inspector. She owes me two months’ commission. Two hundred quid. And now she brings you to my door, asking about what? Drugs, I suppose?’

  ‘I don’t think you’ll be getting your money.’ He sat down and placed his hands on the desk. ‘She’s dead.’

  Julie didn’t miss a beat. ‘I could have told you that was coming—she was an overdose waiting to happen. The clients complained. Said she had needle marks on the inside of her thighs. Put the punters off. Ho hum, two hundred quid. I’m going to guess she didn’t leave it to me in her will.’

  ‘When did you last hear from her?’

  ‘Week before last. Then she didn’t turn up to a gig last Wednesday, didn’t call.’ She paused, lightly drumming her nails on the desk. ‘I lost that venue right off.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Nag’s Head. Archway.’

  ‘And what was the last place she did turn up?’

  ‘Um …’ Julie leaned forward in her seat and, licking a finger, flicked through a large loose-leaf file. He could see a seam of grey hair along her parting, the scalp very pink underneath. ‘There.’ She tapped a page. ‘She must’ve turned up to the Dog and Bell because I didn’t hear from them. That was a lunchtime gig, last Monday.’

  ‘The Dog and Bell?’

  ‘Trafalgar Road. That’s in—’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Caffery’s skin tingled minutely. ‘It’s east Greenwich.’ The aggregate yard was less than a mile away. He started a new page on his notebook. ‘Did Shellene work on her own that day?’

  ‘No.’ She tilted her head and looked at him carefully. ‘Are you going to tell me? Was it an overdose?’

  ‘There was another girl on the show?’

  Julie looked at him for a moment, her mouth twitching slightly. ‘Pussy Willow. She only does Greenwich shows.’

  ‘Has she got a real name?’

  ‘We all have real names, Mr Caffery. It’s only the very saddest of punters that believe our mummies and daddies really call us Frooty Tootie or Beverly Hills. Joni Marsh. She’s been with me years.’

  ‘Have you got her address?’

  ‘She won’t like it if I give it out. Specially to the pi—’ Julie stopped herself and smiled slowly. ‘Specially to a detective.’

  ‘She won’t know.’

  She gave him a narrow look and scribbled an address down on the back of a business card. ‘She shares with Pinky. Used to be on my books too. Becky, she’s called, now that she’s stopped.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He took the card. The air force husband was coughing up phlegm in the bedroom.

  ‘Do you have a girl on your books called Lacey?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Betty?’

  Julie shook her head.

  ‘And does the name …’ He looked at his notes. ‘The name Tracy ring a bell?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Petra?’

  ‘Petra? Yes.’

  Caffery looked up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes, I—Petra. Funny little thing.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Little?’

  ‘Small, I mean.’ She gave him a dirty look. ‘We’re not child pornographers, Mr Caffery. I mean one of the strippers. She pulled a fast one on me too, and me thinking I was a good judge of character.’

  ‘She disappeared?’

  ‘Off the face of the planet. I wrote to her hostel. Never got a reply, of course.’ She shrugged. ‘She didn’t owe much so I let it drift. You put these things down to experience, don’t you?’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Christmas. No, early February, because we’d just come back from Majorca.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Her? No. Wouldn’t touch them. The others, yes. But not Petra.’

  ‘When you say she was small—’

  ‘Tiny bones. Like a little bird. And skinny with it.’

  He shifted uncomfortably in the narrow chair. ‘Do you remember the last gig she did?’

  Julie gave him a long thoughtful look, then slowly, woodenly, turned to the book. ‘Here.’ She ran her finger across the page. ‘January twenty-fifth. The King’s Head. Wembley.’

  ‘Did she ever do the Dog and Bell?’

  ‘All the time. Her hostel was in Elephant and Castle. Joni knows her.’ She licked her finger and flicked the page over. ‘Odd,’ she said faintly. ‘She did the Dog and Bell the day before the King’s Head. The day before she disappeared.’

  ‘OK. I need her address.’

  ‘Look.’ Julie sat back and placed her hands on the desk. ‘Tell me now what’s going on.’

  ‘And a photo of Petra.’

  ‘I said, what’s going on?’

  He nodded at the ceiling. ‘And that one of Shellene.’

  She sniffed loudly and retrieved a file from under the desk. She flipped through it, pulling out two head-and-shoulders of Shellene and one badly lit full-length colour shot of a brunette in a fishnet leotard and held the photos out to Caffery without looking at him.

  Petra wasn’t pretty. She had very small features, dark eyes and the determined triangular chin of a street urchin. The only make-up she wore was a dark pencil outline on her mouth. Caffery held the picture so it caught the sunlight and looked at it for a long time.

  ‘What is it?’

  He looked up. ‘Did she dye her hair?’

  ‘They all do.’

  ‘It looks—’

  ‘Purple. Yeah, awful, isn’t it? I told her not to.’

  He dropped the picture into his Samsonite, thinking of the childlike corpse lying in the Greenwich morgue; the only one who had resisted death, the only one who had been restrained. He closed the briefcase, embarrassed by a sudden rush of feeling for a poor anorexic, bound, gagged and fighting for her life.

  ‘Thank you for your help, Mrs Darling.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me what Petra’s got to do with Shellene?’

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  Julie said suddenly, ‘She’s dead too, isn’t she? Little Petra.’

  The two of them regarded each other across the table for a long time. Caffery cleared his throat and stood.

  ‘Mrs Darling, please don’t speak about this to anyone. It’s very early days of the investigation. We appreciate your help.’ He held his hand out, but she declined it.

  ‘Will you tell me more when you can?’ She looked very pale under her blue-black bob. ‘I’d like to hear what happened to poor little Petra.’

  ‘As soon as we know ourselves,’ Caffery said. ‘As soon as we know.’

  ... 6

  AMIP relies heavily on the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, the cross-checking database known by its acronym: HOLMES. The pivot in any team is the HOLMES ‘receiver’—the officer who collates, extracts and interprets the data. At Shrivemoor that person was Marilyn Kryotos.

  Caffery had liked Marilyn instantly: plump and languorous, she drifted through the day, talking in her low, quirky voice about her kids, their pets, their illnesses, their small triumphs and their knee scrapes. The universal mother, Kryotos seemed to deal with
a murder in the same resigned way she’d deal with a dirty nappy: as if it were a faintly unpleasant, but correctable, fact of life. It pleased him that her first choice of companion in the team was Paul Essex: as if their friendship endorsed Caffery’s own judgement of the pair.

  Jack encountered Marilyn that evening when he returned to Shrivemoor with his notes. She was carrying action dockets from the SIO’s room to the incident room and he knew immediately something had her ruffled.

  ‘Marilyn.’ He leaned towards her. ‘What’s up? The kids?’

  ‘No,’ she hissed. ‘It’s bloody F team. They’re moving in and driving me loony toons. They want this, they don’t want that. The latest is that they want a separate bloody office, like they’re better than us or something.’ She pushed dark hair out of her eyes. ‘The CS’s got a hair up his bum about this case and he’s making us suffer for it. I mean look, will you, Jack, just look at this place, it’s not big enough for one investigation team, let alone us and them.’

  Caffery saw what she meant—taking his notes into the indexers he had to push past unfamiliar faces in the incident room. The F team officers all wore crisp shirts and ties, many of them with fresh-from-the-cellophane creases. That pride in their clothing would wear thin after a week of fifteen-hour shifts, he knew.

  ‘’scuse me, mate.’ Someone caught his arm. A sharp-faced man, shorter than Caffery, tanned, with pale blue eyes and a slim little unbroken nose. His yellow hair was slicked into a gleaming shield curved over his head. He wore a crisp, bottle-green suit, and was carrying two more in a dry cleaner’s bag over his shoulder. ‘You got somewhere I can hang these?’

  Caffery found Maddox in the SIO’s office, signing overtime forms. He threw the car keys on the desk.

  ‘The Dog and Bell.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The Dog and Bell. It’s a pub in east Greenwich.’

  Maddox leaned back in his chair and looked at him carefully. ‘Well?’ He opened his hands. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘A Q and A. I’d want to look at any regulars with medical connections.’

  ‘That’ll get the press hopping. They won’t stick to the moratorium if we open our mouths in public. I’ll run it by the CS, but no.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I think he’ll say no. Not yet. You must’ve got other leads?’

  ‘Names. A possible ID on victim three.’

  ‘OK, so get Marilyn to divvy those up. What’s the most promising one?’

  ‘Joni Marsh. Working the Dog and Bell the day Craw disappeared.’

  ‘Right, you take that tomorrow. But take someone else with you, for God’s sake. You know how these women can be.’ A knock on the door and Maddox sighed. ‘Yeah? What?’

  ‘Mel Diamond. DI Diamond, sir.’

  ‘Come in, Mr Diamond. Come in.’

  The yellow-haired officer came in, shucking his suit sleeves down so they covered his cuffs. ‘Evening, sir.’ He ignored Caffery and extended his tanned hand to Maddox, briefly flashing a micro-thin wristwatch. ‘You won’t know me, but I know you. From the Met boat club. Sir.’

  Maddox paused a moment, his small face unresponsive.

  ‘Chipstead,’ Diamond prompted.

  ‘Good Lord.’ Maddox came out from behind the desk and shook his hand. ‘Of course, of course. I know the face. So’—he leaned against the desk and folded his arms, looking Diamond up and down—‘so you’re the lucky DI who’s joining us. Welcome to Shrivemoor.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ His voice was fractionally too loud for the small office, as if he was used to being listened to. ‘All the way from tranquil Eltham.’

  ‘We’ll be putting you straight in: you and your men on the knock tomorrow. Do a three-mile diameter. That OK with you?’

  ‘It’ll have to be OK, won’t it? The governor wants us on routines, back-up to the real team.’

  Maddox paused. ‘Yes, there’s not much,’ he said carefully. ‘Not much we can do about it, Mr Diamond. I’m sure you’re aware of that.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ he said. ‘Of course I’m aware. And I have absolutely no problem with it. No problem at all. If it’s OK by the governor, it’s OK by me—that doesn’t need saying.’ He nodded. Then, as if to draw a line under the issue, he smiled, waved a hand in the direction of the photos on the walls, and said, ‘Nice boat. She yours?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maddox was hesitant.

  ‘She’s a Valiant.’

  ‘Yes she is, indeed she is.’

  ‘Good boats, Valiants. Some find them a bit tubby, but I like them. Marvellous cruisers too.’

  ‘Yes, well.’ Maddox was warming now. ‘Hate to say it but the Americans usually come up trumps with cruisers. Mammoth indulgence, of course.’

  ‘A cutter won the Met’s Frostbite run this year.’ Diamond’s tongue moved inside his mouth. ‘It wasn’t by any chance …?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maddox nodded modestly. ‘Yes, indeed.’

  Standing against the wall, his arms folded tightly, Caffery was surprised to find himself irritated by this exchange. As if the benefit of Maddox’s support and affability was his exclusive right, not something to be switched on a whim to another DI. Irrational though it was—he’s not your father, Jack, you don’t have any rights to him—he was angered to see Maddox this vulnerable to flattery, and when DI Diamond grinned, delighted—‘Good God, good God. Just wait till I tell my mates who I’m working with’—Caffery turned away and quietly left the room.

  ... 7

  That evening Jack sat at his desk in Ewan’s room, gazing at the Windows 98 clouds on the screen. The upper branches of the old beech at the foot of the garden cast shifting, coppery shadows on the wall above him. He didn’t need to turn and look to know how the new leaves almost concealed the rusting nails, deep in the flesh of the tree, and the few mossy planks: the remains of the tree house which he and Ewan had crouched in as kids, shouting to the roaring trains in the cutting below.

  Sometimes, in his solitariness, Jack strained to remember how it was, how he was. Before. He had an image of a child, lighter than a breath, nothing to stop him floating away over the roof tops into the blue air.

  And then—that day. Recollected as a set of jerky scenes spliced carelessly together, slightly grainy, as if he’d cheated and taken the memories not from real life but from a spool of 8mm film tucked somewhere in the back of his parents’ attic.

  It was mid-September, windy and sunny, and the dried planks of the tree house creaked as the beech, still soft and green with summer sap, bowed in the wind. Jack and Ewan had clashed. They had found four floorboards in a skip; Ewan wanted to build a watch platform in the southernmost branches of the tree, so he could see the trains swaying down the line from Brockley station. Jack wanted the platform at the north end, so he could look off down the track at the misty bridges of New Cross, see the faces of the city workers as they travelled home with their London Evening News.

  Jack—an exasperated eight-year-old on a short fuse—shoved his older brother hard against the tree trunk. Ewan’s response was ferocious and startling: he recovered his balance, extended sturdy arms and bulldozed, screaming, into Jack. ‘I’m telling, I’m telling.’ Spittle flew from his mouth. ‘I’m telling Dad.’

  Jack was caught off balance, sent reeling to the edge of the tree house, coming to a halt half on, half off the deck, his shorts ripped by a nail, legs dangling, the thumb on his left hand trapped between two planks. Pain made him furious.

  ‘Tell then, you bastard! Go on. Bloody tell.’

  ‘I will.’ Ewan settled into resentful guilt. His eyebrows closed together, his bottom lip pushed out. ‘I hate you, you scally. Bloody, bloody, fucking scally.’

  He turned and clambered down the rope ladder, his face closed in angry concentration, and dropped into the railway cutting. Swearing loudly, Jack freed his thumb, pulled himself back into the tree house and lay there, breathing slowly, his throbbing hand sandwiched between his bare knees, angry and exasperated.

  Beneath
the tree house, where the banks of the cutting flattened into a wide band of undergrowth, the brothers had created a network of paths for their games, each route meticulously explored, mapped, named: a trampled cobweb spiralling out in the bindweed. As Jack watched from the tree house, Ewan chose the southern path, the one dubbed the ‘death trail’ because it skirted by a rusting immersion heater—‘See that, Ewan? That’s an unexploded bomb. A V2 probably.’ His clean, dark head bobbed a few times above the undergrowth, the mustard T-shirt flashed. He reached the clearing they called camp 1, beyond which lay the DMZ, demilitarized zone, the lethal V2 and land of the Gooks.

  Jack lost interest. Ewan sulked too easily. It tired him. Angry and in pain he slid down out of the tree and went inside to complain about the black-and yellow half-moon bursting under his thumbnail.

  Afterwards it was the tree house which cut their mother more deeply than anything. Caffery could see her now, a thought or memory having halted her mid-oven cleaning or mid-washing up, to send her stiffly into the garden, where she would stand, staring at the tree, pink rubber gloves dripping suds into the grass. The last place she’d seen her son.

  And then the half-hysterical, helpless outbursts to her husband. ‘Explain that tree house, Frank; if it’s still there then why isn’t he? EXPLAIN IT, Frank! Tell me.’

  And Jack’s father would cover his ears and sink into the armchair, the sports pages bunching up on his lap, unable to tolerate his wife’s anguish, until one day he snatched up a ball-peen hammer and marched out into the mud and rain still wearing his chequered slippers.

  Caffery had crept up to this very room and stood wobbling on the bed so he could reach the window and watch the wood cracking, slats dropping to the ground, the mud splatters on his mother’s tights as she stood sobbing on the churned-up lawn.

  And then, through the bare branches of the trees, on the other side of the railway cutting, he saw someone else.

  Ivan Penderecki. Pale, meaty arms propped on his decomposing back fence, grey rain and a distant smile on his face.